“That’s ten thousand for these two books. I had no idea they could be worth that much.”
“I know my stuff, Mercer. Ten thousand is a good deal for you, and for me as well. You want to sell?”
“I don’t know. I need to think about it.”
“Okay. No pressure from me. But, please allow me to keep these in my vault until you decide. As I said, the salt air is brutal.”
“Sure. Take them. Give me a couple of days and I’ll make up my mind.”
“Take your time. No rush. Now, about that champagne.”
“Yes, of course. It is pushing seven o’clock.”
“I have an idea,” Bruce said as he stood and took the books. “Let’s drink it on the beach and go for a walk. I don’t get much beach time, not in this business. I love the ocean and most days don’t even get the chance to see it.”
“Okay,” she said with a slight hesitation. Nothing like a romantic stroll in the surf with a man who claimed to be married. Mercer took a small cardboard box from the counter and handed it to him. He placed the books in it as she removed the champagne from the refrigerator.
10.
It took an hour to walk to the Ritz and back, and by the time they returned to the cottage shadows were falling across the dunes. Their glasses were bone dry and Mercer wasted no time refilling them. Bruce fell into a wicker rocker on the deck and she sat nearby.
They had covered his family: the sudden death of his father; the inheritance that bought the bookshop; his mother he hadn’t seen in almost thirty years; a distant sister; no contact with aunts, uncles, cousins; grandparents long gone. Mercer had matched him story for story, then went one up with the tragedy of her mother’s mental illness and commitment. That was something she told no one, but Bruce was easy to talk to. And to trust. And since both were scarred by the wreckage of abnormal families, they were on common ground and felt comfortable comparing notes and talking about it. The more they revealed, the more they managed to laugh.
Halfway through the second glass of champagne, Bruce said, “I disagree with Myra. You shouldn’t write about families. You’ve done it once, and brilliantly, but once is enough.”
“Don’t worry. Myra is perhaps the last person I would take advice from.”
“Don’t you love her, though, crazy as she is?”
“No, not yet, but I’m growing fond of her. Does she really have a lot of money?”
“Who knows? She and Leigh seem to be quite comfortable. They wrote a hundred books together, and by the way Leigh was far more involved in the romance fiction than she will admit. Some of their titles still sell.”
“Must be nice.”
“It’s hard to write when you’re broke, Mercer, I know that. I know a lot of writers and very few of them sell enough to write full-time.”
“So they teach. They find a campus somewhere and get a steady paycheck. I’ve done it twice and I’ll probably do it again. Either that or sell real estate.”
“I don’t think that’s an option for you.”
“Got any other ideas?”
“Actually, I have one great idea. Top me off and I’ll tell you a long story.” Mercer got the champagne out of the refrigerator and emptied the bottle. Bruce took a long drink, smacked his lips, and said, “I could drink this stuff for breakfast.”
“Me too, but coffee’s a lot cheaper.”
“So I had this girlfriend once, long before Noelle. Her name was Talia, a sweet girl who was gorgeous and talented and really messed up in the head. We dated off and on for about two years, more off than on because she was slowly losing her grip on reality. I couldn’t help her and it was painful watching her deteriorate. But she could write, and she was working on a novel that had enormous potential. It was a highly fictionalized story of Charles Dickens and his mistress, a young actress named Ellen Ternan. Dickens was married for twenty years to Catherine, a really stern woman in the Victorian sense. She bore ten children, and in spite of the obvious physical attraction the marriage was notoriously unhappy. When he was forty-five, and perhaps the most famous man in England, he met Ellen, who was eighteen and an aspiring actress. They fell madly in love and he left his wife and kids, though divorce was out of the question in those days. It’s never been clear whether he and Ellen actually lived together, and there was even a pretty strong rumor that she had a child that died at birth. Whatever the arrangement, they did a good job of hiding and covering up. However, in Talia’s novel, they had a full-blown affair that is narrated by Ellen and no details are spared. The novel got convoluted when Talia introduced another famous affair, one between William Faulkner and Meta Carpenter. Faulkner met her when he was in Hollywood cranking out screenplays for a buck, and from all indications they were in love. This got fictionalized too and was very well done. Then, to make the novel even more complicated, Talia introduced yet another affair between a famous writer and his girlfriend. There was a story, one that was never verified and is probably not true, that Ernest Hemingway had a quick romance with Zelda Fitzgerald when they were living in Paris. As you know, facts often get in the way of a good story, so Talia created her own facts and wrote a highly engaging account of Ernest and Zelda carrying on behind F. Scott’s back. So the novel had three sensational, literary love affairs raging by alternating sections, and it was just too much for one book.”
“She let you read it?”
“Most of it. She kept changing the stories and rewriting entire sections, and the more she wrote the more muddled it became. She asked for advice, I gave it to her, and she always did the opposite. She was obsessed with it and wrote nonstop for two years. When the manuscript passed a thousand pages I quit reading. We were fighting a lot then.”
“What happened to it?”
“Talia said she burned it. She called one day out of her mind and said she had destroyed it for good and would never write another word. Two days later she overdosed in Savannah, where she was living at the time.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Twenty-seven years old and more talent than I’ve ever seen. A month or so after her funeral, I wrote to her mother and rather gently asked about what, if anything, Talia might have left behind. Never heard a word, and the novel has never been mentioned. I’m convinced she burned it, then killed herself.”
“How awful.”
“It was tragic.”
“You didn’t have a copy?”
“Oh no. She would bring the manuscript here for a few days and make me read it while she kept working. She was paranoid about someone stealing her masterpiece and guarded it closely. Poor girl was paranoid about a lot of things. In the end she was off her meds and hearing voices, and there was nothing I could do. Frankly, by then I was trying to avoid her.”
They pondered the tragedy for a minute or so, each sipping slowly. The sun was gone and the deck was dark. Neither had mentioned dinner, but Mercer was prepared to say no. They had spent enough time together for one day.