The Last Book Party(56)
On the plane, I settled into a window seat, slipped off my sandals, and started flipping through my stack of mail. It was the usual junk—catalogues, utility bills, a circular from the Piggly Wiggly supermarket—until I saw a large envelope from the Truro library. Inside was a recent edition of Publishers Weekly, with a Post-it note on the cover, on which Alva had scribbled Thought you’d be interested.
The magazine was like a relic from a past life. I scanned the bulletins on new book deals and editors moving from one publishing house to another. I read an article about the alarmed industry reaction to the continued expansion of Barnes & Noble, which with its purchase of B. Dalton Booksellers the year before had become the second-largest bookseller in America. I read about a new editor at Hodder, Strike who was causing a stir among the old guard by paying exorbitant sums for commercial books with questionable literary value. And then I turned the page to find a full-page black-and-white photograph of Jeremy, wearing a white T-shirt and black jeans and gazing with great seriousness out the floor-to-ceiling window of a sparse industrial-looking loft.
Jeremy’s novel, to be released at the end of the month, was already being acclaimed with the usual clichés—“fresh and original,” “bold and beautiful,” and a phrase long banned at Hodder, Strike because of overuse, “a meditation on the transformative power of love.” The interviewer asked how Jeremy had chosen the topic of leprosy, to which Jeremy had responded that he was drawn to the idea of being isolated physically as well as emotionally.
The end of the profile quoted Malcolm as saying that Hodder, Strike had great expectations for Jeremy’s novel and would be feting him at a book party at Scribner’s Book Store on Fifth Avenue on September 29. I checked my Filofax to be sure I was right. The party was that evening.
48
I called Malcolm from a pay phone in the airport.
“How’s the Citrus County Bugle?” he asked.
“It’s the Chronicle and it’s fine, but I’m in New York.”
“They’ve run you out of town already?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t written anything noteworthy enough for anyone to take offense,” I said.
“Soon enough, cherub. Just don’t stay too long. It will ruin you. The truths of the world are not captured in the who-what-when-where-why of an inverted pyramid.” It was not the first time someone at Hodder, Strike had dismissed newspaper writing as superficial.
Before I mentioned Jeremy’s book party, Malcolm said he was adding my name to the guest list. He signed off by telling me to “shake the hayseeds out of my hair,” reminding me of how provincial New Yorkers can be, as if there’s no intelligent life beyond the island of Manhattan.
I took a cab to my old apartment, where my former roommate, Annie, still lived with the assistant publicist who had taken over my share of the lease. I let myself in and took a long shower, savoring the intense Manhattan water pressure and trying to calm my nerves about seeing Jeremy after so long.
With the passage of time, and having read Henry’s novella carefully, I realized I may have been too harsh in attacking Jeremy. The structure of his novel was different from Henry’s and, more important, his language was both subtler and more pointed. His depiction of Sarita’s interior life, her girlish yet deeply mature longing, was worlds away from the clumsy way Henry had tried to convey the same thing. I no longer thought what Jeremy had done was completely wrong. But I was still troubled by his dishonesty.
It was jarring to be back in New York. Walking down Broadway to the bus at Ninety-Sixth Street, I moved too slowly, eliciting annoyed stares from several people who pushed ahead of me. I was the only woman in the city not dressed in black. Before I had gone two blocks, I knew that my floral top and flowy white pants, which felt so pretty in Florida, were the wrong choices for a sophisticated Manhattan publishing party. And my plan to travel by bus and avoid the steamy subway turned out to be a bad one. The crosstown bus took forever to come, and the bus down Fifth Avenue crawled in noisy traffic. By the time I arrived at Scribner’s, I could see through the store’s two-story windows that the party was already in full swing.
I paused for a moment at the door. Scribner’s, a Beaux Arts masterpiece, was too majestic a place to enter in a frazzled rush. With its vaulted ceiling, decorative iron railings, clerestory windows, and grand staircase, Scribner’s was more than a bookstore. It was the Tiffany of books, a sparkling monument to literature, a place where buying a book felt like an event. Malcolm, who adored the place, had told me that for decades the store’s head manager would call in the bestsellers to The New York Times for its list, occasionally naming a new book that hadn’t yet sold a single copy but that she was confident deserved to be included. Until the late 1970s, the store refused to sell paperbacks. I hoped that Jeremy knew how significant it was, a real vote of confidence in his future, for Hodder, Strike to choose this venue for his book launch. Clearly, plagiarism wasn’t an issue of anyone’s concern.
I made my way to the back of the store, where Ron, standing at the bottom of the sweeping staircase in a black jacket over a black polo shirt, looked very much the associate editor. He was talking to Mary, who seemed to be in her element, pert and professional in a little black dress, checking off items on a clipboard.
I waved at Malcolm, who mimed an air kiss and turned his attention back to a young woman, no doubt an assistant publicist, who was straightening a few stacks of Jeremy’s books on a nearby table. Beside them was Ron’s replacement as editorial assistant, Charlie Rhenquist, looking preppy and confident in a navy blazer with gold buttons. He was talking to a petite woman with a helmet head of teased blond hair who I suspected was the editor Publishers Weekly had reported was raising eyebrows by publishing books at Hodder, Strike that made money.