Exciting romantic life! When I couldn’t even make Carey shag me in a bread shop.
We drank our coffee and eventually got around to talking about work. I learned that Deenie’s publisher let her work two days at home, because it was hard to get editing done in a busy office, and she often worked well into the evening. There was a certain number of glamorous lunches involved in her job, but not nearly as many as you’d think. She named some of the books she had worked on, and I was surprised to hear that I knew almost all of them. I hadn’t read them, but they had climbed up the bestsellers chart at the shop, and I had looked at their blurbs.
“Do you get a percentage?” I asked. “For all the books you worked on that did really well?”
She laughed drily. “No,” she said. “I wish.”
Deenie added, with a note of conspiracy, that having books that had sold very well could have other benefits, allowed you to pull rank on certain things. Her eyes flitted to the nearest bookshelf, where five copies of The Kensington Diet sat.
“Ah,” I said, “I see.”
We both laughed then, a laugh that was all fondness, because we both loved Dr. Byrne and supported his right to write useless books.
She gave me my duties. She wanted me to read through her slush pile of manuscripts, mostly sent by unpublished authors, and keep a spreadsheet of my notes on them. She showed me the Excel spreadsheet she had been keeping since she started working in books. It was hundreds of rows long, alphabetical, and colour-coded. Green meant excellent. She would try to acquire all the green books. Yellow meant “shows promise.” Red meant absolutely not. The spreadsheet was mostly yellow. Within yellow, there was more coding: books that weren’t quite right, authors who weren’t quite ready, subjects that were slightly out of fashion. Each entry had one sentence, summing up the book and its writer. “Civil war epic, goes on a bit, he knows a lot about the skerries.”
Some of the yellow entries were from years ago, and a few of those books had gone on to be bestsellers. One author, who had won a national short story award that year, was summed up as “strange little man: loves dogs, hates women.”
As she explained all this, I could feel myself becoming jittery with excitement. It was the first time I had ever seen behind the curtain of the world I had been annotating diligently for years. I imagined my favourite authors showing up on one of Deenie’s spreadsheets, or on identical spreadsheets across the world. Donna Tartt, Toni Morrison, Richard Yates, Barbara Trapido, Haruki Murakami, Edna O’Brien. Intellectually, I knew they all must have been rejected by publishers, and had read interviews to that effect. But the notion that they could have once lived in the mediocrity of the yellow list was so refreshing to me.
I would have a certain number of manuscripts to read a week. I could read some at home, and some at her house. I was also in charge of her public work inbox, of sending one of her templated rejection emails to all the hopeful writers who wanted so desperately to be published but apparently not so desperately that they were willing to learn Deenie’s name. “Dear Sirs” was the most common way she was addressed.
On the whole, we had a good time together. I remember thinking, several mornings while we quietly read and sipped coffee from burnt clay mugs, If this is work, then sign me up.
For the first few days of my internship, James was waiting at the door when I came home, desperate for intel on the inner workings of his lover’s home life. I didn’t know what to tell him.
“She’s really lovely,” I said, with a note of apology.
“Does she suspect anything?”
“Well,” I replied slowly, “she thinks you’re straight.”
“Oh.”
He looked stunned, like someone who had made a monkey’s paw wish that had come true, but in all the wrong ways.
I described their house to him, the bright rugs and the seats in the window, and he hated it. “Tell me how their marriage is,” he said desperately. “Do they seem happy?”
“He’s never there!”
And he wasn’t. College was out and the summer literary festivals had hit, so Dr. Byrne was still doing his best to shill copies of The Kensington Diet. He had found some momentum with his new book, too, so his mid-afternoon visits were beginning to dwindle.
James was trying to convince Dr. Byrne to let him tag along to one of the literary festivals. To say he was an assistant. Dr. Byrne was firm: absolutely not. The people at the festivals were Deenie’s people. The risk was too great.
I feel a twinge of guilt, looking back on those months now. I was either at work, under a stack of manuscripts, or with Carey. I had sworn off the synthetic weed, but James was still smoking it in bed, miserable in front of Frasier.
“I’m your best friend,” he snapped once, when he saw me circling and underlining a manuscript, the way Deenie had taught me to. I had graduated from her slush pile and was now doing some light editing. “You’re supposed to love me the most.”
The baldness of this. It was something neither of us would say to a boyfriend, terrified as we were of admitting raw and open need. But we could say it to each other.
“I do love you the most,” I said, throwing my arms around him. “But I need to compartmentalise. I can’t be a spy for you. She’s my friend, sort of.”
I had a new flush of sympathy for Dr. Byrne, who had got through his own clashing loyalties by blanking me. I understood the temptation.
“How’s the TV show going?” I said. We had given up on saying that I was co-writing it with him. I hadn’t opened the document or written a word in a month.
He didn’t reply, and just went to take a shower. His second of the day.
Some days later, James took three buses to Dingle, eight hours in total, and gatecrashed a festival that Dr. Byrne was speaking at. It was a profoundly stupid thing to do. Dr. Byrne ignored and dodged him at the festival, sent him a terse text message to meet him at the hotel, and then they argued all night. I don’t think James actually wanted Dr. Byrne to leave his wife. He just felt like he deserved more respect, more time, a small pied-à-terre and a marabou dressing gown. He wanted the affair to be Frencher, if at all possible.
James knew all this was impossible, but he was reaching the same space that I had hit in May. He was starting to wonder what was going to become of him, too, except his case felt more drastic than mine. He didn’t even have the mediocre degree from the mediocre university.
One morning in July, he came into the kitchen, where I was toasting bagels. Carey was in the shower.
“What are you doing up?” I asked.
This was three days after the Dingle trip, and James had been sequestered in his room ever since. He had the ironing board out, and was going through both my clothes and his.
“I’ve decided to get a grip,” he said. “I’m going to give up Fred.”