Riverside Drive

The ratings have just soared in the tri-state area.

“Thank you for being so nice,” Alexandra said. She let go of Cassy’s hand, walked down to the elevator and pressed the button. “Will I see you again soon, do you think?”

“Well,” Cassy said, hanging on the door, “I’ll be seeing a lot of you. We tend to watch a lot of news around here.”

“Great,” Alexandra said.

“Good night,” Cassy said, closing the door.

“Good night.”

Cassy locked the door and leaned against it. And then, after hesitating a moment, she ventured a look out the peephole.

He won’t give up on this one, she thought.

2

The Stewarts

Howard heard the front door of the apartment slam. “Hi, Rosanne,” he called, pouring the rest of the water into the coffee maker.

“Hi.” Swish, swish, swish; the familiar sound of Rosanne’s jeans.

Silence.

Howard looked over his shoulder and saw her leaning against the doorway. “You look very tired,” he said, moving over to the butcher-block table.

“You got it.” She let her bag slide down off her shoulder to thump on the floor. “Party at the C’s last night.”

“Okay,” Howard said, picking up a piece of paper and examining it, “I’ll strike ‘windows’ off of Melissa’s list.” He leaned over the table to pencil in “next week.”

Rosanne tossed her bag up onto the counter and adjusted her bandanna to a more pirate-y angle. “Been on the list for three years,” she said, “you’d think she’d catch on.”

Howard smiled, pushing his glasses up higher on his nose. “Melissa doesn’t like to admit defeat.”

Rosanne gave him a look and moved on to the refrigerator. “You oughtta get a medal or somethin’,” she said, opening the door.

Howard let the comment pass. “I got some half-and-half—it’s in the door.”

“Great, thanks.”

“And there’re some bran muffins in the breadbox.”

Rosanne closed the refrigerator door and walked over to the coffee maker. Tapping her fingers on it, trying to hurry it along, she said, “So how are ya?”

Howard tossed the pencil down on the table. “Good, I guess.”

“I brought that book back,” Rosanne said, reaching for her bag.

“What did you think?”

Rosanne pulled it out and handed it to him. “I liked it. I liked it a lot, only—”

Howard was looking down at the jacket of the hard-cover volume of a Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. “Only what?”

“I don’t know, Howie,” she sighed, swinging her weight to one leg. “Like I don’t know if it’s so good for me to be readin’ romances. Kinda gets me depressed after—it’s not like it’s like real life or nothin’.”

“Well,” Howard said, considering this.

“But I liked it okay,” she finished. “And I read another one in there about the family movin’ out West—gettin’ shot at and attacked and all.” She moved over to the sink. “Weird how it was like now back then.”

Howard laughed. “I’ll give you something a little different this week,” he promised.

Rosanne opened the cabinets under the sink and squatted down. “Yeah, okay,” she said, pulling out various cleaning agents and plunking them down on the floor. She shook the bathroom cleanser container. “We need some Comet, Howie,” she said. Howard wrote this down. “And you better tell her highness,” Rosanne added, whipping her head around in his direction, “that we don’t want any of that el cheapo cleaner she always gets. Brother,” she muttered, standing up and slamming the cabinets shut, “you’d think if she wanted a clean house she’d get some decent cleanin’ stuff.”

“I’ll get it,” Howard said, dropping the pencil.

Rosanne turned around to look at him.

“What?”

Her mouth twitched one way and then the other. “Nothin’,” she finally said, waving him away. “Go do your work. I wanna listen to the radio.”

As Howard walked through the living room he heard Rosanne whirling the radio dial. In a few minutes, he knew, every radio and television in the apartment, save in the master bedroom, would be on (9 a.m., Radios: Howard Stern (WXRK), John Gambling (WOR), Don Imus (WNBC); TVs: Leonard Philbin and “The Munsters.” 10 a.m., Radios: K-Rock, Sherre Henry (WOR) and WPLJ; TVs: Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue. At eleven, while Rosanne cleaned their bedroom to Joan Hamburg (WOR), Howard would move to the living room for a half hour and either turn off the TV or give in and watch “Father Knows Best.”

In the beginning, Howard had stayed home on Monday mornings to read manuscripts as an accommodation to Melissa to have someone home while Rosanne was there. Melissa was still under the impression—kept there, quite deliberately—that these mornings were of enormous inconvenience to Howard when, in fact, they were often the best times of his week.

Howard settled down into Melissa’s pink chaise longue and picked up the remaining unread part of a manuscript that had been submitted to him at the office. It was not holding his attention, however, and in a moment he was staring out the window at the Hudson River.

Howard Mills Stewart was thirty-three years old and in perfect health. He had been married for eight years, was living in a fabulous three-bedroom apartment, was an esteemed editor at Gardiner & Grayson, one of the most famous publishing houses in the world, and yet—

And yet…

Why, he wondered, did he feel so terribly unhappy? So lonely. So utterly lost.

When twenty-two-year-old Howard Stewart joined the training program at Gardiner & Grayson Publishers, Inc., in 1975, to say that he was unprepared for the world of book publishing is putting it mildly. Nothing he had studied at Duke, nothing he had imagined as a teenager in Columbus, Ohio, had seemed to be of use to him. No, that was not quite correct. There was one thing he had brought along with him that was of enormous value: to so love reading, to so love books, that not even book publishing could scare him into seeking another means of employment.

When he had arrived in New York City—at the Chelsea apartment he shared with no less than five other recent college graduates—Howard had no doubts that he would discover great writers and nurture them to staggering heights of critical success. It would take him about a year, he thought. He even had a list—in his head—of the kind of writers they would be: a Charles Dickens; an Edith Wharton; an F. Scott Fitzgerald; a John Cheever; and a John Updike. And so, when he arrived at Gardiner & Grayson for his first day of “training,” he was rather taken aback by being asked to type some three hundred mailing labels to send out review copies of books.

When the publisher, Harrison Dreiden, recruited Howard to work as an assistant in his office, everyone told Howard how lucky he was. Howard wondered. Could book publishing really be like this? As far as he could make out from the vantage point of his desk, no one in the office ever read or ever edited. All that seemed to go on were phone calls, typing and meetings, meetings, meetings and more meetings.

“What exactly is it that you do all day?” Howard once asked a senior editor. She had thrown her head back and laughed. “Okay, Howard,” she said, checking her watch, “I will give you a one-minute summary of an editor’s job. Ready?”

Howard nodded.

“The editor represents the house to the author, and the author to the house, right? Okay then, lesson number one: the editor is responsible for absolutely everything to absolutely everybody.”

“Got it,” Howard said, a trifle annoyed with this simplicity.