Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [42]
Nell had been Oona’s editor in those days. She was already freelancing, ping-ponging her way among publishers caught short-handed. She’d carved a medium-sized niche for herself – she was known for working wonders with not-yet-publishable raw material, and for getting things in on time, and for not charging too much, and for fielding midnight calls from drunken authors with encouragement and tact and a form of murmuring that passed for understanding. Usually she edited novels. She’d taken on Oona’s book as a trade-off for a publisher pal of hers, an old lover, in point of fact; he’d offered a plum in return for the root vegetable he considered Oona’s book to be.
Yet Oona’s book was the kind that publishers wanted, because it could potentially make money. In the time left over from her day job, which was as office manager for a smallish magazine, Oona had written a Superwoman self-help manual called Femagician, about how to juggle a career and a family and still find time for personal beauty routines and for remodelling the den. It was a subject that was fashionable just then, and the publisher was in a hurry: such waves had to be surfed before they’d passed by. They were counting on Nell – said her pal – to wrestle the book into shape in double-quick time.
Nell had spent many hours with Oona, recasting chapters and reorganizing paragraphs and suggesting fresh details and additions and deletions. She was surprised to find that, despite her outward appearance – briskness, tidiness, smiling capability – Oona’s mind was like a sock drawer into which a number of disparate things had been shoved. There was a lot of jumble.
At the end of the editing process, the thing had been practically a different book, and certainly a better one, for which Oona had said she was grateful. She’d expressed this gratitude in the Acknowledgements section, and then again, in pen and ink, on the title page of the copy she’d given to Nell. For invaluable Nell, the rewrite queen – the power behind the scenes. Love, Oona. Nell had been pleased, because she admired Oona quite a lot, and looked up to her as an older woman who’d got her life figured out, unlike Nell herself.
The book had been a success, or what was considered a success then. Oona had been interviewed, not only in newspapers and on radio, but on television as well, on the kinds of morning chat shows for women that existed at that time. She’d become moderately and, as it turned out, temporarily famous. In the context of Oona’s life – the editing sessions with Nell, and then the book’s publication and its aftermath – Nell had seen Tig as an indistinct form, a shadow in the background. Nell had known nothing about Tig then, and nothing about the submerged horrors of the marriage: she was far outside the circle of friends who were in on the civilized arrangement.
In public, Oona’d had nothing but praise for Tig. He’d been so supportive of her career, she’d said. He helped with the grocery shopping, he did a lot of the cooking, he stayed with the kids when Oona was otherwise occupied, and all of that in addition to his job at the radio station where he worked as a producer of documentaries and interviews. Unlike the jealous monsters that turned up in newspaper headlines for beating their wives to death with crowbars or drowning them in the bathtub, he was entirely in favour of her having a life of her own.
The two of them had appeared, glossily coloured, in the pictures taken for a magazine article. They were pretending to cook a meal together – possibly not even pretending. Oona was stately in a loose caftan garment, a necklace of uncut amber around her neck, Tig large and ruggedly casual in a vest and shirt sleeves. The magazine was a women’s magazine, so shots of the kitchen were featured. A raw turkey was posed between them, with carrots and potatoes and celery stalks