Because She Can

by Bridie Clark

  Click.

  I threw the bread back in the fridge and poured myself a big gulp of pinot grigio. I tried to cling to the happiness I’d felt just a minute before—but my Vivian-induced dread put up the better fight.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE SOUND AND THE FURY

  Claire!?”

  My head snapped up from my desk, bloodshot eyes squinting angrily in the fluorescent lighting. Not again. I’d only meant to give my pounding head a momentary rest, but judging from the drool puddle that had formed on top of the manuscript I was editing, I must have dozed off. No wonder, really, considering how little sleep I’d gotten the night before and the scintillating topic at hand: the memoir of the man with the world’s biggest—

  “Claire, are you there?!” the intercom bleated again, Vivian’s voice full of hostile static.

  “Here, here,” I mumbled back, pressing down on the red button.

  “I need to see you in my office,” Vivian crackled. “Now!”

  Her office? My stomach lurched into my throat at the thought. I’d managed to avoid stepping into that pit of venom and destruction for more than a week. It had been a month of pure hell since Vivian screamed at me for the first time, and now I just tried to get through the day without face-to-face confrontation. Vivian could be abusive enough over the intercom; inside her secluded, palatial, freezing office—buffered by soundproof walls—she really hit her stride.

  “Be right there,” I sputtered into the box, my grogginess burning off in a blaze of panic. I quickly ran my fingers through my shoulder-length hair, last washed three days ago (poor hygiene semi-justified by a crushing workload), and decided that spearing it in a bun with a pencil would be my best option.

  Then, looking down, I realized that I’d unthinkingly put on the first shirt my hand had grabbed off the armchair this morning—the same black button-down I’d worn last Friday, a particularly stressful day. The shirt looked like a battered survivor; its armpits exuded a strong alkaline odor.

  As I headed for the door, my eyes caught on my huge wall calendar. January, finally—month seven. The halfway mark. Christmas had come and gone with poor Mom sitting on my couch next to me, watching me work … and so had New Year’s. Randall’s holiday work schedule had been just as bleak, but he’d managed to break away for a quick coffee with me and Mom. It wasn’t much time, but at least Mom finally had met him. She thought he seemed like a good guy. I could tell she still had concerns about my moving in, but she was trying to be supportive.

  I crossed out Monday on the calendar. A hard-won X. The highlight of each day had become slashing a huge red X through it, watching the days and then weeks slowly add up. Sometimes I felt like a prisoner making scratch marks on the wall of my cell, but usually it made me feel better … because each red X brought me closer to the end of my self-imposed yearlong sentence at Grant Books.

  The beginning of the new year had been particularly ghoulish. My list of inherited books had grown to thirty-two—we’d had more turnover than usual. Next week was our marketing conference, so I’d been trying feverishly to pull together something, anything, to show for each of the books I had on Grant’s list. That meant canceling my date with Randall and staying at the office last night until 3:30 a.m. This weekend, I was officially making the move into his place, thanks to Deirdre and Lucille, who’d stepped in to coordinate the details. Lucille was unusually excited about me living in sin with her son—in fact, she’d gotten in the habit of calling my office several times a day to discuss pressing move-in details (such as whether I preferred satin or silk clothing hangers in my new walk-in closet).

  “Where the fuck are you, Claire!” the intercom blazed back to life. “When I say NOW, what do you think that means?”

  My hands shook. My left eye twitched. Five seconds to pull myself together. My stomach flipped again. What had I done to ignite Vivian’s wrath this morning? As usual, it sounded like my boss was loaded for bear.

  I took a deep breath and made my way quickly through the labyrinth to Vivian’s office, passing Lulu’s corner and stealing a sideways glance in spite of myself. Vivian had recently switched our offices, sticking me in a windowless closet next to the interns and giving Lulu the view.

  Behind her meticulously orderly desk (reeked of OCD), Lulu sat delicately sipping a Starbucks coffee and diligently typing away. Her hair was Jennifer Aniston perfect (the long, blond, pin-straight phase), and her sunny yellow sweater set definitely looked as if it had been recently laundered.

  Damn her.

  As a kid, I’d naively assumed that once I grew up I’d never have to deal with the class bully or teacher’s pet again—but in the last seven months, I’d been faced with mounting evidence that these types grew worse with age. Vivian was the adult embodiment of a particularly virulent strain of elementary school bully—the kind who’d flush a nerd’s head in the toilet while simultaneously stealing his lunch money, giving him a wedgie, and insulting his mom. And Lulu was the thirtysomething version of the class kiss-up, that impossibly perfect girl in the front row who shot her hand in the air to answer every question the teacher asked. Flawless on the outside, hypercompetitive and self-serving on the inside. Not to be trusted.

  The fact that Lulu was back to being Vivian’s little pet—and I’d been exiled to Château Bow Wow—didn’t do much to bolster my warm and fuzzy feelings about her. That’s understating it: Lulu was on the short list of people I wouldn’t have objected to air-dropping into downtown Mogadishu.

  “Phil!” I exclaimed, smacking right into him as I turned the corner to Vivian’s office. He looked pretty bedraggled. I hadn’t seen him much lately; he’d been as swamped as I’d been with a few big books.

  “I’d avoid going in there, unless you absolutely have to,” Phil warned. “T. Rex is hungry.”

  “Unfortunately, I’ve been summoned.” I swallowed the bowling ball–size lump in my throat. Vivian in a notably worse-than-usual mood made me feel like running for shelter, but I had to soldier on. I gave Phil a sympathetic hug. “Sorry, buddy. Try not to take it personally.”

  “Same to you.” He sighed before trudging back down the hall to his office.

  I took another deep breath, heaved all my body weight against the vaultlike door of Vivian’s office, and stepped inside. The climate was arctic, and I immediately felt my lips turn purple and the hairs on my arms stand at attention. Vivian was on the phone and held up a finger for me to wait. I sat stiffly on a couch.

  I thought back to Jackson’s cozy office at P and P, which had been filled with overstuffed leather couches, warm lighting, family photos, wraparound bookshelves, antique typewriters. Many a night I’d grab a manuscript and some takeout, sink into a chair, and read for hours while Jackson worked at his desk. Mara often did the same. It’d been like a family library. We’d been like family.

  But that was then.

  Now I was surrounded by Vivian’s sleek black-leather-and-chrome couches, which were about as comfy as park benches. The lighting was icy, the artwork phallic—mainly skyscrapers jutting against the New York City skyline. Bookshelves had been forgone in favor of backlit display cases. The glass case closest to me housed Vivian’s first edition of The Prince, and the case on the other side of the couch held her first edition of The Happy Hooker. You could tell a lot about my boss by the two books she treasured most.

  “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Jesus. You get nominated for one National Book Award and suddenly you think—” Vivian lapsed into uncharacteristic silence, her long fingernails drumming hyperactively against the desk like the precise staccato of a machine-gun round.

  She reminded me of an old-school gangster: the bizarre pin-striped suits with wide lapels, the bling of the honking canary diamond on her pinkie, the legions of spineless HR goons trained to turn the other way as she bludgeoned Mather-Hollinger’s company policy. The possibility of waking up next to a horse’s head had crossed my mind more than once.

  If someone cro
ssed her, Vivian was prepared to finish him or her in whatever way she could: Contracts were canceled on her whim, reputations were destroyed, psyches ravaged. Worse, though, was that Vivian opened fire in response to any perceived slight, which meant that she’d often level some poor soul who’d done nothing more than hair-trigger her acute paranoia. In Vivian’s mind, everyone was out to screw her over, steal from her bottom line, undermine her power and position.

  “What did you just say?” she snarled into the phone, motioning for me to keep waiting. “Let’s get one thing straight, you worthless piece-of-shit hack. I’m not a bitch, I’m the bitch. And if I don’t have a publishable manuscript in my hands by Thursday—yes, I mean this Thursday—I’m the bitch who’s going to see every penny of your advance back. Capice? I don’t care if your mother has three hours left to live—”

  She slammed down the phone and then buzzed Tad, her assistant du jour (twenty-four, former male underwear model, who earlier that morning had written “auther” in a companywide e-mail).

  “Cross Hiram Peters off my call list,” she barked into the intercom. “Fucking fairy.”

  Oh no. Poor Hiram. Phil would absolutely freak. He’d worked so hard to keep Hiram on board. Hiram’s last epic novel had been nominated for a National Book Award, establishing him as a writer of tremendous repute, and beyond that, Hiram was just about the sweetest man you could hope to know. Phil had mentioned that Hiram was two weeks late in delivering his latest manuscript because his mother was very ill—a transgression that in Vivian’s eyes reduced him to a “piece-of-shit hack.”

  Vivian turned her steely-eyed focus on me, and I felt my blood run cold. “Have you seen the covers for White House Confidential?” she inquired in a quiet voice. Too quiet.

  My mind flashed to a recent Explorer channel show: A group of capsized swimmers had watched sharks circling them for almost an hour, but it was only when the circling stopped and the fins disappeared, diving deep below the water’s surface, that they knew they were really in trouble. Sure enough, the sharks shot up from the ocean depths, jaws wide to seize their treading legs. Only one swimmer had lived to tell the tale. Quiet didn’t bode well, for shark or Vivian attacks.

  “Um, yes, Vivian, I’ve seen them. I think Karen did a great job. They’ve vibrant, they’re compelling—” I cleared my throat and racked my brain for more positive adjectives. I’d learned early on in my career that the publishing industry was big on fancy adjectives. A manuscript wasn’t good or bad, it was explosive/poignant/unique or it was unstructured/trite/derivative. “They’re provocative,” I concluded. Karen was an exceptionally gifted art director, but judging by the sound of muffled sobbing coming from behind her closed office door that morning, I guessed that Vivian had been tough on her recently. I was thrilled with the covers Karen had designed for White House Confidential, and so was everyone I’d shown them to.

  “Provocative? Is that what you actually think?” Vivian’s indoor voice had left the building. Now she was booming. “Frankly, Claire, you wouldn’t know provocative if it introduced itself and then bit you in the ass. You’re still living in your ivory tower. I shouldn’t need to tell you that they’re fucking awful. Awful! They are the most uninspired covers I’ve ever seen in my life. And you, as an ed-i-tor, should be managing the art director and making sure she’s getting the right sense of the fucking book! You are supposed to be in control of the process, Claire.”

  I heard myself gulp. Vivian had an uncanny knack for making even my name sound like a vile insult.

  “Why am I the only one here who fucking gets it?” she shrieked across the desk, her jade eyes flashing.

  Nine times out of ten, Vivian defaulted to one of her favorite three tirades: 1) Why am I the only one here who fucking gets it; 2) I am not your fucking mother; 3) Why do I have to do everyone’s fucking job for them? Or, if you were really lucky, some new and exciting combo platter.

  “Sorry, Vivian,” I mumbled. “I’ll stop by Karen’s office right now. It’s my fault. I should have given her more insight on the book.” Of course, Karen and I had already discussed the cover direction several times, and she’d read the entire manuscript. And I genuinely loved what she’d done. It was award-winning work. But fighting back would only incense Vivian more, as Phil had advised me when I started.

  I just hoped Karen and I could come up with something that would satisfy her. Generally that required weaving a writhing, seminaked body into the cover concept, but this was one of the few books on our current list that wasn’t purely about sex—so we would have to be a bit more inventive.

  “I can’t keep doing everyone’s fucking jobs for them,” Vivian spat before whipping around to face her computer. I guessed that meant I was dismissed, and I slowly edged out of the office backward, as if Vivian were a wild animal whose predatory instincts might be triggered by sudden movements.

  “Are you ill, Claire?” Lulu asked condescendingly when I passed by her at the water cooler. “You look really washed out. Oh, wait … could it be the lack of sunlight in your new office?” She batted her eyelashes, feigning real concern for my health.

  “I’m fine, Lulu,” I said, unclenching my teeth just enough to speak.

  The rest of the day went by in a flash of meetings, angry phone calls from agents, and a forest’s worth of paperwork. I forgot about lunch and would probably have done the same with dinner if my hands hadn’t started shaking a little at my keyboard. So I ate a half-eaten, slightly petrified Snickers bar I’d squirreled away weeks ago in the back of a desk drawer. I asked David to hold all calls but Vivian’s and managed to plow through quite a bit of work. Around 10:00, I pulled the plug and left.

  Outside, the air was brisk, invigorating. It felt good to feel the sting on my cheeks. Winter would soon enough make way for spring, another season passing me by while I spent fourteen hours a day in the office. I decided to walk down to the subway at Grand Central, just to stretch my legs a bit, and I wrapped my arms around my tote bag, full of manuscripts I’d need to tackle at home.

  Randall had flown out that morning for an important pitch meeting in London. It was just as well, really—I wanted to savor my last nights in my studio. It felt like the end of an era.

  I let out a deep breath, and it hung in the chilly air.

  Suddenly I remembered something—I’d completely forgotten to call Luke Mayville back. He’d called that morning, but the entire day had flown by and I’d never gotten back to him. I fished for my cell phone, even though it was really too late to call. Luke picked up on the second ring.

  “Hey, it’s Claire. Sorry to call at this hour, I just didn’t have a second free during the day, and I wanted to let you know that I’ll be getting my edits back to you by the end of next week. Sorry it’s taken me so long … it’s been a little hectic lately.”

  “I’ll fully accept both unnecessary apologies if you’ll come meet me for a drink,” Luke said. I could hear people in the background. “I’m on Perry Street, pretty close to where you live. Want to meet me at the Otheroom?”

  “I’d love that,” I answered, realizing it was exactly why I’d called. I needed a friend. And a drink.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BLEAK HOUSE

  First thought on waking up this morning: Thank God it was just a dream. I flopped over to spank the snooze button on my alarm clock. It had gone off just as Vivian was flying at me, vampire fangs exposed, shrieking over my inability to edit a manuscript written entirely in Sanskrit.

  Second thought: I’m going to puke.

  Leapt to the bathroom in a single bound. An often overlooked convenience of living in a shoebox, I realized, holding my hair back with one hand.

  This was so not good. I was still wearing my dirty button-down and skirt from yesterday. The shirt that I’d deemed smelly and gross the previous afternoon was now so repugnant that I stripped it off, balled it up, and threw it in the trash can. Uggggh. I’d never felt more disgusting in my entire life.

  The night befo
re was nothing but patchy static. Finding Luke at the Otheroom … the tremendous joy of my first sip of Jack and Coke … talking about his book … another round of drinks … venting about work, Vivian, Lulu … another round … confessing my mixed feelings over leaving my apartment to move in with Randall … another round … troubles with his vegan girlfriend (who apparently caught him eying a suede coat) … another round … and then Luke walking me home, his arm around my shoulder because I was shivering from the cold … kissing my cheek outside my building …

  I cringed. Uh-oh. That was without question the part of the memory that had me feeling uneasy. I had tugged on Luke’s sleeve, tried to convince him to come upstairs for one more drink. I hadn’t wanted our conversation to end. Had he come up? Had anything else happened after that kiss on the cheek? I racked my brain for more details … but no, I remembered walking up the stairs by myself, a goofy grin on my face. Nothing more had happened, I was completely sure of it.

  So why did I feel weirdly, vaguely … guilty?

  Maybe I was just mistaking a raging hangover for guilt.

  I showered and dressed my aching body for work. Today was clearly a cab-to-work day. Dealing with subway crowds was not an option.

  “Morning, Claire,” David said as I shuffled past his cubicle half an hour later. “Vivian’s looking for you; she’s been calling since eight-thirty or so. She seems to be …” He trailed off.

  “In a black mood?” I filled in dryly. “You mean she didn’t give you her usual greeting of ‘What’s-your-face, have that worthless, birdbrained twit call me back’?”

  Gallows humor was all we had at Grant Books.

  It was then that I noticed the shadow over David’s humorless face. He was clearing his throat so vigorously, it sounded like a car engine revving. Oh no. Please don’t let her be … , I prayed as I rotated around to face Vivian, a frothing pit bull ready for battle. Behind me.