Spanish Disco. Erica Orloff
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Riggs I feel sorry for him. He hated the attention.”
Young men, legless and haunted after Vietnam, camped out in front of the Manhattan apartment where Riggs lived. Their pictures, in their wheelchairs lined up outside his Upper Eastside address, made Life magazine. They wrote him bags of mail. But Riggs seemed spooked by the attention his book garnered. He had his glamorous young wife, Maxine, and she was all he needed. Or wanted. They pulled up stakes and moved to rural Maine. He was working on his next book. That would be how he communicated with his public. Through his words. And he would have kept communicating if Maxine hadn’t been killed.
Maxine was the literary world’s equivalent of Jackie Kennedy. An eighteen-year-old free spirit when they met, she married the handsome, long-haired Riggs when she was nineteen and he was thirty. With long black hair and eyes described as emerald-colored, she dressed with grace and style, and beguiled the rare interviewer with witty comments and an infectious laugh. But after the veterans started seeking them out, Maxine and Riggs retreated to their home and sightings of them became gossip column fodder.
The papers reported it as a tragic accident. She had been standing outside the back door of their white clapboard house, when a trespassing deer hunter shot her. One minute she had smiled at Roland, saying she would go pick them some tomatoes for their dinner salad. The next she was a bloody heap a few feet from her carefully tended garden. Deer bullets leave gaping holes. The hunter never came forward. No one was ever charged.
Roland Riggs’s hair had turned completely white by her funeral. He aged ten years in four days. Within a week, he closed up his house in Maine and took off for parts unknown. He never published his next book. He never spoke to the press. He was never heard from again by anyone but his editor. Then his editor died of old age, and no one heard from him except his publisher’s royalty department.
“He said I’d understand,” Lou looked down at the dust cover to Simple Simon. “He read the article in Publisher’s Weekly about West Side. How I came here after Helen died. Cassie, he wants me…us…to publish his next book.”
I thought, briefly, of falling off the couch for effect, but I stayed in my seat and struggled to sound intelligent. “Why you? Because you’re a widower?”
I stared at Lou. What little hair he had left was silver, and he wore gold wire-rimmed glasses. Short, with a slender build, he would be thought of as elegant. Until someone heard him open his mouth. Then “New Yawkese” came flying out. “Fuck if I know, really, kid. He talked about that night in Key West. How we had a connection. He talked about finding his wife by their garden. He said, ‘I’ve been living with her ghost for over twenty years. She never leaves me. And it never gets better.’” Lou looked up at me. “That’s how I feel about Helen.”
“I know,” I whispered.
“So he doesn’t want some faceless schlub somewhere handling his book. He wants me. West Side. Us. If he reads PW, he knows how publishers just gobble each other up. Soon, there’s just going to be one giant God damn publishing house, and every book will be owned by the same fucking conglomerate. In this day and age, no one will give him the kind of attention he deserves.”
“Bullshit. This is Riggs. This is the encore to Simple Simon. Publishers would sign their souls over to Satan for a chance to publish it. Just show ’em the dotted line.”
“That would imply that they have souls.”
“They’d give him a two-million-dollar advance. They would. What kind of advance can you give him? Our standard fifteen thousand?”
“Well…actually, he doesn’t want an advance. He just wants a lot of control.”
“Control?”
“Specifically?” He raised his eyebrows, something he does when he’s about to tell me news I may not like. Raised eyebrows, edit this book in two weeks.
“He wants you to edit his book.”
My heart stopped beating, I think, and in the silence I heard the clock on Lou’s shelf ticking.
“Me?” I started breathing again. “He’s heard of me?”
“You were in the article in PW.”
“I’m flattered, but it’s not as if I’d let you give his book to anyone else.”
“Glad you feel that way.” Pause. Raised eyebrows. “Because he wants you to go stay with him while you do it.”
“What?” I put my mug of coffee down.
“Yeah. He wants you to move in for a month. Really hash it out.”
“Hash it out?”
Lou shrugged.
“Hash it out with Roland Riggs? You don’t hash things out with a Pulitzer-prize-winning genius.”
“A minute ago you were griping that Simple Simon meant nothing. That it didn’t change people. That they’d weep over my laundry list.”
“A minute ago, I wasn’t Roland Riggs’s new editor. A minute ago, I wasn’t leaving my beachfront condo for who knows where to go live with this recluse, who, for all I know, is certifiable after all these years. Christ, he called you up in the middle of the night mid-stream in a thirty-year-old conversation.”
“Cass, even if he is certifiable, you’d chew him up and spit him out with your first cup of coffee. Besides, you’ve handled Michael Pearton. He’s not exactly small potatoes. He’s hit the New York Times bestseller list. Albeit infrequently. God, he takes a long time to write a book. Anyway, Pearton’s kind of weird. How bad could Riggs be?”
“Michael’s different.”
“Yeah. You give him phone sex.”
“You know, I told you that over a pitcher of margaritas, and you insist on throwing it in my face every chance you can slip it into a conversation.”
“I think it’s funny.”
“Funny? The guy calls me at three in the morning. He won’t let me be. He hounds me with e-mail.”
“And he’s made you and me rich.”
“Technically, you’re a lot richer than I am.”
“But for thirty-three years old, you ain’t doing so bad. And that’s nothing compared to what Roland Riggs can do for you.”
“And you.”
“Sure. But it’s not about the money. It’s about Simple Simon. It’s about closure for an entire generation of people who read his book and can’t forget it.”
“Maybe an encore isn’t so smart.”
“Maybe it is.”
“Lou, what did Simple Simon mean to you? Maybe that’s what some of this is about.”
He looked away.
“Okay, Lou. You don’t want to look at that, fine. But it’s not like I can just leave all my other authors and books for a month.”
“We have e-mail. Take your laptop. You’re not in the office all that much anyway. The guy has a phone.”
“I don’t know. It just sounds…weird.”
“It’s not like you’ll be living in a shack somewhere.”
“Well, where will I be going?”
“He has a big house over on Sanibel Island.”
“Sanibel? I’ll die there.”
Sanibel is a tiny spit of an island off the West Coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico. The Old Guard are strict about development. No high-level condos. No good rye bread. No NY-style cheesecake. No nightlife. Lord knows what kind of coffee I could get there.
“He has a housekeeper who doubles as his personal chef. He’s right on the beach.