‘If you’re okay to finish there, Betsy,’ I said.
‘I’m okay,’ she said, in a near-whisper. ‘I just needed you guys to know. You may find me crying or just staring sadly out of the window and I need you to know that it’s not you, it’s me, simply working through this.’
‘You’re very brave,’ Mannix said. ‘And please know we’re all here for you.’
‘I appreciate that.’
‘Right, then,’ Mannix said to me. ‘Let’s get to work.’
‘Who made you the boss of her?’ Jeffrey said.
‘I did,’ I said.
‘But you’re always working. You never stop.’
‘Because there’s a lot to do.’ I was sick of explaining this to him.
Bryce Bonesman wanted fast-track changes to One Blink at a Time. ‘You have to rewrite a lot of the book. Some of those sayings just don’t cut it. And some, they belong to other people, right? So we have copyright issues.’
Basically, they needed twenty-five original inspirational sayings and they needed them by mid-November in order to publish in March. ‘I wish we could publish in January,’ Bryce said regretfully. ‘No one publishes in January, it’s a wasteland – you could have the market all to yourself. But we don’t have time to turn it around.’
Every evening, Mannix and I went through the notebooks he’d kept of our conversations in the hospital and so far we’d polished and finessed nineteen extra sayings that Bryce Bonesman had deemed acceptable. But we still had six to go and our deadline was two short weeks away. It was a lot harder than I’d ever realized, to be wise.
What made it more difficult was that Bryce had told me that my second book was to be ‘more of the same’. ‘Exactly like your first book, but with new material, obviously.’
So I was in a constant bind between wanting to give all my good sayings to One Blink at a Time but also needing to hold some good stuff back for the second book.
Mannix and I withdrew to our bedroom, which also doubled as our office.
‘That call you got after the photo-shoot?’ I asked. ‘Was it from Phyllis? She’s cancelled tomorrow’s meeting?’
Mannix hesitated. He tried to protect me from bad news. ‘Yes,’ he said.
True to her promise, there was no day-to-day contact with Phyllis. All she cared about was the optimum moment to do the best deal for my second as-yet-unwritten book with Blisset Renown. So when she’d heard about my upcoming interview with Annabeth Browning for Redbook, she decided it would be ideal to have a meeting with Bryce and his team on the morning after. ‘They’ll be high as kites and in we go, boom! We walk out with half a million dollars.’
‘Another time will come,’ I said. ‘So how bad is the fallout from poor Annabeth’s relapse?’
‘The public aren’t making any connection with you.’
‘But …?’
‘Sorry, baby. There’s an email from Ruben saying four of the glossies have cancelled the pieces you’ve written.’
Ruben had made me do countless articles for the monthly magazines – some big, some small, everything from my first kiss to my favourite tree to the lipstick that saved my life – to be run in the April editions. The April editions – which were published in March, to coincide with my first tour – were about to be put to bed, so I’d been killing myself to get everything written in time.
‘Okay.’ I took a moment to feel the loss. ‘What’s done is done. So today’s blog? Should I say that we’re praying for Annabeth? They love that holy stuff here.’
‘I think you should distance yourself from her.’
‘That sounds a bit … brutal.’
‘It’s a brutal country. No one wants to be associated with failure. You saw what they were all like today at the photo-shoot.’
Mannix’s phone rang. ‘It’s Ruben.’
‘Great news!’ Ruben yelled. Even though he was talking to Mannix, I heard everything.
Some Midwest magazine called Ladies Day wanted me to write an article about my illness. ‘I know,’ Ruben said. ‘You’ve never heard of it. But it’s massive in the heartland. Readership of eight million. They need fifteen hundred words by midnight.’
‘… Midnight?’ I said. ‘Today’s midnight? Mannix, give me the phone. Hi, Ruben, Stella here, have you any advice on how I should handle the Annabeth story in my blog?’
‘Annabeth who? That’s how you handle it.’
He went away. Mannix crafted some words, meant to have been written by me, for the blog and I started work on the piece for Ladies Day. Everything to do with my book happened at high speed, and I always felt like I was lagging far behind.
Both Mannix and I were clattering away at our laptops when the doorbell rang and jolted us from our concentration.
‘Gilda,’ Mannix said.
‘It’s ten p.m. already?’ Gilda came three nights a week to do Pilates with me.
‘You too tired? Will I cancel?’
‘No, it’s okay.’
‘Look at you.’ Mannix laughed. ‘All lit up by your girl crush. Should I be jealous?’
‘Should I be jealous?’
But I wasn’t worried that Mannix fancied Gilda. It’s not that I was naive – a bass note of low-level watchfulness hummed constantly in me – but there just wasn’t any spark between them. They were civil and friendly, and that was about it.
Jeffrey shouted, ‘Gilda’s here.’ Jeffrey, on the other hand, was mad about her.
Gilda stuck her head around the door. She was all smiley and rosy. ‘Hey, Mannix. All set, Stella?’
‘Just coming.’
I had my Pilates lesson in the hallway because there wasn’t any other room to do it in. But Gilda had said, ‘Some of my clients have a private gym in their own home and they don’t work as hard as you.’
We started and it was tough, like it always was. Halfway through a hundred pelvic thrusts, tumbling noises came from Betsy’s bedroom – clearly something had fallen, I was guessing it was one of her shelves – and she started yelling for Mannix. He came out of our bedroom and cut through the hallway.
‘Sorry about this,’ he said, and for a moment he stood over me, his legs outside mine. He looked down and silently he mouthed, ‘I want to fuck you so hard.’
Between the squeezing of my lady-centre I’d been doing and the look in his eyes, I was afraid I was going to orgasm there and then.
‘Can’t persuade you to do Pilates too?’ Gilda said, in her melodious voice.
She was still in pelvic-thrust mode. Her hips were raised and her region was angled towards him. It was almost as if her voice had come from down there. He flicked the quickest, quickest look at it, then coloured slightly and went off to see to Betsy.
After Gilda left, I took my laptop into the family room to continue work.
‘Come to bed,’ Mannix said.
‘I can’t. I’ve to finish this.’
‘Come to bed,’ he said. ‘That’s an order.’
But I was too anxious to laugh. ‘Soon.’
When I finally emailed the article and climbed into bed, Mannix was asleep. Sometimes when this happened, his arm would snake across the bed and he’d pull me to him, but this night it didn’t.
At seven the next morning, Mannix and I were still asleep when the doorbell rang.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Mannix mumbled. ‘Oh, it’s Gilda. Time for your run.’ He woke up a little. ‘You still haven’t found out if Laszlo Jellico is her boyfriend.’
‘She’s mentioned him once or twice.’ I was pulling on my running clothes. ‘But I don’t know if she’s, you know, at it with him. I don’t think she is. Go back to sleep.’
‘Me? I have responsibilities, including persuading your charming son to get out of bed.’
My heart sank. Sometimes this was so very difficult.
‘I’ll be home in forty-five minutes. Thank you for getting the kids up.’
‘Whatever. Find out!’ Mannix called after me. ‘Is she or isn’t she?’
&nbs
p; Down in the street, Gilda was doing her stretches. She wore a pink hoodie and a pink hat and looked so cute that it made me laugh. ‘You look like you’re about twelve.’
‘I wish! I’m thirty-two years of age.’
Thirty-two. I’d always been curious but hadn’t known how to ask.
Going for broke, I asked, ‘And do you have a boyfriend?’
‘I’m not dating right now.’
I had a little think. I gathered she meant ‘No’, but they arranged words differently in New York.
‘Yourself and Laszlo Jellico …?’ I prompted.
‘We had a thing. Nothing serious. Relationships are hard.’
‘… I know.’
She gave me a look. ‘Not for you.’
‘Yes for me, sometimes.’
‘But Mannix …?’
I hesitated. ‘My son hates him. And we’re very different, Mannix and I. We were brought up differently, we think differently.’ It was a huge relief to say this to someone who wouldn’t judge me, who hadn’t known the old me, the one who was married to Ryan.
‘But you seem crazy about each other,’ Gilda said.
‘… We have a … spark.’ I was mortified, but this was my fault; I’d started this conversation. ‘You know, the physical thing. Sometimes, the rest of it can be difficult.’
I got back from the run to find Mannix trying to get the kids out to school, so when Ruben rang I picked up. Usually Mannix dealt with Ruben’s torrent of demands and fed them back to me in a more manageable form; however, he was locked in some stand-off with Jeffrey over something that was totally inconsequential but that mattered to both of them.
‘Great news!’ Ruben declared. I had already learned to mistrust that phrase and I would eventually come to loathe it. ‘Ladies Day love your piece.’
‘That’s great.’
‘But they need some rewrites. About your faith. How prayer and your faith saved you.’
‘You mean faith in God? But I don’t really have a faith in God.’
‘So make it up. You’re a writer. They need it by this afternoon.’
‘But my author photo is being done this afternoon.’
‘So you’ve got all morning.’
‘Any news on Annabeth? How’s she doing?’
‘Like I said, Annabeth who? I’ve got a list of other smaller pieces for you. The Sacramento Sunshine want five hundred words on your favourite star sign, the Coral Springs Social want an original recipe from you, with an emphasis on low cholesterol –’
The phone was taken from my hand by Mannix. He mouthed, ‘Don’t talk to him,’ then left the room.
Mannix was suspicious of Ruben. He didn’t like his scatter-gun approach to my publicity. He said there was no structure to it, no targeted demographic, that I was simply providing filler for countless local newspapers and exhausting myself in the process.
A few minutes later Mannix was back. ‘Do the Ladies Day piece,’ he said. ‘It’s actually got a decent readership. Unlike those other pamphlets that Ruben is plugging. And don’t talk to Ruben, that’s my job. Right, I’m going for a swim.’
Every morning Mannix went to a nearby pool and powered through fifty laps, slapping the water like it had insulted his mother. ‘I’ll be back in an hour.’
I laboured over the Ladies Day piece, trying to bump up my faith in God, but I couldn’t bring myself to actively lie: that was wrong and potentially dangerous. Although I didn’t believe in God, I was still afraid of Him.
During the daytime, Mannix set up office in the family room while I stayed in the bedroom, bent over my laptop. Now and again, through the wall, I could hear Mannix’s voice murmuring on the phone, and it still had the power to thrill me. All I had to do was stand up and take my clothes off and in thirty seconds I could be having sex with him. But we had work to do. Sometimes I made coffee and left one for him by his door, but I didn’t speak to him; that was what we’d agreed, the only way we’d get anything done.
At the moment Mannix had a side project on the go; he’d dropped one or two hints about it but I knew not to push him until he was ready to tell me. It was coming up to one o’clock when he burst into the bedroom and announced, ‘Thirty grand.’
‘What is?’
‘Your advance from Harp Publishing. To publish One Blink at a Time in Ireland.’
‘Oh my God.’
It had been my idea to keep Irish rights out of the deal with Phyllis. I was just being patriotic. But a few weeks ago Mannix had realized that those rights could be sold. He’d asked me if he could try to land an Irish publisher and, apparently, he just had.
‘They’re really reputable. They’ve published a couple of Man Booker winners.’
‘Are you serious? Dad will be so happy. Jesus, Mannix. Thirty grand.’
‘Their initial offer was fifteen hundred euro. I got them up to thirty thousand.’ He couldn’t hide his pride. ‘And because there’s no Phyllis, there’s no agent percentage.’
‘You’re the agent. You’ve agented this. Mannix, you’re an actual agent! Oh, Mannix, I’m so impressed.’
‘How impressed?’
I glanced at the clock. We needed to be quick. ‘This impressed!’ I declared, putting the palm of my hand on his chest and shoving him onto the bed.
He was easy to undress – a T-shirt, a pair of sweats, they were off in seconds. His musky smell made my body open like a flower.
I lowered myself onto him and moved in sinuous figures of eight above him, squeezing myself tight and moving him with me. It was still a novelty, this control over my own body. He kept trying to speed up and I kept placing my hand on his abdomen and saying, ‘Slow down.’
Eventually he flipped me over and the weight of his pelvis on mine triggered an immediate orgasm.
‘Not yet,’ I begged. ‘Wait. One more.’
‘I can’t,’ he gasped, and convulsed into me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered into my hair.
I stroked the back of his head. ‘Testosterone boy. All fired up from doing your deal. God, I’ve never met anyone who loves sex as much as you.’
‘You love it too. You’re having a long-overdue sexual awakening and you’re just using me.’
‘Really?’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
At the studio for my author photo, the stylist brought along a case of stunning Jimmy Choos, which Berri, the art director, instantly nixed. ‘All wrong,’ he yelled. ‘You’ve got to look momsy.’
I slid my feet into a pair of super-high, pointy-toed, bling-encrusted beauties and Mannix grabbed his phone and took a shot.
‘Don’t tweet that!’ Berri said.
‘Too late,’ Mannix said and we both laughed.
‘I’m the art director! I’m the boss here! And you two need to take this seriously!’
‘She looks great in those shoes,’ Mannix told Berri. ‘Why make her into something she’s not?’
‘This!’ Berri pointed at Mannix and got the attention of everyone in the room. ‘This right here is why we don’t encourage boyfriends on author shoots.’ To Mannix, he said, ‘You don’t get it. It’s not who you think Stella is: it’s who we decide she is. And we decide she’s cosy and safe. It’s how her book will sell.’
Quietly, Mannix said to me, ‘I’ll buy you those shoes.’
The stylist overheard. ‘I can do you a fifty per cent discount.’
‘In that case, I’ll buy her two pairs.’
The three of us dissolved into giggles, which earned us cold looks from the photographer and Berri. But the problem was that this shoot was way too similar to four or five other photo-shoots I’d already done, including yesterday’s shoot-that-never-happened with Annabeth in the Carlyle.
Admittedly, each time, I’d had a different hairdresser, a different photographer and a different art director, with a different brief, but it was the same me with the same face. The waste of time and resources made the whole process seem silly.
We got home just in time for dinner w
ith the kids. They were chatty and so obviously happy that it was balm to my soul. After the shoot today and the awful photos in which they made me look like a ninety-three-year-old great-grandmother, I’d wondered if I’d made an appalling mistake, uprooting us all and bringing us to this strange country.
When dinner finished, Mannix said, ‘Put on your new shoes and let’s go out for a martini.’
Regretfully, I shook my head. ‘We’ll do it when we’ve delivered all twenty-five of Bryce Bonesman’s wise sayings. Until then, we’ve got to keep working. Sorry, baby. Hey, any emails from Ruben?’
‘No.’
‘Can I ring him? I just want to know if the Ladies Day piece was okay. I put a lot of work into it.’
Mannix sighed. ‘I’ll ring him. I’ll put him on speaker.’
‘Hi, Ruben,’ I called across the room. ‘Was the Ladies Day piece okay?’
‘Lemme see my emails. Ladies Day, Ladies Day … Right, here we are. No. They didn’t like it. Que sera, right?’
‘None of it?’ I asked.
‘None of it.’
‘So that’s it?’ I couldn’t quite believe it.
‘That’s it. Junked. Onwards and upwards.’
October ended and we hurtled on through November. Every day was insanely busy.
Mannix and I got our twenty-five new sayings in just ahead of Bryce’s deadline then I started media training with a consultant called Fletch. We did dozens upon dozens of fake TV interviews in which no matter what I was asked – what age were my kids, what was in my bucket list – I answered with ‘One Blink at a Time.’
‘Seriously,’ Fletch said. ‘Saying the title of your book every ten seconds is optimal.’
I was given detailed points on posture, ankle-crossing, head placement. Even the correct height of shoe to get the most upright angle for my body.
‘And you need some jabs.’
‘Jabs?’ I thought he meant inoculations.
‘You know, filler in your lips, Botox around the eyes. Nothing major. Nothing surgical. I know a good guy.’
Mannix opposed it furiously. ‘It’ll ruin your face.’
Until now I’d resisted injectables because Karen wrought such disaster on the faces she ‘treated’, but I couldn’t help wondering how I’d look if a proper person got their hands on me. So I went to Fletch’s guy, who lured me in with his ‘less is more’ approach and who sent me away looking a little fresher and brighter but not much different. A complete contrast to the poor creatures who staggered out of Honey Day Spa after Karen’s ministrations, often looking like they’d had a stroke.