The Thin Pink Line Read online

  “He’s not the most polite bartender in all of London, but at least he doesn’t water down his drinks.”

  “Excuse me?” I asked, turning to the man who’d suddenly taken up occupancy on the barstool to my right.

  If I were to have to describe him for a lineup, I’d say that he was of medium height, medium build, was a handful of years or so older than me, had dirty-blond hair that was beginning to inch its way backward and eyes that were the shade of brown that I’d always pictured myself looking at over morning beverages for the rest of my life. Obviously, I would probably not ever make the ideal witness to a crime, but I know what I like. In short, he was no pretty boy like Trevor, which was fine because I wasn’t naturally given to pretty boys. The only problem that I could see with the man before me was that he had a long, droopy mustache which, oddly enough, was drooping much lower on one side than the other.

  “I said, he’s not the most polite—”

  “Yes, I heard you,” I cut him off, frowning. I outlined the area where my own mustache would be if I had one. “Do you know that one side of your mustache is drooping down far lower than the other? If you don’t do something about it soon, I’m afraid you might lose part of it.”

  “Oh, blast,” he swore mildly, shocking me when he ripped the mustache off, shoving it in the pocket of his tweed jacket. “I’d forgotten I had it on.”

  “That’s much better,” I commented, for underneath the preposterous mustache, there was a second mustache, much nicer than the first. “Are you coming from a costume party?” I asked skeptically since, outside of the double mustache, his tweed jacket, light-blue oxford shirt and tight jeans looked quite regular, although it was a little early on a summer evening for tweed.

  “You could say that,” he said without elaborating. “And yourself?”

  “Sorry?”

  He indicated my all-black ensemble, which had the unmistakable look of statement-making. “Are you sort of coming from a costume party as well? The Valley of Fear doesn’t often get women other than Sue coming through its doors—” he nodded at the pee-haired barmaid “—much less one who looks like she’s supposed to be something.”

  “Oh. No.” I imagined an imaginary party. “I left my broom and hat at home so they wouldn’t let me in.”

  “I see,” he said as the bartender brought my drinks and placed a pint of ale before my companion without his having to ask.

  “They know you well here?” I asked, having tossed back half of the double shot and a healthy pull on the Guinness.

  “You could say that this is the only place where they do know me.”

  “How sad.”

  “Not when you consider what most people are like.”

  “What a peculiar thing to say.”

  “But true.”

  “What a truly peculiar thing to say.” I knocked back the rest of the shot, followed by more Guinness, and paused, considering. “What a peculiarly true thing to say.” I slammed the glass down and ordered another round. “And one for my interesting friend here,” I added.

  “It’s not very often that I’m bought a drink by a woman, much less one who’s so attractive. Lack of hat and broom notwithstanding, of course.”

  “Of course. But, my heavens, there are an awful lot of things that don’t happen very often in your world, aren’t there? And most of them much less no less.”

  “Yes, it is a small world, but it’s my world so I try to make do. Might I ask for your name, so that I can tuck it away somewhere within that small world?”

  Well, I was willing to be charmed. I thrust out my hand for a shake. “Jane Taylor. Assistant Editor at Churchill & Stewart. Jilted lover. Twenty-nine.” Might as well get the worst of it out up front, I figured.

  His hand was satisfyingly warm in mine. “Whoever he was, I’m glad he’s gone, but he must be the biggest idiot who ever lived.”

  “Goes without saying.”

  “Tolkien Donald, by the way, at your service.”

  Okay. So I didn’t laugh directly in his face, but near enough. “Tolkien Donald? Are you having me on?”

  Apparently, he was used to small-minded people like me who had nothing more amusing to do with themselves than laugh at other people’s names. His answer sounded like it had been given with the near regularity of extraordinarily tall people responding to the old “How’s the air up there?” query, although I sensed he was putting a little more energy into it than usual for my sake. “Actually,” he said, “I think that it was more of a case of my parents having me on. Course, now that I’m grown up and they’re both gone, it seems a bit silly to hold a grudge.”

  I tried to look appropriately sober, at least after I was through hiccupping. “Dead?”

  “No. Barcelona.”

  Well, that wasn’t that bad then. “So,” I prodded, “are you going to elaborate on the name thing, or is this going to be another one of those mysterious things like the fake mustache thing, where you just shove it in your pocket and pretend it was never there?”

  “Oh, no. I’m willing to talk about the name thing. Quite used to it, really. See, my parents caught the sixties bug a little late in the day, so when I was about four, they suddenly went all hippie and everything, discovering peace and incense and The Hobbit and all of that other groovy stuff. Up until that point, my name had been Donald John. But they decided to convert, see, and just like some people at that time were switching religions, they decided that we should all change our names. My father went from Ron to being Elrond, which wasn’t too bad, but my mother went from Claire to Galadriel which was awful hard for some people to spell. It didn’t help the postal service people any when they gave up on last names entirely. Course, me being their only child, they renamed me from Donald to Tolkien, after the man who’d started it all.”

  “But you said your last name is Donald.”

  “Oh, yeah, well, the grandparents were confused enough as it was, so my parents let me keep that just for people who couldn’t handle change very well.”

  “And your parents? In Barcelona? They still go by Elrond and Galadriel while being, what, in their fifties? Sixties?”

  “God, no. They went back to Ron and Claire John about twenty years ago, about the same time they gave up tie-dyeing and got into the bond market.”

  “But you never thought to go back to Donald John?”

  “No. Why would I? I’m used to it, aren’t I.”

  And, oddly enough, the idea that Tolkien Donald should have learned to adapt to such an oddity, to come to take it as commonplace, made me fall in love with him on the spot.

  Two hours later, still in the same spot, still feeling in love only more so, I sat on the same stool contemplating life (mine), love (someday mine?) and the amazing man I’d just met (could Tolkien some day be mine?).

  Okay, so maybe I’d budged from the stool at least twice during the evening for absolutely necessary visits to the loo, but still…

  Watching Tolkien’s back as he exited the Valley of Fear after he’d reattached his mustache and told me he needed to get back to work, I was basking in the rosy glow of new love.

  Had I ever felt this way so quickly before? I wondered. About any man?

  No and no.

  I was still doing that rosy-glow thing, moonily gazing at the space he’d so recently inhabited, when for the second time that evening I was startled by a voice coming at me from the side.

  “I thought you were supposed to be pregnant? Why, not only are you not even showing, but here you are out drinking as well!”

  The voice belonged to Alice Simms, an acquaintance of mine who edited for Quartet Books Limited.

  As I swiveled sharply to face the body that the voice was coming from, I saw that Alice was still…

  Oh, good God! Do you really need to know what she looks like right now? This woman was about to burst my mendacious bubble! I had no time for pithy descriptions. Suffice it to say that she’d never been asked to model for any glossy covers, but no man had e
ver asked her to put a bag over her head, either. Alice was medium; in almost every way imaginable, she was medium.

  No sooner had I relegated Alice to a lifetime of mediumness, however, than the thought occurred to me: would it really be so bad to end my charade now? Surely, even I could see that it was insanity to try to impersonate a pregnant woman for nine months. Yes, the positive attention would be nice. But I had originally wanted to trap Trevor, and yet now had lost him. Then, I had wanted the experience of being pregnant to continue, with no threat of a real baby at the end of the line. But now that I had met Tolkien—okay, so maybe I’d only just met him—what good did my faux pregnancy serve me?

  I decided there and then that confession would be good for my soul; a first baby step, if you will, toward coming clean with everybody. So I told Alice everything. After all, she was a reasonably even human being—okay, medium—surely, if anyone could understand and forgive my actions…

  “Has anyone ever told you, Jane, that you’re insane?”

  We had retreated from the bar to a tiny corner table for more privacy, as if we really needed it in that deserted hole. Now I put my finger to my lips as though in deep thought. “Now, let me see… What is it about your unfortunate choice of wording that leads me to believe that you won’t take no for an answer to that unspeakably rude question?” I had decided to take offense. “Of course they have,” I replied with some asperity, “more and more often as time goes on.” Belligerent now, arms crossed: “So? What of it?”

  The expression on Alice’s face showed that she had clearly decided to take offense, too. Well, who could blame her, really? I was behaving in an impossible way for someone who was so patently in the wrong in so many ways; even I could see that.

  But then, a curious thing happened: Alice laughed.

  “Oh, Jane, what a wonderful story your story would make!”

  Then, an even curiouser thing happened: Alice got a positively devilish gleam in her eye that reminded me shockingly of, well, me.

  “Oh, Jane,” she gushed some more, “I’ve just had the most wonderful idea!”

  I was almost afraid to ask. “Which is…?”

  She leaned in conspiratorially. “Don’t stop your charade now.”

  “But I just told you—”

  “Continue faking being pregnant for the whole nine months, see if you can pull it off. You can consider it as research.”

  “But—”

  “Then turn it into a book.”

  “Wha—?”

  “Just think about it for a moment. You know yourself that all of us in publishing are always looking for the next great thing. Well, let me tell you, nothing could be more bizarre than what you’re telling me you’ve been doing. Think of the book it could make—Woman Fakes Pregnancy for Nine Months.”

  My practical side was kicking in. “Well, as far as titles go—”

  “Never mind that now.” She brushed me off. “We can work out the minor details later. For now, just think about it. I know my publisher would pay a lot of money for such an unusual story. Hell, we’d probably have to bid against several other publishers to get it. Although,” she added, an ingratiating note creeping into her voice, “I would certainly hope, that since this was practically all my idea—”

  “How much money are we talking about here?” I was now officially in full-fledged practical mode.

  She couldn’t have emphasized her next utterance more if she had been the person to originally invent italics: “Lots.”

  Mmm, that did sound like an awful lot.

  “But wait a second,” I objected. “What am I going to tell my family and friends when the nine months are up?”

  She shrugged it off. “Well, you’ll have a big book contract by then, won’t you? You’d be amazed… Well, maybe you wouldn’t…but it truly is amazing how quickly people forgive and forget all kinds of things when there’s a published author around.”

  What she said was true.

  “Yes, but—” I was still stuck in objecting mode “—if I make it nonfiction, people might object to how they’re portrayed. I don’t want to get sued for this.”

  “Then write it as fiction, if you must, Jane. Really, I don’t care. Just write it! Honestly, fiction, nonfiction, like I said, we can work out the details later. Put it to you like this—if you don’t write it, I will.”

  I was a little shocked. “You mean that you dream of being a writer, too?”

  “God no. A person would have to be insane to choose to be a writer if they could possibly help it. No, it’s simply that I can’t bear to have a good story go to waste. Write—the—book—Jane.”

  She certainly was persuasive.

  Within the body of every editor beats the heart of a would-be writer.

  Okay, maybe not every editor. I’m hyperbolizing a bit here, but bear with me.

  As with many another editor before me, I had initially got into publishing in the hopes of getting a leg up on my own writing career. I wanted to write novels; not necessarily important novels, mind you, but I did want to get paid for telling stories. The problem was, as is often the case in these situations, in performing the mechanics of the day-to-day grunt work that was supposed to move me closer to my ultimate dream, I lost sight of the dream. Oh, sure, there were mornings when I still dragged myself out of bed early enough to take a stab at writing a cohesive story. But, as time wore on, those mornings had dwindled down to the status of few and far between. I, who had never really wanted to settle—at least not in my working life—had learned how to settle: settled for a job that gratified me in some small sense; settled for being part of the stratosphere that other would-be authors wanted to float in; settled.

  I took a moment out for sensible thought, a moment to reflect on possible outcomes of this harebrained scheme of hers. If I went along with it, then I wouldn’t have to come clean just yet with everyone I knew—a definite plus. In addition, I’d finally be what I’d longed to be before I’d become A Woman Who Settles: I’d be A Published Writer. To carry it further, if I made my story nonfiction, people might sue me. But even if I made it fiction, there was still a chance—a fairly large chance—that people would be angry with me for lying to them for so long.

  Well, I finally concluded, in a sense Alice’s plan would leave me no worse than before. In fact, what with a book contract and all, it would leave me a lot better. Oh, sure, at the end of nine months, unless I could somehow produce a baby, people might be so mad at me that I’d have to leave London forever. But now, instead of just being any old exile, I’d be a successful exile. And anyway, I had never known before what I was going to do when the clock ran out on me, and yet I’d proceeded. Why not proceed now, then, with a far greater incentive?

  Still, wanting to object at least one last time, I half-heartedly reiterated my concerns to Alice about everyone hating me in the end.

  “Well, you did always say that you wished you were a paid storyteller,” she pointed out.

  I had indeed.

  Then she made me be quiet—no small task—as she outlined the way she saw the next several months as going: me keeping a diary of daily events regarding the fake pregnancy, then distilling it down to the funnier parts and e-mailing it to her for her approval.

  When she was done, I had one final question. “How much did you say again that you were sure they’d pay for this story?”

  “Lots.”

  “A more exact number might be nice.”

  Holding my gaze as if we were expert bluffers involved in some kind of poker match, she rifled through her purse, located a pen, scribbled a figure on the bar napkin and pushed it across the table to me. She’d never once broken eye contact and yet she’d managed to write her figure out legibly. God, she was good!

  I studied the figure, swallowed. “This must be a mistake,” I said. “I’m fairly certain you must have absentmindedly added an extra zero or two here.”

  Alice smiled confidently, and just shook her head.

  “Are y
ou authorized to make an offer this big?”

  “Well,” she conceded, “there are a few formalities I’ll need to go through at my end. But, basically, yes.”

  “God, you’ve got so much more power than I do.”

  She merely shrugged.

  “Okay, I’ll do it. But only if I can have a contract now.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now. I’m certainly not going to go on with this charade—and possibly fuck up my entire life in the process—in the mere hopes of there being a contract at the end. I need a guarantee.”

  “And what’s in it for us?”

  “You get to sign me up now, without having to run the risk that there might be a bidding war involving other publishers, a bidding war that you might lose. After all, if you’re waving these kinds of figures under my nose merely upon hearing the idea…” I paused for a moment, thinking about how betrayed Dodo would feel that I’d sold my book to someone else. But I couldn’t tell her about the fake pregnancy, not just yet. Oh, well, I sighed. Maybe I could just dedicate the book to Dodo. Didn’t people usually forgive all sins when books were dedicated to them?

  “Yes,” she said. “I see your point. But tell me something.”

  “Hmm?”

  “How do I know that you can write?”

  “I’m an editor, for chrissakes. Of course I can write.”

  She stared at me until I relented.

  “And you’re an editor, too,” I conceded. “So if it turns out I can’t write, you can always fix it.”

  “True.”

  “When do I get the contract?”

  “A few weeks?” She shrugged. “Just as soon as we can agree on the details and draw it up.”

  “And then I’ll get…?”

  “What everyone else gets—one-third upon signing, one-third upon delivery of a satisfactory proposal, one-third upon delivery of a satisfactory manuscript.”

  “So, then, when I sign this contract in a few weeks, at that time I’ll get one-third of…?”

  “Yes, Jane. You’ll get one-third of lots.”

  Well, I couldn’t very well walk away from that, now, could I?