“No, really, Lucy, I don’t want to color my hair. I’m not going to color my hair. Or cut it.”
She gave me a long look, her irises bright green against her pale skin. “You don’t want to look like me, is that it?”
“No, that’s not it. I just…” I didn’t know what to say. Her eyes were begging me to tell her that I would love nothing more than to look exactly like her and that I was overwhelmed with gratitude. I sensed that anything less would actually wound her. But I couldn’t find it in myself to give her what she wanted. “I just don’t think it would suit me,” I said.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “You don’t know what suits you. That’s why you look the way you do. I thought I could help you with that, but clearly I’m mistaken.”
“I’m sorry, Lucy, I didn’t mean—”
The daggers flying from Lucy’s eyes cut me off mid-sentence. She moved away from me and toward the salon. I followed her, preparing to go in with her, but she put her arm out to stop me.
“We’re done for the day, Angel. You’re on your own. Make sure you don’t miss your flight.”
This, I realized, was Lucy’s way of showing that she was hurt.
I stood bewildered on the street for a minute after that, wondering what she expected me to do. Was I supposed to follow her? Apologize? For a second, I toyed with the idea of doing just that. But a second was all it took to realize that I was actually free of her for the first time in days, released from servitude and able to go wherever I wanted. I hailed my own cab and went to the hotel. I was going to pick up my things and then I was headed directly to the airport. Because the only place I wanted to go was home.
DAWN WAS BREAKING as I dragged my suitcase up the stairs to my apartment. I’d never craved the comfort of my own bed with such a single-minded intensity. It was all I could think about as I dropped my bags, locked the door behind me, and fell down onto my covers.
Something was wrong.
I sat up and looked around my apartment. All the objects around me were still, familiar, the way I had left them. But there was something different in the air. I got the distinct feeling that things had been moved and then put back in their place. There was a just-settled feeling all around me, a displacement of ions, a faint odor I couldn’t place—as if someone had been there very recently. I got up and flipped on the light, although the sun was starting to filter through the window. The feeling of intrusion got stronger even as I failed to find anything that would confirm it. My unrinsed coffee mug was exactly where I had left it in the kitchen. The piles of papers and manuscripts next to my bed were in exactly the same state of disarray. The sink in my bathroom was dry. My bed was made, exactly the way I’d left it. Had I made my bed before I’d left? I searched my memory for the details of that morning and couldn’t find them. I’d always been inconsistent about making my bed in the morning, leaving it rumpled half the time when I couldn’t be bothered. I grabbed the covers and threw them back, expecting I didn’t know what to jump out at me, but of course there was nothing there except the sheets and pillows.
I was very tired, I told myself. This was a reasonable explanation for why I was suddenly so paranoid. Sleep deprivation was the quickest way to get to hallucinating twitchiness. But I’d operated just fine on less sleep. I’d only started feeling this pervasive sense of intrusion since Blind Submission.
It took only a minute to pull my laptop from its bag and power it up. There was one e-mail waiting for me. From G.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: An excerpt
Dear Ms. R—
I find myself with an excerpt and I’m looking for a place to insert it. Ideas?
Cheers,
G.
Alice’s bed was her sanctuary. She loved the feel of rich cotton sheets and plump down. She took her bedding very seriously. She’d read somewhere that Jackie Onassis had said that people with real wealth and taste only used pure white cotton sheets and Alice had never forgotten it. It had been difficult, in the early days, to provide herself with a bed, let alone white cotton sheets, but as soon as Alice had the means, she’d gone shopping for linens of gradually increasing thread counts.
It wasn’t easy to keep such high-quality sheets looking good. They had a tendency to wrinkle at that level. But Alice was willing to sacrifice for her luxury. She ironed her sheets with steam, focused to the point of meditation, until every wrinkle vanished from their surfaces. Then she took great care to lay them on the bed and tuck them in tightly. It was then that Alice could slide herself between those tight, soft sheets of white. In this, Alice’s bed resembled nothing so much as a book. The bedsheets became clean white sheets of paper that she slid herself between, insinuated herself against. And Alice became the text written upon them.
Soft white sheets for her hard dark thoughts.
I looked over at my bed, at my white down comforter and my white five-hundred-thread-count cotton sheets that, until this moment, I had been dying to lie down on and I started to cry.
He was gaslighting me and it was working.
Blind Submission was starting to make me crazy just as Alice was becoming crazy in it.
It was time to tell Lucy. She’d read the manuscript and she’d seen my notes, but she had no idea of the extent of G’s personal game with me. I’d kept it from her out of…what? Pride? The illusion that I could control both the book and its author? Or was it fear? Fear that Malcolm, my bitter ex-boyfriend, was the real author. It was time to come clean—to tell her about Malcolm and to fill her in on my suspicions about Anna. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to do this, but I had a little time to plan it out. By the time she got back from New York, I’d be ready.
I realized that my telephone was ringing. Damiano! I’d tried his cell phone at least a dozen times over the last day and got the same out-of-area message every time. I lunged for the phone, catching it before it had a chance to go to voice mail.
“Hello?” I sounded, both breathless and anxious.
“Angel? It’s Jackson.” He was whispering.
I checked the time. It was 8:15 A.M.
“Jackson, what is it? What’s the matter?”
“Are you coming in?” he asked.
“I just got in,” I said. “My plane was delayed. I was going to come in later….”
“I think you should come in now,” he said.
“What’s the hurry?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
“Lucy’s about to have a staff meeting. I’ve only got a second here—Craig’s in the bathroom. But Anna’s in there already, Angel. She told Lucy that you’re not coming in and she’s—”
“But how can Lucy have a staff meeting?” I said stupidly. “She’s still in New York.”
“She’s not in New York, she’s here.”
“But she’s staying an extra day—today—in New York. She’s not coming home until tonight.” So she can take Damiano to meet his editor and whatever else she’s planning to do with him, I added to myself.
“No,” Jackson said insistently. “She’s here. And Julia Swann came in with a preemptive offer for the Elvis book and Lucy’s looking to maybe have some kind of mini auction for it. Didn’t you know that?”
“Today? But Julia Swann said—I thought she wasn’t even going to offer on it. How can Lucy have an auction today?”
“I don’t know, Angel, but she’s going to. I thought you knew. Lucy was expecting you to be here. There’s a note on your desk from her.”
“What does it say?”
“Angel, I have to go. I’ll tell her you’re on your way.”
How was it possible that Lucy was back in the office when I’d barely landed myself? And where was Damiano?
THE OUTER OFFICE WAS EMPTY when I walked in a half hour later. I could hear voices coming from Lucy’s office and assumed the staff meeting was already in progress. I dropped my purse and manuscripts next to my chair and was overwhel
mingly relieved to see my angelfish alive and swimming in its bowl. There was a yellow sticky note stuck to the side. Welcome back, it said in Jackson’s handwriting. Lucy’s note sat next to it, waiting for me on my desk. I grabbed it and scanned it as I headed toward her office.
Angel—
Today’s top priorities:
1. Get “Elvis” author on the phone asap—we need to discuss her new direction with her novel!
2. Karanuk—see me!!!
3. My NY notes are on your desk—please sort!
4. What is going on with Blind Submission?!?!
5. Prepare list and status of all option books!
—LF
I was trying to figure out where she’d found the time to even think about the items on the list, let alone organize them as tasks for me, when I walked into her office and saw all eyes in the room immediately turn to me.
“Well,” Lucy said, “glad you could join us, Angel. Anna said that you were ill, which I found difficult to believe since I just saw you yesterday and you were fine.” Lucy delivered this statement with her usual crispness but didn’t seem at all annoyed. She looked well rested and surprisingly chic in a black pin-striped pantsuit. Her hair, a white mist around her head, looked exactly the same as it had the day before.
“That’s interesting,” I said, shooting quick daggers at Anna, “because I never said any such thing.”
“Um, well, I guess I just assumed,” Anna said. There was something different about Anna, and it took me a second or two to figure out that she was wearing makeup—too much of it, in fact, and she’d chosen exactly the wrong color (powder blue) to layer on her eyelids. She’d used some kind of greasy product to slick back her hair and was squashed into a pair of khaki overalls. I had no idea what kind of look she was going for, but whatever it was, it wasn’t working. She looked like painted lunch meat wedged between Craig and Jackson on Lucy’s couch.
“As fascinating as the semantics of your conversation are, Anna, there is business at hand,” Lucy said. “Do I need to reiterate that we are extremely short on time today?” Anna’s face flushed and she looked down at the floor. Craig, who seemed more sallow and shapeless than usual, was staring intently at the pad of paper on his knees, and Jackson simply looked relieved to see me. I sat down in the only available chair, which happened to be right next to Lucy.
“Weren’t you planning to stay in New York today, Lucy?” I said.
Lucy raised her eyebrows and gave me a half-smile. “My plans changed,” she said. “If that’s all right with you, Angel?”
“I was just wondering,” I said, “because—”
“In fact, I was due to meet with an author,” Lucy interrupted. “Your Italian man.” She gave me one of her laserlike stares. I felt my heart flip and beat erratically against my chest. I couldn’t control the flush I could feel spreading to the roots of my hair. I looked down at my notepad in a weak effort to conceal it.
“Damiano Vero,” Anna squeaked from her position on the couch.
“Yes,” Lucy said. “Damiano Vero. But he never showed up. Which is either the height of disrespect or an indication that something’s happened to him.”
“But how…?” I began. My overtired brain was trying to work out how Lucy could have been in New York waiting for Damiano a couple of hours ago and be sitting here now. I scrambled for options, but the only ones I came up with were witchcraft and time travel. “Weren’t you meeting with him today?” I asked before I realized that I wasn’t supposed to know anything about their meeting at all.
“Actually,” Lucy said, plucking a speck of lint off her pants, “we were supposed to meet for drinks yesterday.” She shrugged dramatically. “I gave him an hour and a half. I think that’s plenty of time. It was obvious that he wasn’t going to make an appearance. I’m assuming he didn’t contact you, Angel?”
“Um…no.” I didn’t have to see my face to know that it was beet red.
“Heeey,” Anna said, as if something important had just occurred to her. “Didn’t you talk to him the other night, Angel?”
I was a deer stuck in headlights and couldn’t speak, couldn’t move away from the oncoming impact. A look of genuine surprise spread slowly across Lucy’s face, and behind that I thought I detected a glimmer of satisfaction. I needed to say something, but my words were frozen and unyielding in my throat.
“What’s this?” Lucy asked.
I could actually see Anna puffing herself up like a hideous popover. Clearly, she’d been waiting a long time for this moment. “He called here the other day looking for Angel. He wanted to know what room she was staying in. In New York. I thought he had, you know, a meeting or something.” Anna gave Lucy a big fat grin. I wanted to kill her—put my hands around her doughy neck and squeeze until she choked. “Did I do the wrong thing?” Anna said sweetly.
“Did you talk to him, Angel?” There was an echo in Lucy’s voice, as if she were speaking to me through a tunnel. I couldn’t focus. My heart was beating so hard, my vision was jumpy and blurred.
I cleared my throat and with all the self-control I could muster, I said, “No. I haven’t spoken to Damiano Vero for weeks.”
“Really,” Lucy said. “Well, I can’t imagine what happened to him.”
“Isn’t he, like, a heroin addict or something?” Anna said. “Maybe he, you know…” Every one of us turned to Anna then, our faces showing varying degrees of surprise and disgust. Anna sensed that she’d taken her little riff too far and her color rose slightly. “I’m just saying—” she started, but Lucy finally cut her off.
“Find him, Angel,” Lucy said. There was firmness and finality in her tone. “But not now. Right now we need to discuss the Elvis book. You saw my note? Have you spoken to the author yet?”
“Not yet, no. I haven’t had a chance.”
“Well, that might be better, actually, although I can’t imagine what you have to do that would be more important. The point is this: Julia Swann is very interested in this project. She’s offering us a one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar preempt.” Lucy took a dramatic pause and tapped her Waterman pen on her knee.
“That is so great,” Anna interjected.
“I thought Julia said that she wasn’t likely to get a book like this past her board,” I said. “What happened to change that?” I was flooded with relief that we were off the topic of Damiano, and intended to keep steering the conversation away from any other verbal land mines.
“I happened,” Lucy said. “I see you were paying attention, Angel, but not closely enough. This book has certain elements that are irresistible to Julia Swann and to Long, Greene, and they want it badly enough to offer us a lot of money.”
“But what elements?” I pressed.
“Poker,” Lucy said.
“Poker?”
Lucy sighed as if my question was very tiring to her. “Yes, Angel, poker. And if it’s Texas No Limit Hold ’Em poker, that’s even better. I don’t remember if that’s the specific game she’s writing about.”
“That’s because she wasn’t writing about poker at all. It’s a literary relationship story about modern love, trust, and marriage set against the backdrop of Las Vegas. It’s about a road trip. It has nothing to do with poker.”
Lucy looked at me, and perhaps it was some trick of light in the room, but I could swear her eyes were twinkling. Her mouth, however, remained set and determined.
“It does now,” she said.
“So that’s the new direction you want me to discuss with the author?” I said after a pause.
“Exactly,” Lucy said.
“But Lucy…” I couldn’t stop, although I wanted to. After all, it wasn’t my book, and what did I care if Shelly Franklin rewrote her entire novel to include the game of poker as a central theme? But I couldn’t let it go. I didn’t particularly care for Shelly Franklin herself and thought she could use both a primer on social skills and a few visits to a good therapist, but I loved her novel and I’d worked very hard to g
et it in the shape it was in. The thought of dumbing it down and tearing it apart to make it fit the commercial flavor of the moment was revolting to me.
“What if the author doesn’t want to take this book in a different direction?” I asked Lucy. I heard the strident note in my own voice and did nothing to soften it.
Lucy waved her hand in the air and smiled. “Please,” she said. “Of course she’ll want to. That’s not the concern here. Look, Angel, you know as well as I do that poker is very hot right now. There are plenty of instructional books and collections of fiction, but there isn’t really anything out there like this. Honestly, do you think this author would rather sell her book to Long, Greene—who, by the way, have plenty of literary cachet if that’s what she’s after—or some tiny little press with no money to give her and no way to give her book wide distribution? There’s a reason she came here, Angel.”
“I don’t know, Lucy, I’ve been working with her for a while now. I don’t know if she can change this book so radically.”
Lucy tilted her head to the side and gave me an appraising look. I’d never challenged her this way before and we both seemed to realize it at the same time. What came as a surprise to me, though, was that Lucy didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she seemed invigorated by it.
“Well, you’ll call her in a minute, Angel, and we’ll see, won’t we?” Lucy crossed her legs slowly and tucked an errant wisp of hair behind her ear. I noticed that she was wearing a brand-new pair of black alligator pumps that matched the stylish briefcase I’d seen her carry in New York. “But the consideration now,” she went on, “is do we accept Julia’s preempt or do we take it out and possibly get more? Or possibly less? Julia’s advised me that she won’t use her offer as a floor, so we’d be starting lower. I’ve got substantial interest for this book, but you never know how that’s going to play out. Especially these days. So which way do we go?”
Lucy’s question had a rhetorical flavor, but I answered, anyway. “Shouldn’t we ask the author?”
This was, perhaps, one question too many. “Again, Angel, why did she come here? If she could make these decisions for herself, she wouldn’t need an agent, would she? She wouldn’t need me. Does anyone else have any thoughts on this? We need to get it settled immediately.”
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