“I know.”
“There’s no book biz without Sonny. It’s like the movies without DeNiro. Seriously, darling, how are you?”
“I’ve been better.”
“Of course. You poor dear. Can I help?”
“I don’t think so.”
She looked at me like a sculptor with a block of marble, as if she were deciding where to start chipping away at the stone. “Still hate my guts?”
“I don’t waste much time on you or your guts anymore, Bree.”
“I come in peace,” she said.
“I really don’t care how you come. Or how many times you come.”
“Touché,” Bree said. “I deserve that, darling, but the Kevin Stone thing was years ago. Can’t we get past it?”
“I’m sorry, is there a statute of limitations on screwing your best friend’s fiancé?”
“No, but you know me, Julie. It really wasn’t my fault. I’m an utter slave to my little man in the boat. It’s like a disability. Don’t you Americans have to make accommodations for people with disabilities?”
“I’m not sure the ADA covers sluts,” I said.
“Well, it should. Imagine if I hadn’t slept with Kevin and you wound up marrying the son of a bitch. He would still have been a horny horse cheating on you with nineteen-year-old interns. So you could say I was actually doing you a favor by sleeping with him.” Before I could slap her for the second time in my life, she leaned across the desk and whispered, “Kidding, darling, kidding, kidding, kidding. You know I feel like a complete and total shit for what I did.”
“You should.”
“And I do, but the disability thing? Absolutely true. It tingles, and I must obey.”
I laughed. You can’t help but laugh at Bree. For as long as I’ve known her, she has been obscene, ruthless, shameless, and very funny. I’ve hated her for years, but I loved her for even more years.
We go way back. Back when my hair was short. Before we both became entertainment agents on opposite sides of the pond. I’ve slept in her bed more times than I can count. No, not in an “I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It” kind of way; we were best friends who bunked together whenever we were in the same city. Truly, Bree was my sister. I envied her for her utter confidence. She could waltz into a roomful of strangers and charm the pants off them. Literally. She was the ballsiest girl I had ever met. She used to RSVP herself to in-crowd parties when invitations came for her boss. She used to raid the slush piles for manuscripts when the top agents were out to lunch. She was arrested once for beating up a reporter who trashed one of her clients in the press, and the reporter wound up hiring her as his own agent. That’s Bree.
She’s right about Kevin, too. Marrying him would have been a disaster. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t ready to pluck out her eyes when I found out she’d been sleeping with him.
“Did you and Kevin hook up last night when you got into town?” I asked.
Kevin Stone is still an agent at McNally-Brown. He finally got married last year, but I doubted that monogamy was his style. If Bree called, he’d come running.
“No, no, no, fool me twice, shame on me,” Bree insisted. “I have sworn off married men forever.”
“You?”
“Forever! Or at least until I’m really, really horny. Shame, though. Kevin did have amazing stamina. I mean, after four hours, I would look at him and say, shouldn’t we call a doctor or something? But he claimed it was all him, no drugs.”
“Shut up, Bree.”
“You’re right. Me and my big mouth. Although most men like that.” She slapped herself. “Ouch, there’s a freebie for you. So what’s up with you, darling? Are you seeing anyone?”
“No.”
Bree sighed. “Look at you, you gorgeous thing. What a waste. What are you saving yourself for, Julie?”
“I’m experimenting with celibacy,” I said. “Or rather, celibacy is experimenting with me.”
“That’s like putting the Mona Lisa behind glass.”
“The Mona Lisa is behind glass,” I said.
“Yes, but her smile would be bigger if she were on her back.”
“I’m not like you, Bree. I don’t jump into bed for the hell of it.”
“Yes, yes, you have to be in a relationship. Why add complications to something simple like sex? Look, you were engaged to Thad Keller, and you told me the banging with him was roll-back-your-eyes-orbit-the-moon. As for Kevin, I know what it was like to sit on that nightstick. So do yourself a favor, darling, and get some.”
“Do you really think I want sex advice from you?”
“Who better than me?” Bree asked. “What about your new office mate? Garrett? He’s delicious, and you see him every day. I know you always had a thing for him.”
I shot her the evil eye that said, Quiet! I got up and shut the door. It’s a small office. It’s easy to overhear.
“Ah, methinks I touched a nerve,” Bree said. “You should go for it, darling. Dating a younger man is hip these days. Everyone’s doing it.”
“Can we move on?” I said. “I assume you didn’t come here simply to talk about my love life.”
“Okay, fine. Next topic. Are the rumors true about Gernestier? Are you letting Helmut take over West 57?”
Oh, great. Word about the possible take-over was already on the street. It wouldn’t take long for news to spread. The publishing industry is populated by incorrigible gossips. I wondered if Helmut had leaked the offer to put pressure on me.
“Where did you hear that?” I asked.
“The two of you went to da Umberto, right? Vittorio likes me. He tells me everything.”
“Well, keep it to yourself, okay?”
“My lips are sealed, darling.”
Right. At least until someone sticks a tongue between them.
“Do you want my advice?” Bree went on.
“Like I want an STD.”
Bree was unfazed. “Sell the business.”
“Just like that?”
“Publishers are dinosaurs, darling. Sonny was the last T-Rex. We all need to reinvent ourselves.”
“I love the book biz,” I said, which was true.
“There is no book biz anymore. There are hardly books anymore, just bits and bytes on Kindles. We serve the great god Amazon.”
“A book is a book.”
“Sell,” Bree repeated.
“And do what?”
“Work with me.”
“With you?” I asked. “Are you kidding?”
“Not at all. I need a partner. We always made an amazing team.”
“I don’t think so, Bree.”
“Well, suit yourself, darling, but you should think about it. Anyway, if you won’t join me, I’m sure your mother can hook you up in L.A., right? You’d look great on Venice Beach.”
I’d heard that suggestion before, and when it comes to my mother, I don’t believe in coincidences. “By any chance, has my mother talked to you about her plans for my career?” I asked.
“Well, of course, we talk every day. Didn’t she tell you? Cherie is producing the film version of Paperback Bitch.”
Stop. Pause. Rewind. Bree did not really say that, did she?
“My mother is producing the movie of your freaking book?” I asked.
It came out more like the sound made by a howler-monkey. I really did say “freaking,” by the way.
“Yes, she loved it,” Bree said. “She said it was the funniest damn thing she’d read in years.”
“That book makes me look like some kind of deranged über-bitch.”
“Oh, it’s just a novel, Julia. Sorry, Julie.” She gave me an evil cackle. “Oh, and nice use of über. You’re already getting in touch with your inner German. Helmut will like that.”
“Go away, Bree.”
“We haven’t talked about King.”
“So talk. Make it quick.”
“He’s flying in tonight. We’re both staying at the Gansevoort.”
“Is he read
y for Pierce Gorgon tomorrow?” I asked.
“Darling, no one is ready for Pierce. The man feasts on children like some kind of Hans Christian Anderson troll. Anyway, King isn’t really a candidate for media training. I never know what’s going to come out of his mouth until I hear it.”
“Great.”
“Whoopi wants him on The View, too. I love her, but I miss Barbara, don’t you? Just as well, though. Babs probably would have brought her little dog on the set. King isn’t good with dogs.”
“I’m trying to get King on the Kelly Jax show, too, ” I said, “but Kelly isn’t very happy with me right now.”
Bree shrugged. “Relax. We’re golden. The line at the bookstore will be out the door.”
My habit is to think about all the things that can go wrong. It’s a sickness. I remembered the reporter in the lobby and his insinuations about King and Sonny. “Do you know a Post reporter named Nick Duggan? I gather he was in London for a while.”
“Diggin’ Duggan?”
“That’s him.”
“Typical tabloid trash. The only thing he digs into is his nose. Why?”
“He’s asking questions about King. I’m a little worried.”
Bree shook her head. “Forget him. Nothing to worry about. Worrying is a symptom of someone who’s not getting laid. You need to get out more. Come on, I’ve got the evening free. We can paint the town.”
“You and me?”
“Sure, it’ll be like the old days. We’ll have fun. Get drunk. We can see a play together.”
Uh oh. Did she say: See a play?
I said: “See a play?”
Bree grinned. “Right. See a play.”
“Tonight?”
“Tonight.”
“With you?”
“With me.”
“Any suggestions?” I asked.
I was really hoping she’d say Kinky Boots. Fun Home. The Book of Mormon. Mamma Mia! Anything but what I knew she was going to say.
“I hear that adaptation of Rear Window is terrific,” Bree replied with faux innocence.
She reached into the pocket of her leather jacket and slid out a Broadway ticket and waved it at me. It was a match for the free ticket on my desk. She was sitting next to me in the front row.
See? There’s always a catch.
6
I had lunch that day with Libby Varnay, author of Morningside Park. Libby is an incorrigible gossip, and she was in fine form.
“Have you seen the new Woody Allen film?” she asked me, her eyes dancing wickedly. “It’s about a sexually charged twenty-two-year-old girl who falls passionately in love with a short Jewish man in his seventies.” She snickered and added, “I do love these May-December male fantasies, don’t you? Think about all those fifty-something university professors who write novels. Have you noticed how their heroes are always fifty-something university professors? And invariably, the gorgeous blond undergrad falls passionately in love with them. I mean, honestly, has that happened even once in the history of the world?”
Libby sipped white wine. I had iced tea. She eyed me across the table, where we were seated near the conservatory windows at Tavern on the Green. She had no trouble reading my face. “I’m trying to cheer you up, Julie,” she said. “Obviously, I’m doing a terrible job.”
“No, no, it’s not that.”
Libby took my hand. “Never mind, I understand. Cry if you want. I did plenty of it myself when I heard the news.”
I’m sure she did. I love Libby, and so did Sonny.
Libby is the very definition of how to age beautifully. She is around fifty years old, tall, pencil thin, caramel skin. Her nose is pinched, like Lena Horne’s. Her short black hair sweeps across her forehead, every strand precisely in place. Her fingers are delicate, with cuticles like crescent moons. Normally, she wears an expensive necklace of gray pearls, with matching ring and earrings, but today she wore a high-necked white silk blouse, giving her the elegant neck of a swan. I doubt she even owns a pair of jeans or flat shoes.
You’d think, looking at her, that this vision of grace must have been born to money, but the opposite is true. She grew up dirt-poor north of 150th. Twenty years ago, while working as a day nurse in a facility for Alzheimer’s patients, mostly indigent blacks, she wrote her one and only novel. Morningside Park was set inside a fictional version of that facility, where a young psychiatrist illegally uses experimental hallucinogens to unlock and document the visions of his patients. The book skipped across time and geography, evoking the worlds in which each patient lived. Those beautiful worlds stood in stark contrast to the unflinching horror of the facility itself, depicted as a house of such bleak torment that the disease becomes an escape. Like his patients, the psychiatrist begins to seek refuge in an alternate reality, taking the drugs himself, going on longer and longer respites from his daily life until, in the end, he cannot find his way back.
I remember reading the novel for the first time when I was eighteen. I sat on the rocks in a hidden crevice of Central Park on an August Sunday morning, intending to spend an hour with the book, because Sonny told me it was wonderful. Ten hours later, as darkness started to fall, I finally emerged from my hiding place, my face flooded with tears. I had never felt so devastated, so fragile, or so alive. I didn’t go home. I walked north to Morningside Park, a stupid thing for a teenage girl alone, but I needed to stand outside the facility where Libby had worked and study its brick walls and broken windows, and feel its hopelessness, and try to see what she had seen there.
It was at that moment that I understood the power of a novel to change your life.
Fourteen publishers rejected Morningside Park. It was too frank. Too honest. Too extreme. They wanted nothing to do with it. Sonny was different. He read it and drove to the Washington Heights apartment that Libby shared with her mother and four sisters and asked her in person for the honor of publishing her novel. They became best friends.
Some people write book after book; some have only one in their hearts. Libby birthed Morningside Park into the world and never finished another book. Not that she needed to. The book and the movie lifted her and her family out of poverty and into the exclusive wealth of the Upper East Side. She’d established a foundation in her will for combating Alzheimer’s, so that her crusade would live on long after she was gone. So would the power of her novel.
That was exactly how publishing was supposed to work. Or at least, that was what I’d always believed.
“I have a gift for you,” I told her.
Libby’s eyebrows went up in a question mark. I handed her the first edition of Morningside Park, Sonny’s copy from his desk. She handled it delicately, like china. She opened the book to the middle and saw the freshness of his notes, scrawled on the pages. Her eyes filled with tears.
“That man,” she said with such deep affection I smiled.
Her emotion attracted attention. Outside the restaurant, in the rain, a middle-aged man in a wool suit stared at us. He had curly gray hair, flat on his head, and he looked too prosperous to be a typical gawker. However, he obviously recognized Libby. He stood there with his nose practically pressed against the glass and watched us for so long that it became uncomfortable. Finally, my cold stare drove him away.
I watched as Libby turned each page in her book as if it were brittle. I don’t think she’d even been aware of the stranger outside. She was probably used to fans popping up everywhere.
“Sonny told me once he was prouder of your book than anything else he’d put in print,” I said.
Libby smiled, and her teeth were ivory white. “Look at these notes. I wish he’d made those suggestions back then. I would have made more edits.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” I teased her.
“No, I wouldn’t, you’re right.” She closed the cover and reminisced. “Sonny and I were both so stubborn. The battles we had over this book! Sentence by sentence until the early hours for months at a time. I was a pigheaded egomaniac, and I resisted every
suggestion. Both of us were so damned sure we were right. I don’t even remember how we resolved most of the disagreements. I won some, and he won some.”
In my head, I expected Sonny to join us. I figured this was the perfect time for him to chime in, but he didn’t. It was just the two of us. Libby felt some of my loneliness, and she looked around at the bustling restaurant and its elaborate chandeliers with dismay. “There are people whose loss simply leaves the world a grayer place,” she said.
“I know.”
“Thank you for this,” she said, holding the book. “It means the world to me.”
“He’d want you to have it.”
“I’ll treasure it, Julie. Really.”
Libby gestured at a young black man at another table and waved him over to us. I knew him; he was Drew, Libby’s nephew and chauffeur of the past three years. Like me, Libby didn’t drive, so wherever she went, Drew went. She’d already lifted most of her immediate family out of poverty, and she was determined to do whatever she could for the next generation, too. It wasn’t an easy struggle, even with money. Drew had been hooked up with gangs and drugs for most of his teen years before Libby dragged him off the street corners at Audubon Avenue and into her rarefied circle. I liked him. He was overweight and quiet, but he would do anything for Libby.
Libby handed Drew the copy of Morningside Park. “Keep this safe for me, will you, dear?”
“Of course, ma’am,” he rumbled.
I smiled at Drew. He didn’t smile back – he was too shy – but he dipped his head and shuffled back to his own table. It was one of Libby’s traditions. Everywhere she ate, she booked a table for Drew, too.
“Do you need anything, Julie?” Libby asked me. “Is there anything I can do to help? You must have a lot weighing on you right now.”
“I appreciate the offer, but no,” I said. “It helps just to see you, Libby. I’m glad you called.”
She put down her fork and knife. I realized she’d barely touched her goat cheese omelet. “I did want to talk to you about something else,” she told me. “Business, actually.”
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