Mommies Behaving Badly. Roz Bailey
“Popularity with editors is nice, but it doesn’t guarantee a bestseller,” he argued, “and this chocolate story doesn’t fit into our publishing program. It doesn’t speak to our market.”
“Okay,” Morgan said. “If you’re sure you don’t want to publish it, we’ll take it elsewhere. Ellen Engle at Mission Books is in love with it, and Simon and—”
“It’s not that simple,” Oscar interrupted. “We don’t want Chocolate to be published. Not by us or any of our competitors.”
One of Morgan’s brows arched as she murmured a restrained: “Remember the Stones’s song, Oscar? You can’t always get what you want.”
“I never liked that song.” He leaned over the table for emphasis. “And I know how to get what I want, Ms. O’Malley. When people don’t cooperate, I fire them.”
Morgan shot me a cross look. “Aren’t we lucky that we don’t work for Oscar?”
I shrugged, in a near panic, wanting to remind her that, while I might not be on the full-time payroll, Hearts and Flowers was my bread and butter. They paid for my life: everything from lattes to my son’s Pull-Ups, to my daughters’ juice boxes to my car and its ridiculously high-priced New York insurance. I needed them.
Morgan leaned over the table, as if ready to share a secret with Oscar. “This is Ruby Dixon we’re talking about.” Morgan pressed her finger onto the white linen tablecloth, jabbing the point home. “A strong track record, a broad fan base. She’s never missed a deadline and we know she outsells every other romance published in her month.”
“We’re delighted to have Ruby Dixon on our list. We’d like to keep her. Writing short romances.”
“She needs to grow,” Morgan said. “Show us that you want to grow with her.”
“Financial growth is a very good thing,” Oscar said, “but Hearts and Flowers has a very specific market.”
Morgan was shaking her head, frowning in dismay. “I think you’re making a mistake here—”
“We know our readers; we can’t take the chance of putting them off with this chocolate book and—”
“So Chocolate is off the table,” Morgan said.
My eyes did laterals as they kept interrupting each other. This was juicier than I’d expected. Hard to believe it was all over me.
“Let’s focus on the other deal,” Morgan said.
“You seem to be missing the point,” Oscar said, drawing himself back so that he could fold his hands in a little pile on the table. His fingers were small and pudgy. Putty fingers. “Unless you take Chocolate off the market, there is no other deal.”
“What?” Morgan’s voice snapped. “That’s insanity!”
“It’s done all the time,” he said. “If you want to continue publishing with Hearts and Flowers, you must give us an exclusive on the Ruby Dixon name.”
“You can’t own her,” Morgan said. “It’s her real name!”
“It is,” I added, as if this needed verification.
“We don’t buy the person,” Oscar said in a deadly low rasp reminiscent of a serial killer in a film, “only the name.”
“Not this name,” Morgan hissed. I saw my short, sweet writing career flash before my eyes as she tossed her napkin onto the table and stood up. “This writer is not for sale.”
Oscar’s body was stiff as a statue except for his eyes, brown shiny marbles that followed Morgan as she rose from the table. The man was cold, like one of those frosty December mornings that stings the lungs.
“Ruby…” She turned to me, her dark eyes earnest. “I can’t in good conscience advise you to accept this deal with the Devil, not just for the big bucks.”
In a flash I was beside her with less aplomb, my napkin tumbling onto the top of my sensible black pumps, my favorite black pants gaping open to reveal a silver dollar of pasty thigh. Inspired by Morgan’s line “This writer is not for sale!” I wanted to toss off my own powerful protest, something with the passion of “Make Love, Not War” or “We Shall Overcome!” Unfortunately, the best I could do was, “I’m outta here.” I picked up the fallen napkin, snatched the torn seams of my pants together and started to exit behind Morgan.
Halfway across the dining room, I paused and turned back, noticing Oscar’s stone figure slumped in the chair. “But thank you for the lunch,” I called cheerfully.
My career might be over, my livelihood dashed, but really, is that any excuse for bad manners?
2
Cowboy Hats and Hemorrhoids
“I can’t believe you thanked him for lunch,” Morgan said later as we recapped the contract debacle over the phone. I was plugged into the headset of my cell, edging the car home from the Long Island Railroad station amid the usual bumper-to-bumper flow of Queens traffic. Our little attached row house was less than a mile from the station, and yet it took fifteen minutes to get home amid the traffic, lights, pedestrians, and four-way stops that most New Yorkers took as a competitive signal to bear down and floor it.
Morgan was still at the office, thinking out strategies over a cup of orange-twist tea. “Oscar Stollen is a raving lunatic control freak, trying to make you his indentured servant,” she said, “and you thank him for a slab of suckling pig?”
“People just aren’t polite anymore,” I said. “Manners may be the only thing that separates us from other species in the animal kingdom. Thanking him was a show of my behavior, not his.” I had to remember that Morgan’s kids were older, in college. TJ was off at Penn majoring in biology, and Clare was studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan while working part time for a furniture designer and hating it—“but at least she’s working!” Morgan always said. Morgan didn’t need quiet mommy time anymore, hence our luncheon with Oscar was not a break but business as usual for her.
“Well, honey, I’m just sorry I didn’t see that one coming. I’ve always known Hearts and Flowers to ask for exclusives, but I never heard of them demanding them. Creating their own socialist publishing empire. It’s like those think tank deals where you sign away all your creative thoughts. Remember Penelope Glitzman?”
“Penelope…” She was a former romance editor who’d left the company to work for a book packager, a sort of book-idea think tank where a prerequisite to employment was to sign your brain away. The packager paid Penelope top dollar, but also demanded that she sign over her ideas in an agreement stating that all concepts generated while employed there were the creative property of the packager. The book packager banged out half a dozen bestselling series while Penelope was in its employ. When one spun off to a TV series, Penelope moved out to Los Angeles to become its executive producer. Until the book packager filed a law suit, claiming to own Penelope’s work on the series. Her ideas were their “creative properties.” Pretty appalling. My situation was a little different, of course, but close enough to scrape the paint off my toes.
“You’re right about this,” I told Morgan. “No question about it. I can’t sign my creative life away to Hearts and Flowers, no matter how big the advance is. I just got a little mesmerized back there by visions of dollar signs dancing in my head.”
“Those dollar signs are a very real concern for all of us.” Along with her share of woes, Morgan had a hefty mortgage on her Manhattan condo and some whopping credit card bills to pay down. Nine or ten years ago her husband, Jacob, a successful litigator, had flown to Chicago to ride with his biker buddies to a rally in South Dakota, never to return. Apparently Jacob, now Jocko to his biker buddies, was trying his hand at rustling cattle and taming a wild little redhead in Wyoming. When I met Morgan at a romance writers’ convention, talk of Jocko the Urban Cowboy was all the rage.