Annalisa nodded. She’d tried to bring up the topic several times, but every time, he changed the subject. “I need to know, Billy. Otherwise, it’s not right, your spending so much time with me. People ought to be paid for their work.”
“On art, I take a two percent commission. From the dealer,” Billy said, pressing his lips together.
Annalisa was relieved. Billy occasionally mentioned a million-dollar sale in which he’d been involved, and after doing the math, she came up with twenty thousand dollars as his fee. “You must be rich, Billy,” she’d said, half joking.
“My dear,” Billy said, “I can barely afford to live in Manhattan.”
Now, in the gallery, Billy took a step back and, folding his arms, nodded at the photograph as if he approved. “It’s very modern, but the com-position is classic mother and child,” he said. The photograph was a hundred thousand dollars. Annalisa, feeling the sharp pang of guilt that was always under the surface due to her own good fortune, bought it.
She paid with a MasterCard, which Billy said everyone used for large purchases in order to get extra airline miles. Not that any of these people needed airline miles, as most of them flew in private planes. Nevertheless, leaving the gallery with the bubble-wrapped photograph in the trunk of the car, Annalisa reminded herself that it was two thousand dollars in Billy’s pocket. It was the least she could do.
Lola sat at the long counter in the window of Starbucks, reading through a printout of an article she’d found on the Internet. She hadn’t been able to work herself up for a trip to the library after all. As she’d suspected, it would have been a waste of time anyway. There was plenty of information online. Lola adjusted her glasses and prepared to read.
On the way to Starbucks, she’d purchased a pair of black frames in order to appear more serious. Apparently, the glasses were working. As she was reading about Queen Mary’s obsession with Catholicism, a nerdy young man sat down next to her, opened a laptop, and kept jerking his head above it to stare at her. Lola did her best to ignore him, keeping her head down and pretending to be absorbed in the text. From what she could gather, Queen Mary, who was described as “sickley and fraile,”
which Lola interpreted as anorexic, was some kind of sixteenth-century fashionista who never appeared in public without wearing millions of dollars’ worth of jewelry in order to remind the masses of the power and wealth of the Catholic Church. Lola looked up from her reading and saw that the nerd was staring at her. She looked down at the pages, and when she looked up, he was still staring. He had reddish-blond hair and freckles but was better-looking than her first assessment. Finally, he spoke.
“Did you know those are men’s?” he asked.
“What?” she said, giving him a glare that should have sent him away.
The nerdle wasn’t put off. “Your glasses,” he said. “Those are men’s glasses. Are they even real?”
“Of course they’re real,” she said.
He rolled his eyes. “Do they have a real prescription in them? Or are they just for show?”
“It’s none of your business,” she said, adding, for good measure, a threatening, “if you know what I mean.”
“All you girls wear glasses now,” the young man continued on, unabated.
“And you know they’re fake. How many twenty-two-year-olds need glasses? Glasses are for old people. It’s another one of those fake things that girls do.”
She sat back on her stool. “So?”
“So I was wondering if you were one of those fake girls. You look like a fake girl. But you might be real.”
“Why should you care?”
“I think you’re kind of cute?” he asked sarcastically. “Maybe you can give me your name, and I can leave you a message on Facebook?”
Lola gave him a cold, superior smile. “I already have a boyfriend, thanks.”
“Who said I wanted to be your boyfriend? Christ, girls in New York are so arrogant.”
“You’re pathetic,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “And look at you. You’re wearing designer clothes at a Starbucks, your hair is blown dry, and you have a spray tan. Probably from City Sun. They’re the only ones who do that particular shade of bronze.”
Lola wondered how this kid knew about the subtleties of spray tans.
“And look at you,” she said in her most patronizing tone of voice. “You’re wearing plaid pants.”
“Vintage,” the kid said. “There’s a difference.”
Lola gathered her papers and stood up.
“Leaving?” the kid asked. “So soon?” He stood up and fished around in the back pocket of his hideous plaid pants. They were not even Burberry plaid, Lola thought, which she could have excused. He handed her a card.
THAYER CORE, it read. In the bottom right-hand corner was a 212 phone number. “Now that you know my name, will you tell me yours?” he said.
“Why would I do that?” Lola asked.
“New York’s a tricky place,” he said. “And I’m the joker.”
9
A few weeks later, James Gooch sat in the office of his publisher.
“Books are like movies now,” Redmon Richardly said, waving his hand as if to dismiss the whole lot. “You get as much publicity as you can, have a big first week, and then drop off from there. There’s no traction anymore. Not like the old days. The audience wants something new every week. And then there are the big corporations. All they care about is the bottom line. They push the publishers to get new product out there. Makes them feel like their people are doing something. It’s heinous, corporations controlling creativity. It’s worse than government propaganda.”
“Uh-huh,” James said. He looked around Redmon’s new office and felt sad. The old office used to be in a town house in the West Village, filled with manuscripts and books and frayed Oriental carpets that Redmon had taken from his grandmother’s house in the South. There was an old down-filled yellow couch that you sat on while you waited to see Redmon, and you leafed through a pile of magazines and watched the pretty girls go in and out. Redmon was considered one of the greats back then. He published new talent and edgy fiction, and his writers were going to be the future giants. Redmon made people believe in publishing for a while — up until about 1998, James reckoned, when the Internet began to take over.
James looked past Redmon and out the plate-glass window. There was a view of the Hudson River in the distance, but it was small consolation for the cold, generic space.
“What we’re publishing now is an entertainment product,” Redmon continued. Redmon hadn’t lost his ability to pontificate about nothing, James thought, and found comfort in this fact. “Oakland’s a perfect example. He’s not so great anymore, but it doesn’t matter. He still sells copies — even for him, not as many. But it’s the same story with everyone.”
Redmon threw his hands into the air. “There’s no art anymore. Fiction used to be an art form. No more. Good, bad, it doesn’t matter. The public is only interested in the topic. ‘What’s it about?’ they ask. ‘Does it matter?’
I say. ‘It’s about life. All great books are about only one thing — life.’ But they don’t get that anymore. They want to know the topic. If it’s about shoes or abducted babies, they want to read it. And we don’t do that, James. We couldn’t even if we wanted to.”
“We certainly couldn’t,” James agreed.
“ ’Course not,” Redmon said. “But what I’m saying is ... Well, you’ve written a great book, James, an actual novel, but I don’t want you to be disappointed. We’ll definitely get on the list, right away, I hope. But as to how long we’ll stay on the list ...”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” James said. “I didn’t write the book to sell copies. I wrote it because it’s a story I needed to tell.” And I won’t be corrupted by Redmon’s cynicism, he thought. “I still believe in the public. The public knows the difference. And they’ll buy what’s good,” he added stubbornly.