A Lady's Guide to Selling Out

by Sally Franson

  “I’m not as cold and heartless as you all think I am,” she said with a faint smile. “You’ve done a lot for PR this year. You’ve worked hard, you’ve wowed everyone you’ve met, you haven’t once complained—”

  Well, I thought, not to you.

  “—and it’s about time you were acknowledged.”

  I wanted to run behind Celeste’s desk and hug her. Mama! But before I could, she had opened her laptop back up and started typing. “Thank you,” I said.

  “Don’t thank me,” she said, putting up a palm in farewell, and I could tell she meant it.

  * * *

  —

  When I was a kid, I had a book of Greek myths that Louise had given to me for my birthday. I remember being constantly appalled by how stupid some of these characters were. “Don’t turn around, dummy!” I would shout at Orpheus when he was bringing Eurydice back from the underworld. “She’s your mother, you idiot!” I’d yell to Oedipus. But I didn’t yell anything to myself that day because fatal flaws are like Magic Eye pictures: you can’t see them when you’re too close up. It’s all just colorful mush.

  Thrilled with how the Fates rewarded as capriciously as they punished, I played hooky from work the rest of the afternoon, went home and shut the blinds and, calling it research, rewatched the entire last season of The Real Housewives with Ellen Hanks. Boy, is it fun, living in a fantasy. I turned my phone off and got a little day drunk off red wine and ate a lot of popcorn straight from the microwave bag and found myself thinking, God, I am the best and my life is the best and just forget about all that other stuff, Casey! Sure, you had a rough few days, weeks, months. But who cares? Who cares, really? Not you, Casey. Now you’ve got a pile of money and a reality TV show waiting, you’re back and better and you’re going to Vegas, a place where there is no past, no future, nothing beyond whatever glorious temptation is right in front of you! You’ll be happy now, Casey. You are happy. You are. Aren’t you?

  * * *

  —

  The American book fair was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Or maybe it was like a lot of things I’d seen before, it’s just that Vegas made my adrenaline levels much higher and my sense receptors more alert. On the floor of the convention center in Caesars Palace, the best and brightest of the book industry held court. They stood behind skirted tables and alongside huge posters advertising the next greatest best American novel, or memoir, or hard-nosed nonfiction. The crowd at the fair was mixed in the way of gender, and about as mixed in skin color as, say, a gallon drum of vanilla ice cream.

  I’d been to advertising conventions before over the years, and though this was a different industry, the interpersonal dynamics were pretty much the same. You could spot the power brokers right away: they tended to wear pointier-toed shoes and more tailored shirts, their skin as bronzed and moisturized as if they’d just stepped off a plane from St. Barts. You could also tell them apart by the circle of admirers that inevitably surrounded them, mostly younger men, who seemed to know more intuitively than women that one way to gain power was just to find it and stand near it and never let it out of your sight. For if you caught these power brokers at the right moment, they would shine some of that power upon you, not altruistically, but with the selfish pleasure of a benefactor. I’ve always admired the naked ambitions of these sorts of strapping, oxford-shirted, hands-in-the-pockets aw-shucks young men—though I’ve always wanted to punch them, too.

  On the other hand, the women in the convention hall spoke mostly as equals, in small groups, among themselves and with enthusiasm, either unaware of the subtly shifting movements of power or, more likely, already exhausted by it. Not that everyone fell so neatly across these gender lines—but then again, they kind of did.

  Then, there were the writers. Oh, the writers! Flown in by their publishing houses, you could spot them right away, too: looking awkward and feral and stoop-shouldered, shuffling around with downward slopes to their mouths, clearly parched for solitude. Yet here they were, forced to be on display, asked to speak to, say, a blowsy gal named Mary Jo who ran an independent bookstore in Boise and was very curious about where they got their ideas.

  I felt sympathy for the writers. A former poet laureate lurked blackly in one corner of the hall like the Phantom of the Opera; a National Book Award finalist desperately drank cola after diet cola while three old women buzzed around him like gingham flies. Many of them stood by themselves, dazed, in the middle of the room, as the rest of the industry devoted itself to itself.

  The exception among these writers was Julian North—my Vegas raison d’être. He was giving the keynote address that evening, and I spotted him in the hall right away, because people seemed to be pulled toward him, as I had been years ago, as if by some horizontal gravity. He looked similar to how I remembered him: not attractive, necessarily, but tall and trim, and with his salt-and-pepper hair, well-cut slacks, and thick square eyeglasses, he was clearly improving with age.

  Though my guess was, even before he was famous, he’d always been able to draw people to him. There was an energy that radiated from him that translated into an expressiveness in his face, a receptivity in his gestures, which in turn led people to feel immediately familiar around him. Women and men alike fluttered across his perimeter, touched his sleeve. And Julian, instead of, like many writers, keeping himself at a physical or emotional remove from his admirers, appeared to absorb everything they said and did.

  I thought about introducing myself right there on the floor of the convention, but eventually I decided I didn’t want to enter the scrum of devotees. Other people’s hero worship grossed me out.

  Instead I wandered around the hall. I’d chosen my clothes for that day seriously because I wanted Julian to take me seriously, and the only control I had over that, I believed, was through my appearance. I’d picked out a black crepe sheath, black stilettos, and a black crepe blazer I draped over my shoulders, and as I walked I carried my black leather attaché in what I hoped was a very serious manner. Not much in the convention interested me, and I ignored the outposts of consumer goods for sale, book lights and bookmarks and e-readers and leather-bound journals that tied around the middle. Bored and with the bourgeois ennui that strikes at the heart of every midafternoon, I was just about to make like a celebrity couple and split when I heard the nasal honk of a Jersey accent. “Casey? Casey Pendergast? That you?”

  Well, well, well. Who should hurtle up behind me in a cloud of perfume, cigarette smoke, and ball-busting vitality but Ellen Hanks? Though we’d emailed some over the summer, I hadn’t seen her in person since she’d come to the offices for the first and only time that spring. “Ellen!” I yelped joyfully, turning around and giving her a big hug. “What the hell are you doing here?!”

  I was so relieved I wanted to laugh. The Fates were kind! They knew I needed a friend. Vegas wasn’t a place for the solo traveler, and neither were most conventions, unless you were a sociopath or, I guess, a billionaire autocrat. Together Ellen and I could bond over being fish out of water with all these publishing types. Or maybe more like walruses out of water, warm-blooded and prone to bellowing.

  “I could say the same thing to you!” she pulled back and hit me on the biceps like a softball coach. “Look at you! You look good!” she said to everyone within earshot. “You working out? Your arms look good. My God, we’ve got a professional right here!”

  “Ha. I wish. You have no idea how happy I am to see you!”

  “Oh, I have an idea,” Ellen said, and started dragging me by the arm. She looked the same as she had a few months before, tucked into an airtight dress with towering heels, done up with stage hair and makeup. “This thing is a joke. My publisher told me to come here and shill my book, and can you believe it? No one wants to talk about my book! They don’t even know who I am! I told one of these broads I was on television, and you know what she said? She says, ‘I don’t own a television.’ Wh
o doesn’t own a television? Just because I didn’t go to college or write some book nobody’s heard of about the…who knows…war in Iraq. I may’ve had a ghostwriter, but how many vodka companies have you started, honey?” She linked her arm through mine, though continued to propel me across the room. “What are you doing here?”

  I told her—she was a friend of Celeste’s and a client, I was pretty sure confidentiality didn’t matter—I was there to talk with Julian about a sponsorship deal for a new venture PR was running. At the name Ellen rolled her eyes. “That guy. Everyone here’s jerking him off every chance they get.”

  “He’s an amazing writer,” I said. “Like, pretty much my favorite writer of all time. Where are we going, by the way?”

  “I don’t care if he wrote the freaking Bible, it doesn’t mean he’s not an asshole.” Ellen looked like she was about to say something else, but she stopped herself. “We’re going to get a drink is where we’re going. I just got booked on Dancing with the Stars for next season. You’re coming with me, I won’t take no for an answer—”

  Before I could answer her, she turned around, put her arm up, and shouted to what seemed to me no one in particular, “Barry! Barry watch the table, will you? Us girlies are gonna get a drink.”

  Some distance away a tatted and bepierced man, bald and the size of a tank, gave an affirmative wave.

  “That’s my fuckboy,” Ellen said conspiratorially. “Isn’t he great?”

  * * *

  —

  At a bar called Numb, situated right in the center of the gambling floor, Ellen and I ordered supersized frozen cocktails, complete with lids and straws, so you could take them with you while you gambled or swam in one of the numerous pools. Mine was called a Numb Cappuccino!

  Ellen gave me a mile-a-minute update on everything that was going on with her—arguments with her publisher, arguments with her producers, arguments with her assistant, haggle, hustle, money, money—which was long enough to get half a vat of alcoholic slushie in my bloodstream. After that, I proceeded to spill the beans on what happened with Wolf and Susan, what happened with Ben, what happened, or might happen, with the casting agent Celeste knew and the reality show I might be getting. “Are you kidding me right now?!” Ellen said about the latter, smacking me on the arm. “That’s incredible. I told Celeste you were a star. See? Should I make some calls? I know everyone in that town. I could twist some arms for the two of you.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” I said, blushing, or flushing from the alcohol.

  Ellen looked incredulous. “Oh please. You think you’re gonna get anywhere with that attitude? Listen to me. You’ve got to know what you want”—she smacked one fist in her other palm—“and grab it”—smack—“and not”—smack—“let”—smack—“go. You say you want your man back? Well then, Casey, you gotta do something about it! Though be careful, don’t do what I did, I’ve got two restraining orders against me.

  “And that bastard,” she said, changing subjects abruptly while sucking down something called a Purple Haze. “That Wolf guy. First of all, who names their kid Wolf? He sounds typical. Typical bastard. Reminds me of the time my ex-husband tried to take me to the cleaners after I started making money, saying I owed him back alimony. Doesn’t matter, I made his life hell for the six months we were in court.” She drank more Purple Haze. “And I loved every minute of it.”

  “I want to make Wolf’s life hell.” I was getting mad all over again. “More than anything I want to make things right for Susan. I could prove that she wrote these poems, but she doesn’t want me anywhere near her, and anyhow Wolf isn’t even remotely afraid of me. He’s swinging his dick all over the Internet. The other day he literally tweeted ‘I’m king of the world’ and it wasn’t even a cultural reference!”

  I took a sip of Numb Cappuccino! I heard the empty kkkkk sucking sound of the straw that meant I was getting to the bottom. “He feels invincible, and I hate it.”

  Ellen scoffed. “Jerk-off.” She pointed at my empty slushie. “You want another one?”

  Nothing brings women together more than shared fury over men. Well, that and sharing failed attempts at weight loss. We explored our fury for a long time, let me tell you, until it gradually transitioned to a vast exchange of compliments and “I love you”s and two additional swimming-pool-sized cocktails. We hugged until we lost balance and nearly fell off our bar stools. Other patrons wandered toward and away from the bar, Hawaiian-shirted, eyes glazed from booze and poker chips and oxygen, unfazed by two loud and excitable women validating the shit out of each other. We were there for around two hours, maybe; the thing about Vegas is that it eliminates time. With no windows, day bleeds into night bleeds into a permanent and hazy golden hour where everything is allowed, nothing is forbidden, and indulgence is the highest form of living.

  “So what are you going to do about this Wolf guy anyway?” Ellen said finally, circling back to our earlier conversation after our peak drunkenness had faded to a pleasant buzz.

  I threw up my hands. “I literally have no idea. But now I’m mad, and I want to get even. You have to help me think of something better than just flying to New York and ripping him a new one.”

  “Okay. Well—wait.” Ellen cocked her head. “What’re the odds Wolf’s in Vegas right now? You said he’s a writer, didn’t you?”

  “I dunno,” I said. “Oh! But you know how we could figure it out?”

  I pulled out my phone and opened the Twitter app.

  Sure enough, Wolf had tweeted that he was in #vegas for #ABF. laughing for no reason cum party w me, he’d written. “UGH,” I said, and threw the phone down on the bar.

  “He’s here, isn’t he?!” Ellen said with glee. She leaned over to look at the screen, putting her elbows on the bar. She snapped her fingers. “Bartender, can I get a napkin and a pen? Oh, this is good. This is really good. The timing is perfect, we just gotta figure out the details. Let me think—

  “Okay,” she tapped on the napkin and pushed it toward me after she’d scribbled a few things down. “You’re gonna love this. Here’s what we’re gonna do.”

  Ellen’s diabolical scheme was perfect and made-for-television and precisely this: she’d have her lawyers—or, more likely, one of their summer interns—send Wolf one of the firm’s standard cease-and-desist letters. The letter would have to be true, of course, but as Ellen put it, “there is such a thing as trueish.” The point of the letter was not to really sue Wolf, but to scare him into believing we could and would, which would compel him, finally, to excise Susan’s work from his manuscript. In order to really scare him, we had to be, shall we say, playful with the language about the proof we had and the possible repercussions of his plagiarism.

  Sending a letter like that would have been more than enough to assuage my guilty conscience. But because this was Ellen, and Ellen didn’t do anything halfway, she declared we had to raise the stakes even higher. “I don’t want this asshole messing with you ever again,” she said. “What he did to you in New York?” She wagged a finger. “That shit don’t fly with Ellen Hanks.”

  The latter was one of Ellen’s most popular taglines from her TV show.

  So the second part of the plan was to have Barry, Ellen’s bodybuilding fuckboy, deliver the letter to Wolf in person. Ellen said, “Barry’ll do what he needs to do to make sure the message gets through, if you know what I mean.” She said this completely deadpan, thumping her fist into her open palm, and though I had an urge to guffaw, I held it back. Sometimes you just had to succumb to the outsized reality of a reality TV star.

  The lesson I took from the experience was this: whoever said revenge wasn’t sweet hadn’t plotted revenge while getting brain freeze from a Numb Cappuccino! with a minor celebrity. Revenge wasn’t just sweet; it was an opiate. The fog I’d been living with ever since Ben broke up with me—no, since Susan broke up with me—no, since I’d gotten ho
me from Mort and my mother in Milwaukee—no, since I signed on with Nanü four months back—started to clear, and I came upon the glorious sense of purpose I’d been searching for. I felt sunny as a solstice, happy as a ham. Wolf’s end, God willing, would be my beginning.

  “Why are you doing this?” I said, after Ellen had gotten her lawyer on the phone and texted Barry. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I’ve ever been more grateful for another human being. But—why?”

  Ellen sighed and crossed her legs, which was difficult, given the tightness of her dress. “The real reason?” She shrugged. “I like you. If I like you, I like you, it’s not that complicated. Where I come from, we look out for our own. And some of these people out there?” She twirled her index finger. “They’re awful. They’re fucking nuts. Mean, too. And when it comes to people, you’re smart, Casey, but don’t take this the wrong way, you’re real dumb, too.”

  “What do you mean?” But Ellen’s attention had moved away to the casino floor. She was watching something, or someone, but in the blur of lights and sounds and people and desperation masquerading as a good time, it was hard to tell what.

  “You know what I need?” she said finally. “I need a manicure. What time is it?”

  I checked my phone. “Shit!” It was seven-thirty in the evening. Julian’s keynote was at eight.

  Ellen said, “Vegas’s a time warp, what can I say. Last time I was here I ended up sitting on the floor of the Wynn at five in the morning, my dress up to my waist, and some guy named Stefano feeding me hamburgers. No idea how I got there.”

  “I’ve gotta go!” I stood up, pulled my wallet out of my purse to throw down my company card, but Ellen waved her hand away. “Please. This one’s on me.”

  “Okay. Thank you. I mean it. For everything. Oh, and Ellen?” She turned around, and I threw my arms around her. She smelled overpoweringly of perfume and hair products. “I love you.”