“Does the protagonist get married in the end?”
“That would be some kind of twist.”
There I was about to hit the metaphysical CTR-ALT-DEL. There was no way for me to anticipate that the next few minutes provided some real-life, all-too-believable turns. I have no idea if he planned it this way, but Myron was about to give me what I needed to get going on our book, and all I needed to get going with—using a word I don’t use lightly—a vengeance.
✴✴✴
“Why in the world would somebody become a book publisher?” said Myron.
This sounded like a perfectly good rhetorical question, and it would have been had it been ventured by anybody other than Myron Beam. But as I keep saying, Myron never asked a rhetorical question. What kind of person never asks a rhetorical question, which is right there a rhetorical question? I find that bizarre. What is the meaning of life? Who knows? That sort of thing. And see? His big existential question wasn’t an example, however. Life itself may be nothing but a series of rhetorical questions, but he wanted me to answer the question, as if there were one and I was the possessor of the truth.
I did my best and I non-uptalked a while, raising all the predictable points. Somebody becomes a publisher to make a contribution to culture. To change lives. To help human beings become better human beings, one of the most powerful and strange aspects about stories. To bring out books that teach us how to read ourselves. To usher something beautiful into the world. Blah blah blah. Nothing stuck, and I couldn’t blame him when he said:
“I don’t think you have it yet, but you’re getting closer.”
“To make money?” I sent up my white flag.
“Well, that’s not irrelevant, because if you can’t turn a buck today, you can’t publish tomorrow. But there are a lot easier ways to make money. Like opening a pizza parlor, because, unlike with books, everybody loves pizza.”
“You know, Myron, if I were a publisher, I would publish books I love and take my chances in the marketplace.”
“You make me weep, Sibella. I know I cannot figure out the why of me, the why of Hard Rain, but I know Calypso’s not the key, and probably not Fig or Pork or any of the Fontanas. And if you did what you said you would do, you’d be broke after your first big book triumph, because success would go to your head, and you’d take bigger and bigger chances and…”
I knew the litany of issues, I had been working for Myron long enough to have memorized them.
“I would go broke, possibly, but I’d rather go broke than get rich producing work I wasn’t proud of.”
Yes, I was still twenty-five, so there.
“Speaking of which, I have been giving a lot of thought to Adventures of Calypso O’Kelly. You are right. It’s shit, it’s unsalvageable. We can sell the book because Hard Rain can sell anything, but fuck it, I don’t think I can stomach being around her.”
“This makes me proud of you, Myron.”
“God, to be twenty-six again.”
“I am twenty-five.”
“Since when?”
“Since three years after I was twenty-two, which is when you took me on as a junior editor, for which I thank you getting me out of New York and teaching me the business.”
“You’re twenty-five, you say.”
“For a little while longer, till I am twenty-six.”
“I don’t think there are very many if any twenty-five-year-old editors in chief around.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“Well, you could be the first, because now that’s what you are.”
“What are you talking about? We have an editor in chief.”
Well, we did once have an editor in chief, and I did once have a promising new boyfriend I had fallen for, too, but everything had changed, or so I was about to discover.
YGB had quit.
He called up Myron late last night at home and told him he had taken a job in New York. He thanked Myron for the opportunity and for all he had learned. And a minute later Myron got a call from Kelly. She also resigned, and she also took a job in New York at the same house as YGB.
When he noticed how I was taking this news (how the fuck do you imagine I was taking this news?), he said, “Seems like you and he haven’t talked much lately.”
Big jump on the part of the big cheese. “A little break, I thought we were taking, nothing serious, I assumed.”
“I’m sorry, baby, I have to be the one to tell you one other thing. I don’t have any question he and Kelly are, well, you know…”
It all fucking clicked. Kelly had been relatively docile the last few days, barely acknowledging me, and once or twice I caught her jaws in a rare state of immobility. And sensitive me had failed to detect her cloud-cover pheromones from probably her having spent the last two nights with YGB. Now I grasped what was behind her wild accusation. You could have thwacked me with the Collected Works of Anthony Fucking Trollope, all fifty or hundred volumes after hearing about that Kelly trollop, and they would have bounced harmlessly off benumbed me. It isn’t often that I am speechless. Though it has been the case I have been boyfriendless for extended periods of forever, and that was about to be my condition all over again. I was a loser. I told Myron as much. He disputed the point, being that he was Myron and needed his new editor in chief not to be a loser.
After a few silent moments, I couldn’t help it, I burst into tears. It was humiliating to snivel like that, but that is the TMI of the matter.
“Take a couple days off, get your heart and head together.”
I looked over in the direction of YGB’s office and saw that his desk was cleared. When did he do that and how did I miss the obvious? I miss the obvious a lot, you are saying to yourself, and you’re right. I spend too much time thinking about myself, as if I were the center of the fucking universe. I will never put up a shingle that advertised I was a sibyl. But you have to admit, he was a fast worker, and you didn’t see that coming any more than I did. I could learn from him. My exes were all good teachers, if not always in ways I would have preferred.
“And when you’re ready you can take over his office.”
It took a while before I could find my voice.
“It will be good to lose my milk crates home base, yet honestly, I kind of liked them.” How come I never had a handkerchief? My mother always told me I should have one in my purse. Good idea, but I never carried a purse, so there was no safe haven there. I rubbed my eyes with my shirt sleeve.
“You can start whenever you want, editor in chief.”
“How about this instant?” I was merely acting tough, but as I learned with hoops when playing against superior talent, sometimes acting tough can make you tough for real.
“You sure?”
“What fuck the fuck.”
“Whatever you say, Sibella. Caitlin’s coming in, she thinks to sign her contract.”
“Perfect,” I said and cried all over Myron’s shirt some more. He didn’t seem to mind half as much as I did. He was inured to all the weeping that happened around him.
We heard the office door open and close.
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begat me…I am verily persuaded that I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.
✴✴✴
The Caitlin always rings twice. But not this time. She just walked in and started swinging for the offenses.
“Where’s my contract? I don’t spy a check nearby. I’ve been patient for weeks and weeks. And your public image is smeared, and I hope you aren’t trying to pull another fast one because your name is going to be dragged through the mud all over again.”
“Oh, they’re both right here, check and contract.” Myron showed them
both to her. “See?” But first, there was one thing Myron wanted to know.
“Only one thing?”
He didn’t take the masterfulbaition.
“The wallet,” he said. “This time tell me the truth about my wallet pilfered in Venice, it’s not making sense to me.”
“Yes, the famous wallet that launched a thousand licensing agreements. I don’t know why I should give you any satisfaction. Then again, we’re in business together now, what the hell. The plot’s a little convoluted, but I’ll tell you. It’s nice to have one’s work admired.
“You see, my fabulously rich Venetian lover and I were strolling in the rain that night—like you. We saw the whole incident unfold before our very eyes. We couldn’t believe how stupid you were.
“‘Did you see that?’ ‘What?’ ‘Gli Americani in Italia, lambs to the slaughter.’ His English was impeccable. His principles, anything but. He reminds me of Cable. He almost reminds me of you, Myron, but those are subjects for another time and place. By the way, never put your wallet in your inside jacket pocket and, if you do, never lean down before a gypsy, Myron, never. It was my lover who witnessed her lifting your wallet. She was quite deft, and being a native he knew the scam better than I. For somebody like him, Venice was one gigantic, floating crime scene. Isn’t that sweet? He also regarded Venice as one enormous living art installation. You should have seen his personal gallery, a mini Peggy Guggenheim. He had so much money, he barely knew what to do with it except for splurging on art and on younger lovers, like me, whom he flew around the world for his personal use. Anyway, after your pocket was picked, you wandered off, blithely ignorant and probably feeling good about yourself for having given the poor gypsy lady the Euro. We could tell you were going to be lost right away, heading off in precisely the wrong direction, which would not lead to the hotel. In that regard, you were blameless. Venice is nothing but a network of byways that go off everywhere but where you wish to go.
“We knew you and your wife were guests in the hotel. You never noticed us, of course. We approached the hag who had stolen your wallet and confronted her. He told her he would give her a hundred Euros if she gave us your wallet. He threatened her with getting thrown into jail. She counted the money you had inside the fold and said make it two hundred.
“Then he told me he had an idea. ‘Let’s play a little game with the American tourist. Let’s give him a little shock therapy. It can be our little science experiment slash human art installation.’ That was when he inserted five thousand Euros—God, he was phenomenally rich—into your wallet and we hurried back to the hotel before you could get there. He gave the concierge another hundred to swear him to secrecy.”
“And you waited ten years to reach out to me with this manuscript and make your play?”
“Well, I did reach out to your wife not long after Venice. And she leaked to me, unwittingly, of course, information about you and your new business. Which proved my lover right. He created a monster with his living art installation.”
Myron most certainly had not forgotten that part. “That’s a long game to play, ten years.”
“Ten years, they go by in a flash, don’t they? Let’s say it was all in the service of art. Ars longa, somebody once said.”
I couldn’t let her get away with that. “Fraud longa, too.”
The slow play stuck in Myron’s craw. “Ten years, really?”
“Well, I am a deliberate writer.”
“Of nine hundred fucking pages,” I said.
“Look, Myron, your wife wanted me to play you sooner, but she and I drifted apart, and I got involved in other, well, projects—and lovers. How’s she doing? Never mind, I don’t care. And then Cable and I reconnected a couple of years ago.”
I could not resist: “On weasels dot com?”
“Sibella, grow up, why don’t you? Listen. When Cable and I reunited, I took up the manuscript again. And then Figgy, his dad, and I got to talking about his ‘big-time’ publisher.” Yes, the fucking air quotes. “Fig told me all about you, told me how easy it was for him to write books that you bought from him, and I got inspired, though I later found out he was lying through his teeth. He would have cheered me on, had he lived.”
“Pack of wolves,” I said.
“There was no supernatural force behind me? That Venetian night was an omen of nothing?”
“I wouldn’t say that. Life is strange, and full of unreadable omens.”
“And unreadable books,” I said, “like yours.”
“But the bottom line is,” Myron said, “I have been nothing but lucky, no magic involved?”
“I don’t know much about publishing, but I’d say anybody who thinks he’s got books figured out is deluding himself. You don’t need brains, you don’t need business models.”
“I knew I was a natural.”
“All you have to be is lucky to make it in the business. That’s why I’d call your success the most magical thing in the world, Myron.”
“Thank you, Caitlin, that’s what I needed.”
And then he brought up to his eye level the contract and the check and held them there for an excruciating moment.
“No,” she whispered, previsioning accurately.
He tore them both up. Satisfying music to my new editor in chief ears. So satisfying that I didn’t in the moment connect this deed to the financial reality: Myron was tapped out, at least for now. He didn’t have the money to pay her even if he had wanted.
She was shaken, and it took her a few seconds. “Should have listened. Cable predicted you would fuck me over.”
“We gave your book the consideration it richly merited, but Hard Rain is not going to publish you, Caitlin. We’re not the right house for this book, or for you, or for any member of your extended future family. One of the axioms in the industry is you don’t publish books, you publish authors. And you? You’re not right for us.” He didn’t bother to add that his vanishing liquidity was a contributing factor for his decision, and I didn’t, either.
“I wonder how long it will take Cable to sue your ass for breaking an oral contract.”
“I never agreed to any deal, did I, Sibella? Good luck in court, Caitlin.” Unless she had taped our conversation before, that was the badda bing end of it. I have to admit that I am a little bit surprised how remarkably easy it proved to be to deny the truth, the truth that he had made that precise deal in the restaurant that day. I bookmarked this lying moment—to wipe off my mental hard drive later. The book biz is tricky. By which I mean the book biz is cutthroat and unconscionable, but in an honorable way.
“Sibella, are you enjoying yourself?”
“Living the dream, Caitlin, living the dream. Now you are a sibyl?”
“And let me predict another thing: you will regret you ever met me.”
“I already regret it,” I said.
Myron said to her, “Not that you planned to be, but you have been a big help.”
“Don’t mention it. And I mean it, don’t mention it ever again to me. You have no idea what you have accomplished by betraying me.”
“What fuck the fuck. Who betrayed whom again?” I said.
“I have to get to work. It would have been nice to pocket your six-hundred grand, but I’m a pragmatist. If by some chance you escape a lawsuit for breach of contract, there’s always a next time and a new book.”
The Writer’s Pledge of Self-Allegiance: there’s always a next time when it will all work out.
“Where you working, Caitlin?” Not that I cared.
“None of your damned business, sweetheart.”
✴✴✴
“Ever been to Venice, Sibella?”
I guessed Muscle Beach didn’t count.
“It didn’t work out well for me in Venice last time, but we should go on vacation, you and me, what do you say? We could use a break, while my
credit cards still work.”
I would have said that it sounded to me like it sounded to you: What fuck the fuck? He didn’t intend the invitation to mean, you know, romance and so on, I can assure you, or I can pretty much almost assure you if I know anything about men but since I don’t I had better hold my fire. Because I didn’t care if Venice was floating on a torrid lagoon of romance, Myron the Doge’s gondola wasn’t able to float, as you know, and my armada was nada. For him, it had been a tough morning, a tough few weeks. That probably explained his proposal.
Finesse is not a commodity I stockpile. “I’ll be sure to avoid gypsies and Euro trash if I do ever go.”
“You know what today is, Sibella?”
Of course, I did. It was Friday and I was looking forward to spending the weekend feeling sorry for myself and eating Grape Nuts for breakfast and dinner.
“It’s my birthday. Number sixty-two.”
“Fuck, we need to celebrate.”
He didn’t think so, and it was at this point a funny look crossed his face and he said, “All of a sudden I’m not feeling so good.”
“Was it something I said? Don’t go passing out again. Last time that caused more trouble than we could deal with.”
“I am going home to lie down.”
I asked him to tell me precisely what he was feeling. He said he was light-headed, he said his chest felt like it was in a vise, he said his arm was pounding. His eyes looked glazed and then he couldn’t say another word, but his mouth was moving.
I called 911.
✴✴✴
In something like ten minutes the Fire Department showed up.
If I get an extra life, I am going to be a fire fighter.
You chew aspirin because it works faster. Seconds count when it comes to possible blockages to your heart. Amazing, how much knowledge you can acquire when your boss is lying flat on a gurney.
I was also thinking this was shaping up to be a strange birthday for Myron Beam. I was hoping and hoping it wouldn’t be his last. I was impressed by the Fire Department. They were intensely engaged in all manner of activity, hooking up electrodes, taking his blood pressure. I was holding Myron’s hand. I had never held his hand before.
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