I told him about my conversation with Dr. Byrne while under two duvets eating a chow mein that came in a bag from the freezer section of Tesco and whose water chestnuts never properly defrosted. Your teeth would slide through them, particles of crusty frost landing on your tongue.
“Oh my God,” he said. “We’ll have to make it really glam.”
“What? How?”
“Let’s make it black tie.”
“James! No! It’s a book launch, not a gala.”
“Okay, but wear a skirt. Oh! And you have to give him an introduction.”
“An introduction? To what?”
“To his reading. You stand at the lectern and say, ‘It is my great honour to introduce…，’ blah blah blah.”
“Is that normal?”
“Very normal, yes.”
I have now been to enough book launches to know that sometimes the bookseller might give a short introduction, and so in a sense, it is kind of normal. But honestly, if James told me that it was normal to take your top off while working the register, I probably would have believed him.
We spent the rest of that evening researching Deenie Harrington, who was thirty years old and a senior editor at Dr. Byrne’s publisher. There wasn’t much else to “research,” except for a few grainy photos of her at publishing events.
“Christ,” he said, zooming in on her face, “you can tell he’s into the Victorians.”
It was easy to see what he meant. Deenie had shiny black hair and the kind of eggy eyes you see in portraits from the era. She had a sharp nose, a rounded chin, and the pretty look of someone academic yet slightly in-bred.
But even then, I could tell that she was a nice person. She was always smiling in photographs, a warm and nervous smile, and she had a weakness for seventies-style silk hairbands in an array of jazzy patterns.
“She seems a daft bitch,” James said, “daft” being another English-ism he had kept from childhood.
James had no love life himself, so he was prepared to throw a lot of energy into mine. I think I would have put the crush on Dr. Byrne aside if James hadn’t been there, spurring me on. He wanted me to have a glamorous, exciting rebound after Jonathan, but he was also keen for the drama. He wanted to arrange the whole thing like a photo spread in Heat magazine.
“I’ve been thinking,” he announced, a few days before the launch. “Once the drinks bit ends and everyone leaves, we make him stay.”
“How?”
“We make him sign all the copies of his book. Stick him in the stockroom. Then you can seduce him.”
This was a seduction technique stolen from Empire Records, a film we watched a lot because it was about young people in retail.
“In the stockroom?”
“You’ve never fantasised about fucking someone in the stockroom?”
Of course I had. James knew that, too, so I’m not sure why he was asking. We were already at a stage where I had told him about my obsession with strange men in enclosed spaces.
On the morning of the launch I got an email from Deenie Harrington asking if it would be okay for her to come by the shop an hour early to drop off the wine. I told her of course.
I felt like a child whose imaginary friend was starting to bite people. The game had already gone too far. The game had always been just that. A thing to keep James and me entertained while we waited for our frostbitten January to end.
I didn’t actually want to start an affair with my professor. It was a ridiculous notion. There was also the unavoidable fact that Dr. Byrne hadn’t showed the remotest bit of sexual interest in me.
* * *
When I got to work that afternoon, Ben was behind the counter with two big boxes of The Kensington Diet.
“Rachel,” he said, “this is about, like…history?”
“History and literature,” I answered. “The history of literature.”
“Right,” he replied. “Not about diets.”
The cover had a picture of a young Queen Victoria on it, as well as a political cartoon of a starving person. It did not look compelling.
“I never said it was about diets.”
“You said it was written by a nutritionist.”
“I said it was written by my literature professor, Dr. Fred Byrne. Where did you get nutritionist from?”
“I don’t know. I thought it was, like, Dr. Gillian McKeith. Why…why are we launching this?”
“There’s a lot of buzz,” I said, and whisked myself away.
But I couldn’t stop asking myself the same question all day. How had this got so desperately out of hand? James and I hadn’t the faintest clue about book launches. We had printed off some fliers and had them all over the shop, fliers that neither stipulated nor clarified whether The Kensington Diet was an actual diet. We put “free!” on the flier, and now I was beginning to worry whether my adored professor was about to be humiliated by a crowd of people looking for advice on carbohydrates.
Deenie came at 4 p.m. She asked for me by name. Eggy eyes aside, she was very attractive in person. I was holding a stack of The Help by Kathryn Stockett.
“Hello,” she said. Her approach, in all things, was a strange mix of timid and self-assured. It was like she was confident about being shy. “I just wanted to say hello. I’m Fred’s wife.”
I’m Fred’s wife. Why wouldn’t she say that she was his publisher? She hadn’t taken his last name, so it was negligible how much stock she put in being visibly married.
“I was hoping you had some kind of kitchen where we could keep the wine chilled,” she went on. “I’ve brought a few mixers, too, as you can always bet on someone being pregnant.”
“Can you?” I asked.
“Oh, in publishing, always.” She smiled. She had very small teeth. “Also, I wanted to thank you for putting this on.”
“Ah, well.” I shrugged, plopping The Help down on the floor. “The shop had already seen a lot of buzz around the book. I just joined the dots.”
“Right,” Deenie answered. “And when did you first notice the buzz?”
She did not attempt to sound convinced. While I was able to explain the book launch to Dr. Byrne by appealing to his vanity, I would never be able to fool Deenie. As his wife, she might think he was the greatest author of his generation, but as his publisher she probably had a stack of printouts proving that he was not.
“Well, I hadn’t known about the book at all,” I said, trying to stay casual, my guts turning to sludge. “Not until Dr. Byrne came in asking about it, and I saw we had lots on pre-order. All customer ordered.”
“Customer ordered,” she repeated. “That’s so interesting.”
“Everyone loves his classes up at college. He has a lot of fans.”
Deenie Harrington scanned her eggy eyes over me and tried to puzzle out my interest in her husband. There are too many clichés about male English professors and their adoring young students for her not to have been on the alert. She had been in his class herself, albeit as an MA student.
This is what it’s like to love an unreliable man, or to have an untenable job, or an unsteady parent, or an ill child. It is the outfit you constantly dress up and down, accessorising it according to what insecurities hang well, what caveats are the most slimming. But we were close in age; but I was still his student; but we are in love; but what’s to say he won’t fall in love again.