Sara Gruen Page 4

  Amanda blinked at him, awaiting his response.

  “Where? Doing what?” he finally said.

  “Well, that’s the complicated part.” She looked back into her lap. “It’s in L.A.”

  “It’s what?” John said, unsure if he’d heard correctly.

  She shifted to face him and clutched his hands in a death grip. “I know this is going to sound crazy. I know that. And I know you’re going to want to say no at first, so please don’t answer right away. Maybe even sleep on it. Okay?”

  John paused for the space of several beats. “Okay.”

  Her eyes lifted and stared earnestly into his. She took a deep breath. “Sean and I wrote a treatment for a show, and he had a pitch meeting with NBC last week. Today we got the green light. They’re producing four episodes. And then, we’ll see.”

  The room came unmoored. The ceiling swirled like toilet water. John dug his heels into the carpet to remind himself that he was anchored. Sean the who-what? And what was a treatment?

  Amanda explained: she had connected with someone in an online chat room for writers, she said. His name was Sean, and they’d been corresponding for weeks. John didn’t need to worry—she knew all about the dangers of online chat rooms and had set up a Hotmail account with a fake name. They had exchanged real information only after she was sure he was legitimate. Sean had worked with the major networks for years, matching scriptwriters with various television projects. This time, the project was his, and he wanted Amanda onboard—he’d read The River Wars and was a huge fan, thought it criminal that it hadn’t gotten the review attention it deserved, because if it had, she would have been picked up by another publisher the second she was cut loose. She had the perfect voice for this project, which involved forty-something single women and a good deal of bed-hopping and was sure to hit the pulse of an enormous audience (apparently the boomer generation preferred to think of itself as in its forties rather than in its sixties). They’d collaborated on the treatment—a five-page description of the project—and Amanda stood to earn fifteen thousand an episode if NBC decided to keep it going after the initial four episodes. She hadn’t mentioned anything to John before this because she didn’t want to get his hopes up.

  John realized she’d stopped talking. Her eyes bored into his, seeking a reaction.

  “You don’t want me to do it,” she finally said.

  He struggled to form an answer, trying to give his mind enough lead time to race through the implications. “I didn’t say that. It’s a surprise, that’s all.”

  She waited for him to continue.

  “What about Recipe for Disaster?”

  “I’ve been rejected by a hundred and twenty-nine agents.”

  “But that was to letters asking for permission to send the book, right? Nobody’s actually read the thing.”

  “It doesn’t matter. No one’s going to. Apparently.”

  “Tell me why you want to be involved in this series.”

  “I want to write. It’s a way of writing.”

  “Books. You want to write books.”

  “And I’ve been rejected by every legitimate agent in the business. It’s over.”

  He stood abruptly and began pacing. What if she was right? He hated the idea of her giving up, but there was some point at which persistence became masochism.

  “Let’s think this through. What would I do in L.A.?” he said. “No newspapers are hiring. I’d never find another job. I’m lucky I still have this one.”

  “Well, that’s the thing.” She paused long enough that he knew he wasn’t going to like whatever came next. “You wouldn’t have to right away. You can keep working here. You know, until we know for sure they’re going to continue the series.”

  John’s lips moved for a full three seconds before he managed to form words. “You want to move to L.A. without me?”

  “No, no,” she said vehemently. “Of course not. We’ll commute on weekends.”

  “All the way across the country?”

  “We can alternate weekends.”

  “How would we afford all that flying? And what about your rent? You’d have to get an apartment. And a car.” John’s voice rose along with the tally.

  “We could dip into our savings—”

  He shook his head. “No. Absolutely not. And what happens if NBC decides to keep the series going? We continue to live apart?”

  “Then you join me out there. If they pick it up, I’ll be making enough that we could get by while you looked.”

  “What’s the advance?”

  Amanda dropped her gaze.

  “There’s no advance?”

  “Scripted shows cost so much to produce they just don’t have the funding …”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “It’s because of reality TV. It costs almost nothing to produce, compared to almost three million per episode for scripted shows. Networks used to produce a dozen dramas or comedies, hoping one might take. Now they produce a couple and fill up the rest of the time slots with stupid shows about stupid people apparently trying to find true love by having sex in a hot tub with a different person every night while the cameras roll. I know they should pay me. But if I say no to this there are thousands of other writers just dying for a shot at it.”

  John threw his hands in the air. They landed with a smack on his thighs. He hoped this was some kind of hallucination, that his wife was not suggesting they live on opposite sides of the country so she could follow a Hollywood chimera that, for all he knew, came attached to a piece of spam—these writers’ boards were filled with desperate people, some of them malicious, and Amanda was particularly vulnerable. He wondered whether she had paid anything to this Sean person. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, about this that smelled right.

  John’s cell phone rang, piercing a silence that had long since grown uncomfortable.

  Amanda picked it up. “Hello?” After a moment she held it out to John. “It’s your editor.”

  John raked a hand down his face and reached for the phone.

  “Hey, Elizabeth. No, it’s fine. Yeah, really.” His eyes widened. “What? Are you kidding me? Jesus God. And what about …? Is she going to be okay? … Uh-huh. Of course. Okay.” He hung up and closed his eyes. Then he turned back to Amanda. “I have to go back to Kansas.”

  “What happened?”

  “The language lab got bombed.”

  She brought a hand to her mouth. “The place from today? With the bonobos?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh my God. Who would do such a thing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are the apes okay?”

  “I don’t know,” said John. “But the scientist I interviewed was badly hurt.”

  Amanda laid a hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry.”

  John nodded, hearing her as though from a distance. His brain flashed through images of today’s visit—following Isabel to the observation area, noticing how her hair swung as she walked. Watching, rapt, as the bonobos plucked “surprises” from their backpacks, as eager as children emptying Christmas stockings. Sitting in Isabel’s office, watching her eyes flit nervously between him and the voice recorder, and registering his own physical yearning with a dreadful, guilty pang. Mbongo and his gorilla mask. Bonzi smooching the glass. That sweet infant with the naughty streak and irresistible eyes. Isabel was now in critical condition, and although Elizabeth had no details on the apes, every terrible possibility flashed through John’s head—

  “We can’t do this,” he said abruptly. “It’s impossible. Please tell me you realize this is not going to happen.”

  Amanda stared at John until he had to look down. Then she walked past him and up the stairs. A few seconds later, their bedroom door clicked shut.

  I am a fucking cad, John thought as he sank to the floor by the coffee table. He poked an oyster and watched it quiver in its shell. He stared glumly at the Osetra, which he knew he should put in the refrigerator because he had a ge
neral idea of what it had cost. He imagined Amanda, upstairs, climbing into bed and pulling the covers up to her ears, and knew he should go to her. Instead, he took the open bottle by the neck and alternately took swigs and rested it on his thigh, which was soon dotted with wet circles.

  The series seemed like too much of a fluke to be real, but what if it were? His own career was a fluke—he had intended to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a lawyer until he got the internship at the New York Gazette. He was twenty-one and found the atmosphere intoxicating—everyone around him was so smart, so sophisticated, and so wholly and unabashedly bizarre that he wanted to remain a part of it. He got to talk to important people and ask any question he wanted and then got paid to write. Paid to write? Growing up that had never even occurred to him. And every day the job changed and he met someone new, heard another story, and got another chance to either entertain people or expose something that needed to be seen. “The business of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” was one of the aphorisms his boss liked to quote. Of course, newspapers themselves were now among the afflicted. But who was he to deny someone else’s unexpected opportunity?

  It should be easy enough to confirm if the series were real—there would be a letter of offer or a contract—but then what? Everyone knew that long-distance relationships eventually fell apart. John had spent almost half his life with Amanda, and in many ways she defined it. The thought of being without her terrified him. The thought of her being surrounded by predatory males terrified him even more. She was beautiful, and so vulnerable right now, like a nerve scraped raw.

  John picked up the little spoon from the plate of caviar and examined it. It was mother-of-pearl. Amanda must have bought it for the occasion. He dug it into the glistening mound of caviar and put some in his mouth. It didn’t seem right to just swallow something so expensive and of which there was so little, so he held it in his mouth for a moment and then popped the eggs between his tongue and palate. The result was so exquisite he realized he must be doing it right. He took another little scoop. And then another.

  It couldn’t take too long to produce four episodes. She could be safely home in six months. Not that he wanted her to fail; she deserved success more than anyone else he knew.

  After graduating summa cum laude with an insightful thesis on the sociological consequences of the industrial revolution as reflected in the works of Elizabeth Gaskell, Amanda had spent almost the entire time between graduation and their move to Philadelphia writing catalog copy for an online outdoor-sports outfitter. She worked eight-hour days laboring to find new and inventive ways of describing mukluks and all-weather parkas (“top notes of Ugg with a soupçon of Piperlime, and guaranteed 100 percent cat-fur free!”). She joked that her situation could have been worse—her best friend, Gisele, who had graduated first in their class, had taken a job painting house exteriors and had recently married a man who taught sound healing to a group of raw-foodists—but John knew she was simply putting on a brave face. In her spare time, she worked on her first novel, although she was too shy to show it to John until it was complete.

  When she finally gave it to him, John flipped through the pages with a growing sense of unease. He hoped earnestly and with his soul that he was wrong—after all, his own guilty pleasures included Dan Brown and Michael Crichton—and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that the novel was missing that crucial something. Her prose was beautiful and polished and swept him along, but by the time he reached the end she had not blown up a single thing. There was no car wreck, no murder, no secret brotherhood or international plague. It was psychological and literary and while John understood that there were people who enjoyed such books, he wasn’t one of them, which was exceedingly unfortunate given that his wife had just written one and wanted his opinion. When his silence finally grew conspicuous, he lied copiously and through his teeth.

  As the manuscript made its way around New York publishing houses, Amanda—his steady, strong, unsinkable Amanda—began to crack. She developed insomnia. She gnawed her cuticles until they bled. She cooked ever more complicated meals and ate virtually nothing. She developed headaches and, for the first time ever, complained about her job. (“What’s wrong with ‘tufts of skunk’? They wanted edgy, I gave them edgy. How was I supposed to know it really was skunk? And if it was, why all the secrecy?”)

  Four and a half months passed. A handful of rejections trickled in, followed by radio silence. And then, on Amanda’s thirty-fourth birthday, her agent called. A publisher had made an offer for The River Wars and Amanda’s as-yet-unwritten second book.

  Amanda’s was a modest advance, but it allowed her to give up copywriting. Chinese cat fur be damned! With the exception of being required to publish under a pseudonym, John had never seen Amanda so happy. (“Nobody is going to buy a novel by Amanda Thigpen,” her editor had explained. “Now Amanda LaRue, on the other hand …”) The night of the book sale was the first appearance of Osetra in their household, and for that one night everything felt possible—bestseller lists, foreign editions, movie deals. John had never been so happy to be wrong.

  If the lead-up to the release of The River Wars was a frenzy of excitement and anxiety, the weeks that followed were devastating.

  There was no launch party. In retrospect, John realized that he was probably supposed to have arranged one. There were no reviews, because it had been published in paperback rather than as a hardcover, a prejudice John and Amanda didn’t understand but felt someone should have explained. Her “tour” consisted of three local signings.

  John drove Amanda to the first because she was too terrified to be counted on to steer, and when he reached across the gearbox for her hand she clung so tightly that his palm was pitted with nail marks. She practiced deep breathing in the parking lot before going in, and her hands trembled so violently that she expressed doubts about her ability to sign her name.

  The bookstore had a small table set up with a semicircle of folding chairs in front of it. Amanda’s books were piled beside two Sharpies, a plate of chocolate-chip cookies, and a bottle of water. Amanda took her seat behind the table and waited.

  Halfway through her allotted hour, a man wandered to the middle of the semicircle and settled into a chair. John hovered nearby, watching as Amanda first went pallid and then apple-red, and then smiled and steeled herself to say something. Just as she gathered breath, the man stuck his legs out, crossed his arms, and closed his eyes. Within seconds he was snoring. The color drained from Amanda’s cheeks and John nearly couldn’t contain his urge to walk over and dump his hot coffee on the man’s lap.

  The bookstore’s Events Coordinator spent the rest of the hour gamely collaring customers and dragging them to Amanda’s table. Trapped, they’d pick up the book and pretend to read the back cover, muttering and looking uncomfortable until they managed to break eye contact and wander off. At the end of the hour, the cookies were gone and the books remained. Amanda was the color of chalk.

  She insisted on driving herself to both her other signings. “Oh, fine,” she said cheerily when John asked how the second one went. Her smile lasted a couple of seconds before she dissolved into shoulder-wracking sobs. After the third signing, she was more pragmatic. “I’m screwed,” she proclaimed calmly, while filling a tumbler with equal parts vodka and orange juice.

  As the months went by a couple of foreign editions sold (her book was briefly the number-two bestseller in Taiwan, which would have been amusing if it had hit even a single list in the States). And then, out of the blue, both publisher and agent were gone. Although clearly it was through no fault of her own, she obsessed about what she might have done differently. If she’d published under Thigpen instead of LaRue, her real estate in the bookstore would have fallen somewhere between Paul Theroux and Dylan Thomas (it was widely speculated on Internet writers’ communities that Joshua Ferris’s sales were strong because of his proximity to Jonathan Safran Foer). She could have sent herself on a rea
l tour, armed with a GPS, and signed every copy of her book on the Eastern Seaboard. She could have created an interactive Web site, run contests, started a blog. John watched helplessly as she worked herself into a frenzy. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the self-flagellation ended. She called her old boss, was reinstated in her cubicle, and went back to work extolling the virtues of Gore-Tex, which turned out to have been their financial salvation, because shortly thereafter, John lost his job.

  While devastating, John’s layoff was not unexpected: every major paper had suffered massive layoffs, and the situation was particularly dire at the New York Gazette. Management announced its plans to cut a quarter of the newsroom months after everyone took what was euphemistically called a “wage concession” to avoid exactly that. A cheery memo followed, assuring them that if they all pulled together they’d be able to “do more with less!” The next memo implored them to “transform the business,” “generate content” (John wondered what, exactly, management thought the reporters had been doing), and concentrate on “packaging.” Charts! Visuals! Design! These were the way of the future. One buffoon of an executive actually declared that a perfectly designed page should cause readers to spill their coffee. It made John yearn for the days when Ken Faulks was at the helm, but Faulks, a media mogul with sandy hair and a crooked smile, had long since moved on to the greener pastures of porn. John had no particular fondness for the man—as John recalled, he had the people skills of Genghis Khan—but at least he’d kept the company solvent.

  After several months of searching, John took a staff job at The Philadelphia Inquirer, or “the Inky,” as insiders called it. It was a fine job, a great job, but it nearly killed John to accept it because it was a direct result of his father calling in a favor from a fellow Moose Lodge member. And so John was taken on, reporting to Elizabeth, who resented his very presence, even as other Inky employees were being encouraged to walk the plank with early retirement packages.

  Under any other circumstances, his work would have redeemed him: John’s investigation into a fire at the zoo’s ape house in 2008—on Christmas Eve, no less—had uncovered gross incompetence. Fire alarms had gone off and been ignored. People smelled smoke and never investigated. There were no sprinkler systems. All told, twenty-three animals died, including an entire family of bonobos. A week ago, on the one-year anniversary of the fire, a toddler scaled a wall and fell twenty-four feet into the new gorilla enclosure. The only gorilla who had survived the fire, whose own baby had died of smoke inhalation, swooped in through the gaggle of other curious gorillas, cradled the child in her arms, and carried him to the door of her enclosure, where she handed him to zookeepers. This astonishing act of empathy, caught on video and aired across the country, was dismissed by several right-leaning outlets and pundits as simple training. Simple training for what, John wondered? Were they suggesting the zoo had been dropping dolls into the gorilla pit to practice for just such an occasion? John found this reactionary denial almost as fascinating as the gorilla’s response—was it because empathy was supposed to be a purely human response? Was the discussion really about Evolution?—and this led to his proposing a piece on the cognitive studies being performed at the Great Ape Language Lab. At this point Elizabeth suddenly decided he needed to share the byline with Cat Douglas. She offered no explanations, but John had two theories: either she was still so angry about having to hire him that she was shackling him with the most abrasive woman alive, or else she wanted to associate her star reporter with a series that was beginning to smell like potential Pulitzer material. (Early in her career, Cat had become something of a celebrity in the newspaper world when she caught a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter in a lie about a made-up eight-year-old crackhead, and then scored a Pulitzer herself for breaking the story. She had also stirred up controversy by allegedly faking a romantic interest in her rival reporter and going through his files when she was alone in his apartment.)