Plain Jayne (4 page)

Chapter Four

“I won’t do it,” I say stoutly, at first barely loud enough
for it to be technically deemed “aloud.” Then, emboldened by saying it once, I
repeat myself, this time turning around and facing the person to whom I’m
directing the statement.

He sighs and cocks his head, but he sounds more resigned
than angry when he replies, “I knew you were going to say that.”

Because he knows me
so
well already. After being in
the same room with me for a total of twenty-five minutes. Right.

I hold up the manuscript, which is saturated with red ink.
“It won’t even be the same book if I do what you’re suggesting.”

“True. It’ll be better.”

The only thing that stops me from crossing the room and
strangling him is that he didn’t say it as smugly as he could have said it. But
he’s still very sure of himself, which has the same effect on me as the grating
sound of bagpipes.

Rather than give him the satisfaction of showing that I’m annoyed
(which I’m starting to believe is his goal), I coolly flip through the sheaf of
papers in my hand, a bundle that was delivered to me at Gus’s place via bike
messenger earlier today, and state coolly, “Your insights are interesting. But
that’s not what I’m going for.”

His jaw tightens. Then he plops himself into the huge
leather chair behind his desk, grabs a large pen, and furiously clicks it. He
starts to say something, seems to think better of it, but then opens his mouth
again and says, “Funny… at this stage, I assumed you were going for whatever it
took to get your book on store shelves.”

The threat is more than implied. I don’t know how to
respond, though. I feel like every conversational opening he gives me is actually
a crude trap. No matter how poorly-disguised it is, though, I have no choice
but to step into it. Or my unwillingness to respond becomes its own, more
sophisticated trap, as is the case in this instance.

He slides into my silence, “More accurately, I thought you’d
want your book to be flying
off
the shelves. Which it’s not going to do,
the way it’s written now.”

As he waits for my reaction, one that I’m struggling to
moderate, he studiously avoids my eyes. I wonder if he can see how much I’m
blushing as he purposefully types something on his computer and hits “enter.”
Soon after, I hear a musical “ping,” and then he appears to be reading from his
monitor. His features soften, but he reins in his expression before it becomes
a smile.

Now he seems to remember I’m still standing in the middle of
his office, doing my best impression of a statue of the patron saint of open-mouthed
breathers. Glancing up at me, he lifts his eyebrows quizzically, creating a
washboard effect on his forehead. “Hmm?” he questions, as if I may have said
something he merely didn’t catch while playing Words with Friends with his mom,
or whatever he’s doing besides paying attention to
me
.

That thought makes me blurt completely off-topic, “Would you
be acting like this if you were in the middle of a meeting with Tom
Ridgeworthy?”

“Excuse me?”

I have his full attention now. But I have to admit, I liked
it better when he was half-ignoring me. Under his stern glare, I stutter, “I
mean… it’s just… you don’t seem to be… focused on…” Reconsidering this suicide
mission, I try to back out. “Whatever. Never mind.”

Coldly, he says, “No. Please, continue. I’m curious to know
what you mean. Because, obviously, you’re
not
Tom Ridgeworthy. So…”

“I still deserve some respect!”

In a flash, he’s on his feet, crossing the room in two quick
strides and standing inches from me. As he towers over me, he says, “You
‘deserve’ nothing. Got that? I know you’re from a generation that wasn’t taught
that, but allow me to enlighten you. Respect is earned. And so far, you’ve done
nothing to earn mine. So you’ve managed to string a few sentences together into
paragraphs, and paragraphs into chapters, and chapters into a novel, but so
what? That gives you something in common with millions of other people.”

I edge away from him, but the back of my foot bangs up
against the leg of one of the chairs under the antler chandelier, and I almost
fall backwards over the arm and into the seat. This doesn’t distract him at
all, unfortunately.

I can smell his soap (or is that aftershave?) as he looms
ominously. “I’m giving you exactly the amount of attention you’ve
earned
in your thirty-minute writing ‘career.’ When you prove to me that you’re not a
flash in the pan, like I suspect, then I’ll reevaluate the amount of time I
budget to
deal
with you.”

“You’re not that much older than me,” I mutter sullenly. When
he straightens and stares at me like I’ve lost my mind, I skirt the chair to
put some distance—and a very solid object—between us and explain, “You mock my
‘generation,’ but I’m pretty sure yours is the same… or very similar.”

“We might as well be from different planets,” he says with a
sniff. “I don’t identify at all with the norms and values perpetuated in my
peers.”

I roll my eyes. “Oh, buh-rother!” I drawl. “Excuse the hell
out of the rest of us.”

“I’m simply stating the facts.”

“Well, good for you. You know, I don’t appreciate being
reduced to a stereotype by someone who’s less familiar with me than he is with
the barista at the Starbucks downstairs.”

Dismissively, he waves his hand and returns to his desk
chair. “Can we get back to discussing
your book
? Your
raison d’être
?
Your
raison d’être
in my face?”

His rudeness momentarily stuns me into silence again, but I
recover more quickly this time. “My reason for being in your face is that
you
summoned me here,” I remind him. “And I was
trying
to discuss it
with you, but you seem to confuse ‘discuss’ with ‘dictate.’ As I was saying
before, I’m not comfortable with some of the changes you’re demanding.”

“Be specific. Name one.” He points to a chair. “And, please,
sit. You constantly look like you’re about to sprint for the door.”

Probably because I am.

I hesitate, but since he used the word, “please,” a word I
didn’t think existed in his vocabulary, I feel obligated to reward him by
honoring his request. I choose one of the armless, fabric-covered seats
directly across the desk from him. He leans back in his own chair, folds his
hands, and rests them on his flat tummy. His expression is one of both boredom
and tolerance. I guess I’m supposed to feel grateful that he’s granting me an
audience.

“The biggest problem?” I begin, waiting for his terse nod.
“Well, this suggestion about changing the fire to a tornado…”

When I falter, he prods, “Yeeeees…?”

Truth is, my only defense of the fire is that it’s what
really
happened, but he doesn’t know that. And I don’t want him to know it,
either.

Plus, fiction isn’t about what
really
happened; any
writing teacher will tell you that. And simply because something happened in
real life doesn’t mean it makes for good fiction or that it’s even believable,
in some cases. If you can’t sell it to the reader, it’s worthless, whether or
not it happened. I know all these things. Sometimes it feels as if I was
born
knowing these things. But just as my writing skills feel innate, my
instincts tell me it would be wrong to change the fire to a tornado. I don’t,
however, think Mr. Editor Supreme Douchebag Edwards will defer to my intuition.

Finally, I settle on, “It changes so much.”

He smirks. “That’s kind of the idea, Jayne.”

“But if it’s change for change’s sake—”

“It’s not! Trust me.” When it’s obvious by the mutinous look
on my face that I
don’t
trust him and probably never will, he sighs.
“God! You’re going to make me explain every single proofreader’s mark in that
fucking manuscript, aren’t you?”

I bristle. “No. I’m a professional; I can take constructive
criticism. I know a good suggestion when I see one.”

Tossing his hands in the air, he retorts, “Obviously not. Or
else you’d realize that fires are so… so… cliché.” He leans forward, his hands
splayed on his desktop. “
Jane Eyre.
Faulkner. Jack London. Fire, fire,
fire. It’s the only tragedy that writers seem to know how to write about. And if
it’s used symbolically, it’s somewhat excusable, but in your book, the fire is simply
a means to kill off characters and yet another fire to get confused with all
the other fires that have come before it in literature. Boooooring! ‘Flames
licking’ and ‘smoke choking’ and ‘beams collapsing.’ Yawn City.”

During his rant, my eyes fill with tears as if the room
is
filling with smoke. I even clear my throat a couple of times before a
full-blown cough explodes from my lips. The noise brings him up short, but I
turn my head and bend over, pretending to dig for something in my computer bag,
which is resting on the floor at my feet.

With a flat, emotionless voice, I say, “I take it you’ve
never experienced a house fire. Or lost someone in one? Because it’s not
boring. Probably,” I add hastily so as not to give too much away.

“Well, it is on paper,” he quickly claims, oblivious to my
anguish. “At least it is on
your
paper. It’s like you imagined what it
would feel like and then sucked out all the emotion from your imagination and
typed it up, like a robot. Frankly, it left me… underwhelmed. And it doesn’t
make any sense, considering there’s so much raw emotion in other parts of the
book—maybe
too
much. The imbalance is jarring.”

Confident that the tears have passed and that I can face him
without giving him any clue as to how close to a nerve he’s hitting, I
straighten, holding the pen I was ostensibly searching for, and sniff. “That’s
what I was going for,” I inform him. “I wanted it to be remarkable to the
reader how clinical the description of the fire is. Because that’s how the
authorities describe it to Rose. Without feeling. She’s expected to take in the
information as fact, never mind that her
family members
died horrific
deaths in the fire. It becomes a part of her history, her life story, but a
part that she’s never allowed to be emotional about.” I tilt my head and narrow
my eyes. “Seems like a discerning reader like you wouldn’t need something like
that spelled out for you.”

Not at all fazed by my insult, he points to me and says,
“Bingo. If a discerning reader like me doesn’t get it, then you’ve failed.”

Aw, shit.

“But—”

“Enough!” He says it loudly enough to drown me out but
without any heat. Digging around on his chaotic desk, he comes up with his own
copy of my manuscript. “Either rewrite it so that the fire makes me feel
something, or change it altogether. Your choice. Next.”

I hate this fucking asshole.

Chapter Five

I’m not going to reach my goal. I’m not going to see one of
my books on a shelf in a store before my thirtieth birthday. And I have someone
in particular to thank for that. I hardly need to even give you his initials,
surely. It’s obvious who would stand in the way of a dream I’ve had since I was
old enough to realize it would probably be more realistic to shoot for “thirty”
than the original “twenty-five” goalpost I’d set in high school. And there was
nothing (or no one)—until now—to make me think it wasn’t a completely
attainable goal, despite the challenges I came up against time and again.

I blew off friends, eschewed romantic relationships, and
told myself that human contact in general was overrated. Sometimes I worked for
so many hours on end that I couldn’t even see the computer screen clearly. Eating
became a chore that I tried to do as often as possible in front of my computer,
with bites in between long passages of prose. I wrote like a woman possessed, as
if I could erase the pain with a few million keystrokes or, at the very least,
put my grief to bed like an edition of a newspaper. I slept in two-hour
intervals, but only when it was physically impossible to sit, type, and think.

Once, before I became religious about backing up my work in
three places after each prolonged writing session, my computer contracted a
virus—I was “researching” uncircumcised penis pictures, having never seen one
in real life, and I stumbled on a site that had a cyber STD—that wiped out a
solid week of writing, including the scene in which Rose finds out her sisters
and parents have all been killed in the house fire. In reconstructing those
chapters—which still aren’t as good as the originals—I had to go through the
emotional sandblaster yet again.

I also felt the sting of rejection over and over again as every
agent I queried told me, “Not for me.” Gus, and everyone else who was familiar
enough with me to know that I was trying to publish a novel, told me to forget
conventional publishing and self-publish or e-publish. Every time I opened my
email, it seemed there was a message in there from Gus about another unknown
author who had given the publishing industry the middle finger by becoming a bazillionaire
via Kindle or NOOK or both. But I persevered. I was as relentless as a millionaire
thrill-seeker with too much time on her hands, obsessed with climbing the
world’s highest mountain the old fashioned way, simply because she wants to
cross it off on her Bucket List.

Because my dream is to hold a hardbound book, complete with
shiny jacket and delicious-smelling
paper
pages, bearing my name on the
cover and my little author’s blurb on the inside jacket flap.
Not
to see
my name staring coldly at me from a computer or phone or tablet screen. I’ve
already seen that a hundred times on my own laptop. It isn’t the same. Despite
how old-fashioned and outdated the concept is, I want something more tactile
than what the e-publishing world can offer me.