Free Lust & Wonder by Augusten Burroughs Page B

manuscript and that it needed “a shitload of work” but reassured me, “It’ll be great, and you can do it. Totally.”
    I kept waiting for him to grab the envelope and hand me contracts to sign, because I’d read that’s what agents did with new authors. But this didn’t happen, and I began to wonder, so did all this mean he was my agent now? Or was I supposed to revise the manuscript, and then he would decide whether or not I was good enough?
    I pushed my plate back and reached for my Diet Coke, which I sipped through a straw. I glanced at him, and he was already looking at me, smiling like he loved me. This made me look away from him and into the glass, where I stared at the ice. If he decided not to be my agent, I decided not to be a writer. I wanted this one, with the body of a wrestler and mustard stains on his shirt.
    I found it both incredibly easy and incredibly difficult to sit next to him. I was funny around him; he brought that out. But I felt weirdly intimidated, too. If he wasn’t going to be my agent, I wasn’t fully confident I could even snag him as a boyfriend, either. Now that we’d had lunch, I was thinking he was out of my league, even with mustard stains.
    He seemed so at home in the world, so comfortable and easygoing. He told me he’d been raised in Dayton, Ohio, but he seemed more like a California surfer dude to me. Plus, I’d never really been attracted to blond guys before, since I was blond myself. But he was a different kind of blond guy, a more durable variety, with the coarse arm hair of a Middle Eastern terrorist, which was exactly my type.
    When he wasn’t chewing and didn’t have his mouth wide open in hysterical fits of laughter, I could see that he was actually extremely handsome. He did look like a corn-fed Ohio guy, now that I thought about him. He had symmetrical features, like a blond Tom Cruise. Once I saw this, I couldn’t un-see it, and I also realized there was no way he’d date me. So by the end of lunch, when he still hadn’t handed over whatever was inside that envelope and as we shook hands in parting, I felt a crush of despair.
    I’d lost both an agent and a boyfriend at the same lunch.
    Exactly like with an actual date, I kept going over it in my mind until I could no longer make any sense of even the simplest gesture. I was completely confused. Was it a good meeting or a bad one? Had he agreed to take me on as a writer or was I supposed to make those revisions first? And what were those revisions again? I hadn’t taken notes.
    When I got back to my apartment on Third Avenue and Tenth Street, I decided to send him an e-mail, thanking him for lunch and then adding, “By the way, are you my agent now?” at the very end.
    Instead of writing me back, he called me two minutes after I hit Send. The first thing he said after laughing was, “Of course I’m your agent. I’m sorry. I thought I made that clear.”
    I told him I’d seen the envelope and kept expecting him to open it and hand me contracts to sign, a literary agency agreement.
    He howled as if I’d just told the most side-splittingly funny joke. “Oh my God, I’m sorry. That was just something to read in case I had to wait. I can’t believe you thought—” Then he set off on another bender of laughter. “This is an old ‘handshake’ kind of agency, but I will messenger you a contract. Yeah, you’re my client, and I’m your agent, and we’re gonna sell your book. Totally.”
    Totally . I hadn’t used that word since the eighties.
    As promised, he messengered the contract, and I spent at least twenty minutes holding it up to the light to admire the printed text, the texture of the fine linen paper, the logo at the top under which was printed “Literary Rights Management.”
    How was this even possible? If I had an agent, that meant I had to be an actual, real