“Can we at least go over this one more time?” Lila says.
“Sure,” I say.
“This is a party for who?”
“Alice Sebold.”
“And she wrote what?”
“The Lovely Bones, her debut novel and a follow-up to her memoir, Lucky. Alice is married to Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil, an ambitious novel of Roaring Twenties pre-Depression era America that reads like The Great Gatsby as viewed through the lenses of Michael Chabon-slash-Daniel Wallace American postmodern fiction.”
“Well done, Mr. Fitzpatrick. You’ve been studying.”
“Maybe a little,” I say.
“And what’s The Lovely Bones about?”
I stop walking. “Uhh…”
“You mean to tell me you remembered all that about her husband, and you can’t give me just a simple one- or two-sentence overview? You’re a publisher, for God’s sake.”
“I don’t read other people’s books. I want to say there’s a…murder?”
“Good guess.”
“Of a little girl.”
“Now you’re getting somewhere.”
“And her name is Eliza Naumann.”
“No.”
“No?”
“You’re thinking of the protagonist from Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season.”
“Bone Boatwright, maybe?”
“And that’s Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.”
“Scout? Moby?”
“And now you’re just being a smartass.”
“Why am I picturing a fish?”
“Because her name is Susie Salmon.”
“Susie, that’s right. Now it’s coming back to me. Susie is murdered, and then her skeleton narrates the book. Hence the title.”
“Hank.” Lila shakes her head, pulls on my arm. “Just leave the talking to me tonight, okay?”
If you didn’t know the exact address of Flûte, you’d walk right by it. A former speakeasy, the bar is tucked down in the basement of a Theater District high-rise and by way of signage is afforded little more than a small marquee at the top of an unlit stairwell. The only giveaway tonight is a smartly dressed blond woman holding a clipboard and a muscular gentleman in a tight black tuxedo standing in front of a red velvet rope.
“Name?” the blond woman says.
Lila gives her a fake smile. “Delilah Prestwich and Hank Fitzpatrick.”
The blonde nods at the muscular gentleman. He unclips the velvet rope, motions down the stairwell. “Ma’am, sir,” he says, nodding in between each missive.
As far as New York publishing parties go, the atmosphere at Flûte is predictable. The lights dimmed to the point of near-pitch. Cozy surrendering to indulgent. Too many conversations competing for floor space. Publishing executives who’ve been told to watch their bottom lines toasting to million-dollar deals with two-hundred-dollars-a-bottle champagne in lieu of paying their copy editors living wages.
Lila and I settle in quickly at two open seats at the far end of the bar.
“Who’s your friend, Lila?” a voice says over my shoulder.
I turn. The voice belongs to a petite woman—thin and no more than five feet tall, about Beth’s height. Her hair is cut short. There’s no telling with any certainty in this light, but I’m guessing it’s some shade of brown. Standing next to her is a gentleman in dark-rimmed glasses with a consciously unkempt swirl of over-gelled hair .
“Hi, Amber,” Lila says. “Hank, this is Amber Pate, Director of Subrights for Little Brown. We’re officemates.”
I shake Amber’s hand and proceed to lie. “Oh, that Amber Pate. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Same here,” Amber says. She hooks the arm of the gentleman standing next to her. “This is Brian Sweeney, Director of Acquisitions for audiobook publisher Talk Hard Media.”
“Brian Sweeney?” I say, shaking his hand. He’s aged well, a little fuller in the face maybe. “As in St. Ambrose Brian Sweeney?” “Do I know you?” Brian says.
“St. Ambrose, nineteen seventy-six to nineteen eighty. We were in Mrs. Anderson’s and Mrs. Whitcomb’s first and fourth grade classes together.”
“I’m not quite placing the name with—”
I sing it more than I say it: “I saw Brian’s weenie, I saw Brian’s weenie!”
“Excuse me?” Amber says.
“Long story.” Brian shakes his head. “It’s something the Catholic school girls used to tease me about. It appears my ghosts have tracked me down.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it, Brian.”
He waves me off. “Hank, I’m just teasing you. How’ve you been?”
“Not bad,” I say. “You?”
“Can’t complain,” Brian says.
I notice his tailored though not quite fitted suit and his slightly expensive though not pretentious Hamilton Khaki Field wristwatch. “Books on tape seem to be paying the bills.”
“Uh oh,” Amber jumps in.
“What?” I ask.
“You said the three no-no words, Hank.”
“Books on tape?”
“Yeah,” Brian affirms. “It’s a common mistake. In 1975, Books on Tape became the first company to produce and sell audiobooks to consumers and then to libraries and retailers. Talk Hard, my company, opened its doors three years later. Books on tape has since become the generic term for audiobooks, but saying books on tape to me is like telling a Puff sales rep to pass you a Kleenex or a Panasonic rep to go Xerox some copies. Fortunately for us, Random House bought Books on Tape and allowed them to be absorbed by Random Audio, sacrificing one of the only true brand names in all of publishing just to stroke their own egos.”
“Random Audio?” Lila says. “Whoever heard of Random Audio? ”
“Exactly my point,” Brian says.
All things considered, I don’t try too hard to defend Random House. In fact, I don’t try at all. Brian is absolutely right. Random House is the biggest publisher in the world, and nobody walks into a bookstore asking, “Hey, what’s the latest from Random House?” Fuck branding. With the exception of Books on Tape, Harlequin, Little Golden Books, the Dummies books and maybe Penguin Classics, the only thing consumers recognize is the author.
“Oh well,” Lila says, grabbing my arm. “As fascinating as this topic is, I need to pull Hank away for a bit and work the room.”
“Wait a second,” Amber says to Lila. “I need your powers of persuasion.”
“For what?”
Amber puts her hand on Brian’s shoulder. “I’m trying to convince Sweeney here to buy the audio rights to In the Hand of Dante.”
“The new Nick Tosches book?” I say.
“That’s the one,” Amber says.
“I thought you already had an audio deal,” Lila says.
“That’s the problem,” Amber says. “A competing audiobook publisher paid me a lot of money for the rights, and then they spent even more money renting a recording studio in Paris and hiring Johnny Depp as the narrator.”
“Johnny Depp?” I say. “That’s pretty sweet.”
Amber nods. “You would think so, right? Problem is, over the last month they’ve salvaged about an hour of usable audio at most. Apparently Depp and the author keep showing up at the studio blitzed out of their minds on red wine. The audio publisher wants out, and I’m trying to convince Brian to pick up the tab.”
Off to the side of Amber, Brian shakes his head again. “Let the record show I love both Depp’s and Tosches’s work and think the idea of these two characters pounding wine in Paris is cooler than anything I’ve ever been a part of.” He finishes his glass of Dom, cutting himself off in mid-sentence. “And let the record also show that I’m not touching this project with a ten-foot fucking pole.”
I tilt my head, raise my champagne flu
te. “You’re a smart guy, Brian. I don’t care what those St. Ambrose girls said about your wiener.”
The party ended. I got to meet Alice Sebold and Glen David Gold. Alice was unbelievably nice, her husband generous with his time and quick with anecdotes that keenly played off my uninteresting stories. I can’t imagine they cared too much about my life as a small-time editor, but I appreciated their efforts to suggest otherwise.
Michael Pietsch never spoke to me.
“Don’t take it personally,” Lila says. “Michael has a lot on his mind these days.”
“I’m sure he does.” I slide my Metro Card through the subway turnstile, once for Lila, who walks through, and then for me.
“You’re in publishing, you know how it is. Sales are flat across the board. Guys like Michael are under the gun to find new customers, new markets, new sources of revenue, the next big thing.”
The 1 train approaches the station. We take a seat in the middle of the second car.
“The next big thing,” I say. “You mean like The Lovely Bones?”
“I’m talking bigger than just one author or one book,” Lila says. “You didn’t hear this from me, but Michael had some execs from Gemstar in the office today.”
“Is that name supposed to mean something to me?”
“You don’t know Gemstar?”
“Nope.”
“It’s the company that manufactures the Rocket Book.”
“That electronic book reader thingy?”
“Yes,” Lila says. “They want to format the entire Little Brown catalog for their Rocket Book.”
“I think Michael is barking up the wrong tree with that one.”
“How so?”
“Electronic books? I just don’t get it. Books are something you touch, something you smell, something you hold in your hands—keepsakes, heirlooms. Reading a book on a computer screen is never going to catch on.”
“You’re probably right,” Lila says.
“Trust me on this one,” I say.
We exit the subway at the southeast corner of Seventy-ninth and Broadway, the closest station to Lila’s place. My friend’s couch on Forty-second Street was only temporary. Lila was the one who talked me into moving into the spare bedroom in her Upper Westside brownstone. She didn’t have to try too hard.
“Enough publishing talking,” Lila says. “How about a nightcap?”
“Chris not waiting up for us?” I ask.
Lila hooks her arm in mine. “She left this afternoon for Georgia. Femshack is playing at a music festival down in Savannah. You knew that.”
“I did?”
“You did.”
“Well…” I say, pulling Lila’s waist in to mine, “having you all to myself is really going to suck.”
“Behave,” Lila says, pushing me away.
“Hey now, you know no one is happier than me that you two worked it out.”
“Nothing to work out, really. Chris and I never should have broken up in the first place. Last year was a weird time for everyone, I think. After 9/11, instead of holding on tight to those we loved, it seemed like a lot of us tried to just run away, myself included.”
“I know the feeling.”
“I’m glad I stopped running, Hank. She was just too perfect to let go.”
“And I’m sure living rent-free in a brownstone within walking distance of Central Park doesn’t exactly detract from Chris’s perfection.”
“Listen here, fucker.” Lila smacks me in the ass. “You about ready to stop talking and start drinking?”
We cross the street to the Dublin House, a narrow taproom smelling of Guinness and mildew. The mustachioed bartender nods at Lila when she enters.
“Tony, two rounds of the usual,” Lila says. He slides us two pints of Guinness and two shots of Jameson in short order.
We toast, slamming our shots of Jameson in concert. I chase the shot with a small sip of Guinness, letting the creaminess of the head massage my tongue. I return my pint to its loyal coaster. “Great bar,” I say.
“The best,” Lila says. “Hasn’t once shut its doors since the day Prohibition was lifted.”
“Where’d Chris get the idea for the name of the band?”
“You really want to know?”
“What else do I have to do?”
“Chris started up her band right out of high school back in her hometown of La Plata.”
“California?”
“Rural southern Maryland. They used to play out of an old army barracks. They nicknamed the place ‘The Femshack,’ and it became kind of a hangout for all the hip DC lesbians. When they got their first real paying gig in Georgetown, Femshack came with them.”
“And that’s it?”
Lila nods. “That’s it.”
I grab my pint, holding it up to the lights tinged yellow by a century of cigarette smoke. “Did you know Guinness used to be prescribed to post-op patients, pregnant women, and nursing mothers, and that new research suggests a daily pint can lower your risk of a heart attack?”
“Okay.” Lila grabs my pint, sets it on the bar. “Spill.”
“Spill?”
“What’s on your mind?”
“Nothing.”
“My ass. When you start in with the random useless trivia, that usually means you’re trying to work up the courage to ask me something. Let’s just dispense with the bullshit and get to it.”
I grab my pint of Guinness, finishing it in three swallows. Tony seems less than impressed. I clear my throat.
“She’s been calling you, hasn’t she?” I say.
“Who?” Lila asks, as if she doesn’t know exactly who I’m talking about.
“Beth.”
“She wants you back, Hank.”
“Bullshit,” I say. “Beth started talking divorce almost immediately after we were separated. I hear she’s even be dating.”
“Jealous?”
“Should I be?”
“No.”
“You’re telling me, after six months of trying to fast-track me out of her life, now she has a change of heart? I’m not buying it.”
“You’ve given people a second chance who deserved it a whole lot less than Beth.”
“Maybe.”
“At least just call her back, if only because I’m tired of being your fucking answering service.”
“I think I’m going to tell Jack.”
“Wait…what?”
“I’m going to tell Jack that I’m his father.”
Lila has known for years. I can’t remember when I told her, only that she didn’t act surprised. No one seems to act surprised when I tell them. For someone who struggles mightily with being a father, I seem to at least wear it well.
“How’d we get on this subject?” Lila says.
“I’m drunk,” I say. “Felt like talking about something else.”
“I’ll accept drunk as your excuse, then.”
“My excuse for what?”
“For being out of your goddamn mind.”
“The boy is thirteen years old, Lila. He’s nearly in high school. I have Sasha and the twins, and apparently my wife again if I want her. Jack deserves to know.”
“Your mother should be the one to tell him, Hank. Not you.”
“But he needs a father.”
“Jack has a father.”
“Who, Gillman? That looney tune is no father to Jack.”
Oh shit. Did I really just say that out loud? Lila’s bottom lip is quivering. Her eyes well up with tears. “Lila, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”
“Oh you meant it, dickhead!”
Tony approaches, his mustache leering at me menacingly. “You got uh problem here, laddie?”
“I’m fine, Tony,” Lila says, waving him off. “I think you
know by now I’m a big girl.”
Tony leaves. I grab Lila’s hand. “I’m sorry for what I said, really I am. I know Gillman means well.”
Lila grabs a cocktail napkin, wipes her eyes. “Hank, he just comes from a totally different world than most people. His grandparents were polygamists, his parents were glorified drill instructors, and he thought the answer to undoing all their damage was to just seek out very atypical women—first my mother, a barely practicing LDS Armenian, and now your mother…”
“A loud, obnoxious Irish Catholic with a taste for narcotics-tinged melodrama?”
“Your words, not mine,” Lila says. “Problem is, Gillman Prestwich is his father’s son. Dad needs a passive woman. He needs a wife who doesn’t laugh at him when he asks her to wear shirts with sleeves and capri pants instead of shorts because it makes her look like a harlot.”
“You have to admit that was pretty hilarious. He called her a harlot. I mean, come on, who uses that fucking word anymore? Hey, Gillman, the nineteenth century called, and it wants its thesaurus back.”
Lila laughs, the last swallow of her pint shooting out her mouth.
I raise two fingers. “Tony, a couple more Guinness here.” He stands at the other end of the bar, unmoving.
Lila leans into me. “Uh, you kinda have to earn your way up to calling him Tony.” She raises her hand. “Hey Tony,” she says in her best fake Irish brogue. “Two pints o’ the black for me and Henry David Fitzpatrick.”
“Fitzpatrick?” Tony says, his eyes and mustache perking up in unison. “Why didn’t yuh say so?”
Lila struggles to find the lock with her house key. I’d offer to help her, but I see three doors to the apartment.
“Shhhhhhh,” Lila says, putting her finger to her mouth.
“What?” I say.
“Weeft.”
“Weeft?”
“Weef to be quiet.”
“You’re the only who’s talking.”
“Shhhhhhh,” Lila says again.
Nothing good happens at four in the morning, so we made sure to stay at the Dublin House until 4:30. The rounds of Guinness and Jameson blurred into one another. How many rounds did we have? Five? Six? Seven? Eight? I know I blew through at least twenty bucks on the jukebox, all eighties hairbands of course. Tony put an exclamation point on the night for us, buying us a round of Tullamore Dew right before we left.
Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride Page 45