The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

She had been cut from the staff of Congress Memorial Hospital two years ago during a ‘reorganization.’ Luckily for the Chad-and-Nora Corporation, she had landed on her feet. Getting the home nursing job had been something of a coup: one patient, a retired minister recovering from a stroke, thirty-six hours a week, very decent wages. She made more than he did, and by a good bit. The two incomes were almost enough to live on. At least until Anita Biderman came back.

‘First, let’s talk about this.’ She held up the agent’s email. ‘How sure are you?’

‘What, that I can do the work? Pretty sure. Almost positive. I mean, if I had the time. About the rest …’ He shrugged. ‘It’s right there in black and white. No guarantees.’

With the hiring freeze currently in effect in the city’s schools, subbing was the best Chad could do. He was on every list in the system, but there was no full-time position teaching fourth or fifth grade in his immediate future. Nor would the money be much better even if such a position opened up – just more reliable. As a sub, he sometimes spent weeks on the bench.

For awhile two years ago, the lay-off had been three months, and they almost lost the apartment. That was when the trouble with the credit cards had started.

Out of desperation and a need to fill up the empty hours when Nora was tending to the Reverend Winston, Chad had started a book he called Living with the Animals: The Life of a Substitute Teacher in Four City Schools. Words did not come easily to him, and on some days they did not come at all, but by the time he was called in to St Saviour to teach second grade (Mr Cardelli had broken a leg in a car accident), he had finished three chapters. Nora received the pages with a troubled smile. No woman wants the job of telling the man in her life that he’s been wasting his time.

He hadn’t been. The stories he told of the substitute teaching life were sweet, funny, and often moving – much more interesting than anything she’d heard over dinner or while they were lying in bed together.

Most of his query letters to agents weren’t answered. A few were courteous enough to drop him a ‘sorry, but my plate’s full’ note. He finally found one who would at least look at the eighty pages he had managed to wring out of his old and limping Dell laptop.

The agent’s name had a circus-y feel: Edward Ringling. His response to Chad’s pages was long on praise and short on promise. ‘I might be able to get you a book contract based on this and an outline of the rest,’ Ringling had written, ‘but it would be a very small contract, likely a good deal less than you currently make as a teacher, and you might find yourself financially worse off than you are now – insane, I know, but today’s market is pretty sick.

‘What I suggest is that you finish another seven or eight chapters, possibly even the whole book. Then I might be able to take it to auction and get you a much better deal.’

It made sense, Chad supposed, if you were overseeing the literary world from a comfy office in Manhattan. Not so much if you were hopscotching all over the boroughs, teaching a week here and three days there, trying to keep ahead of the bills. Ringling’s letter had come in May. Now it was September, and although Chad had had a relatively good summer teaching (God bless the dummies, he sometimes thought), he hadn’t added a single page to the manuscript. It wasn’t laziness; teaching, even when it was just subbing, was like having a pair of jumper cables attached to some critical part of your brain. It was good that the kids could draw power from that part, but there was precious little left over. Many nights the most creative thing of which he found himself capable was reading a few chapters of the latest Linwood Barclay.

That might change if he spent another two or three months without work … except a few months of living on just his wife’s salary would tip them over. Nor was anxiety helpful when it came to literary endeavors.

‘How long would it take to finish it?’ Nora asked. ‘If you were writing full-time?’

He drew out his cigarettes and lit one. He felt a strong urge to give an over-optimistic answer, but overcame it. He had no idea what was going on with her, but she deserved the truth.

‘Eight months at least. Probably more like a year.’

‘And how much money do you think it would mean if Mr Ringling held an auction and people actually came?’

Ringling hadn’t mentioned numbers, but Chad had done his homework. ‘I’d guess the advance could be in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand.’

A fresh start in Vermont, that was the plan. That was what they talked about in bed. A small town, maybe up in the Northeast Kingdom. She could catch on at the local hospital or get another private; he could land a full-time teaching position. Or maybe write another book.

‘Nora, what’s this about?’