“Heeey, Ellen. It’s Sara.” Do I sound stoned?
“Hey, Sara. I was just thinking about you. I talked to my agent this afternoon and she’s really keen to talk to you. She said Ballast Books is looking for new titles for its Ordinary Lives series. She thinks it could be a good fit—just pitch her tomorrow and whip up a proposal she can shop.”
Sure. I’ll whip something up. “Sure. I’ll whip something up,” I say.
“And don’t forget you’re mine on Friday night.”
“Friday…” Friday?
“The interview for my book.”
“That’s this Friday, right.” It could have been next Friday, the one after that, some Friday next year. This is not impossible.
“I’ll call you at seven—and no cocktails until after we’re done.” Ellen says this playfully, but I know she’s not kidding. I pull the quilt covering Lila’s bed up over my head as if it’s going to shield me from the reality that Ellen knows I’m a fucked-up lush.
“I’m not sure if I’ll be home, so I’ll call you.” I never want to go home to the smell of cigarettes and wine and paperboy fucking and the dirty sheets in the hamper and the stains on the living room rug.
“And where might you be? Something you’re not telling me?” Yeah, that I never want to go home to the smell of cigarettes and wine and paperboy fucking and the dirty sheets in the hamper and the stains on the living room rug.
Ellen would understand about Rockabilly Ben; she’d probably laugh and ask for details. I’ll tell her another time. “Nothing too exciting—I’m staying at Esther’s.”
“Lila research. Smart. You’re barely out of Snap and you’ve dived headfirst into something new. Your focus amazes me, Sara.”
My eyes are at half-mast but I press on. Maybe my focus is amazing. I’m sitting in the den off Esther’s living room, which is really more of a nook, tapping away at Esther’s antiquated PC, trying to gather information about Ballast Books and this Ordinary Lives series Ellen was talking about. Ballast Books publishes those books about regular people that everyone’s always surprised are so interesting. Because everyone has a story. That’s their slogan. It takes me an hour to navigate the publisher’s Web site to learn this. Esther has a dial-up modem and after an hour of waiting for pages to load and for graphics that cannot be displayed I’m fraught and wired and I call the phone company and order Esther a high-speed Internet connection for the new Mac that I’ve arranged to have delivered tomorrow. And there’s not enough Ativan in the world to stop me from helping myself to a glass of wine as Esther putters in the kitchen. She’s making Lila’s casserole for dinner.
Do I ask Esther if I can write a book about Lila? Do I tell her? This is not something I know how to do so I fumble and choke on my babble until Esther stops me. “Sara, dear. Whatever are you getting yourself so worked up about?”
“I’m writing a book about Lila—I want to write a book about Lila.”
Esther sets down her fork. “I see. And this is the book you’re going to be talking to your friend Ellen’s agent about tomorrow?”
I nod. “I remember now. The notes make sense. You see, there’s this series of books called Ordinary Lives, and it’s very successful, but the whole point is that these ‘ordinary lives’ aren’t ordinary at all, and obviously Lila’s life was anything but ordinary so Ellen thinks it would be a good fit, and I have some of her notebooks already and maybe you could help fill in the blanks for me?”
“It’s an interesting idea. I have no doubt that Lila would have loved it. It’s an awfully ambitious project, Sara. Are you sure you’re up for it?”
I have no fucking idea. “I think so. It might be good for me—for my focus.”
“Well, then. We’d better get straight to work after dinner.”
Esther lays out Lila’s notebooks chronologically—all of them, including ones I haven’t seen before—on the floor in Lila’s bedroom, in front of the shelves of vintage magazines that get me more flustered and lusty than I ever was for Jack. We start from the beginning; the first notebook begins shortly after Lila married—at twenty, Esther says. There are pictures of an apartment, a man, the same man she’s posed with in the picture where she wears the dress with the jagged neckline and looks so unhappy, Portrait of a Lady Undone. “That’s Luc,” Esther says. “Lila’s husband. He was very dashing from what I heard—certainly handsome.”
“What happened?” I ask, picking up the next notebook in line. I’m anxious to move ahead, to know it all. The photographs are black-and-white, taken in the fifties and yellowed around the edges. Many of the square black corners pasted into the books to keep the pictures in place have dried up and fall into my hands every time I hold one of the notebooks upright, so I stop and splay out on the floor and open the pages carefully and one by one.
Esther reaches over me and grabs the third book, the one with the Portrait of a Lady Undone and the photo booth pictures and the casserole recipe. “She fell in love with another man—Stephen.” I remember the letters he wrote her, the way he always called her darling. “Luc found out and it was quite a scandal. He tried to reason with her, but Lila would have none of it and she left him. They were divorced—nobody got divorced back then—and she moved in with Stephen. I met her around that time, when I was working at the English library in Westmount. She’d come in to read the magazines she couldn’t afford to buy, although she always scraped together enough to pick up Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Stephen was a writer and didn’t make much money. He wrote paperbacks that you could only order from the ads in men’s magazines while he worked on his novel.”
“He wrote porn?”
Esther laughs. “I’m sure it would be considered very tame today, but back then the books were mailed in plain paper wrappers. Once I got to know Lila she’d bring copies to me at the library and I’d read them under the checkout counter. Some racy stuff. There was even one about bondage. I still have them in a box in my closet if you want to take a look. Lila would have killed me if she’d known I’d kept them.”
“Why?”
Esther closes the notebook, sets it down and sighs. “Stephen didn’t turn out to be the man she thought he was. They had so many plans—to travel, to start a magazine together. Lila wanted to design dresses, Stephen was going to finish his ‘real’ novel. Lila wanted to host fabulous parties and do all the things they talked about, but a few months after Lila moved in Stephen started to talk about getting married, having kids and all the things Lila could have had with Luc but didn’t want. Stephen started to complain about their cramped apartment. He started writing for an advertising agency and gave up the paperbacks. He started wearing a suit and talking about moving to Pointe-Claire. Lila was horrified. She felt he’d conned her by pretending to be someone he wasn’t, so she left.”
“What was the final straw?”
“He told her to grow up.”
My laugh comes out like more of a snort. “I’ve heard that one.”
“Lila didn’t have many friends and when she left Stephen I don’t think she really had anywhere to go. She started spending every day at the library and I noticed that she’d wear the same dress sometimes two or three days in a row. She was always clean and beautifully turned out, but it was odd. I have no idea where she was staying—she never told me. But one day I invited her over for a drink after the library closed and we ended up blind-drunk and she stayed, well, until we bought this place in nineteen sixty-five.” Esther smiles at something only she can see in her head. “I’ll never forget that day I went with her to Stephen’s to collect her things. She was so matter-of-fact about it, efficient. Stephen was crying, begging her to change her mind and she told him to fuck off. I’d never heard a woman talk like that before.”
“What happened to Stephen?”
“He got married and moved to Pointe-Claire—right down the street from Luc and his second wife as it would turn out. Had two kids, stayed in advertising as far as I know.”
“And Lila was okay
with this?”
“She was and she wasn’t. She’d always say that she was, you’d never hear her say otherwise. But the truth is often in what people don’t say. She designed her dresses and she’d put together fashion photo shoots for the newspaper. Men were constantly ringing her up for dates but after Stephen she wasn’t interested in seeing anyone seriously. She believed all men were looking for was a wife for them and a mother for their kids and she didn’t want that, but I think she resented the way married people with kids were always accepted and invited to everything. Lila’s choices scared people, so she kept to herself most of the time. She lived by a strict personal code—she had very strong opinions about what was appropriate and what was not, whether it be about clothes or food or socializing.”
“I’ve read some of her rules. They’re pretty smart. And the how-to-walk-in-heels instructions are genius. She should have had a magazine.”
“She got close, once, to securing the financing, but the deal fell through when she wouldn’t sleep with the financier.”
I roll my eyes. “That’s such a cliché.”
“She wasn’t the same after that. She went on designing her dresses, and there was a point in the late sixties that one of her pieces was featured in Chatelaine and a movie star, some American girl, I can’t remember her name—was photographed wearing another one of Lila’s dresses. That was all very exciting and she had lots of orders and had some meetings in New York, but nothing ever came of that and I think she lost her spirit. Once she knew that she wouldn’t have a magazine or be a famous designer—the things she dreamed about for so long—she changed. I don’t think she regretted not having a family, but she was lonely.”
“I’m lonely.” My voice is barely a whisper.
“Me, too.” Esther nods. “I think that’s the hardest thing to say.”
By 6:00 a.m. the sun is up and Lila is no longer a mystery. She’s a woman who almost did so many things. I jot down a few points in my notebook that I want to be sure to bring up when I talk to Ellen’s agent. I don’t need to sleep, I don’t think I can. I start to write, make an outline. Esther went to bed around four. She was so stiff from sitting on the floor in Lila’s bedroom she could hardly stand. I helped her up and walked her to her bed, guiding her through the living room and down the hall, keeping my eyes ahead and away from the liver spots on her hands.
I don’t need a pill; I don’t want a drink. I’ll write this book, this book about Lila, and people will get to know her and it will be about the way it is if you’re a woman and you don’t want a husband and kids, but it won’t be a downer, some story that the daytime talk shows pick up that prompts more single self-loathing and unnecessary hysteria. No, it will be a celebration about choices, but not in a two-bit schlocky way, and I won’t gloss over the hard parts. It’ll be Lila’s story, but bigger, contemporary, a reasonable alternative to lobotomizing oneself with a stiletto heel after too many reruns of Sex and the City and books with pink covers illustrated with retro-style drawings of girls flagging taxis and drinking colorful cocktails. It has to be real, raw, funny, smart. There will be sidebars with Lila’s advice on manners and makeup and of course walking in heels. There will be casserole at the launch party. Lila’s story is my book and I won’t sell the movie rights, not unless it’s just right and I’m writing the screenplay and somewhere in the contract it says that no matter what, the Lila character can’t get married and have kids and live happily ever after. This is no romantic comedy.
I have a coffee and smoke three cigarettes in a row while I wait for the clock to turn nine. I snap a quick shot of my face with the Polaroid—a portrait of the author before. I wait four more minutes and then I call. Ellen’s agent’s name is Teresa and she talks very fast, though with the coffee and nicotine kicking in, I’m matching her speed with my pitch that I get right into after we’ve said our good-mornings and how-are-yous like we are the best of old friends.
Teresa says uh-huh a lot as I race through Lila’s story and I’m not sure when or where to stop because I haven’t figured that part out so I get into the stuff about the sidebars and having some reproductions of her sketches and wouldn’t it be cool to include a paper pattern—a sewing pattern—so readers could make the Lila dress with the jagged neckline, and that photograph, her Portrait of a Lady Undone, would make the best cover, and it’s a good title, too.
I come up for air and Teresa finally speaks. “She sounds fascinating—great story. Really unique.” I’m going to be a writer, a biographer. I will not smile in my author photograph. “Maybe too unique.”
I fumble for my lighter and a cigarette. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know if it’s relatable enough, I’m not sure if Lila’s story is universal in the way publishers are looking for.”
“But the Ordinary Lives series…”
“I don’t think her life was ordinary enough—she had her issues, her struggles, but not the ones everyone can understand. Most readers are looking to connect with the subjects of these books and Lila’s life was so different, her choices were unusual—I’m afraid she’d come off cold.”
“She wasn’t cold, she was lonely, and it doesn’t get more universal than that.” I’m defensive now. Teresa is not getting it.
“Lonely is fine, but she chose that life and I don’t see readers relating to that. There has to be a connection or the desire for connection and she made a conscious decision to remain disconnected. Do you see where I’m coming from, Sara?”
“You mean she didn’t have a family.”
“It’s not a personal judgment, it’s simply that most people do and it’s those kinds of connections and similarities that make a story like this work—or not.”
“I could send you some copies of pages from her notebooks—they’re remarkable. It might make it easier….”
“Look, Sara. I’m going to be straight with you. The appeal of the Lila book is too narrow. Now, if we were to talk about something more salable like maybe a collection of your DOs and DON’Ts photographs or maybe a street fashion guide or a dishy trend-spotting how-to, tricks of the trade, that sort of thing, I’d love to represent you. Ellen mentioned that you’ve left Snap so it wouldn’t have to be a branded book per se, but we can still play on your position as cofounder. Think about it?”
“Yeah, sure,” I lie.
“Just out of curiosity—how’d she die?”
“What?”
“Lila. How did she die?”
I don’t know. I never asked. Esther didn’t say. I didn’t care. Didn’t I care? I am humbled and ashamed and I lie again.
“Heart attack,” I say.
I have reached a new level of asshole. I am a dirtbag bigger than every dirtbag guy I ever dated in my twenties and there were plenty of them. I don’t know how Lila died. I know nothing—nothing really—about Esther. She was a librarian at the Westmount library, she never married, she didn’t have children, she’s seventy-five and is kind and has liver spots. She likes me but she shouldn’t. I’m an asshole, I’m a nightmare. I take another Polaroid. Tears blink from my eyes. A portrait of the author after realizing she’s not an author at all but an asshole who doesn’t know anything.
I don’t want to wake Esther so I pick her spare set of keys out of the bowl by the doorway and quietly let myself out. I push and twist the childproof cap on the blue plastic vial as I walk. I swallow two Ativan. I have to pick up my dry cleaning.
One
The tranquilizers numb me enough to be able to sip a coffee and scan the shelves at Connections bookstore-café without crying before I walk up the block to the dry cleaner. I’m looking for a book about why I’m such an asshole and how to fix it and another one that will tell me what I’m supposed to do now. I collect books about depression, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder and think I might have all three and be a sociopath. The books advertise help and comfort—I can start living a balanced life today!—but the words strike me as hollow. Even a hea
ling stone seems more promising. That I count seven other people perusing the same section this early on a Tuesday morning makes me depressed—if I wasn’t before—and I dump the pile of books on a display table and the counter girl I’ve seen before shoots me the dirtiest look. My cell phone rings and the counter girl points to a sign: a circle with a picture of a cell phone with a red slash through it. I swear the man in the green sweater thumbing through a book on bipolar disorder actually growls at me. I can’t find my fucking phone, there’s so much shit in my purse, so I take my coffee and flee to the safety of the sidewalk.
It’s Susan the lawyer and she says she has good news. She’s talked to Ted’s lawyer and the Snap lawyer and nobody is acting like a prick—she doesn’t use the word prick, but I like to think she wants to. The deal is in motion, Ted will buy me out, there will be papers to sign and would I prefer a bank transfer or a cashier’s check. Susan recommends the bank transfer. “That’s a lot of money to be walking around with on a piece of paper,” she warns.
It is a lot of money, more money than I’d thought, not that this is money I’d often think about since I figured Ted and I would keep going and going, making fun of outfits and leading Trend Mecca Bootcamp weekends. Nothing would change, we’d never get old or have babies or move to the suburbs. Gen wouldn’t have huge fake breasts and stop talking to me because of Ted wetting his mushroom dick inside that cunt Eva. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. And I was never supposed to get bored with that life and be standing outside some self-help bookstore wondering where I’m supposed to be.
I don’t want to go home or go back to Esther’s. I can’t sit at Connections with the counter girl glaring at me and the green-sweater guy growling. It’s too early for a drink, not that I want one—my blackout night with Ellen was enough, at least for this week, though a glass of wine with dinner or a pint of beer at happy hour doesn’t really count.
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