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18

You ask for the distinction between the terms “Editor” and “Publisher”: an editor selects manuscripts; a publisher selects editors.

—Max Schuster

Emma Ashton sat behind her desk, which was completely stacked with manuscripts, galleys, memos, and the paper detritus that threatened to engulf her. She was as busy as a bad outfit, answering Pam’s correspondence as well as her own. She picked up the letter on the top of the stack.

Dear Ms. Mantiss,

I am genuinely shocked that something as fickle as personal taste—which Duchamp about seventy-five years ago suggested the intelligent person put in a cupboard when viewing any work of art in case of infantile prejudice—can dictate something as important as publication. I am surprised and saddened that people in a position of relative power can have such limited perceptions. Can you suggest another publisher whose “personal taste” my Cunning Beautiful Bitch may suit? It’s a novel that deserves an audience. Thank you.

Emma almost laughed. She’d have to answer this bitter, disappointed woman who had written to Pam. But what was the point? Emma sighed. The woman was a nut case, as well as a truly terrible writer. She believed that “personal taste” shouldn’t affect an editor’s choice of what to publish. What, then, should? It still amazed Emma that so many people attempted to write books with so little encouragement and so little talent. She used to agonize over these, but now she’d just send out another terse letter.

Emma had piles of other letters, papers, cover art, reader’s copies, and actual books all over the edges of the carpet and on the shelves of three walls. Why had she ever thought that editorial work would be elegant and romantic? She had to smile.

Actually, Emma remembered why. When she was nine years old an important speaker had come to Larchmont Grammar. All of Emma’s third-grade class had assembled in the library and been addressed by An Author. She was a large woman with a huge head of gray hair, and she talked about Her Life As a Writer; what it was like to put together the mystery novels she was famous for. But for some reason, the nine-year-old Emma had not been taken by the idea of writing books, even though she loved to read. She merely listened politely, interested but not inspired. It was only when one of her classmates raised her hand and asked what happened to a manuscript after the writer was finished with it that Emma perked up. “Well,” the lady explained, “I send it in to my editor, a woman who sits in a big office in a tall skyscraper in New York City. She is paid a great deal of money to read my book, and then she tells me whatever way I have to fix it. I do fix it, and then the book gets printed and bound and sent out to bookstores.”

Emma was suddenly transfixed with the image, not of the writer before her, but of the mysterious editor sitting “in a big office in a tall skyscraper in New York City.” Emma had been to New York many times with her parents and her older brother, Frederick, and it seemed the center of all things. Imagine having a big office of your very own there and spending all day reading books. She was good at that. To Emma it sounded like the most divine thing in the world. To be paid to read books! To have an office in a skyscraper! From that moment, Emma knew exactly what she wanted to be.

And now that she was an editor there were three great ironies to swallow. The first was that she was paid very little, the second was that her office—virtually all offices in publishing—was laughably small, and the last was that she rarely had any time at work to read. Her days were taken up with list meetings, editorial meetings, rare lunches with authors, cover-art meetings, marketing meetings, and more phone calls than she liked to remember. The workload was crushing.

During her first year at Davis & Dash she had come in to the office to work on both Saturday and Sunday. In fact, that was when she got most of her editorial work done. During the week the noise, the phone calls, the meetings and distractions couldn’t let you sink into the reading. Back then—just five years ago as an editorial assistant—she had only a desk in a cubicle along a row of other cubicles in a long hallway. But after a year or so, coming into the office every day of the week and working at the same windowless, exposed place had become too depressing. Now Emma differentiated her days not by taking the weekends off, but by spending them working at home.

At first that, too, had been hard. When she’d come to New York she’d shared a one-bedroom apartment with two other girls from college, and her space was only a comer of the living room. One of her roommates was fussy. The living room had to be kept straight. Laying out a manuscript and having to clean it up at the end of each work session was time-consuming, unproductive, and frustrating. As soon as she got a raise, Emma had moved out.

It was all for the best. She hadn’t felt comfortable living with the two roommates anyway. It caused embarrassment. She buried herself in work and never had dates, and they seemed to want to know why. Living alone was easier. There were no questions, and she had all the space for her work that she needed. But sometimes she was lonely.

I should be grateful that I have my own place now, been promoted to editor, and have my own office here, Emma told herself. And usually she was. Her studio in the Village was large and sunny—even if it was still mostly unfurnished. But she had decided not to accept help from her mother, and she was making it on her own, with the little extra help from the trust fund her father had left her. She was managing, she reminded herself. A kid from the slacker generation making a pittance but making good.

At that moment the phone rang, and Emma couldn’t help but wince. She paused and hoped that Heather, the assistant she shared with two other editors, would be at her desk and take the call. But it was unlikely. Emma listened to the second ring. She could simply not pick up, but then there would be another call for her to return when she laboriously copied down her voice mail. So, at the third ring, she picked up the phone.

“Emma Ashton? Is that you?” the querulous voice of Anna Morrison greeted Emma. Emma sighed but made sure that Anna wouldn’t hear it. Not that Anna heard much: She was quite deaf, and Emma had to shout her end of their conversations.

“Emma Ashton? Is that you?” Mrs. Morrison asked again at the top of her voice. Emma assured Anna that indeed it was she. “So glad I got you. I’m quite excited, really. I was thinking about a new edition of Green Days, Black Nights.”

The woman was really quite dotty, but Emma knew that she wasn’t so crazy as to think her old book would ever sell again. She just wanted to talk to someone.

Anna Morrison had once been a bestselling author. That wasn’t in Emma’s time, or in Pam Mantiss’s time, or even in Gerald Ochs Davis’s time. Anna Morrison was a kind of editorial mastodon, a throwback to the days of Frank Yerby and Foxes of Harrow. All of her books were out of print, available only in musty library stacks. And the last was probably borrowed back in 1954, no doubt. The trouble was that, unlike other relics, Anna Morrison didn’t know she was dead. For years after she’d gone out of print she had hounded Mr. Davis, who eventually handed her off to Pam Mantiss, who, pitilessly, handed her off to Emma. Every house had these ghosts. Poor Emma wasn’t heartless enough to ignore hers. She knew the old woman’s problem: loneliness. And Emma wasn’t mean enough to simply hang up on the old woman the way Pam used to. Instead, Emma settled more comfortably in her chair and gathered her energy so that she could shout responses to the poor old woman’s questions.

They went on interminably, it seemed. At last she was done—at least finished talking about business. But Mrs. Morrison wanted contact—personal contact. “And you, Emma? How are you? Are you all work and no play? Is there a nice young man in your social life?”

Emma almost snorted at the question. She had no social life. Although last night, she had actually gone to The Gray Rabbit, and despite her habitual shyness and withdrawal she had actually met someone: Alex. She wouldn’t want to shock old Anna Morrison by telling her that she had given Alex her phone number in a bar the night before. Well, she probably would never hear from Alex again.

“Nothing to report, Mrs. Morrison,” she said as cheerfully as she could. She couldn’t restrain a sigh. Why did people bother to take your number and then never call you? Emma shared a little spicy gossip about Chad Weston’s new book and then managed to get rid of Anna Morrison at last. She looked at the work in front of her. Carefully, methodically, she began her sorting, watching as her “to do” list grew to three pages.

Without a knock, the door flew open and Pam Mantiss stuck her head in. “The motherfucker died on me,” Pam said. “Now what the fuck am I going to do?”

“What?” Emma asked.

“Peet Trawley. The prick died. You know what his lawyer just told me? He said Peet has arranged his own tombstone. And you know what it’s going to say?” Emma shook her head.

“‘I told you I was sick.’” Pam laughed maniacally, took a swig from her Snapple bottle, and threw a stack of papers onto Emma’s desk. “I’d like to chisel a fucking omega on it. The End. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” Pam admitted, throwing herself into Emma’s spare chair. “I just can’t believe this has happened to me. Go through this shit and put together the sales report. I can’t do it. Goddammit! I can’t believe the motherfucker died on me.” Pam finished the Snapple, threw the bottle at Emma’s wastebasket, got up, and walked out of the room.

Emma looked at the shelf of Peet Trawley’s oeuvre. All of them had the omega symbol, which she and the other editors cattily referred to as “the ancient Greek symbol for drecki.” Peet was dead. Pam was shaken. Emma was merely thirsty. She wished she had some Snapple, but Pam never shared.

Now she’d have to review the sales report. It was hours of work. She picked up the rumpled sheaf of papers dumped in front of her and wondered how she’d find the time to add one more thing to her “to do” list.