I’d been told how he was great at making people angry. “Pure, unadulterated rage,” a friend of mine said while four of us were having lunch together at the local fry place—fried meat, fried onions, fried potatoes. The waitress didn’t appreciate my humor when I asked her not to let the cook fry my salad. She walked away in a snit and kept it up for the whole meal.
But I was used to my humor getting me into trouble. My father used to say that I did it so no one would see me cry. That puzzled me because I never cry and I told him so. “That’s just what I said,” he answered, then walked away.
So, anyway, this big-time, super-duper, best-selling writer asked me to work for him because I made him laugh. And because I told my ghost story. Well, actually, only sort of told my ghost story. As Heather pointed out, I’d told it better. But, gee, it takes a bigger ego than mine to think she can tell a story to a master storyteller. I had visions of his saying that my “syntax” was wrong.
But before the ghost story—or devil story, as Autumn calls it—I made him laugh about the Pulitzer prize.
I was at a party and Autumn—poor dear, lots of hair but no brain—was in tears because her future mother-in-law had yet again been looking down her nose at my friend. We all knew why Cord Handley was marrying the girl, and it certainly wasn’t for her intellectual ability. She had a mass of thick auburn hair and a set of knockers that kept her from seeing her feet. Autumn complained that she couldn’t find lacy bras in her size. I said, “All I need is lace,” and that made everyone laugh.
We knew there was no real future for Autumn and Cord; eventually, his mother would break them up. Cord’s family was the closest the town had to “old money.” Cord wasn’t all that bright himself, but his mother was and she ran things. Unfortunately, her three children had inherited her husband’s brain and her looks. It made sense that she was trying to improve the line by getting her three kids to marry brains, but her grown children were having none of it. Her youngest son wanted to marry the beautiful, sweet-tempered, but stupid, Autumn.
Poor Autumn left her future mother-in-law’s house every Thursday afternoon in tears because every time Autumn saw her she was quizzed. A sort of verbal SAT test. Tea and stumpers, I called it.
One day when some of my women friends and I were having lunch together, I made the mistake of asking Autumn what she was going to do after the wedding. Since she and Cord were moving into the family mansion after they were married, Autumn would be seeing the old battle-ax every day.
Maybe it’s because I grew up without a mother, but I seemed to have missed out on some being-a-girl education. I merely pointed out what I thought was an obvious problem and all hell broke loose. Autumn burst into tears, and Heather and Ashley put their arms around her, looking at me in disbelief.
My “What did I do?” look was familiar to them.
“Jackie, how could you?” Jennifer said.
I didn’t ask what I’d said that was so horrible. Years before I’d given up trying to answer the question “What have I done this time?”
As far as I can tell, women put most things under the category of “being supportive.” Pointing out that Autumn was probably going to be crying every day instead of just once a week after she moved in with her mother-in-law was, probably, not “being supportive.”
In this instance, I was apparently also being insensitive to the fact that my friend was “in love.” As in, Autumn couldn’t tell her future mother-in-law to go screw herself because Autumn and Cord were “in love.”
“You know about that, don’t you, Jackie? You’re in love, too.”
True, I was engaged and about to be married, but I think I was doing it for some solid reasons. Kirk and I had the same goals and wanted the same things. And, okay, I was sick of living alone since Dad died. Maybe because I’d grown up with only one parent empty houses are not something I’ve ever liked much. I was always afraid that my beloved father would disappear and I’d be left totally alone.
So, anyway, we were at a party and Autumn was gently, prettily, weeping about the latest hateful thing her future mother-in-law had said to her. Since she couldn’t belittle Autumn’s looks, it was about her reading matter. “My dear,” the old woman had said, “the only fiction worth reading is what has won the Pulitzer prize.” I’d learned my lesson and I was trying to “be supportive” so I didn’t advise Autumn to tell the old bat to go to hell.
“I don’t even know what the Pulitzer prize is,” Autumn was saying, sobbing into a lace-edged hanky—no used, frayed tissues for our Autumn!
I knew—bless her pretty little head—that Autumn thought that Teen People magazine was intellectual.
“Look,” I said, stepping closer to Autumn and getting her attention, “you should learn to defend yourself against her. Tell her you always buy the Pulitzer prize-winning novels, but you, like every one else on earth, can’t get through them.”
“I know I can’t read well, Jackie. I’m not smart like you,” Autumn wailed.
The others gave me that look. I wasn’t “being supportive.”
Squatting down in front of Autumn, I took her damp hands in mine. Heaven help me but crying made her prettier. “Autumn, your future mother-in-law is a snob. She thinks that because a book has ‘Pulitzer prize winner’ on the cover that reading it makes her an intellectual. But it doesn’t.”
I wanted to cheer her up but I knew I couldn’t do that by telling her that I read the fiction winner every year, so I decided to elaborate on a pet theory of mine. “You want me to tell you how to write a Pulitzer prize-winning book?” I asked, but didn’t give her time to answer. “First you come up with a love story. That’s right, just like all the gaudy romance novels in the grocery, Pulitzer prize novels are pretty much all love stories, but they’re in disguise. Sort of like buried treasure. And like finding buried treasure, you have to go through a lot of stuff that isn’t treasure to find it. Do you know what I mean?”
“Sort of,” she said, her tears slowing. She wasn’t smart but she was one of the nicest people I ever met.
“Okay, so the author comes up with a teeny, tiny love story, just something as simple as two people meeting and falling in love.”
“That’s what the books I read are about,” Autumn said.
“Yes, but we’re talking about the ol’ prize novels here so those books are different. First of all, the main characters can’t be beautiful. In fact, they need to be homely. No smoldering eyes or raven tresses as those traits would disqualify the book.”
At that I got a tiny smile from Autumn. “I understand. Ugly people.”
“Not ugly and not grotesque. Maybe they have something like big ears. The next thing you have to do is start hiding the treasure. Bury it so the reader can’t find it easily. This means you can’t have the lovers together very often. They can’t be like in a romance novel where the hero and heroine are together on nearly every page. In fact, you can’t even call them a hero and heroine. You have to call them ‘protagonists.’”
“Why?”
“It’s just one of those little rules of literary life. People who think they’re smart like to use words other people don’t use.”
“But Jackie—” she began, but stopped and waited for me to go on.
I didn’t believe she’d remember any of this, but I was indeed cheering her up. And besides, even though I didn’t look up, I could feel that I was drawing an audience, and I can be an awful ham.
Autumn nodded, still holding my hand, and waited for me to continue.
“Okay,” I said, “you start burying your treasure of a love story underneath lots of quirky characters with funny names. You name them Sunshine or Rosehips or Monkeywrench, whatever, just so they get odd names.”
“Why would they do that? Who’s named Monkeywrench?”
“No one, but that’s the point. The judges probably have names like John and Catherine so they dream of being name Carburetor.”
Autumn smiled. “I see. Like Emerald.”
“Protaga…“Autumn said and I grinned.
“Yes. In romances, the protagonists are given beautiful names like Cameo and Briony, and the males are Wolf and Hawk, but those names don’t win prizes. Prize-winning protagonists have odd names, but never beautiful ones. So after you get your names for your characters, you make up quirky personalities for them.”
“Like what?”
“Well…“I thought about it for a moment. “Like Miss Havisham. Heard of her?”
Autumn shook her head. Her crying hadn’t even messed up her makeup.
“Miss Havisham was getting dressed to get married when a note was delivered saying the groom wasn’t going to show up for the wedding. Miss Havisham decided to stay exactly the way she was for the rest of her life, one shoe on, one off, and in her wedding dress. The author showed her years later as an old woman still in her rotting dress, cobwebs all over a table covered with her wedding feast. Miss Havisham is a celebrated quirky character in literature, and people who award prizes love quirky characters. And they want the treasure—the story—hidden very deep, under lots of people with funny names doing lots of strange things.”
“I see,” Autumn said.
I knew she probably didn’t “see” at all, but I could feel the collectively held breath of my audience so I wasn’t about to stop. “In your story you also need to put a shocker, something straight out of a horror novel.”
“But I thought this was a romance novel.”
“Oh, no! You must never call it that. The people who write these books need for you to believe that they’re far above romance writers and horror writers and mystery writers. That’s why they bury all those stories deep inside their books; they can’t risk association with a genre writer. In fact, prize-winning authors have to bury the story so deep that the judges can barely see them.”
Autumn was looking puzzled.
“Okay, let me give you an example. In a romance novel two gorgeous people meet and immediately start thinking about sex, right?”
“Yes…”
“That’s how it is in real life, too, but if you want to win a prize, your characters must never think about sex except in a self-deprecating way. The judges love characters who think they’re unattractive, and who’ve failed at most things they’ve tried. And, by the way, the judges also love incomplete sentences.”
“But I thought—”
“That sentences need a subject and verb? True, they do. Except in prize-winning novels. In a regular novel—one that’s not about to win a prize, that is—the author would write something like ‘After she said goodbye, she turned and went up the stairs.’ A prizewinner would write ‘Said goodbye. Up the stairs. Wished she’d said au revoir.’ See? It’s different. And adding the French helps, too.”
“I like the first way better. It would be easier to read.”
“But this isn’t about ‘easy to read.’ ‘Easy to read’ isn’t ‘intellectual.’ This is about reading a mystery, a horror book, and a love story while believing you’re a superior being who doesn’t read ‘those kind’ of novels. Oh. And it helps to be a woman whose first name is a variation of Ann. No one named Blanche L’Amour will ever win a literary prize.”
When Autumn realized I’d finished, she leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “You’re funny,” she said. “You should marry Cord’s brother.”
I had to stand up to hide the shiver that ran down my spine. Only in my worst nightmare would I marry into that family. Only if—
My thoughts suddenly stopped because standing in front of me, just behind Autumn’s chair, was Ford Newcombe, one of the best-selling writers in the world. The people who’d been hovering over Autumn when she was crying had pulled back and were squashed together on each side of her chair. They were giving Mr. Newcombe lots of reverential air space around him. As befitted his stature, of course.
He was smiling slightly, his blue eyes focused on mine, as though he’d enjoyed my silly story. He had an interesting face rather than a handsome one, but his body looked soft and unexercised. He’d been writing for as long as I could remember, so I figured he had to be ancient, in his sixties, at least.
Of course I’d known he’d been living in our town for the last two years, but no one knew why. After he fired a friend of a friend of mine, I suggested that he was here because every other town in America had run him out.
I’d heard from everyone in town who could talk, even Mr. Wallace who spoke with a machine at his throat, that Ford Newcombe was impossible to work for. He was always in a bad mood, always grumpy, and nothing anyone did ever pleased him. He’d fired at least three people twenty-four hours after he’d hired them. One of them, a woman my father’s age, had told Heather’s aunt, who told Heather’s mother, who told Heather, who told all of us, that his problem was that he could no longer write. Her theory (taken off the Internet) was that his late wife had written all his books and since she’d died, there could be no more new Ford Newcombe books.
I tried to keep myself from questioning that theory aloud. If his wife wrote the books why weren’t they published under her name? This wasn’t the eighteenth century where a book needed a male pen name to make it sell, so why would anyone need to go through such a charade? But when my friends went on gossiping, I finally had to ask why. Jennifer looked at me hard and said, “Tax purposes,” then gave me silent warning that I was not “being supportive.”
So here I was, having made a fool of myself in an overlong, and ridiculous, story about Pulitzer prize-winning books, and he was staring at me. Oh, Lord, had any of his books won the Pulitzer?
Swallowing, I moved away through the people gathered around Autumn (people were always gathered around Autumn) and went to the bar to get a drink. It was one thing to make a fool of oneself in front of friends, but quite another to do it in front of a celebrity. Megarich. Megastar. I’d seen a photograph of this man with the president at the White House.
So why was he here in our nothing little town? And at Jennifer’s parent’s house on a Saturday night? Didn’t he have any presidents to visit? Emperors?
“That was…entertaining,” a voice to my left and above my head said.
I knew who it was so I took a deep breath before looking up at him. “Thanks…I guess,” I said, letting him know I’d caught the little hesitation in his praise. There were lines around his eyes, but I couldn’t tell if they were from age or world weariness. His mouth might have been nice, but it was clamped together in a hard line. I’d heard that the first four women he’d fired had been sent packing because they’d made passes at him. But what had he expected? He was a rich widower. Get real.
“Would you like to work for me?” he asked.
I couldn’t help it. I burst out laughing. Not a polite, refined laugh, but a real hee haw. “Only if I had two heads,” I said before I could get control of myself.
He looked puzzled for a moment, but then he gave a little bit of a smile, so I knew he got it. Back in the sixteenth century, when the duchess of Milan was asked if she’d marry Henry the Eighth, she’d replied, “Only if I had two heads.”
“Okay, just thought I’d ask,” he said, then walked away.
That sobered me. My father said, “That tongue of yours can make paper cuts seem painless.” Now that I’d offended the one and only celebrity I’d ever met, I was sure my father was right.
I turned to the waiter behind the drinks table who’d seen and heard it all. He wasn’t local so he didn’t know my reputation for putting my foot in my mouth. Instead, he was looking at me with astonishment.
“Rum and Coke,” I said.
“Sure you don’t want a block and an ax?” he said, showing me that he, too, got my smart aleck remark.
I gave him my best drop dead look, but he just chuckled.
About ten minutes later, Kirk showed up and I breathed
a sigh of relief. Kirk was my fiancé and a great guy. He was smart and a good businessman, stable (had lived in one place and one house all his life), and good to look at. He wasn’t Autumn’s caliber, but he was nice looking. And, best of all, he didn’t have a creative bone in his body. In other words, Kirk was everything I wasn’t, everything my father hadn’t been, and everything I craved.
When he saw me he smiled and held up a finger to let me know he’d be with me in one minute. Kirk was always buying or selling something. He’d buy some dinky little business, like a cardshop from some little old lady, spend twenty grand or so, and make the store into a place that sold music and movies. Then he’d sell the shop for twice what he’d paid for it and buy something else.
Truthfully, I thought Kirk was fascinating. I liked to read and I had a passion for taking photos with my precious Nikon camera that I’d had to take out a loan to buy, but business and numbers bored me as much as they intrigued Kirk. “That’s what makes us good together,” he said. “Opposites attract.”
Since you can’t pay the rent by wandering through the woods looking for things to photograph, I had a job that kept me around books all day. I did cataloging and research for a professor at the local university. The university had an unwritten requirement that its professors must publish something every few years, so old Professor Hartshorn had spent years pretending he was working on a book. What he really did was hire young girls to research some subject, then he’d criticize them until they quit. That way he could blame the secretary for the work not being done.
I knew this is what he did when he hired me (everybody in town knew he did this) but I came up with a plan to thwart him. I knew from the gossip among his former secretaries that he waited a month before starting to make their lives hell, so during that month I put together a chapter of a book on President James Buchanan. My father had read everything written about the man and used to tell me about him, so I was somewhat of an expert myself. Buchanan was a lifelong bachelor and even during his lifetime it was hinted that he was gay. The truth was that my father was just pretending interest in this long-dead president. Actually, my father had been half in love with Buchanan’s niece who was his White House hostess, the twenty-six-year-old, lush-bosomed Harriet Lane. Nobody else’s dad carried a photo in his wallet of a woman born in 1830.