by Bridie Clark
I plopped down at my desk again and turned on my computer. Jackson and I had a few meetings scheduled for the day with prospective authors, and in the afternoon we were meeting with a novelist to review our notes on her manuscript. Jackson preferred to talk through his editorial letters in person so that there could be no misunderstanding with the author about the revisions he was looking for. It was an old school approach, and maybe not the most time-efficient one, but I’d benefited enormously from being part of these discussions.
You have new mail, my Outlook told me.
Thursday, 8:23 pm
To: Claire Truman
([email protected])
From: Courtney Ronald
([email protected])
Subject: Sorry
Hey, Claire—
You know how much I was hoping to pair you up with Nicholas for his next novel. He’d love to work with you, and I know you’ve got a lot of passion for his work. Unfortunately, I just don’t feel we can continue to string along these other offers. I know you’re doing your best to get an answer asap from Gordon, but this editor at Random House is chomping at the bit and we’re under pressure to accept his very generous advance. I’ve got to do what’s best for my client, and that means taking what we’ve got on the table. So sorry that we won’t be working together on this project, but hopefully we can find one very soon.
Best,
C.
Ugh. I’d put a lot of work into helping Nicholas develop his story line, and it was disappointing to think that I wouldn’t have the pleasure of seeing it through to the finish. But I understood Courtney’s decision. They’d given me more than enough time to come up with a counteroffer, but unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to get the project onto Gordon’s radar screen.
My phone rang and I instantly—if irrationally—thought of Randall. “Peters and Pomfret, this is Claire Truman,” I said in my most professional voice.
“Claire?” It was Mr. Lew, landlord of my West Village apartment building. Shit. I knew immediately why he was calling—it had happened once before, last Christmas, when I just couldn’t make my paycheck stretch in all the directions it had to.
“Hi, Mr. Lew,” I answered gloomily.
“Claire, I am sorry, but your rent check? It bounced like nobody’s business. It’s no problem, Claire, I just need to know when you can pay.”
I apologized and promised to drop off a new check for him next week. Double ugh. I had been working too long to be still struggling on my current salary. Sure it would have provided a very decent lifestyle in Iowa, but in New York the rent on my shoe-box studio ate up three-quarters of my take-home pay every month.
The only thing to do was to focus on the day ahead. I was glad it was heavily scheduled. Things had been pretty slow during the first weeks of summer, and I was ready for more action. I dialed into my voice mail while my nearly antique computer woke itself up … two new messages were waiting for me.
The first was from Jackson, saying that he’d be working from home and that I should reschedule the day’s meetings and feel free to take off early. I sighed. Maybe not the normal reaction to hearing that the day would be slow and relaxed, but I wasn’t in the mood for a leisurely pace. I was already on top of my own workload, and I’d read and written reader’s reports for all the submissions that had come in for Jackson. There wasn’t much I could do to forge ahead without him—at least, there wasn’t enough to keep me busy all day.
“Jackson’s not coming in,” I lamented to Mara over the wall. She scrunched her freckled nose in sympathy, knowing that I’d been feeling underchallenged lately.
“Claire, this is Vivian Grant,” said a sultry woman’s voice on the second message. I sat up straight at the sound of her name. “I’ve just spoken to Randall Cox, who tells me that you’re an up-and-coming young editor. I’m in the market for one of those. You must be getting bored to tears over there at P and P. Call my office. Ciao.”
I took a gulp of my coffee, pulse racing. Randall had wasted no time—he must have called first thing this morning! How incredibly thoughtful! And now Vivian Grant wanted to speak with me?
Despite a few not-so-stellar preconceptions I had about Vivian, I was tremendously flattered. I did a quick Google to refresh my memory: Ten years earlier, Vivian had left Peters and Pomfret herself and struck a distribution deal with Mather-Hollinger. She’d knocked the ball out of the park time and time again, mainly with the bottom-feeding books for which she was famous, but also with some great novels and really solid books about politics, history, and finance. Two years later, the execs at Mather-Hollinger were so bowled over by her performance that they offered Vivian her eponymous imprint, which had since flourished during an industrywide downturn in sales. According to an article in last month’s Publishers Weekly, Vivian was the most financially successful publisher in the industry—during the past year alone, she’d managed to land fifteen titles on The New York Times Best Sellers list.
The woman was doing something very right. And she wanted to speak with me?
Before I could get nervous, I punched in the number at her office.
“Grant Books, how may I help you?” a weary-sounding assistant answered flatly.
“May I speak to Vivian Grant, please?”
Mara’s head rose slowly above the divider, one eyebrow raised artfully.
“Who should I say is calling?” the assistant asked.
“Claire Truman. I’m a friend of—”
I heard the click of someone picking up the line at another extension. “Can you be here in half an hour?” Vivian asked. I recognized her deep, slightly gravelly voice from the message she’d left.
“S-sure, that’d be fine, I—”
“See you then.” The line went dead.
Half an hour? That was sudden. Thankfully, I’d thrown on a suit this morning, thinking that Jackson and I would be in meetings all afternoon.
“Vivian Grant? What’s going on?” asked Mara, sounding concerned.
“Can’t talk now. Sorry, I promise I’ll fill you in later,” I mumbled, clicking open my résumé—last updated two years ago—and frantically making amendments. A few minutes later, I hit print. Mara just watched me with wide, unblinking eyes.
“I’m just going to meet with her, Mar,” I whispered, despite the fact that at 9:30 a.m. we were still the only two people in editorial row.
“What!?” Mara shrieked under her breath.
After stuffing a few copies of my résumé into my bag, I headed for the door. “I’ll be back,” I promised.
“You better be!” she called after me.
It was an unseasonably cool June day, but I still felt a slow trickle of sweat slide its way down the left side of my body as I walked quickly up Fifth Avenue, weaving through tourists.
Not only did this interview represent a chance to accelerate my career, but it was also strangely tied to my personal life, as the introduction had been made by Randall. If I won over Vivian, maybe she’d give me a great job offer and him a glowing report—a winning double punch. On the other hand, what if I really screwed it up? Not only would I have squandered a potential opportunity, but I’d look like a loser with Randall. The pressure was palpable! Another trickle snaked its way down my right side.
“Claire Truman to see Vivian Grant,” I told the white-haired security guard behind the desk in the Mather-Hollinger lobby, hoping to exude an air of professional confidence. He looked up sharply when he heard Vivian’s name and gave me a long once-over.
“Good luck, sweetheart.” He nodded encouragingly, handing over my temporary access card.
The elevator was already crowded when I stepped inside, and I asked a man in suspenders and a bow tie standing next to the panel of buttons if he wouldn’t mind hitting twelve for me. This, for some reason, made everyone in the elevator pause in their conversations and look at me in a strange way. Was asking someone to hit the button for you considered to be a rude request? I made a mental note to be mor
e self-sufficient on the elevator next time.
“Good luck,” said Bow Tie when I stepped out onto the twelfth floor. Could he tell that I was here for an interview? Another woman glanced at me and shook her head sadly. What did that mean? Very disconcerting. Was I trailing toilet paper? Was my skirt tucked into my underwear? I did a quick head-to-toe check but couldn’t find anything obviously amiss.
Taking a deep breath, I pushed open the heavy glass doors and entered the sitting area.
“You Claire?” A kid who looked about sixteen years old immediately appeared in the doorway to greet me. He also looked as though he’d just woken up from a nap. One side of his hair was flat and pressed to his head, the other was fluffed up—like a mix between a Johnny Rotten and a down-covered baby chicken.
“Yes, I am,” I said, smiling and extending my hand. He wagged it limply.
“I’m Milton. Vivian’s assistant,” he mumbled. “Follow me.”
“Nice to meet you, Milton,” I said to his retreating back.
Milton didn’t answer—instead, he opened the door of a conference room and gestured toward an empty seat. “Vivian will be out to see you in a few minutes. Can I get you some water or something?”
“That’s okay, thanks. I—”
Before I had a chance to finish my sentence, Milton had lurched off down the hallway. I cleared my throat and laid my résumé on the table, aligning the corners with the edge of the table, scanning the list of books I’d worked on so they’d be fresh in my mind during the interview.
The Grant Books conference room itself was pretty bland, except that the walls were covered with hardcover editions of the imprint’s best-selling titles. I scanned the display. Vivian had published some really great books—as well as some really lousy ones. The range was exceptional. A trashy tell-all written by a washed-up soap opera star who’d once had a steamy dalliance with the wife of a well-known European tycoon was perched next to a weighty tome about military operations in Iraq, penned by a top homeland security adviser. A phenomenally successful diet book series—with glowing quotes from devotees such as Gwyneth Paltrow jumping out from the cover—shared a shelf with a whimsical, clever novel that had been adapted into a Broadway musical. More chick lit than the eye could take in, all arrayed in a candy store collection of tangy pastels. Three award-winning cookbooks that Mara—who specialized in cookbooks—used as her model for design inspiration. A series of quickie paperbacks written by reality show stars during their fifteen minutes of fame. Up on the walls were some fiercely polarized political books, too—there was oversize, frothing-at-the-mouth, mega-best-selling neoconservative Samuel Sloane at one end of the seesaw and a slew of die-hard liberals balancing him on the other side.
The only common thread among the dozens of books on display was humongous sales numbers. Vivian clearly had the Midas touch, no matter what kind of book she published.
I could learn a lot from someone like her, I thought, taking a deep breath.
Angry voices suddenly clashed just feet away from the conference room. I sat forward and strained to hear, but all I could catch was “a fucking baboon, you know that?” More yelling, and then I heard a door slam so hard that it made the wall shake. It was unnerving, hearing that kind of unmitigated rage within the confines of an office, and my whole body tensed when the conference room door swung open abruptly.
In swept a beautiful woman, calm and composed, a dead ringer for Isabella Rossellini but with strawberry blond hair and green, almond-shaped eyes.
“Claire?” she asked with a captivating smile, shaking my hand firmly. “Vivian Grant.”
This was Vivian Grant? In all I’d heard about Vivian, nobody had done justice to how movie-star gorgeous she was. She looked much younger than her fifty years. With her hair pulled back into a loose bun, her skin a perfect alabaster, she was stunning.
Vivian Grant settled into a chair at the head of the conference table. “Randall speaks highly of you,” she said, reaching for my résumé and skimming it momentarily.
“Does he? That’s nice.” I wished I could pump her for details.
“So, you thinking about having babies anytime soon?” Vivian wore a black power suit and an impressive emerald necklace, but her sprawled pose—a leg hooked over the chair next to her, an arm draped across its back, finger twirling her hair—evoked a woman of leisure, not a powerhouse publisher. It was as if we were two girlfriends out for a relaxed Sunday brunch.
“Hmm?” I responded eloquently, figuring I must have misheard her.
“Babies,” she repeated, as if it were the most natural question with which to open an interview. “So many of my female editors tell me they’re waiting for kids—waiting to meet Mr. Right, waiting to get to a certain place in their careers. One of my editors must be, like, thirty-six? Thirty-seven? She’s married, but waiting for God knows what. I don’t know what she’s thinking. I tell her all the time to get on the program! If I’d taken that approach, I wouldn’t have my sons. Women are supposed to get pregnant in their early teens, you know. We make such a big fucking deal about preventing teenage pregnancy, but that’s what nature intended. Girls are really supposed to get knocked-up at thirteen.”
“Um, how many kids do you have?” I asked, evading the question.
“Two boys. Marcus is twenty-six and gorgeous. How old are you? You should meet him. Oh, right, but you’re with Randall. Are you with Randall? I used to doink Randall’s father, you know. That’s how Randall and I first met. I strolled out of his parents’ bedroom one morning wearing nothing but his father’s button-down and a smile, and there was little Randall, eating his Lucky Charms with the nanny. Anyway, inseminator number one, my son Marcus’s father, was this super hot one-night stand I had in the seventies. And my son Simon’s twelve. Inseminator number two was a perverted fuck-all whom I made the grave mistake of marrying. He kept me in litigation for years. But my kids turned out great, really great. God knows how. I was starting my imprint when Simon was born. I’ll never forget it. I was in a meeting with Clive Aldrich”—the megapowerful CEO of Mather-Hollinger’s parent company—“when I happened to glance down at my watch. Thank God I remembered that I had a C-section scheduled in an hour! Even back then my assistants couldn’t organize my schedule for shit.” Vivian rolled her eyes in utter exasperation. “Anyway, two hours later I was reading submissions and taking calls. Morphine shmorphine. It never slowed me down, honey. Back to work! I didn’t have a single diaper, I didn’t have a crib. Simon slept in a duffel bag for the first four months of his life.” Vivian smiled nostalgically at the memory. “That was the first year I broke into the double digits in number of best sellers published.”
I felt as if I’d just fallen down a rabbit hole. The little monologue I’d rehearsed on the walk over—about why I loved book publishing, what I’d learned in the past five years, why I’d be excited to work for someone like Vivian—now seemed too young, dull, naive, and … well, a little too sane for the conversation we were having.
Thankfully, it didn’t seem that I was expected to talk during the interview. Vivian forged ahead.
“So, are you just about ready to chew your leg off to escape P and P? What do you think of the place?”
I paused. I could sense that Vivian wanted me to rip my current employer to shreds, that this would somehow make her feel I was on her wavelength, but I couldn’t lie. Not to mention, based on the first five minutes of our interview, I was pretty sure I didn’t want the job.
“Well, I’ve learned a great deal,” I started. “I’ve been able to acquire some interesting books, although I’m hungry to take on much more. And the people are—”
“Oh, God, the people,” she groaned, flashing me a conspiratorial look as if she were finishing my sentence for me. “Everybody’s a zombie over there—if Gordon fucking Haas had the instincts I have in my baby finger, he’d be printing money. I hated it there. I was sexually harassed by not one—not two—but four of my colleagues. I’d walk into work every mor
ning expecting a gang bang. You know what I mean? It’s a fucked-up place. And they don’t understand the new direction of book publishing. They’re still selling to the baby boomers, still publishing the same old books. Bo-ring.”
I had no idea which part of her monologue I should respond to—or how. Had she actually been harassed by that many people? I couldn’t imagine who—
“So, how’s your line editing?” she asked, changing the subject. I exhaled for what seemed like the first time since she’d entered the conference room. Finally, she’d lobbed me a question related to the job.
“Well, strong, I think. I’ve had a chance to work on all of Jackson’s titles, as well as many of—”
“Good, good. You’ll be doing a lot of heavy line editing. I’m looking for someone who can take initiative, who wants to bring in lots of books and really run with the ball. Are you ambitious?”
“Yes, I—”
“Good. Because that’s what I’m looking for, someone who’s really passionate about the work. Someone who gets it, you know? Between you and me, I don’t have a single person on this staff who gets it. Maybe Lulu, some of the time. But other than her—and she’s got plenty of flaws, too, believe me—I need to spell everything out to these people. There’s no intuition, no initiative! I need someone with instincts about what fucking works and what doesn’t! You know what I mean?”
I nodded, not bothering with an attempt to squeeze words in edgewise.
“What kind of books would you be interested in working on?” she asked.
I told her that my background at P and P was in literary fiction, mainly because that was how Jackson filled his plate, but that I liked the variety at Grant. It was true. As I spoke, however, Vivian’s mind seemed to drift off and her eyes glazed over. In less than ten seconds, I’d completely lost her interest. I stopped talking. Thankfully, in the silence, she sprang back to life.
“That’s right,” she said, nodding emphatically. “Right, I’m doing something that nobody else does. That nobody else can do. So when can you start?”
