Family Affair (8 page)

"I knew it. You're creeped out." She sat down in the nearest chair, pouted and sighed heavily doing all three things almost simultaneously.

Gitana got up and put her hand on Chase's shoulder. "Now, why don't you tell me what this is really about?"

"I just think with the baby coming that we shouldn't be living in sin. It won't set a proper example. We don't have to have a ceremony or anything because that might jinx us, but I could give you this and you could say 'I do,' and we'd be all set." Chase pulled the ring box out of her pocket. She opened it and peered inside. "Wait, that one is mine." She dug in her other pocket. She'd put them in different pockets so she could keep them straight but had now forgotten which was which. Opening the other box, she said, "Okay, got it all straight now."

Gitana studied the rings. "They look the same to me."

Chase turned it so she could see the inscription on the inside which read, "I will love you forever."

"What does your ring say?"

"Something like that," Chase said evasively.

Gitana eyed her. "Let's see it."

Chase reluctantly handed over the ring. Gitana read the inscription aloud. "Safe, sane and successful."

"I know it's not very romantic, but I saw it as pertinent. Now can we get on with it?"

Gitana smiled. "All right." She stuck out her hand and Chase put the ring on. She peered down at it. "I like it." Then she put the other ring on Chase's finger.

"So I know we haven't had time to write out our vows, but I think this might suffice." Chase pulled out a neatly folded piece of paper from her breast pocket. She cleared her throat. "We promise to love each other for at least another eighteen years, argue as little as possible and not to commit any form of adultery. And I will stay on my medication."

Gitana laughed, kissed her softly and said, "I do."

Chapter Seven

"I can't help it. My protagonist has to be fit," Jasmine said to the other five members of the writers group sitting in Chase's office. She peered down at her manuscript and back up at the group. "I mean how else is he going to chase down the bad guys?"

Chase took a deep breath. She did a lot of deep breathing when she was in her writers group. Losing your temper with one's peers was poor form according to Gitana, not to mention rude. She'd told Chase, "Remember you're all here as allies to the creative process and not mortal enemies." Gitana was correct, of course. So Chase did her best. She summoned up diplomacy and took deep breaths. "Jasmine, most bad guys sit in dimly lit restaurants and bars where they eat very unhealthy foods. Those guys are a heart attack in the making."

Alma offered, "Why don't you have your protagonist exercise at home? He could have a treadmill and while he's running his five miles have all these insights into the crimes he's trying to solve."

Jasmine pursed her lips. She looked a lot like a grown-up Shirley Temple complete with blond ringlets and the endlessly sweet smile—ever eager for a lollipop. The lip pursing destroyed the image as did the tight, low-cut jeans and the stuffed halter top. Shirley Temple all grown up was hot. Chase tried really hard not to look at her boobs, remembering the T-shirt she'd seen in a catalog that read, "Tell your boobs to stop staring at me." That's how she felt right now.

"I just don't get it," Jasmine moaned. "Everything starts out great and then it's like a beacon, the gym call. I put in the scene and bam I'm stuck with a protagonist doing bench presses. He has great pecs but no soul." Jasmine got up and threw the manuscript in the trash can.

Luckily, Chase had emptied it earlier or the manuscript might have gone missing in the vortex of detritus.

Alma got up and retrieved the manuscript from the trash can. Bo shook his finger at Jasmine. It had taken Alma a good minute and a half to get up because she was sixty-three and slightly arthritic, but she managed. Alma Lucero was a much better person than Chase.

The thought had crossed her mind to go and retrieve it from the dust bin—like all the other things she ought to do—pick up litter when she saw it on the sidewalk, smile at a crying baby at the supermarket checkout counter, or offer assistance to the old woman trying to get a package in her trunk at the post office. She feared being rebuked—told to piss off when all she wanted to do was good. She buried roadkill. No language was required. No permission granted—only a sigh of relief from the Universe that something was being put right by someone who cared. For her this worked.

"Young lady," Alma lectured Jasmine, "need I remind you that every word is precious. A gift from on high. To be so disrespectful is dangerous. To anger the muse is to court a dry spell. To show disfavor with the creative force is to bring down the wrath—"

"I got it," Jasmine said, snatching the slightly crumpled stack of papers.

Alma was writing The Book of Forgotten Moments. It was part memoir, part rumination on the mysteries of life and part philosophy on the nature of love. Alma had a lovely wrinkled face, high cheekbones and gray green eyes, her white hair was cut spiky and she dressed in loose-fitting organic cotton shirts and trousers. She wrote the most gorgeous sentences. She had Virginia Woolfs one-hundred and eighty-one word sentence beat by five words. Chase loved when they read Alma's work.

Alma's book was literary and probably would never be published just for that reason. Chase felt like Alma taught them about using words to paint pictures in the reader's mind. The rest of them, Chase included, wrote plot-driven fiction. Theirs were stories where point A led to point B in a quick and concise manner. Alma's stories were filled with images of the garden, the sky, the raging river, the seedy motel with its dirty linen and the lost memory. Their work was a rush to the finish. Hers was a meandering path through a wildflower garden.

"Here, give the pages to me," Chase said. Everyone stared at her with interest. "I need a few minutes with them."

"Why don't I get us all coffee," Bo said. A good-looking, stylishly dressed dark-haired beauty with his cleft chin and aquiline nose, he should have been a model for International Male, but instead while working at Starbucks he wrote guy-to-guy mysteries, as yet unsold, and short porn stories for fag magazines.

"I'll help," Delia offered while gazing with apparent admiration at Chase's soon to be displayed abilities.

Delia had made it more than evident that she was in total awe of Chase and would fuck her on demand. Chase found this slighdy intriguing but also repulsive. She was thirty-seven and Delia was twenty-three. She realized that at Delia's age she had been like that, fascinated by older women, but unlike Delia had no confidence to pursue them. Rather she had engaged in hero worship and fantasies of being discovered as a misunderstood genius and subsequently mentored and fucked senseless. She would never admit this to anyone. Time had been a great and brutal teacher and she'd become the older woman.

While Bo and Delia clanked the coffee things around, peering and whispering in her direction, Chase reconstructed Jasmine's twenty pages—slashing and rearranging, until she got a sense of the plot moving in a better and clearer direction. When she looked up, Delia was handing her a cup of coffee and Alma was smiling at her with sagacity.

"Take a look." Chase handed the manuscript to Jasmine.

Jasmine quickly perused the pages while the others waited. She studied the manuscript like an ER doctor ascertaining the patient's cuts and bruises. She looked up indignant. "You cut the gym scene, made my protagonist fat and ugly and put the murder on the first page. How could you?" Jasmine crossed her legs and scowled at Chase.

Shirley Temple was pissed, Chase thought. She looked like someone had just stolen her umbrella drink.

"I think it sounds brilliant. Can I see it?" Bo asked.

"Feel free." Jasmine handed him the manuscript as if it were used toilet paper. "I don't like it anymore."

"That's good," Alma said.

"Why?" Jasmine asked. She sipped her coffee, her eyes still blazing.

"Because you've divorced yourself from it."

"I don't get it," Delia said, as she read the manuscript over Bo's shoulder.

"Now, Jasmine can work on it without being invested in every word. She's too close to it," Chase said. She put more milk in her cup. Bo always brought coffee from Starbucks and she found it much too strong and too many cups gave her heart palpitations.

"Exactly," Alma said. "And making your protagonist so different from you will make you create a character instead of a male version of yourself which is what you are doing."

"Is it that obvious?" Jasmine asked, chastened.

Bo handed the manuscript to Alma.

"Whit Tamberlaine, detective extraordinaire, is pretty much you with a dick attached," Delia said, smiling.

"Oh, my," Jasmine said. She appeared to be contemplating what that would be like.

Chase had had a dream once where she woke up with a penis and spent the rest of the dream trying to convince everyone, Gitana included, that she was still a lesbian. Freud would have had a heyday with that one.

"Jasmine, this can work. Just start from here and move forward. Find a photo of a rotund man, make a bio for him and start every chapter with someone doing something. You'll be all set. You can make Whit into a great character. Pretty people have it easy so make his life hard, make people treat him shitty and it will make the story much more interesting," Chase said. She had learned all of this the hard way from her much respected yet sadistic editor.

"How do you do that?" Delia asked.

"Years of having my editor rip my work to shreds—it makes for tough skin."

"But how can you not care when your creation is a part of you?" Jasmine asked, obviously still smarting from the attack on her manuscript.

"To be a writer you have to be a cannibal," Chase replied.

"Now, I need an explanation of that one," Alma said. She refilled her mug from the decanter on the table. She sat back and waited, her eyes shining with interest.

Chase smiled. They probably thought she was pulling shit out of her ass. She had written her first novel when she was twenty. The first two went unpublished, eleven others had followed that were published. Over a million words in print, but she'd written more than she could care to count. Writing entailed actually sitting down and connecting ideas, stringing together words to make sentences that made paragraphs and consequently pages. In the rewrite, you cut off pieces. You took stuff from elsewhere in your experience, you read everything you could get your hands on and you learned from it, you cannibalized. You had to be tenacious and ultimately vicious or you never got there.

Chase went to the closet on the back wall of the writing studio and pulled the doors open. Inside was a stack of black and white marbled composition books stacked one on top of the other, floor to ceiling, rows and rows of them.

"What's that?" Delia asked.

"Probably every word she's ever written," Bo replied. He got up to take a closer look. "Holy shit."

"And out of all that came thirteen novels." She picked up her stack of published books that sat on top of the notebooks. "That would never have been published without the necessary reduction and distillation of all this."