Part I
October 2016
Caleb, it’s brilliant, he said, not listening. Brilliant. He was looking past my ear to the bar, where I assumed our server must be, or some other woman. That our waitress wasn’t conventionally attractive didn’t stop him from making a face at me after she’d introduced herself and walked away. I had mirrored it—raising my eyebrows and sucking in my lips—before taking a sip of water to break the moment.
His eyes came back to me. He clasped his hands, placed them on the table, and began talking. I could hardly listen, I couldn’t stop thinking of the affectations infecting his words—do get in touch, have a go, if I could be so daring, unearned pauses, overemphasized mhms—and how rampant it is in the book world, and elsewhere, like the café by my apartment stocked with people who dress like artists on weekends but spend their weekdays on Slack. He ended his brief soliloquy with something about Mavis Gallant, whom I’d never read and whose name I’d thought was pronounced differently. (I looked it up when I got home; he was right.) This was all in response to a new story idea, which was a response to him asking me if I had my next book in mind—next book, as if the one we were meeting to discuss were already in the past—which was supposed to be a segue from our aimless banter to real business talk. When I told him the new story idea—a party of thirty-somethings where everyone slowly realizes death is present, literally in the room, in disguise, and by the end of the night it will take one of them, so that the entire time they all have to prove how full of life they are—he said, a word or two before I finished, love it, which made me hate it and regret ever having dreamt it up.
Ah, Gallant, I said. He looked at his hand, rubbed his pointer and middle fingers together, then scanned the room. He said he wished we could smoke in restaurants, and then, Thanks, Giuliani, which I thought was an ironic riff on Thanks, Obama, which is already ironic—also the smoking ban was Bloomberg, not Giuliani—but he was apparently sincere. This tarnished some of my assumptions about him, mainly that he should be unflaggingly smooth. Ellis Buford was a quote unquote big-shot agent, a phrase I’d heard from too many people with too little irony. He was taller than I’d expected but less handsome in some inscrutable way. I disliked him the second we shook hands, when he apologized for being late—please forgive my truancy—but all of that didn’t matter, nothing mattered in the face of the fact that he was a big-shot agent who was going to change my life. Yes, the phrase is ridiculous but the concept transcends ridiculousness, the concept being power. Big shot. Those two words were the first my lips formed the second we hung up after he called me out of the blue on the Saturday morning four days before our lunch. I was lying on my couch, drinking coffee, listening to John Wizards at full blast (my roommate was out of town), and playing chess online with my computer on my stomach, a ritual I don’t normally interrupt before it fulfills its purpose, a bowel movement, when my eyes wandered to the window, catching sight of a building in the distance. I recognized it and was taken aback; the building was in Brooklyn Heights, meaning that my window didn’t look south but west. That I’d been mistaken about the cardinal orientation of my apartment for the three months I’d lived there was unbelievable; I was someone who could point north any time of day. I considered finishing the game but I was going to lose anyway, so I put on my slippers and walked downstairs and around the apartment until I found my fire escape. I turned around and found the building again. I was right, I realized; I’d been wrong that whole time, and that’s when my phone rang. Caleb? he said. Yes? I said. This is Ellis Buford. I’ve just finished your novel. Do you have time?
The waitress had seen him look around the room and, misinterpreting, came over with a pen and pad in hand—nothing more than accessories, surely, an ironic, kitsch addition to an atmosphere that seemed designed for readers of Maxim. Reclaimed wood clashed with metallic chandeliers clashed with the mid-century modern furniture and attire. It didn’t make any sense, but nothing made sense anymore, and also sometimes a nice SoHo address is all you need to charge $36 for a lunch lamb shank, which was what he ordered us both, along with a Heineken for him. When the waitress looked at me I forgot I could speak, to save me from embarrassment Ellis said the place had great Manhattans, and I said, That’s great, I’ll have that.
As soon as she walked away he jumped right in, as if we’d been discussing the book the whole time. He told me how he’d position it, and me, the story behind the story, which as far as I could tell mostly meant my age, twenty-seven, which I didn’t think was that young but he seemed to think it was, And didn’t you finish it when you were twenty-four? (I hadn’t, and demurred.) That’s “prodigy”-eligible. Then he spouted a laundry list of words and phrases describing the book and my style, my aesthetic, that he would try out with editors, some of which would end up on the back of the book and eventually in the mouths of critics and booksellers and, if all went well, Terry Gross—and who knows, Seth Meyers? During all this he elegantly wove in his own past successes and what they did or didn’t have in common with how my manuscript might be sold. Something in me disliked this kind of talk, made me feel I should cling to the purity of Art when confronted with the vulgarities of Commerce, but another instinct, a better instinct, made me exhale, sit forward in my chair, put my elbows on the table, and listen intently as this man considered my book in much the same way he considered our waitress as she laid down our drinks.
This is all assuming we can work together, he said, and for a brief moment I revisited a thought I’d spent the past three days convincing myself was irrational: that he’d asked me to lunch only to say the manuscript wasn’t for him, or that it would need considerable work. But he was staring at me. His face betrayed worry. Jesus Christ, I thought, he thinks I have other offers. The excitement passing through me felt like a vulnerability I should hide. I looked at him and smiled bashfully, and then I took a sip from my drink.
How is it? he asked.
Good, I said, as if I could tell, as if I cared. It had alcohol in it. The worry in his face was intensifying. I hadn’t answered his tacit question. I asked myself what exactly I was playing at. I didn’t know. Yes, I said, I want to work with you. He smiled and drank his beer, and then launched back into it. So there are five big publishing houses, umbrellas if you will, but within them are … I didn’t know if he was giving me the benefit of the doubt or if he truly believed I didn’t know all of this, given I’d already admitted to having a Publishers Marketplace account, given I’d asked on our call if he thought he could sell the book in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair. He must’ve known how obsessively I’d researched the landscape, the editors I wanted to work with, the art that would be perfect for the cover, the typefaces. I thought again of Caslon, and deckled edges, and clothbound covers of the most subdued greens, and my mind steadied again only when he said, Ed Pollack might like this.
It would be a dream to work with Ed Pollack, I said, and he nodded, thinking of other names that might impress.
Rebecca Wallace, he said. I don’t know if it’s for her, really, but she hasn’t bought anything substantial in half a year. I thought I hid my reaction to this but he picked up on it and passed a smile that was reassuring, or maybe playful, some mix of sentiments that combined for a flawless response. Perhaps I’d underestimated him, perhaps his sort of grace was more practical. He switched from editors to imprints, naming all the ones I expected and needed to hear and the one that I didn’t want to, PFK.
Hmm, I grunted, my attempt at expressing vague doubt.
No? he asked.
I don’t know, I said. They’ve never really struck me as all that serious.
He looked perplexed and mildly amused. He started balancing his beer bottle in the crook of his arm, the first mannerism of his I liked. He was taking his time to respond.
Copyright © 2022 by Andrew Lipstein
