Free Vernon Downs by Jaime Clarke Page A

moving slowly toward the balcony. Charlie swayed with the crowd until Kline was gone and thenmade his way for the door. He’d stayed long enough to recount the party to Olivia and glanced toward Vernon, hoping to give a salute across the noisy room, but Vernon was still in the corner, the woman with the cornflower blue dress whispering into his ear. He laughed and she leaned her body into his.
    A boisterous foursome burst into the lobby, late arrivals for the party raging upstairs. Charlie lingered, eavesdropping on their excited chatter about meeting Vernon Downs, before catapulting out into the night, his senses ablaze with a privileged glimpse of the world Olivia must’ve dreamed of a thousand times over.
    Charlie announced himself to the doorman, who registered a faint look of recognition. The doorman hung up the phone. “He’s coming down.” Charlie had almost missed the message Vernon had left the day before at Obelisk, asking him to join him for lunch. He had spent most of the previous day uptown with Derwin, who had arranged a launch party for Jacqueline Turner, one of his oldest authors, at Bemelmans in the Carlyle Hotel. Derwin had advanced him his paycheck so he could buy a suit for the occasion, again with the assistance of the vanilla-laced salesgirl at Century 21, who remembered him, or pretended to. New York’s reputation as a cold, heartless metropolis was unearned, in his judgment. Eastern Star, the former speakeasy on the same block as Obelisk, had become Charlie’s local, and he was amazed at the disparate population he’d encountered at the Star’s lacquered and pockmarked bar: faces from Florida and Texas and Oregon, or Canada and Europe and Asia—each as friendly as the last, always inquiring what had brought Charlie to New York. He always demurred and instead luxuriated in their answers to the same question, drinking in the various biographies and ambitions. The Vietnamese girl who was studying fashion at Pratt; the Australian couple who hoped to open an apiary somewhere in Brooklyn; the kid fromDetroit who had dreams of becoming a hatter. Their ambitions were endless and Charlie lamented only that he’d never know if any or all of them would come to fruition.
    Charlie’s stomach gurgled, reproof that he hadn’t eaten since the Southern-themed launch party at Bemelmans the day before. The plate of leftover pecan-encrusted sliced chicken breast drizzled in honey and red-skinned mashed potatoes he’d wolfed down was a distant culinary event, and he hoped Vernon’s plans for lunch were more than liquid. Jacqueline Turner had abstained from the delicious fare at her launch party, which Charlie ascribed to nerves. Leading up to the party, Derwin had been distracted with the details. What was left unsaid was that with Jacqueline being eighty, this would surely be her last novel, and even Derwin knew that it would not be remembered or read in the future. Charlie wondered if the same was true for her first novel,
Esque
. A framed enlargement of the cover hung over Derwin’s desk, the author photo a stunning portrait of Jacqueline in her youth, her even features lending her an aura of grace. The knowing eyes bored out from the frame as Charlie considered the art deco design on the cover. The novel had won several of the major fiction prizes the year it was published, and Jacqueline had written two more in short order that sold well enough to her new audience, which thinned with each subsequent title, until she stopped publishing altogether at the young age of forty. Charlie bristled at the notion that it was possible to go from gracing the cover of
Time
magazine to obscurity within the same lifetime. Vernon Downs would be famous his entire life, probably post-humously, too. Jacqueline’s death would merit an obituary in the
New York Times
, and Derwin would keep her work in print as long as he was alive, but it would probably suffer the miserable