Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

At his desk he wrote three rejection letters. Russell took great pride in these, and was known for them; while most editors tried to stay vague and upbeat—“not quite right for our list at this time”—he was specific about his reservations and offered constructive criticism, even as he admitted that his judgment was fallible, or at least that in the end he was a prisoner of his own taste (not that he really believed this). Usually this scrupulous attention was appreciated, although the agent Martin Briskin once told him, “Just give me the fucking verdict and spare me the sensitive lecture.” And it was Briskin with whom he had to deal today.

At nine-thirty he called Kip Taylor, whose money he’d be putting on the line, to get the final clearance.

“Russell, you sound terrible. You’re croaking like a frog. Pull yourself together, man.”

“I’m fine, Kip. Ready to go.”

“So, you think you can get it for seven fifty?”

“I’ll try like hell.”

“You know he’ll want a million. It’s the number — the basic unit.”

Russell assumed he was being polite about the Lilliputian dynamics of publishing, because he distinctly remembered Kip saying that in the financial world, 100 million was the basic unit.

“Then I guess we have to be willing to walk away,” Russell said tentatively.

“Is that what you want to do?” Kip asked.

“I think it’s worth a million with foreign rights.”

“All right, do it if you can.”

This was one of the things he admired about Kip, his decisiveness. He’d started his career as a trader at Salomon Brothers, staking millions on split-second judgments.

“Russell, I have to trust your instincts. That’s why I hired you. If your gut tells you to go for it, then go for it. Honestly, it’s your call.”

Actually, Kip hadn’t hired him; rather, Russell had solicited his capital to help buy a struggling business in which they both saw hidden value, but he was willing to let this pass. Having gotten the answer he wanted, he couldn’t understand why, after hanging up, he felt such trepidation and anxiety. His esophagus was burning with indigestion, his stomach suddenly queasy.

He went out to the deli and bought a toasted corn muffin fresh off the greasy grill — a plebeian delicacy that pleased him no less than last night’s short ribs — gobbling down half of it as he hurried back to the office, chucking the rest, intercepting Gita, his assistant, and Tom Bradley, his subrights director, coming in together. Were they a couple? They certainly seemed a little flustered to encounter him here on the steps. Both followed him up to the second floor after Russell told Tom he wanted to review Kohout’s foreign prospects before making the big call.

At ten-thirty he punched in the number. He could’ve had Gita make the call and ask Briskin’s assistant to hold for him, but that wasn’t Russell’s style. Briskin made him wait several minutes before picking up.

“Speak to me.”

“I want to preempt the Kohout.”

“I hope you have a large figure in mind.”

“It seems plenty big to me.”

“You probably believe it when your wife says that about your dick. But let’s hear it anyway.”

“Seven fifty.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? You call that a preempt?”

“This will be our top title of the year. And I’ll be there with Phillip every step of the way. He’s worked with me, and I think he’d like to again. He knows I’m a good editor and somebody he can trust.”

“Russell, be serious. I can’t go to my client with this.”

“The worst he can say is no.”

“He could say a lot worse, and so can I. If you were on fire, I wouldn’t cross the street to piss on you for seven fifty,” he said before hanging up.

Russell plodded along through the morning, unable to focus as he tried to decide whether to call back and sweeten the offer or wait Briskin out. Maybe, he thought, I should just sit tight. Maybe he’d just dodged a bullet. He had a somewhat distracted lunch at Soho House with David Cohen, the young editor he’d taken with him from Corbin, Dern. David was a keen advocate of the Kohout book and urged Russell to up his offer. The rooftop restaurant had just reopened for the season, and it seemed almost miraculous to dine outside, with the sun on your face, looking out over the Hudson, the slightest fetid whiff of which reached him on the breeze.

—

He’d just settled back at his desk when Gita told him Briskin was on the line.

“Give me a million,” Briskin said.

“Nine hundred, and we keep world rights.”

“Try again. A million and I’ll give you the UK. That’s the best I can do.”

That Briskin was calling at all, Russell interpreted as a sign of weakness.

“A million and world rights,” he said. “Final offer.”

“Come on, Russell, world rights might not be that big a factor on this book.”

“Then you shouldn’t mind giving them to us.”

“Fuck you,” he said before hanging up again.

Russell’s pulse was racing, his face flushed. As the adrenaline subsided, he found himself disappointed and second-guessing his tactics, but later, when his publicity director, Jonathan, and David came in for an update, he felt relieved.

“Well, it wasn’t really our kind of book anyway,” Jonathan said. “I wouldn’t know how to play this to the reviewers.”

“Maybe, but we can’t just suffocate in our comfortable little niche,” David said. “We need to grow.”

“We do?”

“Of course,” David said.

“We don’t do that blockbuster thing,” Jonathan countered.

How easy it is, Russell thought, to be a purist in your twenties.

Gita buzzed and said that Briskin was on the line. All at once the silence in the office was palpable. Russell picked up the receiver.

“All right,” Briskin said, “we have a deal. I have to tell you I advised my client against it.”

“If I didn’t think we could do right by this book I wouldn’t have pushed so hard. I’m going to do everything in my power—”

“Spare me the fucking speech and send over the contract.”

“Okay,” he said, feeling giddy and light-headed as he hung up the phone.

“We got world rights?” Jonathan asked.

Russell nodded. “I’ll tell Tom to get busy on it.”

“You all right?”

“I think so,” Russell said, standing up and walking unsteadily to the bathroom, where he threw up what was left of his lunch.

“ ‘THE LIGER IS A HYBRID CROSS between a male lion ( Panthera leo ) and a tigress ( Panthera tigress ).’ ” Jeremy was reading aloud to his mother from Wikipedia, psyching himself up for the day’s adventure, to see an actual liger in the native habitat of one of the Wildlife Society’s most generous benefactors. “ ‘Thus, it has parents with the same genus but of different species. It is the largest of all known extant felines. Ligers enjoy swimming, which is a characteristic of tigers, and are very sociable like lions. Ligers exist only in captivity because the habitats of the parent species do not overlap in the wild….’ ”

Casey had two extra tickets to see the liger and its trainer in the Fifth Avenue town house of Minky Rijstaefal, who was president of the society. This beast had risen from obscurity into a kind of cult fame after being mentioned in Napoleon Dynamite, and the society was capitalizing on that interest. Indeed, the event had quickly sold out, drawing the otherwise jaded children of the 10021 zip code, who’d already seen plenty of lions and tigers and bears, oh my, and more than a few of whom had been on Abercrombie & Kent safaris in Kenya and South Africa. For Corrine’s part, she couldn’t help being reminded of Luke, who was, she knew, spending the week at his game park, couldn’t help conjuring a glimmer of communion in this Upper East Side expedition, or thinking about the e-mail she’d write to him about it later.