Death by Publication Read online

  “But this is more than an anniversary,” Millagard exclaimed. “This is a crowning achievement, an apotheosis!”

  He asked me to join him in his chauffeured car, and as we drove along the banks of the Seine our talk was of how extraordinary a victory this was. We also talked shop, fixing on the date the book would appear in England and agreeing on a figure for the advance that, especially under the circumstances, was completely fair; we had worked too long and hard for this day to argue over such mundane matters. Then, disgusted by the game I was playing, I asked Millagard about the beautiful Nora.

  “The little bitch! She has Nicolas wrapped around her little finger.”

  I found that difficult to believe. “You mean,” I suggested, “that unlike the others she doesn’t throw herself at his feet.” To which Millagard scowled and said, “No, that’s not it at all. This is something different. I’d call it role reversal. And if one of the two is going to suffer from the liaison, my crystal ball tells me it will be Fabry.” And then, as if to sum it up, he said, nodding sagely, “Black magic, my friend, that’s what it is. Black magic.”

  Or the curse of Yasmina, I thought to myself.

  The memory of Nora, whom I had only glimpsed, and with whom I had not exchanged a word, continued to echo in my mind. It brought back painful memories of my past, my youth, my first, my only love. . . .

  Chapter 2

  Can you believe it? Ten full minutes on the most-listened-to station in the country! That’s more than they gave the Nobel Prize winner! Nicolas was fantastic. A real hit!”

  The press secretary didn’t realize what she was saying. A hit. True, but the hit was coming from me. And his radio interview just now, and all the newspaper articles that were to follow, all the radio and television coverage, would only tighten the noose around his neck.

  The fact was, Fabry’s novel was successful beyond his wildest dreams. It was a great book, his only truly major work, the one he had always wanted to write and till now failed to pull off. Fabry, the past master of redundancy, the man who simply could not refrain from preening and primping, had at long last found a tone that was both natural and precise. Les mots justes, to paraphrase Flaubert. The right words. He had found them, oh God he had, I realized as soon as I had read the first few pages of the manuscript. And then my surprise turned into a mixture of amazement and rage so overwhelming that I found it hard to breathe. . . .

  Remembering all that now, I could feel the anger resurfacing, and I knew I had to banish it from my mind, clear my head completely. If I didn’t, I would never be able to keep to plan.

  After Nicolas had finished his interview—or should I say performance—at the radio station, where Laurent and I had joined him, the next stop on the glory road was at the publishing house, where a huge cocktail party had been prepared. Everyone who was anyone in the world of letters had been invited.

  Laurent and Fabry’s press secretary had gone ahead to make sure everything was in order, so it turned out that Nicolas and I were alone in the press secretary’s car on the trip to the party. It was the first time we had been alone together since the day several months before when Nicolas had flown to London to deliver me his manuscript. We drove in silence along the Seine, as if embarrassed to be sitting next to each other. Neither of us felt like talking. I knew why I didn’t want to. I was hard pressed to understand why Nicolas didn’t.

  In any case, for once I did not put myself out, and we arrived at the publishing house without exchanging a word.

  Nicolas hopped out of the car, leaving me to find a parking space. Not exactly a friendly gesture, I thought, especially since in this part of town parking spaces are at a premium even when there’s no party going on. It was a full half hour before I appeared in the overcrowded rooms of the publishing house, where of course Nicolas was surrounded by a mob of reporters. It would be an understatement to say that they were clamoring for his attention.

  I stood there for several minutes watching him perform. He was, as always, so wonderfully sure of himself, so colossally overbearing, that my determination to be done with him as soon as possible burned greater than ever.

  In truth, have I ever stopped observing him? With admiration, jealousy, or hate? For years that fascination nourished my own self-disgust, that Selbsthass—self-hatred—that I wore like a hair shirt. Today I hate myself less, doubtless because I hate him more. The women’s press were crowding around him now, their tones if anything more strident than those of their male colleagues. With them Nicolas was pompous, smooth, and to my mind slightly ridiculous. God, what bombast to respond to one stupid question after another—always the same ones, it seemed to me—the women were shouting at him.

  “The kind of women I prefer? Oh, good Lord, how can I answer that one? Every woman to whom I find myself attracted possesses a particle of the universal grace that touches me to the very depths of my soul. . . . What after all is seduction if not that strange power of fascination for the inaccessible body, so close, when all is said and done, that one can only properly refer to it as God? Yes, God. Why not?. . .

  “Do I sleep in the nude?. . . As a matter of fact, I do. Why? Perhaps a simple desire to return to the basic state of nature, or perhaps in keeping with the nomadic impulse I feel so strongly within me . . .

  “No, adultery in my work is never a simple aberration of the body in search of its own truth. . . .

  “Please, my friends, give me a little room, if you don’t mind. . . .”

  He would have gone on forever with his shameless striptease if Christiane, Millagard’s wife, had not suddenly called for silence. She strode over to Nicolas, smiling broadly, and handed a cordless phone to him.

  “It’s Peter,” she announced.

  “Oh, Peter! What a nice surprise!”

  The red light on the television camera clicked on, and once again microphones were pushed toward Fabry to catch this touching spectacle of the father talking to his beloved son, who was in a Swiss boarding school and therefore unable to be with his father on this day of days.

  Dear Peter, my godson. I could picture him on the other side of the Alps, in the exclusive school to which his father had banished him since he had divorced the boy’s mother. Nicolas would never admit it, but this too-handsome, too-blond boy was a constant reminder of this failure in his life, and Nicolas hated to lose. In his ultra-chic school Peter no doubt rubbed elbows with Saudi princes and the sons of billionaires from around the world, but neither the gilded youth around him nor the welcoming ski slopes of Gstaad had ever been able to compensate for the fact that his parents had abandoned him. I lavished as much affection on him as I could, and at this point I loved him like a father. I believe, in fact, that he loved me more than he did his own father, which, it goes without saying, infuriated Fabry.

  The love duo over the phone had gone on for about two minutes when Nicolas erupted with a series of exclamations that were like an avalanche roaring down the mountains into the valley.

  “What’s that? My check hasn’t arrived? But they should have called and told me! What? It was Edward who paid? Why in the hell didn’t you let me know sooner, you little jerk!”

  The father-son dialogue, artfully staged by Millagard’s wife to show the human side of Fabry, was fast turning sour. Suddenly Nicolas was seen as perhaps not quite the model father he had made himself out to be. Not only that, but anyone who wanted to could read into his remarks that despite his fame and fortune he was niggardly in paying for his own son’s boarding school. Not exactly the kind of image he wanted to send out into the world.

  From that moment on, the reporters’ questions became increasingly insidious. They began to focus more and more on his personal life. Since you love your son so much, Mr. Fabry, could you explain why you didn’t keep him with you after the divorce? Yes, and about the divorce: is it final now? Mr. Fabry, Mr. Fabry, is there any truth to the rumor that your ex-wife tried to commit suicide?

  The party was turning into a slaughter, and Nicolas
was clearly floundering, tangled up in explanations and self-justifications. It was all Millagard’s wife could do to extricate him from the disaster. At that point I felt disgust for the whole spectacle; all those high-and-mighty, gossipy Parisian intellectuals. The buffet tables, now stripped of their offerings, looked for all the world like some glorified garbage dump. The whole place had the sorry look of the day after a major party. But the party wasn’t over. It was simply moving on to Castel’s restaurant, where dinner was being served for close friends and colleagues only.

  Needless to say, I was one of the happy few.

  Can one ever suppress remorse?

  That night, faced with the radiant joy of my old, esteemed colleague Millagard, I thought I was never going to pull it off. I had never seen Millagard in a better mood, more expansive, more confident, trumpeting to one and all that I was the best, the greatest publisher in England. Twice in the course of the evening he hugged me and said, “I’m so happy to see you, Edward—I can’t tell you how happy. What we’re celebrating tonight is our work. Our joint efforts—”

  And I knew that very shortly I was going to hurt this man, this good and decent man with whom I had worked closely for so many years, that I was going to make him not only suffer but suffer horribly. I felt a surge of shame rise within me. And for a moment I came within a hair of doing an about-face, turning off the hellish machine that I had set in motion. Nothing would have been easier.

  But at that moment Nicolas arrived at the restaurant with Nora Afnazi on his arm. A burst of applause greeted him, igniting my hate all over again. He had regained his self-assurance, which had faltered in the wake of the phone conversation with his son, and he responded to the invited guests with that condescending smile that so exasperated me. I noted too that he studiously avoided making eye contact with me, as if the few thousand Swiss francs I had paid to his son’s boarding school was an embarrassment to him. He sat down at the far end of the table, and immediately a ballet of waiters began swirling about us.

  Nora . . . Yasmina . . . my love stolen by this sleight-of-hand artist. This seducer. How lovely she was, this reincarnation of the only woman I had ever loved! And there she was, seated on Nicolas’s right, whereas on my right sat a two-hundred-pound-plus collection of soft, undulating flesh, belonging to a woman well into her forties who, when she spoke, did not talk but thundered, a woman whose makeup was at its thinnest a good inch thick, and whose arm bracelets rang as loudly as the bells of Westminster Abbey. Ah, yes, Margot Zembla, the high priestess of French literary critics. I knew little about her except that her tongue was razor sharp, much given to cutting, and frequently to murdering, her literary victims. Seeing her here was enough to convince me that the reputation that preceded her was indeed based on fact.

  Leaning out over her plate, she was gorging herself, eating out loud, with moving mandibles more than audible. She was one of those rare creatures gifted with the capacity to chew and enunciate at the same time. Thus, still chewing away, she told me how highly she thought of Nicolas’s novel. “A revelation,” she said, a true bovine, except that her cud was a mouthful of caviar. “And believe me, I know genius when I see it.

  She had the thick, scratchy voice of a woman who smoked as heartily as she ate.

  Hardly believing my eyes, I watched her devour half of the appetizers at our end of the table, followed by two brook trout, plus a filet of duck. Then, seeing I still had not done justice to my duck, she reached across and planted her fork in it, as if she were planting her flag to take possession of a conquered foreign country.

  “You’re not eating that?” she said, her mouth still full.

  And without waiting for my reply she gulped down what was left on my plate in two generous mouthfuls. That amazing voracity, which had initially disgusted me, suddenly became fascinating.

  “I hope you don’t find me too gluttonous,” the ogress simpered.

  No, in a curious way she made me hungry, and when I told her so she seemed touched in the depths of her distant soul. She began to hang on my every word, her eyes fixed on mine, her jaws working away without respite, the better to please me no doubt. Her oversize, insatiable mouth, her fat thigh rubbing lightly against mine, her enormous breasts, which hung out over the table, made me slightly ill and aroused at the same time. If I kept piling food on her plate each time it was empty, it was more to turn me on than to satisfy her ravenous appetite, for my desire was an ambiguous mixture of wanting to possess her on the one hand and hurt myself on the other.

  I began drinking, to protect myself from the swirling eddies into which she was taking me, to drown my remorse, and to fan the fires of my hatred for Nicolas. I kept trying to catch his eye, but each time I did he made a point of looking the other way. A premonition?

  When the “chef’s surprise” arrived on the table—a multi-tiered cake crowned with a quill pen of sugar—there was a new round of applause, and the guests began chanting for the laureate—who asked for nothing more—to make a speech. He pushed back his chair, rose to his feet, and with his best Jimmy Stewart—“modesty is my name”—recalled ingratiatingly, in case those present might not have thought of it, that he had had to wait for thirty years to win the coveted Goncourt Prize, whereas any number of lesser writers, whose names the present company would be hard pressed to remember today, had won it before him.

  “For an ex-diplomat,” chortled my next-door glutton, “tact does not exactly seem to be his strong suit, does it?”

  Then Fabry took off into the philosophical wild blue yonder, somewhere just this side of the sublime but closer to the ridiculous, a witches’ brew of empty words, unbearable phonemes, and jumbled redundancies, winging back to earth with this infuriating conclusion:

  “The colors of the Middle East have taken possession of my pen once and for all. Everything I have written up to now strikes me as pale and lifeless. I was walking alone in a wasteland, transparent, like a ghost, leaving no trace in my wake, reduced to nothing more than a gaze in the empty space through which I passed. From now on I am like a child who has just received his first set of watercolors. In my other books—and this is not to say I am turning my back on them—I was applying the primer, the undercoat, for all my future work—”

  I mean really! The man should have been brought to trial and locked up on the charge of flagrant self-conceit.

  With those closing words he bid the assembled throng good night and withdrew with all the pomp and dignity befitting his new station, taking the lovely Nora with him.

  Their departure sounded the death knell of the evening’s festivities. In any case we were more or less drunk, and I was running a high fever, a kind of erotic fever brought on by the bestial bulimia of Margot Zembla. Thus I politely declined Millagard’s invitation to drive me back to my hotel. We departed with a warm embrace, agreeing to meet the next day for lunch before I took my plane back to London.

  I had taken no more than a dozen steps down the rue Princesse when my ogress caught up with me and grabbed my arm. With her hair like a nest of infuriated vipers, she conjured up one of those Gorgons who hunted down humans, creatures who are the reflection of their guilt, the deformed image of themselves. Those who had the misfortune to look upon them were, if memory served, turned to stone. But for me, this fateful day, I looked upon her as heaven-sent, an ambassador of destiny, come to shame me but also to deliver me from a fate that had so long held me prisoner.

  Another wink from the eye of fate: my hotel bar was closed, which meant that I had no choice but to offer my Medusa a nightcap in the intimacy of my room. Offer made, offer accepted.

  I had not slept with a woman for thirty years. Not since the death of my beloved Yasmina. Castrated by sorrow. Castrated by guilt as well.

  And now Margot Zembla was playing the unwitting role of exorcist. The unlikely combination of her sexual bulimia, the depraved poses she insisted on striking, and her verbal obscenity did the job, and I soon found myself fully aroused. Sullying myself against her sk
in, I took the first steps toward curing myself, and like a man possessed, in a fit of diabolical madness, of morbid hallucination, I took her once, twice, and then again, and each time it was Nicolas I was destroying beneath me.

  Finally she fell into a deep sleep, accompanied by sounds not unlike those of a sink being unblocked. Her snoring in itself was enough to have sounded the retreat of the most romantic love story in history. I offered these nocturnal noises up as a sacrifice, a burnt offering. They were part and parcel of my punishment. I didn’t sleep a wink all night, exorcised to be sure but disgusted as well, disgusted with myself and with this body sprawled next to me.

  I fell asleep at the precise moment when the telephone rang. It was eight o’clock, and the noise-prone object of my desires ended her nightlong pipe-emptying labors and, opening her booze-reddened eyes, gazed longingly upon me.

  I drank the cup to the dregs. When breakfast was served she insisted on eating it not only in bed but naked in bed. Or, rather, naked on the bed. I looked in awe as she wolfed down her breakfast, in her own simpering, gourmand manner. Nor did I turn away when she struggled into her dress, repacked her gelatinous flesh into her orange suit. I listened to the gargantuan gargling noises that later emanated from the bathroom. All part of my atonement, to be sure, but also because I sensed that one day Fat Margot would be useful to me, would become an integral part of my plan. One day in the not too distant future, our paths would cross again.

  “The next time I’m in Paris,” I said, always the gentleman, as I escorted her to the door, “I trust I can ring you up for dinner.”

  After a long, hot shower I felt better. I called my office and told my faithful secretary, Doris—whom the staff referred to as “High Fidelity” behind her back—that I was returning on the next plane. The trying night I had just gone through had eliminated any desire I might have had to lunch with Millagard. I rang him and begged off, on the pretense that some urgent matter had just come up and I had to fly immediately back to London.