“Jo,” he said, “I was wondering if I could stay on after the summer, not as an intern, but as your full-time assistant.”
“What about law school?” I asked, for he’d been accepted to several.
“I can defer for a year or two. If I even go.”
“You’re having second thoughts?”
“I never really had first thoughts. The thinking was done for me.”
I considered it. When Molly retired, I absorbed her entire list. Six months later I fired Charlie Malvino and took over a dozen of his clients as well. My workload was Sisyphean. I needed another assistant, one who read submissions. Lorna didn’t, which I couldn’t really complain about because she’d been upfront about it. “I’m a first-class secretary,” she’d said. “I’ll organize your files so you never lose anything again. I’ll screen your calls, answer your correspondence, keep your schedule. The office will function like it never has before. But I’m no judge of writing and I won’t pretend I am.”
Not your usual agency hire. But my last assistant had just left me for a subrights job at Viking, and the one before that had run off to start her own agency with an editor friend. I was tired of smart, ambitious kids with minds of their own, for all that I’d been one. Lorna was young, but one had only to look at her, with her sensible flats, bargain-basement clothes, clunky glasses, and the excess weight that encased her like an old down coat, to know that she was the very antithesis of her flighty predecessors. She had worked for a temp agency that specialized in publishing, so she knew the business; and because she’d temped for us on occasion, I knew she was a hard worker and brighter than she looked. And she was happy to work for the salary I offered.
Jean-Paul wouldn’t last long, I thought. He’d come to his senses and go to law school, or he’d accumulate a bit of experience and find a job that paid better. But he’d undoubtedly be an asset for as long as he stayed. He had a nice touch with clients, friendly but respectful, unlike Lorna, who, despite her youth, seemed to regard them as unruly children.
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “But you should too. Publishing’s a tough racket, and the pay’s ridiculous compared to what you’d make as a lawyer.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“You should. Money matters. Have you talked to your parents about this?”
I knew at once I’d said the wrong thing. Jean-Paul scowled. “I’m old enough to know my own mind.”
“At twenty-two?”
“You did.”
Meaning, I supposed, that I’d married Hugo at twenty-two. What a strange turn this conversation had taken. I was relieved when the elevator shuddered to a halt and the doors slid open. The building was prewar, but the lobby had been sleekly redone, all glass and polished black marble. The night man was reading a magazine at the security desk. He glanced up as the elevator opened, then shoved the magazine into his desk, stood and touched his cap. “’Night, Ms. Donovan.”
“Good night, John.” There would come a day, I thought, when I would enter a room and no man would notice; but that day was not here yet. I started opening my umbrella as we left the building, but there was no need. The rain had let up, for now at least, and through a parting in the clouds a bright crescent moon shone down on the glistening avenue. After the rain, the Manhattan air smelled as fresh and clean as a sea breeze.
Jean-Paul handed me my tote bag, and we parted on the sidewalk. As I walked south, a man burst from the alley beside our building and rushed toward me. “Jo! Jo Donovan!”
I stopped and turned to face him. He wore a belted trench coat, sopping wet, and a fedora tilted down over his face, so that in the dark I could hardly make out his features. He’d spoken as if he knew me, but I didn’t recognize him except from old Bogart flicks. “Sam Spade, I presume?” I said.
“What time do you have?”
Reflexively I glanced at my watch. “Seven fifty.”
“Mark the time, Jo. Remember this moment. Both our lives are about to change.” His voice throbbed with emotion. It was the sort of voice that sounds good on the radio, deep and smooth. I noticed a parcel under his left arm that looked suspiciously like a manuscript.
“Let me guess: you’re a writer.”
“Not just a writer,” the voice said, “any more than you’re just an agent. I know what you really are, Jo. And soon you’ll know what I am.”
One has to make allowances for writers, especially the unpublished ones. Rejection gets to everyone after a while, and those poor bastards swim in a sea of it.
“Look,” I said, “if you have something to submit, use the guidelines on our website and I promise we’ll read it. This isn’t the way.”
“I did. It never reached you. Someone in your office intercepted it and sent it back unread.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because if anyone had bothered to read it, they’d have recognized it for the work of genius that it is. Also, you failed the test.”
I sighed. “Let me guess: an upside-down page?”
“Which came back the same way.”
“What page?”
“Two hundred sixty-two.”
I laughed, couldn’t help it, though I knew it would only make him angrier. Presumption, thy name is Writer. Our guidelines ask for synopses and the first five pages only, no more material except by request. At least a quarter of submitters ignores those guidelines and sends us their full manuscripts. Clearly Sam Spade was one of those. Even so, it was impossible not to feel sorry for him. A person can pour his heart and soul into a book and still end up with something only a mother would read.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get the answer you wanted,” I said, “but we take on very few new clients, and once we determine that a book is not for us, we don’t continue reading. We get hundreds of submissions a month; if we read them all in full, we’d have time for nothing else, as I’m sure you understand. But of course you should try elsewhere. I’m just one agent. There are any number of good ones out there.”
“Not for me.” He held out the manuscript. “You’ll understand once you’ve read it.”
There’s a reason agents barricade themselves behind assistants and secretaries. Rejection is unpleasant for the rejecter as well as the rejected; a little distance makes it easier to bear. But I had no intention of being bullied into reading something we’d already turned down.
“I can’t help you,” I said firmly. “And for future reference, this is hardly the way to recommend yourself to any agent.”
“You still don’t get it. No other agent will do.” He slid closer. “I know what you are, Jo. You were Hugo’s muse. Now you’re going to be mine.”
A jolt of fear ran through me. I had misjudged the situation. This wasn’t the usual writerly egotism. This was something else.
You can’t live in New York without occasionally encountering crazy people. They used to scare me till I learned the protocol: keep moving, look straight ahead, and feign deafness until they go away. I was good at feigning deafness, having practiced it often when Hugo’s old girlfriends called.
He stood in my path. I stepped to the side, but as I made to pass him, he reached out and grabbed my arm.
I didn’t stop to think. The umbrella was in my free hand and I swung it, striking him solidly across the chest. He flew backward into a lamppost and came back at me.
I faced him squarely, fear banished by anger. How dare he touch me? How dare he mention Hugo, compare himself to Hugo! Dropping my tote, I grasped the umbrella stock with two hands and struck a batter’s stance. I heard steps, running hard; then hands clutched me from behind and pushed me aside. Nose to nose with my accoster, Jean-Paul shouted, “Get the fuck away from her!”
Too angry to welcome interference, I tried to slide past him, but Jean-Paul wouldn’t budge. He shoved the writer hard in the chest. “Grab me, why don’t you?”
/>
Sam Spade backed away, cradling the manuscript to his chest. “Kid, you just made the biggest mistake of your life.” He inclined his head toward me, shadowed eyes groping. “I’ll see you later, Jo.”
He turned and walked away. Jean-Paul lunged after him, but I grabbed his arm. We looked at each other. His face was flushed, fists clenched. I could smell his rage. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I could have used a few more whacks.”
“Who was he?”
“Nobody. Some idiot who can’t take no for an answer.”
“A writer? Someone we rejected?”
“Apparently.”
“What an asshole!”
“Comes with the territory,” I said, but that was just to calm him. Overeager writers were indeed a fact of publishing life, and I’d met my share at writers’ conferences; but this felt different, creepy, and far too personal.
Jean-Paul mastered himself with a visible effort. “I never realized agenting is such a contact sport. Nice umbrella work, by the way.” He picked my tote up from the sidewalk and slung it over his shoulder. “I’ll see you to the subway.”
“I’m fine,” I said, but he walked me anyway.
Chapter 2
Within an hour of its occurrence, my encounter with the crazy writer had been absorbed, processed, and edited into a story that I recounted to a clutch of colleagues at the restaurant, eliciting uneasy laughter from the females, protective noises from the males. Left on the cutting-room floor was Sam Spade’s invocation of Hugo, which had left me feeling more violated than the vilest obscenities could have done. Jean-Paul, all agreed, had behaved admirably. It occurred to me that I had not been altogether gracious to my would-be rescuer. The boy had undoubtedly meant well, even if the one he ended up protecting was my accoster.
I snagged a glass of white wine from a passing waiter and looked around to see who else was there. It was difficult to see much, since the restaurant was fashionably dark. Maison D’être was its name, and it billed itself as an existential café. The menu was eclectic and the food delicious, though what it had to do with existentialism I couldn’t begin to guess. Maybe the small portions. Housed on the ground floor of what had once been a coach house, the restaurant consisted of a single large room with a bar near the entrance. Sconces shone upward, illuminating the tin ceiling. The main source of light in the room was a spotlight at the far end trained on a floor-to-ceiling pyramid of Rowena’s new book, Alexandrian Nights. The pyramid was flanked by two huge arrangements of white roses, her favorite flower. Alexandrian Nights was Rowena’s twentieth book in twenty years, every one of them bestsellers, and Pellucid Press had gone all-out to celebrate this anniversary book. The Pellucid contingent was there in force, of course, led by publisher Larry Sharpe; Rowena would expect no less. In the crush I spotted editors from other houses, a smattering of agents, and some hungry-eyed writers circling the crowd like wolves. Plenty of press, but no book critics. Rowena was not beloved of the critics, nor they of her.
In this, Rowena Blair was not the typical Hamish-Donovan client. Our fiction list tacked toward the literary, while Rowena trod the path blazed by Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins: that is, she wrote big old-fashioned potboilers set in exotic locales, with lots of steamy sex and a spunky heroine whom no adversity could defeat. In my admittedly biased opinion, Rowena got a raw deal from the critics. She wasn’t a great literary artist, but her books were always fun to read, which was more than could be said for many of our more lauded authors. She was an honest craftswoman and a hard worker who always delivered on time, if a bit of a prima donna, as evidenced by the fact that one hour into the party, there was still no sign of the guest of honor.
Rowena liked to make a grand entrance, and no one minded, as her publisher had ensured that her guests would not want for food, drink, or entertainment while they waited. There was an open bar, roaming waiters with trays of hors d’oeuvres, and, running down the center of the room, a large buffet table engulfed by an impenetrable scrum of bodies. They were young bodies for the most part, publishing assistants and interns who supplemented their meager or nonexistent wages by scrounging the free food at every book launch they could get into, as I’d done myself before Hugo. The entertainment came from the spectacle of the waitstaff dressed in tight black pants and T-shirts, all of whom looked like models or actors and probably were, and by the exchange of publishing gossip that was the main currency of these gatherings.
I heard a burst of familiar laughter and spied Charlie Malvino heading in my direction, arm in arm with a Pellucid publicist. Gathering tidbits for his damned blog, no doubt. I hadn’t met Charlie since I fired him and had no wish to meet him now. But as I turned away from him, I found myself face-to-face with another man I’d been strenuously avoiding for weeks.
“Jo,” he said, beaming. “What luck.”
Luck my ass, I thought. Ambushed twice in one day. I should have stayed home, as if that were an option. “Hello, Teddy.”
Despite pudgy, dimpled cheeks and a Tweedledum figure, Edward Warren Pendragon was not nearly as cuddly as his nickname suggested. He had good manners and pleasant looks and a Mississippi drawl that reputedly had cut swaths through the ranks of New York’s female editors, though you couldn’t tell it by me; having grown up in Appalachia, I was cornpone-proof. But Teddy also had a sharp eye and a sharper pen. By trade he was a biographer who specialized in writers. Last year, Vanity Fair had commissioned him to write a profile of Hugo to coincide with the third anniversary of his death. I gave Teddy an interview. Big mistake. Feed a biographer and it only makes him hungry for more.
“You’re a difficult lady to reach,” Teddy said.
“Sorry, I’ve been swamped.”
“Did you get the tear sheets?”
“I did, thank you.” I sipped my wine to bridge the awkward silence where praise should have come.
“You didn’t like the piece?” he said, with the ready insecurity of even the most successful writers.
“Haven’t had a chance to read it yet, I’m afraid.”
He looked as if I’d slapped him.
“Sorry, Teddy. It’s still hard for me, even after three years.” Pathetic, playing the grieving-widow card, but I had a reason. There is only so long you can detain someone at a function like this, and Teddy knew the rules as well as anyone. One moment of commiseration and I could let the human tide bear me away.
He didn’t offer any. “The thing is, Jo, I really need to talk to you, not as Hugo’s widow, but as his executor. The Vanity Fair piece stirred up a lot of interest. Random House approached me about doing a biography.”
I knew this. Hugo’s editor, David Axelhorn, had called me, too, to feel me out. I’d told him I’d think about it and stopped returning his calls. Sooner or later it was bound to happen; but knowing as I did Hugo’s opinion of literary biographers—“coyotes battening on the remains of their betters,” he once called them, in a letter to the Times—I had no intention of helping the process along.
“This week’s crazy,” I said, edging away, “and next week I’m doing a writers’ conference in Santa Fe. Personally, I’m not convinced the time is right for a bio. But call me at the office after that and we’ll discuss it.”
Teddy seemed skeptical, with good reason; he’d never get past Lorna. Then salvation arrived in the form of a six-foot-tall Jewish goddess in a caftan and a very chic turban.
“Molly!” I cried, throwing my arms around her. It felt like hugging a skeleton. She winced a little and I let go immediately. “What are you doing here?”
“Hey, kiddo. What do you think? Rowena threatened my life if I didn’t show.”
I should have anticipated that. Molly had been Rowena’s first and only agent, until she retired. Over the course of twenty books and twenty years, they’d formed a close friendship that continued after Molly retired and I took over Rowena’s representat
ion.
“But how’d you get here?” I asked, for Molly lived in Westchester and could no longer drive.
“Rowena sent her car. You should see her driver. Mamma mia!”
I led her away from Teddy, who showed signs of wanting to join in the conversation. Molly leaned heavily on my arm as we passed slowly through the crowd, all of whom, it seemed, needed to greet her. For forty years she’d been a literary agent, a matchmaker of writers and publishers. She’d midwifed thousands of books, launched hundreds of careers, and now all her babies were coming home to roost. It was some comfort to see how much she was loved and missed, though I cursed their inconsideration in keeping her standing. At home she’d been using a cane since the last surgery, but she was too proud to use one here.
At last we came to an unoccupied table near the pyramid of books, and I urged Molly into a seat. She reached up to adjust her turban.
“You look beautiful,” I said. In fact she looked haggard. In one year she’d aged twenty. Though the caftan disguised the gauntness of her body and the turban her baldness, nothing could soften the stark features that had once ruled her face in stately harmony but now occupied her face like outposts in a barren wasteland. The strange thing was that no matter how often I saw Molly, which was once a month at least, I never seemed to assimilate the changes in her appearance, so each new encounter came as a shock.
Only her eyes were unchanged, deep brown pools of intelligence whose penetrating gaze was fixed on my face. “Such a liar,” she said. “I hate this damn babushka. But the wig is even worse.”
“Can I get you something, Molly?” The crowd by the buffet table was only two deep, and here and there I could glimpse actual dishes. The smell made my mouth water; apart from Lorna’s doughnut, I’d had nothing to eat since breakfast.
“Sit.” She patted the chair beside her, and I sat, swallowing a sigh. “Talk to me. What did Teddy Pendragon want?”
“He cornered me, the prick. The Vanity Fair piece wasn’t enough; now he wants to do a bio.”
A Dangerous Fiction Page 2
