Gossip (20 page)

When I got home that night, there was no message from Nancy on my machine. I stretched out on my futon and tried reading, but Trollope too had died on me since Miami. I turned on TV for the ten o’clock news, wanting to feed my black mood with a murder in Queens or fire in the Bronx. I can measure the depth of my depressions by the hours of news I watch in the evening.

The telephone rang and I jumped up to answer. “Yes?” I said to show that I’d been expecting her call.

“Let me begin by saying that I was more than a little ticked off by your letter.”

I almost didn’t recognize him. His tone was so unexpected, neither apologetic nor furious but dryly jocular. “Bill?”

“I had no idea that woman was a friend of yours. We hadn’t met when I wrote that, remember. I’m sorry. But that’s no reason for you to say the nasty things you said about me and my book.”

He spoke as if it were a minor misunderstanding that would amuse us both once he cleared it up. I had difficulty connecting the man I despised with this friendly, reasonable voice.

“You told a lie about my best friend,” I said calmly. “A lie that can hurt her with the people she works for.”

He responded with an impatient sigh. “It’s not going to hurt anybody. How did you get a copy of my book anyway? Nobody’s supposed to see it until pub. Those are uncorrected proofs, you know. Full of things I’ve fixed.”

“You mean—” There was a flash of hope, a lifting of the weight in my chest. You cut the stuff about Nancy?”

He hesitated. “I can’t remember. It’s one sentence among thousands. I may have changed something.”

He obviously hadn’t. How could I hope for anything from Bill?

“So even after you knew that I knew her,” I said, “you didn’t take it out?”

“I couldn’t. It would’ve spoiled the point I was making. As for being sued, lawyers have vetted the book. I don’t name names. Gossip columns run blind items all the time. And how do you know it isn’t true?”

“Because she told me.”

“You believe everything she tells you?”
¿

“Yes.”

Another exasperated sigh. “Then why are you so worried? It’s politics, Ralph. Where people say untrue things about each other all the time. You have no reason to be upset. God, I never dreamed you were so kneejerk p.c. Why’re
you
playing feminist? You’re a man. What’s feminism
got
to do with you?”

I was baffled to hear my reaction dismissed as cliché. “It’s not feminism. It’s fairness. It’s honesty. Hearing you talk about your book, I thought it’d at least be serious. I wouldn’t agree with it but I’d have to argue with its ideas. But there’re no ideas in it. You don’t criticize the beliefs of Hillary and others. You trash them for being women and call them dykes. You don’t see anything wrong about a gay man calling the First Lady lesbian?”

“Why are you so concerned about my book, Ralph? It’s got my name on it, not yours. Your friend has you pussy-whipped.”

I remained detached from my anger. I am so full of self-doubt that I usually bend to the other person’s tone, and did so even now. It had been easier for me to lose my temper with Nancy, whom I loved, than with Bill, but then anger is so intimate.

“Nancy was in New York today,” I said. “I saw her. I showed her the footnote. And I gave her your bound galleys.”

Silence. “You shouldn’t have done that, Ralph.”

“And I told her how I know you.”

Long silence. “What? Is she going to ‘out’ me? Is that what you’re saying?”

“No.” Neither Nancy nor I had even considered it.

“What would that accomplish? I just want you to know that she’s already hurt by your book. It’s not just politics to her. She blasted me for knowing you. Even if your footnote doesn’t screw her job, it’s going to take her a long time to trust me again.”

“So it’s my fault? You told on me to get even? Look, the three rules of politics are: You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours; smart rats desert a sinking ship; and, if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.”

He was covering his confusion with adult noise, but his panic scrambled his voice and logic.

“They can’t stop my book, you know. Who is this girl to you anyway? Just a friend. A female friend. But I was in love with you. My book doesn’t matter to you at all. You’re just tired of me and want to break off and this way you can feel righteous about pulling the plug.”

“What?” It was like dropping through a trapdoor into a different conversation. “What’re you talking about? You loved me? When did you love me?”

“Why do you think I brought you to Miami? Why do you think I risked taking you out on that boat? I’m still in love with you or I wouldn’t be calling after your hurtful letter.” He swallowed loudly. “I’ve been waiting for an apology for what you wrote. But you only throw more fuel on the fire. I should have seen this coming. You were acting very odd when we said good-bye on Sunday. And to think that I never felt so close with another man as I did with you, Ralph. You enjoyed me. Admit it. We had great sex.”

“I’ve been to bed with enough men not to confuse that with love.” I remained baffled over how the argument had gotten here.

“Uh-uh. Bodies don’t lie. Mine didn’t lie and neither did yours. I can’t believe you’d trash love for the sake of a twat.”

I felt that I was talking to a lunatic. I was afraid to lose my temper. “Bill,” I said calmly. “Do you realize how insane you sound?”

“I’m saner than you. I know what I want and you don’t.

You’re too concerned with what your friends think for you to commit yourself to anything. You are emotionally impaired.”

“You’ve written an ugly book that smears a friend. And you say it’s
my
problem with intimacy? I think you’re nuts.”

“Me? What about you?” His voice grew higher, shriller. “Have you heard me say anything about wanting to beat
your
face in? I couldn’t believe it when I read that coming from a man I loved. I gave you the benefit of the doubt because you were upset for your friend. But you’re sick, you’re dangerous.”

“It was hyperbole, it was to make a point.”

“What a moron I’ve been. I cannot believe that I’ve spent the past three months being in love with a psychopath.”

I was finding my own thoughts twisted in a fun-house mirror. “The feeling is mutual,” I said. “Only neither of us was ever in love, so drop that line of crap and get real.”

“That’s all love is to you. Crap. You’ll regret this. Years from now, when you’re a lonely nobody still slinging books and I’ve become someone important, with a syndicated column or my own TV show, you’re going to think, I could’ve shared that. I could’ve been part of his life. But you blew it.”

I wanted to laugh, but made only a soundless shudder. “Uh-uh, Bill. I’ll just smile and shake my head over the fact that I ever got mixed up with someone like you. But your book’s going to die the quick, silent death it deserves. Although I doubt even that will slap you awake.”

We’d reached the point in any telephone argument where you wait for the other person to hang up, but won’t yourself because it will be a confession of weakness.

“And that’s all you have to say?” said Bill. “That you hope my book dies?”

“Yeah. Because you don’t get it, so why waste my breath?”

“Well, screw you, it won’t die. Good-bye and good riddance.”

“Good-bye, Bill.”

Yet neither of us hung up. He breathed static in my ear. Then his breath stopped. “Good-bye,” he repeated. Click.

And the cordless receiver went dead in my hand. I settled it into its slot in the answering machine, jiggling and scooting it around until the little light showed that the contacts had reconnected.

I fell on my bed, full of the exhaustion that follows anger, without having had any of the pleasure of ripping into someone. I’d expected to argue politics and moral principles and found myself instead stuck in an emotional tar baby. But I’d finally ended my idiocy. “My work here is done,” I muttered sarcastically. All that remained was Nancy. I hoped no harm would come to her and I could do something to prove myself worthy again. We’d been angry at each other before, and it wasn’t always my fault. I trusted that the bedrock of friendship remained in one piece under the bad feeling. And yet—

I had been in love, hadn’t I? It was tangled with so many extenuating emotions that I couldn’t call it love until now, when it was finished. I’d had a last glimpse of it in that blink of hope when I thought Bill might have changed the footnote. But he didn’t care enough about me to do even that much. My love wasn’t so much love of Bill as love for the surprise that someone like that could love me. I would not deny what Bill claimed to feel, even though his love was a blind, solipsistic thing that had nothing to do with me.

Pity. I’d been loved and in love before and knew I would fall again. Tonight, however, I found myself utterly unlovable.

B
UT IT WASN’T OVER. ONLY
Bill was over. His book remained.

Nancy called me the next night. “I didn’t show it to Kathleen. I’ve decided to sit tight and play dumb until it hits. If my nerves hold out. Just back off, Ralph. This is my problem, not yours. I’ll handle it my way. I know I had no business blowing up at you, but you were guilty by association. And you can’t deny you associated. That’s my gut, not my head, but it’s going to take time for my gut to forget.”

When I phoned her a few nights later, she asked me not to call for a while. Our talks only fed her anxiety about Kathleen and her anger with me. “I’ll call
you
when I’m ready to talk.”

It was never out of my thoughts over the next two weeks, yet, unable to discuss it with anyone, the threat became oddly normal, slipping to the back of things like an unpaid bill.

Until one afternoon, I cut into a box with my utility knife, pried open the cardboard and there, in the styrofoam peanuts, was William O’Connor. His glossy brown jacket, as startling as a face, had multiplied in the dark; ten books crowded the box like square, flat toadstools. I nervously took one out. There was no photo on the flap; the publishers kept their author’s youth a secret. The back carried blurbs from Rush Limbaugh, Oliver North and his sibling rival, Ren Whitaker. I flipped to page 175. It was still there, the same exact words, in granite now that thousands of copies were being unpacked all over the country.

I considered hiding the box under the table, unprocessed, only what would that accomplish? Just another book, I told myself, more slabs of foliated wood pulp. I stacked them on the table, checked them off on the packing slip, stamped the backs with price codes and set them in a cart to be taken up with the other new titles. They squatted there for an hour until Robert, who handled “New and Noteworthy,” casually wheeled them away. I hoped that they’d be digested in the forest of print upstairs, not to reappear until we returned them unsold for credit.

I wanted to call Nancy that night and say, “They’re here,” but I stuck to her request.

Books exist in their own parallel universe, a slow, quiet termite realm.
Regiment
sat unnoticed and unsold on a low shelf facing the cash register that first week. Ray Kerrison in the
New York Post
devoted half of his column to “a scathing picture of harpy politics that justifies our worst nightmares.” But people who read the
Post
don’t read books, or at least don’t buy them from us. I wouldn’t have seen the column if Peter, who was addicted to Page Six, hadn’t spotted it.

But there was one other
Post
reader at the store. I entered the staff lounge the next morning to find Alec sitting cheek to cheek with Erica over an open copy of
Regiment of Women.

“Listen to this,” said Erica. “It gets worse.” She read out a passage about the political effects of PMS.

“Disgusting,” said Alec. “Downright gynophobic.” He’d become something of a feminist since he and Erica became a couple. “You seen this, Ralph?”

“What is it?”

“This alleged book,” snarled Erica, handing it to me.

“Misogynistic propaganda. The
Post
loves it, so you know it’s evil. I can’t believe we’re selling it.”

“We should show Elaine,” said Alec. “She wouldn’t have ordered it if she knew what it was.”

I thumbed pages, pretending to see them for the first time. “You can talk to her,” I said. “Although I doubt she’ll send it back. She refuses to play censor.”

“What if you talk to her, Ralph?” said Alec. “You know how to get around Elaine.”

“Well, um, I haven’t read it and we get bad books all the time.” But I wanted us to carry it so I could watch its progress, although that made me feel weak and complicitous.

“No, no,” Erica insisted. “I should do it. Woman to woman. I can make her see what insulting filth this is.”

So Erica spoke to her and, as could be predicted, only irritated Elaine into giving her standard speech about freedom of the press and letting the buyer decide. Her one concession was that we wouldn’t display the book in our windows.

That
Regiment of Women
gave right-thinking people such a wonderful opportunity to be righteous was the first indication it would not quietly die.

The next week, Anthony Lewis on the
Times
op-ed page denounced it as “a frat house bull session posing as journalism.”

A few days later, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt reviewed it on the
Times
book page and, as if to spite his colleague, actually gave it a good review. Without saying what they were, he referred to allegations about Hillary Clinton as “speculative mischief.”

The newsweeklies reviewed it the following Monday, then the
Voice
attacked it—in two different columns. And suddenly, in the insidious way of books,
Regiment of Women
seemed to be everywhere. I could not drop into my newsstand without a fresh reference to it leaping from a magazine cover or contents page. I was looking but hadn’t expected it to be so blatant. The brown jacket intimately leered at me from the windows of other stores, not like a book I already owned, but one I’d written myself.

It briefly broke from its parallel universe into the news when, during a press conference on her health plan, the First Lady was asked to comment on a new book about her. With a cold glare and mechanical laugh, she said, “That would be like me asking if you still beat your wife, Brit. Next question.”