things. People come in and destroy other people’s dumps, or move them, or hide them. And then there’s Harlequin. They want to opt out of the romance book centers and have us carry only Harlequin, which is ridiculous because Harlequin doesn’t sell as well among the yuppies as some of the others, and what we have here is a yuppie market. Then everybody is buying everybody else out, and lines are folding right and left, and God knows what all. It’s a mess.”
I took a deep drag on my cigarette. My signature was beginning to look like a biology class drawing of a frog.
“What about the contemporaries?” I asked her. “You know a writer named Verna Train?”
That took her a while. She seemed to be communing with a central book file located somewhere in her cerebellum.
“Verna Train,” she said finally. “Charla Menlowe.”
“What?”
“It’s like a clump,” she said. “Like actresses. Brooke Adams and Karen Allen are a clump. They look alike. They take the same kinds of parts. You see? Verna Train and Charla Menlowe are a clump, they do the same stuff. They’re good enough to have an audience, but they’re nothing special. But people recognize the names, you see, because they were all over the place during the boom, so if they did something else, we’d want to handle it, we’d make some money just from the name recognition. But not their romance stuff. Not anymore.”
“Right,” I said. I knew all this already.
“In fact,” she said, “that’s what’s happening. There’s a brand-new line coming out in a few months taking all these sorts of middle-level people and putting them into romantic suspense. We’re very excited about it. Not that we’re excited about romantic suspense—that’s not going to go anywhere. But the recognition factor, that’s something else. You know about romantic suspense?”
I knew more than I wanted to know about romantic suspense. I knew more than she knew about the line she was describing. I was glad she thought it would be successful, especially since Nick didn’t. I bent over the fifteenth book and forced the pen to make a signature. It looked vaguely like a crossword puzzle grid.
“You know,” she said. “All that infighting doesn’t help. The kind of readers who buy the line stuff don’t want to think of their favorite writers as—as bitches.”
“The genre is doomed,” I told her.
“Probably,” she said. “But some of these women are monsters, believe me. And it gets in the papers, and it gets around. Take that Amelia Samson. There’s this story going around, it was in Romantic Times, that when Miss Train started losing sales and her publisher wanted to drop her, Miss Samson could have stopped them but she refused. And they’ve known each other forever. They’re supposed to be friends. Some people say Miss Samson even did a little pushing to get Miss Train ousted. What respectable yuppie wants to be associated with a person like that?”
All the respectable yuppies I knew behaved like that, but I didn’t say so. I didn’t say the story didn’t sound like Amelia, although it didn’t. “I don’t suppose it’s hurt Amelia any,” I told her.
The little girl shook her head emphatically. “It’s hurt Amelia Samson a lot. That and the fact that she’s still living in 1921. But believe me, that sort of nonsense doesn’t do anyone any good.”
My signature now looked like a route map for the N train.
It was time to quit.
SEVEN
I T WAS THE BEGINNING of the lunch rush, one of those times when the streets of New York are crowded with cars and people frozen into immobility and distinctly unhappy about it. Even if I could have found a cab, I wouldn’t have been able to get anywhere in it. I would just have traded crowd claustrophobia for traffic jam. I started downtown on foot, dodging arm-swinging secretaries in pastel linen skirts and ankle-strap shoes, ignoring “Walk” and “Don’t Walk” signs. “Walk” and “Don’t
I took a deep drag on my cigarette. My signature was beginning to look like a biology class drawing of a frog.
“What about the contemporaries?” I asked her. “You know a writer named Verna Train?”
That took her a while. She seemed to be communing with a central book file located somewhere in her cerebellum.
“Verna Train,” she said finally. “Charla Menlowe.”
“What?”
“It’s like a clump,” she said. “Like actresses. Brooke Adams and Karen Allen are a clump. They look alike. They take the same kinds of parts. You see? Verna Train and Charla Menlowe are a clump, they do the same stuff. They’re good enough to have an audience, but they’re nothing special. But people recognize the names, you see, because they were all over the place during the boom, so if they did something else, we’d want to handle it, we’d make some money just from the name recognition. But not their romance stuff. Not anymore.”
“Right,” I said. I knew all this already.
“In fact,” she said, “that’s what’s happening. There’s a brand-new line coming out in a few months taking all these sorts of middle-level people and putting them into romantic suspense. We’re very excited about it. Not that we’re excited about romantic suspense—that’s not going to go anywhere. But the recognition factor, that’s something else. You know about romantic suspense?”
I knew more than I wanted to know about romantic suspense. I knew more than she knew about the line she was describing. I was glad she thought it would be successful, especially since Nick didn’t. I bent over the fifteenth book and forced the pen to make a signature. It looked vaguely like a crossword puzzle grid.
“You know,” she said. “All that infighting doesn’t help. The kind of readers who buy the line stuff don’t want to think of their favorite writers as—as bitches.”
“The genre is doomed,” I told her.
“Probably,” she said. “But some of these women are monsters, believe me. And it gets in the papers, and it gets around. Take that Amelia Samson. There’s this story going around, it was in Romantic Times, that when Miss Train started losing sales and her publisher wanted to drop her, Miss Samson could have stopped them but she refused. And they’ve known each other forever. They’re supposed to be friends. Some people say Miss Samson even did a little pushing to get Miss Train ousted. What respectable yuppie wants to be associated with a person like that?”
All the respectable yuppies I knew behaved like that, but I didn’t say so. I didn’t say the story didn’t sound like Amelia, although it didn’t. “I don’t suppose it’s hurt Amelia any,” I told her.
The little girl shook her head emphatically. “It’s hurt Amelia Samson a lot. That and the fact that she’s still living in 1921. But believe me, that sort of nonsense doesn’t do anyone any good.”
My signature now looked like a route map for the N train.
It was time to quit.
SEVEN
I T WAS THE BEGINNING of the lunch rush, one of those times when the streets of New York are crowded with cars and people frozen into immobility and distinctly unhappy about it. Even if I could have found a cab, I wouldn’t have been able to get anywhere in it. I would just have traded crowd claustrophobia for traffic jam. I started downtown on foot, dodging arm-swinging secretaries in pastel linen skirts and ankle-strap shoes, ignoring “Walk” and “Don’t Walk” signs. “Walk” and “Don’t
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