Spanish Disco (2 page)

“You’re a horrible liar. But I know it probably looks lovely wherever you have it.”

“Michael, why does inspiration only strike you in the middle of
my
night?”

My Mr. Coffee machine started making noises, and I willed it to brew faster.

“It’s very odd really. I go to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night absolutely certain of what must happen next. Oh…and showers. I get inspiration in the shower. And now, everyone else in London is getting ready for lunch, and I just have to finish this scene. It’s sad, really. I have a twenty-thousand-dollar antique cherrywood desk good enough for the queen herself, and I never write a damn word sitting at it.”

I knew he was sitting stark, raving naked in his bed, with his laptop and a hard-on for companionship.

“So your inspiration is that David is worrying about breakfast?”

“Yes. It’s the morning after he’s been denied tenure. He feels completely emasculated. And now, as an act of defiance, I see him having eggs.”

“Okay, then. Let him eat eggs.”

“What kind?”

“Michael, who the fuck cares what kind?”

“What kind? Would he eat poached eggs or scrambled?”

“I thought I mentioned sunny-side up with a side of bacon.”

“But that was an offhanded comment. I don’t think you really gave it much thought.”

“Poached.”

“You think so, really? What about eggs Benedict? Because then he would be eating all that wicked hollandaise sauce.”

“I don’t care, Michael. Give him hollandaise if it makes you happy. It’s four-thirty.”

“Is your coffee ready yet? You certainly are particularly crabby this morning.”

“Michael, I don’t know a single other editor who would put up with this kind of shit.”

“Precisely. Which is why you have authors eating out of the palm of your hand, and Louis O’Connor has the most successful small publishing house in the States.”

Eyeing the coffeemaker with lust, I smiled. “Coffee’s almost ready. I’ll be human soon.”

A minute or two later, I sat down at my kitchen table an ocean away from West Side Publishing’s most valuable
author. Michael clicked away on his keyboard, and I drank coffee and held his hand long distance as we worked through the scene. He’d been blocked. I knew he couldn’t get past the fourteenth chapter. Every book was the same. Somewhere in the middle he lost hope. He gave up. He got sick of his book, its plot, of his own characters. And then he didn’t work for a while until he had an epiphany—usually in the middle of
my
night—and called me and we talked for hours waiting for the sun to rise and, with it, the resolution of his crisis. Although I think it was an excuse to hear me talk about my nipples.

“Michael,” I yawned two hours later, “the sun is rising.”

“Tell me about it,” he whispered.

I stepped out onto my balcony, facing the view a Boca Raton condo can buy. “Well, the Atlantic’s really calm this morning—a beautiful azure blue. I see a seagull gliding lazily and a pelican swooping down. The sun is just peeking—the horizon is pink and purple and still midnight a little. The crescent moon is sharing the sky with the beginning of the sun. And here it comes…. God, it’s beautiful, Michael.”

The salty breeze kissed my face.

“You give good sunrise, Cassie.”

“Well, if it weren’t for you, I’d never see them, so I guess I should thank you. But I won’t. I’m going back to bed.”

“You’ve had a pot of coffee. Aren’t you wired?”

“No. Good night, Michael.”

“Good morning, Cassie. You are the bloody best. Thank you.”

“May the next time I hear your voice be after lunch.”

I hung up and ran a hand through my bedhead of messy black curls. I padded back to my room, drew the blinds tighter and dropped my robe, crawling sensuously beneath my sheets. I loved the decadence of going back to bed. I picked up the phone and dialed the office, pressing extension 303.

“Lou…it’s me. Michael Pearton had another pre-dawn meltdown. We were on the phone discussing his main character’s menu choices ’til just now. It’s 6:30. I’m exhausted. I won’t be in until at least noon if you’re lucky.”

I shut my eyes and thought I’d skip the whole day at the office. My boss let me work three days at home, thanks to voice mail and e-mail, and his sheer adoration of me. I was supposed to go in on Fridays, but the hell with it. I turned the ringer off on my phone. Sleep returned quickly. I dreamed of swimming in pools of hollandaise.

At 11:00, the phone rang, muffled, out in the kitchen. I could hear the caller ignoring the fact that I wasn’t answering. I heard four rings, a voice speaking. Hang up. Four rings. Voice speaking. Hang up. Four rings…

“Oh for God’s sake, what do you want, Lou?” I finally snatched the receiver next to my bed.

“How’d you know…”

“You’re the only person stubborn enough to do that, Lou.”

“I need you in here today.”

“Sorry. I put in my hours with the ever-neurotic Englishman last night. Or actually, this morning, but you know what I mean. I’ll be in on Monday.”

“This is big.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bigger than Stephen King, big. This could make me millions. Your bonus could send you into early retirement.”

“So who is it?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“Lou…this isn’t high school. Not that I think you ever went to high school. You were born eating your young.”

“Cassie, my dear, you come and go out of here as the diva you are. But this one time, I’m telling you to get up, get dressed, and meet me at the office. I will mainline you a pot of coffee.”

“This better be worth it.”

“It is. In spades.”

I climbed out of bed, still far too early for my taste. In the kitchen, I dumped out the grinds in Mr. Coffee, the only man in my condo in the last year and a half, and put on my second pot of the day. After a hot shower, a dab of crimson lipstick, and a sort of shaggy-dog shaking of my hair, I dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, threw a linen blazer on, and headed down Florida’s A1A ocean highway to West Side’s offices.

I’m not sure how it is I came to live in a land of pink palaces and perpetual sunshine. It doesn’t suit my personality. But when Lou moved down here from New York, he took me with him. He came for the fishing and the sunshine. He came to get away from New York after Helen died. And I came because he did.

I climbed out of my mint-condition Cadillac that I
bought for a song from the estate of an elderly man who had died. His kids wanted cash. Bargains abound in Florida if you don’t mind owning stuff that belonged to dead people. When Lou first saw it, he thought I was nuts. “A banana-yellow Caddy? You like driving fruit?” But I have claustrophobia. I drive luxury land tanks.

Pressing the elevator button for the seventh floor, I rode up in glass to West Side’s offices.

“Morning, Cassie,” Troy, the receptionist/junior editor, greeted me.

“Mornin’,” I mumbled.

“You look a fright.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. Coffee?”

“Intravenous.”

“You got it.” He held out a mug. “Start with this cup, and I’ll bring a fresh one in as soon as it’s brewed.”

I opened the door to Lou’s office without knocking.

“This better be worth it. I’m feeling
very
bitchy today,” I said, putting the mug down on a mahogany coffee table covered with books West Side had published, and flopping onto a long, buttercream leather couch.

“And how is this different from any other day?”

“If I wanted insults, I would call my mother.”

“Guess who called me in the middle of the night?”

“What is it with authors and the middle of the night, Lou?”

“Indulge me.”

“John Updike?”

“Bigger.”

“I have no clue,” I leaned up on one elbow and took a swig of coffee.

He took the unlit cigar he had in his mouth and set it in his Waterford ashtray.

“Roland Riggs.”

“Holy shit!” I said, as hot coffee sprayed out of my mouth.

2

L
ou smiled at me. “I thought that would grab ya!”

The shock hit me as I mopped at coffee dribbling down my chin. I managed to sputter, “What’d he want?”

“You
do
know my famous Roland Riggs story, right?”

“Do I know it? I’ve been subjected to your Roland Riggs story at every cocktail party you and I have ever attended together. Worse, I’ve been subjected to it secondhand from people who have heard the story and feel the need to tell me. They usually embellish it.”

Troy came in with my second cup of coffee.

“Thanks.” I sucked down a long swig, burning my tongue.

After Troy shut the door, Lou feigned hurt feelings, “All right. So you’ve heard the story. Well…Roland Riggs calls me up in the middle of the night and says—get this— ‘Lou, I guess I was wrong about the computer.’”

Lou’s Roland Riggs story was this: In 1968, Lou was on a fishing trip in Key West. He caught not a single tuna after two days of deep-sea fishing with Key West’s best captain, and he decided to forget the mahi-mahi and settle in for a nice, long beer binge. Lou was sitting at an outdoor patio bar downing a bottle of imported German beer when a disheveled guy about Lou’s age sat down next to him and said, “The Germans are the only ones who can brew beer that doesn’t taste like piss.”

Lou was already a publishing hotshot back then. He knew it was Riggs, even though the author had grown a full beard since his back jacket photo was taken. Roland Riggs, even then, was considered the voice of a generation. He was notoriously moody with his publisher, but he wrote
Simple Simon
and the world had been waiting to see what he would do next. The book sold out of every printing and still does a brisk business. It’s required reading in nearly every high school English course. Roland Riggs hit the lottery with his tale of lonesome angst and war and the end of the 1950s and all its innocence and conformity and fumbled sex in the back of Dad’s borrowed car.

The two of them started talking. They began with Riggs’s dissertation on German brew-making skills. They moved on to discuss women (discovering they both preferred moody brunettes), music (they both despised anything pseudo-folkish with a tambourine in it), books (no one but Riggs, Faulkner, and Hemingway was worth a
damn), society’s ills (marijuana should be legalized), the price of fame (people like Riggs needed to grow ridiculous beards to avoid strangers accosting them) and the cost of the Vietnam war (the soul of the United States). They started talking on a Friday night at ten o’clock and didn’t stop until lunch on Sunday. The last words of their conversation were about the future of technology.

Lou said, “Mark my word, Riggs, one day everyone is going to have a computer—even you. It’s gonna change the way we do everything. Even publish books.”

Riggs had stared out at the ocean, his blue eyes mirroring its color. “I’ll never give up my typewriter, Lou. You’ve had too much German beer.”

With that, the brilliant Roland Riggs stood up, bowed to Lou, and walked down to the turquoise, smooth ocean. He took off his shirt and dove into the water. After splashing about for ten minutes or so, he came out, shook himself like a shaggy dog, and walked, bare-chested, down the beach and out of sight.

“After thirty-some-odd years, Roland Riggs remembered the last words of your conversation?”

“It was a life-changing weekend, Cassie. I remember it.”

“You remember it because it was Roland Riggs. But if he was some faceless beachcomber, you wouldn’t remember a word of it.”

“You underestimate me.” Lou stood and crossed the room, barefoot, to his bookshelf. When Lou moved to Florida, he gave up suits. And shoes. He wore flip-flops to
the office and then took them off once inside West Side’s plush, royal-purple-carpeted suite. He encouraged bare-footedness in all his employees: “It’s good for the sole…get it?”

He pulled down his worn copy of
Simple Simon.

“This book changed people’s lives.”

“Lou, where’s your cynicism? One call from this guy and you’re misty-eyed. A generation of child-men went through a war, and he gave them a voice. But life-changing? This from the man who gave a contract to Eliza James because she claimed to have sucked Lyndon Johnson’s dick.”

“You’re too young to appreciate what this book meant. I remember people weeping over this damn book. Let Stephen King do that.”

“Danielle Steel makes people weep.”

“Danielle Steel, even with a brain transplant, could never win the Pulitzer.”

“Fine. I concede the book was important. Brilliant. But when I read news stories about 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 work
ing 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.