Sibella & Sibella Read online

  “I don’t have much time left?” he said, at which point I should have funneled toward him all those the-best-is-yet-to-come advertisements from AARP.

  “You selling the company?” That would have meant two things for me: freedom and poverty, never a good hook up.

  He wasn’t planning to, he said. If you read too many books you tend to see real-live human beings as if they were characters in novels, and if you’re that way and you think I’m Pippi Fucking Longstocking, we are going to have a major problem. Naturally, I wondered about his motivation. Even junior editors worry about that. But he had made such a strange demand of me, I had to think about who such a man would be to ask such a thing. Was he actually dying or was he merely a drama queen? Either would explain a lot. I have an active fantasy life and a streak of paranoia (thanks, Dad, for sharing your monographs on the fascinating subject). But that doesn’t mean I am always wrong.

  Yet if my worst supposition was on the money, then with your permission let me say Fuck. And may I also add Superfuck.

  At my first opportunity, I later that day looked at the professed book he received over his fucking transom and read last night, which disturbed him so much, and I threw up in my mouth all over again.

  There should be a special 911 type number for book people in dire straits (though when are they not?) and somebody should have dialed it forthwith. For him, for his company, for all of us. The fire department would have had to send over a fleet of ambulances.

  I hate lists that stop at ten, which is barbitrary. There was no way in the world I should write Myron’s book. And if I somehow someday did, it would wind up being a fucking Magnum Dopus. Not to bring up a sore subject, but that’s a sick name for a Classics major’s junk.

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  “Where shall I start, Sibella?” He frisbeed his glasses across his desk to emphasize a point I hoped he was going to elucidate because I had no idea. Like I knew where he should start? Writers say sometimes they are asked the most maddening question in the world: “Have you written something I might have read?” How in the fuck would they know!

  However.

  Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, there was a moo-cow coming down along the road and this moo-cow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo or that was Myron Beam.

  In my biz, they call this narrative foreground. This device should be kept to an absolute minimum, like Junior’s Junior’s foreskin, but I apologize for this unfortunate image and beg your forbearance, please.

  Myron had strong views about books. How could he not; he was a fucking publisher. For instance, he was instinctively inclined to hate memoirs because they could be too much like novels, but I hated memoirs that weren’t more like novels. In almost every respect, I used to think we were not exactly joined at the hip—though, of course, in terms of uptalk, we were at the lip. In business terms, he gave out miniscule advances with big cash commitments on the back end, invested next-to-nothing on marketing and publicity, and had zero capacity to schmooze with anybody who theoretically had any clout. A loser of a commercial formula, right? Not to Myron and not to Hard Rain Publishing. He unfathomably hit the jackpot time after time. What was the secret of his success?

  To answer that question, we need to go back further, way back, to first principles.

  You have heard of books, haven’t you, little children whose glazed eyeballs—once upon a time shiny and bright with wonder—are now permanently glued to your all shiny and bright personal tablets? Yes, I’m talking about books. And later, units.

  And what about you, creaking elders hunched over your walkers and reeking of mothballs? You, too, are familiar with books. The quaint content-delivery systems predicated upon an archaic technology, the production, marketing, and distribution of which are contingent upon an obsolete and certifiably wacko business model dating back to a dark age when ogres’ knuckles scraped the Middle-Earth floor?

  Yes, books, exactly.

  And keep on your toes, High Tech Boychick sporting the goofball Google glasses gadget on your pin head, there’s a fire hydrant lurking around the corner.

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  You don’t know Myron without you have read a book. Or written one.

  That morning, he was going to start to tell me everything. He wanted me to get this right and in the process he cold-turkey strangled to death each and every uptalked sentence ending. That self-control was in and of itself impressive. If a busy man like Myron could achieve that sort of command, there might be hope for me.

  He was not drunk. But in the interests of full disclosure, it was early. Any junior editor who finessed his story, he implied and not inferred, which would be a usage error, Kelly, will be out on the street looking redundantly for another job in the equivalent of our horse-and-buggy industry. Besides, he told me, publishing books brings out the asshole in everybody, most especially him.

  Oh, right, that’s when I first heard that.

  Despite his ravaged state, he was in an expansive mood. He wanted to shoot for an uplifting, dignified note. He found the thing that should have helped. Consulting the puff-piece Hard Rain catalogue copy right there on his magisterially cluttered desk, he could verify that he owned and ran a small, independent press that specializes ahem in quality literary fiction and nonfiction. That was one way to put it. But when you talked about his company you were talking about him. In this regard, he mentioned a person he referred to as his “Unlamented Ex-wife”: “As I was reminding her newest boy toy, Nicky Narcissus, the other day when I bumped into him at the club—he was waiting for his regular full-body depilation—sometimes it is all about me.”

  Oh, all the things Myron and I had in common—you could count them on the middle finger.

  Here’s the skinny. Let’s not soft-pedal the universal perception slash evaluation of Myron, and I quote: Myron was a scumbag, a liar, a scoundrel, a crook, a sleaze ball, an ambulatory colostomy bag, a blood-sucking, spirit-sapping miserable excuse for a human being. And here I’m cherie-picking, referencing some of the more cherrytable views advanced by his best-selling authors, another term for those ungrateful, wolfish, porn-pawing, lip-smacking, marauding obsessives he kept stocked in boxed wine and smokes and microwavable meals while they desultorily slave over their quality literary blah blah blah tales that, despite any of their patented literary drawbacks, he will make turn a profit, you’re welcome, very nice. Most of his publishing peers might as well have been selling transistor radios and top hats and typewriters in a digitized hip-hop age. Because he knew something they didn’t. He knew how to publish books that people cannot help but buy.

  I didn’t say read, though reading them is hypothetically possible.

  “Do you have any concept what goes into bringing out and selling a book, Sibella?”

  You probably think you do but you haven’t a clue and, not to worry, I didn’t, either.

  Acquisition, editorial, design, cross marketing, sales, finance, management, distribution, and so on and so forth. Every road to and from the publishing house conceals an IED or leads to a treasure trove, and each step takes you closer to one or both. The minutiae! The technicalities! For instance, Myron would one day talk to me for hours upon hours about paper and binding. I had no idea such considerations would prove so fascinating to him or if my concussion symptoms would one day subside in my brain pan. If I may continue.

  Look, there were old-school publishers out there hanging on by their fingernails and there were the new-school publishers equipped with MBAs and shiny object jargon that they impressed themselves with—and who were also hanging on by their fingernails. Myron fell into another category: he was a no-school publisher. That’s probably why he said that in the end the success of Hard Rain all boiled down to one thing.

  “Me.”

  When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all
in confederacy against him.

  Kelly? Kelly, you listening?

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  I’m getting ahead of myself, but this is stuff you need to know.

  Much like a good book, a little publishing house like his may have been a perfect window into this crazy little thing called life, and for the same reasons. Perfect indeed because his publishing house, successful as it was, was also cause for all the difficulties that complicated his life—and ultimately, therefore, mine. Thanks to the astonishing circumstances I currently find myself in, I have all the time in the world to tell lucky, lucky you all about it—if I ever work up the willpower and swig down a six-pack of Dyspeptic Dismol.

  The raft of trouble included but was not restricted to: mayhem, defalcation, betrayal, fumbling three-ways, erectile dysfunction, girl-on-girl-on-boy pornography, higher hair tie utilization (you’ll see), ebookapalooza, fraudulent conveyance, insurance fraud, delayed manuscript deliverance, legal malpractice, Hollywood movie and foreign rights negotiation, country living, gun play, guerilla marketing, social media inculcation, right to cure demands (don’t you love that legalese: right to cure?), Chicken Diavolo, gratuitous bashing of the French but not of the fancy French Laundry bistro, global warming, MFA and Ivy League wisecracks, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

  It was the classic nineteenth-century author Hawthorne—you may blondely recall, Kelly—who infamously derided the most successful authors of his era by labeling them “the damned mob of scribbling women,” and who wouldn’t wish to have old Nat shambling around today, to see what unpotable beverage he would take to the book launch shindig? And the whole shebang of Myron’s was destined to come full circle and end with a gruely smidgeon of more mayhem. All this happened, more or less.

  Cue Sound Effects again.

  Do you hear that? That’s a hush, descending. The tale will now—whoosh—darken dot dot dot.

  Please wait while we check your account. This may take a few minutes.

  Their Eyes Were Watching Sibella

  Myron normally slithered in around ten, breezily skimmed emails, deleting most with impunity, forwarding the ones he wanted me to address. Then he threw around his glasses a few times like horseshoes. Usually he carpe diemed the redundant day along with his first opportunity to go to lunch at Avenue Grill downtown, occasionally with an intern or an editor, depending. Never with Young Goodman Brown, Myron’s handle for his anointed editor in chief who visibly wilted when he saw Myron passing him over yet again in favor of the company of somebody who looks better in tight jeans (which would exclude me, as I don’t wear any sort of jeans, especially mom jeans, which no mom of mine would deign to wear). He could have recommended that YGB use the time to catch up on reading Hawthorne or anybody, but the fact is Myron would sooner eat from the bowl on the floor alongside a pooch than break bread with him, and, no, he didn’t have a dog. No disrespect intended toward canines, who are loyal and noble creatures, unlike creatures in the book biz he could and would name.

  Gratuitous TMI re: Myron, and I quote him: “Advisory for prospective Query-ists: unless you’re the second coming of Willie Goddamn Morris, keep your Saga of Loyal Fido in a locked desk drawer.”

  Young Goodman Brown had attended the chichi Ivy League institution that shares his surname, happily for Myron if not him. He didn’t understand his new appellation, or what Myron was driving at. You see, YGB never read Hawthorne or any other writer born before he was first smacked on the butt by his mom’s obstetrician—but I don’t think doctors indulge in such routine child abuse anymore. No wonder he looked at Myron with equal parts pity, scorn, and terror. And it is hard to do all three with one set of eyes, but he managed. YGB had tried to undermine Myron ever since, slyly attempting to deflect credit due to Myron onto himself, all the while smoothly scheming to bed the junior editor (yeah, right) and the interns (of whom I was never not one, get it?) when not running up his expense account on fancy lunches with agents and sometimes with bulimic or gluttonous authors.

  As I came to discover later, to compensate for his lunatic abuse of YGB, he handsomely remoonerated the round-face gorgeous Catholic school boy with tortoise shell glasses and gym-taut muscles rippling inside the rolled-up sleeves of his precariously buttoned everyday Oxford blue Brooks Brothers professionally laundered and pressed shirt. He was certainly paid better than he would have been at a much larger New York house, and Myron’s dividend was the pleasure of rendering him downcast whenever he chose.

  I become aware that I am conveying a sadistic impression of the publisher. But don’t forget, he named YGB editor in chief. Before the lad was hired, his life had consisted of a string of uninterrupted triumphs. He had been, no fucking kidding, a Rhodes Scholar. Ask me, I think YGB stuck around to find out how the other half lived. I came to see that Myron was his lab rat, he was not Myron’s. That, to me, was the spirit of their professional connection. YGB had a lot to learn, and Myron was willing to teach. Somebody had to introduce the boy to Reality.

  You wouldn’t trust indefatigable Murmechka to illuminate anybody about anything, but that delimitation was no imposition upon her: “On the mountain top every man is a lion, in the valley every boy dreams of the sea.”

  And look what had just come across my computer, my OED (Oxford English Dictionary) word of the day: paroemiographer. A collector or author of proverbs, and a dog-chew-toy of a word I was previously unfamiliar with.

  “The hawk is wise that does not take counsel from the swan.” Finally, this minor league paroemiographer was making sense for a change.

  Then, after lunch, two or five drinks and a few cheap and absolutely unproductive thrills with an acquisitions editor later (biology lesson to follow forthwith), Myron came back to ignore voice mails and slipped out around six for additional cocktails prior to dinner at Carmine’s, which is next door to Avenue. Carmine’s does in fact wield a wicked veal chop that Myron found irresistible, despite the admonitions of his doctor, who kept hectoring him about his imminent diabetes and heart risk. Afterward he crawled back to his high-rise on Nob Hill (three sparkling bridges in view, eat your heart out) and read a few pages of a book he wanted to publish till he couldn’t take it anymore and then turned on the television, which was humming when he woke up at four in the morning.

  My personal image of hell: 4:00 a.m. television’s radioactive glow.

  Wolf? Wolf? Are you on TV 24/7, Wolf? Does CNN ever let you go home, feed the cats, water the plants? Back to you in the studio, Wolf.

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  The day when began this story of his—and what effectively was supposed to be mine someday—was destined to be different. For one thing, no lunch at Avenue. He didn’t feel like it. Then it was about five, and he was feeling peckish. His junior editor, yours pecking truly, whom he often believed was an intern, had headed home with her laptop and iPad packed with manuscripts to read, not including the novel Junior wrote (because he hadn’t sent it to her yet, but that was okay, because she would have waited for the Rapture in order to read it). And everybody else had left, too. Myron was stuffing his satchel with materials he would not bother to examine during the evening and he steadied himself for his daily exercise—the stroll to Carmine’s—when for some reason he would never be able to explain he responded to the Pavlovian ding on his computer that indicated the electrifying arrival of a new email that I forced myself to read eventually.

  “Dear Publisher,” it began, tamely enough. “This is the best book you will read this year, maybe the best book in your thus far wretched, forlorn life. I want a $666K advance, and splits favorable to me, not you. You have 24 hours to offer a contract, which you will want to do. I could self-publish, go the hat-in-hand déclassé route of Print on Demand, because I have access to plenty of capital, but I have my reasons, which you may ultimately understand, not that I particularly care. I read on your amateurish website that I am supposed to send you a synopsis and some bio. I will take a pass on jumpin
g through your hoops. But if this helps you rationalize making an offer, think Da Vinci Code meets Fifty Shades of Grey meets Gone With the Wind meets Harry Potter meets Great Expectations meets The Bible.”

  For reasons Myron or a sensible person was simply too obtuse to understand, the one monster book the writer neglected to mention was The Joy of Cooking.

  “Anybody could break this book out and make it a bestseller, even you. Consider yourself lucky. Tick tock, Myron. And one more thing, Myron. You owe me.”

  That email wasn’t a pitch, it was the equivalent of a crayoned ransom note drafted by a circus clown.

  The message was delivered by somebody improbably named Calypso O’Kelly and a file was attached: an eponymously titled manuscript. He opened the file. How could a publisher, especially one with a groaning stomach, resist biting on such a certifiably loopy communication? He had never met a person named Calypso before—and now that I think about it, neither had I. He was in the mood for a good chuckle. It might stimulate his appetite for dinner. The book was titled Adventures of Calypso O’Kelly, and it was just under three hundred thousand words long. Once he stopped chuckling, he started reading; what the hell.

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  Next thing Myron knew it was nine in the morning and his editors (along with his junior editor) were stumbling in to work wearing trademark Gen-X standard issue wraparound what-the-fuck-you-looking-at shades. Wait till they exit their thirties, he was thinking—they will not know what hit them. That constituted a half-viayeayeable naval premise for a bestselling self-help book, but he would not publish self-help, because he had a microscopic shred of integrity, as he liked to boast without justification.