By Any Other Name
Lauren Kate
For Elizabeth Nusbaum Epstein, my BD
Those you love come at you like lightning
—Dorianne Laux, “To Kiss Frank . . .”
Chapter One
“Peony Press, this is Lanie Bloom—” I say, barely getting the phone to my ear before the voice on the other end cuts me off.
“Hallelujah-you’re-still-at-your-desk!”
It’s Meg, our senior publicist, and my closest friend at work. She’s calling from the Hotel Shivani, where, four hours from now, we’ll be hosting a blowout wedding-themed book launch for Noa Callaway—our biggest author and the writer who taught me about love when my mom couldn’t. Noa Callaway’s books changed my life.
If experience is any guide, we’re just slightly overdue for all our best-laid plans to go up in flames.
“No sign of the signed books. And no fucking pun intended. Can you see if they were sent to the office by mistake,” Meg says, a mile a minute. “I need time to arrange them into a five-tiered, heart-shaped wedding cake—”
See? Best-laid plans.
“Meg, when’s the last time you breathed?” I ask. “Do you need to push your button?”
“How can you manage to sound pervy and like my mother? Okay, okay, I’m pushing my button.”
It’s a trick her therapist taught her, an imaginary elevator button Meg can press in the hollow of her throat to carry herself down a few levels. I picture her in her all-black ensemble and stylishly giant glasses, standing in the center of the hotel ballroom downtown with assistants buzzing all around, hurrying to transform the modernist SoHo event space into a quaint destination wedding on the Amalfi Coast. I see her closing her eyes and touching the hollow of her throat. She exhales into the phone.
“I think it worked,” she says.
I smile. “I’ll track down the books. Anything else before I head over?”
“Not unless you play the harp,” Meg moans.
“What happened to the harpist?”
We’d paid a premium to hire the principal from the New York Phil to pluck Pachelbel’s Canon as guests arrive tonight.
“The flu happened,” Meg says. “She offered to send her friend who plays the oboe, but that doesn’t exactly scream Italian wedding . . . does it?”
“No oboe,” I say, my pulse quickening.
These are just problems. As with the first draft of a book, there’s always a solution. We just have to find it and make the revision. I’m good at this. It’s my job as senior editor.
“I made a playlist when I was editing the book,” I offer to Meg. “Dusty Springfield. Etta James. Billie Eilish.”
“Bless you. I’ll have someone copy it when you get down here. You’ll need your phone for your speech, right?”
A flutter of nerves spreads through my chest. Tonight is the first time I’ll be taking the stage before an audience at a Noa Callaway launch. Usually, my boss makes the speeches, but Alix is on maternity leave, so the spotlight will be on me.
“Lanie, I gotta go,” Meg says, a new burst of panic in her voice. “Apparently we’re also missing two hundred dollars’ worth of cake balloons. And now they’re saying, because it’s Valentine’s goddamned eve, they’re too busy to make any more—”
The line goes dead.
In the hours before a big Noa Callaway event, we sometimes forget that we’re not performing an emergency appendectomy.
I think this is because, well, the first rule of a Noa Callaway book launch is . . . Noa Callaway won’t be there.
Noa Callaway is our powerhouse author, with forty million books in print around the world. She is also the rare publishing phenomenon who doesn’t do publicity. You can’t google Noa’s author photo nor contact her online. You’ll never read a T magazine piece about the antique telescope in her Fifth Avenue penthouse. She declines all invitations for champagne whenever her books hit the list, though she lives 3.4 miles from our office. In fact, the only soul I know who’s actually met Noa Callaway is my boss, Noa’s editor, Alix de Rue.
And yet, you know Noa Callaway. You’ve seen her window displays in airports. Your aunt’s book club is reading her right now. Even if you’re the type who prefers The Times Literary Supplement over The New York Times Book Review, at the very least, you’ve Netflix and chilled Fifty Ways to Break Up Mom and Dad. （That’s Noa’s third novel but first movie adaptation, meme-famous for that scene with the turkey baster.） Over the past ten years, Noa Callaway’s heart-opening love stories have become so culturally pervasive that if they haven’t made you laugh, and cry, and feel less alone in a cruel and oblivious world, then you should probably check to see whether you’re dead inside.
With no public face behind Noa Callaway’s name, those of us in the business of publishing her novels feel a special pressure to go the extra mile. It makes us do crazy things. Like drop two grand on helium balloons filled with floating angel food cake.
Meg assured me that when our guests pop these balloons at the end of my toast this evening, the shower of cake and edible confetti will be worth every penny that came out of my group’s budget.
Assuming they haven’t gone missing.
“Zany Lanie.” Joe from our mailroom pops his head inside my office and gives me an air fist bump.
“Joe, my bro,” I quip back automatically, as I’ve been doing every day for the past seven years. “Hey, perfect timing—have you seen four big boxes of signed books arrive from Noa Callaway’s office?”
“Sorry.” He shakes his head. “Just this for you.”
As Joe sets down a stack of mail on my desk, I fire off a diplomatic text to Noa Callaway’s longtime assistant, and my occasional nemesis, Terry.
Terry is seventy, steel-haired, tanklike, and ever ready to shut down any request that might interfere with Noa’s process. Meg and I call her the Terrier because she barks but rarely bites. It’s always iffy whether simple things—like getting Noa to sign a couple hundred books for an event—will actually get done.
It will be a travesty if our guests go home tonight without a copy of Noa’s new book. I can feel them out there, two hundred and sixty-six Noa Callaway fans, all along the Northeast Corridor, from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. They are taking off work two hours early, confirming babysitters, venmoing dog walkers. They are dropboxing Monday’s presentation and rummaging through drawers for unripped tights while toddlers cling to their legs. In a dozen different ways, these intrepid ladies are getting shit done so they can take a night for themselves. So they can train to the Hotel Shivani and be among the first to get their hands on Two Hundred and Sixty-Six Vows.
I think it’s Noa’s best book yet.
The story takes place at a destination wedding over Valentine’s Day weekend. On a whim, the bride invites the full wedding party to stand up and renew their own vows—to a spouse, to a friend, to a pet, to the universe . . . with disastrous results. It’s moving and funny, meta and of-the-moment, the way Noa’s books always are.
The fact that the novel ends with a steamy scene on a Positano beach is just one more reason I know Noa Callaway and I are psychically connected. Family legend has it that my mother was conceived on a beach in Positano, and while that might not seem like information most kids would cherish knowing, I was raised in part by my grandmother, who defines the term sex-positive.