Blind Submission Page 9

  When Alice arrived at the Agency, the office was already a hive of activity. The phones and faxes were humming as Carol Moore’s well trained staff took their places at their desks. Alice observed her co-workers as she greeted them. There was Jewel, a tall, stunning natural blonde who could easily have made a career in modeling if she wanted to. According to Carol Moore, Jewel’s good looks had always been more of a hindrance to her than anything else. Jewel was simply too smart for a career on the runway, Carol said. As a woman with secrets of her own, Alice found this difficult to believe and thought that Jewel probably had some sort of hidden disfigurement or weakness. Every woman had something in her past she was ashamed of. Alice planned to find out what this was and use it to her advantage.

  There was Ricardo, Carol Moore’s office manager. Ricardo was an extremely well-dressed and very handsome man who was, according to Carol Moore, as smart as Jewel. Ricardo kept the office lively with jokes and imitations of movie stars and was always very polite. Ricardo had a photograph of a wife and daughter on his desk, but Alice had looked at the photo and decided that it had come with the frame because the only woman Ricardo ever spoke about lovingly was Carol Moore herself. Yes, Alice thought, Ricardo too had something to hide. Everyone, Alice knew, had something to hide.

  And then there was Carol Moore herself. Like Jewel, Carol Moore was very beautiful. Alice thought she had the look of an older Grace Kelly. Alice had researched Carol Moore before she applied for the job, so she knew that Carol had been a force in the literary world for almost thirty years, but she was carrying those years very well. Alice also knew that Carol Moore had grown up practically destitute and had worked very hard to obtain her position of power. And Carol Moore was a powerful woman. She represented famous writers from all over the world, some of them Nobel Laureates. When Carol Moore called, publishers listened. Alice was counting on that.

  In their meager beginnings, Alice and Carol were similar. During her interview, Alice had implied, without ever seeming to, that she and Carol Moore shared a certain struggle. Alice was counting on Carol to feel drawn to her as a protégé and as someone Carol wanted to make in her own image. That would suit Alice very well indeed. Alice had cut off relations with her own mother long ago in an act of cruel finality and had never known much about what it meant to be a good daughter. But she was a quick study and planned to play on every maternal instinct Carol Moore possessed.

  For now, Alice had positioned herself as close to Carol as she could. She hadn’t minded at all that her title was that of assistant. For Alice’s needs, her position was, at the moment, perfect. She was close to Carol, close to the files, and, most importantly, the receiver of all the mail that came into the office. On all three fronts, Alice had made excellent progress. Besides, Alice didn’t plan to remain Carol’s assistant for very much longer. She had started laying plenty of groundwork. Everybody Alice had ever known, both biblically and in less physical ways, who counted in any way or who could be useful in any way now knew where Alice was employed.

  There was much excitement in the office when Alice took her place at her desk and began to prepare a list of the day’s appointments. Carol Moore had just agreed to represent Vaughn Blue, an internationally known rock star. Vaughn was writing a memoir of his life in the business, much of which involved the sex and drugs that the music industry was known for. Although the book would tell all and name names, Carol Moore was most excited by the fact that Vaughn Blue was a brilliant writer. Vaughn Blue was something of a genius. He held a PhD, which he had completed before he broke onto the music scene, and his book would appeal both to celebrity hounds and book critics. The fact that he was one of America’s sexiest men didn’t hurt either.

  Alice finished preparing her list and took it to Carol Moore who was on the phone and swaddled in Versace couture. Carol smiled at Alice and beckoned for her to sit on the chair opposite Carol’s desk.

  “I have a special assignment for you today,” Carol Moore told Alice.

  “Terrific,” Alice said. “What is it?”

  “Vaughn Blue is coming by the office to sign his contract at around noon,” Carol said, “and I’d like you to take him to lunch. My treat, of course. I’d love to go myself, but I already have lunch scheduled with a publisher who will probably want to buy Vaughn’s book! So what do you say? How does lunch with a rock star sound?”

  “Fabulous!” Alice panted. “I’m so excited!”

  Alice hoped she wasn’t laying it on too thick in an effort to conceal her distaste. Dining with one of America’s sexiest men would have held much more appeal if that man wasn’t also a writer because, in her deepest heart, Alice hated writers. This was one of her secrets.

  That she was a writer herself was another.

  I rubbed my eyes, taking them off the pages in front of me. The words had been slipping and blurring and I struggled to retain focus. It was very early and I was very tired, but I had to keep reading. This, after all, was “the bestseller” that had been promised by letter, by fax, and now by submission from our “next star author.”

  After the author’s admitted “grandiose” claims, I’d fully expected the manuscript to be awful. Because I thought I’d be able to reject it quickly, I hadn’t even bothered to read it the night before, electing instead to get some much-needed sleep. But I was surprised to find that it wasn’t awful at all. Strange, yes, and maybe even a little unsettling, but definitely not out-and-out bad. I read the cover letter again. There was no return address, no phone number, and no name. Was the anonymous-author conceit supposed to tie in to the novel itself? Or was it just to keep us interested enough to ask for more? I leaned over, stretching and touching my toes in an effort to get more blood flowing to my brain so that I could think a little more clearly.

  It had been six weeks since I’d started working for Lucy. Every day of those six weeks had felt like an eternity in itself, but all put together they seemed to have raced by, giving me a strange split perception of the passage of time—a perception only reinforced by Lucy.

  It had only been a few weeks since the sale of Parco Lambro, for example, yet she acted as if the auction were a distant memory. Although she’d sold two more projects since then, neither was auctioned or came close to generating either the excitement or the cash of Damiano’s. Still, the first of those two, a comic novel about a vampire-hunting dog (“The Dogs of Babel meets The Historian,” as Lucy had pitched it), had sold for a respectable seventy-five thousand dollars and the second, a cultural history of lawn ornaments, had gone for fifty thousand. I’d brought both projects to Lucy’s attention. The first had come directly from my reading pile and I’d rescued the second from a stack of rejections that were due to be returned when the cute photo of a garden gnome on the cover letter caught my eye.

  But Lucy didn’t seem to take much satisfaction from either of those sales and was getting edgy, asking every day if I’d found something that could compare to Parco Lambro. “It has to have power,” she told me. “Self-help is bread and butter and nonfiction’s hit or miss. I need something that will make them cry. When they cry, you know it’s going to be expensive.” I wanted to deliver for her. I, too, wanted to make them cry.

  I passed my eyes over the manuscript in front of me again. It wasn’t going to bring anyone to tears, I thought, and it needed some serious work, but it was different from anything else I’d seen lately. Despite its clumsy prose, there was something captivating and even subtly dark about it. And then there was the fact that it was set in a literary agency, something that added a whole other level of weirdness to it. The author’s anonymity had achieved its desired purpose, I decided; it had gotten my—our—attention. The author had obviously submitted before, probably even to us, and had figured out how to keep from getting rejected instantly. And now I’d read the manuscript. And it wasn’t bad. It had potential, I decided, and so I’d pass it on to Lucy.

  While I booted up my computer to write the report, I gave a backward glance at my bed, wher
e Malcolm was sleeping soundly. And why shouldn’t he, I thought. Everyone but doughnut-makers and hospital workers were sleeping at this hour of the morning. My eyes itched with fatigue as I stared longingly in the direction of my pillow. Malcolm’s body was a long shape deep under the covers. I could see only a bit of gold hair and the sloping edge of one cheekbone over the top of the fabric. It took a tremendous amount of will not to abandon my post and crawl in next to him. I didn’t sleep until sunrise anymore, or even close to it. These predawn hours had emerged as the only time I had to get caught up on the avalanche of work that fell on me every day.

  A big part of that catching up had to do with Anna. Her reading had become my reading and her reports were starting to become a big problem for me. I’d already rescued two good novels from the reject pile that she thought were “stupid” and “boring,” two of her favorite adjectives. She was, rightly, convinced that I was undercutting her opinion by championing her rejects. Anna felt that once she’d put the kibosh on a manuscript, my function as a second reader should only be to support her. Of course, Lucy had made me the second reader on Anna’s manuscripts for the exact opposite reason. All this had served to deepen Anna’s hostility toward me. When I wrote my own reports on her rejects, I had to get very creative, writing in a fashion that would seem to support Anna’s statements without pointing out what she’d missed, while implying that she was completely wrong in her assessments without appearing to do so at all. It was starting to become an exhausting process. It occurred to me once again that Lucy should just take Anna off the reading list altogether. But it seemed to me that Lucy got some sort of weird pleasure out of the growing conflict between Anna and me over the reading pile. During my first few days at the office, when Anna had still been chatty with me, she’d told me that Lucy was “grooming” her to become another agent in the office. Considering the fact that Lucy seemed to find the very thought of another agent in the office repugnant, I suspected Anna was not only an inadequate reader but delusional as well. Besides, if Lucy wanted to groom anyone to be an agent, she’d look to me.

  I put Anna out of my mind, rubbed the cold out of my fingers, and started hitting the keyboard.

  Title: BLIND SUBMISSION

  Author: ?

  Genre: Fiction

  Reader: Angel

  This is an interesting piece. It came in unsolicited through the mail, but the author, who is anonymous at this point, lists no phone number or address and only has an e-mail address as a contact. I suppose this adds some intrigue, since the novel is set in a literary agency (!!!), but it also means we know nothing about previous publishing credits, etc. My guess, judging from the writing, is that there aren’t any. The author didn’t provide us with a synopsis, either.

  What this novel seems to be is something of a reverse “insider revenge” novel or, as the New York Times calls it, “bite-the-boss fiction.” Here, instead of having a bitch-from-hell boss and a long-suffering assistant, we’ve got a manipulative assistant with a hidden agenda—something like The Nanny Diaries or The Devil Wears Prada but darker and told from the other side. I think the idea has potential, but I’ve got a couple of concerns. One is the setting. While I like the idea of setting a novel in a literary agency (the fact that it’s close to home notwithstanding), the conventional wisdom is that books set in the publishing world don’t sell. My other concern is the writing, which just seems a little stiff. And, although it feels as if the author also wants to come out right away with mystery and intrigue, the pacing is slow and the characters don’t really stand out, especially the main character, Alice, who is supposedly “a woman with secrets.” The writing is not particularly descriptive and, when it is, the descriptions are awkward. “The sun looked like cold butter,” for example. The dialogue, too, seems a bit forced.

  However, while these aren’t minor details, they are workable. I think we should ask to read more (the author says there is more) to see if the pace picks up and if the writing gets stronger. If the author is willing (and able) to revise, this novel could be quite promising.

  By the time I printed out the report, the small clock on my desk read 6:30 A.M. Lucy had succeeded in training me to function on New York time, and I couldn’t help thinking that people in that city were already at their desks and working. Time was getting short. I had to be at the office at eight and I had a half-hour drive ahead of me. The last manuscript in my pile, a memoir from an Alaskan hairstylist titled Perm-or-Frost, was going to have to wait. I didn’t have high hopes for it, anyway.

  As usual, the sound of my morning shower and hair dryer did nothing to interrupt Malcolm’s slumber. Watching him sleep had become something of a pattern for me. Before I started working for Lucy, he’d spent an average of four nights a week at my apartment, but since my first day, he’d come over every night, whether he was working late shifts at the restaurant or not. Not that this meant we were actually spending more time together. It was more like we were spending more time next to each other. My nights were consumed with reading. Malcolm watched TV. Or slept. Or pointedly reread his own manuscript.

  Malcolm’s novel; another thing I was going to have to deal with soon, I thought. Despite his protests that I was the major beneficiary of my new job, Malcolm had wasted no time in bringing his hefty manuscript over to my place. Of course, he hadn’t demanded, or even suggested, that I take it to Lucy, oh no, he’d just sort of placed it on the floor beside the bed, so that I could “look it over, you know, to give it the final polish.”

  Right around the time of the Parco Lambro auction, Malcolm casually mentioned, “You know, whenever you want to take a look at my manuscript, Angel, please feel free. You’ve clearly got the magic touch.”

  “Let’s wait a bit,” I told him at the time. “It’s too early for me to—”

  “I’m just saying, Angel, if you want to look at it—”

  “Right, of course.”

  “And I’ve started working on something else, by the way.” He gave me a canary-eating cat smile and dropped his voice to a seductive whisper. “I’m really excited about this new one.”

  “Really? That’s great.”

  “You’re an inspiration to me, Angel. Since you’ve become the Mistress of Literature, I’ve been very productive. And notice, I’m not asking you to look at this new one.”

  “I know, Malcolm. I’ll look at Bridge of Lies. I promise.”

  But I hadn’t looked at it and wasn’t sure I wanted to. Malcolm had stopped mentioning his book over the last week or two, but his silence felt heavier and more demanding than his “suggestion” that I read it. I knew I’d have to give it to Lucy at some point, but what would she think if this novel turned out to be less than stellar? And what if she gave it to Anna to read? I shuddered at the thought. There wasn’t going to be an easy way out of this one. I felt a tiny flicker of resentment flare in the back of my brain. I couldn’t help wishing that Malcolm hadn’t put me in this position so soon, despite the guilt that wish brought in its wake. After all, if it hadn’t been for Malcolm, I wouldn’t even have this job. And, despite its challenges, I really did love my job. I’d never worked as hard in my life, but I’d also never experienced the kind of anticipatory rush I felt every time I sat down at my desk. Working for Lucy was…extreme seemed a fitting word. And with extremes, you had to expect both big highs and low lows.

  I searched my closet for something presentable to wear and, as I did every morning, cursed Lucy’s no-jeans policy. My new schedule didn’t allow much time for things like laundry, so my wardrobe offered little in the way of acceptable items. I grabbed my last pair of borderline-clean pants and threw them on. I had no time or inclination to give myself a final inspection in the mirror and told myself that it didn’t matter. In all the time I’d been working there, there had not been a single visitor to the office.

  I heard Malcolm stir and sigh as I gathered my purse, manuscripts, and keys. I bent down into an awkward kneel by the bed so that my face was level with his.

/>   “Hey,” I whispered. “I’m on my way out. See you later?”

  Malcolm smiled, his eyes half-closed, and reached out his arm to cover my shoulders. I could feel the enticing warmth of his skin through my shirt. He brushed the tips of his fingers across my cheek.

  “Mmm, you smell so good,” he said, deepening the corners of his smile. He pulled a strand of my hair free and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. A lewd gleam crept into his eyes. “Got a minute before you leave?”

  “I really, really don’t,” I told him, and hoped that the regret in my voice sounded genuine.

  “You sure, Angel?” he said, pulling me gently toward him. Our lips met for one moment before I lost my balance and slipped off the edge of the bed, dropping my purse and keys and kicking paper as I tried to find purchase on the floor.

  “Baby, are you okay?” Malcolm looked down at me, laughter dying in his throat as we both saw that I’d fallen on his manuscript, tearing a couple of pages and flipping the rest across the floor.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, quickly shoveling it back into place. “I just—”