Page 7

Chapter Seven

The Mighty Pages office is housed in a renovated triplex in SoHo.

I stand on the sidewalk and look up at the etched door.

The building is a beautiful old brownstone that has been tuck-pointed and renovated with new windows. You’d think Carrie Bradshaw might come bounding down the stairs in Gucci, a latte in her hands, late for an appointment.

My parents wouldn’t publish Candace Bushnell novels, though.

Perhaps that is why—in a world where romance and feel-good books have come storming back—The Mighty Pages is not as mighty.

But they do have a knack for spending money like Carrie.

My parents scored this place in a cool neighborhood long ago, just as it was becoming gentrified, when funky art galleries and restaurants lined the narrow cobblestone streets. And they got it for a steal—I mean, relatively speaking as nothing in New York is a bargain—just like they did their prewar apartment on the Upper East Side. A woman had died in it. That didn’t scare my parents off the way it did other potential buyers.

I think a terrible thought: my parents have always seen someone’s death as opportunity.

GiGi made a lot of money in her life, but she was not ostentatious. She never showed her wealth. A perfect summer day for her was reading on the beach, burgers on the grill and a glass of wine at sunset. She didn’t need a second home to go to in the winter months, though she could have afforded it. She didn’t wear designer labels. She preferred to make dinner at home in jeans than reservations at a fancy restaurant.

Her difficult childhood, early loss and bringing in boarders kept her grounded.

My parents do not talk money with me. I wonder if they even talk about it with each other.

“It’s gauche to discuss numbers,” my mother is fond of saying. “We have people for that.”

However, they sure like to spend it, and I’m starting to wonder if their “people” know how to count. I don’t know how they convinced GiGi to spend a big chunk of their inheritance to fund this life in the city, and I will never know why she agreed to it. The taxes and overhead on this building as well as the taxes and monthly association fees for their apartment must be eating a big hole in the remaining trust.

Does that worry me for selfish reasons? Of course.

Does it bother me that they have treated GiGi’s legacy with such disregard? Yes.

I’ve seen the articles in the trades. The Mighty Pages is struggling. Sales are down. Profits are down. Costs and expenses are up. The big publishers have gotten even bigger, gobbling up rivals and smaller presses like Pac-Man.

But all publishers are facing challenges. All have had downturns in sales post-Covid. But publishing also loves to wring its collective hands. I mean, it wasn’t too long ago that publishers believed the success of ebooks meant the certain death of print books.

But everything comes full circle.

I suddenly remember the call I inadvertently received from the Student Accounts department my junior year after GiGi passed away, stating I was not a student “in good standing” as my fall tuition payment was delinquent.

Alarmed, I gave them my parents’ number, and my mother assured me it was just an oversight due to the stress and magnitude of dealing with GiGi’s trust.

I believed her, but then I overheard my parents—after a few glasses of wine that summer—discuss selling the cottage.

I again attributed it to grief and stress, to their growing love of the Hamptons and desire to leave Michigan behind.

But now it’s hard not to wonder if my perfect parents’ publishing house is really just a house of cards right now, and one strong gust is going to crush the King and Queen of Diamonds.

I move out of the way of a swarm of shoppers.

Although most tried-and-true New Yorkers tend to avoid this packed neighborhood and its luxury designer boutiques on most summer days, my parents’ building would sell for twice what they paid.

But they could never do that. They will always try to save face. Image is everything.

They started their publishing house in SoHo long before Gen Z associated SoHo with the cool kid SoHo Houses that have popped up all over the US.

I head up the stairs, stop to look at my reflection in the glass of the front door.

I smooth the wrinkles out of my blouse. I am wearing nice slacks, flared at the bottom, a sensible shoe for walking in New York, and a pretty pink blouse with some of GiGi’s vintage jewelry.

I feel as if I look very “literary” just for my mom. Yes, I am understated, but for my New York interviews, I want my résumé and answers to serve as my style guide.

I open the doors, a whoosh of cool air, classical music and the scent of lemons washes over me.

My mother is near.

I head to the front desk. It’s a massive, old wooden desk—like one that Mr. Potter sat behind in my grandma’s favorite Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life —polished until it gleamed like a Chris-Craft boat. This is Herman Wouk’s writing desk. You can still see his words etched in the wood from his handwriting.

He was the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Caine Mutiny who became known as the king of television miniseries in the 1980s with his monumental war novels, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance . My father was a huge fan of his—an author he deemed the perfect mix of literary and commercial—and he paid a pretty penny to buy the desk and have it shipped to New York.

“May I help you?”

A young woman who is as glammed up as a Kardashian at the Met Ball greets me.

“Hi, I’m Emma. I have an appointment to see Piper Page.”

She doesn’t acknowledge me as much as she looks through me. I’m human glass. I look at the name plaque sitting on the desk.

“Elizabeth?” I ask sweetly to get her attention. “I’m here for an interview.”

She taps on her computer screen with a very ornate nail.

I suddenly think of my sister’s nails and the New Age GiGi advice she gave me long ago about women, money and manicures.

“Old money—even young women with old money—doesn’t deign to do anything crazy with their nails. No extensions, no color, maybe a beigey-pink color,” Jess told me. “That’s because your nails equate to your money. You don’t have to scream to be noticed.”

I look at my nails. They are beigey pink.

“New money,” Jess said, “will go for a little more attention, perhaps an Aprés extension on her nails with a chrome dusting to mimic the sparkle of the sand on a summer day. They don’t have the history of their great-great-grandmothers whispering in their ears to tone it down.”

She concluded: “For women seeking attention—read, a man—nail art is life. She lives for color in order to be noticed, and her nails would be, let’s say, a DayGlo yellow with painted white daisies on the tips.”

I glance at Elizabeth’s nails as she pecks away.

Yellow with daisies.

I’m shocked my mother isn’t aghast at this, but Elizabeth would stop a man—or angry bill collector—in his tracks.

The irony is that Jess is newer money pretending to be old money in order to appeal to a group of want-money women who aspire to be her.

I wait for Elizabeth to tell me that my mother will be coming, and ask if I would like something to drink while I take a seat. But my generation is not the best at interpersonal communication. She is still focused on her screen, then the ringing phone and then her cell.

Finally, she looks at me, a long once-over, and I feel like I want to disappear into thin air, become ether. She nods toward the reception area.

I turn.

The first floor of The Mighty Pages is more Louis Vuitton showroom in Paris than “reception area.”

It is artful.

Illuminated shelves are filled with books, covers out. These are The Mighty Pages’ current books and biggest sellers.

I take a seat on a luxurious leather couch that rests atop a Persian rug that covers the gleaming wood floor. Little side tables with beautiful reading lights and the newest releases are placed just so.

French doors lead to a generous—by New York standards, anyway—patio. At night, this space is transformed into an ethereal literary hot spot, the trees wrapped in lights, tuxedoed waiters serving champagne, hushed talk about the book business. Sunlight shines through the trees, glints into the office and the book covers look burnished in gold.

“Emma!”

I turn, and my mother glides toward me.

She is wearing a short sun-yellow capped-sleeve dress that’s so formfitting it looks as if she stepped into a can of curb paint. Her hair is tousled perfectly. The sun glints off her ears.

My mother is wearing GiGi’s favorite diamond stud earrings.

She looks so happy and confident.

This is my mother’s world, my mother’s home, my mother’s city, far away from Michigan, where she’s always seemed so uncomfortable, her past a relentless deer fly that tracks her no matter how far or fast she runs.

Small-town Piper Brown wanted to turn the page on her life.

And she did.

Deep inside, I’m so proud of her for that. Everyone deserves to be the heroine in their own story, and my mother certainly wrote herself a grand tale.

I only wish she would tell that tale to the world.

“You look gorgeous as usual, Mother,” I say.

“Thank you,” she says, holding out her arms to hug the space between us and kiss the air.

Elizabeth stands and rushes over.

“I see you’ve met my daughter Emma,” my mother says. “Elizabeth is a rising senior at Columbia.”

Elizabeth’s heavily made-up face droops as she puts the pieces of the Page puzzle together.

My…daughter… Emma.

“Would you care for anything to drink?” she now asks me.

I shake my head.

“Elizabeth has taken very good care of me,” I say.

Her eyes widen.

I smile as if to say, I have your back. Women should always have each other’s back.

My mother beams and claps her hands together, pleased. When she does, it’s as if she is actually squeezing fresh lemons.

“You smell as amazing as you look, too,” I add, turning to my mother.

This pleases her even more. She cocks her head, taken aback by my compliments.

“Well, thank you, sweetheart. I’m wearing Acqua di Parma, one of my summer signatures. I think it’s the ideal summer perfume. Rich in Sicilian citrus.”

“Oh, so lemony with the hidden power of preventing scurvy,” I say, recalling the joke I told to the bartender that now seems so long ago. “That should be their new advertising slogan, don’t you think?”

Elizabeth blinks.

“My daughter has a very unusual and self-deprecating sense of humor,” my mother says. “You’ll never quite get used to it, no matter how long you’re around her.” My mother winks at me to soften her insult.

“Especially if she decides to work with us,” my mother adds.

“Do you want to be a writer?” Elizabeth asks me.

I open my mouth to answer, but my mother cuts me off at the pass. “Elizabeth is a very gifted writer, Emma,” she says. “She hopes to be published soon after she graduates.” My mother beams. “I’d love for us to be her home.”

If this were Yellowstone , Beth Dutton just stuck a knife into her unsuspecting victim’s heart.

“Oh?” I manage to say. “What are you working on?”

“I’m doing a modern take on Lord of the Flies but with women,” Elizabeth says.

“I think that’s called high school,” I joke.

She looks at me, bewildered.

“There’s her odd sense of humor again, Elizabeth. It’s like liver paté. It’s deliciously rich and unusual, but it takes a while to accustom your palate to it.”

My mother smiles at me.

“You keep working on that new classic,” my mother says to Elizabeth, “after hours, of course.”

She takes me by the elbow—almost as if I were a shopping cart—and guides me through the office.

I notice Elizabeth and the staff at The Mighty Pages watch my mother. Here, she is what people see, a beautiful blur of yellow.

A perfect paragraph in motion.

The ultimate book cover.

“Let’s take the stairs,” my mother says, glancing down at my stomach. “We can always use the exercise.”

A beautiful staircase—original to the triplex—leads to the second floor, where sales, marketing and publicity have their offices. Up we go to the third floor, which is home to the editorial staff and my parents, who decide which books will be published.

My mother escorts me to her office, which is, again, generous by New York standards. She takes a seat behind her desk.

“I’m amazed you can sit in that dress, Mom. How did you even get to work?”

“Fashion is pain,” she says. “Just like great art.” My mother pulls a pair of dramatic cat-eye glasses off her desk and peers at me. “Speaking of which… You look…” She stops. “Professional.”

“Thank you, I think.”

“Did Lucy dress you?” she asks.

I stayed with Juice last night instead of my parents, who had an event.

“Those Wall Streeters don’t know how to dress,” she continues. “Boring suits. They could afford anything but still look like wallpaper.”

“No,” I say. “I barely saw her. She works 24/7.”

“Well, Lucy has always had an incredible work ethic,” she says. “What happened to all those outfits I sent you for these interviews? You brought those, right? I think you will have time to change after this, don’t you?” My mother smiles. My mom has a magical way of not only saying something positive that is a really a putdown but also a way of posing a question that is really a command. I term it the question-command . My mother never asks a server, Does a house salad come with the entrée? She says, “A house salad comes with the entrée, correct? I couldn’t imagine it any other way!” She never gives the listener a chance to respond. Never gives an option.

“I did bring them,” I say. “They just seemed a bit impractical for getting around the city.”

“A first impression is everything,” she says. “And it’s our reputation on the line here, Emma. We’re recommending you. A sommelier doesn’t recommend Cupcake wine. Right?”

I nod.

“If you just made a bit more of an effort.” She stares at my ponytail. She won’t give it up. I think of what she said to me just a couple of weeks ago: She’s like a dog with a bone. “And do something with your hair. This isn’t your sixth grade class photo.”

Thanks, Mom. Now I feel completely motivated for my interviews after this mother-daughter pep talk.

She lowers her glasses and peers at me.

“So?” she asks. “I trust the last two weeks in Michigan gave you time to reflect after our last conversation?”

I hear the muffled sounds of the city outside, and thoughts of the last two weeks run through my head: the sound of my sister’s luggage being dragged through crushed gravel followed by the rev of a car engine. She left without saying goodbye after our fight.

I then spent the rest of my time fine-tuning my novel and reading S. I. Quaeris novels.

There is a photo of our family on my mother’s desk, turned away from her so that she doesn’t actually look at the image all day but instead gives the impression to the world that she loves family.

A passage from the most recent novel I read swirls in my mind as I stare at our family:

I didn’t read much until my husband died.

I found him in his favorite chair on the patio, overlooking the lake, his coffee still hot. I thought he was asleep at first. He did that a lot when he read. Just nodded off. I hated to bother him as he got so little time to relax. I wonder now if that time I wasted thinking he was dozing might have saved his life.

Perhaps, in all irony, it saved mine.

Believe it or not, I wasn’t much of a reader until he died. In fact, I didn’t pay much attention to what he read until that day. I knew he was gone, so I pulled the book from his hands, pulled up a chair next to him and read to him, like I often did in bed.

Yes, I was in shock, but also shocked by what he was reading: a summer romance, filled with hope and happy endings.

A man reading romance.

But that’s what he needed, right?

Hope.

That’s what we had, right?

The world’s greatest romance.

Until death do us part.

At the age of thirty-five.

This book was now what I needed.

It was a thread of hope.

A belief there would be better days. That I, too, might again have a happy ending.

And so I read the chapter he was reading just so he would know how it ended.

And then the next so I would have a reason to stand up again.

Then I kissed his cheek—whispered, “I will love you forever”—and called 911.

No wonder GiGi loved this author so much. It’s like they were writing our family story.

“Emma?”

I snap out of my memory. My mother is glaring at me, her head tilted dramatically. She lowers her glasses to inspect my sanity.

“Your father and I are elated you are doing all of these interviews,” she says. “Especially with us! But you must remain focused, do you hear me? It’s like you went into a catatonic state just now.”

“Yes,” I say, nodding. “I will be focused. I promise. I’m just a little nervous.”

She seems skeptical but produces what one might call a smile. “That’s natural, but you’re a mighty Page! Remember that. You come highly recommended by me and your father. That’s like receiving a golden key.”

“I know.”

A door closes down the hall.

I remember what I used to believe as a girl about a golden key and what my father told me.

I look at my mother.

Do I have what it takes to unlock my own success?

“Emma!” my mother snaps. “Do you need some coffee to wake up?”

I shake my head.

She continues.

“I know I’ve prepped you on all of this, but you’re going to be speaking with Diane, who’s head of publicity, and her team. Then at eleven, you’re meeting with Ingrid at Penguin Random House, then with HarperCollins at three.” My mother glances down at her calendar. “Oh, and dinner with Vivian Vandeventer at eight.” She looks up. “That one’s all your own doing, God help you.” She laughs. “Then Friday night your father’s special event in the Hamptons.”

“What?” I ask.

I give her a questioning look.

“I didn’t have that on my calendar,” I continue. “I was going to enjoy the weekend with Juice and then head back to Michigan. Isn’t his book tour over?”

“It is. Let’s just say this is a rather important moment for your father and The Mighty Pages. A large group of esteemed authors and publishing insiders and influencers will be in attendance.” My mother smiles that smile, which seems to imply, And we’ll need you on your best behavior. No more Marcus Flare flare-ups. “But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Mostly, we’re thrilled you’re speaking with us today. You know how much we would love to have you on our team. You would be a tremendous asset, just like Jess.”

Her voice trails off, the word was left unspoken at the end of the sentence.

My parents are still miffed at Jess, although they would never say that to me , for taking their idea and then growing The Swans into her own business. They cannot say a word, however, as it would jeopardize their own list. My parents need Jess’s influence. It is now the influencers who influence what we buy, and we follow along like sheep.

“I know,” I say. “And I’m excited to speak with everyone. I certainly feel like—after the last two weeks of consideration—publishing is where I should be.”

I should actually say, Trying to get my book published is where I should be spending my time , but instead I nod my head with conviction.

“I agree, Emma. Your love of books is the number one thing needed in our business.” My mother smiles at me and pretends to fix a hair on her head that is not out of place.

“But a love of books isn’t everything.”

I turn at the sound of my father’s calm voice. He is standing at the door.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hi, honey. It’s good to see you.” He leans down and kisses me on the cheek. “As I was saying, a love of books must be merged with a mind for books.”

“Publishing is BART,” we say in unison. “Business meets art.”

“Exactly,” my father says with a laugh. “Heard that before?”

“Only about a million times.”

“In this business, your heart will want to publish every amazing book you come across, but that’s not possible. There’s a business model for what works and what will sell. You have to follow your gut and your spreadsheet. That’s the key.”

Again with the key.

A soft knock on the door.

“We’re ready for Emma whenever you are.”

Diane has been a book publicist forever and head of publicity for The Mighty Pages the last couple of years. My parents hired her away from Hachette hoping some of her magic and influence might rub off on their titles. Diane has worked with every author of note for the last two decades, and the trades are saying my parents not only paid a small fortune to hire Diane but also need their fall and winter titles to be big successes to right the ship.

“Emma’s ready, aren’t you?” my mother asks, standing.

The question-command.

I nod.

“Right this way,” Diane says.