Page 132 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

A few weeks after Donald hired me, I still hadn’t gotten paid. When I brought it up to him, he pretended at first not to understand what I was talking about. I pointed out that I needed an advance so I could at least buy a computer and a printer—I was still writing on the same electric typewriter I’d bought with Gam’s help in grad school. He said he thought that was the publisher’s problem. “Can you talk to Random House?”
I didn’t realize it at the time, but Donald’s editor had no idea he’d hired me.
One night, as I sat at home trying to figure out how to piece together something vaguely interesting out of the uninteresting documents I’d been poring over, Donald called. “When you come to the office tomorrow, Rhona’s going to have some pages for you. I’ve been working on material for the book. It’s really good.” He sounded excited.
Finally I might have something to work with, some idea about how to organize this thing. I still didn’t know what he thought about his “comeback,” how he ran his business, or even what role he played in the deals he was currently developing.
The next day, Rhona handed me a manila envelope containing about ten typewritten pages, as promised. I took it to my desk and began to read. When I finished, I wasn’t sure what to think. It was clearly a transcript of a recording Donald had made, which explained its stream-of-consciousness quality. It was an aggrieved compendium of women he had expected to date but who, having refused him, were suddenly the worst, ugliest, and fattest slobs he’d ever met. The biggest takeaways were that Madonna chewed gum in a way Donald found unattractive and that Katarina Witt, a German Olympic figure skater who had won two gold medals and four world championships, had big calves.
I stopped asking him for an interview.
From time to time, Donald asked about my mother. He hadn’t seen her in four years, ever since Ivana and Blaine had given Gam an ultimatum just before Thanksgiving: either Linda came to the House for the holidays, or they did. They found their not-exactly sister-in-law too quiet and depressed, and they just couldn’t have a good time with her there. My mother had been in the Trump family since 1961, and though I never understood why my grandfather required her presence at holidays after my parents divorced, she