Meet Sylvia

She was not, by nature, a funny woman. She would say things to set her friends laughing and be shocked, having uttered them with total, morose sincerity. Her agent, Barry Wheeler, perpetuated this unwitting humor by cackling every time she opened her mouth.

Stuffed permanently into a red ski jacket, Barry now glanced at her as she sat in the passenger seat of his Buick LaCrosse. The rain was mild, but he had the wipers on at about twice the speed required to clear the windshield of droplets. She wanted to ask him to turn them down, but felt he might think her neurotic. She needed a cigarette badly, but couldn’t roll down the window in the rain. So, instead, she pressed her knees together a bit grindingly, and tried to hold onto her buzz from lunchtime cocktails.

“I’ve never been to the Steamtown Mall,” Barry informed her jauntily. “Good place for a book signing, though. Sue Grafton was there doing it, once.”

“This isn’t a book singing,” she told him. “It’s a gallows march.”

He cackled, like someone had given him a fanfare cue. She thought about the wipers wiping away infinitesimal layers of glass, almost on a molecular level, until years had passed and they’d worn the windshield down to paper thinness, and then the glass would shatter with a final pass of the blades. That would be interesting. “How long have you owned this car?” she asked him.

“Uhm, maybe nine months?” was his offhanded answer. She cursed mutely. Not nearly enough time. For a while, they rode in silence. Barry had always assumed she was one-eighth insane; not because of her eccentricities, but because he (like many non-artists working in the arts) believed it to be the case with every writer. She let him have that supposition. It made him more malleable when she made odd requests.

Outside the mall, in the very breathy drizzle of rain, she smoked while Barry went scouting inside to find the Waldenbooks. She did not want to go in. This new book was as awful as the one before it. Her advance from Doubleday was decent, enough to keep her fed, housed and blotto, and the projected sales suggested they’d not cut her out just yet. But she was not getting on any list anytime soon. Newsweek had given her three sentences and words like ‘solid’ and ‘engaging’. The Times had called it ‘an ambitious foray into the world of What If’, whatever that meant.

It would be bought by people in airports, or people who wanted something to read by the pool. It would be perched on the top of toilet tanks in peoples’ bathrooms, taken out at the local library. No one would carry it with them. Nothing in it would be highlighted. No pages would be dog-eared, and no one would discuss it with their spouse/friend/co-worker. If someone walked by and saw them reading it and asked ‘Hey – I saw that on Amazon; how is it?’ the reaction would be the same every time: a shrug, an exhale, and an ‘It’s not bad. Something to read, I guess’.

She finished the cigarette, flicked away the butt, and went inside the mall to find Barry and to sign, she estimated, sixteen copies of her latest book.