Remembrance Read online

  Now that I’m an adult and know all about adult things (uh-huh, sure) I know that my parents were not creative and I was. If they bought something that needed assembly, they read the box and put it together in the way the manufacturer wanted them to. If I bought something, I felt that reading the instructions was cheating. And if I couldn’t put it together easily, it was quite ordinary for me to jump up and down on the box and say all the dirty words I knew—which, thankfully, weren’t many.

  My punishment for box jumping or any infraction of the peace rules was to be talked to “for my own good.” Never in my life have I understood that phrase. When someone says this is “for your own good” it always, always, always means that someone is trying to make you openly acknowledge his or her superior power.

  So, anyway, how did I survive these spirit killers? How did I survive being dragged to the preacher so he could talk to me because I was “different”? How did I survive hearing my mother ask my relatives if they had any idea what she could “do” with me?

  I did the best I could by escaping into a land of stories.

  I read incessantly. When my mother made me vacuum the bedroom I shared with my sister, she was more concerned with the length of time I spent vacuuming than with how clean the floor was after I was finished. All she ever checked was to see that the light bulbs were spotless, so I learned to clean the bulbs, then I’d get in the closet with a book, a flashlight, and the vacuum and sit down for a forty-five-minute read. Since my mother had the ears of a bat, I had to make sure the suction was going on and off, so I sat there putting various parts of my face to the hose, sucking and reading, sucking and reading. I did learn that one must make sure the hose end is clean or one’s face gets awfully dirty, then one’s mother makes one actually clean the room. Gag!

  So, anyway, I learned to get round the work, work, work, clean, clean, clean ethic of my mother’s house and make time for the books I loved so much. I read nonfiction even then. I read about heroes, about men and women who had done things and accomplished things in their lives.

  There was Daniel Boone and Jackie Cochran and, oh sigh, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. There was the most magnificent queen who ever lived, Elizabeth I, and there were girls who dressed as boys and became spies. Oh, but the list was endless.

  I didn’t realize it then but what I was doing was researching. Yes, that’s right, researching. Now I receive reader letters saying in awe, How do you ever do all the research necessary to write historical novels? Okay, let’s have a reality check here. This woman has written me that she has a full-time job and three children under the age of five and she wants to know how I research a romantic novel. I want to ask her how she survives each day.

  I guess I’m explaining so much about my life to make you, my readers, think I’m a normal, sane person because something happened to me that isn’t normal and maybe not even sane.

  You see, I fell in love with one of my fictional characters.

  Up until I started writing a book titled Forever, I liked to think I was a perfectly well-adjusted person. Maybe I did have a lot of stories running through my head, but to me, the people who don’t have these stories are missing something.

  Anyway, I like to think I was happy and relatively well adjusted. I was thirty-seven years old, had a great career, had friends, and best of all, I had met a wonderful man named Steven.

  Steve was a dream come true: smart, funny, talented, caring. If I’d made him up he couldn’t have been better. And he adored me. He laughed at all my jokes, thought I was beautiful, smart. You name it, everything was perfect between us. There was no question that finally, at last, I wanted to get married. When he asked me to marry him, while riding in a hansom cab through Central Park, I threw my arms around his neck and said, “Yes, yes, yes!” with such enthusiasm that I embarrassed Steve.

  But that night, actually, early Sunday morning, I awoke at 3 A.M. with an IDEA. That’s unusual for me. When I first started to write I was plagued with Ideas, and I was so afraid that I’d forget them when I awoke that I got out of bed and wrote all night. But after I’d written about ten books, I’d wake up with an Idea, then fall back asleep.

  But that night of my marriage proposal, with my left hand weighted down by Steven’s ring, I had an IDEA. It was so big that I couldn’t relax against Steve’s warm body and go back to sleep.

  So, tiptoeing, I got out of bed and went to my computer to write down my thoughts. What I was really thinking about wasn’t so much a story but a character. Well, okay, a man. A wonderful man, a man unlike any I’d ever written about before. A man who was more real to me than any other man I’d created.

  In my books, I write about one family, the Tavistocks. When I first started writing, every time I finished a book I’d get depressed because I knew that I’d never again see the characters in my book. So one day I had the brilliant idea of writing four books about four brothers in one family. However, I had not taken into consideration that when I finished the series I would be quadruply depressed. When I reached this point, the only way I could figure how to recover was to write more books about the same family.

  At the time I didn’t realize what I was getting into. As the number of books about this family increased, the mail brought me thousands of requests for family trees. And people kept pointing out that I’d have a man and woman with a little boy in one book and in the next book their child would be a girl. I had to buy professional genealogy software to keep up with all of my people, since within a few years I had over four hundred characters, all related to one another.

  Over the years I had come to love my Tavistocks and their cousins, and they had become very real to me. So on the night of my engagement it wasn’t unusual for me to start writing about a man named Tavistock.

  I named him James Tavistock, to be called Jamie, and he was a great big gorgeous sixteenth-century Scotsman running around in the Tavistock plaid, and the heroine was a modern woman of today who travels back in time to meet him.

  When Steve awoke the next morning I was still at my computer, trying to get down dialogue and notes for the book. He’d never seen me like this because over the years I had learned to treat writing like a nine-to-five job. I took off weekends and holidays just like everyone else. I found that this worked better for me than the lunacy of “waiting for inspiration.” The rent I pay each month for my apartment is all the inspiration I need.

  Steve was very understanding. He’s an investment banker (no, I do not allow him to handle my money; I said I was in love, not insane) and was a bit fascinated by the creative process. So he ordered his own breakfast from the delicatessen (in the real world the woman fries eggs for her man; in New York we dial the telephone for our men), and I kept typing.

  After a while he got bored with hearing the keys of my computer, so he tried to get me to go out with him to see a movie or walk in the park. But I wouldn’t go. I couldn’t seem to stop writing about Jamie.

  Steve said he understood, then decided to leave me to my work; he’d see me the next day.

  But I didn’t see him the next day, or the next. In fact I didn’t see him for nearly two weeks. I didn’t want to see anyone; I just wanted to write about Jamie.

  I read books on Scotland until the wee hours of the morning and everything gave me an idea about Jamie. I thought about him, dreamed about him. I could see his dark eyes, his dark hair. I could hear his laugh. I knew what was good about him and what was bad. He was brave and honest; his honor was such that it was a life force. He was proud to the point that it hindered him. But for all his many virtues he was also vain and at times as lazy as a cat. All he wanted was me—I mean, the heroine—to wait on him.

  After two weeks I went out with Steve; I don’t know what it was, but it was as though I couldn’t really see him. It was as though I was seeing all the world through a Vaseline-coated lens. Nothing seemed real to me. All I could seem to hear and see was Jamie.

  Over the next months my obsession with this man only
deepened. Steve did everything he could think of to get my attention. He talked to me, pleaded with me to stop working and start paying attention to him.

  “Where is the woman I fell in love with?” he asked with a smile, trying to make light of what was hurting him so much.

  I couldn’t really answer him. I just wanted to get back to my computer and my research books. I don’t know what I was looking for in the books; maybe I hoped to “find” Jamie in them.

  I have to say that through all of this Steve was wonderful. He really did love me. After about four months of complete inattention from me, he begged me to go with him to a counselor. By this time I was feeling guilty. No, correction, I was feeling that I should feel guilty; what I was actually feeling was that I wanted everyone on the earth to go away and leave me alone with Jamie.

  For three months, Steve and I had weekly visits with a therapist, talking about my childhood. I was completely uninterested in any of it. I sat there and told them what they wanted to hear, that my mama didn’t love me and my daddy didn’t love me, et cetera. The truth was, in the back of my mind, I was thinking only of what I wanted to write about Jamie. Had I fully explored the way the sunlight played on his hair? Had I described the sound of his laughter?

  Steve knew very well that I was paying no attention to any of the therapists, so, after eight months of receiving nothing from me, he told me he wanted to break our engagement. In a scene that I felt as though I were looking at from a distance, I gave him back his ring. The only thought that was in my head was, Now I can spend all my time with Jamie.

  When I first told my friend and editor, Daria, about my obsession with this hero, she was thrilled. Obsessed authors write great books. The authors who fail are ones who call their editors and say, “What do you want me to write next?”

  Daria was the only person on earth who wanted to hear about this man as much as I wanted to talk about him. Of course, to be honest, Daria had learned to listen to authors while line editing other people’s manuscripts, eating a bagel, and directing her assistant about covers and cover copy. Daria has one humdinger of a brain.

  But then something odd happened. After about three months of my talking nonstop about this book, Daria said, “I want to see what you’ve done.”

  “No!” I snapped at her request. Now this is very odd. Writers act as though they have lots of self-confidence, but we all have clay feet. We are in awe of the power of our editors, those first people who see our work. Daria always raves about the first section of a book I turn in to her. Later she may tell me it all needs to go into the trash, but not at first. It’s like, you can’t tell your best girlfriend that the guy she’s madly in love with is a creep. After she breaks up with him, you can tell her.

  Anyway, I usually sent Daria my book in fifty-page clumps and started pestering her for her opinion (i.e., lavish praise) before the express service had even picked it up from my door. One book, I sent her the whole five hundred pages in ten-page segments. Wisely, Daria refuses to have a fax machine in her apartment or else all her insecure, praise-hungry authors would be faxing her their books page by page then demanding an hour’s praise for every paragraph that they hope is wittily written.

  By all of this you can see how unusual it was when I didn’t want Daria to see what I had written. I told her I wanted to finish the section I was writing before I sent it to her.

  The truth was, I didn’t want her—or any other woman—to set eyes on my Jamie.

  Even after months, I still refused to allow Daria to see any of the book, and she began to be concerned. Some writers lie about how much they’re writing, but I knew Daria didn’t think this of me, since I write because I love it—correction, I write because I must, because I am driven to it.

  Daria grew more concerned when, a month after it happened, I told her that I had broken my engagement to Steve. “You didn’t tell me this?” she asked, aghast, for we were truly friends, not just business friends. She seemed a little worried when I said that the broken engagement didn’t matter, that I hadn’t been very upset by the breakup.

  Months went by and I kept writing. When I write, I keep a file named Scenes, and whenever I have an idea about possible bits of dialogue that I might be able to use in the book, I stick it in this file. Being very frugal, I almost always use every word I put into this file.

  But I had written so much about Jamie that the Scenes file was over six hundred thousand bytes, over four hundred pages, and I hadn’t yet really started the book. I kept telling myself that I needed to do a bit more research or needed to know just a tiny bit more about Jamie before I could actually start writing the book itself.

  I had Jamie and my heroine, who was named Caitlin, in every possible situation. I told myself I was “exploring possibilities of their characters.” Twenty-five books I had written, and I’d never before felt this need, but then I’d never before felt this way about a character I’d made up. Oh, I often felt as though I were “in love” with a hero, but it was nothing compared to what I felt about Jamie.

  Months went by and still I kept writing notes for my book. Jamie was no longer a Scotsman but an Englishman in the time of Queen Elizabeth I.

  Daria was more than annoyed with me as I still wouldn’t allow her to see anything I’d written. She reminded me that I was past my due date; it had no effect on me. She sent me a copy of the cover and talked to me about all the people at my publishing house who were depending on me, something that I usually cared a great deal about. But I didn’t care about anyone or anything, just Jamie.

  I think it was the wedding invitation I received from Steve that made me realize that I had a “problem.” I know it was probably a bitter, hurtful thing he did, sending me that pretty, engraved invitation, letting me know that I had truly lost him, but actually it was the best thing that could have happened to me.

  I realized that I had discarded a real, live, utterly wonderful man for a character I had created on paper. I realized that I had not talked to any of my friends in months and that the romance trade papers were running little gossip bits about, What ever happened to Hayden Lane?

  But realization cannot stop something that’s bad. All smokers know they should quit, but that doesn’t make them able to stop the habit.

  But when I was able to admit to myself that I did indeed have a problem, I decided to get help. I spent three months going to a therapist every day. That was useless. No one had even conceived of a case like mine. At first I tried to keep it from her that the man I was obsessed with was a figment of my imagination, but I have a big mouth and I’m not good at intrigue, so she soon found out. Her advice was to get out more, see people. I tried, but that didn’t work because I bored everyone to death with “Jamie says” and “Jamie likes” and “Jamie does.”

  When therapy didn’t seem to be working, I started trying other methods of figuring out what was wrong with me. In New York, there’s a palm reader, a psychic, a tarot card reader, some esoteric something on every corner. I went to several of them. I guess I hoped that someone would tell me that within a week or two I’d be back to my old self. But not one of them told me anything helpful. They told me I was rich and famous and had a star in my palm that meant I was “special.” They told me the people at my work were beginning to think I was crazy and had decided to treat me as though I were nitroglycerine about to go off.

  In other words, they didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. At home, I cried a lot and yearned for Jamie all the time. I didn’t just want to write about him, I wanted to feel him, touch him, talk to him. I wanted to follow his long legs down country paths; I wanted to bear his children.

  I don’t know what would have happened, or how long all of this would have gone on, if I hadn’t met Nora. Like a spider sitting in the midst of her web, she had an office across from my hairdresser’s with a huge red neon sign that said ASTROLOGY. As I sat there with foil in my hair (my hair is white blonde and I get downlights to make it look more “natural”—weir
d, huh?) I thought, I think I’ll go have my chart done.

  I say that Nora is like a spider because I soon learned that she knows even less about astrology than I do. She put the sign up to attract people. Nora really is a clairvoyant, and as soon as I sat down and asked for my chart to be done, she said, “How about a psychic reading, instead?”

  I said, “Sure,” and that one word was the beginning of everything.

  2

  You’re not supposed to be here,” the astrologer cum clairvoyant, Nora, said. “Where are you supposed to be?”

  “At my computer?” I’m always making jokes, but then she was the clairvoyant, not I. Shouldn’t she be divining where I was supposed to be?

  “You are in love with someone, deeply in love with him, but something is wrong. Something is blocking that love. What is it?”

  I sat there in one of my rare moments of speechlessness and stared at her. She was a little too close to the truth, but even toothpicks under my nails wouldn’t have made me give her any help. In the last months I had had too many so-called psychics guessing what my problem was.

  First of all, I don’t think this woman had read the fortune-teller’s handbook.

  Nora didn’t look like a fortune-teller. Palm readers et al. are supposed to shave off their eyebrows, paint them at random elsewhere on their faces, wear earrings the size of hubcaps, and drape cheap, garish rayon scarves about their shoulders. Nora did none of these things. She had a sweet, round face, big brown eyes, dark hair worn in a short fashionable cut and Connecticut lady-on-the-weekend clothes. She just looked normal, pleasant. Not in the least bizarre.

  I could understand that she didn’t know the dress code of witches but why wasn’t she saying what she was supposed to say? She should be telling me that I’d meet a tall, dark man, etc. etc.

  Above all, she should not be asking me questions.