Crossing the Line

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  I sat back in my chair, wishing it were a more comfortable chair, reviewing what I knew of Simon Smock.

  Simon Smock was a schmuck, of course.

  Now, then. Some people will tell you that all agents are schmucks, but that isn’t true. Sure, there are some hard-asses in the business, just as there are some incompetents and some substance abusers and some who ride the glory of one shining success through a thousand failures, but there are also a lot of brilliant minds in that end of the business. Why, in today’s rush-rush publishing climate, the good agents really wind up functioning as the best of editors as well, not merely selling the book but also shaping the content and style even as they shape the career.

  But Simon Smock wasn’t one of those brilliant agents. Simon Smock was a prima donna, a fop. Having seen pictures of him in the trades, I knew him to be a lion’s-head cane-wielding, indigo cape-wearing, Truman Capote-esque figure. Not to mention a pain in the ass. But Simon had something I wanted, and if I wanted to get what I wanted, then I was going to have to work with him.

  The nice thing about e-mail is that, if your timing is lucky and you send your message when the other person is online too, and if that other person is the type to deal with new business promptly, you can receive a response far quicker than you ever would have had you employed snail mail or picked up the phone, trying—and failing—to get through.

  There was a new message in my inbox and it was from—Yes! Yes! YES!!!—Simon Smock.

  Dear Ms. Taylor,

  I’m out of the country for another four weeks.

  I’m traveling in America, talking to editors about that book you’re interested in, as it happens. Rather than sending it to you now, though, I’d like to add you to my list of British editors I’ll be meeting with about it upon my return. Perhaps Churchill & Stewart would like you to take me to The Connaught? I like the dining room there; there’s a painting there, either a Turner or something Turner-esque, that I am fond of gazing upon, but the lounge is nice too and we could always have a drink there in those lovely burgundy Windsor chairs.

  Please call my secretary and arrange it.

  Best,

  SS

  What a self-important little toad!

  I immediately sent a reply stating that I would gladly do as he suggested, all the while keeping my he’s-a-self-important-little-toad thoughts to myself.

  Tolkien and I were going on A DATE!!!

  I’m not sure exactly what had brought it about—the past few months of over-Emma’s-cradle friendship, when he’d visited on my birthday or the fact that he’d run into David in Marks & Sparks, where David had given him the “Jane really is the most amazing, if strange, girl in the world” speech—but I sure wasn’t going to argue. Whatever had brought this good fortune my way, I was taking it this time.

  When he’d first rung up to ask me out, he’d been as nervous as if he was asking me for the first time.

  “Jane?”

  “Yes?”

  “Will you…?”

  “Yes.”

  “We could…”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  What that all translated to was:

  Sunday afternoon at Round Pond, directly in front of Kensington Palace, where Tolkien had laid a checkered blanket on the grass and from which vantage point he and I and Emma watched the kite-flyers on the grass and the little yachtsmen sailing their boats as we picnicked on the lunch he’d provided from home.

  During the course of that nearly indiscernible asking-you-out-on-a-date conversation we’d had, he’d insisted we bring Emma.

  While having a nearly four-month-old baby with me on the first date I’d been out on in months might impress some as sub-romantic, he seemed to need the security—having mumbled something along the lines of, “I need the buffer, Jane, without it I’m worried I’ll fall in love with you all over again too fast”—and I had to admit that I was grateful for the buffer, too. It may have been me who had broken his heart last time around, and I may have been pushing for more by visiting him at his office and hoping for more ever since, but I’d broken my own heart at the same time I’d broken his as well.

  With her there, we could safely talk about neutral Emma-centered topics. Maybe it wasn’t the kind of talk that others would call “romantic,” but any talk between us was further progress as far as I was concerned. If we just kept talking about peripheral things, one day we might just get around to talking about us again.

  So I told him about the playgroup I’d been taking her to, about the other women in it, the other babies.

  “However did you meet up with these women? Not that I don’t think it’s a great idea, which I do, of course.”

  How to tell him…how to tell him…how to tell him I’d met the women by pretending to know one of the women’s dead mother and crashing her funeral?

  The only way to do that was not.

  “I was in line behind her at the supermarket,” I said.

  “And what?” he asked. “You said, ‘Excuse me, but my kid’s black too, do you think we can all play together?’”

  “I didn’t put it quite like that, but, yeah—” I nodded “—that was the general gist.”

  Then, before he could ask more about Mary Jr., I told him my concerns for Emma, my hopes, my dreams.

  Again, I suppose another woman might have taken the chance to talk to him about her own hopes, her own dreams, even what she’d missed most…okay, what I’d missed most since breaking things off with him. But even I, insensitive me, could see he needed me to go cautiously, so I talked about Emma instead.

  “I hope she’ll want to take ballet,” I said. “I always wanted to as a girl, never did, though.”

  “And if she’s not interested?”

  I looked at her, playing contentedly on the blanket.

  “It won’t matter a single bit,” I said, and meant it.

  And then he kissed me. Not much of a kiss, really, by most people’s standards, just his lips softly brushing against mine for the briefest of moments.

  I didn’t care.

  It was the kind of kiss that contained all the dreams we foolish mortals are made of.

  “It’s not like you’re a different person,” he said. “I don’t think there is any such thing. It’s more like you’ve become more of a different part of you, in a different direction.”

  And then he kissed me again.

  Two foolish mortals dreaming, Emma on the grass.

  Emma was such a superior baby, it was hard not to get caught up in the baby expectations of What to Expect. At the end of her fourth month, she could do all of the “may even be able to” things: she could bear some weight on her chubby little legs when held upright, sit without support (well, for about a half second), objected strongly if her favorite toy was taken away and would turn in the direction of a voice other than mine; she particularly loved the sound of Tolkien’s voice.

  Smart girl, eh?

  May, the fifth month

  Stephen Triplecorn was ready to begin his visits to Churchill & Stewart to talk to my co-workers, so that he could see what people who weren’t tied to me by the bonds of either blood or best friendship would say about my character.

  ACK!!!

  Oops, sorry about that. Just one of those bouts of instant mass panic this whole process could induce in a person.

  When he’d called on the phone to set it up, he’d explained that he’d be seeing them one at a time: Constance, Minerva from Publicity, Dodo, Stan from Accounting and Louise.

  “But won’t that take all day to do it like that?” I’d asked.

  “All day?” he snorted. “It’ll take about five months.”

  “Months? You can’t be serious!”

  He snorted again. “I’m as serious as an underbudgeted office, that’s how serious I am. I simply can’t pursue any one case in more than dribs and drabs at a time. There are too many cases and too few caseworkers.”

  “N
o wonder it takes so long for kids to get adopted or even placed,” I’d sniffed.

  “Well, if I were you,” he advised, “I wouldn’t be so quick to complain. The longer it takes me to process your case, the longer you have with Emma.”

  God, that sounded ominous.

  So now here he was, in the outer office of Churchill & Stewart, being grilled by Hilda.

  “If you’re not an agent and you’re not an author and you’re not here about a book and you’re not the boy to fix my copier—”

  “That’s quite all right, Hilda,” Dodo said in her most silken editor’s tone. She held out a beautiful hand. “You must be Stephen Triplecorn. Jane’s told me so much about you. I’m Lana Lane.”

  God! I always forgot that was her real name!

  Stephen took her hand; a trifle suspicious, perhaps, but he took it just the same.

  That handshake was like Moses parting the Red Sea, like lightning striking the Frankenstein Castle, it was like—

  Okay, so maybe it was like none of those things, but it was cataclysmic. I mean, how could it not be? They had to be the two most physically beautiful people in all of the U.K.—she with that blond hair and those elegant fingers, he with that black hair, blue eyes combo plus, er, big package—and here they were, in one small room. Why, it was like Godzilla meets King Kong, except that no one was ugly.

  “Jane hasn’t said a thing about you,” he said, snapping me out of my reverie. “I thought her boss was someone named Dodo.”

  “I’m Dodo,” said Dodo. “And Jane told me how you’d be coming here to interview us each over a period of time. Since I’m in charge here—” but she wasn’t in charge! Dexter Schlager was! “—I’m afraid I wouldn’t feel quite right having you interview the people who work under me unless I was there, too. Surely you understand.” She indicated her office. “Won’t you come in? Then we can see if Constance is ready.”

  As Dodo closed the door behind them, her eyes met mine and she winked.

  What in the world was Dodo up to?

  What Dodo was up to was something I learned an hour later, when she ushered Stephen Triplecorn out of her office with a warm wave (“See you in another month, Stephen!”) and commanded me to come inside.

  “What are you up to?” I asked.

  “I’m trying to help you,” she said. “You really think it’s wise, letting harebrained people like Constance—”

  “But I thought you thought she was smarter than we used to think she was and that was why you were so keen to make her your new assistant.”

  Dodo gave a long-suffering sigh. “Do we really need to go through this again? How many times do I have to tell you, the only reason I wanted Constance—who was showing some real, er, that is to say minor glimmerings of improvement around that time—was because you were in the midst of your eighth month in your fake pregnancy for which you’d soon be taking maternity leave, although none of us knew at the time that it was—”

  “Okay,” I held up my hand. “Okayokayokay.”

  “As I was saying,” Dodo said pointedly, “do you really think it’s wise, letting harebrained people like Constance and people who’ve always hated you like Stan speak unbuffered to a man who holds your maternal future in his hands?”

  She had a point.

  “At least,” she went on, “with me there, I can head them off at the stupidity pass or give you a heads-up afterwards as to what you need to prepare for.”

  I sat myself down across from her, leaning forward in my chair. “So tell me,” I said, “how did it go?”

  “Oh, well,” she said, suddenly going all evasive on me, “you know Constance.”

  “You mean she said something incredibly stupid?” I prompted.

  “In a word, yes.”

  “What was it?” I couldn’t keep the note of desperation out of my voice. Still, Stephen Triplecorn hadn’t slapped the cuffs on me on his way out—not that I really thought someone from Social Services was empowered to do that, which may have explained some of his daily grumpiness—so there was at least that.

  “Er,” began Dodo in Hugh Grant fashion, “I believe Constance started out by saying, you know, in that just-joined-the-Moonies overly enthusiastic gaga way she has—” and here she did a credible imitation of the twit at hand “—‘Jane was brilliant when she was pregnant, er, uh, um, I mean she’s great with that black baby!’”

  “She didn’t!” I gasped.

  “I’m afraid so,” said Dodo.

  “But then what did you do? What did he say?”

  “Well, I got Constance the hell out of there as quickly as I could, didn’t I? After all, another minute and she’d have been bringing up that tarot card-reading midwife you’d fabricated, if only because she still thinks such a creature would be a damned neat idea.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I flashed a bit of leg—” and here she shot one perfect leg out to the side of the desk so I could see it and, damn, but that was one beautiful leg “—and told him how bonkers our Constance has always been. Said her family really had dropped her on her head when she was just a tiny crystal-sucking baby and that we’d given her a job out of pity. Said you’d always been the biggest of sisters to her here, that she looked up to you as the old woman in her shoe and that her reference to your pregnancy was merely a confused metaphor on her part, since to her you were like the Earth Mother and hence eternally preggers.”

  “That sounds like the biggest line of crap I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  “Well, of course it is,” she said. “But do you think he noticed? He was too busy looking at my leg.”

  Now that I knew I’d dodged the Constance bullet, it seemed fairly safe to relax for a moment.

  “Didn’t you notice anything odd about Stephen Triplecorn?” I asked.

  “Now that you mention it,” she said, “I did.”

  I leaned forward again. “Isn’t it the biggest—”

  “He has the most amazing eyes,” she interrupted. “At first, you think they’re cold. But look a little harder, and they’re intelligent eyes. Look harder still, and you realize he truly cares about what he’s doing.”

  “But you lied to him,” I said.

  “Nah,” she pooh-poohed me with a wave of the hand. “Constance has always been a nutter. I merely tinkered a bit with the particulars of her résumé.”

  “But getting back to Stephen,” I said, “you didn’t notice—”

  “Notice what? That he has a crush on you?”

  “What?”

  “Well,” she shrugged, “why else would he be stretching this out over several months?”

  “He told me his office was underfunded.”

  “And I’m sure it is,” she conceded. “But I’m also sure that there’s more to this than meets your eye. I really think he likes you, Jane.”

  The previous year, I’d become friends—well, not really friends, more like barely tolerable acquaintances—with the women Sophie had become friends with (she really had) during her parentcraft classes. There was Peg, known only to me as Goodie Peg, for her likelihood to drown a carrot for being a witch; huffy Trudy; busy Helena; Dora, the legal assistant; cosmetics-happy Elizabeth; and Patty, the equivalent Marisa from Mary Jr.’s playgroup—practically a teenager.

  When Sophie had learned about the playgroup I was in with Mary Jr. and company, she’d invited me to hers “for a change.”

  “What do you think might be different?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, sounding a bit embarrassed. “Our kids are all a few months older than Emma. I suppose I was thinking it’ll give you an idea of what’s in store for you.”

  Tolkien had said something about my experiences with Emma changing me, or maybe it was that he’d said she brought something that was already in me out more strongly. Whatever the exact words, I entered Sophie’s playgroup—late, because Emma’d spit up on me when we were halfway out the door—with the vague expectation that these women would now somehow
be different than they had been when last we’d met. Who knew what I expected exactly? That Peg would be a little less Proctor in Salem-ish? I don’t know. But whatever it was, I wasn’t expecting to have them all be…

  Exactly. The. Same.

  I hadn’t seen them in over six months and they still looked the same, still sounded the same, still all jumped on Trudy—not that Trudy didn’t ask for it—and still looked at me, despite a slight warming the very last time we’d met, as though they might need a cross and garlic to keep me away from their kids.

  In truth, maybe they were a bit justified with that last, given that Sophie must have explained to them that my former pregnancy had been, er, false, and that now I had a black baby I’d found and wanted to raise. I don’t know what her exact words were, because she wouldn’t tell me, but whatever she’d said had been persuasive enough that they’d at least been willing to grant me one-day’s admission, if guarded, into their inner sanctum of breastfeeding and sleep problems.

  Unlike at Mary Jr.’s place, these women all came equipped with their own copies of What to Expect the First Year, which they consulted regularly. I’d thought I was bad, what with how religiously I consulted the thing every night at home, but when Goodie Peg realized that I didn’t keep a copy in my purse at all times, she asked, “But what will you do if—” and here she flipped pages until she arrived at the sort of thing she was looking for “—if Emma pulls on her ear?”