Read Online Goodnight Nobody by Jennifer Weiner - Free Book Online Page B

TV.
    "How long had Kitty been, um, working with you?"
    "Five years, six years, something like that," she said.
    I wrote it down. "How did you meet her?"
    "We were introduced," she said. "Joel Asch, he's the editor in chief of Content, had been her professor at Hanfield. He spoke highly of her, I interviewed her, she seemed intelligent, and capable enough, so that was that. There you go." She tapped her foot on the hardwood floor. "What else? What else?"
    I blurted out the first thing I could think of. "Where's your son? Is he napping?"
    "He's at the park with my mother. She takes care of him when I'm working," she said. She lifted her chin and narrowed her eyes at me, daring me to call her a hypocrite.
    "Oh."
    "And when I travel. I used to take him with me--he was more portable when he was little--but it just got to be too much. Last year I was on the road one night out of every three. That was why Kitty was so perfect," Laura Lynn said. "I supplied the politics, the ideology, the spin. She provided some of the details. You know. All that messy domestic stuff. Dirty diapers and drool." She whipped one manicured hand through the air. I imagined I could hear the air whistling in its wake.
    "So..." I wanted to ask who did the writing, but I knew I couldn't. So I said, "How did you divide the labor?" There, I thought. Much better.
    Laura Lynn shook her head in frustration. Not a single hair moved. "We'd talk on the phone, or we'd email. I'd give her ideas, we'd have conversations, and then she'd send me the final product. When you think about it, I was doing her a real service," Laura Lynn said.
    I couldn't help raising my eyebrows at that one, and I tried to camouflage my disgust as deep interest. "Oh?"
    "I believe in earned equality," she said. I recognized the catch-phrase from one of her TV appearances. "And unlike the so-called feminists"--she hooked her spindly fingers into air quotes and lifted her lip in a sneer--"I actually support women."
    "Oh?"
    "Absolutely," she said, nodding vigorously. "You see, a woman like Kitty, a mom with two kids..." She drummed her fingers on her knee, looking disconcerted, even upset, for the first time in our conversation. "She had two kids, right?"
    I nodded.
    "Two kids, in the suburbs, what other work could she possibly do? She couldn't go to an office, couldn't go back to school. I allowed her the luxury of staying home with her children, and a chance to have a voice in the world!" she concluded triumphantly.
    Hv voice in world, I scribbled, keeping my eyes assiduously on my page, knowing that if I risked looking at Laura Lynn, my face would give me away. "So she worked from home?"
    Laura Lynn nodded, sighed audibly, and glanced at her watch again. "That's right. After that first time we met in the city, it was just easier for us to do it on the phone or with email."
    "That was all right with your editor? With..." I looked at my notebook. "Joel Asch?"
    "Anything was going to be okay with him. He loooved her. He might have been fucking her, for all I know," she added, her voice suddenly vicious. So much for sisterhood, I managed to keep from saying.
    "Did she agree with your point of view? Your take on motherhood?"
    Laura Lynn scowled at me. "Well, of course she did. Why wouldn't she?"
    I wrote it down without answering. I wasn't touching that one. It was probably true. A woman who'd tell an almost stranger, "I would never leave my children," with her face and eyes glowing, like she was in the grip of some religious passion, or insane--probably would buy what Laura Lynn was selling.
    "Look," Laura Lynn continued, leaning forward and laying one hand on my knee for emphasis, "I would have been perfectly happy with a double byline. Honest to God. But the editors felt..."--she gave a tiny shrug--"that my name was the draw, and that sharing the credit would just muddy the waters. And Kitty was fine with it. Really. Especially once we got the book deal."
    "Book deal?"
    She gave another impatient