Slash and Burn

by Valerie Bronwen

  As for the spurious charges of deception, of course all anyone had to do was check the copyright office and they would have seen for themselves that Antinous Renault was, indeed, a woman and not a gay man.

  But since my outing—

  If she weren’t already dead, comparing being exposed as a fraud and a liar to the horrific struggle every queer goes through would have made me want to kill her. And to compare what happened to her to the suicides of bullied queer youth?

  That made me want to piss on her grave. Why did it take so long for someone to kill this monster?

  —I’ve realized that now I am free from this minor deception and can now go forth as myself, a biological female, and what an enormous relief that is! You have no idea how many times I have wanted to come out publicly as myself and put a stop to all of this nonsense. I have always stood for truth and honesty and authenticity, and despite the pretense, have been my true self here, in my fiction, and on my review website. And of course knowing that so many readers and friends throughout the world love me, understand my struggle and what I am going through and want nothing but the best for me—well, I’m practically in tears all over again, but not in sadness and depression but rather for your incredible kindnesses! And this outing has made me understand the GLBT—

  Again with the letters not in the proper order! I suppose it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a straight woman had no idea that lesbians had fought long and hard to not have secondary status—a status that apparently straight English bitches appropriating the gay male experience for profit feel is all we deserve.

  —process even more, the struggle that every GLBT human goes through their entire life until they can finally be honest with themselves and the world. And since I am being honest about everything here, I may as well be completely honest and confess to you all that I believe I may actually be transgendered.

  That made my blood boil so hot I had to get up and walk around before I could continue reading.

  What exactly had she said to me in the airport yesterday? That she was bisexual but had never had sex with a woman because she was too lazy?

  Killing had been too good for her.

  So, the gay male experience wasn’t enough for her to appropriate—she had to appropriate the transgender and bisexual ones as well?

  Hateful fucking bitch.

  It took me a while to calm down before I could read again—but after that, I was pretty much prepared for anything else completely insane she might claim.

  After reading back several more months, I moved on from the blog to her website.

  There was very little—if any—middle ground with Antinous. She either loved a book or she absolutely loathed it—and there were very few books, apparently, that she loved.

  And when she loathed a book, she went after it with everything she had, including the kitchen sink.

  This author should be haunted by the ghosts of the trees killed to print this garbage…this book should be used as an example of what not to do in writing courses…I wanted to throw this across the room but didn’t want to risk damaging my Kindle…I wouldn’t use the pages of this book to wipe my ass because it would be an insult to my ass…

  And other charming bon mots like that. Dorothy Parker she wasn’t.

  My personal favorite was a vicious takedown of a book where she used the review to speak directly to the author—a gay man I’d actually known who’d committed suicide two years before she savaged his book:

  Really, Mr. Severn? That was the best you could come up with? Shame, shame, shame on you! You really should put a little more thought and creativity into your work before you foist it upon the reading public, Mr. Severn.

  I just hoped Chris Severn’s surviving partner hadn’t seen this smug dismissal of his work. Chris had even written a brilliant, award-winning memoir about his years-long struggle with depression.

  Again, she was lucky she was already dead before I read this cruel and dismissive attack on a dead man’s work.

  But the worst was yet to come.

  This was an attack on another writer—Leslie MacKenzie—who was writing young adult novels with gay characters and stories. The woman apparently had a gay son who was a teenager.

  I find it abhorrent that someone would take ADVANTAGE of her son’s sexuality and true life experiences to make money and build a career for herself. What kind of mother would exploit their child like that? Where are the American children’s services people to take this child away from a mother who would do something as despicable and horrible as this? This is so vile it beggars description…as you can be certain, dear friends, I will NOT review this horrible woman’s work and give it a forum or ANY publicity of any kind, and the only reason I mention her name is so that you, too, can AVOID her books like the plague they are…one had to wonder, does she question her son about his dating habits? Does she spy on him when he’s being intimate with another boy? This just frankly reeks of pedophilia at best, child pornography at worst…it also makes me wonder if the child actually does in fact exist…or if she simply invented a gay son to give her “work” more credibility, an authenticity it doesn’t deserve, hmmm? Friends, we have all seen that there are SOME writers who will do ANYTHING to get attention for their books rather than letting their books be judged on their own merits.

  EDIT* I have shut the comments on this entry down, and deleted the ones that were already posted. While I am certainly the biggest advocate of free speech, I will not allow fans of this despicably vile woman to come here and attack me in the ways that they were doing! I find it incredibly horrible that a group of heterosexual white women would attack a gay man in such a way! So, I will henceforth have no choice but to moderate all comments, and ban people who come here with ad hominem attacks on me. Shame on you all, you homophobic BITCHES.

  Considering she was a straight woman pretending to be a gay man—I shook my head. Despicable, really. If this was the kind of thing she regularly engaged in, no wonder she was so reviled.

  It was amazing she’d left it up after she was exposed for the whole world to see.

  Then again, as I’d already noted, self-awareness wasn’t her strong suit.

  She was an unspeakably vile piece of garbage, and after reading it all, I felt like I needed a shower.

  I would have stayed away from this conference if I were her, I thought as I closed the curtains. Why would she come to something like this?

  She clearly liked the attention—even the negative. Negative attention is better than no attention, I guess, for people like her.

  I put the Diet Coke down on the desk as I walked through the bedroom back into the enormous bathroom.

  But the name Leslie MacKenzie sounded familiar—so did Anne Howard, for that matter.

  I tried to remember where I’d heard the names before as I turned on the hot water and washed my face. I rinsed my mouth out with some of the mouthwash provided by the hotel, which wasn’t bad. I took some deep breaths and cleared my mind, pushing the murder of the incredibly unpleasant woman and her online rantings out of my head once and for all.

  Not bad for forty-five, I thought as I ran a brush through my long blond hair one last time. I’d spent most of my life trying to stay out of the sun, so my skin was still fresh-looking and smooth. I only had a few, almost unnoticeable lines radiating out from my eyes and the corners of my mouth. I didn’t look like I was in my twenties—I’m not that delusional—but I still looked well put together. I’d been an athlete in high school and had never really gotten out of the habit of staying fit. One of the things I disliked about Wilbourne’s brutal winter was having to jog on a treadmill at the campus fitness center rather than outside on the roads. I’d tried being a vegetarian for a while, but bacon defeated me. I still limited my intake of red meat, but every once in a while I gave in to the siren song of a bacon cheeseburger. The pale-blue blouse and gray slacks I’d chosen gave me a nice, professional air. I checked my shoulder bag for my notes, laptop, and iPad, and swept o
ut of the room.

  I took the elevator down to the mezzanine level. There was a pair of long tables set up across from the elevator bank; the one on the left had a sign reading Information while the one on the right said Check-In. Two women sat at each table—I didn’t recognize any of them, and Jerry was nowhere to be seen.

  I smiled and hitched my shoulder bag back up. “Good afternoon,” I said to the women at the Check-In table. “I’m Winter Lovelace, and I think I need to check in?”

  The two women, who were hunched over an iPad playing some game involving moving jewels around, both looked up with wide eyes.

  “Oh my God,” one of them spluttered. She looked to be the older of the two—maybe in her late fifties or so. She was wearing a gray sweatshirt with Angels and Demons on the front. She reached down and pulled up a book bag, which she set on the table. “I have your books! I am such a fan! Would you mind signing them for me? Jo, get her registration packet!” While the other woman retrieved an envelope and a gift bag for me, the first woman, whose name tag read Charlene, reverently placed pristine copies of my four romance novels on the table.

  I grabbed a black Sharpie from the side pocket of my shoulder bag and knelt down to sign the books. I picked up the first one, Love Is In The Air, and examined it. It looked brand new; the spine was intact. I opened it up to the title page. “Would you like me to personalize it?” I always ask, since I made the mistake of signing a book once to someone who then snapped, “Signature only! You’ve ruined it!” I’d bought that person another copy, and always asked from then on.

  “Yes, that would be so lovely!” she breathed. “Make it to Charlene, C-H-A-R-L-E-N-E.”

  “Or she could look at your name tag,” Jo said rather snidely.

  “Yes, yes, of course.” Charlene’s face turned scarlet. “Listen to me, you must think I’m a blithering idiot. I’m just such a huge fan…I’ve read all of your books so many times. I bought new ones,” she went on as I signed the first one and opened the second, “because I didn’t want you to see how badly I’d abused the original ones I had. Oh, this is such a thrill!” she gushed. “As soon as I heard you were coming to Angels and Demons, I knew I had to come meet you.” Her chest was heaving, and although her blush had faded, there were two spots of color on her cheeks. “Listen to me blather on, you must think I’m the biggest idiot in the world, seriously.”

  Before I could answer Jo snapped, “A little late to be worried about that now, isn’t it?”

  I looked up from Love Under the Bleachers and raised an eyebrow. “Are you two a couple, by any chance?”

  Jo had the decency to blush, and bit her lower lip. She nodded.

  I finished signing the books and handed them back to Charlene, who blushed again. I held out my hand and shook hands with both of them, adding it was a pleasure to meet them, and wandered into the little room right off the foyer, which a sign declared to be the Book Room. I instantly recognized the man behind the tables piled high with books. He was scowling at a young man with longish brown hair sticking out from underneath a black beret; he was tall and skinny, was wearing beltless jeans defying gravity to stay up and a ratty-looking old green T-shirt. The young man looked vaguely familiar.

  “If I have to tell you one more time to stop, I’ll have hotel security throw you out,” the man behind the table said in a “I’ve had enough of your nonsense” tone.

  “You shouldn’t be carrying that bitch’s books anyway,” the young man snarled before turning and storming out of the room, almost knocking me down in his hurry to get out. I wasn’t able to get a look at his face, other than he had glasses taped together over his nose and some pimples on his chin.

  “Ted!” Ted worked at the Prytania Bookshop, a wonderful independent store in the little mall at the corner of Washington and Prytania in the Garden District. I’ve known Ted for years. He’s funny, a big sports buff (we often emailed back and forth about the Saints), and very well read. If Ted recommended a book, I bought it without question. He also wrote an anonymous blog about the book business that was one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.

  He smiled at me. “I was wondering when you were going to stick your nose in here.”

  “What was that about?” I asked, my eyebrows coming together over my nose.

  Ted sighed. “He keeps coming in here and piling other people’s books on top of these.” He gestured with his left hand to two stacks of books—The King’s Sword and His Majesty’s Pleasure, both by none other than Antinous Renault. “And when I told him to stop—well, you heard him. I guess he’s not a fan.”

  “Apparently not,” I replied, looking back out the door, but the young man had apparently disappeared. “Antinous Renault seemed to have that effect on a lot of people.”

  “No one seems to want to buy her books,” Ted replied glumly. “I thought what with the tragic death and all, there’d be some morbid curiosity—you know how people are, they’d be able to show it to people and say, I bought it that weekend in New Orleans when she was murdered.” He looked at me over the top of his glasses. “You found the body, I heard?”

  I nodded. “Not so much found as it landed in front of me.” I quickly gave him a brief overview of what happened, leaving out having met her at the airport and the things I’d since found out about her.

  “Awful.” He clicked his tongue. “You want to sign your books while you’re here?”

  I found my Winter Lovelace romances stacked neatly at a corner where two different tables had been pushed together. Right next to them, the Tracy Norris mysteries were stacked neatly. I tapped my finger on the stack of the most recent, Blood on the Bayou. “Have any people figured out that Winter and Tracy are the same person?” I couldn’t stop myself from giving him a conspiratorial wink.

  Ted laughed. “I’ve had a couple of people asking why I was stocking the mysteries, if Tracy was going to be here—and they didn’t believe me when I said Tracy and Winter were the same person. I just compared the author photos for them…and that did the trick.”

  “Did they buy anything?”

  “One seemed kind of pissed to find out, honestly.” Ted shrugged. “‘If I’d known Tracy Norris was really Winter Lovelace I would have brought my copies from home!’”

  I sighed. As much as I loved being a writer, sometimes readers could be a bit of a challenge. But if it weren’t for them I’d be just a professor of English at a small university in the middle of nowhere in Louisiana, so as frustrating as they could be sometimes, I always had to suck it up.

  I was lucky to be published in the first place.

  And no, it doesn’t suck to have people tell you regularly that you’re brilliant.

  The trick is not to start believing it yourself—therein lies the path to madness.

  And almost as if on cue, the personification of that walked into the book room, followed by a coterie of her adoring readers.

  My heart sank. The last person in the world I ever wanted to run into was Aphrodite Longwell.

  “Winter darling!” she said in her phoniest voice as she threw her arms apart and clacked across the marble floor in her high-heeled pumps.

  I suppose in the interest of full disclosure I have to confess that I had an interlude of sorts with Aphrodite years ago—when I was young and foolish and didn’t know any better.

  I learned the hard way.

  And in fairness, I have to admit Aphrodite looked good for her age. I wasn’t sure just how old Aphrodite actually was, but I knew for a fact she was older than me. She always kept her hair cut short in what I always thought of as the Shirley Partridge style, and it was always either dyed platinum blond or had streaks of blond through it. Currently she’d gone platinum, and she was, as always, wearing too much makeup—the rouge was thickly applied and her lips were painted the same shade. Her eye shadow was a sparkly green, and she had thickly mascaraed long eyelashes that had to be fake. She was wearing a tight pair of jeans under a pink silk blouse with the belt so tightly cinched it
looked like the circulation to her legs might be cut off.

  Okay, that was rather harsh—but it was pulled pretty damned tight.

  Aphrodite referred to herself as the goddess of lesbian romance, and she did have a large and incredibly loyal fan base. No one knew if Aphrodite Longwell was her real name or a pseudonym, but she’d been going by that name for well over twenty years as she penned at least one successful lesbian romance per year (in some years, two). I wasn’t really a fan of her work—she’d been pretty good when she first got started, but quite frankly it seemed like she’d been phoning it in for years. At some point her publisher started calling her “the goddess of lesbian love and romance”—obviously a play on her name—but she’d never been short on ego. Jerry had forwarded me one of her emails in which she gave detailed instructions on how she was to be treated and referred to all weekend (“I must always be introduced as the award-winning goddess of lesbian love and romance Aphrodite Longwell, anything less would be an INSULT to my stature and contributions to lesbian literature”) which had made me laugh for a good four or five minutes.