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always take up smoking, possibly, or learn a few tricks with a syringe. Meanwhile, she had plenty of days and nights to wax nostalgic about Mia before she died of terminal masochism.

Lunch Wednesday (after a plethora of phoning) was with Thornton Gaddes, an agent whose association with every celebrity with teeth bored him—“unutterably,” he explained (at some length). He was supposed to be intelligent, but Louey couldn’t bring herself to sympathize about his latest stellar obligations, and tried to steer the conversation to business projects. This tactic met with lukewarm success.
    The check came to $89.82 at the restaurant of Thornton’s choice. Louey’s veal had been tasteless, but then she shouldn’t have expected otherwise for a paltry $30, she supposed. Along with a mild case of indigestion, she’d acquired the knowledge that Thornton had four authors she wanted to work with, though he wouldn’t send her two of them and Random House was trying to come up with a few ideas for the other two. Louey started to suggest topics, then realized Random House didn’t need any more bestsellers and held her tongue. She shouldn’t have drunk alcohol at lunch, she berated herself; the afternoon was going to be endless and unproductive. Usually she guzzled Virgin Marys, but with Thornton’s pancake makeup gleaming across the table at her, she’d needed fortification.
    By four-thirty, she’d been complained to by eighty percent of her authors and had given out some uncharacteristically stern edicts along with her customary reassurances. Her willpower was slipping; lately she found herself increasingly unable to reassure her authors, and she’d even come close to hanging up on one of them when he’d interrupted a call from London for the third time.
    â€œI don’t have to live like this,” she told herself when the catalogue copy for the spring list came around written in Serbo-Croatian. Mia was rich; if Louey had been good, she could have been a kept woman by this time, living off the fat of the D’Allesandro money, happy and overfed. “I don’t want to work any more,” she wailed, buzzing Kevin.
    His cheerful voice over the intercom nearly brought tears to her eyes. “Yes, Louey? Your every whim?”
    â€œI want to be blissfully happy,” she moaned.
    He paused. “Leave New York,” he said at last. “You can’t get there from here.”
    After a long swim at the Y, Louey walked home, stopping to eye some movies in the window of her favorite video store. She had at least six manuscripts to get through before Friday, but there was no arguing with either The Philadelphia Story or Risky Business. At least this way she wouldn’t have time to think about Mia.
    Katharine Hepburn had nothing on Mia: not with Mia’s smoky-lashed eyes and that full French mouth. Katharine Hepburn barely had breasts, not like Mia’s. Louey’s heart pounded at the memory of the first time she had seen Mia, at the ripe old age of fifteen. She felt barely more than seven now. It was as if not a single day of the past two years had ever taken place.
    Fuck you, she thought as Tom Cruise faced Rebecca De Mornay in an empty train. Fuck you, Mia. She turned off the VCR and took a manuscript with her to bed. Half the pages were single-spaced and the typeface alternated, sometimes every other paragraph. God, Louey groaned. When was she going to stop expecting Mia to walk through the door?

Louey Mercer had two good qualities she drew upon whenever possible: an inability to tolerate injustice and an ability to see the humor in almost every situation. When she started at the bottom rung of a publishing house nearly everyone had. warned her against, the first quality caused her considerable difficulty, but the second proved invaluable. A fast, tireless worker, she couldn’t help feeling that the people around her had stumbled into such an