A Likely Story

Monday, March 28th

Tomorrow is the first day of Passover. My new editor told me so today at lunch, several times. In fact, I have come to the conclusion that the purpose of our having lunch had nothing to do with The Christmas Book — which was barely mentioned — but that we had gathered at the Tre Mafiosi for sole and chablis so that Ms. Douglas could explain to me what tomorrow, the first day of Passover, meant in the ongoing troubled relationship between herself and her mother, who lives in Fort Lauderdale. I feel I know both mother and daughter very well by now; far too well.

Vickie Douglas is a hotshot younger editor, or at least she was until a year or so ago when she crossed the Rubicon of thirty. About five years back, she was the one who plucked out of the slush pile the ex-hookers diet-and-pornography book which became known in the trade as Fuck Yourself Thin, but which Ms. Douglas herself (it is rumored, or claimed) titled How a Better Sex Life Can Lead to a Slimmer You. With the ex-hooker’s national tour, plus the rather sensational nude exercise photos in the book, it became a monstrous bestseller (I choose my words carefully) and Vickie Douglas immediately left that publisher (and the other not-yet-published books she’d bought there) for a different publisher and a better salary. She’s been at a number of houses the last several years, and came to Craig, Harry & Bourke after leaving Metronome House last fall during a flap that even got reported gingerly in Publishers Weekly (the Junior Scholastic of this tiny world); it was a dispute over the title of a famous lesbian golfer’s autobiography. Ms. Douglas had insisted it be called Different Strokes, while the publisher even more strongly demanded it be called The Carol Murphy Story. (Around the business, it was generally known as “I Can Lick Any Woman on the Tour.”)

A tall, skinny, dark-blonde woman with a very large head provided with prominent facial features, Vickie Douglas is attractive in an acrylic sort of way, until she starts talking, and smoking, and knocking her bulging leather bag over, and dropping ashes in the water glass, and putting her elbow in the salad, and jangling her bangles, and staring wide-eyed like someone who’s just received a dirk in the back in a Hitchcock movie. Her voice is loud and breathy at the same time, and she talks very fast like a mother lying to the truant officer, and her self-involvement is so total I don’t understand how she can bear to release herself after she puts a sweater on.

This is the creature who came to bury The Christmas Book, not to praise it. “You’re doing a fine job,” she told me, her wide eyes glazed as she thought about her mother. “It’s a very interesting concept,” she mumbled, looking around for her roll (it was in her bag). “I don’t want to second-guess you, just keep going on as before,” she suggested, grapes from her sole Veronique rolling across the table.

But intermixed with these platitudes were a few zingers. Frowning at a nearby waiter as though measuring him as a potential stepfather, she brooded, “It’s hard to know what the thrust of the book is, what its argument is.” Wiping coffee from her blouse, she mumbled into her chest, “I’m afraid Mr. Wilson isn’t very impressed by the kind of contributor you’ve come up with so far. Capote, Galbraith; these are all rather yesterday, aren’t they?” Staring at the American Express credit card slip, trying to do gratuity mathematics in her head, she mused, “Perhaps the problem is Christmas itself. Perhaps it’s just too ordinary.”

What am I going to do about this woman? I have to do something about this woman, but what? If I kill her, they’ll only assign another editor, and I know what they’d give me next (assuming I didn’t get arrested for murder, which I surely would). What they would give me next would be some hundred-year-old, pipe-smoking fart with a wonderful shock of white hair and a brain that died in the late nineteenth century, during his second year at Exeter. He would be named something like Raymond Atherton Swifft or Hambleton Cudlipp the Third, he would not have actually done anything at the firm within living memory, and once we had become fast friends he would tell me his one anecdote; the time he got drunk with John O’Hara, missed his train to Croton, and had to take the 7:10.

So Victoria Douglas is not the worst possible disaster that could befall The Christmas Book; she’s only the second-worst.

I have to do something. There’s nothing to do. But I have to. I have to do something about this woman.