I went to see Celebetsy. Since she not only sat in on the editorial meetings but also had a say in the marketing viability of each book we acquired, I figured she might be able to tell me more about Tara’s, specifically: why we bought it, how much we paid for it, when we were publishing it, and—here was the crucial question—whether there would be a publicity budget for it or whether it was one of those books we’d drop in our schedule and ignore, allowing me to pretend it didn’t exist.
She was on the phone when I entered her corner office, which wasn’t lavishly decorated, considering that she was a corporate vice president, and lacked even a hint of its occupant’s private life. There were no framed photographs of her husband, no knickknacks or souvenirs indicating their trips or hobbies, not even a potted plant or two. There were only shelves of books—our books—and they were stacked randomly, haphazardly, not organized or displayed, as if Betsy had only just arrived at L and T and hadn’t had time to unpack, when, in fact, she’d been my boss for over two years.
“I hope I’m not interrupting,” I said after she hung up.
“What do you want?” she said, as opposed to “No, of course you’re not interrupting, Amy. Come right in.” She wasn’t the boss from hell, exactly. She was just missing the gene that enables people to treat one another with civility. As for her physical appearance, she was attractive, although her look was as brittle as her personality. She was model-thin, with the cheekbones to match. Her stick-straight, chin-length brown hair had a blunt, severe cut. And her complexion was pale, excessively powdered, the only color coming from her lips, which were a slash of ruby red. And speaking of her mouth, she had a great smile—one of those wide grins that can really light up a face—but she hardly ever used it, except when she was sucking up to an important author.
“I wanted to ask you about a manuscript we bought,” I said, forging ahead in spite of the usual big chill. “Connie Martino told me it’s a self-help book by”—I tried not to choke on that accursed name—”Tara Messer.”
“Wrong. The book isn’t self-help. It’s lifestyle. If you’re going to rely on hearsay, at least get your categories straight, would you?”
See what I mean? “Sorry. A lifestyle book by Tara Messer. Is there anything you can tell me about it?”
“Julie acquired it.” Julie Farrell was our editor in chief. “She thinks the author will be the next Martha Stewart, minus the baggage.”
Tara had so much baggage, she needed a U-Haul to schlepp it around. “But we’re not talking about actual Martha Stewarty domestic subjects, are we?” I couldn’t picture my old pal serving up advice on cooking or gardening or raising chickens to produce genetically engineered powder blue eggs. She barely knew how to make ice cubes.
“Not really. The book is more about how women can create a beautiful environment by living beautifully. Inside.”
“Inside what?”
“Inside. You know, in our hearts and minds and souls. Apparently, Tara Messer leads this perfect life, and in the book she explains how she does it.”
I knew how Tara did it, and it had nothing to do with having a soul. It had to do with being born into a rich family and by having people, especially your best friend, be your doormat and by marrying the best friend’s fiancé, whose family was even richer than your own. “So, did Julie shell out a nice advance?”
“More than nice. Mid-six figures.”
I might have actually groaned here, such was the pain I felt.
“The author hosts a radio show that’s very possibly going into syndication,” said Betsy. “Julie’s hoping her audience will follow her to bookstores once she breaks out.”
Tara never broke out. Nope, not a single zit all through high school. And wouldn’t you know her stupid little radio show was about to lead her to even greater glory? That was so Tara right there.
“You’ll be the point person on this one, Amy, because we’re going to do big publicity—national TV, a multicity tour, feature stories in newspapers and women’s magazines. I expect you to do it all.”
What I felt like doing at that moment was rolling over and dying. It seemed a viable alternative to being forced to work with Tara, to being forced to promote Tara, but I quickly reminded myself that dying was a rather extreme method of avoidance. I also considered quitting my job on the spot, but I ruled that out as being both impulsive and reckless. No, I decided, I would discreetly look for and get another job in publicity, with a rival publishing house, and then leave L and T before Tara’s book came out. If we had only just acquired it, it would probably be a year before it found its way into the schedule, and I’d be long gone by then.
“The other piece of news about the book,” said Betsy, “is that the author has delivered a really clean manuscript and we’re crashing it out early instead of waiting the usual eternity for it to make it through the pipeline.”
So much for my escape plan. “What’s the rush? It’s not as if we’re talking about a headline maker here.”
“Colman House has a similar book on their list, and we want to get ours out first. We’re planning to publish in six months.”
“Six months?” I’d told Tara I was getting married in six months. Now, I’d not only have to deal with her right away, I’d have to find a fiancé right away. Maybe dying wasn’t as extreme as I thought.
Betsy went on to discuss the technicalities involved in publishing Tara’s tome ahead of schedule, while I was stuck in panic mode.
“Amy?” she said, snapping her fingers in front of my face. “What’s the matter with you? I’m talking to you and you’re not paying attention.”
Damn right I wasn’t paying attention. At that particular moment, I was trying to formulate the excuse I would use to bail out of having to work on the book, but I couldn’t come up with one. Why didn’t I simply admit to Betsy that I’d known Tara for years, that she and I were barely on speaking terms, and that it would be impossible for me to sing her praises to the media? Because the last publicity director who went that route got her ass fired. According to Connie, my predecessor, a woman named Francine, tried to opt out of working on a cookbook by a famous French chef. “I’m a vegan,” Francine told Betsy. “I refuse to promote any food that has a face.” Betsy’s response? “You’re a publicist. You don’t have to eat it. You just have to sell it. But since you can’t, I’ll find someone who can.”
So I couldn’t take a hard line if I wanted to keep my job. Instead, I tried this milder approach: “To be honest, Betsy, I’m not a big fan of the whole ‘Life would be better if only I took more bubble baths’ genre.”
Her lip curled. “Then you’d better become one, or get your paycheck someplace else.”
“Right. I only meant—”
“Hear this loud and clear: Tara Messer has written a book that has the potential to sell a shitload of copies. So I don’t want you delegating it to someone in your department. I don’t want you farming it out to a freelancer. I don’t want you turning up your nose at it because it’s not going to win a Pulitzer. I want you to get the author as much publicity as humanly possible. In other words, Amy, you’ve got a choice: Either join the unemployed or go out there and give this your best shot.”
My best shot? That settled it. I would shoot myself. No, of course, I wasn’t going to commit suicide. I wasn’t going to call Marianne, my old shrink, and make an emergency appointment with her, either, although I contemplated it. Ultimately, it seemed that running back to her reeked of failure—hers and mine. I didn’t want to be one of those patients who spends years in therapy analyzing and exposing and expressing but then winds up being too dense to put any of it to use. And I didn’t want her to be one of those therapists who spends years in training at the Ackerman Institute in New York or the Menninger Clinic in Kansas, or wherever therapists go to become therapists, only to have the patient regress. Besides, I already knew what she’d say if I went back and sat on her cracked leather sofa: “Concentrate on your own life, Amy, not on what Tara has or doesn’t have. Let go of the past. Stay centered.”
So I vowed to solve my Tara Problem myself. As I saw it, there were essentially two parts to the problem. There was the professional issue, where I would have to work alongside her on the book, and there was the personal issue, where I would have to deal with my lie about being engaged. Regarding the professional issue, I decided that with courage and determination and a decent supply of Xanax, I could get through the publicity campaign for the book. Regarding the personal issue, I decided that by pretending I’d never told Tara I was engaged and hoping she’d forgotten all about it, I could get away with having said it in the first place.
To attack the professional issue, I asked Julie Farrell’s assistant on Friday for a copy of Tara’s manuscript, which was bundled in a large envelope, together with a press kit on Tara herself. I took the package home and read its contents over the weekend.
She’s still the girl who won Best Looking in high school, I mused as I examined an eight-by-ten glossy of thirty-year-old Tara.
I was in bed that Saturday morning, propped up against a couple of pillows, a mug of coffee on my night table, the manuscript pages fanned out across the sheets.
Yep, she’s still the Golden Girl, I marveled, observing Tara’s face, clothes, pose, whatever I could glean from that photo. It was true that I had just seen her in the flesh on the street, but I hadn’t really allowed myself to get a good, unmitigated look at her that day. I’d been too caught up in the surprise of seeing her, too caught up in the memory of her with Stuart, the confusion of having once been her devoted friend, the feeling of being thrust back into my role as second fiddle. I knew she’d looked great that day, but until I studied her photo, I hadn’t realized how great.
Why great? What made her a standout? Why had she won Best Looking in high school, and how had she managed to keep the image going as an adult?
Well, it wasn’t just that she was blond, because when we met in third grade, her golden hair had already begun to turn brown. It was how she’d brought it back around to golden, because the process reflected her flair and sophistication and ability to charm. Unlike the rest of us amateur-hour teens with our lemon juice and peroxide concoctions and our do-it-yourself home kits, Tara had consulted a professional at sixteen. She’d done her research by scouring all the fashion magazines, sought out the best colorist in New York, and, after pestering her mother for permission, ultimately won her over and got both the permission and the money to pay for the appointment. From then on, she was blond in that archetypal California blond way (long, straight locks streaked with thin, magical threads of strawberry and banana and copper and platinum, tresses that look like the work of a constant and benevolent sun). There’s nothing worse than a blonde with no shine, and Tara shone.
And she didn’t simply have the hair; she used it as a prop. She shook her head a lot, which required that she reach up and finger-brush away the strands that fell into her eyes. She appeared to perspire heavily, which required that she lift her hair with both hands so she could air out the back of her neck. She was athletic, which required that she reconfigure her hair to suit each level of difficulty—a ponytail with barrettes for tennis, a French braid with a bow for volleyball, a half-up and half-down do for cheerleading. She parted it on the side—on either side—as well as in the middle, and sometimes pulled it straight back. She had the sort of even-featured face that allowed for such flexibility. Even-featured—yeah, right. An understatement.
Tara’s face could accurately be described as heart-shaped, and everything was exactly where it was supposed to be on it—hazel eyes, slightly upturned nose, generous but not distracting mouth, assertive chin with a hint of a cleft.
Her figure was always enviable, even back when I was still trying to shed my baby fat. She had thin hips, a reasonable bust, a flat stomach, and a graceful neck. And she had long legs, as I’ve already indicated, but there was trouble with those legs, which is to say they were the source of her single physical imperfection: Tara Messer was knock-kneed! Not obscenely, but enough to notice. I smiled when I remembered that this flaw existed and that not even the ever-glib, ever-persuasive, ever-magnetic Tara could talk her way out of it. Yep, she was knock-kneed and self-conscious about it, and as much as it pains me to admit this, I was ecstatic the day I first detected it, because I actually believed it might level the playing field.
What else made Tara such a hit in life? She had style—the right clothes and accessories for every occasion. For example, she was on top of trends well before I even knew they were trends, and she could always pull them off, even the outrageous ones. She could go with a hippie, bohemian look one day and do a debutante-with-pearls look the next, while I was still preoccupied with whether hemlines were heading up or down.
But the main reason she was so popular, at least when we were kids, was that she had energy, and I’m not talking about some New Agey type of flow. I mean she had bounce, stamina, liveliness. She was one of those people who initiated, stirred the pot, was never afraid of taking a risk. She was fun to be around back then—the silly, mischievous, giggle-till-you-drop kind of fun. “Let’s call boys and hang up,” she’d suggest. Or: “Let’s take the train into New York and not tell our parents.” Or: “Let’s go skinny-dipping.” My conflict in those days was that she made me feel special by virtue of the affection she showed me, but at the same time she made me feel inferior by virtue of the affection everyone showed her.
I sighed as I flashed back yet again to the scene with her and Stuart in the bedroom. The ache was still there, but even more fresh was the bafflement. What I continued to wonder was this: Why does someone who has it all want what you have instead?