“It’s that bad, isn’t it?” she said. And then, before I could respond, she went on, “Of course it’s that bad. That was awful what I did to them, and you were right: I was pimping for Dirk. As a matter of fact, Dirk is the reason I’m calling you today.”
“Dirk? What about Dirk?”
“He’s not what he appears to be, Lise. As your friend, I feel the need to warn you about him.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Last week I had the most awful conversation with him. Afterward, I tried calling Artemis about it, only it took her a while to get back to me. Apparently she’d been on holiday in Spain.”
“I’m glad to hear your sister takes nice vacations, but I don’t know what any of this has to do with me.”
“You know all that stuff from the trade magazines about Dirk being the Jaguar?”
“Of course. He’s supposed to be one of the most revered and cutthroat agents in the world. His deals are legendary.”
“His old deals were legendary. But tell me: How many deals of his have you read about lately?”
I racked my brains but couldn’t think of any. After admitting as much, I said, “That doesn’t mean anything, though. Every deal doesn’t get reported in the trades. With hundreds of thousands of new books being published every year worldwide that’d be impossible.”
“Perhaps. But how many agents go by the Jaguar? You’d think you’d hear something, wouldn’t you?”
“Why don’t you get to the point, Diana?”
“Artemis says that the scuttlebutt going around London is that the whole the Jaguar stuff is just smoke and mirrors. She says Dirk is just coasting on his laurels. He did make a few big deals, huge deals, early on in his career, but then he overspent on big-ticket items and invested his money unwisely. According to Artemis, he’s become a bottom-feeder, spends all his time trying to poach other agents’ clients and making dicey deals that smack of questionable business ethics or”—she hesitated for a moment—“trying to put together pie-in-the-sky schemes like weight-loss memoirs. Artemis says that, in literary circles, he’s not revered as the Jaguar anymore. On the contrary, behind his back they refer to him now, laughingly, as the Tabby.”
“The Tabby?”
“I know. It’s awful, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is awful,” I said, agreeing with her, only not about what she might have thought. “I think it’s awful that you’ve become such a petty and bitter person now that you’ve made a hash of things with Dan, and I’m guessing you’ve made a hash of things with Dirk too, so you have nothing better to do with your time than try to interfere with my business relationship with Dirk. I suppose you think that, just because you’re not happy, no one else has a right to be either.”
“But that’s not it at all! I was calling you as your friend! Not only is he…the Tabby, but he’s also turned out to be a sadistic prick! I wanted to save you from being hurt by Dirk, as I’ve been!”
“The only thing you need to save, Diana, is your words. I don’t want to hear them anymore.”
“But—”
Too late for her. I’d hung up.
“What was that all about?” Tony asked.
“Diana.” I sighed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with that woman. When I first met her back in January, I thought she was one of the sweetest women I’d ever met in my life. But now? How can one person change so much?”
“People do change, Lise. You should know that by now. It’s part of life. Of course, they never change when you want them to.”
I’d invited Tony over to spend his lunch break between classes with me. I’d even made lunch.
The last month or so had brought a revelation. Whereas in previous years I’d had no problems spending the summer months with my motor running on idle, now that we were full into fall and I was home every day as part of my job, being a full-time, at-home writer wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. In truth, it was damn lonely. Most days, since my friends worked and it had long since become too cool to go swim in my parents’ pool every day, I didn’t see a soul unless I had errands to run, and I’d even started getting weird about that. I was quickly learning that having a job that kept you in the house all day was just a short hop, skip, and jump away from agoraphobia.
People have this glamorous view of writers, where we spend all our nights at book publishing parties sipping Cristal with Gore Vidal and James Patterson. Or maybe they have a lazy view, where we spend our days in bunny slippers and feather boa robes, eating bonbons while watching soap operas and pecking away at the old Olivetti during commercial breaks. Nothing could be further from the truth.
That’s not to say much writing got done those days.
Most days I spent with my bottom plastered to the chair in front of the computer. Not writing, I visited online forums for writers that only made me more depressed because other people seemed to be producing things and selling things when I was doing neither. Not writing, I spent an extraordinary amount of time playing online games like Sudoku or Word Whomp, the latter being a Boggle sort of game, but only for one person at a time and with beavers involved. At least I think they were beavers. They could have been gophers. It’d gotten to the point where I was developing carpal tunnel syndrome, not from working on my book, but from whomping those damn words. I’d once read an interview with a successful author who was quoted as saying, “The more successful I get, the bigger my butt.” Me, I was accomplishing the latter without ever having the privilege of the former.
So, since Tony had been so nice and supportive when I learned John and Danitra had sold their books, when the loneliness became too much—when I was tempted to go to Super Stop & Shop, not because I needed anything but just so I could chat with the item checkout workers—I’d turned to him for lunch companionship and he’d graciously accepted.
The phone rang again.
“It’s probably just Diana again,” I said. “I’ll just let the machine take it.”
But it wasn’t Diana. Instead, I heard Dirk’s voice booming, “Lise, if you’re there, pick up! I’ve got some wonderful news for you!”
“Sorry,” I apologized to Tony, “I’d better take this.” Then to Dirk I said, “I’m here. What’s the news?”
“Earlier today I had the most marvelous conversation with an editor who read your book.”
“I didn’t even realize you’d submitted it to anyone,” I said, not daring to let myself hope or dream about what this call could mean.
“Sorry, I suppose I should have told you first, but it was one of those spur-of-the-moment, cocktail-party things a few nights ago. Anyway, she read it and loved it, and she has only a few minor reservations.”
“What sort of reservations?”
“Well, she thinks—and I must say, I agree with her—that the book isn’t quite commercial enough as it stands now.”
“Not commercial enough?” I tried to think back on the book in question, but Dirk had already had me make so many revisions to it, it was mostly all a muddle. I did recall removing all literary allusions. Oh, and at Dirk’s suggestion, I’d added a cat.
“Look, Lise, she’s really keen on the book in so many ways. This is no time to pull any author crap.”
“I wasn’t—”
“The book needs to be bigger than it is now. It needs—I don’t know—a murder or two, or something.”
“But it’s not a mystery.”
“Now, why did I know you were going to say that?” He laughed. “No worries. The editor and I have it all planned out.”
“You do?”
“Oh, yes. We’re going to put you in touch with a book doctor—more like a ghostwriter, really—someone who can whip this mess you’ve written into shape.”
He was right. The book as it stood now was a mess, which was why it was a muddle to me, but it was a mess because Dirk’d had me rewrite it every five seconds. Besides which…
“But if a ghostwriter works on it, even if my name winds up on the cov
er, it won’t really be my book anymore, will it?”
“Oh, come on.” And now he sounded exasperated. “You’re not a schoolgirl. You can’t possibly be that naïve. People do it all the time. Well,” he considered, “perhaps not with fiction quite so much. But nonfiction? Publishers would have cows if every politician and celeb who signed on to write a book announced they wanted to write the books themselves!”
I tried to process what I was hearing. Dirk was telling me there was an editor who wanted my book, but only if I turned over the book he’d molded more than I had and let some other person write it instead.
“If this editor has a ghostwriter whose work she admires,” I asked, “why not just let the ghostwriter pen a whole book?”
“Oh, that’d be way too much work. It’s a lot like building a house, you know. You see, you’ve already banged up the basic structure, which is a lot of work. Now you just need to let someone else move in and decorate the place for you.”
He’d said, “You see,” but I didn’t see much at all. And what little I did see, I didn’t like.
“No,” I said.
“What do you mean, no?”
“I won’t do it.”
“But you’ve already come this far! It’s only one tiny step farther you need to take.”
But I could see that I’d already come too far. As it stood now, the book only felt half mine. If I did what Dirk suggested, it wouldn’t be mine at all.
“I’m sorry, Dirk. I know you’ve put a lot of time into this—”
“You don’t know the half of it!” His voice had turned ugly, a sneering thing. “So, what are you going to do? Go back to writing about sunsets and Middle East strife? Anyone can describe a sunset. But not many people can make others laugh and think. With the proper ghostwriter you could become—”
“I’ll take my chances,” I cut him off. “I want to go back to writing about sunsets and Middle East strife. Maybe I’ll find a way to do it that’s never been done before. Maybe I’ll find a way to write what I want and make people laugh and think. Good-bye, Dirk.”
Cindy
“The baby’s due in two and a half months, and I need someone to be my Lamaze coach.”
“What does a Lamaze coach do?” Sylvia asked.
“Go to Lamaze classes with me at the hospital, and then be with me in the labor and delivery room when the baby is born so I won’t have to do it all alone.”
“Sounds like a great thing. Who are you going to ask?”
“You.”
You always hear people talking about laughing so hard or being so shocked at something that they spit whatever they were drinking at the time out of their mouths, but I’d never actually seen it done until that night.
“Oh, jeez,” Sylvia said, handing me a napkin to wipe the coffee from my maternity blouse, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t sweat it,” I said. “I’m sure when the baby comes, I’ll get spit up on with a lot worse things than coffee.”
“Look,” Sylvia said carefully, “don’t get me wrong, I’m flattered that you asked me. How could I not be? But isn’t there someone else you’d rather ask? What about Carly?”
“Carly is doing much better these days. Anyone can see that. But you never can tell with Carly. I don’t want to put too much pressure on her now that she’s doing so good. Plus, she’s been putting in so much overtime at Midnight Scandals and that’ll only increase once we head into the holiday season, she’ll probably be in the middle of some giant bra sale when I go into labor.”
“What about your mother? Don’t you think she might be offended that you asked me instead of her?”
“You only say that because you’ve never met my mother.” I snorted. “If a train was coming down the tracks, rather than pushing me out of the way and risk getting hit herself, my mother’d watch me get hit, and then tell everyone what a lousy day she just had.”
“God,” she said, “how’d you ever avoid turning into the biggest jerk the world has ever seen?”
I smiled. “I have a few good friends,” I said. “At least now I do.”
“You do,” she said, obviously warming with eagerness to the idea, “you really do. What about one of those other friends, then?”
I shook my head.
“Lise?” she suggested.
I shook my head.
“Diana?” she suggested.
I shook my head harder. Even though Lise had told us how nice Diana had been in trying to warn her about Dirk, I still didn’t want her. I knew who I wanted. But, apparently, maybe she didn’t want me.
“Maybe an old girlfriend?” she suggested. “Maybe a teacher from back in high school?”
“You’re really starting to get desperate here,” I said, forcing a laugh that didn’t feel genuine. “Who are you going to suggest next? The mailman? The neighbor’s cat?”
Sylvia winced. “It’s not like that,” she said. “But this is a big decision to make. I just want to make sure you make the right decision.”
“I have made the right decision,” I said. “I want you.”
“How do you know I’d even be good at this…Lamaze stuff?”
“You’ll be perfect,” I said, covering one of her hands with one of mine.
“Crap.” She got up to refill her coffee cup. But before she turned away, I could have sworn I saw a tear in her eye. “I knew I should never have asked you to move in.”
• • •
“I think they all think we’re lesbians,” I whispered, being quick to add, “not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
Sylvia surveyed the other students in the Lamaze class: five other couples, all paired off boy/girl.
“So?” she said. “Better that than they think I’m your mother.”
“I just didn’t expect to feel this out of place,” I said. “The only woman without a man with her, you know?”
“Shh,” she said. “I’m trying to learn something here.”
As the night wore on, a night that included breathing exercises and a video, a part of me regretted my decision. Sylvia, it turned out, was a drill sergeant.
“Breathe in low, shallow spurts,” she told me. “Do it again. You don’t want them”—and here she indicated a tall redheaded woman to the left of us and her short spouse—“to be better at this than we are, do you?”
“This is not a competitive sport,” I huffed between breaths.
“I don’t care,” she said. “I want us to be the best.”
Some of her enthusiasm disappeared, however, as we watched the video of an enormously pregnant woman straining to give birth.
“I’m glad they don’t give us popcorn and candy with this thing,” Sylvia whispered. “Who thought of this?”
“Who thought of what?”
“Having babies like this. If human beings have to procreate, shouldn’t there be a better way? It’s gross. How’s she going to get a baby out of there?”
“Oh, you’re a big help,” I said. “It’s beautiful.” That’s what I said to her, but inside I was scared to death. How was I going to get a baby out of there? “Having a baby is going to be a piece of cake. Speaking of cake, I’m hungry. Can we go get dessert after this?”
“Jeez,” Sylvia said, unable to tear her eyes away from the screen as the baby’s head appeared between the woman’s legs, “how can you think of food at a time like this?”
• • •
But I could always think of food those days, no matter what was going on, and I said as much to Sylvia as we walked out of the hospital and into the crisp night.
“You really want cake?” she said. “After that?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“I want ice cream instead.”
“But it’s cold out.”
“I still want it.”
So she took me to an ice cream shop where we just made it in as the last customers before closing time since all the local shops closed pretty early once the summer season wa
s over. I ordered a dish of mint chocolate-chip ice cream with double hot fudge sauce, which I ate out in the van since the owners looked anxious to close up shop. I set the ice cream dish down on the dashboard and did up the buttons on my coat, a clown-like coat like the one Jacqueline Kennedy wore on the campaign trail with Jack that I’d picked up at a thrift store.
“Would you like some?” I took up my dish and held out a spoonful. To be honest, I wanted every last bite for myself, but it only seemed right to share.
After what she’d seen back in the Lamaze class, her face was a sickly shade, not as green as my ice cream, but definitely in the same color family.
“I think I’ll pass,” she said.
We ate in silence for a while; or, at least, I ate.
“What were you like before Eddie?” Sylvia asked.
“Where did that come from?”
“Natural curiosity.” She shrugged. “I was just wondering what you used to be like when you were younger, back before you met him.”
“I don’t know.” Now it was my turn to shrug. “I guess I was like most girls, wanting to meet the guy who would be the one.”
“So how come you never go out at night?”
“What do you mean? I’m out now, aren’t I?”
“You’re having ice cream in a van with your Lamaze coach. I’d hardly say that qualifies as a wild night on the town.”
“What do you expect me to do? Go out to bars and shoot pool?”
“Sure. So long as you don’t drink any alcohol, why not? You’re certainly not going to meet any new guys sitting around the condo, watching TV with me and Carly every night.”
“Oh, right.” I laughed. I patted my belly bulge, and then scooped up another spoonful of green ice cream and fudge. “I’m sure there are just a whole ton of eligible guys out there right now who’d want to be with me.”
“Who’s Porter?” she asked suddenly, right smack out of the blue.
“Excuse me?”
“Porter. Whenever I clean your room, I see that business card stuck in the corner of the mirror over the dresser. It says Porter Davis on it. You’ve kept it up there all these months, so I was naturally wondering who he was.”
The Sisters Club Page 29
