With my very best,
G.
I leaped out of my chair like an insane woman, ran the few steps over to Anna’s desk, and turned her computer to face me before she had a chance to quit out of what she was doing.
“Hey!” Anna yelled, and recoiled as if I’d struck her. The sound was loud enough to alert both Craig and Jackson, who looked at us with matching stares of alarm. I gripped Anna’s computer screen and peered into it. Solitaire. She was playing Solitaire.
“What are you doing?!” Anna squealed.
I searched for open windows on her computer, for any indication that she’d just sent me that e-mail, and found none. She’d been sitting there all along playing an electronic card game. It was no wonder she never got anything done.
“Is there a problem, Angel?” Craig’s voice rumbled through my consciousness and forced me to turn around.
“No, no problem,” I said, and walked back to my desk, where my intercom was shrieking.
“Angel!”
“Lucy?”
“My office, please!”
“On my way.” I quit out of my e-mail program and grabbed the folders on my desk before heading over. I wasn’t about to leave anything behind.
“Angel,” Anna hissed as I passed her desk.
“What?”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing,” I said in a stage whisper. “Thanks for asking!”
“Well, that’s done,” Lucy said as I entered her office. “Elvis has left the building.”
I smiled. I had to give her credit for that one. “Viva Las Vegas,” I said, playing along.
“Indeed,” she said. “One hundred and fifty thousand later.” She looked at my surprised expression and nodded. “That’s right, I got her to go higher. And I got our girl a bestseller bonus, too. Let’s hope that the poker is still hot by the time it’s published.” Lucy was clearly on a roll.
“Have you called the author back to tell her?”
“Angel, I’m an extremely busy woman. If I spent all my time listening to the billing and cooing of grateful authors, I’d have none left to actually sell their books. Now, what’s next?” She was moving with her usual sharklike speed, swallowing up everything in her path.
“Karanuk?” I offered.
“Yes, but first we need to talk about Blind Submission.” Lucy walked around her desk to her couch and sat down. She patted the space beside her. “I can’t have a conversation while you’re standing there like that, Angel. Come and sit down.”
I took a seat on the couch as far away from her as I could get, and placed my papers on her coffee table. A wave of dizziness hit me and I had to steady myself to keep from falling forward. I realized that the overload of adrenaline that had been keeping me awake had just run out. It didn’t help that the temperature in Lucy’s office, which was usually brisk at best, was quite warm, hovering between sultry and somnolent.
“Aren’t you exhausted?” I asked her. “With the flying and the time change and all?”
Lucy smiled at me, showing an excessive number of her gleaming white teeth. “I slept on the plane,” she said. I wondered if her remaining Xanax had anything to do with that. “The time change never bothers me. It’s only three hours and, as you know, I live on New York time, anyway.”
“But you must have taken a red-eye, right? I mean, that’s the only—”
“Angel, I appreciate your concern for my health, but onward we go, yes? Blind Submission. What’s going on with it?”
The very sound of the title made my throat constrict. But I had to tell her. “Yes, I need to talk to you about that,” I said. “It’s gotten a bit complicated.”
For the second time that morning, Lucy seemed surprised. It wasn’t an expression I was accustomed to seeing on her face, and it made me very uneasy.
“Really?” she asked. “In what way?”
She waited for me to answer, another anomaly, and I reached for the right words.
“I can’t work on it anymore,” I said at last.
“And why is that?” Lucy asked.
“Because I think I know who’s writing it and I know why.”
“Well, I’m most interested to hear about the why,” Lucy said, “but first, do tell me the who.” She seemed to be enjoying the conversation immensely. There was none of the usual clipped sharpness in her tone. For once, she seemed content to stay on one topic for longer than five seconds.
“It’s Malcolm,” I said, and held my breath, waiting for her reaction. I’d prepared myself for several—anger, annoyance, a lack of surprise—but not for what I saw, which was complete and authentic confusion.
“Malcolm who?” she said.
“My ex-boyfriend, Malcolm.”
“Your what?” I watched as she puzzled it out in her head. Was it really possible that she didn’t know who I was talking about? Lucy and I faced each other with mirrored expressions of bewilderment until a lightbulb finally went on in some corner of her brain. “Ohhh, Malcolm. The fiancé.” Her expression changed to one of distaste. “The writer,” she said with cruel emphasis. “Really, Angel? You’re telling me that your fiancé is the author of a novel you’ve been working on for—how long now?—and that I’ve been pitching all over New York?”
“He’s not my fiancé,” I said. “He’s not even my boyfriend anymore.”
“Is this your way of trying to get me to represent him, Angel?” she said. “Because I can assure you it’s not going to work.”
“And I can assure you that I’m not,” I said.
For a moment I thought I saw the flicker of a smile on her face, but I couldn’t tell. Her eyes had gone very bright and clear and were staring right through me. I had the sudden sensation that we were on opposite sides of a seesaw and that the balance between us was about to shift.
“An-gel,” she said, stretching the syllables of my name, “you’re saying your—Malcolm told you he was the author of this novel? Why on earth wouldn’t you have told me sooner?”
“Because I wasn’t sure. I’m still not one hundred percent positive, but it has to be him.”
“And why is that?”
“I think this was his plan all along,” I started. I looked at Lucy, trying to gauge her receptiveness. She was waiting patiently for me to continue, with what seemed like genuine concern on her face. That look gave me strength and my words started tumbling out. “He wanted me to work here in the first place,” I said. “He figured I’d give you his novel and then you’d represent him. But when that didn’t work, he started writing this one, anonymously, so that we wouldn’t know it was him and automatically reject it. His writing is all he’s ever cared about, not me. And then I broke up with him. That was not part of his plan.”
Lucy tapped her fingers lightly on her leg, her impatience returning. “But how is that connected to Blind Submission, Angel?”
I hesitated for a fraction of a second while I debated whether or not to tell her about Damiano. That was all it took to decide not to. “Lucy, you’ve read that manuscript,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s more than a coincidence that the characters and plot are so much like us and this agency?”
Lucy shrugged. “Maybe,” she said, “but that’s part of what makes it interesting. Part of what makes it different from all the other crap out there. But Angel, I still don’t know what makes you think it’s your—Malcolm.”
“There are aspects of Alice,” I began, and stopped, searching again for the right words. “There are some very personal details of that character that are identical to me. Nobody but Malcolm would know about those.”
“And how would Malcolm know about what goes on in a literary agency?”
“Well, I told him things he could have used,” I said. “But I also think he had some help from…”
“From whom, Angel?”
“Anna,” I said. “I think he and Anna…I think they are or were involved in some way.”
“What?” Lucy looked revolted.
“I don’t know,” I said. “For sure.”
“Well, Angel, I have to say I’m very disappointed in you.” Lucy shook her head as if to punctuate her point.
“You’re…?”
“If you’ll recall, you assured me when I hired you that your personal life would not infringe on your professional life. This is exactly the kind of scenario I was trying to avoid. You were not honest with me, Angel. And I have to say this hurts me. Really, I feel that I’ve offered you much more than a job here. I’ve given you a career, not to mention a salary that is astronomical by publishing standards. And I feel, frankly, like I’ve been a mother to you, Angel.”
I remembered how on our flight to New York Lucy had convinced the flight attendant that I was her daughter. As absurd as it seemed, perhaps she’d convinced herself as well. For an instant, I thought about what it would be like to be Lucy’s daughter and found it vaguely terrifying. I promised myself I would call my own mother as soon as I had the chance.
Lucy was still talking. “Do you know how many aspiring writers have come through this office in the guise of employees?” she asked me.
“But Lucy,” I told her, “I am not a writer.”
Lucy raised her hand to stop me. “No,” she said, “what you’ve done is less honest than that. This is a business, Angel. I sell books here. And I now have a book that I have a tremendous amount of interest in, a book that I have staked my reputation on, and now, because of your personal involvement in it, I am supposed to abandon it?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying,” I said, grasping for whatever it was that I was saying. “I just don’t want to work on it anymore.”
“Angel, do I need to remind you that you were the one who ‘found’”—she made quotation marks in the air—“this novel in the submission pile?”
“Yes, but—”
“Has it suddenly become a bad book?”
“No, it hasn’t.”
“So the only reason that you don’t want to work on it is that your ex-boyfriend is writing it? Because you did want him to get published, and that’s why you took advantage of your position here, but now that you’ve broken up with him, you don’t want him to get published, so you’ve decided to try your best to destroy his book? Is that right?”
“No,” I said. I had to admit it to myself, Lucy’s argument was starting to sound perfectly valid. It was true that Blind Submission had become a much better book. It was true that I had wanted to help Malcolm. And it was true that I no longer wanted to have anything to do with him. With a few well-aimed verbal strokes, Lucy had managed to make me doubt all of my own motivations.
“I wouldn’t have thought you’d want to represent this novel now,” I said, “knowing that he’s writing it.”
“But why wouldn’t I, Angel? It’s not about him, it’s about the book.”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, I realized the truth in them. It was always about the book for me. In one form or another, I’d been living inside a book for as long as I could remember. And now I was living inside Blind Submission, a book about books, which was, in its own perverse way, about me. I’d been living on its pages, shaping it to suit myself. She was right: It wasn’t about him at all—for her or for me.
“Do you really think it’s that good?” I asked her.
“It will be when you get through with it, Angel. You were there with me in New York. You heard them. They want it.”
“They haven’t seen it,” I said.
Lucy shrugged. “That doesn’t matter,” she said. “They’re going to buy this one and they’re going to spend a lot of money. It’s going to be big, Angel.”
“But what about Malcolm?” I asked her.
Lucy gave me a tight smile and folded her arms. “What if you’re wrong, Angel? What if he’s not the author? Are we going to let it get away because of your personal problems?”
“Well—”
“But let’s assume that he is for a moment. Why don’t we let him remain anonymous? Since that’s the way he chose to come in. And now that I think about it, that may be the best way to sell him as well, as an industry insider who has to keep his identity concealed.” She ran her fingers along the crease in her pant leg, sharpening it. “It’s fitting, no? He gets his book sold, but he doesn’t get any glory. Everybody wins. What do you think?”
I liked the idea more than I wanted to admit, and I thought that Malcolm would never go for it, which made it even better because he’d have to. And I was the one who was going to deliver the news to him.
“Okay,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “I’m glad we’ve got that settled. Now, is there anything else you’d like to get off your chest?”
“No,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Then get Karanuk on the phone. No, don’t leave, Angel. Use my phone and put him on speaker. You need to hear this.”
I was halfway to her desk when I decided to take one more leap into the deep end. “Actually, there is one more thing, Lucy.”
“What?” All of Lucy’s trademark impatience was back.
I took a deep breath. “I’ve been thinking, and I know you like us to take initiative, Lucy, you know, be proactive.” I tried to smile, although my heart was beating double time at the thought of what I was about to say. “I’ve learned so much from you, Lucy. I’m sure I could never be as good as you, but I was wondering if…you’d consider giving me a shot at selling a project on my own. For this agency, of course.”
Lucy was amused. “At what point did I give you the impression that I was interested in adding another agent to my staff, Angel?”
“You’ve said I’ve got a good eye, Lucy. I could still do what I’m doing now, but I’d be better, more productive.”
“How can you possibly think you’ve learned enough to be a successful agent, Angel? You’re a baby in this world.”
I swallowed the insult and moved forward. Still smiling, I said, “I’ve had an excellent teacher. The best.”
Lucy paused, weighing the options. “I’ll have to think about it,” she said finally.
“That would be great.” And enough to move forward with Sunny Martin, I thought.
“This is a good day for you, Angel. Now, if you don’t mind, get Karanuk on the phone.”
I was halfway to her phone when Lucy stopped me again. “Go get everybody else,” she said. “I need everyone to hear this. It’s not often one gets to witness the birth of a seven-figure book idea.”
“Karanuk!” Lucy shrieked into the speakerphone once we were all assembled once more in her office.
“Yes, Karanuk,” he said with his characteristic deadpan.
“My dear, I’ve got some fabulous news for you,” Lucy said, sweeping her eyes over the four of us.
“News,” Karanuk repeated.
“I know you’ve been torn as to what to write next, dear,” Lucy said, “and I’m just thrilled to tell you that I’ve just been to New York and I have come up with a brilliant idea for you.”
“I’m writing Thaw,” Karanuk said. “I sent it to you.”
“Cold!Cooking!” Lucy yelled into the speaker, unable to contain herself any longer. “Recipes in prose. Or essays and recipes. A new kind of cookbook. It will be stunning, K, just stunning.”
The static hiss was the only indication that Karanuk hadn’t hung up. Flushed with anticipation, Lucy leaned closer to the phone. “Karanuk? Are you thrilled?”
“I’m writing Thaw,” Karanuk said finally. “I am working with your assistant, Angel. I’ll talk to her. She understands.”
Lucy leaped at the phone and picked it up so that Karanuk’s voice would no longer be audible to the rest of us. All eyes, I noticed, were now on me. “Listen, K,” Lucy said, “this is a good idea. You should consider it. What? Well, in all honesty, Thaw needs some work, K. Yes. Yes, she is. Yes, I do. I’m your agent, Karanuk, not her. No. Well, I hope you’ll reconsider.”
Lucy hung up the phone and looked a
cross her office at the four of us. It was impossible to get an exact read on her expression. “He wants to write Thaw,” she said quietly. “Angel, you’ll need to work with him on that.”
Nobody spoke or got up for a moment. I got the sense that we were all afraid that if we moved she’d explode.
“Why the FUCK is everyone still sitting here?” she said finally. “Have we run out of work to do?”
Within seconds, every one of us was back at our desks.
SIXTEEN
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Blind Submission
Hello G,
I thought you’d like to know that we’ve decided that we now have enough text to take your novel out for sale. However, we won’t be able to do that until you sign an agency contract. I know you want to remain anonymous, but I’m afraid it’s time to “come out.” Lucy and I both know who you are, so there’s no need to keep this up. There’s no harm done, okay? Just give me a call—you know the number—and we’ll get this thing going the way it’s supposed to.
Thanks,
Angel
It was almost noon on Saturday when I turned on my computer and prepared to check my e-mail. As my laptop booted up, I dialed Damiano’s number one more time and listened to it ring a half-dozen times before I placed the phone back in its cradle. It was the fifth time I’d tried to reach him since I’d left work. I’d brought my angelfish home at last and had placed the bowl next to my computer. I ran my hands over the glass as if it were a crystal ball and tried to make myself believe that I hadn’t lost Damiano forever. But as I connected with the server and logged onto my e-mail program, I could see immediately that it wasn’t going to be a day for faint hopes and half-baked beliefs. There waiting for me was another missive from my author from hell.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Blind Submission
Dear Ms. Robinson,
Well, it seems we are in the home stretch, doesn’t it? I am racing toward the finish—with your help, of course. I don’t have time to write you a long note (need to get back to work, don’t I?), but I wanted to tell you this:
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