Spanish Disco

“I know,” I whispered.

“So he doesn’t want some faceless schlub somewhere handling his book. He wants me. West Side. Us. If he reads PW, he knows how publishers just gobble each other up. Soon, there’s just going to be one giant God damn publishing house, and every book will be owned by the same fucking conglomerate. In this day and age, no one will give him the kind of attention he deserves.”

“Bullshit. This is Riggs. This is the encore to Simple Simon. Publishers would sign their souls over to Satan for a chance to publish it. Just show ’em the dotted line.”

“That would imply that they have souls.”

“They’d give him a two-million-dollar advance. They would. What kind of advance can you give him? Our standard fifteen thousand?”

“Well…actually, he doesn’t want an advance. He just wants a lot of control.”

“Control?”

“Specifically?” He raised his eyebrows, something he does when he’s about to tell me news I may not like. Raised eyebrows, edit this book in two weeks.

“He wants you to edit his book.”

My heart stopped beating, I think, and in the silence I heard the clock on Lou’s shelf ticking.

“Me?” I started breathing again. “He’s heard of me?”

“You were in the article in PW.”

“I’m flattered, but it’s not as if I’d let you give his book to anyone else.”

“Glad you feel that way.” Pause. Raised eyebrows. “Because he wants you to go stay with him while you do it.”

“What?” I put my mug of coffee down.

“Yeah. He wants you to move in for a month. Really hash it out.”

“Hash it out?”

Lou shrugged.

“Hash it out with Roland Riggs? You don’t hash things out with a Pulitzer-prize-winning genius.”

“A minute ago you were griping that Simple Simon meant nothing. That it didn’t change people. That they’d weep over my laundry list.”

“A minute ago, I wasn’t Roland Riggs’s new editor. A minute ago, I wasn’t leaving my beachfront condo for who knows where to go live with this recluse, who, for all I know, is certifiable after all these years. Christ, he called you up in the middle of the night mid-stream in a thirty-year-old conversation.”

“Cass, even if he is certifiable, you’d chew him up and spit him out with your first cup of coffee. Besides, you’ve handled Michael Pearton. He’s not exactly small potatoes. He’s hit the New York Times bestseller list. Albeit infrequently. God, he takes a long time to write a book. Anyway, Pearton’s kind of weird. How bad could Riggs be?”

“Michael’s different.”

“Yeah. You give him phone sex.”

“You know, I told you that over a pitcher of margaritas, and you insist on throwing it in my face every chance you can slip it into a conversation.”

“I think it’s funny.”

“Funny? The guy calls me at three in the morning. He won’t let me be. He hounds me with e-mail.”

“And he’s made you and me rich.”

“Technically, you’re a lot richer than I am.”

“But for thirty-three years old, you ain’t doing so bad. And that’s nothing compared to what Roland Riggs can do for you.”

“And you.”

“Sure. But it’s not about the money. It’s about Simple Simon. It’s about closure for an entire generation of people who read his book and can’t forget it.”

“Maybe an encore isn’t so smart.”

“Maybe it is.”

“Lou, what did Simple Simon mean to you? Maybe that’s what some of this is about.”

He looked away.

“Okay, Lou. You don’t want to look at that, fine. But it’s not like I can just leave all my other authors and books for a month.”

“We have e-mail. Take your laptop. You’re not in the office all that much anyway. The guy has a phone.”

“I don’t know. It just sounds…weird.”

“It’s not like you’ll be living in a shack somewhere.”

“Well, where will I be going?”

“He has a big house over on Sanibel Island.”

“Sanibel? I’ll die there.”

Sanibel is a tiny spit of an island off the West Coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico. The Old Guard are strict about development. No high-level condos. No good rye bread. No NY-style cheesecake. No nightlife. Lord knows what kind of coffee I could get there.

“He has a housekeeper who doubles as his personal chef. He’s right on the beach. You’ll have your own guest suite. He has a pool.”

“You make it sound like I’m going to the Hilton.”

“Look, Cassie, we haven’t had a mega-hit in a while. I field calls every month from publishers who want to gobble us up. I’m getting old. I’m not sure I can keep up this independent thing forever. I need this book. We need this book.”

“You couldn’t sell West Side. You wouldn’t sell. This is your baby.”

“Baby or not, things are tight. We’ve had a couple of bombs. That damn actress’s book—why’d I buy it? So we’re in trouble, and I need you to pretend you’re going to Vegas. You’re going to Vegas, and you’re taking all our chips and you’re putting them all down on black. In the big roulette wheel of publishing, this is our chance to create a legacy. To leave our mark.”

“I need another cup of coffee. I need to talk to Grace about handling my shit while I’m gone. I have to make a dozen phone calls. I’ve had no sleep. I haven’t eaten. And I’m really cranky.”

Lou cocked a smile at me. “Just another day at the office.” When he smiled, which was much rarer than when Helen was alive, he was still that good-looking kid from Doubleday who made a name for himself by working longer and harder and smarter than anyone else. His blue eyes shone.

I winked at him and went to my office. I slipped off my shoes. Lou’s habits had become remarkably enmeshed with my own. I started my personal coffeemaker—I don’t work and play well with others, and I don’t share my pots of coffee. As I heard the sounds of brewing ecstasy, I leaned back in my chair and put my perfectly pedicured feet up on my desk—“Cherry Poppin’ Red” nail polish on my toes. What do you pack to go see a Pulitzer-prize-winner? Do you let him see you before your first morning cup of coffee?

I stared out the window at the Atlantic Ocean that a few hours ago I had described to Michael. Now, everything was different. I was taking all our chips and betting on black.

3

M ichael took it rather badly.

“What do you mean you are jetting off somewhere for a month. A bloody month! We’re in the middle of my novel, Cassie.”

“Michael, as I’ve already explained, I have e-mail. Use it. I am taking my laptop. You can leave messages for me at the office, and I can call you whenever you need me. You have written seven books. Aces High sold out of three printings and is still doing well. You can handle this little, teensy-weensy inconvenience.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Michael, we’re already an ocean apart.”

“Precisely why I am so upset with you, Cassie Hayes.”

“I don’t quite see where we’re going with this. You live in London. I live in Florida. We’ve worked together for five years. What’s another three hundred miles’ difference?”

“Cassie, some author calls Lou in the middle of the night, and you’re running off to live in this man’s house for a month, when you’ve never even agreed to come to London.”

“Well, you’ve never come to Florida.”

“I have. You were in L. A., remember?”

“A poorly timed trip, Michael.”

“Why won’t you even tell me who this chap is?”

“I can’t. I really can’t. He’s very famous but very protective about his privacy. Lou would kill me. I just can’t.”

As we talked, I threw the entire contents of my closet on my bed and started picking through my clothes and placing them in pack/don’t pack but keep/Goodwill piles.

“You could bloody fall in love with this man. A month! A month in the tropics.”

“Michael…” I spoke soothingly, as one might speak to a man about to jump from London Bridge. “I live in the tropics all the time. The warm, balmy breezes are not going to make me take leave of my senses.”

“A month in his home, Cassie.”

“Trust me on this one. I am not going to fall in love with him. Michael, this is ludicrous. And if I did fall in love with him, which I won’t because he’s too old for me anyway—it’s not like I’d ever stop working or stop being your editor. I’m not exactly the stay-at-home wifey type. Believe me. So this entire conversation is predicated on a fear that will never happen.”

“I could care less if you stopped being my editor. I want you to come to London.”

“Why? So you can feel like you’re just as important to me as this author? You know you are.”

“No.”

A long silence followed.

“Michael? Are you still there? Or have you been drinking, because you are acting totally off the wall.”

“For such a brilliant girl, Cassie, you can be impossibly thick as a plank.”

More silence.

“Are you so bloody stubborn that you are going to make me say it?”

“Say what?”

“That I am hopelessly besotted with you.”

My breath left me. I sat down on the Goodwill pile, and a belt dug into my ass. I moved over to the keep-but-don’t-pack pile. More silence.

“So I want you to promise me you won’t go doing anything stupid like falling in love with this decrepit old author you’re racing off to see—if he really is as old as you say he is.”

“I promise,” I whispered.

“And I want you to come to London when you return. Even if it’s just for a few days. A weekend.”

“Michael, what time is it there?”

“Seven o’clock.”

“You have been drinking. You’re slurring your speech.”

“Not a drop.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do.”

“But…but we have a perfectly good working relationship. I’ll grant you that we have phone sex that, well, quite frankly, is more of a relationship than I have with anyone else. But why would we ruin this all by meeting?”

“Because you can’t love someone over the phone and over your bloody e-mail. I want to meet you. This has been the longest pre-coital relationship in history.”

“I don’t know about that. I think one of the Brontë sisters corresponded with her future husband for seventeen years or something drawn out and Victorian like that.”

“You’re not a Brontë.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Promise me you’ll think about it.”

“I promise. But you think about it, too. We have the perfect relationship.”

“Long distance?”

“Yes. You know how grumpy I am. How I don’t rise before noon. How I need my coffee and have horrible eating habits. I have a two-bedroom condo and live alone, and I need a weekly housekeeper just to keep the place decent. I laugh too loudly. I drink too much. I play my music at decibels designed to rupture the human eardrum. I really am horrible at relationships. ‘We,’ whatever ‘we’ are, are perfect.”

“I’d rather have imperfection, Cassie. Think about it.”

“I will.”

“Call me.”

“I will.”

“Write me.”

“I will.”

“And no falling in love.”

“Okay.”

“Talk to you soon.”

“Sure.”

“I do adore you.”

“Michael…”

“Ciao.”

I held the phone, listening to dead transatlantic air until the operator informed me it was time to make a call. What had just happened? A perfectly good editor-author relationship had gone up in flames. How could he love me? We’d never met, as he so stubbornly kept pointing out.

In the past, I’d stared at his cover photos feeling mildly like a jellyfish and woozy inside. He was sexy. But he was there, and I was here. It was perfect. No morning chit-chat. No fighting over toilet seat lid etiquette. No one badgering me about my weird hours, my caffeine addiction, my overindulgence in tequila sunrises. No one yelling at me when my gut screamed out over my combined poor habits and I was writhing on the bathroom floor—no “I wish you’d see someone about that.” Michael was my ideal non-lover. And if he thought about it long enough, he’d realize it, too. I’d just let it all sink in to him. Maybe he was having a post-writer’s block orgasm from our most recent phone call.

I turned my attention to the serious pile of Goodwill clothes amassing on my bed. I hated to shop but realized I didn’t have a month’s worth of clothes to take. Time to hit the mall, then visit my father.

In a place where pink palaces reign, the malls are enough to make a practical woman don a burlap sack. Overpriced is a mantra, and over-the-top is a Boca staple. I pulled up to Bloomingdale’s and forced myself to go through the doors. I am seriously mall-phobic. I think it’s those faintly Night of the Living Dead-like makeup counter women. I’m fond of my slightly flawed face the way it is—crooked smile, full lips, and freckled nose included. I even like the tiny scar by my right eyebrow where Billy Monroe stabbed me with a pencil during a second-grade fight. Billy ended up with a black eye. I called it even.

My shopping technique is simple. I head to Ann Taylor and find a shirt I like. Then I buy it in seven colors. Next I find pants I like. I buy three of the exact same pair in the same size, eight. I do the same with shorts. I toss a scarf and a new purse on the pile. Buy two pairs of size-nine shoes that look comfortable. I don’t try anything on. I have them ring it all up. I am out the door in less than fifteen minutes. The Ann Taylor girls see me coming from three stores away and sound some sort of “Bitch alarm.” They steer clear of me ever since I told the manager, “Look, I am about to spend seven or eight hundred dollars. I don’t want any help. I don’t want anyone to talk to me. If you stay out of my way, then I will return several times a year to spend roughly the same amount of money. Deal?” She had nodded, and I’ve been shopping there for four years.

After damaging my credit card, I left the mall and drove to Stratford Oaks Assisted Living Facility.

“Mornin’, Charlie.” I smiled at the security guard in the fern-filled lobby.

“Mornin’, Ms. Hayes.”

I had hoped to be able to really talk to my father, but today wasn’t going to be one of those days.

“Sophie!” He smiled broadly at me and called me by my mother’s name. I hate that I look like her.

“Jack.” I smiled warmly, approaching him, this half-stranger who no longer knew me by my real name most of the time. He looked thinner by the day. They told me he resisted all foods but pie. Why pie? They used to go to some place down in Greenwich Village and order pieces of it after the theater.

“Come here, Sophie. I have to tell you the funniest story.”

I listened to his tales of authors and editors in New York’s 1940s literary circles. My father had worked for Simon & Schuster. I laughed where I was supposed to laugh and feigned shock where I was supposed to feign shock. I had heard all these stories many times before. “Sophie” patted his bony hand and smiled and went along with the whole charade. I waited patiently for a moment when lucidity would peek through like a ray of sunshine streaming down from behind a cumulus cloud. Sometimes I was rewarded, feeling like some people do when they see a magnificent beam filtering down—that perhaps there is a God in heaven after all. Other times, the clouds stubbornly shut out the sun, leaving both Dad and me in dreary grayness.

“Well, Jack, I really must be going.”

“So soon, Sophie? So soon? Our time together is always so brief. I wish your divorce was final.”

“It will be soon, Jack. Then we can be together always.”

The doctors tell me not to go along with his fantasies. “Bring him back to the present,” they say. But I refuse to deny him these afternoons of happiness. He always remembers the same years. My mother and he were dating. It was before I came along. Before she abandoned us both. Before all the heartache.

“I love you, Sophie.”

“I love you, too, Jack.”

The clouds parted.

“For heaven’s sake, Cassie, how long have you been standing there?”

“Only a minute or two, Daddy.”

“Come give your Dad a big old hug.”

I grabbed him tightly, smelling his Royal Copenhagen cologne, rubbing my face against the soft terry-cloth of his blue robe.

“How’s my genius daughter?”

“Just fine, Dad. Guess what?” I said, sitting down on the hassock by his slippered feet.

“What?”

“I’m going to work with Roland Riggs.”

He leaned back in his chintz chair and smiled.

“As if you hadn’t before…but, my God, Cassie, you’ve hit the big time.”

“I know. And I’m going away for a few weeks. To stay with him while we work on his new novel. He lives on Sanibel Island.”

“Bring me back a conch shell.”

I laughed. “I will. Can you believe it? Roland Riggs!”

We talked for about a half hour. I held on to every clear word. Then I could see him growing tired.

“I really need to get going, Dad.”

I leaned over and hugged him again.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too. And I’m very proud of you.”

“I know, Dad. I know.”

I fought to keep the tears from coming and stood.

“Tell me everything when you return.”

“I will.”

“Don’t forget a thing.”

“I won’t, Dad.” I smoothed the hand-knitted afghan over his legs and held onto his hand one last time.

Then I walked down the linoleum floors of the hallway. Royal Copenhagen was replaced by antiseptic hospitalish clean. “I won’t forget a thing, Daddy,” I whispered. I wished he wouldn’t either.

4

“L aptop?”

“Check.”

“Bathing suit?”

“Lou, this really isn’t necessary.”

“Bathing suit?” he said, his voice a little more insistent.

“Check.” Lou was going to send me off with the precision of a military operation. We stood in the parking garage of my building, his black Jaguar next to my yellow monstrosity. Looking like we’d just completed a mob hit, we stared into my trunk.

“Pajamas?”

“I brought a kimono.”

“No can do. Pajamas, Cassie. You cannot sleep naked in Roland Riggs’s house. What if there’s a fire?”

“You’ve become a freakish version of a Jewish grandmother.”

“Pajamas?”

“Robe.”

“Well, I knew this would happen. So hold on…” He went to his car and fumbled in the front seat. “Here.” He smiled, shoving a Victoria’s Secret pink-and-white shopping bag at me. Inside was a very tasteful and elegant set of lounging pajamas.

“What? No oversize South Park sleepshirt?”

Ignoring me, he continued. “Cell phone?”

“Check.”

“Daytimer?”

“Check.”

“Coffeemaker?”

“Check.” We had decided I should have my own coffeemaker in my room so I wouldn’t have to greet Roland Riggs in the mornings pre-caffeine.

“Coffee beans.”

“Check.”

“Grinder.”

“Check.”

“Double latte with two sugars for the road?”

“No…I figured I’d stop on the way.”

“If you stop, you’ll be late. Can you this once be punctual? Hold on.” Again he bent into the Jag and emerged with a tall double latte from my favorite coffee bar.

“You happen to have a tall, dark, and handsome guy in there who also cooks?” I took the latte and set it on the roof of my Caddy.

“No. But I thought of everything else. That’s why we’re a good team.”

He smiled at me, and we had another one of our awkward moments. I knew he thought of me as a daughter. He and Helen never had children. But she had always been the one with the easy, affectionate gestures. A tall, graceful blonde, with the aura of Grace Kelly, she was the one who bought my Christmas gifts—always something truly personal and perfect. A first-edition copy of The Sun Also Rises. An antique cameo pin for my blazer lapel. A tortoiseshell-and-silver brush-and-comb set engraved with my monogram. Helen gave sentimental gifts chosen to show how much she and Lou loved me. Without Helen, Lou faced the daunting prospect of conveying his emotions without her. Since her death, he hugged me clumsily. Mumbled when it felt right. Nursed me through self-pitying moments with visits to our favorite dive bar. But Helen had humanized Lou; they were a perfect pair, and without her he was totally adrift.

“The best team in publishing.” I hugged him. We were about the same height. He patted my back.

“Call me.”

“I will. You’re going to miss me.” I pulled away.

“Oh sure. You after two pots of coffee barking at me over the schedules and covers. Hell, I might actually get some work done with you gone.” He cleared his throat. “You better get going.”

I threw my pajamas in the trunk, donned my Ray-Bans, and took my latte.

“Admit it.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll miss you. Now get going.”

I eased my car out of its tight parking space, waved and was on my way, trying not to think of Michael Pearton. But the mind, even my caffeine-hyped mind, doesn’t work that way. I drove across the Florida Everglades, heading to ward Sanibel Island, and tried—hard—not to think of his voice. But the harder I tried, the more vividly his face and disembodied voice drifted toward me, like a phantom passenger on my soft leather front seat.

I forced myself to think of Lou and Simple Simon, which he made me re-read three times. Lou had been impossible since Roland Riggs’s call. Every day he had new instructions. “Hook up your e-mail if you can. Right away. Call me the second you finish reading the manuscript. Tell me what he looks like. See if you can find out if he’ll do publicity for the book. Is he willing to do interviews?” I hadn’t seen him so hyped up by the possibility of a book since he courted movie legend Joan Fontaine to write her memoirs. (She declined.)

“Lou, shut up,” I had said. “You’re making me nervous. He’s just a guy. He pisses standing up like all the rest of you.”

“Sometimes I piss sitting down.”

“You know, Lou, that’s a little more information than I need to know.”

“Christ, I get to hear about every time you have your period. We brace for your PMS like it’s a hurricane crossing the Caribbean and heading dead-on towards Boca. You can hear about how I sit.”

I smiled to myself as I drove. Think of Lou and Roland Riggs—was I talking to myself already?—not Pearton. I flipped on my stereo, popped in my Elvis Costello CD and steered toward Alligator Alley while listening to “Indoor Fireworks.”

Alligator Alley is a lonesome, flat expanse of highway stretching from one coast of Florida to the other. As far as the eye can see in any direction is Everglades. Reeds and swamp, the occasional scruffy tree. I presume alligators. And dead bodies. Mafia hits take place in the ’glades. At least that’s what Joe “Boom-Boom” Grasso told me. We published his book about life in the Gambino crime family.

Empty mile after mile of swamp ate at my nerves. I gave up and allowed Michael to invade my thoughts. The mark of a good editor is an anal-retentive mind that never forgets a detail. With my typical obsessiveness, I replayed every conversation I’d had with Michael over the last five years.

So much of what passed between us was banter at first. Indoor fireworks. But somehow, over the years, we had progressed to intimate all-nighters about God (he tried to persuade me to give up my agnosticism), writing, dreams, Freud (we both concurred—sometimes a cigar is just a cigar), and even my father and mother. I forced his face from my mind by singing along with Elvis. Every time I tried too hard to make Michael vanish, he returned to my thoughts, his enigmatic smile staring up from his jacket photo. I felt my stomach tighten slightly.

Two hours after my departure from Boca, my banana-mobile and I emerged from the ’glades and proceeded toward the island. If you’re into the beach and the sun and palm trees and sand—which I am not—then Sanibel is indeed a paradise. I hadn’t yet spoken to Roland Riggs, but he had given Lou explicit directions to his house. For a New Yorker, any directions that start, “Make a right onto Periwinkle Way” bodes ill.