One Fifth Avenue

“I didn’t even know your wife was pregnant,” James said. “How’d it happen?”

“It just happened. Two months before we got married. We weren’t even trying. It’s all that sperm I stored up over fifty years. It’s powerful stuff,” Redmon said. “Man, having a baby, it’s the greatest thing. How come no one tells you?”

“Don’t know,” James said, suddenly annoyed. Babies. Nowadays, a man couldn’t get away from babies. Not even at a business lunch. Half of James’s friends were new fathers. Who knew middle age was going to be all about babies?

And then Redmon did the unthinkable. He pulled out his wallet. It was the kind of wallet teenaged girls used to have, with an insert of plastic sleeves for photographs. “Sidney at one month,” he said, passing it over to James.

“Sidney,” James repeated.

“Old family name.”

James glanced at the photograph of a toothless, hairless baby with a crooked smile and what appeared to be a peculiarly large head.

“And there,” Redmon said, turning the plastic sleeve. “Sidney at six months. With Catherine.”

James assumed Catherine was Redmon’s wife. She was a pretty little thing, not much bigger than Sidney. “He’s big,” James said, handing back the wallet.

“Doctors say he’s in the ninety-ninth percentile. But all kids are big these days. How big is your son?”

“He’s small,” James said. “Like my wife.”

“I’m sorry,” Redmon said with genuine sympathy, as if smallness were a deformity. “But you never know. Maybe he’ll grow up to be a movie star, like Tom Cruise. Or he’ll run a studio. That would be even better.”

“Doesn’t Tom Cruise run a studio, too?” James smiled feebly and tried to change the subject. “So?”

“Oh yeah. You probably want to know what I think about the book,” Redmon said. “I thought I’d let Jerry tell you.”

James’s stomach dropped. At least Redmon had the courtesy to look distracted. Or uncomfortable.

“Jerry?” James said. “Jerry the mega-asshole?”

“One and the same. I’m afraid he loves you now, so you may want to amend your assessment.”

“Me?” James said. “Jerry Bockman loves me?”

“I’ll let him explain when he comes by.”

Jerry Bockman, coming to lunch? James didn’t know what to think. Jerry Bockman was a gross man. He had crude features and bad skin and orange hair, and looked like he should be hiding under a bridge demanding tolls from unsuspecting passersby. Men like that shouldn’t be in publishing, James had thought prudishly the one and only time he’d met Jerry.

But indeed, Jerry Bockman wasn’t in publishing. He was in entertainment. A much vaster and more lucrative enterprise than publishing, which was selling about the same number of books it had sold fifty years ago, the difference being that now there were about fifty times as many books published each year. Publishers had increased the choices but not the demand. And so Redmon Richardly, who’d gone from bad-boy Southern writer to literary publisher with his own company that published Pulitzer Prize–winning authors, like Philip Oakland, and National Book Award winners, and authors who wrote for The Atlantic and Harper’s and Salon, who were members of PEN, who did events at the public library, wh

o lived in Brooklyn, and most of all, who cared—cared about words, words, words!—had had to sell his company to an entertainment conglomorate. Called, unimaginatively, EC.

Jerry Bockman wasn’t the head of EC. That position was held by one of Jerry’s friends. Jerry was the head of a division, maybe second in command, maybe next in line. Inevitably, someone would get fired, and Jerry would take his place. He’d get fired someday, too, but by then none of it would matter because he would have reached every goal he’d ever aspired to in life and would probably have half a billion dollars in the bank, or stock options, or something equivalent. Meanwhile, Redmon hadn’t been able to make his important literary publishing house work and had had no choice but to be absorbed. Like an amoeba. Two years ago, when Redmon had informed James of the impeding “merger” (he’d called it a merger, but it was an absorption, like all mergers), Redmon said that it wouldn’t make any difference. He wouldn’t let Jerry Bockman or EC affect his books or his authors or his quality.

“Then why sell?” James had asked.

“Have to,” Redmon said. “If I want to get married and have children and live in this city, I have to.”

“Since when do you want to get married and have kids?” James asked.

“Since now. Life gets boring when you’re middle-aged. You can’t keep doing the same thing. You look like an asshole. You ever notice that?” Redmon had asked.

“Yeah,” James had said. And now Jerry was coming to lunch.

“You saw the piece about the ayatollah and his nephew in The Atlantic?” Redmon asked. James nodded, knowing that a piece about Iran or Iraq or anything that had to do with the Middle East was of vast importance here on the little twelve-mile island known as Manhattan, and normally, James would have been able to concentrate on it. He had quite a few informed opinions on the subject, but all he could think about now was Jerry. Jerry coming to lunch? And Jerry loved him? What was that about? Mindy would be thrilled. But it put an unpleasant pressure on him. Now he was going to have to perform. For Jerry. You couldn’t just sit there with a Jerry. You had to engage. Make yourself appear worthwhile.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about Updike lately,” James said, to ease his tension.