Amy Falls Down (28 page)

After Amy spent twenty minutes dawdling in her room, showered, and changed clothes for the conference, she still had plenty of time to eat dessert with her fellows. She knew this because Jenny Marzen had texted her (“come whenever u can we’re saving a seat for u!!!”) while she was still in the cab. Because the restaurant, like the Whither event room, was somewhere in this vast hotel, she slipped through a side door in search of a corned beef sandwich and ended up standing on 45th Street eating a pretty decent bowl of tomato bisque from a soup cart. Apparently Horn & Hardart had gone out of business.

When she got there, the “event room” was free of writers and full of people cleaning up after the last crowd, which had apparently gathered to hear from a murder of agents. Just now, the conference crew was taking down the signs for the “Agent Round Table” and replacing them with signs for the writers. There were, Amy estimated, two hundred audience seats. From the back where she sat, the writers’ table on stage was reassuringly tiny. Of course it was not round at all, but a long table set up so that four pseudo-luminaries could face the crowd. She lifted her feet for a young woman running a carpet sweeper and scanned a program abandoned on the seat nearby. Yesterday morning’s Bookseller Round Table—“Depending on the Kindles of Strangers”—had apparently focused on the rise of the electronic book. Perhaps that was supposed to be the focus of the whole Whither thing. Amy, who knew nothing about electronic books, took the time now to open up the event packet Maxine had express-FedExed to her two days ago.

Apparently the conference was designed to “give the book-reading public a better understanding of ongoing upheavals in the publishing industry,” at which point, try as she might, Amy could not stay focused. Why should people who read books give a damn about the “industry”? For that matter, why should writers? She could see why publishers, booksellers, and agents needed to hash out this stuff, but writers weren’t
industrialized
in the first place. They weren’t on salary, they didn’t have benefits and pensions, they lived by their wits. That without them the “industry” would collapse would be certain, except that if today’s novelists went on strike, the MFA mills would replace them, overnight, with tomorrow’s. Every hundredth human in America had a manuscript on his hard drive.

She saw that the tickets for tonight’s discussion were the most expensive: fifty dollars for the privilege of sitting through two hours of baloney from Amy & Peers. They had paid half that to see the other three groups, including the agents. This surprised her. In San Diego and elsewhere, roving bands of agents routinely charged good money for five-minute pitch sessions with literary hopefuls. Today’s session hadn’t involved any pitching at all, just bloviating, but Amy was sure that aspirants had swelled the ranks of the agent audience anyway, if only to be within hoping distance. Was this also why they were paying to see the writers? Amy scribbled “Hoping Distance” in her notebook.

“Excuse me, madam, you’ll have to leave,” said a young man with a WPC pin on his shirt front.

“Why?” asked Amy.

“The doors don’t open for another twenty minutes.”

“I’m not an audience person,” said Amy. “I’m—”

“You’ll also need a different ticket, for the Writers’ event.” He was glowering at her. He must think she had tried to sneak in on an Agents ticket, like some high school kid theater-hopping in a multiplex.

Amy gathered up her belongings. “Is there some sort of green room?” she asked him. Milling around outside the magic door with
hoi polloi
wouldn’t have offended her sense of status, which was nonexistent, but she thought she might not be able to resist the impulse to bolt for a cab to Anywhere Else.

The young man blanched. Amy had of course read about this phenomenon—in the 1920s, fictional characters blanched all over the place—but until now she’d never seen a real person turn this alarming shade of white. White people, of course, were really pink, but not this kid.

“Yes,” she said, “I’m one of
them
”—airily dismissing the faraway stage—“but don’t worry about it. Just tell me where I belong.”

He led her up onstage. “We don’t have a green room. There’s no backstage area. I’m so sorry,” he said more than once. He pulled out her chair, seated her at the table, and ran away before she could assure him that he had just been doing his job.

There was a personalized event packet in front of each chair like a place card. She had been seated between Jenny Marzen and Davy Goonan, and to his left was somebody named Jasmine White-Banerjee. Marzen had to be the designated heavy-hitter. Goonan should be, except he was old and out of fashion. Goonan she knew—not personally, but from his early books.

When Amy was in high school, Davy Goonan had been white-hot, a National Book Award contender, a hard-drinking Irishman with lethal charm whose brilliant, caustic, and often misogynist novels excited a largely female readership. Amy had enjoyed his books. He was the postwar Dreiser, his novels huge and lumbering, but she had loved Dreiser too. During the seventies, he was the go-to bull’s-eye of feminist critics. He might have weathered the political sea change, except that he was also a bad-boy celebrity at a time when simultaneous public infidelities and fistfights actually harmed sales. Amy hadn’t thought of him in years. Still, she was sorry now to read that he was presently toiling as an adjunct writing teacher at the New School. He was still in print but broke. He’d probably spent his fortune on fines, booze, and alimony. He must be at least eighty.

Amy took out her laptop and did a search on Jasmine White-Banerjee. Indian-American novelists had been
hot
(as the Industry would have it) for a while, but she was unfamiliar with this particular name. On a Burdock Press website, she found White-Banerjee, or rather a “book trailer” for her recent novel
Justine’s Tale.
Amy, who had avoided looking at book trailers until now, clicked on the video, which opened with a woman’s dark silhouette against a background of scarlet damask drapes. “I am Justine Moritz,” she was saying, in a vaguely Nordic accent. “We were children together. He loved me like a sister. I loved him like…” Cut to a zag of lightning and a blast of bass trombones, then back to the silhouette, illuminated this time, revealing a youngish blond woman, who slowly turned toward the camera and resumed speaking. “We were children together,” she said again. “Often he would show me his … experiments.” Again with the lightning, then quick shots of cages, frogs, surgical tools. “They frightened me, but I loved that look in his eyes, that passion, and hoped that some day he would come to me…” A piano began to play the same five notes over and over, as a young man’s face, scowling at something off to the side, appeared next to the blonde. This really didn’t look like a novel about the Indian diaspora. The camera zoomed in on the girl’s lips. She whispered: “And one day he did.” The music stopped. “As a … monster.” Instantly a quick-cut montage, accompanied by tom-toms, of screaming faces, spurting and dripping blood, a noose, and a creature who looked like Boris Karloff. Oh my god, thought Amy. This idiot had written a novel about Frankenstein’s housekeeper.

“It is kind of over the top, but that’s what you get when the publicity budget’s for shit.”

Amy looked up and almost screamed, for there stood the woman in the video.

“Yes,” she sighed, “I did my own acting. This time, I won’t have a cheap-ass publisher.” She stuck out a cold little hand for Amy to shake. In back of her, trudging up the steps to the stage, were Jenny Marzen and Davy Goonan.

“We missed you!” sang Jenny. She handed Amy an ornate foil box. “We brought you a Frangelico brownie!”

Goonan was the first to settle in. The fit was rather tight, as Goonan and Jenny were considerably fatter than their author pictures. Amy was not, since her hideous photo was not a glamorized head shot. Only Jasmine White-Banerjee was fashionably slender. Also the youngest by at least twenty years. “What’s that?” Goonan asked, pointing toward the video. Amy pressed “play” and slid the laptop in front of him. To her right, Jenny leaned into her and said, “I’m such a fan! We meet at last!” and so on, and the next few minutes were lost as the women engaged in rote fawning and the man stayed silent, glued to the screen. “What are you going to talk about?” asked Jenny.

“I have no idea,” said Amy, just then recollecting something Maxine had said about her not being keynote. Keynotes were speakers. Was she supposed to get up and say something? She really should have read the material Maxine sent her. But she had been too busy preparing for death, and now the hall was beginning to fill. Amy tried to empty her mind and just watch people take their seats and the camera crew—there were just two TV cameras—fiddle with machinery and wires.

“Did the bastards force you to do this?” Goonan asked Jasmine White-Banerjee, pointing to the laptop screen. “It this what it’s come to?” She laughed and shrugged and all but rolled her eyes at Amy and Jenny. Apparently they had had enough of Goonan during dinner, although Amy couldn’t see that he was all that hard to take.

Jenny reached around Amy and put a hand on his shoulder. “Nobody forces us, Davy,” she shouted, splitting Amy’s right eardrum. “Book trailers are a new marketing tool.”

“Here’s the deal,” Jenny said in a lower tone to Amy. “Jazz is going to talk about the writer’s marketing responsibilities in the new millennium. She knows a lot more about this stuff than we do!” Apparently Jenny and Amy were “we.” “I’m going to do my usual rags to niches shtick.” She lowered her voice. “God only knows what
he’
s going to talk about.”

Why did she think Goonan was deaf? His voice was low, husky, lilting. If he could hear himself talk, he couldn’t be very hard of hearing. Out of the corner of her eye she watched him fool around with her laptop. This didn’t worry her. She had put her stories on there, but they were on her home computer too, so even if he wiped the hard drive she’d be okay.

“Tom!” shrieked Jenny Marzen, at a portly middle-aged man in sports jacket and dungarees who approached the stage.

“Who the hell is that?” asked Davy Goonan.

“Tom Maudine, we told you, remember? He’s from NPR. He’s going to be moderator. Amy, you know Tom, right?”

“I know his voice,” said Amy, who after a panicked second realized he was the NPR guy. She’d done at least ten “Just Us” radio shows with him and had assumed he was much younger, with dark hair and horn-rims, like Ellery Queen.

He shook hands all around, told Amy he was happy to meet her after all their hours together on the air, and then made his announcement. “We’re trying something new this time, and I hope you’ll all get behind it. I’ve prepared a number of questions for you, of course, but we’re also going to invite viewers, listeners, and audience members to tweet questions of their own. I’ll keep an eye on the tweets, and if they’re better than mine, I’ll—”

“Say again?” said Davy Goonan.

“It’s a new system,” said Tom. “If audience members want to come to the mike for questions, of course we’ll let them, but we’re hoping they’ll be sending their questions electronically.”

Goonan turned to Amy and muttered, “I could swear he said they were going to
tweet
.”

“Yes, Davy, they’re tweeting!” yelled Jenny Marzen, “It’s the latest craze.”

Amy had come to this conference prepared to learn that Jenny Marzen, who had somehow become her nemesis, was a perfectly likeable, intelligent woman. “Would you like to trade places?” Amy asked her. “You’d be closer to Mr. Goonan that way,” but Goonan—for it must have been he—clamped an iron hand on her knee. Clearly he preferred a buffer between himself and the helpful harpy.

“This isn’t half bad,” Goonan said to Amy, pointing at the screen, where he had summoned up “True Caller,” one of her recent stories. “It’s a bit lightweight for you, isn’t it? But it’s nice.”

Amy didn’t know what to say. Davy Goonan read her stuff?

“Oh yes,” he said, “I’ve stopped writing, but I still read the occasional story.” He pronounced
occasional
with a long
O,
a charming remnant of his old brogue, or at least it charmed Amy, who felt for just a moment as though she were twenty again. Davy Goonan liked her stuff! He inclined toward her. “You know, those SOBs only paid for one drink at dinner. I thought this creature was just trying to manage my drinking, but no, she showed me the voucher, and it was one drink apiece! After that we were on our own.”

“Do you mind my asking,” said Amy, “why you’re here?” Under other circumstances, with a different person, this would have been a rude question, but Amy was certain he would know what she meant.

“Could ask you the same,” he said. “Fact is, thought I missed it.” He took a drink of water. “Spotlights. Dancing girls. Never again, though. Cheap bastards.”

When the room filled, the TV guys hit the camera lights and the show got underway. First to speak was Jazz W-B, who explained why all writers should participate in the marketing of their own books. She opened with a book trailer—not the horrible
Justine
thing, but one in the works for her upcoming novel,
Spielvogel’s Complaint.
Since C-SPAN Books was low-tech TV, the video trailer was projected onto an old-fashioned white screen and ended up washed-out and hard to see. Still, it was watchable, as this time her new publisher had sprung for a real actor, a vaguely familiar goateed man who regarded the camera with unease as another man, off-screen, reeled off a monotone list of sexual disappointments. The audience tittered politely while Amy tried to identify the actor and also figure out why the name Spielvogel was so familiar. Both answers came simultaneously: the actor was Hal Hockman, who had been lynched twice in a memorable
Deadwood
episode, and Spielvogel was Portnoy’s psychiatrist.

That this Wasp hyphenated her husband’s name in order to garner reviewer attention was, Amy supposed, a forgivable all’s-fair strategy, but Whitebread-Banerjee was also the kind of writer who, either lazy or simply unoriginal, kidnapped characters created by her betters and impressed them into her own second-rate books. This practice had been going on for some time now. Amy associated it with the flourishing population of young writers who didn’t have anything to write about yet but thought they
had to write something,
and so they commandeered the lives of minor characters in famous novels. Scarlett O’Hara’s mother, Squire Western’s mistress, Sidney Carton’s tobacconist. Great fiction can be fashioned out of anything, including hand-me-downs, but for every Jean Rhys there were a hundred Jasmine White-Banerjees.