“So you went, and they fell in love with Jordan Neale,” Leslie said, smiling as though she’d heard the happy ending of a fairy tale.
Ellie laughed. “Not quite like that. Did I mention that I didn’t learn to type until after I was published?”
“So you hire someone to type the books for you,” Leslie said, puzzled.
“And how was I going to pay for that?” Ellie said. “If Martin had found out . . .”
“He would have cut you down until you burned everything you’d written,” Madison said softly. “But in a ‘loving’ way, of course. ‘Are you sure you want to have someone else read what you’ve written, sweetheart?’ he’d say.”
“Yes,” Ellie answered. “Exactly. Verbal abuse. Of course at the time, I didn’t think that consciously. Jeanne said that women in my situation must make themselves believe that the man they’re with is good. If they begin to see the truth about him, then . . .”
“Then they have to do something and they’re too terrified to try anything. After all, the man has spent all his energy on making her feel incompetent and inadequate,” Madison finished for her.
“Yes,” Ellie answered, saying everything in that one word.
“So how did you get published?” Leslie asked in exasperation.
Ellie laughed as she looked down at her empty cup. “Innocence, for one thing. If I’d known anything at all, I wouldn’t have tried. I wouldn’t even have made that appointment with the editor. Later, people told me that I couldn’t do what I did, that I had to have an agent, that my manuscript had to be this and that. I was told that there were rules and that I had broken all of them.”
Ellie looked up, smiling. “But you know what? The publishing world is just as hungry as we readers are for good stories. My editor would kill me for saying this, but if your story is fabulous, you can turn it in written in charcoal on bark and the publishing house will take care of the rest.”
“Yeah, but how did you get anyone to read those manuscripts in the first place?” Madison said. “I hate handwritten insurance forms, so I can’t imagine a whole book done in pen and ink.”
“You’re exactly right. If my editor had known what she was asking for, she wouldn’t have asked me to send my books to her. You see, Daria was late. She’s usually late, but not through any reason except that she has a thousand things to do and ten minutes to do them in.” Ellie smiled. “I’ve often told her that my career started because she was late. In fact, I once gave her a pocket watch for a gift.”
When Leslie and Madison looked blank, Ellie explained. “You know, like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. ‘I’m late. I’m late,’ the White Rabbit says.”
The women smiled, but Ellie could see that they wanted her to tell them about her book.
“Okay, but I only know what happened because later Daria and I became friends and she told me the story.”
For a moment Ellie was silent; then she smiled and started to speak. There was a faraway look in her eyes, a look of happiness the women hadn’t seen before.
“I’m late,” Daria said to her assistant, Cheryl, who had traveled to the writers’ conference with her. “I have to go now!”
“But there’s just one more and she looked so hopeful. She has this big box clutched to her chest and she looks scared to death, as though if she’s caught she’ll be punished.”
For a moment Daria closed her eyes in exasperation. Cheryl was new, fresh out of a prestigious university with a degree in English lit, a minor in creative writing.
“They all look like that,” Daria said in exasperation to her assistant, then thought, Until they get some money; then they—No, she wasn’t going to complete that thought. This was the third day that she’d been at the conference, and she’d heard at least fifty authors pitch their work, but she’d heard nothing that was of any interest to her. One by one, she’d sent the authors to Cheryl to pick up standardized sheets with pointers on how to get a science fiction novel published, how to get a romance published, and so on.
Daria looked at her watch again. It wasn’t as though she were late for a hairdresser’s appointment. She was late for a speech. At the end of the hall was an auditorium, and there were about three hundred paying would-be writers sitting in there right now waiting to hear Daria tell them how to get their books published and on the best-seller lists.
Of course, what Daria wanted to do was get up there and say, “Write a good book and it’ll sell,” then sit down. But, no, that wouldn’t do. No, she had to stand up there and talk for thirty minutes about margins and how much her publishing house was willing to pay for a book they hadn’t seen to an author they’d never heard of.
Daria looked at her eager young assistant. Was she actually a nice person or was this some passive-aggressive action meant to make her boss do what she wanted her to do?
Whatever, Daria thought with a sigh. “Five minutes,” she said to Cheryl, then tried to look stern and like a “real” boss.
With a radiant smile, Cheryl put her head around the door and said, “You can come in now,” and in walked a short, thin young woman who did indeed look frightened.
“I don’t mean to take up your time,” the woman said hesitantly.
“That’s all right,” Daria said as patiently as she could manage. “You’ve written a book?”
“I . . . well, I guess so. I mean, I’m not really a writer, but I did have a few ideas, so I wrote them down. I’m sure they’re not worth anything, but then, maybe, someone might like them. Or maybe one of them, I don’t know.”
Daria had to work hard to keep the smile on her face. One of those, she thought. Some writers hyped themselves up and came at you like a tsunami released on your face, telling you that they were going to put your publishing house on the map with this magnificent opus they had wrought.
Then there were people like this woman, this . . . Daria looked at the woman’s name tag, but all she could see was the last name of Gilmore. The first name was hidden behind the blue typing-paper box that she was holding so tightly to her chest that her fingers were white.
“Ms. Gilmore,” Daria said, “may I be honest with you? I’m late for giving a speech, and—”
Instantly, as though she were obeying orders, the woman stepped back and started apologizing. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. They didn’t tell me. I thought I had an appointment for one o’clock, and—”
Daria very well knew that it was now two-thirty, so that meant the woman had been sitting outside in the hall waiting for this moment for . . . Well, based on Daria’s experience, the woman had probably been waiting all her life to hand her manuscript over to a New York editor.
Daria couldn’t take the guilt anymore. As she gathered her things, she handed the woman her card. “Here, send what you have to New York. Mark it to my personal attention and I’ll take care of it myself. How does that sound?”
“Very generous,” the woman said, looking at the card as though it were the key to heaven.
As Daria left, to ease her guilt a bit, she gave the woman a little squeeze on the shoulder; then she practically ran from the room.
Cheryl walked into Daria’s office, laughing. “You’ll never guess what I just received in the mail.”
“I can’t imagine,” Daria said absently as she searched through the pile on her desk to find the fifty pages of manuscript that she’d just edited. She had to get everything into her bag to take home. Unfortunately, she had to go to a dinner tonight with some of the bigwigs of the company, which meant that she’d be up until midnight trying to catch up on her workload. She had three—count ’em three—books that she was crashing, books that had been put in the schedule, then the authors, for one reason or another, hadn’t turned their manuscripts in on time, so it was up to Daria to do a year’s work in just weeks.
“You remember that writers’ conference last week when you had that late author appointment? You told her that she should send what she’d written to you here, to your personal
attention. Remember?”
Daria’s head came up. She was stressed-out right now, so she had to bite her tongue to keep from saying that if there was anything wrong, then it was going to be on Cheryl’s head, not hers. But Daria didn’t say that. “I remember. What about her?”
“If I remember correctly, you said, ‘Send me what you have.’”
“Yes,” Daria said impatiently. She didn’t have time to play guessing games. If she didn’t rush, she was going to be late to dinner, something that one didn’t do to the publisher and the CEO.
“She obeyed you to the letter,” Cheryl said, barely able to contain her mirth. “She’s sent you a package that is—Oh, wait, here it is. I got Bobby from the mailroom to carry it for me. You have to see this!”
To Daria’s great annoyance, a guy from the mailroom plopped what had to be a three-foot stack of paper on top of Daria’s already overcrowded desk. She had to count to five to keep from snapping that she didn’t have time for this!
“There are five novels, and they are all handwritten!” Cheryl said as though this were the greatest joke in the world.
Daria gave her assistant a tight little smile. Everything was new to Cheryl, including handwritten manuscripts. But Daria had been in publishing for a long time, and she’d seen a lot of them. “Send all of it back,” she said. “Tell her our policy on handwritten—”
But before Daria could finish the sentence, the phone on the desk outside rang and Cheryl ran to answer it. Bobby from the mailroom, obviously afraid that he was going to be told to rewrap the huge package, disappeared as though he were a genie returning to his bottle.
“One. Two. Three,” Daria counted in an attempt to calm her already jangled nerves. The papers she desperately needed for her work tonight were under this monstrosity on her desk. And, looking at the thing, she was afraid that if she touched it, it would collapse and all three feet would go everywhere. Ten years from now, she’d still be finding handwritten pages scattered about her office.
“Cheryl!” Daria called through the open door, but there was no answer. Just then Daria looked down and she thought she saw a corner of the pages she’d been looking for sticking out from under the towering mass. Maybe . . . If she was very careful . . .
Leaning over the stack of papers, Daria reached, her nose practically on the top page of the manuscript. Actually, the handwriting on the pages was quite legible.
“Max turned to me and said, ‘What’s to eat?’ so I knew that it was time to find another murder,” Daria read.
At that Daria smiled. Bored housewife turned detective, she thought; then she read the next sentence.
Ten minutes later Cheryl returned to the office, still laughing, “I’ll get Bobby to take this away. I just wanted to show you—”
“Go!” Daria said, her eyes on the tenth page of the manuscript.
“But—”
“Go!” Daria repeated louder as she turned the page. “And shut the door behind you.”
Without a sound, Cheryl tiptoed out of the room, closing the door behind her.
Thirty minutes later, when the telephone rang, without glancing up, Daria pushed the button that cut off the caller, and when it rang again, she slid the lever on the side of the phone that silenced the ringer.
The next morning, at eight A.M., an irate publisher stormed into Daria’s office. “You’d better have a damned good reason for last night!” the publisher said. “I spent the evening making excuses for you.” The woman broke off when she saw Daria’s face. She’d been in publishing for a long, long time and she knew that look. It’s what she called The Holy Grail Look. It appeared when an editor got to do what she’d become an editor to do. That look didn’t have to do with money or the latest demands of some spoiled author. No, that look meant that the editor had just read a good book. That most holy of holies in the publishing world: a good book.
Immediately, the publisher stopped bawling out her editor. This was the best excuse, the only truly acceptable excuse there was.
“How many?” the publisher asked softly. You couldn’t tell about editors. Sometimes they fell in love with books that had no commercial value.
“At least a million copies in hardback,” the editor said, speaking of the print run. Daria’s voice lowered to a whisper. “And there are five books completed, and three more outlined.”
For a moment the publisher blinked. “You need anything? Bagel? Juice? Coffee? Bags of money to send to the writer?”
“A typist.”
“I’ll send you five of them,” the publisher said, then left her editor’s office. Halfway down the hall, she let out a loud whoop of sheer joy.
Fifteen
For a moment both Leslie and Madison were silent. For all that Madison hadn’t read any of Ellie’s books, she was alive, therefore she’d heard of them. The first one had come out about six or seven years after they’d met in New York, about 1987, and it had swept the country. Madison remembered that for months that first book was all that the women in her office had been able to talk about. They’d loved Max, the flawed hero, but, even more, they’d loved the dashing heroine, Jordan Neale, who was so clever at getting herself into and out of messes.
“When I read about her, I feel like I am her,” one of the women at work had gushed to Madison.
Madison had always meant to read one of the books, but she’d never had time. In spite of thinking that, after Roger, she never again wanted anything to do with the medical world, Madison still spent most of her evenings curled up with medical textbooks and trade journals. That the texts and magazines had changed to dealing with animals instead of people didn’t bother Madison in the least.
However, she’d been aware of the growing popularity of the Jordan Neale romantic mysteries. When the second book came out, the women were reading it under their desks. One day a golden retriever had swallowed the staple puller off a woman’s desk because she’d been so engrossed in Alexandria Farrell’s latest novel that she hadn’t even seen the dog. Dr. Parkhurst said that it was a good thing the dog hadn’t been brought in for rabies. “It would have been worth it,” the woman had said as she clutched the book to her bony chest.
Now, having heard about the man Ellie had been married to, Madison couldn’t imagine what his reaction to his wife’s success had been.
“What a great story,” Leslie said.
Frowning, Madison drew deeply on her cigarette. “So what did he think of your success?”
“He suffered,” Ellie said, then threw up her hands in exasperation. “He said that he was glad that one of us had been ‘given’ success. I can’t describe how guilty he made me feel. For years we’d talked of nothing but how he was going to set the world on fire, how he was going to achieve greatness, but, instead, I was going to get everything that he’d ever wanted. He made me feel terrible, really and truly terrible. I couldn’t enjoy my success because I felt that anything I achieved was at his expense.”
She took a deep breath to calm herself. “So I did everything in the world that I could think of to make him feel that my success was just as much his. I dedicated every book to him. At every interview I said that he was my inspiration. And of course I turned over every penny I earned to him to manage. But he wouldn’t ‘manage’ the money. I negotiated all contracts, made all the decisions about investments. I set up the corporation. Everything. I had to do it all by myself. All Martin did was spend the money. But, between him and me, we pretended to each other—and to others—that he was the ‘manager.’ I didn’t think about it consciously, but I think that I hoped that if he believed he controlled the money, he’d believe that it was his as well as mine . . . .” Trailing off, she looked at her hands.
“But nothing can please men like that,” Madison said. “Nothing you do is enough for them. Roger was threatened by anything that I achieved. During the divorce several people, including Dr. Oliver, testified that he wouldn’t be walking if it weren’t for me, but Roger said that he would have been walking s
ooner if I hadn’t dragged him down.”
“Right,” Ellie said, her head coming up. “The more success I had, the more Martin put me down. And he put me down in a way that he knew would get to me. He told me that I’d prevented him from becoming a musician, that if he hadn’t left New York for me, he would have made himself into ‘Somebody.’ But instead, he’d given all his success to me and I’d forced him to give up the only dream he’d ever had. I used to talk for days, trying to make him remember that that’s not how it was. I’d spend hours just on the fact that I’d given up my art and left New York because he wanted to go to L.A. to become a musician. But no matter what I said, Martin remembered something different. He remembered that I quit painting because I wasn’t very good, and he remembered that he’d left what would have been a fabulous future in New York and we moved to L.A. because I said I had to have more sunshine in my life.”
Ellie took a deep breath to calm herself. “I stood it as long as I could. I got to the point where I didn’t care whether what he remembered and what I did were the same. And I was sick unto death of all of my money he was spending. We bought a beautiful big house with a dedicated recording studio on the end of it. But after Martin filled the studio with music equipment, he then packed the house with speakers and lots of black boxes with flashing lights on them. And when the house was bursting at the seams, Martin said we had to buy a bigger house, this time with a recording studio four times as large as the one he had. And while he was buying and buying and buying, he was whining to me that I wasn’t earning enough fast enough. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I filed for divorce.”
Here Ellie had to pause. “It was in the divorce courtroom in that small town that I found out that the judge agreed with my husband,” she said softly. “Martin went into the courtroom with copies of my books and the interviews I’d given as ‘proof’ that he’d been deeply involved in my writing. And the judge believed every word he said. The judge told my attorney that it was a community property state, so Martin owned my books as much as I did, so why should I get control of them and not him? And by control, I mean that he could have added porno to them, could have let them lapse out of print, anything he wanted to do with them.”
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