Connecting the Dots

I’ve always been one of those people who has imagined that drafting a novel hits some critical point where everything coalesces and then the task becomes more like skiing than rock climbing. Maybe this is true, but I’m having the opposite experience I’ve been really busy in my non-writing life, but thus far it’s gotten more rather than less difficult. I actually write short stories and other things very quickly. I’ve even been known to complete story drafts in two hours. If you think of a novel as maybe twenty five short stories, I should be able to do this in about six weeks. Right now, it’s taking me about a month a chapter.

There are several phases to any fiction project. I’ve come to realize that I’ve very fond of the “explosion of ideas” phase. If you’re old enough to remember them, kids project books used to have these pages with a bunch of points with numbers attached to them. If you drew a line from number to number, a picture would emerge. Some people would start at one and find two then three, etc. Others, like me would try to connect the numbers that would reveal the picture as quickly as possible. Once I figured out what the shape was supposed to be, I sometimes wouldn’t take the time to line in the still unconnected dot/numbers on the page. I love recognizing connections and shapes. To me, the rest is just something you do. I remember there were other kids who would painstakingly fill in all the lines then spend even more time coloring the shape in. Coloring was just never for me.

In developing a draft, I’m having to force myself to go one, two, three, four this time. When I’ve skipped around in the past, I’ve always had some notion of what goes in between, but I couldn’t settle down to fill in the connections that most other people would need to see the picture. The single hardest thing for me though is that as I’ve moved in more linear fashion, each chapter has felt less like an opening out of the material than a shutting off. Let me offer an obvious example. Once Marie appeared in this last chapter, Lucky now can’t be married to someone else, not involved with a woman, etc. At a more serious level, each chapter also commits you to certain themes and stylistic decisions for the rest of the book. It’s hard for me to give up the shuffle of possibilities where any plot card can turn up at any given moment.

Fascinatingly, chapters three and four were parts of the book that I’d refused to fill in for some time. I’d started chapters that included Luke Howard “present time” and Marie, but I’d never sustained them. It feels good to finally set them into the flow of the book. Of course, I may well change my mind soon. It’s also been a struggle.

I did want to mention that blogging the draft has been very helpful. For one, it’s actually very useful to have a single “ordered” draft up that I can access from any place that I can get on the internet. I get to view my “process” including the length of time it takes between chapters, but it also holds me accountable in an odd way. Very few people visit this page (I don’t make any attempts to link it), but I know they can and that if too many weeks go by between installments they’ll see that.

Two of my blog friends, Mr. Pogblog and Bellarossa are, whether they know it or not, doing a similar thing with blogs. Mr. Pogblog is doing his 88 days to Druidic enlightenment and has gotten more or less half way there. Bella’s been documenting her “creative” life since her decision to move to Chicago. She includes pictures, links to articles she’s gotten published, and more recently video clips of performances, events, friends’ performances, shows she’s helped produce, etc. It’s certainly been inspiring to follow and it’s a really interesting way to track someone else’s creative process. I know this notion of “blogging” as something other than an end in itself isn’t exactly novel, but I believe that it has great potential. I think Orson Scott Card, a much better known writer, has also been putting his drafts online so this technique is not limited to those of us who blog in obscurity.

In the meantime, I’m on to Chapter Five and trying to find a way to let the various streams of Lucky, Luke Howard, the Ghost in the Blue Screen, etc. run together for a bit while still moving forward.

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Chapter 4: The Answering Machine

Over the next four days, my answering machine had six phone calls from Uncle Leon and one from Jan Grady. I don’t always return Uncle Leon’s calls, but he usually waits a couple days before trying again even if the matter happens to be important. According to Uncle Leon, it’s always important. I wouldn’t expect him to phone me just to see how I’m doing. We’re very Americanized, but this is one of those Confucian customs that isn’t written anywhere yet everyone observes it. As far as I can tell, Confucius didn’t know about telephones, though my Grandfather would have disputed that. In fact, he used to insist that the Chinese invented everything from the computer, to the movie projector, to chocolate milk. Anyway, the younger generation is supposed to call the elder generation to pay “respects” which is the Confucian equivalent of just saying “Hi”. You don’t do the reverse because that would well just reverse everything.

It is, however, okay to call younger members of the family on a business matter. I know that Uncle Leon has a non-business life, but I’ve never been part of it. He used to take regular hunting trips and he’d return to the house with various brothers in law and some of my male cousins dressed in camouflage and bearing assorted dead birds and an occasional mammal carcass, but my Dad never liked the idea of shooting things. As I got older, I could have gone on my own. My cousins loved talking about guns and I’d never fired one. It was just that I thought about the constant level of hostility within my Dad’s family and determined on my own that a hunting trip was something better done with non-relatives. I’ve still never gone hunting.

It was however obvious from all those phone messages that Uncle Leon was hunting for something. Somehow, the sale of Paperson suddenly depended on me or whatever my connection to Jan Grady happened to be. He wanted to know as much as he could about Jan Grady, project manager for the Howard Group. I doubt that it was because he cared about Jan Grady, my long lost dorm pal, or our time in Dunster House at Harvard, he simply liked to be the one in any business transaction who controlled the information. Uncle Leon had spent most of his adult life trying to finally become the family member who took care of the business. Suddenly and entirely by accident, or so it seemed, I found myself in the intriguing position of having some sort of influence over the process.

While this aspect was certainly fun, I’d managed to get through adult life by minimizing my formal responsibilities. After all, who else let’s someone leave him six phone messages in a row?

“So, Lucky. Aren’t you going to call your Uncle Leon?”

Marie was in the backyard preparing to plant tomatoes. As a concession to being together, I’d built her two redwood planter boxes. Dirt was already pouring out of one unjoined corner. I had hit that corner twice with the back end of a shovel. Twice a year whether I need to or not, I do time in Marie’s garden in the spirit of being a good boyfriend. As I mentioned, formal responsibility has not been one of my adult strengths. We’ve shared a bedroom now for five years, three crops of vegetables, and one year where I forgot to water when Marie went to visit her family for a week without me.

“Did he leave another message?”

“I told you about the first four. You’re not even listening to them.”

“Why should I rewind the tape to listen to them. He’ll tell me what they’re about when I call him.”

“Look, there are two things you always avoid. One is anything to do with taxes or money and the second thing is anything that has to do with your Dad’s family. Why do you do that?”

I stick one end of the shovel into a slab of black compost and transfer it to the planter.

“I don’t know. I just don’t like dealing with those things.”

“You think maybe I’ve figured that out after five years? You won’t even talk about those things…..And who’s Jan Grady?”

Marie stands on top of the far end of the planter box with a pair of hedge clippers. She’s been out in her garden since the sun came up. She wears a pair of shorts, a blue work shirt, and a not necessarily flattering sun hat which obscures her face. She’s naturally on the pale side, so takes care to ration her exposure to the largest object in our solar system. The travails of blonde-haired people remain very exotic to me.

I don’t answer at first, well aware that this is not the kind of question one answers casually. It’s not like anything bad has happened with Jan Grady. It’s more that Marie is the sort of woman who will read what might happen into my answer. Naturally, I have to make my answer sound as casual as possible but only after I have taken some care in my choice of words.

“She’s the project manager from the Luke Howard organization. I thought I mentioned her when I went to Paperson the other day.”

Marie looks at me suspiciously. She tugs at the brim of her sun hat and snips the air with her shears.

“Paperson?”

“You know, my grandfather’s estate. That’s the name of the town. I lived there when I was a kid.”

“I know your grandfather’s estate has never had a name before….And why would she call you instead of your uncle. Isn’t he the one who takes care of everything?”

I find myself instinctively placing the shovel between my body and Marie’s shears. I take another angry scoop of compost and slap it into the planter.

“I thought you wanted me to help you out here….”

Before Marie can react, it dawns on me that I’ve just made things look far worse than they actually are and soften my tone, “Jan Grady turned out to be an old friend from Harvard. I was totally surprised that she showed up. I hadn’t much thought about her since we graduated.”

“Hadn’t much thought about her?”

Marie can be on the jealous side in both senses. We come from very different backgrounds. My father screamed at me when I admitted to him that I hadn’t applied to Yale or Harvard Law School because I wanted to come back to the west coast and didn’t have the grades anyway. After he stopped yelling at me, he called me at two in the morning to keep talking to me about how it was embarrassing for him to tell people that I didn’t want to apply to places like that. Marie’s parents didn’t even talk to her about going to college after high school. She got married instead, divorced the guy after several years of trying, then finished college locally a few years after we met.

When we first met, I still talked to an old girlfriend. Marie made me stop. It was a reasonable request even though it was just talking. After that, I’d gotten in the habit of not going out of my way to mention other women even business associates unnecessarily.
The fact that Jan Grady had been to Harvard with me made the situation many times worse. Even worse, I was going to have to confess that Jan more than twenty years out of college was probably more attractive now than she was then.

“She’s just someone I knew from the dorm. I hadn’t seen or talked to Jan Grady since graduation at least until the other day.”

Marie looked at me and shook her head. Once again, I pretended to be diligent about filling the planter box with compost.

“Then why’s she calling you at home? How did she get our number?”

“I didn’t say we we hadn’t been friends. She probably just wants to catch up.”

Marie nodded. “You never went out?”

“Actually at that time, no one exactly went out.”

I swallowed as I saw Marie’s eyes widen underneath the brim of her sun hat. I’d said the right thing the wrong way. I quickly reminded her.

“I never slept with anyone until I was almost twenty four. You know that. That’s three years after I left Cambridge.”

“But did you want to?”

“No, she was just a friend in the dorm. We’d sit at the same table in the dining commons sometimes. Jan had a boyfriend. It wasn’t me. I knew her boyfriend, Jamie.”

That answer was finally good enough for Marie even though it left out a key fact or two about my friendship with Jan Grady back when she was Jan Free and when it wasn’t strange to talk to a near stranger for two hours over dinner about making the University divest any stocks it held that had investments in South Africa or say alone in a dorm room at three in the morning. I finished my time in Marie’s garden and we even kissed some at the end when she came to bring “Manolo” ice water. Manolo is the imaginary illegal Mexican laborer who works in her garden twice a year who looks exactly like me and does her bidding both in the garden and in certain parts of the house.

Once in the house and in sight of the telephone message machine, I had a problem. Obviously, I couldn’t call Jan Grady first with Marie around. I had to call Uncle Leon.

“Lucky, how are you?”

“Hi Uncle Leon, I was away for a couple days. Sorry, I didn’t get your call earlier.”

“Your wife was very nice. She didn’t mention you’re being away.”

“Marie’s sort of absent-minded sometimes.”

“Well, I hope I get to meet her one of these days.”

“Sure, one of these days? How are your kids?”

“Good, good….Did I tell you that Mikey’s working in Manhattan? He recommended Microsoft and Cisco a few years ago. Smith Barney loves him.”

I doubt that Uncle Leon knew that one of my friends insists that he’d seen my cousin Mikey at Studio 54 a decade earlier in the bathroom with a razor blade and a powdery substance. He only told me because my friend Ambrose is the sort of east coast guy who is sure that every Chinese person from Sacramento has to know every other Chinese person from Sacramento. As it happened, I did know my cousin Mikey, who had once been Uncle Leon’s “overweight” son whose mother used to embarrass him about it.

“You know, I had a friend who sort of knew Mikey. He said he was having a really good time in the city. I’m glad to hear that Mikey’s doing well.”

Truth is that most of Manhattan did cocaine in the Studio 54 bathroom that decade. I felt like I was one of the few college graduates who managed to avoid that sort of thing entirely which may have had something with my keeping my virginity until I was twenty four. It’s not like Mikey was an addict. He was probably just a pretty typical Go-Go Wall Street type of the era.

“We’re really proud of him. Who would have thought that Mikey would make it on Wall Street?”

Uncle Leon’s other sons probably weren’t doing as well in “parent” terms as Mikey. One was in the retail clerks union and another worked for the State of California. The youngest had managed to stay in junior college for seven years. They seemed happy enough, the couple times I’d seen them in the twenty years since my Grandfather’s funeral, but I wouldn’t really know.

“So, it must have been a surprise for you to run into someone you knew from college.”

“Well, it was a big school.”

“Jan Grady must have done very well.”

“I assume so.”

We had crossed over into the seemingly casual part of our phone call that really mattered to Uncle Leon only he wasn’t going to show it.

“How did you know her?”

“She lived in my dorm. We used to talk once in a while.”

Marie was at the sink washing lettuce. As I mentioned the dorm, she turned in my direction and watched me intently.

“Uncle Leon, is there something I need to do here?”

“Well, yes…but we can talk about that later.”

“Okay, I just have a few minutes though. I have to deal with a client in a little bit.”

Marie looked at me quizzically and mouthed “Client, what client?”

I waved her away with my non-phone hand.

“I didn’t know you were practicing law again Lucky.”

“Well sort of. It’s not a big deal. I just promised to call this guy back.”

“What is it you were doing again these last few years?”

“Well, I took time off to write a you know kind of a book.”

“And how did that go? Did you ever finish? Did you find a publisher. You know I remember that eulogy you gave for your cousin Chucky. You’re good at that sort of thing.”

“Thanks, Uncle Leon.”

“No really.”

I was very close to saying “Uncle Leon, what exactly do you want from me right now? It’s not like you to smooth talk me about stuff like that”, but I resisted the temptation.

I was now twisting the phone card in my free hand. In the meantime, Marie was shaking her head. We went through almost two years of my taking the day to write and my not really writing anything. I was perfectly sincere about doing the writing, I had just found it hard to say exactly what I wanted to say.

“No, it’s a big project and it needed a little more time.”

“Wasn’t it going to be about your Grandfather?”

“Yeah, more or less.”

“Well, I’d love to see it some time. I’m sure it would be really interesting.”

“Sure, it’s got to be ready though…So is there something going on with the Estate Uncle Leon?”

There was enough of a pause over the phone that I wondered briefly if Uncle Leon was still on the line.

“Well, I know you have a client, but Lucky I need to ask you something.”

“Ummm…sure.”

“You know how important this sale is. Paperson’s been in the estate and trust for almost twenty five years. If we can sell it or license it whatever these people want, it means we can close the Estate finally. I’m sure you want that.”

“I think we all want that Uncle Leon.”

“Okay….I know you and I haven’t always cooperated on this.”

“Uncle Leon, I filed that petition almost twenty years ago. We worked it out.”

“Lucky, look. This Jan Grady seemed to be very friendly with you. If she winds up talking to you on your own, would you mind letting me know right away what she has on her mind?”

“What?”

“I mean just about the things that pertain to Paperson.”

“Uh…”

“Look Luke Howard is a big fish. He’s supposed to be a very shrewd businessman. They say he’s been so successful because he manages to bring his productions in under budget. You’ve got to be a tough negotiator to do that.”

“I thought it was because of those furry aliens he created.”

“Lucky, this family’s going to need every edge it can get if it’s going to get what it deserves in this deal. You know what I mean? Whatever you can find out, I need to know. I don’t know if you know this, but in real estate timing can be everything.”

“Honestly, Uncle Leon, I haven’t talked to Jan Grady since we were in Paperson that morning. I doubt that I’ll ever have anything to tell you. She’s someone who I haven’t seen or spoken to since Boz Scaggs was on the radio.”

“Who?”

“I’m just saying I don’t know anything more than you do at this point and I don’t expect to.”

“Lucky, I was there. She’s going to call you.”

“Is that it Uncle Leon?”

“Do we have an understanding?”

“Sure, why not?”

Marie was already hand shredding the romaine and dropping it into a paper bag for me to shake out the moisture. This was perhaps the first time in five years, I would have preferred to be out working on Marie’s garden instead of having her around for my next phone call. In the meantime, the message light was on and that last message from Jan Grady was still on the tape.

“Dear, you didn’t happen to write down Jan Grady’s number when she left that message?”

“You mean you didn’t write it down yourself? Maybe you were too busy with your client?”

“Okay, I’ll answer your questions. Can I just make this call first?”

“Lucky, I know you think I’m being jealous. It’s really not that. It’s just like there’s this whole part of your life where I don’t seem to know you.”

“I’ve talked about it.”

“Honestly, maybe you have a little, but you hardly say anything about it. I’ve never met most of your father’s family.”

“Well, we’re not that close.”

“But, you and I are. You’re the one who claimed you wanted to write about it. How do you expect to do that if you won’t even talk about it with the woman you live with?”

That should have made me feel better, but it only made me feel worse. I had never dated Jan Grady never even hugged her before a few days ago in Paperson. At the same time, Marie had a good reason to be jealous. I just wasn’t sure how or in what form it was going to come out.

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