I could find a dozen beginnings. Perhaps it might be best to begin in a hotel room, in London, a few years ago. It was 11:00 AM. The phone began to ring, which surprised me. I hurried over to answer it.
“Hello?” It was too early in the morning for anyone in America to be phoning me, and there was no one in England who was meant to know that I was even in the country.
“Hi,” said a familiar voice, adopting an American accent of monumentally unconvincing proportions. “This is Hiram P. Muzzle-dexter of Colossal Pictures. We’re working on a film that’s a remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark but instead of Nazis it has women with enormous knockers in it. We’ve heard that you were astonishingly well supplied in the trouser department and might be willing to take on the part of our male lead, Minnesota Jones…”
“Jonathan?” I said. “How on earth did you find me here?”
“You knew it was me,” he said, aggrieved, his voice losing all trace of the improbable accent and returning to his native London.
“Well, it sounded like you,” I pointed out. “Anyway, you didn’t answer my question. No one’s meant to know that I was here.”
“I have my ways,” he said, not very mysteriously. “Listen, if Jane and I were to offer to feed you sushi—something I recall you eating in quantities that put me in mind of feeding time at London Zoo’s Walrus House—and if we offered to take you to the theater before we fed you, what would you say?”
“Not sure. I’d say ‘Yes’ I suppose. Or ‘What’s the catch?’ I might say that.”
“Not exactly a catch,” said Jonathan. “I wouldn’t exactly call it a catch. Not a real catch. Not really.”
“You’re lying, aren’t you?”
Somebody said something near the phone, and then Jonathan said, “Hang on, Jane wants a word.” Jane is Jonathan’s wife.
“How are you?” she said.
“Fine, thanks.”
“Look,” she said, “you’d be doing us a tremendous favor—not that we wouldn’t love to see you, because we would, but you see, there’s someone…”
“She’s your friend,” said Jonathan, in the background.
“She’s not my friend. I hardly know her,” she said, away from the phone, and then, to me, “Um, look, there’s someone we’re sort of lumbered with. She’s not in the country for very long, and I wound up agreeing to entertain her and look after her tomorrow night. She’s pretty frightful, actually. And Jonathan heard that you were in town from someone at your film company, and we thought you might be perfect to make it all less awful, so please say yes.”
So I said yes.
In retrospect, I think the whole thing might have been the fault of the late Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. I had read an article the previous month, in which Ian Fleming had advised any would-be writer who had a book to get done that wasn’t getting written to go to a hotel to write it. I had, not a novel, but a film script that wasn’t getting written; so I bought a plane ticket to London, promised the film company that they’d have a finished script in three weeks’ time, and took a room in an eccentric hotel in Little Venice.
I told no one in England that I was there. Had people known, my days and nights would have been spent seeing them, not staring at a computer screen and, sometimes, writing.
Truth to tell, I was bored half out of my mind and ready to welcome any interruption.
Early the next evening I arrived at Jonathan and Jane’s house, which was more or less in Hampstead. There was a small green sports car parked outside. Up the stairs, and I knocked at the door. Jonathan answered it; he wore an impressive suit. His light brown hair was longer than I remembered it from the last time I had seen him, in life or on television.
“Hello,” said Jonathan. “The show we were going to take you to has been canceled. But we can go to something else, if that’s okay with you.”
I was about to point out that I didn’t know what we were originally going to see, so a change of plans would make no difference to me, but Jonathan was already leading me into the living room, establishing that I wanted fizzy water to drink, assuring me that we’d still be eating sushi and that Jane would be coming downstairs as soon as she had put the children to bed.
They had just redecorated the living room, in a style Jonathan described as Moorish brothel. “It didn’t set out to be a Moorish brothel,” he explained. “Or any kind of a brothel really. It was just where we ended up. The brothel look.”