“Didn’t we discuss this? I have that lunch,” James said.
“I need you to do something for me.”
“What?” James said.
“Get the keys to Mrs. Houghton’s apartment from the super. I can’t have those keys floating around. And I need to show the real estate agent the apartment. Mrs. Houghton’s relatives want it sold quickly, and I don’t want the place sitting empty for long. Real estate is at a high now. You never know when it might drop, and the price of that apartment needs to set a benchmark. So everyone’s apartment is worth more.”
As usual, James zoned out when Mindy talked real estate. “Can’t you pick them up when you get home?” he asked.
Mindy was suddenly angry. She had excused much over the years with James. She had excused the fact that at times he would barely make conversation other than to respond with a two-syllable word. She’d excused his lack of hair. She’d excused his sagging muscles. She’d excused the fact that he wasn’t romantic and never said “I love you” unless she said it first, and even then he only, when obligated, said it three or four times a year. She’d excused the reality that he was never going to make a lot of money and was probably never going to be a highly respected writer; she’d even excused the fact that with this second novel of his, he was probably going to become a bit of a joke. She was down to almost nothing now. “I can’t do everything, James. I simply cannot go on like this.”
“Maybe you should go to the doctor,” James said. “Get yourself checked out.”
“This has nothing to do with me,” Mindy said. “It’s about you doing your part. Why can’t you help me, James, when I ask you to?”
James sighed. He’d been feeling up about his lunch, and now Mindy was spoiling it. Feminism, he thought. It had wrecked everything. When he was younger, equality meant sex. Lots of sex, as much as you could grab. But now it meant doing all kinds of things a man wasn’t prepared to do. Plus, it took up a huge amount of time. The one thing feminism had done was to make a man appreciate what a bummer it was to be a woman in the first place. Of course, men knew that anyway, so maybe it wasn’t much of a revelation.
“Mindy,” he said, feeling kinder, “I can’t be late for my lunch.”
Mindy also tried a different approach. “Have they told you what they think of the draft of your book?” she asked.
“No,” James said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Because they’ll tell me at lunch. That’s what the lunch is about,” James said.
“Why can’t they tell you on the phone? Or by e-mail?”
“Maybe they don’t want to. Maybe they want to tell me in person,” James said.
“So it’s probably bad news,” Mindy said. “They probably don’t like it. Otherwise, they’d tell you how much they loved it in an e-mail.”
Neither one said anything for a second, and then Mindy said, “I’ll call you after your lunch. Will you be home? And can you please get the keys?”
“Yes,” James said.
At one o’clock, James walked the two blocks to the restaurant Babbo. Redmon Richardly, his publisher, wasn’t there, but James hadn’t expected him to be. James sat at a table next to the window and watched the passersby. Mindy was probably right, he thought. His book probably did suck, and Redmon was going to tell him they weren’t going to be able to publish it. And if they did publish it, what difference would it make? No one would read it. And after four years of working on the damn thing, he’d feel exactly the same way as he had before he started writing it, the only difference being that he’d feel a little bit more of a loser, a little bit more insignificant. That was what sucked about being middle-aged: It was harder and harder to lie to yourself.
Redmon Richardly showed up at one-twenty. James hadn’t seen him in over a year and was shocked by his appearance. Redmon’s hair was gray and sparse, reminding James of the head of a baby bird. Redmon looked seventy, James thought. And then James wondered if he looked seventy as well. But that was impossible. He was only forty-eight. And Redmon was fifty-five. But there was an aura about Redmon. Something was different about him. Why, he’s happy, James thought in shock.
“Hey, buddy,” Redmon said, patting James on the back. He sat down across from James and unfolded his napkin. “Should we drink? I gave up alcohol, but I can’t resist a drink during the day. Especially when I can get out of the office. What is it about this business now? It’s busy. You actually have to work.”
James laughed sympathetically. “You seem okay.”
“I am,” Redmon said. “I just had a baby. You ever have a baby?”
“I’ve got a son,” James said.
“Isn’t it just amazing?” Redmon said.
“I didn’t even know your wife was pregnant,” James said. “How’d it happen?”
“It just happened. Two months before we got married. We weren’t even trying. It’s all that sperm I stored up over fifty years. It’s powerful stuff,” Redmon said. “Man, having a baby, it’s the greatest thing. How come no one tells you?”
“Don’t know,” James said, suddenly annoyed. Babies. Nowadays, a man couldn’t get away from babies. Not even at a business lunch. Half of James’s friends were new fathers. Who knew middle age was going to be all about babies?
And then Redmon did the unthinkable. He pulled out his wallet. It was the kind of wallet teenaged girls used to have, with an insert of plastic sleeves for photographs. “Sidney at one month,” he said, passing it over to James.
“Sidney,” James repeated.
“Old family name.”
James glanced at the photograph of a toothless, hairless baby with a crooked smile and what appeared to be a peculiarly large head.
“And there,” Redmon said, turning the plastic sleeve. “Sidney at six months. With Catherine.”
James assumed Catherine was Redmon’s wife. She was a pretty little thing, not much bigger than Sidney. “He’s big,” James said, handing back the wallet.
“Doctors say he’s in the ninety-ninth percentile. But all kids are big these days. How big is your son?”
“He’s small,” James said. “Like my wife.”
“I’m sorry,” Redmon said with genuine sympathy, as if smallness were a deformity. “But you never know. Maybe he’ll grow up to be a movie star, like Tom Cruise. Or he’ll run a studio. That would be even better.”
“Doesn’t Tom Cruise run a studio, too?” James smiled feebly and tried to change the subject. “So?”
“Oh yeah. You probably want to know what I think about the book,” Redmon said. “I thought I’d let Jerry tell you.”
James’s stomach dropped. At least Redmon had the courtesy to look distracted. Or uncomfortable.
“Jerry?” James said. “Jerry the mega-asshole?”
“One and the same. I’m afraid he loves you now, so you may want to amend your assessment.”
“Me?” James said. “Jerry Bockman loves me?”
“I’ll let him explain when he comes by.”
Jerry Bockman, coming to lunch? James didn’t know what to think. Jerry Bockman was a gross man. He had crude features and bad skin and orange hair, and looked like he should be hiding under a bridge demanding tolls from unsuspecting passersby. Men like that shouldn’t be in publishing, James had thought prudishly the one and only time he’d met Jerry.
But indeed, Jerry Bockman wasn’t in publishing. He was in entertainment. A much vaster and more lucrative enterprise than publishing, which was selling about the same number of books it had sold fifty years ago, the difference being that now there were about fifty times as many books published each year. Publishers had increased the choices but not the demand. And so Redmon Richardly, who’d gone from bad-boy Southern writer to literary publisher with his own company that published Pulitzer Prize–winning authors, like Philip Oakland, and National Book Award winners, and authors who wrote for The Atlantic and Harper’s and Salon, who were members of PEN, who did events at the public library, wh
o lived in Brooklyn, and most of all, who cared—cared about words, words, words!—had had to sell his company to an entertainment conglomorate. Called, unimaginatively, EC.
Jerry Bockman wasn’t the head of EC. That position was held by one of Jerry’s friends. Jerry was the head of a division, maybe second in command, maybe next in line. Inevitably, someone would get fired, and Jerry would take his place. He’d get fired someday, too, but by then none of it would matter because he would have reached every goal he’d ever aspired to in life and would probably have half a billion dollars in the bank, or stock options, or something equivalent. Meanwhile, Redmon hadn’t been able to make his important literary publishing house work and had had no choice but to be absorbed. Like an amoeba. Two years ago, when Redmon had informed James of the impeding “merger” (he’d called it a merger, but it was an absorption, like all mergers), Redmon said that it wouldn’t make any difference. He wouldn’t let Jerry Bockman or EC affect his books or his authors or his quality.
“Then why sell?” James had asked.
“Have to,” Redmon said. “If I want to get married and have children and live in this city, I have to.”
“Since when do you want to get married and have kids?” James asked.
“Since now. Life gets boring when you’re middle-aged. You can’t keep doing the same thing. You look like an asshole. You ever notice that?” Redmon had asked.
“Yeah,” James had said. And now Jerry was coming to lunch.
“You saw the piece about the ayatollah and his nephew in The Atlantic?” Redmon asked. James nodded, knowing that a piece about Iran or Iraq or anything that had to do with the Middle East was of vast importance here on the little twelve-mile island known as Manhattan, and normally, James would have been able to concentrate on it. He had quite a few informed opinions on the subject, but all he could think about now was Jerry. Jerry coming to lunch? And Jerry loved him? What was that about? Mindy would be thrilled. But it put an unpleasant pressure on him. Now he was going to have to perform. For Jerry. You couldn’t just sit there with a Jerry. You had to engage. Make yourself appear worthwhile.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Updike lately,” James said, to ease his tension.
“Yeah?” Redmon said, unimpressed. “He’s overrated. Hasn’t stood the test of time. Not like Roth.”
“I just picked up A Month of Sundays. I thought the writing was pretty great,” James said. “In any case, it was an event, that book. When it came out in 1975. A book coming out was an event. Now it’s just like…”
“Britney Spears showing her vagina?” Redmon said.
James cringed as Jerry Bockman came in. Jerry wasn’t wearing a suit, James noted; suits were for bankers only these days. Instead, Jerry wore khakis and a short-sleeved T-shirt. With a vest. And not just any old vest. A fishing vest. Jesus, James thought.
“Can’t stay long,” Jerry announced, shaking James’s hand. “There’s a thing going on in L.A.”
“Right. That thing,” Redmon said. “What’s going on with that?”
“The usual,” Jerry said. “Corky Pollack is an asshole. But he’s my best friend. So what am I supposed to say?”
“Last man standing. That’s what I always aim to be,” Redmon said.
“The last man standing on his yacht. Except now it’s got to be a mega-yacht. You ever seen one of those things?” Jerry asked James.
“No,” James said primly.
“You tell James what I thought about his book?” Jerry asked Redmon.
“Not yet. I thought I’d let you do the honors. You’re the boss.”
“I’m the boss. Hear that, James? This genius says I’m the boss.”
James nodded. He was terrified.
“Well, to put it mildly, I loved your book,” Jerry said. “It’s great commercial fiction. The kind of thing every businessman is going to want to read on a plane. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. There’s already interest in Hollywood from a couple of my buddies. They’ll definitely pay seven figures. So we’re going to push the production. That’s right, isn’t it?” Jerry said, looking to Redmon for affirmation. “We’re going to push the hell out of this thing and get it out there for spring. We were thinking next fall, but this book is too good. I say let’s get it out there immediately and get you started on another book. I’ve got a great idea for you. Hedge-fund managers. What do you think?”
“Hedge-fund managers,” James said. He could barely get the words out.
“It’s a hot topic. Perfect for you,” Jerry said. “I read your book and said to Redmon, ‘We’ve got a gold mine here. A real commercial male writer. Like Crichton. Or Dan Brown.’ And once you’ve got a market, you’ve got to keep giving them the product.”
Jerry stood up. “Got to go,” he said. “Got to deal with that thing.” He turned to James and shook his hand. “Nice to meet you. We’ll talk soon.”
James and Redmon watched Jerry go, watched him walk out of the restaurant and get into a waiting SUV. “I told you you were going to want a drink,” Redmon said.
“Yup,” James said.
“So this is great news. For us,” Redmon said. “We could make some real money here.”
“Sounds like it,” James said. He motioned to the waiter and ordered a Scotch and water, which was the only drink he could think of at the moment. He suddenly felt numb.
“You don’t look so happy, man. Maybe you should try Prozac,” Redmon said. “On the other hand, if this book takes off the way I think it will, you won’t need it.”
“Sure,” James said. He got through the rest of the lunch on automatic pilot. Then he walked home to his apartment in One Fifth, didn’t say hello to the doorman, didn’t collect the mail. Didn’t do anything except go into his little office in his weird apartment and sit in his little chair and stare out the little window in front of his little desk. The same window a hundred butlers and maids had probably stared out of years before, contemplating their fate.
Ugh. The irony, he thought. The last thirty years of his life had been made tolerable by one overriding idea. One secret, powerful idea that was, James had believed, more powerful even than Redmon Richardly’s friggin’ sperm. And that was this: James was an artist. He was, in truth, a great novelist, one of the giants, who had only to be discovered. All these years he had been thinking of himself as Tolstoy. Or Thomas Mann. Or even Flaubert.
And now, in the next six or eight or ten months, the truth would be revealed. He wasn’t Tolstoy but just plain old James Gooch. Commercial writer. Destined to be of the moment and not to stand the test of time. And the worst thing about it was that he’d never be able to pretend to be Tolstoy again.
Meanwhile, on a lower floor in Mindy’s grand office building, Lola Fabrikant sat on the edge of a love seat done up in the same unattractive nubby brown fabric as the couch in Mindy’s office. She swung one sandaled foot as she flipped through a bridal magazine, studiously ignoring two other young women who were waiting to be interviewed, and to whom Lola judged herself vastly superior. All three young women had long hair worn parted down the middle, with strands that appeared to have been forcibly straightened, although the color of the women’s hair varied. Lola’s was nearly black and shiny, while the other two girls were what Lola called “cheap blondes”; one even sported a half inch of dark roots. This would, Lola decided, briskly turning the pages of the magazine, make the girl ineligible for employment—not that there was an actual job available. In the two months since her graduation from Old Vic University in Virginia, where she’d gotten a degree in fashion marketing, Lola and her mother, Beetelle Fabrikant, had scoured the Internet, sent e-mails, and even made phone calls to prospective employers with no luck. In truth, Beetelle had done most of the actual scouring, with Lola advising, but even Beetelle’s efforts weren’t easily rewarded. It was a particularly difficult time to find a job in fashion in New York City, with most of the positions taken by interns who spent their summer vacations angling for these jobs. Lola, h
owever, didn’t like to work and had chosen instead to spend her summers sitting by her parents’ pool, or the pools of her parents’ friends, where she and a gaggle of girlfriends would gossip, text, and talk about their fantasy weddings. On inclement days, there was always Facebook or TiVo or the construction of elaborate playlists on her iPod, but mostly there were trips to the mall and endless shopping sprees paid for by a credit card provided by her father, who, when he occasionally complained, was silenced by her mother.
But as her mother pointed out, adolescence couldn’t go on forever, and as Lola wasn’t engaged, finding the boys in her hometown and at the university nowhere near good enough—an assessment with which her mother agreed—it was decided Lola should try her luck in New York. Here, she would not only find interesting employment but meet a much more suitable class of male. Indeed, Beetelle had met her husband, Cem, in New York City and had been happily married for twenty-three years.
Lola had watched every single episode of Sex and the City at least “a hundred times,” and adored the idea of moving to the city and finding her own Mr. Big. If Mr. Big weren’t available, she would happily take fame, ideally becoming the star of her own reality show. Either option was acceptable, the result, she figured, being much the same: a life of pleasurable leisure in which she might indulge in all the usual pamperings and shopping trips and vacations with girlfriends—the only real difference from her current life being the possible addition of a husband and child. But her mother insisted she at least make an effort to work, claiming it would be good for her. So far, her mother had been wrong; the experience was not good at all, merely irritating and annoying. It reminded her of being forced to visit her father’s relatives, who were not as well off as her own family, and who were, as Lola commented to her mother, “frighteningly average.”
Having been blessed with the pleasingly uniform features of a beauty contestant—made more regular and pleasing by the subtle shaving of the cartilage on her nose—Lola considered herself most definitely not average. Unfortunately, despite several interviews with the human resources departments at various fashion magazines, her superiority had failed to impress, and when she was asked “What do you want to do?” for the fifth or sixth time, Lola had finally answered with a curt “I could probably use a seaweed facial.”
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