The Dark Half(7)

He looks up and smiles. Beaumont is thirty-nine, but when he smiles in that open way, he might be mistaken for one of his own undergrads. 'George died of natural causes.'

Beaumont says George Stark was his wife's idea. Elizabeth Stephens Beaumont, a cool and lovely blonde, refuses to take full credit. 'All I did,' she says, 'was suggest he write a novel under another name and see what happened to it. Thad was.suffering from serious writer's block, and he needed a jumpstart. And really' - she laughs - 'George Stark was there all along. I'd seen signs of him in some of the unfinished stuff that Thad did from time to time. It was just a case of getting him to come out of the closet.'

According to many of his contemporaries, Beaumont's problems went a little further than writer's block. At least two well-known writers (who refused to be quoted directly) say that they were worried about Beaumont's sanity during that crucial period between the first book and the second. One says he believes

Beaumont may have attempted suicide following the publication of The Sudden

Dancers, which earned more critical acclaim than royalties.

Asked if he ever considered suicide, Beaumont only shakes his head and says,'That's a stupid idea. The real problem wasn't popular acceptance; it was writer's block. And dead writers have a terminal case of that.'

Meanwhile, Liz Beaumont kept 'lobbying' - Beaumont's word - for the idea of a pseudonym. 'She said I could kick up my heels for once, if I wanted to. Write any damn thing I pleased without The New York Times Book Review looking over my shoulder the whole time I wrote it. She said I could write a Western, a mystery, a science fiction story. Or I could write a crime novel.'

Thad Beaumont grins.

'I think she put that one last on purpose. She knew Id been fooling around with an idea for a crime novel, although I couldn't seem to get a handle on it.

'The idea of a pseudonym had this funny draw for me. It felt free, somehow - like a secret escape hatch, if you see what I mean.

'But there was something else, too. Something that's very hard to explain.'

Beaumont stretches a hand out toward the neatly sharpened Berols in the mason jar, then withdraws it. He looks off toward the window-wall at the back of his study, which gives on a spring spectacular of greening trees.

'Thinking about writing under a pseudonym was like thinking bout being invisible,' he finally says almost hesitantly. 'The More I played with the idea, the more I felt that I would be . . . well . . . reinventing myself.'

His hand steals out and this time succeeds in filching one of the pencils from the mason jar while his mind is otherwise engaged.

Thad turned the page and then looked up at the twins in their double high chair. Boy-girl twins were always fraternal . . . or brother-and-sisteral, if you didn't want to be a male chauvinist pig about it. Wendy and William were, however, about as identical as you could get without being identical.

William grinned at Thad around his bottle.

Wendy also grinned at him around her bottle, but she was sporting an accessory her brother didn't have - one single tooth near the front, which had come up with absolutely no teething pain, simply breaking through the surface of the gum as silently as a submarine's periscope sliding through the surface of the ocean.

Wendy took one chubby hand from her plastic bottle. Opened it, showing the clean pink palm.

Closed it. Opened it. A Wendy-wave.

Without looking at her, William removed one of his hands from his bottle, opened it, closed it, opened it. A William-wave..Thad solemnly raised one of his own hands from the table, opened it, closed it, opened it.

The twins grinned around their bottles.

He looked down at the magazine again. Ah, People, he thought where would we be, what would we do, without you? This is American star-time, folks.

The writer had dragged out all the soiled linen there was to drag out, of course - most notably the four-year-long bad patch after The Sudden Dancers had failed to win the NBA - but that was to be expected, and he found himself not much bothered by the display. For one thing, it wasn't all that dirty, and for another, he had always felt it was easier to live with the truth than with a lie. In the long run, at least.

Which of course raised the question of whether or not People magazine and 'the long run' had anything at all in common.

Oh well. Too late now.

The name of the guy who had written the piece was Mike - he remembered that much, but Mike what? Unless you were an earl tattling on royalty or a movie star tattling on other movie stars, when you wrote for People your byline came at the end of the piece. Thad had to leaf through four pages (two of them full-page ads) to find the name. Mike Donaldson. He and Mike had sat up late, just shooting the shit, and when Thad had asked the man if anyone would really care that he had written a few books under another name, Donaldson had said something which made Thad laugh hard. 'Surveys show that most People readers have extremely narrow noses. That makes them hard to pick, so they pick as many other people's as they can. They'll want to know all about your friend George.'

'He's no friend of mine,' Thad had responded, still laughing.

Now he asked Liz, who had gone to the stove, 'You got it together, babe? You need some help?'

'I'm fine,' she said. 'Just cooking up some goo for the kiddos. You haven't got enough of yourself yet?'

'Not yet,' Thad said shamelessly, and went back to the article.