The Mulberry Tree

Everyone in town—and eventually even the bartenders—tiptoed over to surround the big chair and listen to this girl tell a story.

Okay, I was jealous. No one had ever spontaneously listened to me like that. Only if there was a lot of advance publicity and I arrived in a limo did people listen to me with rapt attention.

So what story was she going to tell? I wondered. As all of us waited, she proceeded to cheer up this brainless little beauty queen with a story on how to write a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel.

Since my sales kept me out of the prize-winning circles, (“Money or prizes,” my editor told me. “Not both.”) I listened. And as she talked, I found myself wanting her to be even more critical than she was. What about the overuse of metaphors and similes? What about emotion? My editor called them “Connecticut books.” Not too much emotion in them. Cool. Dignified. Cerebral.

We always want more, don’t we? Prizewinners want sales; best-sellers want prizes.

When Jackie finished her story, I expected everyone to burst into applause. Instead, they acted as though they hadn’t been listening. Odd, I thought.

She got up (even at her age my knees would have been killing me) looked straight at me, ignored my smile, then went over to the bar to get a drink. I followed her and nearly fell over my tongue trying to give her a compliment. Since the people who knew her hadn’t said anything, I thought maybe they knew she hated praise.

Then I really messed up because I blurted out that I wanted her to work for me.

Brother! Did she laugh. When she told me that she’d work for me only if she had two heads, it took me a full minute to understand what she was saying. I didn’t know exactly where the quote came from but I could guess.

Okay, so I can take a hint. I turned around and walked away.

I would have gone home then and probably forgotten about the whole thing (and would have had to work to not use the woman’s “How to Write a Pulitzer Prize–Winning Novel” speech in a book—if I ever wrote again, that is) but Mrs. Lady of the House grabbed my arm and started pulling me from one room to another to introduce me to people. After several minutes of this, she told me that I needed to forgive Jackie, that sometimes she could be, well . . .

“Abrasive?” I asked.

Mrs. Lady looked at me hard. “My cousin worked for you for four and a half weeks and she called me every day to tell me what you put her through. Let’s just say that Jackie doesn’t have the franchise on abrasive behavior and leave it at that, shall we? Mr. Newcombe, if you’re looking for an assistant, I think Jackie Maxwell just might be the only woman who could work for you.”

When she turned away and left me standing there, if it hadn’t been late at night I would have called the moving company and said, “Come and get me now!”

A few seconds later, I was trapped by a dreadful little woman who wanted me to personally publish her 481 church bulletins, many of which no one—meaning no congregation—had ever read. “Original source,” she kept saying, as though she’d found George Washington’s unpublished diaries.

I was rescued by Jackie. I meant to get her alone outside so I could apologize and maybe start over, but when I turned around, I saw she had been followed by an entourage of gawking girls. Within seconds I was bombarded with questions.

As the girls took me over, I could see Jackie inching away. I was beginning to adopt the philosophy of “if it was meant to be it will happen” when one of the girls dropped a bombshell on me. She said Jackie knew a true devil story.

Through my limited (mostly assistantless) research I knew that devil stories were rare. Ghost and witch stories were abundant, but devils . . . Rare.

After persuasion, Jackie told the story in a couple of sentences, but she told all of it in those two sentences. Someone once told me that if a person was a really good storyteller he could tell the story in one word and that word would be the title of the book. Exorcist is an example. Says it all.

Her story intrigued me so much that I thought maybe my ears would start flapping and pull me straight up. Wow! A woman loved a man the townspeople believed was the devil. Why did they believe that? And they killed her. Not him. Her. Why didn’t they kill the man? Fear? Couldn’t find him? He’d gone back to hell? What happened after she was murdered? Any prosecutions?

But before I could ask anything, Jackie dropped her glass—on purpose but I had no idea why—and all the girls turned into squawking hens and ran for the nearest bathroom.

I took a few moments to try to turn myself into their idea of a cool, calm, sophisticated best-selling author, then hightailed it after Jackie.

As soon as she came out of the bathroom some guy went up to her, said he had to leave and called her “Pumpkin.” No one on earth looked less like a

“Pumpkin” than that curvy little creature.

I didn’t like him. He was too slick-looking for my taste. A used-car salesman trying to look like a stockbroker. And he was with a tall young man who looked like someone had turned the lights off inside his head. I’d be willing to bet six figures that those two were up to no good.

But then, maybe it was just that I really was beginning to want this young woman to work for me so I was getting possessive.

I again tried to get into a conversation with her and find out more about the devil story, but she seemed to be embarrassed because her friends had said that she should write a book. First of all, I didn’t remember hearing that. It was probably when my ears were twitching and I was floating. Second, I wanted to say, “Honey, everybody wants to be a writer.”

But as I chatted with her about her not wanting to be a writer, I found out she was getting married in three weeks (I guess to the salesman-broker). Then she more or less told me that she wouldn’t work for me if I were the last man . . . Et cetera.

I went home.

Early the next morning I called the moving company and indefinitely postponed my move. I decided I really did need to figure out where I was going before I packed up.