Steven Rowley - The Editor

I start to catch my breath. “Another one what?”

“Another bimbo. It was just on CNN.”

“Another one?” Strike that. I don’t want to get engaged in conversation about politics, something I don’t particularly care about at this moment.

“I think this is the end of his campaign.” Daniel looks up at me and notices my chest heaving. “Jesus. Did you run up the stairs?”

And that’s when I break into a huge, cat-who-ate-the-canary kind of grin.

“What?” Daniel has this look on his face that I love. I remember he made it on our first date, maybe even in response to my smiling devilishly at him. Brown eyes wide, lips slightly parted, hinting at the whitest teeth behind them, one of his pronounced Latin eyebrows slightly higher than the other. Five years later, that look still slays me.

I shrug and grin more. I must look like the Joker. Or at least Jack Nicholson.

“You’re not going to defend him, I hope.”

“Clinton? Nope.” Then I burst out laughing. It’s orgasmic, like a release for the whole day.

“What, then?”

Daniel and I met when we were both trying to get rush tickets to the Broadway revival of Cabaret . I made a crack about Joel Grey getting top billing for playing the emcee. I mean, he had won an Oscar for the role, but he was still the emcee. Daniel overheard me gripe and said it was like reviving Grease as a starring vehicle for Doody and I laughed. I had noticed him earlier on line for the box office and wanted to sleep with him the moment I laid eyes on him. It was the way he jumped up and down while pleading for a ticket, any ticket, like a dog on its hind legs, begging for scraps. We were unsuccessful that day but left far from empty-handed.

I snap off the TV.

“I was watching that,” he protests.

“It’s CNN. It’s on all day.” I take off my gloves and my coat and throw them on the chair. “I think I sold my book.”

Daniel stares at the blank TV screen until that sinks in. “Wait, you what?”

“Well, the offer will go to my agent and I’m sure there will be some back-and-forth and we’ll have to come to some agreement on terms. He may be on the phone with them now. Did Allen call? And there’s work to be done on it still. Hard work, she called it. On the ending, mostly.” I bite my lip. “But … yeah . I think I sold my book.”

Daniel’s legs swing around and his feet plant firmly on the ground. He pushes himself up with his fists and hovers just over the couch, preparing to leap up if necessary. “To a publisher?”

“To a doorstop salesman.” If it’s going to take him so long to catch on to this bit of the news, the rest of it will be a Sisyphean task of explanation on my part.

“Obviously to a publisher. To a good publisher?” Daniel doesn’t leap, but at least he stands. “Who?”

The grin is back. This is going to knock his socks off. “I sold it to a giant .”

“A giant,” he says skeptically.

“That’s right.”

“A literary giant?”

“A GIANT giant.”

Daniel crosses over to me and puts his hands on my shoulders, concerned. I peripherally glance down at his hands. “Wait, I’ve heard this before,” he says. “You sold your book for a handful of magic beans.”

Daniel is going off the deep end. “What?”

“And we no longer have a cow. But I shouldn’t worry, because you’re going to grow a beanstalk!”

“No. Stop it. Not a giant . An icon. But I’m sure she hates that word. She’s a really big person.”

“Like, obese?”

This is coming out all wrong. “Okay, I’m ready to move on from this part. Jackie. I sold my book to Jackie !”

Daniel thinks on this for a minute. “Karen’s friend? The lesbian who works at Reader’s Digest ?”

“KENNEDY. Jackie. Kennedy.”

He freezes. Finally. The reaction I was looking for. “Oh,” he says, quietly. But he’s still not quite there.

“Oh …” I repeat. And then I coax, “Na-ssis.”

Finally, magic happens. In unison: “Jackie … Kennedy … Onassis.”

It’s just like out of a movie, us saying it together: a scene that would strain credulity but would still be an audience favorite and get high marks in test screenings.

“Get out!” Daniel removes his hands from my shoulders and pushes me in the chest. Hard.

“Ow.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You just punched me in the sternum.”

“Jackie fucking Kennedy.”

“Onassis. Except I don’t think that’s her middle name. And she says Jacqueline, but like in the French pronunciation.”

“You’re joking.”

“Non, non,” I say, mustering my best French. “Je ne …” I can’t think of the word. “Joke pas .”

He looks at me, scrutinizing my face, just as he did the first time I told him I loved him, to see if I am recklessly toying with his emotions or if I’m indeed telling the truth. He scans my eyes, perhaps to check if my pupils are dilated in the throes of some drug-fueled hallucination. At last he smiles, a recognition that I am of sound mind, just as he did upon I love you .

“Oh my God! When do you meet her?”

“I just came from there.”

“From where?”

“From meeting her. At Doubleday.”

“Her office. You just came from there.” This is two steps forward and one step back. I try to be patient; it took me time to catch on to all this and it happened with me in the room. “You just entered our apartment door, coming straight from Jackie fucking Kennedy’s office.”

“Yes. Well, no. A conference room. Her office was too small.”

“Her office is too … small .”

“That’s what she said, yes.”

“She’s the widow of Aristotle Onassis, who was, for a time, the richest man on the planet.”

I fail to make the connection. “So?”

“She could probably buy Doubleday. And the building it’s in. But you’re telling me her office is small?”

I see his point, but I can actually answer this one. “She doesn’t want to buy Doubleday. She doesn’t want special treatment.”

“She told you that?”

I try to recall our exact conversation. She said something along those lines. And could she buy Doubleday? I seem to remember something about Onassis’s daughter getting the money. “We didn’t go over her financials or anything. It’s all kind of a blur, to be honest.”

“But you know this because you just came from there.”

“Exactly.”

“And you had a meeting—not in her office, which is small, but in a conference room, where she made an offer to buy your book.”

“It took me a while too. You’re doing great.” Daniel rolls his eyes. He thinks I’m being patronizing, but I’m really not. I’m being sincere. So I wrap my arms around him, nuzzle my face in his shoulder, and excitedly scream.

“Did you just spit on my shirt?” He stretches the fabric for evidence.

“Daniel! Focus!”

He returns his attention to me. “So. What did you talk about? You and the former First Lady.”

“I asked her about Charles de Gaulle.”

“The airport?” Daniel peels me off of him.

“The French president.” I bang my head against his shoulder several times, embarrassed.

“As in how he’s doing? Because I think Charles de Gaulle is dead.”

I laugh, because that’s the man I fell in love with. The man who makes me laugh every night before we fall asleep holding hands. “I asked if he was tall.” I kind of throw my hands up as if to say, What else are you supposed to ask her about? and also, I know! in recognition of my own ridiculousness.