The Bestseller

by Olivia Goldsmith

  “No. Let’s do it together. Maybe it will bring us luck.” Frederick smiled at her.

  Camilla nodded. “Let’s,” she agreed, “although I think an Italian post office is the bleakest place in the world.” They turned into the stazione post office. The noise was an assault, and the people in the crowd—who seemed not to be divided into any queues but milling randomly, more like an unruly mob—seemed about to assault one another. For a moment Camilla felt Frederick shrink back. Was he timid as well as being what some of her American tourists would call ‘“a klutz”? Camilla couldn’t help feeling more than a little put off by a man who was less physically secure than she.

  But after a moment he launched them into the crowd and finally managed—after ten minutes of pushing and gesturing and speaking his broken Italian—to get them up to an air-mail window. Another disheveled Italian, this one an unshaven young man in a wrinkled uniform, took her precious parcel, applied the appropriate colorful stamps, and then flung it over his left shoulder onto a pile of other parcels as if it were less than a pair of discarded shoes. Camilla winced, but Frederick laughed, turned to her, and put his long hand against her cheek. “It’s okay,” he told her in a voice that was surprisingly comforting. “It will get there safely.” And then he bent down and kissed her softly and sweetly on her mouth.

  “Ah, bellissima” said the man waiting behind them at the front of the mob. “Bravo” called out someone else. Camilla colored.

  “Can I trust a man who prefers Guardi to Canaletto?”

  He stopped her. “Listen, let me explain. I am an architect—”

  “That’s why you should recognize the merits of Canaletto. His combination of fantasy and precision.”

  “No, he does things by rote. He’s lost the soul of Venice. Guardi paints with feeling.”

  “I believe he painted with a brush.” Her face was flushed. She was annoyed.

  The Italians, looking for divertissement and always interested in love, were watching their row. Camilla was far too shy to be put in this awkward position. Frederick was truly sweet, but…what could she say? Before she had to say anything he turned them around and, arm in arm, they walked out of the post office, leaving the bedlam behind them.

  “Where are you taking your chickadees today?” Frederick asked her, joking about the tour group. They were Americans, a group of doctors and their wives from Philadelphia. They had been particularly nice but demanding. Today they’d leave for Rome. She’d be both a bit sorry and a bit relieved. It was also the day she was paid, and she was hoping for large tips.

  “I’m taking them up to the top of the Duomo and then to the Campodeiglia,” she told him. “Photo ops, you know.” Was he planning to come? Since they’d come back from Assisi, each time she had looked up during her lectures and seen Frederick at the edge of the crowd she’d been flattered, but today she’d find it embarrassing to have him watch her palm gratuities, like a common waitress. Sister Agnus Dei would call it false pride. Anyway, she was too tongue-tied to tell him how she felt. “Should I expect you?” was all she asked.

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Regretfully not. But will you meet me for dinner?” Camilla nodded, very relieved and quite pleased.

  “Come to my hotel,” he suggested. “The dining room is terrific.” Camilla had never been to the restaurant in the Helvetia & Bristol. It was expensive, and attracted the young, moneyed Florentine crowd. She wondered, briefly, if Gianfranco might be there. Well, what was that to her? She hadn’t seen him in weeks.

  “Yes,” she said, “I would love to.” And they parted at the corner with her manuscript in the mail and an agreement to meet at seven-thirty that evening.

  The tour group had broken up after a stunning last view of Firenze. The city was as beautiful to look at from the hills around it as it was to examine from within. And the gratuities had been even more than Camilla had hoped for. Thank God Americans were so generous! She had been a bit in the hole after taking off those days for Assisi, though she had refused, of course, to accept anything from Frederick. Despite his insistence that she had been—as he put it—a miraculous tour guide, she didn’t want to be his employee. He had been so complimentary—he’d said she’d given him new eyes. She’d been pleased by that, but she’d still only accepted the dinners, the hotel room, and the companionship; she wouldn’t take money.

  Now Camilla had a few lira to spare, as well as an hour or two to herself. But the long day had worn her out. She thought she would just lie down for a few minutes before she’d think about bathing and dressing for dinner.

  When Camilla woke, it was already twilight. She sat up with a start, her heart pounding. She had overslept. Well, she hadn’t meant to sleep at all. She looked at the little clock she kept on her bedside table. It was the only valuable thing in the room, a small enameled carriage clock that Gianfranco had given her. It was already seven o’clock! She almost ran to the little basin in the corner. She’d have no time for a proper bath or to wash and dry her hair. She would have to sponge herself and put her hair on top of her head.

  Camilla hated to rush. She realized, as she washed and dressed, that she must have slept away her free time to avoid thinking. She had, after all, quite a lot to think about. Frederick clearly liked her, and she liked him, too. But in what way? She could still feel his kiss on her lips. But she didn’t feel that way about him, did she? Was this just another useless adventure? She was twenty-nine, and she’d already had “adventures” in New York and here in Firenze. She had loved but not been loved in return. She was tired of being only a diversion. Was she merely a diversion as part of Frederick’s holiday and nothing more?

  The thought led her to the bigger question: What in the world was she doing? She seemed to be bouncing about the globe, as empty as a Ping-Pong ball. Where did she belong? She had had to leave Birmingham and her dreary, hopeless family to get her schooling, but she hadn’t managed to find a place for herself in New York. Without money or friends she’d found it a hard city. So she’d come to Firenze, a soft and beautiful place, only to find there was no niche for her here, either. There were women—older, fatter, faded women—who got stuck here working as guides and living in lonely bed-sitters in pensiones. The idea of winding up with that life chilled Camilla.

  And what about the manuscript? She tried to imagine where it was right now. Had it been loaded on a plane yet? What would happen when Frederick’s sister received it? Would it be read? Would it be liked? Would it be published? She’d been quite chuffed by Frederick’s praise, but now she’d lost her confidence. What if her manuscript was misplaced or, worse, rejected?

  No wonder I fell asleep, Camilla thought. She had tried over and over to figure out the puzzle: how to fit in, how to forge strong connections with people, how to build a life. Somehow, though, she didn’t have the knack. It seemed to her that love and work were the only two solutions to her loneliness. But working as a tour guide was not, in the end, either a deep connection to people or deeply engaging. She’d hoped her writing would matter. And it had. She’d felt intimate, connected, to the growing book. She’d come to love her characters. It seemed a natural thing for her to do, an outgrowth and explanation of who she was. But now it was finished. She had written it alone and she was still alone. Would it always be this way?

  It was all so unsettling. She knew only one thing: She would like to write another book. She would like to tell more stories. It seemed to be the thread that ran through her life: She was a good tour guide not because she spoke well but because she wove an interesting narrative into her explanations. She retold the old myths and made the history of Firenze and its artists and rulers come alive. She thought she might also have made the characters in her novel do the same. She had watched her characters, her narrative, spin out before her, as amazing to her as if she’d been able to throw out silk and spin a web. But would it hold? Was it enough to build a new life on?

  Camilla looked at herself in the little mirror over the basin as she
pinned up her hair. She was almost afraid to admit how much she wanted this to happen. What if her book was bought? What if she did find a niche for herself? If she could write and make a living at it, she felt as if she had taken care of half of the formula.

  That left only love to consider. Camilla put the last pin in her hair and walked out the door to dinner with Frederick, wondering what his sister in New York was like.

  26

  Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

  —Samuel Johnson

  Emma Ashton lay on the sofa, the Susann Baker Edmonds manuscript arrayed on the floor in stacks before her. She was truly and deeply miserable. It was in a mood like this that the sofa—an expensive down-filled splurge that she had spent some of her trust fund capital on—really paid dividends. Emma was embraced by the cushions. The deeper she sank into the mess of the Edmonds manuscript, the more deeply she was soothed by the comfort of the sofa. She thought, for a moment, of a line she’d heard credited to Jackie Kennedy Onassis. “If we all have to be miserable, it’s better to be miserable in sable.”

  Emma put down her pencil. She pushed herself up from the sofa and looked at the mess that surrounded her. She’d been hoping for a call from Alex, but the call hadn’t come. Emma sighed, wearily, and thought about going out this evening, just to clear her head. But she hated the bar scene and going to the movies alone, and Alex still might call. Anyway, she had so much work to do.

  Emma stretched and walked across the big empty room to the single enormous window that looked over a group of gardens. Though her dubiously dubbed “studio loft”—basically one large room—was only on the fourth floor, it got a lot of sun, since it overlooked three-story brown-stones to the south. But the day had been cloudy, and now dusk had already turned the tangle of unpruned trees and bushes below into darkness. Across the way, in the top-floor windows, lights had gone on and Emma could watch a mother feeding a toddler his dinner. She sighed. Twilight always made her melancholy.

  She turned to face the mess of soiled pages on the floor. When she had gotten into the book business she had hoped for more than this. She had hoped to work on books that mattered, on stories that illuminated life, that gave solace or described life’s great pains and great joys in a way that was beautiful.

  But what was this manuscript? Mere distraction, and a bad job of it, too. The Edmonds book was stillborn, a pathetic effort to update what—to Emma—was already an insincere, empty style. Edmonds had written wish-fulfillment books up to now: long sagas of a woman’s struggle, filled with descriptions of relationships, clothes worn, meals eaten, and the rest of the tedious details her fans once seemed to crave.

  This new book had lost all of that, so the reader was left with nothing but character and plot, neither of which were Susann Baker Edmonds’s strong points. The story was a middle-aged romance, something Emma thought of as “old adult.” If “young adult” books were aimed at the netherworld of readers too old for children’s books but too immature for regular fiction, “old adult” existed for those grown-ups too dumb or too lazy for real books. Like all of the new genre, this story set up a character disappointed by life, as “old adult” readers must be. But, unlike the reader, the main character got rewarded with everything she needed. Yet it was all so dead, so formulaic, that it was virtually unreadable. “Paul looked at her and she turned away in shame. The varicose veins…the stretch marks. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he breathed.” Ugh. Emma thought of what her mother’s reaction would be and winced.

  Well, she thought, it could be worse. She could have been assigned SchizoBoy, and then she would have had to resign. This manuscript was only silly, not evil. Reading the Chad Weston book had made her physically ill. She and the other women editors could hardly believe that Davis & Dash would publish it. She’d started a petition to ask them to refrain, but most people were afraid to sign it. Emma had been disappointed by that.

  But what would she do about this? Tell Susann, tell Pam, that the book merely had to change plot, characterization, and style? Wouldn’t they welcome that news. Emma shrugged. And who knew? In this business it was so hard to tell what would sell. The Celestine Prophecy, Mutant Message Down Under, Border Music! For all Emma knew, this empty, manipulative novel could be on the list the week it was published.

  She sighed and went into her small kitchen to boil some water for pasta. She’d eat in, and maybe take a walk to the river later. She grated some cheese and emptied a plastic tub of pomodoro sauce into a pan. Across the room, near the archway to her sleeping alcove, her backpack lay on the floor, its drawstrings open, its contents scattered. She would clean that up just in case Alex did call. She strode across the wide, empty space and bent over the bag. It was surprisingly heavy, and when she looked into it she saw the wrapped manuscript that the old woman—what was her name?—had thrust at her. No doubt it was crap. She’d wait a week and then give it back. But as she turned to hang the backpack on its hook, her eyes crossed the Susann Baker Edmonds mess. Could anything but SchizoBoy be worse? Emma thought again of Jewel, or Pearl, or whatever the old woman’s name was. She remembered her look of pain. Was it really her dead daughter’s manuscript? With one last sigh, Emma pulled it out of her backpack and took it into the kitchen.

  The phone rang. Emma answered, hoping it would be Alex.

  “Hello, Emma.”

  “Mother. Are you calling from Italy?” It was funny: Emma hadn’t heard from her mother in almost a month, but now she instantly felt smothered.

  “No, dear. Larchmont.”

  “Similar but not matching, and the board goes back,” Emma said. But of course her mother never watched television and would not get the reference to the old game show. “When did you get home? I thought the two of you weren’t back until next week?”

  “Wrong on both counts. We were both scheduled back yesterday, but Frederick has stayed on,”

  “Alone?” Emma asked, surprised. “He’s staying alone?”

  “Let us hope so,” her mother said. “They take good care of him at the Helvetia & Bristol, and he hired a driver. But I do worry.”

  “You worry too much,” Emma said. “If he wanted to stay, I guess he can manage.” But she wondered herself. Why had Frederick stayed? Perhaps he, too, was feeling suffocated by their formidable mother. Of course, both of them had long ago run away from Mrs. Ashton, but poor Frederick had had to return. Emma shook her head over the tragedy and couldn’t help but think—not for the first time—that a tiny bit of their mother was glad that Frederick had to return to the nest. Emma shivered.

  “Did you enjoy Florence?” Emma asked, because she didn’t want to discuss anything else with her mother right now. Not her brother, not her job, not her sex life.

  “It was lovely as always, but I thought if I had to see one more duomo, I would come down with a duomodenal ulcer. There are a lot of churches in Italy that only an architect could love.”

  “When is Frederick coming back?” Emma asked.

  “That isn’t clear. He’s met someone.”

  Well, that was news. “Oh. Then he’s touring with a friend?” That would make sense. Why hadn’t she said so before?

  “No. Not exactly. He appears to have made a kind of conquest. A girlfriend.”

  “No kidding! Great!” And unusual. Emma loved Frederick and wished him the best. “Does she know?”

  “I’m not certain. And it wasn’t my place to ask. I don’t know if I should have left him, Emma.” There was a pause. “I felt I had to do what he asked me to do, but I don’t know if it was the right thing. I haven’t called Dr. Frye yet, but I want you to promise me that if your brother calls you, you’ll encourage him to come home.”

  “Mother, we’ve had this talk before. Frederick has to live the way he wants, just as I do. I’m sorry. Believe me, I’m sorry about everything that makes you unhappy about Frederick and me. But you have to accept us as we are, just as we hav
e to accept ourselves.” Emma rolled her eyes. Talking to her mother too often made her sound like a badly written self-help book. Was that the reason she avoided it? “Mother, I have to go.” Never complain, never explain. That was the rule Emma tried to follow with her mother. Actually, it was a rule her mother had taught her. They said good night, and Emma hung up the phone.

  The water was boiling, and she threw enough pasta for two into the pot. As if Alex just might drop by. And, if Alex didn’t, Emma would eat all of it at the counter, reading just the first chapter of this mammoth piece of work. She looked at the title. The Duplicity of Men. Not bad, Emma thought. Just the first chapter, she told herself. That was all—well, that was more—than she owed the woman.

  27

  A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

  —Margaret Atwood

  Pam threw down her pencil in disgust. She was surrounded by yellow sheets of legal paper, most of it crossed out and crumpled. And all of it added up to nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  What the fuck was going on? She had spent three weekends and every evening writing “Peet’s” book, but she hadn’t come up with a usable chapter, page, or paragraph. After years of contempt for the writers she worked with, after years of envy at their royalties, she was having to examine one of her most basic beliefs: that she could write better.