Within an hour of its occurrence, my encounter with the crazy writer had been absorbed, processed, and edited into a story that I recounted to a clutch of colleagues at the restaurant, eliciting uneasy laughter from the females, protective noises from the males. Left on the cutting-room floor was Sam Spade’s invocation of Hugo, which had left me feeling more violated than the vilest obscenities could have done. Jean-Paul, all agreed, had behaved admirably. It occurred to me that I had not been altogether gracious to my would-be rescuer. The boy had undoubtedly meant well, even if the one he ended up protecting was my accoster.
I snagged a glass of white wine from a passing waiter and looked around to see who else was there. It was difficult to see much, since the restaurant was fashionably dark. Maison D’être was its name, and it billed itself as an existential café. The menu was eclectic and the food delicious, though what it had to do with existentialism I couldn’t begin to guess. Maybe the small portions. Housed on the ground floor of what had once been a coach house, the restaurant consisted of a single large room with a bar near the entrance. Sconces shone upward, illuminating the tin ceiling. The main source of light in the room was a spotlight at the far end trained on a floor-to-ceiling pyramid of Rowena’s new book, Alexandrian Nights. The pyramid was flanked by two huge arrangements of white roses, her favorite flower. Alexandrian Nights was Rowena’s twentieth book in twenty years, every one of them bestsellers, and Pellucid Press had gone all-out to celebrate this anniversary book. The Pellucid contingent was there in force, of course, led by publisher Larry Sharpe; Rowena would expect no less. In the crush I spotted editors from other houses, a smattering of agents, and some hungry-eyed writers circling the crowd like wolves. Plenty of press, but no book critics. Rowena was not beloved of the critics, nor they of her.
In this, Rowena Blair was not the typical Hamish-Donovan client. Our fiction list tacked toward the literary, while Rowena trod the path blazed by Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins: that is, she wrote big old-fashioned potboilers set in exotic locales, with lots of steamy sex and a spunky heroine whom no adversity could defeat. In my admittedly biased opinion, Rowena got a raw deal from the critics. She wasn’t a great literary artist, but her books were always fun to read, which was more than could be said for many of our more lauded authors. She was an honest craftswoman and a hard worker who always delivered on time, if a bit of a prima donna, as evidenced by the fact that one hour into the party, there was still no sign of the guest of honor.
Rowena liked to make a grand entrance, and no one minded, as her publisher had ensured that her guests would not want for food, drink, or entertainment while they waited. There was an open bar, roaming waiters with trays of hors d’oeuvres, and, running down the center of the room, a large buffet table engulfed by an impenetrable scrum of bodies. They were young bodies for the most part, publishing assistants and interns who supplemented their meager or nonexistent wages by scrounging the free food at every book launch they could get into, as I’d done myself before Hugo. The entertainment came from the spectacle of the waitstaff dressed in tight black pants and T-shirts, all of whom looked like models or actors and probably were, and by the exchange of publishing gossip that was the main currency of these gatherings.
I heard a burst of familiar laughter and spied Charlie Malvino heading in my direction, arm in arm with a Pellucid publicist. Gathering tidbits for his damned blog, no doubt. I hadn’t met Charlie since I fired him and had no wish to meet him now. But as I turned away from him, I found myself face-to-face with another man I’d been strenuously avoiding for weeks.
“Jo,” he said, beaming. “What luck.”
Luck my ass, I thought. Ambushed twice in one day. I should have stayed home, as if that were an option. “Hello, Teddy.”
Despite pudgy, dimpled cheeks and a Tweedledum figure, Edward Warren Pendragon was not nearly as cuddly as his nickname suggested. He had good manners and pleasant looks and a Mississippi drawl that reputedly had cut swaths through the ranks of New York’s female editors, though you couldn’t tell it by me; having grown up in Appalachia, I was cornpone-proof. But Teddy also had a sharp eye and a sharper pen. By trade he was a biographer who specialized in writers. Last year, Vanity Fair had commissioned him to write a profile of Hugo to coincide with the third anniversary of his death. I gave Teddy an interview. Big mistake. Feed a biographer and it only makes him hungry for more.
“You’re a difficult lady to reach,” Teddy said.
“Sorry, I’ve been swamped.”
“Did you get the tear sheets?”
“I did, thank you.” I sipped my wine to bridge the awkward silence where praise should have come.
“You didn’t like the piece?” he said, with the ready insecurity of even the most successful writers.
“Haven’t had a chance to read it yet, I’m afraid.”
He looked as if I’d slapped him.
“Sorry, Teddy. It’s still hard for me, even after three years.” Pathetic, playing the grieving-widow card, but I had a reason. There is only so long you can detain someone at a function like this, and Teddy knew the rules as well as anyone. One moment of commiseration and I could let the human tide bear me away.
He didn’t offer any. “The thing is, Jo, I really need to talk to you, not as Hugo’s widow, but as his executor. The Vanity Fair piece stirred up a lot of interest. Random House approached me about doing a biography.”
I knew this. Hugo’s editor, David Axelhorn, had called me, too, to feel me out. I’d told him I’d think about it and stopped returning his calls. Sooner or later it was bound to happen; but knowing as I did Hugo’s opinion of literary biographers—“coyotes battening on the remains of their betters,” he once called them, in a letter to the Times—I had no intention of helping the process along.
“This week’s crazy,” I said, edging away, “and next week I’m doing a writers’ conference in Santa Fe. Personally, I’m not convinced the time is right for a bio. But call me at the office after that and we’ll discuss it.”
Teddy seemed skeptical, with good reason; he’d never get past Lorna. Then salvation arrived in the form of a six-foot-tall Jewish goddess in a caftan and a very chic turban.
“Molly!” I cried, throwing my arms around her. It felt like hugging a skeleton. She winced a little and I let go immediately. “What are you doing here?”
“Hey, kiddo. What do you think? Rowena threatened my life if I didn’t show.”
I should have anticipated that. Molly had been Rowena’s first and only agent, until she retired. Over the course of twenty books and twenty years, they’d formed a close friendship that continued after Molly retired and I took over Rowena’s representation.
“But how’d you get here?” I asked, for Molly lived in Westchester and could no longer drive.
“Rowena sent her car. You should see her driver. Mamma mia!”
I led her away from Teddy, who showed signs of wanting to join in the conversation. Molly leaned heavily on my arm as we passed slowly through the crowd, all of whom, it seemed, needed to greet her. For forty years she’d been a literary agent, a matchmaker of writers and publishers. She’d midwifed thousands of books, launched hundreds of careers, and now all her babies were coming home to roost. It was some comfort to see how much she was loved and missed, though I cursed their inconsideration in keeping her standing. At home she’d been using a cane since the last surgery, but she was too proud to use one here.
At last we came to an unoccupied table near the pyramid of books, and I urged Molly into a seat. She reached up to adjust her turban.
“You look beautiful,” I said. In fact she looked haggard. In one year she’d aged twenty. Though the caftan disguised the gauntness of her body and the turban her baldness, nothing could soften the stark features that had once ruled her face in stately harmony but now occupied her face like outposts in a barren wasteland. The strange thing was that no matter how often I saw Molly, which was once a month at least, I never seemed to assimilate the changes in her appearance, so each new encounter came as a shock.
Only her eyes were unchanged, deep brown pools of intelligence whose penetrating gaze was fixed on my face. “Such a liar,” she said. “I hate this damn babushka. But the wig is even worse.”
“Can I get you something, Molly?” The crowd by the buffet table was only two deep, and here and there I could glimpse actual dishes. The smell made my mouth water; apart from Lorna’s doughnut, I’d had nothing to eat since breakfast.
“Sit.” She patted the chair beside her, and I sat, swallowing a sigh. “Talk to me. What did Teddy Pendragon want?”
“He cornered me, the prick. The Vanity Fair piece wasn’t enough; now he wants to do a bio.”
I fully expected her to join in my indignation. She had been Hugo’s agent, after all, his dear friend and our accidental matchmaker. She would hate the idea of our lives being pawed over and hung out for display. So I could hardly believe it when Molly said, “You could do worse.”
I gasped. “Et tu, Molly?”
“Someone’s going to write one,” she answered matter-of-factly. “You can’t prevent it, so you might as well find someone good. Teddy’s first-rate. Did you read his Vonnegut?”
I had read it and it was good. It was the reason I’d agreed to the interview, that and the incessant nagging of Hugo’s publisher. But there was a huge difference between a magazine profile and a book, and I was amazed that Molly couldn’t see that.
“Didn’t you like his Vanity Fair piece?” she asked.
“I didn’t read it.”
“Well, you should, it was very flattering. He called you and Hugo the greatest literary couple since Scott and Zelda.”
“You call that flattering? Look how Zelda ended up!”
“You’re made of sterner stuff. Anyway, if Teddy doesn’t write it, someone else will. I’ve heard rumors.”
“What rumors?”
Molly lowered her voice. “I heard Gloria Vogel’s been shopping a proposal.”
I couldn’t take it in. Gloria Vogel wrote celebrity bios—gossipy, titillating, speculative trash. Impossible. Molly must be wrong.
Except that she was never wrong. Even secluded in her house in Scarsdale, Molly Hamish collected information the way TVs collect dust. She heard everything about our incestuous little world: who’s moving where, who’s stealing whose authors, who’s cheating on whom in the boardroom and the bedroom. If Molly said it, it was true.
I felt sick to my stomach. First Sam Spade, then Teddy, now Molly. The first two I could have taken in stride. Desperate writers come with the territory, and as for Teddy, fending off pests had been one of my jobs as Hugo’s wife; I could do it in my sleep. That was just business.
But Molly was different. Molly had given me my start in publishing, choosing me out of a hundred applicants to be her assistant. She’d introduced me to Hugo. After he died and I was drowning in grief, she pulled me ashore, taking me back into the agency, piling on work to fill the unbearable emptiness. It was useful work, I was good at it, and it gave me a reason to crawl out of bed even when I didn’t want to. I loved Molly. She was the mother I’d never had, just as I was the daughter she’d longed for. How could she take Teddy’s side, against Hugo’s wishes and my own?
I yearned to go home, crawl into the big bed I’d shared with Hugo, and pull the covers over my head, but I couldn’t leave before congratulating Rowena. Suddenly a blare of trumpets sounded, silencing the room. The doors to the restaurant were flung open, the lights raised, and two trumpeters marched in. Behind them, half-reclining on a litter carried by four huge men, was our very own Rowena. She was dressed as Cleopatra in a flowing, draped gown of gold and Nile green, thick jade wristlets, and a gold head cloth that covered the crown of her head and fell squarely to her shoulders. Her eyes were ringed with kohl. A large fake snake—I hoped it was fake—was wrapped around her neck.
My eyes met Molly’s, and we burst into laughter. Our client’s flair for over-the-top drama wasn’t confined to her novels. The launch party for her last book, which was set in a circus, had been held in the Big Apple Circus, and Rowena had made her entrance on an elephant. But tonight she’d surpassed herself. If nothing else, it was a bracing antidote to the usual staid book launch.
“Did you know?” I asked Molly when I could speak again.
She was laughing so hard that mascara was carving rivulets in her powdered cheeks. “She never said a word! Bless her for making me come. I’d have died if I’d missed this.”
The crowd parted before Rowena like the Red Sea before Moses, flashbulbs marking her passage. The litter bearers, clad in short togas and leather sandals with straps that wove around their calves, carried Rowena to the pyramid, where her publisher awaited. Larry held out his hand, and the Queen of the Nile graciously descended.
The room rang with laughter and applause. Rowena spread her arms to embrace us all. Her outfit was perfect, down to the very sandals Cleopatra would have worn if Manolo Blahnik had lived in ancient Egypt. In her natural state, Rowena, née Marylou Hubbard, would have made a creditable farmer had not ambition and talent propelled her far from the Kansas wheat fields of her youth. She had broad shoulders and a sturdy physique that not even the most rigorous diet and exercise regimen could render sylphlike, and her nails were polished works of art mounted on thick, blunt fingers. But everything that could be changed had been: boobs, butt, tummy . . . The face framed by that golden headpiece had been expertly improved and updated. Rowena was fifty-three, admitted to thirty-nine, and could almost get away with it.
Waiters came around with Champagne. Larry’s toast was both effusive and sincere, befitting an author whose books accounted for a hefty percentage of his company’s gross revenue. In her response, Rowena lauded her publisher, swore undying love for her editor, and thanked what seemed like the entire Pellucid sales force by name. Then she said, “Finally, most importantly, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my two extraordinary agents, Molly Hamish and Jo Donovan. Molly believed in me before I believed in myself, and she terrorized other people into believing as well. She has been my champion, my teacher, my protector, and my friend. When she told me she was retiring, I was devastated, first for her but also, with true writerly selfishness, for myself. I knew no one would be able to take her place, and indeed no one ever could.
“But Jo Donovan stands in a place of her own. We all know the kind of writers Jo has worked with. We know the level. I was—I admit it—intimidated. As young as she was, to have done so much: what would she make of my scribblings? What I discovered, when I turned in Alexandrian Nights, was an agent/editor par excellence. She treated my twentieth book as if it were my first. She saw through what was on the paper to what was in my heart, and she would not rest until she had cajoled and bullied me into producing the best work I had in me. And then she sold the hell out of it.” Beside her, Larry shrugged in rueful acknowledgment. Rowena raised her glass in our direction. “To have had two such agents in a lifetime is a blessing indeed.”
Molly blew her a kiss and I bowed my head in thanks. I knew perfectly well that before Molly’s chair had even cooled, Rowena’s phone had been ringing off the hook with suitors. That this woman, who could have had any agent she wanted, should have felt nervous about showing me her work spoke again to the appalling insecurity of fiction writers. Tightrope walkers, Hugo once called them, crossing chasms on strings of words. I couldn’t do it. Give me the business end of publishing any day.
I assured myself that Molly had a ride home, then said good-bye before she could start in on me again. Rowena was surrounded by people, but a lane opened for me. We hugged. She smelled of something expensively exotic.
“Nice entrance,” I said.
“I wanted a horse-drawn chariot, but the restaurant wouldn’t go along. Some stupidity about the health code.”
“This was better.”
She grinned. “It was, wasn’t it?”
“Thank you for those lovely words. Molly was touched too.”
“I meant every word, my dear.” She squeezed my hand. Then the crowd exerted its pressure and I was rotated out. I made for the exit before anyone else could jump me and was waiting for my tote at the hatcheck counter when Molly appeared, leaning on the arm of one of Rowena’s tunic-clad litter bearers.
“Bit young for you, isn’t he?” I asked.
She veered toward me and rapped my knuckles with her umbrella. “This is Manny, Rowena’s driver. He’s taking me home.”
I looked him over. “Like that?”
“It’s New Yawk,” Manny said. “Who’s gonna notice?”