Adulation (29 page)

He’d placed the statue next to him while he dozed off, and gripped it again, feeling its cool sheen against his clammy hand. Charlene, no stranger to awards herself with two Emmys and two Oscar nominations, succumbed to the statue’s hypnotic powers momentarily, studying its contours and admiring its luster, prying Danny’s fingers  loose so she could hold it herself. It seemed to have rendered her breathless for a moment.

“You’ve done it all, Danny,” she said to the statue, her voice sounding soft and distant. “I mean,

what comes after
 
this
?”

“Welcome to my nightmare.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Sunny Smith

I
N JUST THREE
 
weeks since the Oscars, despite my trying to keep a low profile where my books wereconcerned (I now had two on the market and was getting ready to upload the third in the series), all kindsof people I’d known (and I use that word generously) in high school or college were coming out of thewoodwork to tell me that they’d found my books and read them and they were really good and was it truethat Danny Masters meant me when he said “Sunny” at the end of his Oscar acceptance speech and howdid I know him and if I did was it possible for me to get their script in his hands and, hey, that jackassthing was awesome and, whoa, what was I still doing working at the bookstore when I was now a famousauthor and was I going to adapt my own books into movies and could they be in them and how hard was itto publish a book and if I needed somewhere to invest my royalties they knew a guy... Many of them foundme either via Facebook or the Twitter account I had set up.

My parents were thrilled with my success; lately they’d been calling every week and asking mehow the books were doing.

“You know you can check yourself,” I said. “The rankings are right there on Amazon.”

“It’s more fun hearing it directly from you,” said my father. He and my mom recommended mybooks to everyone they ran into—grocery store cashiers, librarians, the mail carrier, their mechanic, eventhe folks in the Quaker group they’d recently joined. Yes, my parents were becoming Quakers. It seemedto suit them, actually.

“Does this mean we need to buy one of those i-reader-doohickey-thingies?” asked Mom.

“You can download the software and read it on your computer,” I said.

“I’d prefer to have a good old-fashioned paper book, if it’s OK with you,” said Dad. “If we’regoing to kill trees, let’s use ’em for books.”

Truth be told, I enjoyed their attention. They ended every phone call with “I’m so proud of you,”and although they’d always been supportive of me no matter what I did, they seemed to have finallyrealized my writing was more than a hobby. And yet, I realized that by letting my novels sit in a drawerfor all those years, and not having written anything new since splitting with Teddy, it was no wonder thatthey’d thought it was just a phase. Besides, when I was married, had I not spouted on about becoming amom? With so many contradictions, it was hard to take any commitment I made seriously.

The idea that strangers were reading—and judging—my writing terrified me. Fifteen reviews hadalready been posted, so far all of them favorable, and none written by my friends. And yet I also couldn’thelp but be excited. It had pained me to see those manuscripts stuck in a drawer  all these years, thecollateral damage of my self-imposed obscurity. I had forgotten the exhilarating feeling of seeing my namein print, despite my wishing for a different name. I had given birth to every one of my books. I hated thebanality of the metaphor—authorhood was no match for motherhood—but it did bear a slightresemblance.

Meanwhile Josh had joined Masterminds and relayed the conversations taking place there; theregulars that I had once been friendly with had insisted that Sunnyside, the woman from the jackass

incident, and now mysterio-Sunny from the Oscar speech were one and the same. And all were speculating as to my whereabouts while hoping for another appearance from Danny Masters. I was dumbfounded.

“There can’t be a connection, can there?” I asked Georgie when he came into the stockroom to check on an order and I filled him in on my latest sales report. He’d been coming in a lot less frequently since I’d started dating Josh. “I mean, how can these buyers possibly know the Sunny that Danny Masters blurted is Sunnyside, who is Sunrise M. Smith? I would never put those two together. How do they even know
 
sunny
 
was a name and not some random comment that got cut off? How many even heard him say

it?”

“It’s that old Wella Balsam shampoo commercial, remember?” he said. “You tell two friends, and

they tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on.”

“Yeah, but who told whom?”

“Who cares? Just take the money and run.”

Before the Oscars I was averaging sales of ten units per day of both books. The day after, I sold fortycombined. By the end of the month, I had climbed up to fifty per day, and my Amazon rankings increasedby the thousands.

“Now that they’re selling, I can raise the price to two-ninety-nine once I get the rest of the seriesuploaded, which will take me from a thirty-five to a seventy percent royalty on Kindle,” I said to Josh onenight, my enthusiasm causing me to speak quickly. “Add that to the fifty percent royalty I’ll make on the Trinket and whatever the Nook pays out. Sell two thousand copies of all titles combined per month and I’ll have at least four grand coming in every month.”

“Holy shit, Sun,” said Josh as he smiled with delight.

“If this keeps up, I may be able to pay off my credit cards by June.”

“Hell, Sun, if this keeps up, you can say good-bye to Whitford’s for good.”

The idea of quitting my job struck me as illogical. “Why would I want to leave Whitford’s? Andwhy would you be so supportive of my doing so?”

“Sunny, you’re a fantastic stock manager—really, one of the best we’ve got—but come on. You’re
forty years old
 
and you’ve got so much more going for you.” He emphasized my age in a way that mademe feel self-conscious and antiquated. Since when was forty too old to be working in a bookstore? Heck, I was a manager.

He must have seen the effect of his remark on me because he backpedaled: “At the very least, youcould move down to part-time and devote more time to writing. That was the plan you had with your ex-husband, wasn’t it?”

Wow. Joshua Hamilton paid attention.

I decided to brush off the remark and go with the momentum. “I think it’s time to get these babiesup on the Trinket and the Nook.”

“Agreed,” he replied. “And you really need to get your own website with its own e-mail address.”

“Why?”

“Because I googled ‘Sunrise M. Smith’ the other day and got a ridiculous number of hits. Bookblogs are reviewing your books. Kindle sites are featuring you in their trending sections. You could benews, Sun. Hell,
 
Newsday
 
or News Twelve Long Island should be interviewing you. Maybe they want toand just don’t know how to reach you.”

The very mention of News Twelve sent my deflector shields up. “I told you,” I protested, “I don’twant in on any of that.”

“Who are you, Cormac McCarthy?”

“It certainly hasn’t hurt
 
his
 
sales.”

“Is this because of what happened with your ex-husband?”

Wow. Twice in ten minutes. The first time felt validating. The second, however, made me feel like I was under a microscope. Like he was using my greatest weakness against me.

“Not everyone wants to be in the spotlight, Josh. Not everyone needs that kind of attention. I’m awriter. I’m not an entertainer or a performer.”

“There’s a difference between avoiding the spotlight and being afraid of it,” he said.

“In today’s day and age, when everything has an indefinite virtual shelf life, I think I have everyreason to be afraid of it.”

He bristled at my stubbornness. Ever since the Oscars, Josh seemed more determined than ever tohelp make my books successful, to make
 
me
 
a success. By nature he was a proactive guy (it was whatmade him so good at his job), but I was starting to wonder if I was nothing more than a project for him totroubleshoot, like a store that wasn’t making its numbers. Maybe that day he met me he’d only beenattracted to my potential, as if to say,
 
“Yeah, I could work with that. I can turn her around in no time.”
 
And perhaps that’s what Georgie had taken note of, and why he objected to it. Or was I just not used tohaving support from someone with whom I was so intimate? Had I let Joshua Hamilton in too much toosoon?

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Danny Masters

S
EVERAL WEEKS AFTER
 
the Academy Awards, after the barrage of congratulatory phone calls, e-mails,five-minute interviews (during which he said the same things:
 
Yes, I’m still floating on air
 
;
 
No, I don’treally wanna talk about the part of the speech that got cut off, it was just something I tacked on at thelast second
;
 
The next thing is to write the next thing
) finally slowed to a trickle, Danny went to Ken Congdon’s executive office at Kingsmen Studios for a meeting.

“Shit, man, when was the last time you slept?” said Ken after he gave Danny the handshake-morphed-into-a-guy-hug.

“I got six hours last night. That’s good for me,” Danny replied.

“Been a helluva ride for you, huh.”

“Indeed.” Danny took out a cigarette and put it back again. He’d been smoking twice as much sincethe Academy Awards.

“Well, congratulations. Couldn’t happen to a better guy. You deserve it.”

“Thanks,” said Danny. “So what’s up?”

“Sit down,” said Ken, pointing to one of the two upright chairs in front of his desk.

Uh-oh. Despite Ken’s friendly tone, Danny knew this couldn’t be good. He sank into the leatherupright and took out the cigarette again. “Something tells me I’m going to need this in a minute,” he said,tapping it against the pack.

“Your show was rejected, Danny.”

A storm started to whirl inside Danny’s gut. He couldn’t remember the last time his work had beenrejected.

“What happened to the sure thing?”

“The network wasn’t happy with where you were going with it. It wasn’t the writing, mind you. The writing, as always, was right on the money. But they weren’t ever sold on the story or the characters.”