“Just as well,” Mrs. Ashton said calmly.
“Well, when would you be free?” he asked, ignoring his mother.
“Frederick, leave the girl alone,” Mrs. Ashton said. “She doesn’t want to go to Assisi with you.”
“Oh, no!” Camilla blurted out, surprising herself. “That’s not true. I mean, yes, I would like to go.” She surprised herself even more because she meant it. “But I simply can’t. I mean, not now. Not this week, anyway.” She thought of Gianfranco, back in Firenze. He was what the French called a cinq-a-sept, a five-to-seven kind of lover because, she had only recently realized, he regarded her as a mistress, not a potential wife.
“Some other week?” Frederick asked. “Next week?”
“Well, I will be flying home at the end of next week,” Mrs. Ashton said. “It appears that I can’t go to Assisi.”
Frederick looked across the table at Camilla and smiled. “But that doesn’t mean that we can’t, does it?” he asked.
I write for women who read me in the goddam subways on the way home from work. I know who they are, because that’s who I used to be. They want to press their noses against the windows of other people’s houses and get a look at the parties they’ll never be invited to, the dresses they’ll never get to wear, the lives they’ll never live, the guys they’ll never fuck.
—Jackie Susann
A technician was winding a cable across the beige rug of the living room. “Susann Baker Edmonds Interview,” read the clapper board, waiting among the other flotsam and jetsam of television recording for the camera to begin taping. Susann herself, beautifully dressed in a Carolina Herrera suit, stood quietly as the makeup artist dusted her with one more layer of glare-reducing powder. After more than a dozen years of these interviews, she still got nervous, but she had taught herself to breathe deeply and calmly and to empty her mind of everything. Susann and Alf had worked hard at treating a seamless image of herself—an image of a woman that every one of her readers might want to be. She knew that they didn’t only love her books—they loved her story. Her own story. Because if she could rise from the misery of her legal-secretary job in Cincinnati to the dizzying heights of international living at its best, so could they.
Of course, they didn’t know how frightening it was to look at the monthly bills when you were living at this level. Susann lived very well—Alf insisted that she deserved it. And he clearly enjoyed it, too. He enjoyed this house in France more than she did. Hell, she didn’t even speak French. The view was lovely, but the expenses increased the pressure on her, demanding that she produce a book every year. Still, she was lucky and she knew it. This was not the time to think about the pressure, only about happiness and complete satisfaction. It took energy to project that, and Susann used these last moments to gather hers.
Then, “What the hell do you think you’re doing! Do you know how much that rug cost?” All heads but Susann’s snapped around to face Alfred Byron, Susann’s lover and literary agent. He was a short, burly, white-haired man with a face too easily red. It was scarlet right now. Susann didn’t have to turn to know that. She froze, closing her eyes.
“Six thousands francs a square meter! Do you know how much that is in dollars? Do you know how much that is in yards? I had this rug hand-stitched in Portugal for Susann! And now you’re snaking some greasy cable over it!”
A production assistant began apologizing while two techies quickly moved to lift the offending electrical cord. Smoothly Susann moved to Alf’s side and patted his hand. “It won’t do any harm, Alf,” she said quietly. “It isn’t covered with grease. They don’t use grease for TV.” She turned to the assistant producer, a kid who couldn’t be thirty. “I’m sure it’s fine as it is,” she told him, giving him her best smile. He looked doubtfully from her to Alf’s red face. Why was it that everyone took Alfred as the authority? Was it simply because he was louder? Because he was older? Or was it because he was a man?
Susann kept herself from audibly sighing. She knew that all Alf wanted was to protect her, to be helpful, and to be sure that everything went right. He was as involved and concerned about her career as she was. Sometimes she was afraid he was more involved. She should be grateful, she told herself, and she was, but sometimes Alf could be so … so …
“Well, they shouldn’t be taping it down. Should they? Should they be taping it? Won’t that stuff leave marks on the carpet, the tape?” They all looked down at the gray gaffer’s tape that held the cable in place.
“We don’t have to tape it, Mr. Byron. We’ll take that tape right up.”
Susann doubted the tape would have done any damage, but she smiled her best smile, patted Alf’s arm again, and then went back to the mirror. She didn’t like what she saw. She should have had her eyes done again when she had the second face-lift, she thought as she looked at the puckerings of skin that held the powder in little crepe lines under her eyes. She hadn’t been sleeping well, and it showed. Brewster Moore, her surgeon, hadn’t wanted to do the eyes now—he had felt she should wait. But what in the world for? Wait until she looked older? Until she looked even worse? It wasn’t his damn eye pouches that were going to appear on television or on the back of a new book. He was good but too conservative. She wanted to stamp her foot and push the damn mirror away.
“Is everything all right, Mrs. Edmonds?” the makeup woman asked. What was the woman’s name? Louise? No, Lorraine. Susann made it a point to remember the names of all the gofers, drivers, assistants, and secretaries who crossed her path. It was the least she could do. So she looked back helplessly at her reflection and the pouches under her eyes, then smiled her best smile at the girl.
“Yes, Lorraine, it’s terrific. I wish you could do my makeup every day.”
The girl smiled and, mercifully, took away the damn mirror. Susann stared blindly out the window, across the pool, and began her breathing. Now was not the time to think about Alf and his disloyalty, her daughter’s wasted life, or the deadline she felt strangled by. Now only remember that half of all mass market paperbacks sold were romances—almost a billion dollars in annual sales. She was ready to clear her mind and assume the state that allowed her to project an air of happiness and complete satisfaction. That is what her readers wanted to see. That is what her readers wanted to have. It Was what all of her heroines wound up with at the close of all of her books. Happiness and complete satisfaction. She took another deep breath.
“Who the hell is smoking?” Alf yelled. “Who the hell is smoking in here?” He stopped yelling momentarily as he apparently found his culprit, then resumed. “Don’t you know Susann has asthma?”
Susann didn’t have asthma, as it happened. Alf did. She turned and saw Alf’s big back hunched over. Oh, my God! He was yelling at Tammi Young, the newscaster who was about to conduct the interview. Alf must not have recognized her. The girl had seemed a brainless little twit, but she worked for the network and Susann did not need a hostile interview right now. Not when her last two books had barely held the number-one spot for more than a week!
But at that moment, before she had a chance to straighten things out, a sound technician—Kevin? or was it Brian?—approached her and asked, very quietly, if she could snake the thin black microphone wire up under her jacket for him. She nodded; it seemed Alf and Tammi were working things out on the other side of the vast living room. She’d be grateful for that. She’d be even more grateful if he’d just butt out. She looked up and saw Edith grinning. Edith loved it when Alf made an ass of himself.
There was a time when Susann had been grateful for Alf’s constant involvement and his enthusiasm and strength. She had been writing for five or six years, her third marriage had failed, and so had her books. No one believed in her