Chapter 24 One Big Happy Hercules Family
One Big Happy Hercules Family
A week later I’m in New York at my publisher, my favorite place in the world next to my own house. Hercules occupies several
floors of a building in Midtown; as soon as I enter the lobby, the temple of books with its soaring ceiling and white marble,
its glass cases featuring decades of priceless first editions, I know I’m home. And not just because my own novels are front
and center, alongside Roth’s and Hemingway’s—hello, boys, good to see you. It’s because the first time I stepped into this building, with my then-new briefcase and hair that curled over my collar,
my life began.
Other writers talk about impostor syndrome—I’ve heard them whine about it endlessly in the Darlings meetings.
The fear of being a fraud, of not living up to your literary identity.
I’ve never had that. This is where I belong.
Before Hercules, there was only a disjointed mosaic of experience, the jutting memory rocks in the mist: our mid-century house on the peak, all glass and steel; ever snowing, raining, or ice outside; my father passing out at dinner, his forehead thumping into his bloody roast; the thin cries in the blizzard; Pen screaming, pounding on the door to be let in; the animals in the shed my father slid wires into, through their ears or mouths, the others waiting in the cages with their shaved fur and sick, trusting eyes.
Increasing focus once I got to college, the dorms with the nubile, juicy bodies and the overheated classrooms where we talked books and craft.
Then grad school. But it wasn’t until I reached Hercules that everything snapped into clarity and I became who I am.
So the puppet thinks he’s a real boy. This is where I became real, where I became William Corwyn.
This is the mecca, the nucleus of my purpose. The pinnacle of
publishing. And it’s here I will stay.
I give my name to the security guard—not that he should need it; Just turn around, pal, I want to say, I’m right behind you on the shelf. I frown for the camera, receive my ID tag, go through the metal detector, and take the elevator to the twenty-seventh floor.
The Hercules lobby glows ahead of me, full of late morning sun bouncing off surrounding office towers. I stride through the
glass doors to be greeted by—myself, the life-size William Corwyn avatar my marketing team has been sending to all my events.
Cardboard William is cross-armed, shirt sleeves rolled up to show his writerly forearms, the muscles developed from a lifetime
of typing. He’s wearing, as I am today, his blue button-down and khakis, holding a copy of All the Lambent Souls, and giving the Hercules visitor an ironic look over his glasses, as if to say, They made me do this so you’ll buy my book.
I remember the photographer Jayne sent to my house in Maine to capture this shot, a gay gent with an entourage, which was
a bit of a bummer—I’d hoped for some toothsome chickadee with a Canon, special delivery!—but also good because less distraction.
“Hello you handsome devil,” I say to myself, and stride to the front desk. The receptionist is, as they always are, young
and dressed far too severely for her age. She has dark hair parted in the middle like a Ted Bundy victim, paper-white skin,
square black-framed glasses, and the same button-down my avatar and I are wearing.
“Hi,” I say, smiling. She’s on her headset; she lifts one finger, and I raise my brows, displeased. I take out my phone and
check it, making her wait once she’s done. Lambent Souls is #9 on today, 58,976 reviews on Goodreads. Not bad. “William Corwyn for Jayne Wetzel,” I say, without looking up.
“I know who you are,” she says, and I’m revising my opinion of her just slightly when she nods to my avatar and says, “You’re
pretty ubiquitous around here.”
“As it should be,” I say. “My ubiquity pays your salary. Let Jayne know I’m here, please.”
While I’m waiting, I take visual inventory of the lobby. As downstairs, the walls are comprised of spotlit glass shelves featuring
the first editions of Hercules authors going back to when the publisher was founded, beginning with Fitzgerald and Dreiser
and continuing through Styron, Roth, E. B. White, to the ladies: Toni Morrison, Ann Patchett, Donna Tartt. Good company. I
do see one of Simone’s novels, only her first, The Sharecropper’s Daughter, which did so nicely for her and the house.
Too bad, Simone. If you’d played your cards right, you’d be here with me.
In contrast, all of my books are featured, from The Girl on the Mountain to Medusa to Lambent Souls.
There are several editions of my first major bestseller, You Never Said Goodbye, hardcover and domestic paperback and all the foreign editions. This, too, is as it should be.
Jayne comes striding into the lobby, and we hug. “Admiring yourself?” she says.
“Admiring my placement,” I say, grinning. “Thanks for making time for me before your big trip to Frankfurt.” I wink to let
her know she’s forgiven. “Ich bin ein Frankfurter.”
Jayne laughs. “You’re some kinda hot dog, all right.
” She squeezes my arm affectionately. Jayne’s about ten years older than I am, tall with a great rack, a real Valkyrie, and I’ve often imagined if we had met when I was still a virgin, we could have had a Mrs. Robinson situation.
Jayne would have eaten me alive, and I would have died happy.
She’s still attractive, in her energetic, perpetually untidy way, with light eyes and graying sandy hair and excellent teeth, the kind of woman you’d more expect to see on a Thoroughbred than in an office.
In fact, she does retreat in winters to her horse farm in Florida.
Jayne is not at all for me, but she has come to occupy a much more important place in my life than a romantic snack: my editor.
Without her having plucked my manuscript out of the slush pile while I was still an undergraduate, if she hadn’t then summoned me to New York, my career, and hence I, would not exist.
“Let’s go back,” she says. “Did you just get in? You’re impeccable as usual, Billy. Next to you I always feel like I just
spilled coffee on myself. Which actually I did.” She brushes in disgust at the stain on her sweater. “Speaking of which—coffee?
Tea?”
“Coffee with cream, dear, please,” I say to the receptionist, not because I really want it but to give her a chance to redeem
herself.
I walk with Jayne into the inner sanctum. Contrary to what most aspiring writers probably dream, the guts of the publishing
house look like any other corporate office, a maze of cubicles where the junior editors and assistants sit, carpet, overhead
lights, file cabinets—and more books. Shelves and shelves of them, hardcovers and paperbacks and galleys, oh my, and stacks
of paper everywhere, manuscripts, even in this age of digital submission. The walls are lined with framed posters of the more
famous authors’ book covers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Pat Conroy, Andre Dubus and Jodi Picoult. The senior editors have
offices with doors that shut and multimillion-dollar views, and as I accompany Jayne to her corner suite, I notice an addition
to the decor: more of me, avatar Williams appearing at intervals. The first one is plain, simply greeting whoever comes back
into the house, but another, next to a cubicle, is wearing a lei and a Hawaiian shirt. A third has a Yankees cap on, a fourth
sports a beret and pencil mustache, baguette jammed into the crook of his cardboard arm. By the time we get to the William
holding a bouquet of dead flowers and a sign that says Evolved White Male Author, I’m feeling a little steamed.
“What’s with the avatars?” I ask, as I enter Jayne’s office, which at least is gratifyingly wall-to-ceiling with my book covers.
She grins.
“Don’t you just love them?” she says. “Marketing overordered, and we decided to keep them. We call them the Flat Williams.
You’re our favorite two-dimensional character!”
She’s laughing as she drops into her desk chair, ha ha ha, until she sees I am not joining her but instead smiling thinly, standing with my hands clasped behind my back.
“Oh, come on,” she says. “Don’t tell me you’ve lost your sense of humor. I’ll send you home with some.” She beams up at me
as the receptionist comes in with my coffee. “Now tell me the fabulous book idea.”
“Thank you, dear,” I say to the girl as she leaves. She’s spraddle-legged, which is too bad but also lends itself to some
interesting possibilities.
Relenting, I sit and launch into my elevator pitch for the new novel, which I admit is unformed yet, but I know I can execute
and polish. “So there you have it,” I finish. “Still under construction, but basically: historical fiction, dual timeline,
revenge across the centuries. With a clowder thrown in for good measure. That’s the working title, by the way. The Clowder.”
Jayne has been listening with rapt attention the entire time I’ve been speaking, tugging on her earlobe. Now she asks: “What’s
a clowder?”
“A group of cats,” I say. “In this case, an ironic nod to the thing men have always called women. A certain part of their
anatomy, anyway. And a love letter to those women, my angry female readers. Like the ones in the pink knitted hats.”
Jayne stares at me a minute longer, then claps. “Bravo. Billy Corwyn plus histfic is every editor’s dream.”
“Plus cats,” I remind her.
“Plus cats. You’re going to reinvent the blockbuster.”
I bow my head modestly.
“Frankly, I’m relieved,” Jayne adds. “I know I can count on you to pull a rabbit out of the hat last minute, Billy, but this
time you were cutting it close.”
“I just like to keep things interesting.”
“Well, cut it out. I’m too old for that.” She grins, her full-wattage white smile. “You writers are a major pain in the ass