Page 8 of The Last Book Party

I guessed the answer before Jeremy said it: Lil was Franny’s girlfriend.

“Oh, right,” I said, although I could tell Jeremy knew it was the first I was hearing of Lil. My heart pounded. Franny hadn’t given any indication that there was a Lil, but neither had he said there wasn’t. I had been no more forthcoming. Were he to discover I had a boyfriend, he could have been just as surprised. But with no attachments to speak of, the existence of Lil made me feel foolish and angry.

What had Franny told Jeremy? That I’d thrown myself at him pathetically? Had he described our time together as a convenient seduction while his girlfriend was away?

Malcolm threw an arm around Jeremy and said, “OK, children, enough ‘do you know so-and-so.’ It’s full-moon drinks tonight, and I command you to follow me downstairs.”

A tall, bald, dapper man with plump and rosy cheeks, Malcolm had a playful sense of humor and loved to banter with Hodder, Strike’s much younger editorial secretaries and assistants. Every month or so, he took a bunch of us for drinks at the Guardsman, a few blocks down Lexington at Thirty-Fourth Street. With bar food, darts, and tall wooden booths, the pub was not the kind of place Malcolm would ever take an older author for lunch—for that he favored Le Périgord—but he seemed to enjoy catching up on gossip and sipping dry vermouth while we put as many beers on his tab as we could manage in an hour or so. I loved talking with Malcolm, especially after he returned from a trip to his “beloved Britannia” and would tell me about having tea with his “dearest of friends” Frances Partridge, whowas eighty-seven and the author of one of my favorite books,Love in Bloomsbury: Memories.

I followed Malcolm and Jeremy and a few others to the elevator and down to the Guardsman. When we were settled with drinks, Malcolm smoothed his silk Hermès tie, lifted his glass, and proposed a toast to Jeremy, whom the other assistants watched with varying degrees of envy. Jeremy lifted his mug and quickly downed nearly half of it. I must have been staring because he quickly put his mug back on the table.

“What—was I not supposed to drink?” He spoke directly to me, without a hint of friendliness.

“Technically, no. Not when you’re the one being toasted.”

“Right. Thanks for the etiquette lesson.” Jeremy picked up his mug and finished the rest of his beer in one swallow.

When Malcolm went to get another pitcher for the table, I asked Jeremy how he knew Franny. Their friendship made little sense to me. Where Franny was all lightness and warmth, Jeremy seemed dark and cynical.

“Boarding school at Choate. Freshman year,” Jeremy said.

“Roommates?”

He shook his head. “More like partners in crime.”

“What’d you do?”

“Pot, Quaaludes, busting curfew—the usual overprivileged adolescent shit.”

“It hardly sounds criminal,” I said.

“What’d you do in high school, write in pen in the margins of a school copy ofWuthering Heights?”

“Ink in a book? Never,” I said.

“Dare a controversial new design for the yearbook?”

“Literary magazine.”

Franny and Jeremy together still perplexed me. Jeremy struckme as a quintessential prep-school snob who had already sized me up and judged me harshly as the suburban public school girl I was.

I asked Jeremy if he’d ever been to Franny’s place in Truro.

“Been there? I practically lived there. Had my best vacations there. Thanksgivings too.”

He said this as if it were a badge of honor, and a claiming of territory. No wonder Jeremy seemed so full of himself; he was part of that literary world.

Malcolm slid back into the booth and handed Jeremy another beer.

“So, cherub,” he said to me, “did you know that Jeremy was something of an adolescent prodigy? When he was still in high school, he had a collection of short stories published—a small press, of course, but impressive nonetheless. A recasting ofWinesburg, Ohio—but at Choate!An Enclave in Wallingford.”

Jeremy seemed embarrassed.

“The head of the English department made it happen,” he said.

I couldn’t help but be impressed and a little jealous that while still a teenager Jeremy had hit the trifecta of literary success: talent, confidence, and connections.

“Enough with the modesty,” Malcolm said to Jeremy. “Your teacher helped because you were that good.”

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