A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO, while cleaning out a basement, I happened upon something I had no memory of saving: one of the surveys Janet Klass sent me every month as part of her doctoral research, and that every month I filled out as dutifully as the good student I had recently been. The survey consisted of twenty-four multiple choice questions, the first of which ran as follows:
What is your chief motivation for writing?
(a) Personal satisfaction
(b) Financial reward
(c) Public recognition
(d) Desire to communicate
(e) Other (please amplify below)
How did I answer? I can’t recall. Probably (a), personal satisfaction, the rituals of a child trying to write the Narnia Chronicles. Or perhaps (d) or (c). Not (b). I would never have admitted to (b). Now I can see that within me there coexist two radically different beings, the artist and the fame seeker. Without the artist, the fame seeker would have nothing to peddle. Without the fame seeker, the artist would have no audience, no career, most crucially no money; the fame seeker—from whose embrace of the public the shy artist shrinks—is also his enabler. For just because art is the opposite of commerce doesn’t mean that it lives outside its influence. Indeed, Janet, if I were to fill out your survey today, the only answer I could give to this question would be (e) other. Please amplify below, you say; all right, I will. But I must warn you, it will take more than a paragraph. Indeed, you might say this very novel is my amplification.
Ahem. But where was I? Oh yes.
After I graduated from college I moved to New York, where I went to work for the publishing firm of Hudson House, in whose editorial department I had once been a summer intern. In the interval a paperback company called Terrier Books had acquired Hudson, fusing the two entities into the rather ungainly “Hudson-Terrier.” Hudson had then sold its old offices on Fifth Avenue, with their battered mahogany writing desks and leather armchairs, shipped its staff and files downtown to Terrier’s vast and loftlike “space,” and removed the word “House” from its spines, so that they bore only the name “Hudson.” New joint stationery was printed up, on which the famed wirehaired dog that was the symbol of Terrier appeared to be barking at the oil lamp that had been Hudson’s logo since its inception in 1883.
In my childhood, Terrier books had always been my favorites, if for no other reason than because my family always kept fox terriers, creatures of great tenacity and loyalty, whose obsessive habits in many ways mirrored my own. Thus whenever my brother and sister initiated a round of that game wherein people are likened to foods, machines, flowers, etc., when the category of “animals” came up I was always a terrier. The little black-and-white dog on the spine of the books, so similar in affect and posture to the ones with which I lived, was a mascot: all my earliest literary dreams ended with publication by Terrier, which was probably why I so delighted in the prospect of working there.
My job required me to be at the office three days a week, which I thought ideal, because it left me plenty of time to write. As it happened, the publication of my story the previous spring had caused a small stir in literary circles: that is to say, it had piqued the curiosity of readers, become the subject of speculation among writers (particularly homosexual writers), provoked a barrage of letters to the magazine, most of them negative, etc. And yet, curiously enough, this little storm that the story had generated barely touched me, its author, mostly because the magazine’s policy of not printing the biographies of its contributors meant that none of the speculators knew who I was. Also, at the time of the publication I was out of the country, traveling in Europe and enjoying (if that is the right word) the heady regret of being absent from my own great moment. I remember that the week of July 11, when the issue of the magazine featuring my story hit the stands, I was in Rome, staying in a little hotel near the Spanish Steps—a more expensive place than I could afford, really, except that there happened to be a single single room, without a bath, and about the size of one. And there, on the floor next to the narrow bed, my head on my suitcase (there was no space for a desk, much less a chest of drawers), I would half sit, half he in the afternoons, writing until the sun went down, at which point it would be cool enough that I could go and wander the old city, bored and friendless yet too shy to strike up a conversation with strangers.
What I didn’t know was that across the ocean, my story was taking on its own life. In gay circles, writers who had struggled for years to get their work into the magazine were making aghast and disbelieving telephone calls to one another, asking if anyone knew who “he” was, this Martin Bauman who had stepped out of nowhere to one-up them. No one knew anything, though, except that there was a Martin Bauman listed in the Manhattan telephone directory, a gay Martin Bauman, in fact, who worked as an interior decorator. Many years later, at a party, I met him. Thrown into sudden intimacy by the mysterious bond that is a common name, we retreated together to a comer, where he told me, “You can’t imagine the calls I got. And the invitations I turned down!” No one guessed that the Martin Bauman who had actually written the story had already stepped back into that nowhere from which he had emerged briefly—or more correctly, a new nowhere, that of a tiny, telephoneless room in Rome, the one window of which looked out onto a cramped cortile, and in which, on hot nights, it was impossible to sleep.
And yet, so brief is the American attention span that by the time I got back to school in September the issue of the magazine containing my story had already been buried, in dentists’ waiting rooms and in Upper East Side living rooms (as well as on my mother’s kitchen desk), under stacks of more recent numbers. Even my mother’s friends, from whom she had been having to endure a barrage of undesired commiseration all summer (“Poor Carolyn! Did you know before you read it?”) started leaving her alone, their interest caught by fresher scandals—a child on heroin, a husband surprised in panties and high heels—all of which came as a relief to me. As it stood I had too much to do—my senior thesis, a photography course I was taking, the perpetual possibility of love—to be able to contend with such an ambivalent variety of fame. Instead I became political; I met, and briefly ruined, Barb Mendenhall; I went to bed with a handsome art student, and enjoyed myself a little bit. For a while even New York faded into the background; even Liza Perlman, with whom I was in the incipient phases of becoming intimate, disappeared, subletting her apartment and taking a two-year teaching gig at a tiny college in Minnesota.
From Stanley Flint, on the other hand, I heard nothing, and this surprised me. That he hadn’t read, or at least heard about the story, seemed improbable, for I knew that he subscribed to the magazine, and kept abreast of the fiction it published, seventy-five percent of which he dismissed as “unmitigated shit.” Did his silence mean, then, that my story had not qualified as part of that minority he considered worthy? Or was the letter he never wrote (and I checked my mailbox every day) merely a snub—further evidence that he had not forgiven me for my failure to get him his old job back?
One afternoon during my last semester I ran into Baylor in the rare book room of the library. Though she had graduated a year earlier, she was still living near campus, having taken a job as an editorial assistant at the university press. “Hello, Bauman,” she said when she saw me. “Congratulations on your story.”
“Thanks.”
“I can’t pretend I’m not jealous as hell. I am. In fact, I wish I hadn’t liked it as much as I did.”
“And you—are you writing much these days?”
“All the time. Every spare minute.” She checked her watch. “Oops, I’d better get back to work. Nice seeing you.” And she hurried out the library doors.
It was mid-April when this meeting took place. The forsythias were in bloom; my senior thesis was finished, typed, turned in. With graduation only weeks away, I suddenly realized that I could no longer put off dealing with certain realities I’d been trying to avoid for months, chief among them the knowledge that at summer’s end I would no longer have a secure little dorm room to return to, no longer a cozy schedule of lectures and seminars to keep me busy and vary my days. Instead I would have to make a life for myself and by myself—a task upon which, with that concentrated and pleasureless determination that had characterized my seduction of Theodoric Vere Swanson, I now focused my energies: I started looking for an apartment, a job, an adulthood. At school most of my friends were in a better situation than I was. Donald Schindler, having deferred Harvard Law School, was going to work on the stock exchange; Jim Sterling had landed a job as an editorial assistant at Time; Ash, who always made odd choices, was planning to enroll in clown school. As for me, my sole ambition was to move to New York and write. And yet despite Baylor’s jealousy, even where writing was concerned, things were not going nearly as well as I had hoped. For though the publication of my story had netted me a few thousand dollars and half a dozen letters of vague inquiry from publishers and agents, it had not, as I had dreamed it might, led to the publication of a second story in the magazine, and then a first-refusal contract, and finally one of those coveted writers’ offices past which Edith had led me before our first lunch. Instead everything I’d sent her since the previous summer—seven stories in all—she had, for a variety of sensible reasons, rejected—which meant that I could no longer count on the magazine to make my career. Nor could I count on it to pay my rent. So I decided to look for a job. Because I knew people at Hudson, Hudson was the first place I called, and Hudson was where I ended up working.
Through Janet Klass I found an apartment not far from Riverside Park. In fact, it was Janet’s apartment: she was giving it up in order to move across town, where her mother had bought a co-op “as an investment.” The place she passed on to me cost nine hundred dollars a month, and was located on the fifth floor of a tenement walk-up that belonged more to the Lower East Side than to the amplitudinous blocks of West End Avenue on which it perched, sordid and forlorn. On either side red-brick apartment houses rose up, grand and stolid, the epitome of West Side gentility with their gynecologists and piano teachers, their service entrances, their conscientious lack of thirteenth floors. Our grimy little edifice, by contrast, had neither elevator nor elevator man. Its stairwells smelled of unwashed hair. Bugs lounged in the ceiling fixtures.
Because much of this and the next chapter will take place in that apartment, I shall now describe it. It was L-shaped. When you entered, you found yourself in a corridor too narrow for most pieces of furniture to pass through. Three doors opened off this corridor, the first onto a tiny bedroom with a loft bed, the second onto an even tinier bathroom with a miniature sink and tub, the third onto a second bedroom that could only have been called spacious when compared with its neighbor. All three of these rooms looked out onto the vestibule in which the super kept his pile of used car parts and pit bulls.
After that the corridor turned a comer. Here there were two larger rooms (by larger I mean nine feet by nine feet), both of which faced west, smack onto other apartments. The “view” was of a young woman who came home every afternoon in tennis shoes, her pumps in her shoulder bag, and spent her evenings smoking joints in front of the television. One of these rooms I used as a bedroom, the other as a living room. At the far end of the corridor was the kitchen, with its bottom-of-the-line appliances and wood-grain laminate breakfast table.
I had two roommates, Dennis Latham and Will Gibson. Dennis, who came from Atlanta, was the plump, intelligent, soft-spoken boyfriend of a girl with whom I had become friends toward the end of my senior year, Wendy Stone. Evenings he sold tickets at the old Thalia movie theater, which showed revivals; mornings he spent reading avant-garde philosophers such as Benjamin, Derrida, and Adorno.
Will was tiny, at least when compared with Dennis and me: five foot two in his tennis shoes. Although he was twenty-one and in his first year at NYU Law School, he looked every inch the adolescent, with a hairless chest and spotty chin. From what we could tell he didn’t own a razor. Privately we wondered whether some drug his mother had taken during her pregnancy had stunted his growth. Yet he was far from sickly. Indeed, his nervous, animate athleticism put both of us to shame. While we slept late on weekend mornings, he would be up at dawn, riding his bicycle to the Columbia gym. In the afternoons he ran in Central Park. Not surprisingly he was much in demand in certain circles, and maintained a coterie of older admirers who took him to dinner at Le Cirque, or to Paris on the Concorde. To these gentlemen Will must have seemed a precious rarity—an articulate, legal alternative to the risky dalliances that had undignified the greater part of their lives—yet the only thing he really shared with his suitors was the very taste for “unripe fruit” that drew them to him. (Such is often—and ironically—the case.)
Despite our differences in temperament, the three of us made up a cozy, not uncomfortable little household, and though our divergent schedules meant that we rarely ate or socialized together, nonetheless we managed to pay our rent on time and keep the bathroom clean. Nor did we lack for company, especially on weekends, when we seemed always to have houseguests: Wendy Stone, down from the university, where she was finishing up her incompletes (she was a troubled girl, a brilliant rebel, whose parents—affluent pseudo-WASPs—had changed their name from Stein); or Dennis’s friend Teddy, up from Washington, where he was working as a congressional page; or someone Will had picked up at the monthly Columbia gay dance, an undergraduate usually, smallish and stylish, and a study in contrasts with the older, richer men into whose elegant East Side and East Hampton lives he sometimes disappeared on weekends.
He is dead now. Two years later a bus ran him down on his bicycle near Lincoln Center. And Dennis is teaching English in Texas, and Wendy is married to a man who dared question, once, the purpose of books in the video age, thus ruining our friendship forever. And Janet—I haven’t a clue what’s become of Janet, or her study. Years and miles separate us all from one another, as well as from those nights when we roamed the city in a pack, eating in coffee shops in groups of twelve, or going to double bills at the Thalia in gangs of fifteen, or flowing in and out of parties: it seemed that every weekend, somewhere, there was a party, given by a friend or a friend of a friend. And how many friends I had! Maureen and Ron and Tom'S. and Tom R. and Josef and Elise and Melora ... the names roll off my tongue easily today, even though I don’t remember much about any of them. Some of them I spoke to for only minutes at a time, some of them I never spoke to, yet they were my dearest friends, with whom I rolled like a puppy in the intimate, indiscriminate heap that was New York, to me, in those years.
It’s hard for me to imagine that there was ever a time when I didn’t drink coffee, but there was. No doubt a certain resistance to adult habits—of which another symptom was my aversion to wine—underlay this curious abstention; for though I was old enough to vote, pay taxes, and go to prison, in those years it comforted me to think of myself less as a grown-up than a child on the outer edge of childhood, whose father could always be counted on to rescue him from difficulties, and whose missteps would always be excused as the foibles of youth. Coffee would have spoiled the effect, which was why, on the Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings when I rode the subway downtown to Hudson-Terrier’s offices—they were located in the east teens, in a region of warehouses and lofts to which the publishing industry, driven from midtown by exorbitant rents, was gradually migrating—I always brought a can of Diet Coke with me, the contents of which, once I had settled into my tiny cubicle, I would empty into a mug emblazoned with the old pre-Hudson-Terrier logo (that ubiquitous oil lamp), where, once the bubbles had settled, it did a passable imitation of joe. In this way I could indulge my own morning habit without upsetting those of my colleagues who could not stomach the idea of a Coke at eight A.M.
My chief responsibility at Hudson was to deal with what is known in publishing circles as the “slush pile”: specifically, that stack of unsolicited manuscripts, most of them addressed to “Dear Sir” or “Dear Editor” or even “Dear Mr. Terrier,” that is the bane of every editorial department, and that never seems to get any smaller, no matter how diligently the eager-eyed slush reader (invariably a kid like me) struggles to keep it in check. And if at Hudson the slush pile was particularly huge, this was in large part because a dozen years earlier another slush reader had plucked out of the heap a novel you are certain to have heard of, one that went on to become the biggest bestseller in the company’s history, and because of which Hudson now enjoyed a reputation for sympathy among the naive and unconnected—one to which Harry Hudson HI, its owner, had only added when in an interview he’d once vowed that no manuscript would pass through the portals of his house without getting a fair reading. (This was the sort of thing Harry Hudson III had a habit of saying, and that annoyed his employees, who knew he had never read a slush manuscript in his life. Nor did his edict last long; a few years later, in his late eighties, nearly blind and hugely rich from the buyout, he gave up his nominal tide of “president” at the company he no longer owned, as well as the grand and ceremonial office that was always kept on the ready for him, even though he never once, in my tenure, visited there. After that, Hudson ceased to employ a slush reader, choosing instead to enforce the policy—already in place at other publishing houses—of returning every unsolicited manuscript unopened. The job I once held, as a result, has disappeared.)
At first I laughed a lot over the slush pile, the manuscripts and letters I was always skimming, of which a typical (though invented) example might be the following:
Dear Mr. Terrier:
Several years ago I was abducted by aliens and taken aboard their spacecraft, where I was subjected to surgical procedures in the private regions of my body. Since then I have tried to interest the police, FBI, CIA, Surgeon General, even the President himself in my experience, to no avail. Now my phone is being tapped. Rocks have been thrown through my window, the brakes on my car fixed. In sum, there is a conspiracy afoot to squash the valuable information I have to share. Taken: The True Story of an Alien Abduction recounts not only my experiences aboard the craft but the subsequent attempts on my life by government agents determined to keep me silent...
No, I am not being fair: this is not a typical example. I include it only to alarm and amuse. Much more typical (and sadder) were the badly written memoirs of adolescence through which at first I slogged dutifully, then later, as I grew more jaded, threw into the reject pile after reading only a sentence (shades of Edith); the children’s books with tities like Deirdre the Dodo, Fred the Fox Goes to the Doctor, Pete Puppy’s Day Out; the trashy novels about rich people written by poor people; the volumes of confessional poetry (one of them was called—quite memorably, I thought—Probing the Abscess); the trashy novels about poor people by rich people; the exposes of corruption in obscure industries that promised to be “timely.” (This latter adjective, which I encountered in nearly every letter I read, infuriated my friend Carey Finch, the youngest of the editorial assistants, and an idealist of the most irascible variety. “Don’t they understand?” he’d say, quite literally tearing at his hair. “The point is to write something time/m!”)
Most of these manuscripts were not timeless. Instead, in their coarse sincerity, they foretold the confessional talk shows that would become so popular in the nineties, the ones on which (for example) women whose sons had died from autoerotic asphyxiation would describe the horrifying scenes they’d happened upon, in bedrooms decorated with posters of baseball stars. Even so, I gave each one of them my faithful consideration, in the naive hope that if I dug long enough I might discover somewhere a piece of real literature by some winsome unknown: a fresh Flannery O’Connor, a proto-Paley, a child Salinger; instead of which I found junk—boring junk—most of which I sent back swiftly, with only form rejection letters paper-clipped to the manuscripts, in the self-addressed stamped envelopes that its authors, careful to follow the guidelines listed in the Writer’s Market, almost always took the trouble to enclose.
And yet when, on rare occasions, I did happen upon a manuscript that merited, at least in my view, a more considered response (if for no other reason than because its sincerity broke my heart), I would take the trouble to send a personal reply. Thus, to the girl from Cincinnati who had written The Michael Jackson Diet Book: How the Inspirational Music of Michael Jackson Can Help You Lose 50-100 Lbs.; to the English professor from El Paso who had gone to the heavy expense of photocopying and mailing his twelve-hundred-page, heavily annotated biography of James Ellroy Flecker; to the ex-hippie in the East Village who wrote freshly and urgently about her boyfriend’s periodic habit of emptying everything they owned onto the sidewalk and trying to sell it, yet whose work was marred by her bizarre refusal to use punctuation; to these people I wrote letters—sometimes long letters—that I signed in a purposefully illegible scrawl, a vague streak of nothing that would be impossible to decipher, and behind which I could remain safely anonymous. For as Carey had pointed out, even though I had the least power of anyone at Hudson, to those authors who sent their books in over the transom (some of whom might be psychotic) I had the most.
As I was rapidly discovering, I had come to work at Hudson during a transitional moment in its history—indeed, a transitional moment in the history of American book publishing. To understand the nature of this transition one needed only consider the layout of the Hudson-Terrier offices. The northeast comer, into which no natural light ever crept, was the domain of “Hudson Editorial,” where the assistants wore tartans, worked under brass lamps with green glass shades, and thumbtacked postcards of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce over their typewriters. The southeast comer, on the other hand, belonged to “the terrible Terriers.” Here the sunlight poured in so liberally you had to squint against it. The terrible Terriers wore contact lenses instead of glasses, went to the gym, and talked on the phone. It seemed that they were always talking on the phone. Horrifying neologisms peppered their conversations: “privish” (as opposed to “publish”), “midlist,” and perhaps most upsetting of all, “impact,” which they used as a verb, in sentences along the lines of: “How do you think the sale of Scribner’s is going to impact the industry as a whole?” (My mother’s son, I grimaced every time I heard it.)
Working there was a little bit like trying to drive in one of those medieval European cities where powerful BMWs jostle tiny Fiat 500s, or worse still, ass-drawn carts on the narrow streets. Thus, though there was a computer in the office, only one person knew how to use it. At Terrier the editorial assistants at least had self-correcting IBM Selectric typewriters. At Hudson we made do with Liquid Paper. Also, because Harry Hudson III was essentially a kind man, the Hudson staff included a number of rather useless old people he had never had the heart to fire. There was a short, white-haired lady named Mrs. Brillo who had been with the company for thirty years, and who performed, from what I could tell, only two functions: first, she talked to the photocopier, which like all the machines at Hudson was both old and ornery; second, at her little desk she maintained a large stock of offbrand supermarket cookies and pastries, of which everyone was invited to partake. I liked her. During my breaks I would often stroll over to her desk for a Danish or a few creme wafers from a fifry-for-a-dollar-ninety-nine pack, or a generic Mallomar. Then one afternoon she was fired; given two hours to clean out her desk. Nothing more. After that, no one talked to the photocopy machine, while the brisk young woman who appropriated Mrs. Brillo’s desk not only kept no treats there, she ate only carrots and breadsticks, and later had to be hospitalized for bulimia.
Of course, if we had been wiser, or less blind, we might have seen in the firing of Mrs. Brillo a grim omen for the future, just as we might have foretold the grosser hijackings to come, for example, from the memo that went around the office the week of my arrival, announcing (as if it were news) that the staff was always welcome to buy Hudson-Terrier books at a forty percent discount, but really warning us to put a stop once and for all to a practice by means of which editorial assistants had been supplementing their paltry salaries since time immemorial: namely, taking books from the office and selling them at the Strand. Upon reading this memo my young colleagues groaned and shook their heads, just as they groaned and shook their heads when they learned that our new boss, Marjorie (or Marge) Preston, had been given a mandate by Terrier—which had itself been given a mandate by its “parent” corporation, a murky multinational based in Germany—to “increase revenues and decrease spending.” And though no one was quite sure just what, on a practical level, this frightening edict might mean, nonetheless we made all sorts of doomsday predictions—less out of fear than in the spirit of the paranoid flyer who imagines that by constantl envisioning a crash he can keep the plane aloft. For when one is standing on the cusp of a new age, what is difficult to grasp is not the fact of change, but its extent. Thus, decry though we might the demise of the all-cloth binding in favor of the cardboard binding with only a strip of cloth on the spine, I doubt that any of us could have foreseen the day when books would have no cloth on them at all. Nor would we have believed him had someone told us that in a dozen years the old Scribner’s Bookshop on Fifth Avenue would have become a Benetton, or that closer to home, the terrier would have consumed the oil lamp at which he currently only barked, leaving “Hudson” a tiny imprint of Terrier, with a staff of two. For Hudson was Hudson; to suggest that one day it might simply be put to sleep was as ludicrous as to imagine that someday CDs might eclipse records, or that Mr.———would be fired as editor of the magazine. Our cynicism, in other words, had limits; the world did not.
Still, we were stoic. In the face of the gravest indignities—for instance, the purchase for a million dollars of a trashy novel (“a commercial novel,” the terrible Terriers corrected) no better and no worse than any of the hundreds that had come in via the slush pile—we put on a brave face. Nor did I flinch when asked to type, on behalf of a long-standing editor (who was in turn acting on orders from Marge), a wad of letters to authors long published by Hudson, of which a typical example was the following:
Dear Nancy,
What a delight it was running into you the other night at Billie Eberhart’s dinner! I must say you’re looking terrific, in addition to which we’re all thrilled here at how well the Terrier reprint of Soldiers and Sisters is doing—3,300 copies sold at last count!
By the way, you owe us $142.33 for copies of your books above and beyond those specified in your contract, and if we don’t receive payment soon, a collection agency will be notified.
Well, that’s all for now. Hope your work’s continuing apace, and that George and the lads are well. Oh, and has Lucy finished Brearley yet? She’s scrumptious!
Yours with affection,
Lorna
Later, when things got worse, a lot of my colleagues left publishing. Carey Finch, about whom I shall have more to say presently, got a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, and became an avatar of Queer Studies. Others went to business school or law school, and ended up a lot richer than the editors for whom they had once worked—those editors whose habit of going out for expense account lunches at pricey restaurants they had found, in the days when they could barely afford to buy a carton of yogurt, so galling. Only one has stuck it out in publishing: Sara Rosenzweig, the assistant to our editor in chief, and hence, back then, the editorial assistant in chief. In her late twenties and very smart, Sara was not only a Jew, but an Orthodox Jew, who lived with her mother on the Lower East Side, had to leave work early on Fridays in order to be home before dusk, and dressed, even on the hottest of summer days, in blouses the sleeves of which dropped below her elbows, pantyhose, knee-length skirts. Sara’s hair was so stiff and blond that at first I wondered whether she was compelled to wear one of those wigs that married Orthodox women must put on so that men cannot see their tempting locks. In fact, the hair was hers, and she was single. This was a problem, for though she insisted that she could never marry a man who wasn’t Orthodox, she also couldn’t bear most Orthodox men, whom she considered boorish. “Well, why not marry a Conservative Jew, then?” I’d ask her during the lunches we sometimes ate together. Why not eat shrimp, or wear pants, or cook meat with milk? To which she would respond that the arbitrariness of Orthodox practice was exactly its point: precisely because the rules were outdated, their acceptance was the ultimate proof of faith.
It was through Sara that I was introduced into a substratum of Manhattan society of which I might otherwise never have learned anything. This was the culture of middle-class Orthodox Jews, the tendrils of which, though firmly rooted in the Lower East Side, also reached into the most remote neighborhoods of Upper Manhattan. These Jews had their own restaurants, at which Sara and I often ate: in addition to the French-kosher La Difference, there was the Chinesekosher Moishe Peking, and the Japanesekosher Shalom Japan, the owner of which sang karaoke on Thursday nights.
It was here that I told her, one Thursday night, that I was gay. She remained nonplused.
“And yet I’ll bet there aren’t any gay Orthodox Jews, are there?” I challenged.
“Sure there are.”
“So how do they reconcile their sex lives with their religion?”
“Well,” Sara said, “the ones I know—because biblical law says you can’t lie with another man, they do it standing up.”
The ingenuity she described—an ingenuity that was at once Jewish and gay—made me laugh. In this way our friendship was secured.
After that we had lunch together most days, either at the office, or at one of the kosher restaurants, or on Tuesdays at a cheap Chinese place nearby, with all the other editorial assistants. Because Sara could not eat the food served here, she always brought along a bottle of fruit juice and an apple that she would peel primly, while the rest of us spun the lazy Susan in the center of the table, piled our bowls with greasy noodles and kung pao chicken, guzzled Tsingtao beers. Conversation at these lunches tended to devolve quickly into complaint: the dissipation of literary values was lamented, as were our pitiful incomes. (Average starting pay in those days was just under twelve thousand dollars a year.) Or we would tell rude stories about our bosses, one of whom—a new recruit from Random House—did not know the difference between Tom Wolfe and Thomas Wolfe. This horrified his assistant, Jane, an earnest Vassar graduate of twenty-two. “I mean, can you imagine?” she’d say. “An editor at one of the most illustrious publishing houses in New York, and he doesn’t know who Thomas Wolfe is.”
“My boss can’t spell ‘separate,’” a colleague chimed in.
It is worth pointing out here that like the new arrival from Random House, the editor who couldn’t spell “separate” was one of the ones Marge had hired upon her arrival, and as such to be distinguished from the few remaining old editors, the ones who had been with Hudson twenty years or more, and not only knew the difference between Thomas Wolfe and Tom Wolfe, but had edited both of them. These editors had lunch at their desks, in contrast to the new kids, who ate out every day with agents at fancy restaurants—meals from which they returned moaning that the food had been too rich. “These days when I go to the Four Seasons I just order a green salad with lemon juice,” Marge herself was wont to say, to the horror of Sara, whom she had never once invited out for a meal, kosher or otherwise.
All struggles, I’m convinced, come down in the end to food. My colleagues, I saw, were in the process of becoming Marxists; they were experiencing alienated labor; they were smarting at the unequal distribution of wealth. And yet a vestige of their old literary idealism must still have survived in them, for toward the ends of our Thursday lunches, a little drunk from too much Tsingtao beer, we would always end up vowing that someday, together, we would quit Hudson and form a new publishing company, one that cared about literature, and that would be called (after the Chinese restaurant) Round Table Books. And at this new company the old values would be resurrected. Young authors would be taken on with an eye toward the future—tiny Hemingways, miniature Whartons, junior Faulkners! A backlist would be built to rival that of Scribner’s or Knopf—exactly the sort of backlist that these days Hudson seemed to care less and less about replenishing; yes, for a moment, hope would brighten our young faces, until it was time to pay the bill (so poor were we that we divvied it up to the penny), after which, slightly urpy, we would return to our cubicles and wait for the editors, who had big offices with windows, to come back from their equally big lunches.
As for Marge Preston, her insistence that she ordered only a green salad when she went to the Four Seasons must have been spurious. Either that, or she simply did not possess the aristocratic genes of lamb-chop-loving Edith Atkinson, in comparison to whom she appeared bookish, lumbering, and coarse, all at once: a peculiar mélange of Marianne Moore and Estée Lauder. Though she was not yet forty, it was to her that the powers that be not only at Terrier, but at the conglomerate that owned Terrier (of whom the most daunting was no doubt her own immediate superior, the elegant Mrs. Fairfax, whose soft-spoken manner and impeccably tailored suits belied a certain professional implacability) had entrusted the perilous job of dragging fuddy-duddy old Hudson House into the twentieth century; nor, I think, could they have found a better person to take on this onerous task, for though Marge was an instinctive and somewhat ruthless businesswoman, she was also the author of a biography of I. Compton-Burnett, which meant that the more literary members of the Hudson staff could not help but respect her erudition. I remember her as a mass of flying yellow hair, cigarette smoke, and L’Air du Temps, always in a rush, always late for something, yet never too busy, even in the midst of giving orders to two or three people at once, to offer some nugget of witty and allusive commentary. “This manuscript,” she might say, “makes me remember what Dr. Johnson said about the dancing dog: the thing is not that it is done well, but that it is done at all.”
The same might have been said of Marge herself. Though a shrewd editor, capable of inspiring awe in Nobel laureates, several of whom had dedicated books to her, she was also hopelessly disorganized, forever losing crucial documents and missing deadlines and failing to return phone calls. In this regard she posed a startling contrast to the sleek and efficient Mrs. Fairfax, whose presence of mind always seemed to put Marge to shame. Worst of all, she often broke down at critical moments, at which point the responsibility for running the editorial department would fall—unbeknownst to anyone—onto Sara’s capable shoulders. Without Sara, Marge might have been fired by Mrs. Fairfax months earlier. Yet rather than acknowledge this debt to her assistant, or express to her any form of gratitude, time and again she passed Sara over for promotions. Her excuse was that Sara did not possess the “intellectual qualifications” necessary to become an editor, which meant in essence that she had graduated not from Radcliffe or Smith, but from the City University of New York. Instead, she disparaged and abused her assistant, much as in old novels the “distressed gentlewoman” will often heap opprobrium upon the paid companion without whose assistance she cannot so much as get out of bed in the morning.
As I mentioned earlier, Marge’s mandate from Terrier had been to transform Hudson from a sleepy and genteel backwater into a “major player,” and toward this end she had not only gotten rid of all the “dead wood” (people like Mrs. Brillo), but made it clear to her underlings that their future at the company depended on their capacity to generate profit. It was a decree at the very mention of which the oldtimers cringed, for by and large they were mild, unambitious men and women who lived in rent-controlled apartments, and were content to publish every year a familiar assortment of first novels, French cookbooks, and detailed guides to birdwatching. None of these books sold very well (or cost very much), yet in the old days this hadn’t mattered much, since as everyone knew Harry Hudson III had such deep pockets that he never looked at the balance sheets; the whole company was for him merely a tax write-off; in short, he preferred that Hudson lose money. To the old-timers, the bestseller was a distasteful, even lurid animal, one to which, when on rare occasions they did produce a specimen (always by accident) they referred with wistful regret, as if success were an unfortunate and rare mutation in the literary gene.
Of course they were wrong—and not merely in their estimation of Harry Hudson El’s attitude. For as it turned out his pockets weren’t nearly so deep as everyone had thought, which was why he’d had to sell the company. And now the powers that be had given Marge deadlines and numbers to match. Rumor even had it (though this Sara refused to corroborate) that at the end of the coming year she was supposed to fire all the editors whose books had failed to make a profit—in which case, as Carey Finch noted ruefully, she’d have to fire every editor in the house. This she didn’t do. And yet it was true that recently a few editors—including Carey’s boss—had rather abruptly decided to take early retirement. In their place terrifying “hot shots,” such as Jane’s recruit from Random House, were hired. This was particularly troublesome to Carey, who had liked his boss, a fiery leftist whose list consisted mostly of statistic-driven studies by political scientists who wrote earnest analyses of urban decline, environmental decline, social decline—in short, books that proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that our culture was in decline. But now this affable and somewhat tipsy gentleman had suddenly (and under duress) “left,” and though Marge assured Carey that he himself would be kept on, she gave no indication as to who it was he would be working for: someone flashy and vulgar, no doubt, who would laugh at his idealistic advocacy of the timeless.
Carey was an angular young man of twenty-one, graceful less in the manner of a bird than of a squirrel; and indeed, it was of a squirrel that I usually thought when I ran into him in the corridor where he went to smoke, lifting the cigarette to his lips with that same blend of appetite and precision that marks the aforementioned rodent’s demeanor when eating acorns. Everything about him, now that I think of it, was squirrely: his fine-boned hands, his silky fawn hair, even his eyes, which were the size and color of hazelnuts. I thought him very handsome. Whenever he strode down the hall past my desk, his gaze intently focused, his body spry in its never-changing uniform of jeans, tweed jacket, and Oxford shirt, my response was invariably one of attraction mixed with envy. For I recognized that despite whatever comparisons one might draw between him and backyard animals, Carey possessed, and would always possess, the very thing I lacked: namely, that cohesive admixture of self-knowledge and taste to which we refer when we say that someone has a “look.” I knew. I didn’t have a look. Instead, with my wrinkled shirts, ill-fitting glasses, and shaggy hair that when uncut (which was most of the time) lifted off my head in rolling waves, I must have given an impression as ill-defined as that of Marge Preston, when she hurtled by in one of her weirdly conceived and oddly touching outfits: a pink Chanel suit, say, with Birkenstock sandals.
What made Carey’s look work, on the other hand—what made his perfect manners and faultless fingernails signify so much more than merely a dull adherence to convention—was the current of short-temperedness, even violence, that underscored his idealism, and that revealed itself whenever, at Round Table lunches, the topic of literature came up. Then he would become both testy and argumentative, especially if a writer he considered to be overrated (for example, Forster, my own favorite, whom he thought a sentimentalist) received what was, in his opinion, undue praise. For unlike the terrible Terriers, he really loved literature, and not as a writer manque, but as a reader. He read with epicurean gusto. He read the way a gastronome eats.
Carey lived not far from me, in a studio apartment on West 110th Street, which meant that sometimes we rode the subway home together after work. Because we never talked about anything except books, I had no idea that he was gay until one Saturday evening when, quite by accident, I ran into him with some of his friends at the monthly Columbia gay dance. The occasion, which might have been awkward, turned out to be utterly cordial; indeed, not only was Carey not flummoxed by my presence, he appeared genuinely pleased to see me, and immediately invited me to join the little group of boys with whom he was sitting at one of the tables on the periphery of the dance floor. These turned out to be mostly old pals from college: one was a graduate student in Biology, another worked as a legal clerk, a third managed a gourmet food shop. None of them seemed to be remotely on the make, which rather surprised me. Instead they spent the duration of the festivity happily planted at their little table, never dancing (it was hard to imagine Carey dancing), just chatting, mostly about some mutual friends, a couple named Richard and Susan, whose doings they seemed to find endlessly fascinating. And how safe, even cozy, I felt in the little nest that Carey’s friends formed, especially when, from a distance, a man I had noticed at another Columbia dance started staring at me. The trouble was, there was something slightly mad about the way this man stared; it gave me an instant erection. He was probably thirty—years younger than I am now. He had thick hair, broad shoulders, just the tiniest bit of a beer belly. From where he stood leaning against the wall, his hips slightly bucked, drinking a Corona into the neck of which a lemon wedge had been shoved, he cast me a look so frankly lewd and assessing I almost giggled. No one had ever looked at me that way before. And yet such brazenness only left me shy and at a loss for words. So I stayed where I was, safe behind that social border across which, I knew, decorum would forbid this man from dragging me by the hair, no matter how much I might want him to. Even when he went to the toilet, casting a glance over his shoulder as he walked, I didn’t follow.
When the dance ended, we all went out for hamburgers at Tom’s Diner (later to be made famous by Suzanne Vega), where I saw a lot of people I knew: Philip Crenshaw, as gaunt as ever with his kohl-ringed eyes, and Lars with Eve Schlossberg, who was studying photography at the New School, and my roommate Will with one of his boyish amours. The man who had been staring at me I did not see: he had gone home, apparently, or moved on to some other venue. I remember feeling relieved, and at the same time disappointed. Secretly I hoped that when I left the diner to go back to my apartment, I’d find him waiting around the comer, at which point I would have no choice but to submit to his bold gaze. But I didn’t. Instead I walked home alone, looking back now and then to see if by any chance he might be lingering on a stoop.
That night it was too hot to sleep. Naked and unsheeted in my bed, I tried to imagine what the stranger with the questioning eyes might have done with me, or to me, had I gone with him. Part of me lamented not having approached him—the part of me that was tired of crossing only when the crossing guard told him to. And yet that spare, brutal room to which, in my imagination, the stranger led me was a place I feared as much as I desired. There, I knew, I would be stripped not only of my clothes, but of my very self; the crossing guard would fall to the pavement, and in his place would rise up a creature of pure, pleading appetite.
We were having a terrible heat wave in New York. Though the sky was always gray and heavy, no rain fell on the dirty sidewalks for weeks at a time. Each workday, on my way to and from the subway, I’d find myself pushing through an end-of-the-world heat, a death-of-the-rain-forests heat that might have been a rain forest. And yet even on Sundays, when the streets were empty, and everyone sensible had gone to the beach, I stayed behind, too grateful at last to be a leaseholding resident of Manhattan even to want to contemplate stepping off the island of my dreams. Anyway, I reasoned, why fight the crowds at the beach, why endure sunburn and sand flies and pebbles in my shoes, when I could just as easily spend the day at Jim Sterling’s parents’ cool apartment, reading, or watching television, or playing Monopoly? This was my preferred method of repose. Quintessential city people, the Sterlings owned no “little place on the shore,” no country house. Instead Mrs. Sterling joked that they had invested their money in first-class air-conditioning. “Our unit’s a Cadillac,” she told me. Nor had she any truck with the claim that too much conditioned air was bad for the lungs. On the contrary! She kept their apartment so cold we had to wear sweaters.
Hot Sunday mornings, then, while all our friends were lugging beach umbrellas, ice chests, and suntan lotion to Penn Station, Jim and I would meet at the comer of 86th and Broadway (he too was renting a cramped apartment), then walk together to his parents’ building on Central Park West. Up we’d ride in the elevator, noting carefully, whenever it made stops to pick other people up or let them off, the styles in which the various foyers were decorated. One, I remember, brought to mind old ocean liners; another, all chintz and bullion fringe, resembled a Victorian powder room; a third had gleaming white walls and a chrome-edged table I recognized from the Museum of Modern Art’s furniture collection.
Soon we’d arrive at the twentieth floor, which belonged in its entirety to the Sterlings, and where the walls of the foyer were painted a crisp butterscotch yellow. The floor was marble, as was that of the dining room, which was unquestionably the most impressive room in the apartment, with walls covered in Zuber paper, hand-blocked and painted, and in this case depicting a vaguely Eastern river landscape, replete with rose-colored peacocks and ginkgo trees. At the mahogany table an individual saltcellar with its own tiny spoon sat behind each place setting. Until I’d met the Sterlings I hadn’t known what a saltcellar was. Now I dismissed the salt-and-pepper sets of my childhood as yet further evidence of its cultural poverty, and vowed never to “shake” salt again so long as I lived.
Of course, if the Sterlings themselves had been as stuffily formal as their dining room—if, for instance, Mrs. Sterling had set her table with four forks and three spoons, or kept a little bell by her plate to ring for the maid (indeed, if she’d had a maid, as opposed to Gussie, who came in three times a week to fry chicken and wore an old pair of Jim’s underpants on her head)—then probably I wouldn’t have liked them nearly as much as I did. And yet this Jewish couple who had grown up in Yonkers were amazingly (considering the elegance of their apartment) blasé. Except on those nights when Gussie fried them chickens, they ate only take-out, most of it from Zabar’s, that West Side emporium to which, in the spring and fall, Mrs. Sterling liked to go herself to do the shopping. (In summer and winter she had everything delivered.) Sundays in particular were days of ritualistic excess, the table littered with little plastic Zabar’s tubs containing lox and flavored cream cheeses, platters of rye bread, bagels, and bialys, sheets of wax paper layered with lacy slivers of pastrami, half cakes in half-cake-shaped plastic receptacles. Jim and I would eat—brunch, not lunch—then afterward retreat to his room, where we might amuse ourselves by playing old board games, or watching reruns of 1950s science fiction movies. When you are twenty, childhood has yet to season into memory; beneath the bark the wood is still green. Hence we could happily waste the whole day in an inertia of television. Or he might read, while I reverted to my adolescent habit of drawing maps for nonexistent subway systems. Or we’d take on projects in Mrs. Sterling’s kitchen, preparing from a cookbook called Cocktail Food (it was the only one she owned) such dainties as “cucumber flowers filled with caviar,” “lemon swans,” “pink-salmon-souffle-stuffed zucchini boats.” Now I see that if we threw ourselves into these activities with such fervor, it was only because we knew they were the last little gasps of a dying thing, as in the final weeks of August children will often seem to play with greater intensity, as if to protest the leaves that are already starting to change, the “Back to School” ads in the newspapers. For soon we would reach a point where we could no longer muster the enthusiasm needed for such play; we would jump full-force into adult habits and tastes: strip poker instead of Monopoly, coffee instead of Diet Coke. Ours was the zeal that precedes nostalgia, which was why, when we shook hands at the comer of Broadway and 86th Street at day’s end, a blush of shame would sometimes creep over our faces—evidence that the pleasures in which we had been indulging were at once too ludicrous and too intimate to bear articulation.
Probably the sense that has eroded most steadily in me, as I’ve grown older, is that of certainty. When I was young, I felt certain that I would live the entirety of my life in New York City; I felt certain that I would never own a house, only an apartment; I felt certain that the city was—no, not my choice—my fate. Instead of which, almost two decades later, I live as far from New York as you can get, amid patient cultivations, on an unpaved road where the only traffic is caused by passing flocks of sheep. These days it’s hard for me to believe that I could have endured summers in New York—yet I not only endured them, I thrived on them. After all, there was so much to do! Shakespeare in the park (hours waiting in line), Ethiopian restaurants where one ate mysterious pulses with one’s fingers (risk of salmonella). Everything was always open. You could get cold sesame noodles at two in the morning if you wanted to. (Cold sesame noodles—a dish I had never tasted outside Manhattan—were my chief gastronomic passion; for two weeks straight that summer I ate nothing else, only slurped, every night, those delicious chilly threads and their peanut butter dressing from the aluminum tins in which the local Chinese restaurant packed them.) Or you could go to any number of clubs, or travel from party to party, or stay home and watch reruns of I Love Lucy until dawn.
City life became, for me, the source of mad daydreams. For example, it thrilled me to contemplate the fact that just a few inches away from where I sat, say, reading in the Sterlings’ living room, someone else, a stranger, was very likely also sitting. And who might this stranger be? A movie star? A man who forced his wife to dress in a rabbit suit? A girl who drew pentangles on her bedroom floor? That I didn’t know enraptured me, and made me regret those expanses of lawn and tree that in my parents’ neighborhood separated one family from the next. Here, on the other hand, variety was layered, as in a club sandwich. People lived atop one another, and beside one another, and all around one another, in a series of boxes inside other boxes. It made me feel ensconced, protected, saved.
That summer, with the exception of Jim, I was spending less and less time with my old friends and more with Carey’s—a coterie of intelligent, well-educated young men who wore tweed jackets, had their hair cut at old-fashioned barbershops, and spoke incessantly, whenever they were together, of this couple, this Richard and Susan, with whom they were collectively obsessed, and about whom they were always saying vague and tantalizing things along the lines of: “The thing about Susan is that she’s just so ... but what can you say about Susan?”
Apparently you could say that she loved sex; that once she had told Carey she pitied men, because they could never experience the bliss of being fucked simultaneously from front and back; that a parfumeur in Paris had been so taken with her, he had mixed a special perfume in her honor.
As for Richard, he was a great fellow. Everyone loved Richard. At NYU Law School normal straight guys scrambled to be his friend. (Later I asked my roommate Will if he knew Richard. “That guy?” Will said. “He never talks. I hardly notice him.”) Richard was sometimes the subject of salacious speculation among the group, chiefly regarding the size of his penis. (Whenever this matter came up, I noticed, Carey would grow gloomy, silent, and the subject would change.)
He had other reasons to be gloomy. At Hudson, Marge was taking her time replacing the editor he had worked for, which meant that he found himself in what was for him the unenviable position of not having enough to do. Carey was one of those people who is only happy when he has tasks to which he must attend (a convenient excuse, I have found, for the avoidance of self-examination). Accordingly, in the days following his editor’s “retirement,” he would often wander over to my desk and linger there idly, in much the same way that I had often lingered at Mrs. Brillo’s desk, hoping she might offer me a second doughnut. One day he even asked if he could help out with the slush pile. Sara was so shocked that Carey would actually volunteer to take on this onerous task that she asked Marge to give him a project to keep him busy until she hired the new editor, at which point Marge saddled him with a 750-page fishing encyclopedia to edit.
Secretly I was disappointed. While they’d lasted, I’d enjoyed Carey’s visits, the frustrated energy he radiated when idle. The truth was, I had become a bit smitten with him—or to put it more accurately, I had decided to become a bit smitten with him, not because he attracted me physically (in his agile wiriness, he could not have differed more from the dark stranger at the dance), but because he seemed to me the sort of person with whom I ought to fall in love: one whose evident respectability, when the time came to enact that visit home with a boyfriend that was my story in the magazine, would distract my mother’s attention from the fact that he was male. Obviously this was neither the first nor the last time I would fall in love in such a calculated way, for in those days, as I have said, I could divorce the erotic from the romantic as neatly as my sister separated the yolk from the white of an egg. Lust, I believed, could also be an offshoot of love, one that evolved slowly, over years. It was the same trick I’d played in high school, when I’d convinced myself that I had “crushes” on certain girls, only this time the object of my artificial affection was not a girl, but a boy whose very decorousness obviated the necessity of thinking about desire.
On the subway, meanwhile, brutish men, versions of that leering beau ideal at the dance, would sometimes look my way. Because they recalled the stare of the stranger at the dance, their glances, even when casual, excited me. Around them I built erotic scenarios as elaborate as the imaginary subway systems I still invented at Jim Sterling’s on Sunday afternoons. In the fantasies I spun around Carey, on the other hand, the two of us never took off our clothes. Instead, wearing cashmere sweaters and ascots, we would sit side by side in leather armchairs, in the living room of the village brownstone we owned together. A fox terrier (homage to Terrier Books, of which Carey was now editor in chief) lounged between our feet. What I was enjoying, in these fantasies, was what Mrs. Patrick Campbell called “the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue”—yet I had never known the hurly-burly of the chaise longue. I had skipped a crucial step. And meanwhile Carey and I remained only friends. I was far too timid to make advances. Also, we were never alone together. Instead, whenever we went out it was in the company of other people—Carey’s college buddies, or the Round Table crew, or Eve Schlossberg, with whom he’d turned out to have gone to high school.
Was it because of shyness that he was trying to avoid being alone with me? I wondered sometimes, but could not say for sure. The nervousness he radiated blocked out all signals, collected around him like a woolly darkness. In his company motives were obscure, distances distorted, perspectives blurred.
At work, meanwhile, the period of limbo continued. Candidate after candidate for the open slot Marge interviewed and rejected. Nor was she quick in the process. Lackadaisical in the least pressured of situations, she grew panicked under the gun, and ground to a halt. Without Sara’s aid I don’t know what she (or Carey) would have done; she simply could not make up her mind. And then one Friday, in response, perhaps, to some unspoken signal of helplessness, Sara stepped in and took over. She was really extraordinarily efficient. By the end of the morning she had every one of Marge’s meals booked for the following week: breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with prospective editors, some of whom Marge herself had approached, some of whom Sara had chased down on her own.
Monday the rush began. Not that we had any idea who the candidates in question were. Sara was nothing if not discreet. Only she knew to what restaurant Marge went hurrying off at the end of every morning, invariably twenty minutes late, and invariably not in possession of some crucial item or document: her wallet, or a catalogue, or an umbrella, with which Sara would have to run after her, calling “Wait!” as the elevator doors shut on Marge’s face.
The strategy worked, however. By the end of the week Marge had gained five pounds from all the meals, but was also down to three finalists. Or so Sara confided in us without divulging a single name. After all, it is by only sharing just enough information to keep others hungry that you can secure for yourself a small power base.
That Friday, meetings were scheduled with all three candidates. Because at least two of them already had other jobs, these meetings had to be conducted in secret, not at the office, but in Marge’s living room. Even though Friday was usually one of my days off, I came in after lunch, if for no other reason than to give Carey moral support. Especially for him, a palpable halo of worry surrounded Marge’s empty office as the afternoon waned, and no call came. By the end of the day, we realized, a decision would most likely have been made. But what decision? Who? Only Sara might know, and Sara wasn’t talking.
Dusk fell. “Has she called?” we asked Sara, who was putting on her raincoat, readying herself for the hurried trip home before the sun set. But she only shook her head. “Sorry, lads,” she said, and went. Carey packed up his fishing encyclopedia. I asked if he wanted to have dinner with me, and though the invitation seemed genuinely to please him, nonetheless he asked if he could take a rain check: his mother was in town, and he was going with her to her favorite sushi bar.
Monday I arrived at the office before nine. Sara and Carey were already there, which didn’t surprise me. What did was that Marge was in her office with the door closed.
“According to the janitor they’ve been locked up together since six-thirty,” Carey said.
“Who are they?”
“Marge, Mrs. Fairfax, and Mr. X,” said Sara.
“Or Ms. X,” Carey added. “We won’t know until they come out whether it’s Mr. or Ms.”
For a moment the three of us simply stared at the closed door. Then Sara said, “Well, no point in standing around, let’s get to work.” And she sat down at her desk. Reluctantly, Carey slunk off to his fishing encyclopedia. Getting ice for my Diet Coke, I passed Marge’s office a second time. The door was still shut.
Eventually I too sat down, and was just reading the first page of a “young adult” novel called Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Retarded when a spasm of adolescent hunger seized me, and I decided to go and get something from the candy machine—checking on the way, of course, to see if Marge’s door was open; it wasn’t. I ate the Hershey’s bar I’d bought, then retraced the path to my cubicle, which took me yet again past Marge’s door, still closed. Then I went to the men’s room, where I was just unzipping my fly when someone walked in and stood at the urinal next to mine. I turned to see who it was, and found myself eyeball to eyeball with Stanley Flint.
“Bauman,” he said casually. “What are you doing here? They’re not publishing you, are they?”
“No, I work here,” I answered.
“Really? What a coincidence,” Flint said. “Because as of today, so do I.”