The Bestseller

by Olivia Goldsmith

  “What’s the rush?”

  “She’s leaving for location. At least that’s what she says. So talk to Jude Daniel and get back to me.”

  Alf put down the phone, his heart beating loud in his chest. He wondered if he should take a pill but decided not to. This was good excitement. He’d make the deal. The professor would be thrilled. So would Pam Mantiss. He looked up, into the dark brown eyes of Camilla Clapfish. He’d forgotten all about her. But she’d witnessed his triumph.

  “I’ve just sold an author’s book to the movies,” he said. “I rewrote most of it. He listened to me, and now it’s going to star one of the biggest actresses in Hollywood. So, what do you think?” He had to wrap this up. He had more important things to do and wondered where he could reach the professor.

  “Well, thank you for taking this time to see me,” she said. “I’m committed to meeting one other agent before I make my decision.”

  What the hell was this? “You’re seeing another agent?” Alf asked. Pam Mantiss hadn’t told him that. What had this been? An audition? As if Alf Byron had time to waste! He stood up. “Well, if you think that someone else can give you better advice than I just did, I suggest you take it.”

  Camilla Clapfish paled a bit. “Oh, I didn’t mean that—”

  “Look, I’m a busy man and I’m not looking for new clients. You talk to your other agent, and you work with him. And good luck to you,” he said. Camilla stood up, and he moved her to the door.

  “Natalie,” he shouted, “can you see Miss Clapfish out?” His secretary appeared, and Alf didn’t bother to take Camilla’s pretty hand again. “Best of luck,” he repeated and turned his back. If Pam was pissed that he had not nailed the girl down, he’d more than make up for it with the good news about the option on In Full Knowledge.

  And who knows, maybe this little English chit would be back, begging him to take her on. At 20 percent.

  54

  Unhappy endings in books are better than happy ones because readers believe life is sad and feel less manipulated.

  —Maureen Egen

  Judith sat at the new word processor, carefully typing in her handwritten revisions to In Full Knowledge, hitting the “save” key at almost every line. She was paranoid, but it was justifiable. She had worked all day yesterday, forgotten to save her edits, and lost it all when she’d reached across the keyboard for her coffee and hit some unknown combination of buttons. She’d been highlighting something to put into italics, and she still wasn’t sure if she hit the trackball or accidentally touched the mouse or both. The whole thing made her sick.

  Judith burped, patted her chest, and took a few more gulps of ginger ale, though Daniel had forbidden her to eat or drink around the computer. She hated everything about the stupid machine, even the words; trackball, mouse. It sounded like some demented game that Tom and Jerry would play. And how user-friendly was the thing if she couldn’t even drink her coffee near it? A whole tedious day’s work wasted!

  She hated the laptop almost as much as she hated the dead space that was their new apartment. It was five rooms on the first floor of the Fox Run Green Garden Apartments, but there were no gardens, no foxes, and not even much green. The place was perched in three levels up a hillside. Their own apartment was dark because it faced north, and there were balconies on the two floors overhead, blocking the light as effectively as awnings.

  Judith admitted that the walls—all beige—were straight and clean, and the wall-to-wall carpet—a light blue—was brand-new. But the cleanliness seemed sterile to her, and their mishmash of old furniture looked even more pathetic in the setting of these middle-class walls. She missed her turret room and the lively view of the campus. The extra space only made her feel lonely. In fact, she felt buried alive.

  Even Flaubert was uncomfortable—he followed her from room to room and lay his head on her foot the moment she sat anywhere long enough. Now she looked down at him and scratched behind his crooked left ear. His tail thumped twice in gratitude, two halfhearted thwacks against the floor, and then he sighed. Hadn’t someone written that there was nothing more heartbreaking than the unconscious sigh of a dog? “You’re right,” she told Flaubert. “This place sucks.”

  There was also something about the new-carpet smell that made her constantly sick to her stomach. She left the windows open almost every day, but the nausea kept coming back. Daniel said it was all in her head, but she knew for sure it was in her nose and belly. What did they make this glistening, springy rug out of, anyway? Nothing that had ever grown on a sheep’s back, that was for sure. Probably from by-products of a nuclear reaction or a Valdez spill. Synthetic was such a cold, scary word. God knows what these fumes could do to her liver. Judith was even worried about Flaubert lying on the stuff all day, so she’d put down blankets for him.

  Judith thought back with some embarrassment to all the complaining she had done about their old apartment. Now, in comparison, the place seemed heavenly. It had windows long enough for Flaubert to look out of. Here the windows began at chest height, narrow slits along the top of the rooms. She guessed that it was considered “modern,” not to mention cheaper to build. There were other modern conveniences. The dishwasher and the trash compactor and the microwave, all in almond, were lovely, if you cared about microwaves and dishwashers and trash compactors. To her surprise, Judith found that she didn’t, not at all. She’d complained about the nasty kitchen and the splintered floors at their old place, but she preferred them to this nylon hell that needed constant vacuuming. Somehow, when she let the dust and clothes and books and papers collect around their old apartment, it looked bohemian. Here it merely looked tacky.

  Meanwhile, Daniel had introduced her to Cheryl, who lived upstairs. She was the only possible fox at Fox Run. Her one-bedroom apartment looked like a picture from one of those second-rate women’s magazines you could only buy at supermarket checkout counters. The place was stuffed with dried-flower arrangements and flounced lace curtains and gingham throw pillows, all color-coordinated in salmon and mint green. The girl even had one of those repulsive new brass beds that were reproductions of the originals, which hadn’t been hip for a decade. Judith might be a slob, but she was also a snob—and proud of it. Cheryl’s little nest of horrors with the flowered Melmac dishes was nothing Judith wanted to emulate. What was the point of Daniel introducing them, and later asking how she liked Cheryl and her place? Was Daniel trying to help her find friends or give her homemaking tips? The girl was sweet, and she obviously adored Daniel, but then, they all did. Anyway, Cheryl was not a potential friend, and it didn’t look like there were any other potentials at Fox Run. It was a long walk from town, and without a car Judith felt more isolated than ever.

  But perhaps that was her sickness: Maybe she was a chronic complainer, which Daniel had just accused her of. He said that each time she got something new, she regretted what she had lost, though she had been unhappy with whatever that had been. Judith had to admit there was some truth to his accusation.

  Depressed and confused, Judith patted Flaubert, typed a few more lines, and hit Command S to save. She looked down at the next yellow tag on the manuscript page. It was one she hadn’t noticed before, but then there were so many. It was a key scene, right after Elthea realizes her boyfriend has been cheating and is going to leave her. Over the course of a night, Elthea, in despair, calls his answering machine and leaves a dozen begging messages, each one more desperate, more pathetic, and more angry than the last. Then, in horror and disgust, she decides to drive to his house, get in, and erase the messages. Though it’s past three in the morning, she packs her sleeping boys into the back of the car and takes off on her doomed mission. That’s when she sees him with the other woman. Judith was proud of the chapter. It stretched out the horror to the breaking point.

  The yellow slip merely said, “Cut scene. Too long. Pick up the pace. Anyway, impossible for so many messages to fit on a tape.”

  Judith looked at the comment in disbelief. This
was the turning point of the book. Elthea’s obsession, her need to connect and the impossibility of doing so had to be shown. And it would take a dozen messages to do it. Judith lifted her hand to the note, tore it off the manuscript, and crumpled it up. Her hands were shaking. She thought of Elthea, disintegrating this way before the reader’s eyes. One could understand what propelled her, with her children, into that suicidal, homicidal dive. To cut the scene would destroy the only possibility that a reader would have to truly understand Elthea, her utter humiliation and her outrageous act.

  Judith stood up, and Flaubert’s head fell off her foot onto the synthetic carpet. Synthetic. That was the word, all right. They wanted to make the book synthetic, faster-paced, stupid. Who was this editor? Certainly Gerald Ochs Davis couldn’t be this thick. As Judith lifted the page, her nausea increased. If she drank any more ginger ale, she’d burst, but the queasiness wouldn’t go away. She leafed through the next few pages to see if the comments got worse. And they did, in a way. There, written not on a yellow note but right on the manuscript, in the margin next to the flashback sex scene, was another comment she hadn’t noticed. Part of the paragraph had been circled, and in the same handwriting as that on the little yellow Post-its the editor had written, “I wish you’d do this to me.” Judith felt her stomach heave and took two deep, fast breaths. What in the world was this’? Surely Gerald Ochs Davis wasn’t a homosexual, or was he? Judith stared at the words. I wish you’d do this to me. For a moment, Judith was tempted to laugh. Someone, a man or a woman, had written that to Daniel, but the irony was that it was she, Judith, who had created the sex on the page. If Mr. Davis was gay, wouldn’t he be disappointed to find that out? And if a woman had written those words, wouldn’t she be confused? I wish you’d do this to me. Judith did begin to laugh, and as she did Flaubert jumped up, unaccustomed to that noise. But after a couple of moments, the laughter became a spasm in her stomach and her gorge rose. Before she had time to get to the bathroom, Judith vomited, splattering the pristine blue carpet, Flaubert, and the edge of the laptop’s screen.

  She threw up again, this time only on the carpet, then dry-heaved until even the last bit of ginger ale was emptied from her. Shaking, she sat back down. What had just happened?

  She looked down at the mess she had made. Her resentment, her jealousy, her suspicions, fear, and anger had all overcome her. She had been holding it down for days, weeks, and it had to come up. She was furious with Daniel, her only friend, for his betrayal. She was furious with herself for being used, for being stuck here and taking on this editing job. And she was frightened—truly and deeply frightened—that Daniel was cheating on her in more than one way: that he wasn’t just taking credit for the book but that perhaps he had taken Cheryl or some editor woman who had been near this manuscript as his new mistress, while she was becoming his discarded wife.

  The stench of her vomit rose from the floor. Of course, Judith told herself, she could just be overreacting. Maybe she was coming down with a stomach flu. It was going around. And the toxic smell of the carpet was enough to make anyone sick. So was this editing job. But, as nausea rose again, Judith thought for the first time about whether there might not be another reason for her sickness. Judith wondered whether she might be pregnant.

  55

  We must cultivate our garden.

  —Voltaire

  Opal needed more bags. That was the problem. Maybe some cartons, too, for the heavier stuff, but definitely more bags. And not these thin, white kitchen ones. She needed the heavy lawn-and-garden bags. How, she wondered, could an enclosed, fenced space collect so much trash? How did these cans and plastic forks, sodden newspaper pages and broken bottles find their way back here? Did people throw them out their windows? Opal sat back on her heels and surveyed what she had done. A small corner, about five feet square, was cleared, but she had filled four large bags to do it. She’d have to quit now and go and get more bags.

  Actually, she hadn’t even been thinking about clearing this backyard wasteland, but with the book actually sold, Opal found herself with time on her hands. She’d done as much cleaning as she could bear to do in Terry’s apartment—at this point she felt as if she could map every permanent stain on the blue-painted walls. So, this morning, after a bracing cup of tea and with nothing else to do until she went to The Bookstall at one, Opal had donned the thick yellow rubber gloves she used for housecleaning and had gone out into the small yard.

  There was, she found, some order to the chaos out there. Despite the weeds, broken branches, and dead leaves, she found evidence that someone had once at least tried to garden there. Under the trash she had unearthed a flagstone walkway. At the far end of the yard, where she was working right now, there was a brick wall and, before it, a kind of raised bed had been built, though it had been completely obscured by the weeds and garbage. At one time it must have been a bed of roses, because Opal could recognize the two thorny stumps she had already uncovered and pulled from the unpromising soil.

  She didn’t have any tools, so she made do with the house broom, which she used to awkwardly sweep up the piles of dead leaves and pulled weeds. She also improvised with the metal dustpan, and had even employed its edge to scrape away at the dirt, once the leaves and weeds were cleared. But what she needed to do the job efficiently was a rake and a small shovel, not to mention a weed whacker. Opal thought longingly of her garden shed back in Bloomington. She didn’t suppose they had weed whackers in New York City. She wouldn’t make the investment, anyway. After all, she was in no rush. This was merely something to do while she waited for the contract from Alex Simmons and made sure the book was really on its way to publication.

  The cleared earth gave off a rank odor—it smelled more than a little of cat. But the old leaves and the dead tall grasses smelled just like her garden back in Indiana. Suddenly, Opal experienced a wave of homesickness. She had only two more months before her library job was lost. She wondered how the tenants were treating her house. She turned back to one of the bags she had filled and tried to stuff a few more handfuls of twigs into it. Funny how heavy all that light grass got when it was shoved into a plastic bag. She could barely move this one, and as she tried to, she saw a branch press out through the plastic, three quarters of the way toward the bottom. It tore a hole the size of a half-dollar. Opal sighed. It would all tear now if she moved it. She’d have to double the bag.

  “What are you doing?”

  Opal jumped at the sound and turned to see Aiello. How had he gotten in? It was only then that she noticed the recessed door at the side of the building, set back from Terry’s apartment and obscured by a scratchy holly bush.

  “What are you doing?” Aiello asked again, always the master of the obvious.

  “It’s Sunday,” Opal told him. “I’m going to church.”

  “Man is closer to God in a garden than anywhere else on earth,” Aiello quoted, and Opal nearly fell over sideways. “It’s a poem,” Aiello told her, though he pronounced it pome. “My mother had it on a plaque in her yard.”

  Opal had actually known the poem for years. It wasn’t much, as poems went, but the only poetry she’d figured Aiello knew would be a limerick about a boy from Nantucket. Opal was surprised, to put it mildly.

  “You need more bags,” Aiello commented. Well, for once his base-level perceptions could be useful.

  “Have you got any?” Opal asked.

  “Sure,” Aiello said, and without any further nagging or requests he disappeared from whence he came and returned with a whole roll of sturdy black plastic trash bags.

  “These here ones won’t hold,” he told her, pointing to her own with his chin, and Opal tried to avoid being exasperated. Effortlessly, he picked up the first two white sacks and placed them in one of the larger, heavier-gauge black ones. In two minutes he had consolidated all of her work into a single, twist-tied mound. “You need a hoe,” he said, “and a scythe to cut this down.” Opal just shrugged and turned back to pulling weeds from the long
bed. “I got a scythe,” Aiello added. “You want me to cut all this down for you?”

  “You have a scythe?” Opal asked in disbelief. Aiello as the grim reaper was a disconcerting image. What was the man doing in the midst of this urban blight with a tool as Brueghelesque as a scythe?

  “My grandfather had a big garden out in Corona,” Aiello volunteered. Opal didn’t know where Corona was, but she supposed it was somewhere in the country. “Grew vegetables, had fruit trees. Even grew his own grapes. I used to help him. When he died, I kept the scythe.”

  Opal wasn’t sure if she was comfortable with the combination of Aiello and a large curved blade, but the temptation to get the worst part of the mess cut down was more than she could resist. Not that she was planning to stay, or that she might even get around to planting this place. It was merely the librarian in her, the part of her that liked things to be tidy. “Certainly,” she said. “That would be very kind of you.”

  He turned to go, but as he did, he stopped at the gate. “Oh, here,” he said, handing her an envelope bearing the small green sticker that meant it was registered. “You got this, and I thought you might want me to sign for it. Save you a trip to the post office.” That was Aiello! Just when she thought he might actually be reasonable and pleasant he’d do something nosy or rude or out of line. Receiving other people’s mail was a federal offense! And surely it hadn’t come on Sunday. How long had he been holding it?

  “When did it come?” she asked.

  “Yesterday,” he said. “Or the day before.” She very nearly snatched it from him, but before she could express her annoyance, he was gone. He had no right to sign for her mail. What if it was something important? He’d held it all day yesterday and made two trips out here before he’d even remembered to give it to her. The man was impossible!