“Mindy,” he said, feeling kinder, “I can’t be late for my lunch.”
Mindy also tried a different approach. “Have they told you what they think of the draft of your book?” she asked.
“No,” James said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Because they’ll tell me at lunch. That’s what the lunch is about,” James said.
“Why can’t they tell you on the phone? Or by e-mail?”
“Maybe they don’t want to. Maybe they want to tell me in person,”
James said.
“So it’s probably bad news,” Mindy said. “They probably don’t like it.
Otherwise, they’d tell you how much they loved it in an e-mail.”
Neither one said anything for a second, and then Mindy said, “I’ll call you after your lunch. Will you be home? And can you please get the keys?”
“Yes,” James said.
At one o’clock, James walked the two blocks to the restaurant Babbo.
Redmon Richardly, his publisher, wasn’t there, but James hadn’t expected him to be. James sat at a table next to the window and watched the passersby. Mindy was probably right, he thought. His book probably did suck, and Redmon was going to tell him they weren’t going to be able to publish it. And if they did publish it, what difference would it make? No one would read it. And after four years of working on the damn thing, he’d feel exactly the same way as he had before he started writing it, the only difference being that he’d feel a little bit more of a loser, a little bit more insignificant. That was what sucked about being middle-aged: It was harder and harder to lie to yourself.
Redmon Richardly showed up at one-twenty. James hadn’t seen him in over a year and was shocked by his appearance. Redmon’s hair was gray and sparse, reminding James of the head of a baby bird. Redmon looked seventy, James thought. And then James wondered if he looked seventy as well. But that was impossible. He was only forty-eight. And Redmon was fifty-five. But there was an aura about Redmon. Something was different about him. Why, he’s happy, James thought in shock.
“Hey, buddy,” Redmon said, patting James on the back. He sat down across from James and unfolded his napkin. “Should we drink? I gave up alcohol, but I can’t resist a drink during the day. Especially when I can get out of the office. What is it about this business now? It’s busy. You actually have to work.”
James laughed sympathetically. “You seem okay.”
“I am,” Redmon said. “I just had a baby. You ever have a baby?”
“I’ve got a son,” James said.
“Isn’t it just amazing?” Redmon said.
“I didn’t even know your wife was pregnant,” James said. “How’d it happen?”
“It just happened. Two months before we got married. We weren’t even trying. It’s all that sperm I stored up over fifty years. It’s powerful stuff,” Redmon said. “Man, having a baby, it’s the greatest thing. How come no one tells you?”
“Don’t know,” James said, suddenly annoyed. Babies. Nowadays, a man couldn’t get away from babies. Not even at a business lunch. Half of James’s friends were new fathers. Who knew middle age was going to be all about babies?
And then Redmon did the unthinkable. He pulled out his wallet. It was the kind of wallet teenaged girls used to have, with an insert of plastic sleeves for photographs. “Sidney at one month,” he said, passing it over to James.
“Sidney,” James repeated.
“Old family name.”
James glanced at the photograph of a toothless, hairless baby with a crooked smile and what appeared to be a peculiarly large head.
“And there,” Redmon said, turning the plastic sleeve. “Sidney at six months. With Catherine.”
James assumed Catherine was Redmon’s wife. She was a pretty little thing, not much bigger than Sidney. “He’s big,” James said, handing back the wallet.
“Doctors say he’s in the ninety-ninth percentile. But all kids are big these days. How big is your son?”
“He’s small,” James said. “Like my wife.”
“I’m sorry,” Redmon said with genuine sympathy, as if smallness were a deformity. “But you never know. Maybe he’ll grow up to be a movie star, like Tom Cruise. Or he’ll run a studio. That would be even better.”
“Doesn’t Tom Cruise run a studio, too?” James smiled feebly and tried to change the subject. “So?”
“Oh yeah. You probably want to know what I think about the book,”
Redmon said. “I thought I’d let Jerry tell you.”
James’s stomach dropped. At least Redmon had the courtesy to look distracted. Or uncomfortable.
“Jerry?” James said. “Jerry the mega-asshole?”
“One and the same. I’m afraid he loves you now, so you may want to amend your assessment.”
“Me?” James said. “Jerry Bockman loves me?”
“I’ll let him explain when he comes by.”
Jerry Bockman, coming to lunch? James didn’t know what to think.
Jerry Bockman was a gross man. He had crude features and bad skin and orange hair, and looked like he should be hiding under a bridge demanding tolls from unsuspecting passersby. Men like that shouldn’t be in publishing, James had thought prudishly the one and only time he’d met Jerry.
But indeed, Jerry Bockman wasn’t in publishing. He was in entertainment. A much vaster and more lucrative enterprise than publishing, which was selling about the same number of books it had sold fifty years ago, the difference being that now there were about fifty times as many books published each year. Publishers had increased the choices but not the demand. And so Redmon Richardly, who’d gone from bad-boy Southern writer to literary publisher with his own company that published Pulitzer Prize–winning authors, like Philip Oakland, and National Book Award winners, and authors who wrote for The Atlantic and Harper’s and Salon, who were members of PEN, who did events at the public library, who lived in Brooklyn, and most of all, who cared — cared about words, words, words! — had had to sell his company to an entertainment conglomorate. Called, unimaginatively, EC.
Jerry Bockman wasn’t the head of EC. That position was held by one of Jerry’s friends. Jerry was the head of a division, maybe second in command, maybe next in line. Inevitably, someone would get fired, and Jerry would take his place. He’d get fired someday, too, but by then none of it would matter because he would have reached every goal he’d ever aspired to in life and would probably have half a billion dollars in the bank, or stock options, or something equivalent. Meanwhile, Redmon hadn’t been able to make his important literary publishing house work and had had no choice but to be absorbed. Like an amoeba. Two years ago, when Redmon had informed James of the impeding “merger” (he’d called it a merger, but it was an absorption, like all mergers), Redmon said that it wouldn’t make any difference. He wouldn’t let Jerry Bockman or EC affect his books or his authors or his quality.
“Then why sell?” James had asked.
“Have to,” Redmon said. “If I want to get married and have children and live in this city, I have to.”
“Since when do you want to get married and have kids?” James asked.
“Since now. Life gets boring when you’re middle-aged. You can’t keep doing the same thing. You look like an asshole. You ever notice that?”
Redmon had asked.
“Yeah,” James had said. And now Jerry was coming to lunch.
“You saw the piece about the ayatollah and his nephew in The Atlantic?” Redmon asked. James nodded, knowing that a piece about Iran or Iraq or anything that had to do with the Middle East was of vast importance here on the little twelve-mile island known as Manhattan, and normally, James would have been able to concentrate on it. He had quite a few informed opinions on the subject, but all he could think about now was Jerry. Jerry coming to lunch? And Jerry loved him?