Adulation (23 page)

Sunny Smith

D
ESPITE GEORGIE’S OBJECTIONS
, I’d begun dating Joshua Hamilton a week after our dinner at Nocello’s. We disclosed our intentions to Angela and Phil, who, to my surprise, seemed to have no problem with it. (If anything, Angela seemed a little jealous.) Phil’s one condition was that Josh had to schedule storevisits on days I wasn’t working, and Josh’s superiors “strongly discouraged” him from talking aboutcompany business on personal time.

Georgie insisted that I was dating Josh solely for the sex, and I argued profusely against it (itwasn’t
 
solely
 
for the sex). It was the kissing—damn, that man could kiss. I swear he got a master’s degreein it. I couldn’t help but think that his ex-wife must miss him a lot.

If only I could adequately explain Josh’s kissing method: He started out gentle and soft, like hewas putting his lips to a baby or a trophy, the way athletes do when they’ve won the championship. Hislips were neither too dry nor too moist—ever—as if he let them steep over a steaming cup of tea beforehe went anywhere. They lingered over my lips for a moment, luring me in to their supple goodness, andthen it was as if he pulled my bottom lip open  with his top, and sort of blew into my mouth (twice asfantasmic when he did this trick with my earlobe). After that, he French kissed me with slightly moreforce, but not invasively. He constantly freshened his breath—if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear hewoke up already minty fresh—and had straight, white teeth.

Meanwhile, his hand was caressing some part of me, depending on what number date it was andhow receptive I was—my forearm, my cheek, my neck, right by the carotid artery, or just around the curveof my right breast (he was left-handed)—but I was so stimulated by the kissing that the caressing almostfelt like an extension of it.

His kisses were so sexy, so intoxicating that I lost myself, and I was the one going further, leaninginto him more, moving his hand to my knee and pushing my skirt up.

Or maybe it was just me—I was horny as hell, not having had sex in years. And so I shamelesslygave in on our third date, inviting him into my apartment (lit only by the streetlamps outside shiningthrough the windows), pulling out a handful of wrapped condoms from my clutch purse, and leading himinto the bedroom with an extended arm.

“It was a symphony,” I said to Theo on the phone after Josh left the next morning, me still blissedout in my bed. “A ballet. An aria. A—”

“I got it, Sunny,” interrupted Theo. “He’s fucking Fabio in the bedroom.”

“You meant that as an adjective and not a verb, yes?”

“Yes,” she said. “Kinda rushing it, aren’t you? What about your six-date rule?”

“Did you hear what I said? It was ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’ Besides, do you know how long it’s beenfor me? My vibrator and I were about to file jointly.”

I could almost hear Theo wince. “I don’t need to know these things.”

I snorted. “Oh, please. You told me you named yours Ed.”

“Whatever. So where is Mr. Wonderful? Don’t tell me he hit and run.”

“He brought me breakfast in bed,” I said, turning to lie on my back and replaying the memory of Josh carrying in two plates of burned buttered toast and two mugs of coffee, one with the Whitford’s logo on it, the other a faded
 
Hard Rock Café Boston
 
logo. You’d think he’d made bacon and eggs and served them on china plates with mimosas in champagne flutes, the way I described it. “Then he had to leave to get to a store in Stanford. Wanted to make it to the ferry in time.”

“Mmm-hmm,” said Theo skeptically.

A few days before Thanksgiving, we both had too much to drink, and I showed Josh the 40 for 40 list.

“This is fantastic, Sunny,” he said in his managerial cheerleader voice as he perused the list (I hadlearned by our third date that everything with Joshua Hamilton was “fantastic”). “Hmm, you haven’tchecked too many of these off. No. No, that won’t do at all. We’re going to change that, startingtomorrow.”

“What, you’re going to whisk me away to Paris or something?”

“No, we’re going to get you published.”

“How?”

“You’re going to self-publish—and it pains me to say this—to the Kindle. Because, let’s face it, that’s where the action is. But we’ll get you on the Trinket too.”

I felt woozy and tried to sit up straight. “I don’t know if any of my stuff is publishable. The agents didn’t seem to think it was.”

“Do you know how much good writing agents turn down in a day, a week, a month? Surely you’re

aware of how much the publishing industry has changed in the last twenty-four months.”

“I see evidence of it in the shipment every day.”

“So you of all people know the shit that’s been going on the shelves. Publishers and booksellers

want
 
bankable
 
content, not quality.”

I frowned. “Come on, Josh. That’s not only cynical, it’s a sweeping generalization.”

“There’s an author who self-published solely to e-book format last year. She had two series of fantasy novels. You know how many units she sold in one month?
 
Two hundred thousand.
 
Two hundred thousand smackers in one month. She was a millionaire before the quarter was even up.”

“I don’t write fantasy. I write historical fiction—mysteries set on Long Island in the twentieth century. One for each decade, starting with the fifties.”

“Even better! You can market it as a series.”

“Yes, but who wants to read anything about historical Long Island other than geeky Long Islanders like myself?”

“People in Dumbfuck, Nowhere, who think Long Island is a glamorous place to live. And I’ll bet there are plenty of other geeky Long Islanders such as yourself.”

“But—” I started.

“Sunny!” said Josh, probably louder than he intended, being tipsy. “Strike while the iron is hot and fucking publish your books! What have you got to lose?”

The argument with Georgie invaded my mind at that moment, and I tried to push it out. Neither of us had acknowledged it since it happened.

What
 
did
 
I have to lose?

There was a time when I took rejection rather well. I diligently, ritually sent stories to magazinesand literary journals and wrote pithy query letters to agents. Occasionally an agent requested the first fifty

pages, or even the entire manuscript, and I’d sent them, hoping for the best but accepting the outcome either way. I could’ve opened a mail center, I was so organized. The possibility of rejection had never deterred me from pursuing my goal.

The same mentality applied to my love relationships. And that wasn’t to say that I didn’t feel the sting, or question whether I was chasing nothing more than a moving cloud when the rejection letters (or breakups) came. As long as the rejection was a private affair, then I could handle it. But the Humiliation with Teddy had changed all of that. He had made a fool out of me in public, and if my inadequacies as a wife and procreator could be outed, then who was to say any inadequacies that someone decided I had as a writer wouldn’t undergo the same outing and humiliation? Not that I thought myself a bad writer—I loved the stories I wrote—but I already knew that I could  not, would not please everyone. That wasn’t the problem. It was this age of exposure. I didn’t want the adulation any more than I wanted the evisceration. Become intimately familiar with my writing, fine. But pay no attention to the woman behind the keyboard.

I’d made petty excuses because it was easier than admitting that I was terrified of being discovered. And I’d become obscure as a result.

What did I have to lose? My invisibility cloak. It had become my security blanket.

“Will you help me?” I asked Josh.

“I would be honored to help you,” he replied.

It was the first time I’d been proactive in years, and I couldn’t believe how good it felt. Like I’djust gotten a shot of B-12.

The very next day I gave Josh the first manuscript of what we decided to call the Long Island Mystery series,
 
Long Island Ducks
, and he read it from beginning to end within days, copyediting andmaking notes along the way. According to him, it didn’t need much by way of revision, just clarificationof a description here, tightening of a plot line there, making sure everything fit, no characters’ nameschanged halfway through, no dead bodies suddenly showing up alive, that sort of thing.

“It’s really good, Sun,” he said. “And it’s marketable. I don’t know why you gave up on this.”

“Guess I thought the boat had already sailed,” I lied.

“The detail is remarkable. You really did your homework.”

“I was a history major in college.”

“Really?”

I nodded. “Spent my senior year doing an honors project that involved historical research oftwentieth-century Long Island. That material became the settings and background and stories in mynovels.”

“That is totally fantastic, Sunny. Wow.”

I smiled. “History is, after all, nothing more than storytelling.”

“I never thought about it like that.”

Neither had I, for a long time.

I started spending nights and weekends I wasn’t with Josh formatting my Word files and studyingthe basics of book cover design on Photoshop. I planned to upload the book to Kindle Direct Publishingfirst, and price it for one dollar, under the name Sunrise M. Smith, a decision I’d made reluctantly.

The CHANGE NAME entry on the 40 for 40 list had started out as a joke, but I started to seriouslyconsider it this time. My parents named me Sunrise Morning Smith because I was born precisely atsunrise. They had been enchanted with the idea of calling me Sunny Morning, no doubt hoping mydisposition would match. The names Jackie, Janis, and Glory had all made the short list (I had come veryclose to being named Morning Glory, in fact). In retrospect, being named Jacqueline Smith probablywould’ve been tough during the
 
Charlie’s Angels
 
fad, although I would have rather endured that teasingthan all the stupid weather metaphors.

My brother’s full name is Timothy Leonard Smith, and my mother once confessed to me that his

middle name was supposed to be “Leary,” after that “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” guy who used to encourage people to do LSD  in the sixties, but then they imagined him filling out job applications. This was my parents’ role model. Him, and John, Paul, George, and Ringo. And Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Gloria Steinem, of course. My guess is that had they conceived a third child, they would’ve named it Jerry Garcia Smith, even if she’d been a girl.

My name never felt like me—I never felt “sunny.” Not that I was clinically depressed or anything like that. But “sunny” was the last word I’d use to describe myself. I had taken Teddy’s last name, Hanover, when we were married because I preferred the sound of Sunrise Hanover to Sunrise Smith. Sunrise Hanover sounded like a corporation dedicated to clean energy. But I’d gone back to my maiden name because of the Humiliation and not wanting a lasting reminder of my failed marriage. It was bad enough that I had joined the ranks of the divorce statistics, something I’d vowed not to do when I was a hopeful and idealistic teenager. Sunny Smith didn’t sound as bad as Sunrise Smith (although the latter looked more sophisticated in print than the former), but really, how asinine was it to pair such an unusual first name with what is perhaps the most common surname of all time?