by Heidi Pitlor
My final check for Lana’s book came through about six weeks later, and Kurt and I celebrated by taking Cass camping up near a lake in Williamstown. As we finished setting up our tent and unfurling our sleeping bags inside, it began to rain buckets. We had little choice but to pack everything back up and drive to a nearby motel, an almost entirely empty two-story place with several American flags out front. We ordered a pizza, changed into our pajamas, and watched Muppets Most Wanted. The three of us fell asleep together in bed, our arms slung over each other.
When I woke the next morning, I gently slid Cass’s hand from my arm. I left him and Kurt, and went for a walk behind the motel, where a creek ran through a gully and led to a sprawling open meadow. How long had it been since I had just gone for a walk on my own? I let the coarse grass brush my legs and picked a handful of dandelions to bring back to the boys. I watched a butterfly flicker past.
Back in Lenox, Kurt got his first paying job as a furniture-maker: four chairs and a long table to help furnish the barn that Peg and Marv Meyers were now converting to a guest house. They hired me to get rid of some poison ivy and a dead Japanese maple, and plant some ornamental grasses by their steps. Kurt worked in the empty barn while Cass helped me outside, which was idyllic until he became very interested in the poison ivy, and I had to distract him.
When that job ended, Cass and I started going to Sandy Beach most afternoons. We would meet up with Luana and Carlos, as work was light for her, too, at the time. Jessica came along one day in July, and I noticed that her lower abdomen was a little distended. She confided that she was eight weeks pregnant. Luana and I whooped and congratulated her, but Jessica interrupted with, “One day at a time. I’m not going to celebrate until I’m holding a full-term baby.”
We both nodded but went to hug her.
That afternoon, Colin called me with an offer for another memoir, this one for a movie actor, a known womanizer who had long ago been named the “Sexiest Man Alive.” “This was even before People Magazine coined the term,” Colin said. “No clue who named him this. I know he’s not Lana Breban, but you’ll get to write about some cool places at least.” The book would describe his time riding his motorcycle through South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana. Colin told me the advance. “Oh,” I said. “I got more than twice that for Lana’s book.”
“I know,” he said. “Things are tough in publishing right now. Everyone’s reading the news and not much else. Believe me, this is a decent offer.”
From the sound of it, this client could well be a geriatric Nick Felles. “What if we asked for a cut of royalties? If I sent you a report of what my costs will be, you know, of what I’ll need to live on and for childcare while I’m writing this, would you at least consider it?”
“What, did Lana get to you?” Colin said.
“Yes,” I snapped. “So what? You don’t need to condescend.”
“Sorry. Jeez, Al. Lighten up,” he said. “You used to be more fun, you know.”
“I’m happy to explain how fun it is to work without enough childcare or decent health insurance. I’m happy to explain what it’s like to pull a memoir out of thin air because your client all but extorts you, and what it was like to hear the news that six months of work was thrown out because your client raped one or more of his—”
“Okay, all right. I get it,” he said. “I can’t guarantee anything.”
“Thank you,” I said, my stomach settling. I had said what I needed to. It felt good and, in a second, a little terrible; what if my exasperation had been too much? What if he deemed me “high maintenance” and decided to finally be done with me and my work? “Anything would be great, Col.”
“I’ll let you know.”
“Did you see that review of Lana’s book today?” I had forgotten to disable Google Alert for Lana, and had seen a starred prepublication review from a trade magazine.
“Yes! Nice work! Shirley sent it over. They’re all really pleased,” he said. “Do you want me to start sending you reviews?”
I was surprised at his offer. “That’d be nice. But only if they’re good reviews. You can skip sending me the bad ones, okay?”
The next day, he came back to me with an extra three thousand dollars and half a percentage point of royalties. It would inevitably amount to far less than what I had earned for Lana’s book even without royalties, let alone what I could have brought in for Nick’s, but it was a start, and I accepted.
I considered the alarming fact that I had earned additional money simply by asking. Lana would say this was also a function of my inherent value. It occurred to me that I could have asked for more years ago. I had always been glad for any offer from Colin, and had taken the payment as something fixed. I had the sensation of discovering some hidden button underneath the seat of my truck, a button that, when properly pushed, had the potential to add horsepower and mileage capability. It had been there the whole time, but I had never known to look.
Admittedly, that three thousand dollars made it more bearable to hear the details of my new client’s past affairs with a swimwear model and a smoking hot Dutch biologist whom he had met in Pretoria. After a few phone conversations, after he had gotten used to my questions, and we had gotten used to each other, he asked if I was single. I made a surprised gulp.
“Let me ask you something,” he went on. “This will be fun, I promise. Of my films—and you did say that you’d seen them all—which romantic scenes did you like the most? When was I the most convincing? I want to see if you could tell when I was the most aroused, you know, the times when I wasn’t acting.”
“I’ll pass,” I said, my stomach tight.
“Oh, Allie, just play along. Not even one comes to mind?”
“I’ll pass.”
He groaned. “You’re not one of those feminists?”
My instinct was to again reply, “I’ll pass.” As his ghostwriter, I did not want him to think less of me. And after all, he was nearing eighty. He might not have known any better, I reasoned.
You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything. I recalled Billy Bush’s laughter. “I might—I guess I am,” I finally said. “One of those.” I wanted to qualify my answer, to say something that might make him feel better or reassure him, which might prompt him to continue droning on about his virility and success in weightlifting, his decision to turn down the role of Spartacus, but I stopped myself.
From then on, I heard primarily about such topics as the motorcycle repair shop and library in Botswana where he had taken part in a rain-making ceremony and his work advocating against rhino poachers in South Africa. I knew that it would be a far better book—simply because I had refused to pass along my romantic status or my take on the visibility of his lust for his co-stars. How strange that such a quick refusal, such a simple but necessary thing, had ever given me pause. I was well aware that shutting down uncomfortable questions would not always be this simple, but I thanked God that this one time, it was.
September came, and Cass and Carlos started kindergarten, glorious, free kindergarten.
I first saw Lana’s book in the window of a local bookstore the day after I sent the editor the first few chapters of the new travel book. There they were on the cover, Lana in hoop earrings, a cream-colored turtleneck and a navy skirt, and Norton in khakis and a red polo shirt, the two sitting side by side on a park bench, holding ice cream cones and looking beatifically at the camera. All That Matters: A Story of Love and Motherhood. How far back in time this book had traveled from its initial conception, a guide to help feminists raise feminist sons. Of course, backward was the direction the country was now moving. Just two weeks ago, white supremacists had marched in Charlottesville, and horrifically, one of them had struck and killed a counter-protester with his car. The president actually went on record to remark about the “good people on both sides.”
“There’s Lana!” Cass said, pointing at the window. I nodded. “Your name isn’t on the front?”
“No, but that’s the
job.”
We walked inside the store and found a stack of the books. I lifted a copy and took in the praise from a list of celebrities, one I swore was a Republican. Surely all these busy people had not read the whole book in such a short period of time. Maybe their assistants had to stay up nights in order to read it quickly—or maybe they had to write these glowing sentences on their bosses’ behalf without any access to the book at all.
When we got home, I sent a congratulatory email to Lana. Luana and Carlos came over soon after and the boys played their rescue dog game out front.
The next day, Lana wrote back, “We did it, Allie! You did it. Thank you. Truly.”
Soon after, my mother called. She had just bought a copy of the book herself.
“You might recognize some, a lot, of stuff in there,” I told her.
“What do you mean?”
“I had to fudge a few things here and there,” I said. “You’ll see.”
“Patty said you already made the New York Times bestseller list! Is this the first time one of your books has done this well?”
“It is? Wow, great!” I said, excited. Then alarmed. “Wait, what?”
“How does Cass like kindergarten?” she asked in a strange voice.
“You didn’t tell Patty, did you?”
“I wasn’t—what does it matter now? You’re done with the book. You’re no longer working with Lana, right? Patty knows to keep her mouth shut. I was very clear about that part.”
“Mom?”
She breathed into the phone. “Sweetie. We had that argument, and then I read Lana was running for senate. I was so excited for you! You’ll understand someday. You can’t help bragging about your child, even after they grow up.”
For a brief moment, I was touched, having conditioned myself to expect mostly bafflement and distaste from her and Ed. But the moment passed. “Was anyone else there to hear you?”
“No, I promise,” she said. “Allie, how much trouble could a fundamentally insecure old lady in Sebastian, Florida, cause? Try not to worry. I told her that it was totally private information. Let it go.”
The book was already in stores, I reminded myself, and, in the meantime, I had written another one. My mother was right; who would care if Lana had used a ghostwriter? I had little choice but to hope for the best and move on. “All right.”
“I can’t wait to read it!”
After we said goodbye, I stood for a moment, my phone in my hand, my heart sideways. I disabled the Google Alert for Lana, and typed out a quick email to my new editor: “Can’t wait to hear your thoughts. I’m really proud of our work. Are we staying with Uncivilized: Secrets of a Global Adventurer as the title?”
Chapter Seventeen
Kurt and I sat on my couch, our legs intertwined, as he read a nature magazine and I scrolled through Ghostwriters Talk on my laptop. I reached over to squeeze his foot. When he set down his magazine, I climbed on top of him. He unclasped my bra, but then Pete called. Kurt kissed my head and whispered, “Love you.” “Love you, too,” I said gladly, and he went off to talk to Pete in the other room.
Alone now, I thought again of Patty Copeland and went to her Twitter feed. My mother had told me that Patty had set one up solely to follow Lana’s tweets. I knew that I was being overly cautious and unnecessarily concerned.
But a heartbeat later, I proved myself wrong. I blinked over at everything on the screen, and had to scroll down to understand precisely what was going on. Two days earlier, someone named John Ashley, whose handle was @deplorablefucker67, had posted: She had a ghostwriter/ghostmom—A. Lang—cuz LB knows shit about motherhood. Nothing in book is real. Norton raised by nannies. #Breban4Senate.
Patty had replied: I know the writer’s mother! #Breban4Senate.
Did Patty think her comment was private? Was she, @GrandmaPattyC, trying to impress other people by having a connection to me? When I clicked on #Breban4Senate, my face—and the rest of me—went numb.
Rich elitist globalist fraud.
Gotta love the coastel SJWs, too important 2 raise there own kids.
Does Lang use nannies too? Or is she one herself? Or a man?
Kill her. Kill them both. Die cunts.
There were hundreds of tweets over the past few hours: one linked to a photograph of a younger Norton standing next to Gloria, her face partially obscured. Another attached Lana’s travel schedule over the past year; she had been home, presumably with Norton, for a total of sixteen days. The year before that, another document showed, she had been in New York for only twenty-two days. I saw GIFs of a baby crawling around in piles of money and a toddler photoshopped next to an image of Lana, a speech bubble near his mouth that read “Who the hell are you, lady?” There was a photo of Lana next to George Soros, possibly the most vilified left-wing donor; a picture of two unsmiling women, supposedly but likely not in fact Gloria’s sisters, and a host of dirt-faced children seated on the ground against a rotted-out wall. “Oh God,” I said. There was a tweet from @BerkshireBabe, someone who had actually seen or heard about Cass dumping the replica jaw in that fish tank in Aaron’s lobby, and this one sent a current from my feet to my scalp; a tweet from Barton Heller’s mother about Cass, a sniveling little dork. And another from her: This is a book of lies. This is Allison’s life, not Lana’s. There was a photo of me in high school from one of the landscapers from the Mount, who proudly owned up to harassing me a couple of years ago.
I forced myself to keep reading. There were rape threats against Lana, me, Gloria, and Norton, wildly graphic and violent fantasies. There were disturbing GIFs, pictures involving KKK insignia and nooses and naked women. There were pictures of Lana’s face transposed onto the heads of piled bodies outside concentration camps.
“What?” Kurt asked. He stood nearby, the magazine in his hand.
“What?” he said again.
“Do you think that I’m someone who deserves bad things?” I managed. At best, the general public would think of Lana as yet another politician pretending to be “one of the people” and me as some kind of desperate opportunist and terrible mother. Those who did not know me well enough would think me a liar, a liar who had sold out her own life, and the life of her son.
“What are you talking about?”
I began to hyperventilate. Kurt ran for a paper bag and sat next to me.
Now that a hostile cyber-mob was waving their flags and marching toward me and Gloria and Lana, there was no need to hold back. I explained everything to Kurt. I told him all about Lana’s reticence and my trip to New York, about the meeting with Gin and Shirley, and the long, tense talk with Lana afterward. I told him about my mother’s inferiority complex and Patty Copeland’s as well. I had to think that neither of them knew the depths to which things could sink on Twitter, but at the same time, I wanted to throttle them both.
Kurt pulled his whole face back with his hands. “Man. I don’t know what to say.”
I brought the paper bag back to my face.
“Maybe Lana won’t mind that much. She’s all over Twitter—she’s got to be used to trolls, right? And you didn’t leak anything about her life, I mean, at least not directly?”
The bag ballooned and shrank and ballooned again from my mouth.
I had told my mother something in confidence, and Kurt was right: there were plenty of worse things I could have done. Still, what would happen to Gloria? And to me, ultimately? I had checked the other day after talking to my mother, and my nondisclosure agreement did mandate that I was to pay back “any and all monies” should I disclose my work with Lana. She herself could not have been more adamant about my keeping quiet. For a moment, I wondered if this Twitter wildfire could even be traced back to me. My mother was not on Twitter, just Facebook. But one only had to google Patty to see that she lived in close proximity to my mother and Ed, and that they all belonged to the same book group at the local library.
I set down the brown bag and yelled for Kurt to go roll me a joint.
“
First give me that,” Kurt said, and snatched away my laptop. He went to find my phone and hid both. “It’s late—you need to get some sleep if you want to have the energy to manage this whole thing tomorrow.”
“Morning, Sunshine.” It was Colin. Kurt was bringing Cass to school and I was back on Google, the brown bag at the ready. “Feel like hopping a bus to New York? I take it someone’s told you about the fun things about Lana all over Twitter.” I let out a pained grunt. I had no idea how much he knew about my involvement. “Her campaign is meeting later this morning and they told me to get you down here. I’ll see you at her place—just text me when your bus gets in.”
“Why do they need me there?” I asked carefully.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” he replied.
I checked my email inbox, where a host of new messages awaited me: three from Colin, one from Gin, two from Lana, as well as emails from my mother and Patty even. There was no time to sit and read all these messages; I had to hurry if I wanted to catch the bus. I got dressed, a solid lump filling my throat, and gathered what I needed.
Kurt pulled my truck in the driveway and trotted inside the house. I told him about Colin’s call. “Oh man,” he said. He and Pete had tickets to see some new band at the Calvin that night. “You want me to cancel and stay home with Cass?”
“But you’ve been talking about this show for weeks.”
“Pete can sell my ticket. This is what people do for each other,” he said, as if I were new to the proclivities of interdependence between human beings. I suppose that on some level, I was.
“I’ll try to get back as early as I can.” I pressed my hands to my heart as a kind of thank you. “What if I never get hired to write again? Oh my god—what if someone does something to Cass?”
“Go. You don’t want to be late.”
“You didn’t answer me. What if some neo-Nazi is on the bus and knows who I am and shoots me in the head? Everyone has guns now.”
“Allie, come on,” he said. “Just take the brown bag.”
On the bus, I forced myself to listen to a meditation app. Afterward, I watched the hills pass by, the clouds like scattered wool in the morning sky. I considered crafting an email to Lana and Colin and just coming clean about what I had told my mother. Wouldn’t I at least get a few points for being forthright? If it had not been for Cass, I might have gone ahead and done so. But if there was any chance that Lana and her people had not connected me with @deplorablefucker67 and Patty’s tweets, any chance that Colin would continue to employ me as a ghostwriter or that I would not be asked to repay the money I had earned from Lana’s book, I owed it to my son and myself to not say anything.