Foul Matter

by Martha Grimes

  “Listen, I got nothing against that stuff in the Met. I just don’t happen to think Monet and that bunch speak to a lot of people right now.”

  “They speak to me. You’ve got your contract. Tell me about these men, how I can get hold of them if I need to.”

  “I told you. Michael’s. Two o’clock, Friday.” Danny reached up his hand almost daintily to adjust his tinted glasses and walked back into the fog.

  THIRTEEN

  Bobby Mackenzie’s assistant—he had four—Melissa was retooling her face in front of a mirror propped against a small pillar of what had turned out to be Jordan Strutts’s nonbest-seller, a book that Bobby and Peter Genero had championed the past June: “championed” meaning talked about, gotten the buzz out on rather than actually “stood behind.” “Stood behind” would have been a real commitment, one for which Bobby could get the entire roller coaster of promotion, publicity, and sales fired up to launch a book like a rocket. Strutts’s book hadn’t been so blessed.

  As Sally passed by the outer office, Melissa rose quickly, rushed to the door into the corridor of plush carpeting, and called to her to come back.

  “I’ve got to go to Bloomie’s for a final fitting and it sounds like they’ll be in there”—she bucked her head back toward the inner office—“like, forever. Are you busy?”

  Sally sighed. She was always busy. It’s what came with the good fortune of being the right arm of an editor who more than did his job. Tom Kidd took on more books than he could comfortably manage within the limits of the ordinary working day, so he changed the limits. Right now he had four books on the spring list, and there were endless tasks to perform in the publication of just one, much less four. If you were Tom Kidd, there were.

  “You want me to sit at your desk. Okay, but not, believe me, ‘forever.’ If I see forever coming, I’m out of here. What fitting?”

  “My dress. My wedding dress, for God’s sakes. I am getting married.”

  Married. Did people still do that sort of thing around here? Did Bloomingdale’s have a bridal department? Fat lot Sally’d know about it. So Sally smiled at Melissa, hoping it was a smile worthy enough for a woman about to marry. “I forgot, sorry. Yes, of course I’ll answer your telephone. And whatever.” She could hear the voices in the inner office. Loud laughter, then laughter pitched low.

  Melissa was shrugging into a black cloth coat, pulling her long taffy-colored hair out from the imprisoning collar. “There’s not really much ‘whatever.’ Bobby’s been energy deprived the last few days. That, or what he’s doing doesn’t involve anything I do. ’Bye.”

  Sally sat down in Melissa’s typist’s chair, which was just like Melissa: pert and small. How a chair could be “pert” she didn’t know, but this one, with its little curved back and ergonomic seat like a sealed buttock, managed to be, as if it might spring into action at Melissa’s slightest touch. Melissa wheeled everywhere—to the filing cabinets, to the Xerox machine—with the momentum of a veteran paraplegic racing down a ramp. There should be contests. Sally felt what little energy she had brought into the office was being sapped by the chair.

  She closed her eyes, heard the drone of voices, heard a few words that sounded like “over my dead body” (Bobby talking), and felt weary, weary and old. She was thirty-two and, although she really loved her job (and how many could say that?), she still felt wasted. For Sally really wanted to write, too. It would be almost impossible to have so much exposure to good writing and the thrill (writers mightn’t admit it, but that’s what it was: thrilling) of seeing one’s words in print, more than “in print,” published by a prestigious publisher who’s willing to pay for it. Well, she had tried to write, but—and she supposed that this was the difference between writers and nonwriters—had grown horribly frustrated in the mere attempt to set down one single sentence. It was as if she were staring at nonreflecting glass, the words congealing in her mind, coagulating into a full stop. It was simply transferring the words in one’s mind to the page, wasn’t it? Then how was it the words seemed un-graspable? She had attempted this time after time and the same thing happened. It brought her to tears.

  Without giving her own poor attempts away, she had asked Tom Kidd, who had told her, after mulling the question over (one of the reasons she liked him), that writers just kept on staring at nothing until they wrote something. Might be two minutes or two weeks. Maybe it was something ordinary mortals couldn’t do. Not write (Tom said), but wait.

  “You make it sound as if they’re more holy or more noble.” She had been irrationally irritated by his answer.

  And Tom mulled that over, too. “Holy, maybe; noble, no.”

  They talked a lot about things like this, sometimes eating their lunch in Tom’s office, Sally bringing in her insulated bag with the colored cats on the cover; Tom getting out his brown bag that always held his white meat of chicken sandwich. On white bread, Wonder Bread. This same sandwich his wife had been making for him over the years and he said every lunchtime that it was the best chicken sandwich in the world. Sally had once accepted a quarter of his sandwich to see if this was true, expecting that she’d be sampling stars or the silver dust of a comet’s tail, and being disappointed when it turned out to be plain old chicken. Just chicken, butter, Wonder Bread. But she’d made an ummm sound and told him that yes, he was right.

  After perhaps a hundred failed fiction-writing attempts, Sally hit on possibly writing nonfiction. That might be her forte. She didn’t believe this, but one day she did ask Tom, from the other side of the piles of books on his desk and her chin nearly grazing the garish jacket on top, whether anyone had recently written a book about the sheer hell of writing.

  Tom had said he didn’t know it was sheer hell, at least if what she meant was incredibly hard work, which he could only demonstrate by citing four of his own writers, and the rest—and God only knew the rest of the house’s—made it look like a day at the beach. Anyway, no, he didn’t know about any nonfiction books about a writer’s turmoil (though he could list off the top of his head a dozen fictional accounts of turmoil). There were, however, a lot of how-to books, which were relatively worthless. Would-be writers read them for company, not direction.

  He must know, of course, why Sally was asking these questions, but he didn’t come out with it. He was too much of a gentleman to embarrass her.

  She thought about Ned and Saul and holiness. What did Tom mean by “holy,” anyway? It had been a word she’d tossed out like a sneer that he had taken at least semiseriously. Was it like dedication? No, it had to be more than that, or something other than.

  The telephone rang again just as the fax machine started spitting out pages. She told the caller Bobby was at a sales conference and the caller rang off. The fax machine stopped. She paid no attention.

  Concentration, what about that? Was that some kind of “holy” thing? Being centered? Focused? They—Ned and Saul—certainly shared the capacity for all of these things. It was almost transcendent, the way they kept their writing selves intact and nearly untouchable. She wondered if the more that ability was used, the more the centered and transcendent part grew until one day it was all of them, it was the whole self. They became their writing; they were their characters. She thought: how incredible, no longer having to drag around as if you had a dead body shackled to your ankle, that part of the self that wept over publishers’ indifference, that wailed at bad reviews, and, once landing on the TBR list in fourth place, raging against the three guys who had bested you at first, second, and third.

  The egos of writers were really that hard to satisfy, that insatiable. Yet who could blame them? Having poured a quart of blood into even the shoddiest offering, why blame a really good writer who had poured out the whole four quarts? It was his life’s blood in that book, don’t you forget it! But Saul and Ned—

  “. . . Ned Isaly . . .”

  Sally jumped slightly in her chair. For a second, she thought the name had been spoken in her head. It came, of course, from
Bobby’s office and it wasn’t until then that she realized the door was open a crack—just a sliver, enough to let through light and sound. The voices rose and fell like the tide coming in and going out.

  “. . . Isaly’s contract . . .”

  One of them said it again . . .

  Inside the office, Clive was pacing. His steps took him nearer to the door and farther from it. “Bobby. For Christ’s sake—!”

  “You said it yourself; you used the argument yourself. If we break Isaly’s contract, we’ll have to contend with Tom Kidd.” Bobby had his feet on his desk and was leaning back, sans coat, holding a dust jacket up to the light splashing in through his window. Central Park glittered in the light. “This jacket sucks, Clive.” He tossed it across the desk. “As long as Ned Isaly delivers a manuscript, we can’t touch him. I mean, it would be pretty foolish to pretend it was unacceptable. That’s even without the complication of Kidd’s walking out if we did it. So what else did Zito say?”

  Clive made no move to pick up the cover mock-up, appalled that Bobby could take this whole business so calmly. “That’s all. Just that these two always work together.”

  Sally sensed, if she didn’t actually hear, someone moving toward the door. She zipped the typist’s chair over to the Xerox machine and punched it on. She had nothing to copy but a page from a book lying there, but it made no difference as her back was to the door and she was on the other side of the room. She slapped the open book down and pushed the button.

  “Where’s Melissa?”

  It was Clive. She removed the book and turned to face him, trying to look really dumb, her mouth slack, eyes wide. “Oh. Melissa had to leave for a while. It was a kind of emergency about her wedding.”

  Clive wasn’t interested in the wedding; he was looking at her for a long moment, obviously trying to assess what, if anything, she’d heard. He wouldn’t have worried about Melissa; she was too self-absorbed to let any talk intrude that hadn’t to do with her wedding. But Sally, that was cause for concern. Sally was known to be smart, quick, and intuitive.

  Sally turned back to the machine as if she couldn’t care less what they got up to in there.

  “What’re you doing out here?”

  Over her shoulder she said, “Copying some pages. Why? Did you want something?” Still wide eyed, she was all candor.

  “What? No. Yes. Make some coffee, will you?”

  She nodded. She could tell he had determined she was harmless and had heard nothing.

  The door would not stay shut, that’s what it was. Even after Clive had made a point of pulling it to, it was clear (to her, not to him) that the catch was worn or dislodged.

  She wheeled to the coffeemaker and dumped several spoonsful of Blue Mountain into the grinder (God, but this man was spoiled!), which she then transferred to the cone holder of Bobby’s spaceshuttlelike-looking coffeemaker (designed, she noted, by Porsche); she added water, turned it on, then wheeled back to the desk. The desk was as close to the door as it was possible to get, short of putting her ear up to it, and she daren’t get that close.

  At first, Clive’s voice was considerably lower, and he’d stopped pacing, so that she heard nothing but a mumble. But it wasn’t long before the voice returned to normal levels and he had resumed his movements again. She would make sure her hands were on the computer keyboard if one of them suddenly appeared again.

  Ned. They were still talking about Ned and Ned’s contract. Why? This meeting seemed to be taking place for that sole purpose . . .

  Clive was out of his chair and pacing again.

  “So who are they?” Bobby wasn’t about to let him get back on the subject of Ned-if-Ned-publishes.

  “Candy and Karl,” said Clive. “Those are the names he gave me.”

  “Two. We don’t want two. That’s just one more person to know about the, ah, project.”

  Clive took a weird delight in being able to tell Bobby for once he had no choice. No Bobby choice—this included no rewriting of the Constitution, no reimagining the universe, no reinventing the world. The World as Bobby Mackenzie Sees It. Fuck you, Bobby. “Whether you want two or not, you’ve got two . . .”

  “Whether you want to or not, you’ve got to . . . ” Sally couldn’t understand why Clive seemed to be telling Bobby what to do. “Got to” what?

  Clive moved closer to Bobby’s big desk. “They work together.” Jesus, were they really talking about this? Clive had known Bobby was a megalomaniac, a virtual Attila the Hun, but this . . . ? And Clive himself—he was afraid to think about what he thought about himself.

  “Huh.” What came from Bobby was a kind of exploded sigh. He picked up another colorful, shiny jacket and held it at arm’s length. “Where in hell was Mamie Fussel when this got done?”

  “It was Mamie who did it.” She was the art director, a rough-cut woman Clive didn’t particularly care for.

  “I’d rather be back in the days of tits and ass.”

  “These are the days of tits and ass,” said Clive. “Could we focus here? Could we just stay on the point here?”

  Bobby dropped this jacket on the other one. “Another thing is, Isaly’s going to be giving Tom a new manuscript soon. It’s due this month.”

  They always talked about manuscripts like long-overdue babies. Tired, Clive had finally dropped onto the sofa. “Why in hell does that make a difference?”

  “Why? Because I don’t think Paul Giverney would relish a new Isaly coming out, even after this little reversal of fortune Ned’s going to have. And God knows not with all of the attendant publicity around the publication of Isaly’s new property. Right?”

  Clive could only stare.

  Bobby picked up the phone, then thought better of it, plucked up the two jacket mock-ups, and went to the door.

  “Where the hell’s Melissa?”

  “Small emergency,” said Sally as she raised her fingers from the keyboard. “Coffee’s just about ready.”

  “Uh. Call Tom Kidd and ask him what’s the progress on the Ned Isaly book. Then tell Mamie Fussel I want to see her asap. These are fucking terrible.” He tossed the jackets on Melissa’s desk.

  “I can—” She stopped. At Bobby’s raised-eyebrow inquiry, she mumbled, “Nothing.” She could have, too. Told him about the progress of Ned’s book. But that might eclipse Tom’s own reaction to all of this. Tom wouldn’t stand for their giving Ned any trouble.

  Bobby disappeared from the door and, as Clive had done, pulled it shut.

  Sally felt a chill descend and rubbed her arms against it. She thought she knew what the theme of this conversation between the two of them was about. If Ned reneged on the delivery date of his book, Mackenzie-Haack would drop him. She could not work out what Paul Giverney had to do with it.

  Tears came to her eyes. What in God’s name could Bobby (or Clive) have against Ned? How could they even consider such a thing?

  Sally stared at the gaudy jackets Bobby had dropped on the desk. They were not inspired, no, but neither were they awful.

  And to Bobby it was all the same—the end of Ned Isaly at Mackenzie-Haack and two dead-in-the-water dust jackets.

  “She was nothing like my mother,” said Saul, still talking about his grandmother.

  They were sitting in the park, on this now-luminous November day, such a rarity in New York that all one wants to do is sit and look at it, at the light that lay like a transparent crust across the cold grass beyond them. It was so clear, Ned’s head was spinning a little with the dazzle and clarity of it all, as if he were drunk on air.

  Saul had stopped talking and sat smoking a fresh cigar. Then his talk resumed: “I could never understand how my mother and my uncle Swann could be her children. I got it in my head there was a mix-up in the hospital. You know.”

  “Maybe you believed that; kids do, don’t they? It’s a way of explaining discomfort and pain to themselves.” Ned was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, and now looked up at Saul, waiting for him to go on, but he’d stopp
ed. Ned was surprised he’d talked this much about himself. About anything, really.

  “Isn’t that Sally?”

  Ned followed the direction of Saul’s gaze. It was Sally and she seemed in a dreadful hurry, walking so fast she might at any moment break into a run. Getting up, smiling, he regretted there was no wind to snatch up a page of his manuscript and send it flying, just to see her, once again, make that leap and pluck it out of the air.

  “Hey! Hey!” she called, as if in standing they meant to run away from her.

  By the time she reached their bench, she was out of breath. “I was going—” She stopped, breathed deeply.

  “What is it?” Saul asked.

  She didn’t look at Saul, but at Ned. Without preamble, she said, “They’re trying to get rid of you.”

  Ned gave a little half laugh. “What’re you talking about? Who?”

  “Clive and Bobby. I heard them talking. I just took over for Melissa for an hour or so, and the door was open an inch but they didn’t know—” Then she shook her head, as if with growing impatience at herself for bothering with details, even for being breathless. “It was open an inch and I wasn’t even conscious of their voices until one of them spoke your name. I didn’t think too much of that, there was no reason they shouldn’t, but then it was ‘Ned Isaly’ several times over.” And here Sally turned a stricken face upward to Ned. “They said ‘Isaly’ and ‘contract’ several times. So it wasn’t a casual mention of your name. The meeting was about you—”

  Ned interrupted. “Was Tom there?”

  It annoyed her immensely that Ned would look for some benign reason for this meeting. “No, of course he wasn’t! Wouldn’t I have said? That’s part of it, that he wasn’t there, that they were making decisions about you without him. Clive was upset, too. I could tell from his tone. And to upset Clive—he’s such a selfish creep—would take a lot. Listen: it sounded as if they were going to try to break your contract.” Her voice rose steadily, anxiety squeezing it out.