Ellipsis (13 page)

A couple of minutes later Magda Danielson came on the set, followed by her ubiquitous makeup person. This time Magda was wearing a blouse, a plunging black number above a snug-fitting pair of silver slacks—apparently once a Raiderette, always a Raiderette. Carmen rushed to her side and did whatever producers do in tones that were low enough to be dubbed a whisper. A cue-card man took his place behind the middle camera, and the light man turned some dials on his board that caused the candlepower in the room to quadruple. A ponytailed young man wearing a headset and kneepads approached from behind the blue door, crouched beneath the middle camera, and began to count down from ten. For the first time I appreciated the significance of the show going out live. My pulse began to race even though I was just an unlooker.

Just like that, Magda was talking, thanking her viewers for joining her, teasing them with Chandelier's imminent arrival, and chatting of the events of the day, which included a joke about Al Gore and another about Mrs. Clinton. After she segued into a commercial, Chandelier joined her onstage.

The makeup and lighting people made minor adjustments, the soundman clipped a mike to Chandelier's collar, the countdown started again, and Magda was introducing Chandelier as the most important voice in women's fiction since Margaret Mitchell. Chandelier accepted the compliment as her due, then gave Magda a return tribute that encompassed both Oprah and Diane Sawyer. As the mutual admiration society moved into second gear, and Chandelier began describing the plot of
Shalloon
, my mind began to travel elsewhere.

When it came back, Magda was asking Chandelier to tell her viewers how she got her start as a writer. Chandelier had obviously answered the question a thousand times and was ready when she got her cue.

“I started writing because I married a bum,” she announced bluntly.

Magda's smile turned delicious. “The infamous Mickey, is that right?”

“That's right, Magda.”

“Tell us more.”

Chandelier settled in for a cruise. “I was twenty-nine, living in Hayward, working a dead-end job, and living in a depressing apartment I couldn't afford with a roommate I couldn't abide. I was new in town and had no friends, and a date was just something that grew on a tree. Then this guy came along to put in new carpet. We had a few chats and he asked me out. And I said yes. And he said nice things about me. And showed up on Sunday with a pizza and a cowboy movie and cleaned my car and unclogged my sink, so I thought what the hell. Maybe he drinks a little too much and he's crude and insensitive sometimes, and a bit of a racist and not actually that smart. But I'm not lonely anymore, so I'll marry him the first time he asks, and there'll be plenty of time to shape him up later. Which taught me my biggest life lesson.”

“Which was?”

“Men don't shape up.”

Magda whooped and slapped her knee. “Tell it like it is, girlfriend.”

Most of the staff milling around the studio were women, and most of them started clapping. I tried to blend with the bookcase.

Chandelier was just getting warmed up. “After we were married, of course he got worse. He quit his job and spent the day watching TV; he drank twice as much as before, only now it was Heineken, not Bud; he demanded to be waited on hand and foot; and he complained if dinner wasn't ready on time or the mashed potatoes had lumps. Meanwhile, I took a second job to make ends meet, and a writing course on weekends at the community college as a way to get out of the house. Then he began to fool around.”

Magda shook her head in elaborate commiseration. “They all do it, don't they? It's never whether, it's only when.”

“That's certainly true in my experience, Magda, and the other thing about it is, they don't seem to enjoy it until they
tell
you about it, am I right? Which Mickey would do in glorious Technicolor during fits of drunken apology, just before he went out and did it again.”

“What did you do about it?”

“I took it for six years.”

“And then?”

“I threw him out.”

Cheers from the staff; claps from Magda.

“Tossed his stuff in the yard, changed the locks, had the sheriff put enough of a scare in him to convince Mickey I was serious, and bought a gun in case he didn't take no for an answer. And that solved problem one. But not the other problem, which was money.”

“What did you do about that?”

“A few years before all this, I'd written a book. My first one—
Pendant
—it's in its twenty-third softcover printing, by the way. Anyway, in order to keep my mind off Mickey and his antics, I wrote this book. The women in my writing group loved it but the men thought it was fluff. So I did another draft, right?—deferring to men, not women, the way we were brought up to do. The women loved the new draft even more, but the men still thought it was bilge. But this time I wised up and went with the women. I went to a writers' convention up in Seattle and met an editor who promised to take a look at my book, so I mailed it to her the minute I got back home. Two months later I got a letter with a three-book contract enclosed. And I've been writing ever since. And once I hit big with my fifth book, I got rid of my biggest problem.”

“And what happened to dear Mickey?”

Chandelier laughed. “He's still around, unfortunately. Like that yeast infection you never quite get rid of.” Magda and the distaff crew convulsed on cue, then they went on to discuss Chandelier's upcoming tour.

Which left me with two versions of Chandelier's past, one from Mickey Strunt and one from the horse's mouth. I didn't completely credit either one, particularly, but clearly the money Chandelier had given Mickey over the years wasn't necessarily because of his contributions to her books, it could just as well have been to keep him from suing her for slander while he remained a staple of her act.

As the interview was winding down, Lark McLaren sidled over to me. “That's really what hooks them, you know,” she whispered.

“Who?”

“The fans. It's not the books they love so much. It's the bio.”

Chapter 13

After she and Magda had hugged and kissed and exchanged competitive compliments, Chandelier's magical mystery tour loaded into limos and moved on to Steinway Books in Berkeley.

The store was on the north side of the city, not far from Chez Panisse and the lesser lights of a neighborhood that had become known as the Gourmet Ghetto. As befitted its commercial peers, Steinway Books was a fairly high-toned place, catering to faculty and students at the university and to the yuppies who lived in Berkeley for the political ambience but made their money across the bay in ways violative of most of the mores of their hometown. On the surface it was surprising that Chandelier Wells would be featured in Steinway's reading series, which usually catered to
The New York Review of Books
set. On the other hand, the books intellectuals actually read are often quite different from the books they enthuse about in public.

I got there in plenty of time to check out the store for thugs and bombs. The front room featured the new books, in shelves along the walls and on tables in the center, meaning the sight lines were fairly clear and unobstructed. The back of the store housed used hardcovers and paperbacks in a crowded maze that made it an easier place to hide out. The front was crowded with browsers, but in the back there were only a few obsessive collectors seeking overlooked bargains and a couple of undergrads in search of a cheap read. I checked the back room out pretty thoroughly, including the stock room and rest rooms and broom closet, and found nothing untoward except for a transient using the rest room as a public bath. The smell alone was enough to convince me he was what he purported to be.

The front of the store was an easier task, and the result was the same—nothing suspicious, nothing extraordinary. While I worked, I noticed a copy of Chandelier's first book in a glass case along with several other first editions—the one next to hers was
Look Homeward, Angel
. I picked up
Pendant
and looked inside. The book was signed by Chandelier. The price, written lightly in pencil in the upper-right corner of the flyleaf, was $2,100. After blinking to be sure I'd read the number correctly, I put the book back in a hurry, before I did damage I couldn't pay for.

By the time Chandelier and her entourage swept into the store, I was talking to the assistant manager. Her name was Kelly and she was eager to the point of ecstasy at what was about to occur.

“Lots of people in the store read Chandelier,” she said with a grin, “but I'm the only one who admits it.” When I asked if the owner had any aesthetic objections to Chandelier's official appearance, Kelly told me that Chandelier made such a fuss if she wasn't included in the series it was easier all around just to book her as a sideshow. But if there was any certainty in life, it was that Kelly didn't use that term to Chandelier's face.

Kelly hurried over to make Chandelier welcome, and I joined the crowd of some forty people sitting shoulder to shoulder in matching folding chairs set out in ranks of eight before a podium complete with microphone and water glass, waiting for Chandelier to start speaking. My fellow aesthetes were mostly middle-aged, mostly female, and either eager for the opportunity or slightly embarrassed at being where they were. A few of the latter even bolted for the door after squirming uneasily for a few moments, for fear of being discovered where they couldn't pretend that their presence had everything to do with Toni Morrison and nothing to do with Chandelier Wells.

As Chandelier waited to be introduced, I caught her eye and nodded to indicate that everything seemed okay. She didn't look as though she believed me. I wasn't sure I believed it myself. Berkeley wasn't called Berserkeley for nothing.

Kelly was effusive in her praise and Chandelier seemed equally appreciative of the opportunity to appear in one of the finest independent bookstores in the country. After both parties were adequately stroked, Chandelier began to read from
Shalloon
, specifically a scene where the heroine, Maggie Katz, meets the CEO of the cosmetics company suspected of corporate wrongdoing and parries a pass he makes at her. The prose was florid, the conflicting emotions explicitly staked out, the heroine's reactions gutsy but gentle, and her degree of revulsion at the pass somewhat less than absolute. By the time Chandelier was on the fourth paragraph, I was thinking more about an assistant DA named Jill Coppelia than a news reporter named Maggie Katz.

What I was wondering was whether I should give Jill the name of someone who could tell her and her grand jury something about police corruption in the city, and particularly about the gang of dirty cops called the Triad. Wally Briscoe was the guy I was thinking of. He was a cop and had been a good friend of my friend Charley Sleet. Even when Charley decided to start taking down the Triad on his own, he hadn't homed in on Wally even though Wally had been active in the Triad himself for some years before drifting to the edges of the organization. Wally wasn't my friend, particularly, but his relationship with Charley, plus my general inclination to steer clear of cops and DAs at least during business hours, made me reluctant to roll over on him. On the other hand, the woman I loved needed help, which was a pretty strong shove in the other direction.

I hadn't come to any conclusion about Wally Briscoe when Chandelier stopped reading, bowed to the quick burst of applause, sipped from the glass of water, and said she'd be happy to answer questions. Hands shot in the air like bids for Kennedy memorabilia.

Most of the questions were pat and predictable, I suppose—where do you get your ideas, are your stories based on real life or do you make them up, do you use a computer, do you have an agent, does your editor change your work very much, have there been any movies made from your books, if a movie
was
made, who would you want to play Maggie? But a few of the questions caused Chandelier to squirm just a little and fumble for answers that, when they came, seemed more thoughtful than rote—do you consider your books to be literature or merely entertainment (the latter), what's the difference between the two (entertainment caters to an audience; literature is self-centered), how do you think your work benefits society if at all (that's not for me to say, although some people do seem to be comforted or encouraged by Maggie's pluck and persistence), do you try to send a message to your readers and if so, what is that message (basically, that life is difficult but salvageable), are you a feminist (of course), are you antimale (not at all), are you in a relationship right now (I keep those parts of my life private), did becoming a famous writer do what you thought it would do for you in terms of happiness (almost but not quite).

Chandelier tiptoed through the rhetorical minefield with surprising deftness, then a young woman sitting three seats down from me stood up. She wore the Berkeley winter uniform of Birkenstocks, wool socks, baggy corduroys, rag sweater, and a knit scarf long enough to rope a steer. “My name is Lucy Dunston Bardwell,” she began gravely, in the manner of a patriotic oration.

“Hello, Lucy,” Chandelier replied easily as she glanced at the clock on the back wall, obviously wondering how soon she could head back for the city.

“Do you remember me, Ms. Wells?”

Chandelier squinted for better focus. “No. I don't believe so. Should I?”

“Six years ago, I was a student in a writing course you were teaching in the extension program at San Francisco Bay University.”

Chandelier smiled broadly. “I remember those days very well. I had some good writers in those classes. Including you, I'm sure.”

“I was working very hard on a novel back then. It was called
Childish Ways
.”

Chandelier's smile seemed to solidify just a bit, in the way clay becomes ceramic. “I don't remember it; I'm sorry. I read a lot of student work in those days. They sort of blended into one big book, I'm afraid.”