so hard. Her work had bought her this villa, the beautiful furniture in it, the Rolls parked in the garage, the services of Edith and the French couple who cooked and cleaned and drove for her. But it hadn’t bought her daughter’s love or happiness. And wasn’t Susann slipping? She pulled her arthritic fingers through her artfully streaked blond hair and walked back to the chaise. She crossed her legs and her arms and told Edith crossly that she was through for the day.
Edith gave her a look and shrugged her rounded shoulders. The woman would have a dowager’s hump in no time, Susann thought distastefully. “AH right,” Edith said, but Susann knew it wasn’t all right. She had a deadline, Edith knew she had the deadline, and Susann always delivered on time. Her books came out each Mother’s Day, as regular as jonquils in March. But this one would be different. It would be on the fall list. Her publisher demanded it. And she would not disappoint them.
Almost two decades ago she and Alf had been among the first to spot the hole in the marketplace between the heavily promoted spring list and the most important fall offerings. When her first successful book came out fourteen years ago, Alf had taken advantage of the women’s market just waiting there at Mother’s Day, and it had made her name.
It had also made her a rich woman. Well, not the first book. Of course she’d gotten screwed out of that deal. Each year since she had followed up the success of The Lady of the House with another Mother’s Day novel, and with Alf’s help, each one had sold hundreds of thousands of copies in hardcover and millions in paperback. She’d become a tradition among some women—daughters giving mothers a Susann Baker Edmonds, and now their own daughters gave them copies. Three generations reading her uplifting stories. Yes, she felt proud of what she’d accomplished. She’d become famous and wealthy, and Alf had become her full-time agent and taken over her affairs and fired the incompetent lawyer who’d given her first book away. They’d retained a PR firm. Her name popped up regularly in the columns. Four of her books had been made into television miniseries, and another three were optioned. She was the most profitable woman novelist at her publishing house, and they treated her appropriately.
But there was the rub. Susann put her hands over her eyes to shield her face from the sun. She was the most profitable women’s writer, but there were all those men out there, turning out their techno-thrillers, their legal-suspense stories, and those other testosterone-driven books, all of which were being made into feature films by those bastards in Hollywood who ignored middle-aged women. It was so unfair. Susann had never had a movie made of any of her books. Women would go to see Crichton movies and Grisham movies and Clancy movies, but men wouldn’t take their wives out to see a woman’s saga. Women’s books were only good enough for the pink ghetto of television. And without the extra heat that films generated, it was getting harder and harder nowadays to keep a bestseller up at the top of the list. So this new one would come out in the autumn. Would it help? There were one hundred and fifty romance titles released each month. As if that wasn’t enough, most tried to interest book buyers, stores, and readers with all kinds of giveaways and undignified trash. Joan Schulhafer of Avon Books had put it succinctly when she said, “We have a higher nicknack-per-author ratio than any other genre.”
Edith was gathering up her steno pad, her bag of pencils and yellow Post-it notes and paper clips. She was taking off her reading glasses, putting them in her skirt pocket and putting her sunglasses on her sun-burned pink nose. In the last two decades, while she worked with Edith, Susann had married, divorced, become slimmer, younger-looking, better dressed, and blond. While Edith … Edith hadn’t changed at all, except to age. She looked like a drone. It actually frightened Susann, partly because—even though she looked at least a decade younger—Susann knew she was actually four years older than Edith. And Edith knew it, too, being one of the few insiders who knew Susann’s real age.
Hell, Edith didn’t just know her real age (fifty-eight), she knew her real name (Sue Ann Kowlofsky), the real number of marriages Susann had been through (three), the real number of face-lifts Susann had had (two), and even where she kept most of her money (the island of Jersey). Edith knew all the sordid details about Susann’s daughter, Kim—the drug rehabs, the DWIs, the bad men. Perhaps that was why Edith so exasperated her. Edith had neither improved herself, nor did she seem impressed with Susann’s improvements. There was no softening mystique “between them. And Susann didn’t like living without mystique. She had become dependent on her publicist-generated bio, Alf’s respect, the publisher’s kid-glove handling, and the aura that fame and wealth had given her.
“Alf ought to be back soon,” Susann remarked. “I have to get dressed. We have a dinner party tonight.” Edith didn’t much like Alf, and the feeling was mutual.
“The chapter’s more important than the party,” Edith said. “It needs work.”
Susann felt her temper rising, but she bit back the words she wanted to spit and, instead, gave Edith one of her best smiles. “Why don’t you see what you can do with it?” she asked.
Edith stood, finally, and shuffled off the terrace into the house. Susann got up and crossed to the balustrade, leaning against it and looking out toward the water. The autumn sun slipped behind a cloud, and Susann, clad only in a bathing suit and chiffon cover-up, shivered. The problem was that as tacky and annoying as she was, Edith was right. The new book was not only coming slowly, it was coming badly. And there was no room for shoddiness. At this point in her life Susann could not afford to slip out of the golden circle of bestsellers and back into obscurity, back to Cincinnati. The very thought made her shiver again.
The women’s fiction market was changing. Alf said it was moving forward and might leave her behind. But without her books, without her fame, without the money that she brought in, where would she be? Who would she be? What would Alf do if her business fell off ? Managing her had made him, but as he’d taken on other clients, hadn’t his interest in her waned a bit? Would even Edith stick with her if all of this ended?
Susann closed her eyes, shutting them tight despite the crow’s feet. Plastic surgery still couldn’t do anything about crow’s feet, though it had erased the bags and tightened the sags under and over her eyes. Still, good as she looked, young as she looked, slim as she looked, Susann clutched the railing with her arthritic hands and knew she was just a fifty-eight-year-old woman, frightened and alone.
What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he’s staring out of the window.
—Burton Rascoe
Judith stared out the window, looking up from the typewriter on the card table she was using as a desk. She was alone, except for Flaubert, who snorted and whimpered in his sleep. Judith wondered if the dog was dreaming. She stretched in her chair. From her seat she could see King Street and a tiny corner of the state university campus. A girl was leaning up against the brick wall of the student center, and, as Judith watched, the dark, lanky young man who was standing beside her leaned in, encompassing her with his hands. Then he quickly kissed her on the mouth. The girl laughed and tossed her head. Even through the dirt of the windowpane Judith could see the white flash of her teeth.
It seemed so long to Judith since she’d been a student, even though it was only two semesters ago. And it seemed even longer since Daniel had kissed her that way. Perhaps he had never kissed her that way. Daniel was not what anyone would call the spontaneous type. Brilliant, yes. Ambitious, definitely. But spontaneous … No, Judith could never remember Daniel kissing her like that.
Of course, he hadn’t been free to kiss her on the campus, she told herself, trying to be fair. Judith always tried to be fair. She remembered reading somewhere that her name came from the Old Testament, that Judith might have been one
