“You make me sound like a spider or a snake ready to eat them.”
“Perhaps you are, and I just don’t know it yet.” In truth, they knew nothing about each other. And he had told her nothing about himself in exchange for what he’d asked her, and for the little bits she’d said about her parents. It had been a one-way conversation.
“And where did you grow up?” she asked him.
“In London. With my grandmother. My parents were actors, perennially on tour. I hardly ever saw them. So our lives were not so dissimilar as children. Maybe that’s why we were drawn to each other.” He was presuming a lot. They had just met and had dinner. She had not been “drawn” to him yet, she was just inquisitive, and very cautious, after Scott. “I think people with dysfunctional families always seek each other out, instinctively, don’t you? All of my girlfriends came from divorced parents.”
Her parents had been divorced, but her father had been anything but dysfunctional. He was a very stable person, except for his one colossal mistake marrying her mother.
“I’m not sure that theory holds,” she said skeptically.
“I can promise you it does. And there’s a lot you haven’t told me yet.”
“And maybe never will,” she teased him. He was very pushy for a first evening. When they got to her address, she got out of the car and thanked him for dinner.
“Let’s do it again,” he said as though it was his decision, and then he drove off with a wave, and she let herself into her building, and her flat. She still had a bag to unpack and clothes to put away, and she thought about Ivan White as she did. He was a would-be writer. And he was a little too aggressive for her taste, and too nosy. He seemed like a good person to keep at a distance. She put him out of her mind as she unpacked her father’s photograph and his two favorite books she had brought with her.
—
Ivan’s persistence over the next several weeks was startling. She told him she was busy every time he invited her to dinner. And he wanted to know why and with whom, and if she had a boyfriend in London. She said she didn’t.
“Don’t you want one?”
“Not necessarily. I want to get my bearings, figure out my job, explore London, make some friends, do some work I brought with me, and if a man I like turns up in all that, that would be nice, but I’m not shopping for a boyfriend.”
“Are you afraid of men?” he pressed her.
“No. I’m afraid of making a mistake and being unhappy.”
“Then you end it, and start again.”
“That sounds exhausting. I’d rather be careful in the beginning.”
“That’s ridiculous. You have to experience life. How can you do that if you never make mistakes?” He was always trying to convince her of something. She didn’t have dinner with him again for a month, but he kept badgering her and she finally gave in. She knew by then that he was twenty-seven years old, and he had recently broken up with a girlfriend who had left him for someone else. The girls in the office thought he was hot, but said he looked like a cheater. She wondered how they knew that. They said it was just a feeling, when Alex had lunch with them. She particularly liked Fiona, an assistant editor from Dublin. She edited picture books for children aged three to six, and she seemed to like it.
Alex’s job had turned out to be not at all challenging. Her boss never gave her anything interesting to do, and a lot of filing. The assumption was that she wouldn’t stay long as an intern. She seemed to resent Alex, and was unfriendly to her. It made for boring days and very little satisfaction. She was writing on weekends, which gave her something to do. She was working on the outline for her next book.
And Ivan’s work as a “nonfiction editor” seemed to consist mostly of checking text proofs for errors before they went to print. Neither of them had interesting jobs, but Alex loved the idea of working in London. That gave her all the satisfaction she needed. She was getting very close to starting her next book, and had had several phone conversations with Bert about it. He liked her ideas for it a lot, and thought her publisher would too.
Ivan liked spending time with her, supposedly as friends, and he talked a lot about the novel he was going to write, which made her nervous. If he ever figured out that she was a writer and had published, he could be consumed with jealousy, as Scott had been, and take it out on her in some way, and she didn’t want to go through that again. It made her very cautious about everything she said.
He was hanging around her apartment one day, waiting to go out with her to the contemporary wing of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and saw an envelope from her agent on her desk, with a note in it about pub dates and a royalty check for fifty thousand dollars for her first book, but fortunately there was no mention of Alexander Green on any of the paperwork, nor the title of the book, just the date of publication. She saw him glance at it, and then peek into it as she walked back into the room, and he moved away from the desk immediately. He looked startled when he turned to her. He had recognized the name of the agency, which was well known in publishing, even in England.
“What do you need a literary agent for?” He made it sound like an accusation, as though she had taken something that belonged to him.
“I don’t. I worked for them one summer,” she said, trying to be creative, but she didn’t sound convincing, even to her own ears. “They send me letters sometimes, and they owed me some money from a tax refund.” She said it in case he had seen that there was a check in the envelope, but she was annoyed at him for looking into her mail, which seemed incredibly rude to her.
“They must have paid you a fortune,” he commented drily, with an edge to his voice.
“They didn’t. Why? What makes you say that? Why would you assume that?”
“Because they sent you a fifty-thousand-dollar tax refund.”
She cringed as he said it. “That’s none of your business, Ivan,” she said, shutting down the subject.
“No, it isn’t, and it was presumptuous of me to look, but I was curious why they were writing to you.”
“You should have asked me. Don’t snoop through my mail.”
“There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there?” he accused her. And she knew it was a story that would have stunned him, but fortunately there had been nothing in the envelope that would expose her as the writer of the Green books. The publisher was very careful about that, so even their accounting staff didn’t know. All payments went to Rose Porter’s agency, and were then paid out to Alex, and the books were only referred to as Book 1, Book 2, and so on, with no titles and no author’s name. But the check was a big one, and why would a literary agency be sending her that kind of money?
“There’s nothing I’m not telling you, or that you need to know.”