The Man Who Would Be F. Scott Fitzgerald Read Online Free Page B

phone buzzed. Then he reached for the cordless headset on the desk and put it on. It had a mouthpiece and earphones and an antenna sticking out of it. It looked like a prop left over from an old episode of Star Trek , the one where somebody stole Spock’s brain. Boyd jumped to his feet and paced around the office as he talked, coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other.
    “Yo, amigo, you sound like shit in a microwave! Gotta start living clean like me! How’s the little baby? … That’s beautiful, man. Beautiful.” Boyd shifted from chummy to grave. “So, listen, I have a firm offer on the table — buck and a quarter up front.” (Translation: another publisher had offered one of Boyd’s clients an advance of $125,000 for their next book.) He shifted to confidential now — the man worked through the gears as fast and furious as Emerson Fittipaldi. “None of this would be happening if it was up to me. You and me, we’re like family. I want you to have it. And if you’ll just match their figure by the end of today, you’ll get it, okay? … Sure, sure think it over.” He said good-bye, yanked off the headset, and flung it carelessly onto the desk. Then he sat back down, chuckling to himself. “Between you and me, the cheap bastard’s been all alone in the bidding since seventy-five thou. But what he doesn’t know won’t piss him off, right?”
    “I thought that sort of thing wasn’t done,” I said.
    “It wasn’t — yesterday. But that was when publishing was about books. It’s about bucks now, and anyone who says it isn’t is doing a yank on your frank.” He picked up a football from his credenza and gripped it by the seams. “I know, I know. A lot of editors think I’m a douchebag, and guess what — I like it that way. It means I’m doing my job. What’s important to me is that my clients are happy. And believe me, they are.”
    He tossed me the football. It had been autographed by a drug-dependent pro quarterback whose memoir Samuels had peddled for six hundred thousand. Happy indeed.
    He took me in with his nonblinking lasers. “What would you say if I told you I’ve convinced Cam Noyes’s publisher to accept a work of nonfiction for his second book instead of a novel. Exact same money.”
    “I’d say,” I replied, “you’re almost as good an agent as you think you are.”
    “It’s going to be a kind of portrait of his time,” he went on. “His life, his friends, his scene. Charlie Chu is doing original portraits and illustrations for it. An explosive collaboration, really. Like a labor of love for the two of them. Actually, there’s no existing term to describe what it is.”
    “I can think of one — home movie.”
    Boyd’s nostrils quivered, but he kept right on coming. “We’re talking about the top writer and top artist of this generation. There’s no doubt that it’ll be major.” He seemed utterly sure of this. And he was. Like all topflight salesmen, he was his own best customer.
    “What’s happened to his second novel?” I asked.
    “Too soon. Cam has to wait for his ideas to percolate — especially because everybody expects so much of him. In the meantime, he needs product out there. And some help — pulling it together. He needs a good editor is what he needs, only there are maybe three in the whole fucking town and his isn’t one of ’em. You interested in helping him out?”
    “That’s not my specialty. There are plenty of competent free-lance editors out there if you —”
    “You’re not gonna make this easy for me, are you, amigo?”
    “That’s not my specialty either.”
    He sighed, started to nibble irritably on the cuticle of his left thumb. Abruptly, he stopped himself. “Look, Cam Noyes is a cottage industry now. He has promotional commitments, personal appearance tours, speaking engagements — twenty grand a pop on the college campus tour. His time has become too valuable for him to spend it alone in a room generating material. Literary