only one a week, or even one a day?
He looked at the half-demolished avalanche of her sundae, one cherry almost buried in whipped cream, another floating in chocolate syrup. He remembered the way the living room had looked, with sugar-glazed dishes everywhere.
No. Annie was not the waiting type. Annie would have watched all twenty episodes in one night, even if they gave her eyestrain and a splitting headache.
Because Annie loved sweet things.
“I can’t do that,” he said.
Her face had darkened at once, but hadn’t there been a shadowy relief there, as well? “Oh? Why not?”
Because you wouldn’t respect me in the morning, he thought of saying, and clamped down on that. Clamped down hard.
“Because I’m a rotten story-teller,” he answered instead.
She slurped up the remainder of her sundae in five huge spoonfuls that would have left Paul’s throat gray with frostbite. Then she set her dish down and looked at him angrily, not as if he were the great Paul Sheldon but as if he were someone who had presumed to criticize the great Paul Sheldon.
“If you’re such a rotten story-teller, how come you have bestsellers and millions of people love the books you write?”
“I didn’t say I was a rotten story-writer. I actually happen to think I’m pretty good at that. But as a story-teller, I’m the pits.”
“You’re just making up a big cockadoodie excuse.” Her face was darkening. Her hands were clenched into shiny fists on the heavy material of her skirt. Hurricane Annie was back in the room. Everything that went around came around. Except things no longer had been quite the same, had they? He was as scared of her as ever, but her hold over him had nonetheless diminished. His life no longer seemed like such a big deal, gotta or no gotta. He was only afraid she would hurt him.
“It’s not an excuse,” he had replied. “The two things are like apples and oranges, Annie. People who tell stories usually can’t write stories. If you really think people who can write stories can talk worth a damn, you never watched some poor slob of a novelist fumbling his way through an interview on the Today show.”
“Well, I don’t want to wait,” she sulked. “I made you that nice sundae and the least you could do is tell me a few things. It doesn’t have to exactly be the whole story, I guess, but . . . did the Baron kill Calthorpe?” her eyes sparkled. “That’s one thing I really want to know. And what did he do with the body if he did? Is it all cut up in that trunk his wife won’t let out of her sight? That’s what I think.”
Paul shook his head—not to indicate she had it wrong but to indicate he would not tell.
She became even blacker. Yet her voice was soft. “You’re making me very angry—you know that, don’t you, Paul?”
“Of course I know it. But I can’t help it.”
“I could make you. I could make you help it. I could make you tell.” But she looked frustrated, as if knowing that she could not. She could make him say some things, but she could not make him tell.
“Annie, do you remember telling me what a little kid says to his mother when she catches him playing with the cleaning fluid under the sink and makes him stop? Mommy, you’re mean! Isn’t that what you’re saying now? Paul, you’re mean?”
“If you make me much madder, I don’t promise to be responsible,” she said, but he sensed the crisis was already past—she was strangely vulnerable to these concepts of discipline and behavior.
“Well, I’ll have to chance that,” he said, “because I’m just like that mother—I’m not saying no to be mean, or to spite you—I’m saying no because I really want you to like the story . . . and if I give you what you want, you won’t like it, and you won’t want it anymore.” And then what will happen to me, Annie? he thought but did not say.
“At least tell me if that nigger Hezekiah really does know where Misery’s father is! At least tell me that!”
“Do you want the novel, or do you want me to fill out a questionnaire?”
“Don’t you take that sarcastic tone to me!”
“Then don’t you pretend you don’t understand what I’m saying!” he shouted back. She recoiled from him in surprise and unease, the last of that blackness going out of her face, and all that was left was that weird