by Chris Pavone
“Just meet me.”
“Okay, okay. The usual?”
“Yes. At seven-fifteen?”
He guffaws.
“Seven-thirty?” she counters her own opening bid, contrary to what they both know is a fundamental tenet of negotiating. He’s tempted to remain silent, to let her dig herself deeper into her own hole, to plumb the depths of her desperation, to find out how many times she will relent before forcing him to counteroffer. But it’s just a breakfast hour, and it’s Isabel. “Eight.”
“Quarter of.”
“Done.”
Jeff is feeling a little better—or less bad—every second. He rises slowly, picks his way past the paper piles, past the draped and discarded clothes, over the strewn sneakers and shoes. He pushes open the creaky bathroom door, and turns on the hot tap, running the water; it’ll take at least two minutes to get hot. The old sink is rust-stained and chipped, with a wildly unprofessional patch at the drain, where it looks like somebody used Wite-Out as compound. And no matter how many times he replaces the washer, a new drip always materializes. Always. It has become part of his routine, buying and replacing washers.
He’s an unpaid handyman. The opposite of paid: he himself does the paying, twenty-six hundred dollars a month, to buy and replace the washers in his lousy sink whose water takes forever to get hot.
Jeff lets his razor and washcloth sit in the stream of slowly heating water, and looks at himself in the mirror, disappointed at what he sees. Yesterday ended with late hours at the office, hunched over a manuscript. Then his hard work was permanently interrupted by an off-hours phone call from one of his authors, who claimed he was being driven insane by the copy editor’s nitpicking—“pecked to death by minnows”—and demanding satisfaction. Mason actually used the word satisfaction, as if the guy wanted to challenge the poor anonymous freelance copy editor to a duel.
“What exactly do you want from me?” Jeff asked.
“Come get drunk,” Mason said, matter-of-factly. Mason has a lot of free-floating anger, which is both alleviated and exacerbated by his frequent excessive drinking. “I’m around the corner.”
Jeff obeyed, because this is occasionally his job: pint after pint of ale with the occasional gratuitous shot of tequila, punctuated by a revolting plate of nachos and a gruesome order of buffalo wings with their pathetic accompaniment of plastic-cupped blue-cheese dressing and a few sticks of stringy, water-logged celery. Listening to a complaining author, perched there on the adjoining barstool in his studiously overgrown beard—seemingly a contractual obligation, these days, for young novelists—and meticulously curated vintage T-shirt, ranting and raving about all the things that authors rant and rave about. It was brutal.
Today would be a good day to not shave. But today is Tuesday, the weekly editorial meeting, and the executives will be there, so Jeff makes a greater effort to dress professionally on Tuesdays. And, as a rule, he shaves, as he does now, with slightly shaky hands that make him nervous, especially around the Adam’s apple.
A few years ago, Jeff himself fell victim to the ineluctable trend, and grew a full beard, bushy as a whole but scraggly in spots. The beard made him look vaguely rabbinical, and if there was one thing Jeff didn’t want to go out of his way to look like, it was his second cousin Rabbi Abe Feinberg.
Instead of the unsuccessful beard, Jeff wears his wavy hair longish. His friends from college who earn millions from law firms and investment banks can’t have long hair. But Jeff can, so he does.
Groomed, showered, dressed, and ready to go, Jeff takes a wrench to the bathroom sink, and removes the washer, slides it into his pocket. He’ll stop at a hardware store today, and buy a new one.
He grabs his sport jacket from the coat closet, amid the golf bag and the skis and poles, a tennis racquet with busted strings, a canvas bag filled with balls and shoes and caps and gloves, the detritus of the recreational athlete.
At the front door he notices an envelope pushed under the door. He looks away from it quickly, pretending that if he doesn’t pick it up, doesn’t acknowledge it, then it doesn’t really matter, or even exist. A late-rent notice. Another ledger line in his broad portfolio of financial failures.
Chinatown is insistently awake, loud and dirty, bright and early. When Sara left him, Jeff couldn’t afford to stay in their one-bedroom in Greenwich Village. So he’d moved down here to Mulberry Street. People assume that his address is in trendy Nolita, among the boutiques and bars inhabited by beautiful people. And Jeff doesn’t necessarily disabuse anyone of this misconception. But he really lives a few blocks south of the region North of Little Italy with the silly name, in decidedly unfashionable Little Italy proper, which isn’t even truly Little Italy anymore, but a tendril of Chinatown that for a few blocks happens to be littered with mediocre Italian restaurants.
As it turns out, Chinatown is the only conveniently located part of downtown Manhattan that Jeff can afford, above a grocery store that seems to specialize in various types of dried shrimp, which itself is above a basement-level dumpling factory, on a street choked with erratically wandering tourists and diesel-spewing delivery trucks and dense crowds of Chinese people with their red plastic shopping bags.
Jeff had thought it’d be cool to live in Chinatown. And maybe it would’ve been, if he were twenty-five years old. But he’s not. And at this point in his life he hates this neighborhood, and the circumstances that put him here.
And before long, he probably won’t be able to afford even Chinatown. He steps into the brand-new coffee shop on the corner, one of those joints that specify the growers and regions and acidity levels of their humanely sourced fair-trade beans. He orders a three-dollar macchiato from an alarmingly muscled and extravagantly tattooed woman wearing a wifebeater and a skullcap, operating a machine that bears more than a passing resemblance to a Lamborghini, house music thumping at seven-thirty a.m., a miasma of patchouli. This café is a shot across the bow, signaling impending rent hikes, even for small walk-up apartments with crappy leaky bathrooms.
He considers himself in the full-wall mirror, a forty-something editor wearing the professorial outfit—gray slacks, herringbone jacket, blue shirt, repp tie—that’s practically standard-issue to people with his type of job, from his type of college. The only nice piece of clothing is the jacket, which is now getting threadbare, purchased at 80 percent discount at a sample sale in a Midtown hotel’s ballroom, back when his then-girlfriend Sara was trying to remake him into a more fashionable version of himself. She always had access to sample sales, and plus-one invitations to friends-and-family previews of restaurants, and gratis tickets to film screenings. The stray perks that enable permanently broke young New Yorkers to appear glamorous.
Sara wanted everything. She wanted to be out every night, on every guest list. She wanted to rub shoulders with the rich and famous; she wanted to become one. She’d been deluded by their early relationship, when Jeff was bringing her along to awards ceremonies and book parties, back when people were still throwing book parties as a matter of course. There would be more and more, better and better, and her good-looking successful well-connected husband would help make her Big.
When she realized that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, she used him a final time, as fodder for her writing, on her way out the door. That book had already been turned into a goddamned play, for crying out loud. Off-Broadway. There was now a film option.
Jeff was astounded at what some people were willing to do, to advance their careers. He was amazed to discover that he’d married one of those people. He’d married the wrong woman. Or she’d married the wrong man. Both.
He steps out of the café. Stands on the sidewalk and takes a glance uptown, then down-, not sure what he’s looking for. Then he starts trudging north.
Jeff will take a pill tonight. He has been sleeping badly these last few months, lying in bed, worrying. About everything. Not just at the office, where he has to admit he has been in a multi-year slump. But worried about his who
le life. He has never fought for what he loved—in fact, he has never done a good job of even admitting to loving what he’s loved. It was Sara who proposed to him; it was Sara who unilaterally decided they were finished.
But soon everything will change. Soon he’ll have another great success, like in the old days, and he too will be able to buy a decent place to live, to pay his bills on time, to save for retirement.
Jeff wonders whether everyone has noticed his midcareer stall: his colleagues, his boss, his friends from college, from the beginning of his career, Isabel. Do people sit around, pitying him? He’s never really entertained the possibility that he’s a loser. Has he been wrong, all these decades? Do losers know it?
These self-doubts are why he made the decision he did, three months ago. The decision to really and truly grow up, to do what needs doing in order to find his way in the world as a successful adult, to be willing to make a genuine sacrifice.
Last night, in the pub with Mason, Jeff was halfway expecting that he’d see that other man. The one who’d accosted him, made the bizarre proposition, in that very same bar.
CHAPTER 4
Ring.
Alexis is digging through her purse to find the phone, tossing aside keys and lipstick and a tin of mints and a compact, business cards from young editors and discount shoe stores and that British woman she met at the party and the MBA-ish guys she met after the party, at the bar, where she has to admit she was flirting like a madwoman, more so as the night wore on, as drink number three turned into numbers four and five, and finally Courtney said, “We really have to get out of here, or you’ll end up going home with a stranger and seriously regretting it. Like, seriously.”
The caller-ID announces that it’s Isabel calling. Her boss. At 6:51 a.m.
“Hello?” she whispers. “Isabel?”
“Hi Alexis. Sorry to wake you.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” she says, slipping out of bed, trying not to disturb Spencer. Before she got into the taxi at 2:00 a.m., she drunk-dialed, standing there in the teeming tenement-filled street on the Lower East Side, teetering on her high heels, watching as a giant black SUV nearly ran down a gaggle of too-drunk-to-pay-attention girls—not terribly dissimilar to herself—and she gasped and dropped her phone midsentence. A degrading denouement. “I was awake.”
She tiptoes to the kitchen, shuts the door, takes a seat at the Ikea drop-leaf dining-table/desk/dressing-table/everything-table, an ungodly mess of jewelry and makeup and napkins and pens and a pepper mill, a small leather-bound notebook, and not one but two power strips filled with chargers—Kindle and Nook and Sony e-reader, iPad and iPhone, plus a plain old laptop computer—as well as a cellophane-wrapped brick of ramen that she intended to eat Sunday night but didn’t, too busy finishing the manuscript to do anything that resembled cooking beyond tearing open a bag of pretzels to dip in Greek yogurt. And of course the thick stack of paper, for the very unusual submission, delivered very unusually: on paper.
“Everything okay?”
Of the 500 queries, book proposals, and full manuscripts that arrive every year to the attention of Isabel Reed, 490 of them are digital, and at least 9 of the others are garbage. There seems to be a high correlation between paper submissions and unpublishable drivel.
“Yeah,” Isabel says, unconvincingly. “Listen: that manuscript you gave me yesterday? Tell me again how it came to us.”
This is what she wants to talk about? At dawn? That’s not Isabel’s style. As a rule, Isabel is an eminently reasonable boss, a valuable mentor, maybe even a genuine friend, not one of those psychopath caricatures. Which there are plenty of, in the competitive corridors of Atlantic Talent Management, and clearly elsewhere in the book business. Alexis has come to recognize that she had been damn lucky to have landed at her particular cubicle.
“Right.” She closes her eyes and rubs them, trying to gather lucidity. “Friday. The package was dropped off during the middle of lunch—maybe one o’clock? You were definitely not in the building.”
“In an envelope? In a cardboard box?”
“A Jiffy bag.”
“Who delivered it?”
“Dunno.”
“Well, was it Lucas? Or one of the other mailroom guys?”
“Um, no. It was some guy I don’t know.”
“As in, you don’t know his name? Or you’ve never seen him before?”
“Never seen him before, I don’t think. The truth is I didn’t get a good look at him—really, I didn’t get any look at him—I was on a very, very long call with Steph Bernstein, who was having a massive meltdown about all the negative reader reviews on Goodreads, which have been sort of vicious, on top of that brutal daily Times review. Did you ever call her back, by the way? She’s pretty anxious to hear the feedback about her new proposal.”
“Oh God. I really don’t want to.” That promised to be one of those bad-news conversations with a disappointed client that is the bane of an agent’s life.
“So, anyway, I’m pretty sure I didn’t know the guy who delivered it. I sort of assumed he was from another department, like commercial or talent or something, or, y’know, accounting. Whatever.”
“Was there anything to give any idea who it came from? Or where?”
“Like, um, what?”
“I don’t know,” Isabel says, exasperation rising in her voice. Isabel sounds too frustrated, for this line of questioning, this early in the morning. “Like a postmark? A postage meter’s stamp? Anything written on the package?”
“No, not that I remember. Sorry.”
“And there’s no other contact info for the author? No note, or letter, or anything?”
“Just that e-mail address, on the cover page. Have you tried that?”
“Yeah. All I get is an error bounce-back.”
“Weird.”
“Isn’t it? So … You read it over the weekend? All of it?”
“Yes.” It sort of ruined Alexis’s weekend. And Courtney gave her so much shit about her weekend geek-out that Alexis caved, agreeing to a Monday-night revelry that runs utterly counter to her work ethic. Which is how she ended up at a book-launch party, with Courtney and her friends from the Columbia publishing course, huddled together in their chunky eyeglasses and liberal-arts degrees, inhaling pinot grigio and cubes of dried-out Manchego.
Courtney is only two years older than Alexis, but she has her own office—a tiny little windowless cube, with glass walls that face the door to the book-storage room across the corridor, but still: a door. And her own clients, at least some of them. And her own business cards.
Meanwhile Alexis has been entry-level for two years, nothing but incremental cost-of-living pay increases and no additional vacation time. Two years of answering someone else’s phone, wearing the headset nine or ten hours a day—wearing that damn headset in the halls, at her desk, in the bathroom. Two years of filing someone else’s contracts, mailing someone else’s bound galleys, reading someone else’s submissions. Assisting someone else’s life, instead of living her own. And taking someone else’s calls, at seven fucking o’clock on a Tuesday morning. Even if that someone is the famous—or once famous—Isabel Reed.
“Isabel?” she asks. “What’s this all about? Did you actually read it?”
“Oh, yes. It’s incredible.”
“Right? I had no idea how Wolfe Media got started. And all that business in Europe with the CIA? And that accident? Unbelievable.”
“That may be exactly the right word. Do you believe it?”
“You don’t?”
“It’s hard to say. There’s so much … negative, isn’t there? Maybe too negative to be credible?”
Alexis wonders if Isabel might be right. Or if Isabel’s judgment is clouded. “You know him, don’t you?”
“Charlie Wolfe?”
“Yeah.”
“No,” Isabel says. “Not really. We met a handful of times, long ago.” For a few seconds the phone line is filled with nothing but breathing. Then,
“Alexis, have you told anybody about the manuscript?”
Alexis is seized with panic. “Like who?”
“Like anyone?”
“No, no,” she instinctively lies. But there was of course Courtney. And their friend James from ICM. And then—oh God—that British woman, the subsidiary-rights director at McNally & Sons, maybe named Camille, something-or-other …
What the hell was she thinking? She was thinking that this is what you’re supposed to do, with a hot new property: talk about it. Make people want it, expect it. Try to create an air of inevitability about it.
But she can see now that she’d been too eager. Too early. She’d wanted to feel like a grown-up, like she had grown-up responsibilities, even though she wasn’t, and didn’t. She wanted her job to catch up to her ambition.
And—fuck!—there was that tweet of hers, @LitGirl, late Sunday night: Can’t stop reading #AccidentByAnonymous! My new favorite author. But who ARE you, Anonymous?
“Good,” Isabel says. “And the report—did you write it at work?”
“Um, yeah?”
And of course her Facebook status over the weekend, LOVING this anonymous manuscript that’s ruining my weekend.
“It’s not on your laptop? At home?”
This makes Alexis nervous in a new way. Why should Isabel care where the reader’s report was written? “No …”
“And do you have a copy of the manuscript? At home? Or in the office? Did you make yourself a photocopy?”
Alexis says a knee-jerk “No” while staring at her copy sitting right in front of her. She’d made this set of pages because she was sort of hoping she’d be allowed to run with this project—utter slush, with no referral—herself. But this hope was obviously irrational. Another misjudgment. It’s hard to see clearly with ambition clouding your eyes.
“Okay,” Isabel says. “Okay, thanks. I guess that’s it for now. I’ll be in by nine-thirty. See you then.”
Alexis’s heart sinks. “Not today” meekly. “Remember?”
A long, painful pause. “Oh.” Isabel hadn’t remembered. “Personal day?”