“Yes,” she said simply, as he fell into step with her.
“Ah, American?”
“Boston.”
“Intriguing.” He smiled as she went to her desk. She wondered what he did there, since the whole floor seemed to be mostly editorial people. He disappeared down another hall, and she didn’t see him again until they met leaving the building at the end of the day.
“How was school?” he asked and she laughed.
“Not bad for a first day.” The work seemed to be fairly simple so far, at least what they were giving her. She had done a lot of filing, but it was exciting to be in another country, and to have a new city to discover. And London was easy because of the language.
“Where are you staying, with friends?” He was very bold about asking her questions, as she tried to figure out what bus to get on outside the building. She had a map but was embarrassed to take it out and look like a tourist.
“No, I was lucky. I found an apartment, furnished.”
“Want a lift?” He pointed to a small, battered Fiat parked at the curb, with the steering wheel on the European side, not the British. She hesitated and then nodded. She knew where he worked, so he wasn’t a total stranger to her.
“Okay, thanks.”
“Where do you live?” She told him the address and his eyebrow shot up again. “Very posh. Knightsbridge. I live in Notting Hill.” And on the way to her apartment, he suggested dinner. It all seemed a little hasty to Alex, she wasn’t sure if he was just being friendly or was putting a move on her. It was hard to tell. “There’s actually a pub quite near you that I like. Want to rough it with a beer and a burger?”
“Sounds familiar.” She smiled at him. “Sure, thanks.”
They ordered dinner and wine when they got there, and the pub was cozy and dark. She realized she didn’t know his name then, and introduced herself.
“Ivan White,” he supplied. “And what do you want to be when you grow up?” he asked, as they waited for the food. “Not an editor, surely.”
“Probably not. You?”
“I edit nonfiction right now. I have a novel in me somewhere. I’m waiting for it to come out.” She almost groaned when he said it. Not another writer, although he was just being collegial and this wasn’t romance. But he had homed in on her pretty quickly. “And you’re not a writer?” He seemed surprised.
“Not really. I wrote a little in college,” she said vaguely. “Mostly for school. And some short stories in high school.”
“And you don’t want to write women’s fiction?”
“Not at all,” she said empathically, and at least that was true.
“How refreshing. Most of the women I meet want to write novels. Very tedious, I assure you.” She wondered why it was okay for him to want to write a novel, but not the women he went out with, but she didn’t ask him.
“Why don’t you like women writers?”
“They take themselves too seriously, and it’s all too emotional and gushingly dramatic, or romantic. Erghk.” He made a face.
“And what kind of novel would you write?” Now she was curious about him and what made him tick. He seemed very sure of himself and was undeniably handsome, and knew it. Even the five-day beard stubble looked somewhat affected, but it suited him. She still liked the look of him for a villain in a book, and maybe he was.
“I think my style is more like Tom Wolfe,” he said blithely, as their burgers came.
“That’s impressive.”
“It’s what I’m drawn to, and I think when I actually sit down and write it, it will be pretty similar.” He seemed confident about it and she was amused.
“I enjoy crime books, I’ve been reading them all my life,” she said to change the subject a little.
“Like whom?”
She reeled off some names and he was unimpressed, and then she decided to play with him a little. “Have you read Alexander Green?”
He nodded. “He’s pretty good, very formulaic, though, don’t you think?” It was a major put-down, that she wrote by a formula, rather than having the books be different each time.
“How many have you read?”
“Two, I think. Odd that you’ve read them. They’re really brutal.”
“I used to read some pretty gory crime thrillers with my father.”
“You’re a strange sort of girl, aren’t you?” he mused, looking at her. “You jaunt off around the world, stop in London and get a job, find an apartment, like men’s books. You must have been a tomboy as a kid. What are your parents like?”
“They died when I was very young. My father worked for a construction company, and my mother was an actress and model.”
“Sounds like an ill-fated match,” he said as they ate.
“It was. She left when I was seven. I lived alone with him after that, till I was fourteen.”
“And then?”
“It’s a long story.” She didn’t want to tell him about the convent. She didn’t know him well enough and had told him more than she’d intended.
“It’s either a very sad story, or an extremely happy one,” he guessed.
“Pretty happy. It worked out well.”
“You married and had three children.”
“No, definitely not that!” She laughed.
“How old are you, by the way?” He had been curious about it since he first saw her that morning. He was moving quickly and wanted to know a lot about her.
“Twenty-two. I just finished college in June.”
“And you’re on a junket around Europe,” he added. “Rich parents. Poor people can’t do that. Did yours leave you a lot of money?”
“That’s a little blunt, isn’t it?”
“It never hurts to ask. If they did, you can pay for dinner. If they didn’t, I will.” He was only half teasing.
“Let’s split it.” She didn’t want to be indebted to him anyway. And she wanted to start on the right foot so they could be friends. But in the end he didn’t let her pay for dinner and said he’d only been joking. He drove her back to her apartment after dinner and told her he’d had a fun evening with her.
“So did I,” she said easily. She had no friends here and was starting with a clean slate. And she wanted to have time to write, once she settled in.
“I think you’re lying to me, though,” he accused her.
“About what?” It was a surprising comment for him to make.
“I think you’re a writer in the closet.”
“What makes you think that?” She wondered why he would say that.
“Because you’re a keen observer of people. I see you watching me, and everyone around the room. I’ll bet you could describe everyone in the restaurant tonight, couldn’t you?”
“Of course not.” But he was absolutely right, which made him the keen observer as much as Alex.
“You look at people like a writer, checking out their reactions and emotions, and saving them for later.”
“You make me sound like a spider or a snake ready to eat them.”
“Perhaps you are, and I just don’t know it yet.” In truth, they knew nothing about each other. And he had told her nothing about himself in exchange for what he’d asked her, and for the little bits she’d said about her parents. It had been a one-way conversation.
“And where did you grow up?” she asked him.
“In London. With my grandmother. My parents were actors, perennially on tour. I hardly ever saw them. So our lives were not so dissimilar as children. Maybe that’s why we were drawn to each other.” He was presuming a lot. They had just met and had dinner. She had not been “drawn” to him yet, she was just inquisitive, and very cautious, after Scott. “I think people with dysfunctional families always seek each other out, instinctively, don’t you? All of my girlfriends came from divorced parents.”
Her parents had been divorced, but her father had been anything but dysfunctional. He was a very stable person, except for his one colossal mistake marrying her mothe
r.
“I’m not sure that theory holds,” she said skeptically.
“I can promise you it does. And there’s a lot you haven’t told me yet.”
“And maybe never will,” she teased him. He was very pushy for a first evening. When they got to her address, she got out of the car and thanked him for dinner.
“Let’s do it again,” he said as though it was his decision, and then he drove off with a wave, and she let herself into her building, and her flat. She still had a bag to unpack and clothes to put away, and she thought about Ivan White as she did. He was a would-be writer. And he was a little too aggressive for her taste, and too nosy. He seemed like a good person to keep at a distance. She put him out of her mind as she unpacked her father’s photograph and his two favorite books she had brought with her.
—
Ivan’s persistence over the next several weeks was startling. She told him she was busy every time he invited her to dinner. And he wanted to know why and with whom, and if she had a boyfriend in London. She said she didn’t.
“Don’t you want one?”
“Not necessarily. I want to get my bearings, figure out my job, explore London, make some friends, do some work I brought with me, and if a man I like turns up in all that, that would be nice, but I’m not shopping for a boyfriend.”
“Are you afraid of men?” he pressed her.
“No. I’m afraid of making a mistake and being unhappy.”
“Then you end it, and start again.”
“That sounds exhausting. I’d rather be careful in the beginning.”
“That’s ridiculous. You have to experience life. How can you do that if you never make mistakes?” He was always trying to convince her of something. She didn’t have dinner with him again for a month, but he kept badgering her and she finally gave in. She knew by then that he was twenty-seven years old, and he had recently broken up with a girlfriend who had left him for someone else. The girls in the office thought he was hot, but said he looked like a cheater. She wondered how they knew that. They said it was just a feeling, when Alex had lunch with them. She particularly liked Fiona, an assistant editor from Dublin. She edited picture books for children aged three to six, and she seemed to like it.
Alex’s job had turned out to be not at all challenging. Her boss never gave her anything interesting to do, and a lot of filing. The assumption was that she wouldn’t stay long as an intern. She seemed to resent Alex, and was unfriendly to her. It made for boring days and very little satisfaction. She was writing on weekends, which gave her something to do. She was working on the outline for her next book.
And Ivan’s work as a “nonfiction editor” seemed to consist mostly of checking text proofs for errors before they went to print. Neither of them had interesting jobs, but Alex loved the idea of working in London. That gave her all the satisfaction she needed. She was getting very close to starting her next book, and had had several phone conversations with Bert about it. He liked her ideas for it a lot, and thought her publisher would too.
Ivan liked spending time with her, supposedly as friends, and he talked a lot about the novel he was going to write, which made her nervous. If he ever figured out that she was a writer and had published, he could be consumed with jealousy, as Scott had been, and take it out on her in some way, and she didn’t want to go through that again. It made her very cautious about everything she said.
He was hanging around her apartment one day, waiting to go out with her to the contemporary wing of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and saw an envelope from her agent on her desk, with a note in it about pub dates and a royalty check for fifty thousand dollars for her first book, but fortunately there was no mention of Alexander Green on any of the paperwork, nor the title of the book, just the date of publication. She saw him glance at it, and then peek into it as she walked back into the room, and he moved away from the desk immediately. He looked startled when he turned to her. He had recognized the name of the agency, which was well known in publishing, even in England.
“What do you need a literary agent for?” He made it sound like an accusation, as though she had taken something that belonged to him.
“I don’t. I worked for them one summer,” she said, trying to be creative, but she didn’t sound convincing, even to her own ears. “They send me letters sometimes, and they owed me some money from a tax refund.” She said it in case he had seen that there was a check in the envelope, but she was annoyed at him for looking into her mail, which seemed incredibly rude to her.
“They must have paid you a fortune,” he commented drily, with an edge to his voice.
“They didn’t. Why? What makes you say that? Why would you assume that?”
“Because they sent you a fifty-thousand-dollar tax refund.”
She cringed as he said it. “That’s none of your business, Ivan,” she said, shutting down the subject.
“No, it isn’t, and it was presumptuous of me to look, but I was curious why they were writing to you.”
“You should have asked me. Don’t snoop through my mail.”
“There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there?” he accused her. And she knew it was a story that would have stunned him, but fortunately there had been nothing in the envelope that would expose her as the writer of the Green books. The publisher was very careful about that, so even their accounting staff didn’t know. All payments went to Rose Porter’s agency, and were then paid out to Alex, and the books were only referred to as Book 1, Book 2, and so on, with no titles and no author’s name. But the check was a big one, and why would a literary agency be sending her that kind of money?
“There’s nothing I’m not telling you, or that you need to know.”
“Have you ever written a book?” he asked her, looking her straight in the eye. Previously she had said she hadn’t, and had no interest in writing, which was a total lie, and he sensed that she was hiding something from him.
“I play around with short stories sometimes, but not in a long time.”
“That’s a lot of play money, Alex.”
“I did some ghostwriting for one of their celebrity clients while I worked there.” She was thinking on her feet, and that sounded more plausible to him. He was almost convinced, but not quite.
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“Because I signed a confidentiality agreement with the celebrity, so I couldn’t, and I still can’t.” She looked prim as she said it.
“Some people have all the luck,” he said, looking annoyed. “I’d love to do some ghostwriting for that kind of money. Who was it?”
“I told you, I’m not at liberty to tell you, or I’d be in breach of contract.”
“A man or a woman?” he persisted.
“A man.” She was inventing it as she went along.
“That’s stupid. Why would they use a woman to write for a man? You can always tell a woman’s voice when she writes something. There isn’t a woman alive who can write like a man.” There had been a number of them in history, but she didn’t press the point. He had the same limited view and prejudices as many others, which was why she wrote under a man’s name.
“I was the only one willing to do it. He was a very difficult person.”
“Well, you were damn lucky to make that kind of money. So I guess you didn’t have a rich father after all, just a lucky job one summer. You won’t make that kind of money here,” he said, and she nodded, hoping he’d calm down and forget about it. She put the envelope in her desk drawer and they left for the museum a few minutes later, but he was out of sorts for the rest of the day, and sullen when they went to dinner, and he started talking about his future novel again. She dreaded the subject with him. And if he knew the truth, and how much she’d been paid for her last two novels, he would have hated her and she knew it. She felt as though she could never get away from jealous would-be writers who would begrudge her her success if they knew she was always hiding, and pretending to be someone el
se. She was becoming the fictional person, not Alexander Green.
“Why don’t you just do it,” she snapped at him when he talked about it over dinner, “instead of talking about it? If you want to write a novel, put your ass in the chair and write it.”
“When am I supposed to do that? I work all day and I’m tired when I get home.” So was she, and she had been in college for four years, and she had gotten up at four o’clock in the morning sometimes to write before her classes, or stayed up all night after she finished her assignments and then worked on the book. That was the kind of dedication it took.
“You could work on the weekends,” she pointed out.
“I have other things to do,” he said in a plaintive tone. “And you need time to be inspired, you can’t just sit down and write like an accountant with a calculator.”
“Sometimes you just have to do it,” she said with conviction. She had the kind of drive that was required, Ivan didn’t. He wanted to write at his leisure when he was in the mood. He wasn’t serious about it, and she knew he’d never write the novel. He would just talk about it. If he was compelled to do it, he’d have written his novel by then. All he wanted to do was complain, and resent others who had the grit and guts to do it. Writing wasn’t an easy business, in fact, it was damn hard. She’d given up sleep and fun and parties to do it, and dates and romance, relationships she could have had. To Alex, her life was the writing, not everything else, and the reward was finishing the last page and knowing you had stuck it out till the end. She sensed that he would never know the joy of that, because he wasn’t willing to sacrifice himself.
“What makes you think you know so much about writing,” he said angrily, “just because you did some ghostwriting for some fat cat who wrote you a big check?” She didn’t like his tone or what he said.
“I know what it takes. You have to give up a lot to write a book. But what you get back is so much better.”
“Yeah, the money,” he said bitterly.
“No, the pride in your work,” she said with a light in her eyes he’d never seen before. “The money is nice, but it really has nothing to do with it.”
The Right Time Page 15
