One Fifth Avenue - Candace Bushnell [77]
“It’s none of your business,” she said, adding, for good measure, a threatening, “if you know what I mean.”
“All you girls wear glasses now,” the young man continued on, unabated. “And you know they’re fake. How many twenty-two-year-olds need glasses? Glasses are for old people. It’s another one of those fake things that girls do.”
She sat back on her stool. “So?”
“So I was wondering if you were one of those fake girls. You look like a fake girl. But you might be real.”
“Why should you care?”
“I think you’re kind of cute?” he asked sarcastically. “Maybe you can give me your name, and I can leave you a message on Facebook?”
Lola gave him a cold, superior smile. “I already have a boyfriend, thanks.”
“Who said I wanted to be your boyfriend? Christ, girls in New York are so arrogant.”
“You’re pathetic,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “And look at you. You’re wearing designer clothes at a Starbucks, your hair is blown dry, and you have a spray tan. Probably from City Sun. They’re the only ones who do that particular shade of bronze.”
Lola wondered how this kid knew about the subtleties of spray tans. “And look at you,” she said in her most patronizing tone of voice. “You’re wearing plaid pants.”
“Vintage,” the kid said. “There’s a difference.”
Lola gathered her papers and stood up.
“Leaving?” the kid asked. “So soon?” He stood up and fished around in the back pocket of his hideous plaid pants. They were not even Burberry plaid, Lola thought, which she could have excused. He handed her a card. THAYER CORE, it read. In the bottom right-hand corner was a 212 phone number. “Now that you know my name, will you tell me yours?” he said.
“Why would I do that?” Lola asked.
“New York’s a tricky place,” he said. “And I’m the joker.”
9
A few weeks later, James Gooch sat in the office of his publisher. “Books are like movies now,” Redmon Richardly said, waving his hand as if to dismiss the whole lot. “You get as much publicity as you can, have a big first week, and then drop off from there. There’s no traction anymore. Not like the old days. The audience wants something new every week. And then there are the big corporations. All they care about is the bottom line. They push the publishers to get new product out there. Makes them feel like their people are doing something. It’s heinous, corporations controlling creativity. It’s worse than government propaganda.”
“Uh-huh,” James said. He looked around Redmon’s new office and felt sad. The old office used to be in a town house in the West Village, filled with manuscripts and books and frayed Oriental carpets that Redmon had taken from his grandmother’s house in the South. There was an old down-filled yellow couch that you sat on while you waited to see Redmon, and you leafed through a pile of magazines and watched the pretty girls go in and out. Redmon was considered one of the greats back then. He published new talent and edgy fiction, and his writers were going to be the future giants. Redmon made people believe in publishing for a while—up until about 1998, James reckoned, when the Internet began to take over.
James looked past Redmon and out the plate-glass window. There was a view of the Hudson River in the distance, but it was small consolation for the cold, generic space.
“What we’re publishing now is an entertainment product,” Redmon continued. Redmon hadn’t lost his ability to pontificate about nothing, James thought, and found comfort in this fact. “Oakland’s a perfect example. He’s not so great anymore, but it doesn’t matter. He still sells copies—even for him, not as many. But it’s the same story with everyone.” Redmon threw his hands into the air. “There’s no art anymore. Fiction used to be an art form. No more. Good, bad, it doesn’t matter. The public is only interested in the topic. ‘What’s it about?’ they ask. ‘Does it matter?’ I say. ‘It’s about life. All great books are about only one thing—life.’ But they don’t get that anymore. They want to know the topic. If it’s about shoes or abducted babies, they want to read it. And we don’t do that, James.