The Man in the White Linen Suit

by David Handler

“The living room sofa opens up into a bed. They’ve always shared a room. Now they share a bed,” she said with weary resignation. “Not exactly ideal, but it’s just temporary. They’ll have their own places soon enough.”

  The office door was closed, as were the windows. It was hot and stuffy in there. Also cluttered. Kathleen opened the windows a bit, mindful of the rain pattering against the screens. The girls’ bedroom furniture had been replaced by a beat-up steel desk and three metal filing cabinets. Lulu made a quick circuit, nose to the rug, then returned to the hallway and stretched out.

  I stood in there gazing around. A large wall map of Tulsa, Oklahoma, dated 1919, was tacked to one wall. On another wall there was a storyboard that had 3-by-5-inch note cards in assorted colors stuck to it with pushpins, a writing technique that I’ve never understood or found useful. I’m a strict adherent of the late, great Theodore Sturgeon’s second law: The reader can never know where the story is going if the author himself does not know. But it seems to work for some people. Scribbled on the cards were phrases like T & T Oil swindle, 1918, Debutante ball, first fistfight, 1926, and Birth of Bonita, 1933. There were also dozens of Polaroid photos tacked to the walls—shots of elegant and not-so-elegant houses, the entrance to a fancy country club, government buildings, shopping districts. There were books piled on the floor. Also shoeboxes filled with dozens of tape cassettes from interviews that Tommy had conducted. One of the shoeboxes was marked “Prof. Henry Thompson, Okla State U,” the other “Greg Rollie, columnist, Tulsa Daily World.” Notepads were heaped on the desk. So were Tommy’s early typewritten drafts, which were piled more than a foot high. I leafed through a few pages, pausing at random to read a snatch from Chapter 1: Before there was a Tulsa there was the prairie and the Indians and the buffalo who roamed that prairie and sustained the Indians who lived and died there.

  One of the notepads on the desk had been set aside from the others. On its cover Tommy had written ADDISON’S INPUT in big black letters. I flipped it open, glancing at Tommy’s notes from his story sessions with the most successful novelist of the past half-century: A tale of two eras: Pre-oil boom, post-oil boom . . . Keep Indian and settler stories parallel . . . Intertwine by way of Bonita and her baby . . . Brandon is straight arrow, Weatherby a conniving crook . . . Male offspring of Weatherby’s Indian mistress doesn’t know Weatherby is his father. Lives with his Indian mother. Graduates from law school, enters politics. Is in love with Tulsa’s richest society debutante, unaware that they share the same father . . .

  To me, Addison’s story input came across as if it had been cobbled together from an old Clark Gable/Spencer Tracy MGM movie. But it was also exactly the sort of thing that his millions of readers had been lapping up for decades.

  I flipped the pad shut and put it back down on the desk, satisfied. Part of me, the part that suspects the worst and believes nothing, had been wondering if there was no Tulsa manuscript and never had been. If Tommy had somehow gotten himself mixed up in an elaborate shell game of Sylvia’s devising. He hadn’t. The book was real. And worst-case scenario—which is to say if I couldn’t recover Tulsa from whoever had it—Tommy could conceivably reconstruct his final draft from the earlier ones. Authors lose their final drafts to fires and floods all of the time. Shit happens. But it would take him many months and push back the pub date of Tulsa from the summer of ’94 to ’95, which would constitute a huge financial blow to Guilford House. Could that be why this had happened? To deliver a gut punch to Sylvia and Guilford House? Who would have an interest in doing that, and why?

  “He’d lock himself in here every single day,” Kathleen said to me in a quiet, strained voice. “He’d come out to eat, pass out for a few hours, then go back to work. He never took a day off. Never even left the apartment unless it was to ride the subway uptown to see Addison. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and find him fast asleep facedown on his typewriter with ink all over his stupid face. All he did was work and work. And for what? Why did he push himself so hard?”

  “He wants to be a writer.”

  “He is a writer.”

  “A famous one who is admired and looked up to. Men aren’t very complicated. We want to stand out.”

  “But what about enjoying yourself a little?”

  “Writers are a peculiar breed, like I said. We’re obsessed. And we’re never, ever satisfied.”

  “You seem happy enough.”

  “Sure I am, aside from the part where I crash-landed for an entire decade.”

  She glanced down at the desk. “He must have made eight trips to Oklahoma researching the damned thing.”

  “Do you have his travel and expense receipts?”

  “No, he always gave those to Sylvia. Half of the time I never even knew exactly where he was. It’s not like he’d call me every night from some motel and say, ‘Hi, honey,’ and we’d talk over his day. He’d just be gone for weeks at a time and then one day he’d show up here with a suitcase full of dirty laundry and fall into bed. If I asked him how the trip went he’d say, ‘I’m tired. Leave me alone.’ So I did.”

  “And now he has Norma and you have Richie.”

  “That’s right,” she said, raising her chin at me. “Tell me more about Norma. Does he want to marry her?”

  “I have no idea. I told you, I didn’t know he was seeing another woman.”

  “And I still don’t believe you,” Kathleen said defiantly as we stood there in the cluttered office that had once been their daughters’ bedroom. “He always talked about you like you were his best friend.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “You’d have to ask him that.”

  “He doesn’t speak to me anymore, remember?”

  “All I know about her is that she’s young and a climber.”

  “So what good can Tommy do her? He’s not some famous author and no one’s ever mistaken him for Patrick Swayze.”

  “Kathleen, I truly don’t know,” I said, suddenly starting to feel trapped and suffocated in there. I backed out into the hall and started toward the front door to fetch my raincoat and fedora. Lulu was already waiting for me. She felt trapped and suffocated, too. “Like I keep trying to tell you, I’ve never met Norma Fives. But I intend to.”

  FOR AS LONG as I’d been an aspiring novelist, successful novelist, stoned-out wreck of a novelist and celebrity ghostwriter—which is to say for as long as I’d lived in New York—there’d always been a watering hole somewhere in Midtown Manhattan that was, by unwritten accord, the designated safe haven where literary and theatrical people could meet in public without meeting in public. If a major Broadway producer was cheating on his wife, he could safely meet another woman, or man, for a discreet drink there. If a big-time literary agent was trying to steal another agency’s client, the courting would take place there. Once you walked through the door, you became legally blind. If you saw someone you knew you didn’t see them and they didn’t see you. Gossip columnists like Liz Smith and Cindy Adams respected this understanding and never so much as mentioned the name of the place—which, during most of the 1980s, was Trader Vic’s, the dimly lit old-time tiki bar in the basement of the Plaza Hotel. But after the famously sleazy real estate developer/con man/tabloid clown Donald Trump bought the Plaza in 1988, he evicted Trader Vic’s on the grounds that he considered it “tacky.”

  I can pause here for a moment if you’d like to chortle. Virtually everyone in New York did.

  After the chortling subsided, a new safe haven had to be found. These days, it was Benny Eng’s Wan-Q, a dimly lit retro nonchic Cantonese restaurant on West 56th Street two doors down from the rear entrance to the Essex House. Wan-Q had a burbling Buddha fountain by the front door. It even had a tiki bar motif so that sentimentalists who resented having been evicted from Trader Vic’s by the Donald would feel at home.

  It was quiet in there at four on a rainy afternoon. Benny Eng, who is a burbling Buddha himself, greeted Lulu and me effus
ively, took my soaked trench coat and fedora to hang on the rack by the door and led us to a high-backed wooden booth near the rear, where young Norma Fives was seated, sipping a glass of white wine.

  I don’t know what I was expecting Norma to look like. Actually, that’s not true. I was expecting her to be hot. She turned out to be a scrawny, hawk-nosed little woman wearing a pair of thick horn-rimmed glasses. Her blunt chin-length hairdo looked as if she’d cut it herself in the bathroom mirror with a pair of poultry shears. What with the glasses, the hairdo and the boxy, short-sleeved linen dress that she had on, Norma looked eerily like one of those nutso skinny-armed little girls in Roz Chast’s New Yorker cartoons. Hot she was not. Not unless you consider a young Imogene Coca in horn-rims hot. Calm she was not. In fact, she was so nervous as I approached her that the wineglass shook in her hand, its contents sloshing over the rim. And yet she was the most-talked-about young editor in the publishing business. Super smart. Super ambitious. A force to be reckoned with.

  And Tommy O’Brien had dynamited his marriage because of her.

  She gulped at me. “Mr. Hoag?”

  “Make it Hoagy.”

  “It’s an honor to meet you. I admired Our Family Enterprise immensely.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And Tommy can’t say enough great things about you.”

  “Don’t believe any of it.” I sat across from her in the booth, ignored the extensive menu of “Tropicocktails” and ordered a Chinese beer for myself and a plate of fried shrimp for Lulu, hold the dipping sauces. Lulu circled around three times under the table and curled up there to wait.

  Norma watched her curiously. “So this is the famous Lulu.”

  “No, I ditched Lulu last year. Too high maintenance. This is her cousin Sweet Emily.”

  “Tommy warned me you were a kidder. You’re teasing me, right?”

  “Little bit.”

  The waiter brought me my beer. I sampled it, found it a bit flat and sprinkled some salt on it to liven up its head as he returned with Lulu’s shrimp. She promptly dove in.

  Norma studied me in fascinated silence for a moment before she said, “I hear you’re working on a new novel and that it’s mondo terrific. I’d love to see it when you have something to show.”

  “Sylvia James has already offered me money for it.”

  “You haven’t signed a contract yet, have you?”

  “No, Alberta’s considering her offer a floor bid.”

  “Awesome.” Norma smiled at me with vulpine pleasure. “There are very few things in life that make me happier than outbidding Sylvia on a major book.”

  “Sylvia warned me about you.”

  Norma took a small, careful sip of her wine. “What did she say?”

  “That you were unscrupulous.”

  She let out a bray of a laugh. “Coming from Sylvia, that’s an Olympic-caliber compliment. Did she happen to mention that my first job in publishing was serving as her personal assistant at Guilford House?”

  “As a matter of fact she didn’t.”

  “Well, she wouldn’t, would she?”

  “Meaning . . . ?”

  “Have you noticed that ghastly jagged scar directly under her left eye?”

  “I have.”

  “You’re looking at the girl who gave it to her,” Norma said proudly.

  “You gave it to her? How?”

  “By hurling a Stanley Bostitch stapler across the conference table at her during our weekly editorial meeting. A mere half an inch higher and she could have spent the rest of her life wearing an eye patch just like her crazy father.”

  “Just out of curiosity, why did . . . ?”

  “Why did I throw a Stanley Bostitch stapler at her? Because she screamed at me and called me a ‘retarded anorexic cunt’ for contradicting her in front of the entire editorial staff. This was after two years of suffering the worst kind of abuse and torment a lowly assistant can be expected to endure. I graduated from Bryn Mawr, same as Sylvia did. My English lit professor was a classmate of hers. When I told her I wanted to get into publishing, she contacted Sylvia and Sylvia took me on as her assistant. My first day at work everyone in the office smirked at me and said, ‘Nice knowing you.’ I quickly found out why. Sylvia’s the single nastiest, most abusive woman I’ve ever met. She used to berate me until I cried. She also has no sense of professional ethics whatsoever. She’s a conniver, a liar and an outright thief.”

  “But otherwise you like her a lot.”

  Norma allowed herself a faint smile.

  “She stammers, you know.”

  “Nay, not so. I went through two years of hell with her and not once did I ever hear her stammer.”

  “That’s because you were never in a room with her when she was with her father. She no doubt does everything she can to make sure that no one ever sees the two of them together, but in my case it was unavoidable. And if you think she’s abusive, you should see the old man in action. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for her.”

  “Wait, feel sorry for Sylvia?”

  “You’ll note that I said almost.”

  Norma took another careful sip of her wine. “That woman tried to break me. It’s the only form of pleasure she knows.”

  “But she didn’t break you.”

  “No way, José. She just made me stronger and stronger until that memorable Monday morning when I called her a deranged bitch in front of everyone and hurled that Stanley Bostitch stapler at her as hard as I could.”

  “Did she file assault charges against you?”

  “Nope, just tried to fire me. I said, ‘You can’t fire me. I’ve already quit.’ Walked straight to the elevator and never went back. One of my friends brought my purse, coat and personal things down to me in the lobby. Then I went home and made some calls. Two days later I had a job at Deep River.”

  I sipped my beer, gazing across the table at her. Now that she was done regaling me with her triumphant tale about the Stanley Bostitch stapler she seemed ill at ease again. Squirmy. Couldn’t sit still.

  “I’m told you’re a rising star over there. Hear nothing but good things about you,” I said.

  “Thank you. That’s nice to know.”

  “So tell me about you and Tommy.”

  She lowered her gaze, running a finger around the rim of her wineglass. “Just for starters, I never thought that I’d find myself mixed up with a forty-five-year-old married man. I don’t see myself as that sort of person.”

  “What sort of person?”

  “A home-wrecking slut. But he told me that he and his wife have an understanding.”

  “If you call not speaking to each other an understanding, then they have an understanding.”

  “Tommy calms me down, which is truly major for me. I’m a nervous wreck from the moment I open my eyes in the morning until the moment I try to close them at night. I don’t sleep. Sit up reading most nights until four, five A.M. Tommy’s good for me. He makes me feel safe.”

  “He’s not feeling very safe himself right now.”

  “But he should be okay at your place, shouldn’t he?”

  “What makes you think he’s at my place?”

  “He called me from there.”

  Damn. I’d told him to stay away from the phone.

  “Besides, you’re that kind of friend.”

  “What kind is that?”

  “The kind who won’t bail on him.” She took a deep, ragged breath before she said, “He’s the first man I’ve ever loved. I’ve loved boys. But Tommy’s a man. He has genuine life experience. He has depth.”

  “You sound pretty serious about him.”

  “I am.”

  “So why didn’t he move in with you when he left Kathleen?”

  “Couldn’t. I have a tiny studio down on Bank Street that’s barely big enough for me and the mice. But we’re definitely talking about getting a place together. I have real hopes for us. And for Tommy’s career. I think he has tremendous untapped potential.
I can help him. I want to help him. In fact, I have a firm deal for serious money that I could offer him right now if he weren’t under contract to Addison James for slave wages.”

  Our waiter returned, retrieved Lulu’s cleaned dish and asked us if we wanted another round of drinks. We did.

  “What sort of a firm deal?”

  “Three years ago I signed up a nifty little thriller by a young copy editor at People named Rose Ellen Hartmann for no money, by which I mean $8,000. It was called The Girl Under the Bed.” Norma paused so that I could let out a suitably awestruck gasp. I don’t do suitably awestruck gasps. She sat there with her mouth open, momentarily thrown, before she recovered and kept on going. “We published it in June of last year and it’s still on the New York Times bestseller list sixty-two weeks later. We’ve sold the foreign rights in forty-two different countries. Castle Rock paid $1 million for the film rights. The movie, starring Julia Roberts, comes out in December and will send our paperback sales through the roof.” Norma hesitated before she added, “Naturally, we signed Rose Ellen to a seven-figure contract to write three more books for us.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “But there’s been a slight hitch.”

  “Of course there has. That’s what makes publishing such good, clean fun.”

  Our waiter returned with her wine and my beer. Norma reached for her glass and this time took a large gulp. “Rose Ellen has no second idea. In fact, she sort of crashed and burned after the incredible success of The Girl Under the Bed. Had to spend some time in a facility in upstate New York.”

  “Coke?”

  Norma blinked at me. “How did you know?”

  “Been there, snorted that.”

  “Now she’s gone home to live with her parents in Maine for a while. She’s sort of in hiding, so please don’t ask me exactly where in Maine she is.”

  “Wasn’t planning to.”

  “I want Tommy to ghost her second book for her. I can offer him $250,000 and 25 percent of the royalties.”

  “Can you get his name on the cover?”

  “That I can’t do. Deep River thinks Rose Ellen is going to be a franchise author once she gets her head on straight. Still, it’s a major pay hike for him and it’s royalty participation and . . . you’re looking at me dubiously. Why?”