“But—”
“Go!” Daria repeated louder as she turned the page. “And shut the door behind you.”
Without a sound, Cheryl tiptoed out of the room, closing the door behind her.
Thirty minutes later, when the telephone rang, without glancing up, Daria pushed the button that cut off the caller, and when it rang again, she slid the lever on the side of the phone that silenced the ringer.
The next morning, at eight A.M., an irate publisher stormed into Daria’s office. “You’d better have a damned good reason for last night!” the publisher said. “I spent the evening making excuses for you.” The woman broke off when she saw Daria’s face. She’d been in publishing for a long, long time and she knew that look. It’s what she called The Holy Grail Look. It appeared when an editor got to do what she’d become an editor to do. That look didn’t have to do with money or the latest demands of some spoiled author. No, that look meant that the editor had just read a good book. That most holy of holies in the publishing world: a good book.
Immediately, the publisher stopped bawling out her editor. This was the best excuse, the only truly acceptable excuse there was.
“How many?” the publisher asked softly. You couldn’t tell about editors. Sometimes they fell in love with books that had no commercial value.
“At least a million copies in hardback,” the editor said, speaking of the print run. Daria’s voice lowered to a whisper. “And there are five books completed, and three more outlined.”
For a moment the publisher blinked. “You need anything? Bagel? Juice? Coffee? Bags of money to send to the writer?”
“A typist.”
“I’ll send you five of them,” the publisher said, then left her editor’s office. Halfway down the hall, she let out a loud whoop of sheer joy.
Fifteen
For a moment both Leslie and Madison were silent. For all that Madison hadn’t read any of Ellie’s books, she was alive, therefore she’d heard of them. The first one had come out about six or seven years after they’d met in New York, about 1987, and it had swept the country. Madison remembered that for months that first book was all that the women in her office had been able to talk about. They’d loved Max, the flawed hero, but, even more, they’d loved the dashing heroine, Jordan Neale, who was so clever at getting herself into and out of messes.
“When I read about her, I feel like I am her,” one of the women at work had gushed to Madison.
Madison had always meant to read one of the books, but she’d never had time. In spite of thinking that, after Roger, she never again wanted anything to do with the medical world, Madison still spent most of her evenings curled up with medical textbooks and trade journals. That the texts and magazines had changed to dealing with animals instead of people didn’t bother Madison in the least.
However, she’d been aware of the growing popularity of the Jordan Neale romantic mysteries. When the second book came out, the women were reading it under their desks. One day a golden retriever had swallowed the staple puller off a woman’s desk because she’d been so engrossed in Alexandria Farrell’s latest novel that she hadn’t even seen the dog. Dr. Parkhurst said that it was a good thing the dog hadn’t been brought in for rabies. “It would have been worth it,” the woman had said as she clutched the book to her bony chest.
Now, having heard about the man Ellie had been married to, Madison couldn’t imagine what his reaction to his wife’s success had been.
“What a great story,” Leslie said.
Frowning, Madison drew deeply on her cigarette. “So what did he think of your success?”
“He suffered,” Ellie said, then threw up her hands in exasperation. “He said that he was glad that one of us had been ‘given’ success. I can’t describe how guilty he made me feel. For years we’d talked of nothing but how he was going to set the world on fire, how he was going to achieve greatness, but, instead, I was going to get everything that he’d ever wanted. He made me feel terrible, really and truly terrible. I couldn’t enjoy my success because I felt that anything I achieved was at his expense.”
She took a deep breath to calm herself. “So I did everything in the world that I could think of to make him feel that my success was just as much his. I dedicated every book to him. At every interview I said that he was my inspiration. And of course I turned over every penny I earned to him to manage. But he wouldn’t ‘manage’ the money. I negotiated all contracts, made all the decisions about investments. I set up the corporation. Everything. I had to do it all by myself. All Martin did was spend the money. But, between him and me, we pretended to each other—and to others—that he was the ‘manager.’ I didn’t think about it consciously, but I think that I hoped that if he believed he controlled the money, he’d believe that it was his as well as mine . . . .” Trailing off, she looked at her hands.
“But nothing can please men like that,” Madison said. “Nothing you do is enough for them. Roger was threatened by anything that I achieved. During the divorce several people, including Dr. Oliver, testified that he wouldn’t be walking if it weren’t for me, but Roger said that he would have been walking s
ooner if I hadn’t dragged him down.”
“Right,” Ellie said, her head coming up. “The more success I had, the more Martin put me down. And he put me down in a way that he knew would get to me. He told me that I’d prevented him from becoming a musician, that if he hadn’t left New York for me, he would have made himself into ‘Somebody.’ But instead, he’d given all his success to me and I’d forced him to give up the only dream he’d ever had. I used to talk for days, trying to make him remember that that’s not how it was. I’d spend hours just on the fact that I’d given up my art and left New York because he wanted to go to L.A. to become a musician. But no matter what I said, Martin remembered something different. He remembered that I quit painting because I wasn’t very good, and he remembered that he’d left what would have been a fabulous future in New York and we moved to L.A. because I said I had to have more sunshine in my life.”
Ellie took a deep breath to calm herself. “I stood it as long as I could. I got to the point where I didn’t care whether what he remembered and what I did were the same. And I was sick unto death of all of my money he was spending. We bought a beautiful big house with a dedicated recording studio on the end of it. But after Martin filled the studio with music equipment, he then packed the house with speakers and lots of black boxes with flashing lights on them. And when the house was bursting at the seams, Martin said we had to buy a bigger house, this time with a recording studio four times as large as the one he had. And while he was buying and buying and buying, he was whining to me that I wasn’t earning enough fast enough. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I filed for divorce.”
Here Ellie had to pause. “It was in the divorce courtroom in that small town that I found out that the judge agreed with my husband,” she said softly. “Martin went into the courtroom with copies of my books and the interviews I’d given as ‘proof’ that he’d been deeply involved in my writing. And the judge believed every word he said. The judge told my attorney that it was a community property state, so Martin owned my books as much as I did, so why should I get control of them and not him? And by control, I mean that he could have added porno to them, could have let them lapse out of print, anything he wanted to do with them.”
Ellie had to take another breath before she could go on. “In the end, to keep control of my books, I agreed to give Martin all the money I’d earned, everything that had been purchased with the money from the books, and I have to support him forever. Lavishly support him.”
“You’re kidding,” Madison said.
“No. That is not something I joke about. He gets his first. I even have to carry a huge insurance policy on my life so that if I die—or go bankrupt—he gets paid.”
When Ellie said no more, neither Leslie nor Madison could think of a reply. Didn’t people who had made as much money as Ellie have all the power in a divorce? Wasn’t it the money that always won?