22 Minutes of Unconditional Love by Daphne Merkin

Author:Daphne Merkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

XIII

ON A MONDAY MORNING in mid-June, Judith can be found in the conference room, where the weekly editorial meeting of Phoenix Books is taking place around a long oval table, with yellow legal pads, sharpened pencils, and Styrofoam cups of coffee at the ready. This is where Dolores Lawson finds her and, after knocking on the door and interrupting a heated discussion about a book proposal on a recently deceased film director, hands her a note with the words “URGENT PHONE CALL” written on it in neat capital letters. Judith nods at Dolores and gestures that she’ll come out and take the call.

“I don’t see that many copies,” Steven, the company’s bearded wunderkind marketing director, is saying. “I see thousands of books coming back if we were to begin to print anywhere near that number of copies.”

“Excuse me,” Judith says, pushing her chair back from the table. Her shoulder bag, which she has hung from the chair, falls to the floor. Katrina, who is sitting on her right, her trademark perfume wafting its green scent through the room (causing Judith to wonder irritably, not for the first time, why anyone would want to smell like a freshly cut lawn), looks up from her doodling.

“Auf Wiedersehen,” she says blackly. Katrina is fluent in several languages, having spent much of her childhood in foreign schools as the daughter of a diplomat.

“He’s a cult figure, for God’s sake,” Steven is continuing. “And not even an American cult figure! Most of the country hasn’t heard of him.”

“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, isn’t that right, Steve?”

“I don’t know about that, Cal,” the marketing director says, rubbing the side of his face thoughtfully. “I just know this one doesn’t feel that big to me. I can’t see us getting in an auction and losing our cool over it, put it that way.”

“Mencken,” Katrina says dryly. “If you’re going to quote Mencken at Steve, Cal, at least give him credit.”

Cal Anderson—the Cal was short for Robert (the nickname didn’t make sense to Judith, the only other person she had ever heard of with this same bewildering nickname was Robert Lowell)—gives a brief, weary smile. He and Katrina, editorial director and senior editor, respectively, considered themselves to be the standard-bearers of high culture in an increasingly lowbrow industry and as such were given to competitive attributions of great sayings and esoteric phrases.

“Excuse me,” Judith says again, standing behind her chair. “I’ve got to take this call. I just want to say that I liked it, for whatever it’s worth. I thought it got into the granular details of moviemaking in a way I hadn’t read before. The agent sent it to me on an exclusive and I promised I’d let her know by the end of the day.”

“Granular.” She had chosen the word deliberately, just to keep them on their toes.

“I read it,” Elaina says, and then pauses.

Shit. Leave it to Elaina to pick this moment to weigh in with her usual defeatist opinion.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.