The Water Keeper(25)
I was amazed. “How do you know all this?”
“The man got me off drugs! Needless to say, I’m a fan.”
I was laughing. “Evidently.”
She continued, “His is the first book in publishing history where advertisers are offering him money—like six-figure money—to mention their products in his books. Automobiles, watches, computers, phones, sunglasses, motorcycles . . .” She paused again. “A winery in Napa even paid a junk-load of money to become the only type of wine he serves at communion. And they paid a bonus if he serves it to her—”
“That’s ridiculous. May even be blasphemy.”
She nodded. “There are some angry readers who agree with you. Anyway, whoever this writer is, he’s no dummy. It’s not like you’re watching one big commercial. He’s sly the way he does it. Like, he does it, you read past it, and then it hits you. ‘He just mentioned another product.’”
“I’ll bet Hollywood loves this guy.”
“That’s just it. He said no to Hollywood, which just makes everyone want it all the more. Two studios have sued the publisher for rights but lost in court. David Bishop is a genius—he has made a buttload of money and he’s gonna make a buttload more in this next book ’cause he’s giving people a little of what they want but not everything.” She shook her head. “Kill the series? Not a chance.”
“Of course, you’re assuming that, whoever this person is, they’re motivated by money.”
“That’s another thing. Several of the news networks investigated where the royalty payments go. Wanna guess?”
“Some fat, bald guy draped in cheesy gold chains and bad sunglasses living on the beach in Monaco, sipping an umbrella drink, collecting the interest, laughing at people like you?”
She smiled. “Close, but no. They tracked the royalties to an offshore holding account, but”—she held up a finger—“one of the reporters had a cousin or something who worked at Google, and he figured out that the offshore stuff was just a shell, and that most of the transfers, after they went through a few more shells, ended up . . . Are you ready for this? At a nonprofit.”
She nodded knowingly. “That’s right.” She whispered for emphasis. “He’s giving it all away.” She raised an eyebrow. “Which only helps sell more books.” She finished her food and spoke with her mouth half full. “I’m not sure what motivates him, but this whole idea—the writer who is both writer and character, and the nun with a scar and a secret, and their impossible love, the way their adventures bring them together but not ‘together,’ but oh so close, and how the royalties go to some nonprofit that nobody can find—the whole thing is what people like me dream of.”
“Which is?”
She shrugged, speaking matter-of-factly. “The fairy tale. There are a lot of women out there who think we’re just forever stuck on the island of misfit toys, and yet here’s a writer who causes us to think that maybe someone might love us despite the scars and the baggage. Someone who knows what I’m thinking enough to finish my sentences. And what’s more, would know how to fix my coffee if we were stranded on an island. Someone who”—she waved her hand through the air in front of her—“protects me from the world that wants to hurt me.”
I laughed. “Sounds like a soap opera. Or maybe worse, pulp fiction.”
She paused. Her voice changed. “I think he, whoever he is, is wounded. Something deep. Some days I think he writes to remember. And some days I think he writes to forget. Whatever the case, I read to believe.”
“In?”
“A love I can only dream about.”
“Sounds like you know him.”
“I do. We all do. That’s the mystery and the majesty. He’s that good.”
I laughed. “Somebody should find this guy.”
“In his last book, the two of them are in Budapest. On this secret mission. And they’re in this hotel in”—she made quotation marks in the air with her fingers—“‘separate but joining’ rooms, mind you, and he’s in the shower trying to rinse off the blood from a gunshot wound, and she’s leaning with her ear pressed to the wall listening to him shower, and she feels guilty but she can’t pull herself away. They’re separated by a single wall, eight inches at most, but it might as well be a million miles.”
My voice turned sarcastic. “Yeah, I can see it in my mind’s eye. Just tantalizing.”
She waved me off. “Anyway, he’s in there like a chiseled Adonis in a fountain, and he reads the label on the shampoo in the shower ’cause it smells good and drowns out the smell of his own blood. And you know what happened?”
“No, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”
“The body wash in the book was real in real life. The week after the book released, that body wash was number one on Amazon.” She raised both eyebrows. “I bought a case.”
“Unbelievable.”
She waved her fork in circles in the air. “I know how it sounds. What blows my mind is the fact that whoever that writer is, he or she has written something that is so good it took my mind off the drugs. Think about it. Better than drugs? And I’m not the only one. Therapists in rehab give these books to their patients. ‘Read this. Let’s talk.’ Right now there are book club support groups across the country filled with junkies and addicts who are getting clean—all ’cause somebody wrote some words. If I could, I’d hug whoever it is. Kiss them on the mouth. I don’t care. Man, woman, child, zombie . . . they did something that nothing else could.”