Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [61]
“Look, let’s be honest, Devi,” Jess said on the phone to me at the agency office. “It isn’t working out.”
“I’ll have to call you back, I’m on the line with Santa Monica about the Slater tour. Are you at home?”
“No. Devi, put Santa Monica on hold. This is urgent. It’s eating me up. I can’t handle what you must think of me. I hate not being straight with people. We didn’t plan it this way. Neither of us did. I don’t know how seriously involved you were with Ham. I mean, we need desperately to talk about the situation.”
“Are you at Ham’s?”
“It just happened, there’s no explaining it or apologizing for it. I mean, I’m not asking you to leave or anything. It just seems so awkward …”
“I’ll have to call you back, Jess, the Slater development sounds messy.”
“You’re not listening, Devi.”
“You feel guilty, deal with it. Ciao!”
The cyber-politician, Cindah Slater, didn’t get to promote her memoir, I Keep Going Home, in San Francisco. She was too unpopular as a spokesperson to ever be elected to any one post, in any one city. She’d found her niche by moving beyond any issue. “It’s not drugs, it’s dealing with the effects of drugs,” she’d say. Or “We live in a postrace society,” or “I don’t give a rat’s ass about Medicare and balanced budgets. I’m looking to the real balance in this country …” She was accustomed to cheers, and when the cheers weren’t loud enough for her as-told-to memoir in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Iowa City … she had her breakdown; she slashed her wrist in a hotel bathtub. The media stayed with the breakdown-and-suicide-attempt story. A television “newsmagazine” interviewed the limo driver who had chauffeured her the evening of the Breakdown. The limo driver was a middle-aged man, with a middleweight fighter’s broken face and a spreading belly tucked into dark suit pants. He said, “You hire a limo, you get a bar, you get a TV, a cell phone, a fax machine, but no tissues to weep into. When you arrive at the limo stage, tears is verboten. So, I offered the lady my handkerchief. A personal gesture. She needed it, too, I can tell you.”
I later saw the limo driver on Ricki Lake and Jenny Jones. He wore Armani suits on both. He talked of his childhood in Romania. “You need to have spent time in hell,” he informed the studio audience, “to really appreciate heaven.”
Pragmatic advice for all readers of the imaginary syndicated column “Dear Devi.” Use your ingenuity, hustle being at the right place at the right time to turn your two-bit anonymous life into cash-cow celebrity.
FOR GUILT-STRICKEN IN SAUSALITO: Please expect a personal response to your request.
The West Coast publicity office of Cindah Slater’s publisher’d been on the line, its fifth call, when Jess was angling for absolution. On the sixth call, the publicity people decided to cancel the rest of the Slater book tour because they couldn’t make the suicide-attempt story work to sell $24. 95 hardcovers. I spent half an office day canceling the memoirist’s Bay Area appointments. “Due to unforeseen developments …”: that was the line with the media, and with managers of bookstores.
The rest of my work that week was routine. I took messages, updated itineraries, tidied up Jess’s files and alphabetized clients’ books, starting with Ariana Ash, This Age of Decadence, and finishing with Herman Yanofsky, I Winked, the Stars Wobbled. I tried reading Ash’s novel, set in Manhattan. East Side, not Nicole’s or Angie’s West Village Manhattan. The back cover described Ash as “the Edith Wharton for the nineties,” but the thirty pages I scanned read like Martha Stewart hints on the care and feeding of East Side male availables. I tucked Ash back in her new niche on the top shelf, and pulled Yanofsky out of his cramped slot