The Bear Went Over the Mountain Read Free Page A

Hemingway?”
    “Who?”
    “Yes, who indeed. I think you just might be the one to make people forget him.”
    “Pie,” said the bear to the waiter at the French restaurant to which Boykins had taken him.
    “Nothing else?” asked Boykins.
    “Cake ice cream.”
    “It’s nice to see someone who’s not obsessed about their weight.”
    “Winter,” said the bear, patting his stomach.
    “Yes, it
was
a difficult winter.” Boykins’s eyes were dark, their gaze intense. His gestures were precise. He leaned forward, supporting his chin with thumb and forefinger. “Have you got anybody representing you on the West Coast? A Hollywood agent? Because the cinematic possibilities for your book are very strong. I can just see that huge solstice bonfire on the big screen.”
    Boykins moved the vase on the table a few inches tothe right. Yes, he said to himself, that’s better. Boykins had spent his childhood performing numberless compulsive rituals; in the middle of the night his parents would find him standing bolt upright in his room, the coils of compulsion holding him paralyzed.
    “In fact, the whole book reads like a movie, which I’m sure isn’t news to you. It’s a brilliant piece of crossover work.” He smoothed the edge of the tablecloth down, several times. As a child, Boykins had no time for sport, no time for girls, no time for anything but smoothing his pillow hundreds of times, then standing on one leg in the bedroom, arms raised for hours in supplication to the faceless power that ruled him. “I’ve started working with a wonderful young woman at Creative Management. I’m sure you’d get along with her very well.”
    The bear wanted to be careful about those he got involved with. “She like pie?”
    “Pie?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well,” laughed Boykins, “I’m sure she likes it. Whether she eats much of it, I can’t say.” Boykins crunched a piece of celery in his strong jaws and chewed it thirty-seven times. While standing bolt upright in his college dormitory the night before graduation, and clicking his fingers thirty-seven times, he’d wondered how he could ever fit into the normal world with such an affliction. “I can tell you this, Zou Zou Sharr is one of thesmartest women in Hollywood. And she’s beautiful, for whatever that’s worth. She knows the important directors, she knows the stars, and she’s a tough negotiator. And just so
you
know it,” smiled Boykins, “so am I.” Brutal negotiations were nothing to a man who’d spent his youth and young manhood standing on one leg. Who could back him down? In spite of his savage negotiating, publishers liked him. When they took on a writer represented by Boykins, they knew Boykins would edit text, design jackets, write ad copy, invent publicity gimmicks, drum up the sales force, call reviewers, court the media, and woo bookstores. His quiet insanity drove him to seek control over everything and it paid off in sales. “I don’t like to use the word
trendy
, Hal, but I think your book definitely touches a contemporary nerve.”
    The bear sniffed, enjoying the weave of perfumes and colognes in the air, which made him feel as if he were in a field of flowers. He sipped some wine. His only previous experience of alcohol was a bottle of cooking sherry he’d downed while rampaging in the kitchen of that rural Maine restaurant; its effect had been blurred by the great number of pies that’d accompanied its ingestion. Now the effect was more noticeable and his sensitivity to the fragrant air increased. His nose, which for years had led his instincts, led him now, without deliberation, without preliminary weighing of what was at stake. He slid out of his chair and down onto the floor of the restaurant, where herolled around with his paws in the air as a bear will do when he finds a field of flowers that fills him with happiness.
    Boykins went rigid in his chair. His client was making an ass of himself. On the other hand, to roll off your chair