Chapter 2
“Actually, yes.” Ellery allowed an ironic smile to rise at the corner of her mouth and gazed curiously at the shards of what she hoped was imitation eighteenth-century French porcelain scattered across the floor. “I thought parts of it were quite funny.”
She knew Black shared her wicked sense of humor.
In fact, there were even some parts of the article—the line about romantic novels doing for adverbs what Lady Gaga did for hat wear popped to mind—she’d written specifically for him.
She leaned forward to give him a broad, collegial smile, though why it looked as if he were choking on his tie, she didn’t know.
She hoped he hadn’t taken to ordering the salami breakfast burritos in the cafeteria again.
“You have to admit you took some cheap shots,” Phil said carefully from his perch on the adjacent chair.
“Yeah,” she said, laughing, “I did. I especially liked the ‘literary equivalent of word-search puzzles’ line.” Her phone vibrated, and she stole a quick glance at the screen.
A text from Axel? Emergency! Trust me on this, it began, and she clicked the phone off automatically.
The last time he used that line, she’d ended up with sixteen tubs of something that looked like rabbit pellets and smelled like the floor of a bar stacked in her entry hall for six months.
Life with a Canadian hadn’t been easy, at least not that Canadian.
They seemed to have beer in their blood.
“But it isn’t the books themselves,” she went on, “it’s that woman and the way—”
Phil cleared his throat.
“—she insists on seeing her achievement as something more than having figured out how to build the biggest crap-shoveling machine in the history of publishing.”
Phil made an even louder noise and began waving his hand back and forth below the edge of Black’s desk.
“It would be like the head of BP writing a book on harnessing the power of the ocean,” she said, “or the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates on squeezing profits out of a sports team. I mean, they have the credentials, but who would want to read it? And, my God, the outfits she wears—”
Black slammed his fist so hard on his desk, Ellery jumped. “I think,” he said slowly, “it’s time for a little fair balance.”
Ellery looked at Phil. He looked as if he’d been laid out sitting up. All he needed were coins over his eyes and a bugler playing “Taps.”
“Fair balance?” she repeated.
“Yes,” Black said. “I’m curious as to why so many women love those books, aren’t you?”
She cut her gaze to Phil, like a runner looking for a sign, and got nothing but the faint whiff of embalming fluid.
This was like some weird, otherworldly experience.
Buhl Martin Black wondering why women liked romance novels?
The man who could give you the name and theme of every short story that had been published in the New Yorker since 1972 and who had cried when John Updike died? “Well, I mean, I guess.”
“Good,” Black said. “Because I want you to write a piece on it.”
“Me?” She felt the world shifting under her feet. “I don’t know the slightest thing about them.”
His eyes shone like round, hard nuggets of coal. “Really? You seemed to have formed quite a clear opinion.”
“But—”
“I want three thousand words,” he said. “A real ode to the topic. Why don’t we try for the upcoming issue?”
She blinked. They had moved from the absurd to the impossible. “The issue being put to bed next Monday, as in ‘one week from today’?”
“That’s the one.”
Three thousand words? On a topic she neither understood nor could tolerate? “In Vanity Place?”
“Are you under the impression, Miss Sharpe, that understanding what makes women tick is somehow beneath our notice? As far as I know, they still make up half our readers, though I am only the publisher, so perhaps I’ve been misinformed.”
This from a man who had nearly drummed her out of the editorial room for once professing a liking for Bridget Jones’s Diary. “But—”
“But nothing. I want the article to be in essay form. Your personal journey, discovering the marvelous world of romance novels.”
“I—”
“You will be the literary critic who convinces the non-romance-reading public they’ve been wrong all along. You will be credited with the Great Awakening. You will go down in history as the Pied Piper of Romance.”
She supposed it wasn’t the best time to remind Black that the people the piper cast his spell over followed him into a river and drowned. She cleared her throat. “You know I was supposed to be doing the John Irving interview.”
“Does John Irving have something to do with why women like romance novels?”
She shook her head slowly. “Not as far as I know.”
“Then Irving can roll up his wrestling mat and hit the showers as far as you’re concerned.”
At this, Phil emerged from the dead and hopped to his feet. “We’ll make it happen.”