The Last Book Party Page 5

  “I’m not embarrassed by it,” he said. “I mean, it’s not like it’s a secret.”

  “Of course not,” I said, thinking that it was exactly like that.

  “I changed it after I graduated high school. Grand is a family name.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of that. Wasn’t Greenberg a family name too? The actual family name? I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the name had been changed from Greenberg to Grand at Ellis Island, but it was unusual for someone so young to choose a new name and to switch from an obviously Jewish one to another so devoid of context.

  “What did your parents make of that?”

  “It was just another thing they didn’t understand about me.”

  He didn’t offer up anything else, so I decided not to press him on it. If this night was going to be bearable, he was going to have to lighten up.

  Jeremy and I arrived before the others at the next stop, in a new high-rise with a doorman. I couldn’t remember who was hosting this segment of the party, so we settled in on the black leather couches on the side of the lobby to wait. The walls were lined with mirrors, which made me slightly dizzy.

  “Is this lobby really big or is it just an illusion?” I said.

  Jeremy shrugged. “I think they decorated it to make it appear large enough to justify the high rent.”

  I didn’t know what else to say, so I just sat there, not realizing that I was staring at Jeremy until he asked, “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I just can’t figure out if you are less intimidating now that I know you’re a Greenberg or more intimidating for having had the nerve to change your name.”

  “More intimidating,” he said. “Definitely.”

  Within a few minutes, the rest of the party arrived and we joined them in a boisterous elevator ride up to the apartment of Callie Calhoun, the most senior of the junior publicists, who had recently moved in with her boyfriend, Clint, a bond trader.

  “The next course is ready and waiting,” she said, ushering us from the elevator to her front door in heels that struck me as ridiculously high for an evening of traipsing around Manhattan.

  The apartment was vast and sparsely furnished. In the living room were two buttery leather couches, a dark green recliner, and a glass coffee table perched on what looked like two tree stumps. The hallways were decorated with huge framed photographs of someone—presumably Clint—skiing, golfing, and surfing in beautiful locales. The action shots looked like cover photos from Outside magazine.

  Staring at the photographs with his arms folded, Jeremy said, “These tell the story of a manly man, a true American.”

  “A masturbator of the universe.”

  Jeremy laughed. “Did you really just say that?”

  “Apparently, I did. You know, like masters of the…”

  “I get it.”

  Callie, who had disappeared into the kitchen when we arrived, walked into the living room with a large oval tray of tiny plastic cups filled with a jewel-toned assortment of cubes.

  “Our next course is served,” she said, placing the tray on the table. “Jell-O shots!” Guests quickly swarmed around the table. Jeremy asked my favorite color and then elbowed his way toward the shots. He emerged holding three red cups in each hand.

  “Three?” I said.

  “One is a shot. Two is a snack. Three make a course.”

  “Are we really going to have to find our way to yet another apartment before we get some food?” I asked, looking around the room for something to eat. “I hate to do this on an empty stomach.”

  “In Russia, when there’s no food to go with the vodka, they smell something pungent, like a wool sweater or some hair, to trick the stomach,” Jeremy said.

  “Does that work?”

  “I have no idea.” He leaned toward me and gently lifted the hair from below my shoulder and brought it to his nose. With his head bent down, I could smell his curls, which had the faintest scent of citrus. When he lifted his head, the ends of my hair resting loosely in his fingers, his face was close to mine. He looked appealingly unguarded.

  “Where’d you learn that?” I asked.

  “My father was born in Moscow. Learned it from his father.” He twisted his fingers gently through my hair.

  “Grandpa Greenberg?”

  Jeremy gripped my hair a little tighter and gave a gentle tug.

  “The very one,” he said, letting my hair go.

  Jeremy downed his shots one after another. “As bad as I remember,” he said. He cocked his head toward me and pointed to his hair. “Want to do it à la Russe?”

  I leaned in, took a quick sniff of Jeremy’s head, and then raised a plastic cup in the air, eager to feel the effect of the vodka.

  “To Grandpa Greenberg,” I said, and swallowed the cold shot.

  9

  I didn’t realize how tipsy I was until we left Callie’s building to head to the next stop of the evening, which was in an apartment at Waterside Plaza, down in the east Twenties.

  Out on the sidewalk, Callie and some of the others were debating too loudly whether it made more sense to take the subway to Twenty-Third and walk east or to take the bus down Second Avenue.

  I turned to Jeremy and said, “Can we just take a cab? I’m starving.”

  I stayed close to him as we walked to the corner and he peered uptown, looking for a taxi coming down Second Avenue. I watched Jeremy, thinking about how easy it would be to lean over and rest my head on his shoulder. A Checker cab pulled up, and Jeremy opened the door and waited for me to slide to the other side. I flipped down the jump seat and rested my feet on it.

  Jeremy gave the driver the address and we careened down Second Avenue, slamming over pot holes, swerving to pass slower cars, and flying through traffic lights just before they changed from yellow to red. “Whoa, this car is going way too fast,” I said, closing my eyes. “It’s making my head spin.”

  Jeremy leaned forward and politely asked the driver to slow down a bit. His voice at that moment reminded me of his writing. I still couldn’t put together the richly imagined world of his novel with the cagey guy from New Jersey sitting beside me.

  “May I ask you one question?” I said, forgetting my earlier reticence to let on that I’d read his manuscript. “I’ve been wondering. I mean, I loved your novel and it all rings true, amazingly true, but I can’t help wondering, why leprosy? Who even thinks about that anymore? What was the connection?”

  “That was more than one question,” Jeremy said.

  I kept on. “What’s the link between boy Greenberg in New Jersey and girl leper in Nepal? Did you have a skin condition as a kid or something?”

  “Wow, you are so perceptive. It was eczema. A severe case.”

  I gasped. “Really?”

  “No, not really. Not at all. Do you actually think so literally, that creativity can be distilled so simply from point A to point B?”

  I wasn’t too wasted to be embarrassed. I looked out the window, watching the delis and pubs of Second Avenue pass by in a blur.

  “It wasn’t an unreasonable question. I mean, your novel doesn’t seem to be a case of ‘write what you know.’”

  “Write what I know? No thanks.”

  I wasn’t surprised that he’d be among the many writers who scoffed at that whole idea, but I was still puzzled by his choice of subjects.

  “But you took such a leap. I mean, not just a foreign country, but a foreign girl. A teenage girl.”

  “Men can’t write women?” he asked. “It’s a human story. She’s a human.”

  “Yeah, a human who happens to be a fourteen-year-old female, which is sort of a seminal time in the life of a … human girl.”

  We sat in silence for a few blocks. And then Jeremy said, “If I wanted to tell the world why I write or why I wrote about a Nepali girl, I would have written an essay instead of a novel. Is that concept too complicated for you to understand? Have you never written something that appeared on the page in
a mysterious way?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have,” I said.

  “So you do write. Why am I not surprised? Do you know exactly where your writing comes from?”

  I had to admit I didn’t. To make my point, and perhaps to impress him, I told him about the best story I had written at Brown, about an angry widower trying to convince himself he needs no one, and how it had poured from me in a magical rush of scribbling during a train ride from Providence to Philadelphia to visit my brother. The story was published in Issues, the school literary magazine, and had gotten a lot of attention from the real writers on campus, one of whom, in what he probably considered a compliment, told me he was impressed that such a meek girl had written such a sharp story. I didn’t tell Jeremy that I knew what had inspired me—a disconcerting one-night stand with a maddeningly cerebral semiotics major—but that I was still astonished by the ease with which I’d written the story. Nothing had flowed like that since then, which made me think that perhaps I wasn’t meant to be a writer after all.

  “Tell me,” Jeremy said, putting on the deep voice of a television interviewer, “was there not something in your childhood that prompted you to write from the perspective of an angry man? Perhaps … an abusive relationship?”

  “Very funny. And no comment. I’m not the one heading out on the publicity circuit soon. And good luck with that, by the way. It’s clear you’re going to be a real charmer.”

  I rested my head on the back of the vinyl seat and closed my eyes. At that moment, I only wanted to be back in Truro, hundreds of miles from Manhattan and its ambitious young writers. I wanted to be sitting in dusky light at the table in Franny’s kitchen, filled with a sense of belonging and promise.

  10

  The final apartment was narrow and decorated in hues of beige. The windows looked as though they couldn’t be opened, giving the space a slightly claustrophobic feel. When Jeremy and I walked in, Mindy Blodgett was adding a large wooden salad bowl to a sizable spread of food that included the obligatory brie, our second of the evening, and pasta primavera with sun-dried tomatoes.

  “Come, take, eat!” Mindy said, waving a paper plate as if she was about to toss it like a Frisbee. I filled a plate with pasta and salads and moved to the corner of the dining room. Leaning against the wall, I ate to quell my stomach and get some space from Jeremy, who was circling the food table warily. Mindy followed closely behind him, giving a running commentary on the menu. “That’s spinach salad, with hard-boiled egg and bacon. That’s chicken salad, with walnuts and grapes. That’s hummus. It’s chick peas.”

  “Of course,” Jeremy said. He put some pita triangles and a spoonful of hummus on his plate. He moved over to stand beside me.

  “Lost your appetite?” I asked.

  He dipped some pita in his hummus.

  “I suppose I have. I’m not partial to salads.”

  “Of any kind?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “So no vegetables. I’ll be sure to mention that to Mary so she can include it in the press release for your book launch. Any other deeply personal details you’re willing to share?”

  Jeremy looked at me and for a moment I thought he was going to tell me off. But then he set down his paper plate and shrugged. “OK, so sue me. I don’t like being interrogated about my writing. I’ll get over it. Go ahead. Ask me three questions. Anything at all.”

  “Three? How generous,” I said. “OK. Question one, were you sick as a child?”

  “You can’t give it up, can you? I had the mumps and a few bouts of strep throat, but other than that, I had a healthy childhood. Next?”

  “What was the first piece of fiction you ever wrote?”

  “A short story about a girls’ volleyball team whose obsession with a Ouija board takes a dark turn.”

  I couldn’t help myself and laughed. “Was that science fiction or pornography?”

  He smiled slyly. “Is that your third question?”

  “No! Absolutely not. I get one more.”

  “OK, go for it.” I looked at his pale face, his dark hair.

  “When and where did your parents meet?”

  He exhaled slowly.

  “Come on, out with it. You promised.”

  “In 1945. In a displaced persons camp in Germany. A fitting beginning to a miserable marriage.”

  “I had no idea. I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be. They were among the lucky ones.”

  Jeremy looked away, and before I could say more, Mary walked up and asked if she could “borrow” Jeremy to open a bottle of champagne. “I’m afraid of flying corks,” she said with a girlish grin. He followed her to the kitchen, and I walked across the room to talk to Ron, who’d just arrived with Kayla. I was surprised they had stuck with the party; they both seemed too cool for one office gathering, let alone three.

  “Are those the vittles?” Kayla asked, without moving to take something to eat.

  Ron looked around.

  “Where’s your boy wonder?”

  “I told you, he’s not my boy wonder,” I said.

  “No? Isn’t a book contract like a … pheromone?”

  “It has its limitations,” I said, watching Jeremy deftly twist the cork and release it from the bottle. When he turned and saw me, he raised the bottle as if to make a toast. I raised my cup of water.

  “You know what they say,” Kayla said, linking her arm through Ron’s. “Those who can’t do, sleep with those who can. Isn’t that what drives you all to work for pennies—the proximity to literary greatness?”

  Mary held up her wineglass and smiled as Jeremy filled it. She clinked her glass against his beer bottle. They laughed. He looked less intense talking to her, and even seemed relaxed. Mary looked pretty. She had a way of putting people at ease that I envied.

  I slipped into the hall bathroom, sat on the toilet, and tucked my feet under the fluffy pink bathmat. So Jeremy Grand, up-and-coming writer by way of Choate and an unlikely friendship with Franny Grey, was also Jeremy Greenberg, son of Holocaust survivors, who grew up in New Jersey.

  Was it the extremes—charmed Franny raised by literary soul mates and dark Jeremy with parents who had experienced unimaginable evil—that had made them who they were and had given them such confidence to create? Where did that leave me? I hadn’t grown up charmed or tortured; there wasn’t anything unusual about me at all. How could an ordinary life like mine result in a story worth telling?

  With her comment about the allure of writers, Kayla sounded like my mother, who had tempered her disappointment with my job in publishing with hopes I might find a successful young author to marry, or at least some friends to jump-start what she considered my lackluster social life. She had always dismissed the notion that I could become a writer myself. After graduation, when I’d toyed with the idea of getting an MFA in fiction, she’d told me that “having some talent is good enough for a hobby, but not a true vocation. If you’re not blessed with genius, what is the point?” Her opinion would have been easier to counter if we weren’t graced with the presence of uncanny genius in the form of my older brother, Danny, who had practically come out of the womb doing problem sets. Danny was the embodiment of the idea that remarkable people were born, not made.

  When I left the bathroom, Ron and Kayla were sitting in the corner, and Jeremy and Mary were still talking, now standing a little closer to each other and sharing a small plate of cheesecake that Mary held up between them. I kept my head down and walked to the door.

  11

  Out of sorts when I woke up Sunday morning, I was disappointed that it was one of those rare crisp, clear summer days in New York that made me feel compelled to be outside. But rather than lifting my mood, the sunlight and blue sky would accentuate the drabness and dirty sidewalks of the Upper West Side.

  I grabbed an old blanket and walked down Broadway and into Riverside Park to find a calm place to read the new Martha Grimes mystery I’d swiped from the storeroom at work. My hope of losing myself
in the book for a few hours, however, was quickly dashed. No matter how I positioned myself, the roots of the tree I had settled under dug into my back. The intermittent wailing of car alarms wouldn’t let up. I couldn’t tune out the jumpy beat of “La Bamba” from someone’s boom box. The clamor reminded me of how disenchanted I had become with living in the city.

  New York no longer felt romantically seedy. It felt aggressive and mean. I was tired of the noise, the rancid smell of garbage bags on the sidewalks, the aggressive packs of guys in spandex shorts biking through the park, the warm, sooty air that rushed from the subway grates as I walked by, tasting like pennies in my throat.

  My mood was the same Monday morning when Mary practically skipped up to me to ask why I’d left the party early. “It was just getting started,” she said, perching herself on the edge of my desk. “Mindy has access to the roof, and everyone went up and danced.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Well, obviously not Ron,” she said, absently flipping through the cards of my Rolodex. “But pretty much everyone else, including Jeremy.”

  Mary eagerly shared what she had learned about Jeremy. Most of it concerned his years at Vassar and his postgraduate journey to go trekking in Nepal where, one night in a crowded bar in Kathmandu, he’d learned from an expat doctor about Nepal’s leprosy colonies.

  “And—voilà—the inspiration and setting for his novel,” Mary said.

  “That’s quite an adventure,” I said, trying to sound less impressed than I was.

  Mary leaned in as if she was going to tell me a secret. “And get this—he funded the trip with his bar mitzvah money. Don’t you just love that?”

  I admired Jeremy’s courage. I wouldn’t have the guts to spend all my savings on one big trip or travel to Nepal on my own. But as much as I liked his novel, I was still unsure whether his decision to write about a Nepali girl with leprosy was inspired and bold or absurd and presumptuous. I was shy about sharing my own voice and here Jeremy had written hundreds of compelling pages about a girl on another continent, in an entirely different world.