Chapter One
Tempe, Arizona
Clad in boxers patterned with glow-in-the-dark pumpkins and a
Garfield "Easy Rider" tank top, clothing belonging to her daughter
Fiona, Prudence stood, two mornings later, before her open
refrigerator, unable to fend off the realization that something in
her life was off-kilter. Incontestable evidence presented itself in
the one egg, two heels of twelve-grain bread, bag of rubbery
carrots, and sad knob of old butter. Outside the icebox and inside
her head (that overcrowded, bony box) lurked the reluctant awareness
that (a) she did not have money to buy groceries, (b) she would not
be paid for three more weeks, and (c) while she had been busy
helping others, no one had thought to help her. Entrenched within
Prudence's moral foundation was a certain unchecked generosity, a
self-destructive impulse toward charity. Give, woman, give, to the
headstrong, plunging world ... At fourteen, Prudence Parker had
copied down this anonymous quote in her diary, a virtue thereafter
subscribed to and left unexamined, a virtue leaving her, decades
later, feeding others while starving herself. Martyrdom, an
incremental, dishonest way to die.
Scrambling her solitary egg, toasting both grainy heels, Prudence
mentally calculated the credit remaining on her card. Her penury,
even to herself, was scarcely credible. She was a teacher at a
community college, wasn't she? She lived in a reasonably attractive
home with a brick fireplace and a newly fiberglassed swimming pool,
didn't she? Aside from the cavernous icebox, the refrigerator busy
chilling nothing, there were no outward, visible signs of monetary
distress. Even Prudence had overlooked her own plight until there
was no food, no money, and her daughter, Fiona, was due home, set to
begin her senior year in high school. Since Prudence and Powell's
divorce eight years before, Fiona had spent summers with her father
in Taos, always flying home the day before school started. Eight
summers of the same wrenching farewells and queer, ensuing silence,
driving home from the airport without her child, the gradual
adjustment to solitude, until, just as she'd developed a mostly
pleasant routine, when silence no longer felt adversarial, the
summer passed and Prudence had to re-adapt, make room for Fiona's
return.
According to her late father's Pragmatic Book of Life, one should
never admit budget failure. A person should cut out one's tongue
rather than confess the deep embarrassment of fiscal idiocy. Thus it
was with little discernible enthusiasm she plucked the day's mail
from its black metal box, tossing plant, clothing and cookware
catalogs and past-due bills into the trash, pausing only to tear
open a large lilac envelope hand-addressed in violet ink, a
masculine scrawl. Inside, a formal invitation to Mildred Crawley's
home for afternoon tea. Tea, just for sharing toilet tissue?
Prudence checked the address. Camelback Mountain. Her body began its
low-pitched dowsing thrum, not in response to a library book, but
simply from holding the blowsy, empurpled signature of a romance
writer in her hand.
Mineral monstrosity! Luxe behemoth! A few scant hours after
receiving her invitation, Prudence paused in her little two-toned,
sunbaked Nash Rambler, hands on the steering wheel, neck craned up
at the red rock castle gouged imposingly into one flank of Camelback
Mountain, twin turrets jutting out, rugged, frank statements of
penile aggression. She was only halfway up the winding ascent, a
vertiginous climb steeper than the parking spiral at the Phoenix
airport. After a series of hairpin turns, she arrived at the top,
counting six garages built into the bottom layer of the castle. She
parked in the pencil-thin shade of a dying saguaro, walked across a
wooden drawbridge, a dry, rocky, waterless moat, and knocked on a
massive timbered door fit for giants, a fee-fi-fo-fummish door.
Ushered into the castle by a grim-faced old toad wearing a starched
white nurse's uniform, Prudence trailed the toad's squeaking rubber
shoes down a vast, parqueted hallway into a large circular,
cavernous room with round recessed windows set high along one wall.
In the center of this dank, echoey rotunda noised an impressive,
deafening waterfall, backlit with gel lights, green, red, yellow and
blue sweeps of garish color passing in monotonous rhythm across a
botanical jungle suggestive of the Pleistocene era. With neither
fanfare nor courtesy, Prudence was seated at a small garden table
made of white, floridly patterned wrought iron. The nurse squeaked
off, and moments later the boxy creature Prudence remembered meeting
in the Tempe library's handicapped bathroom stood before her,
extending a broad hand with its fleet of dark hairs and
vampire-sharp glue-on nails. Outfitted in a maroon silk smoking
jacket, black silk pajama bottoms and sleek black slippers, sparse,
snowy hair cropped close to the skull, Mildred Crawley was
incontestibly, inarguably, a man.
"Delightful of you to arrive on such peremptory notice, Ms. Parker."
The familiar chalky enunciations. "What you see"-here Mildred
(Prudence knew no other name) gave a lordly, operatic gesture with
silk-robed arms-"is my recompense for helping lonely female souls,
one page at a time, one book at a time, one series at a time, find
asylum from mundane and otherwise socially wretched lives. Casa
Crawley has twelve bedrooms, six and a half bathrooms, a fully
outfitted dungeon, an Olympic-size pool along with a spa for twenty.
I admit to hedonism, gluttony and a sybaritic excess of lovers who
have kept pace with my literary output, a boy for every book, not
intentional in the least. Until she died at noon on Secretary's Day,
1992, my mother, Glorianna Jean, lived here with me. And as
melodramatically as the truth may fall upon your unassuming,
innocent ears, Ms. Parker, I have not long to live myself, less than
six months. Perhaps only three. The Mildred Crawley you see before
you, nee Digby Deeds, totters on the last of her pathetic, shopworn
legs."
Colors swept like klieg lights across her host's face, turning it
jaundiced, sickly green, hellish-lit or moody blue by turns. He
scraped back a dainty iron chair and sat fussily down just as the
nurse trundled in a tea cart, the kind Prudence associated with
five-star hotels, fully linened and loaded with tea sandwiches,
French pastries and a silver tea service. Ravenous, Prudence heaped
her plate as Digby began his story, after helping himself to nothing
but a cup of green tea and a paper-thin slice of kiwi which he left
untouched. "Twenty-five years ago, on a drunken dare, I dashed out
my first Mildred Crawley romance, Beauty, Her Dark Beast, a mere
lark, with my partner, Edgar, who has been irredeemably and
unforgivably dead, leaving all the drudgery to me, for more than ten
years now. Beauty was a positive horse plop of cliches, a monstrous
success, manna for the booboisie, that apt coinage of Mencken's. I
found myself shackled to my nom de plume, Mildred Crawley, having
accepted a wildly lucrative contract for the Savage Love series, to
be followed by the Savage Dream and Savage Passion series, a ride
straight to the top, where I have lived, in outrageous splendor,
ever since. My newest agent, a dreadful little fellow who insists on
wearing fruit-colored leisure suits, induced me to appear at your
quaint little bibliotheque-sales, he insisted, were dipping, and I
owed my readers, no less than semper fi, one of my rare appearances.
Meeting you in a public toilet, Ms. Parker, was worth every misery
of that arduous afternoon, even perhaps the divinely ordained reason
for my appearance. To be perfectly blunt, I have been seeking an
heir. Someone to complete the final forty plots of my Savage Passion
series. And like a Hollywood starlet discovered waitressing at a
drugstore counter or checking hats at the Ritz, I feel in my dying
bones that I have discovered you, Prudence Parker. My starlet. My
heir."
"How flattering," Prudence mumbled. How ludicrous, she thought.
"I further confess, when I emerged from that nasty stall and saw
you, so manque, with a certain irresistible je ne sais quoi look of
genteel, Bronte-esque poverty about you, it was as if you had
emerged, full-blown, from my dreams."
Prudence bent down to retrieve her linen napkin from the floor where
it had slipped from her lap. I looked manque, she thought, because I
was blind. The man is mad.
After they had eaten, or rather after Prudence had hoovered up every
single cucumber and shrimp paste sandwich, giving mumbled answers to
Digby's few questions about herself between mouthfuls, he led her up
a steep, winding marble staircase to his author's turret, a circular
chamber with a panoramic view of Phoenix, cloaked in its usual
sulfuric caul of bilious, industrialized air.
"Following Balzac's lead, though spared his genius, I wear a white
silk robe, drink strong black coffee and write from midnight to
dawn, five days a week. I finish each of my books in ninety days; an
utterly methodical, cold-blooded process. Because of failing health,
my output, in the past year, has declined significantly. What I have
done instead, to amuse myself as well as pave the gold brick road
for my heir or heiress-perhaps you, Ms. Parker-is to draw up
plots, detailed plots, blueprints, for forty additional novels. This
will require someone to simply fill in the blanks, someone, after I
am cast out into the cosmos, to carry on the Crawley name. I know
little of your personal life, Ms. Parker, but judging from the fact
that you were alone in a library on a Saturday evening, and further
judging from the look of your car"-they stood staring out a deeply
recessed turret window at Prudence's faded aqua and beige
Rambler-"this may be welcome news. Each of my books earns an
advance of ten and royalties of upwards of twenty thousand dollars.
And though what I view as destiny you may view as bizarre
happenstance, a chance encounter in a toilet stall, the figures may
still impress you. It is equally true you may, at this very moment,
be scrambling for an excuse to escape." He peered at her. "Are you?"
What about the dungeon? Fully outfitted. What was that about?
Prudence felt anxiety mixed with greed over such dangled sums of
money, an overall giddiness, perplexity, a bungled sense of wonder.
As she often did in crisis, she heard her mother's voice-Nothing's
free in this world, Prune, don't be a naive Nancy!
"I don't quite know what to think. I-"
Just then the bashing, assaultive sound of heavy metal music leapt
up the spiraled staircase. Wearily, Digby brushed a sallow hand over
the top of his white cropped hair. "He'll be the death of me, I know
it."
"Your son?"
"Hardly. Let's trudge down, shall we?"
"Therron is a fledgling Navajo poet," Digby's voice floated backward
as Prudence trailed him down the staircase. "An exquisite piece of
human furniture. He is with me for my fortune, and pretends, not
very convincingly, otherwise." In a living room the size of a resort
lobby, its oak floor saturated with animal skins and pelts, its
polished rosewood walls studded with mounted heads of game animals,
moose, deer, elk, and an entire family of molting javelina, they
stood gazing out one of several velvet-swagged, leaded windows
watching a copper-skinned young man, completely naked, with
stylishly short bleached hair swan-dive into an Olympic-size pool.
"Therron is the only one to have gone completely aquatic," sighed
Digby. "He is the perfect one-night stand. One night after another."
"Couldn't he write your series for you?"
"He's a fledgling poet, my dear. Taking on the Mildred Crawley
mantle would be tantamount to suicide. Stabbing himself to death
with his own pen."
It was dusk by the time Prudence trawled back down the mountain,
having ended her visit by thanking Digby but refusing his generous
offer. How could she possibly churn out such dreck, color in the
stiff plot points of romance, betray her own aesthetics? Digby
simply urged Prudence to give herself time, to sleep, as it were, on
his offer. Not wishing to insult the wishes of a dying man, Prudence
found herself exiting Casa Crawley with a heap of Crawley romances,
both hardback and paper, sliding about in the backseat (having been
shouldered out by taciturn Therron, clad in nothing but the electric
blue Speedo he'd hastily snapped on, Prudence assumed, for her
sake). The only way she could consider carrying on Digby's Savage
Passion series was if it were a secret pact between them-and if,
like Digby, she could learn to flip out romances, fast as hotcakes,
in the middle of the night. What was it he had said? Crawley's
Foolproof Formula for Best-Selling Romance: four sex scenes per
book, understanding that emotional intimacy is far more dangerous
than physical contact, and on the final page of every Crawley
romance, the woman always, always, wins.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Late Bloomer
by Melissa Pritchard
Copyright © 2004 by Melissa Pritchard.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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Late Bloomer