He's working late, I would tell myself on those nights. He wants to finish up his work there so he can come home. I tried not to imagine him out having fun with his cohorts while the children kept me housebound and exhausted. I tried not to worry that he'd met another woman, that he was drinking his evening scotch with her. But things had been off between us lately—not on the surface but underneath. I can see now that it started that morning he found me writing, the moment I confessed to telling Bob I was writing a novel, but at the time all I could see was the strain that had crept into our lovemaking since I'd gotten my diaphragm, which, with the exception of that morning after he'd had the breakthrough on the MOS chip, I'd been using religiously.
One night when I got no answer at his apartment at eleven, at midnight, at one in the morning—4 A.M. his time—I was sure he was in some other woman's arms. Some mask designer, I thought, who had a life of her own, money of her own, who wouldn't have to turn down the heat in the wintertime to save up for a second car. I don't know why I didn't call his office earlier that night—maybe because I rarely did even when he was here, because I hated to interrupt his work. Or maybe because I, like Kath, didn't really want to know. But when I finally summoned the courage to phone his office, he answered on the first ring, his voice full of that funny croaky roughness it gets when he works intently for a long time.
With all that time alone while Danny was out of town—he came only for the occasional weekend—I wrote and wrote so that, by the end of 1970, I declared myself “done” with “Michelangelo's Ghost.” Again. (There's a wonderful quote by the French poet Paul Valéry—compliments of Brett, of course: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” We were all beginning to see that “done” was a relative thing, not so much “finished” as “can't bear to read a single word again.”) I made a new list of agents, and I was more prepared for rejection this time: Maggie had made me a little squid out of a toilet paper roll, complete with a black piece of paper inside, which, when you blew through the tube, came out as the little guy's “ink.” When I got rejection letters, I could just pull out my squid and ink them!
The day I sent off my new batch of queries, Maggie lost her first tooth. She didn't want to leave it under her pillow for the tooth fairy, she wanted to keep it herself. “I don't need money,” she said. “I still have my dollar Grandpa gave me for my birthday.” She would leave a note under her pillow asking the tooth fairy to let her keep the tooth, she decided. If the tooth fairy promised not to take it, she would put it under her pillow the next night. If the fairy said she'd need to take the tooth to leave the money, no deal. A small thing, that first lost tooth, but I missed sharing it with Danny, missed enjoying together our daughter's odd spin on it.
In mid-February, the phone rang: an agent calling to ask for my manuscript. No need to ink that! One part of me thought it meant nothing, that he liked the idea of the novel but when he started reading he would pass, and another part of me was worried: Who was this agent? What did I know about any of this? Five rejections poured in over the next couple of weeks, only confirming my fears. But then a second request for the manuscript came, another small measure of hope.
One afternoon later that month Maggie and her friend Karen Geisel, along with Linda's Julie and Jamie, proudly informed me they were writing a book together. I made all the right noises—their writing was so neat, and their illustrations lovely. (“Illustrations,” I called them, not “stick figure crayon drawings.”) Karen, comfortable now, said they were going to send it to her grandpa when it was done, and he would publish it for them.
Me: “Is your grandpa a publisher?” Shamelessly milking this seven-year-old for information, thinking maybe I did have a connection to a publisher, albeit a tenuous one.
Karen: “No, he's Dr. Seuss.”
Me (gulping): “Your grandpa is Dr. Seuss?”
Karen: “Yes. And if he likes it, he'll get it published for us.”
I just stood there with my mouth open, thinking maybe if I rubbed her head, some of whatever made her grandfather magic would rub off on me.
Two days later the first agent, Fred Klein, called to say he loved my book and he was sure he could sell it. He was utterly charming about the fact that another agent had the manuscript. “It's an important decision,” he said. “You need to pick someone you're comfortable with.” And within minutes, I'd said I'd withdraw the manuscript from the other agent, and sure, I'd be happy to send him something on my second novel—as if I really did have something to send.