Gideon Read Online Free

dunked on by a spindly high-school kid. Then New York Magazine gave the Nathan Lane profile they’d promised him to another freelancer—the editor’s sister-in-law. Then his dad called from Pompano Beach to tell him he thought Carl was wasting his precious Ivy League degree and his life, not necessarily in that order. Plus the Mets had lost three in a row, Nick at Nite had cleared out The Odd Couple and Taxi to make way for I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched , and now, just to round things out, he found himself in a room with the only two people left in the world who believed in his talent, in his future, in him. Unfortunately, one of those people was dead and the other one hated his guts.
    No, it definitely had not been one of Carl’s better weeks.
    He was standing next to an open casket in the Frank E. Campbell funeral parlor on Madison Avenue and Eighty-first Street, where Betty Slater, the legendary literary agent and even more legendary alcoholic, was laid out, looking as rosy and lifelike as a basket of wax fruit. At least she was not glowering at him with undisguised hostility, the way Amanda Mays, standing on the other side of the casket, was. Amanda was still angry over a slight misunderstanding. Something to do with a certain plum job in Washington, marriage, and living happily ever after. Carl had to admit to himself that some of the misunderstanding was his fault.
    Actually, Carl had to admit that all of the misunderstanding was his fault.
    The turnout for Betty’s funeral was huge, considering just how cranky Betty had gotten toward the end of her life, when she’d managed to offend just about every publisher, critic, and author in town. It was her brutal honesty, mostly. Throwing out words like stinks , and phony , and—one of her favorite combinations— pseudointellectual crap . Nonetheless, this was an event the people had dutifully turned out in droves for it, clustering around her open casket in solemn tribute. Norman Mailer was there. And John Irving. Maya Angelou was there. So were Sonny Mehta, Tina Brown, Judith Regan, and a number of prominent editors and literary agents. All to pay their respects. To mingle. And, Carl was horrified to observer, to work the room. Because Betty had still had a few money clients in her stable, and now they were on the loose. Most notably Norm Pincus, the balding, splayfooted little shlub known to the reading public as Esmeralda Wilding, author of eleven straight best-selling bodice rippers. Agents were hovering around the tubby little gold mine like vultures, waiting to swoop down on him. It was, Carl reflected, in terrible taste.
    Especially because not one of the vultures was paying the least bit of attention to him .
    Hey, wasn’t he talented? Didn’t he have the potential to write best-sellers? Quality best-sellers? Couldn’t he go on Oprah and charm the hell out of America?
    And wasn’t that Maggie Peterson staring at him from across the room?
    It was.
    Holy shit. The Maggie Peterson. Staring at him. And not only that. Now coming toward him. Smiling and sticking her hand out. The most famous, the most visible, the most flamboyant, and by far the hottest editor in New York publishing was speaking to him. She’d had three number-one best-sellers in a row. Her own imprint at Apex, the international multimedia conglomerate. She was a star. And Carl Granville knew that what he could use more than anything else right now was just a little bit of stardust. He was twenty-eight years old and burning to write the next great American novel. He had just delivered the first draft of his most recent attempt to Betty Slater, but she had died before she could tell him what she thought of it. And now he had no agent, no money to pay this month’s rent, and no reason whatsoever to believe that his next payday would arrive any sooner than the twenty-fourth of never. But suddenly there was hope. Maggie Peterson was saying something to him.
    She was saying: “I don’t know