How far is a man willing to go in pursuit of the life he desired? [FRAGMENT]

Florence Darrow has always wanted to be a famous writer. When she receives a job offer as an assistant to a famous author who lives in complete isolation and hides under the pseudonym Maud Dixon, she agrees without hesitation. During their stay in Morocco, however, a catastrophic car accident occurs. Maud has disappeared like a rock to water, while Florence wakes up in the hospital knowing that she miraculously survived. Now she can watch everything she worked so hard to turn to dust and start all over again – or accept that the fame she had always dreamed of was written for her and it’s time to reach out for it.

Alexandra Andrews “Pozorantka”, WAB Publishing House – excerpt:

Semat, Morocco

Madame Wiiil-cock?

She jerked her left eyelid open; warm yellow light broke under her. A blurry white figure moved across the field of vision. She closed her eye.

Madame Wiiil-cock?

Something was beeping piercingly. This time she forced herself to open both eyes. She was lying in an uncomfortable bed behind dirty curtains.

Madame Wiiil-cock?

She turned her head stiffly. A man in uniform sat in the chair next to her; looked like a military man. He rested his elbows on his thighs and watched her intently. His swollen face had the features of a plastic doll. He wasn’t smiling.

Madame Wiiil-cock? He repeated for the fourth time.

Helen? She croaked.

Helen. The man nodded. – Do you know where you are?

She looked around.

In the hospital?

That’s right. Yesterday you were partying hard.

I was partying?

And it’s sharp.

She laughed softly, unconsciously. The man clearly did not like it. He frowned. Suddenly, the curtain to her left was swung open with gusto. They both turned their heads. A woman in a white coat and a white headscarf emerged from behind her. Nurse? With a pleasant smile, she leaned over the bed, said something in a foreign language, and smoothed the thin blanket. Then she spoke sharply to the man. The man got up, spread his hands conciliatingly, smiled heavily, pulled back the curtain and disappeared.

The young woman in bed turned to the nurse, but she was already leaving.

Hello! She called in a hoarse voice. The nurse did not hear her or ignored her call. The young woman was left alone.

She stared at the ceiling covered with brown streaks. She wanted to get up and sit up, but the cast on her left wrist prevented her from doing so. Only then did she say she was sore. Everything hurt her.

She looked again at the chair the man had risen from. She called her “Madame Wiiil-cock.” The detail seemed important, but she was unable to connect it to anything. She closed her eyes.

After a few moments – or maybe hours – the veil opened again. This time the nurse brought another man.

Mrs. Wilcox, he began. – Glad you woke up. – He spoke English more carefully than the natural speaker of the language, clearly separating the syllables. – My name is Tazi, I’m a doctor. You were brought in at night during my shift. You have two broken ribs, a broken wrist, hematomas on your face and chest. You were in a car accident. Such injuries are typical when an airbag opens. You were lucky it only ended there.

As if waiting for a signal, the nurse pointed to a disposable cup of water and a white tablet the size of a molar.

Hydrocodone. Painkiller, explained the doctor. “I’ll check in with you this afternoon, but I don’t see any reason why we should keep you here any longer than until tomorrow.” Rest for now, Mrs. Wilcox.

He left, dragging the veil of a white-clad nurse behind him.

“Mrs. Wilcox.” She spoke the name silently.

Helen.

Then the light went out and she fell asleep.

Part I.

Two young women were climbing the narrow stairs to the second floor, where laughter and music could be heard. Florence Darrow, who went first, ran her hand over the blood-red wall.

There is something perverse about organizing events here for the publishing industry, she said.

They both worked as editorial assistants at Forrester Books, and on that day there was the company’s annual Christmas party – as usual on the first floor of the dark Library Bar. The leitmotif was literary kitsch.

It’s like calling a UN summit in Disney Park.

Well, Lucy Gund nodded softly.

As a result of going up the stairs, her dress stuck to the pantyhose and wrinkled on her thighs.

They came upstairs and paused just outside to look around. The party had only been going on for half an hour, but there was already a noisy buzz above the crowd filling the air like smog. Almost a hundred people – some of them they had contact with at work, but many did not know – stood in tightly packed groups. Florence did not want to be there too soon, but now she wished they had come at this time to take up a corner. They scanned the room for familiar, friendly faces. They found none.

What, after a drink, to get you started? Florence suggested, and Lucy nodded.

They both started working at Forrester around the same time, almost two years ago, and Lucy immediately gave Florence an unconditional loyalty. In theory, she was exactly the kind of friend Florence hoped to make in New York. Lucy was raised in Amherst, where her parents taught in the college English department. Her father was the author of the best biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne ever published. Florence spent the first Thanksgiving after moving to New York and was delighted to discover that their old house full of books was adjacent to Emily Dickinson’s. He was the intellectual idyll in which she always wanted to grow up. Lucy’s parents’ home was everything that Florence’s mother’s cramped apartment in Port Orange was not.

But Lucy lacked the confidence and refinement that Florence had always thought should be a natural consequence of her childhood. Lucy was painfully shy. Florence sometimes suspected that her mother had ordered her to find one and only friend in New York, and assured her that if Lucy did, she would be fine later. And Florence was the first person Lucy met in Forrester.

The girls didn’t really socialize with the company, and that’s because Lucy didn’t try and Florence didn’t make it. Because Florence broke off contacts with her former friends from Florida – she treated her past as a gangrene rotting limb that should be cut off for the sake of a higher good – Lucy was, in fact, her only friend. Paving their way to the imposing mahogany bar along the back wall of the hall, they passed a long table full of heaps of grapes and cheese. The bartender in a black satin vest was smiling somewhere above their heads. Apparently they didn’t meet the requirements to get his attention. Lucy was used to not being noticed – to be honest, I guess she even liked it, but Florence had had enough success with men to be disappointed when one of them did not notice her charms. She was not unattractive, though she was undoubtedly the first thing that stood out when looked at when she looked pale. Florence gave the impression of someone who had spent his youth in an underground bunker, not in sunny Florida. This was the best proof that she was born in the wrong place, she often thought with satisfaction. Her milky complexion blushed easily – you could never be sure whether it was out of embarrassment or fervor, as if her creator was torn between the clashing forces of chastity and perversion. Some men were mesmerized by this, but repulsed by many. Florence also had dark, almost black eyes and dark blond curls sticking out like Medusa’s lush hair. Despite the fact that her mother spent a fortune over the years on gels, sprays and fixative pastes, she never learned to tame them.

What for the ladies? Asked the bartender in a trained tone. Light flashed in his stiffly spiked hair.

Florence imagined breaking it between her fingers like grass covered with frost.

Lucy pointed to an ad for a cocktail, the place’s specialty today.

For me, I think it’s the Decimal Dewar Rating. Florence asked for red wine.

Cabernet or Pinot?

It makes no difference, she said casually, or so she intended.

She didn’t know wine for a penny.

After taking a sip, they left the bar in search of a group with violent boundaries. Other assistants at the table with food noticed, so they stopped nearby. Junior editor Amanda Lincoln was ostentatiously arguing about something with a tall, slender twenty-something in a tan corduroy suit.

No way, you bloody misogynist, she said.

Gretchen, the energetic girl who sat at the desk across from Florence, turned to explain the situation to them.

Fritz insists Maud Dixon is the guy. He claims he knows it for sure.

No, Lucy whispered, her hand hiding her mouth.

Maud Dixon is the pseudonym of the author or author of an exceptionally high-profile debut, the novel Fokstrot in the Mississippi, which had been published a few years earlier. It was about two teenage girls in Collyer Springs, Mississippi. Maud and Ruby want to get out of their hometown at all costs, but their age, gender, poverty and icy indifference of their families frustrate their plans at every turn. The action climaxes when Maud kills an entrepreneur who, while passing through town, chose sixteen-year-old Ruby and continues to haunt her.

The murder violently tears the girls out of their hometown’s clutches. One of them goes to jail and the other goes on a scholarship to the University of Mississippi.

Critics widely commented on the sharp, devoid of sentiment prose and fresh eyes that attracted the attention of the entire literary community. The book, however, only gained fame when a famous Hollywood actress chose it to read for her book club. Whether this was a stroke of luck or a prediction genius is unknown, but the novel came at the peak of the #MeToo movement and perfectly captured the righteous, brutal anger hanging in the air. Regardless of what exactly happened behind the local tavern on the night young Maud Dixon stabbed Frank Dillard, a lewd and terrifying individual, the reader cannot blame her.

Over three million copies of the novel have been sold in the United States, and a miniseries has just been produced. Interestingly, the figure of the author (or author) was shrouded in mystery. Dixon did not give interviews, did not go on promotional tours, did not run any advertising campaign. And in the book she did not even include thanks.

The publisher, a company competing with Forrester, admitted that Maud Dixon was a literary pseudonym and that the author wished to remain anonymous. Of course, it immediately sparked off the guesswork. The question “Who is Maud Dixon?” Has appeared countless times in the press, on forums, and at corporate lunches in the publishing industry. Two living Americans named Maud Dixon were immediately tracked down and eliminated from the ranks: one lived in a nursing home in Chicago and had no memory of the names of her own children, and the other, a dental hygienist, came from a poor family in a Long Island town, and no one had ever heard of a talent or inclination to write.

Many people assumed that since the name and surname of the main character coincide with the name and surname of the author, the novel is autobiographical. Several amateur detectives found crimes that shared some common features with the incident described in the book, but none of them showed such similarity that it could be said with certainty that they were at issue. This was made difficult by the fact that the state of Mississippi kept the records of juvenile offenders from their twenty years of age. As for the scene itself, the town of Collyer Springs did not exist. And at this point the investigation stopped.

Basically, Florence did not respect books that made their sensational plot successful. She considered murder a cheap currency. However, on reading the Foxtrot in Mississippi, she was amazed. The murder here did not prove to be a simple ploy to raise the stakes – it was the raison d’être of the entire novel. The reader felt the murderer’s haste, the absolute imperative guiding her, and even her satisfaction in plunging the knife into the victim’s body.

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