eight years of living here, I’ve lost the sensation of my mother’s excited whisper and firm grip. Times Square came to mock me—symbolic of the dismissal I faced trying to make it as a writer. It was every rejection letter, every failed job interview, every face that chuckled when I revealed my dream, every horrible, soul-crushing temporary job. It led to my hating New York. Hating myself. I never felt the same energy of that day again.
Until now.
I count to ten to just “feel the energy,” giving my father at least that much, then blow into my cupped hands to warm them. Gloves! I have gloves. I find them in my coat pocket and put them on before scurrying west across Forty-Ninth Street. I have to get home to Hell’s Kitchen. I have to get home to tell Daniel and to be there when my agent calls.
I have to get home before I wake up.
I bound up the steps of our five-story walk-up, two at a time from floors one through three, then individually until I reach the top. On the fourth-floor landing, my messenger bag swings forward and I almost eat one of the steps that leads to our door. It’s then that I realize just how grungy our building is, the stairs thick with years of grime and grease from whatever unpleasant bits of the city people track in on their shoes. I brush myself off, but not the troubling realization that we really do live like this. It’s not at all suitable to entertain these new circles I may be traveling in. When I reach the apartment door, it’s locked. I mean, of course it’s locked. Even though this is David Dinkins’s New York, we’re not animals. Usually I have my keys in hand, but I ran up the stairs too quickly to retrieve them. I reach in my pocket and pull out a crumpled gum wrapper. Please tell me I wasn’t chewing gum during the meeting! I check my mouth. No gum. Breath not great, but no gum. This brings some small relief. I find my keys, but it takes me three attempts to open the door.
Inside, Daniel is lying on the couch.
“I was hoping that was you. I thought we were being burgled.” Daniel is the type of person who says “burgled” instead of “robbed,” and he’s not even a writer—or a lawyer. He directs theater. I stare at him, his maddeningly thick hair and dark features, unsure of what to say. Not what to say so much as how to begin to say it. Also because my heart is pounding from my sprint up the stairs and I taste something coppery and I may be having a stroke. “You’re not going to believe this.” He gestures toward our nineteen-inch television. “There’s another one.”
I start to catch my breath. “Another one what?”
“Another bimbo. It was just on CNN.”
“Another one?” Strike that. I don’t want to get engaged in conversation about politics, something I don’t particularly care about at this moment.
“I think this is the end of his campaign.” Daniel looks up at me and notices my chest heaving. “Jesus. Did you run up the stairs?”
And that’s when I break into a huge, cat-who-ate-the-canary kind of grin.
“What?” Daniel has this look on his face that I love. I remember he made it on our first date, maybe even in response to my smiling devilishly at him. Brown eyes wide, lips slightly parted, hinting at the whitest teeth behind them, one of his pronounced Latin eyebrows slightly higher than the other. Five years later, that look still slays me.
I shrug and grin more. I must look like the Joker. Or at least Jack Nicholson.
“You’re not going to defend him, I hope.”
“Clinton? Nope.” Then I burst out laughing. It’s orgasmic, like a release for the whole day.
“What, then?”
Daniel and I met when we were both trying to get rush tickets to the Broadway revival of Cabaret. I made a crack about Joel Grey getting top billing for playing the emcee. I mean, he had won an Oscar for the role, but he was still the emcee. Daniel overheard me gripe and said it was like reviving Grease as a starring vehicle for Doody and I laughed. I had noticed him earlier on line for the box office and wanted to sleep with him the moment I laid eyes on him. It was the way he jumped up and down while pleading for a ticket, any ticket, like a dog on its hind legs, begging for scraps. We were unsuccessful that day but left far from empty-handed.
I snap off the TV.
“I was watching that,” he protests.
“It’s CNN. It’s on all day.” I take off my gloves and my coat and throw them on the chair. “I think I sold my book.”
Daniel stares at the blank TV screen until that sinks in. “Wait, you what?”
“Well, the offer will go to my agent and I’m sure there will be some back-and-forth and we’ll have to come to some agreement on terms. He may be on the phone with them now. Did Allen call? And there’s work to be done on it still. Hard work, she called it. On the ending, mostly.” I bite my lip. “But … yeah. I think I sold my book.”
Daniel’s legs swing around and his feet plant firmly on the ground. He pushes himself up with his fists and hovers just over the couch, preparing to leap up if necessary. “To a publisher?”
“To a doorstop salesman.” If it’s going to take him so long to catch on to this bit of the news, the rest of it will be a Sisyphean task of explanation on my part.
“Obviously to a publisher. To a good publisher?” Daniel doesn’t leap, but at least he stands. “Who?”
The grin is back. This is going to knock his socks off. “I sold it to a giant.”
“A giant,” he says skeptically.
“That’s right.”
“A literary giant?”
“A GIANT giant.”
Daniel crosses over to me and puts his hands on my shoulders, concerned. I peripherally glance down at his hands. “Wait, I’ve heard this before,” he says. “You sold your book for a handful of magic beans.”
Daniel is going off the deep end. “What?”
“And we no longer have a cow. But I shouldn’t worry, because you’re going to grow a beanstalk!”
“No. Stop it. Not a giant. An icon. But I’m sure she hates that word. She’s a really big person.”
“Like, obese?”
This is coming out all wrong. “Okay, I’m ready to move on from this part. Jackie. I sold my book to Jackie!”
Daniel thinks on this for a minute. “Karen’s friend? The lesbian who works at Reader’s Digest?”
“KENNEDY. Jackie. Kennedy.”
He freezes. Finally. The reaction I was looking for. “Oh,” he says, quietly. But he’s still not quite there.
“Oh …” I repeat. And then I coax, “Na-ssis.”
Finally, magic happens. In unison: “Jackie … Kennedy … Onassis.”
It’s just like out of a movie, us saying it together: a scene that would strain credulity but would still be an audience favorite and get high marks in test screenings.
“Get out!” Daniel removes his hands from my shoulders and pushes me in the chest. Hard.
“Ow.”
“You’re kidding.”
“You just punched me in the sternum.”
“Jackie fucking Kennedy.”
“Onassis.