“They aren’t all nice, Henry,” I say.
“Sure they are.” He holds up a review from the Times. “‘A hilarious and fun read.’”
“You’re leaving out the rest of the sentence, Henry. It says, ‘A hilarious and fun read at times.’”
“So we edit the review a little. Everyone does it. We’ll just say Desiree’s writing is ‘hilarious and fun.’”
“It’s not the truth.”
“You write fiction, for God’s sake! Everything you write is false!” He laughs.
But I don’t. Much of what I write is true at its core. Ebony’s voice is as pure to me now as it was twenty-five years ago. And somehow I have a white male editor editing that truth, rewording her African-American voice.
Only in America.
“Lighten up, Pete. So you took your hits on Ashy. All first novels get that kind of treatment. But even though we thought it would be a mid-lister, it sold like crazy, remember?”
Floods of other critical reviews rush through my head: “She doesn’t get under the skin of her characters…She has occasional insights…She works with flimsy material…She caters to the least common denominator…Her plot is melodramatic and improbable…Ms. Holland must create stronger male characters.”
“The reviewers slammed me, Henry.”
He shakes his head. “They slammed Desiree Holland, not you, Pete. Don’t take critics personally. They’re slamming a woman who doesn’t exist. The joke’s on them.”
“I have my pride.”
“It’s not yours to have, Pete.”
I blink at Henry. “It isn’t?”
He leans back in his leather swivel chair. “Desiree wrote the book—”
“I wrote the book,” I interrupt.
“The critics don’t know that!” He leans forward. “And if critics didn’t condemn at least one book a week, they wouldn’t be doing their jobs. Their reviews didn’t hurt sales at all, did they? And they loved The Devil to Pay. It was a smash critical success—”
“—that didn’t sell.”
I have never understood nor will I ever understand the publishing industry in America. Ashy was a trashy, sex-driven novel with a sassy heroine, a novel with few if any socially redeeming qualities and relatively little meaning, and the public ate it up and asked for seconds while the critics ranted “Trash!” Then I wrote The Devil to Pay, which even Eliot thought was a well-crafted, focused, character-driven story with plenty of redeeming qualities and meaning, and the public yawned while the critics shouted “Success!”
“Okay, so The Devil to Pay didn’t sell in hardcover, but sales picked up in paperback, and the trade paperback is a consistent seller. I’m sure one day some movie company will snatch it up.”
Fat chance. Ashy collected dust and cigarette ashes for four years on a movie producer’s desk—or so Eliot told me—before the producer finally decided to pass. I doubt the producer even cracked open the book.
“Aren’t you still getting nice royalty checks from both books?”
“I’m only getting half now.”
Henry wrinkles his mouth. “You’re…divorced?”
I nod. Edie hated each book, and she even did everything in her power to keep me from writing them. I told her that each had been dedicated to her—“For E.” is all it said—but she didn’t believe me. I had made the mistake of telling her all about Ebony one night after a few too many glasses of wine. At the time, she said it didn’t matter what I did—or whom I did it with—in the past. It obviously mattered. She was jealous of what she called my “continuing relationship with that Negro,” and she did everything to sabotage my writing career. And for this she gets half of my money for books she despised.
“I’m so sorry. Last I heard, you were still separated. How, uh, recent is your divorce?”
I had waited and wasted five years for Edie to sign those damn papers. “The ink’s probably still drying in Pittsburgh.”
“I’m so sorry.”
I’m not. “Don’t be.”
“This is all so strange. You’re now a divorced writer of romance. We can’t let P. Rudolph Underhill go on the cover now. That would be hypocritical, wouldn’t it?”
Oh, no, we wouldn’t want hypocrisy in the publishing industry. So Desiree Holland, writer of sassy interracial African-American romantic comedies, is now a middle-aged, graying, divorced white man with no way of letting the world know he is a writer and no place to call home.
“Look,” I say as I feel the lint in my pockets, “I know this will be a lot to ask, Henry, but after the lawyers and all…”
Henry blinks at me. “A little tight on money?”
A boa constrictor couldn’t squeeze a nickel out of me. “Yeah, I’m strapped. I had to sell my Mustang to pay my lawyer and buy the plane ticket here.”
Henry still blinks. “Ouch.”
“So, would it be possible, you know, if—”
Henry stops blinking. “Say no more, Pete. I’ll see what I can do about a pre-advance advance.”
I’ve never heard of such a thing. “A what?”
“I’ll get you something to tide you over for a while.”
Which means that I’ll get some chump change until I produce.
He stands. This means that the meeting is almost over. “You have any working titles for Desiree’s next book?”
Desiree’s next book. I have plenty of title ideas for my next book, but I don’t share them with Henry. He’s promised to see about some money—which I might be able to keep one hundred percent of this time—and I don’t want to ruin that chance. I will simply write two books, one for Henry and one for me, and I’ll give them both to Henry. Or…I’ll give Henry his Desiree Holland book and go out on my own into the publishing world with my own name.
And that scares the living lint out of me.
“You have thought up some titles, haven’t you?”
“I don’t usually start with a title, Henry.” Besides, the marketing department or an editor usually titles everything anyway. “Uh, how about…A Whiter Shade of Pale?”
Henry smiles. “Funny, and very sixties. With a song tie-in to boot. Any others?”
“What about…Devil’s Dance?”
He nods. “Plays off The Devil to Pay. But your first novel didn’t have the word ‘devil’ in the title. Hard to market that unless we change Ashy to Ashy Devil. That can be arranged, you know. Might give that novel another boost, too, maybe get it a movie of the week or something. I hear BET’s doing its own movies these days. Give me a third title possibility.”
Henry’s rule of three is still in effect. Almost all the romance novels he edits have three parts whether the author intends to have them or not: beginning (back story), middle (rising action with lots of sex), and end (climax with lots of nasty sex). Once I begin writing my novel, I’ll have to send him chapters in batches of three, the first three loaded with back story, triple-spaced.
“Um, how about…Holding My Breath?”
He closes his eyes. “Kind of has a Waiting to Exhale feel about it.” His eyes pop open. “And we both know what happened to that