Wild Orchids Read online

  I had to remind myself of those words several times during the next months. I even typed them on a piece of paper and hung them on the wall above the typewriter. At some point, Pat wrote “Amen!” at the bottom.

  I never went back to my classroom full of non-English-speaking students. At first Pat called in sick for me, and for a week she took over the class, but after the third student asked her to marry him so he could stay in the U.S., she quit. And she told them that I quit, too.

  The book took me six months to write, and during that time I didn’t come up for air. I saw Pat but I didn’t see her. As far as I remember, we had no conversations. I didn’t think about how she was managing to pay the bills without my income, but I imagine her father helped. I really don’t know. My book was all the life I had.

  When it was done, I turned to Pat where she was curled up on the end of the couch reading, and said, “I finished it.” While I was writing, she’d never asked to read a word of the book and I’d never offered to show it to her. Now, shyly, feeling sheepish, I said, “Would you like to read it?”

  Instantly, she said, “No,” and I nearly collapsed on the floor. What had I done? Did she hate me? In the seconds before she spoke again, I imagined at least a dozen reasons why she didn’t want to read my book—all of them bad.

  “Early tomorrow we’re driving to Dad’s house and you’re going to read the whole book aloud to both of us,” she said.

  I stared at her for a few silent moments. It was one thing to bare my soul to her but to her father?! I searched for some excuse that would get me out of it. “But what about your job? You can’t miss school. Those kids need you.”

  “It’s summer. School’s out,” she said, without a trace of humor in her voice.

  It was a six-hour drive to her father’s house, and I was so nervous that after I ran into the left lane the second time, Pat took over driving. By the time we got there, all the blood had left my face, my hands and my feet.

  Pat’s father was waiting for us with fat turkey sandwiches, but I knew that if I took a bite, I’d choke. Pat seemed to understand. She put her father on the sofa, and me in a chair, then she dropped the first half of my manuscript on my lap. Without a word, she settled herself on the sofa beside her father, full plates on their laps.

  “Read,” she said as she took a bite.

  That manuscript needed a lot of work. It was full of dangling participles, and contained thousands of ambiguous antecedents. I’d been writing so fast that I forgot to put in “he said” and “she said,” so sometimes it was difficult to figure out who was talking. And my dates were all mixed up. I had people being born after they were married. I would have a character named John and twenty pages later I’d call him George. And I don’t even want to think about the misspellings and typos.

  But for all the errors, the book had something that all my previous work hadn’t. At the sixth chapter I looked up and saw that Pat’s father had tears running down his cheeks. The book had heart. My heart. And in writing about what was inside me, I had at last broken up that huge, hard structure that had been living inside my chest. I had put the ugly thing, molecule by molecule, onto paper.

  Night came, Pat put a glass of iced tea by my hand and I kept on reading, and when my voice gave out, she took the pages from me and began to read out loud herself. When the sun came up, I took over again while Pat scrambled eggs and toasted half a loaf of bread. When anyone went to the bathroom, we all went down the hall together and stood outside the door, never breaking in the rhythm of reading.

  The housekeeper came at nine A.M., but Pat’s father told her to go home and we kept on reading. When Pat finished the book at a little after four that afternoon, she leaned back in the chair and waited for our verdicts as though she were the writer and we the jury.

  “Brilliant,” Pat’s father whispered. “Martha has been avenged.”

  His opinion was important to me, but it was the opinion of the love of my life, Pat, that I wanted to hear. But she didn’t say a word. Instead, she set the pages on the floor, got up and walked out the front door, taking the car keys and her handbag off the foyer table as she left.

  Her behavior was so odd that I wasn’t even hurt by it. The book had been about her mother so maybe Pat was upset, I thought. Or maybe—

  “Women!” Pat’s father said, and that seemed to sum it up.

  “Yeah. Women,” I said.

  “What’d’ya say we get drunk?” my father-in-law asked and I’d never heard a more pleasing suggestion in my life.

  By the time Pat returned an hour and a half later, he and I were downing shots of bourbon at an alarming pace, and he was telling me that he thought my book was the best one ever written. “Second only to the Bible,” he said.

  “You mean it?” I asked, my arm around him. “You really, really mean it?”

  When Pat walked into the kitchen carrying two big bags with Office Max printed on them, she took one look at us and told us we were disgusting.

  “But you didn’t like my book,” I wailed, the booze having dissolved my manly charade.

  “Nonsense!” Pat said, taking the bottle and glasses off the table and placing a huge pizza box before us. She opened it to reveal a giant pizza covered with hot sausage and three colors of peppers—my favorite.

  It wasn’t until later, after I’d thrown up and shared the pizza with Pat’s father, who then went straight to bed to sleep it off, that I realized Pat had taken her other bags and disappeared. I found her in the dining room, the table covered with pens, papers, and my manuscript.

  My head ached and my stomach was queasy, and I was beginning to worry because she still hadn’t made even one comment about my book. “What are you doing?” I asked, trying to sound everyday and as though I didn’t want to jump up and down and scream, “Tell me! Tell me! Tell me!”

  “I’m editing,” she said, looking up at me. “Ford, it’s the best book I’ve ever read, but even I could hear the errors in it. You and I are going over it sentence by sentence and correct it, and when it’s done we’re sending it to a publishing house.”

  “To my agent,” I murmured. Best book, she’d said. Best book.

  “That pompous little windbag?”

  I had no idea she didn’t like the man.

  “No,” Pat said. “I am going to be your agent.”

  “You?” I said, and, unfortunately, it came out sounding like I didn’t believe that she, a high school chemistry teacher, could, overnight, become a literary agent.

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “If you can become a writer, I can become an agent.”

  “Sure, honey,” I said, reaching out to take her hand. I’d call my agent first thing in the morning.

  Removing her hand from my grasp, she looked back at the manuscript. “Patronize me all you want, but while you’ve been writing I’ve been thinking and I know I can do it. All I ask is that you give me the chance.” When she turned to me, her eyes were fierce, determined, almost scary. “I have no talent,” she said in a hard tone I’d never heard her use before. “And I’ll never have children. I have nothing but you and your talent to thank God for four times a day.” She put her hand on the tall two-box stack of typed pages. “You don’t know it yet but this is brilliant. And I know that right now, this minute, is my one chance in life. I can step back and become the writer’s wife and be stuck at the end of the table with all the other stars’ spouses—or I can become your partner. Maybe I can’t write, but I’m better with numbers and money than you are, and I can organize anything. You write and I’ll take care of the rest of it. I’ll take care of contracts and promotion and defined benefit plans and royalties and—”

  She stopped talking and looked at me. “Do we have a deal?” she asked softly, but her voice was full of steel. She wanted this as much as I wanted to write.

  “Yes,” I said, but when she put out her hand to shake mine, I kissed her palm, then her wrist, then I ran my lips all the way up her arm. We ended up making love on her
mother’s dining room table on top of the manuscript, which slid out of the boxes and spread itself out under us. For the six weeks that it took us to edit and rewrite the book, whenever we came to stuck-together pages, we looked at each other and smiled warmly.

  There’s no way to describe the twelve years between the publication of my first book and Pat’s death.

  After we’d edited the book, had it professionally typed, and made six photocopies of it, Pat made appointments with editors in New York and we went there for two days. She went to the meetings alone because she said that I’d turn into a whining baby when people started putting a dollar value to my “blood on a page.” I protested that I was never a “whining baby,” but I knew she was right. That book was about Pat’s mother’s life so how could that be worth less than billions?

  In the end, I spent the days wandering around Central Park worrying so much that I lost four pounds. “If I’m not around you don’t even eat,” Pat said, disgusted, but I could tell that she was as nervous as I was. We never talked about the “what if” but it hung in the air. What if she wasn’t suited for agenting? What if she couldn’t sell the book? And, the worst, what if no one liked the book enough to want to buy it?

  At the end of the two days we went home to wait. The people she’d given the book to had to have time to read it. They had to discuss money with their bosses, and they had to—Who knew what they had to do?

  I tried to tell myself that this was business, but part of my mind said that if they turned down the book it was as though they were rejecting Pat’s mother—which is what I had titled the book:Pat’s Mother.

  Pat pretended she was cool and calm, laughing smugly whenever I jumped at some noise and looked at the telephone. But I got her back. I arranged with a guy I used to work with to call our number, then I hid the two telephones in our house. Pat had forbidden me to answer the phone, so when it rang I remained sitting at the table, the newspaper hiding my face. When the phone rang, Pat went running, and when she couldn’t find the phone, she started throwing things around until the house was a jumble.

  When she finally got to it and answered, out of breath, the caller hung up.

  I kept the newspaper over my face to hide the fact that I was laughing so hard. I thought I’d pulled one over on her until a minute later she refilled my coffee cup. When I took a drink, I sputtered. She’d put dishwashing detergent in it.

  As I was hanging over the sink washing out my mouth, Pat gave me a little smile that told me not to mess with her again.

  When the phone rang again, I was still at the sink, Pat was rummaging in the refrigerator, and I could see she had no intention of answering it. I grimaced. It was probably Charley asking if he’d done all right.

  Slowly, I walked over to the phone, now in plain sight, and when I picked it up I was told to hold for someone at Simon & Schuster publishing house.

  I couldn’t speak. Holding the phone away from my ear, I looked at the back of Pat. By some sixth sense, she turned, saw my white face, and nearly leaped over the couch to take the phone from me. Sitting down at the table, I took a deep drink of my coffee, and listened. Pat mostly said, “Yes. Yes. I understand,” then she hung up and looked at me.

  The first thing she did was to take away my cup and pour out the soap-laden coffee. I’d drunk nearly half of it and hadn’t noticed. As she handed me a paper towel to wipe out the inside of my mouth, she said, “They’re going to auction the book.”

  I had no idea what that meant but I knew it was bad. Auctions were for used furniture. If someone died, their furniture was auctioned off.

  Seeing that I didn’t understand, Pat sat down at the table beside me and took my hand in hers. “Three publishing houses want to buy the book, so they’re going to bid on it. Highest bidder gets your book. The auction will go on all day today.”

  What I didn’t know until later was that Pat and I had done everything wrong. We should have presented the book to one publishing house at a time. But she had given the book to three houses and she’d told each house who else was looking at it. Because all three houses liked the book, and because they didn’t want to offend the wife of the author, the publishing houses had done the agent’s job and arranged the auction themselves.

  But on that long ago day, in our innocence, neither Pat nor I knew of anything “wrong.” We just settled back and did the only thing we could do: wait. The phone rang every hour as the houses presented their bids to us and asked us about the other bids.

  After each call, we called Pat’s father to keep him abreast of every bid increment and every development.

  It was an exciting, frightening, exhausting day. Pat and I didn’t eat a thing and I suspect that her father didn’t either. We wouldn’t move inches away from the phone for fear we’d miss something.

  At five P.M. it was over and I was told I was to receive a cool million from Simon & Schuster.

  How do you celebrate something like that? It was more than we could comprehend. Champagne wasn’t enough. This was a life change, and it was too big for either of us to grasp.

  We sat at the breakfast table in silence, not sure what to do, and having nothing to say. Pat clasped her hands in front of her, then started examining her fingernails. I picked up a pen from the table and began to color in the o’s on the front page of the newspaper.

  After several minutes of silence, I looked at Pat and she looked at me. I could hear her thoughts as clearly as if she were saying them aloud. “You call your dad,” I said, “and I’ll…Uh…” My mind was so blank I couldn’t think of what I should do.

  “Wait in the car,” Pat said, as she called her father to tell him of the deal and that we were on our way to celebrate with him. The thoughts that Pat and I had shared were that there were three of us in this, not just two, and any celebration we had we had to share with him.

  When we got to his house, it was nearly midnight, and we had to park three blocks away because there were so many cars parked on the streets.

  “What idiot gives a party on a Tuesday night?” Pat asked, annoyed that we had to walk so far.

  We were almost there before we realized that the party was in her dad’s house and it was for us. Neither Pat nor I could figure out how he’d done it, but in just six hours Edwin Pendergast had put together a party that will live in history. All the doors of his house were open, but so were the doors of the two houses flanking his, and guests and waiters and caterers were swarming all over the three lots and three houses.

  What a party it was! In the wide area created by the three front lawns was a live band playing Big Band-era music, the music Pat’s parents loved best.

  In front of the band were half a dozen professional dancers dressed in forties costumes swinging to a horn player who had to have been a blood relative of Harry James. Neighbors and people I’d never seen before, aged from eight to eighty, were dancing right along with the professionals. They all shouted hellos and congratulations when they saw Pat and me, but they were having too good a time to stop dancing.

  As Pat and I got close to the front door, we heard other music coming from the back. I grabbed Pat’s hand and we ran down the path at the side of the house and there, just behind Pat’s mother’s rose garden, was another band, this one playing modern rock and roll, and more people were dancing on the combined lawns of two houses.

  The backyard of the house on the left of Pat’s father’s house was enclosed by a high fence. They had a pool, and when we heard laughter coming from the other side of the fence, Pat shouted, “Give me a boost up.” I cupped my hands, she put her foot in them, and looked over the top of the fence.

  “What’s going on?” I shouted above the music. I saw her eyes widen in shock, but she didn’t say anything until she was back on the ground.

  “Swimming party,” she shouted into my ear.

  I looked at her in question, silently asking why a swimming party was cause for her look of shock.

  “No suits,” she shouted up at me. But w
hen I looked about for something to climb on to look over the fence, she grabbed my hand to pull me into her father’s house.

  It was chaos inside. There were two live bands outside, one in front and one in the back, and with all the windows and doors open on that hot summer night, it was cacophony.

  But it worked. The truth was, the clashing bands were just how I felt. I had hungered after being published for as long as I could remember. I used to write comic books when I was a kid. One time when I was staying with a church-going uncle, I wrote a new book to the Bible. All I’d ever wanted all my life was to write stories and have them published—and now it was going to happen.

  But I was also scared to death. Maybe this book was a fluke. A one-time accomplishment. It had been based on the needless death of a woman I had come to love. So what was I to write about for the second book?

  My wife punched me in the ribs.

  “What are you worried about now?” she shouted up at me, obviously disgusted that I couldn’t stop even for one night.

  “Book two,” I yelled back at her. “What do I write about next?”

  She knew what I was saying. My success had happened because I’d written about a personal experience. No, I had exposed my personal experience. What else did I have to expose?

  Shaking her head at me, Pat took my hand, led me into the downstairs bathroom and locked the door. It was quieter in there and I could hear her. “Ford Newcombe, you are an idiot,” she said. “You have a mother who used you as a weapon for punishment. You have a father who’s in prison, and you have eleven uncles who are, each one, vile and despicable. You’ve had enough bad in your life to supply you with a thousand books.”

  “Yeah,” I said, beginning to smile. Maybe I could write about Uncle Simon and his seven daughters, I thought. Or about my sweet Cousin Miranda who died young, but for whom no one had ever mourned. Why was it that only the bad ones were missed? Was there a nonfiction book in this?