My agent, Larissa, waved to me from beside the maitre d's stand and kissed me on both cheeks, a recent affectation, I assumed. I air-kissed back, trying not to stare at the elderly lady broadcaster ensconced at a table for four by the window, whose famous face had been lifted so many times that her eyebrows and her hairline were more or less in the same place. "And you remember Patsy, of course," Larissa said.
I nodded and submitted to Patsy's double kiss. I'd met Patsy only once, when Valor had held a champagne-and-cake reception to celebrate Big Girls's sixth month on the best-seller list. Patsy was short and plump and looked vaguely like Mrs. Claus, with her white curls and twinkling gold-rimmed glasses. Looking at her, you'd never guess that she'd earned her Ph.D. in comparative literature by twenty-three, or that beneath her sugar-cookie exterior she was scary-smart (and sometimes, I'd read, just plain scary).
Larissa removed her coat, revealing one of what I'd once joked were her two hundred identical black pantsuits. Over her arm, she carried what looked like a bowling-ball bag made of green leather, ornamented with all manner of fringes and tassels plus a heavy brass padlock--the kind of thing my sister would have been able to identify by name, designer, and price tag on sight.
Finding Larissa had been a happy accident. After I'd written my book, I'd gotten in touch with Violet, the agent who'd sold my screenplay.
"A novel?" she'd repeated dubiously.
"You know," I'd said. "The things that screenplays are sometimes based on?"
"Can't help you, lovey. I--Hey, fuck you, asshat!"
I'd grinned. Violet looked like a Girl Scout and cursed like Chris Rock. "You okay?"
"Yeah, yeah. Some douche-sip took my parking spot. Listen, I'll shoot you the names of some book agents. How's New York?"
"Philadelphia," I'd reminded her. She'd apologized and sent me ten names within the hour. Larissa had been the first one on the list to request the entire manuscript, and she'd called me on a Saturday to tell me, in her tiny, squeaky voice, how much she'd loved the book, how it had spoken to her (at the time, I distinctly remember thinking, How?).
The hostess led us across the sunny restaurant, through the maze of tightly packed tables set along white walls filled with bright modern art, past editors and agents lunching on salads and grilled fish, to a prime table for four. A waiter passed out oversize menus and offered sparkling, tap, or still water. We made small talk about my train trip, the renovations of Patsy's flat in London, and Larissa's new assistant, who'd put herself through college working weekends in her family's nail salon and insisted, each week, on giving her boss a pedicure. Patsy's dress was navy, and when I looked more closely, I saw that Larissa's black suit was actually a very dark blue. Navy, I thought regretfully. Navy was the new black. How had I missed that? Why couldn't I have been a tenth as obsessed with high heels and high fashion as the Big Girls Don't Cry critics had once claimed? Ah, well. Content of my character, I thought, and Seven pounds thinner.
After a few more minutes of small talk, the waiter returned. "Ready to order?" he asked.
I requested a Cobb salad. "Dressing on the side?" he asked.
"Oh. Sure." Silly me. I hadn't realized that the object of the game was to order a Cobb salad with so many things omitted that you'd be left with basically a twenty-four-dollar pile of lettuce leaves and tomatoes. Larissa asked for a Cobb salad without bacon, dressing on the side. Patsy ordered hers without bacon or avocado, or any dressing at all.
Yummy, I thought. I slipped my feet out of my shoes and set them on the carpet, which I could feel literally buzzing beneath me. The electric energy of New York, I thought a little romantically. Then I realized that what I was feeling was the reverb from a dozen cell phones and handhelds and BlackBerries set on vibrate and humming away from a dozen different expensive purses on the floor.
I smiled at Patsy as she sat back and said, "So!" Then I reached into my own pedigree-free bag. I'd brought the latest Lyla Dare manuscript, completed just the night before. I slid the pages across the table.
Patsy shook her head. "Actually, we didn't ask you here to talk Lyla. Although you've been doing an excellent job," she added.
I slipped the manuscript back into my purse. "Okay." I was starting, very belatedly, to get an idea about why they'd asked me to New York instead of sending me the usual edit memo by e-mail; about why I was nibbling lettuce in the plush front room of Michael's, sitting on bentwood chairs at a linen-draped table within earshot of an executive editor at Allure, seeing and being seen, instead of in Peyson's tiny windowless office, eating corned beef off of wax paper.
Patsy steepled her chubby fingers underneath her chin and leaned forward, blue eyes saucer-wide. "As you know," she began, "the tenth anniversary of Big Girls Don't Cry is coming up this fall."
I nodded. My knees were already starting to shake, and my hands, when I wiped them on my napkin, were slimy.
"We'd like to do a special rerelease," said Patsy. "New cover, new packaging, a beautiful new author photo, a whole new publicity campaign."
"That sounds amazing," said Larissa. I nodded numbly. Well, they owned the rights to the thing. It wasn't as if I could stop them.
"We were hoping," Patsy continued, "that you'd be available to help us promote it. We were thinking about a sixteen-city tour."
"Oh, I can't." I tried to sound apologetic rather than insane. Judging from the looks I was getting, I didn't think I'd been entirely successful. I lifted my water glass with a trembling hand and took a sip. "I'm sorry," I said. "But I just don't think I can leave home anytime soon. Joy's bat mitzvah's this fall, too, and there's a lot of planning to do."
"Of course," said Patsy. Perhaps sensing my discomfort, she reached across the table and patted my icy hand with her warm one. "Maybe just a satellite-radio tour, some TV bookings. And a reading here in New York, of course. It could be fantastic."
I nodded, thinking I'd get out of that when the time came. There were excuses I could make, illnesses I could feign. Actually, I probably wouldn't even need to fake it. Just the thought of having to sit on a couch with some newscaster and relive that part of my past made me want to heave.
Patsy tugged at one of her white corkscrew curls and resettled her napkin on her lap. At the table beside us, a young woman in navy (of course) was settling into the chair the waiter had pulled out. "My agent will be joining me," she said proudly. I turned away.
"And," Patsy continued, "with the tenth anniversary of publication this spring, everyone at this table, all of us at Valor"--she favored me with her warmest smile--"and the millions of Big Girl fans, of course..."
I smiled weakly, bracing myself.
Patsy went on. "...we're all wondering whether you've given any thought to another novel." She beamed at me as if she'd just set a beautifully wrapped gift on the table.
"It's very flattering. I'll, um, think about it," I stammered.
"We don't need a whole book right now," said Patsy in her softest and most soothing tone. "It doesn't have to be a sequel, either. If there's just an idea you've had kicking around..."
"Will you excuse me?" I pushed myself up and out of my chair. My water glass shivered as I turned around fast, almost crashing into the waiter, who was carrying our denuded salads to the table. "Excuse me," I said again, and hurried around the corner to the ladies' room, where I sat in the tiny marble stall with my head in my hands.
A dream come true. Cliche city, right? Yet no fewer than twenty newspaper articles about the surprising success of Big Girls Don't Cry had quoted me saying exactly that. It is a dream come true. It certainly looked that way: unlucky-in-love, oppressed-at-the-office, unhappy-in-her-own-skin big girl from broken home gets love, and a man, and a beautiful baby, and a best-seller. Not necessarily in that order, but still, an undeniable happy ending.
Twelve years ago, I'd written Big Girls in my spare bedroom, banging out five hundred pages in six months of white-hot fury. The manuscript was a sprawling, profane picaresque about a fat, funny, furious
girl, the father who'd abandoned her, the boyfriend who'd broken her heart, and the girl's fitful journey toward love and happiness, with many (entirely fictional) stops in many (equally fictional) boys' beds along the way. In a fit of literary pretension, I called the book Nought. Would I be open to a title change? Larissa had asked. I'd told her I would be open to a sex change if she thought she could sell the book and give me enough of a cushion to pay for health insurance and maybe put a down payment on a condo.
Three weeks later the book was revised, cut down from its original 500 pages to a much more manageable 370, and renamed Big Girls Don't Cry. A week after that, Larissa sold the book to Valor for an amount of money that alternately thrilled or terrified me, depending on my mood.
The first thing I did as soon as the check for the first chunk of the advance cleared was to make a down payment on a row house around the corner from my apartment, a redbrick building with four good-size bedrooms spread over the top two floors. The house had a postage-stamp garden in the backyard, with southern and eastern exposures, and a weeping cherry tree standing shoulder-high in one corner, along with wooden half-barrels where I could grow herbs and tomatoes. After I'd moved Nifkin and Joy and all of my earthly possessions into our new digs, I rented a house by the beach in Avalon for two weeks.
I drove Joy to the shore on a Friday afternoon in August. I'd treated us to fried clams and crabcakes for dinner, and made it to the rented house as the sun set. I gave Joy a bath in the deep claw-footed tub, tucked her in to the bedroom next to mine, and plugged her Cinderella night-light into the wall. "Knuffle Bunny," she demanded. I read her the story of how Trixie's daddy loses her favorite toy at the Laundromat, until Joy yawned and popped her thumb into her mouth.
"Love you, boots," I said, cracking open her bedroom window. The house still smelled faintly musty, but mostly of the salty breeze. I could hear the waves from every room.
"You're my mommy," Joy said sleepily. Bundled under the covers, she still looked tiny, baby-size, even though she was two. She'll grow out of it, her pediatrician assured me, explaining that she was just the right size for her gestational age. Eventually, she'll catch up to the rest of the kids. You'll look at her, and you won't even see a difference. Except I knew I'd always see.
"That's right," I assured her. Nifkin came clicking into the room and settled himself in Joy's suitcase, rooting around until he'd made a nest on top of her shorts and shirts.
Joy sat up in bed and looked at me. "Who is my daddy?"
"Um..." I leaned against the doorjamb. I'd known this question would be coming, but I'd thought I'd have more time to figure out my answer. "Yes. Well. About that..."
"Pe-tah." She nodded, looking satisfied.
My breath caught in my throat. It had been a year since that August night in the car, the night when he'd told me he wouldn't keep waiting. I'd thought of him every day and every night, but I wasn't sure Joy even remembered Peter. "You see, honey, the thing of it is--"
She waved one fist at me--Joy-speak for Quiet, you, I'm thinking!--and stared at me with her lips pursed. "Granny Annie is your mommy," she said.
Okay. Terra firma again. "That's right."
"Who is your daddy?"
My hand closed convulsively on the light switch, and the room was plunged into darkness except for Cinderella in her ballgown, dancing just above Joy's pillow, head lifted, as ever, in expectation of the prince's kiss. "I..." I took a slow breath and swallowed. "Well, his name is Larry."
"Arry," Joy repeated sleepily. I leaned against the wall. If I wasn't ready for questions about her father, I was doubly unprepared for questions about mine. My father had left when I was a teenager, married a much younger woman, and had two kids. I hadn't seen or heard from him since our single encounter in Los Angeles, when I'd shown up at his office pregnant, wearing a gold wedding ring I'd bought for myself, hoping for something I couldn't name--that, at twenty-eight, single and knocked up, I could be his little girl, his princess; that he would think me beautiful.
It hadn't happened. He'd turned away, his expression somewhere between disinterested and disgusted, and I'd remembered with a pain that felt like a cramp, like something tearing inside of me, a bit of graffiti I'd seen once in the ladies' room at the Vince Lombardi Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike, written in tiny black letters on the scarred green metal door: I never knew my father / it doesn't really matter / that's all there is to that.
That's all there is to that, I'd thought. I'd walked out of his office, and I hadn't seen him since. I hadn't planned on Joy even noticing that she was down a grandpa for years. I'd thought I would have time to prepare: read the right books, figure out the right thing to say.
I stood there in the darkness, looking down at her, wondering whether she'd think that people--no, not people, parents--could just drop out of your life like loose teeth. Peter had. Bruce had. My father had. She'd probably think that everyone could or would. Maybe she'd think that someday I would leave, too.
There was only one telephone in the rented beach house, an old rotary model made of black plastic on the kitchen counter right beside the sink. Peter answered on the first ring, as if he'd been walking around the way I had, with his phone stuck in his pocket, or as if he'd been sitting beside it, waiting. Not that I believed he'd been waiting. He'd probably met someone already. She was probably right there beside him on the bed, and if she knew about me at all, she was probably thinking I was the biggest idiot who'd ever lived. She was probably right.
"Peter? It's Cannie. I wrote a book," I blurted.
His voice was neutral. "Oh."
"It...if you'd read it, it explains..." I slumped into the chair in front of the telephone, thinking how ridiculous I must sound. "About Bruce and my father and what happened to me. About why I can't be a good wife." I gulped. "Peter, I'm sorry. I am." Tears were running down my face, and words were spilling out of my mouth. "Joy misses you. Tonight she said that you're her father, and I think..." I gulped again and wiped my eyes. "I wish...I mean, she's had enough people leave, and I thought maybe if you would read the book...I could give you a copy. It's not coming out until next spring, and they changed the title, but I could print it out and give it to you..."
His tone was fractionally warmer, the bedside-manner voice he'd used with me when I was at my lowest, the voice you'd use to tell a patient that yes, her condition was terminal and you'd try to keep her comfortable. So maybe he was alone. Or maybe it was just that his new girlfriend had gone to the bathroom to slip out of her lace merry widow and into her leopard-print thong. "Where are you?" he asked.
"New Jersey. I took Joy on vacation. I'm sorry to bother you. I'll be okay. I should have..." I made myself stop talking. "Well, anyhow. I'm sorry I bothered you."
Now he sounded amused. "Where in New Jersey?"
"Avalon. The beach. I got some money for my advance, and I thought we should go to the beach. Get some sun. Walk on the sand. Joy's therapist said it's good for her to walk on the sand."
"What's the address?"
My heart rose, and I bit down hard, not letting myself hope. "Hang on." I told him where I was, and we said goodbye. Then I climbed up to the widow's walk off the master bedroom, with the door open, listening to the hushing sound of the waves rolling onto the shore, laughter from the bar down the block, and the voices of people playing cards on the porch of the house next to mine. I let the summertime smells swirl around me, salt water and the smoke from somebody's charcoal grill, until headlights washed over the walls and Peter walked unerringly up the stairs and out to the deck and took me in his arms.
Later, on a mattress that sagged in the middle, in a room where the walls were glazed with moonlight, it occurred to me that writing my book had been something like an exorcism. I'd written it all down, every angry, hateful, vengeful thought, every sorrow and insecurity, my bad romances, my messed-up family and lousy self-esteem. I'd embroidered the truth with the gaudy gold thread of sex, and a lot of it, letting my heroine work out he
r anger in a variety of far-fetched and acrobatic encounters, giving her everything I'd ever wanted, and now I was free--or as free as I could ever be. I nestled against Peter's chest, imagining that the bed was a boat and the two of us were adrift on a gentle sea, floating far, far away from my unhappy history, everything and everyone who had ever caused me pain.
His hand was in my hair, and my cheek was warm against his chest. "I'll marry you," I said. "If you still want me."
He chuckled. "Isn't that obvious?"
I twined my legs between his. "The only thing is, no big party. I don't want a spectacle."
"No spectacle," he repeated.
I kissed him sleepily. "Also, I really don't want a wedding dress. They're a huge waste of money. I mean, two thousand dollars on something I'll wear only once!"
"No dress," Peter agreed.
"Joy should be the flower girl." I closed my eyes, picturing it. "Can Nifkin be the ring bearer?"
"Whatever you want." I could feel his lips curve into a smile against my cheek. "No party. No dress. Taint carrying rings. Excellent."
"Don't call him Taint."
"Means the same thing as Nifkin," he said, yawning.
True enough. "Oh, and I can't have my picture in the paper."
Peter sighed. "Do I want to ask why not?"
I shook my head. I'd used that scene in the book, a page right out of my own life. Once, my father had found me at the dining room table, poring over the wedding listings, studying the pictures. He'd squinted at the page, checking out the brides like he'd never seen one before. Maybe he hadn't: "Fish wrap" was one of his kinder terms for our local paper. He stuck to the Times. "Why so interested?" he'd asked. I'd told him about the Bow-Wow Bride contest. "Can you believe it?" I'd asked, my voice rising indignantly. "Can you believe people would be so mean?"
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