“No, not yet, but I’m growing fond of her. Does she really have a lot of money?”

“Who knows? She and Leigh seem to be quite comfortable. They wrote a hundred books together, and by the way Leigh was far more involved in the romance fiction than she will admit. Some of their titles still sell.”

“Must be nice.”

“It’s hard to write when you’re broke, Mercer, I know that. I know a lot of writers and very few of them sell enough to write full-time.”

“So they teach. They find a campus somewhere and get a steady paycheck. I’ve done it twice and I’ll probably do it again. Either that or sell real estate.”

“I don’t think that’s an option for you.”

“Got any other ideas?”

“Actually, I have one great idea. Top me off and I’ll tell you a long story.” Mercer got the champagne out of the refrigerator and emptied the bottle. Bruce took a long drink, smacked his lips, and said, “I could drink this stuff for breakfast.”

“Me too, but coffee’s a lot cheaper.”

“So I had this girlfriend once, long before Noelle. Her name was Talia, a sweet girl who was gorgeous and talented and really messed up in the head. We dated off and on for about two years, more off than on because she was slowly losing her grip on reality. I couldn’t help her and it was painful watching her deteriorate. But she could write, and she was working on a novel that had enormous potential. It was a highly fictionalized story of Charles Dickens and his mistress, a young actress named Ellen Ternan. Dickens was married for twenty years to Catherine, a really stern woman in the Victorian sense. She bore ten children, and in spite of the obvious physical attraction the marriage was notoriously unhappy. When he was forty-five, and perhaps the most famous man in England, he met Ellen, who was eighteen and an aspiring actress. They fell madly in love and he left his wife and kids, though divorce was out of the question in those days. It’s never been clear whether he and Ellen actually lived together, and there was even a pretty strong rumor that she had a child that died at birth. Whatever the arrangement, they did a good job of hiding and covering up. However, in Talia’s novel, they had a full-blown affair that is narrated by Ellen and no details are spared. The novel got convoluted when Talia introduced another famous affair, one between William Faulkner and Meta Carpenter. Faulkner met her when he was in Hollywood cranking out screenplays for a buck, and from all indications they were in love. This got fictionalized too and was very well done. Then, to make the novel even more complicated, Talia introduced yet another affair between a famous writer and his girlfriend. There was a story, one that was never verified and is probably not true, that Ernest Hemingway had a quick romance with Zelda Fitzgerald when they were living in Paris. As you know, facts often get in the way of a good story, so Talia created her own facts and wrote a highly engaging account of Ernest and Zelda carrying on behind F. Scott’s back. So the novel had three sensational, literary love affairs raging by alternating sections, and it was just too much for one book.”