Fashionistas (17 page)

K
eller calls me first thing Wednesday morning to say that the deed is done.

“All systems are go. Delia submitted the list for November parties to Jackie last night at six o’clock,” he announces, sounding more thrilled about the prospect of Jane’s downfall than you’d expect from someone who was blackmailed into participating.

“Not blackmailed,” he corrects, when I whisper this observation into the receiver. “You crumbled at the first sign of a countermaneuver. I think you should stick with magazines. Clearly games of war are not your strong point.”

“This isn’t war.”

Keller laughs. “You don’t think handing that list to Jane was the first act of aggression?”

“No,” I say, because that wasn’t the first act. Dropping the Gilding the Lily folder on her desk was.

“Anyway,” he says, “I can’t help but be cheerful about it. If I was having second thoughts about my decision to help, they were banished the second I saw Delia’s reaction. It’s en
tirely possible that she minds being in my shadow a bit more than she lets on.”

I think of the drawer full of files on her co-workers. “Don’t take it personally. I suspect she doesn’t like being in anyone’s shadow.”

“That’s Delia—very ambitious. And she does the job better than I ever did. November’s list wasn’t supposed to be in for another two weeks and I would never have been able to pull it together so early. I hate talking to publicists.”

“Then it’s a good thing you’re an architect.”

“Speaking of which, I’ve got to get going. I’m already running late because I had to take Quik for an extra long walk this morning.”

“Still no sign of Kelly?” I ask, unrepentant. Taking Quik for an extra long walk means letting him sit in the shade for another ten minutes. He can do that in the apartment.

“No. I got the name of another walker from a friend, but I don’t see it working out.”

“Why not?”

“The guy’s name is Killer. Clearly his parents were trying to warn us of something.”

“It’s obviously a nickname.”

“That’s worse then, isn’t it? He seems to be announcing his intentions.”

For a reclusive ogre who growls if you get too close to his hermitage, Keller is an awfully chatty fellow. “I thought you had to get going.”

“I do. I do. I just want to make sure you weren’t booked for tomorrow night.”

“Why’s that?” I ask, thinking this is unsafe territory. Emotionally unavailable. Emotionally unavailable.

“I have a plan.”

“A plan?”

“Yeah, it’s nothing as lavish as yours and it won’t end in the total destruction of a fellow human being but it could still be fun. What do you think?”

“It’s not my plan,” I say, loud enough for Allison to hear if she’s listening. “I didn’t come up with it.”

“Huh?”

I’m tempted to explain everything. I’m tempted to tell him that Allison Harper is the evil genius behind the plan to topple Jane and that I only date men I’m not attracted to. But I don’t. I hold myself back and agree to meet him at the bar at Isabella’s at seven-thirty.

J
ane calls me into her office. She looks up when I enter, she tells me to take a seat, she asks after my family. Suddenly I’m anxious. This isn’t just bizarre behavior, this is night-and-day, are-you-sure-you-haven’t-been-lobotomized stuff.

“And your parents, are they well?” she asks.

“Yes, thank you,” I say cautiously. I’m trying to keep shock out of my voice.

“Are they still in Florida?”

This is a shot in the dark. Jane doesn’t know a thing about my folks. “Uh, Missouri.”

“Good. Good.” An awkward silence passes as Jane stares at me. She’s staring at me with the sort of intensity that makes me want to fidget in my seat. If this were a doctor’s office and Jane an oncologist, I’d expect her to tell me that the tumor is inoperable. “Vig, how long were you my assistant?”

I know the answer to this one and still I feel uncomfortable. “Two years.”

“That’s right. Two years.” She gets out of her chair and takes the one next to me. We are now both on the visitor’s
side of the desk as if we’re equals. “And in those two years we formed a bond, a bond of mutual respect and hard work.”

I don’t think
mutual respect
is a phrase ever before uttered in this room and the anxiety I feel grows into fear. I’m afraid Jane is going to ask something of me, something personal that you only ask a close friend, like to be your Lamaze coach. “All right,” I say agreeably but I shift in my seat and move my arms behind my back. I don’t want to hold hands with Jane.

I needn’t have worried. Done with equality, she stands up and leans against her desk. “I think it’s time for a promotion.”

It’s not normal for underlings to be consulted in decisions like these, but I’m not surprised. Nothing has been normal since the moment I entered this office. “Whose?”

“Yours,” she says, with a tight-lipped smile. Being the bearer of good news does not come easily to her.

I’m too shocked to do anything but stare at her with wide-eyed amazement.

“How does senior editor sound?”

Senior editor sounds great. It sounds like the best thing I’ve ever heard. “Good.”

“Good.” Jane returns to her desk and her black leather swivel chair. “I’ll have Jackie send out the memo. Now, the first thing I’d like you to do for me is call the publicist for Gavin Marshall.”

I don’t know why I’m surprised. I should have seen this coming. “Gavin Marshall?”

“Yes, the Gilding the Lily artist. Call his publicist and tell him that we want to meet with him to discuss my ideas for
Fashionista
’s covering Gilding the Lily.”

“But Marguerite told me to—”

“Vig, you’re a senior editor now. You don’t have time to run errands for that woman. Of course if you’d rather run errands for her, I can tell Jackie not to send out that memo after all.”

The threat is clear. “No, no. That’s not necessary.”

“I didn’t think so.” She smiles smugly. This is an expression that looks at home on her face. “So you’ll just tell Marguerite that the whole thing didn’t pan out.”

“Didn’t pan out?” Even though this is just a pretend game, I feel compelled to play every move.

“Yes, you called the publicist and they’re not interested. End of story.”

If Marguerite were really pursuing Marshall and his artwork, then “they’re not interested” wouldn’t be the end of anything. Lucky for Jane—or rather unlucky for her—Marguerite doesn’t even know it exists. “All right.”

“Good. So you’ll set up the meeting then? Talk to Jackie about my schedule. I want it to be as soon as possible. We’re already working on the December issue.” She picks up the phone, signaling the end of the meeting. Another person would say goodbye but Jane doesn’t bother.

My hand is on the door when she calls my name. “Vig, not a word about this to anyone. Not a single solitary word. Understand? I’d hate to bump you back down to associate editor.”

I assure her I do and leave.

M
aya writes about dead bodies—in subway cars, in Roman baths, in the closets of apartments not yet rented. She scatters them about and lets unsuspecting people find them. She lets clueless bystanders stumble onto them and forces even the most indifferent amateur detective among them to go about finding the murderer. These are the books she writes, the sort where ordinary people test their mettle as they bungle their way through death. They are impossible to sell.

“They’re not mysterious enough to be mysteries,” she said, as we sat in the bar of the Paramount drowning the sorrow of a lost agent, “and they’re too mysterious to be straight fiction. They’re hybrids, neither fish nor fowl but some strange griffin mongrel that no one has a place for in their heart.”

She gets maudlin when she is drunk.

Maya chose mysteries because she thought they’d be easy. She thought they’d be easy to write (built-in plots!) and easy to sell (built-in markets!). This was before she realized she couldn’t actually write one. This was before she realized that
the formula that so recommended them couldn’t be strayed from and that she’d find the who-did-it aspect to be completely irrelevant to character development.

“I’m going to write a romance,” she declares now as she opens her brown bag. She withdraws a ham and cheese sandwich, a bottle of Fresh Samantha Super Juice, a bag of Lay’s potato chips and a Hostess cupcake. She has packed herself the sort of lunch your mother used to when you were in fifth grade. The only thing missing is the apple.

My lunch is less impressive. I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—no side dish, no refreshment, no dessert. “A romance?” I ask.

“A romance.”

“Why a romance?”

“Because they’re awful,” she says, as if this explains everything. Her eyes are still bright red, but they’re no longer puffy and drippy. The eyedrops the doctor gave her are slowly working.

But this doesn’t explain anything. “They’re awful?”

“Well, they’re not all awful—some are actually quite decent—but a great many of them are. They simply publish too many a month for all of them to be good. It’s like what happens when they expand the number of major-league baseball teams,” she says, squinting into the sun. We’re having lunch on a bench near the entrance to Central Park. The Plaza hotel is across the street and several unhappy horses pulling tourists go by.

This is a new development. Maya doesn’t usually talk in sports metaphors. “What happens when they expand the number of major-league baseball teams?”

“It dilutes the pitching staff.”

Even though this sounds vaguely familiar, like something I’ve read in a newspaper or a magazine, it doesn’t mean anything to me. “All right.”

“The demand is so great that quality can’t keep up,” she
clarifies. “I can dash off a hundred thousand words in a couple of months. It shouldn’t be too hard.”

“No,” I say.

“No?”

“No.”

“No what?”

“Just no.”

“But what are you saying no to?”

“The entire diluted-romance-market scheme,” I explain, horrified by the very idea of Maya devoting a hundred thousand words and a couple of months to something she couldn’t care less about. “You’re just wasting your time.”

“Why am I wasting my time?”

“It won’t work.”

Maya grunts in annoyance or frustration and crumbs of white bread fall from her mouth. “Why won’t it work?”

“Because you don’t know anything about romances.”

“What’s to know? Two people fall in love.”

“You hold the whole genre in contempt.”

She shrugs. “Well-earned contempt.”

“Well there!”

She’s unconvinced by my logic. “Well there what?”

“Don’t write a romance. Don’t write another mystery. Just write a book.”

“Now there’s a ridiculous idea,” she says, her eyes disappearing into the bag of potato chips.

“Why is it ridiculous?”

Maya doesn’t answer, but this doesn’t surprise me. We’ve had this discussion many times before, and although she always retreats behind a wall of silence, I know exactly what she’s thinking. Writing genre fiction is easy: You follow a formula, do your best and in the end if you’re not one-tenth as good as the people you adored growing up—E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Virginia Woolf—it doesn’t really matter. No one expected anything from you anyway. Writing genre fiction is easy. It’s taking yourself seriously as a writer that’s hard.

“You have to stop this,” I say, after a long silence.

Maya blinks innocently as she eats potato chips. “Stop what?”

“Your terms of reference. This cultivating-hustle thing, this switching-genres nonsense. It’s like you’re going through the five stages of grief, only with you there are five thousand. Get over it already, and start focusing on what really matters,” I say, suddenly annoyed. I can only hold a hand for so long before my impatience kicks in. “I know it’s hard and it’s scary—it took me almost two whole days to get up the nerve to call van Kessel for an interview—but you have to do it.” I don’t know how I became an example of goal-oriented industriousness, but here I am—Vig Morgan, pattern card for getting it done.

Maya is silent. She crunches potato chips and stares at me with sullen eyes. Then she says, “I’m thinking of doing a historical, like England at the turn of the nineteenth century.”

I sigh heavily.