The Last Book Party(9)

“That tickles,” I said, trying to pull my hand away. He held on and moved his finger to the center of my palm.

“You will journey to a great height, the very top of a high mountain. No, the top of a tall, tall sand dune—in the middle of a dark, moonless night.”

“Alone?” I asked.

“Hard to tell,” he said, running his finger to my wrist and up my arm. “Hmm, I see a man. A mysterious and handsome man.”

“Who is he?” I asked, shivering from the feathery tickle of his touch.

“Who is he?” Franny flipped onto his stomach, the mysterious tone gone from his voice. He climbed on top of me, covering my neck with kisses. “He is me, of course!”

The next morning, on my way back to New York, I was brimming with happiness. I liked the idea of myself as someone who could act on a whim and spend a night with Franny without needing more. I was relieved that Annie was in Toronto at a wedding. If she had been home, she would have wanted all the details and then come up with scenarios for my potential torrid romance with Franny.

But by the end of the week, I was slipping. It was difficult to concentrate at work. I tried to hold on to that carefree version of myself, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Franny, replaying his words and wondering if he was thinking about me at all. I couldn’t help imagining the two of us together as an artistic couple like Henry and Tillie.

Our magical evening had ended on a hopeful note. We had tiptoed downstairs from his room, long after we’d heard his parents come home from dinner and settle in for the night. Franny loaded my bicycle into the back of his mother’s old station wagon and drove me home. We stood for a moment by the car. I could see the moon over the top of the oak tree that my parents kept trimming to restore their neighbors’ view of the harbor. Franny put his hands on my shoulders and kissed me deeply. In a tone that sounded definitive but later struck me as noncommittal, he said, “I will see you soon.”

I got back to my desk as Malcolm came out of his office with a pale, tall man with dark, curly hair and a strong Roman nose. He looked a few years older than me, but had the mannerisms of someone younger, his hands shoved deep into his jeans pockets as he chewed his lip. I knew before Malcolm said anything that this must be Jeremy Grand, who had written a novel about a love affair in a leper colony. I hadn’t read the manuscript yet, but Malcolm had told me he’d fallen for it immediately and made a quick offer to publish it. I stood up to shake Jeremy’s hand, but he kept his hands in his pockets. He dropped his chin at me, as if we had met before.

In a vaguely British accent that belied his West Virginia origins, Malcolm said, “Jeremy tells me that he’s recently discovered you know a gentleman friend of his, the progeny of one of our esteemed authors.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said, with a smirk. “I hear you know Franny Grey.”

The way he said it made me wonder how much Franny had told him. I felt my cheeks flush.

“I met Franny in Cape Cod.”

It sounded like a ridiculously simple sentence for something that had taken up so much of my thoughts for the past week.

“So I heard,” Jeremy said. “I spoke to him Monday before he left for Maine with Lil.”

“Lil?”

I guessed the answer before Jeremy said it: Lil was Franny’s girlfriend.

“Oh, right,” I said, although I could tell Jeremy knew it was the first I was hearing of Lil. My heart pounded. Franny hadn’t given any indication that there was a Lil, but neither had he said there wasn’t. I had been no more forthcoming. Were he to discover I had a boyfriend, he could have been just as surprised. But with no attachments to speak of, the existence of Lil made me feel foolish and angry.

What had Franny told Jeremy? That I’d thrown myself at him pathetically? Had he described our time together as a convenient seduction while his girlfriend was away?

Malcolm threw an arm around Jeremy and said, “OK, children, enough ‘do you know so-and-so.’ It’s full-moon drinks tonight, and I command you to follow me downstairs.”

A tall, bald, dapper man with plump and rosy cheeks, Malcolm had a playful sense of humor and loved to banter with Hodder, Strike’s much younger editorial secretaries and assistants. Every month or so, he took a bunch of us for drinks at the Guardsman, a few blocks down Lexington at Thirty-Fourth Street. With bar food, darts, and tall wooden booths, the pub was not the kind of place Malcolm would ever take an older author for lunch—for that he favored Le Périgord—but he seemed to enjoy catching up on gossip and sipping dry vermouth while we put as many beers on his tab as we could manage in an hour or so. I loved talking with Malcolm, especially after he returned from a trip to his “beloved Britannia” and would tell me about having tea with his “dearest of friends” Frances Partridge, who was eighty-seven and the author of one of my favorite books, Love in Bloomsbury: Memories.

I followed Malcolm and Jeremy and a few others to the elevator and down to the Guardsman. When we were settled with drinks, Malcolm smoothed his silk Hermès tie, lifted his glass, and proposed a toast to Jeremy, whom the other assistants watched with varying degrees of envy. Jeremy lifted his mug and quickly downed nearly half of it. I must have been staring because he quickly put his mug back on the table.

“What—was I not supposed to drink?” He spoke directly to me, without a hint of friendliness.