The Thin Pink Line Read online

  “You’re not fooling anyone, you know,” the voices from above mocked me as I took the flights of stairs two steps at a time, the potential risk of damaging my baby by falling be damned. “You’ll find out soon enough. You can’t avoid it forever, you know.”

  I had just finished reading the first three chapters plus synopsis that Mona Shakespeare had sent me. Actually, she’d attached the file to her next e-mail following my response to her desperate query and I’d only just got a chance to look at it. Weird times we were living in, when an editor could only make tactile contact with a manuscript submission if she was willing to first download it into her computer and then print it out.

  Still, I supposed that it was time efficient and cost effective on her part.

  Of course, as luck would have it, I’d been completely preoccupied with this and that for the past month and so had forgotten all about her book almost as soon as I’d downloaded it and printed it out. I’d only just rediscovered it when I’d accidentally bumped a stack of month-old correspondence off the corner of my desk that I’d also not found time to get around to in the past month.

  Sometimes it felt as though you could no longer turn around in a bookshop or at an editorial meeting without being confronted with yet another pink-covered book whose pages told about the wacky adventures of yet another twentysomething Londoner who labored in publishing—I don’t know why they all have to be in publishing, but they always are—and who will do anything in her power to find Mr. Right. Even though I was under thirty myself, just barely, I could still not quite grasp the entertainment industry’s skewed vision of a world in which important characters could only be under thirty as if, upon hitting thirty, they might magically go up in smoke.

  Still, it was refreshing at least to see one person attempting to make her publishing doll move in a different direction, and this bizarre American woman who had submitted to me a portion of her bizarre manuscript had done just that.

  And the best part of all?

  Her book about modern pregnancy was nothing like my book about modern pregnancy.

  Pregnancy was funny, there were no two ways about it, and Mona Shakespeare had succeeded in hitting the thing squarely on the head. She’d deftly satirized the silliness of a world that briefly canonized women, for a nine-month period of time, just for proving themselves able to procreate, just for proving themselves capable of having something come out of their sex lives other than orgasms. Her heroine was called Stacy—like working in publishing, all these heroines have girlish names—and her problem wasn’t that she couldn’t get a man to marry her. Rather, because she’d been sleeping with anyone that she could get her hands on—always using brightly colored condoms, of course, color-coded according to which partner she was with at the moment, though one had obviously sprung a leak—in her massive manhunt for a regular date, once she’d turned up pregnant she hadn’t a clue as to who the father might be. Hers was definitely not your mother’s Cinderella story. With so many candidates to choose from, then, she’d taken each aside to tell them what had happened in the hopes that just one out of the bunch would have the decency to stand by her. What she hadn’t counted on, however, was the Madonna factor.

  Ten years ago, a man faced with the unwanted pregnancy of some girl he’d slept with might simply say, “Prove it.” Now, the world had become so baby-besotted—all you had to do was note how much attention had been paid to the singing Madonna’s pregnancies in order to prove that was true—that Mona Shakespeare somehow managed to make it seem plausible that ten men would not only not turn their backs on the product of a one-night stand, but would embrace the shot at fatherhood! Even though they didn’t really know the mother at all and, in some cases, didn’t like what little they knew.

  Apparently, both men and women were so busy these days making a solid go of their careers first that they were having trouble fitting in the necessary time to meet the kind of persons a person could seriously consider procreating with. When the time clock ticked them over to the other side of thirty—and most of the men Stacy slept with in Mona Shakespeare’s book had made the Humpty Dumpty fall over to the other side—rather than self-destructing in sixty seconds, they were desperately casting about for suitable partners with whom to try to recast their image upon the face of a child. What Mona Shakespeare’s book turned on then—which, by the way, was titled The Rubber Slipper—was the idea that Stacy was trying each of these men on as her pregnancy progressed in order to see which one would make the best dad. I was impressed enough with the first three chapters I’d read to e-mail Mona Shakespeare right away to send more.

  I was also sufficiently impressed to shout out, “Dodo! Come quickly! I think I’ve got us a winner here!”

  Dodo, however, was preoccupied enough with her own work to shout back, “Can’t you come to me, Jane? I am pretty busy at the moment.”

  I immediately put on my tired-pregnant-woman’s voice, lowering my tone just enough so that she’d have to strain to hear me. “I suppose so. Although I have been feeling somewhat knackered lately. What with the baby making me feel beastly and all.”

  She was in my doorway in an instant. “I’m sorry, Jane. How rude of me.” She tried not to look like she wanted desperately to get back to her own work. “There was something you wanted to share with me?”

  “Just this!” I crowed triumphantly, rising from my desk with more bounce than any knackered pregnant lady had a right to have and waving the pages of Mona Shakespeare’s manuscript in my fist. “I think I’ve found us our next bestseller!”

  “Oh, Jane.” Clearly Dodo was experiencing one of her jaded days. “They’re all bestsellers. I have a stack of submissions to go through on my desk—” and here she gave me an accusing look because I’d been pulling hormones lately to avoid having to help her do her job “—and they all come with letters from their authors saying that they’re bestsellers.”

  “I know all that, Dodo, but this one really is. This is one that’ll make none of us here at Churchill & Stewart care anymore if Colin Smythe’s next Regency-style novel is set in Japan with the main character being a gay sumo wrestler who longs to one day ski in the Swiss Alps! I’m telling you, Dodo—sit! Sit! Sit! Sit!”

  And right then and there, I made her sit down at my desk and read every last word of the printed-out pages from The Rubber Slipper. All the while, I alternated pacing up and down in front of the desk with sneaking around to peek over her shoulder and see where she was at whenever she broke into laughter, which was often.

  “I particularly liked the one American that Stacy dates,” she chuckled, putting down the last of the pages, “the one who, even though he’s returned home to Idaho following his vacation fling with her, upon hearing of her pregnancy, comes rushing back to London with a baby-size pair of six-shooters for his son to wear in the crib.”

  “Which is when Stacy says, ‘How do you know the baby’s going to be a boy? I’m almost positive I feel a girl coming on and if I’m right, I know she’d much rather have a set of knives,’ before sending him packing to America and moving on to Suitor Number 4, Mitch, the frustrated walking tour guide from the West Country who hates all tourists and who we’ll meet just as soon as Ms. Shakespeare sends us chapters four and up.”

  “God, Jane, I really think you might be right about this one. It really does feel…so…right. And that name! Do you think she’s having us on—Mona Shakespeare?”

  “Well,” I said defensively, “it’s not like she’s trying to convince us that her parents named her Gladys. Now, Gladys Shakespeare would be a bit of a stretch. Anyway, think of the marketing possibilities. Helen Fielding trades on Henry. Joanna Trollope trades on Anthony. If any publisher could find someone with the last name of Brontë who could string more than two words together successfully, they’d slap a pen in their hands so quickly Bramwell would do another spin in his grave.”

  “Yes, I know that, but this Mona person’s an American.”

  “And you think the Americans are
more averse than we are to capitalizing on famous names? Look at the Hemingway legacy. Why, I’ll wager you that there are more Hemingway offspring and subrelatives currently writing than Papa had cats.”

  “Yes, but Mona’s American, while Shakespeare’s—”

  “Oh, stop being so elitist, Dodo. We’ll cross that marketing bridge when we get to it and I’m sure we’ll manage to use good old Billy S. to our best advantage. Why couldn’t he have had an illegitimate offspring from some fan who’d come to see him with her father, whose own offspring several generations down the road in turn eventually became slave owners in Virginia and decided to adopt the use of the last name of the man who’d shagged their grandmother or great-grandmother or whatever upon completion of The Taming of the Shrew? Nearly four hundred years in the ground, and people are discovering new things about Shakespeare all the time, new plays even, so why not this?”

  I noted the pale expression on Dodo’s face and went on before she could voice her objections to the notion of desecrating the Bard’s memory, even in the name of greater sales. “But we can worry about that later. The important thing now is that we get Mona to send us the rest of that book before some American publisher gets smart enough to snap it up first. I want that Rubber Slipper.”

  “And if the rest isn’t as good as the beginning?”

  “It will be. And, if it’s not, we’ll work on it with her until it is. Bridget Jones sold something like 900,000 copies before it even hit the States. When’s the last time Churchill & Stewart had a debut novelist who could sell a million copies out of the gate?”

  “I see your point.”

  “First we find out what Mitch is up to in chapter four.”

  “Oh!” She was suddenly like a little girl. “I do want to find out more about what the frustrated walking tour guide is like.”

  “Then we check out chapter five.”

  She consulted the synopsis. “Edward Mumford? The podiatrist who ends up getting arrested for molesting his patients?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, this is a fun book.”

  “Yes, it is. And we’re going to take this thing one step at a time and do it right.”

  “I suppose there really isn’t any reason why Shakespeare couldn’t have some American descendants.”

  “No reason at all.”

  “Virginia, you said?”

  I shrugged. “It could just as easily be South Carolina. Just so long as it’s somewhere that they have cotton.”

  “But Mona’s in New York.”

  “Well, people do have a tendency to move around a bit after a couple of hundred years. Still, if the details bother you, we can always make the female ancestor of Mona’s who slept with Shakespeare Dutch. She could be a Dutch woman whose family had temporarily escaped to Stratford-upon-Avon in order to avoid some kind of windmill crisis or something.”

  “I think you’re right after all, Jane. I think maybe we should leave those details for later.”

  “Fine.”

  “Of course, I’ll help you in any way I can with this one and I’d really love to be hands-on about it, but I do realize that Mona wrote to you. You know, this could be the making of your career.”

  “Actually, I’m starting to count on it.”

  “Could you feed Kick the Cat for me, David?” I asked. “He’s really been quite peckish lately and I’m worried that if I don’t keep his bowl topped up, he’ll eat the first mouse he sees.”

  “That is what cats do,” he said, but he retrieved one of Kick the Cat’s beloved cans of Fishy Fiesta from the cabinet over the kitchen sink nonetheless. I thought that the stuff was just about as noxious as a substance could possibly be and still be called “food,” but he loved it. The cat, that is; not David.

  “Yes, well…” My voice trailed off, distracted by the task at hand, as I removed the back from a crystal picture frame that I’d bought cheap.

  “How are things going with Tolkien?” asked David, as he did every time I saw him.

  “Fine,” I said. “We have great fun, great sex, I have more real talks with him than with anyone I’ve met since I met you, I see who he is and I love that, I let him see who I am and he still manages to love that—”

  “The only problem,” David said, “is that you have this pregnancy charade going on with most everybody in your life and you can’t tell him about it, because then he would think you are dishonest plus a stark-raving loon.”

  “Well, there is that.”

  “You should really bring him round to meet us sometime,” said Christopher, who had recently moved in upstairs with David, their relationship progressing at an alarmingly quick, and healthy, rate.

  “Yes, you really should,” enthused David, putting his arm lightly around Christopher’s shoulders. “Perhaps we would rub off on the two of you, he would ask you to marry him, and you would say yes and abandon your ridiculous scheme.”

  Never able to do anything by halves, it was just my luck: instead of one fairy godmother, I’d somehow managed to wind up with two.

  “I thought we had already agreed that this was all your fault,” I said to David. “After all, it was you who turned this fake pregnancy into some kind of bet between us.”

  “I—”

  “Could you pass me those scissors?” I asked Christopher, who had just seated himself perpendicular to me at the table, bottle of ale in hand.

  “What are you doing with those underexposed photos?” he asked idly, as he did what I’d asked.

  “Making my own sonogram pictures,” I said, snipping away.

  “You’re doing what?”

  “Making my own sonogram pictures,” I answered again, holding the photos up to the light so that I could trim the edges more neatly.

  When my repeating the same exact words failed to illuminate things sufficiently for them, I explained how, ever since my day at the clinic two months ago, I’d been wanting to get my hands on some sonogram pictures to show the people at work.

  “But no one would sell me theirs, even I’m not mean enough to tackle a prego in the street in order to steal hers, and the idea of diving into the oversize refuse bin in the alley behind the clinic in hopes of finding something there just made me go all queasy.”

  “You do realize, Jane,” pointed out Christopher, “that these underexposed shots of yours don’t look a thing like a real baby.”

  “Yes, I know. But, then, neither do real sonogram pictures, so you could say that science and I are even.”

  “Yes, but sonogram pictures are more than just dark gray pictures with a few squiggly specks of light in them.”

  “Well, not by much.”

  “Yes, but they do usually have data all over them,” Christopher went on.

  “Data?”

  “Yes. You know, things like the patient’s name, the date and time of the procedure, the office where it was done…”

  As he carried on with further information involving measurements in centimeters, I wondered if he were somehow related to Stan from Accounting with his fast-breeding sisters. Now that he mentioned it, though, I supposed that I did remember registering, on some subconscious level, some of this data when I’d looked at the sonogram pictures of that prego outside of the clinic, but it certainly hadn’t concerned me at the time. As for the exact details of what he was talking about now, it was all too complex for my purposes.

  “If people ask,” I said, studying my handiwork, “I’ll just tell them that Madame Zora took these with a new machine she got in acknowledgement of the technological revolution, but that she doesn’t like to do her pictures like just everybody else. I’ll say that instead of all of that printing and those centimeters you mentioned, she prefers to mark the back of her snaps with hex signs individualized to fit the patient at hand.”

  “You’re a sick, sick woman, Jane,” David said.

  I met his eyes briefly over the top of my completed arts-and-crafts project, and smiled, feeling the gleam in my own eyes as I reflected on how won
derful this was going to look in my office. “Yes, I do know that.”

  Maybe it was because I still hadn’t gotten quite used to the difference that the cloth baby made in my center of balance because, like real pregnant women, I was experiencing a problem in terms of increased clumsiness. If I were really pregnant, the reason why I couldn’t seem to keep from dropping things to save my life would have to do with the loosening of joints and retention of water, both of which could make a person’s physical ability to grasp things something less than perfect. Another thing the pregnancy guides attributed clumsiness to was lack of concentration brought on by the “scatterbrain syndrome” that seemed to be part and parcel of bringing new human life into the world. In my case I’d found that the scatterbrain syndrome was part and parcel of keeping all of my deceptive balls in the air at once and I accepted the attendant clumsiness as the natural byproduct.

  But my family members and the people at work were less inclined to blithely accept my advanced case of the “dropsies” as a charming result of my current condition. Sophie no longer encouraged me to pick up Baby Jack; no hardship, that. Mother would not allow me to drink tea out of a china beaker and, even when we were in public, insisted that fine restaurants put my beverages into unbreakable paper cups. And as for the people at work, not only had they laid in a supply of paper goods in the kitchen area, but they’d also forbidden me to open any jiffy packages, even if they were addressed directly to me, because, as Stan from Accounting so succinctly put it, “God knows what the butterball would do if she happened to come into contact with a staple,” to which Louise had added, “Besides, we can’t very well have her accidentally shredding the pages of the only copy to the next bestselling Harry Potter clone, now, can we?”

  Of course, if Dumbo-like clumsiness weren’t enough, not to mention the insults that seemed to go along with it, the cloth baby had impacted my physical life in another negative way: just like with travelers who carry too much weight on one shoulder, the additional weight I was carrying in front, faux or no, was causing me to have the kind of back distress that was also common to carriers of real babies.