I take out my phone and snap a quick picture of the couple in profile, of their glowing candlelit picnic. I’m about to send it to Ryan, because this will be us one day.
But then I imagine him at his senator’s birthday dinner in D.C., the one I was supposed to attend. How he might not be pleased to get this photo.
I put my phone away. I blow a kiss to Edward and Elizabeth, then jog toward home in the New York night.
* * *
“I’m about to tell you something,” I say to BD the next morning over brunch at an Ethiopian restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen. “But first I need to swear you to secrecy.”
BD puts down her menu and smiles. “This is why I need to come to New York more often. Do you know the last time your father or your brother started off a conversation half so well? I think Hillary’s husband was in office.”
BD’s in town for just a few hours, passing through the city on a road trip with a group of friends she calls the League of Widows. This afternoon, they’re on their way to Niagara Falls.
I was up all night debating whether I should say what I’m about to say. But if I hadn’t canceled my D.C. weekend with Ryan to meet with Noa Callaway, then I wouldn’t have gotten to see BD at all. So in a way, it feels like it was meant to be that my grandmother is here when I need her most.
“You joke, but—” I say.
“I joke, but I’m dead serious. In the way only an octogenarian can be. You can trust me with your confidence, Elaine.”
“Thank you.” My eyes fill with tears.
BD scoots her chair around the table to be nearer to me. She holds my hands. Hers are always cold and smooth, and she wears about eighteen thousand very nice rings.
“Honey. Is it Ryan?”
“What? No. Everything’s fine with Ryan,” I say. “It’s . . . Noa Callaway. I met Noa Callaway.”
I swallow and meet my grandmother’s wide eyes. BD has been a fan of Noa’s almost as long as I have, ever since I bought her Ninety-Nine Things a decade ago in large print.
“She’s a he,” I say and hang my head. “A man. And not the good kind.”
“Well, that’s a third-degree doozy.” BD tosses her napkin on the table, as if she’s just lost her appetite.
I, on the other hand, have started stress-eating. I grab a huge wedge of injera and sweep up a mound of spicy chicken doro wat.
“Okay, where do we begin?” she says.
“We could begin with the fact that the whole reason I got into publishing is because of Noa Callaway, and it turns out she’s a lie,” I say with my mouth full. “Now I’m an accomplice, and Peony is profiting off the misconception that our biggest author is a woman.”
“Go back, go back.” BD waves her hand. “Let’s work our way up to moral depravity—”
“But morally, I am violating the trust of millions of readers! Can I even call myself a feminist?”
My grandmother pats my arm. “I don’t think Gloria Steinem is coming to take your card away just yet,” she says, then pauses to think. “Another way of looking at what happened is the classic you-met-your-hero, Lanie. Why don’t you slow down and tell me about it?”
“Ugh,” I say, as the memory flows back into my mind. “His real name is Noah Ross. He’s a mid-thirties narcissist with a smug smile and a completely reckless disregard for the fact that he’s four months late on his next manuscript. He doesn’t seem to grasp that even if it doesn’t matter to him whether he writes another book, it matters to a whole lot of other people. It matters to me.”
“What makes you so sure he’s not working on this book?”
“Because yesterday I told him to send me what he had so far.” I push back from the table. “Radio silence.”
“So.” BD raps her long nails on the table. “Noa Callaway is a putz, and he’s got writer’s block, just in time for your provisional promotion. This is not good.”
“I keep coming back to the moment when I finally understood who he was. We were at the chess house in Central Park. And this thing passed between us. It was like both of us knew everything was about to change—and not for the better.”
“So, you weren’t the only one nervous about the reveal?”
“He wasn’t nervous,” I say. “He was ice-cold. He brought me to a location that meant something to us both—you know, our online chess games?”
“Legendary,” she concedes.
“And then he played me like a fiddle.”
“A pawn would be a more apt metaphor, here, Editor.”
“Whatever! He also mocked my suit!”
BD’s brows shoot up. “The Fendi?”
I nod, daring BD to defend him now. “Characterizing, wouldn’t you say?” I sigh. “I wore it because I think I was expecting him to be more like . . . you. Less like . . . himself. Honestly, it’s hard for me to remember now who or what I’d been expecting. Oh, BD, why couldn’t it have been you?”
“Well, I’m flattered, but I can’t say I’m surprised.”
“Really?” I say, amazed. “You’ve read all Noa’s books. You’re honestly telling me you suspected Noa Callaway had a . . . you know . . .”
“You can say penis to your grandmother, Lanie.”
“Oh jeez. Fine. Penis.”
“Manhood,” BD says.
“Dick.” I put my head on the table. She runs her nails along my shoulder like she did when I was little, and it helps.
“All I’m suggesting is,” she says, “there’s a reason he’s been hiding behind a pseudonym.”
“I wish I knew what that reason was,” I say, lifting my head off the table. “It might make him seem more human. Less like the Great Red Spot of Jupiter settling permanently over my life. Then again, knowing my luck, I’d probably discover things about him that would only make me hate him more. Can you believe, he actually asked me why it bothers me to find out he’s a man?”
“Did you have an answer?”
I sigh. “It made me think of something Ryan said once, at a work party I brought him to. About how the whole point of fiction is that it’s a lie.” I grimace, remembering. “It didn’t score huge points with Sue. But you know, Ryan’s bookshelves are crammed with biographies of Great Men. He and his friends all quote from the same texts. They read them like technical manuals, how-to guides to Become Great. I think it lets them fantasize that someday, the story of their lives will be interesting enough for other men to want to read.”