* * *
When I got to work that afternoon, Ben was behind the counter with two big boxes of The Kensington Diet.
“Rachel,” he said, “this is about, like…history?”
“History and literature,” I answered. “The history of literature.”
“Right,” he replied. “Not about diets.”
The cover had a picture of a young Queen Victoria on it, as well as a political cartoon of a starving person. It did not look compelling.
“I never said it was about diets.”
“You said it was written by a nutritionist.”
“I said it was written by my literature professor, Dr. Fred Byrne. Where did you get nutritionist from?”
“I don’t know. I thought it was, like, Dr. Gillian McKeith. Why…why are we launching this?”
“There’s a lot of buzz,” I said, and whisked myself away.
But I couldn’t stop asking myself the same question all day. How had this got so desperately out of hand? James and I hadn’t the faintest clue about book launches. We had printed off some fliers and had them all over the shop, fliers that neither stipulated nor clarified whether The Kensington Diet was an actual diet. We put “free!” on the flier, and now I was beginning to worry whether my adored professor was about to be humiliated by a crowd of people looking for advice on carbohydrates.
Deenie came at 4 p.m. She asked for me by name. Eggy eyes aside, she was very attractive in person. I was holding a stack of The Help by Kathryn Stockett.
“Hello,” she said. Her approach, in all things, was a strange mix of timid and self-assured. It was like she was confident about being shy. “I just wanted to say hello. I’m Fred’s wife.”
I’m Fred’s wife. Why wouldn’t she say that she was his publisher? She hadn’t taken his last name, so it was negligible how much stock she put in being visibly married.
“I was hoping you had some kind of kitchen where we could keep the wine chilled,” she went on. “I’ve brought a few mixers, too, as you can always bet on someone being pregnant.”
“Can you?” I asked.
“Oh, in publishing, always.” She smiled. She had very small teeth. “Also, I wanted to thank you for putting this on.”
“Ah, well.” I shrugged, plopping The Help down on the floor. “The shop had already seen a lot of buzz around the book. I just joined the dots.”
“Right,” Deenie answered. “And when did you first notice the buzz?”
She did not attempt to sound convinced. While I was able to explain the book launch to Dr. Byrne by appealing to his vanity, I would never be able to fool Deenie. As his wife, she might think he was the greatest author of his generation, but as his publisher she probably had a stack of printouts proving that he was not.
“Well, I hadn’t known about the book at all,” I said, trying to stay casual, my guts turning to sludge. “Not until Dr. Byrne came in asking about it, and I saw we had lots on pre-order. All customer ordered.”
“Customer ordered,” she repeated. “That’s so interesting.”
“Everyone loves his classes up at college. He has a lot of fans.”
Deenie Harrington scanned her eggy eyes over me and tried to puzzle out my interest in her husband. There are too many clichés about male English professors and their adoring young students for her not to have been on the alert. She had been in his class herself, albeit as an MA student.
This is what it’s like to love an unreliable man, or to have an untenable job, or an unsteady parent, or an ill child. It is the outfit you constantly dress up and down, accessorising it according to what insecurities hang well, what caveats are the most slimming. But we were close in age; but I was still his student; but we are in love; but what’s to say he won’t fall in love again.
“Working together must be fun,” I said lamely.
“It is,” she replied. “On the days he can bear to be edited.”
She rolled her eyes slightly, and then smiled to confirm this was all in good fun.
“Well, I’ll see you later,” she said. “It was nice to finally meet you.”
The “finally” rang out between us, deadly little aftershocks of a natural disaster. I took a step backwards and she left the shop. It was four o’clock. The launch was to start at six thirty. I would host it while James worked the front till for the late-night shoppers.
Deenie wanted to figure out whether I was the kind of girl who has ill-advised but unrequited crushes on her professors, or the kind of girl who orchestrated bookshop launches in order to seduce them. I don’t think she found an answer. I was odd and tall and I was not skinny. I was nothing at all like her. But maybe, she must have figured, he was approaching his mid-life crisis and maybe part of that was wanting an ingenue that reminded him mostly of himself.
If she did find an answer that day, I don’t know what her plan was. I don’t think she would have threatened me. She was, before anything else, an extremely kind person.
7
WHEN YOU’RE YOUNG you tend to live in absolutes. In my head, there were only two ways for the book launch to go. Either it was going to be abysmal and a profound humiliation or it was going to be the best book launch in the history of small, un-catered events.
The truth was, as always, somewhere in-between. It rained badly all afternoon, which mentally made me cut at least ten people from the guest list. We sold a few copies that day, the table we dedicated to the book having conferred a sense of importance on it, and we were sure to tell everyone who bought a copy that the author would be doing a reading that evening. Ben, having gotten over his disappointment that the book was not by Dr. Gillian McKeith, was starting to talk about the night as a “trial run” for other launches, and was talking enthusiastically about developing a “relationship” with Deenie and her publishing house. He went out to buy crisps from the big Tesco in an attempt to cement this relationship. He refused to call them crisps. He would only call them “refreshments.”