Here's - HarperCollins Publishers
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carol shields<br />
think of such distractions as clotheslines and baking tins. He was<br />
the barking terrier, going at Mrs. Winters’s ankles, shaking out his<br />
fur and asking me to justify myself, wanting me to explain the<br />
spluttering, dying, whimpering bonfire of my life, which I would<br />
not dream of sharing. He seemed to forget he was interviewing<br />
me about Danielle Westerman’s new book.<br />
I understand you’re working on a second novel, said he.<br />
Well, yes.<br />
Takes nerve.<br />
Uh-huh.<br />
Actually—actually, well, he had a novel on the go himself.<br />
Really! What a surprise!<br />
At the end of the hour he did not ask for the bill. I asked for the<br />
bill. “I’ll just put it on my Visa,” I said, breaking a tenuous breadth<br />
of silence. I announced this with all the majesty I could muster<br />
over a vinyl table, like a grande dame, adding twenty years to my<br />
age, and feeling the vowels shifting in my beautifully moulded<br />
throat. Such dignity; I surprised myself with my own resonance,<br />
and I may have managed a pained smile, displaying, no doubt,<br />
that famous overbite. He turned off the tape recorder at the word<br />
“Visa.”<br />
He had two young children at home, he said. Christ, what a<br />
responsibility, although he loved the little bastards. One of them<br />
was quite, quite gifted; well, they both were in their separate<br />
ways. But the work of raising kids! Never enough time to read the<br />
books he had to review, books all over the house with little markers<br />
in them, books he would never finish. So much was expected,<br />
and of course, like all journalists, he was underpaid.<br />
Oh, shut up.<br />
They also expected him to do a feature on the weekend.<br />
Uh-huh?<br />
And last week he’d actually broken the MacBunna story.<br />
Really? Macumba? Marimba?<br />
Congratulations, said Mrs. Reta Winters from Orangetown.<br />
Thanks.<br />
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