“How long do we have before the submission?” Pam asked.
She was buying it? Emma took what felt like her first deep breath all morning. “Until next Monday,” Emma said. She’d have to give Pam a weekend to look it over. “Will you promise to read it?” Emma asked.
“Well, I’ll try to get to it.”
“That’s not good enough,” Emma said.
“What?”
“You have to promise to read it or I have to give it right back,” Emma told her, her heart thumping against her chest.
Pam squinted again. “I told you I’d try.”
It was now or never, Emma thought. “I feel very strongly about this book, Pam. I feel that it’s the best thing I’ve read since I’ve been here. And if that isn’t enough of a recommendation to ensure that you’ll read it, I don’t see how I can continue working here.” There. It was said. Emma watched Pam’s mobile face freeze, while her eyes glittered even more electrically. They both stood silently for a moment. Emma had time to wonder if she’d be fired, have to quit, or win this round.
“All right,” Pam said. “I’ll read it.”
Emma could hardly believe it. She tried to show no triumph, no excitement. This was Pam’s victory. “Great,” she said. “You’ll like it. You really will.”
“Maybe. But I don’t like ultimatums. You used your chip. Okay. Just remember that you cashed it in. Better not use it again.” Pam looked past Emma, out toward the hall. “How’s the Edmonds manuscript?”
“It needs a lot of work,” Emma told her.
“I know that.”
“It can be fixed,” Emma told her.
“Good. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting about another first novel. Except it’s a good one, a commercial one. One that will make us money, which is, after all, our job.” Coldly, Pam walked past Emma, out of her own office, and down the hall toward God’s Little Acre. Which gave Emma the space and the privacy to do a short, silent, victory dance all around the room.
32
Getting even is one reason for writing.
—William Gass
“We’re suing. Of course we’re suing. We’re getting a goddamned injunction against her and her publishers and stopping the sons of bitches now,” Alf nearly yelled.
Susann stiffened. She wondered how much privacy a privacy panel in the limo really guaranteed. She’d picked Alf up at the airport—he’d been in Frankfurt, checked up on the house in France, and had flown in from Nice. They were going straight to the Davis & Dash meeting. She’d have to tell Alf about Kim. A blurb about Kim’s book deal with Citron Press had appeared in Publishers Weekly while he was in Frankfurt. He wasn’t taking it well. “Do we have to tell them?” she asked, and she knew her voice sounded pathetically like a frightened child’s. She’d done the best she could to prepare for this meeting: Her hair was freshly done, her suit was immaculate, and her makeup perfect. But she was still very frightened.
“Of course we have to tell them,” Alf snapped. “It will be a joint suit. Do you think Gerald Ochs Davis has paid for the Baker Edmonds name to see some schprintz buy it for a buck three-eighty? We know she’s a thief. But Kim hasn’t just ripped off your name; I’ll bet they copy your cover style and your titles, too. This isn’t a situation like Mary and Carol Higgins Clark. They’re friends as well as mother and daughter. They agreed to share the name. But you’re not friends with Kim.” Alf was breathing hard. Susann wondered if he’d taken his pills. He was tired and cranky from the trip.
“She’s done nothing but bleed you and exploit you for years,” he continued. “This is one exploitation she is not going to get away with. I can’t stop you from giving her money, but I can stop her from stealing your name.”
Susann winced. The fact was that in publishing, like all other American businesses, brand names sold. Bookstores prepared for a new shipment of Collinses or Clancys or Steels knowing that shoppers bought by the name. They flew out of stores. Only this year, Grisham’s publisher shipped three million hardcover copies of his new novel, The Rainmaker, and had to guarantee that they’d arrive at all the nation’s bookstores on the same day.
So Susann understood that her name had value—and that seeing it on another book, a book not by her, was a sort of infringement, legal or not. Fans might buy it—would buy it—by mistake. Bookstores would order it, counting on that mistake. And even the book clubs—who rarely took up a first novelist—might buy something with the “brand recognition” Kim’s book would automatically have.
Susann felt sick to her stomach. It wasn’t that what Alf was saying was untrue; the fact that it was true and the nastiness of his description was what she found so extremely unsettling. Kim had stolen before—money for drugs, and she’d shoplifted, too. But calling her a thief was so…hard. And now that burden was added to the already frightening prospect of the editorial meeting she was about to face. She smoothed the skirt of her suit.
Susann hated to be edited. It made her feel criticized and misunderstood and stupid. Imogen had always been very gentle with her. Pam certainly wouldn’t. She knew that there were problems with her new book. When she’d asked Edith to grade it, as she always did when they completed a manuscript, Edith had looked at her coolly and said, “C minus.” That alone was enough to make Susann feel faint, but though she resented Edith’s judgment, she accepted it. Edith was not a liar, nor malicious. Before this Edith had never graded her lower than a B plus. Always, they had worked together to raise it to at least an A minus. But Susann didn’t know how to fix this slight book. It wasn’t her métier. This meeting, to go over editorial “suggestions,” would be tense enough with Susann remembering Edith’s grade as well as the disappointing performance of her last book. But now the additional problem of Kim’s knockoff book seemed too much. It was all too much. For the dozenth time, Susann wished she’d never left her old publisher.
“Stop the car,” Susann said. Her voice rose. “Stop the car, now.” The limo slowed, and the moment it was stopped Susann threw open her door, not waiting for the driver’s help. She stepped out onto the pavement, her feet encased in dainty Christian Louboutin heels. Bending from the waist so she would not muss her bouclé Sonia Rykiel suit, Susann vomited all across the back fender of the immaculate stretch limo.
“I don’t understand,” Gerald said stiffly. “When did you find this out?”
Susann sat quietly. She may not feel calm, but at least she would look calm. Susann knew what she had to do. She would give them her best smile. She looked up at all of them and tried to move the corners of her mouth—but found that, as if she’d had a stroke, her mouth could not obey. Alf had warned her not to mention the meeting with Kim. He spoke for them both: “We read it in Publishers Weekly, just the way you did. I should explain that Susann has been estranged from her daughter for some time. The kid’s been in every rehab joint in the country. She’s a drunk and a druggie, completely undependable.”
Susann tried not to wince. She thought of the afternoon she had walked into her bedroom and found her husband fondling poor Kimmy. Joseph Edmonds only had been Kim’s stepfather, but he’d raised her far more than her real father had. Susann had never gotten over the shock and the disgust at seeing Joe’s hairy adult hand covering Kim’s crotch. Even now, in this immaculate office, she felt as if she might be sick again, right there on Gerald Ochs Davis’s superb English antique table. Susann knew that Kim had been badly damaged, and she also knew that Kim had blamed her and manipulated her for years. Both realities were equally true. Susann had simply tried the best she could to cope. She had left Joseph Edmonds, she had found a therapist for Kim, she’d gotten launched on her writing career, and she had tried to live with Kim’s anger and instability. When she met Alf and the money started coming in, she’d used a lot of it to try and assuage Kim’s pain.
But, as with Humpty Dumpty, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men didn’t seem able to put Kim back together. Once broken, she remained broken, and both of them
had to cope with the result as best as each could. Today the result had not taken Susann to court, to bail Kim out for passing bad checks or for shoplifting, nor had it brought her to yet another hospital or intervention. Instead it had brought her to the private conference room of Davis & Dash’s publisher, where she sat before these two strangers, humbled and humiliated, and could explain almost nothing about the truth behind the visible situation.
“I’d like to call Jim Meyer in, if you don’t mind,” Gerald said. “You remember him. He’s our corporate counsel.” Had he sneered? Susann knew that Alf had negotiated for months with Meyer to get every penny, every concession he could. Exposing this mess to Meyer would be one further humiliation.
Susann sat as still as she could. Somehow all of this had taken on a life of its own. What if she simply stood up and screamed, “Leave Kim alone! Leave my daughter alone!” But she sat frozen, doing nothing.
Alf cleared his throat in the silence. “The thing you need to know is that legally she has no right to the Edmonds name. Kim is Susann’s daughter by a previous marriage. She was raised, in part, by Joseph Edmonds. But he never legally adopted her. She did use the name growing up, but there might be an angle there,” Alf suggested.
Under the table Susann felt her hands clench, and her perfectly manicured nails dug into the flesh of her palms. Why had he told them that? He was such a bulldog. He was always so ready to fight. Why couldn’t he just leave Kim alone? Or put this in Davis & Dash’s hands and walk away? For a terrible moment Susann could not help but compare Alf’s attitude toward her daughter with his attitude to his sons. He would never do anything, anything at all, that would hurt them. Not even marry the woman he loved. Or said he loved. For the first time since she had taken her seat in the exquisite conference room, Susann moved, but only to shake her head. Suddenly she felt exhausted—as if lifting even a pen would be far beyond her strength. I need a good, long rest, she thought.
“Well,” Pam Mantiss said, “clearly this is going to take some time and legal action. In the meantime, why don’t we focus on some of the editorial issues that have to be addressed?” The editor in chief looked across the table at Susann. “You see, Susann, the thing is, this book just won’t cut it. You need a hit, and you need one badly. I’m afraid this book—as it stands—is not that hit. We’re asking for significant changes. It’s going to take a lot of work.”
33
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
—T. S. Eliot
Pam Mantiss looked at the manuscript in front of her. The Duplicity of Men. It was badly typed, and to make that worse, it had been badly photocopied. The pages were blurry, and reading all 1,114 of them had been a bitch. It had taken all weekend. But Pam had to admit it was a brilliant book—perhaps the most brilliant book she’d ever read in manuscript. The question now wasn’t whether the book was good, but whether it would be good for her.
There were certain things about The Duplicity of Men that Pam liked. She liked its intelligence, and she liked to be thought of as intelligent. Only an intelligent editor would handle this book. Was that enough reason to publish it? What would be the consequences? It would burnish her reputation, tarnished over SchizoBoy, but what would it do to her bottom line? Because being intelligent was certainly not enough. Pam Mantiss also had to be successful.
Pam luxuriated in success and all that it brought with it. Except, perhaps, the workload. For the last five years, Pam had been able to work at a manic pace for four days a week and have Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to herself. Many senior editors in publishing managed to do that. But the only way she could manage was because of Emma. Pam hadn’t liked the threat Emma had made and the way she had made it, but she had to admit to herself that she didn’t want to have to give Emma up. So the question on the table today, along with the mammoth manuscript, was how to keep her success, her reputation, her profits, and Emma. The only answer seemed to be by publishing The Duplicity of Men.
Well, maybe that wasn’t so bad. After all, she’d gotten the Jude Daniel book for a song. And she had a good feeling about that one—it had “bestseller” written all over it. Plus, the giveaways she’d had to promise to Byron was all stuff the Edmonds book needed anyway to keep the old bag on the list. And with what they’d paid for it, they’d have to spend to keep her on the list. After yesterday’s meeting, Pam thought that Susann was pistol-whipped enough to make any changes necessary to resuscitate the pathetic manuscript. And Jim Meyer, the creep, would handle the daughter/author issue.
Pam looked up at the clock. It was almost two-thirty, and she had a meeting with Stewart Campbell at three. She struggled into a pair of black jeans but could barely get them half-zipped. Well, she’d throw a long sweater over them. Campbell was a nobody—she’d published two of his mysteries, and they’d gone nowhere fast. She was about to reject his latest, but then she realized he was the solution to her Peet Trawley problem. In the immortal words of Don Corleone, she was about to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
So, she decided, she’d do this Terry O’Neal book. Anyway, she’d manage to buy Duplicity before any other house got to see it, thanks to Emma’s anonymous “friend.” The list was shaping up, if only she could bag a couple of other good things and get the new Trawley book finished.
Pam sat in the bright light behind the Formica table at Ollie’s Noodle House. Stewart sat across from her, playing with the huge bowl of soup he had ordered. Pam should have stuck with the soup, too. Instead, she’d had fried dumplings, the irresistible scallion pancakes, and the chow fun for which Ollie’s was famous. But tomorrow, she decided, she was going to go on a water fast. She’d stop on her way home this afternoon and buy two cases of Evian and have them delivered. Now she looked across the table at Stewart. She’d better talk fast, because in just three-quarters of an hour the dinner crowd would begin to trickle in and the joint would be jammed, with the excess spilling out in lines along upper Broadway for the next five hours. Pam didn’t need to have this conversation overheard.
Stewart looked at her. He had nice eyes, and the kind of dark, thick hair that stood up from his head in a healthy-looking thatch. He was a little younger than she was—maybe thirty-five or -six—and not bad-looking. But there was a softness about his face that in men always turned Pam off. She’d never slept with Stewart. Or maybe she had, once, after his first book party. It was hard to remember. She used to drink. Whatever, it had never happened again, and it never would.
Stewart’s books sold, but not much. They certainly weren’t art and not quite popular enough to be moneymakers. That made him a hack. He’d put together a plot, he’d plod through it in a workmanly way, and he’d get his stuff in on time. He’d done two books, and she’d never paid him any more for the second than she had paid him for the first. He had a day job, substitute teaching in Brooklyn. She knew nothing else about him, except she thought he’d once been married.
“So, what do you think?” Stewart was asking. He mistakenly believed she’d called him about his work. As if she cared. He was talking about creating a new detective, as if Pam needed another goddamned Uh-oh. She shrugged, and before she had a chance to tell him no, she watched his shoulders droop and his lip extend. This was a man who expected defeat.
“Forget about it, Stewart. I have something more important to talk to you about. How would you like to make some real money?”
“Who do I have to kill?” Stewart asked. It wasn’t such a funny joke: Pam remembered that last year Stewart had been stabbed, badly, by a junior high school student. It had taken him months to recover, and his case against the Board of Education was dragging on endlessly.
“No violence involved, except of the psychic kind,” Pam assured him. She paused. “Aside from your recent near-death experience, did you ever think of ghosting?”
Stewart smiled, his grin lopsided. “I wasn’t sure my writing was good enough for anyone to hire me to write for them,” he snorted.
Time for som
e pop psychology, Pam decided. The guy had to be enthusiastic and motivated. At the same time, if the poor fuck wasn’t desperate, he wouldn’t take the gig. “Hey, don’t be so down on yourself. Your work’s not so bad. It’s just not succeeding financially. If you had more time to hone it, to work on it…but that takes money. I have a way we both can make some money.” She paused, certain she had his attention. He’d stopped picking at his rice noodles, and she nodded toward the bowl. “Are you done?” she asked. When he said he was, she pulled the dish in front of her and began to shovel the noodles into her mouth. Stewart just sat there. What a schlemiel. But one she could manipulate—one she owned. “Do you know that Peet Trawley died?” she asked. He shook his head. “Well, he did. And I have a manuscript of his—well, a kind of outline—that’s got to be smoothed out. Well, actually, finished. Uh…written, really. It’s got to be written.”
Stewart was silent, but he wasn’t stupid. “You mean you need a ghostwriter to finish Peet Trawley’s book?”
She nodded, her mouth full of noodles.
Stewart watched her eat for a few moments. “Is it legal?”
“Sure,” she said and wiped her hand with her mouth. “He gets the royalties,” she reminded him, her resentments still fresh.
“But he’s dead.”
“Okay. So his family gets the royalties. You get the drift. The point is, I need someone who’ll take on the work for hire. Flat fee. No credit. Just the money.”
“And you think I could do it?”
She’d have to play this part carefully. “I think with my help you can do it,” she said. “But then Peet needed a lot of my help, too.” Just then, as she had feared, a noisy group of Columbia students walked into the restaurant. Pam hoped they wouldn’t sit anywhere near her. She also hoped they weren’t from the law school. She’d have to make a side deal with Stewart on this. Jim Meyer and the others could never know. She’d tell Gerald but no one else. They’d crucify her. She crossed her arms and leaned forward. “I need this work done fast. I tell you the story, you write it, I edit it. You make any revisions needed. You’re paid upon completion, not before. You agree not to reveal your involvement. Ever, for any reason. Not to your girlfriend, not to your mother. No one. And then you get a hundred thousand dollars.”
The Bestseller Page 22
