Shuteye for the Timebroker (32 page)

But in Riley’s defense, he felt, there were other factors behind his dismal string of romantic failures than mere masculine inattention. Young single urban women today seemed incapable of sustaining any relationship that did not conform to an unreal mass-media template. Tutored by television, movies, and books to expect the perfect boyfriend to be rich, handsome, romantic, witty, faithful, and adoring, while at the same time encouraged to be demanding, capricious, oversensitive, boisterous, and egocentric, the women Riley met and fell in love with invariably undermined any potentially long-term relationship. Not by being horrible bitches by any means. No, their hearts were generally good. But they were all just confused about how to reconcile their factitious needs with the realities of the male character.

Raised on a diet of pink and aqua dreams of having perfectly glossy hair, perfectly rewarding careers, a perfect set of female friends, and perfectly attentive lovers, the women Riley found himself dating were perfectly impossible.

So a succession of live-in affairs had each eventually degenerated into a tense disentangling of formerly shared possessions and the curt exchange of forwarding addresses. At thirty-three, Riley was living alone—miserably, but at least quietly.

It was at this downhearted juncture in his failed life that Riley was struck by his purest moment of literary inspiration.

Browsing the fiction shelves at the Union Square branch of Barnes and Noble one Saturday, Riley had been overwhelmed by the number of chick-lit books, and the lofty positions they occupied on various best-seller lists. He had taken a stack of these novels to a chair and begun to read. At the end of four hours, he knew several things:

1. The psyches of these heroines matched those of Riley’s ex-girlfriends almost exactly.

2. At the core of each book was a desire to be accepted despite one’s imperfections.

3. On a practical level, nothing would screw up a working girl’s day worse than a laddering tear in her pantyhose. Unless it was a wild, cocaine-fueled orgy in the company’s coed john.

4. And Riley fervently understood that he could write one of these books.

It took Riley six white-hot months to write
The Secret Sutras of Sally Strumpet
. Into this book he poured the powerful twin streams of both his romantic and artistic frustrations. He found that by combining all the endearingly ditzy and annoyingly winsome qualities of his numerous past lovers into one figure, while minimizing their foibles (all in the interests of readerly self-identification), he had distilled a kind of Ur-heroine who possessed enormous capabilities, charms, and appetites while remaining fascinatingly flawed. Sally Strumpet practically leaped off the page, an adventurous Every woman evoking readerly empathy, summoned from deep within Riley’s anima.

Strictly to formula, the book, despite various narrative detours, was a quest for love. Sally had to work her way through a series of losers before meeting Mr. Right. Sally’s stereotypically disappointing paramours all shared the various flaws that Riley had heard himself accused of. Riley constructed Sally’s ultimate dream beau—a supernaturally handsome Tierra del Fuegan sheepherder named Esteban Badura—by blending elements of Enrique Iglesias, Antonio Banderas, and Dr. Phil.

And by rigorously excluding everything he knew about great literature, he was able to fashion a thin yet stickily enticing prose style eminently suited to best-sellerdom—the literary equivalent of flypaper.

Riley cast the book as a partially disguised fictionalization of the actual exploits of the pseudonym-concealed “Sally Strumpet.” A cleverly worded disclaimer up front insured that the reader could not think otherwise. Judiciously salted with references to barely veiled real persons, places, and events, the narrative slyly borrowed most of its plot from such classics as
Tom Jones, Fanny Hill, Candy,
and
Fear of Flying
. (The latter novel used despite Jong’s insistence that none of what she wrote qualified as chick lit.) Of course, plenty of modern touches— heartfelt cell phone and e-mail exchanges; massive shopping expeditions; numerous movie references—concealed these borrowings. Riley even managed to salve his conscience by modeling the big climax on certain scenes from
Ulysses
. Just to ice the cake, Riley layered in some borrowed mysticism from a dozen New Age philosophies, thus justifying the whimsical title.

Once the book was finished, Riley knew he had written a masterpiece—of its type. He began marketing it with a dedication he had never expended on his serious work. He concentrated solely on attracting an agent, since he wanted an intermediary between him and any publisher, to preserve the facade of female authorship. He met Harvard Morgaine at a party sponsored by
Royale
, and managed to convince the dapper, silver-haired agent to read the manuscript. Morgaine swiftly recognized the virtues of the book and agreed to rep it.

The contract Morgaine secured from Aleatory House was for a moderate seventy-five-thousand-dollar advance. The first printing was set at fifty thousand copies.

Those copies sold out in five weeks.

Now, nearly a year after publication, Riley’s book remained in every top ten list, fluctuating in sales according to various bouts of publicity but never dropping below the number-ten spot on any national list. Once the announcement of an impending movie was made, sales would doubtlessly soar even higher.

Riley now had more money than he had ever imagined having.

But none of the other joys of authorship.

Those belonged to Sally Strumpet.

Who had, despite her endearing ways, proved to be a treacherous bitch.

* * *

“OK, Riley,” said Morgaine, “I’ve winnowed down our possibles to twenty candidates, based on their physical resemblance to Sally, the way she describes herself in the book.”

“Harv, I wrote the book, remember? Not Sally. Sally doesn’t exist.”

Morgaine extracted his soggy cigar and waved it dismissively. “Of course, of course. Just a manner of speaking. You did such a convincing job bringing her to life, it’s only natural to talk about her like she really exists. Which she soon will. After a limited fashion. Anyhow, all I need you to do now is give me your opinion about which gal has that special Strumpet strut. We really need to pick someone who can convince the world that she wrote
Secret Sutras
.”

Riley leaned back wearily in one of the leather chairs in Morgaine’s office. The two men were alone. Riley’s gaze traveled the shelves lined with the books written by Morgaine’s clients. His eyes jerked away from the multiple copies of Secret Sutras in their saccharine pastel covers. Next to those abominations stood last year’s winner of the National Book Award, contributed by another client of Morgaine’s. By all rights, a Riley Small novel should have rested there. But instead Riley’s only legacy, totally anonymous, was a book that felt like it had been ghostwritten for some selfish, larger-than-life celebrity.

Knuckling his eyes, Riley said, “OK, Harv, I’ll try. Let’s hope the perfect Sally Strumpet is waiting for us out there.”

Morgaine re-socketed his cigar and slapped Riley’s knee. “Excellent! Let’s get the girls onto the catwalk. And remember—none of these babes know what they’re really interviewing for. The last thing we need is for word to get out that we’re searching for a Strumpet look-alike.”

Summoned by intercom, Morgaine’s office assistant—the perky, petite Nia Poole—conducted the first candidate in.

Sally Strumpet, the whole world knew, was fashion-model tall, “but not as skinny as one of those masochistic walking clothes hangers. I’m quite nicely padded in fact, from addiction to Cheesecake Factory goodies. In a perfect world, they’d use me as their spokeswoman!” She possessed a “tawny mane of curls that owes more to nurture than nature—nurture being defined as the tender ministrations of the fabulous Mr. Jean.” She liked to dress casually, especially for her rough-and-tumble job as videocam operator for a cable news program. But she could stun a room of men when really dolled up, like that time when she crashed the UN reception for President Putin. (It was at the UN that she had met Esteban Badura, who was present so far from his sheep to testify about global warming in his South American homeland.)

The woman who entered the office now matched many of the Sally Strumpet specs. But Riley could immediately tell she wasn’t right for the impersonation. Her face was too harsh and angular, her attitude too cruel. The planes of her cheeks looked like they had been sharpened on a grindstone. Without being invited, the woman sat down and crossed her legs as if she were Sharon Stone under interrogation. Spotting Morgaine’s dead cigar, she took that icon as permission to light up a cigarette of her own.

“This gig include medical coverage? ’Cuz I’ve got this pre-existing condition—”

Riley rolled his eyes, trying to signal Morgaine to cut this interview short. But the agent was politely persisting in questioning the woman, as if she could ever possibly stand in for Sally Strumpet.

Once the first candidate left, Morgaine turned hopefully to Riley. “So, what’d you think?”

“Harv, I would sooner dress up in drag myself than hire that woman. She would disgrace Sally’s good name. Jesus, I thought she was going to slit both our throats for the sheer thrill of it with those daggers she called fingernails!”

“All right, maybe she wasn’t perfect. But we’ve got nineteen more to go.”

The next woman radiated more of Sally’s innocent
joie de vivre
. But when she saw Morgaine’s library she uttered a brazen squawk and said, “Jesus, look at all them books! What’re you guys anyway, perfessers?”

The third candidate also failed Riley’s inspection when she opened her mouth. It was not her choice of words but rather the timbre of her voice, which sounded like Fran Drescher’s filtered through George Burns’s vocal cords.

And so the afternoon went, each succeeding woman presenting some fatal flaw of either looks, character, or intelligence. Four hours after they had started, both Morgaine and Riley were exhausted and dispirited.

“I thought number twelve had potential—” Morgaine gamely ventured.

“You mean potential to fall forward onto her face at any minute? Oh, excuse me, her face would never hit the ground! I’ve never seen such an outrageous boob job. She had to have ten pounds of silicone in each tit, for Christ’s sake!”

Morgaine smiled wistfully at the memory. “I was going to ask you if we could alter the next printing of your book to include some amplified chest dimensions for Sally, but I guess you wouldn’t—”

Riley surged abruptly out of his chair, nearly tipping it over. “Damn it, Harv, that tears it! It’s bad enough I created this monster in the first place, but I’m certainly not giving her retroactive knockers bigger than her head! Like none of the previous readers would even notice the changes, either! Look, I’m going home now. Call me when you need me again.”

“That’ll be tomorrow. Those women all came from just one agency, and I’ve got dozens of others lined up.”

“Wonderful, just wonderful. I can hardly wait.”

* * *

In the taxi back to his apartment, Riley was plagued by a kaleidoscope of shifting faces. All the mock Sally Strumpets he had interviewed rose and fell before his mind’s eye, leering and grimacing, beckoning and taunting. They had all been just close enough to the “real” Sally to freak Riley out. He felt that some malign deity had stolen his brainchild and warped her over and over again, creating twisted versions of his ideal.

When Sally had existed only in Riley’s mind, she had been utterly self-consistent and utterly authentic. Her transfer to the printed page had diluted her nature and character a trifle. But this final attempt at actually instantiating her in the flesh threatened to corrupt her entirely. Was it possible for a Platonic ideal ever to manifest itself in this degenerate realm? Yet cruel circumstances dictated that he had to continue trying.

How he would find the strength to face tomorrows interviews and any subsequent ones, he could not say.

When success had finally visited Riley, he had immediately done two things. He had quit
Royale
magazine—not in a thundering fit of denunciations; after all, he had not been mistreated, and the amiable if dead-end job had paid the rent—and he had gotten new digs. From a crappy studio in Hell’s Kitchen he had moved to a modest co-op on the Upper East Side. Doorman, concierge, snooty neighbors, expensive little pampered dogs, the whole works. Riley hadn’t enjoyed his new living quarters as thoroughly as he had thought he would. The sterility of the neighborhood depressed him. But he felt his new status as a best-selling (anonymous) author required him to live in such respectable terrain.

Up in his co-op, Riley kicked off his shoes, took a beer from his immaculate Sub-Zero fridge, and slumped down in front of his theater- sized TV. With alcohol and cable, he vowed to shut his brain off for the night.

Halfway through
Who Wants to Create a Reality Show?
, a program that followed competing teams of amateurs in Hollywood trying to pitch a reality show, there came a rather assertive knocking on Riley’s door. Muzzy from his fourth beer, he staggered to answer the summons. Halfway to the door, he wondered who could be visiting him, and how they had gotten past the building’s staff without Riley’s being informed.