The Accident (18 page)

The elevator doors open, releasing them both from the special hell of
sharing an elevator with an ill-advised sexual partner, into the cramped, unattended lobby, then the bright sunshine.

“Well,” Rana says, “that sure was fun. Bye.”

Jeff can’t think of anything clever to say before the girl walks away. He stares after her for a few seconds, feeling sorry, though he’s not sure about what, exactly.

Then he too starts walking through Union Square’s riot of exuberant youth—the summer-school students from NYU and the New School and Parsons, the high-school kids cutting classes, the young underemployed adults and disheveled grad-school matriculants, the street artists and musicians and dancers and chess players, banging on their clocks and checking out the girls who walk by, and dog owners at the dog run, checking out one another. In the playground, bordered by a parking lot of imported strollers, the benches are occupied by groups of well-off-looking white parents alternating with clusters of nannies arranged by their lands of origin—South America, Tibet, the Caribbean—watching their charges with widely varying levels of vigilance. To the east, a decidedly shiftier element dominates, drug dealers and users, crazies shouting profanities, wild-eyed shirtless men tossing garbage into the grass. Skateboarders perform recklessly along the southern steps, where beat cops maintain a lax distance, not incentivized to intervene in any mere misdemeanors. They’re here for the felonies.

Jeff walks away from the park, into tree-lined Greenwich Village, trudging through the quiet streets at a steady pace, losing himself in
The Accident
. He can’t help but plot out ways to improve the manuscript, crafting the editorial letter in his mind: passages that should be shortened, or deleted entirely; redundancies to be tightened; vocabulary choices that are used repeatedly, ill-advisedly; staccato sentences that ought to be lengthened, and unwieldy run-ons that should be subdivided into more manageable lengths. There are elements of the end of the story, he expects, that might be teased earlier, maybe cutting in a different timeline to the otherwise straight chronology. In many books,
there are things that should be said at the beginning, about the end. And vice versa.

Can this book actually be true? Completely true? And should its veracity—or lack of—influence his behavior? If some of it is true, how much? And if it’s a decent amount that’s true—if any of the important events did indeed happen—then does it matter if some of it is untrue, or exaggerated? What’s the core essence of the story …?

And is Isabel serious about ten-plus million dollars? In that case—in any case—will Bradford be willing—will Brad be eager—to acquire it? Every month the rumors get more insistent, the chatter gets louder, about a sellout to one of the multinationals. It has become practically deafening, and some speculation even made it into
Publishers Weekly
. Will Brad want to gamble big money while his company is being yanked from under him? Will he want to gamble big money
because
his company is being yanked? Being bought by Wolfe Worldwide Media, of all the goddamned outfits in the world?

And will this manuscript bring an end to the recent unsuccessful interlude in Jeff’s career? The part where he has sat in ed-board meetings, not paying any attention, nor being paid any attention?

Jeff has an ex-wife on the other side of the continent. He has arthritis in both knees, and wiry gray hairs growing out of his ears, and a prostate that’s beginning to worry him. But he still manages to think of his life as something that’s just getting underway; he’s still willing to believe that he’s on the upslope.

And, of course, can he really pursue this manuscript? Or will he have to destroy it?

“A
gain and again, I find myself telling these guys”—all Dan’s clients are apparently guys—“that if anyone else can write the book,
you
shouldn’t. The first step is to ask: What’s the one book in the world you’re best qualified to write?”

Dan has been pontificating for thirty minutes now, his leg jiggling under the table; he’s one of those inveterate leg-jigglers. Jeff wants to fasten the damn thing in place with a nail gun.

“What’s the single story that can be told by only one person in the world—
you
?”

At this, Jeff looks up from his food, stares into the distance. Who’s the one most likely author in the world for
The Accident
? Every legitimate news outlet in America—as well as plenty of nonlegit ones—has poked and prodded through Charlie Wolfe’s past, interviewing ex-girlfriends and schoolmates and law-school classmates, colleagues and rivals, friends and foes. The author of
The Accident
would have called the same sources who’d been called before, by people from the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
and the
Washington Post
, from CNN and ABC and FOX, from
Salon
and the
Huffington Post
 … Sooner or later, all these sources would’ve stopped confirming credentials. So if someone called who wasn’t who he was pretending to be, these sources wouldn’t even notice, much less do anything about it.

And whoever wrote
The Accident
would’ve had access that none of the other journalists ever had. He would’ve unearthed some game-changing secrets, and for some reason would’ve held on to those secrets until now … Why?
Who?

Jeff feels his phone vibrating in his pocket. He hates answering in the middle of meals, or meetings, but because of the manuscript he’s afraid to miss calls—from Isabel, or from Brad, or from who knows. Plus he could really use a break from this blowhard.

“Oh go ahead,” Dan says, eagerly retrieving his own device from the clip on his belt. “I should check e-mail.”

Jeff excuses himself, stands, looks at the phone as he walks away from the table. “Hey,” he says. It was Isabel’s name on the small screen. “I’m at lun—”

“I need to see you.”

“Everything okay?”

“When will you be finished?”

“Um, I don’t know. Twenty minutes?”

“Then you’re going back to the office?”

“Yes. Isabel, is everything okay?”

“No … listen … I’ll meet you at your office in a half-hour. Okay?”

Jeff has a premonition of a tidal wave sneaking up behind him, a hundred-foot-high wall of water moving at fifty miles per hour.

O
n Bleecker Street Jeff notices Naomi Berger leaning against a lamppost, seemingly staring off into nothingness under a towering London planetree. They exchange quick cheek kisses, but they don’t hug; they’re business acquaintances, not friends.

“I hope you’re not waiting for Borders to come by,” Jeff says, “make you an offer for the store. You know they went out of business, right?”

She laughs, in that way that people laugh when something isn’t funny. “Having a book party tonight,” she says. “Waiting for the wine guy to return. He got chased around the corner by a traffic cop.” She waves her arm in the direction of a meter maid who’s sauntering up the shady street, window-shopping amid striped awnings and plate-glass windows and young women walking in and out of boutiques, carrying sturdy shopping bags with braided-rope handles. “They’re donating the wine, and I don’t want their delivery guy to get a parking ticket to boot. That would make me just too damned unappealing, don’t you think?”

Jeff has sympathy for Naomi, and her bookshop, one of the better respected independents in town, among a dwindling population. It must be difficult for her to remain solvent, and it’s a crucial business for the publishing community, for Jeff’s livelihood. Neighborhood bookstores aren’t merely places for customers to purchase products from retailers; they’re where readers discover authors, where kids discover reading. Discoverability is what keeps the book business alive.

“Nothing could make you unappealing, Naomi Berger. Everyone loves you.”

He thinks he sees her blush under all those freckles. She turns her eyes down to the sidewalk, but doesn’t say anything. Sometime about a decade ago, Naomi had popped up in front of Jeff at a party, late at night, all smiles and laughs and even a wink. After a flirty five-minute conversation, it was clear to Jeff that this woman was angling for intimacy. He quickly pecked her on the cheek and fled. Jeff was not in the habit of forgoing flings, but he knew that Naomi was close friends with Isabel.

“Well, nice to see you,” he says. “Have a good party.”

Jeff continues up the street, around a corner, and walks five steps past the hardware store before he remembers the washer in his pocket that needs replacing. Perhaps if he behaves as if his normal life is ongoing, then maybe it will be. He pauses on the sidewalk for a second, but decides it’s more important—much more important—to solve his career problem, to deal with this manuscript, than to solve his plumbing problem. He needs to return to the office. So he keeps walking for another few steps before he admits that now that it’s on his mind, he should just stop for a minute and buy this goddamned little thing.

He turns around, retraces his steps while fingering the corroded ring of metal in his pocket. A vaguely familiar man is approaching, but doesn’t make eye contact, and continues past on the sidewalk, staring straight ahead.

Jeff feels his stomach fall away, his body flooding with panic.

He walks into the small cluttered shop, his brain clamoring at this development, and absentmindedly spends forty cents on two washers.

He takes out his phone, dials the number. When the man answers, Jeff asks, without preamble, “Are you having me followed?”

There’s a lot of static on the line, but no voice. Jeff thinks the call may have been dropped, so he takes the device from his ear, looks at the screen, then hears “No” from the little speaker. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m pretty sure I just saw a man on the sidewalk who was in a restaurant with me this morning.”

The man doesn’t respond. “I know exactly where you are, without following you.”

Jeff looks up at the streetscape, the humongous brownstone Italianate houses, the smaller red-brick Federal ones, the awninged doormanned apartment buildings. “This guy is not one of yours?”

Even through the thick static, Jeff can hear the man sigh. “I’m afraid not.”

“What should I do?”

“Be
careful
.”

H
e stops in a café, orders a coffee, struggling to distribute the weight of the bag that’s tugging his shoulder, heavy from the manuscript plus the unwieldy bound galleys that Dan foisted upon him, advance reader’s editions of books that Jeff absolutely does not intend to read. Fuck it, he thinks. He takes the paper-bound galleys out of his bag and deposits them on the café’s counter, now communal reading material along with various sections of more than one newspaper, and a few magazines, and the ubiquitous flyers for a guitar teacher.

He negotiates his café exit at the same time as the entrance of a woman pushing a stroller, a whimpering infant strapped inside. This woman is clearly at the very end of her rope, tear tracks down her cheeks, haggard and disheveled, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt splattered with spit-up, the odor of baby powder trying to mask something funkier. Jeff holds the door for her, and she manages to project thank-you into the raise of her eyebrows. But no small act of kindness is going to make a dent in this woman’s despair, not today.

Jeff takes a sip through the sip-top, scalds his tongue.

He glances up and down the street, looking again for that familiar man, or anyone else who might be following him. He walks the width of the sidewalk, and steps to the curb, down into the gutter, to cross the street.

In the middle of the street, his bag strap slips off his shoulder, and yanks his arm downward, sloshing hot coffee out of the cup onto the back of his hand. He mutters
“Fuck”
and looks down at his hand, then up again at a growling sound coming from his left, a car tearing up the street, accelerating as it approaches.

CHAPTER 23

C
amilla starts reading while the car is pulling away from the curb. She reads through the stop-and-go traffic of the surface streets, then through the clogged Holland Tunnel, which usually seems too long—can the Hudson River really be this wide?—but today she doesn’t notice. She reads as the Town Car hums over the gritty black ironworks of the Pulaski Skyway, skimming over the New Jersey swamps, skirting the ominous idea of downtown Newark.

She is still engrossed as the car comes to a stop. The driver leans back to hand her the paperwork. “Miss?”

Camilla looks up. “Oh! So sorry.” She takes the little clipboard, signs the voucher. She tucks the manuscript into her tote and climbs out onto the well-policed curb in front of the terminal. She looks around at the passengers in ticketing: the run-of-the-mill business travelers, the college students, the tourists—a normal assortment—who are complemented by passengers bound for both Tel Aviv and Mumbai, with clusters of Hassidim and Hindus in dueling observant-religious garb, strewn around the vast hall. It looks as if the extras for two different period movies have both been called to the same soundstage, milling around, trying to figure out who’s responsible for the mix-up.

She arrives at the gate an hour before departure. Peers into her tote at
the three-ring binder filled with supporting material for McNally’s next-spring list. Camilla is always living six to twelve months in the future, in the space occupied by next Christmas, next New-Year-New-You promotion, next Mother’s Day, next summer-beach-read roundup. After a decade of living in next year, and the following year, Camilla has lost the ability to keep reliable track of when exactly it is, right now.

None of the books on next spring’s list, in that binder, will be worth anything to anyone in Hollywood. So they’re not worth anything to her. Instead she pulls out the anonymous manuscript again.

This is the part of her job she loves, the part she’ll miss: sitting in an airport or a bar or at her desk, one of the first readers of a not-yet-published manuscript, just a bunch of loose letter-size pages in her hands, which less than a year later will be typeset and printed and trimmed and bound, shipped in sturdy little manageable-size cartons around the country—around the world—and shelved in thousands of stores, in bookstores and big-box mega-marts and gift shops, on new-release tables and in window displays, on bestseller lists in dozens of languages.