The Accident (6 page)

She freezes on Broadway, aghast, about to step on a cat-size rat, lying belly-up in the middle of the sidewalk, in a pool of bright red blood; it must have just died. She feels a wave of nausea, with nothing but coffee and cigarette fumes in her stomach. She shivers, then continues walking down the street, one foot in front of the other.

T
he red awning beckons, the windows are warmly aglow, like a crackling fire in the gloomy hearth of sooty SoHo. A re-creation of a Parisian brasserie that’s so well executed that it has been copied in Paris.

Isabel examines her reflection in one of these large windows. She pulls her hair back over her ear, and straightens her collar, and smooths the wrinkles out of her tight—too?—skirt. Here in the vague blur of a plate-glass window, she looks okay. It’s only up close, well-lit, that the truth reveals itself.

She wends her way through the crowded room, past the
Times
and
Journal
s and
Le Monde
s scattered across tables, past tall men in dark suits and beautiful women in dark glasses. She arrives at the banquettes along the east wall, and reaches into her bag, and removes a thick stack of paper.

Thud
.

Jeffrey jumps in his seat, looks up from his haphazardly folded newspaper, looks down again at the stack of manuscript that just landed on the tabletop. “Sunshine,” he says, smiling, “good day.” He tries to stand up, but he’s trapped under the lip of the table, so manages only to get into an uncomfortable-looking half-crouch, limbs fluttering.

“Oh sit down.”

He sinks back onto the leather bench with a shrug.

Isabel drops her oversize tote, her manuscript bag, now a few pounds lighter, onto the floor. She glances around the restaurant, sees some familiar faces, a few casual acquaintances, and one very young, ambitious, and aggressively cleavaged colleague—rival, more accurately—named Courtney, a faithful soldier in the formidable army of fashionable females,
girls with long bouncy layered blown-out hair and meticulously applied makeup, painstakingly accessorized wardrobes that are constantly updated, not just seasonally but monthly or even weekly, operating according to the precept that you should always wear the most expensive, most current item—jacket, handbag, haircut—that you can afford, or that you can pretend to afford.

The irritating girl is meeting with a bright young editor who seems to be everywhere, all of a sudden. People who Isabel thinks of as assistants seem to have “senior” in their job titles, and books on bestseller lists. Meanwhile Isabel’s own cohort is receding from the front lines, chucking it all to go make goat cheese in Vermont, or disappearing for a few weeks during the worst of the chemo. Isabel has been startled by the vicissitudes of middle age.

The editor waves at Isabel, while Courtney raises a perfectly plucked eyebrow, and flips her hair—she’s an incessant hair-flipper—but doesn’t alter the set of her mouth, the plastered-on toothy smile, one of those Midwestern mouths whose repose is a severe frown, but it’s a repose that’s rarely allowed to show itself in public, beaten out like left-handedness in a midcentury Catholic school, so the world sees only the forced smile, the dimples, the ingratiating lie of limitless positivity.

“Who’s that?” Jeffrey asks.

“You don’t know her?”

He shakes his head.

“She’s no one.” Isabel sure as hell isn’t going to be the one to tell him. “Some junior something or other, in my office.”

“Looks familiar.”

“You mean she looks hot?”

“Well …” He tries to fight off a smile, unsuccessfully. “But that’s not why I asked.”

“Uh-huh,” she says, throwing some scorn at him. He blushes, as he always does when any remotely carnal subject arises, usually brought up by Isabel. Under oath and the penalty of death, she’d have to admit that
she does this purposefully, as a test, double-checking that Jeffrey still carries his long-lit torch for her, a perpetual crush that serves as her sexual security blanket. There have been moments in her life when she could’ve returned the sentiment, and not just those two nights, separated by a decade, when they kissed. But there had always been some barrier in the way: her marriage, or his, or other lesser but still important relationships.

Today, though, they’re both single. And today, after all she learned last night, she feels an additional tenderness toward him, a gratitude for his constancy, his honesty. Jeffrey has loved her for twenty years, and everyone knows it; there are times when that means the world to her. There are times when she loves him.

Jeffrey is one of those men who seem to get better-looking with age—the salt-and-pepper hair, the crinkly eyes, the laugh lines, all make him more appealing every year. This doesn’t really happen for women, Isabel thinks.

“I’ll be right back with your coffees.”

Isabel watches the waitress leave, her youthfully skinny little ass retreating across the room in a pencil-thin black skirt and a prim white apron. Isabel turns to Jeffrey, who has noticed the same thing, but probably with a sentiment that’s not bitterness. He has always had a wandering eye, frequently met, a good-looking charming man in an industry predominantly populated by women.

She sees him glance down at the title page to read
The Accident
, by Anonymous. Lower on the page, there’s the shadow of disappeared content where Isabel taped over the author’s e-mail address and hand-wrote her own contact information, before she handed the stack of paper to the scrawny pallid clerk at the twenty-four-hour copy-shop/postal-center, around the corner from her apartment. There’s a lot you can accomplish in New York City, at all hours, in stuffy fluorescent-lit rooms manned by disaffected overeducated underemployed young adults, rooms that almost always have security cameras mounted where they can film the entire room, as much to monitor the clerks as any potential crooks.

“So.” Jeffrey taps the stack of paper with the fountain pen he’s always carrying around. “What is it?”

She pauses before answering, “The biggest bombshell you’ll ever read.”

Jeffrey nods, waiting for more, seemingly not getting it. “You’re not going to explain?”

“You want a pitch?”

“I guess so.”

This is how it’s normally done: the agent pitches a project to the editor; the editor reads the material—a proposal, or sample chapters, or a whole manuscript; then the editor either makes an offer for publication, or declines to.

But apparently that’s not exactly how it’s going to work this time. Isabel shakes her head.

“
Any
thing?”

“I’ll let the content speak for itself. Everything else is hearsay. Bullshit.”

He grins at this.

“But I will tell you this, Darling: the project is yours, exclusively.” Isabel sports her own little smile, a purposefully disingenuous-looking one. Pretending to be an agent who’s pretending to be hard-selling. “For forty-eight hours.”

“That’s mighty generous of you. May I ask why?”

“Because I love you. Obviously.”

“And?”

“Are you suggesting that I
don’t
love you?”

“What are you looking for, Sunshine? I assume you have a number in mind. As compensation for the luxury of an exclusive submission.”

“You’re asking what it’s worth?”

“I guess I am.”

“Eight figures.”

Jeffrey can’t help but laugh, then realizes she’s serious. “What are you, out of your mind?”

She doesn’t answer.

“I’ve known this was coming, Sunshine, for a long time. But I have to admit, now that it’s here, I’m still sort of surprised.” He shakes his head. “Which is too bad. Because, you know, I’ve always hoped that one day we’d settle down, you and I. Exchange artisan-forged rings. Buy a drafty little farmhouse and some foul-smelling, disagreeable livestock.”

He’s joking, sort of. Actually, she’s pretty sure that he’s pretending to be joking.

“But not if you’re going to be insane.”

“I didn’t say that’s what I’m
asking
. But that is, I’m certain, what it’s worth.”

“Plus,” he continues, “and I’m telling you this as a friend—and you know I love you dearly—you look like crap. If you’re going to be showing up in restaurants at eight in the morning, asking for ten-plus million dollars, you’re going to have to …” He gestures in her general direction. “You’re going to have to look less like shit.
Or
, you’re going to have to be naked and performing, you know … 
sex
ual acts. Dealer’s choice. But you can’t be fully clothed
and
looking like shit
and
asking for eight figures.”

“You’re not looking so hot yourself. Drink too much last night? Again?”

“No, thank you, I believe I drank just the right amount. And you? Did you sleep at all?”

“Not much. Listen, Jeffrey,” she plants her elbows on the table, leans in. “This is serious.”

“What is?”

“This whole thing is. Not a game. Don’t spread the manuscript around your office. You can tell people what it is, obviously. But don’t distribute copies to the whole world; in fact, don’t copy it
at all
. Don’t tell anyone who absolutely doesn’t need to know.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will,” she says. She suddenly feels her energy fading, precipitously. “Listen, I have to go. And you should get started reading.” She stands, leans in to kiss his cheek. “Forty-eight hours.”

She turns away, takes a step.

“Hey,” he says.

She turns back.

“Why me?”

“Because I can trust you. Can’t I?”

“Of course.”

“But remember, keep it
quiet
.”

“Why? I don’t under—”

“Because it’s
dan
gerous, Jeffrey.”

“But
why
?”

“Because it’s about some incredibly bad things.”

“Done by?”

She stares at him. “One of the most powerful, well-known people in the world. Media mogul, is the phrase used.”

Isabel can see the color drain from Jeffrey’s face. Then he cracks a forced smile. “So Oprah does, after all, have bodies buried in the basement?”

“No,” she says, “Charlie Wolfe does.”

Isabel decides to leave him there, excited, curious, motivated. She makes her way back through the tightly packed tables, pausing to let waiters and waitresses scurry past. The smell of bacon wafts up from a table, and she inhales deeply, savoring something she forbids herself from eating more than once a month.

In the tight space between tables, a man in a gray suit brushes against her, too closely, and she feels uneasy. She thinks for a second that her pocket may have just been picked. She pats herself down with quick sweeps, and realizes that there’s nothing in her pockets to pick; in fact, her pockets are still sewn shut, just as manufactured in whatever Southeast Asian sweatshop. She looks inside her black leather handbag, and sees the wallet, the phone, the keys. There’s nothing important that could be missing.

Isabel continues on unsteady feet to the front door, to the sidewalk. She lights a cigarette, the smoke flooding her lungs, the nicotine rushing
into her bloodstream. She’d tried Wellbutrin and Xanax; she’d used patches and gum. In the end, the only thing that made her quit successfully was being pregnant.

But then, after everything, she couldn’t help but start up again. At first it was just a single cigarette per day, or two. Then it became a few, and within months she was back to pack-a-day. Over the past couple of years, she’s tried to quit a few times, but not seriously. She anticipates—she accepts—failure. Because she doesn’t want to quit, not really. She wants instead to try, and fail.

She’s the last of her friends who still smokes, which makes her feel like a polio victim in the early 1950s, having just missed the invention of the vaccine. A relic of a different era.

She takes another drag, and glances in the restaurant window, and sees Jeffrey hunkered down above the manuscript.

T
he generic-looking man in the standard-issue gray suit ambles through the dining room, drops his bag in a chair. “Excuse me,” he says, leaning over Jeff’s table, “may I borrow your pen for a moment?” The man points at the Sheaffer on the tabletop.

Jeff glances down. “Sure.”

“I’ll be right back.” The man picks up the pen, walks to another table.

Jeff returns his attention to the stack of paper in front of him, to the manuscript that he hopes—that he
knows
—is the thing he’s been waiting for. Now that it’s here, something this big, he’s worried, unconfident. He hasn’t had something this important since that Pulitzer winner a half-decade ago. He’s out of practice, afraid of how to handle it, how to present it to his boss, his colleagues. Of how to manage Isabel, and her expectations, and timetable. Afraid of other editors to whom she might submit it, afraid of a bidding war, an auction, a humiliating defeat. Afraid of other, less easily identifiable issues, prickling his psyche. Afraid of the decisions he will face. The decisions he will make.

When the man returns, leaving the pen on the table and saying “Many thanks,” Jeff barely glances up, lost in thought. He never imagined this manuscript would actually happen.

The unmemorable man retreats, replaced by the sexy waitress in her white shirt and black apron. What is it about women in servile uniforms? “More coffee?”

Jeff looks up at the waitress, past her, to the table where the man should be. But there’s no one there. Jeff looks down at his empty cup. “Yes, thank you.” This is going to be a long day. He flips to the middle of the manuscript, and starts reading.

Before long Wolfe Worldwide Media was operating two dozen news websites across Europe, and buying up stakes in newspapers and television stations. They had begun the process of launching the American cable news network, whose awareness-building publicity blitz entailed giving countless interviews with other media, reporting on itself, the media’s favorite topic.