The Editor

by Steven Rowley

  I shrug and grin more. I must look like the Joker. Or at least Jack Nicholson.

  “You’re not going to defend him, I hope.”

  “Clinton? Nope.” Then I burst out laughing. It’s orgasmic, like a release for the whole day.

  “What, then?”

  Daniel and I met when we were both trying to get rush tickets to the Broadway revival of Cabaret. I made a crack about Joel Grey getting top billing for playing the emcee. I mean, he had won an Oscar for the role, but he was still the emcee. Daniel overheard me gripe and said it was like reviving Grease as a starring vehicle for Doody and I laughed. I had noticed him earlier on line for the box office and wanted to sleep with him the moment I laid eyes on him. It was the way he jumped up and down while pleading for a ticket, any ticket, like a dog on its hind legs, begging for scraps. We were unsuccessful that day but left far from empty-handed.

  I snap off the TV.

  “I was watching that,” he protests.

  “It’s CNN. It’s on all day.” I take off my gloves and my coat and throw them on the chair. “I think I sold my book.”

  Daniel stares at the blank TV screen until that sinks in. “Wait, you what?”

  “Well, the offer will go to my agent and I’m sure there will be some back-and-forth and we’ll have to come to some agreement on terms. He may be on the phone with them now. Did Allen call? And there’s work to be done on it still. Hard work, she called it. On the ending, mostly.” I bite my lip. “But . . . yeah. I think I sold my book.”

  Daniel’s legs swing around and his feet plant firmly on the ground. He pushes himself up with his fists and hovers just over the couch, preparing to leap up if necessary. “To a publisher?”

  “To a doorstop salesman.” If it’s going to take him so long to catch on to this bit of the news, the rest of it will be a Sisyphean task of explanation on my part.

  “Obviously to a publisher. To a good publisher?” Daniel doesn’t leap, but at least he stands. “Who?”

  The grin is back. This is going to knock his socks off. “I sold it to a giant.”

  “A giant,” he says skeptically.

  “That’s right.”

  “A literary giant?”

  “A GIANT giant.”

  Daniel crosses over to me and puts his hands on my shoulders, concerned. I peripherally glance down at his hands. “Wait, I’ve heard this before,” he says. “You sold your book for a handful of magic beans.”

  Daniel is going off the deep end. “What?”

  “And we no longer have a cow. But I shouldn’t worry, because you’re going to grow a beanstalk!”

  “No. Stop it. Not a giant. An icon. But I’m sure she hates that word. She’s a really big person.”

  “Like, obese?”

  This is coming out all wrong. “Okay, I’m ready to move on from this part. Jackie. I sold my book to Jackie!”

  Daniel thinks on this for a minute. “Karen’s friend? The lesbian who works at Reader’s Digest?”

  “KENNEDY. Jackie. Kennedy.”

  He freezes. Finally. The reaction I was looking for. “Oh,” he says, quietly. But he’s still not quite there.

  “Oh . . .” I repeat. And then I coax, “Na-ssis.”

  Finally, magic happens. In unison: “Jackie . . . Kennedy . . . Onassis.”

  It’s just like out of a movie, us saying it together: a scene that would strain credulity but would still be an audience favorite and get high marks in test screenings.

  “Get out!” Daniel removes his hands from my shoulders and pushes me in the chest. Hard.

  “Ow.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “You just punched me in the sternum.”

  “Jackie fucking Kennedy.”

  “Onassis. Except I don’t think that’s her middle name. And she says Jacqueline, but like in the French pronunciation.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Non, non,” I say, mustering my best French. “Je ne . . .” I can’t think of the word. “Joke pas.”

  He looks at me, scrutinizing my face, just as he did the first time I told him I loved him, to see if I am recklessly toying with his emotions or if I’m indeed telling the truth. He scans my eyes, perhaps to check if my pupils are dilated in the throes of some drug-fueled hallucination. At last he smiles, a recognition that I am of sound mind, just as he did upon I love you.

  “Oh my God! When do you meet her?”

  “I just came from there.”

  “From where?”

  “From meeting her. At Doubleday.”

  “Her office. You just came from there.” This is two steps forward and one step back. I try to be patient; it took me time to catch on to all this and it happened with me in the room. “You just entered our apartment door, coming straight from Jackie fucking Kennedy’s office.”

  “Yes. Well, no. A conference room. Her office was too small.”

  “Her office is too . . . small.”

  “That’s what she said, yes.”

  “She’s the widow of Aristotle Onassis, who was, for a time, the richest man on the planet.”

  I fail to make the connection. “So?”

  “She could probably buy Doubleday. And the building it’s in. But you’re telling me her office is small?”

  I see his point, but I can actually answer this one. “She doesn’t want to buy Doubleday. She doesn’t want special treatment.”

  “She told you that?”

  I try to recall our exact conversation. She said something along those lines. And could she buy Doubleday? I seem to remember something about Onassis’s daughter getting the money. “We didn’t go over her financials or anything. It’s all kind of a blur, to be honest.”

  “But you know this because you just came from there.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you had a meeting—not in her office, which is small, but in a conference room, where she made an offer to buy your book.”

  “It took me a while too. You’re doing great.” Daniel rolls his eyes. He thinks I’m being patronizing, but I’m really not. I’m being sincere. So I wrap my arms around him, nuzzle my face in his shoulder, and excitedly scream.

  “Did you just spit on my shirt?” He stretches the fabric for evidence.

  “Daniel! Focus!”

  He returns his attention to me. “So. What did you talk about? You and the former First Lady.”

  “I asked her about Charles de Gaulle.”

  “The airport?” Daniel peels me off of him.

  “The French president.” I bang my head against his shoulder several times, embarrassed.

  “As in how he’s doing? Because I think Charles de Gaulle is dead.”

  I laugh, because that’s the man I fell in love with. The man who makes me laugh every night before we fall asleep holding hands. “I asked if he was tall.” I kind of throw my hands up as if to say, What else are you supposed to ask her about? and also, I know! in recognition of my own ridiculousness.

  “You asked her a question that rhymed?” Daniel is incredulous.

  “I don’t think I phrased it as a couplet.”

  “But it was about the physical stature of the former president of France.”

  “I couldn’t think of what else to say!”

  “And that’s what popped in your mind. Not ‘What do you do in your spare time? Is that an original Oleg Cassini design you’re wearing? Do you have any shirtless pictures of your son?’”

  “Who is Oleg Cassini?”

  “My point is—”

  “Your point is clear,” I interrupt. “But what else are you supposed to say to someone who wants to publish your book?”

  Daniel takes a lap around our minuscule living room. Since the couch and the coffee table and the TV and the one accent chair we found on the
curb near Ninth and Forty-Third take up most of the space, he basically turns in a very tight circle, careful not to trip on the edge of the oriental rug, which is folded in half because it’s too big for the room. When he stops he says, “What I don’t get is why. Why does she want to publish your book?”

  I mime a dagger going into my heart.

  “Oh, come on. I don’t mean it like that. I’ve read your book. I love your book!”

  “But you can’t imagine anyone wanting to publish it.”

  “In fact, I can. I just didn’t think she published fiction.”

  “It’s a memoir. Sort of. Just fictionalized.”

  “It’s a novel, genius, and I didn’t think she did that.”

  “What did you think she did?”

  “I don’t know. Art books.”

  I blanch at the thought, but I don’t know why. If you asked me yesterday what kind of books Jackie Kennedy published I would have had no idea. I had only a vague recollection that she even worked in publishing. Today I have no sense of her list either, but I’m feeling oddly defensive of it.

  “You know,” Daniel continues. “Coffee-table books. Like on the history of tatting.”

  It’s infuriating at times, the things he knows. In the middle of our worst arguments he’ll produce a fact that makes me want to hit him in the face with a shovel.

  Daniel can read my bewilderment. “Lacemaking.”

  “The history of lace?” The idea is almost absurd.

  “The history of making lace.”

  I glare at my boyfriend. “You frighten me.”

  Daniel does another turn in place, the way a dog might before lying down.

  “Well, I don’t know what to tell you other than she’s interested in publishing my book. We’re going to work on it. Together.”

  Daniel chews the inside of his cheek. “And what if she wants to change it?”

  “I imagine she will want to change it. That’s her job. It’s called editing.”

  “But what if she wants to change it and you don’t agree with how she wants to change it, but you can’t say anything because she’s Jackie fucking Kennedy?”

  “You’ve really got to stop calling her that.”

  “I’m serious. What if she wants to set the story on Cape Cod?”

  “You could try being excited for me.”

  “What if she wants to set the story on Cape Cod and add schooner racing as a leitmotif because that’s what she and Ethel did off of Nantucket.”

  “She and Ethel discussed leitmotif?”

  “No. Raced their . . . lady schooners.”

  I want to laugh but also bang my head against the wall. “Please don’t say ‘lady schooners’ again.”

  “But . . .”

  “She doesn’t.”

  “You just know.”

  I nod. I don’t know how else to explain it to anyone who wasn’t there. We talked a little about characters and relationships and motivation, and I know we will talk more. And even if we hadn’t, we definitely discussed my ability to tell her no.

  Daniel finally relents, his engines out of steam. “Well, congratulations. I mean it. Bravo.” This time he hugs me.

  “Thank you.” This is what I’ve wanted. I grip him tight. His T-shirt smells like dryer sheets from the fluff-and-fold we splurge on sometimes when we have money. But more than that. It smells like him. Daniel breaks the hug first to look me square in the eyes and I bite my lip to avoid a toothy grin.

  “You had me going there for a moment,” he says. “The bit about Charles de Gaulle was a nice touch.”

  Huh?

  “Can you imagine if you ever did meet her and that’s what you asked?”

  “I did meet her and that is what I asked.”

  Daniel laughs. “Is Charles de Gaulle tall? Was he on the ball or off the wall? Did you two break bread on the National Mall? Tell me, Jackie, is the frog the opposite of small?”

  I punch Daniel in the arm. Normally when I do this it’s meant to be playful. This time I’m not so sure. “I asked that for my mother. She used to talk about the presidential visit to Paris like she was there and not stuck in rural New York with three children under the age of ten. I knew she would love whatever the answer was. Oh! And there’s a whole story about the Mona Lisa that I can’t wait to tell her.”

  “Your mother . . .” Daniel says.

  “You may remember her. You’ve been introduced on numerous occasions.”

  “Your mother, who has adored the Kennedys for most of her life.”

  Oh, shit.

  “Your Irish Catholic mother whom you wrote a not entirely flattering, although, to be fair, not entirely unflattering, book about? The one who named you Francis? The one who will have a book about her edited by Jackie Kennedy?”

  At least he doesn’t say “fucking” this time.

  And then it hits me. As frustrated as I have been with Daniel for not immediately getting it, there are layers to this bonanza that even I have yet to process. I’m still scooping my chip through the top layer of a fourteen-layer dip. There are thirteen more layers of mush and fattening sludge to get through before I reach the bottom. As I chew on that image I realize it’s a horrible metaphor—with each passing moment, I feel more like the dip, in another sense of the word.

  “Come here.”

  Daniel motions for me to step closer, but I’m frozen in place.

  “Come. Here.”

  I take two steps in his direction and he hugs me again, this time for real. “You really did this. You really met Jackie Kennedy.” He pauses, the truth now undeniable. He cups the back of my head, massaging my scalp.

  “I thought you didn’t believe me.”

  “I do now! It’s written all over your face. You bastard.” I can feel him smile, his cheek pressed against mine. “I’m so proud of you.”

  He squeezes me even tighter.

  “What’s more, I think this is a terrific marriage.”

  “You don’t believe in marriage,” I say, halfheartedly. I’m hundreds of miles away.

  “I don’t believe in monogamy and the subjugation of women, but I’m not so worried in this case.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “This could be a great creative marriage.” He leans back to see if I’m paying attention. “You’ve worked so hard. Been so disciplined. This is your moment. I’m really happy for you.” He musses my hair. “Seriously, though. How are you going to tell your mother?”

  “I don’t know.” I’m certain the words fall out of my mouth, but in my head I just say Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, over and over again until my mind goes dark.

  ◆ FIVE ◆

  I wake to the sound of my mother crying. I grasp and find one of the buttons sewn on the mattress, the one that I cling to when I wake from nightmares of monsters grabbing my feet, but the button fails to provide familiar comfort for a simple reason—I’ve never heard my mother cry. Not like this. And it’s more frightening than any demon.

  “Mom?” I call, but no one answers.

  I study the contents of my bedroom in the morning light to distract myself. I can see my dresser and my toys and the needlepoint fire engine my grandmother stitched. The curtains flutter and float on the breeze sneaking in the open window. I know where I am and I know my name and that I am seven years old and I’m comforted by at least that much. Still, I feel apprehension, bordering on anxiety—what news could this crying possibly bring?

  I look down under the bed like I always do to make sure it’s safe before planting my feet on the floor, and slowly slink out of my room. My mother is in the living room chair where my father usually sits, smoking a cigarette. She’s watching our small TV while clutching a mug, as she does in winter when she wants to warm her hands. The news people on the screen seem especially somber, more so than usual. The volume
is low and I can’t make out their words, but their expressions need no interpretation.

  “Mom.” I say it again, real quiet this time, in case I am not supposed to see this.

  I fidget with the snaps on my pajama pants, grasping for an activity so that I’ll appear casual when I am eventually seen (and I will be seen). I count the seconds, as I somehow know they are the precious foundation of a future important memory; the more seconds I can count, the stronger the memory will be. There won’t be many. My mother has eyes on all sides of her head.

  . . . nine . . . ten . . . eleven . . . twelve . . .

  “You should be getting dressed for school.” Her head remains perfectly still, encased in a cloud of dancing smoke.

  I remove my hand from the snaps of my pants and take a step closer, looking at the thick, brown carpet the entire time, imagining it a sea of mud. Or quicksand. I quickly lift my feet just to make sure I still can.

  “Go on, Francis,” she says, encouraging me again to retreat, to get dressed, to leave. Sensing that I am not only disobeying her but am actually advancing, she sets her mug on the TV tray, ashes her cigarette, and wipes her eyes with the backs of her hands in a vain effort to transform this crying stranger back into the mother I know.

  I place one foot in front of the other, carefully, deliberately, heels touching toes every time, each foot docking with the other before I attempt any further forward motion. I can smell the acrid smoke of my mother’s cigarette and I inhale it deeply, inhale her. Eventually I am beside her. I grasp the arm of the chair, afraid to reach out for her, afraid, given her strange trance, that she might dissolve into ash like her cigarette from even the faintest human touch.

  “It’s Bobby.” She starts sobbing. I’m startled by how much sobbing looks like laughing. And by how the way she tucks her head into her arm makes her look like one of the preening swans that used to visit our duck pond. “They got him.” I wrack my brain trying to place this Bobby, and discern just how close he is to us. They got him? I’m not even sure what that means. Did a van pull up alongside him? Is he a cousin or a family friend? If they got him, were we somehow in danger of being snatched too?