“Cassie, my dear, you come and go out of here as the diva you are. But this one time, I’m telling you to get up, get dressed, and meet me at the office. I will mainline you a pot of coffee.”
“This better be worth it.”
“It is. In spades.”
I climbed out of bed, still far too early for my taste. In the kitchen, I dumped out the grinds in Mr. Coffee, the only man in my condo in the last year and a half, and put on my second pot of the day. After a hot shower, a dab of crimson lipstick, and a sort of shaggy-dog shaking of my hair, I dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, threw a linen blazer on, and headed down Florida’s A1A ocean highway to West Side’s offices.
I’m not sure how it is I came to live in a land of pink palaces and perpetual sunshine. It doesn’t suit my personality. But when Lou moved down here from New York, he took me with him. He came for the fishing and the sunshine. He came to get away from New York after Helen died. And I came because he did.
I climbed out of my mint-condition Cadillac that I bought for a song from the estate of an elderly man who had died. His kids wanted cash. Bargains abound in Florida if you don’t mind owning stuff that belonged to dead people. When Lou first saw it, he thought I was nuts. “A banana-yellow Caddy? You like driving fruit?” But I have claustrophobia. I drive luxury land tanks.
Pressing the elevator button for the seventh floor, I rode up in glass to West Side’s offices.
“Morning, Cassie,” Troy, the receptionist/junior editor, greeted me.
“Mornin’,” I mumbled.
“You look a fright.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. Coffee?”
“Intravenous.”
“You got it.” He held out a mug. “Start with this cup, and I’ll bring a fresh one in as soon as it’s brewed.”
I opened the door to Lou’s office without knocking.
“This better be worth it. I’m feeling very bitchy today,” I said, putting the mug down on a mahogany coffee table covered with books West Side had published, and flopping onto a long, buttercream leather couch.
“And how is this different from any other day?”
“If I wanted insults, I would call my mother.”
“Guess who called me in the middle of the night?”
“What is it with authors and the middle of the night, Lou?”
“Indulge me.”
“John Updike?”
“Bigger.”
“I have no clue,” I leaned up on one elbow and took a swig of coffee.
He took the unlit cigar he had in his mouth and set it in his Waterford ashtray.
“Roland Riggs.”
“Holy shit!” I said, as hot coffee sprayed out of my mouth.
2
L ou smiled at me. “I thought that would grab ya!”
The shock hit me as I mopped at coffee dribbling down my chin. I managed to sputter, “What’d he want?”
“You do know my famous Roland Riggs story, right?”
“Do I know it? I’ve been subjected to your Roland Riggs story at every cocktail party you and I have ever attended together. Worse, I’ve been subjected to it secondhand from people who have heard the story and feel the need to tell me. They usually embellish it.”
Troy came in with my second cup of coffee.
“Thanks.” I sucked down a long swig, burning my tongue.
After Troy shut the door, Lou feigned hurt feelings, “All right. So you’ve heard the story. Well…Roland Riggs calls me up in the middle of the night and says—get this— ‘Lou, I guess I was wrong about the computer.’”
Lou’s Roland Riggs story was this: In 1968, Lou was on a fishing trip in Key West. He caught not a single tuna after two days of deep-sea fishing with Key West’s best captain, and he decided to forget the mahi-mahi and settle in for a nice, long beer binge. Lou was sitting at an outdoor patio bar downing a bottle of imported German beer when a disheveled guy about Lou’s age sat down next to him and said, “The Germans are the only ones who can brew beer that doesn’t taste like piss.”
Lou was already a publishing hotshot back then. He knew it was Riggs, even though the author had grown a full beard since his back jacket photo was taken. Roland Riggs, even then, was considered the voice of a generation. He was notoriously moody with his publisher, but he wrote Simple Simon and the world had been waiting to see what he would do next. The book sold out of every printing and still does a brisk business. It’s required reading in nearly every high school English course. Roland Riggs hit the lottery with his tale of lonesome angst and war and the end of the 1950s and all its innocence and conformity and fumbled sex in the back of Dad’s borrowed car.
The two of them started talking. They began with Riggs’s dissertation on German brew-making skills. They moved on to discuss women (discovering they both preferred moody brunettes), music (they both despised anything pseudo-folkish with a tambourine in it), books (no one but Riggs, Faulkner, and Hemingway was worth a damn), society’s ills (marijuana should be legalized), the price of fame (people like Riggs needed to grow ridiculous beards to avoid strangers accosting them) and the cost of the Vietnam war (the soul of the United States). They started talking on a Friday night at ten o’clock and didn’t stop until lunch on Sunday. The last words of their conversation were about the future of technology.
Lou said, “Mark my word, Riggs, one day everyone is going to have a computer—even you. It’s gonna change the way we do everything. Even publish books.”
Riggs had stared out at the ocean, his blue eyes mirroring its color. “I’ll never give up my typewriter, Lou. You’ve had too much German beer.”
With that, the brilliant Roland Riggs stood up, bowed to Lou, and walked down to the turquoise, smooth ocean. He took off his shirt and dove into the water. After splashing about for ten minutes or so, he came out, shook himself like a shaggy dog, and walked, bare-chested, down the beach and out of sight.
“After thirty-some-odd years, Roland Riggs remembered the last words of your conversation?”
“It was a life-changing weekend, Cassie. I remember it.”
“You remember it because it was Roland Riggs. But if he was some faceless beachcomber, you wouldn’t remember a word of it.”
“You underestimate me.” Lou stood and crossed the room, barefoot, to his bookshelf. When Lou moved to Florida, he gave up suits. And shoes. He wore flip-flops to the office and then took them off once inside West Side’s plush, royal-purple-carpeted suite. He encouraged bare-footedness in all his employees: “It’s good for the sole…get it?”
He pulled down his worn copy of Simple Simon.
“This book changed people’s lives.”
“Lou, where’s your cynicism? One call from this guy and you’re misty-eyed. A generation of child-men went through a war, and he gave them a voice. But life-changing? This from the man who gave a contract to Eliza James because she claimed to have sucked Lyndon Johnson’s dick.”
“You’re too young to appreciate what this book meant. I remember people weeping over this damn book. Let Stephen King do that.”
“Danielle