usual bumper-to-bumper flow of Queens traffic. Our little attached row house was less than a mile from the station, and yet it took fifteen minutes to get home amid the traffic, lights, pedestrians, and four-way stops that most New Yorkers took as a competitive signal to bear down and floor it.
Morgan was still at the office, thinking out strategies over a cup of orange-twist tea. “Oscar Stollen is a raving lunatic control freak, trying to make you his indentured servant,” she said, “and you thank him for a slab of suckling pig?”
“People just aren’t polite anymore,” I said. “Manners may be the only thing that separates us from other species in the animal kingdom. Thanking him was a show of my behavior, not his.” I had to remember that Morgan’s kids were older, in college. TJ was off at Penn majoring in biology, and Clare was studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan while working part time for a furniture designer and hating it—“but at least she’s working!” Morgan always said. Morgan didn’t need quiet mommy time anymore, hence our luncheon with Oscar was not a break but business as usual for her.
“Well, honey, I’m just sorry I didn’t see that one coming. I’ve always known Hearts and Flowers to ask for exclusives, but I never heard of them demanding them. Creating their own socialist publishing empire. It’s like those think tank deals where you sign away all your creative thoughts. Remember Penelope Glitzman?”
“Penelope…” She was a former romance editor who’d left the company to work for a book packager, a sort of book-idea think tank where a prerequisite to employment was to sign your brain away. The packager paid Penelope top dollar, but also demanded that she sign over her ideas in an agreement stating that all concepts generated while employed there were the creative property of the packager. The book packager banged out half a dozen bestselling series while Penelope was in its employ. When one spun off to a TV series, Penelope moved out to Los Angeles to become its executive producer. Until the book packager filed a law suit, claiming to own Penelope’s work on the series. Her ideas were their “creative properties.” Pretty appalling. My situation was a little different, of course, but close enough to scrape the paint off my toes.
“You’re right about this,” I told Morgan. “No question about it. I can’t sign my creative life away to Hearts and Flowers, no matter how big the advance is. I just got a little mesmerized back there by visions of dollar signs dancing in my head.”
“Those dollar signs are a very real concern for all of us.” Along with her share of woes, Morgan had a hefty mortgage on her Manhattan condo and some whopping credit card bills to pay down. Nine or ten years ago her husband, Jacob, a successful litigator, had flown to Chicago to ride with his biker buddies to a rally in South Dakota, never to return. Apparently Jacob, now Jocko to his biker buddies, was trying his hand at rustling cattle and taming a wild little redhead in Wyoming. When I met Morgan at a romance writers’ convention, talk of Jocko the Urban Cowboy was all the rage. Of course, I didn’t hear any of it, being out of the loop, more focused on my writing than on agent/editor scuttlebutt. So when I wrangled a meeting with Morgan and, by way of small talk, asked: “Are you married?” she laughed till there were tears in her eyes and told me I was refreshing.
Although he was the father of her kids, who were in junior high when their dad left, Morgan had never talked about Jocko much. She still didn’t mention him much, aside from the occasional shorthand barbs in e-mail, things like “What do I know, he always hated redheads.” and “Maybe there’s some Brokeback lawyer thing going on.” Along with the appropriate joke: “What do cowboy hats and hemorrhoids have in common? They’re both worn by assholes!”
Since Jacob’s desertion I’d seen Morgan through two minor surgeries. She’d eaten her way up to a size 14 then dieted down to a ten, given up smoking and thrown herself into her career, which had meant a boost for mine. She’d become a great agent and a better friend. She helped me maintain my sanity when the kids and husband tore it to shreds, I helped restrain her from hiring a hit man to go after Jocko.
So in light of our relationship, I knew it would kill us both to have that jumbo, megacontract snatched away.
“We both need the income,” I said, thinking aloud. “Not to be a downer, but even if Chocolate sells, I’ve got to keep writing romances.”
“Of course, of course, and why wouldn’t you? You’re so good at it, and it earns you a nice chunk of change. Don’t you worry about Oscar. We’ll get you a contract for more romances. Trust me, honey, trust me. This will work out over the next few months. If Oscar wants you that much, another publisher will want you more.”
“It would feel strange not to be writing for Hearts and Flowers, not to be working with Lindsay.”
“I know, I know. But in the meantime, you still owe them one romance, and you’ve got Chocolate to write.” We had already decided that Chocolate would be a stronger sell if Morgan could dangle the complete manuscript before the noses of a few editors, and so my work was cut out for me. “If I put my mind to it, I’ll bet I can get you a fat offer to ease your worries. Once Chocolate is a hit, Oscar will come crawling back to us, whimpering like a suckling pig.”
Christmas…ouch. Without a new contract, I’d have to think twice about getting Jack that new set of golf clubs he’d been dropping hints about. Of course, there’d be no cutting back on toys for the kids, or holiday trimmings, but I’d learned that the things that mattered most to the girls, like decorating cookies or reading Christmas stories under the tree, cost very little. In fact, without a new contract I’d have plenty of time to be the perfect Christmas mom. I’d delay delivery of my last book in the contract and spend my time decking the halls, organizing caroling parties, decorating cookies, building the gingerbread house the girls had been pining over…
“Of course, this is all the more reason to get Chocolate written, quick as the wind,” Morgan said, rattling my vision of an idyllic Christmas. “How fast can you get it finished? That would help me sell it, to have a complete manuscript.”
I tried to do a mental calculation of my calendar as I vacillated between turning right onto Northern Boulevard to pick up the girls from after school or heading straight home to the relative quiet of the house with just the sitter and Dylan. It was only four thirty and I could probably squeeze in another hour or so of work, but the December days were getting shorter and the sudden invasion of night in the afternoon always filled me with a haunting desperation to retrieve my children and see them safely tucked away at home. Funny, on a July night I could work until seven without guilt, but encroaching winter somehow tugged on my maternal instincts. I turned right, toward after-school care.
“Are you there?” Morgan asked. “Can you hear me?”
“Just dodging traffic.”
“So finish Chocolate ASAP. Put Oscar’s last book on the back burner, okay? We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“Got it. Bye!” As I hung up I realized that someone would have to tell my editor, Lindsay, our side of the story, and I wasn’t sure about sharing any of this with Jack until things got settled. We’d connected briefly after the big lunch. I’d stood ducking the wind in a storefront above the tracks of Penn Station to get cell phone service. But I’d downplayed the meeting with Oscar, and Jack seemed to forget all about it, caught up in the office politics at Corstar Headquarters, in Dallas where CJ and Hank and Desiree were bemoaning the fact that they’d been passed over for promotion and the big bosses had seen fit to recruit a division manager from outside the company, hiring a woman named Terry Anne, aka Tiger.
“What do you think about Tiger?” Jack had asked. “Sound like trouble to you?”
“Be glad you’re not part of the Dallas
