If iPhones and the internet had existed when Ronnie made her debut, the tools that let people track one another’s every move; that made everyone immediately reachable, eternally findable had been around, she wouldn’t have been able to compartmentalize her two lives so effectively. In New York City, in her hats and her vests and her tall suede boots, she was an author, and she felt like an author, whether she was posing for publicity shots, or giving interviews to reporters, or doing readings and signings at the 92nd Street Y. In Boston, in her paisley skirts and peasant blouses （which eventually gave way to kilts and cardigans and penny loafers）， she was a professor and, eventually, a wife. In Boston, with Lee, she was Ronnie. In New York, with Alice and Emily, both of whom were single, she was Veronica. Maybe that was what had gotten her in trouble, she would think: that sense of being split, of inhabiting two identities, of being two different women in two different worlds, more or less at the same time.
On a day in March 1982, two months before her second book, After Dawn, was scheduled to come out, Ronnie took the train to New York City. The weather had been miserable the previous week, cold and gray with intermittent sleet, but that morning she’d smelled spring in the air. Just as the train pulled into Penn Station, the sun broke through the clouds. She emerged onto Thirty-Fourth Street and lifted her face to a sky that was brilliantly blue.
She walked uptown to her publisher’s office and found Emily, her editor, hanging up the phone, bouncing on her toes, practically vibrating with delight.
“Guess who wants to buy the film rights to Summer Sisters… and just guess how much they want to pay?” She broke into a dance, shimmying her shoulders, like the news was too big for her to hold still. “Guess!”
Ronnie shook her head, speechless. Emily leaned close and whispered a name and number in her ear. Ronnie drew back, shaking her head in disbelief.
“No way.”
“Yes, yes! Congratulations, Veronica!”
The publisher, a silver-haired man who seemed, at sixty-five, impossibly old to Ronnie, had ordered champagne, and that night they’d gone to Elaine’s to celebrate. Alice promised she could get them in. “Maybe we’ll see Woody Allen!” In her high-heeled boots and her newest jacket and fedora, with two glasses of champagne already inside her, Ronnie would have said yes to anything.
Woody Allen hadn’t been there. But Elliott Gould had, and so had Bernadette Peters. Ronnie thought she glimpsed Liza Minnelli in the ladies’ room, and she got a look at Elaine herself, holding court from her table in the corner. The first sip of her martini was sliding down Ronnie’s throat like nectar from a glass so icy that her fingers felt chilled when she gripped it, when someone tapped her shoulder. “Veronica Levy?”
She turned. The man was movie-star handsome, with a strong jaw and a head full of thick dark-blond hair. Ronnie felt herself staring. Then Emily was on her feet, grabbing the man’s hands and kissing his cheek, and Alice was saying, “Veronica, you remember Gregory Bates?”
Gregory Bates was Emily’s colleague, another editor at the publishing house. Veronica had met him in passing when visiting the office and been struck by his good looks.
“Come have a drink with us!” Emily said. A moment later, Gregory was installed at their tiny high-top table. More champagne in a bucket of ice arrived at the table, and they were toasting Ronnie’s film sale, her brilliant future, her brilliant book.
By the time the second bottle arrived, the four of them were throwing out casting suggestions for Summer Sisters, with Gregory insisting, absolutely straight-faced, that Jane Fonda should be cast as both Jenny and Jill. “She should at least play one of the sisters, but both would be even better,” and when Ronnie asked how they’d pull that off, Gregory had said, very solemnly, “Wigs,” and she’d laughed so hard that tears had been streaming down her cheeks.
By last call, two bottles of champagne were upside down in their ice buckets, and empty glasses covered their table. Alice had announced, with a dignified hiccup, that she needed to get home to her cat, and Emily had a breakfast meeting the next morning, and then it was just Veronica and Gregory.
“Can I call you a cab?” he asked. Veronica still felt wide-awake, tingling with booze and excitement, enthralled with all the good news. She knew she’d never sleep. At least, not anytime soon.
“I think I’ll walk,” she said, and Gregory had offered to escort her, even though he lived, she’d learned, on the Upper West Side.