Ring Around the Sun

CHAPTER SEVEN

ANN CARTER said to Vickers: "Some day, Jay, I'm going to get sore enough at you to take you apart. And when I do maybe I'll have a chance to find what makes you tick."

"I got a book to write," said Vickers. "I'm writing it. What more do you want?"

"That book could keep. You could write it anytime. This one won't."

"Go ahead, tell me I threw away a million bucks. That's what you're thinking."

"You could have charged them a fancy fee for writing and gotten a contract with the publisher like there never was before and…"

"And pushed aside the greatest piece of work I've ever done," said Vickers, "and come back to it cold and find I'd lost the touch."

"Every book you write is your greatest one. Jay Vickers, you're nothing but a literary ham. Sure, you do good work and your darn books sell, although sometimes I wonder why. If there were no money in it you'd never write another word. Tell me, honest, why do you write?"

"You've answered it for me. You say for money. All right, so it's for money."

"All right, so I have a sordid soul."

"My God," said Vickers, "we're fighting as if we were married."

"That's another thing. You've never married, Jay. It's an index of your selfishness. I bet you never even thought of it."

"Once I did," said Vickers. "Once long ago."

"Here, put your head down here and have a good long cry. I bet it was pitiful. I bet that's how you got some of those excruciating love scenes you put into your books."

"Ann, you're getting maudlin drunk."

"If I'm getting drunk, you're the man who drove me to it. You're the one who said, 'Thanks for the chance, but I'm not having any."

"I had a hunch there was something phoney there," insisted Vickers.

"That was you," said Ann. She finished off her drink.

"Don't use a hunch," she said, "to duck the responsibility for turning down the best thing you ever had. Any time someone dangles money like that in front of me, I'm not letting any hunch stand in my way."

"I'm sure you wouldn't," Vickers agreed.

"That was a nasty thing to say," Ann told him. "Pay for the drinks and let's get out of here. I'm putting you on that bus and don't you come back again."