The Last Book Party(16)
“A short story about a girls’ volleyball team whose obsession with a Ouija board takes a dark turn.”
I couldn’t help myself and laughed. “Was that science fiction or pornography?”
He smiled slyly. “Is that your third question?”
“No! Absolutely not. I get one more.”
“OK, go for it.” I looked at his pale face, his dark hair.
“When and where did your parents meet?”
He exhaled slowly.
“Come on, out with it. You promised.”
“In 1945. In a displaced persons camp in Germany. A fitting beginning to a miserable marriage.”
“I had no idea. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. They were among the lucky ones.”
Jeremy looked away, and before I could say more, Mary walked up and asked if she could “borrow” Jeremy to open a bottle of champagne. “I’m afraid of flying corks,” she said with a girlish grin. He followed her to the kitchen, and I walked across the room to talk to Ron, who’d just arrived with Kayla. I was surprised they had stuck with the party; they both seemed too cool for one office gathering, let alone three.
“Are those the vittles?” Kayla asked, without moving to take something to eat.
Ron looked around.
“Where’s your boy wonder?”
“I told you, he’s not my boy wonder,” I said.
“No? Isn’t a book contract like a … pheromone?”
“It has its limitations,” I said, watching Jeremy deftly twist the cork and release it from the bottle. When he turned and saw me, he raised the bottle as if to make a toast. I raised my cup of water.
“You know what they say,” Kayla said, linking her arm through Ron’s. “Those who can’t do, sleep with those who can. Isn’t that what drives you all to work for pennies—the proximity to literary greatness?”
Mary held up her wineglass and smiled as Jeremy filled it. She clinked her glass against his beer bottle. They laughed. He looked less intense talking to her, and even seemed relaxed. Mary looked pretty. She had a way of putting people at ease that I envied.
I slipped into the hall bathroom, sat on the toilet, and tucked my feet under the fluffy pink bathmat. So Jeremy Grand, up-and-coming writer by way of Choate and an unlikely friendship with Franny Grey, was also Jeremy Greenberg, son of Holocaust survivors, who grew up in New Jersey.
Was it the extremes—charmed Franny raised by literary soul mates and dark Jeremy with parents who had experienced unimaginable evil—that had made them who they were and had given them such confidence to create? Where did that leave me? I hadn’t grown up charmed or tortured; there wasn’t anything unusual about me at all. How could an ordinary life like mine result in a story worth telling?
With her comment about the allure of writers, Kayla sounded like my mother, who had tempered her disappointment with my job in publishing with hopes I might find a successful young author to marry, or at least some friends to jump-start what she considered my lackluster social life. She had always dismissed the notion that I could become a writer myself. After graduation, when I’d toyed with the idea of getting an MFA in fiction, she’d told me that “having some talent is good enough for a hobby, but not a true vocation. If you’re not blessed with genius, what is the point?” Her opinion would have been easier to counter if we weren’t graced with the presence of uncanny genius in the form of my older brother, Danny, who had practically come out of the womb doing problem sets. Danny was the embodiment of the idea that remarkable people were born, not made.
When I left the bathroom, Ron and Kayla were sitting in the corner, and Jeremy and Mary were still talking, now standing a little closer to each other and sharing a small plate of cheesecake that Mary held up between them. I kept my head down and walked to the door.
11
Out of sorts when I woke up Sunday morning, I was disappointed that it was one of those rare crisp, clear summer days in New York that made me feel compelled to be outside. But rather than lifting my mood, the sunlight and blue sky would accentuate the drabness and dirty sidewalks of the Upper West Side.
I grabbed an old blanket and walked down Broadway and into Riverside Park to find a calm place to read the new Martha Grimes mystery I’d swiped from the storeroom at work. My hope of losing myself in the book for a few hours, however, was quickly dashed. No matter how I positioned myself, the roots of the tree I had settled under dug into my back. The intermittent wailing of car alarms wouldn’t let up. I couldn’t tune out the jumpy beat of “La Bamba” from someone’s boom box. The clamor reminded me of how disenchanted I had become with living in the city.
New York no longer felt romantically seedy. It felt aggressive and mean. I was tired of the noise, the rancid smell of garbage bags on the sidewalks, the aggressive packs of guys in spandex shorts biking through the park, the warm, sooty air that rushed from the subway grates as I walked by, tasting like pennies in my throat.
My mood was the same Monday morning when Mary practically skipped up to me to ask why I’d left the party early. “It was just getting started,” she said, perching herself on the edge of my desk. “Mindy has access to the roof, and everyone went up and danced.”
“Everyone?”