A Lady's Guide to Selling Out

by Sally Franson

  “You nut job,” she said into my hair. “I love you, too.”

  * * *

  —

  By the time I got back to the convention center hall, it was nearly empty. The few remaining people were putting white sheets over their book tables and turning off LCD monitors. Even though the ABF folks had done their best to make their event seem hip and glamorous during the day, as the space closed for the night—the cleaning staff was already dragging in vacuums and wheeling in carts—it made me sad to look at what was left once all the shiny, important people were gone. For a convention celebrating what always seemed to me like a necessary human endeavor—using language to make sense of our lives—the room looked awfully small. Outside the hall the rest of Vegas went blithely by, engaged in less demanding pastimes.

  It felt wrong, I guess, to see that these books and their guardians meant so little to the rest of Caesars. But of course, people hadn’t come to Caesars to read. They’d come to gamble and drink and pretend to be someone else for a while, someone richer and cleverer and unburdened by the past, someone who took risks and said what they meant and wasn’t so stinking afraid all the time. In short, people came here to forget their burdens, to immerse themselves in a reality unfamiliar to them and exciting in its unfamiliarity, to remove some steam in this temporary game of make-believe.

  But what they didn’t know, or maybe they did but had forgotten, was that books did that too. When I was a kid, and I found myself lonely, or afraid, or fed up with my parents or teachers or friends at school, I read. Because books, the good ones, the ones you hold on to and come back to, they never disappoint. They’re the best kind of escape because, instead of leading you away from yourself, they end up circling you back to yourself, nice and easy, helping you see things not just as they are, but as you are too.

  And though you’d think this circling would be the last thing you’d want, seeing as escapism was what you were after in the first place, it ends up being the best part. Because the people who made those books, they put themselves on the line to do so. They spent a long time working; they gave you the best of what lay inside them, though this may have hurt them too. And you can feel that in the good books; you might even call that feeling love. A feeling so much better than distraction, than pleasure, than obliteration, but boy, so much harder to do.

  Yes, I wish I could have said this to those people snapping selfies with Cleopatra, or walking into pillars buried in their phones, or eating or drinking or smoking like crazy just trying to get to—what? where?—that infinity beyond loneliness and fear. But who was I to talk? I, Casey. Settling scores by threats and bodybuilders named Barry whilst press-ganging into the advertising industry.

  The keynote was in another hall on the other side of this floor. I went to the bathroom first and splashed water on my face. The drinking, Ellen’s kindness, thinking about how much I loved books, it’d all made me a little sentimental and red-eyed. I looked hard at my reflection in the mirror and tried, for a moment, to make peace with what I saw. Not just with how I looked, but what was inside.

  Still frowning with the effort, I got a text from Ellen. Barry says your guys taken care of ;)

  Yes!!!!!!! I wrote back immediately, adding a biceps emoji. Ah well, I’d give peace a chance later.

  I snuck into the back of the packed hall to listen to Julian’s keynote. It had just started when I arrived, and the audience was hushed, rapt; you could hear a pen drop. I plopped into one of the few open chairs in the back and made, I guess, what could have been construed as excessive noise: unwrapping a piece of gum, shrugging off my blazer, trying to turn off my phone but accidentally making it ring, cracking open a can of sparkling water I’d stolen from the convention. When a few guys in front of me turned and frowned, I shot them a look and pumped my shoulders back like Come at me, bro. What did they think this was, church?

  But actually, that’s exactly what they thought it was. Art is as fine a substitute for religion as, say, CrossFit or political ideology, and the secular humanists who packed the hall looked to Julian for direction just like Catholics look to the pope and hippies to tarot. As a prophet, Julian was riveting. The subject of the speech he gave wasn’t particularly original—asking the publishing industry how to remain relevant in the media-saturated digital age was by then well-worn territory—but as any good orator knows: it’s not what you say, it’s how. As I listened, transported, it became clear that Julian was a master not only at writing, but at delivering his writing in a way that felt, well, mighty. His cadence was full of pregnant pauses and alternately hushed and soaring tones, and with his words he opened up the possibilities of the human condition, asked us to expand the capacities of the heart. To an inherently sentimental audience like this one, Julian’s connecting of a smaller, more prosaic truth (people need to read more or this industry will become extinct) with a larger and loftier one (we must help people face who they are without flinching) felt like gospel. How could I not love him for giving me this feeling?

  I was not alone. Julian was mobbed with admirers and hangers-on after his Q&A, and I figured the only way to get to him was through a war of attrition. Leaning against a fake Roman column, I drank the black coffee ABF had provided for the occasion and shoveled a piece of sheet cake in my mouth, having forgotten once again, or maybe having been too nervous, to eat much that day. The room was full and throbbing with inspiration, and I tried to capture some of it while I thought about how I might convince Julian to get on board.

  Beyond the obvious problems of his sick wife’s medical bills, Julian didn’t appear to be someone motivated by money—a sure sign he’d grown up with a fair amount of it. So I couldn’t just appeal to his wallet. No, Julian’s entrée into Nanü had to be ideological, something about the revolution starting from within. Promoting a tablet that had custom-made features for writers was a way to combat the war between literature and digital culture he had spoken about in his address. There was no need to fear technology; we had only to make sure we were using it in a way that furthered our empathic capacities. Yes, I thought, high from the sugar, as I grabbed another piece of cake. I was sure that was the right approach.

  Time went by indeterminately. I drank more coffee and ate more cake until my hands shook. I was nervous about talking to Julian, infinitely more nervous than I’d been with the other writers. Eventually the crowd thinned; I held my space against the Roman column, until, at what seemed at the time to be my great fortune, a figure appeared at my side.

  “You must be Casey Pendergast,” Julian North said.

  I jumped a mile. “Who, me?!”

  He laughed. “Who else?”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Celeste Winter told me to be on the lookout for a tall blonde with legs like a gazelle. You seemed to fit the bill. Julian North.” He stuck out a hand. We shook.

  Something small pinged inside me when he said the thing about a gazelle, but I brushed it off. Just look at what happened with Ben. I was always overreacting. “We’ve met once before,” I blurted out. “You came to my college and spoke a long time ago. You signed my book—it was because of you that I became an English major.”

  “No kidding.” Julian waved goodbye to someone behind me. “I’ll take the compliment, don’t get me wrong, but my guess is you would’ve become an English major anyway.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He smiled knowingly. “My work’s made me useless in most ways, but understanding human nature isn’t one of them.”

  “Well—” I said. And I did not know what to say after that.

  I figured we would meet up the next day to have a proper chat, seeing as he probably needed to get back to his wife. But it was Julian who suggested that we get something to eat, explained he hadn’t had a chance to get dinner before the talk and was rightfully starved. “Me too!” I explained. I thought but did not say, We have so much in comm
on!

  As we walked out of the room, he put a gentlemanly hand on my back. This seemed normal. Everything Julian did seemed normal, or even better than normal. Magical. Reporters who had written about Julian before always remarked on the force field he had around him. The only reality was what he alone created. Julian was a master at getting people to talk about their personal lives while saying nothing about his own.

  Perhaps this explains why I have no clear recollection of moving to the sushi bar at Caesars and ordering a tableful of nigiri and rolls, as well as sake that arrived in an elegant ceramic pitcher. The next thing I remember is pouring my heart out to him about Susan. “She’s the reason I came to see you in the first place,” I said, dabbing my eyes with a starched napkin. “She’s been my best friend for ten years, and now she won’t even pick up the phone when I call. I can’t believe I was so stupid, trusting this poet guy”—I didn’t want to name Wolf directly—“to help get her published. I don’t even think I did trust him; I just wanted to get back at him by using him like he’d used me.”

  Julian appeared completely immersed in what I said. “I understand,” he said, looking into my eyes.

  “You do?”

  He nodded without breaking his gaze. I can’t even tell you how good that felt. I felt, I suppose, above all else, honored. A man like Julian North, respecting me.

  “Sorry to burden you like that,” I said, abruptly looking away, because something pinged in me again, he was paying a little too much attention, it was making me uncomfortable. But no, actually, I corrected myself, that was my fault. I just wasn’t good at accepting heartfelt gestures.

  He shook his head and picked up a neatly cut rectangle of tuna. After he swallowed he said, in his mighty way, “It’s not a burden. It’s life. Everything you’re saying, everything you’ve done, in my own way I’ve said and done too. Here, between the two of us, we get to be who we are.”

  “I can’t even tell you how relieved it makes me to hear you say that,” I said. More tears popped out from the corners of my eyes. “I’m touched, truly. It’s been just—devastating—”

  Wait, why was I talking about Susan? How did we get here? Didn’t I have a job to do? Julian poured us both another large thimbleful of sake. I tried to course-correct. “Anyway, sorry, I don’t know how we got so off—how are you? How’s your wife? I was really sorry when Celeste told me the news.”

  Julian put his chopsticks down and picked up his sake. “She’s all right.”

  “I am sorry,” I said. “I really am.

  “Umm,” I said after another pause. Julian could use silence to his advantage better than anyone I’d ever met. “Should we talk about business?”

  He put his glass down and his elbows on the table, interlacing his fingers and placing his chin upon their tips. “Yes. Why not.”

  So I told him about the tablet and how I thought it might be a useful meeting of the minds between literature and technology, but because I could not keep anything back from that magnet inside of him, I also told him about my moral dilemma with Tracy Mallard and Mort Stillman. “If you’re going to come on board with us,” I said, and then, correctingly, “with Nanü, you should do so with your eyes wide open. That’s where I’m at right now. I don’t want to manipulate you into doing anything you’re not a hundred percent okay with—not that I think I could. It’s just you seem like such a good person, and you’re doing such good work, and I figure the only way to do business with a good person is to try to be a good person back.”

  Julian looked at me intently. His eyes were strange, mostly blue, but with a splash of brown in one of them. “I admire you,” he said.

  “Oh.” I blushed at the compliment. He had expressed neither interest nor disinterest in my proposal thus far, so I went on to say that I thought he could be an ambassador of literature in the digital age. “You’re the agent of change!” I said. “That’s you, everybody listens to you. You’re, like, an American hero!”

  He laughed a little. “Once one of my readers wrote to me. She was in a hospice in South Florida, stage four liver cancer. She knew she was going to die soon, she said, so she was writing letters to all her heroes, to let them know how much they’d meant to her.

  “She could have left it at that, and I could have, too. But I didn’t. I told my wife to cancel everything, and I got on the next plane to Florida. By the following morning I was sitting next to her in the hospice. She didn’t want me to see her—the room smelled of decay, her body was failing—and she cried when I walked in the door. But I didn’t leave. Her family was dead, her husband had left her years before. So I stayed with her till the end.”

  My eyes filled with more tears. I didn’t know why he was telling me this story, but I felt, again, so honored that he considered me a worthy addressee.

  “Would you mind waiting here for a second while I go check on my wife?” he said. “I won’t be long, and I can tell we’re not done talking.”

  “Oh God, of course,” I rushed to say. “Of course. I’ll be right here.”

  Julian paused. “Unless you wanted to come with me? As I said, it’ll only be a minute.”

  “Oh!” I said. This was a strange request. Wasn’t it? In Julian’s reality it was hard to say. But then again, I was drunk, so what the hell did I know? “Well…yeah, I guess,” I said fumbling around for my purse. “I don’t see why not.”

  The next thing I remember is standing in front of his door while he tried a couple times, unsuccessfully, to stick his key card in the slot, before the red light finally turned green and the door swung open.

  “I’ll be right here,” I said, motioning to the hallway.

  “Don’t be silly,” Julian said welcomingly. “Come on in.”

  “But your—” I coughed. “Your wife’s sleeping, isn’t she?”

  Julian saw my expression, laughed. “Oh no. Jill isn’t here. I just want to call and check on her.”

  “Ohhhhhh!” I said. I looked around at my invisible peanut gallery in the hallway. “Right. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, of course she’s not here, since—”

  Trailing off, I followed him.

  In hindsight I know how woefully obvious this all seems. It always does, doesn’t it? But the brain has a special mechanism that allows us to see only the parts of a person we wish to believe are there. Just look at my mother, spending her life with a man who lied to her half the time. Denial is part of being; dissonance isn’t processed very well by our delicate little hippocampi. What I mean is, I started my conversation with Julian that night believing he was an amazing person, and it was an amazing person that I followed into this hotel room.

  Julian’s room was a suite, complete with a high-wattage view of the Strip. “Can I get you a drink?” he said, disappearing around the corner into what I assumed was a kitchen.

  “I’m okay, thanks.” I took a seat on an overstuffed couch, which was part of a whole living area separate from a platformed area, atop which was a king-sized bed. I gave a little whistle. “Nice place you got here!”

  “Isn’t it? ABF put me up.”

  I crossed my legs and put my hands on my knees, trying to seem businesslike. Even though, sure, a few beats had felt funny, I was really enjoying our conversation. It was the first time a Nanü writer was speaking to me as a peer, an adult, and not just a kid or hired gun. I wondered how open Julian was to mentorship. I’d never had a male mentor before, only Celeste, but Julian seemed like a person I could learn a lot from about, well, being a person, and right now I needed someone like that in my life.

  When he reappeared, he’d taken off his jacket and tie. But everyone needed to kick back after a long day. Hell, five minutes didn’t pass from the time I usually got home to when I’d pulled on my sweatpants.

  No, it was only when he sat right next to me on the couch, when there were at least four other pieces of furniture to si
t upon, that I got another ping. My belly, all of a sudden, began to hurt. A tremor, too, in my brain: on the right side, a quiver, like something was bending that I could not keep straight.

  “So tell me more about this tablet,” he said.

  I smiled, partly with relief. This was about work, after all! I turned to face him. But before I could, he had put a hand on my thigh and was leaning forward, brushing his lips to my neck.

  I jerked back. “Oh—ah—what? Sorry—”

  “It’s okay,” he murmured, and leaned forward to kiss me again.

  “No!” The sound of shock. “I mean—what are you doing?”

  “What do you mean, what am I doing?” he said into my ear, pushing my hands off my knees, pushing my legs apart, and beginning to push his fist between my thighs. In my nerves I felt equal parts arousal and revulsion. He kissed my neck more, and I sighed, not because I wanted to but from the involuntariness of bodily pleasure. Until the thing that had bent in my brain straightened with a snap, and the instinct that has kept humans surviving and women upright kicked in so hard that I jumped to my feet.

  “What are you doing?” I said again, crossing my arms over my body protectively. “You have a wife!”

  Julian didn’t say anything, only sat there, the bulge in his trousers prominent. “Sit down,” he said, as calmly as if we were discussing the weather. He patted the spot where I’d been. I suddenly realized how much older he was. My father’s age, were he alive. “Come sit with me.”

  “No!”

  “But you liked it, didn’t you?” he said calmly. “You liked the way I felt between your legs?”

  “No!” My face was hot, my fists clenched, my ankles crossed.

  “I know you liked it,” he said, and held up his fingers. “I felt you liking it.”

  “What the fuck, dude,” I said. “That’s it, I’m leaving.” I turned on my heel and headed for the door. I was no longer thinking about work, my future, about venture capitalists, about equity, about books, about television. I was not thinking of Wolf or Susan or Ben or Lindsey or Celeste, Barry or Ellen or Vegas. I had one thought on my mind: I need to get out of here as fast as I can. I need—to run.