Chapter 27 Jake Fischer

CHAPTER 27 JAKE FISCHER

2006

New York City

The first time I saw Cate Kay’s name was in a review of her now-famous debut in the New York Times . It was just after lunch, and I was walking back to my desk at Vanity Fair , where I was a senior writer. As I passed another writer’s empty cubicle, I saw the book review section face up on the edge of the desk and paused on seeing the massive question mark that anchored the page. T HE V ERY L AST : A R UNAWAY S UCCESS was the headline, then beneath it, more intriguing to me, the subhead: I DENTITY OF AUTHOR OF brEAKOUT HIT REMAINS A MYSTERY. I skimmed the page: “Even the book’s editor is in the dark as to who the elusive ‘Cate Kay’ is.”

My first thought was No way . I brought the section back to my desk and dropped into my rolling desk chair, momentum pushing me to my phone. I scanned the article. My takeaway: the book was no literary masterpiece, but compelling and selling like hotcakes. I laughed at the ridiculousness of the book’s tagline: “ The Road , but a beach read!” (Absurd though it was, I later had to admit that it conveyed exactly what The Very Last was.)

Back then, I was always on the hunt for a story to pitch my editor, otherwise I might get saddled with some trivial assignment. A colleague had been a senior writer, same level as me, then got bumped to writer-at-large. When I went to the editor-in-chief, not to complain, but to simply ask for clarification, he pointed out that she had two cover stories under her belt while I was still looking for my first.

Sometimes landing a cover story was luck and timing. One of her covers was a short Q I once saw a line of canoes painted to look like the ones from The Core, which made me wonder if the book had licensed itself out to nuclear bombs as well. I

“Do you have an inkling as to who Cate Kay is?” I finally asked toward the end of our conversation, which I’d front-loaded with questions about Slush, so that maybe Melody would think that the entire piece would be built around her nascent agency.

She laughed at the question, then said, “The one thing I know for certain is that the author is a woman.”

“How?”

“The writing,” she said simply. “A man would have centered the experience of Jeremiah instead of Samantha,” which was at that point a meaningless observation to me because I hadn’t yet read the book.

“I look forward to reading it,” I said, making a mental note to pick up a copy that same day. Maybe, as Melody was alluding to, there were clues in the text. “One more question if I may,” I jumped back in.

“Yes?”

“Who do you work with, if not Cate Kay? There must be somebody on the other end of your calls?”

“Of course,” she said, and nothing in her voice suggested this was a big secret as she said, “That would be Sidney Collins.”

I scribbled down the name in my notebook, spelling it like the city, Sydney .

“And you’re sure this Sidney Collins—you’re sure this person’s not the author?”

“When it comes to Cate Kay, there are only two things I’m sure of: she’s a woman, and she is not Sidney Collins.”

“You’re certain?”

“I take it you haven’t spoken yet to Ms. Collins?”

“I have not.”

“Well then, you will see for yourself.”

This chat with Melody Huber was one of the only of its kind. The next time I got her on the line she was much less forthcoming. Most of her answers were along the lines of, “I can’t tell you that, Mr. Fischer,” or, “I’m not at liberty to say,” and I quickly gathered that Sidney Collins had called around to everyone with hands on The Very Last and asked them not to cooperate with any media attempting to uncover the identity of Cate Kay.

After three weeks of calling every day, I finally convinced Sidney Collins II to meet me at Blue Star Café in Harlem. I arrived right on time, scanned the space once, twice. Then came a voice from behind me, smooth and assured. “Mr. Fischer, I believe?” I spun, and there was Sidney Collins, looking like she planned to go running after our meeting. Beneath the ball cap, I couldn’t see her eyes, but she was long and lithe. Not unpleasant to look at, but not remarkable, either.

“So,” I said, settling into the seat across from her. “The famous Sidney Collins.”

“I prefer ‘infamous.’?” She smirked and lifted her cap slightly to scratch her hairline. And now I could see her eyes and they were exceptional, a velvet blue. Then she tugged her cap back down, and the gesture seemed to suggest business, like a baseball manager with one foot on the dugout steps. She leaned forward and said, “Listen, Jake, let’s just get right to it. First, as I said in our brief conversation on the phone, everything is off the record—including that comment I just made about preferring ‘infamous’…”—and here she winked at me as if to say I know all your little tricks , and I felt exposed because I had, in fact, filed away that detail as material. She continued: “If I want something on the record, I’ll specify. If you want something on the record, you can ask. We clear?”

“This ain’t your first rodeo,” I said, because acknowledging the dynamic seemed like the next best move.

“Actually, it is,” she said. “If by rodeo you mean media circus.”

A clever turn of phrase. I decided to buy myself some time, so I asked Sidney if she needed anything—a scone or muffin?—then excused myself to the counter for a coffee and a regroup. The young woman helping me was striking, with shimmering brown eyes beneath a red cap that had the shop’s logo. She III greeted me warmly, which was unusual for New York, but I just didn’t have the brain space to engage.

What I needed was to establish some simple facts I could print, basic stuff that Sidney would be paranoid to reject, and build from there. Get a couple points on the board, I told myself while pouring cream until it turned my coffee off-white. Black coffee was for the insane.

“Can I write that we had coffee?” I said while slipping back into my seat.

This question seemed to surprise her, which made me feel better. She wasn’t invincible. “Yes,” she said slowly, like she was still searching for my angle, to cut me off at the pass.

“Okay.” I pretended to jot something down in my notebook. “And can I write how you take your coffee?”

She squinted at me now, turned her head slightly while keeping her eyes fixed on mine. “Why would that matter to anyone?”

“It’s a detail,” I said. “If I can’t tell them anything new about Cate Kay, I can at least tell them how her… his… lawyer takes her coffee. Everyone likes to know how people drink their coffee.” As I said it, I realized how true this last part was, and I made a mental note to pitch a front-of-book piece that would just be a list of a dozen celebrities and how they took their coffee.

“Yes.” She tilted her cup and peered inside. “You can write that I take my coffee black.”

I learned almost nothing from that coffee with Sidney. Cate Kay was maybe a single person, but also could be a pair, or even a group of people. Sidney seemed to enjoy the battle of wits we were engaged in; me dissecting each of her words for information, she stripping them of their specificity. I did, however, come to understand why Melody was convinced Sidney wasn’t Cate Kay. Many reasons, really, and probably Melody’s had something to do with Sidney’s lawyer-like mentality, whereas mine was something more subtle. Sidney gave off an air of virtue that could only exist if she was doing all this for someone else.

The article I eventually published for Vanity Far was meh. No new ground broken on Cate Kay, just a few empty roads traveled down. Because of that article, the world knew a couple places from which Cate Kay almost certainly hadn’t come (for example, I found no trace of her at Sidney’s alma maters, SUNY Plattsburgh and NYU), but was still properly baffled about where she had. More than anything, the piece read like a profile on Sidney Collins, which is probably why she kept my contact info.

And no, it did not make the cover.

I . Note from Cate: We did not license nuclear bombs. But—point taken. I will admit that I green-lit—or Sidney did, without asking me—an absurd amount of consumer goods. Much of this I regret. Exploiting the books commercially was a by-product of never receiving public credit for them. Money was a proxy—an inferior one, I’ll add. Give me credit all day, every day.

II . Note from Cate: That was the only major interview Sidney ever did. She liked it too much, for one—the attention. And also, she saw how this one article was cited and aggregated and spun forward. She had planted her flag as the public guardian of the Cate Kay empire. No more media needed.

III . Note from Cate: Yup, that was me. Guess Sidney was playing a sick little game with Jake. I had no idea.