by Lynn Messina
For a reclusive ogre who growls if you get too close to his hermitage, Keller is an awfully chatty fellow. “I thought you had to get going.”
“I do. I do. I just want to make sure you weren’t booked for tomorrow night.”
“Why’s that?” I ask, thinking this is unsafe territory. Emotionally unavailable. Emotionally unavailable.
“I have a plan.”
“A plan?”
“Yeah, it’s nothing as lavish as yours and it won’t end in the total destruction of a fellow human being but it could still be fun. What do you think?”
“It’s not my plan,” I say, loud enough for Allison to hear if she’s listening. “I didn’t come up with it.”
“Huh?”
I’m tempted to explain everything. I’m tempted to tell him that Allison Harper is the evil genius behind the plan to topple Jane and that I only date men I’m not attracted to. But I don’t. I hold myself back and agree to meet him at the bar at Isabella’s at seven-thirty.
The Contract
Jane calls me into her office. She looks up when I enter, she tells me to take a seat, she asks after my family. Suddenly I’m anxious. This isn’t just bizarre behavior, this is night-and-day, are-you-sure-you-haven’t-been-lobotomized stuff.
“And your parents, are they well?” she asks.
“Yes, thank you,” I say cautiously. I’m trying to keep shock out of my voice.
“Are they still in Florida?”
This is a shot in the dark. Jane doesn’t know a thing about my folks. “Uh, Missouri.”
“Good. Good.” An awkward silence passes as Jane stares at me. She’s staring at me with the sort of intensity that makes me want to fidget in my seat. If this were a doctor’s office and Jane an oncologist, I’d expect her to tell me that the tumor is inoperable. “Vig, how long were you my assistant?”
I know the answer to this one and still I feel uncomfortable. “Two years.”
“That’s right. Two years.” She gets out of her chair and takes the one next to me. We are now both on the visitor’s side of the desk as if we’re equals. “And in those two years we formed a bond, a bond of mutual respect and hard work.”
I don’t think mutual respect is a phrase ever before uttered in this room and the anxiety I feel grows into fear. I’m afraid Jane is going to ask something of me, something personal that you only ask a close friend, like to be your Lamaze coach. “All right,” I say agreeably but I shift in my seat and move my arms behind my back. I don’t want to hold hands with Jane.
I needn’t have worried. Done with equality, she stands up and leans against her desk. “I think it’s time for a promotion.”
It’s not normal for underlings to be consulted in decisions like these, but I’m not surprised. Nothing has been normal since the moment I entered this office. “Whose?”
“Yours,” she says, with a tight-lipped smile. Being the bearer of good news does not come easily to her.
I’m too shocked to do anything but stare at her with wide-eyed amazement.
“How does senior editor sound?”
Senior editor sounds great. It sounds like the best thing I’ve ever heard. “Good.”
“Good.” Jane returns to her desk and her black leather swivel chair. “I’ll have Jackie send out the memo. Now, the first thing I’d like you to do for me is call the publicist for Gavin Marshall.”
I don’t know why I’m surprised. I should have seen this coming. “Gavin Marshall?”
“Yes, the Gilding the Lily artist. Call his publicist and tell him that we want to meet with him to discuss my ideas for Fashionista’s covering Gilding the Lily.”
“But Marguerite told me to—”
“Vig, you’re a senior editor now. You don’t have time to run errands for that woman. Of course if you’d rather run errands for her, I can tell Jackie not to send out that memo after all.”
The threat is clear. “No, no. That’s not necessary.”
“I didn’t think so.” She smiles smugly. This is an expression that looks at home on her face. “So you’ll just tell Marguerite that the whole thing didn’t pan out.”
“Didn’t pan out?” Even though this is just a pretend game, I feel compelled to play every move.
“Yes, you called the publicist and they’re not interested. End of story.”
If Marguerite were really pursuing Marshall and his artwork, then “they’re not interested” wouldn’t be the end of anything. Lucky for Jane—or rather unlucky for her—Marguerite doesn’t even know it exists. “All right.”
“Good. So you’ll set up the meeting then? Talk to Jackie about my schedule. I want it to be as soon as possible. We’re already working on the December issue.” She picks up the phone, signaling the end of the meeting. Another person would say goodbye but Jane doesn’t bother.
My hand is on the door when she calls my name. “Vig, not a word about this to anyone. Not a single solitary word. Understand? I’d hate to bump you back down to associate editor.”
I assure her I do and leave.
Terms of Reference, August 24: Switch Genres
Maya writes about dead bodies—in subway cars, in Roman baths, in the closets of apartments not yet rented. She scatters them about and lets unsuspecting people find them. She lets clueless bystanders stumble onto them and forces even the most indifferent amateur detective among them to go about finding the murderer. These are the books she writes, the sort where ordinary people test their mettle as they bungle their way through death. They are impossible to sell.
“They’re not mysterious enough to be mysteries,” she said, as we sat in the bar of the Paramount drowning the sorrow of a lost agent, “and they’re too mysterious to be straight fiction. They’re hybrids, neither fish nor fowl but some strange griffin mongrel that no one has a place for in their heart.”
She gets maudlin when she is drunk.
Maya chose mysteries because she thought they’d be easy. She thought they’d be easy to write (built-in plots!) and easy to sell (built-in markets!). This was before she realized she couldn’t actually write one. This was before she realized that the formula that so recommended them couldn’t be strayed from and that she’d find the who-did-it aspect to be completely irrelevant to character development.
“I’m going to write a romance,” she declares now as she opens her brown bag. She withdraws a ham and cheese sandwich, a bottle of Fresh Samantha Super Juice, a bag of Lay’s potato chips and a Hostess cupcake. She has packed herself the sort of lunch your mother used to when you were in fifth grade. The only thing missing is the apple.
My lunch is less impressive. I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—no side dish, no refreshment, no dessert. “A romance?” I ask.
“A romance.”
“Why a romance?”
“Because they’re awful,” she says, as if this explains everything. Her eyes are still bright red, but they’re no longer puffy and drippy. The eyedrops the doctor gave her are slowly working.
But this doesn’t explain anything. “They’re awful?”
“Well, they’re not all awful—some are actually quite decent—but a great many of them are. They simply publish too many a month for all of them to be good. It’s like what happens when they expand the number of major-league baseball teams,” she says, squinting into the sun. We’re having lunch on a bench near the entrance to Central Park. The Plaza hotel is across the street and several unhappy horses pulling tourists go by.
This is a new development. Maya doesn’t usually talk in sports metaphors. “What happens when they expand the number of major-league baseball teams?”
“It dilutes the pitching staff.”
Even though this sounds vaguely familiar, like something I’ve read in a newspaper or a magazine, it doesn’t mean anything to me. “All right.”
“The demand is so great that quality can’t keep up,” she clarifies. “I can dash off a hundred thousand words in a couple of months. It shouldn’t be too hard.�
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“No,” I say.
“No?”
“No.”
“No what?”
“Just no.”
“But what are you saying no to?”
“The entire diluted-romance-market scheme,” I explain, horrified by the very idea of Maya devoting a hundred thousand words and a couple of months to something she couldn’t care less about. “You’re just wasting your time.”
“Why am I wasting my time?”
“It won’t work.”
Maya grunts in annoyance or frustration and crumbs of white bread fall from her mouth. “Why won’t it work?”
“Because you don’t know anything about romances.”
“What’s to know? Two people fall in love.”
“You hold the whole genre in contempt.”
She shrugs. “Well-earned contempt.”
“Well there!”
She’s unconvinced by my logic. “Well there what?”
“Don’t write a romance. Don’t write another mystery. Just write a book.”
“Now there’s a ridiculous idea,” she says, her eyes disappearing into the bag of potato chips.
“Why is it ridiculous?”
Maya doesn’t answer, but this doesn’t surprise me. We’ve had this discussion many times before, and although she always retreats behind a wall of silence, I know exactly what she’s thinking. Writing genre fiction is easy: You follow a formula, do your best and in the end if you’re not one-tenth as good as the people you adored growing up—E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Virginia Woolf—it doesn’t really matter. No one expected anything from you anyway. Writing genre fiction is easy. It’s taking yourself seriously as a writer that’s hard.
“You have to stop this,” I say, after a long silence.
Maya blinks innocently as she eats potato chips. “Stop what?”
“Your terms of reference. This cultivating-hustle thing, this switching-genres nonsense. It’s like you’re going through the five stages of grief, only with you there are five thousand. Get over it already, and start focusing on what really matters,” I say, suddenly annoyed. I can only hold a hand for so long before my impatience kicks in. “I know it’s hard and it’s scary—it took me almost two whole days to get up the nerve to call van Kessel for an interview—but you have to do it.” I don’t know how I became an example of goal-oriented industriousness, but here I am—Vig Morgan, pattern card for getting it done.
Maya is silent. She crunches potato chips and stares at me with sullen eyes. Then she says, “I’m thinking of doing a historical, like England at the turn of the nineteenth century.”
I sigh heavily.
Jane’s File
Before giving it to me, Delia went through Jane’s file and censored the things she didn’t want me to see. Like a letter from your grandfather on the front in 1941, the pages are speckled with blocked-out words. Anything that might reveal where troops are stationed is crossed out with a black felt-tip Sharpie. There is nothing here that vital and I can’t make sense of Delia’s choices. I’m trying to establish a pattern but they are completely haphazard. She’s like Yossarian declaring death to all modifiers.
Ninety percent of the file is mundane and boring, and I have to force myself to stay awake. While reading Jane’s address to the Women’s Editorial Society, who honored her with a coveted Helen award, for Best Magazine, I nod off and I only wake up when the telephone rings. I splash cold water on my face and try again but I have to stop. The thank-you speech is more than seven pages long and there is only so much I can take of her protestations of gratitude to the sisterhood. Jane is not a sister. She’s an only child who doesn’t play well with others.
The interesting part of the file is the folder filled with receipts and bills of sales and vouchers that document Jane’s systematic stealing from the company. Every chair in her apartment, every Picasso lithograph on her walls, every stitch on her body was paid for by the Ivy Publishing Group. Fashionista foots the bill for her annual two weeks in Borneo and her lovely little weekend rental in Aspen. We pay for her haircuts and massages and for the skin on the heel of her foot to be rubbed off once a week. Lunch is always on the company as well as transportation and Broadway shows. The only thing Ivy Publishing does not pay for is her children’s pricey Upper East Side private school educations, but that’s just a matter of time. In a year or two or three she’ll convince the accounting department that her daughter is a primary source, that her sense of style is what keeps the magazine fresh and on the cutting edge.
“That’s an insane amount of information,” I say to Delia, when I see her in the cafeteria. We are standing in front of the international section, a series of Sterno-heated trays that are usually filled with refried beans and ground beef with taco sauce. Today it’s stocked with Southern cuisine. “Why haven’t you used it?”
“I’ve tried. She’s like the Teflon Don. Nothing sticks to her.”
“You’ve tried?”
She spoons some grits onto her plate. “I’ve tried. I leaked some of those documents to Bob Carson in finance a year ago and nothing happened. He didn’t even flinch when he saw that Fashionista paid for her face-lift.”
“Her face-lift?”
“You missed that?” she asks with a smile. “She listed it on an expense report as ‘massage.’”
“Massage?”
“Yes, as in massaging the truth, I believe.” She gives me a curious look as she takes a piece of fried chicken. “You were her assistant. Didn’t she have you doing these reports for her?”
I shrug. “I never paid the least attention to what I was doing. She could have expensed the Statue of Liberty and it wouldn’t have made an impression. How’d you leak it?”
“Left it in his in-box when nobody was looking.” She holds a serving spoon filled with fried okra in my direction with a questioning look. I shake my head. Although I’ve been following her to each station in the international section, I don’t have any intention of eating. I’ve just had lunch with Maya and only stopped on the second floor to pick up dessert.
“Didn’t flinch at all?”
“Nope. And when I leaked documents that suggested she was selling furniture the company owned and pocketing the profit—nothing. I’ve tried and I’ve tried but they don’t care. She’s held to a different standard of accountability. Why else do you think I’m so excited about your idea? It’s about time someone else gave it a shot.”
“I guess so,” I say, trying to digest the fact that Delia has tried to depose Jane as often as the CIA has Castro.
She takes her tray laden down with Southern specialties to the cash registers. “I’m really excited about this. I think it could work. I think this might finally be the silver bullet that takes her down.”
I watch her walk away before picking up a Rice Krispies treat and heading for the cash registers.
This Is Just a Date
Keller takes me square dancing.
“I don’t two-step,” I say, when we enter the large room that looks and smells like a high school cafeteria. We are in the basement of a church on the corner of Broadway and Eighty-sixth. Someone has adorned the room with purple and green streamers and they hang from the ceiling like Christmas decorations.
With a hand on the small of my back, Alex steers me to the ticket table and plunks down his ten dollars. The cashier puts it in a metal strongbox. “That’s all right. Just as long as you do-si-do,” he says.
I’m not sure if I do-si-do. The last time I stood in a square and danced was twenty-two years ago at a Brownie function with my father. My memory of the evening is hazy and if I didn’t still have a navy-blue bandanna from the event, the experience would have erased itself completely from my mind.
“I’ve never been to a church social before,” I say, taking in the scene. Across the room the band is setting up. A thick man with a potbelly stomach and a goatee is strumming his guitar and trying to get it in tune. “Do all the proceeds go to the orphans?”
Keller takes my hand and leads me over to the refreshment table. “I don’t know if there are orphans and I don’t know where the money goes. This is a first for me, too.” He gestures to the list of beverages. “What can I get you?”
Although it is still early in the evening, I’ve already had two gin and tonics—one while waiting for him and another while we were talking. Since I’ve already had two strong drinks, the wise thing would be to say that he could get me a Coke. But I’m not feeling wise. I’m in the basement of a church about to square dance. I get a beer. You can’t do-si-do sober.
The room is packed with a wide range of demos—MTV, AARP, PTA—and we have to snake ourselves through the crowd to find an unoccupied spot. “How did you hear about this?” I ask.
“Read about it in the Resident,” he explains, taking a sip of beer. “I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. I was a square-dancing fiend at summer camp.”
“That’s amazing.”
“That I was a fiend?”
“No, I already knew that. I meant your reading the community paper.”
He looks at me with genuine surprise. “You don’t read yours?”
“Uh, no,” I admit, feeling as though I’m confessing to a mortal sin. It’s not up there with impure thoughts, but suddenly it seems worse. “I don’t even know what it’s called.”
“Where do you live?”
“Cornelia, between Bleecker and West Fourth.”
“The Villager.”
“How do you know?”
“Community papers are a passion of mine.”
I laugh. “No, really.”
“I used to live down there.”
I’m about to ask where and when but the band, the Hog-Tieds, has finished tuning and is ready to start. I finish my beer in two impressive gulps, toss out the plastic red cup and present myself, along with Alex, to a square looking for a fourth side. There is a nervous fluttering in my stomach, the unreliable sort that makes you wonder if you’re going to throw up. I give my date a sidelong glance.
Alex squeezes my hand. “You’ll be fine.” He is trying to be reassuring and supportive, and even though he fails, I give him one of those thanks-for-playing smiles.
