A Dangerous Fiction

by Barbara Rogan

  I fully expected her to join in my indignation. She had been Hugo’s agent, after all, his dear friend and our accidental matchmaker. She would hate the idea of our lives being pawed over and hung out for display. So I could hardly believe it when Molly said, “You could do worse.”

  I gasped. “Et tu, Molly?”

  “Someone’s going to write one,” she answered matter-of-factly. “You can’t prevent it, so you might as well find someone good. Teddy’s first-rate. Did you read his Vonnegut?”

  I had read it and it was good. It was the reason I’d agreed to the interview, that and the incessant nagging of Hugo’s publisher. But there was a huge difference between a magazine profile and a book, and I was amazed that Molly couldn’t see that.

  “Didn’t you like his Vanity Fair piece?” she asked.

  “I didn’t read it.”

  “Well, you should, it was very flattering. He called you and Hugo the greatest literary couple since Scott and Zelda.”

  “You call that flattering? Look how Zelda ended up!”

  “You’re made of sterner stuff. Anyway, if Teddy doesn’t write it, someone else will. I’ve heard rumors.”

  “What rumors?”

  Molly lowered her voice. “I heard Gloria Vogel’s been shopping a proposal.”

  I couldn’t take it in. Gloria Vogel wrote celebrity bios—gossipy, titillating, speculative trash. Impossible. Molly must be wrong.

  Except that she was never wrong. Even secluded in her house in Scarsdale, Molly Hamish collected information the way TVs collect dust. She heard everything about our incestuous little world: who’s moving where, who’s stealing whose authors, who’s cheating on whom in the boardroom and the bedroom. If Molly said it, it was true.

  I felt sick to my stomach. First Sam Spade, then Teddy, now Molly. The first two I could have taken in stride. Desperate writers come with the territory, and as for Teddy, fending off pests had been one of my jobs as Hugo’s wife; I could do it in my sleep. That was just business.

  But Molly was different. Molly had given me my start in publishing, choosing me out of a hundred applicants to be her assistant. She’d introduced me to Hugo. After he died and I was drowning in grief, she pulled me ashore, taking me back into the agency, piling on work to fill the unbearable emptiness. It was useful work, I was good at it, and it gave me a reason to crawl out of bed even when I didn’t want to. I loved Molly. She was the mother I’d never had, just as I was the daughter she’d longed for. How could she take Teddy’s side, against Hugo’s wishes and my own?

  I yearned to go home, crawl into the big bed I’d shared with Hugo, and pull the covers over my head, but I couldn’t leave before congratulating Rowena. Suddenly a blare of trumpets sounded, silencing the room. The doors to the restaurant were flung open, the lights raised, and two trumpeters marched in. Behind them, half-reclining on a litter carried by four huge men, was our very own Rowena. She was dressed as Cleopatra in a flowing, draped gown of gold and Nile green, thick jade wristlets, and a gold head cloth that covered the crown of her head and fell squarely to her shoulders. Her eyes were ringed with kohl. A large fake snake—I hoped it was fake—was wrapped around her neck.

  My eyes met Molly’s, and we burst into laughter. Our client’s flair for over-the-top drama wasn’t confined to her novels. The launch party for her last book, which was set in a circus, had been held in the Big Apple Circus, and Rowena had made her entrance on an elephant. But tonight she’d surpassed herself. If nothing else, it was a bracing antidote to the usual staid book launch.

  “Did you know?” I asked Molly when I could speak again.

  She was laughing so hard that mascara was carving rivulets in her powdered cheeks. “She never said a word! Bless her for making me come. I’d have died if I’d missed this.”

  The crowd parted before Rowena like the Red Sea before Moses, flashbulbs marking her passage. The litter bearers, clad in short togas and leather sandals with straps that wove around their calves, carried Rowena to the pyramid, where her publisher awaited. Larry held out his hand, and the Queen of the Nile graciously descended.

  The room rang with laughter and applause. Rowena spread her arms to embrace us all. Her outfit was perfect, down to the very sandals Cleopatra would have worn if Manolo Blahnik had lived in ancient Egypt. In her natural state, Rowena, née Marylou Hubbard, would have made a creditable farmer had not ambition and talent propelled her far from the Kansas wheat fields of her youth. She had broad shoulders and a sturdy physique that not even the most rigorous diet and exercise regimen could render sylphlike, and her nails were polished works of art mounted on thick, blunt fingers. But everything that could be changed had been: boobs, butt, tummy . . . The face framed by that golden headpiece had been expertly improved and updated. Rowena was fifty-three, admitted to thirty-nine, and could almost get away with it.

  Waiters came around with Champagne. Larry’s toast was both effusive and sincere, befitting an author whose books accounted for a hefty percentage of his company’s gross revenue. In her response, Rowena lauded her publisher, swore undying love for her editor, and thanked what seemed like the entire Pellucid sales force by name. Then she said, “Finally, most importantly, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my two extraordinary agents, Molly Hamish and Jo Donovan. Molly believed in me before I believed in myself, and she terrorized other people into believing as well. She has been my champion, my teacher, my protector, and my friend. When she told me she was retiring, I was devastated, first for her but also, with true writerly selfishness, for myself. I knew no one would be able to take her place, and indeed no one ever could.

  “But Jo Donovan stands in a place of her own. We all know the kind of writers Jo has worked with. We know the level. I was—I admit it—intimidated. As young as she was, to have done so much: what would she make of my scribblings? What I discovered, when I turned in Alexandrian Nights, was an agent/editor par excellence. She treated my twentieth book as if it were my first. She saw through what was on the paper to what was in my heart, and she would not rest until she had cajoled and bullied me into producing the best work I had in me. And then she sold the hell out of it.” Beside her, Larry shrugged in rueful acknowledgment. Rowena raised her glass in our direction. “To have had two such agents in a lifetime is a blessing indeed.”

  Molly blew her a kiss and I bowed my head in thanks. I knew perfectly well that before Molly’s chair had even cooled, Rowena’s phone had been ringing off the hook with suitors. That this woman, who could have had any agent she wanted, should have felt nervous about showing me her work spoke again to the appalling insecurity of fiction writers. Tightrope walkers, Hugo once called them, crossing chasms on strings of words. I couldn’t do it. Give me the business end of publishing any day.

  I assured myself that Molly had a ride home, then said good-bye before she could start in on me again. Rowena was surrounded by people, but a lane opened for me. We hugged. She smelled of something expensively exotic.

  “Nice entrance,” I said.

  “I wanted a horse-drawn chariot, but the restaurant wouldn’t go along. Some stupidity about the health code.”

  “This was better.”

  She grinned. “It was, wasn’t it?”

  “Thank you for those lovely words. Molly was touched too.”

  “I meant every word, my dear.” She squeezed my hand. Then the crowd exerted its pressure and I was rotated out. I made for the exit before anyone else could jump me and was waiting for my tote at the hatcheck counter when Molly appeared, leaning on the arm of one of Rowena’s tunic-clad litter bearers.

  “Bit young for you, isn’t he?” I asked.

  She veered toward me and rapped my knuckles with her umbrella. “This is Manny, Rowena’s driver. He’s taking me home.”

  I looked him over. “Like that?”

  “It’s New Yawk,” Manny said. “Who’s gonna notice?�
�

  Chapter 3

  It was too early to check into La Posada, so I left my bags and slipped out for a walk through downtown Santa Fe. Once the writers’ conference began, the world would shrink to the size of the hotel, and between workshops, panels, pitch sessions, luncheons, and dinners, I would have no time to indulge myself. Blazing sun glanced off the adobe buildings and flooded the streets; the air tasted of pine and dust. It was just past noon and very hot. Island-dweller that I was, I felt the altitude as a lessening of gravity, as if a single strong gust would send me soaring, Chagall-like, over the adobe walls into the deep-blue distant sky.

  Over the course of a year, I, like most agents, receive a dozen or more invitations to attend writers’ conferences. Most I turn down, because it’s rare to find a publishable writer among the attendees, much less one whose work I loved enough to take on. But this Santa Fe conference held two big attractions. The first was that one of my favorite clients, Max Messinger, was among the presenters; the second was Santa Fe itself. I’d been there with Hugo, a year into our marriage, and if I kept my eyes straight ahead, I could imagine him striding beside me, hear his voice in my ear.

  I found my way to the plaza, which looked exactly as I’d remembered it and probably not very different from the way it had looked two hundred years ago. In the portal of the Palace of the Governors, Native American women sat on low stools behind blankets covered with crafts: jewelry for the most part—silver and turquoise and coral—but also woven blankets and rugs, baskets, pottery. The women did not hawk their wares but rather sat in dignified silence, speaking only when addressed. On the last day of our visit, Hugo bought me a silver pendant set with turquoise and coral from a woman who mistook me for his daughter. I wondered if she was still there. Resisting the lure of the shady cottonwoods, I crossed to the portal and made my way down the line of vendors. I studied each one in turn, but if the seller was among them, I didn’t recognize her.

  Well, I thought, twelve years. Anything can change in twelve years. Isabel Delgado, Hugo’s friend and collaborator, might have sold her house on Canyon Road, though I hoped not, for it suited her so well. It had adobe walls a foot thick and rounded windows, hand-carved vigas, and kiva fireplaces in all the principal rooms. The terra-cotta floors were strewn with bright Navajo rugs, and niches in the walls displayed her collection of Indian pottery. There was a separate adobe outbuilding fitted up as a state-of-the-art music studio, where she and Hugo worked on the project that had brought us to Santa Fe: a rock opera based on his first novel, Distant Cries. Every morning, before they started working, the three of us drank coffee on the patio beneath a trellis of orange trumpet vine, surrounded by pots of periwinkle, sage, and desert marigolds. Afterward I’d leave them and go off on my own to explore the city.

  In the early days of my marriage, I had been wary of other women. Hugo was a famous playboy, and I did not yet feel myself an equal partner in our marriage; I didn’t even feel equal to the worldly, accomplished women who orbited around him. But Isabel Delgado didn’t worry me, because the composer was old, forty-five at least, well past the age of dalliance. (That Hugo was even older never occurred to me; in my eyes he was ageless.) She was a fine-looking woman for her age, tall and slender with strong features and long black hair, filigreed with silver, that she wore in a single braid down the middle of her back. Though she was as acclaimed in her world as Hugo was in his, she lived simply and without airs. And she was kind to me in an Auntie Mame sort of way. She gave me things: an embroidered shawl, turquoise earrings, and a Hopi bowl . . . When Hugo died, she flew to New York for the memorial service.

  I should call her, I thought. But somehow I didn’t care to.

  • • •

  I had checked in with the conference organizers and was just getting my room key when a hand clasped my shoulder. At once I flashed back to Sam Spade grabbing me on the street and, without thinking, I knocked the hand away and spun around.

  Max Messinger raised both hands. “Easy there, bruiser.”

  “Max!” I cried, and we fell into each other’s arms. Max was a legacy from Molly, but one I’d long since made my own. He was six-foot-two with a gleaming bald head, a trim goatee, and one gold hoop earring. Before he took to writing thrillers for a living, he’d been an FBI profiler, and before that a field agent. I kept expecting the sedentary life of the writer to take its toll, but the body pressed to mine was as soft as a refrigerator.

  He held me at arm’s length and inspected the goods. “You’re a breath of New York air.”

  “My new scent: Eau D’exhaust.”

  He laughed. “Come have a drink.”

  I asked the desk clerk to send my bags to my room and hooked my arm in Max’s. We strolled out to the garden and chose a table beside a fountain. There was something so comforting about being with Max; it was like walking a mastiff.

  “How’s Molly?” he asked.

  People asked me all the time, and I usually said she was doing fine, holding her own. I couldn’t lie to Max, though. “Not great. It’s in her bones now.”

  He said all there was to say, which was nothing. Dragonflies darted through the spray of the fountain. A waitress came and took our orders: white wine for me, beer for Max.

  When she left, Max said, “Barry sends his love and two pots of jam from our very own strawberry patch. Can you believe those words coming from a New York Jew? Life is so incongruous.”

  “Who does the canning?” I asked.

  “Elves. You didn’t think Barry would stain his lily-whites, did you?”

  Barry Roth was an entertainment lawyer and Max’s husband. Molly took credit for the match, having sent Max to Barry when the movie rights to his first book sold. Within a month they were living together; and days after gay marriage was briefly legalized in California, Molly and I flew to L.A. for their wedding. At the dinner we sat next to Max’s mother, Estelle, a plump little widow from Queens, who danced the hora with gusto and confided, after a few White Russians, “I always hoped he’d marry a nice Jewish girl. But two out of three ain’t bad.”

  Of course, by then Max was out of the FBI. They’d known he was gay—Max was too big to fit in any closet—but marriage might have strained his colleagues’ grudging acceptance to the breaking point. Or so I imagined, for while Max made prodigious use of his years in the bureau for his thrillers, he rarely talked about his own time there. Couldn’t have been easy, I imagined, being gay and Jewish to boot. But writers do tend to be outsiders, and whatever else he was, Max was a writer to the bone.

  Over our drinks we discussed his new publisher. I had moved him over to Random for a three-book deal with a 50 percent bump in his advances and a fresh marketing plan to back up their investment. The first book was due out in a few weeks and Random had already gone back for a second printing. There was a twelve-city tour in the works, along with a national radio campaign. Max should have been over the moon, and a part of him was, but another part of him worried. “What if they don’t earn out? What if I don’t make the list?”

  Writers. Every one I’d ever met was bipolar, the poles being arrogance and insecurity. Even my Hugo had had his moments of doubt. I never knew what would trigger them. A clueless review, the success of a lesser writer (not even great writers, I’d learned, were immune to jealousy), a significant birthday. It was better in Paris, where we spent six months of every year, but the troughs between books were always fraught with danger. I’d come home from shopping on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, carrying our daily baguette, fruit, and cheese, to find him sprawled across our brass bed, wiry gray hair furrowed with tugging, surrounded by balled-up sheets of loose-leaf paper.

  “I’m done,” he’d say. “I’m finished. I’m out of words.”

  “They’ll come back,” I’d promise. And they always did.

  Max had opened a menu and was studying it closely. “I’m starving. Eating for two now, you know.”
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br />   “Excuse me?”

  He gave me a sly grin. “Didn’t I tell you? We’re pregnant.”

  “Highly unlikely.”

  “And yet true, thanks to an egg donor and a lovely surrogate named Pamela.”

  I was speechless, but Max, secure in my delight, rattled on without noticing. He’d always wanted kids, he said. Barry was the hold-out, but when he hit forty, something changed. “We don’t know which of us is the biological father. Better that way, don’t you think?”

  “Much better.” I managed a smile. It’s not that I wasn’t happy for them. He’d taken me by surprise was all.

  “If it’s a girl, we’re naming her Molly.”

  Something cold and hard throbbed in me, like the beating of a dead heart.

  “You don’t think she’ll be offended?” he asked. “Technically Jews aren’t supposed to name children after the living.”

  “She’ll be thrilled and honored. It’s a lovely name. If I’d had a daughter, I’d have called her Molly.” I don’t know why I said that. It felt like sticking a fork in my hand. There was a time when I thought Hugo and I would have a child. It didn’t happen. Since then I’d put fruitless longing behind me and moved on. Still, now and then it flared up, like malaria or some hidden disease of the heart.

  Max probed my face. At certain angles, you could still see the detective in him. “What’s going on in your life, Jo?”

  “Same old same old. Fighting with publishers. Doing their job for them.”

  “And? Anyone special?”

  That again. Max was as bad as Molly, always urging me to start dating, get back in the game. I’d had offers, from men far more attractive than the oily Teddy Pendragon, but none of them were Hugo; none of them compared.

  “You know,” I said, “ever since you found wedded bliss, you’ve turned into an awful yenta.”

  “I come by it honestly,” Max said. “You met my mother.”