Elin Hilderbrand - The Rumor

Hope said, “Is Dad okay?”

“Not really,” Grace said. She cleared the girls’ plates and stood up, not wanting to say anything else. Eddie was right: the girls needed to learn what was going on from Eddie and Grace before they heard it elsewhere-but she would let them have today.

Madeline read the completed first draft of B/G three times. It was good; it was addictive. The power and the urgency of the affair and the forbiddeness of it made it irresistible, but the genuine love between B and G made it luminous.

She wasn’t going to publish it.

Oh, how she dreaded calling Angie. And yet, call Angie she must.

Angie’s assistant, Marlo, answered. “She’s at lunch.”

“She is?” Madeline said. It was ten fifteen. No one ate lunch at ten fifteen, not even Angie Turner. Maybe “lunch” meant she was meeting her tile guy at a suite at the Warwick Hotel. Madeline decided to just tell Marlo, and Marlo could break the bad news to Angie. “Listen, Marlo, I’m not going to publish B/G. I have to pull it off the list.”

“Please hold,” Marlo said. “I’m putting you through to Angie.”

“I thought she was at lunch.”

“She just walked in,” Marlo said.

“How’s my favorite author?” Angie said when she came on the line. “How’s the Next Big Thing? I’m just going to start calling you Number One, because that’s where you’re headed, Madeline. Straight to the top spot. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today.”

Marlo hadn’t told her.

“Did Marlo tell you?” Madeline asked.

“Tell me what?” Angie said.

“I can’t let you publish the book,” Madeline said.

Silence.

Madeline waited. Maybe that was it. She had spoken the words. Could she just hang up?

But then Angie started to yell. Whippet-thin Angie, in her pencil skirts and Louboutin slingbacks, had an angry voice that nearly shattered Madeline’s phone. Madeline couldn’t make out every word, but the gist was something like, You can’t just… The book, Madeline, you don’t make those decisions, we do… Murder, bloody murder. This is going to be big, so big, so huge, you have no fucking idea how you’re hurting yourself, might as well get a razor and slit your… How you’re hurting me… I’ve bragged about this book to my friends, my actual friends… yoga… my son’s soccer games…

Then she took a breath. She said, “The marketing budget is quadruple what we gave you for Islandia. This is a whole new league for you. You will be right up there with your cousin Stephen.”

Here, Madeline interjected. “He’s not my cousin.”

“You can’t not publish it,” Angie said. “That isn’t a choice.”

“It is, though,” Madeline said. “It’s my choice, and I’m sorry, Angie. I’m sorry I’m taking back the book, I’m sorry I’m disappointing you.”

“You’re more than disappointing me, Madeline,” Angie said. “This isn’t catching my fourteen-year-old daughter smoking on the corner of Bleecker and Sixth Avenue. That was disappointing. This is something far worse.”

“I can’t let you publish it,” Madeline said. “I’m sorry I ever wrote it. I should never have let that story see the light of day.”

Silence. It sounded as if Angie were lighting a cigarette of her own.

She said, “It’s a good book, Madeline.”

“But I don’t feel good about it,” Madeline said. “Listen, I don’t want to keep you from your other work. Nothing you can say is going to change my mind.”

“Oh, yeah?” Angie said. “How about this? You’ll be hearing from our legal department.”

And with that, she hung up.

An hour later, as Madeline was lying on the sofa of the apartment, reading the latest issue of the New Yorker, hoping for another great idea, her phone rang.

It was Redd Dreyfus.

Madeline sighed. He was calling to tell her… that she would have to pay her advance back? That he was firing her as a client? That her career as a novelist was over, and she might as well never traverse a bridge or tunnel to the borough of Manhattan again, because as far as the publishing world was concerned, she was dead?

Madeline steeled herself for the worst. “Hello?” she said.

“Madeline King,” he said. “How are you, my darling?”

Redd sounded relaxed, but he also sounded old. He had been fiftyish when he signed Madeline as a client, which would make him seventyish now.

She said, “I’m so sorry, Redd.” She swallowed. “I can’t do it. The truth is, I blatantly used my best friend’s affair as the basis for that novel. Not everything is the same, but the story is hers, not mine, and I can’t let it see the light of day.”

“Aha,” Redd said. “You do realize it’s not against the law to base your novel on true experiences, even if they belong to someone else, right? I mean, let’s say your friend reads the book and feels you’re trying to pass her real-life story off as fiction. Let’s say she hires a lawyer. Those cases rarely see the light of day.”

“It’s not against the written law, maybe,” Madeline said. “But it’s against my law. The law I have with myself. I wrote the book because I was desperate for an idea, and then one fell into my lap. The timing was uncanny. I convinced myself that it was okay, that I would change the details and no one would recognize it. But the essence of Grace’s story is also the essence of my story, and it’s not fair of me to use it. It’s unethical.”

“Well,” Redd said. He took a long pause. “It sounds like this is the right decision for your soul. I applaud you for that.”

“You do?” Madeline said.

“I do. I know Angie unleashed her holy wrath, but I got her calmed down.”

“She said I’d be hearing from their legal department,” Madeline said.

“She’s trying to scare you. She’s desperate to publish that book-it seems like a personal mission of hers-but it’s your intellectual property. The thing that matters is that you wrote a really good book. And if you did it once, guess what?”

“What?” Madeline said.

“You can do it again,” Redd said. “You’ll come up with another idea, trust me.”

Madeline said, “But what if Angie doesn’t like it as much? Will I have to pay my advance back?”

“Hell no!” Redd said. “I mean, does Angie have to accept it? Hell yes. But I have full confidence that you’ll deliver something even better, Madeline. If not on the next try, then on a subsequent try. And even if you don’t ever deliver, it’s very difficult for a publisher to get advance money back once it’s been paid out. I’ve had authors who have been ten years late on delivery! I’ve had authors who disappeared to South America! I’ve had authors who plagiarized the work of their teenage children!” Redd’s voice was growing animated. Madeline knew he had put on weight in recent years, and she feared his having a heart attack right there at his desk. Thankfully, he calmed down. “My dear, I’ve seen it all. I know you feel like you’re the only author who has ever used the travails of a close friend as fiction fodder, but, I assure you, you are not. What’s the popular phrase? Write what you know. Authors do this kind of thing all the time. And I realize you feel like you’re not going to be able to write something else, but, Madeline, I’m telling you, you are. You don’t even have to believe in yourself. I’m your agent. I’ll do the believing.”

“Thank you,” Madeline whispered.

“I’ll handle Angie,” Redd said. “After all, you don’t just pay me to sit around my office and look handsome.” He let out a great belly laugh. “Now, my darling, get to work.”

Madeline hung up the phone and thought, Yes! She needed to stop worrying about Eddie and the fifty thousand dollars, and she needed to stop vilifying Allegra-she was a narcissistic sixteen-year-old girl-so what? Brick would get over her and move on, and his heart would be stronger in the place where it had been broken. But, most of all, Madeline had to stop missing Grace.

That was the toughest thing. She couldn’t make herself stop missing Grace.

Maybe she could write a novel called Missing Grace, about a novelist who writes about her best friend’s affair and then regrets it. It would be sort of like the woman on the cereal box eating from a box of cereal that has her own picture on it, and so forth infinitely.

Her brain hurt thinking about this.

She picked up her pen and a fresh legal pad.

Get to work!

A little while later, a phone call came to Madeline’s cell phone from Rachel McMann. Madeline had decided to write not a sequel but a prequel to Islandia. She would tell the story of Nantucket before it became submerged under water. She would write a novel about the beginning of the end, her protagonists, Jack and Diane, still in their mothers’ wombs. She would cast a foreboding shadow over everything; it would be psychologically terrifying because readers would know the water was coming.

Brilliant? Or potentially brilliant? Better than a sequel, anyway, Madeline thought.

Rachel McMann. Now what? Madeline thought. She had already had two long phone calls with Rachel about the Allegra-Ian Coburn-Brick situation; that topic was exhausted. And at the end of the second conversation, Madeline had let Rachel know that she was back to living at home. She and Trevor had worked things out. Moving on.

Madeline let Rachel’s call go to voice mail. It was two o’clock-Madeline had only four hours left, and she was still working on an outline.

Rachel called again, and Madeline thought, Really? She picked up.

“Hello?” she said, allowing a tinge of impatience to creep into her voice.