“Night Journey. You were making so much noise I got out of bed, and when I looked at the paper, I saw it was on. I have to see the thing anyhow, so I might as well do it now.”
“You have to take notes on Night Journey?”
“We’re having some trouble with the Driver estate.” He pointed the remote at the screen and raised the volume. Distant in the hazy swamp, wolves howled. More peeved than she wished to be, Nora watched the boy make his way beneath the monstrous trees. “It’ll be okay,” Davey said. For an instant he took her hand. She squeezed it and tucked up her legs and rested her head on his shoulder. Davey twitched, signaling that she was not to lean on him.
Nora slid away and propped her head on the back of the sofa. “What kind of trouble?”
“Shh.” He leaned forward and picked up the pencil.
So she was not to speak. So she was a distraction. For some reason Davey had to get out of bed in the middle of the night to take notes on the film version of Night Journey, Hugo Driver’s wildly successful first novel and the cornerstone of Chancel House, founded by Lincoln Chancel, Davey’s grandfather and Hugo Driver’s friend. Davey, who took enormous pride in the association, had read Night Journey at least once a year since he was fifteen years old. Anyone less charitable than Nora might have said that he was obsessed with the book.
4
MANY WERE OBSESSED with Hugo Driver’s first novel. One of Davey’s occupations at Chancel House was answering the requests for photographs, assistance with term papers and theses, and other mail concerning the writer that flowed into the offices. These missives came from high school students, stockbrokers, truck drivers, social workers, secretaries, hairdressers, short-order cooks, ambulance drivers, people who signed their letters with the names of characters in the novel, also famous crazies and sociopaths. Leonard Gimmell, who had murdered the fourteen children in his second-grade class during an outing to the Smoky Mountains, wrote once a week from a state prison in Tennessee, and Teddy Brunhoven, who had appeared in front of a recording studio on West Fifty-fifth Street and assassinated the lead singer of a prominent rock and roll band, communicated almost daily from a cell in upper New York State. Both men continued to justify their crimes with complex, laborious references to the novel. Davey enjoyed responding to Hugo Driver’s fan mail much more than the other duties, matters like crossword puzzles and paper plates, wished on him by his father.
Twice Nora had begun Night Journey, but she never made it past the chapter in which the boy hero succumbed to an illness and awakened to a landscape meant to represent death. Bored by fantasy novels, she could smell the approach of trolls and talking trees.
Davey also revered Twilight Journey and Journey into Light, the less successful sequels, but had opposed the decision to sell the film rights to Night Journey. On the movie’s release a year ago, he had refused to see it. Any movie of the novel would be a failure, a betrayal. You could make good movies of second-rate books” movies based on great books left an embarrassing stink. Whether or not this rule was generally true, it had applied to Night Journey. Despite forty million dollars’ worth of special effects and a cast of famous actors, the movie had been greeted by hostile reviews and empty theaters. It disappeared after two weeks, leaving behind the stink Davey had predicted.
5
FORBIDDEN TO SPEAK, Nora slumped back and watched the di-saster unfurl. All that money had bought unconvincing trees, tattered clothes, and a great deal of fog. The boy came through the last of the trees and found himself on a desolate plain. Here and there, plaster boulders floated up out of silver mist. Distant wolves howled.
Bent over his notebook, Davey frowned like an earnest student taking notes in a class he didn’t like. Seriousness and concentration increased the accidental likeness between them. At forty, he still had the large, clear eyes and almost translucent skin that had both attracted and repelled her when they had first met. Her first coherent thought about him, after she had adjusted to the unexpected resemblance between them, had been that his version of her face was too pretty. Any man who looked like that had to be impossibly vain. A lifetime of being indulged, petted, and admired would