When the topic turned to his novel and what had inspired it, Tenpenny pleaded the artist’s Fifth: his motivation didn’t matter, it was how they were inspired by it that counted. He had speed-read through the 450-page manuscript the night before, but the prose was dense and not much had stuck. He knew that it had something to do with an old man named Fritz and a young ghost named Dolores, so he satisfied them by recounting the time he and a friend had reached out to the other side.
It happened in St. Croix soon after his prep school friend Wellsy’s death. “He had died just a couple weeks earlier under less than ideal circumstances,” Tenpenny said, without elaborating about the contentious land deal. “Poor guy’s pump blew doing blow. So we figured if anyone would be hanging around it would be Wellsy. He was kind of clueless and wouldn’t even know he was dead. We lit candles and meditated on him for a while, asking him to give us some kind of sign—a flicker of light, a cool breeze. When nothing happened, we turned on a tape recorder and asked again, this time out loud, and we also opened up the floor to any random spirits that were floating around, just so long as they were good-natured. Anyway, it didn’t seem like anything was happening but we decided to play the tape back anyway.”
“And . . . ?” Gary asked.
“Nothin’. It was a big waste of time and we felt more than a little stupid for spending the last couple hours talking to the air. Then, just as my friend was about to leave, he said, Hey, I wonder what would happen if we rolled the tape backward. So we did.”
The editors leaned in anxiously and Tenpenny milked the moment. Then . . .
“Still nothin’.”
As the men laughed, Tenpenny wished that Beresford could be witnessing this from some detached, egoless parallel universe where the benefits of Tenpenny taking the reigns would be as evident to him as it was to the rest of the world. Certainly Beresford deserved props for writing the songs, but Tenpenny was Roger Daltrey to his Pete Townshend—an infinitely better front man—and the main reason the book would ever reach a wide audience. Even in this happy state, though—perhaps because of it—Tenpenny recognized that humans are tragically tethered to their egos and thus he was forced to plan accordingly.
*
The next afternoon Tenpenny stopped by Scholl’s office and dropped a couple bombshells.
“I don’t want the book released in Europe,” he announced.
“What are you talking about? Why not?”
“I just don’t think they’ll get it.”
“Of course they’ll get it—it takes place in London.”
“Right,” Tenpenny said, “but it has a particularly American POV.”
“Shat’s silly,” the palsied Phyllis added, unnecessarily.
Scholl offered, “Roger, you’re being too hard on yourself. I don’t think you know what you have here. This is a book for the world. The entire world.”
This was true, Roger knew, and for a brief moment he hated Beresford for making him keep it from the French and Germans and those newly freed Russians. But what could he do? If he allowed it to be read everywhere, it was only a matter of time before it seeped into England, which is where he planned for Beresford to be residing again soon.
“And I want the title changed.”
“A new title too?” said Scholl, exasperated.
“Yes. I want to call it The Saturday Night Before Easter Sunday.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what I want to call it.”
“The Saturday Night Before . . . ?”
“Easter Sunday.”
Scholl looked at Phyllis, who was wearing a kind of half poker face.
“But that doesn’t mean anything,” said Scholl. “What does it even mean?”
“Well, um . . . it means, uh . . . it means, uh . . . well, it means nothing. The Saturday night before Easter Sunday doesn’t stand for anything, it’s a nothing date. It’s not like New Year’s Eve or Christmas Eve—it’s just . . . the Saturday night before Easter Sunday. It sounds good, but it really means zilch. And that’s . . . that’s really . . . The point is, it’s the emptiness of these people, and their world . . . and the disappointment, and, you know . . .”
“No, I don’t know,” Scholl said. “It’s a terrible title, and the original title was great.”
“Look, that’s my title. Sometimes titles are terrible.”
“Sometimes titles are terrible?”
“I mean, not every title has to mean something. Look at Blood Simple, that was, uh . . . or Dog Day Afternoon—there were no dogs in that, but it gave you a feeling, and the Saturday night before Easter Sunday is the feeling I want people to get when they pick up my book.”
“You just said the Saturday night before Easter Sunday means nothing, so what’s the feeling?”
Tenpenny thought about this. “I want them to come in neutral.”
*