Selling Out by Dan Wakefield Page A

you make it any sooner, you think?”
    â€œI don’t see how I can do everything in a week as it is. Especially with this god-awful weather.”
    It was ten above zero in Haviland. A big snow had fallen just the day before she arrived, and the roads had been cleared just in time for her to get through. If it hadn’t been for Al Cohen’s tramping over to the house in snowshoes to get the furnace going again, the pipes would have surely frozen.
    From the half-open window above the bed where Perry lay with the phone a soft evening breeze wafted in, scented with sea air and oleander. Jane’s voice sounded so immediate and close it seemed as if she might be calling from the corner, or from a booth at the Hamburger Hamlet, yet the words she was saying, the talk of roads blocked by snow, gave Perry the weird sensation she was speaking not just from across the country but from some other world, one of those sci-fi creations of Isaac Asimov or Ursula K. LeGuin.
    Nor was it only the weather she described that seemed so oddly unreal and otherworldly. The people who only a month ago were familiar figures in Perry’s daily life, the students and faculty, now seemed almost as remote, as Jane spoke their names and concerns—the books and classes, Al Cohen filling in for old Bozeman, who had suffered a mild heart attack, a basketball game canceled with Bowdoin, in Maine, because of the weather.
    â€œI love you,” Perry said. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
    Being in such different climates made him feel farther from her than he really was, gave him a bit of a panic.
    â€œI’m fine, and I love you, too,” she assured him. “I’ll come back as soon as I can.”
    That night he dreamed of searching for her over ice floes.
    It wasn’t just the weather that was different in Southern California. Time was different, too.
    It was faster.
    Perry had imagined that, if anything, time out here at the edge of the vast Pacific, under the palm trees and constant sun, would probably be slower, lazier, than back in the brisk climate of the East. Like everyone else, Perry had read about the famous laid-back atmosphere of L.A., the mellow attitude of the natives of the region, whose casual clothes and morals were suited to the slow, sensual rhythm of surf and sun. Maybe that was true for some beach bums and bunnies, but it bore no relation to the full-throttle freeway race of show business. If Rome were the set for a TV movie, it surely would have been built in a day.
    Overnight, literally, Perry’s script had been transformed from the ethereal realm of imagination to the real world of production, even before he’d finished writing the second hour.
    â€œThe First Year’s the Hardest” was not just a story any more, it was a company, with its own office. Of course the office was just another of the old, anonymous-looking motel-like buildings on the sprawling Paragon lot that happened to be vacant at the moment because the last production it sheltered was finished, either by completion or failure, leaving no trace of its character, leaving only the building, the shell, the office, ready to receive and be filled by the energy and spirit, the furniture and flesh of a new enterprise.
    â€œThe First Year’s the Hardest.”
    That’s what the secretary said when she answered the phone in Ned Gurney’s office.
    She said the name of Perry’s story, Perry’s show, as if it were General Motors or Lord & Taylor or Standard Oil.
    As if it were real .
    As if it were a regular business with typewriters and desks, secretaries and executives—and it was, it was all that.
    Perry felt a little like a combination of Henry Ford and Rudyard Kipling—a literary man of action, an empire builder.
    â€œYou can pick your own office here in the building,” Ned Gurney told him, “but don’t feel you have to be here if you prefer to write back at your