The House on Willow Street

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Suki found this approach strange. She liked seeing the flicker of admiration in men’s eyes, liked using her sexuality as part of her personal arsenal of weapons. But it was different for Melissa, she realized: Suki was the talent, the performer, whereas Melissa had to do deals with men. Totally different.

At Melissa’s small boardroom-style table, lunch was set up for two: some deli cold cuts, bagels, salad and diet sodas.

They sat and helped themselves, even though Suki wasn’t in the slightest bit hungry. The Xanax was kicking in and now she wanted a strong coffee, preferably a macchiato with foam, and a cigarette, then she’d relax totally. But instead she made up a plate of salad and poured herself a diet drink.

‘How’s the book going?’ Melissa asked.

Suki had already worked out how she was going to answer this.

‘Slowly,’ she said. There was no point in lying to Melissa. She was about to explain all the issues which were clouding her head: money worries, the damn Suarez book, and point out that if she was earning more money, then she could concentrate …

‘What’s wrong?’ rasped Melissa, bonhomie gone, suddenly looking panicked. ‘You’ve given the publishers the outline, Suki. That’s what they’ve paid for. Reuben is a big fan of yours, he turned down Women and Their Wars all those years ago and he still regrets it. That’s money in the bank for you, but the publishers won’t keep waiting for ever. Past glories have got you this far, now you have to deliver – on schedule. My ass is on the line with this. Your due date is in three months and they’ve had nothing so far. What’s going on?’

Suki could feel the hand holding the glass of soda shake at Melissa’s lengthy outburst. The fear rose in her again.

‘It’s Redmond Suarez,’ she said. ‘He’s writing a book about the Richardsons. He’s interested in me. I’m so stressed about all of this, I just can’t write.’

The words, once blurted out, had the effect of making Melissa sit back and smile with relief.

‘Suki, relax, honey. This is good, better than good. This is a publicist’s dream. I get that you’re worried. Nobody wants a guy like that writing about them. Suarez is a sewer rat – but people are interested in sewer rats. No matter what he says, it will be good for your profile. A little of that high-class Wasp stuff can only do you good. Plus, Reuben is going to flip with joy. He’s always had a thing for the old Republican Mayflower types like the Richardsons and he’d like nothing better than to see them red-faced with embarrassment – if WASPS can go red, that is. Money can’t buy it!’ She beamed. ‘This is all good. Why didn’t you tell me before?’

Melissa began eating her bagel again and Suki somehow found the strength to put her glass down. ‘I need a coffee,’ she said. ‘I can’t eat.’

Melissa flipped a switch on the desk phone and asked for coffee. ‘Hurry, Jennie, we’ve got to be out of here at forty after one to get to Box House by two.’ Then she turned back to Suki. ‘So,’ she continued, ‘what have you heard about the Suarez book? Have you talked to the Richardson family about it yet? I presume they know? Bet they do.’

‘I haven’t talked to them,’ Suki said, ‘but they’ll know. They always know everything.’

That she knew for a fact.

By the time they got to Box House Publishing – another monolith of sheeny glass – Suki had drunk two coffees, plastered a nicotine patch on her arm in lieu of cigarettes, and taken another half Zanax. She was feeling no pain and the face she examined in her compact mirror was looking good. Tranquillizer-induced good, she knew, but that was fine. Who cared where the relief came from, right? She raked her blonde hair back from the widow’s peak in place of combing it, and applied more eyeliner and fire-truck red gloss.

‘Is Suarez interested in the Jethro years?’ Melissa asked as they went up in the elevator.

‘Not sure,’ said Suki, unconcerned in her happy bubble. ‘Not yet, anyhow. Jethro’s people would have the lawyers on to him like a shot. It’s always hard to nail down facts with bands like TradeWind. The tabloid rumours are so wild, nobody cares what another biography would say. Jethro never speaks, never denies, never apologizes.’

She knew that from personal experience. When Jethro had moved on, she’d never heard from him again, despite their having shared a bed for more than two years.

Today’s meeting was with her editor, the marketing team and the cover department. They were all at least fifteen years younger than Suki and Melissa, but Suki tried to tell herself she didn’t care. When she’d started out as a writer, these kids were still in strollers. How could they know what she stood for with their talk of modern covers and what people wanted?

It turned out that they had heard about the Suarez book and everyone was pretty perky at the prospect.

‘It’s what people want to read, the inside story,’ breathed one particularly young girl in opaque pantyhose and a skirt so short she’d have been told she was ‘asking for it’ when Suki was young.

Suki had railed against the ‘asking for it’ mantra all her life. Women should be able to wear what they want, be what they want. But as she’d found to her cost, it hadn’t quite worked out that way. When you looked like you were asking for it, you sometimes got it – and that had the potential to destroy you.

Decades on, female politicians were still criticized for what they wore, though nobody would do that to male ones. Yet here were these young women with careers wearing clothes that seemed to say ‘one more inch and you’re at my crotch’.

Suki shook her head to rattle these crazy thoughts out of it and tuned back in. They’d moved on to the subject of e-books, blogging tours and the fact that Suki’s interesting past made her a person of interest to both the books and feature pages.

She continued to intermittently tune in and out until the meeting came to an end. Still in a Zanax-induced daze, she made her way back down to street level. On her way to hail a cab, she passed a gaggle of young girls wearing what looked to her like fancy dress costume: dark pantyhose, tight denim shorts, unflattering sneaker boots, long open shirts and skimpy stomach-baring T-shirts with writing on them. The clothes were not revealing as such, but they did, Suki realized, highlight the female body. Some guys laying cable watched the girls and Suki watched the men. She had never worn clothes like that when she was their age, but the body-conscious dresses and high boots she’d dressed in back then were designed to achieve the same result.

After the no-nonsense style of Melissa, who’d made such a statement, Suki felt almost shocked by the girls. And she was unshockable, wasn’t she?

In Women and Their Wars she’d written about female empowerment and the glass ceiling. At the time, it had been a hot topic. Not any more. Though the glass ceiling remained, no one seemed interested. Feminist writers had devoted entire books to topics such as body image, sexuality, the power of motherhood – and what difference had it made?

Young girls still chose clothes that would make men want to sleep with them. Older women wanted to have both a career and babies. Women of all ages wanted to look attractive to the opposite sex and not show any sign of growing old, ever. Nothing had changed at all.

Suki held out a hand to hail a passing cab. When it drew up, she saw her own image reflected in the windows: a woman with a nest of tousled blonde hair and full lips stained with red gloss. The perfect image of wanton sexuality.

In the back of the cab, she wiped the excess red off with a tissue.

The plane was delayed and she had to wait an hour at the gate with nothing to read but notes of the meetings and a magazine she’d bought that morning. She liked the empowering stuff and snippets about mindfulness or meditation. She didn’t do any of it; so far as Suki was concerned, reading about it was enough. The articles calmed her, as if the information was seeping into her bones.

One day, she promised herself, she would give this stuff a try. Maybe when the book came out and she had some money. Perhaps then she’d go to Avalon and spend time with Zach and Kitty. They were growing up and she was missing so much of it. She’d been close to Zach when he was younger: he’d been so sweet, so wise, despite being a kid. Suki had felt the warmth of both Tess and their father’s kindness in the boy and she’d adored being with him.