The Dark Half

Beaumont says George Stark was his wife's idea. Elizabeth Stephens Beaumont, a

cool and lovely blonde, refuses to take full credit. 'All I did,' she says, 'was suggest

he write a novel under another name and see what happened to it. Thad was

suffering from serious writer's block, and he needed a jumpstart. And really' — she

laughs — 'George Stark was there all along. I'd seen signs of him in some of the

unfinished stuff that Thad did from time to time. It was just a case of getting him to

come out of the closet.'

According to many of his contemporaries, Beaumont's problems went a little

further than writer's block. At least two well-known writers (who refused to be

quoted directly) say that they were worried about Beaumont's sanity during that

crucial period between the first book and the second. One says he believes

Beaumont may have attempted suicide following the publication of The Sudden

Dancers, which earned more critical acclaim than royalties.

Asked if he ever considered suicide, Beaumont only shakes his head and says,

'That's a stupid idea. The real problem wasn't popular acceptance; it was writer's

block. And dead writers have a terminal case of that.'

Meanwhile, Liz Beaumont kept 'lobbying' — Beaumont's word — for the idea of

a pseudonym. 'She said I could kick up my heels for once, if I wanted to. Write any

damn thing I pleased without The New York Times Book Review looking over my

shoulder the whole time I wrote it. She said I could write a Western, a mystery, a

science fiction story. Or I could write a crime novel.'

Thad Beaumont grins.

'I think she put that one last on purpose. She knew Id been fooling around with

an idea for a crime novel, although I couldn't seem to get a handle on it.

'The idea of a pseudonym had this funny draw for me. It felt free, somehow — like

a secret escape hatch, if you see what I mean.

'But there was something else, too. Something that's very hard to explain.'

Beaumont stretches a hand out toward the neatly sharpened Berols in the mason

jar, then withdraws it. He looks off toward the window-wall at the back of his study,

which gives on a spring spectacular of greening trees.

'Thinking about writing under a pseudonym was like thinking bout being

invisible,' he finally says almost hesitantly. 'The More I played with the idea, the

more I felt that I would be . . . well . . . reinventing myself.'

His hand steals out and this time succeeds in filching one of the pencils from the

mason jar while his mind is otherwise engaged.

    Thad turned the page and then looked up at the twins in their double high chair. Boy-girl twins were always fraternal . . . or brother-and-sisteral, if you didn't want to be a male chauvinist pig about it. Wendy and William were, however, about as identical as you could get without being identical.

  William grinned at Thad around his bottle.

  Wendy also grinned at him around her bottle, but she was sporting an accessory her brother didn't have — one single tooth near the front, which had come up with absolutely no teething pain, simply breaking through the surface of the gum as silently as a submarine's periscope sliding through the surface of the ocean.

    Wendy took one chubby hand from her plastic bottle. Opened it, showing the clean pink palm. Closed it. Opened it. A Wendy-wave.

   Without looking at her, William removed one of his hands from his bottle, opened it, closed it, opened it. A William- wave.

Thad solemnly raised one of his own hands from the table, opened it, closed it, opened it.

The twins grinned around their bottles.

   He looked down at the magazine again. Ah, People, he thought where would we be, what would we do, without you? This is American star-time, folks.

   The writer had dragged out all the soiled linen there was to drag out, of course — most notably the four—year—long bad patch after The Sudden Dancers had failed to win the NBA — but that was to be expected, and he found himself not much bothered by the display. For one thing, it wasn't all that dirty, and for another, he had always felt it was easier to live with the truth than with a lie. In the long run, at least.

    Which of course raised the question of whether or not People magazine and 'the long run' had anything at all in common.

Oh well. Too late now.

    The name of the guy who had written the piece was Mike — he remembered that much, but Mike what?