Charlotte Rains Dixon is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. Charlotte works as a ghost writer, an editor, and she's a co-director of The Writer's Loft, a continuing education program for writers at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. Charlotte earned her MFA in writing at Spalding University. Emma Jean's Bad Behavior is the second novel Charlotte's written. Charlotte attends a weekly writers' workshop hosted by Karen Karbo, writer and critic (author of Tales from the Second Wives' Club, The Stuff of Life: A Daughter's Memoir, Motherhood Made A Man Of Me: A Novel, The Diamond Lane, and other works). Check out other info on Charlotte's work and on the writing life at: www.wordstrumpet.com
Meanwhile, enjoy this excerpt from Emma Jean's Bad Behavior by Charlotte Rains Dixon
Chapter One: The Second Best Moment of Your Life
Emma Jean Sullivan hated babies. She hated cute, fat little girl babies with long eyelashes and dimpled cheeks, and she hated sturdy boy babies with button noses and comical serious expressions on their faces. She especially hated the baby whose wails were at that precise moment filling every cubic centimeter of air in the Woodland Hills Barnes and Noble, and ruining her book signing.
Pen poised above an open novel, Emma Jean paused, cocked her head and grimaced at the sound of the screeching tot. The screams were momentarily obscured by the hiss of the espresso machine in the store’s coffee shop, but once the whine of the steam stopped, the infant’s howling filled the store once again.
Emma Jean set her purple fountain pen down beside the book, on the title page of which she was carefully inscribing, To Darlene, Here’s to finding your passion! (the your thickly underlined to underscore the fact that Emma Jean, of course, had already found hers) and looked up at Darlene.
“Babies are like cats,” Emma Jean said. “They know I hate them so they follow me everywhere.”
Darlene gazed back at Emma Jean blankly. Perhaps the young woman had not heard her over the howls of the baby, whose screams now grew louder. How could Emma Jean be expected to converse charmingly with her fans when they couldn’t hear a damn word she said?
And tonight, thank you writing gods, she had a sizable number of fans waiting to hear her delicate comments and get books autographed. Emma Jean angled her neck to check the length of the line. It snaked through Biography, around New Mysteries, and back beyond Art. The crowd would be more satisfying if most of its members weren’t toting worn, personal copies of her four previous books. So far that evening, she’d signed dozens of her older novels, even the out of print ones, but very few of her latest, The Winemaker’s Wife. No matter how hard she had worked over the last month—readings by the bushel, signings by the gallon—she couldn’t nudge Wife onto the bestseller list. She so desperately needed the novel to sell in the manner of her previous books, what with a huge mortgage to pay, a husband with expensive tastes to support, a life to finance. Which was why she needed that howling baby to shut up. As long as it yowled, her fans would not be able to hear a single one of her delightful, felicitous words—words that might entice them to buy Wife.
The baby’s howls now formed a constant staccato wall of sound. Emma Jean turned to the two women who stood next to the table, the bookstore manager and her literary escort. Was her name Mary or Marcy? How could she be expected to remember such things with the current cacophony in the store?
“Can’t we get that baby to be quiet?”
The bookstore manager, a woman with dull, thin brown hair and thick glasses, shrugged. “It’s a free country. I can’t kick someone out just because their kid is screaming. I’d have the ACLU over me like flies on poop.”
Mary/Marcy leaned forward. “It’s shit. The expression is flies on shit.”
“I was trying to be polite,” the manager said.
“To hell with polite,” Emma Jean said. The baby’s screams tore through her. She placed her hands on the table and rose. “If you won’t deal with that baby, I will.”
The bookstore manager scrambled to her feet. “No, no, you stay here, I’ll go see what I can do.”
Emma Jean sat back down and took a deep, cleansing breath to compose herself. She tilted her head to the exact angle she had practiced in the mirror, smiled up at the next fan, and pushed an oversized plate of cookies towards her. Emma Jean always brought cookies to her book signings. If she were home in Portland, she’d whip out a batch of her special peanut butter cookie recipe herself, but here in LA she’d had to rely on a bakery that Mary/Marcy found for her. And most of the cookies remained on the plate, seeing as how everyone in LA was painfully figure conscious. Still, Emma Jean felt it important to make the effort for the things that were important to her, and her fans definitely counted in that elite group. The others who made the cut were her students and her beloved husband, Peter. They were the three things in life that Emma Jean cared about most—the holy triumvirate, her sacred cows.
“Society favors parents and disregards those of us who choose not to bring children into this crazy world,” she said, dredging up a hint of a southern accent left over from her Georgia upbringing, and raising her voice so it could be heard over the baby’s screeches.
The next three women in line nodded their heads in unison. Emma Jean watched, fascinated, as their chins bobbed up and down at precisely the same time. They were clones, arrayed in the style that, in the day and half she’d been here, Emma Jean had learned was currently ubiquitous in Los Angeles. Shoulder-length hair which fell just so, a massive SUV to maneuver in freeway gridlock traffic, an Iphone, and a fat-free latte were requisite accessories. Tight jeans were de rigueur, as was a cute butt to put into them. A camisole with at least a hint of cleavage was also mandatory.
Emma Jean looked down at her own V-necked tank top and yanked at the bottom of the V. She was showing more cleavage than usual, and it was all Mary/Marcy’s fault, as the escort had come to pick her up early and ended up advising her on her wardrobe. “C’mon. Wear the sexy one and show some skin. Everyone in LA does. You’ll look stodgy otherwise,” Mary/Marcy had said, and Emma Jean had grudgingly agreed the top looked better on her than any other choices. Her breasts were, she was inordinately proud to admit, still quite shapely and full for her age, no doubt because she had never nursed a baby. The infant’s crying now reached a new pitch of keening desperation. Apparently the bookstore manager was not having any luck dealing with it.
“Oh lord, I do wonder how the human race survives, don’t y’all?” Emma Jean said. The three clones smiled hesitantly. One was blonde, one brunette, and one a very brassy redhead that came from a bottle if Emma was a day over forty. And in truth, she was eight years over forty, though her website listed her as forty-three, which was a necessary lie (so why hadn’t she made herself younger still?) but a damned inconvenient one as she always had to stop and think how old she was supposed to be when she wrote about birthday celebrations on her blog.
The blonde clone giggled. The other two nodded, their expressions very serious.
Emma Jean shook her head. “I guess I just wasn’t meant to be a mama, and the good lord knew that.”
The red-head leaned toward Emma Jean, and her voluminous breasts threatened to elude the spandex of her tank. “That’s what I love best about your work,” she said. Emma Jean tried not to stare as a melon mound of flesh loomed dangerously above the rim of the woman’s top. “You’re so honest about how happy you and your husband are without children. I just read your blog post about you guys being in Paris, and it was so romantic. I love the part where he kissed you at the top of the Eiffel Tower.”
“Thanks, doll,” Emma Jean said. She’d liked that post, too, even if the kiss had only been a chaste and quick peck on the cheek. It had sounded vastly passionate when she’d written about it, which was, after all the power of the pen. “Peter and I have all we need, just the two of us. Two against the world, y’all know what I mean? He says his wine is his baby and I say my students are my kids.”
She had borne the tragic misfortune of her infertility bravely, and after it became apparent that she and Peter would never produce a baby, she had vowed to become the standard bearer for all childless women. And so she had, writing bestselling novels and enchanting blog posts on the joys of life without children. That she wasn’t the only one who felt as she did was evidenced by the long line of fans who stood before her. Still, it took a lot of energy to uphold the stanchion of childless living, particularly when that miserable baby’s screams continued to fill the air. Emma Jean, however, would persevere with the role she had been granted.
“I love reading about you and Peter in your blog,” the brunette said. “Sometimes I wish I’d thought things through a little better before I decided to have children myself.”
Emma Jean smiled and nodded, attempting to look encouraging. This was the part she liked best about book signings, the moment when complete strangers confessed their unhappiness with their children, their pets, or most often their husband. She loved hearing their stories. Plus she’d learned that the more she chatted and listened to them pour forth their lives, the more likely her fans were to buy books.
The brunette leaned in closer. “How do you and Peter do it? How do you keep your marriage so vital and alive?” she asked.
“Lots and lots of sex,” Emma Jean said. This was her standard response, though that hadn’t been true for months. How long had it been? Emma Jean couldn’t remember. She couldn’t even remember how long it had been since she’d even thought about having sex with Peter.
Now the brunette’s lower lip quivered ominously and she leaned in close to whisper. “Ever since I had my last baby it seems like my husband isn’t interested in sex any more.”
“How old is your child?” Emma Jean asked.
“Six months.”
“Why, darlin’ I think its just about the most natural thing in the world for a man and his wife to take awhile to get reacquainted with each other after such a momentous occurrence. Something similar happens to one of the characters in my latest book.”
“It does?”
Emma Jean nodded. “And she comes up with some dang clever ways to solve the problem, too. You should buy a book and read it, maybe it will help.” Emma Jean plucked a copy of Wife from the towering pile on the table and opened it. “What’s your name?”
“Emily.”
To Emily, here’s to you finding your passion! Emma scrawled. Her purple fountain pen was running low on ink, so she set it on the table and picked up another. She always traveled with five or six of her special pen, the Fountaineer.
The bookstore manager had returned from her errand to quiet the baby, which had been unsuccessful, since the baby still screamed. She reached out to the next clone in line and opened her novel to the title page, then set it up on the table, a not-so-subtle hint for Emma Jean to cut it short with Emily.
“It’ll be okay, love,” Emma Jean said, patting her hand and then handing her the book, and Emily smiled gratefully, if also a bit tearily. Usually Emma Jean would have asked Emily for more details of her life’s problems—after all, Emma Jean was a story teller, and as she told her students, stories were everywhere; you just had to be open to receive them. But clearly the rabbity bookstore manager was getting a bit antsy about the large numbers of people standing in line without buying her new book. Plus, she was unhappy about the cookies, Emma Jean could tell. She’d fussed earlier about how the crumbs might damage the towering stack of copies of Wife on the table. But she looked like she had never enjoyed a luscious, home-baked cookie, ever in her life. Never mind that these particular cookies were not home baked, it was still too bad the woman couldn’t let loose and enjoy a little. Emma Jean’s credo was that one must grasp life with both hands and shake the hell out of it. The concept was so important, she’d named her blog after it—Life, Full Tilt.
The baby’s wails reached a new crescendo and then a door slammed and suddenly there was silence. Like a stop action movie, all was quiet and still. As with the sudden absence of pain, the abrupt quiet was unsettling for a moment. And then the murmurs of shoppers and the chatter of her fans in line sprang up again.
“Thank you, God,” Emma Jean said, and smiled up at the next person in line.
Who was not a female. Who was a male. Who looked like Brad Pitt, especially his narrow blue eyes, friendly, but with that vague hint of fierceness behind them. The short blond hair, the dark blond eyebrows, the devilish smile. Which he was currently using lavishly on her.
“But you’re a man,” Emma Jean said.
“I’m glad you noticed.”
How could she not? My god, he was handsome. Medium height, with big broad shoulders and a muscular chest beneath his white Lake Tahoe t-shirt. He cradled a large stack of books in his arms.
“It’s just that most of my fans are female. Who do I sign this too?” Emma asked.
“It’s for Carolina. My wife,” the man answered.
She pushed a yellow post-it note toward him. “Write it out for me.”
He reached into the pocket of his black chino pants, came up empty handed. “I’ll spell it.”
“I don’t process information auditorally. I need to see it.” She rolled her fountain pen across the table toward him. “I don’t want to mess it up and make you buy a new copy.”
“If that happened, I’d have to get in line all over again and that wouldn’t be so bad, would it?” He had uncapped the pen and bent to write the name on the sticky note but he looked up at her and grinned.
Her heart unwedged itself from its customary position and did a little conga line boogie around her chest before returning to its normal place. Emma Jean placed the flat of her hand on her chest, covering the V of her tank top, to force her heart to quit dancing. The man—Carolina’s husband, and no doubt she was a beauty with a name like that—bent to his task. Emma Jean stared at the crown of his head. His hair was thick and lustrous. When he was finished, he looked up and smiled at her again.
“For me, it was the best moment of my life.” He pushed the pad toward her.
“What was?” Emma Jean asked, pulling the post-it off its pad and positioning it on the title page, so that she could copy the name.
“The day my son was born. I was eavesdropping on your conversation about children and I thought somebody should come to their defense.”
Emma Jean stared into his eyes—Robin’s egg blue but minus the inscrutable expression most blue eyed people carried—and imagined him at play dates or soccer games. Or whatever it was people did with kids these days.
Mary/Marcy nudged her, as if to tell her to hurry it up. But the man was still smiling down at her. Laconic. That’s what she would call his smile if she were writing about him in a novel. It was the only word for it. And his eyes, with that come hither look that made you want to follow wherever he led. She had to move him along through the line. Emma Jean forced her eyes away from his, and carefully inked his wife’s name onto the title page, along with the usual inscription. The espresso machine hissed and the sweet smell of steamed milk filled the air. She ripped off the post it note and stuck it to the table, then closed the book’s cover and held it out without looking at him. She’d be okay if she didn’t look at him.
“Thank you, Emma Jean.”
She couldn’t help it, she looked at him. His eyes—those amazing blue eyes—riveted her. He took the book and added it to the top of the pile in his arms.
“You’re a reader,” she said.
He nodded. “It’s something to do when I have a spare moment at work. I usually go through a couple books a week.”
“Wow,” Emma Jean said. “That’s more than I read.”
“I bet you’re buying this one for your wife.” Mary/Marcy chose this moment to insert herself into the conversation. Emma Jean glanced at the escort, annoyed. Mary/Marcy’s eyes shone as she looked at the man.
“I am, but that doesn’t mean I won’t read it, too.” He turned the book over, glanced down at the blurbs on the back cover. “I like wine. It looks pretty good. ”
Emma Jean thought about this for a moment. He read books. He was a man who read books. Better yet, a hunky man who looked just like Brad Pitt who read books. Best of all, a man who had an interest in reading her books. Peter read only wine industry magazines. It usually took him the better part of a month to read one of her novels, and even then she suspected he skimmed half of them.
“Have a cookie,” she said. Lord, could she sound any more inane?
But he took a cookie, and a napkin, and carefully placed both on top of his pile of books. Then he smiled and held out his hand. “Thanks. My name is Riley Atkinson.”
She took his hand and shook it and then her next words came out unbidden.
“What was the second best moment of your life?” she blurted.
The timid bookstore manager chose that moment, no doubt the first ever in her life, to assert herself. “I’m sorry sir, but if Ms. Sullivan has signed your book, I must ask you to move along. We’ve got a long line of readers waiting.”
Emma Jean shot her a dirty look, but Riley dropped her hand from his, shrugged and smiled his laconic smile. He raised his hand in a boyish wave, turned and walked away, biting into the cookie as he left. Emma Jean watched him—he had an adorable butt—until Mary/Marcy nudged her with an elbow and she took the book from the next person in line.
“Could you write it to Maria?” the woman said. She was plump and sported spiky hair.
To Maria, Emma Jean wrote, though the words on the page blurred. All she could see was Riley, his boyish blue eyes, his shock of blond hair. How long had it been since Peter looked at her with the frank appreciation that Riley had exhibited? The rest of the evening proceeded uneventfully, but her mind kept going back to Riley. To Alison, here’s to finding your passion! Oops, she was so distracted she forgot to underline the your. Oh well, Alison would just have to live without. To Deborah, To Susanna, To Christine…the names rolled off her pen, an endless stream.
Finally, she inked the last inscription. The bookstore manager had her autograph the remaining books so that she could slap a signed by the author sticker on them and hopefully move them faster. Was it her imagination or had the manager grown more peevish over the course of the evening, constantly harping on the disproportionate numbers of fans who brought in old copies of her books to sign?
It didn’t help that from where she sat she could see a huge stand-alone cardboard display of The Devil’s Daughter. The book’s author, Marielle Delany, had been a student of Emma Jean’s for five years in the private writing group she ran. Bless her heart; Marielle was one of her most favorite students ever, even despite Marielle’s wee mean streak and tendency toward manipulation. It was the book that mattered, though. And The Devil’s Daughter? Awesome book. Huge accomplishment. Seeing as how it was a lurid memoir, it was probably the only one Marielle had in her, so Emma Jean was thrilled with how well it was doing. Ecstatic, even. Over the top delighted.
Emma Jean pushed back from the table and stretched her arms out straight in front of her, then moved her neck in the roll she’d learned in yoga class, before she became a yoga slacker, and decided to call her husband. She opened her phone and punched the Peter button, but as usual, he didn’t answer. Why did people carry cell phones if they weren’t going to answer them? Was he avoiding her, or just busy? She suspected he was avoiding her. He’d been distracted of late, and suddenly seemed completely uninterested in her. Emma Jean hadn’t talked to him in the two days she’d been in LA, and she had desperately needed his emotional support, what with Wife not selling as well as her other novels, and the constant pressure of performing well at her readings.
Emma Jean stood. The bookstore manager had wandered off and so had Mary/Marcy. She glanced around and saw them across the store, chatting by the main check out area. Emma Jean liked to keep her eye on her escort, as the thought of finding her way home alone through the canyons and freeways of LA terrified her. Mary/Marcy would drive her back to the motel and pick her up again the next evening for a reading in Orange County, which was apparently somewhat ominous. From the way Mary/Marcy spoke, they’d have to leave very early to get there on time. As far as Emma Jean could tell, one had to leave very early to get anywhere in LA.
She always resisted visiting LA, number one because she had an irrational fear of earthquakes, but number two because of the siren song effect it exerted. When first she arrived, she hated it, hated the sun, the palm trees, the mad rush of the freeways. But then, little by little, LA seeped into her veins, so that by the second or third day of her stay she actually started to like it a little. It alarmed her that she was capable of feeling anything remotely resembling affection for something that stood so thoroughly in opposition to all her deeply cherished beliefs. It bothered her that she could even think of liking a place that was so, well, phony. Soon, she consoled herself, she’d find herself back home in Portland—rainy, green, cloud-shrouded Portland—and all would be well again. Though Portland was now her home, her public persona required allegiance to her homeland in the south, the place of her birth, the region where her heart truly lay, at least as far as her fans were concerned.
I’m just a southern girl, she sang to herself as she gathered up her fountain pens. It was a song she sang to the tune of the Queen song, Bohemian Rhapsody. I’m just a southern girl, living in the Wild West. Because I’m easy come, easy go….Now wait, hadn’t she brought five pens along? She only found four on the table.
“A little high, a little low, anyway the wind blows.” A man’s voice sang the rest of the Bohemian Rhapsody verse. Oh God, she’d been singing out loud. She looked up. Riley Atkinson. And he was holding out the missing fountain pen.
“I pocketed it by accident.”
“I…I just realized it was missing. Thank you.”
“I like your words to the song, better, by the way.”
Emma Jean nodded. “Too bad I’m a lousy singer.”
Riley laughed. Emma Jean liked the way he didn’t correct her, didn’t try to pretend she could in any way carry a tune. He said, “I never got a chance to answer your question.”
She cocked her head to one side, quizzically.
“The second best moment of my life.”
“Oh, right.” She nodded her head up and down vigorously, too vigorously. Her breath had got caught up in her throat and the air shimmered, forming a bubble around the two of them. The rest of the bookstore fell away, as if sheared off by an earthquake, and all she could see was Riley.
“Don’t you want to hear the answer?” he asked.
She nodded, not willing to trust the words that might spill from her mouth.
“The second best moment of my life will be when you say yes to dinner.”
