Naked Once More (2 page)

After her first book had made the best-seller lists and her performance on talk shows had turned her into a semi-celebrity, several enterprising gossip columnists, scenting possible scandal in her determined reticence, had tried to trace her family. The farthest any of them got was the campus of a midwestern university where, it was rumored, Jacqueline’s son was registered. Inquiring of a fresh-faced young woman in the registrar’s office, the reporter had been told that a Mr. Kirby was indeed in residence. An introduction was offered. The journalist was then led to a room occupied by seven or eight—or possibly twelve or thirteen, he eventually lost count—smiling young men all claiming to be the son of Jacqueline Kirby. They all had different first names—names like Peregrine, Radcliffe, Percival, Agrivaine and Willoughby—and the interview promptly deteriorated into a free-for-all of claims and counterclaims, denials and insults, ending in actual hand-to-hand combat.

Further research indicated that the only Kirby registered at that particular university was a thirty-nine-year-old graduate student of obviously oriental parentage.

Chris had chuckled over the story, but when he was questioned about Jacqueline’s private life, he told the literal truth: he knew no more than anyone else. He didn’t want to know. It was part of his job to calm his clients’ frazzled nerves, build up their fragile egos, and try to talk them out of making disastrous commitments of time and money, but he did not consider himself obliged to play psychiatrist—or lawyer. For all her failings, Jacqueline had never wakened him at 3
A.M.
threatening suicide, or demanding that he make bail for her. He was content to know no more than he needed to know; and indeed, as he studied his companion, surrounded by her cloak like a peacock in molt, he found it impossible to think of her as a grandmother.

The arrival of the waiter, proffering menus, distracted Jacqueline temporarily, but after she had refused a third drink and decided on a salad, she returned to the subject—like a cat mauling a dead mouse, Chris thought gruesomely.

“It really isn’t irrelevant, Chris. The rat race is getting to me. I’m not enjoying it anymore. I did once, I admit it; I had a ball, showing off and smirking at the cameras and thinking up cute, acerbic comments.”

“Many of which you stole from Dorothy Parker.”

“You know that, and I know that, but most of the audience never heard of her—or any other writer except the current best-sellers. People don’t read, Chris. Even book people. I know, I’m exaggerating; I don’t suppose there are more than three publishers who brag about never reading novels. But…” She pressed her hands to her temples. “I need to get away from all this. I need to get out of New York and contemplate my navel, or my soul. Probably the latter, since it is aesthetically more pleasing.”

“Mmmmm.”

“Chris!”

Her raised voice made him jump. “What?”

“Something is bothering you,” Jacqueline declared. “You’ve been squirming like a guilty schoolboy, and avoiding my eyes.”

“Well…”

“Was it something I said?” She rolled her eyes and made a face, but the concern in her voice was sincere.

“No. I mean, yes. I mean…” Chris took a deep breath. “What you just said struck a nerve, though it wasn’t intended to do so. I know exactly how you feel. I want out of the rat race too. I’m getting out. Retiring.”

Jacqueline’s face went blank. She stared at him, her lips parted, for what seemed to Chris like a very long time. Then she screamed.

The sound was not very loud or elongated, but it was shrill enough to turn the heads of the diners at nearby tables. Jacqueline’s hands went to her throat. “Oh, God. Oh, God! You don’t mean it. You can’t do this to me, Chris. After all these years—after all we’ve been to one another…” She slumped forward, plumes at half-mast.

Chris cleared his throat. “Jacqueline…”

Jacqueline sat up straight. Her eyes were luminous with laughter—and something else. A little tingle of pleasure touched Chris at the sight and made him less irate with her absurd performance than he might otherwise have been. “You have Roquefort on your feathers,” he remarked, dabbing at them with his napkin.

“I do love you, Chris,” Jacqueline murmured. “Sorry about that, I couldn’t resist. You looked so guilty, I thought you were about to announce your forthcoming incarceration for fraud, or your nuptials, or something really serious. You weren’t worried, were you? You didn’t think I’d make a scene, did you?”

“Didn’t you?”

“Just a teeny-weeny itsy-bitsy one. Confess, you’d have been crushed if I had accepted your decision coolly.”

“I thought you might try to talk me out of it.”

“Shall I?”

Chris shook his head. “I’ve been remodeling that house in Maine for over a year now. It’s finished; and so am I. I want to sit on a rock and think for a few years. Do some fishing and skiing, cultivate my hobbies—”

“Carving duck decoys.” Jacqueline’s voice was studiously, suspiciously, unamused.

“It’s a skill,” Chris insisted. “An art form. Decoys are highly collectible—”

“I believe you, sweetie. I know you’ll carve superb ducks.” The glint of mockery faded from her eyes and she said gently, “I’ll miss you terribly, Chris. I doubt I will ever find another agent with your combination of intelligence, humor, and integrity. I would try to talk you out of it if I didn’t think so highly of you. Feeling as I do, all I can say is I’m terribly happy for you.” She shook her head. “Good Lord, I’m talking as if you had announced your nuptials. I’ll cry in a minute.”

Chris said nothing. Jacqueline peered at him. “Chris, you look like a cat that’s raided the goldfish bowl. You sly dog, you, don’t tell me there is an unknown charmer on the distant horizon?”

“She’s the town librarian.”

For some reason this struck both of them as immensely amusing. The remaining tension, and sentiment, dissolved in gales of laughter.

“You’ve got good taste,” Jacqueline remarked, carefully dabbing at her encrusted mascara. “As an ex-librarian, I can assure you there is no finer type in the land. If you don’t invite me to the wedding I’ll come anyway, and bring something wonderfully ghastly, like a Victorian chamber pot. But, Chris—all kidding aside, and bushels of mazel tov—what am I going to doooo?”

The last word was a siren-like wail. Jacqueline was back in form.

“If you’d like me to, I’ll continue to handle your first two books. There will be royalties, foreign sales, and the like, for some time to come.”

“Thanks.”

“My ten percent will be thanks enough.”

They smiled at one another in perfect understanding and amity. Chris went on, “There are few agents in New York who wouldn’t kill to have you on their list. You can pick and choose. I suggest you interview several.”

“Like I did when I picked you?”

Chris’s lips twitched as he remembered. He had never heard of Jacqueline Kirby when she first called him to announce she was looking for an agent and would like to interview him. The cool effrontery of the statement was breathtaking; unpublished authors don’t interview agents, they plead with those godlike creatures to glance at their manuscripts. Chris started to explain this when the cool, ladylike voice on the other end of the wire interrupted him.

“I’ve been working with Hattie Foster. You know her, I presume.”

Chris had to admit the presumption was justified. Hattie Foster was one of the best-known and most cordially disliked people in publishing. Her fellow agents detested her as much as—it would have been impossible to detest her more than—editors and publishers. Nor was she particularly popular with the authors she had misrepresented and allegedly defrauded. Earlier that year she had figured prominently in a scandal that had rocked the publishing world and left Hattie’s not entirely pristine reputation further besmirched. A case of first-degree murder, solved by a homicide detective named O’Brien and a woman named…

Chris pursed his lips in a silent whistle. No wonder the caller’s name had been vaguely familiar.

“I know her,” he said cautiously.

“Say no more, say no more. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.”

“What?” Chris took the phone away from his ear and stared at it.

“I beg your pardon, I am wandering from my point. Hattie submitted the manuscript to Last Forlorn Hope of Love, which, or who, as the case may be, made an offer for it.” She mentioned an amount that made his eyebrows rise. “I feel, however, that the book is worthy of a wider audience. Besides, I’m not comfortable with Hattie. I’ve decided to leave her and find another agent.”

“But…” Chris tried to think of a polite way to put it. He failed. “But, Miss—er—Ms.—er—Mrs. Kirby, you can’t do that. I couldn’t take an author from a colleague. Especially Hattie Foster.”

“I can.” The statement was followed by a crisp sound, as of teeth snapping together.

And she could, too. After he had read the first fifty pages of the manuscript, which arrived via messenger that afternoon, Chris had called Hattie, and Hattie had assured him she would never dream of holding an unhappy client to an agreement and that, moreover, she wished both of them the best of luck. The sentiment was so wildly unlike Hattie that Chris could only conclude Jacqueline was blackmailing her. He asked no questions, then or later; he didn’t want to know about that, either.

“Names?” Jacqueline said, and Chris dismissed past memories for present business.

They discussed the matter—the pros and cons of various individuals, the burning question of large agencies versus independents—but it was increasingly evident to Chris that Jacqueline’s heart wasn’t in it.

“I don’t know whether I want another agent,” she muttered, studying the dessert menu.

“Oh, go ahead; have the chocolate cake.”

“I intend to. You never hear me babbling about dieting, do you?” She didn’t give him time to answer. “That’s not why I’m grumbling. I’m upset. I’m not going to try to talk you out of it, I really am not; but I hate the idea of finding someone else. I lucked out the first time; how can I hope it will happen twice?”

The compliment was too graceless to be anything but sincere. Chris beamed. “Don’t depend on luck. Use your intelligence.”

“I don’t know whether I want to write anymore.”

“Nonsense.” Chris addressed the waiter. “Two coffees, and the lady will have the Deadly Delight.”

Jacqueline leaned back and contemplated her ringed hands. “I wrote that first book as a joke, you know. Surrounded by romance writers, unable to believe the stuff I was reading had actually been published… I was astonished when it took off the way it did.”

“So was I.” This candid admission won Chris a hostile green glance from his client. He tried to make amends. “Nobody knows what makes a best-seller, Jacqueline. Yours was a good book—of its kind—and eminently readable. The second book was stronger, more professional. If you continue to improve—”

“But I don’t want to continue. I hate the damned books.” The waiter thrust Jacqueline’s cake in front of her and beat a hasty retreat. She contemplated its swirled frosting gloomily. “Oh, don’t worry, I haven’t developed delusions of grandeur; I don’t want to write lit-ra-choor, or win the Pulitzer. The literary pundits may dismiss my kind of writing as ‘popular fiction’; but it’s a lot harder to write than those stream-of-consciousness slices of life. A ‘popular’ novel is just about the only form of fiction these days that has a plot. I like plots. I like a book to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I’m proud of what I do and I have no desire to read or write anything else. But ro-mance? God save the mark! There haven’t been more than half a dozen good historical novels written since the turn of the century, if you count Dorothy Dunnett’s six-volume saga as one.
Gone With the Wind, The Time Remembered, Katherine, Amber, Naked in the Ice
.… Did you just flinch, Chris? Why did you flinch?”

“It wasn’t a flinch, it was… Nothing.”

Jacqueline was too preoccupied with her grievances to pursue the point. “Well, maybe
Naked in the Ice
isn’t a historical novel. It’s a unique blend of fantasy and fact, an adult
Lord of the Rings,
a literary
Clan of the Cave Bear,
a Pleistocene
Gone With the Wind.
But you know one thing all those books have in common, besides being best-sellers? Not a single organ of the body throbs, hardens, or pulsates! Honestly, Chris, if I have to write one more so-called love scene I’ll start giggling, and I won’t be able to stop, and three or four days later somebody will find me lying across the typewriter laughing insanely and they’ll call an ambulance, and as they carry me away… Chris, you did flinch. I saw you.”

“What do you want to write?” Chris asked.

“A joke book,” Jacqueline said promptly. “A lunatic farce; a diabolically witty, mordantly humorous work like
Black Mischief
or
Cold Comfort Farm.
Or maybe a fantasy novel.” Her eyelids, lips and feathers drooped pensively. “A nice fantasy novel. Or a mystery story. I’ve always thought I could write a lovely mystery. I have this friend.…”

Chris didn’t flinch, he cringed. One of Jacqueline’s flaws as a client was that she “had these friends,” who produced, from time to time, suggestions designed to drive an agent crazy. “You mean your agent hasn’t sent you anything from Tiffany’s? Darling, all best-selling authors deserve little trinkets from Tiffany’s.” It was thanks to one such friend that Jacqueline had developed her unholy passion for the Tavern on the Green.

He listened in tight-lipped patience while Jacqueline rambled on about her friend Catriona, who was a well-known mystery writer, and who felt absolutely confident that Jacqueline could write a smashing suspense novel if she wanted to. Finally he said mildly, “I’m sure you could. Of course you wouldn’t make much money from it.”

“Oh.” Jacqueline considered this depressing suggestion and nodded reluctantly. “Catriona says crime doesn’t pay—enough.”

“The successful crime writers, like your friend, do well. But they don’t stay on the top of the
Times
list for six months.”

Jacqueline’s emerald eyes narrowed, and Chris added hastily, “I know, there are exceptions. I am merely pointing out that for you to give up a sure thing for a questionable possibility would be foolish in the extreme.”