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
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
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 real 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
After several months of searching, John took a staff job at
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.)
John realized with a start that he had eaten every last dot of the Osetra. There was a tiny bit of champagne left in the bottle, but he didn’t want to change the flavor of his mouth. What he wanted was more caviar. He ran his finger across the plate and licked it.
Then he hauled himself off the floor and locked the front door. As he passed the hall table he noticed the message light blinking on the house phone. Fran, his mother-in-law, had left multiple messages, each more forceful than the last. Apparently Amanda had been screening her calls. John could not have been more sympathetic. Their mothers were polar opposites, but equally challenging. Where Patricia would retreat into a glacial silence, Fran would be upstairs sorting your socks. She disguised Schadenfreudic glee as helpfulness, malice as concern, all while harvesting information to share with the rest of the clan. With Fran, nothing was off-limits.
John deleted her messages.
It was two in the morning before John remembered the beef Wellington, and he remembered it then only
