Impersonation

by Heidi Pitlor

Genres: Family Life

Synopsis

Allie Lang is a professional ghostwriter and a perpetually broke single mother to a young boy. Years of navigating her own and America’s cultural definitions of motherhood have left her a lapsed idealist. Lana Breban is a powerhouse lawyer, economist, and advocate for women’s rights with designs on elected office. She also has a son. Lana and her staff have decided she needs help softening her public image and that a memoir about her life as a mother will help.

But this time, everything becomes more complicated. Allie’s childcare arrangements unravel; she falls behind on her rent; her subject, Lana, is better at critiquing than actually providing material; and Allie’s boyfriend decides to go on a road trip toward self-discovery. But as a writer for hire, Allie has gotten too used to being accommodating. At what point will she speak up for all that she deserves?

A satirical, incisive snapshot of how so many of us now live, Impersonation tells a timely, insightful, and bitingly funny story of ambition, motherhood, and class.

Release date: August 18, 2020

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

I once saw a woman in a library pick up a biography of Mother Teresa. A few seconds later, she returned it to its display, and next, she reached for a Kennedy nephew’s memoir. The title, The House that Uncle Jack Built, was printed in a faux handwritten scrawl above the nephew’s name, itself set in a bold Baskerville twice as large as the title. The book could have been called Why I Love Pants; it was the man’s last name that would move copies. After eyeing the front and the back, the woman tucked her hair behind one ear and read the first page.

I took the woman to be in her early forties, like me. Dressed in athletic pants, a Fendi T-shirt, and salmon-colored sneakers, she may have been just summering here in the Berkshires. I stayed less than a pace away and tried to catch a glimpse of her reaction to the moment that Peter Kennedy, as a child, stuck his hand into the eternal flame, “immediately searing three fingers. A cemetery official marched over, called me a ‘little brat,’ and ordered my whole party to leave, not knowing my relationship to the deceased.”

What ineffable quality made people want to keep reading a book after only a paragraph or two? At the time, I was reading this how-to book on teaching your baby to sleep. My goal was for my son—and me—to get more than three hours of rest without waking. I was also halfway through a book on the ins and outs of single parenting.

In my arms, my son chose that moment to eject his pacifier and shriek in a manner both rhythmic and alarming in its goatlike tenor. The woman glanced up, and what she saw was a short, bleary-eyed woman staring back at her, a woman with shoulder-length, unruly brownish-graying hair and an inconsolable baby dressed in a Red Sox T-shirt and a diaper. Cass had spit up on my jeans ten minutes earlier, and the left leg was still wet where I had rinsed it in the bathroom. The woman’s eyes went between me and my son while I tried to quiet him. I bobbed up and down, and made pressurized wave noises in his ear, but to no avail.

In order to give her some peace, I headed to the front lobby, at last reinserting my son’s pacifier once I found it lodged in the neck of my hoodie. With Cass settled, I turned to see a librarian checking out the Kennedy book for the woman. I was pleased, nearly triumphant. She headed toward the entrance, where we now stood, and a man bypassed her, making her stumble against us.

“Excuse me,” I said, although it was she who had bumped into me and my son. “I hope you like that book. I hear it’s good.”

“I don’t have my wallet on me.” She kept her eyes on my old flip-flops.

“What?”

“I can’t give you anything.”

“What? No.” I laughed a little, so taken aback that I could not think of what to say next.

She reached for her phone in her handbag and hurried out the door.

I stood there with Cass in my arms.

Had I not signed the nondisclosure agreement, I like to think that I would have asked her to please, in the future, try to avoid these snap judgments of people. Maybe I would have asked her to check her assumptions about class. I don’t know. At the very least, I would have informed her that I was the one who had written the book in her hands.

What reason would she have to believe me, though? For all I knew, she was not what she appeared, either. She could have been a Kennedy herself—or maybe she once had a violent encounter with a panhandler. Maybe she even had some financial troubles of her own, although when I saw her sail past in a Mercedes SUV, I guessed not.

At the time, I had ghostwritten a handful of books for an assortment of minor celebrities, one billionaire oilman, relatives of the famous, and the once but no longer famous. Few of my clients were natural storytellers, but they were each dear to me in their own way. They had opened up to me, a few considerably so, and in turn, I had learned to omit any unflattering facts and highlight that which would benefit their personae. I kept in touch over the years with several of them. When Clyde Elliott, a former astronaut, passed away, I sent his widow irises, her favorite flower. She had written me a kind note: “You took an old man’s ramblings and turned them into music.” I replied with my own note. “Your words touched me deeply, as did my time with Clyde.” I didn’t tell her that, despite my best efforts to rebuff him, he had been a dogged flirt, or that he had complained to me about how, for the safety of other motorists, his wife should be prohibited from “driving while female.” My work to hide or recast the truth—something that had become second nature to me—often had to move beyond the printed page.

I should mention that what follows began not long ago, but before the #MeToo movement and the much-contested confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Before countless children were separated from their parents near the Mexican border and four congresswomen of color were told by the United States president to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” As always, much of the past looks different from the vantage point of the present or, more specifically, the first day of 2018, when I am writing these words. We lived in a different country, of course, even that recently. I mean this not as justification.

In January of 2016, my agent called me about a new book. I may as well have won a lottery; the money was multiple times what I had earned for any of my previous jobs. And Nick Felles would easily be my most well-known client. I hardly believed Colin at first.

“It’s true,” he said over the phone. He himself would take home 15 percent. “Now go buy yourself a spa weekend.”

I did not tell him that I had more pressing needs than a pedicure and a facial. It was approaching two years since my last book, a memoir for Connecticut congresswoman Betsy McGrath. What savings I had were fast disappearing. I had my side jobs landscaping and substitute teaching, work I did to fill in the gaps between ghostwriting jobs, but it had become tough to cover costs. My car had recently died. I woke each morning with thoughts of doom.

After we hung up, I went for Cass. “We can finally buy you a big-boy bed!” I held him tightly, as if to press all of my relief into his small body and soft face.

“Okay. That hurts. I have to pee,” he said.

We had just begun potty training, and I raced him to the bathroom.

A month or so later, I drove a beautiful preowned Toyota Tacoma with a double cab off the grounds of the car lot, Janis Joplin’s “Get It While You Can” blasting from the speakers. I had left a straitjacket of a corporate writing job in Manhattan a decade earlier in order to move back to my hometown in the Berkshires and become a freelancer. I worked in my kitchen; I made my own hours and rules. If I wanted to, I could wear an old T-shirt and pajama bottoms every day. I had never settled into a mediocre relationship. I had a sweet, lovable son all to myself. I was living life on my own terms, and as I came to a stop at a red light, I thought at long last, I was reaping the benefits.

I was the only person I knew who had never seen Skinwalker Ranch, Nick Felles’s TV series about shapeshifters, UFOs, cattle sacrifice, and a coven of bombshell witches. Before we spoke, though, I watched a season, and while it was more violent than my usual fare, Ranch, as Nick called it, did hook me with its cliffhangers, its seamless meshing of the ancient with the futuristic, its attractive cast that was frequently shown nude.

“How did you come up with the idea for the show?” I had asked him on our first phone call.

“I’ve always been into the supernatural,” he said. I began to record our conversation, as I had told him I would. “I inhaled Tolkien as a kid. And I’m fascinated with primitive violence, I mean, what raw force really looks like, domination and justice between two people, you know? Are you a real warrior if you just push a button or tell someone else to drop a bomb? So I thought, ‘Get rid of the guns and the bombs and the drones,’ and on my show, I’d just have pure human power. Mano a mano. It was important to me to braid this violence with a lot of fucking.” I was about to interject “Why?” but he quickly continued: “Can I be real? What’s more objectively beautiful than two bodies doing it? Hello, why do you think the great artists painted so many nudes? Picasso said that sexuality and art were basically the same thing. He’s one of my muses.” Nick paused again briefly, as if to allow me to ask, “Who are the others?” but then he went on. “Picasso and Tolkien, and Bukowski and Kerouac. Oh, and women. Can a whole gender be a muse? Why not, right? But, you know, I’m no sheep. If you asked me which actress I would do from any time in history? I’d say, Hell no to someone current like Dakota Fanning or Kristen Stewart, I mean before she switched teams. Give me Linda Harrison back when she played Nova in Planet of the Apes. Give me Mia Farrow from Rosemary’s Baby.” He cleared his throat.

I tried to clear mine and think of how to suggest he consider ways to shroud his id. It might have been more effective to joke with him in a pointed manner, but he hardly sounded like a person who would laugh about himself.

“I guess I just wanted to get at the dotted line between sex and violence, you know, love and hate. I had this idea of a story that put man against woman against animal against self against the occult in a hot pandemonium. In my earliest visions of Ranch, Ancient Rome met this kind of futuristic frontier territory. I could see it all in my head before I met with the suits at the studio. The rest, as they say, is history.”

I thought of Cass, and the fact that human beings required food and shelter. The money from this book would give us one very good year—even more if I was careful. If nothing else, I reasoned, Nick spoke as if I were already his friend, and his openness would only make writing the book easier.

No one could claim that Nick Felles suffered from a dearth of audacity or good luck. He had gotten into TV soon after his video game franchise, Honor Code, had exploded onto the marketplace, outselling even some Grand Theft Auto games. With the hope that I might see a different or at least more nuanced side of my new client, I tried playing Honor Code on a friend’s son’s PlayStation, but I couldn’t even pass level one. Within seconds, a woman soldier in a black bikini appeared, the words sexy cherry572 floating above her head, and ripped off both my arms and exploded my head like a ripe melon against my opponent’s fortress wall. She then stomped all over my brain matter.

“Your parents let you play this game?” I asked Connor, who was eleven. “How are you able to win?”

“Maybe you just need to practice more or be, like, younger,” he said.

By the time Nick was twenty-seven, he had won three Video Game Awards, three Emmys, two Hugos, and had bought himself a modern five-bedroom in Malibu with an infinity pool and views that stretched from the Santa Barbara Islands to Point Dume. How many other people, he said, could claim to have done any of these things before the age of thirty?

He sent the thinnest of drafts for me to fill out, and on the page, he came across as even more shameless than he had over the phone. I got to work and tried to make him more likeable wherever I could. I gave him a larger appreciation of his vast fortune. I played up his relationship with his mother and dialed down his many public escapades with a South American model. I opted not to include the monologue that he had delivered to me about the ideal nipple size.

Over the following weeks, I was relieved to learn that Nick had another side, a surprisingly kindhearted one. He donated big money to the NAACP and Boys Town, as well as Planned Parenthood. He was curious about me and how I had gotten into ghostwriting, and about Cass, too. We had a long conversation about the need for more diverse characters in certain children’s programming. Most of my previous clients treated me more like a therapist, a husk of a person whom they could trust to be gentle with their truths. Very few asked anything about my son or my life.

After I sent him a few chapters to make sure that I was on the right track, he texted: Dude, u made me sound like a twinkle bitch.

Can I ask what you mean by ‘twinkle bitch?’ I replied.

He wrote, A douche-nozzle. An ass-hat. Just keeping it real Allie cuz we are friends, right? The part about my fans was good. But u probably wouldn’t use the words “twinkle bitch” just like I would never say “My life has been a series of precious gifts” or “As I look out over the ocean sunset, a glass of wine in my hand . . .” I told u I’m a whiskey guy. Can u add a huge amount of sack?

Any response that is less than stellar about your writing can, in the moment, be diminishing. Once the sting of his blunt criticism passed, I tried to think of how to reply. I had already written for a man whose oil company was later sued for actively covering up climate-change science. Was Nick any worse for this planet than Bob Smelnick? Finally, I texted, Tons of sack coming right up!

I could not have had less in common with Nick: I was a newly solvent forty-three-year-old who preferred British TV mysteries to Skinwalker Ranch, weed to whiskey, Bob Dylan to Kanye, books to video games, privacy to ostentation. But ghostwriting is a form of acting, method acting really, as well as improvisation. You must become your subject, whether they are a Kennedy, a congresswoman, or a guy who espouses anarcho-primitivism and might frequent urbandictionary.com.

I had to start thinking more like a man. No one was asking for grace or modesty here. I had a son to support, as well myself. And I had never worked with Nick’s editor, and for all I knew, he was cut from the same cloth as Nick.

I downed a mug of black coffee and returned to the so-called drawing board.

I am living the life I have always wanted. I’ve been called a “wunderkind” and a “ratings machine.” My shows can be seen in Japan, Australia, on airplanes, and at American military bases in Iraq. I’ve got a candy red Ferrari Enzo, a first edition of Dracula, and Axel, my reticulated python, has his own climate-controlled bedroom with a killer view of the Pacific. But I never take my success for granted. I still sign every autograph and talk to every fan. You have to keep it real.

Sustaining this amount of sack for a whole a book would be challenging. Maybe, I thought, I should go back to Nick and suggest that just a hint of douche-nozzle might not be the worst thing for his memoir. Of course sack was who he was, and who he was, for better or worse, was a major success.

I thought ruefully of other clients who had shackled me with their fears of exposing the slightest unflattering truths. Most panicked about coming across as too cocky, too lucky, slutty, overly opinionated. Invisible electric fences were everywhere. The congresswoman’s memoir had to have been my most frustrating book. I’d had to downplay her wealth, avoid any mention of her sister who had killed someone in a drunk driving accident, avoid her first two marriages, cut a long section recapping her critical thoughts of a sex-trafficking prevention bill. I might as well have been writing marketing copy for the state of Connecticut itself.

I have to admit that, with time and practice, sack came to feel liberating. Very little of Nick’s life was off-limits to me; the work almost seemed more like transcription than anything else. He was enthusiastic and forthcoming and consistent, and soon enough I could even predict some of his answers to my questions. He liked to philosophize with me about human nature. He tended to overuse the words primitive and transformative. We had long phone conversations about Abraham Lincoln, the creative process, family relationships, skin care, and the versatility of avocados.

The writing went fast, and in a matter of weeks, I finished several more chapters. He liked them so much that, in return, he sent me a pink Gucci handbag and Cass a samurai sword, and although I was more of an any-color-but-pink backpack kind of person and the sword nearly decapitated my son when he got ahold of it, I was touched.

When I had finished half of his book, Nick invited me to meet him for coffee before an upcoming gaming conference in Albany, about an hour away from our house. I did not often get to visit with my clients.

What time and where? I texted.

Only after I pressed Send did a soupy ambivalence form within me. I would get to meet him in person—but he would also get to meet me. I am not proud to say that I had been coy with Nick about my age. I knew he would respond better if he thought I was younger, and possibly hot. When he had asked to Skype, I told him that my computer’s camera was not working. If he had googled me, he would have found nothing; I tried to keep the lowest possible profile. I had done so for over a decade, as long as I had been a ghostwriter. Before then, I wrote marketing copy for an equity firm in New York. How wildly different my life had been, although on consideration, Nick may well have fit in with some of my coworkers there. Back then, I went out regularly with my male colleagues, who were in general far more receptive to me than the other women in the office, two mid-level workaholic lifers and one brilliant but aloof junior analyst. One evening, I almost won an after-work drinking contest. The following week, they invited me to lunch at a tony American bistro, where I was the only woman at the table. As they discussed classic Bruce Springsteen set lists, the fuckability of certain A-list actresses, Enron, the axis of evil, the New York Knicks, I quietly worked at my turkey club sandwich and sweet potato fries.

“You are the first girl I’ve ever seen order anything but salad for lunch,” one said approvingly.

Being “one of the guys” was a kind of safe harbor. After all, they would not critique my fuckability if I was sitting right there with them. And to be frank, I liked having access to these secret conversations. A few women nearby glanced over at me. I became a different person in that moment, a woman who had something that other women desired. I was not used to this sensation, and over time, I admit that I may have milked it too much. When they began to flirt openly with me, I brushed them off, but always gently and with ambiguity. They nicknamed me Little Tiger because of my preference for a shot of sloe gin with a similar name. In less than a month, I was offered a raise and moved from my cubicle to a small office, and even got to handle correspondence and some research for one of the managing directors. Life was pretty good for the moment.

At dawn on the Tuesday that I would drive to meet Nick in Albany, I carried my sleeping son across our front yard. The ranch house that I had been renting, going on six years now, was situated on a cut-through that led to the Mass Pike, and cars and trucks were audible at all times, even from inside. I tripped over a tree root and my neighbor’s dog broke into a bark and I whispered to Cass, “Please don’t wake up, please don’t wake up,” because if he did, he would detonate. He was no good with separation.

Bertie met me at her screen door. “I’ve got him,” she said quietly, her dentures not yet in, and reached for Cass. But she was too frail to carry him, so I gestured for her to hold the door as I went inside and set him on her couch.

I hated to leave my son while he slept. He had no father who might watch him today. His Tigger sweatshirt was too small. Bertie’s house smelled of incontinence and there was a long gash in her screen door, not that my house was in much better shape. My front steps were crumbling, an accident waiting to happen, and the roof leaked when it rained. Jimmy Pryor, my landlord and neighbor, was frustratingly slow to repair such things. Thanks to Nick’s book, though, I had started looking for a nicer place.

I kissed my forefinger and grazed it past Cass’s cheek. “Bertie, you’re a lifesaver,” I said.

Back home, I pulled my hair into the neatest bun I could manage and changed into the professional ensemble that my friend Maggie had helped me find the other day at Ann Taylor. The first pair of gray pants that I had tried on had lining that moved like cream against my skin. The buttonhole was thick and reinforced, and the zipper slid right up, bringing to mind the pricier clothing I had worn back in New York. I thought once again how I should have kept those outfits instead of donating them to Goodwill when I started working at home. At the time, I had been so glad to part with those stiff, constricting business suits and toe-pinching heels, those trappings of a person who had come to seem less and less like me.

It took me about an hour to reach Albany, and I found Nick in a private booth toward the back of Wellington’s, a swank restaurant in the hotel where he was staying. A brawny guy about Nick’s age sat next to him and both tapped at their iPhones. A Lakers cap on his head, Nick appeared younger in person than in the pictures I’d seen, his face the shape of a plate. Blond stubble dotted his chin. He looked up at me with his glinty blue eyes and said, “You’re Allie?”

I nodded. “Hi, Nick.”

“Sit, sit!”

The other guy kept his eyes on his phone but coughed into one fist.

“Nice place,” I said and lowered myself into a weird metal bowl of a chair across from them.

He squinted over at me. “Dude, you are way hotter than I thought you’d be.”

“Oh, thanks.” I may have chuckled and picked at my nails. “You have a good flight? When did you get in?”

“Like an hour ago. I slept through most of it.” Nick kept his eyes on me. “It’s so weird—I pictured you as kind of frumpy. Bigger and kind of, you know, softer. Maybe it was just that first time I read your stuff, when you sounded all lame. I guess first impressions stick.” He shook his head.

I blinked over at him and forced a smile. I did not want to come across as uptight.

“No offense, though.”

“None taken. Maybe we should write a book together,” I tried to joke.

Our banter halted when a statuesque twenty-something with a red bob and jade green eyes appeared at the table to take my order.

“Just a cup of coffee, please,” I said.

“You’re Shannon?” Nick said, his eyes on the name tag pinned just north of her right breast. His friend looked up at her and slid his phone into his back pocket. “Shannon, can you fill me up?” Nick said. He raised his coffee mug to his mouth and gave the rim an almost imperceptible lick.

“I think I can do that.” She flashed a smile, her face pink, and she turned to take another table’s order.

The friend muttered something like “Tasty.”

Nick looked back at me. “So Allie, I read the chapters you sent. It was wild. It’s like I got cloned and my clone wrote this incredible book about me. It turned me on how much you got into my head. I got a boner just thinking about it.”

“Great!” I said, my eyes on the table as I reached for my notebook.

He made a few minor suggestions: he wanted me to cut the bit about his bully neighbor when he was a kid, as well as his pet rabbit, Buttercup. He did not think I needed to use the name of the bougie town outside Chicago where he had grown up. “No one wants to hear about all that boring shit.”

I took notes as he spoke.

We got to talking about the next season of Ranch, his python, his sister’s new twins. The day before, I had started writing a scene between him and his mother. She had struggled a lot since being laid off, and Nick was about to tell her that he was going to buy her a condo.

“How’s your mom’s lupus?” I asked.

“She had a flare-up last week and sacked out on my couch for a couple of days. I hired my massage therapist for her. Maurice does all the older ladies on set. He’s my birthday gift to them.” Then he asked me about Cass’s separation anxiety and whether I had yet tried avocado toast with cilantro and fried egg.

His friend said, “Felly, I’ve got to split. I’ll be at the booth with Jim and Jim.” They fist-pumped and a moment later, Nick and I were alone.

He explained that Curtis and the two Jims were here to promote Honor Code: Execution Time, the sixth installment in the series. “I do so little for my game these days,” Nick said with the regret of a divorced father toward his child. “Life gets mad busy. Hey, I brought you something.” He opened a leather folder on the table. “I got Fufu Muhammad’s autograph for Cass. She’s the actor who does the voice of Doc McStuffins.” He handed me a slip of paper on which she had handwritten, “Dear Cass, Don’t forget to stretch and flex! Your friend, Doc.”

“Oh my God.”

“It’s no big thing.”

My son ingested on average three episodes of Doc McStuffins every day. He sang the theme song constantly. Cass saw few characters on TV who looked anything like him, although I suspected the stuffed animals had a lot to do with his love for the show, too. “Nick! He. Will. Die. You have no idea.”

Nick shrugged.

“This is fucking dope,” I said.

“You sound like me again!” He beamed.

“I’m kind of a sponge, I guess. It’s my job.”

Two months after I went to Albany, I stood watching Cass ride his new balance bike around an empty school parking lot. We had just come from visiting a renovated two-bedroom, two-bath bungalow for rent in Stockbridge. It had a screened-in front porch, an attic that could be used as a playroom or an office, and was located just a block away from Beartown State Forest. It even had a sweet little pergola on the side that was frizzy with clematis. “I’m in love,” I told the real estate agent, and she said she would go get started on the lease.

“You got this! Don’t keep leaning to the side!” Kurt called out to Cass, and took my hand. Kurt and I had been together-ish for about four months. He had his faults—ambition and money were not currently his things—but he was great with Cass, a kid who liked to draw and listen to music rather than wrestle with friends or play catch. Kurt was also easy on the eyes and, to be frank, gifted in bed, all reasons I had agreed to let him move into my basement. At the moment, Kurt worked part-time at his friend Pete’s hardware store and was trying his hand as a sculptor.

“Not so fast!” I hollered, just as Cass tipped over onto a bike rack.

We rushed to help him, and then my cell phone rang. It was Colin’s number, so I answered, and Kurt gestured for me to take the call, that he would tend to Cass.

“You might want to sit down,” Colin told me in a funny voice. “I’ve got some news.”

“Okay.” I glanced around, but there was nowhere to sit.

“Nick Felles is in a bit of trouble.”

Kayla Hokin was a lead on Ranch, but I did not recognize the other names. There were multiple charges of sexual assault, as well as three other anonymous allegations of attempted sexual assault.

“Wait,” I said. My heartbeat zoomed. “Rape?”

Colin went on to tell me that Nick’s book had been canceled. Production on Ranch had halted, and a press conference with the prosecuting attorneys was taking place as we spoke.

As if by instinct, I wondered if the police had the right person. Of course they did. I had been writing for Nick, as Nick, for nearly six months now, and inside my chest, alongside my . . .