“The thing of it is,” Margot recovered, “the thing of it is that I think that The Reluctant Leper is the true title. You see, he’s reluctant in his acceptance of his situation, but then he comes to identify with the lepers to such an extent that he becomes one.”
Before she could explain Laird’s multiple levels of reluctance and how they play out in his final choice, Lane cut her off. “Never you worry. I have every editor at the house on the job. They’ve all promised to bring me five titles by Friday. I’ll let you know what we decide.”
Seeming to notice that she was the only one still eating, Lana set down her fork even though it held an entire bite of food. “You mean you’ll run your choices by her and see which ones she likes the most.”
“You’ve got a good agent on your side, Margot. Of course we’ll show her the title. She’s the author.”
The handsome assistant waiter cleared their dishes, and Doreen followed with a dessert tray. Margot’s gaze shifted from a vanilla-raspberry roulade to a walnut-honey napoleon, from a sugar-crusted lemongrass crème brulee to a slice of chocolate cake decorated with thin curls of real gold. “We also have two soufflés,” Doreen said directly to Margot, “chocolate with bitter orange and a really delicious key lime.”
Lana pushed in her stomach. “I really shouldn’t.”
Transfixed by the pastries, Lane answered without looking up, “But you always do. And we can’t leave our author underfed.”
“Starvation is for the unpublished only,” Lana added.
“We haven’t time for the soufflés,” Lane told Doreen, “but bring us one of everything else and three forks for each.”
Fifty minutes and one-third of four desserts later, Margot rang the bell at Jackson’s address and was buzzed in. She ascended the stairwell slowly, made anxious by all that sugar. She was also decidedly sore of foot from her grown-up shoes.
Jackson was standing at his open door when she stepped onto the fourth-floor landing. “Welcome, author.” He smiled before adding in a more natural tone, “I’m glad you’re here.”
Though Margot was used to spending long hours alone and had never been the chatty type, she found herself leaning sideways into Jackson’s sofa, telling him the details of her lunch, her breathing out of pace with her words.
“Are their names really Lane and Lana?” Jackson shook his head in exaggerated disbelief. “I’m sure they know what they’re doing, but perhaps you and I will beat them to the perfect title.”
“You couldn’t do any worse than I did.”
“I know we’d planned to stroll, but what would you think of staying here, sipping some wine? I had Doreen recommend a special bottle to toast your success.”
Margot, without another pair of shoes, was relieved to avoid the walk. “That’s nice, but we must toast your success first.”
“Not yet, Margot. I’ve two more days of agony, and I’m bracing myself for bad news.”
“It will be good news, I’m sure of it. If someone will publish a book about lepers in nineteenth-century Louisiana, they’ll publish anything.” She added hastily, “By which I don’t mean to suggest that your book is just anything. I only meant that any topic has a chance.”
“Your book sounds beautiful, Margot, and I love the few pages you’ve shown me. You’re a master of the perfect word choice, that’s clear.”
Jackson rose and Margot’s gaze followed him into the clean, almost professional looking kitchen. He pulled a bottle from a horizontal wine rack, carefully turning it upright before removing the foil with a small knife and the cork with the attached screw. “Your point about topic is good. I certainly take heart from a review I saw recently — get this — for a hundred-page novel — they’re actually calling it a novel and not a novella — about the siege of Leningrad. Has no one heard of scale? Sounds awful, but the reviewer was nice about it and it certainly gives me hope.”
Jackson Miller was closer to one of Henry James’s urbane charmers than the men who populated Margot’s fantasies: composites of Thomas Hardy’s stolid, fate-battered heroes, Heathcliff, the Swann of the earliest volumes, and the occasional sincere-eyed European movie star. Yet as she watched the sure movements of his hands, she thought that she could love him if that’s what he wanted from her.
Jackson put two glasses of the red wine on the chest that served as coffee table and sat on the sofa next to her. “Margot, I understand your father doesn’t hold me in great affection, but I hope that’s no reason that you and I can’t continue our friendship.”
“It’s the same for me. The way I feel, I mean.”
“Not that my friendship is any great prize. I am what I am, and I’ll go on struggling for the good life that I’ve always wanted. But your friendship, well, it’s worth a great deal. If I were sure of that friendship, I would at least be within sight of loftier ideals.”
Margot accepted the wine he moved from the table to her hand, and they toasted the acceptance of her novel.
“Hey, I know. You can call it Stumps. You know, cypress knees and those literary leper parts.” He held up his arm with his hand balled and twisted.
Margot swallowed her mouthful of wine quickly so that she wouldn’t laugh it across the front of her dress.
“So you have a sense of humor.” Jackson looked down into her eyes, smiling into his cheeks, his good looks boyish despite his height.
“Do I seem so very dull?” Margot tilted her head and tucked her curls behind the ear closest to Jackson, wondering if she was flirting well or poorly.
“Not dull, not at all. But smart and quiet and reticent. Serious. Those qualities are exactly what I like so much in you — and what I find so different from myself. But all the better that there’s a generosity and sense of humor beneath it.”
“And many of your qualities are attractive to me, because they’re so foreign to who I am. You’re self-confident and charming and determined to succeed.” She felt a smile grow. “And tall.”
As he took her glass from her hand, she noticed she’d drunk most of its contents. He set both glasses down and turned to her, wrapping her shoulders in his strong arm.
“I promise to be careful with you, Margot. I wouldn’t hurt you for anything.”
When he said that, his stature seemed more protective than intimidating, and she leaned into him. When he stroked her face with his free hand and kissed her mouth with just the right amount of pressure, she warmed with such pleasure that she thought the feeling might be love. It was like standing in a strong summer breeze, a welcome wind on a stagnant day. It was like the promise of change.
That night, lying in Jackson’s bed listening to his slight snore, she believed that love might indeed be the word for what she felt.
Chapter twenty-three
As winter stepped into the city, Amanda Renfros discovered something: she liked to write. Social by nature, she generally felt anxious by herself, with no one to react to, banter with, or enchant. Now though, she found that she didn’t mind being alone at her computer, that actually, she wasn’t quite solitary when she worked. She had for company a cast of attractive, witty, and highly promiscuous French aristocrats and their hangers-on. She befriended her heroine, Libertine, a buxom young woman of common birth who’d used her natural charm and ambition to wedge herself into a place at court. It helped, of course, that men found Libertine uncommonly pretty — all the more so because her humble background suggested that she might not be particularly skillful in deflecting the sexual advances of the well-born.