The Bestseller

by Olivia Goldsmith

  Of course, they didn’t know how frightening it was to look at the monthly bills when you were living at this level. Susann lived very well—Alf insisted that she deserved it. And he clearly enjoyed it, too. He enjoyed this house in France more than she did. Hell, she didn’t even speak French. The view was lovely, but the expenses increased the pressure on her, demanding that she produce a book every year. Still, she was lucky and she knew it. This was not the time to think about the pressure, only about happiness and complete satisfaction. It took energy to project that, and Susann used these last moments to gather hers.

  Then, “What the hell do you think you’re doing! Do you know how much that rug cost?” All heads but Susann’s snapped around to face Alfred Byron, Susann’s lover and literary agent. He was a short, burly, white-haired man with a face too easily red. It was scarlet right now. Susann didn’t have to turn to know that. She froze, closing her eyes.

  “Six thousands francs a square meter! Do you know how much that is in dollars? Do you know how much that is in yards? I had this rug hand-stitched in Portugal for Susann! And now you’re snaking some greasy cable over it!”

  A production assistant began apologizing while two techies quickly moved to lift the offending electrical cord. Smoothly Susann moved to Alf’s side and patted his hand. “It won’t do any harm, Alf,” she said quietly. “It isn’t covered with grease. They don’t use grease for TV.” She turned to the assistant producer, a kid who couldn’t be thirty. “I’m sure it’s fine as it is,” she told him, giving him her best smile. He looked doubtfully from her to Alf’s red face. Why was it that everyone took Alfred as the authority? Was it simply because he was louder? Because he was older? Or was it because he was a man?

  Susann kept herself from audibly sighing. She knew that all Alf wanted was to protect her, to be helpful, and to be sure that everything went right. He was as involved and concerned about her career as she was. Sometimes she was afraid he was more involved. She should be grateful, she told herself, and she was, but sometimes Alf could be so…so…

  “Well, they shouldn’t be taping it down. Should they? Should they be taping it? Won’t that stuff leave marks on the carpet, the tape?” They all looked down at the gray gaffer’s tape that held the cable in place.

  “We don’t have to tape it, Mr. Byron. We’ll take that tape right up.”

  Susann doubted the tape would have done any damage, but she smiled her best smile, patted Alf’s arm again, and then went back to the mirror. She didn’t like what she saw. She should have had her eyes done again when she had the second face-lift, she thought as she looked at the puckerings of skin that held the powder in little crepe lines under her eyes. She hadn’t been sleeping well, and it showed. Brewster Moore, her surgeon, hadn’t wanted to do the eyes now—he had felt she should wait. But what in the world for? Wait until she looked older? Until she looked even worse? It wasn’t his damn eye pouches that were going to appear on television or on the back of a new book. He was good but too conservative. She wanted to stamp her foot and push the damn mirror away.

  “Is everything all right, Mrs. Edmonds?” the makeup woman asked. What was the woman’s name? Louise? No, Lorraine. Susann made it a point to remember the names of all the gofers, drivers, assistants, and secretaries who crossed her path. It was the least she could do. So she looked back helplessly at her reflection and the pouches under her eyes, then smiled her best smile at the girl.

  “Yes, Lorraine, it’s terrific. I wish you could do my makeup every day.”

  The girl smiled and, mercifully, took away the damn mirror. Susann stared blindly out the window, across the pool, and began her breathing. Now was not the time to think about Alf and his disloyalty, her daughter’s wasted life, or the deadline she felt strangled by. Now only remember that half of all mass market paperbacks sold were romances—almost a billion dollars in annual sales. She was ready to clear her mind and assume the state that allowed her to project an air of happiness and complete satisfaction. That is what her readers wanted to see. That is what her readers wanted to have. It was what all of her heroines wound up with at the close of all of her books. Happiness and complete satisfaction. She took another deep breath.

  “Who the hell is smoking?” Alf yelled. “Who the hell is smoking in here?” He stopped yelling momentarily as he apparently found his culprit, then resumed. “Don’t you know Susann has asthma?”

  Susann didn’t have asthma, as it happened. Alf did. She turned and saw Alf’s big back hunched over. Oh, my God! He was yelling at Tammi Young, the newscaster who was about to conduct the interview. Alf must not have recognized her. The girl had seemed a brainless little twit, but she worked for the network and Susann did not need a hostile interview right now. Not when her last two books had barely held the number-one spot for more than a week!

  But at that moment, before she had a chance to straighten things out, a sound technician—Kevin? or was it Brian?—approached her and asked, very quietly, if she could snake the thin black microphone wire up under her jacket for him. She nodded; it seemed Alf and Tammi were working things out on the other side of the vast living room. She’d be grateful for that. She’d be even more grateful if he’d just butt out. She looked up and saw Edith grinning. Edith loved it when Alf made an ass of himself.

  There was a time when Susann had been grateful for Alf’s constant involvement and his enthusiasm and strength. She had been writing for five or six years, her third marriage had failed, and so had her books. No one believed in her except Edith, and that wasn’t enough. It was only when she met Alf and he began not only to fight and negotiate for her, but also to believe in her work, that things had started to fall into place. He’d gone out and gained her exposure, finding all kinds of publicity angles, and that, plus his relentless nagging of the publisher to advertise and promote her book, had finally propelled her out of the paperback ghetto into hardbacks and up the list. Alf couldn’t have been more proud if he wrote the books himself, and sometimes Susann thought he believed he had written them. He always talked about what was owed to “our work,” and how many copies of “our latest book” had sold. For years he had negotiated every contract, taken care of all of the business, managed and invested her money, and supervised all publicity and book tours. He also had started sleeping with her.

  Their affair was on-again, off-again. She knew Alf would never marry her—he wouldn’t offend his two sons. Because Alf, despite the poetic last name, was a Boronkin, not a Byron. The joke was he’d dropped his old friends along with the “kin.” He’d adopted the name when he left Cincinnati and set up shop in New York. But he kept close to his sons and was a Jew who refused to marry a shiksa. No matter how successful either of them became.

  Susann looked at him now, earnestly talking to the director. Somehow Alf had not adjusted to success. He had fought his way to the top with her, but once there, he continued to fight. What was that called? A bunker mentality? Sometimes Susann thought that if Alf didn’t encounter difficulties, he considered it his job to create them. Just so he had an obstacle he had to overcome that day. But Susann was tired of obstacles. Though she appeared ten years younger than her fifty-eight years, she felt ten years older. She looked down at her hands, swollen from arthritis. She’d do everything she could to keep them off camera. Her hands did not look happy or satisfied. She supposed she wasn’t either.

  She had met Alf when she was forty-three. She had felt young then—although she probably hadn’t looked as good. Still, she’d had lots of energy and enthusiasm, despite the lousy job and the failed marriages. Life seemed an adventure. Alf had been older and, it seemed, wiser. He’d had his own insurance agency and had invested a little in Cincinnati real estate. His first wife had died, and his two sons were grown. He had half-romanced, half-adopted Susann.

  It had been a lovely time. Alf had thought of her writing as magical, not a business. He’d read every word breathlessly. And just as her writing had rescued her from a mundane life, it had given him a n
ew and exciting second career. Alf was more entranced with the glamour of the entertainment world than Susann had ever been. It was he who kept the scrapbooks, dusted the shelf of her books, and had the first of each of “our new editions” bound in blue calfskin and stamped with gold.

  Now, somehow, Alf felt like a burden, along with all the other burdens Susann felt she was carrying. He had insisted on this last contract—for two new books—in addition to the other new one they already had to deliver on. And he’d pocket almost a quarter of a million dollars in fees, while she was saddled with delivery. Finally, she and Edith had finished the first draft of the new book, but Susann knew it was flat. It was a funny thing: Back when she was penniless and living from paycheck to paycheck, when she didn’t have time to be a good mother to Kim, she had written about success and wealth, family love, and the glamorous life with a lot more passion and clarity than she did now, now that she was living it. There was an irony there, but Susann was not the type to ferret it out. And she was too tired.

  Alf had proudly and overaggressively negotiated the blockbuster twenty-million-dollar contract, but the pressure that had put on her seemed to Susann almost unbearable. After all, money wasn’t everything. He’d made her leave the publisher she had been with from the beginning. He made her leave her editor, Imogen.

  In the old days, she had gotten relatively small advances and her enormous sales had meant big royalty checks. The publisher had treated her like a fine piece of jewelry. Imogen never forgot a birthday. But Alf had insisted that it was bad business to let the publisher sit on the money until—twice a year, and then reluctantly—it paid out the royalties she was owed. “Why should we let them be our bankers?” Alf asked. “They don’t pay interest.” He had gotten bigger and bigger payments up front, but when her publisher balked, he had shopped her around to a new house—Davis & Dash—where she had been given a huge advance. Susann was afraid that neither this new book or the next one would earn out the advance money. She couldn’t bear having Gerald Ochs Davis, her new publisher, looking at her like she was a bad investment instead of a jewel in the crown. She had been a winner, and every bit of success had been a thrill and a surprise. Now, behind the eight ball of the two contracts, she was expected to perform at the very highest commercial level; anything less would be considered failure. And one thing Alf Byron would not tolerate was failure.

  “We’re ready for you now, Mrs. Edmonds,” the unbelievably young assistant director told her. Susann came out of her reverie, depressed and dissatisfied. But that’s not what she was allowed to be right now. What she had to be was happy, with an air of complete satisfaction. And that is what she would be.

  “I’m ready,” Susann said, and gave the boy her best smile.

  9

  I’m not a big believer in disciplined writers. What does discipline mean? The writer who forces himself to sit down and write for seven hours every day might be wasting those seven hours if he’s not in the mood and doesn’t feel the juice. I don’t think discipline equals creativity.

  —Bret Easton Ellis

  Daniel Gross sat in his small office, his back to the door, his shoulders hunched over the notebook he was writing in. The typewritten copy of Judith’s latest chapter—well, his chapter, really—was secreted under the flap of the back cover. As he copied the chapter carefully into his notebook, he made a few revisions and cross outs. But Judith had done a good job typing up his ideas, and there was really very little—surprisingly little—he had to change. Too bad her typing was so lousy. He looked at the name on the title page. “Jude Daniel.” Perhaps he should have picked a different nom de plume: something more commercial like Paige Turner or Bess Cellar or E. Z. Reid. He corrected another one of Judith’s mistakes.

  Judith could sit down every day and pound it out. That’s how he knew she wasn’t truly sensitive, not really an artist. For him it was necessary to feel the creative urge. The muses did not dance to your command, he thought. Who had written that? Perhaps he had. He jotted it down in the margin of his notebook.

  Each time Daniel finished copying a page, he tore Judith’s typewritten version into many strips and, instead of throwing them in his wastepaper basket, put them into his pocket. It was better to be safe than sorry, as his grandma used to tell him. Safe from what, or sorry about what, he wasn’t exactly sure.

  And the fact is, he didn’t feel safe and he might indeed be sorry. He hadn’t received tenure last year, but then how could he reasonably expect to after being caught in adultery, breaking up his marriage, and marrying a student? Eleanor, his first wife, had been well liked in the department. Although it wasn’t illegal, leaving your no-longer-so-young-looking wife for a much younger student certainly was not approved of. A definite frost had descended upon the women professors in his department, and Daniel wondered if now, despite his good work, he might never achieve tenure. No, he certainly wasn’t safe.

  But sorry? Was he sorry he’d married Judith? Well, he surely was sorry that her father had taken it so badly, the anti-Semite. The old bastard was loaded, and if Daniel hadn’t exactly counted on living off some of the Hunt glassworks fortune, he had at least looked forward to the possibility. He had already played the we’re-young-and-in-love-and-poor-as-college-students game once with Eleanor, and he no longer found it amusing. But Judith might, in the end, be his ticket out of here. Daniel looked around the cramped cubicle that was his office. It was painted a shiny khaki color, God knows how long ago. Sometime after the Korean War? Or World War II, or maybe even World War I? The paint was flaking in more than half a dozen places. If he ever wanted to commit suicide, Daniel reflected, he probably had enough lead in the available paint flakes for effective poisoning.

  Daniel looked out the drafty window. The room was so badly heated that he kept his coat on all the time. Except, of course, in the summer, when the room was so hot that he sweated. Now it was hard to believe that he had once spread Judith on this very desk and had the energy, in the heat, to make love to her. Daniel shook his head.

  He was about to finish copying out the last page when there was a knock at the door. Guiltily, he folded up the final page and thrust it deep into the unused pages of his notebook. He left the notebook lying open on the half-finished page. “Come in,” he called.

  The shining blond head of Cheryl Jenkins hesitantly peeked around the door. “Is it all right?” she asked.

  “Fine,” Daniel said, “just fine.” The girl entered the room, and it seemed as if the sun entered with her. It must be her hair, Daniel thought. It was so very blond. It must be natural, because dyeing it would never leave it so glossy, so very shiny.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” Cheryl said, “I mean, I know you have lots to do—”

  “No, don’t worry about it. I’m just doing a little editing on my novel.”

  “Your novel?” Cheryl breathed. “Oh, I really shouldn’t be bothering you.” She turned as if to go, and Daniel lurched across the small room and took her hand.

  “It’s all right, Cheryl. I’d be happy to help you. What is it?”

  The girl colored and took her hand away but looked up at him. She was very short, and suddenly two thoughts occurred almost simultaneously to Daniel. The first was how ungainly Judith was compared to this tiny sprite. And the second was whether Cheryl’s pubic hair was as blond as the shiny cap of hair on her head.

  Cheryl was rummaging through her purse. She took out two crumpled sheets of paper. “I’ve never read anything aloud at the writers’ circle,” she said, “but I thought this wasn’t too awful. I mean, not really bad, and so I thought, maybe…well…”

  Daniel took the two sheets from her trembling hand and read them quickly. The writing was clear and a lot more forceful than Cheryl was herself. In fact, it was better writing than the stuff Chuck Tasity, another student, turned out by the truckload and read promiscuously. “This is really good, Cheryl. You should read it.”

  Her smile of pleasure was a delightful reward for his praise. �
��Really?” she asked. He nodded.

  “Really,” he told her.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you think so. I’ve gotten so much out of your class and the writers’ circle. It’s really improved my work.” She paused and blushed again. Daniel wondered if her nipples were truly pink—the girl was a china doll. “You’ve done so much for me, I wish I could do something for you,” Cheryl said.

  Daniel smiled, resisting his impulse. Jesus Christ, it was hard to be married. “Maybe you could buy me a cup of coffee sometime,” he said.

  She hung her head, then looked up from under her lashes at him. “I could type for you,” she suggested. “I noticed that all of your drafts are handwritten. And the typed versions are—well, I could type for you,” she repeated in a very small voice.

  Daniel smiled. Not only was Judith a lousy typist, but she insisted on using her stupid high school portable typewriter. “Maybe we could talk about that. Have you got a word processor?”

  “Oh, yes. I’ve got a laptop. And a laser printer,” she told him.

  Daniel wondered where she got the money for that kind of equipment. He looked down again at the sheets of paper in his hand. “You have real talent, Cheryl.”