by Liz Ireland
“You should do what they say on TV. Get a life.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do.”
“Your own life.”
“Okay, Sylvie. See you Saturday.”
“Maybe I’ll talk it over with Bernadine.”
“What?”
“Our book,” she explained, as if I were dense.
“You mean the one we’re definitely not writing?” I asked.
“Exactly.”
Chapter 21
Nine months went by.
(Sorry, Rita.)
Of course, nine months is a loaded number. Nine months in a Candlelight book means only one thing: pregnancy. But in publishing, nine months is the amount of time that generally lapses between when a manuscript is turned in and when a bound book hits the stores. For a book that’s generating buzz, or to cash in on a trend, a publishing house can speed up the process. A president’s memoirs can appear on bookshelves a couple of months after he turns it in. A National Inquirer flash-in-the-pan can go from headlines to book deal to remainder table in less time than it took my grandmother to prepare a fruitcake.
Gazelle did a really fast job on Fleishman’s book. I was humiliated in time for Christmas.
The nine months I was referring to, though, were the nine months that it took for Sylvie and me to finish her memoirs. From September to May we toiled every weekend and sometimes a few nights a week. While I was working at Candlelight, Sylvie would get her thoughts together and scrawl notes on legal pads Luke provided. Then when I saw her next, we would type up a few pages and read through them.
Other things happened in those nine months. Luke tracked down R.J. Langley and Langley coughed up most of Sylvie’s money, in the apparent hope that she would decide she was too old to make it worth her while to try to get her hands on everything.
Then Luke filed suit against him for the rest.
While I was working on Sylvie’s book, I became less spastic about my job, and about Fleishman. I was even too busy to worry about Luke, who was gentlemanly to the point of insult. Occasionally we would go out for drinks, or for lunch. At my invitation, we went out to see a movie once. Afterwards, we went out for drinks and talked about Sylvie’s case. Then he offered to pay for my cab and sent me back uptown.
I seemed to have a knack for latching on to guys who blow hot and cold. There’s a self-help section in Barnes and Noble for that, too. Believe me. I’ve been there.
For the first time in my life, I let all that relationship business go and concentrated on something I felt was more important than myself—namely, getting the book done. I can now testify that a good way to save your own life is to concentrate on someone else’s.
It helped that Sylvie’s life was amazing. I had expected a pastiche of parties, travel, and name dropping. But it turned out that was the least of it. Her French mother and Polish father had emigrated to the United States at the beginning of the last century, but they had died in the flu epidemic of 1918, leaving young Sylvie and her older sister in the care of distant cousins (who just happened to have a baby named Bernadine). Sylvie ran away when she was old enough to pass for eighteen, and went to France, which of course her mother had told her all about. In Paris she found work as a model and became known as a party girl until she attached herself first to a famous writer and then a painter. This was her Where’s Waldo period, in which all the photos were taken.
But it was what came after that stunned me.
While she was still with the painter, a wealthy young man fell in love with her. His parents would have none of her; she might have seemed glamorous to us, but to the old aristocracy she was basically a Jewish tramp. When the war came, she and her young man got married in secret before he left, but he was killed in the early days, and she was left on her own to walk to Switzerland. His family wouldn’t help her.
Believe me, when I heard Sylvie telling me about fleeing the Nazis on foot, my little work kerfuffles and Fleishman friction seemed like nothing. Nothing.
What was it about these old people? How could they have gone through all this stuff and kept quiet about it so long? Even when we were working on the book, I was having to pry details out of Sylvie, especially if she thought something was too grim or unpleasant. But if these things had happened to anyone from the baby boomers on down, there wouldn’t be a Barnes and Noble big enough to hold all the tell-all memoirs. My generation couldn’t keep its collective yap shut about anything.
I became so absorbed in Sylvie’s life that at night I would sometimes dream I was her, spending the night in a wheat field, not knowing what had happened to my husband, forgotten by my famous friends in the glitterati; or, after the war, fighting to get a small portion of my late husband’s wealth. When I woke up, for the first time I knew what it was like to be glad to be me with my non-problems.
During this time, Andrea became less spastic, too. I could tell by the way that she would occasionally show up in her best interview suit that she was still trying to get out. But then something amazing happened. An office shakeup. An earthquake, really. Art Salvatore promoted Mercedes to Vice President in Charge of Editorial, and Mary Jo became Editorial Director. Mercedes, in her first decision as Queen of the Universe, promoted Andrea to editor and put her in charge of Mary Jo’s God Pod. Andrea was the youngest editor in charge of a line.
In this same spirit of creative personnel maneuvers, Rita finally promoted Lindsay. (Also, she was desperate for support staff.) Truly, this move was not as crazy as it would have seemed even six months before. In helping me clear out some slush, Lindsay found some real gems, including a vampire anesthesiologist manuscript I had completely forgotten about. Retitled Got You in My Blood, the book was right up Lindsay’s alley, and she developed a real enthusiasm for what she was doing that seemed to ground her, a little.
After the Romance Journal party, Lindsay did some homework and called up Melissa MacIntosh with some ideas for The Rancher and the Lady, turning the ranch into a sperm bank and the lady into a cop with a history of infertility who stumbles into mysterious deaths at an in vitro fertilization clinic. It wasn’t a quick fix, and I think Melissa was reluctant at first to take the story in such a different direction, but by the time they were finished with it, Melissa and Lindsay turned Seed of Doubt into the Pulse line’s bestseller for its month. After that, Lindsay developed a reputation for being a miracle worker, and her screw-ups, verbal faux pas, and funky wardrobe started to be viewed more as odd little quirks than career killers.
And in March, she got married. Rowdy finally convinced her that twenty-four was not too young to find the guy you want to grow old and dull with. (He also got her pregnant.)
In Lindsay’s place, Rita hired a recent Swarthmore grad named Brea who is shockingly efficient. Even so, Rita was never able to get herself away on vacation, though Andrea, Lindsay, and I did convince her to work from home one week rather than forfeit some of her paid leave.
There were other changes, too. Madeline left Candlelight to become a fiction editor for a fashion magazine. Mary Jo bought a new house five blocks from her old house in Mount Kisco. Ann adopted a dachshund. Troy went to Cancun—not with the Calvin Klein underwear guy, but with someone he said was just as juicy.
Muriel was promoted to Janice Wunch’s assistant and hasn’t had any obvious depressive episodes since. She seems to derive quite a bit of personal satisfaction from generating the late list for her boss.
Compared with everyone else, my life seemed reasonably static. The article came out in BM saying that I was making waves, but I didn’t. The piece turned out to be very complimentary toward me and Candlelight; after the incident at the Japanese restaurant I sent Alex some flowers as a small thank you for saving my life. We did another phone interview that went much more smoothly.
I stayed in my same job, my same office. I went to one conference in Wichita Falls and another in Boston and at both I managed not to make an idiot of myself. At home, everything was working out. We were near enough to
the park that I could walk Max over every morning and night, which I loved. When I first moved to New York, I was wary of Central Park, just because of the stories I’d heard growing up of famous crimes that had been committed there. But it’s like having the country right in the middle of the city, except it’s a good kind of country. The kind where you can walk five minutes and catch a cab to escape it.
Wendy finally graduated and landed an incredible job as an assistant lighting engineer for a firm that puts together large rock concerts. Good-bye, Starbucks.
Soon after her graduation in May, Wendy, Andrea, and I woke up one Saturday morning, made waffles, and proceeded to sit down to breakfast at our card table, which we had dressed up with a tablecloth my mom had sent.
The card table wobbled when Andrea put her plate down. She let out an exasperated breath. “I’ve about had it with this table.”
“What’s the matter with it?” Wendy asked.
“It’s flimsy.”
“So?” It was serviceable, that was the thing.
“So here’s an idea for what we can do with our Saturday,” Andrea suggested. “Let’s go shopping for a table. A real table. You know, made of wood.”
Wendy and I stared at each other uncomfortably. I think we had both been waiting for Andrea to crack up someday.
“Maybe we could really go insane,” Andrea continued, stabbing at her waffle, “and buy matching chairs.”
“That would be expensive, wouldn’t it?” I felt bad complaining, since not long ago I had purchased a new laptop to use working on Sylvie’s memoirs.
With agonizing calm, Andrea put down her fork. She looked from Wendy to me. “Have you checked your bank account lately, Rebecca?”
I shrugged. “I have some money saved up…”
“And you paid off your Discover card.”
She was right. I had.
She turned to Wendy. “And you’re making…what? About ten times what you were making serving coffee part time?”
Wendy frowned. “Yeah.”
“And I’m raking in more than either of you schmucks. We have to face facts here, girls. We’re successful. We made it. We’re in our mid-twenties and we’ve got good jobs and decent salaries. I don’t know how it happened. I’m not sure how long it will last. But I do know one thing. We can afford to go out and buy a cotton-pickin’ breakfast table!”
My God, she was right. For a few moments, Wendy and I were like those guys in old war movies when the battle was over and they had to let the fact that they were still alive sink in. We had survived the battle of the crowded Brooklyn railroad flat. The struggle for financial aid. The ex-boyfriend blitz. When we looked at each other, it was with happiness and relief and even a little tearful nostalgia for what we’d been through.
“When it comes right down to it,” Andrea said, slowing down a little, “we could probably afford to move to a bigger place…”
“Or even our own smaller places,” Wendy said, frowning.
I froze. Neither of those options appealed to me. I liked where we were. Wendy and Andrea were like my family. And hadn’t Andrea hated life in her little efficiency? True, she could probably afford an efficiency in Manhattan…
Couldn’t we wait to uproot ourselves again until we absolutely had to?
“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “Why don’t we just buy a new table?”
Wendy and Andrea studied each other for a moment before laughing in relief.
“New table,” Wendy agreed.
“Right.”
“I’m glad you thought of that,” Andrea told me.
We submitted Sylvie’s memoir, Inventing Myself, to a small but well-known press and kept our fingers crossed. Now it was my turn to be the nervous author. I worried Sylvie would fret about it all as much as I did. But she was cool as a cucumber.
“Nobody’s going to buy a story about an old lady,” she said.
“Your story’s not about an old lady,” I said.
But she was convinced that what we had just done was an exercise in vanity. Or maybe she was just better at hiding her nerves than I was. Besides, early in the summer Sylvie was busy moving from Queens to a place that had come open in Bernadine’s building in the Bronx, back in the neighborhood she had fled nearly eighty years before. I was worried that the move would be too much for Sylvie, but instead it seemed to affect her like a tonic. I helped find her movers and insisted she pay for someone to pack for her, too.
“You’ve got money again,” I reminded her. “You should use it.”
She laughed at me. “That’s Andrea talking to me now, isn’t it?” I had finally taken Andrea and Wendy to meet Sylvie, and they thought she was a trip. Andrea and Sylvie really seemed to hit it off. “She told me that I needed to get a new television. I told her that I was so old that I might not even live much longer. And then she said, ‘So you’re not only planning to take it with you, but you expect to get it repaired when you get there?’” She cackled with glee over that.
Andrea was telling everybody to spend their money these days, apparently. She convinced me that for the big RAG convention, which was being held in New York City this year, I needed to get a new dress. Something really great.
That wasn’t for vanity so much as self-preservation. Fleishman was going to be there. Cutting Loose had been nominated for a Raggie in the category of Best Romantic Comedy (comedy to whom?) and I worried that, since he was one of the few male writers ever nominated for anything by the romance writers, he would come out the big winner. If I was going to have egg all over my face, at least the rest of me should look good.
Whether he actually would win was a raging debate both at our office and elsewhere. At first he seemed the odds-on favorite, since the initial review of Cutting Loose had been favorable. Gazelle had managed to get his mug all over the Romance Journal. In the month of December he was in a full-page color ad, a feature article entitled, “Good-bye Chick Lit, Hello Laddies!” and he received a four-and-a-half kissy review. Other publications were not quite so fawning. BM said, “Yet another entry into the world of lad lit, with an emotional twist. Jack Fleishman might be the male answer to Jennifer Weiner, but one may ask oneself, was a response really necessary?”
Ouch.
When I finished reading that review, I leaned back in my chair, luxuriating in the thought of Fleishman reading it, too. Schadenfreude never felt so good.
In spring, just after the nominations were announced, controversy started to rage in earnest in the pages of RAG’s monthly magazine, The Romance Voice. “Back to the Double Standard” was a rabble-rousing article about how it seemed to some that books written by men automatically were given more respect than those written by women. Women’s voices were dismissed as “chick lit” while Nick Hornby—and others—were written up in the New York Times Book Review. Publishers who treated their bread-and-butter, paperback romance novels like so many widgets to be cranked out in a month suddenly were taking out full-page ads for first-time male authors writing books that were essentially no different from what their female counterparts were writing.
The author of the piece even got a quote from Fleishman. “I’m a huge fan of romance. Huge. But I wanted to write something that would appeal to everybody—that wouldn’t, you know, be branded as just a woman’s book.”
It was like tossing a crippled wildebeest in front of a pack of hyenas. From our office, you could almost hear the collective howl go up across America—the howl of royally pissed off women writers.
Andrea came into my office with the article, gleeful. “Give a blowhard enough rope…”
The famous authors in the article who responded to Fleishman’s quote pointed out that they also tried to appeal to everyone, though they were rarely marketed in such a way that this would come through to anyone casually browsing through a bookstore.
“It’s blowback,” Andrea said. “It’s wonderful. Savor the moment!”
The moment dragged on. The next month, letters poured in to The Roman
ce Voice either supporting the idea that the romance industry was primed for a hostile male takeover, or that the writer of the original article was fostering gender conflict among the very people who write books celebrating equality and respect. Then a second wave of angrier letters poured in, with one side calling the other Susan Faludi-wannabe-flame-throwers, and the other side claiming its critics were passive-throwback-mealy-mouths who wouldn’t see the error of their beliefs until the market for women’s fiction had dried up and left them self-published and royalty-free.
By May, some authors were pleading “Why can’t we all just get along?” but by then no one was listening. They were especially not listening to Fleishman, who wrote a letter of apology emphasizing his respect for the RAG, all of its members, and the romance industry as a whole. One of the proudest days of his life, he wrote, was when he was nominated for a Raggie. He said his quote had been taken out of context.
I had a few authors up for awards whom I would be sitting with at the ceremony. One, Riva Nash, was up against Fleishman for her middle-aged art student book. I tried not to let it build up in my head as a big me-against-him battle, because essentially, it had nothing to do with me. It was about them. I mean, about their books.
Besides, if Fleishman lost that would be so fantastic. And I wasn’t that much of an optimist.
For the big event, Wendy and Andrea helped me find a knockoff Missoni dress that was somewhere in the realm of affordability. It was simple, but the colors were bright and it had flow. It was also a size twelve, which depressed me. I was sliding. Too many nasty chocolate apricot cookies, which I was actually beginning to like. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a blob.
“Would you shut up about the size?” Andrea said after listening to me moan. We were all squeezed into a Bloomie’s dressing room. “So it runs small. You look fantastic.”
“Look,” Wendy said, poking at me with a forefinger. “That bone sticking out is your collarbone. And there’s your waist. It’s smaller than mine.”