It seemed to sum up my despair and my growing certainty that I would never be able to write again (what a tragedy, V. C. Andrews with a prick felled by writer’s block). It was this quote that suggested any effort I made to better my situation might be meaningless even if it succeeded.

According to gloomy old Dennison Carville, the aspiring novelist should understand from the outset that fiction’s goals were forever beyond his reach, that the job was an exercise in futility. “Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there,” Hardy supposedly said, “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.” I understood because that was what I felt like in those interminable, dissembling days: a bag of bones.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. If there is any more beautiful and haunting first line in English fiction, I’ve never read it. And it was a line I had cause to think of a lot during the fall of 1997 and the winter of 1998. I didn’t dream of Manderley, of course, but of Sara Laughs, which Jo sometimes called “the hideout.” A fair enough description, I guess, for a place so far up in the western Maine woods that it’s not really even in a town at all, but in an unincorporated area designated on state maps as RR-90. The last of these dreams was a nightmare, but until that one they had a kind of surreal simplicity. They were dreams I’d awake from wanting to turn on the bedroom light so I could reconfirm my place in reality before going back to sleep. You know how the air feels before a thunderstorm, how everything gets still and colors seem to stand out with the brilliance of things seen during a high fever? My winter dreams of Sara Laughs were like that, each leaving me with a feeling that was not quite sickness.

I’ve dreamt again ofmanderley, I would think sometimes, and sometimes I would lie in bed with the light on, listening to the wind outside, looking into the bedroom’s shadowy corners, and thinking that Rebecca de Winter hadn’t drowned in a bay but in Dark Score Lake. That she had gone down, gurgling and flailing, her strange black eyes full of water, while the loons cried out indifferently in the twilight. Sometimes I would get up and drink a glass of water. Sometimes I just turned off the light after I was once more sure of where I was, rolled over on my side again, and went back to sleep. In the daytime I rarely thought of Sara Laughs at all, and it was only much later that I realized something is badly out of whack when there is such a dichotomy between a person’s waking and sleeping lives. I think that Harold Oblowski’s call in October of 1997 was what kicked off the dreams. Harold’s ostensible reason for calling was to congratulate me on the impending release of Darcy’s Admirer, which was entertaining as hell and which also contained some extremely thought-provoking shit. I suspected he had at least one other item on his agenda—Harold usually does—and I was right. He’d had lunch with Debra Weinstock, my editor, the day before, and they had gotten talking about the fall of 1998. “Looks crowded,” he said, meaning the fall lists, meaning specifically the fiction half of the fall lists.

“And there are some surprise additions. Dean Koontz—”

“I thought he usually published in January,” I said.

“He does, but Debra hears this one may be delayed. He wants to add a section, or something. Also there’s a Harold Robbins, The Predators—”

“Big deal.”

“Robbins still has his fans, Mike, still has his fans. As you yourself have pointed out on more than one occasion, fiction writers have a long arc.”

“Uh-huh.” I switched the telephone to the other ear and leaned back in my chair. I caught a glimpse of the framed Sara Laughs photo over my desk when I did. I would be visiting it at greater length and proximity that night in my dreams, although I didn’t know that then; all I knew then was that I wished like almighty fuck that Harold Oblowski would hurry up and get to the point. “I sense impatience, Michael my boy,” Harold said. “Did I catch you at your desk?

Are you writing?”

“Just finished for the day,” I said. “I am thinking about lunch, however.”

“I’ll be quick,” he promised, “but hang with me, this is important. There may be as many as five other writers that we didn’t expect publishing next fall: Ken Follett… it’s supposed to be his best since Eye of the Needle… Belva Plain… John Jakes…”

“None of those guys plays tennis on my court,” I said, although I knew that was not exactly Harold’s point; Harold’s point was that there are only fifteen slots on the Times list. “How about Jean Auel, finally publishing the next of her sex-among-the-cave-people epics?” I sat up.

“Jean Auel? Really?”

“Well… not a hundred percent, but it looks good.

Last but not least is a new Mary Higgins Clark. I know what tennis court she plays on, and so do you.” If I’d gotten that sort of news six or seven years earlier, when I’d felt I had a great deal more to protect, I would have been frothing; Mary Hig-gins Clark did play on the same court, shared exactly the same audience, and so far our publishing schedules had been arranged to keep us out of each other’s way… which was to my benefit rather than hers, let me assure you. Going nose to nose, she would cream me. As the late Jim Croce so wisely observed, you don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t Ipit into the wind, you don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger, and you don’t mess around with Mary Higgins Clark. Not if you’re Michael Noonan, anyway. “How did this happen?” I asked. I don’t think my tone was particularly ominous, but Harold replied in the nervous, stumbling-all-over-his-own-words fashion of a man who suspects he may be fired or even beheaded for bearing evil tidings. “I don’t know. She just happened to get an extra idea this year, I guess. That does happen, I’ve been told.” As a fellow who had taken his share of double-dips I knew it did, so I simply asked Harold what he wanted. It seemed the quickest and easiest way to get him to relinquish the phone. The answer was no surprise; what he and Debra both wanted—not to mention all the rest of my Putnam pals—was a book they could publish in late summer of ’98, thus getting in front of Ms. Clark and the rest of the competition by a couple of months. Then, in November, the Putnam sales reps would give the novel a healthy second push, with the Christmas season in mind. “So they say,” I replied. Like most novelists (and in this regard the successful are no different from the unsuccessful, indicating there might be some merit to the idea as well as the usual free-floating paranoia), I never trusted publishers’ promises. “I think you can believe them on this, Mike—Darcy’s Admirer was the last book of your old contract, remember.” Harold sounded almost sprightly at the thought of forthcoming contract negotiations with Debra Weinstock and Phyllis Grann at Putnam. “The big thing is they still like you. They’d like you even more, I think, if they saw pages with your name on them before Thanksgiving.”

“They want me to give them the next book in November?

Next month?” I injected what I hoped was the right note of incredulity into my voice, just as if I hadn’t had Helen’s Promise in a safe-deposit box for almost eleven years. It had been the first nut I had stored; it was now the only nut I had left. “No, no, you could have until January fifteenth, at least,” he said, trying to sound magnanimous. I found myself wondering where he and Debra had gotten their lunch. Some fly place, I would have bet my life on that. Maybe Four Seasons. Johanna always used to call that place Valli and the Four Seasons. “It means they’d have to crash proseriously crash it, but they’re willing to do that. The real ques-is whether or not you could crash production.”

“I think I could, but it’ll cost em,” I said. “Tell them to think of it as: being like same-day service on your dry-cleaning.”