The Net

By Ken Kaye

Herb McRay, a builder, goes online to publish his wife's illustrated children's books -- incognito.

"I thought ahead, all the way to the last chapter. My fantasy did not culminate in a denouement when my brilliant, loving deed could berevealed to Suzanne; when we could laugh about it. An act of love of the purest kind: Suzanne must never know the act had been committed, let alone by whom.

"What I felt wasn't a spiritual, uplifting sort of decisiveness; it was a dark determination. Once I started lining those bricks up and stacking them, there would be no moving them. They would build a windowless, doorless wall of dishonesty between myself and Suzanne for the first time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ken Kaye
• Release date: Feb 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310060885

Ken Kaye

Ken Kaye's fiction, available from online booksellers, includes the collection of short stories "Birds of Evanston" and five novels: "Eve" (Adam's memoir, a novella), "The Net", "Eye of the Storm", "Survivors", and "Be the Best".Kaye lives in Evanston, Illinois, where he has worked as a college professor, a family therapist, and a consultant to family-owned businesses. (His nonfiction books are in the field of psychology.) Thirty-five years after his Ph.D., he earned an MFA in creative fiction from Bennington College.email: [e-mail] (and please remember to leave a review of my book at your favorite online retailer)

Book preview

The Net

Ken Kaye

eBook edition published at Smashwords. ISBN 9781310060885.

Copyright 2014 by Ken Kaye

Original print edition © 2009 by Ken Kaye

Author’s Disclaimer:

This novel is set at the end of the last century on a street called Lincoln Street in a town called Evanston, on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. Any additional correspondence to places, people, or events in the author’s life are coincidental.

Table of Contents

June, 1996

1994

1995

1996

About the Author

June, 1996

Thoughtless?

Insensitive?

Demeaning bastard?

Slimeball, for God’s sake? I don’t deserve that. I was not toying with her feelings, and I’m done apologizing for noble intentions and a result that she should feel glad about.

I happen to have saved the documents, electronic and otherwise; the whole archive from beginning to end. Let me tell you what I did and why, what I was thinking, play by play. Give me the benefit of the doubt, at least read this and then tell me if I’m still an asshole.

1994

There’s so many things you do well, I said. It seems like you’re fixated on the one area where you have the least chance of succeeding.

Thank you very much for that insightful analysis. And for your encouragement.

I was bewildered! I am trying to encourage you. Didn’t I just say you have incredible talent? I’m encouraging you to invest your resources where there’s a market for them.

Fuck you, Suzanne explained.

All I was trying to do was to discourage her from a dream in which I feared she was slowly drowning. Talented artists are a dime a dozen. You’re as good as the best, but there are more than enough of the best to fill the demand. Afterward I felt bad; I hadn’t meant to be cruel. But her friends were more cruel: They encouraged her to keep trying. Believe in yourself, you just haven’t had good luck yet, they said. Which was precisely the problem: It was a matter of luck. She might go to her grave undiscovered. Not that Suzanne was looking for world class recognition, now or ever; she simply wanted to enjoy whatever success she could while still alive. The idea of posthumous discovery didn’t excite her a whole lot. All she wanted—desperately—was a publisher who’d employ her talent as an illustrator or publish her picture books for children.

Reasonable enough, of course, but even that was a crapshoot. It’s not what you can do that gets you work as an illustrator, it’s who you know. And luck. I wished she would enter paintings in a juried art show or a local art fair. Priced reasonably, I had no doubt, her work would go home with people. She could stop feeling like a failure.

You don’t get it, she said. I am not a painter. I’m an illustrator. I do books.

It was true, she did fabulous, beautiful books. The books Suzanne had done were the equal, I thought, of Maurice Sendak’s or Leo Leonni’s or anyone else’s—except that they were unpublished. The only child who had ever seen them was Nathan; and over the five or six years Suzanne had been trying to find a publisher, Nathan had outgrown those books.

She refused to go after the achievable goals that most artists, it seemed to me, would consider success. How about trying to get assignments in advertising? Oh no, too commercial, not her own artistic statement. Magazines? Too constraining. And she wouldn’t be caught dead sitting in a booth at an art fair, one more canvas schlepper in a lawn chair and sun hat. Wouldn’t teach, either. She was determined to make her name as an author/illustrator of books for children. Beatrix Potter did it. Sendak, Richard Scarry, Martin Handford. Barbara Cooney. Marcia Brown. William Steig. Their work sold millions of copies, yet they wrote and drew for themselves. They created what they loved to read and see—or so my wife believed, anyway—and that was the kind of success she aspired to. The kind she had so little chance of attaining—one in ten thousand, maybe?—notwithstanding all her talent.

I had been married to the woman for twenty years, long enough not to be surprised when I couldn’t reason with her. How did I feel about her? I was crazy about her, and she drove me crazy; both. I would try to josh her into putting things in perspective. Art for Art’s sake, right?

Right.

"I’m going to kill that guy Art if I ever catch him. I don’t mind him sleeping with you once in awhile—can’t blame the guy for lusting after you—but he’s fucking with your mind. Art’s telling you you’re not good enough for him unless you’re written up in the New York Times or something. I’m telling you you’re a great artist already. So what’s he got that I haven’t got?"

I don’t know, she smiled, not because she was amused. She smiled as if to say, You’ll never know.

This unsatisfiability of hers had a long history. She was unhappy way back when Nathan was in nursery school. She was eager to be doing something. Why not go back to teaching, I’d suggested. Not important enough, for God’s sake. What could be more important than teaching kids? She had taught college, surely high school would be a worthy challenge? I believed then and do now that she didn’t consider it a worthwhile accomplishment because the odds were she’d be successful at it.

* *

Candew Partners has an official company lunchroom: a window booth in the Salonika, our neighborhood diner a block from the office. Niko tends to hold the booth for Blake and me if he can. Once in a while Barb comes with us—she tells us it’s Secretary Week or her birthday or Pulaski Day, and the lunch comes out of our employee relations budget. Never mind that she’s Blake’s wife. But usually it’s just the two of us. The time I’m recalling, we got on the subject of our wives.

I said, The maddening thing is Suzanne has talent.

I know she does, Blake agreed, you showed me her paintings at the house.

You’ve seen her stuff. She doesn’t have to resort to primitive cartooning like most of the illustrators you see. She’s able to paint realistic people and animals with very expressive faces. She can draw as well as Beatrix Potter, she can write as well as Maurice Sendak.

I agree. She is good.

To me, she’s an undiscovered genius, I said. Of course, I’d seen so much of her work for twenty years that I couldn’t judge it any more than I could judge how attractive she was or how bright Nathan was. Any more than I could judge his singing or her wit. Both of them, wife and child, often seemed brilliant to me; but I knew that Suzanne’s style, her technique, her taste had altered my perception. Whether I began with any artistic judgment of my own or not, I had appreciated Suzanne’s work so deeply and for so long that it had become the standard to which I compared all paintings, all drawings, and especially all children’s books.

How is she going about marketing herself? Blake asked. Not that he knows anything about marketing, but he’s the kind of guy who will get interested in something he never thought about before, if you want to talk about it. The expression on his chubby face, at that moment, was just how he must have looked as an altar boy.

Well, she’s tried several agents with no luck, I said. Worse than no luck. While she’s pinning her hopes on one of them, she doesn’t pursue any publishers on her own. Now she’s hooked on this Internet. Do you know what news groups are, or USENET groups?

I’ve not looked into it yet. Chuck’s online all the time, and one of these days I’m going to sit down with him and find out what it’s all about. Chuck is a couple of years younger than our Nathan, so he must have been nine or ten at that time.

They’re like community bulletin boards, organized by topic. You’d probably find an architect’s news group, for example, or urban real estate developers, or toxic waste cleanup problems, or left-handed golfers or in Suzanne’s case, children’s book illustrators and publishers.

And people ‘chat’ with each other all day and night, I’ve heard.

That’s a little different. They have chat groups, too, but this is where you post questions, answers, commentaries on others’ questions and answers. You might only check in once every few days or so, it’s like leaving notes for a whole bunch of strangers who purport to have something to say to one another.

So Suzanne’s looking for work that way? Blake said.

I think it’s more like finding out how people are getting their work considered, what kind of illustration styles the publishers are really interested in, that kind of thing.

That’s great.

I don’t know, I said, I’m afraid it’s another dead end for her.

Early on a Wednesday morning near the end of May, I logged into my AOL Brubek account for the fifth time, more than half hoping there would be no mail. Only one person had been given the address. Only one person, Suzanne, had heard from or of the pseudonymous Bruce Beckman, a name that had popped into my head as suddenly as the box that now popped onto the screen, You have new mail. I hesitated before clicking the icon to open the message from my wife. Then, reading those paragraphs she had typed so innocently, I shuddered. The die was cast. How could I not go through with it?

Not that it had been an impulsive act, opening the account with America On Line and using it to reply to Suzanne’s ingenuous posting on the alt.writers.childlit news group. I had thought about the pros and cons, the potential and the risks, argued with myself for days, ever since she had shown me her posting and the reply from solicitous Ms. Zuckerman. In fact, the idea had begun to form in my mind when Suzanne first mentioned having surfed the Internet for writers’, illustrators’, and children’s publishing news groups. She had posted a question about a vanity press, got one vacuous reply; where others would have been disillusioned, she had been hooked by the imagined limitless potential of cyberspace. I had seen my opportunity.

Months earlier, I’d suggested that we self-publish her first book. You don’t have to worry about making money right away, I had said. "I know you want it to succeed on its own, but that’s not what you should be concerned about at this stage. We can afford to spend a little money priming the pump—it’s just like any other capital investment—and it might even pay for itself. Then you can go to big