Foul Matter (11 page)

Clive wasn’t interested in the wedding; he was looking at her for a long moment, obviously trying to assess what, if anything, she’d heard. He wouldn’t have worried about Melissa; she was too self-absorbed to let any talk intrude that hadn’t to do with her wedding. But Sally, that was cause for concern. Sally was known to be smart, quick, and intuitive.

Sally turned back to the machine as if she couldn’t care less what they got up to in there.

“What’re you doing out here?”

Over her shoulder she said, “Copying some pages. Why? Did you want something?” Still wide eyed, she was all candor.

“What? No. Yes. Make some coffee, will you?”

She nodded. She could tell he had determined she was harmless and had heard nothing.

The door would not stay shut, that’s what it was. Even after Clive had made a point of pulling it to, it was clear (to her, not to him) that the catch was worn or dislodged.

She wheeled to the coffeemaker and dumped several spoonsful of Blue Mountain into the grinder (God, but this man was spoiled!), which she then transferred to the cone holder of Bobby’s spaceshuttlelike-looking coffeemaker (designed, she noted, by Porsche); she added water, turned it on, then wheeled back to the desk. The desk was as close to the door as it was possible to get, short of putting her ear up to it, and she daren’t get that close.

At first, Clive’s voice was considerably lower, and he’d stopped pacing, so that she heard nothing but a mumble. But it wasn’t long before the voice returned to normal levels and he had resumed his movements again. She would make sure her hands were on the computer keyboard if one of them suddenly appeared again.

Ned. They were still talking about Ned and Ned’s contract. Why? This meeting seemed to be taking place for that sole purpose . . .

 

Clive was out of his chair and pacing again.

“So who are they?” Bobby wasn’t about to let him get back on the subject of Ned-if-Ned-publishes.

“Candy and Karl,” said Clive. “Those are the names he gave me.”

“Two. We don’t want two. That’s just one more person to know about the, ah, project.”

Clive took a weird delight in being able to tell Bobby for once he had no choice. No Bobby choice—this included no rewriting of the Constitution, no reimagining the universe, no reinventing the world. The World as Bobby Mackenzie Sees It. Fuck you, Bobby. “Whether you want two or not, you’ve got two . . .”

 

“
Whether you want to or not, you’ve got to . . .
” Sally couldn’t understand why Clive seemed to be telling Bobby what to do. “Got to”
what
?

 

 

Clive moved closer to Bobby’s big desk. “They work together.” Jesus, were they really talking about this? Clive had known Bobby was a megalomaniac, a virtual Attila the Hun, but this . . . ? And Clive himself—he was afraid to think about what he thought about himself.

“Huh.” What came from Bobby was a kind of exploded sigh. He picked up another colorful, shiny jacket and held it at arm’s length. “Where in hell was Mamie Fussel when this got done?”

“It was Mamie who did it.” She was the art director, a rough-cut woman Clive didn’t particularly care for.

“I’d rather be back in the days of tits and ass.”

“These
are
the days of tits and ass,” said Clive. “Could we focus here? Could we just stay on the point here?”

Bobby dropped this jacket on the other one. “Another thing is, Isaly’s going to be giving Tom a new manuscript soon. It’s due this month.”

They always talked about manuscripts like long-overdue babies. Tired, Clive had finally dropped onto the sofa. “Why in hell does that make a difference?”

“Why? Because I don’t think Paul Giverney would relish a new Isaly coming out, even after this little reversal of fortune Ned’s going to have. And God knows not with all of the attendant publicity around the publication of Isaly’s new property. Right?”

Clive could only stare.

Bobby picked up the phone, then thought better of it, plucked up the two jacket mock-ups, and went to the door.

 

“Where the hell’s Melissa?”

“Small emergency,” said Sally as she raised her fingers from the keyboard. “Coffee’s just about ready.”

“Uh. Call Tom Kidd and ask him what’s the progress on the Ned Isaly book. Then tell Mamie Fussel I want to see her asap. These are fucking terrible.” He tossed the jackets on Melissa’s desk.

“I can—” She stopped. At Bobby’s raised-eyebrow inquiry, she mumbled, “Nothing.” She could have, too. Told him about the progress of Ned’s book. But that might eclipse Tom’s own reaction to all of this. Tom wouldn’t stand for their giving Ned any trouble.

Bobby disappeared from the door and, as Clive had done, pulled it shut.

Sally felt a chill descend and rubbed her arms against it. She thought she knew what the theme of this conversation between the two of them was about. If Ned reneged on the delivery date of his book, Mackenzie-Haack would drop him. She could not work out what Paul Giverney had to do with it.

Tears came to her eyes. What in God’s name could Bobby (or Clive) have against Ned? How could they even consider such a thing?

Sally stared at the gaudy jackets Bobby had dropped on the desk. They were not inspired, no, but neither were they awful.

And to Bobby it was all the same—the end of Ned Isaly at Mackenzie-Haack and two dead-in-the-water dust jackets.

“She was nothing like my mother,” said Saul, still talking about his grandmother.

They were sitting in the park, on this now-luminous November day, such a rarity in New York that all one wants to do is sit and look at it, at the light that lay like a transparent crust across the cold grass beyond them. It was so clear, Ned’s head was spinning a little with the dazzle and clarity of it all, as if he were drunk on air.

Saul had stopped talking and sat smoking a fresh cigar. Then his talk resumed: “I could never understand how my mother and my uncle Swann could be her children. I got it in my head there was a mix-up in the hospital. You know.”

“Maybe you believed that; kids do, don’t they? It’s a way of explaining discomfort and pain to themselves.” Ned was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, and now looked up at Saul, waiting for him to go on, but he’d stopped. Ned was surprised he’d talked this much about himself. About anything, really.

“Isn’t that Sally?”

Ned followed the direction of Saul’s gaze. It was Sally and she seemed in a dreadful hurry, walking so fast she might at any moment break into a run. Getting up, smiling, he regretted there was no wind to snatch up a page of his manuscript and send it flying, just to see her, once again, make that leap and pluck it out of the air.

“Hey! Hey!” she called, as if in standing they meant to run away from her.

By the time she reached their bench, she was out of breath. “I was going—” She stopped, breathed deeply.

“What is it?” Saul asked.

She didn’t look at Saul, but at Ned. Without preamble, she said, “They’re trying to get rid of you.”

Ned gave a little half laugh. “What’re you talking about? Who?”

“Clive and Bobby. I heard them talking. I just took over for Melissa for an hour or so, and the door was open an inch but they didn’t know—” Then she shook her head, as if with growing impatience at herself for bothering with details, even for being breathless. “It was open an inch and I wasn’t even conscious of their voices until one of them spoke your name. I didn’t think too much of that, there was no reason they shouldn’t, but then it was ‘Ned Isaly’ several times over.” And here Sally turned a stricken face upward to Ned. “They said ‘Isaly’ and ‘contract’ several times. So it wasn’t a casual mention of your name. The meeting was about you—”

Ned interrupted. “Was Tom there?”

It annoyed her immensely that Ned would look for some benign reason for this meeting. “No, of course he wasn’t! Wouldn’t I have said? That’s part of it, that he
wasn’t
there, that they were making decisions about you without him. Clive was upset, too. I could tell from his tone. And to upset Clive—he’s such a selfish creep—would take a lot. Listen: it sounded as if they were going to try to break your contract.” Her voice rose steadily, anxiety squeezing it out.

Saul laughed. “Oh, come on, Sally. Why the hell are you so worried? This is Oz you’re talking about. So you pulled back the curtain and found some damned fool was pulling the strings—”

Sally flashed at him. “Shut up, shut up!”

Saul did a little dance backward, a boxer’s step, threw up his hands.

Ned only shrugged and said, “How can they? It’s a contract for two more books, isn’t it?”

“How
can
they? This is publishing, Ned! They can do whatever freak things they want. You know what it’s like—” Then she shook her head in a kind of hopeless way. “No, you don’t. You never pay any attention to them.”

“Hear, hear,” said Saul.

Ned only laughed. “Well, there’s a limit to even what they can do.”

Sally, much shorter than Ned, who was over six feet, tried to shove her face into his by standing on her toes. “Didn’t I just
say
? This is publishing and there
are
no limits. They can do whatever the hell they want to.”

“I doubt it,” said Saul, puffing on his cigar. “Come on, let’s go to Swill’s. Take the afternoon off.”

“I can’t. I have to work for a living,” said Sally.

Saul put his arm around her shoulders. “You call that ‘living,’ girl?”

B
obby Mackenzie sat at a table not in, but near the front window of Michael’s, with Giverney’s new book on the table beside him. Michael’s was packed as usual at lunchtime. Bobby delighted in seeing Damon Rich, publisher of Queeg and Hyde, sitting a dozen tables behind him, in the back room. He delighted even more in seeing Nancy Otis, high-powered editor, who had left Queeg and Hyde for Grunge, sitting at a table just barely visible around the corner of the back room, which was where they put the real nonstarters.

When Clive had come up to the table an hour ago, Bobby had been eating bread sticks delicate as bird’s legs and was now rolling one of them across the back of his hand. He reminded Clive of a drum major sometimes; he moved through the corridors of Mackenzie-Haack as if he had a whistle in his mouth and was pointing the parade in the proper direction.

Bobby kept craning his neck to see who was coming through Michael’s double doors. “Where are these guys?”

Clive touched a napkin to the corner of his mouth. “They’ll be here.” He loved it that Bobby was kept waiting.

“You told them two o’clock, right?”

“No, they told
me.
They’ll be here, Bobby. It’s only a little past.”

They wouldn’t want lunch, Danny Zito had said. A drink, maybe. Coffee and dessert, maybe? Bobby and Clive had already ordered and eaten. The remains of Bobby’s risotto lay on a big plate. Clive had ordered his usual salad. If he ate like Bobby, he’d be a blimp. Bobby’s metabolism hammered every calorie to its knees.

“These them?” Bobby gestured toward the front.

Clive nodded, sighed.
These them.
If Bobby’s articulation had leaned ever so slightly closer to gangland, it would have come out “Dese dem?” How could anyone who talked like that be president of one of the most prestigious literary publishers in New York?

The two men at the front of the restaurant, quite decently dressed except for the Ray-Bans on the taller one, were pointed in the right direction by the maître d’. They made their way—carved their way, rather—through the flotilla of white-linen tables, every table taken, making no allowance for the strained space between. Elbows got jostled, scarves fluttered away, silk-lined furs slid halfway to the floor. Women gaped; men glared.

Clive cringed.

Could the two coming toward him care less?

Bobby smiled. He loved any “fuck-you” attitude as long as it wasn’t directed at him.

They arrived at the table. Odd the way they occupied space without seeming to be fully there. Or perhaps Clive was trying to divorce himself from the whole transaction. He wished Bobby had stayed at home. But, no, Bobby had to be in on everything, have a finger in every single pie. If Bobby’s kinetic energy was to travel down his arm to the hand he now extended, these two would fry where they stood.

Clive was doing the introductions while the three shook hands, Bobby more enthusiastically than his guests. “Mr. Candy . . . Mr. Karl . . . (were these first names? last names?) Bobby Mackenzie of Mackenzie-Haack.”

Whatever was going on in the minds of these two, Clive couldn’t say. Their faces were twinned, both expressionless as store-window mannequins. They looked amazingly alike despite their obvious differences: one tall, the other short; one stocky, the other angular and thin. They sat down.

Bobby’s enthusiasm was pumping. Clive couldn’t believe it, not in these circumstances. But Bobby got excited over anything rich and new: new writer, new failure of another publishing house, new lawsuit, new hit men.