The Mentor

by Lee Matthew Goldberg

  Wonderful fate had delivered this news to William’s door. If this girl could get a deal with Kyle before completing her novel, then he certainly had a shot too, especially since he already had an in.

  He sat back with his hands laced behind his head and couldn’t help but smile.

  2

  MORNING SEX HAD become a regular occurrence for Kyle and Jamie, at least on the nights she stayed over at his place in Brooklyn. Their relationship was inching up on six months, new enough to still discover fresh maneuvers to get each other off. Both were overachievers and brought this competitive drive straight into the bedroom. While his nights these last few weeks had been full of potential manuscripts and author or agent dinners with bottomless gin drinks, and she was in the throes of starting an interior design business, the alarm was permanently set for five to ensure a full hour of sweaty fucking before they continued their workouts at the gym and then parted ways for the rest of the day.

  This morning was truly one for the ages, and why shouldn’t it be? Kyle had just closed the deal of the year with his new author, Sierra Raven, after she finished only a hundred pages of a manuscript now primed to be a sensational literary debut. The mind-boggling insanity of this deal was compounded by the fact that (a) this was Sierra’s first book and (b) she’d been the first author he nabbed on his own besides the difficult ones tossed to rookies by the company’s publisher, Carter Burke. Within a day, the movie rights had been snapped up, and the name Kyle Broder no longer evoked the dreaded response, Who? Now the words fluttering from everyone’s lips in the biz were more like, Ah, yes, Kyle Broder, that young rising star.

  All these career-excelling thoughts flooded Kyle’s mind while he thrust into Jamie with one of her ample breasts in his mouth. The headboard slammed into the wall, practically knocking off his Wisconsin Badgers banner—its gruff mascot, Bucky Badger, sternly trying to remain intact. Jamie slapped his firm backside, her favorite part of him. Hey, I’m an ass woman, she’d say, so sue me. She wailed loud enough for the alley cat to scratch at the window. Kyle had dubbed the cat Capone due to its ugly mug. Capone’s heated mimicry caused them to burst into fits of laughter as they got each other off. And all of this before five thirty, plenty of time left to spoon.

  “I think Capone’s jealous,” Kyle said, scooping his arm under Jamie’s head so she could nestle into his chest. She played with a patch of his light brown chest hair.

  “Jealous of you or me?”

  “Maybe he was looking for a three-way?”

  She hit him with a pillow. He kept his smirk, her second favorite physical attribute of his. Delivered properly, it made it hard for her to ever stay mad for long.

  Kyle, however, was pretty much smitten with everything about Jamie. Her athletic body she worked hard for. Tan skin no matter what the season. Sandy blond hair always coolly slicked back. Electric blue eyes with flecks of brown and green. Jamie was chic and fashionable without being high maintenance, but, equally important, chill enough to throw back beers at a sports bar like she was one of the boys. In fact, they had met at Kettle of Fish down in the West Village, a Wisconsin Sconnie bar, since they both hailed from that state, him from Sheboygan, her from Kewaunee. In a sea of failed relationships with jaded New Yorkers, their Midwestern states of mind had been exactly what the other was looking for. And while they wore their tough New Yorker masks throughout most of the day, in private they’d sing praises for fried cheese curds and use ’Scansin slang like dem, dat, dis, and dere without any worry of being looked at strangely.

  Capone was now humping the window, his furry stomach splayed against the glass.

  “He’s hungry,” Jamie said, heading over to open the window.

  Capone leaped at the chance for some indoor living and darted inside, flying past Jamie and already trotting out of the bedroom in search for scraps in the kitchen.

  A gust of wind sent a chill through Jamie. She picked up one of Kyle’s button-downs and put it on.

  “Why don’t you just go ahead and adopt him?” she asked, smelling Kyle’s musky cologne that remained on the collar, a mix of vanilla and forest.

  “Yeah, I don’t think I’m ready for that type of commitment…”

  He stopped himself, the words trailing off his tongue, already floating in the air between them. He had never lived with a girlfriend before, usually ending a relationship after six or so months when the inevitable inkling of antsiness would seep in. Granted, no one else had maintained his interest like Jamie so far, but it was still too early to get real and hand over a spare key, especially with the life-changing last few weeks he’d had.

  Jamie looked like she wanted to give a clever retort about his fear of cat commitment, but she chose to touch her tongue to her top lip instead. In her mind, it wasn’t worth ruining the bliss of the morning. The two of them also had the tendency to let a casual remark spiral into a full-blown fight. Both were hotheads, and while their arguments never lasted long, to someone listening beyond the walls, those fights could read as intense.

  Jamie wasn’t one hundred percent ready to move in either. She enjoyed her space, her separate life. The only true issue she had with their situation was the “long-distance” aspect of it. She lived on the upper Upper West Side, two trains and more than an hour from his Cobble Hill apartment. Also, she had a Craigslist roommate named Sybil who was a messy drunk but paid her rent on time and worked from home selling items on eBay. How Sybil managed to make her share of their $4,000 rent baffled Jamie, but what pissed her off the most about Sybil was that Kyle never stayed over because of the girl’s slovenly ways. Sometimes, if Jamie took a step back and looked at their relationship with fresh eyes, it seemed like she was the one really putting in the work while Kyle just reaped the benefits.

  She glanced at the clock, 5:45, fifteen minutes left to spoon. He was giving her that slick grin, which admittedly made her wet, so she slid back into his arms and tickled his stubble.

  “I’m so proud of you,” she said, kissing his soft lips.

  “Thanks, baby.”

  He spun on top of her, hard once again. Maybe her third favorite quality of his was his impressive libido. Before she knew it, her legs were wrapped around his neck and the headboard slammed into the wall hard enough for the Bucky Badgers banner to become dislodged this time.

  * * *

  RIDING TO ROCKEFELLER Center on the F train, Kyle read through the unchecked e-mails on his cell. Like every rush-hour train in New York, getting a seat was a pipe dream, so he hovered over a lady who wore what looked to be Santería garb. Since the Sierra Raven deal, every top agent in the biz had a “hot” new book for him. This meant he needed to read everything, because an editor’s worst nightmare is to overlook a gold mine. He knew how many of his peers were kicking themselves for passing on Girls Without Hope, Sierra’s heartbreaking tale of four sisters in the Ozarks dragged through the foster system, a dark Little Women for the times. In fact, it had first crossed Brett Swenson’s desk, the editor at Burke & Burke who had taken Kyle under his wing when Kyle was still just an associate editor. Kyle often got the scraps no one else wanted, but when an e-mail from Brett came through with the subject Girls Without Hope—Hell NOPE!, Kyle felt a stirring in his heart before seeing any pages. He pictured the book on a shelf at Barnes & Noble. Its title would be in the bold pink of a little girl’s diary against the stark blackness of a night sky with a lone tire swing dead center. Brett’s e-mail lambasted this “chick-lit disaster-in-the-making,” with a series of other digs, although Brett hadn’t even opened the attached manuscript. At the time, Kyle had mostly been after boilerplate thrillers and mysteries but found it tough to break in new crime writers in an oversaturated market. After the success of a slew of bestsellers with Girl in the title, he figured he’d give this one a chance. He took the first hundred pages—which turned out to be all Sierra had written—to Bouchon Bakery, and over a raspberry jam donut became mesmerized. The initial pages showed the promise of winning some literary awards.
Once other publishers started biting, Carter Burke agreed to fork over a serious amount of dough. Because Kyle made the discovery and closed the deal, he got a promotion to editor.

  The F train halted while he was in the middle of reading a pitch about a dystopian future after a nuclear fallout where robots try to recreate humankind with disastrous results. He spun around, practically landing in Santería Woman’s lap. She was dressed in white with a spherical white headpiece and colorful jewelry. Her plastic bag full of hair and shells fell to the floor. She clicked her tongue at Kyle as she scooped up the bag, her eyes like lumps of coal. She hissed in an indecipherable language that he could only imagine was some type of voodoo curse. The train moved forward once again and stopped at Rockefeller Center. He sandwiched his way out of the doors. On the platform, the woman’s coal eyes turned toward him with a shake of her head before the train zoomed into the tunnel.

  “Fucking New York,” he murmured out loud, sometimes enthralled by its eclectic mix of people, other times longing for a quiet Wisconsin lake with only his thoughts as company—far from a rush-hour morning full of chaos and voodoo spells.

  * * *

  BURKE & BURKE’S offices were styled with a retro 1960s Mad Men ambiance. Carter’s father had started the company with his uncle in ’62, and his will stipulated that the look of the company remain intact. So each office was fitted with Saarinen glass tulip tables and Artemide Nesso lamps that resembled mushrooms. Clean-lined sofas bordered the walls in signature burnt orange. Plastic Eames armchairs and dazzling wall sculptures had been placed in the waiting area.

  Amanda, who sat at the front desk, gave Kyle a wave upon entering, each of her fingers painted in a different color nail polish.

  “Sierra is waiting in your office,” she said, choosing turquoise for her thumb.

  Down the hallway, Brett Swenson sipped an espresso over his assistant, Darcy’s, desk, his tie tossed over his shoulder. He wore a blue pin-striped suit with a cornflower pocket square. He had the slightest hint of a paunch despite an hour on the treadmill every day. Just a few years older than Kyle, Brett’s hair was still more pepper than salt, but the tiniest moon had begun to surface in the center of his head. Kyle had the kind of hair that would be described as golden in Roman times, swept back with only a dab of gel, good to go until his head hit the pillow at night. Sometimes he noticed Brett staring at his hair in conversations and at meetings, as if Brett was desperately searching for any type of thinning or stray grays.

  “GQ’s Man of the Year,” Brett said, shooting back the espresso and raising his hand for a high five. Kyle grudgingly complied. Brett rubbed at his nose. One time at a Kentucky Derby party, Brett confessed to Kyle about losing all the cartilage in his nose from doing too much blow at Duke.

  “GQ?” Kyle smirked.

  “Let me amend that to GQ dot com’s Man of the Year.”

  This was a common joke at Burke & Burke, the death of print, and more specifically, the death of literature. It was why Kyle had aimed for a career in genre books, worrying that there was no longer a place for beautiful sentences in today’s market. Well, at least until Girls Without Hope hit the stands.

  “Your ingénue is looking on point today,” Brett said, rubbing his hands together and sucking at his teeth. Darcy looked up from typing to frown. “She’s in this baby doll dress.” Brett’s voice dropped to sotto voce. “I need more talent like that around here.” He eyed Darcy, who was taller than them all but managed to sink low in her seat.

  “Sierra could’ve been yours, Brett.”

  “Don’t remind me about the e-mail of my nightmares,” Brett said, “when I let that sweet fish slip away.”

  Brett was showing all of his teeth to Kyle, bleached to the point of absurdity. The man drank too much coffee for his enamel to be anything but a tinted brown. He slapped Kyle on the back, harder than the average bro pat, enough to make Kyle pivot in place. Kyle made sure not to look like it affected him in the least.

  “Guess you’re just becoming careless in your old age,” Kyle said, keeping his tone as light as possible. The two of them often sparred like this over their first coffees.

  “Up yours, you towheaded son of a bitch,” Brett cackled, as Kyle continued on his way and threw up his middle finger in response.

  In his office, Sierra was tucking her short brown hair behind her ear and scrolling through a series of pictures on her phone. The photos were of the Ozarks near her hometown, a meth-ridden landscape of burned-out houses and double-wide trailers, the bleak setting for Girls Without Hope. Kyle knocked on his door so he wouldn’t startle her and then felt foolish for doing so.

  “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting long, the F train was slow,” he said, easing into his desk chair. Behind him stood Rockefeller Center in all its glory. He hoped he would eventually have a view of its famous Christmas tree. His last office didn’t even have a window.

  “You’re lucky,” Sierra said. “I have to rely on the M train. Short for my miserable commute.”

  “You’re in Bushwick, right?” He remembered how she spoke of her up-and-coming neighborhood that now attracted a hipster spillover from pricey Williamsburg.

  She nodded and shifted in place to cross her legs. Kyle noticed the dress Brett had described as baby doll, a cutesy pink that he could picture Jamie wearing.

  “Yup, fellow Brooklynite here,” Sierra said. “I’m surprised you don’t live in Manhattan. Somehow I picture every editor in town living here. Like all of them together in a giant apartment building off Central Park, quoting Salinger.”

  “You try affording that on an editor’s salary. On any salary!”

  Kyle laughed and she did too. Was he flirting? Admittedly, he flirted with everyone, girls and guys, cats and dogs; he was a charmer.

  “Well,” he began, “you could actually afford Central Park views with your new advance and movie money.”

  “I’m not spending any of it until the book is finished. Except for this dress.” She felt its fabric and then lifted her leg into the air, showing off her ankle-strap high heels. “And these Jimmy Choos. My first pair of heels outside of Payless.”

  “You deserve it, Sierra.” He clapped his hands together to avoid staring at her leg. She lowered it with a smile. “So, do you have some new pages for me?”

  She took a sharp breath and scrunched up her face. She had the tiniest nose, what could truly be described as a button.

  “I’ve only finished one more chapter.”

  She eased a few pages out of her bag and handed over chapter 5. Her fang tooth picked at her bottom lip and her butt hung on the edge of the chair. These were the first pages she’d given him since the deal had closed. He could tell she was nervous.

  “You could’ve e-mailed me this, you didn’t have to come all the way here.”

  “I wanted to personally give it to you. I wanted to thank you for changing my life.”

  “I could say the same to you.”

  His office phone rang, loud and disruptive. He almost didn’t acknowledge it, but then looked down and saw a Connecticut area code. He wondered if it was someone from college who’d heard about his success.

  “Take it,” Sierra said. “I don’t mind.”

  “Okay.” He answered the phone. “Hello?”

  “Kyle? This is your old mentor, William Lansing.”

  “Professor!” Kyle said. Ho-lee shit, he mouthed to Sierra.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing your workday.”

  “Not at all. Hey, what a great surprise.”

  Kyle immediately pictured Professor Lansing in his classroom staring out at an Ultimate Frisbee game on the Green: a little older, a little grayer and stooped, but still dignified. He held up a finger to Sierra to indicate that this would take a minute. She had already gone back to scrolling through her Ozark photos.

  “I saw the article on you in the Killingworth Gazette this morning,” William said.

  “Oh, right. Right.”

  “How exciting, Kyl
e. Burke & Burke is a very reputable house. How long have you been there? The last we spoke, you were getting an MFA after I wrote you a rec.”

  Kyle had gone straight to an MFA program at U. of Wisconsin after graduating from Bentley. He had illusions of being a writer back then. It had been a tough time, since he was so near to his hometown while his mom was going through terminal cancer. They had never been close and by then he’d become numb to the idea of death. He wound up workshopping the same story over and over, realizing he was better at giving critiques than fixing his own maudlin prose.

  “I moved to New York after grad school,” Kyle said. “I was an editorial assistant at Macmillan before coming to Burke & Burke.”

  “And now this huge deal. Kyle. My boy. It is truly outstanding. It was the front page of the Gazette.”

  “I guess in Killingworth it’s top news.”

  William responded with something between a chuckle and a cough. Instantly, Kyle regretted the comment. Professors spent their whole lives in small towns while students just passed through and often went onto bigger and better places. It had to have stung once in a while.

  “It’s not like any other publications really wrote about the deal,” Kyle said. “Besides Publishers Weekly.”

  Kyle knew this was a lie. Just Google his name and you’d find a flood of articles now—albeit, not the front page like the Gazette; there were wars going on. He didn’t know why he felt the need to act so humble.

  A break in the conversation seemed to stretch and stretch. Something about his former mentor always made Kyle tongue-tied. William finally broke the lull.

  “So I’m calling because I was planning on being in New York for a conference this week.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “I know it’s last minute, but I thought we could get together.”

  “Absolutely. It’d be great to see you.”

  “As long as you’re not too busy—”