Faking Life (2 page)

“Give me the one minute pitch. You're on the phone with the Today Show. Oprah. They're impatient. Why would they want John Gillis on their show?” Esther sucked in a breath and started.

“John Gillis is twenty eight. He's worked as a bartender since graduating from NYU, never aspired to anything more than that. Then one night the short order cook dies, literally has a heart attack at the stove. This throws Gillis's life into upheaval. It makes him question his ambition, his whole life. This book speaks not just to, but
for
millions of people out there who've been content with normalcy. John Gillis wants something more out of life, and this book is his journey to find that.” Nico scoffed.

“Sounds like lad lit.” Esther shook her head.

“It's true, Nico. That's what's great. He's not some bedhopping scumbag, he's a real guy with real dreams that he's only just begun to see.” Nico waited, and Esther continued. “It's someone's life Nic,” she said, placing her hands on his desk and leaning in close. She breathed through her mouth in an effort not to inhale the sickly sweet aroma wafting from his smooth cheeks. “It's not a celebrity tell-all or someone bored with nothing to say. He's a normal guy, just like millions of other people out there. Nothing fancy about it, but that's what makes it work. In fact, it's
better
he's a nobody. Think about it—your average Joe, or John in this case—sick of his mundane existence decides he's not gonna take it anymore. You know how many people feel the same way, just getting up in the morning because they don't know what else to do? Because they're used to it? It touches a nerve, Nic.”

Nico flipped the pages with his thumb. “Is this all he sent? How much more does this Gillis have written?” Esther smiled. She was prepared.

“He says he has a little over a hundred pages. He sent 50 of it. It's all in the cover letter. It's unique, in that we can watch his story unfold over time.” She waited, Nico stayed silent. Then, reluctantly, he spoke.

“And how does it end?” Esther looked at her feet for a moment, then back up.

“I don't know. I don't think he does either.” She could feel Nico slipping away. She needed to reclaim it. “I ran a Google search on that bar he works for. There's story there too. You know Travis Barker, the actor?”

“Of course. Action star. Did those
Near Death
movies in the 90's.”

“Right. Well, remember that messy divorce he had, was in all the papers?” Nico nodded.

“Well, the bar Gillis works at, Slappy's Slop House, that was where it all went down.”

Nico steepled his fingers. “Do tell.”

“Barker showed up one night with this blonde, not his wife, and they get pretty boozed up and start making out right there, a PDA display worthy of late night Cinemax. Right in the middle, this tourist takes a picture of it. Sells it to the tabloids for a hundred grand, next thing you know Barker's all over the news. And this bar, this Slappy's Slop House, it was mentioned in just about every article written. You could see signs for their World Famous Wings. Gillis was working that night. He served Barker his drinks.”

“So there's an angle,” Nico said.

“The bar became an overnight celebrity. They have a much more upscale clientele now, velvet rope and everything. In a way, it meshes with Gillis's story. Everything's changing around him, except him.”

“I remember that story. Pretty ugly custody case. People will remember it and be curious to see how Gillis fits in.” Esther nodded. She stared into Nico's eyes, afraid of his response but confident in the project she was vouching for. Shit, if he couldn't see the potential here, she might as well quit now. Assuming the rest of Gillis's story made her feel the same way—kind of
tingly
—like the first section did, she knew readers would gobble it up in a heartbeat.

Nico picked his teeth with his fingernail and spat something small and white through his lips.

“Run off another copy,” Nico said. Esther nodded, waiting until she'd turned around before letting the smile come. She took it as karma when the copier didn't jam and handed the warm pages to Nico, pride coursing through her body. She was sure that if John Gillis knew what she'd just done, he'd be eternally grateful.

Esther took the original and went back into the main office. She sat down at her desk, a light brown wooden slab with unsteady legs from years of ten-pound manuscripts being thrown upon it. Adjacent to the desk was a large oak bookshelf, lined with dozens of tomes represented by Vanetti Literati. In less than four years, she'd read every title in the Vanetti catalogue, most of them written long before her hiring.

Caressing John Gillis's pages in her hands, Esther felt satisfied. She wasn't quite sure why, but Gillis had inspired real emotion in her. A stranger. Her body felt warm. She fished the torn envelope from the recycling bin and looked at the return address. John's address. She tried to visualize what his apartment looked like, what he looked like. Was he ugly or handsome? Washboard abs or a few too many six-packs? She'd read intimate details about his life, but he remained a mystery. She wondered if they'd ever have a chance to meet. It was all up to Nico, she supposed. But she'd done her part. Anything else was up to chance.

“Hey Est,” Frank Menegaro said, striding up and placing a manicured hand on the polished wood. He took it off when she glared at him, leaving a five-fingered sweat stain that refused to evaporate.

Frank was twenty-four and a recent graduate of a college that Esther refused to name on account of her application having been rejected in high school. Although he was an Administrative Assistant—a notch below Esther—he wore impeccable custom-tailored Italian suits every day and interchanged four pairs of spiffy Bruno Maglis. He wore a tie tack. She'd never met anyone under fifty who wore a tie tack. His hair looked as though he kept Jean-Louis David on retainer and he never seemed to have a five o'clock shadow, even on the rare occasions when he stayed past five o'clock. Three weeks after Frank started working for Nico, Esther had made the mistake of taking him up on an offer (after three glasses of wine at a theoretically friendly dinner) to see his “meager apartment,” as he put it. Upon seeing the doorman and riding in the bronze-gilded elevator, she knew he wasn't paying for the two-bedroom on 57th and 3rd on his $21,000 a year salary.

The first thing she noticed was that the apartment was new—incredibly new. The tiled floor looked freshly waxed and the pine bookshelves had their original dark brown luster. Each of the dozens of books on the shelves looked like they'd been shipped straight from the warehouse. Pottery Barn bags were stuffed in the trash. She could see her reflection in the dust jackets of the hardcovers and, upon closer inspection, couldn't find a single crease or crack on the spines of the paperbacks.

“Impressive, isn't it?” he'd asked.

“Quite,” she'd said with a complete lack of sincerity that went unnoticed. They'd nursed a glass of wine for half an hour, Esther quietly spitting each sip back. She resisted his pathetic come-ons while counting the seconds until she could honestly claim to need to go home and sleep. She finally excused herself when she felt his hand bunching up her pantyhose. Her justification was a plant that needed watering. A hibiscus. She'd didn't even know what a hibiscus looked like.

Frank continued to make underhanded passes nearly every day at work, but once she learned to deal with them he seemed mostly harmless. She took his juvenile innuendos with a grain of salt, but it was incredibly unsatisfying that most of her backhanded compliments went over his head.

“Hey Frank,” she said, burying her face in a piece of paper.

“Watchoo reading?” He leaned over and plucked the page from her hand. Unable to find title or author name, he rummaged around until he found the cover letter. He took this too, spilling paper all over the periwinkle carpet.

“Damnit Frank, be careful,” she said, collecting the pages and shuffling them together.

“John Gillis,” he said, pronouncing it “guileless”.
That
ticked her off. He could drop all the pages he wanted, but when he mispronounced John's name she really bristled.

She grabbed the pages from his hand. “He's going to be a new client. You should read it when you get a chance.” Frank sniffed like he smelled rotten fish.

“Yeah,” he said with the same amount of sincerity as Esther when she said she liked his ties. “I'll get right on it.”

Esther resumed reading, Frank hovering like an unfriendly shadow. “Can I help you?” she asked, her patience wearing thin.

“Nope, just watching you read.” He leaned in and sniffed her head. Esther recoiled. “You smell nice, what's that perfume you're wearing? Wait, let me guess…Chanel?”

“No, it's a new one. Eau d'Annoyance. They're giving out free samples today at Bloomingdales. Better get over there before they run out.” Frank absently scratched the side of his nostril.

“Yeah, I'll get right on that,” he said, turning around and walking back to his desk. Esther composed herself and continued reading.

Not many prospects, other than Gillis, in today's batch. She pocketed a note scrawled on what looked like bathroom tissue that read, “
I have written a really good book that will sell over a billion copies. If you represent me I promise to give you an autographed copy free of charge and one marzipan duck
.” In good crazy writer tradition, there was no envelope or return address. She usually trashed letters that arrived without return envelopes, but at home she kept a private stash of her favorite whack jobs; people who wrote queries on cardboard with glitter paint and stapled five-dollar bills to their cover letters. People who wrote books about their love affair with lint. People who dreamed they'd been switched at birth with Prince Charles. They were the easy part of the job. The hard part was reading a manuscript she
knew
the author had pumped sweat and blood into, had been nurtured from infancy, yet would still find itself shipped back with a rejection slip as personal as a tube of lipstick. Sometimes she wished she could call up every one and tell them to keep trying and that some day, maybe not now or even soon, someone would love their work as much as they did.

Esther could hear pages slowly turning in Nico's office. That boded well. Generally if he didn't find anything salable about a project, Nico would nix it within minutes. There simply wasn't enough time in the day to spend on something that couldn't work. But lately there was just so much he didn't think would work…

It was hard for Esther to watch this formerly great man travel the downward spiral of a tremendous career. The money coming in, once a torrent, then a stream, was now just a few drops from a trickle. And while it couldn't all be attributed to Nico, she knew many of the agency's clients were beginning to think a change of scenery would be for the best. Every now and then, Esther would see the spark, the desire, the
want
that made Nico such a great representative. It was in those fleeting moments that Esther was proud to work for him.

“Esther, could you come in here?” The pages had stopped turning. Esther's heart leapt. She stood up and smoothed her skirt out, making sure she was eminently presentable to make her final pitch.
Please let him like it. I know this can work.

Nico was on the phone when she entered. He pressed his index finger to his lips and motioned for her to sit down. She pulled up a chair and gazed over his clutter-free desk while Nico waited for whomever he had called to answer. Esther smiled as she looked at the framed pictures of Nico's son, Pietro, encased in sterling silver frames and polished to a gleam. The only other item on the desk was a stained coffee mug with “Guatemala” printed in blue on the side. There were no pictures of his wife. You'd have thought Pietro was conceived out of thin air.

Nico's most prized possession, the one Esther read whenever she had a chance, hung on the far wall behind the desk. The faded piece of paper, yellowed with age with two faint signatures at the bottom, was framed in classy bronze with the date
8-4-78
engraved at the bottom. The frame was always shiny and positioned opposite the doorway, as if giving the visitors a chance to see their reflection via a mirror to Nico's past.

Inside the frame was a contract, signed in splotchy ink, by Nico Vanetti and Clarence Watters, the very first client to sign with Vanetti Literari. To this day, Nico spoke of Watters as though the Pope himself would relish the honor of kneeling before him. He was Nico's most prized client, and though his last few books had seen disappointing sales compared to his stunning debut, Watters was still the literary equivalent of an Al Pacino or Jack Nicholson. Someone who didn't necessarily guarantee high revenue, yet whose name embodied prestige that was worth its weight in gold.

Years ago, Nico had read a short story by Watters in
The Paris Review
and promptly sent off a letter asking if he had representation. Nico received a letter eight days later. No, Watters did not have an agent, and by the way, he'd been sitting on a novel set in pre-Civil War Alabama for some time and hadn't had any luck selling it. Nico asked to see the first fifty pages, which he read with the enthusiasm of a boy inhaling his first comic book. When the sample ended with the hero meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe on a train, he'd immediately offered his services.

Seven months and four drafts later, Nico sold Watters's first book,
Alabama Song
, along with two future works, for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The film was released three years later and garnered four Oscar nominations. But now Nico's career, like Watters', was a faded memory of former glory.

Suddenly Nico's eyes perked up. He gestured for Esther to listen.

“Mr. Gillis?” Nico said, sitting up straight. Esther froze. Nico combed his fingers through his hair, as though the man were sitting in front of him. “Nico Vanetti, how are you? Good. Listen, John, my agency received your letter and I had a few questions in addendum to the information you provided.” Nico smiled and winked at Esther.

“It's regarding your memoir. Not about the proposal itself, but about you. Is it true you've never written previously? Uh-huh,” Nico said, scribbling loudly on a piece of paper. He was writing nothing more than curly-Q's, but it was loud enough that Gillis could surely hear it over the phone. “Mr. Gillis, I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but we receive literally thousands of letters each year, many from professionals, and even then we seldom offer representation. Sometimes we decline people who have published entire
books.
I want you to understand that although I'm impressed by your work, we'll need more to go on if we choose to move forward.” Nico was smiling as he said this, and Esther couldn't help but feel somewhat guilty as she did the same.