She’d originally planned to eat at the bar of a new restaurant at the edge of town, where the food and ambience were surprisingly upscale, but now she couldn’t take the chance of bumping into Duncan there. After her last class she’d picked up the ingredients for a salad with the intention of staying in. But then, feeling too restless to face a night alone in the tiny house she was renting, she decided she’d sneak off to Tony’s. She figured it was the last place in the world Duncan and his pals would be welcoming the weekend.
When she reached the restaurant, she paused for a moment outside, trying to shake the twinge of melancholy she felt. Metallic chips in the old sidewalk caught the moonlight and sparkled like crazy. From a few blocks farther downhill, she could pick up the smell of the Winamac River—muddy, fishy, but rousing in a strange, earthy way. Sometimes from outside Tony’s she could hear music wafting up from the taverns along River Street, but it was too early right now. Hopefully, she thought, Lily Mack had hooked up with a guy last night and spent the day in bed with him, oblivious to anything but the wild sex she was having.
As Phoebe entered the restaurant, the short, pudgy Tony greeted her with a bear hug, once again declaring her his favorite blonde. After her first dinner there, someone had apparently divulged to him that she was a famous writer from New York City. Obviously, Phoebe thought, the person had failed to reveal the rest of the story, or Tony would be far less jolly about seeing her.
He led her to her usual table at the back of the main dining room, which ran adjacent to the bar area. She slipped off her trench coat and glanced around the restaurant. It was about three-quarters full, and most of tonight’s patrons were well into their meals. She’d come to learn that people ate insanely early in small-town Pennsylvania. At moments like these she felt like Alice after she’d slipped down the rabbit hole: everything around her was not only disturbingly unfamiliar, but it made no sense. Seven months earlier she’d been living in Manhattan with her partner Alec, just off the tour for her latest book—Hollywood’s Badass Girls. She’d bought herself a beautiful pair of diamond studs to celebrate the book’s sixth week on the New York Times list. Things couldn’t have been sweeter. And then it all came crashing down.
It had started with Alec. One night after dinner, when she began to clear away the dishes, he’d held up a hand from his seat at the table and asked her to please wait.
“What’s up?” she asked, sitting back down again, predicting what was coming. He was probably miffed at how distracted—and absent—she’d been during the last leg of her book tour.
“We need to talk,” he said slowly.
“O-kay,” she replied, slightly disconcerted now.
“I care about you, Phoebe,” he said soberly, “and we’ve had five great years together.”
My God, she thought, is he about to dump me as we sit here with a platter of chicken bones between us? “What’s the matter?” she demanded, unable to keep the edge out of her voice.
“I’ve always known you didn’t want to get married. And I accepted that.”
“Well Alec, if I remember correctly, you’ve never wanted to either,” she said.
“I guess. I mean, sure. But . . . I don’t know, lately I’ve wondered if I may have been wrong thinking that.”
The comment stunned her but at the same time eased the twinge of anxiety she’d begun to feel. “Are you saying you want to get married?” she asked, smiling a little. But then she saw from the panic flashing in his eyes that she had it wrong.
“It’s not just marriage,” he said quickly. “I think I’d like kids, too. And I know that’s a deal breaker for you.”
“Well, it’s a deal breaker now, certainly. I’m forty-two, and there’s not much chance of me getting pregnant. But let’s at least talk this over. If you’re feeling different about certain things, I’m happy to listen.”
But his decision wasn’t open to discussion. He’d made up his mind to move on and move out, to try something new in life. No, there wasn’t another woman, he said. Phoebe had just sat there at the table, reeling from the shock. She knew things weren’t perfect with them, that their relationship was less than passionate these days, but she cared about Alec and had never seen this coming.
“I actually thought you might be relieved,” he said after a few minutes.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked angrily.
Alec had shrugged. “You haven’t seemed quite . . . I don’t know, in the throes of the relationship lately. Even with all your crusading, you used to still save some energy for me, but not anymore.”
Six weeks later he called Phoebe, wanting to let her know—“out of fairness”—that he was seeing a thirty-one-year-old woman at his law firm. No, he swore, nothing had happened while he was still living with Phoebe, but “to be perfectly honest,” he realized in hindsight there’d been a certain attraction from the beginning.
Phoebe had set the phone down feeling stung and humbled. So this must be karma, Hollywood style, she had thought. Is this what I get for calling Jennifer Aniston a Needy Nellie on Entertainment Tonight?
She buried herself in work-related projects—research, speeches, TV appearances. But in late May that went off the rails, too. Her editor, Dan, the preppiest gay man she’d ever known, had called her at 9:00 a.m., just as she was sitting down at her desk in her home office. A surprise, because he rarely rolled into the office before ten.
“Have you heard?” he demanded breathlessly the second she answered.
“What? That I’ve been short-listed for the Pulitzer?” Phoebe had asked jokingly. And then, as if her brain was on a two-second delay, she realized his tone had sounded jittery, not gossipy.
“A blogger is saying you plagiarized your last book,” Dan told her. “That you lifted some of the stuff on Angelina Jolie from another writer.”
“That’s totally untrue,” Phoebe had said indignantly. “What writer? Where?”
“Some British chick who writes for a UK Web site. Huffington Post is the one reporting it. But Gawker has already picked it up.”
“Well, it’s a lie. I’ve never taken a thing from another writer.”
But she had. Not intentionally. Over the next weeks, as the nightmare began to unfold, she discovered that a freelance researcher she’d used for the book had typed up notes from some blogs and stupidly placed them in a file of Phoebe’s own typed notes rather than in a research folder. When Phoebe had read the notes months later, it wasn’t hard to mistake them for her own work—the writer actually seemed to be aping a blunt style that Phoebe was known for—and she had incorporated them directly into her manuscript.
On the advice of spin doctors at a top PR agency, she’d made a statement explaining everything, but the press coverage had been unmerciful and unrelenting, fueled in large part by the glee of the people who’d come off badly in her books. See, one Hollywood agent had declared in an interview, everything Phoebe Hall has ever written is total fabrication.
Thankfully, Phoebe’s publisher accepted her version of events—or at least seemed to—after the blubbering researcher had admitted her error in front of a conference room of executives. They said they were committed to working with Phoebe and had every reason to believe things would blow over, just as they had for authors like Doris Kearns Goodwin, who’d been in her position. But they wanted to hold off on the paperback edition of the book until the situation cooled down. Meanwhile, the press—especially papers like the New York Post and Web sites like Gawker—kept at it. Reporters had even camped outside her apartment building to hurl questions at her as she came and went, as if she had run a huge Ponzi scheme or stabbed her husband in the heart with an ice pick. Before long her prized gigs—TV appearances on the Today Show and Entertainment Tonight, her own blog on the Daily Beast—were put on hold or dried up entirely.