When Rose and I moved to the city, living in Brooklyn meant you had to commute to Manhattan in order to have a good time. Tokens were still the only currency accepted by the subway. The New York Times printed their photos in black and white, and there was no such thing as the Style section. Coffee cost less than a dollar. You could smoke in bars. Tower Records still stood at the corner of Broadway and Fourth Street. The most important machines at work were telephones, Xerox machines, faxes, computers, and printers. If you needed to temp you could still sign up, like your grandmother did, with a Kelly Girl service, and some of the Midtown offices they sent me to had IBM Selectrics sitting out on the desks like old horses nodding off in their stalls, and I can still hear the warm hum they radiated between words, and the clicking of the cylinders as you pulled the paper up and out of them. The Strand was a dump. Other places were dumps, too—dumps or near-dumps, like McHale’s and the Subway Inn and Rudy’s and the Holiday Cocktail Lounge—but the Strand stands out at the moment because I was in there the other day marveling again at the heaps of branded merch that now greet its guests and contrasting that place with the one that used to smell of dust and the funk of its unwashed cashiers. We drank at night in dumps; ate in near-dumps. Sat in vinyl booths patched up with duct tape; pissed in scrawled-up, paint-peeling, rust-watered bathrooms. Nobody minded or cared. That’s how you knew you were not in the suburbs.
Everyone has their own New York, and this was ours.
Rose and I met in 1997 at a music magazine we used to refer to as WKRP. On my first day, as she led me down a cramped hallway back to my cubicle, through a gauntlet of offices blasting music from behind closed doors, I apparently wondered aloud: And where are the adults? Rose always said that’s when she knew she liked me. Rose, of course, scared me a little. But she didn’t scare me as much as the girl with an office at the end of the hallway—Tracy, the managing editor—who was actually sleeping with musicians we loved, Bikini Kill be damned. Since Tracy was doing all of this while earning a master’s in psychology from CUNY, however, you couldn’t call her a groupie. You wouldn’t dare call her a groupie, because she’d tell you to go fuck yourself and ask you how much fun you were having over there in your saddle shoes. Tracy. She wasn’t tall, but bony and angular enough to make you think she was, and her black hair, chopped into a bob, gleamed blue, just like Veronica’s did in the Archie comics Rose and I later discovered we were both addicted to as kids. Tracy’s official title was managing editor, but her true value lay not in wrangling copy, but in wrangling all the talent for the magazine’s annual music festival. No one knew where Tracy lived or where she’d come from, although someone thought they’d heard it was Forest Hills. Someone once said that she didn’t even graduate from college. Tracy. She drew all kinds of glamour to herself, and seemingly without effort. People wrote songs about her, blew her kisses in liner notes.
Tracy had no time for equivocating bullshit. She wanted what she wanted, and hated what she hated. One night, when we were all drinking after work, the editor-in-chief told us that he’d heard from a friend in a band who sometimes slept with Tracy that Tracy was getting herself handcuffed fortnightly to the bed of a famous writer for The New Yorker. Rose rolled her eyes and I said Nice work if you can get it, but on the train home we both confessed to wishing we were somewhere in the vicinity of invitations to what we used to call the voluptuous ludicrous.
One morning I got into the elevator with a copy of The Dialectic of Sex and Tracy laughed and rolled her eyes. If I were you I’d stop reading about it and start getting some. I laughed, too, but weakly. Philistine, I thought, and then Handcuffs and then Point taken, and tossed the paperback in a trash can on the way to the subway that night after work.
Tracy. Famous Tracy, the editor-in-chief called her. Vanilla Nice, she called him. I remember Tracy at staff meetings, standing by a window in the conference room so she could smoke, her blowing the plume out into the unremarkable skies that stretched over Fourteenth Street. Calling bands asshats and dismissing someone’s album as a piece of jizz.
Rose and I did not become friends immediately, although I’d been aware of her before we met. She’d been writing for the Voice, for the New York Press, for Time Out. But never for the Times, I noticed with relief. I’d stare at her byline on the subway or in a bodega thinking Who is this girl doing my job? I’d sit on the subway reading her pieces, listening to the voice of a girl that was louder than ink and larger than column inches, I might have written at the time, if I had to review the sound Rose made. A girl unafraid to lose herself in a description of the physical pleasure the music gave her and unafraid of turning lethally bemused when the music failed her. The display, and the confidence it took to put it out there and keep it coming, was infuriating. Rose wanted you to watch and she knew you wouldn’t stop watching, and if she hadn’t been funny, which meant she was smart, I would have been able to write her off as an attention whore. And that might have been the most infuriating thing of all—not being able to write her off completely.
And then she and I were up for the same position at the magazine—staff writer—but Rose was the one who landed it. I didn’t really have the experience to apply, but the editor-in-chief said he liked my sentences enough to want to talk with me.
These pieces aren’t very strong argumentatively, said the editor-in-chief, at the interview. Karl: blond hair shaved very close to his head, heavy black eyeglass frames, bitten cuticles, combat boots cracked from use. He was not an eighty-five-year-old man, as his name suggested he might be. But they are lively.
I see, I said. No one had ever suggested that my writing was lacking in any regard. And he had a resume in front of him that tallied several awards for writing over the course of college and graduate school. This was yet another encounter with a very particular kind of assertion of authority practiced by many of the young men I’d meet in New York: a routine dispensation of firm, almost acerbic verdicts that made them seem much more unflappably discerning than their twenty-six or so years. They wore used T-shirts and dress shirts and sneakers to work—I almost wrote school—and so they performed their adulthood by putting on a suit they thought they had to wear because they were paid to traffic in opinion and taste. You could almost hear them adjusting their rhetorical cuff links and shaking out the cuffs of their rhetorical trousers before they gave you their take.
You want to write, he said. But can you edit? He took four pages of copy off the middle of his desk and handed them to me.
I took out a pen, plowed through the copy, gave it a once-over, and handed the pages back to him quicker, I think, than he expected, or so the look of slight surprise on his face suggested.
The next day he called to tell me that he’d given the job to a writer whose byline he’d been seeing all over, a writer whose voice was already fully developed, and who had more experience, all of which meant he wouldn’t have to spend time training her to write a profile. He was calling to tell me this, he said, because he didn’t want to make me sit around wondering what had happened and why. The sincerity made me almost pity him rather than mind that I was being rejected. And then he called a month later because Rose, the writer he’d hired, needed more editing than he’d imagined, some other editor of his had just quit to run a record label in Chicago, and would I mind helping him out for $25,000 a year? Maybe you can write, too, he said. We’ll see. I did the math on the back of a Brooklyn Union Gas bill lying next to the phone and said yes.
It was very easy work. The magazine, like most magazines, was nothing more than a mosaic made up of rewritten press releases, despite several of us trying to write sentences that could potentially be cited in other people’s think pieces. And since most of my coworkers just wanted to leave at five to collect the free drinks and free drugs that came with the job, they took my edits easily, smilingly, often letting me rewrite pieces outright if they were a big enough mess. You do it, Tracy told me the first time I asked if she might take another stab at a piece. You’re smart enough to make sure I don’t sound like an idiot. When I wasn’t rewriting pieces, I pushed punctuation around, uprooting colons and semicolons and planting them where they needed to be. I was weeding a garden, and I found it soothing. When I’d gotten my bearings I told the editor-in-chief I could turn myself into the managing editor Tracy was too busy schmoozing to be, and with his blessing I drew up schedules, sent out reminders via email, walked around with a clipboard, and beaned people with it playfully when they said they needed another day, another hour. I was impersonating a person with a career, which amused me. And after the psychological torture of graduate school, the piecework felt like a much-needed convalescence. I thought I might vacation at the magazine for a year—which became two.
Karl Orson Schroeder. Or, as it appeared on the masthead: Karl O. Schroeder. Native and apostate son of Orem, Utah, descendant of Mormon bishops on his mother’s side and gun-toting polygamists on his father’s. I suppose he could have had any name, or been anyone in that position, at that time, with those approximate qualities and tastes, and a crush would have gone off within me like a long-buried land mine.
He was the oldest of five and seemed to know something about keeping a group of people mostly, happily in line. He never lost his temper although he could lower a stone-cold look of warning, pulled his oars harder when one or ten of us, hungover and sleep-deprived, dropped ours, and bought us all beer or pizza to keep us rowing. We might have bitched at his rigor but never too forcefully, because we knew he was right and we were lazy. Karl, from time to time, could be seen through his door reading from John Berryman’s Dream Songs and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, as if to ward off the evil spirit of serviceable prose working in the service of capitalist gain. He was an extremely intelligent boy-slash-man from a working- to middle-class family—from what, if he got drunk enough, he called trash—and those two biographical coordinates have always worked on me the way a handsome face never could. His weekly emails to the staff were small masterpieces chiseled out of wit, both anarchic and dry, and what I suspected was creeping intellectual boredom.
Whenever I heard the sounds of Rose and Karl walking down the hallway, their laughter announcing their return from lunch, I’d stop typing and sit still, listening to her high spirits tumbling over his measured, but clearly amused, interjections. I eavesdropped on those two the way I’d eavesdropped on Heloise and Abelard for my senior thesis: judging them one moment and envying them the next. Have mercy on me, Heloise, I prayed, for I too am a woman who responds not to beauty but to authority. And then I’d type faster to chase these thoughts away.
Karl was pleased with himself for hiring me, but Rose thought I was her bête noire. Because with Rose it wasn’t weeding, it was wondering whether you could get a coherent narrative to grow in rocky, incoherent, and self-dramatizing soil. She must have been able to publish so much, I thought, although I didn’t want to think it, because the men who ran the music sections liked the sound of her voice and what it promised: easily aroused availability without demands. I wondered, and I didn’t want to think this either, whether Karl had hired her because he was beguiled by that promise, too.
Rose knew how to talk to famous people and could get them to say all sorts of things, could get them, at the end of every interview, to say that they hated interviews but they loved talking to her, which left her with so much material she could never decide what was most important, so she poured it all into the blender and hit puree. Tracy could get you to want to sleep with her, and Rose could do that, sure, but she could also get you to just want to spend hours and hours with her—the more dangerous prospect. So much so that from time to time a publicist would call the magazine and request that Karl do the interview—a request that he would respectfully deny. Karl used to say that he thought Rose was so good at getting inside people’s heads he sometimes worried that she’d end up in a cult—or even worse, would found one herself.
I’d email to say I was coming over to her cubicle to give her edits, and when I arrived she’d already be in fighting mode. Her back stiff, her face blank in the even blanker light of the computer, she would not look at me when I talked. She would wordlessly, testily hit the backspace key to erase whole sentences, and select and then delete whole paragraphs—whole paragraphs, when I had suggested maybe losing just the first few words. She knew I was right but had to do something to make it clear to me and to herself that she had been hired for a reason. Standing there trying to talk to her ice-cold face while remaining ice-cold, too—I could not let her break me—was like driving through a slaughtering rain with no exit ramp in sight. I hated it. I’d have to take three walks around Fourteenth Street to shake off all the gritting of teeth I’d done while suffering through her performance. Once it drove me downstairs to the ancient Irish bar across the street that smelled perpetually of bleach, where I sat watching NY1 for two hours while nursing a whiskey.
Karl was shrewd and wise, but not yet wise enough to realize that it was incredibly stupid to have one highly strung, highly intelligent girl tell another highly strung, highly intelligent girl that she needs to stop being herself—for this is what you are doing when you tell someone to cut five paragraphs in order to get to the almighty point.
More often than not, reentering the magazine, coffee in hand, after one of these clashes, I’d see Rose in his office with the door closed—no, what I’d see were her feet on his desk, and sometimes I saw him laugh, stand up from his chair, and forcibly remove her fancy feet from his wire-basket inbox. Rose had a pair of shoes for every day of the week, it seemed. Through his door’s window I noted a parade of the following: platforms from the seventies, red snakeskin with brass buckles; black velvet platforms from the forties; white canvas platform espadrilles, embroidered, probably, in Mexico in the sixties, with fuchsia and egg-yolk-yellow flowers, and about six inches’ worth of green grosgrain ribbon running up the trellis of her calves.
And when I walked around Fourteenth Street I thought: Why should she have everything? Why should she attract the attention of famous people and Karl alike?
Do you think Rose and Tracy ever, you know, worry about the consequences of their actions? asked Nicole, one afternoon while she sat on a plastic orange milk crate in my cubicle going over edits, and the both of us paused to watch Tracy walk down the hallway, earrings, hair, bracelets, and black coat of what Rose would later tell me was Persian lamb, jangling and swinging as she strode out of the office on high heels, reading a New York Post as she did. Nicole, the editorial assistant and heavy metal enthusiast who’d dropped out of Rutgers to take care of her mother while she underwent chemo, who showed up to work that day with a wreath she’d made of pink and blue silk flowers from Michaels atop her long brown hair, this wreath crowning an outfit of striped T-shirt, jeans, and Chucks, an ensemble she would later wear that night to see a band that sang about death, blood, and charred remains. Nicole! Who had postcards of Pope John Paul II and Ricky Martin tacked up in her cubicle. Who I’d hear talking on the phone to her mother, telling her mother where in the kitchen she’d put the Crisco or baking powder after using it to make chocolate chip cookies for the bands she interviewed. Ma! Nicole would say. It’s right behind the freakin’ Bisquick! Ma! We would go to lunch, my treat, and talk about the books she read for her uncompleted senior thesis on Mary Wollstonecraft and England’s slave trade. I took her bra shopping at Filene’s, and brought her books I thought I’d outgrown. Or she would come and sit on a milk crate in my cubicle—I’d bought a velveteen pillow, pink, from the Kmart on Astor Place, so it would be more comfortable for her—and we’d strategize responses to the boys who were not returning her emails.
Well, I began, torn between wanting to let rip my own resentment and wanting to keep steady for mentoring’s sake. I did not finish that sentence, because what can you say when your own heart is held up to yours like a mirror?
Rose claimed she did not like Nicole. Perhaps because she had an irrational fear of catching a worse case of what she already had: an upbringing that had steeped her tongue for too long in salt and vinegar, that had given her the heart of a street fighter rather than the cool, calculating mind one could inherit if one had been to some manor born. The kind of cool, calculating mind that could result from seeing it all, and having it all, before the age of eighteen—school in New York City, camp for socialization purposes in Maine, camp for educational purposes on Martha’s Vineyard, Christmas in India, summer in Italy, internships in London—and so could not get too worked up about possibly missing the train to the rest of your life. The kind of mind that had unshakable faith in its own powers. The kind of mind that never had to worry about money, and so could do what it pleased, when it pleased, no matter how unremunerative.
Tracy liked Nicole, and this made me less afraid of Tracy. Tracy had been what we used to call a metalhead when she was younger, and sympathized with Nicole’s borderline spastic passion for an utterly uncool genre. You could not say that Tracy saw herself in Nicole—because Tracy herself had probably never, would never, expose her love of anything with the abandon Nicole did.
Tracy appointed Nicole to be the moderator of a panel during one of the magazine’s annual festivals, and I remember standing with Tracy in the back of a conference room in the Hilton on Sixth Avenue across the street from Radio City, smiling with Tracy as we watched Nicole, clutching a sheaf of index cards in her left hand and clicking a hotel pen in her right, leaning in, ready to engage and ready to note. Wearing a dress she’d bought the night before with boots Tracy had lent her, sitting erect and confident, her tightly wound energy appearing in this context like authority and efficiency, shrouded as it was in a black dress and black boots, a suit of armor that I know from much experience helps repel all stray and sloppy thoughts, and helps you fend off the sloppiness of thought in others, a uniform that makes you feel that you have taken the shape of a sheathed knife in watchful, elegant reserve. Nicole, confident because someone had given her the spotlight she needed to grow a little taller. Nicole, making the panelists laugh and provoking them to admit that she had asked questions that had never occurred to them. Which is what every journalist likes to hear: that they have momentarily unseated the expert.
You’re kind, I said to Tracy, as we watched Nicole, index cards tucked under her armpit, shake hands and work the crowd.
Please, she said. I just didn’t want to have to moderate a conversation with these yo-yos. I’ve slept with two of them.
Yo-yos. The exact word my grandmother used to call out idiot drivers, and this was another reason why I could not be 100 percent terrified of Tracy.
How’d I do? Nicole said, beaming. The crowd murmuring and percolating all around us under fluorescent lights.
Beautifully, I said. I was beaming, too. It felt so very good to deliver a compliment and mean it, to hand it over without jealousy or false cheer.
Can you smell me from where you’re standing? she said, holding her arms out by her side and circling them like propellers. My armpits are soaking wet.
The Chucks and the flower crowns disappeared after that day, and Nicole began wearing black dresses and black boots, exclusively, to work.
Later that day, in the same conference room: three musicians, two men and one woman, all of them wearing faded, previously used cowboy shirts. The men had thrown theirs on top of new jeans whose hems were artfully fraying; the woman had tied hers over a black slip dress that had probably been someone’s actual lingerie. The woman’s songs—I knew I should like them because they were trying to get me in touch with the eternal feminine that lived in the dark and could communicate only in howls, and a lot of people did like them, a lot of people loved them, but to me the howls just sounded like preening—like one woman’s advertisement for herself, and for the healing powers of anal sex. No thanks. One of the men, the more handsome of the two, was causing a bit of a commotion at the time because, after spending most of the last decade annihilating American hypocrisies over two-minute punk songs, he’d just released an album, mostly acoustic, on which every song was named after a girl: Amy, Aimee, Jessica, Heather, Stephanie, Dana, Michelle, and Lori. (The hidden track: Andrea.) The names seemed like a cruel joke about the inescapable banality of a certain kind of girl, and how that certain kind of girl was a symbol of the inescapable banality of a certain kind of American life, and there was a lot of discussion about whether this was an anti-capitalist critique or straight-up misogyny or both or who cared. The songs themselves were sometimes cruel, but they were crammed with images I wished I’d come up with, and it reminded me of why I did not listen to Bob Dylan—was it a compliment to be looked upon so long by him, to have riled him up to blistering, Shakespeare-grade poetry with your essential mutability, or was it plain old humiliation? But the hidden track was so beautiful it made me forgive the possible cruelty.
I want to talk about this guy’s record, said the woman, after everyone had been seated and before Rose had even had a chance to make the introductions. She leaned into her mike and cast an intense and mischievous look down the table. I can’t tell whether it’s a mean stunt or what.
I’m sorry you feel that way, said the minor commotion, whose robotic intonation made it clear he was ironizing that phrase and its worth as a communication tool.
I laughed in spite of myself. Other people in the audience did, too. So did the woman. Angela.
You’re such a cunt, Josh, she said, still laughing.
Josh was grinning like crazy. I looked at Rose, who was also grinning like crazy, clearly delighted that an altercation between lesser deities had broken out on her watch. I looked at the other guy in the cowboy shirt—leaning all the way back in his chair, stretching out his arms way over his head, and scrutinizing the ceiling as if none of this was happening. I looked at Nicole, sitting next to me. She had buried her face in her hands.
I’m sorry, Rose—that’s your name, right? the woman said. This is your party, you host it.
Yes, said Rose. She faced the crowd. My name is Rose, Rose Pellegrino. And I’m so happy to be here and to have a conversation with these musicians, whose work I’ve loved for such a long time. A conversation, an interaction, an encounter, a bar brawl, whatever.
Everyone laughed—the guests and the audience both, the tension that had been in the room dissipated, and it all seemed under control for about forty-five minutes, until Rose and Josh began openly flirting with each other.
So love songs, said Rose.
It’s the whole point, said the guy who was not Josh. Every musician I ever admired tried to say something about okay, yes, existence in general, and I’m pretty sure that coming of age after punk made it harder to talk about having tears in your beer, for a lot of reasons, some good, some bad. But what I mean is that even when I wasn’t writing about a girl I was still, you know, writing like that girl was watching, or, you know, might be watching. The thing doesn’t have to be about love to be about love, if you know what I mean.
He’s right, said Josh, who seemed a little stunned, if I had to guess, by the fact that someone he usually felt comfortable writing off had bested him through this completely spontaneous and completely sincere attempt to cut through the crap—his own and ours. But because you don’t get to be a minor commotion without needing the spotlight like a drug, Josh had to find a way to upstage this guy.
Josh leaned into the microphone, arms crossed in front of him. Let’s say I’d just met you, he said to Rose.
Rose smiled.
And maybe I wanted to get your attention somehow, but I didn’t want to come on strong. So maybe I’d write a song where I’d say, When she puts her mascara on she doesn’t need a mirror.
He had seen what Nicole and I had seen—Rose, out in the hallway just before she had to go on, in the middle of a crush of people, back against the wall, head tilted back, flicking the wand once, twice, on each set of lashes, tossing the tube of mascara back in her bag, blinking, and then wiping her index finger under each eye—left side, right side—to remove any smudges. Said Nicole, on our way into the room: If I tried that I’d totally poke my eye out.
And then, he said, his voice just a bit softer, as if there was no one else in the room but him and Rose, as if night had fallen and he was calling her with his last dime, I’d send it like a letter and hope you heard it.
Goddamn, said a woman sitting next to me.
That’s not a tribute, said Angela, that’s a hit and run. She was sitting back in her folding chair, nowhere near her microphone, but everyone could hear her.
Then what would you want me to do? said Rose to Josh.
This is stressing me out so bad, Nicole whispered to me. I gotta get out of here. Let’s go.
We can’t, I whispered. We’re in the middle of the room. We’d become part of the show.
Rose is gonna get herself murdered.
Good, I said. She deserves it. The words hopped out of my mouth like a hot coal from hell. I might have even hissed them. Nicole’s eyes widened, and I felt awful for letting my mask slip.
It’s up to you, said Josh. You have all the power here.
Then Angela spoke. I’m having trouble deciding—and then she broke off. The room’s attention swung back to her. Rose, she said, I’m having trouble deciding whether you’re actually smart, or just ballsy and hot.
I’d been wondering the same ever since I’d met Rose.
Ballsy? said Angela. Or do I just mean mouthy?
I’ve heard worse, said Rose. She did not appear bothered.
I don’t think you have, said Angela.
Karl had materialized at the front of the room, I noticed, and was now standing off to the side by the doorway, arms crossed, staring, ready and waiting, it seemed, to wrestle all of these people and their egos to the ground. I noticed Rose notice him.
Let’s talk about music, said Angela. That’s what I came here to do.
Is that really what you want to talk about, said Rose, or is that just some line you know you need to throw out so we know you’re serious and have ideas when you’re not busy taking it up the ass?
Oh my God, I said out loud. Nicole had been chewing extremely hard on a pen cap and I heard a piece of it crack off in her mouth.
You’re a cunt, too, said Angela, who was smiling again, wildly happy to be back in the position of stirring up shit.
Josh tried to get a handle on the situation. I think—
Don’t rescue me, said Rose, holding up her hand like a stop sign, not looking in his direction at all, still staring down Angela, who was still smiling.
Karl walked up onto the stage, unhurried but determined, and picked up a microphone. It was 4:59, he told the audience, and there was another panel due in here any second, so we’d have to wrap this conversation up. He thanked everyone for coming, told the guests he really appreciated the time they spent with us, put the microphone down on the table, and made a signal for the sound guy to start some music. And stood there until everyone on the stage had made their way off. He touched Rose’s arm as she passed but she kept walking.
I still did not know whether or not Rose was smart, but I saw that she was tough in a way that appeared rooted in something like real courage and, what’s more, had applied that pressure to a woman who claimed to be acting on behalf of femalekind but was really just interested in making messes wherever she went, and that kind of thing could only serve to liberate one woman—the woman making the mess.
That was a Friday. On Monday Rose threw a fit in her cubicle because I suggested that maybe she was putting words in a famous musician’s mouth. How can a person be this much of a goddamned stickler? she shouted, and when I think about it, I may have suggested such a thing because I wanted Josh to be the unicorn eating out of my laughing maiden hands, because I wanted Karl to reach out for my arm as I walked away from a battlefield, because I wanted to be onstage with an audience hanging on my every word. And maybe Rose burst into flames because she had neither fucked Josh nor definitively trounced Angela, and Karl had pulled the plug on her show. I said nothing, just let her rage, and stared at the black-and-white publicity shots of musicians, particularly the shot of Johnny Cash, who, Rose claimed, once read out a verse from a Gideon New Testament as a blessing to her, until it seemed like she had exhausted her store of indignation. I fantasized, as Rose punctuated some point by slamming the heel of her hand down on her desk, once, and then twice, about being able to go home soon, where I could eat a shitty mass-produced chocolate chip cookie the size of my face while reading Anna Karenina.
Karl overheard it all, as did the whole staff, which I could care less about, because it had been Rose who’d lost control, and on my way back to my desk, he motioned me into his office. Then motioned me to close the door. We stood facing each other.
You’re a good person, Charlotte, he said.
I don’t know what earthly good that’s doing anyone, but thank you, I said.
What can I do?
Give me the rest of the day off?
He laughed. Deal.
And money for dinner?
He took his wallet from his back pocket—he still wore one on a chain, a hardcore-kid habit that Rose and I would later affectionately mock—and fished out two fives.
Thank you very much, I said. I didn’t leave. I wanted more words from him.
Come out with me tonight? he said. With something that sounded like panic, but also like now-or-never, head-for-home-plate, hop-on-the-bus-before-it-pulls-away-into-traffic hope.
Won’t you want your money back? I said, because I was panicked, too, and thrilled, and had to paper it all over with meaningless speech.
He shook his head as he pawed over his desk to find something. A piece of paper to write on. Meet me here at seven thirty, he said, now confident, now back in control, scrawling an address down while I tucked the fives into his mug of pens and pencils.
On my way out I saw Rose in Karl’s office. He’d left the door open just enough for sound to leak out as I walked past. You want what you want too badly, he said. He sounded annoyed, frustrated. You’re going to scare it away, you know?
My coat, as I made for the elevator, swung like Tracy’s, propelled by feelings of mild triumph and slight vindication. Because of course what he’d said to Rose would never apply to me.
When Karl sat down across from me at the Bemelmans Bar, he slipped a used paperback in my direction while asking a white-jacketed waiter, who had alighted at our table, for two gimlets.
Lost Illusions? I said. Gimlets? I wanted to laugh but I couldn’t because laughing was really just a defense against my envy of Karl’s swift and sure exercising of his critical faculties, his tastes. His confidence.
Two classics that deserve higher profiles, said Karl.
I’ve read this in French, I said, looking in the front flap to see who had owned the book before me. For Elaine, the cobwebby hand of an elderly person had written. Christmas 1980.
Is that a joke? he said.
No. Is that an insult?
He laughed the way I’d heard him laugh with Rose. It was a stoutly unselfconscious burst of approval that ran counter to his seriousness. The sound happened and disappeared so quickly it made you wonder what you’d actually heard.
No, Charlotte. You make a lot of jokes, and I—
The waiter stood there with our drinks. Karl explained that his first boss in New York, his first mentor, had given him a copy of the book, and he thought I might appreciate how contemporary it felt. He’d given Rose a copy, too, he said.
Rose, I said. I wished I hadn’t.
Karl’s expression: curious, amused. He waited for me to say more, and when it became clear I wasn’t going to, he raised his glass. To you, Charlotte Snowe, and your formidable work ethic.
I raised mine. Well, I said, no one’s ever allowed me to be mediocre. Or lazy.
Same here, he said. But don’t you think that you’re the one not letting yourself be mediocre?
I drank, trying to steady my shaking grip on the delicate martini glass; he drank, and stared right at me. It seemed that Karl was delivering me the supreme compliment of focus—that he was staring at me the way I’d stared all my life at paintings and oceans. I steadied my hand and stared back.
I believe in geography the way some people believe in astrology, he said, after we had set our drinks down on the table. Where did you grow up?
I opened my mouth but Karl spoke again. No, wait. He was shaking his head, looking at his knees. There’s a better question. He looked up. Sergeant Pepper or Pet Sounds?
The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, I said.
Karl smiled as if he’d found a hundred bucks in his coat pocket.
We talked for three hours. Three hours in which we’d each had one drink more than we’d promised ourselves, and by the end of it he’d written the titles of three books I’d mentioned across the top of his right hand. Three hours in which I came to understand that the self-seriousness was the armor of a young man who, like myself, came from people who did not overly value, and might even be suspicious of, the mind, and so had to erect an impregnable shell to protect what no one around him seemed to hold dear. Karl. Whose father no longer talked to him because this oldest of five no longer believed. Whose family did not understand why New York. It’s as if my sisters think I’m still on my mission and I’m coming home in a month, he said. Whose fellow missionary, when he was stranded in Bolivia for his requisite two years, once woke Karl up in the middle of the night by choking him, and was subsequently sent home, where he was diagnosed with manic depression, leaving Karl to wonder what kind of God would allow that much torment to visit a soul. Whose mother used to write to publishers if she noticed too many typos in the Agatha Christie books she checked out of the library for his brothers and sisters. Whose youngest brother once had to use pliers to pull a fishing hook out of the inside of Karl’s right forearm—Let’s take a look, he said, unbuttoning his cuff and rolling up his long black cotton sleeve to show me a scar that looked like a tiny raised wishbone, and then, Oh, while we’re here, he said, and pointed to another scar hovering above it, the remains, he said, of a botched attempt at self-tattooing with a sewing needle and some India ink he’d stolen from his high school’s art room.
It appeared that the brailled flesh was trying to spell out Jenny.
In return I turned my right cheek toward him to show him the three currently empty holes in my ear—my souvenir from high school art room days, I said.
When I turned back to face him his head was in his hands.
Should you go home? I said. I put my right hand on his left knee. Do you need to throw up?
He took my hand off his knee, turned it over, and looked at my palm like he wanted to drink that, too.
Then the check came, and Karl, almost immediately, became businesslike, avuncular. Out came the wallet, the shuffling of cards, receipts, pens. I realized I was drunk not just on gin and sugar but on my own powers of charm. I will win you like a prize, I thought.
At around midnight we walked out to Madison Avenue, stood side by side outside the entrance to the hotel, and stared down into the tunnel made by Seventy-Sixth Street as it ran toward the blackened park. I made a number of immodest wishes on the taxi lights and the streetlamps and the scant number of stars in the sky as we continued to stare straight ahead into the dark tunnel.
You’re an A-side kind of girl, he said. Get home safe?
I rode the subway wishing on faces, shoes, fluorescent lights, maps, tiles, on the cheeks and noses of children asleep in strollers, and on my own clasped hands, which turned the wishes into a prayer. Wished for the rumble underneath us all to be a sign of happy upheavals to come.
Early the next morning, Rose appeared in my cubicle. Large cup of coffee from the cart on the corner of Fourteenth Street gripped in black-leather-gloved hand, blond hair piled on top of her head, some curls still wet, some curls not, a huge woven red scarf wrapped around a gray wool coat, vintage, with brass buttons, and leather boots in a color I’d call burgundy but she’d call wine. I was begrudgingly appreciating her formidable sense of style when she spoke.
Last night I had a dream that you and I were at the Barneys Co-Op sale fighting over a dress. She took a sip of coffee and watched my face. It seemed that she was waiting for me to explain this dream to her. Did Rose really not see that it was an expression of the anxiety she felt when I questioned her choice of words or the veracity of her facts, because when I did I forced her to question who really owned her stories, and by that extension whether she had any talent at all?
Since I couldn’t say any of that, I said this: You know, I don’t wake up every morning thrilled to contemplate all the ways in which I can ruin your day.
It’s like you forget there’s a human girl who wrote the sentences, she said. You never give me even one compliment to soften the blow. You just show up and start telling me where my slip is showing and where my stockings have run.
She could have been me, talking about my mother. Rose, and it tumbled out of me without thinking, you could be a great writer if—
If what? Someone had said what I was about to say to her before, I could tell, before she’d fallen into her sea of helping hands, and she didn’t like being reminded of it.
If you started at some point before midnight and read back over what you wrote before you hit send! Take your sentences seriously. Take your audience seriously. Limit yourself to one cliché a piece instead of ten. You’re in this incredibly privileged position—don’t make us think we could do your job better!
Is that what you think? Do you think you could do this job better?
I didn’t answer.
And where have you been published?
Nowhere.
Do you want this job?
I interviewed for it but didn’t get it.
Confronted with a fact that would have certainly wounded her had it been her lot, she appeared to soften.
But I learned that I actually don’t want your job, I said. Musicians are rock dumb, and I have no interest in wasting my mind in the celebration of their talent when I should be sharpening my own.
Rose laughed. They are rock dumb, she said. Pause. I like your shoes.
I looked down at my Doc Martens. Wing-tipped Mary Janes left over from college, inflexible black leather, with ridged rubber soles, which I made myself wear even though they hurt, because I’d bought them in London and spent a lot of money on them.
I don’t think you do, I said, but I appreciate the gesture.
She sighed. I keep meaning to find some other less trivial way to bond with other women, but nothing works as well as a compliment on your clothes.
In my other life I was Elsa Schiaparelli, I said.
Oh that’s funny, Rose said, more to herself, a note taken, than to me.
I stood up and held out my hand. She smiled wide and shook it, and I smiled, too, relieved and very pleased, but a little scared, too, because Rose of course might be crazy, and then she turned and strode down the hallway. I rested my hands and forehead on the top of my cubicle wall, still pleased and relieved but also exhausted, and feeling that I didn’t want to do anything much because I’d already achieved quite a bit for the day.