Faking Life Page 18

  Larry was drawn to me, the same way that pretty girls and nerdy guys stick together in high school. He gravitated to what felt right, to someone who could understand his pain, someone who could correctly diagnose him. Coping with the disease is easier when you spend time with others afflicted.

  Just like Larry and Gerald, I've been beaten down for so long, the fists flying like hummingbird wings, that I couldn't see them anymore. It's cadence, part of my daily ritual, and my life just doesn't make sense without it. I am that frightened boy in the corner, pelted by dodgeballs thrown by people who have forced me to play their game. I've let them set the rules while I didn't even know what they were. Gerald couldn't hold his own against better athletes, but in seventh grade he placed second in the New York State Chess Championships and our school commemorated November tenth “Gerald Levinson Day”.

  There is no John Gillis Day.

  Today, across the bar, I saw a scared child cowering in the corner, praying the hurt wouldn't come. One day, if I'm not careful, I might wake up with the whole world pelting me and wondering how I let it happen. Wishing I'd fought back while I still could.

  I need to fight back. I need to step out of the corner. I don't want to recognize fear in anyone else's face. I don't want to be anyone's mirror image, especially my own.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Entering the subway Monday morning, Esther caught her heel on the platform, twisted an ankle, and fumbled a tube of lip-gloss, which tumbled onto the tracks where it was likely carried off by a family of beagle-sized rodents. If she'd asked for her day to begin in the shittiest way possible, she would have been satisfied.

  Esther watched her fellow commuters, the other straphangers, and wondered if they'd ever felt like she did. She couldn't tell from their expressions, so she tried to read it in their gestures, their subtle mannerisms. She hoped she wasn't the only one who'd become disillusioned. Apathy was a terrible state of mind, so Esther did her best to pretend it wasn't as uncommon as she was afraid it was.

  When she arrived at the office, the new section of John Gillis's manuscript was sitting on her desk. Attached was a Post-It note from Nico asking to see her when she'd read it. The pages looked stale, a dirty off-white as though they'd been left in a coal mine. She put down her coffee, took the pages and quickly scanned the cover. Her heart drummed faster as she imagined what lay inside.

  The office was quiet, not unusual for a Monday morning, so she took slowly sipped her coffee and read her email. Nico's door was closed, but Esther could hear faint murmurs behind it. He spoke in staccato bursts and then paused, waiting for whomever he was speaking with to respond. After trying unsuccessfully for half an hour to decipher what Nico was saying, Esther began reading.

  She'd nearly finished when Nico came out of his office, rubbing his hands together, a slight smirk on his lips. She didn't care why he was happy. Maybe he'd gotten a higher offer, though she knew he was gleefully looking forward to setting an auction date. He wanted the bidding to be a war, with houses fighting tooth and nail for John Gillis. They'd have to earn the privilege to paste their logo on the book's spine. Then again if someone made an offer that was too good to pass up…

  “Well,” Nico said, sitting down on the edge of her desk and brushing the queries aside, toppling several of them onto the floor. Esther didn't move. She just stared at him.

  “I just got off the phone with Laura Brigham. She wants Gillis for their Fall catalogue and offered half a million dollars. I told her that wouldn't fly, but she said she'll try to get it up. They think it'll be a great book for college freshman, a kind of 'if you don't get good grades you'll end up like this' warning. Have you read the pages yet? Aren't they magnificent?” Esther nodded ambivalently and opened a query. Nico finally noticed the pile on the floor. “Est, what is all this?”

  “Today's queries,” she said, reading the letter in her hands. She paused, then put it in the 'maybe' pile. She picked up the stack, four in all, and handed them to Nico. “These are the ones I thought deserved a look.” Nico looked at her curiously.

  “That's quite a few, are you sure they're all good enough to warrant consideration?” Esther nodded like she hadn't been surer of anything in her life. “Well, let Frank take a peek. I have too much on my plate right now.” Esther could sense her silence at this request said more than enough.

  “Frank,” Nico said with a booming voice that caused Esther to whip her head around. Frank entered, wearing acid-washed jeans and—were those sunglasses?—a Grateful Dead t-shirt. Frank didn't seem the type to own any Dead albums and Esther was willing to bet he couldn't name more than three of their songs.

  “Did we do away with the dress code or something?” she asked. Her question went ignored.

  “Frank, Esther's kind of backed up here with all the queries. Would you give her a hand?” Nico gathered up the letters from the floor and held them out to Frank.

  “Give me them back Nic,” she said, grabbing them from his hands. He didn't resist, and she swore she heard a soft snicker when two letters fell back to the ground, nestling between her feet. Nico looked down at them scornfully. He used his feet to scoop them together, then bent down and picked them up.

  “Are these what this is all about?” Nico said, eyes wide, accusing. He glared at the letters. Esther shook her head, but couldn't bring herself to meet his eyes. “Cause I'll tell you something, whatever you think of these, they're all bullshit now.” He threw the mangled letters into the recycling bin at Esther's feet. Horror swept through her like bitter rain. Frank wasn't smiling, but he didn't seem to have a problem with Nico's actions.

  “I know this is about John Gillis. I also know that you hate some of the things I've done. Well, a project like this comes along once in a lifetime, and you'll learn that you don't let these things slip away, no matter what happens. Because opportunities like this are what you work your whole career for.”

  He didn't acknowledge Frank. His words were directed towards Esther, goading her, trying to elicit a reaction. She didn't want him to know that she cared more deeply about John Gillis than anything she could remember. She needed him to keep her going. She needed to believe that everything would end like she hoped it would. She was scared to acknowledge it, but she knew Nico needed her to make it happen. But at the end of the day, Esther was terrified that every thought and word on those pages might have the invisible fingerprints of Nico Vanetti.

  “Don't get down, Esther. I know what you're thinking, because I once thought like that,” Nico said. He leaned against the wall, remembrances washing over his face. “God, did I love to read. I'd go through almost a book a day. Sometimes I'd have to reread pages two or three times because I was so eager to find out what happened at the end that I wouldn't pay attention to anything in between. I wanted the resolution, the catharsis. I wanted to see what happened to all the characters I'd grown to love. But in my haste, I'd miss things about those people that would endear them to me even more.” Esther felt hot tears welling up in her eyes. She wanted to grab John's pages and shield them from Nico, keep them all to herself where they couldn't be touched.

  He continued. “What you're doing now is what I used to do. You're not caring about the characters, the relationships you've built. You want there to be a happy ending and you want the book to sell and you want Gillis to make millions of dollars and you want our commission to come and the agency to be saved but what you aren't seeing is what happens in the middle. Life isn't about happy endings. Things don't always end the way you want.”

  Frank took that as his chance to pipe in. “I don't think she really gets what…”

  “Not now Frank,” Nico said. Frank tucked his thumbs into his jeans and slunk back to his desk.

  Nico went into his office and dragged a chair over to Esther's desk. She was trying to hold in her breath, trying to suck the tears back into her eyes where they could disappear.

  “Look at you,” Nico said. He took a tissue from her desk and dabbed gently at her cheek.
She grabbed it away from him. Nico jolted back, then smiled. “You feel for John Gillis right now. But I know you're not upset at me. You know I care too, very much so. But you care about him, and that's what I love about you. That's why I know this project is going to work. But in this business you need to be detached from your projects, otherwise everything becomes too personal. If you fall in love with something that doesn't sell, all you're left with is the empty feeling of a seed that should have been a beautiful flower.” He gently moved the query letters to the other side of the desk, unearthing the copy of Gillis's manuscript. He picked the pages up, straightened out a folded edge, and placed them into Esther hands.

  “What we have here is beautiful and it's growing,” Nico said. He slid his chair away from the desk. Although only separated by a foot, Esther felt like they were a million miles apart. Nico took a deep breath and his eyes softened.

  “When I was six years old my mother had a stillbirth,” Nico said. Esther stopped rubbing her eyes and looked up at him, her vision blurry. She opened her mouth but no words came out.

  “I was twelve years old when she became pregnant with my brother, Paulo. They knew what they wanted to name their next son before he was even conceived. Then in the seventh month, all of a sudden she wasn't pregnant anymore. I was in grade school. Most days I walked home alone, the cobblestones sharp against my heels, but one day when the bell rang my father was outside waiting for me. He wasn't crying, but I could tell he had been. I knew it was my mother the second I saw him, and I started to cry too. I ran up and he took me in his arms, and he just lost it. I remember her stomach looking so big one morning, thinking a giant egg was going to come out of her, and then the next day it was flat, like someone had taken a pin and popped her. I remember my mother and my father sitting on our living room couch, her head buried in his arms, my father looking around the room helplessly. I remember how much she cried and I remember every sound she made and every tear she shed. I didn't think my family would ever recover. But you know what? Two years later she gave birth to my sister, and for every wail and every tear she shed for Paulo, she shed twice as many in joy for Annalisa. What I'm saying is, happiness counts for so much more than sadness, and what you're feeling right now is the sadness that comes before the joy. They're intertwined Esther; you can't have one without the other. But if you try to skip over the hardships, the happiness won't be nearly as sweet.”

  Esther felt hot tears well up when Nico finished, a great weight pressing on her abdomen. She stared into Nico's eyes and knew every word was the truth. He was laying himself bare, naked, for her to see.

  “What's sweet?” Frank said, sipping loudly from his cone-shaped cup as he sauntered in. Nico scowled and shooed him away. Nico shared a smile with Esther as Frank left, bewildered. Then he put his hand on her shoulder. Nico's grip was iron, yet strangely contoured, like a malleable metal that could be shaped into a dangerous weapon. Nico let the hand rest for a moment, then stood up, took his chair and went back into his office.

  Esther looked at the pile on her desk and wiped her eyes. John was her source of passion, of inspiration. He was her light in the darkness, but that light was fading fast. She needed to regain some of it.

  She opened up a query and read it. The note was from a woman in Dover who'd written a 300-page eulogy to her recently deceased parakeet Bippy. She stuck it in the 'Reject' pile and moved on.

  Esther wanted to go back to Slappy's, maybe have a drink, see if John had returned to work. She longed to watch his hands move behind the bar, fluent yet rushed, as though hoping each drink might be his last. I could, she thought, really go for a stiff drink. That's an easy way to kill two birds with one stone. She took out her day planner and wrote John Gillis in bold letters at the top, then let it sit open on her desk for the rest of the day. She closed her eyes and prayed that the middle would soon be forgotten, that everything would end alright.

  Chapter Twenty

  Frank Menegaro didn't care much for the book business. He considered the vast majority of authors to be stuck-up assholes, people he wouldn't associate himself with if he wasn't paid to do so. Plump, old white men who wouldn't know a suntan if a Coppertone truck hit them in the ass. “Anyone can write a book,” he'd sniffed to his friends on many occasions. “But most of 'em don't make any money.”

  He'd stumbled into his job at Vanetti Literati a month after returning from Prague. His parents had gotten sick of Frank lounging around the house all day, eating their food and costing them $50 a week in overdue movie rentals. He'd proposed the post-collegiate vacation with the logic that if he was going to be lethargic, he might as well take in some culture.

  The job had come about when Frank's father, a well-respected orthopedic surgeon operated on a patient named Bill Lawson. Lawson was an editor, and a well-paid one at that. After one of many successful surgeries Carl Menegaro had performed on him—six alone on a hangnail that wouldn't go away—Lawson offered restitution for keeping him in good health. To Frank, Lawson was an old-school thinker, a dusty relic of a man who thought he still lived on the barter system. The fees alone were a handsome gift to Frank's father, but when Lawson mentioned he had a colleague in need of an assistant, Frank's resume (with a few minor exaggerations) magically leapt to the top of the pile.

  His interview with Nico had gone extremely well. Frank had no idea what the criteria was to work at an agency, and was relieved when Nico's questions were ones he could answer with top-of-the-head bullshit.

  “Who are your favorite authors?”

  King. Grisham. Clancy.

  “How many books would you say you read over the course of a year?”

  Oh, a lot I suppose. Fifty, sixty.

  “What would you say is your favorite book, Frank?”

  Oh, that's a toughie Mr. Vanetti. I'd have to go with Catcher in the Rye. It's just such a classic, you know?

  Nico smiled, as though it was the answer he'd been looking for. Frank congratulated himself, went out and got drunk.

  Working at the agency was easy. Most days were the same, except when Nico was at a lunch or attending a conference. Then he could surf the net without looking over his shoulder, although he had a feeling Esther was constantly sneering behind his back.

  “I want to see you take more initiative,” Nico would sometimes say to him, always out of Esther's earshot. “Hang out with Esther while she works, see how she does things. She has a good eye. Take on a few queries and see what you can do with them. See if you can dig up a diamond in the rough.”

  In Frank's opinion, he didn't need to prove his initiative. He was sure that if he really wanted to, he could run the business better than Nico. Get their authors a million bucks each. He had people skills. He'd have no problem convincing editors that every one of their books was going to hit number one in its first week out.

  Nico had confided in him the details of the Gillis book, about how he'd persuaded the owner of Slappy's Slop House to bust him down to a crappy shift, to humiliate him. “It makes sense,” Nico had said to him. “It gives Gillis a different perspective on things, makes him want it more. He's been working in the same bar in the same capacity for six years, and if we really want this thing to fly we've got to shake things up.”

  Makes sense, Frank thought. But why stop there?

  Frank respected Nico's opinion, and if Nico felt the project was worth it, then it probably was. After all, dull blades could still draw blood. Besides, most of the memoirs he'd read were whiny grade school shit; guys crying because they'd accidentally caught Mommy and Daddy in the sack. That stuff about Gillis getting laid by his babysitter, it was a total crock. Never once had Frank heard someone complain about a lay, even if it was a bad one by a club skank.

  Play it off, they'd say. If the girl was too ugly to mention or didn't return phone calls, play it off. It was nothing to begin with.

  Frank buttoned up his coat as he walked down Sixth Avenue, nearing NYU territory. Kids in puffy jackets and exploding backpacks trudged t
o class like they were hauling the world's biggest burdens.

  Take some initiative, Frank. He'd show Nico what initiative was. He wanted a team player? Frank would take this fucking team and carry it.

  He'd left his Yankees hat at home this time, not wanting to take a chance on being recognized. The way Nico described Artie, Frank was sure he'd recognize him with no problem. They were all the same, those lower East side bar owners. Greasy little bald men wearing shiny suits, scanning the crowd for the prettiest girl to give their sad, wrinkled libidos a workout. They all came from money, too. They opened the same type of bars they'd gone to as kids, hoping one day they their place would draw the same caliber tail.

  Normally Frank wouldn't be caught dead in a place like Slappy's Slop House. The beer was overpriced and the clientele was the worst kind of faux trendy. He preferred clubs, where there was more room, where the dance floors weren't cheap parquet and the DJ's didn't care what MTV considered hip.

  And Esther.

  Always condescending, always acting like he had no business opening his mouth. She was one of those people who'd write a book like Gillis. All self-loathing and poor me, poor me crap. She made a steady living and worked in the entertainment biz, what did she have to be pissed about? Even if books weren't as glamorous as movies or T.V., they were still part of the same universe. She was making contacts other people would kill for.

  He didn't hold a grudge when she'd turned him down. Even if she had said yes, Frank's judgment would have eventually prevailed. He'd gotten girls that could put her to shame. Girls with luscious, firm breasts—real or fake, it didn't matter—and asses you could crack a walnut on. After years of stealing the panties off of New York's best women, not hooking up with Esther was like dropping a penny after robbing a bank.