Pug Hill - Alison Pace [53]
“Are you working on another novel now?” I ask. “Yes”—big exhale—“I was about half way through my second novel, No Yellow, and it was really fucking brilliant, but ...” She trails off and stares into her bourbon.
“But, what, it didn’t sell or whatever?” Alec pipes in. “No, uh, it sold. It sold on a proposal,” she answers back quickly, haughtily. “It’s just, I, uh ... I lost it. It got erased.”
“Dude,” Alec says. Amy looks at her hands. “Yeah, so I have to write it again. I mean I have parts of it that I e-mailed to myself for safe keeping, it’s just, the majority of it was on my laptop and I spilled, uh, a glass of water on my laptop.” Her eyes tear up. “Accidentally, of course.”
Alec says, “Dude, that’s fucked up.”
“Yeah,” she says, nodding her head slowly.
“Didn’t you have it backed up anywhere?” I ask, and the way she looks at me says, really succinctly, “No,” and also, “Do you have any idea how many people have asked me that?”
“Do you have any idea how many people have asked me that?” she says, just in case I missed the point.
“I’m sorry,” I say, “that was a dumb thing to say,” and Amy looks like she might start yelling.
“Dude, it was a dumb thing to do. Uh, no offense, Amy.” She looks at me with squinty eyes, turns in her chair a bit to look at Alec, she takes another deep breath, lets it out.
“It was really fucking brilliant, and now it’s just really fucking depressing,” she explains again, and though everything about her seems so utterly pessimistic in tone and in feel, I can’t help thinking that somewhere at least, she must be really optimistic in spirit, to come to a public speaking class to prepare for reading a book out loud that hasn’t yet been written.
“So are you just working on the second book now?” I ask.
“Yeah, mostly, it’s just, you know, it’s hard. I write for magazines, too.”
“Dude, no way, I love magazines, what sort of things do you write about?
“Trends, mostly. In New York,” Amy says, haughty again, and again I think I don’t really like her. I contemplate angling my chair the other way, joining into the other conversation, happy the chair I am in has left me with some options. I look across the table: Martine is speaking quickly, making quick circles in the air in front of her breasts; Lawrence is smiling brightly, looking not so much at her as off into the distance. Amy, I think, is better than the alternative.
“Did you ever want to be anything other than a novelist?” Alec asks her. It seems it has yet to occur to Amy that she could, and probably should, ask us some questions, too.
“What?” She hisses.
“Did you ever want to be anything other than a novelist?” Alec repeats.
“Yeah,” she says wistfully, “thin.” I think that I may have more in common with Amy than I’d care to acknowledge, and that is most definitely a bad thing. I also think that maybe I should jump in here, that maybe we need to change the subject, before any further similarities reveal themselves to me.
“Well, what are you guys going to read next week?” I ask.
Amy answers first, “I’m going to read a haiku I wrote, it’s about despair.”
Right, right, I think.
“I don’t know, maybe I’ll just read a paragraph or two from The Da Vinci Code, that’s my favorite book of all time. How great was that book?” Alec asks us, bursting with enthusiasm.
“They never went to the bathroom,” I say. “Every minute was accounted for, every second, and they never went to the bathroom.”
Amy puts her face in her hands, rubs vigorously for a moment up and down. She tilts her head back, leaving her hands on her throat and says, loudly, to the ceiling, “I cannot believe it has come to this. I cannot believe I am part of a conversation that is debating the merits of that commercial piece of crap, The Da Vinci Code.” Amy spits a little as she says this, and then reaches quickly for her bourbon, taking a big sip and turning away from Alec, to me, “That’s not your favorite book also, is it?”
“No,” I say, and really, it wasn’t. I