CHAPTER FOUR
“Thank God that’s over for another year. Jesus! I don’t know why I let myself get talked into going every time.”
Joe laughed at her and drained his drink. “A little thing in your contract called a publicity clause? Which you were happy enough to sign at the time?”
“Don’t talk to me about contracts. I’ve got to see Don when we finish up here. Also, you’re right and I hate you.”
Before Joe could comment, the waitress came over and set down more drinks. “Absolut rocks,” she said, deftly sweeping their trash out of the way.
“Ewww, Joe! How can you drink that liquid hell?”
The waitress didn’t change expression, but Marie thought she detected a twinkle in the woman’s eye as she added, “And a Shirley Temple...with a tequila chaser.”
Now that was more like it. Marie gulped down her tequila as the waitress left, then followed it with a swallow of Shirley Temple while Joe looked on in mingled fascination and nausea. “My editor’s going to want a title for my latest literary bowel movement.”
“Will you knock it off? You write great books. Even I like to read them.”
“I’m a whore for the entire paperback book industry.”
“Waitress!” Joe screamed. The waitress, who hadn’t had time to get far, came back. “Take these away, please,” he continued, shoving the glasses toward her, “and bring the lady some coffee. Repeatedly.”
“I loathe coffee,” Marie muttered.
“You get so obnoxious when you’ve been drinking. Well. More obnoxious, anyway. It’s either drink coffee or be slapped.”
“Can’t we do both?” She paused, trying to decide if she was joking or not. Since she didn’t know, Joe was probably right...time to switch to coffee. “We’re still on for the movies tonight?”
“Assuming you can crawl out of your self-pity pit long enough to fork over nine bucks to General Cinemas, yes. Listen—for a title, how ‘bout Passion’s Fury ?”
“Done that. But that’s a good try. Anything with Fire or Flaming in the title works, too.”
“How about Love’s Blazing Inferno?”
She laughed. “Sounds like a cross between Die Hard and Gone with the Wind. Nice try, though. There’s a list.”
“What?”
“There must be a list. Some editor wrote up this list and sent it to the marketing department of every romance novel publisher in the world. That’s my theory.”
Joe looked at her and, when she didn’t crack a smile or otherwise indicate she was joking, said, “Okayyyyy, way past time for you to sober up.”
“Ardor,” she said. “Beauty, bride, bliss, caress, dawn, desire, dusk, evening, fire, flaming, flower, fury, garden, heart, jewel, lady, love, moon, moonlight, moonstruck, morning, night, passion, pirate, plunder, queen, ravish, ribald, savage, sweet, sunrise, sunset, tender, wanton.”
“You’re cheating. You’re peeking at your phone.”
“You know I’m not.”
He waved that away, then asked, “What’s the new book about?”
“It was about Bard and Deirdre, a poet and a psychologist who meet at an environmentalist convention. They fall in love while implementing a terrific recycling program that will cut paper waste by twenty-two percent within ninety-six months.” She gulped coffee, grimaced, then took another swallow. “But after this meeting, I’m guessing it’ll be about...ah...Brad and Debbie. They meet at a singles bar. She’s there on a dare, dressed up as a prostitute because she lost a bet. He falls for her disguise. They have mindless sex and fall in love while implementing a new martini menu for the bar.”
“How about Cocktails for Two?”
“How about I just kill myself now?”
“Passion’s Plunder”?
“Already done.”
“Come the Dawn”?
“That has possibilities,” she admitted. “Let’s remember that one.”
“Come the Dusk”?
“See how easy it is? I could do a whole series. The Come Trilogy. Remind me to put you on my acknowledgments page. ‘And thanks to my best friend, Joe Hall, for a mediocre, yet provocative, title.’”
“I’ve been on your acknowledgments page and honey, the thrill is gone. In lieu of seeing my name in print for the fourth time, can I have cash instead?”
She laughed. She couldn’t help it. No matter how down she got—and these days, she was almost always down—he could crack her up. “Off the subject, how did Blank-o work out?”
He shivered. “Badly. As you suspected, the accent is a fake—I happen to know cabeza estupido doesn’t mean ‘I can’t live without you’. Blanco’s looking for love in all my wrong places...never mind. You know what you should try?”
“A home lobotomy?”
He ignored that. “Why don’t you write gay romances? There’s a great market, and I bet you could have some flexibility. A lot of my friends complain they don’t have anything to read.”
“That’s a really good idea, but it’s not for me. I’d better stick to what I know.”
“Ha! And yet you’re writing about happy women having sex. When you’re about as happy as a chocoholic on a diet, and I know perfectly well you haven’t gotten laid since St. Patrick’s Day last year.”
“Let’s skip that subject, okay? I can only focus on one aspect of my sucky life at a time.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but...” He yawned theatrically.
She made no attempt to hide her irritation. “If I were a nobody, I could write the kind of books I want. But because I’m ‘Jessica C. LeFleur’, I’m stuck in the bodice ripper niche.”
“Tell me more about the problem that thousands of writers would love to have.”
“I know in the scheme of things it’s not a big deal,” she admitted. “But you can have ‘good’ problems and still want change.”
“Bullshit.”
“Truth. Look at my situation. Even if I switched publishing houses, they’d expect a certain type of work from me. The stuff that makes money...that’s what the big houses care about, understandably. And if I actually managed to convince someone to give a literary manuscript a chance, the critics would hate it before they read a word.”
“The critics don’t hate you now. How can you be so sure they—?”
She snorted. “Are you kidding? Most critics won’t even condescend to review a romance novel. But they’d all rush to review my literary work, and trash it, to keep me in my place.”
“Bitchy and paranoid. Nice combo.”
“They’d think I was overstepping my bounds,” she continued. “Because I’m not a real author. Not in the eyes of anyone who matters.”
Joe leaned forward on his elbows, and in spite of her dreary mood, she was again struck by his fine good looks. His eyes were large, blue, and soulful. His hair was so black it was nearly blue under certain lights. He was exactly her height, lean and wiry, and not for the first time did she think Asian Americans were some of the best-looking people on the planet. Born of a Japanese-American and a Northern European American, Joe was one of the best-looking men she’d ever seen.
If he was only ugly, she thought desperately. I’m shallow, I’m sure I wouldn’t be so in love with him if he looked like he drank water out of a toilet bowl. Right? Right.
“A) About five hundred thousand readers would disagree with that,” Joe was saying in that lecturing tone she knew well. “B) What do you care what a bunch of stuffed-shirt critics think, and C) You’re making me sick . Do you realize how many aspiring authors would sell their sisters to be where you are?”
“So? I never wanted to be a best-selling author. But my agent sold my soul to a publishing house that builds fiction giants, not literary little people.”
“Please! Not another ‘my life sucks even though I sell gobs of books and have money falling out my ass’ speech. Besides, your agent didn’t do shit without your permission.”
Her grip tightened on her coffee cup as she glared across the table at Joe. “My permission? I didn’t know what I was doing back then, I trusted his advice. The only reason I wrote Love’s Sweeping Tide was because that spawn of Satan told me the romance market was the easiest to break into.”
“Well. He was right.” She had to agree with that one. Once all she dreamed of was getting published; she had never thought beyond that. Kind of like the woman who spent two years obsessively planning every detail of her wedding, but never gave a thought to the marriage that came after.
“I always thought I’d be so grateful to be published that I’d write whatever they wanted. But now that I am, it’s just not enough. I know I sound whiney, I know you’re sick of hearing it, but I’m not happy.”
“Think about your money! Works for me.”
“‘It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation, which gives happiness.’ Thomas Jefferson.”
In response to this, Joe scooped his bag off the floor, rooted around in it, and produced a battered paperback. He thumbed rapidly through tattered pages and, when he had found what he was looking for: “‘There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.’ Logan Pearsall Smith.”
“Cheater.”
“You’re the cheater,” Joe retorted. “You’ve got a photographic memory, for God’s sake. It’s not like you stay up late memorizing this stuff. How many grading curves did you wreck in high school? Used to drive me crazy, especially since you only sound smart.”
“Cogito ergo sum,” she said smugly. “I think. Therefore I am.”
“You look like a monkey, and you smell like one, too. How ‘bout that ?”
“Great, Joe.”