In the Drink (18 page)

Naturally, this created an interesting situation for me with Gil and Janine. As the manuscript of
The High-Heeled Gumshoe
progressed, one or the other of them called every so often. Since I fielded Jackie’s phone calls, I was usually the one who spoke to them. I had to bite the inside of my cheek to prevent
myself from saying, “But the duke
has
to drink too much at that party, because later on he doesn’t remember that Genevieve swore him to secrecy, so he lets the cat out of the bag on Klaus von Hasselhoff’s yacht, and that’s how Felicia knows Genevieve knows about her husband!” Instead, I said politely that I’d check with Jackie, then hung up, waited twenty minutes, and called back. I couldn’t tell whether or not Gil had the least idea what Jackie and I were up to; his tone was always vaguely sly and amused, but this could very well have been his manner with everyone. And I was sure he wouldn’t have cared at all who wrote the books; why should he, as long as they made money? But for the sake of Jackie’s pride, I dutifully kept up the pretense with everyone, including Jackie herself.

When I’d started work on the book, Jackie had induced me to sign an agreement, which Margot had drawn up for herself and also signed, that prevented me from enacting any future legal efforts to gain recognition, more money, or any rights over my work. William was already familiar with this arrangement because Margot had told him all about it; he told me in no uncertain terms that I was prostituting myself. “You’re not going to get anything out of this except resentment,” he said earnestly. “It’s not worth it. I told Margot the same thing.” I had laughed at him. Prostituting myself? He’d never cleaned houses for a living; he’d never waited tables. He had no idea. Eighteen dollars an hour had seemed like a lot of money when we’d agreed to the terms of my employment, back when I was grateful to have this job at all.

But he was right. About a month into writing the book, it struck me that I earned the same hourly wage whether I was writing or playing Miss Lonelyhearts on the phone with Mr. Blevins when Jackie wasn’t in the mood to talk to him. Jackie had been given a six-hundred-thousand-dollar advance for three books, of which she would pay me about one-thirtieth to
write the second one. She didn’t need the money; Giancarlo had bought her off with a bundle so big it couldn’t really be called a bundle, it was more like a freight. So, with this firmly in mind, I got up my nerve one day and asked for a raise. “I think I deserve it,” I said brazenly, “now that I have the book to write in addition to my secretarial work.”

She looked at me for a moment, numbers whirling in her eyes. They came up two zeroes. Like many absurdly wealthy people, Jackie lived in utter terror of spending any more than she absolutely had to because then her money would all be gone. And you couldn’t pay people too much or they’d get ideas, and keeping people from getting ideas was what made the whole thing work.

“Well,” she sputtered, “my advance isn’t really so much money, when you think about how much it costs to live in New York. In Paris, I never had to think about money, Giancarlo handled everything. Now I’m worried all the time about whether or not I’ll have enough. You can’t imagine, Claudia, I used to be able to buy whatever I wanted!” She shook her head.

And that was that. Clearly a ghostwriter was no more than a glorified secretary, who was only slightly more than a maid. Jackie didn’t have to mop her own floors or type her own letters, so why should she be expected to write her own books? And why should she have to pay more than secretary’s wages to have someone do it for her? Her readers bought her books not because they were well-written, which for the most part they weren’t, but because they believed they were true. Jackie’s name was the valuable commodity, and the books themselves were merely gross vessels for that breath of immortal ether.

Anyway, she did her part. As Genevieve, she went on talk shows, gave interviews, did book tours, was taken out to lunch. She charmed her audiences and interviewers with her gallant
chicness and her frank, sometimes scandalous revelations about famous people, most of whom were dead and unable to refute her stories. She recounted passages from the books as if they had actually happened; she implied that her interviewer would be absolutely floored if he or she knew the real identities of her characters, and she wished she could reveal them but loyalty to her friends forbade her. Watching Jackie on these shows, I was amazed by how convincing she was. If I hadn’t had absolute proof to the contrary, I would have found it impossible to believe that she wasn’t telling the truth. People she’d known for years, friends of hers who had spent a great deal of time with her during the era of her supposed “cases” for Roper and Blythe, actually began to remember incidents from the books, and to corroborate them. “In 1978 or ’79,” one of her less famous socialite friends told an interviewer, “Jackie was always asking questions about the strangest things. I was flattered, frankly. I thought to myself, now what does someone like Genevieve del Castellano care about my trip to Cannes? Of course, everyone knows now that she was working undercover, but back then I never suspected a thing! That’s how good she was!”

As long as interviewers and gossip columnists reflected her notion of the way she wished to be perceived, she was secure and serene, and everything was peachy in Jackieland. But she had no recourse against negative press. When a writer for a small weekly called her “a high-school dropout” and “a smalltime Jersey racketeer’s daughter who snagged a rich husband,” both of which were technically true, she exploded into frantic and hapless self-defense. “That damn little two-bit nobody! How can he say this? I’d like to shred him to bits like a cabbage! High-school dropout!” She ran temporarily out of breath, but after one sharp inhale she was back in business. “He can call St. Agatha’s! My God, these rumormongering
trashy writers, don’t they have anything better to do than inventing these lies and rumors about innocent people?”

Then she deflated like a wineskin. She mooched around in her bathrobe, devouring a bag of jelly beans in the mistaken perception that her despondency was caused by low blood sugar. “I’m usually so energetic,” she called to me from the foyer, where she stood looking into the mirror to reassure herself that physically, at least, she still existed. “I accomplish more than any other woman I know.” I had to rest my hands on the computer keyboard and tilt my head to hear her, my facial muscles frozen in a bright, fascinated mask in case she stuck her head in to check my reaction. “I’m not like that Dorcas Robles, or that Lucille Patterson, spending all my waking hours at the hairdresser’s or having lunch. That’s why men like me, because I’ve got spice, I talk about things that interest them. Dorcas won’t even travel without that little dog of hers.
He’s
her boyfriend, if you ask me.” Dorcas Robles was a pouty and diminutive Spaniard who spent half her time whispering in hoarse distress into the telephone and the other half hand-feeding her lapdog Pepe, a yappy scrap of fur she’d had dyed to match her platinum pageboy. I had no idea why Jackie considered her any kind of rival, but right now everyone seemed to be her rival, except maybe for me. When I heard the click of jelly beans hitting her teeth in the doorway behind me, I twisted around, smiling encouragingly at her. My neck immediately began to ache. “I’ve had such a fascinating life! Not many people have lived the way I have. I’ve traveled everywhere, I knew everyone, all the most famous stars, the top politicians. That’s why all those people buy my books, because they’re dying to know what it’s like to live the way I do.”

She trailed off to her bedroom to admire certain photographs of herself posing with her titled and famous friends; her voice faded away. I sat motionless, worried, feeling as if this
were all somehow my fault. When the phone rang a few minutes later, she whipped to the doorway of the dining room and fastened her desperate, yearning gaze on my face. “It’s Lisa Morris from
People
magazine,” I said, almost babbling with relief.

Her hand shot out as if for a syringe of heroin. She scratched the back of my hand as she grabbed the receiver. “This is Genevieve del Castellano,” she said grandly. As Lisa Morris’s voice poured into her ear, she swelled and straightened, a drooping plant sucking up water. “Yes,” she said, self-assured again, “I would be quite interested. Let me check with my secretary.” She covered the receiver and hissed, “March seventh at four?” I looked at her calendar and nodded. “I think that’ll be just fine, dear,” she said into the phone. “Now, will you be coming with a photographer, or will that be scheduled for another day?” By the time she hung up, she was flushed and rosy from her nourishing suck at the nipple of public attention.

Her fan mail trickled in at the rate of one or two letters a week. I would have supposed these fans to consist primarily of Republican housewives in Virginia and Southern California, but letters came from foreign dignitaries, retired engineers, college women seeking advice about their own dreams of being female private eyes, gay men who adored her and called her the bravest, most fabulous woman in the world. They took her books seriously, and believed every word; I established affectionate epistolary friendships with some of them. Those who said they were looking forward to seeing Jackie on her book tour made me nervous: I hoped they wouldn’t be too disappointed when they realized that Jackie in the flesh knew and cared considerably less about them than did the Genevieve of all those effusive, encouraging letters. I assuaged my fears with the fact that I wouldn’t be there to see it happen. I would be where I always was, in Jackie’s dining room.

And for the first couple of years, that was just fine with me. I felt safely and vicariously connected to the world without having to confront it myself. It wasn’t until
The High-Heeled Gumshoe
was reviewed with arch, coy, not-quite-uncomplimentary condescension by the Sunday
Times Book Review
(appropriately enough, by a debutante-turned
-Glamour
staff writer, the daughter of an old friend of Jackie’s) that I began to chafe at my invisibility. A passage from the book, reproduced in a sidebar accompanying the review, looked surprisingly literary out of context, and I was hit between the eyes by the realization that people were really going to think Jackie had written it. As long as this had been an abstract eventuality, it hadn’t mattered. Now I felt intimations of a hunger to be recognized for myself.

One day not long after “my” book came out, I looked down at the book on the lap of the woman next to me on the subway and beheld with a small shock of pleasure my own words, in print. I read along with her. The two of us were so engrossed that we almost didn’t notice when we reached our common destination. In the final instant before the doors slid closed, we came to our senses, hastily rose as one and collided in the doorway of the train. “Oops,” she murmured distractedly. “Sorry,” I said, peering closely at her: this, then, was The Reader. She wore large purple-tinted glasses and a burnt-orange wool suit, and her hair had been fashionably frizzed. She looked respectable and not unintelligent.

As we exited side by side through the turnstiles, I couldn’t resist. “Excuse me,” I said.

She glanced at me, just a dart, to make sure I wasn’t asking for money.

I smiled to show that I was harmless. “I noticed the book you were reading.”

“What, this?” She showed me the cover. “It’s trash, but it’s great for the train.”

“I’m glad you like it,” I said eagerly. “I wrote it.”

She stopped walking and looked at me, then turned the book over to show me the photograph of the superbly coifed Jackie, who looked exactly the way the author of such a book should look. “That’s you?”

She had me there. I shook my head.

“I didn’t think so,” she said, perplexed, and started up the stairs to the street.

I climbed the stairs behind her, chuckling grimly to myself. I knew who I was, even if no one else did.

Those books were mine: the one I’d written and the one I was almost finished writing. They were mine, more than anything else had ever been, those preposterous books, riddled with clichés and inconsistencies. I had written them and they belonged to me, and they were all I had.

I fled out of the park, toward home. On the island in the middle of Broadway was the person who had shouted and gestured at me earlier. He had taken off his blanket, revealing himself to be a black man with a grizzled white head and a broad, wrinkled, plum-colored face. He was doing a sort of dance, flapping his arms and rushing at the pigeons who fluttered around him; they lifted off and alit nervously a few feet away every time he charged at them, but they stayed near him, waiting for his next move as if the whole thing had been choreographed. Then I realized that his hands were full of crumbs, and that they were enduring his fearsome dance because he was feeding them.

I came in to find my answering machine telegraphing a line of red glowing dots. While the tape rewound, I lifted the blankets from the bed into the air as if I were making smoke signals and let them settle.