Page 6 of The Last Book Party

“This is Eve,” Franny said, and then introduced me to his mother, Tillie. I didn’t say that I had read her poems in college, or that I knew her latest collection had been well reviewed. I didn’t mention that I worked at Hodder, Strike and had read the first chapters of Henry’s memoir, with his breathless account of their steamy courtship and coming together as “literary soul mates.” I didn’t say anything about being at the party the night before or peeking into her bedroom. Franny told her about the surf and how we had pulled in the lobster trap. She lifted the lid on the pot. “You know, technically, you’re poachers.”

Franny shook his head. “Nah, these little lobsters were children lost in the storm.”

“We’re not really thieves, are we?” I asked.

“Your secret’s safe with me,” Tillie said, opening the refrigerator and bending down to reach for something in the back. “Here, you can christen your bounty with this.”

She stood up and held out a black bottle. “Freixenet,” she said. “You drink, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Good girl.”

She handed the bottle to Franny and put two wineglasses on the table. She said she and Henry were going to work for another few hours and have dinner in Provincetown at Napi’s. I wanted to know what they were writing and if they took turns reading their drafts aloud. Did they share an office, sit side by side?

Tillie left, and Franny poured the champagne.

“To the ocean,” he said, handing me a glass.

“To the ocean.”

I took a big sip. Then another. We ate sweet Portuguese bread, ripping chunks off a round loaf, until our lobsters turned bright red. The champagne tickled my tongue and rippled to my head. The lobsters were small and their meat was sweet and juicy. We tossed the shells into a metal bowl that sat between us on the table. It got darker in the kitchen, but we didn’t turn on the lights.

Franny wanted to know what I loved about my job. I told him there wasn’t much.

“I am a very educated typist,” I said.

“So why do you do it?”

I told him about my leap into publishing after graduation, how excited I was to learn the magic of making books and how hopeful I’d been that working with real authors and editors would give me back some of the confidence in my own writing that I’d lost in the midst of so many talented writers at school.

“Were they really that good?” Franny asked.

“They were. Prolific too. And arrogant. They carried themselves like writers with a capitalW. I’m sure you had the type at art school—straight guys who wear eyeliner. Everyone seemed so sure of themselves. It was like they were preparing to become the ‘voices of their generation’ and I was struggling to clear my throat.”

When I was hired as an editorial secretary at Hodder, Strike, I felt as though I’d won the lottery instead of a $13,700 annual salary that was barely enough to cover my rent in the cramped and dark one-bedroom apartment on upper Broadway that I shared with a former classmate named Annie. An assistant account executive at McCann Erickson, Annie kept trying to convince me to join her for “more money and better parties,” but for at least my first year at Hodder, Strike, I had loved my job.

“It was a thrill to read every submission, to open every box of new books. I thought my instincts had been right and that working at a publishing house really would help me start writing again. But over time, being among people whose job was to judge books had the opposite effect.”

I told Franny how Ron Ingot, the editorial assistant who was one rung above me, also working for Malcolm Wing, had a daily ritual of skewering submissions he didn’t like. We all laughed at his pithy critiques, but they left me feeling a little queasy, as if I’d authored the novels myself.

“What would this Ronny-boy say?” Franny asked.

“Well, he faulted one manuscript for its ‘pitiful irrelevance’ and took another author to task for the ‘circuitous exploration of her destitute imagination.’”

“Ouch.”

It turned out that reading and making fun of the slush pile, all the manuscripts sent in by hopeful writers with no connections, was not a confidence booster. Every line I wrote, I imagined Ron reading and saying, “Hey, everyone, listen to this doozy.”

Tipping his wooden chair back and letting it balance on two legs, Franny asked me to tell him more about the slush pile. He pretended to be shocked to find out it was not a literal pile, just shelves of manuscripts, each a stack of papers in a cardboard box.

“No pile? That’s terrible!” he said. “The manuscripts should be tossed into a pile, a huge messy pile of manuscripts. A mountain of dreams.”

“Very boring dreams,” I said. “Few are well written.”

“Who cares? I don’t want to read them, I want to photograph them. I want to take a whole series of photographs of the Hodder, Strike slush pile.”

“Which isn’t a pile.”

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