“Then what did you do?”
Ellie smiled. “You know how your life can change in an instant?”
“Oh, yeah,” Madison said. “Roger called and said he needed me, so I left New York and went to him. One phone call.”
Ellie smiled. “For me it was going to the dentist and picking up a copy of a local magazine off his table. In the back was an ad about a writers’ conference that was being held in a town about sixty miles south of us. At the bottom of the ad was a sentence that said that editors would be available for conferences to talk about the writer’s work.”
“So you went, and they fell in love with Jordan Neale,” Leslie said, smiling as though she’d heard the happy ending of a fairy tale.
Ellie laughed. “Not quite like that. Did I mention that I didn’t learn to type until after I was published?”
“So you hire someone to type the books for you,” Leslie said, puzzled.
“And how was I going to pay for that?” Ellie said. “If Martin had found out . . .”
“He would have cut you down until you burned everything you’d written,” Madison said softly. “But in a ‘loving’ way, of course. ‘Are you sure you want to have someone else read what you’ve written, sweetheart?’ he’d say.”
“Yes,” Ellie answered. “Exactly. Verbal abuse. Of course at the time, I didn’t think that consciously. Jeanne said that women in my situation must make themselves believe that the man they’re with is good. If they begin to see the truth about him, then . . .”
“Then they have to do something and they’re too terrified to try anything. After all, the man has spent all his energy on making her feel incompetent and inadequate,” Madison finished for her.
“Yes,” Ellie answered, saying everything in that one word.
“So how did you get published?” Leslie asked in exasperation.
Ellie laughed as she looked down at her empty cup. “Innocence, for one thing. If I’d known anything at all, I wouldn’t have tried. I wouldn’t even have made that appointment with the editor. Later, people told me that I couldn’t do what I did, that I had to have an agent, that my manuscript had to be this and that. I was told that there were rules and that I had broken all of them.”
Ellie looked up, smiling. “But you know what? The publishing world is just as hungry as we readers are for good stories. My editor would kill me for saying this, but if your story is fabulous, you can turn it in written in charcoal on bark and the publishing house will take care of the rest.”
“Yeah, but how did you get anyone to read those manuscripts in the first place?” Madison said. “I hate handwritten insurance forms, so I can’t imagine a whole book done in pen and ink.”
“You’re exactly right. If my editor had known what she was asking for, she wouldn’t have asked me to send my books to her. You see, Daria was late. She’s usually late, but not through any reason except that she has a thousand things to do and ten minutes to do them in.” Ellie smiled. “I’ve often told her that my career started because she was late. In fact, I once gave her a pocket watch for a gift.”
When Leslie and Madison looked blank, Ellie explained. “You know, like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. ‘I’m late. I’m late,’ the White Rabbit says.”
The women smiled, but Ellie could see that they wanted her to tell them about her book.
“Okay, but I only know what happened because later Daria and I became friends and she told me the story.”
For a moment Ellie was silent; then she smiled and started to speak. There was a faraway look in her eyes, a look of happiness the women hadn’t seen before.
“I’m late,” Daria said to her assistant, Cheryl, who had traveled to the writers’ conference with her. “I have to go now!”
“But there’s just one more and she looked so hopeful. She has this big box clutched to her chest and she looks scared to death, as though if she’s caught she’ll be punished.”
For a moment Daria closed her eyes in exasperation. Cheryl was new, fresh out of a prestigious university with a degree in English lit, a minor in creative writing.
“They all look like that,” Daria said in exasperation to her assistant, then thought, Until they get some money; then they—No, she wasn’t going to complete that thought. This was the third day that she’d been at the conference, and she’d heard at least fifty authors pitch their work, but she’d heard nothing that was of any interest to her. One by one, she’d sent the authors to Cheryl to pick up standardized sheets with pointers on how to get a science fiction novel published, how to get a romance published, and so on.
Daria looked at her watch again. It wasn’t as though she were late for a hairdresser’s appointment. She was late for a speech. At the end of the hall was an auditorium, and there were about three hundred paying would-be writers sitting in there right now waiting to hear Daria tell them how to get their books published and on the best-seller lists.
Of course, what Daria wanted to do was get up there and say, “Write a good book and it’ll sell,” then sit down. But, no, that wouldn’t do. No, she had to stand up there and talk for thirty minutes about margins and how much her publishing house was willing to pay for a book they hadn’t seen to an author they’d never heard of.
Daria looked at her eager young assistant. Was she actually a nice person or was this some passive-aggressive action meant to make her boss do what she wanted her to do?
Whatever, Daria thought with a sigh. “Five minutes,” she said to Cheryl, then tried to look stern and like a “real” boss.
With a radiant smile, Cheryl put her head around the door and said, “You can come in now,” and in walked a short, thin young woman who did indeed look frightened.