Blind Submission (34 page)

“Why are you over there, Angel? What are you doing?”

I stared at him and tried with all the powers of reasoning I had left to convince myself that I was in the middle of a bad dream.
Who was this man?
He'd become a complete stranger in a matter of seconds. No, he'd been a stranger all along. I knew his words on a page—I didn't know
him
at all. But he knew me, didn't he? Knew just what I'd do, how I'd be, what I wanted, and he
had kissed my tattoo.
He knew everything. It was worse than a bad dream, I decided—it was a bad dream that belonged to
someone else.

“Angel?”

“I think you should go.” I sounded weak and slightly hysterical. In the remote corner of my brain that wasn't full of frightened confusion, it occurred to me that I'd just delivered one of those lines that only works in the movies.

“What? Why?
Che cosa c'é?
”

“I…my…” I raised my hand to my right breast, instinctively covering my tattoo. “You knew about this. How did you know?”

“Know? I don't understand. Excuse me…Angel?”

“Can you just—Can you
please leave
?” The note of hysteria in my voice had sharpened.

Damiano searched my eyes with his. His face went from light to dark with surprise, confusion, disbelief, and finally something that looked like a kind of sad acceptance. He shook his head slightly and started to speak again, but caught himself and closed his mouth, compressing it into a tight line. He got up, more gracefully than I would have expected under the circumstances, picked up his clothes from the floor, and put them on in less than a minute.

He was at the door, one hand on the handle, before he turned to me again. “Angel?” I shook my head, tightening my grip on the sheet, and looked away.
“Mi dispiace,”
he said, and then he was gone.

I waited, suspended, for what could have been seconds or minutes and listened to the sounds of voices and traffic coming from outside the window. The room had gone cold and I was shivering. It was suddenly essential that I be clothed. I didn't want to look at my own naked, traitorous body for another second. I walked over to my suitcase, dragging the sheet with me, and saw that I had an e-mail message waiting on my computer. I was going to wait—to get dressed and read it afterward—but then I saw who had sent it.

 

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Alice

My dear Ms. Robinson,

A quick question for you.

I've just realized that since Alice's steamy encounter with Vaughn early on, we haven't seen much of the two of them together in the flesh as it were. I'm wondering if I shouldn't write in a quick scene of Alice and her stud getting down and dirty in their favorite hotel (which, incidentally, is the Whitman on East 54th Street—is it a problem if I use the real name of the hotel in my manuscript? I thought it had a nice literary feel to it). What do you think? Personally, I believe it would add a little heat. Sex sells, doesn't it? And the two of them could be very, very hot together, no? But you're the boss—I'll only add it in if you think it would be a good idea.

Looking forward,
G.

 

I looked from my laptop to the small hotel pad and pen next to it. The curling script on each said
Whitman Hotel.
He knew where I was.

He was watching me.

I stood over the computer, my body paralyzed by fear but my mind alive and swarming with wild thoughts. I had been such a fool to believe, even for a second, that Damiano was involved in
Blind Submission
in any way. My paranoia was justified—the e-mail was hard evidence of that—but I'd made the terrible mistake of directing it at the wrong person. I'd kicked Damiano out, a move as cold as anything Alice could have come up with, after he'd given me so much, and now he was gone. I'd become so unbalanced by this novel that I could no longer tell what was real and what was fiction. I was Alice, all right, and I'd gone right through the looking glass. But my feelings for Damiano had to be genuine. I hadn't dreamed what had happened between us. I'd had him and lost him in the space of an hour and now I didn't know if I'd ever get him back. He was probably thinking about what a mistake
he'd
made at this very moment. And all of this was because of a book—
Malcolm's
book. Of course Malcolm would know where I was. Anna had seen fit to share all those details with Damiano, hadn't she? It would make perfect sense that she'd shared them with Malcolm as well. Like me, Damiano had just been a pawn in the game Malcolm was playing. The game he'd been playing with Anna's help. Anna, who had been sitting at my desk, going through my things, talking to someone named Malcolm on the phone…

Was it possible that Malcolm and Anna were working on this thing
together
?

I looked at the clock and subtracted three hours. It was only five o'clock on the West Coast. Everyone should still be in the office.

 

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject:

J—

Are you still in the office? Is Anna? What is she doing? Need to know.

A.

 

While I waited for Jackson's answer, I tried to figure out what I should write back to G. It was clear that I was
supposed
to respond in some way, but I didn't want to risk playing into whatever scenario G was setting up for me next. I didn't have time to get very far, though, because Jackson's response came over within minutes.

 

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re:

Hi A—

I'm here, but Anna's gone. She left work early (a couple of hours ago, maybe?)—said she was feeling sick. Why? What's up? What do you need?

J.

 

Anna hadn't missed a day of work since I'd started and had never taken off early. Feeling sick, was she? If my not-so-far-fetched suspicions were true, she really
was
sick. I didn't take the time to write back to Jackson, reaching instead for my cell phone and dialing the office number.

“Lucy Fiamma Agency, this is Jackson.”

“Jackson, hi, it's Angel. Just act like I'm calling about a submission, okay?”

“I'm sorry, she's unavailable at the moment. May I help you with something?” He was good. I felt a small twinge of relief that I hadn't dismissed his intelligence before it was too late.

“I need Damiano Vero's cell-phone number. Can you get that for me?”

“Yes, we'd be happy to look at it,” he said. “Anything else I can help you with?”

“That's it for now. Thanks, Jackson.”

“No problem,” he said.

“I'll fill you in later,” I said. “I know you're wondering…. Anyway, I'll be back in the office soon and we can talk then.”

“Well, we'll look forward to reading that,” he said, and as he spoke, an e-mail message from him containing Damiano's phone number appeared on my computer screen.

“Got it,” I said. “Thanks again.”

As soon as I'd hung up with Jackson, I dialed Damiano's number. I was desperate to find him. I needed to explain everything to him, which I should have done before I threw him out. I had to tell him how sorry I was and beg him to come back. My heart was beating so hard as I dialed the numbers that the phone vibrated in my hand. His name was on my lips, ready to fall, when an automated operator came on the line informing me that the wireless customer I was trying to reach was out of the area. Damiano was gone—just gone—and I was the one who had sent him away.

For the second time that night, my eyes spilled over with tears. But this time the tears were angry ones. I'd been feeling so sorry for myself, as if I'd been the victim of some master manipulation. But what had really happened was that I'd allowed myself to become a character in somebody else's story. The realization that I'd been facilitating it all along made me furious with myself. It might be too late to save what I could have had with Damiano, I thought, but this—I turned back to my computer—I could still control.

It was time to smoke out the author of
Blind Submission.

 

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Alice

G—

I don't want to play anymore. I'm done. I've discussed it with Lucy and she agrees. She'll be in touch to let you know how we proceed from here.

Angel

 

I sat in front of my computer and waited. I didn't know exactly who G was, it was true, but in a strange sense I
knew
G—the entity behind
Blind Submission
—quite well. I knew what kind of notes to give him and how he'd respond to them. Editorially, at least, I knew what he wanted from me—and that was for me to keep going. He liked our little arrangement very well. I sent the e-mail because I knew G would be quite disturbed by the thought that I was quitting
Blind Submission
and would quickly write back to me with some kind of concession or maybe an apology for going too far. Either way, my e-mail would get to him enough for him to reveal himself—I hoped. I was taking a risk, of course. It was possible that he'd contact Lucy himself and tell her and then I'd have to answer for it, but I didn't think he would. G needed me.

When there was no response after a half hour, I got up, put on a pair of pants and a sweater, and sat back down again. After another half hour of staring at the screen, I picked up the hotel phone and ordered a sandwich from room service. It took forty-five minutes to be delivered and twenty for me to eat it and place the tray outside my door. Still there was no response from G. I sat, and then lay down on the bed. I could smell Damiano on the sheets and I buried my face in the pillow to breathe what might be the last of him into my body. I wasn't even aware of falling asleep until the hotel phone rang at midnight, jolting me out of unconsciousness. I was still half in a dream when I picked it up.

“He-hello?”

“Angel! Are you awake?” Lucy's voice shredded the remnants of my sleep and pulled me into full, glaring alertness.

“Um, I am now.”

“Good! What's on tomorrow's schedule?”

“Well, you've got…um…” I couldn't remember the details of her day, and I started to slide off the bed to pull out my copy of her schedule when she stopped me.

“I need you to rearrange my morning, Angel. I want you to move all my appointments to the afternoon.”

“But I can't do that, Lucy. It's too late to call—”

“You'll find a way, Angel—you're a bright girl and this isn't rocket science.”

I sighed into the phone. It was senseless to argue with her. “Okay,” I said. “And is there something you'd like me to schedule instead?” Like a meeting with the mayor, I thought, or something equally impossible.

“We're taking a spa morning, Angel! Hair, nails, the works!”

“What?”

“It just occurred to me that tomorrow is your last day here in Gotham and I promised to get you made over when we arrived. So voilà, Angel, I'm true to my word.”

I was sure that, like all of Lucy's “generous” gestures, this one had a catch buried in it, but she sounded genuinely excited at the prospect of taking me with her to a salon and I was too unstrung to try to figure out why.

“Okay,” I said. “Great. I'll see you in the morning, then.”

Lucy hung up without saying good-bye, something I'd gotten used to from her. It saved time and skipped over any finality. If she hadn't said good-bye, she was still present in some form and one would have to stay at the ready, waiting for the next command. I placed the receiver back in its cradle and got out of bed. The wise thing to do now was to leave messages for the editors Lucy would now not be seeing in the morning, but instead of reaching for the schedule, I sat down once more in front of my laptop. It was still on and plugged into the phone line.

There were no new e-mails waiting for me.

FOURTEEN

MY FLIGHT ARRIVED
in San Francisco so late it went over into the next day. By the time I got out of the airport, through the city, and on the road to my apartment, it was close to five o'clock in the morning. I'd been able to sleep a little on the plane, but that only served to stave off total exhaustion. What I really needed was a long night in my own bed. I was so tired I didn't know if I could even stay awake for the long drive home. If you counted the time change, I was twenty-four hours into what had become an endless day.

It had started, as so many of my days now did, with Lucy. After obsessively checking my e-mail only to find my in-box empty and G now apparently playing possum, I collected Lucy, who actually sprang for a taxi to take us to one of New York's finest salons.

“This is where I always come when I'm in the Big Apple,” Lucy told me. “They are beyond fabulous here. I've pulled quite a few strings to get you in as well. What they do here is
better
than plastic surgery. You won't believe it. You're going to be
transformed,
Angel Robinson!”

“What am I transforming exactly, Lucy?” I softened my question with a bright smile, but I was starting to get a very uneasy feeling about Lucy's plans for our spa day.

“Well, among other things, your hair,” Lucy said.

“What's wrong with my hair?”

“The
color,
for one thing. You shouldn't
be
a redhead in the first place, Angel, that's the problem right there. And the length is an entirely different issue. Mature women don't have long hair, Angel, it's a rule.”

I had a painful flashback to Damiano and how he'd run his hands through my hair, how genuinely he'd admired it and how beautiful he'd made it seem. Lucy saw the memory reflected in my face and gave it an entirely different interpretation.

“Don't worry about how to style it, Angel. I've instructed them to cut your hair like mine. This is a brilliant cut and very versatile. And I think my color—well, maybe a shade or two darker—would be
perfect
for you.”

That was when I decided that our bizarre girlfriend-bonding moment was over.

“That's extremely generous of you, Lucy,” I said, “but I'm kind of attached to my hair the way it is.”

“You're not
serious
?” she asked. “If it's the cost you're worried about, don't—I'm buying. Now, let's go, shall we?”

“No, really, Lucy, I don't want to color my hair. I'm not going to color my hair. Or cut it.”

She gave me a long look, her irises bright green against her pale skin. “You don't want to look like me, is that it?”

“No, that's not it. I just…” I didn't know what to say. Her eyes were begging me to tell her that I would love nothing more than to look exactly like her and that I was overwhelmed with gratitude. I sensed that anything less would actually wound her. But I couldn't find it in myself to give her what she wanted. “I just don't think it would suit me,” I said.

“That's where you're wrong,” she said. “You don't know what suits you. That's why you look the way you do. I thought I could help you with that, but clearly I'm mistaken.”

“I'm sorry, Lucy, I didn't mean—”

The daggers flying from Lucy's eyes cut me off mid-sentence. She moved away from me and toward the salon. I followed her, preparing to go in with her, but she put her arm out to stop me.

“We're done for the day, Angel. You're on your own. Make sure you don't miss your flight.”

This, I realized, was Lucy's way of showing that she was hurt.

I stood bewildered on the street for a minute after that, wondering what she expected me to do. Was I supposed to follow her? Apologize? For a second, I toyed with the idea of doing just that. But a second was all it took to realize that I was actually
free
of her for the first time in days, released from servitude and able to go wherever I wanted. I hailed my own cab and went to the hotel. I was going to pick up my things and then I was headed directly to the airport. Because the only place I wanted to go was home.

DAWN WAS BREAKING
as I dragged my suitcase up the stairs to my apartment. I'd never craved the comfort of my own bed with such a single-minded intensity. It was all I could think about as I dropped my bags, locked the door behind me, and fell down onto my covers.

Something was wrong.

I sat up and looked around my apartment. All the objects around me were still, familiar, the way I had left them. But there was something different in the air. I got the distinct feeling that things had been moved and then put back in their place. There was a just-settled feeling all around me, a displacement of ions, a faint odor I couldn't place—as if someone had been there very recently. I got up and flipped on the light, although the sun was starting to filter through the window. The feeling of intrusion got stronger even as I failed to find anything that would confirm it. My unrinsed coffee mug was exactly where I had left it in the kitchen. The piles of papers and manuscripts next to my bed were in exactly the same state of disarray. The sink in my bathroom was dry. My bed was made, exactly the way I'd left it. Had I made my bed before I'd left? I searched my memory for the details of that morning and couldn't find them. I'd always been inconsistent about making my bed in the morning, leaving it rumpled half the time when I couldn't be bothered. I grabbed the covers and threw them back, expecting I didn't know what to jump out at me, but of course there was nothing there except the sheets and pillows.

I was very tired, I told myself. This was a reasonable explanation for why I was suddenly so paranoid. Sleep deprivation was the quickest way to get to hallucinating twitchiness. But I'd operated just fine on less sleep. I'd only started feeling this pervasive sense of intrusion since
Blind Submission.

It took only a minute to pull my laptop from its bag and power it up. There was one e-mail waiting for me. From G.

 

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: An excerpt

Dear Ms. R—

I find myself with an excerpt and I'm looking for a place to insert it. Ideas?

Cheers,
G.

 

Alice's bed was her sanctuary. She loved the feel of rich cotton sheets and plump down. She took her bedding very seriously. She'd read somewhere that Jackie Onassis had said that people with real wealth and taste only used pure white cotton sheets and Alice had never forgotten it. It had been difficult, in the early days, to provide herself with a bed, let alone white cotton sheets, but as soon as Alice had the means, she'd gone shopping for linens of gradually increasing thread counts.

It wasn't easy to keep such high-quality sheets looking good. They had a tendency to wrinkle at that level. But Alice was willing to sacrifice for her luxury. She ironed her sheets with steam, focused to the point of meditation, until every wrinkle vanished from their surfaces. Then she took great care to lay them on the bed and tuck them in tightly. It was then that Alice could slide herself between those tight, soft sheets of white. In this, Alice's bed resembled nothing so much as a book. The bedsheets became clean white sheets of paper that she slid herself between, insinuated herself against. And Alice became the text written upon them.

Soft white sheets for her hard dark thoughts.

 

I looked over at my bed, at my white down comforter and my white five-hundred-thread-count cotton sheets that, until this moment, I had been dying to lie down on and I started to cry.

He was gaslighting me and it was working.

Blind Submission
was starting to make me crazy just as Alice was becoming crazy in it.

It was time to tell Lucy. She'd read the manuscript and she'd seen my notes, but she had no idea of the extent of G's personal game with me. I'd kept it from her out of…what? Pride? The illusion that I could control both the book and its author? Or was it fear? Fear that Malcolm, my bitter ex-boyfriend, was the real author. It was time to come clean—to tell her about Malcolm and to fill her in on my suspicions about Anna. I didn't know exactly how I was going to do this, but I had a little time to plan it out. By the time she got back from New York, I'd be ready.

I realized that my telephone was ringing. Damiano! I'd tried his cell phone at least a dozen times over the last day and got the same out-of-area message every time. I lunged for the phone, catching it before it had a chance to go to voice mail.

“Hello?” I sounded, both breathless and anxious.

“Angel? It's Jackson.” He was whispering.

I checked the time. It was 8:15
A.M
.

“Jackson, what is it? What's the matter?”

“Are you coming in?” he asked.

“I just got in,” I said. “My plane was delayed. I was going to come in later….”

“I think you should come in now,” he said.

“What's the hurry?” I asked. “What's going on?”

“Lucy's about to have a staff meeting. I've only got a second here—Craig's in the bathroom. But Anna's in there already, Angel. She told Lucy that you're not coming in and she's—”

“But how can Lucy have a staff meeting?” I said stupidly. “She's still in New York.”

“She's not in New York, she's here.”

“But she's staying an extra day—today—in New York. She's not coming home until tonight.”
So she can take Damiano to meet his editor and whatever else she's planning to do with him,
I added to myself.

“No,” Jackson said insistently. “She's here. And Julia Swann came in with a preemptive offer for the
Elvis
book and Lucy's looking to maybe have some kind of mini auction for it. Didn't you know that?”

“
Today?
But Julia Swann said—I thought she wasn't even going to offer on it. How can Lucy have an auction
today
?”

“I don't know, Angel, but she's going to. I thought you knew. Lucy was expecting you to be here. There's a note on your desk from her.”

“What does it say?”

“Angel, I have to go. I'll tell her you're on your way.”

How was it possible that Lucy was back in the office when I'd barely landed myself? And where was Damiano?

THE OUTER OFFICE WAS EMPTY
when I walked in a half hour later. I could hear voices coming from Lucy's office and assumed the staff meeting was already in progress. I dropped my purse and manuscripts next to my chair and was overwhelmingly relieved to see my angelfish alive and swimming in its bowl. There was a yellow sticky note stuck to the side.
Welcome back,
it said in Jackson's handwriting. Lucy's note sat next to it, waiting for me on my desk. I grabbed it and scanned it as I headed toward her office.

 

Angel—