Having already snooped at Darlene’s e-mail, I went on to the offices of the other characters. Ellen deRosset, a dark-haired woman dressed in black, confided that she had corrected her seventh-grade teacher’s grammar. “I read War and Peace when I was fifteen. The complete works of Balzac before I was twenty-five. I think you get the picture. So I am not happy that I was given the assignment to edit this ‘women in sports’ book. I dislike sports rather intensely. The only sport I know anything about, really, is fencing. But one must be flexible these days, and the MCI Business software makes this assignment easier to handle, if not more palatable.”
Reginald Gales told me how MCI’s e-mail and conferencing services came in handy. One of his authors lived on a caboose in Wyoming, while another wrote from a houseboat in Florida; “he once had a shark bite off his TV antenna.”
Marta Dragelov, the fact checker, was an avid user of MCI’s news-flash service, which crammed her computer with such items as, “India Asks Phone Firms to Set Up Local Factories”—actual news stories that I could see while clicking on them. Peter Hoffman was away at home and working in his pajamas. Martin Banks, the technophobic editor, said he was “being tutored on the wonders of MCI electronic office ephemera by none other than Miss Ellen deRosset.” He hoped that she would notice his new pair of wing tips.
The real payoff for readers was in Curtiss Bruno’s office. Wearing a striped shirt and a tie and looking like an incurable office politician, he nevertheless held a hand over his mouth as if to say: “Maybe I’d better shut up before I spill too much.” Oh, Curtiss, why bother? I could tour an electronic version of the not-quite-completed winter catalogue—with listings of fiction, visual arts, poetry, and nonfiction.
All categories carried dates older than the Web area itself—MCI was apparently relying on imaginary contributors to prime the pumps. “Ivana diTommaso’s” background just seemed too New Yorker-ish. She had “grown up in Bologna, Italy, and Grosse Pointe, Michigan” and had “developed from a quiet film student” to “one of America’s fine short story writers.” If she existed, the electronic catalogue at the Library of Congress had yet to note it when I made a short detour by way of my software’s task-switching capability. Not that I trusted the catalogue. A branch of Random House had published my first book, The Silicon Jungle, yet it was missing from the LC catalogue that day; and for all I knew, maybe the librarians had also neglected the accomplished Ms. diTommaso. I charitably allowed for the fact that she just might exist.
Her story, “The Legend of Wendell County,” told how a county records keeper had become a community grandmother who, not content to record births, deaths, and divorces, tried her hand at marriage counseling and other social workish pursuits—until one day she lost her way in winter and turned into something else, a ghost. The bottom of the page carried an authentic-looking “© 1994 Ivana diTommaso.”
I moved on. “The Tree House” was a story from Katy Rudder, a member of “the first Peace Corps class ever assigned to China, where she is teaching English at Leshan Teachers College in the Sichuan Province.” Based on what I was reading, MCI’s artistic tastes—or its ad agency’s—were corporately wholesome. And so were its contributors. I doubted that Gramercy would have been the best place for the young Burroughs or Kerouac.
Perhaps this would change, maybe Gramercy would grow more adventurous with time, but right now I wasn’t sanguine in that regard. The nonfiction area was a real loss with just one title, of a harmless, theological type. I doubted that this would be the place for, say, Seymour Hersh or Robert Caro. Like the writing, the art looked competent and maybe much better, but, again, safely within corporate parameters.
The most cautious contributors were MCI’s lawyers, or whoever else had written the legalese for one Web site. All writers and artists had to send in releases saying they wouldn’t sue MCI for using accidentally similar material. The lawyers warned, “All work that is submitted electronically over the Internet needs to be accompanied by a hard copy of the release form, sent in separately by postal mail. We will not look at any work placed on our server until we have received the hard copy of the release form. All files on the server older than 14 days, for which we have not received a release, will not be reviewed....” I remembered the essay on theology. It was uninspired enough for an attorney other than Scott Turow to have written it, and sure enough, the author’s note said he was “happy with the practice of law.”
Despite the less-than-striking short stories and the soporific essay, I loved the sparkle of Gramercy Press as a whole. I recalled an area on the Web known as Bianca’s Smut Shack. Its creators let you get inside the head of a virtual woman, let you know what books she read, what movies she watched, what records she listened to, and you could add your own opinions. At the time I’d told the Shack crew, “Watch out, folks. Don’t be surprised if a big company creates characters in an ad where everyone buys the right products.” Well, it had happened. And MCI and its advertising agency had done many good things that people with their resources could more easily accomplish.