They’d gone to the movies—a double feature of Jaws and Rosemary’s Baby—then out for dinner at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that served Szechuan food so hot it made your eyes water. “You order,” Lee said, so Ronnie got them dumplings, glistening and fried; crispy, salty egg rolls; and a dish called four-cup chicken, studded with red peppers. Lee’s glasses fogged up after his first bite, and his forehead started to sweat, but he kept going, gamely. Ronnie was impressed.
“Suzanne tells me you’re a writer,” Lee said.
“Aspiring,” said Ronnie, and patted her lips. Lee poured more tea from the metal teapot into her cup. Casually, he said, “You know, my aunt’s a literary agent.”
Ronnie’s heart began to beat faster. She hadn’t known that. Suddenly, Lee Weinberg was looking a lot more appealing, steamy glasses or not. “Really?”
“In New York City.” He named several reputable writers his aunt represented, and asked, “What’s your book about?”
When she told him—two sisters, their marriages, and, eventually, their daughters and sons; the tension between tradition and modernity, the old world and the new, Lee listened while attempting to maneuver a dumpling onto his plate. After his third try at grasping it with his chopsticks, he’d shrugged, stabbed it through its center with one chopstick’s tip, and plunked it in the dipping sauce. “What books would you compare it to?” He smiled, showing even white teeth. “I know that’s a question my aunt always asks.”
Ronnie ran her fingers over the tablecloth, thinking that this was where things got tricky. As much as she’d wanted to be a respected, literary writer, she was starting to suspect that she was something else. “It’s commercial,” she’d said, her voice low, as if she was confessing something terrible. “Like Jacqueline Susann, or Judith Krantz.” Her grad school classmates would have laughed, or denied knowing who those writers were, even if they privately devoured those sprawling, dramatic, breathlessly plotted books, hiding the cheap paperback covers behind more respectable fare.
Ronnie had never set out to write that kind of book, even though she’d happily read dozens of them, along with horror and romance and mysteries and every other kind of fiction. She’d simply failed at writing the kind of book she thought she’d wanted to write, the kind the critics would appreciate and future English majors would someday study. Attempting to change the kind of voice in which you wrote, or the subjects that interested you, she’d finally decided, was like trying to change your blood type. Instead of trying to turn herself into the kind of writer she would never be, she had decided to write in her own voice and tell the story that kept talking to her, urging her on; the one that made her both a writer and a reader, eager to see what would happen next.
Lee Weinberg spooned fried rice onto his plate. “Would you like me to ask my aunt if she’d meet with you?”
Ronnie considered. How would she feel if Lee’s aunt rejected her? How beholden to him would she be if, somehow, it did work out, and his aunt took her on as client and actually sold her book to a publisher? How would she feel if she didn’t try at all?
“Yes,” she said. “I’d be very grateful.”
The next day, Ronnie went into her closet and gathered the short stories that had garnered the most encouraging rejection letters. She sent them to Lee’s aunt, along with a note introducing herself, and explaining that she’d also written a novel. Two weeks later, Alice Weinberg called, inviting her to the city. Ronnie tucked the notebook that held the only copy of her now-completed novel into her handbag. She took a train from Boston to New York City, and walked uptown to Alice’s office in Midtown Manhattan, across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. For the length of the trip, she’d readied herself for the rejection she was certain was coming. She only hoped the woman would be encouraging, maybe offering suggestions for how to improve her work, or other places she could submit it. Still, when she’d found herself in the middle-aged woman’s office, sitting on the other side of her desk, after she’d glimpsed her short stories sitting in a neat stack, she couldn’t keep her heart from swooping madly, or from sinking, precipitously, when Alice Weinberg leaned forward and said, “May I speak frankly?”
“Of course.” Ronnie had worn her best dress for the meeting, a peasant-style frock in a red and gold paisley print, with an empire waist and dangly ties at the collar. The dress had felt fine back in Boston, only now, compared to Alice’s chic black dress, it looked gaudy. Plus she realized that the sleeves had been made for a woman with a more delicate frame, and the elastic at their ends was biting into her forearms and leaving dents around her wrists.