Animal Appetite

ask whether there were any dogs in her book. If so, I could always skip to the end to make sure they were still alive.
    I invited Estelle to have lunch with me in the Square, but she pulled what I now see as a fast one on me. She claimed to be busy, but offered to let me pick up the manuscript. Cambridge has at least as many unpublished writers as it does psychotherapists, perhaps more. There’s a connection there: The would-be writers who aren’t published because they can’t get the words out go into treatment for writer’s block, and the prolifically unpublished get driven mad in a whole variety of different ways. Some find themselves stuck in the neurotic dilemma of being so terrified of rejection that they won’t let anyone read their work. Others overcome the fear, only to discover that, contrary to what their therapists promised, it was all too realistic after all. They get rejections from agents that consist of nothing but their own query letters with “No!” scrawled in the margin. Selfesteem plummets. Prozac time! Back to the shrink!
    Meanwhile, the poor shrink has succumbed to an occupational hazard almost as dire as getting shot: Sooner or later, the therapist, too, decides to write a book, and, being a Cambridge therapist, starts off not by sitting at a desk or keyboard but by consulting another Cambridge therapist about fears of self-revelation and inadequacy, and ends up hiring a writing tutor, who turns out to be another therapist’s patient, in other words, an unpublished writer frantic to earn a living.
    Expert that I am on this subject, I quickly diagnosed
    Estelle Grant as having reached the stage of conniving desperation that writers attain when they discover that even their own mothers can’t be persuaded to read their books. Until I plowed through Estelle Grant’s manuscript, she wouldn’t tell me a damned thing about Damned Yankee Press. I could hear the deal in Estelle’s voice. I agreed to fetch the book.
    She lived on a narrow, car-lined street of rickety asbestos-shingled three-family houses a few blocks from the river. Even before the year’s first snowstorm, two of her neighbors had staked their claims to on-street parking. One spot was marked by three official-looking orange traffic cones selected, I thought, to create the impression that a parking-spot thief would be placed under immediate citizen’s arrest. The other was occupied by two battered and bent aluminum folding lawn chairs that effectively suggested a history of having been smashed over the heads of unwise drivers who’d failed to respect the significance of the resident snow-shoveler’s territorial claim. No fool, I double-parked, dashed up the tumbledown stairs to Estelle’s shaky little front porch, and rang a bell labeled with four names, one of which was hers. The door was opened immediately by a woman wearing black tights and what I assumed was a formerly tunic-length blue-patterned wool sweater that had been misguidedly washed in hot water and consequently made its wearer look as if she’d absentmindedly forgotten to put on a skirt. Even if Estelle hadn’t introduced herself, I’d have known who she was: She answered the door with a thick manuscript in hand. Purring on Estelle’s shoulder was a tricolor kitten that chewed on her long, thin, wavy brown hair while kneading the shrunken sweater with its paws. The kitten was adorable. Estelle was scrawny and had the kind of pale, sickly-looking skin that I associate with people who work in health food stores and subsist on mung beans, strips of dried seaweed, and other foreign objects that would make a dog throw up.
    “I’m double-parked,” I told Estelle.
    She handed me reams of would-be blockbuster. As if to confirm my supposition about the deal she’d offered me, she said sweetly, “We’ll talk after you’ve read it.”
    “I can hardly wait.”
    “The chaos is deliberate,” she advised me. “Damned Yankee Press was the most disorganized place I’ve ever worked.” With pride in her voice, she confided, “My novel is drawn from life.”
     

Twenty

     
    Estelle Grant’s novel was called Multitudes in the Valley of Decision. Although I traced the phrase to the Old Testament, I never did figure out the meaning of the title. Multitudes seemed to refer to the book’s thousands of adverbs, most of which were unpronounceable, pedantic, or both: “sillily,” “inchoately,” “hermeneutically.” Valley, I deduced, alluded to the depths