The Bestseller Read online

  The Bestseller

  Olivia Goldsmith

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1996 by Olivia Goldsmith

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to reprint the following: “Luck” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes. Copyright © 1947 by Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” © 1978 Zevon Music. All rights reserved, used by permission.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition October 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-439-4

  More from Olivia Goldsmith

  Fashionably Late

  Flavor of the Month

  Marrying Mom

  Switcheroo

  The Bestseller

  Young Wives

  Bad Boy

  Insiders

  Wish Upon a Star

  To Larry Ashmead

  Editor of Genius

  Cultivator of Tomatoes

  Whose stories of writers, agents, editors, and publishers inspired, awed, and amused me.

  This is your book as much as it is mine. Let them sue you.

  The year I returned to active publishing there were five varied manuscripts submitted to Davis & Dash; five manuscripts, each by a different author, each with different aspirations. All five made the enormous jump from unpublished manuscript to published book, but only one among them was destined to make the next leap to become the bestseller.

  —Gerald Ochs Davis, Sr.

  PART ONE

  A Novel Idea

  One day God decided he would visit the earth. Strolling down the road, God encountered a sobbing man. “Why are you crying, my son?”

  The man said, “God, I am blind.” So God touched him and the man could see and he was happy.

  As God walked farther he met another crying man and asked, “Why are you crying, my son?”

  The man said, “God, I am crippled.” So God touched him and the man could walk and he was happy.

  Farther down the road God met yet a third man crying and asked, “Why are you crying, my son?”

  The man said, “God, I’m a writer.” And God sat down and cried with him.

  —Gerald Ochs Davis, Sr.

  Fifty Years in Publishing

  1

  Nobody ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one.

  —Robert Byrne

  Terry was looking down at the pilled cuff of her sweater when she saw Roberta approaching. Roberta had an even sadder look than usual on her plain face. Terry was not surprised. Business at The Bookstall had dropped off a lot over the summer, when any West Sider with disposable income uses it to get out of Manhattan on the weekends. But now, with Christmas coming, business had not picked up, probably because of the superstore that had planted itself on twenty thousand square feet just two downtown blocks away.

  Roberta was a little woman, small-boned and birdlike. Terry liked the way the older woman looked. Her skin had those tiny, even fine lines that fair-skinned brunettes are often saddled with, though Roberta’s hair had gone from brown to gray long ago. Now Roberta laid her hand on Terry’s ratty sleeve. Reluctant, Terry looked into Roberta’s sad brown eyes.

  “I have some bad news,” Roberta said, but Terry didn’t need to be told. She’d seen it coming. Still, Roberta was from the old school, the one where people took responsibility for their actions and felt they owed explanations. She lived up to her name: Roberta Fine. “I don’t think I have to tell you that it’s not your performance, and that it’s certainly not personal,” Roberta began. “You know how much I’ve enjoyed working with you the last year and a half.” Terry, a writer, heard the nuance. She didn’t need Roberta to continue, though she did. “But even on a part-time basis, I simply can’t afford…” Roberta paused, shook her head, and briskly licked her lips for a moment, as if moistening them would make the words come out more easily. “The only other option…” Roberta began, then stopped.

  Terry merely nodded her head. They both looked over at Margaret Bartholemew. Poor Margaret. Older even than Roberta, lumpy Margaret was hunched in the corner, awkwardly packing a box of returns. She lost her grip and half a dozen books fell to the floor, one of them tearing. No credit for that return. Roberta closed her eyes briefly and sighed. She lowered her already quiet voice.

  “I can’t let Margaret go,” Roberta almost whispered. “She only has this and Social Security. Without a place to come to each day, people to talk to, well…I’ve been over it a hundred times, Terry, but I just can’t—”

  Terry smiled and shook her head. “No problem,” she said. She tried to muster some humor. “I mean it. It’s not like you were paying me what I was worth.”

  “A price beyond rubies,” Roberta nodded, her face still serious. She patted Terry’s pilled cuff. Then she sighed again. “The truth is, I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep the store going. But that’s not your concern.” Roberta shook her head. “After twenty-seven years, you’d think that people would have some loyalty, that they would…” She paused. In all the time Terry had known Roberta, first as a customer at The Bookstall and later as an employee, she’d never heard Roberta bitter. Well, she didn’t hear any bitterness now, exactly. Just disappointment and, perhaps, a little hurt surprise. Terry knew all about both of these feelings.

  Roberta just shrugged her birdlike shoulders as if to end the conversation and reached up to pat Terry’s arm. “You’re young and talented. You’ll move on to other things soon. But I’m so sorry, dear.” And it was that, the word dear, that made the tear slip out.

  The tear had been Terry’s only surprise. She had seen the end coming—and not just the end of her little part-time job at The Bookstall. As she swung north up Columbus Avenue, Terry was numb. She carried her pilled sweater, a hairbrush, and a few other personal belongings in a biodegradable Bookstall bag—along with the copy of Alice Thomas Ellis’s new short-story collection that Roberta had inscribed and insisted Terry take as a gift. Terry felt no anger, no pain. After all, the job hadn’t given her enough to live on, not even in the limited way she lived, including the tiny income from the manuscript typing she did on the side.

  Terry thought of Roberta and how the older woman had called her young and talented. So why did Terry feel so old and used up? After she had finished her Columbia dissertation, and after she’d spent the tail end of her loans and grants, she had managed to support herself for the last eight years on marginal jobs at copy centers, word-processing services, and then at The Bookstall, while she wrote, edited, rewrote, submitted, and resubmitted her manuscript, her magnum opus, the book that explained the world as she saw it. And she’d failed.

  While friends around her took real jobs, got promoted, married, and moved on, she’d only written. And not just written—she’d also tried to sell her work. She wasn’t one of those slackers who was so terrified of rejection that they never attempted to be published at all. Terry had tried. She’d kept careful lists. She knew how to research. She’d figured out the best, most literary editors and submitted the book to them at the ever-dwindling number of publishing houses in New York, holding her bre
ath while an editor considered her work, living through the rejection and watching her target shrink as one firm was subsumed by another. Well, the corporate-acquisition ballet hadn’t mattered in the end because they’d all rejected her. Some had shown initial interest but in the end considered her novel “too literary.” Others felt that it lacked focus and pacing. Or that it was too long. Or that the humor was too coarse, too farcical. It was too political, too serious, too depressing. Some simply rejected it out of hand and advised her to get a day job. But most sent the standard rejection letter, the one that meant that nobody had even bothered to look at an eleven-hundred-page unsolicited manuscript that hadn’t been touted by an agent or bid on by Hollywood.

  Terry actually smiled at that. Imagine Hollywood trying to film The Duplicity of Men! Hollywood was all about the duplicity of men, and they weren’t ready to give away any of their secrets.

  She shook her head, switched her bag to her other hand, and waited at a red light to cross Broadway. At this point she was down to only one hope. The manuscript, edited yet again, had been out for close to five months at Verona Press, and a subeditor, Simon Small, had actually written her two letters, each with a few intelligent questions. This was the longest time anyone had considered Duplicity. But it had been weeks since her last inquiry, and he wasn’t responding to her calls or her letters. She sighed. It was a bad sign. She had almost nothing in the bank, and now she was unemployed again. Her hopes hung on a very small Simon because she would not, she could not, ask her mother for yet another loan.

  Opal was still back in Bloomington, Indiana, still working at the college library and still foolishly believing that her daughter was a genius. Poor Opal, Terry thought. She’d already had so many disappointments. Terrance O’Neal had courted Opal but quickly revealed himself after marriage as nothing more than an Irish drunk. He then abandoned her and their infant daughter. Opal got the job as librarian but then was passed over time and again for promotion.

  But Opal was a stoic from an Indiana farm family. Alone, she’d gotten herself through the classics, not to mention the library-science program at the state university. When her father wouldn’t “waste money on school for a girl,” she’d done it all herself. Opal had worked and raised Terry alone and helped her get scholarships to both Yale and Columbia. Opal had molded her daughter into the writer who would tell the world what men were and why they were the way they were. Opal had taught Terry that life consisted of pain, false hopes, hard work, and the exaltation of great talent. They had read Tolstoy together, and Trollope, Dickens, and Austen. Terry had been the only girl in the seventh grade to know that George Eliot was a woman. And that George Sand was, too. If it made her a bit of a freak, she didn’t mind. Terry loved books as passionately as her mother did and was grateful that Opal had shown her the door through which she could escape their limited world. Greedily, guiltily, Terry had stepped through it, leaving Opal behind.

  But now, eight years later and with several initials at the end of her name, Terry not only found life as painful and tragic as Opal had predicted but had to bear the burden, the horrible realization, that perhaps the pain was not going to be ameliorated by the benison of talent. Books, her mainstay and her escape, had turned on her. Every published book taunted her. Words, which had been her comfort, her tool with which to weave a story, were now a chain that was dragging her down.

  Terry had never meant to write a commercial book, a million-copy bestseller. Certainly not. If there was a God and that God looked into the deepest, darkest place in her heart, there wouldn’t be the smallest bit of envy for John Grisham or Danielle Steel. Terry didn’t want a six-figure publishing contract or her name on the bestseller list at the 20 percent-off rack at Barnes & Noble. She wasn’t that modest. She wanted immortality. She’d suffered loneliness and poverty to string her words together, one by one, for more than a thousand pages. And all to find her true friends, a small, serious readership. Now, after enough submissions to make her dizzy, Simon Small, a man she’d never even met, was the only one left who could grant her a chance at that.

  She passed Ninetieth Street and the only neighborhood tavern that was still cheap enough for her to nurse a beer at. But Terry didn’t have the heart or the money for that. Soon it would be the unemployment line and a begging letter to Opal. No. She shook her head. None of that, none of that ever again. Opal had deceived her, and she in turn had deceived Opal. They had created a world of false hope. She had, like the girl in the fairy tale, tried to sit in a roomful of straw and spin it into gold. But she had failed.

  Terry shrugged and turned left, walking along her block toward Amsterdam Avenue. This was one of the dicey streets where the West Side renaissance had not yet taken hold. A few brownstones, their facades raped in the fifties by white brick fronts, stood among nondescript apartment buildings too shabby to go co-op. Her own, the shabbiest of all, had been converted into tiny studios. She walked down the two steps that led to the entrance and through the narrow hall to her apartment in the back. Chinese take-out menus littered the floor, but today she had no energy to pick them up. Nor would Mr. Aiello, the super, who lived in the front. Terry stopped at the tarnished brass mailbox and took out her key. Maybe there would be a letter from Opal, filled with the small goings-on of the library and of her garden and her reading. Yeah, and maybe there’d be an overdue notice from ConEd, and another from the phone company. But once Terry inserted her key, her heart dropped. It was much worse than that. She saw the package that all writers hate and fear. It was a big envelope, and for all intents and purposes, it could just as well have been a bomb. Because it stopped Terry O’Neal’s life as completely as a terrorist.

  She wrestled the package out of the narrow box, forgetting to relock the brass door. There it was, return address Verona Publications, 60 Hudson Street, S. Small. Terry had been submitting her work long enough by now to know what a returned manuscript looked like. Especially this one, her only one, which ran 1,114 typed pages. And had been returned twenty-six times. No, she corrected herself. This would make it twenty-seven.

  Terry hefted the package under her arm, walked down the dark hall, and fumbled with the keys to the apartment. She had rented the place eight years ago after finishing her dissertation and leaving Columbia. It was just a single room, but there were ornate moldings on the wall from when the broken-up space had been something more. There was a crystal chandelier, which miraculously no previous tenant had ruined or stolen, and a marble fireplace, which, though smoky, actually worked. The apartment was dark at noon, it had virtually no closet space, and the hot water was never more than tepid, but it had charmed her. Back then, it had echoed la vie bohème. In a hopeful, flamboyant mood she had painted it peacock blue with white trim.

  Now the blue was faded and the white had grayed. The room looked not like a writer’s lair, an artist’s garret, but like a cheap, dark, and nasty place to have to begin or end a life in. Terry sat down on the Salvation Army sofa and tore open the envelope. The letter clipped in front of the manuscript was no surprise. There were never any surprises.

  Dear Ms. O’Neal,

  It is with real regret that I am forced to return your manuscript The Duplicity of Men. Despite some beautifully written passages and an interesting theme, the editorial board, upon consideration, has decided it is inappropriate for our list at this time.

  I am therefore returning it to you with sincere regret. I would be most willing to look at any other novels you may be working on in the future.

  Simon Small

  Any other novels? In the future? For a moment, Terry almost laughed. She sat there, drained and empty. She was a big girl, and her heavy thighs sank into the sofa, her arms hanging between them. She didn’t move for a long time. Until she knew.

  Enough is enough, she thought. Soundlessly, she pushed herself up and went to the battered file drawer where she kept the other letters, the rejections she had collected from Putnam and Simon & Schuster, from Little, Brown and Houghton Mifflin, f
rom Viking, Davis & Dash, Random House, and Knopf. From all of them. There were dozens. Could she say that fairly? She was always exact with her words. To be sure, she counted them one last time. There were twenty-six, with Simon Small’s making the twenty-seventh. So, in fact, she could say there were dozens. And she’d done no better with the university presses than with the commercial houses. Well, what had she truly expected? She knew nobody and nobody cared to know her. She had poured all of her reading, all of her love of language, all of her experience of life into these carefully constructed, crystalline pages of prose and had been foolish enough to think that somebody would care enough to read them. Well, she was wrong. The whole folly was over.

  Carefully, meticulously, she went to the fireplace and crumpled up some old newspapers and torn cardboard. She started a blaze. Then, slowly, a few pages at a time, she fed the manuscript to the flames. It felt surprisingly cleansing. It didn’t take long: less than a half hour perhaps. Certainly not long considering the thirty-three years it had taken her to learn to read, to learn to write, to imbibe the great works, to develop her own style, to have a story to tell, and to tell it. It had been a hard life, often full of pain and frustration. Now she had to add defeat. But, Terry knew, if she couldn’t live a writer’s life, she didn’t want to live at all.

  Once her manuscript was burned she looked around, as if waking from a trance. She didn’t stay still long. It had felt too good to stop. Before the fire died, she fed an earlier draft into the flames, then her latest marked copy. Next she began to scour the apartment in earnest. She found every note, every draft, every partial photocopy, and fed all of it into the bonfire. After all, there was no point to saving it anymore. She had run out of publishers, time, money, and belief. And the anticipation—the waiting for the rejections—had been more painful than the rejections themselves because somehow she had always known that her vision was too dark, her world too sad, to be lauded by publishers or her professors. Terry had been the type of student who never found a mentor, who never shone in seminars, who never got to be the pet at workshops. She was too rawboned, too raw altogether, too unfeminine and clear-eyed. She was not likable, and her professors saved their compassion—if they had any—for others. She had lived in obscurity, and that’s just where she would die.