Personal Velocity , livre ebook

Canongate Books - Miller Rebecca

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69 pages

English

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'An excellent book' Guardian'Compelling' IndependentThe vibrantly fresh and lustrous stories in Miller's collection explore the multifaceted lives of women in seven arresting portraits. Modern and diverse, these women of different classes and ages struggle with sexuality, fate, motherhood, infidelity, desperation, and an overriding will to survive. We meet Greta, a cookbook editor who is chosen by Tavi, the hottest writer of his generation, to edit his new book; Paula, a pregnant twenty-one-year-old, who is on the run; Delia, an abused working-class wife who goes into hiding with her children; and Louisa, a painter who moves rapidly from one lover to the next, acting out a self-perpetuating drama over which she has no control. Edgy, fearless, and beautifully spare, Personal Velocity is a superb collection from one of the best writers in contemporary fiction.

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Short story

Informations

Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	02 juillet 2009
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781847677747
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0360€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Rebecca Miller is a writer and director. She is the author of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee , a Sunday Times bestseller and Richard & Judy Book Club pick, which she also adapted for screen; Personal Velocity , her feature film of which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance; and Jacob’s Folly . Her film work includes Angela , The Ballad of Jack and Rose and Maggie’s Plan . Her work has been published in thirty-two languages.

The paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2009 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Doubleday, a division of Transworld
This digital edition first published in 2009 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Rebecca Miller, 2001
The moral right of the author has been asserted
canongate.co.uk
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is copyright © Rebecca Miller, 2008
Lyrics from ‘Baby’s Got Her Blue Jeans On’, words and music by Bob McDill, copyright © 1984, are used courtesy of Universal-Polygram International Publishing, Inc., o/b/o Itself and Ranger Bob Music (ASCAP), International copyright secured All rights reserved
All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
British Library Cataloguing - in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 346 6 eISBN 978 1 84767 774 7
For D.

Contents

Greta

Delia

Louisa

Julianne

Bryna

Nancy

Paula

Greta
Greta Herskovitz looked down at her husband’s shoes one morning and saw with shocking clarity that she was going to leave him. The shoes were earnest, inexpensive brown wing tips. Greta was wearing a pair of pointy alligator flats. Lee was twenty-eight, the same age as Greta. He was six feet tall, had blond hair, powerful shoulders, and a slender waist. His cheeks were peppered with pockmarks, but they looked good on him. Since he’d left graduate school, Lee had worked as a fact checker for The New Yorker and was whittling away at an eleven-hundred-page dissertation about two firsthand accounts of nineteenth-century Arctic expeditions and how they reflected Victorian society. The cannibalism in particular. Lee was a kind, quiet man. If he ever fell out of love with Greta, she knew he would go into therapy and fix it. But she hadn’t bargained on her own success.
One day about a year prior to the moment with the shoes, Greta was walking down the hall of the shabby, venerable publishing firm Warren and Howe in a pair of cheap pumps, carrying an untidy pile of seven file folders, each containing a different recipe for rice pudding. She was currently editing a book by Tammy Lee Felber entitled Three Hundred and Sixty-Five Ways to Cook Rice . Aaron Gelb, the legendary senior editor at Warren and Howe, a wise, sad man with enormous pockets under his brown eyes and a slow, pessimistic, humorous pattern of speech, called out to her from his office.
‘Ms Herskovitz,’ he said, ‘would you come in here please?’
Greta turned, alarmed. She was wearing a fitted brown suit with a skirt that ended several inches above the knees, and she wondered if maybe she was pushing it. As she entered, Mr Gelb sat down at his desk and put his head in his hands, his customary posture when in thought. Greta sat down opposite him. Her nylons rubbed together as she crossed her legs. Worried that her skirt looked obscene, she gave it a little tug. Mr Gelb slipped his glasses to the top of his head, rubbing his eyes for a very long time and sighing. Then he looked out the window.
‘Thavi Matola wants to have lunch with you,’ he said.
Thavi Matola was the hottest writer of his generation. He was thirty-three. Greta’s publishing house wanted him badly. They were calling his agent, trying to get to him through his friends. His first novel, Blue Mountain , was a love story about Bounmy, a Laotian male prostitute, and an Alabama gas-station attendant named Rory. It had won the PEN Faulkner Prize, sold half a million copies.
‘With me?’ Greta said.
‘He called me up and said he heard we had an excellent editor here. And it was you.’ Greta had never edited anything but cookbooks. ‘Do you have any idea why he might have said that?’
‘Maybe he likes to cook,’ said Greta. Mr Gelb smiled faintly.
‘If the lunch goes well, he’ll come to Warren and Howe. If not, he’ll go peddle his wounded psyche someplace else.’
‘Wow,’ said Greta. ‘This is really strange.’
‘One o’clock on Thursday at the Senate,’ Gelb said, opening a drawer and taking out a large roll of antacid tablets. ‘Wear pants.’ Greta got up. When she was at the door, Gelb said, ‘Wear what you want. What do I know.’ She shut the door. Poor Mr Gelb. She went straight out to the most expensive shoe store she had ever heard of and put the alligator flats on her credit card. She couldn’t even begin to afford them, but she needed to feel worthy, she needed to feel like a pro.

On the day of the meeting she wore a red suit with a fairly short skirt – just above the knees. It was a cool, clear spring day. She was twenty minutes early, so she walked over to the Museum of Modern Art and wandered around the cluttered gift shop with the fixed stare of a sleepwalker, little charges of anxiety going off in her belly, till three minutes to one. Then she rushed over to the restaurant, sat down at the corner table that had been reserved by Mr Gelb’s secretary, and took out her notebook so she’d look busy. Inside was a shopping list: bananas, clementines, toilet paper, rice, batteries, tampons. She looked up and Thavi Matola was standing there.
‘Greta Herskovitz?’ he said.
‘Yes – oh, hi!’ Greta stood up, adjusting her hair band. She felt off-kilter. She should have been watching for him. Thavi sat down. He was slender, androgynous-looking, with smooth brown skin and short curly hair. His mother was Laotian, Greta remembered. Father, Italian-American soldier, dead. Refugees. Hard life. Three sisters, two left behind in Laos because of that government.
‘I really loved your first book,’ she said.
‘It’s a piece of shit,’ said Thavi in a slight accent, lighting a cigarette.

‘I think that’s pretty common,’ said Greta.
‘Second thoughts?’
‘Self-hatred.’ A minor convulsion of amusement forced the smoke out of Matola’s nose; he fixed his gaze on Greta like a child surprised to hear a stranger call him by his nickname. Greta felt her muscles relax. ‘The pasta’s good here,’ she said, then ordered steak frites. Thavi convulsed again, air hissing from his nostrils, lips clamped shut. They started a bottle of wine. Greta didn’t usually drink at lunch but she could tell he wanted to so she went with it, trying hard not to let her mind go slack.
‘What’s the new book about?’ she asked. ‘If you don’t mind talking about it.’
‘Laos,’ he said. ‘The trip over. I was on my own.’
‘That must have been frightening,’ said Greta. ‘How old were you?’
‘Thirteen,’ he said.
‘Have you written much yet?’
‘About a hundred pages. Aren’t I the one supposed to be asking the questions?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘What’s your story?’ he asked.
‘Manhattan, I was born in Manhattan, went to the Flemming School uptown – a small private, you know – and then to boarding school, then to college, then to law school, but I quit – my father’s a lawyer, we’re not speaking, my mother is – well, dead. They’re divorced. I mean they were. I’m twenty-eight. My father has a three-year-old.’ God almighty please let me shut up , she thought. Her steak arrived. She cut into it vigorously.
‘My friend Felicia Wong said you were great at trimming fat,’ he said, watching her do so. Felicia Wong had written short stories at Harvard. Greta had been one of the editors of The Advocate . She had an eye for the inessential and would sift through the undergraduate fiction, culling every superfluous word. The writers had called her the Grim Reaper. Yet they all wanted Greta Herskovitz to comb through their work. She had been a bit of a star at Harvard.
‘I have a tendency to overwrite,’ he said. ‘I need someone to kick my ass.’
‘I can kick your ass,’ said Greta accommodatingly, wondering if he was gay. By the time she got back to the office, Thavi Matola had called and said he’d sign with Warren and Howe if Greta Herskovitz edited the book. It was unbelievable. No more rice pudding. All the other editors came into her cubicle to congratulate her. Miss Pells, the sixty-five-year-old receptionist, showed Greta where her new office was going to be. She’d have a door, a window. Before Greta left, Gelb called her into his office.
‘We’ll renegotiate your contract next week,’ he said, looking impressed and suspicious. It was surreal.
When she got home Lee was watching a documentary about boat building. Greta burst into the room, dropping her bag on the floor, yelling, ‘HE WANTS ME TO DO IT!’
‘That’s amazing, sweetheart,’ he said. Greta saw a shadow of anxiety cross Lee’s face, and she blushed, feeling strangely sheepish. As they talked over her triumph quietly on the couch, a toxic blend of anxiety and elation built up in Greta’s mind and seemed actually to be pressing against her skull. She craved air. She wanted to go out, she wanted to tell people her news, she wanted to get drunk, to celebrate. She remembered a party uptown being given by an old friend from Exeter, a girl named Mimi. Mimi was tall and thin, very blond, and so beautiful it was hard to look at her. She was, however, uneasy in herself, and had a tendency to join cults, which was to Greta a small consolation. Greta was squat, with short muscular legs and thick dark hair and squinty brown eyes and full lips. And charisma. Many men found her sexy. Her boyfriends had tended to leave her, though, for girls like Mimi. The fragile kind.
At the party, Lee was having a laconic conversation with a couple of playwrights they both knew. Greta watched him