“You mean something like a book?”
“Yeah, a book, a novel. I know you’re not a fan,” he told me. “You said that you don’t like to read and I saw your face when you talked about your mom’s profession.” He imitated it, andinstead of looking pleasant and handsome like he usually did, he turned into a sour lemon.
“It was a different situation with my mother,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“Do you write because you enjoy it?” I asked, and he nodded. “Well, she wasn’t writing books for fun. They practically tortured her. She spent years on each project and then it wasn’t ever a sure thing that she’d be published. If she was, she’d still fall to pieces because no one outside of a very small group of academics cared at all. If she got a bad review, she would shut herself in her bedroom and refuse to come out for days. Her last book was calledDimidiateand when that got panned—” I stopped. It had been the final straw for her.
He waited for a moment but spoke again when I didn’t continue. “If my book ever does get published, no one will care besides my immediate family. Maybe an aunt or something, but I’m not expecting to land on a best seller list, or even to make any money.”
“I’ll read it.”
“You told me you don’t like to read,” he reminded me again.
“I have problems with that,” I explained. “I have trouble decoding.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s basically the ability to break apart words into sounds and then figure out what they are. You have to be able to decode well in order to read well. I couldn’t do it like a normal kid.”
“Normal?” he echoed.
“Like other kids,” I corrected myself.
“How did you learn?”
“When I was a few grades into school, they figured out what was wrong and then I got accommodations to make it easier,” I said. “But I dreaded reading and all the related stuff, like spelling tests.”
“And second-language classes.”
I nodded. “School worked better once I figured out that you can pretty much listen to anything. I hardly had to read at all in college.”
“But your job is numbers,” he said. “It’s not the same?”
“I don’t have many problems with math, and that was one of the reasons I always liked it. Anyway, I’m careful and I check myself constantly. But I’ll happily read your book,” I assured him. “Tell me what it’s about.”
It was the story of a family, not an unhappy one, but not without problems, either. The central character was a guy who’d had trouble growing up and who seemed to make a lot of bad choices. “You’re going to ask me if it’s autobiographical,” Levi noted.
“Is it?”
“To some extent,” he answered. “Parts of me are in all the characters, and parts of my parents and my siblings. But there’s no direct portrait of anyone, even if they might think so. I hope they don’t see too much of themselves, though, because I don’t want to hurt any feelings.”
“You didn’t tell me how it ends,” I said. “What happens to the guy?”
“I’m not done with it yet.”
“So, you don’t know? Don’t you have some kind of outline you’re following? Or notes?”
“I know exactly how it ends,” he said. “I’m just not telling you.” I sat back, annoyed, and he laughed. “I thought you’d be happy to learn that I wasn’t a complete and utter slacker, even when I wasn’t exactly prospering. Mary Evelyn couldn’t stand the idea of me as a writer.”
“She read your book?” I felt a twist of unexpected jealousy at the thought.
“I only told her that I was thinking about doing it, and she hated the idea that I wouldn’t have a regular job with a consistent salary. I understood her concern.”
“So do I,” I said fervently. “Depending on royalties is terrible, because they vacillate so much. My mother earned next to nothing from her books but her taxes were always a mess with grant money, speaking fees, and all her other income streams.” They’d been more like trickles.
“How do you know? Were you doing her taxes?”
