Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Wes
Wesley Spencer considered lighting his entire laptop on fire.
While that wouldn’t solve the problem of his inbox in a concrete sense, it would feel so good.
He loved making decisions that felt good in the moment.
Unfortunately, there were moments after those moments.
Moments in which he’d have to explain the fire alarm blaring to the neighbors and the destruction of company property to his bosses.
Worst of all, the thousands of unread emails would not somehow disappear in this process.
The number, four digits, stared at Wes from the anchored bar on the bottom of his screen.
The eyes of that number bore through him while he was trying to work on Things.
Things sounded abstract and amorphous, and sometimes it was.
Client feedback, contract drafts, invitations to editor lunches and drinks sessions that he couldn’t turn down for fear of offense that would compromise some later deal.
Wes loved his job, he really did, but if he could have done that job in the middle of a forest with no Wi-Fi, he probably would have been a kinder and better person.
As it was, he was not kinder or better.
There were few great writers. There were even fewer great agents, at least those known outside the highly specialized literary circles Wes trod.
He didn’t know why he needed to be great, but what were you if you weren’t great?
Fucking email, though. He’d spent two hours sorting and prioritizing tiny icons this morning: red stars and blue stars and exclamation points and why didn’t Outlook offer a tiny little bomb icon?
Even after those two hours of sorting and snoozing, he felt overwhelmed.
Wes’s phone rang. It rang a lot—a necessary part of the job. He was almost grateful for a different piece of technology to feel overwhelmed with.
“Hello, Novel Literary. This is Wes Spencer.” This dialogue was one he’d learned from his internship, substituting another agent’s name.
“Wesley. Hi.”
He didn’t know if it was him conjuring her, but the voice rang familiar from those intern days at Eikura, Schier he did this for all his clients, and even though Maureen wasn’t his client, he had a certain stake in her career.
When he worked at Yuri’s agency, he’d been assigned to read slush.
If he ever thought he got too many queries a week now, that was dwarfed by Yuri’s daily intake.
She typically had two interns at any given time reading queries and skimming the first few pages.
If anything caught their attention, the interns would forward it to Yuri.
It had been a grueling job, and at the beginning, Wes had passed along the first thing that really caught his eye, only to have Yuri leave her desk, walk to the pod he shared with the other intern, and read a sliver of the paragraph in an ironic voice.
“This is a total, total rip-off of Franzen. Do you read?” she had asked.
“I read that .”
“Read more. Read better. And don’t send me this.” And she’d turned and left.
It had been a full week before Wes found anything else promising, and then he only forwarded it to her with a demure “Good premise.” He hadn’t gotten scolded for that one.
He sent a few more—but nothing stopped Wes’s heart like Maureen Denton’s query and first pages had.
Vulnerable—that was the only word for it.
The yolk of the words was smeared all over the manuscript, raw and sweet and bright.
When Yuri ended up signing her as a client, Wes felt victorious, and not only because he had found a client in the slush pile before his fellow intern.
Mainly, he felt Maureen’s book was something beautiful that would touch people someday.
And then Wes left—was fired—before he found out how that story ended.
And so, the Google alert, one that hadn’t ever pinged his inbox with a deal announcement from Publishers Marketplace or a prepublication interview with The New Yorker.
Nothing. He had honestly forgotten about that alert, but like a seventeen-year cicada, it wouldn’t be forgotten now. Here was the fruit of that interest.
Wes’s stomach twisted. He remembered how good Maureen’s—Mo’s—first project had been.
Quiet, maybe, but the prose was lush. He tried not to be curious what she could do with the themes and characters of The Proud and the Lost , especially since he had written his own book reworking those characters and themes.
Maybe hers would be horrible. Maybe he didn’t have anything to worry about.
There is nothing vainer than hope. There is nothing more hopeful than vanity.
Wes had been silent for at least thirty seconds, practically ten years in phone time. Maybe Yuri thought he’d grown the balls to hang up on her. More likely she thought he couldn’t string a sentence together.
Accurate.
“I don’t know what you want me to do,” Wes finally said. “The Morgan estate has been extremely litigious in pursuing cases which even suggest a connection to P&L .”
“I’ll be honest, Wes. If this manuscript wasn’t good, I wouldn’t have made the phone call. I know the right way to do this, and I’d like to go through you rather than finding work-arounds.”
“Is that a threat?”
Yuri gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “Oh, Wes,” she said.
“Oh, Yuri,” Wes said, as if he hadn’t called her Ms. Eikura every single day of his internship.
The familiarity that came with using her first name should make him feel like they were equals, but it did not.
He could see Yuri going to his boss, or writing to Estelle directly, and he did not like that idea.
Estelle read her mail, every piece of it.
Every piece of fan mail that came in through the years passed through her careful fingers. She even wrote back.
Maureen had written a new novel. Maureen’s novel was an adaptation of P&L . And he didn’t want to talk to Estelle about it. “I’ll try to bring it up with her, but no promises.”
“You’d get a cut, you know. Just keep that in mind.”
He wouldn’t get a cut, though. He didn’t want a cut from someone else’s book.
The first step of showing his book to Estelle was resigning from his place representing the trust, but he’d been putting that off until his book was absolutely perfect.
Mostly perfect might have to do. Wes hung up and stared at his half-written letter, knowing that instead of introducing the one book, the book of his heart, he might have to introduce two.
He could pour a glass of whiskey, à la Hemingway, and write a missive full of braggadocio, but if he was already thinking in ten-cent words, alcohol wouldn’t help.
Estelle Morgan-Perry was a plainspoken woman in every interaction Wes had with her.
He’d also changed his mind, knowing that a letter was the surest way to reach her.
Email was faster but less likely to be opened.
For this, Wes would break out the seventh-grade calligraphy-camp skills.
It was time to tell her about his adaptation.
Two weeks later, he was in Greenwich with an iPad full of cookbooks.
On Wes’s manuscript wish list, he called for “Literary and upmarket fiction, fantasy with a twist, nonfiction books about lesser-known events, and cookbooks,” which made for a wonderful collection of persistently excellent prose, dragons, long-form-podcast-worthy histories he knew nothing about, and cookbooks.
Wes did cook, but it was lonely cooking for one.
Often, he took the best bets to his mother’s house to try out some of the most appealing recipes.