Pete had news of his own. He’d fallen in love with an evolutionary biologist named Bonita who shared his commitment to the environment and the betterment of emerging nations, and since she was two months pregnant they were getting married.
Mother, Pete, and I toasted one another, and I thanked God once more for Jake and Love, Max, because if my brilliant, handsome baby brother had found true love and was starting a family while I was still living at home and earning nada, running props at the Well of Loneliness Theater, I would have been suicidal. And yes, I do know how petty and immature that sounds.
The day after Jake and I got engaged, I made a decision about something that had been nagging at me for a while. I hadn’t yet shown Love, Max to my mother, but now it was due to hit the stores in a couple of weeks. “I have to give Alexandra an advance copy to read,” I told Jake. And I could hear the marshmallow fluff coming into my voice.
“What are you so afraid of?” Jake had read the book by then, and he said he thought it would sell big. Back in those days, Jake was all about being supportive.
“I’m afraid she’ll think the story is inconsequential,” I told him.
But that wasn’t my only reason for putting off showing it to my mother. I tried to explain my biggest fear to Nancy. “The story isn’t about my mother and my father. Not really. Not totally. But—”
“But it’s based on them—loosely. And now you’re afraid your mother will recognize herself. Trust me, it’ll never happen. The only time people think you wrote about them is when you didn’t.”
Nancy was right—and she wasn’t. I gave Alexandra a copy of the book on a Wednesday and, knowing her packed schedule, I didn’t expect to hear from her for weeks. On Sunday morning, she showed up at my doorstep carrying what looked like a duffel bag with holes in the side and my book. There were tears in her eyes. “Oh, Francesca, honey,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” She dropped the duffel bag and held out the book. “I never knew how you felt.”
I promised myself that the next time I saw Nancy I was going to strangle her.
“It was a long time ago,” I started to say, “and”—but my mother had gotten down on her knees and was unzipping the duffel bag.
“I never knew how much you missed having a dog after ours went with your father to California,” said my mother, as a puppy with humongous feet emerged. “I know it’s a few years after the fact, but better late than never, right?” she asked hopefully. She beamed down at the puppy. “Lenny and I picked her up in a shelter on Long Island. I couldn’t call her Max, because she’s a girl, so I named her Annie, after my mother.”
I need to take a moment to make it clear what this meant. My mother almost never mentioned her birth mother, but when she was a kid she’d had all these fantasies about Annie. Little Alexandra Karras’s dream mommy was a mix of Eleanor Roosevelt, Marie Curie, and Mother Teresa—with a little Wonder Woman thrown in. And although my mother had matured since then, I knew in her heart the dream still lived. In fact, I always thought my mother’s career as a female Lone Ranger was a tribute to Annie, who once told her—with great pride—that her name, Alexandra, meant defender of mankind in Greek. Mother was three at the time, and Annie died shortly afterward, but the memory was one my mother cherished. When she named my new dog Annie, I knew it was a really big deal. So even though Jake and I had never discussed getting a pet, I said, “Oh Mother, a puppy! She’s just what I wanted!” Come on, what would you have done?
CHAPTER 5
Our apartment building came into sight as the sun was just starting to set. I figured by now Jake would be back home getting ready for the awards dinner, so I took out my cell phone and called to tell him I was on my way. There was no answer on our landline. That was a little strange, but I thought maybe he was taking Annie out for her evening potty break. It wasn’t something he usually did, since he had agreed to keep her only because I said she was my dog and therefore my responsibility, but he could have decided to surprise me. I called his cell. It was turned off. I wondered if he’d started for the awards ceremony without me. I checked my watch; it was way too early. I started walking faster again. There had been a time—when we were first married—when Jake wouldn’t have dreamed of taking off without telling me where he was going and when he would be back. And, come to think of it, I wouldn’t have gone wandering through the park without letting him know. We always kissed each other good-bye back then. Back then, when I was a success, and Jake was proud of me.
MY SUCCESS BEGAN before Love, Max even went on sale. It started with a phone call from Nancy. I’d been running in the park with Annie—yeah, we both jogged in those days—and I came back to find a message on my machine saying that a Hollywood producer was in town and she wanted to take a breakfast meeting with me to discuss making my book into a TV movie. The phrase take a meeting sounded so official and scary that I asked Jake to come along because he had experience with show-business people. That was how we met Andrea Grace. Given everything I’d heard about how young everyone was in the entertainment industry, I expected her to be a baby. But Andy was a year older than Jake, and she was a knockout. Her thick chestnut hair was pulled back into a low bun, and Sheryl would have killed for the name of the genius who’d done her highlights. I would have killed for a figure like hers, without an ounce of fat. Her brown eyes were big and warm, and she was one of those rare women who can make wearing eyeglasses seem chic. When we shook hands she did that two-handed thing that falls somewhere between a shake and a clasp and told us to call her Andy, in a voice that reminded me of old-time movie stars like Greer Garson and Irene Dunne. She asked us to sit.
“If the producing thing doesn’t work out for you, I’d say you’ve got a career in voice-overs, Andy,” said my husband. She laughed delightedly. That was another of her skills: She was the kind of person who laughed so genuinely at your jokes that you actually got funnier.
We talked briefly about what happens when a producer options a book. Andy explained that she would put down ten percent of the purchase price—which she would negotiate with Nancy—to secure the rights to Love, Max. This option would last for a year, during which time she’d try to sell one of the networks on the idea of making the book into a movie. She’d also try to interest a couple of big-name actors. If none of this worked out, the rights to Love, Max would revert to me. If the project was green-lighted, Andy would be my new producer.
“Of course I’m not promising anything, because this business is a floating crap game, but I really think I can make this happen, Francesca,” she said.
I was already seeing my name on a credit crawl. Maybe I’d get to go to the Emmys.
“Now, tell me how you visualize Love, Max the movie,” Andy said. “Who do you see as the leads?”
I didn’t. For me, the characters were so tied to real people I couldn’t imagine anyone playing them. But before I had to admit that, Jake stepped in with a list of names I never would have thought of in a million years. Soon he and Andy were chatting merrily about directors and writers and which actor should do the dog’s voice-overs. When the breakfast was over, Andy kissed us both good-bye like we were long-lost relatives. Later, Nancy said she was able to up the option price for the book by twenty-five thousand dollars because Jake did such a good job of charming Andy. Talk about the perfect husband.
Getting optioned by a Hollywood producer was just the beginning for my book. I’m not going to say Love, Max was a huge John Grisham–sized success, but it was an impressive debut novel. Everyone agreed on that. And the momentum kept growing. When I went on my book tour, the salespeople in the bookstores told me they couldn’t keep it on the shelves. I spoke at libraries where the lists of people who were waiting to take it out were so long they’d had to order more copies.
Everywhere I went, I wore false lashes and piled up my hair on top of my head with a few sexy tendrils hanging down. And if there were days, even back then, when spending an hour and twenty minutes making up my face, and gluing the damn lashes
to my eyelids—not to mention the time I almost glued one to my eyeball—seemed like a total waste of time, and if I got sick of remembering to schlep three different kinds of hair straightener around the country, I told myself it was worth it. Certainly Jake thought it was. He flew to be with me whenever he had a free day, because he said I needed an entourage. I felt like a rock star—most of the time. Sometimes, like I’ve said, I felt like none of it was real and I was waiting for some cosmic second shoe to drop. But I kept that to myself. (Life lesson: When you’re on a roll, no one wants to hear about your angst.)
GRAMERCY PUBLISHING DID six printings of my book. People magazine did an article on me. Love, Max made the New York Times bestseller list for the entire month of August. Grant you, the book never got out of the bottom half, but it was on the list. Gramercy was thrilled with me. Sheryl was thrilled. So were Alexandra and Pete. And Jake couldn’t tell me often enough how much he loved me.
Jake sold his loft apartment—it was pretty heavily mortgaged so there was only a tiny profit—and I sold the co-op I’d bought with my advance check for Love, Max. We took that money, plus the inheritance from Dad that I’d been saving for a rainy day, and bought our palace on the Upper East Side. Somehow it seemed ungrateful to save for a rainy day when the universe was handing us so many goodies. We ate out almost every night, and we went to lots of parties.
“I feel like I’m in my Sheryl phase,” I told my stepmother on the phone.
“But you’re not like me,” she said.
“Okay, then I’m in my Cheerleader phase.”
“You never were the cheerleader type either.”
“People change.”
I wanted to believe that. Well, maybe I missed the old me sometimes, but mostly I wanted to believe I was part of this sparkly new creature called Jake-and-Francesca. I’m not saying we were one of those high-profile couples who have to fight off the paparazzi at the airport—for one thing, we didn’t travel much—but Jake felt we were getting there.
“Getting where?” I asked him on New Year’s Eve, when we were dressing for a party at some museum.
“Oh, come on, Francesca, it’s a figure of speech. Don’t always pick things apart.” Jake hated it when I did that.
“I’m serious. What are we aiming for? How far up the food chain do we want to go?”
“As far as we can.”
“There will always be someone above us. This is Manhattan.”
“You’re just bitching because you hate New Year’s Eve.”
That was true. I’d spent too many years home alone on one of the great date nights of the calendar. December 31 was way too much pressure for my taste. I’ve always felt the same way about Valentine’s Day. But now Jake grabbed me and led me to the mirror. “What do you see?” he demanded.
The couple that smiled back at me was New York Magazine glamorous. Jake was wearing a tux and looked like he’d just stepped out of the pages of GQ. I’d had my hair and makeup done at the hot salon du jour, and my gown was a flattering pink—I’d settled on pink as my signature color. I knew I was never going to look better than I did at that moment. And if somewhere in the back of my head I heard Alexandra’s voice saying that focusing women’s attention on their looks was society’s way of keeping them chained intellectually, I told the voice to lay off.
“We’re pretty spiffy,” I said.
“We’re going to own this town before we’re through.” He laughed happily. When Jake laughed like that, I could believe anything.
WE CONTINUED TO do the social whirl. We went to the opening nights of galleries, Broadway shows, and designer boutiques. I became a part of a group of women—all movers and shakers—who got together once a month for dinner in wildly overpriced restaurants.
“I’ve made some friends,” I told Sheryl on the phone, knowing she’d be as surprised as I was. I’ve never been Miss Popularity.
There were reasons for that. During my teen years, I’d gone to a progressive private high school, and since there were only forty-nine students in the entire school you were either in or you weren’t. We had classrooms without walls and called our teachers by their first names, there were no written grades, and the dress code mandated only that we wear shoes every day. Sports were considered deeply uncool; that was the sort of thing kids did who lived in those parts of the country where people voted Republican. This was the kind of thinking that went on in my own home, so it wasn’t new to me. However, the other students at my school were mostly from families that successfully did creative things like act and write and paint—which meant they were rich and nuts—and I didn’t fit that mold; my mother couldn’t afford to send me to Aspen to ski during the Christmas break, and I wasn’t doing drugs. I hadn’t made one lasting friend, either in high school or in my equally progressive and nutsy small college. As for the years after college, I believe I’ve mentioned that I worked almost exclusively for my mother’s friends.
But I thought all that changed after my marriage and Love, Max.
“Now I’m like you and the Girls,” I told Sheryl.
“Oh, Francesca, I’m so glad,” she said. “I know you have Pete and your mom, but there’s nothing like knowing you have a bunch of girlfriends who are there for you.”
My new pals did talk about being there for one another; the word supportive was tossed around a lot. But it seemed to me that most of the time at dinner was spent detailing all the fabulous moving and shaking they were doing.
“So they share the good stuff instead of boring the hell out of one another with a lot of soul searching,” Jake said, when I mentioned it. “Not everyone wants to get all gloomy and introspective.”
“But would they really have my back if I needed them?”
“Who says you’re going to need someone to have your back? Lighten up, Francesca.”
I told myself that he was right, and I just wasn’t used to hanging out with the in crowd.
“I love my life,” I murmured happily to Jake one night as I was drifting off to sleep. “If I ever go back to being me, shoot me.”
We were six months into our marriage by then. Love, Max had been published six months and a week earlier, and I’d had my run on the Times bestseller list. I truly believed that my life was golden and nothing could ever go wrong for me again. Then Nancy took me out to lunch.
“Gramercy has gotten in touch,” she said. She was so excited, she’d forgotten to send the breadbasket back and was inhaling a hunk of focaccia. “They’d like to buy another book from you. Do you know what you want to write next?”
I didn’t have a clue. My brain—and I could actually visualize this as I sat there—was like an empty room with nothing in it but a few dust bunnies in the corners. But Nancy was licking focaccia crumbs off her fingers and waiting for me to speak. I couldn’t admit I had nothing.
“Well, I thought maybe I’d write about Max again.”
“A sequel!” Nancy said. “Oh, God, you don’t know how happy I am that you said that. Gramercy will be over the moon.”
“Really?”
“Sequels sell. Big-time.”
Well, it made sense. People would want to read about the characters they already knew they loved. And I wanted to write a book that would sell even better than my first one. No way I wanted to lose my shiny new success. “That’s what I want to write,” I said. “A sequel.”
Nancy leaned forward eagerly. “What’s the story?” she asked.
I was back to dust bunnies in the brain. “I have a couple of … thoughts … and themes … that interest me,” I improvised. “Let me go home and put something down on paper.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t have any ideas, I reassured myself, it was just that I hadn’t thought seriously about writing a second book. I’d been too busy running around, sparkling and getting manicures. Once I got back into work mode, I was sure to come up with something.
The trouble with me being in work mode was, frankly, there were times when it wasn’t pretty. When I was wri
ting Love, Max, there were days when I got so absorbed I forgot to brush my hair—let alone curl it fetchingly on top of my head. Hell, there were times when I forgot to brush my teeth. I didn’t go out of the house for three weeks while I was rewriting the first draft except to grab food and chocolate. I walked into walls and talked to myself when I was working out plot points. No way I was going to expose Jake to this side of Francesca.
I told myself I could continue the active social life Jake enjoyed so much even though I was working. It would just take a little discipline. I’d put myself on a schedule—check into my office from nine to five like anyone else with a job. I’d still have my weekends free to get my hair straightened. I could still do my makeup every morning.
It took me three weeks to figure out that story ideas do not come on command. At least mine didn’t. I sat in my office wearing my itchy false lashes for eight frustrating, terrifying hours a day and came up with nothing. I eighty-sixed the damn lashes. I also canceled a couple of brunches and a hair appointment. Finally, I managed to concoct a plot that even I knew was too vague to show to Nancy.
Meanwhile, Jake watched me thrash around and became increasingly bewildered. “Don’t you have a deadline for finishing this proposal?” he asked me.
“Not a specific one, but Nancy says the sooner the better.”
“Why don’t you just write it?” It was the first time I’d had to remind myself of all the reasons why I loved him.
The good news was, Jake was going to Tuscany for a week to do a shoot with a young Italian starlet—a gig he’d gotten on Andy’s recommendation—and he wanted me to go with him so I had a reprieve.
“We didn’t have a honeymoon, so this will be like one,” I said to Nancy. “I’ll get that book proposal to you as soon as I get back.”
“Great. Because they’re hot for Francesca Sewell’s next novel, and we don’t want to let them cool down,” she said, thereby ensuring that I spent every morning of my belated honeymoon hunched over my computer trying to force sentences out of my brain and into the keyboard. In the afternoons, I joined Jake and the starlet and Andy, who had flown over to see how the shoot was going. We drank cappuccinos in little cafés, and I tried to pretend that I was paying attention to all the laughing and fun chat that was swirling around me, while the computer back in the hotel room haunted me.
Looking for a Love Story Page 4