I found it hard not to hate Deenie, for the first hour I was in her house. She seemed to take it all for granted. She opened the door wearing a pinafore dress with a black roll neck underneath, and her headband was the same colour as the dress. I knew that she dressed like something between a primary school teacher and Daphne from Scooby-Doo, but the fact that she looked like this in her own home was too much. She led me through to the kitchen, shoeless in black tights. I felt enormous next to her.
“How are you?” she asked, as if I had just popped by socially. “Are you still with that lovely-looking boy I saw you with that day?”
I don’t know whether she really thought Carey was lovely looking. Not everybody did. James used to say a lot of sly “eye of the beholder” stuff whenever his physical appearance came up. What I did see, however, was that she wanted to check if I had a boyfriend.
“Carey,” I confirmed. “Yeah, he’s back on the scene.”
“Was he off the scene?”
“Oh, yeah.” I shrugged. “We fell out of contact for a bit, there.”
“God, I wish I was as lucky with men as you when I was your age. I was so dweeby, like a little worm. Didn’t have a proper boyfriend till I was twenty-three.”
This was startling from a number of angles. If Deenie was going to be my boss, then this was a lot of personal information from her. Also, lucky? With men?
I must have looked confused, so she clarified. “I was just thinking of that night we saw you at Goldfrapp, with that other nice-looking guy.”
It made sense for Deenie to have zero gaydar, considering who she was married to.
“James,” I said.
“He wasn’t serious, then?”
“Just a friend,” I replied, and made it sound like I was being discreet.
She poured the coffee. “Sorry,” she said, shaking her head like she was reprimanding herself. “It’s just, all my friends are married or pregnant or whatever. Whenever anyone has, like, an exciting romantic life, I’m all over it.”
Exciting romantic life! When I couldn’t even make Carey shag me in a bread shop.
We drank our coffee and eventually got around to talking about work. I learned that Deenie’s publisher let her work two days at home, because it was hard to get editing done in a busy office, and she often worked well into the evening. There was a certain number of glamorous lunches involved in her job, but not nearly as many as you’d think. She named some of the books she had worked on, and I was surprised to hear that I knew almost all of them. I hadn’t read them, but they had climbed up the bestsellers chart at the shop, and I had looked at their blurbs.
“Do you get a percentage?” I asked. “For all the books you worked on that did really well?”
She laughed drily. “No,” she said. “I wish.”
Deenie added, with a note of conspiracy, that having books that had sold very well could have other benefits, allowed you to pull rank on certain things. Her eyes flitted to the nearest bookshelf, where five copies of The Kensington Diet sat.
“Ah,” I said, “I see.”
We both laughed then, a laugh that was all fondness, because we both loved Dr. Byrne and supported his right to write useless books.
She gave me my duties. She wanted me to read through her slush pile of manuscripts, mostly sent by unpublished authors, and keep a spreadsheet of my notes on them. She showed me the Excel spreadsheet she had been keeping since she started working in books. It was hundreds of rows long, alphabetical, and colour-coded. Green meant excellent. She would try to acquire all the green books. Yellow meant “shows promise.” Red meant absolutely not. The spreadsheet was mostly yellow. Within yellow, there was more coding: books that weren’t quite right, authors who weren’t quite ready, subjects that were slightly out of fashion. Each entry had one sentence, summing up the book and its writer. “Civil war epic, goes on a bit, he knows a lot about the skerries.”
Some of the yellow entries were from years ago, and a few of those books had gone on to be bestsellers. One author, who had won a national short story award that year, was summed up as “strange little man: loves dogs, hates women.”
As she explained all this, I could feel myself becoming jittery with excitement. It was the first time I had ever seen behind the curtain of the world I had been annotating diligently for years. I imagined my favourite authors showing up on one of Deenie’s spreadsheets, or on identical spreadsheets across the world. Donna Tartt, Toni Morrison, Richard Yates, Barbara Trapido, Haruki Murakami, Edna O’Brien. Intellectually, I knew they all must have been rejected by publishers, and had read interviews to that effect. But the notion that they could have once lived in the mediocrity of the yellow list was so refreshing to me.
I would have a certain number of manuscripts to read a week. I could read some at home, and some at her house. I was also in charge of her public work inbox, of sending one of her templated rejection emails to all the hopeful writers who wanted so desperately to be published but apparently not so desperately that they were willing to learn Deenie’s name. “Dear Sirs” was the most common way she was addressed.
On the whole, we had a good time together. I remember thinking, several mornings while we quietly read and sipped coffee from burnt clay mugs, If this is work, then sign me up.
For the first few days of my internship, James was waiting at the door when I came home, desperate for intel on the inner workings of his lover’s home life. I didn’t know what to tell him.
“She’s really lovely,” I said, with a note of apology.
“Does she suspect anything?”
“Well,” I replied slowly, “she thinks you’re straight.”
“Oh.”
He looked stunned, like someone who had made a monkey’s paw wish that had come true, but in all the wrong ways.
I described their house to him, the bright rugs and the seats in the window, and he hated it. “Tell me how their marriage is,” he said desperately. “Do they seem happy?”
“He’s never there!”
And he wasn’t. College was out and the summer literary festivals had hit, so Dr. Byrne was still doing his best to shill copies of The Kensington Diet. He had found some momentum with his new book, too, so his mid-afternoon visits were beginning to dwindle.
James was trying to convince Dr. Byrne to let him tag along to one of the literary festivals. To say he was an assistant. Dr. Byrne was firm: absolutely not. The people at the festivals were Deenie’s people. The risk was too great.
I feel a twinge of guilt, looking back on those months now. I was either at work, under a stack of manuscripts, or with Carey. I had sworn off the synthetic weed, but James was still smoking it in bed, miserable in front of Frasier.
“I’m your best friend,” he snapped once, when he saw me circling and underlining a manuscript, the way Deenie had taught me to. I had graduated from her slush pile and was now doing some light editing. “You’re supposed to love me the most.”
The baldness of this. It was something neither of us would say to a boyfriend, terrified as we were of admitting raw and open need. But we could say it to each other.
“I do love you the most,” I said, throwing my arms around him. “But I need to compartmentalise. I can’t be a spy for you. She’s my friend, sort of.”