2
THE STEWARTS
Howard heard the front door of the apartment slam. “Hi, Rosanne,” he called, pouring the rest of the water into the coffee maker.
“Hi.” Swish, swish, swish; the familiar sound of Rosanne’s jeans. Silence.
Howard looked over his shoulder and saw her leaning against the doorway. “You look very tired,” he said, moving over to the butcher-block table. “You got it.” She let her bag slide down off her shoulder to thump on the floor. “Party at the C’s last night.”
“Okay,” Howard said, picking up a piece of paper and examining it, “I’ll strike ‘windows’ off of Melissa’s list.” He leaned over the table to pencil in “next week.”
Rosanne tossed her bag up onto the counter and adjusted her bandanna to a more pirate-y angle. “Been on the list for three years,” she said, “you’d think she’d catch on.”
Howard smiled, pushing his glasses up higher on his nose. “Melissa doesn’t like to admit defeat.”
Rosanne gave him a look and moved on to the refrigerator. “You oughtta get a medal or somethin’,” she said, opening the door.
Howard let the comment pass. “I got some half-and-half—it’s in the door.”
“Great, thanks.”
“And there’re some bran muffins in the breadbox.”
Rosanne closed the refrigerator door and walked over to the coffee maker. Tapping her fingers on it, trying to hurry it along, she said, “So how are ya?”
Howard tossed the pencil down on the table. “Good, I guess.”
“I brought that book back,” Rosanne said, reaching for her bag.
“What did you think?”
Rosanne pulled it out and handed it to him. “I liked it. I liked it a lot, only—”
Howard was looking down at the jacket of the hard-cover volume of a Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. “Only what?”
“I don’t know, Howie,” she sighed, swinging her weight to one leg. “Like I don’t know if it’s so good for me to be readin’ romances. Kinda gets me depressed after—it’s not like it’s like real life or nothin’.”
“Well,” Howard said, considering this.
“But I liked it okay,” she finished. “And I read another one in there about the family movin’ out West—gettin’ shot at and attacked and all.” She moved over to the sink. “Weird how it was like now back then.”
Howard laughed. “I’ll give you something a little different this week,” he promised.
Rosanne opened the cabinets under the sink and squatted down. “Yeah, okay,” she said, pulling out various cleaning agents and plunking them down on the floor. She shook the bathroom cleanser container. “We need some Comet, Howie,” she said. Howard wrote this down. “And you better tell her highness,” Rosanne added, whipping her head around in his direction, “that we don’t want any of that el cheapo cleaner she always gets.”
“Brother,” she muttered, standing up and slamming the cabinets shut, “you’d think if she wanted a clean house she’d get some decent cleanin’ stuff.”
“I’ll get it,” Howard said, dropping the pencil.
Rosanne turned around to look at him.
“What?”
Her mouth twitched one way and then the other. “Nothin’,” she finally said, waving him away. “Go do your work. I wanna listen to the radio.”
As Howard walked through the living room he heard Rosanne whirling the radio dial. In a few minutes, he knew, every radio and television in the apartment, save in the master bedroom, would be on (9 A.M., Radios: Howard Stern (WXRK), John Gambling (WOR), Don Imus (WNBC); TVs: Leonard Philbin and “The Munsters.” 10 A.M., Radios: K-Rock, Sherre Henry (WOR) and WPLJ; TVs: Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue). At eleven, while Rosanne cleaned their bedroom to Joan Hamburg (WOR), Howard would move to the living room for a half hour and either turn off the TV or give in and watch “Father Knows Best.”
In the beginning, Howard had stayed home on Monday mornings to read manuscripts as an accommodation to Melissa to have someone home while Rosanne was there. Melissa was still under the impression—kept there, quite deliberately—that these mornings were of enormous inconvenience to Howard when, in fact, they were often the best times of his week.
Howard settled down into Melissa’s pink chaise longue and picked up the remaining unread part of a manuscript that had been submitted to him at the office.
It was not holding his attention, however, and in a moment he was staring out the window at the Hudson River.
Howard Mills Stewart was thirty-three years old and in perfect health. He had been married for eight years, was living in a fabulous three-bedroom apartment, was an esteemed editor at Gardiner & Grayson, one of the most famous publishing houses in the world, and yet—
And yet... Why, he wondered, did he feel so terribly unhappy? So lonely. So utterly lost.
When twenty-two-year-old Howard Stewart joined the training program at Gardiner & Grayson Publishers, Inc., in 1975, to say that he was unprepared for the world of book publishing is putting it mildly. Nothing he had studied at Duke, nothing he had imagined as a teenager in Columbus, Ohio, had seemed to be of use to him. No, that was not quite correct. There was one thing he had brought along with him that was of enormous value: to so love reading, to so love books, that not even book publishing could scare him into seeking another means of employment.
When he had arrived in New York City—at the Chelsea apartment he shared with no less than five other recent college graduates—Howard had no doubts that he would discover great writers and nurture them to staggering heights of critical success. It would take him about a year, he thought. He even had a list—in his head—of the kind of writers they would be: a Charles Dickens; an Edith Wharton; an F. Scott Fitzgerald; a John Cheever; and a John Updike. And so, when he arrived at Gardiner & Grayson for his first day of “training,” he was rather taken aback by being asked to type some three hundred mailing labels to send out review copies of books.
When the publisher, Harrison Dreiden, recruited Howard to work as an assistant in his office, everyone told Howard how lucky he was. Howard wondered. Could book publishing really be like this? As far as he could make out from the vantage point of his desk, no one in the office ever read or ever edited. All that seemed to go on were phone calls, typing and meetings, meetings, meetings and more meetings.
“What exactly is it that you do all day?” Howard once asked a senior editor. She had thrown her head back and laughed.
“Okay, Howard,” she said, checking her watch, “I will give you a one-minute summary of an editor’s job. Ready?”
Howard nodded.
“The editor represents the house to the author, and the author to the house, right? Okay then, lesson number one: the editor is responsible for absolutely everything to absolutely everybody.”
“Got it,” Howard said, a trifle annoyed with this simplicity.
“And it means that the editor has to make sure that everyone working on the book in house does his or her job, even though the editor might be the only one who’s read it.”
Howard frowned.
“So the editor is in contact with everybody who is working on the book: the author, of course, and the agent on the outside, and on the inside, well”—a deep breath—”the managing editor, the business manager, production coordinator, design, copy editing, the art director, sub rights—reprint, book clubs, serial and foreign rights-marketing, publicity, advertising, the flap copy writer, the sales manager, royalty department, the sales reps”—breath—”and that’s when everything’s going smoothly. Otherwise there’s the legal department—”
“So you talk to them all the time?”
“That or we memo each other to death.” Pause. “And that’s only one book—I’m usually working on six to eight books at the same time, with a new list starting every six months. But I won’t have anything to work on unless I get out there”—a wide, sweeping gesture to the window—”and find good books to sign up.”
“Oh,” Howard said, his frown deepening. “So when do you edit? I mean, do you?”
Another burst of laughter. “Of course I do. Oh, Howard,” she said, patting his shoulder, “you’ll find out. Publishing isn’t a career, you know, it’s a calling. In this house it is, at any rate. But don’t worry—either you’ll get it or it will get you.”
Howard’s phone calls and letters back to Columbus did not paint an accurate picture of his life in New York. The truth, he felt, would only upset those who had taken an interest in him early in his life, who had done great favors for him, believed in him, and expected great things of him.
Howard’s dad, Raymond, was born the year the Stewarts lost the two thousand-acre plantation in North Carolina that had been in the family for over a hundred and fifty years. The Depression was on, and the Stewarts moved to Ohio in search of work. When Ray was nineteen, working as a fence builder, he enticed a freshman at Ohio State by name of Allyson Mills to elope with him. Allyson was the daughter of a prominent Shaker Heights attorney. At her urging, Ray worked for his father-in-law as “the highest paid filing clerk in the world” until he couldn’t stand it anymore, quit, and took his bride to the outskirts of Columbus to start a landscaping business. Howard’s dad was sort of, well—yes, he was at home with a shovel, but no, not with a necktie. And Howard’s mom, devoted to Ray, decided she was happy if he was happy and, since he seemed to be, learned how to function in the capacities of the servants she had grown up with.
This was not to say that Ray Stewart did not have high hopes for his eldest son. The trick was how to give Howard every opportunity without accepting any help from his father-in-law (Allyson, too, was eager to do this). The Stewarts had a lot to work with. People liked Howard, they always had. He was acutely bright, good-looking, athletic, and just—just such a great guy. The kind of guy who fit in anywhere, never claiming to be any better or worse than who he was with.
Ray’s friends were local small business owners like himself, forever involved in—and rallying together to protect their interests in—the Chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club. And all of Ray’s friends seemed to see something in Howard they wished to help along. When Howard proved to be good in Little League, he was given a job sweeping out a sporting goods store and got his pick of the best equipment available for any sport that interested him. When Howard was twelve, he was slipped in with the union caddies at a country club. When he was fourteen he earned high wages (under the table) building tennis courts. When he was sixteen, he bought himself a red Camaro (at cost, from yet another friend of his father’s) to drive himself around to the suburban estates where he gave private tennis lessons to wealthy ladies bemoaning their backhands. The ladies adored him. (“You are so kind, Howard,” Mrs. Lane said once, handing him a twenty-dollar tip. “You make me feel as though everything’s going to be all right, even my tennis.”) And the husbands trusted him. (“She hasn’t had a martini before five all summer,” Mr. Lane said, handing him a two-hundred-dollar bonus.) When one of his dad’s friends built an indoor tennis complex, Howard was hired part time and his summer clientele followed him.
When Howard won a partial scholarship to Duke, the Rotary Club bestowed another on him. That, with what money Ray could throw in, with the good deal of money Howard already had (and would continue to make over the summers), enabled Howard to arrive at Duke with no worries save academic and social success. And he achieved both, making the folks back home terribly, terribly proud—of his honors, of his editing the newspaper, of his fraternity, of how Ray could still take Howard down to Leo’s Bar for a “couple of cold ones” and show the boys how their investment was taking shape. (His first summer home, Howard’s parents had promptly sent him up to see Allyson’s family in Shaker Heights. “Make sure Father knows that Ray’s given you money so you don’t have to work at school,” his mother whispered to him. “And if he starts in about your cousin Alfred at Harvard, you tell him to go to hell and come straight home.”)
No, during those first two years in New York, Howard did not want to tell his parents that he made seven-thousand dollars a year, spent his days answering other people’s phones and typing their memos and letters, and spent his nights with cotton in his ears, trying to read manuscripts while his roommates partied around him. And no, not to this day had he ever told his parents that he had sold his car to support his courtship of Melissa.
Ah, yes, Melissa.
It’s important, at this point, to visualize the kind of figure Howard cut in those days. He was nearly six feet, had a strong, outdoorsy kind of build, and yet had this bookish air about him, fostered by the tweed jackets, baggy corduroy pants and horn-rimmed glasses he always wore. He had marvelously wavy, unruly brown hair. His face was imbued with serious lines—a strong nose and jaw—but was almost always seen in varying degrees of good humor. His blue eyes twinkled in any mood; his premature crow’s-feet invited trust; and his mouth held a kind of mysterious promise for many of the women at Gardiner & Grayson. “This mouth is wonderful in any romantic scenario you may care to imagine,” they thought it said.
Harrison Dreiden regularly took Howard to the Century Club for drinks. Harrison—in a way that reminded Howard very much of his dad’s friends in Rotary—had set his sights on Howard as a protege. Which was fine with Howard, since he thought Harrison might well be God’s twin brother. After Howard started working on Harrison’s long list of bestselling authors, the two of them would have long talks that began with Howard’s quest for Dickens, Wharton, Fitzgerald & Gang, and ended with Harrison’s strong recommendation that Howard lower his sights and expand his horizons for the sake of some kind of future in the business.
Even though Howard was the captain of the company softball and squash teams, even though there wasn’t an employee at Gardiner & Grayson who did not like Howard, there was still a bit of a row when Harrison promoted him to associate editor. Apparently some of his colleagues did not seem to think Howard had done much to deserve it, and thus, at the age of twenty-four, Howard acquired a nickname around the house: Prince Charming. (“This is our head publicist, Harriet Wyatt,” one editor had said to an author at a cocktail party, “and this is Mr. Charming, who works in editorial.”)
The Friday night after his promotion, Howard had gone to Crawdaddy’s to meet an old college roommate for a drink. He did so with the first genuine enthusiasm he had felt since arriving in New York. Okay, so what if Teddy was making exactly twenty-three thousand dollars more than Howard at Manchester Hannonford Bank? Howard was an editor at the finest trade publishing house in the world. And so, over a million Heinekens (it seemed), Howard reveled in the feeling of having regained his place in the world.
Enter Melissa.
The noise in Crawdaddy’s was so loud, Howard did not hear her name when Teddy introduced them, and yet Howard felt as though he knew exactly who she was—his. It is true; it happened like that. Howard looked up and instantly felt that he would never find a finer woman to be his wife than the one standing before him. She was perfect. Everything about Melissa was slim, elegant, cool and classy. And it was in that moment, that very first moment, that Howard vowed he would try to win her as his own.
But first there was the overgrown preppy with her to contend with. “Stephen Manischell, Manchester Hannonford,” he said to Howard, shaking his hand. The four of them sat down together at a table, where Howard learned that Melissa Collins also worked at “Manny Hanny” and was currently seriously involved with the creep next to her. But Melissa was not immune to Howard’s intense fascination with her. In fact, within an hour she had moved her chair over to Howard and, with their heads looming closer and closer to each other, told him all about the important aspects of her training program at Manny Hanny (pausing only to tell Stephen to please be quiet, couldn’t he see that she was talking), and what it was like commuting every day from New Canaan, Connecticut. She told him about her parents’ guest house that she lived in. She told him that her mother had cancer and that her father, “Daddy,” imported more cocktail napkins, plastic toothpicks and swizzle sticks than anyone in the world. (She didn’t describe it like that, but even through the haze of alcohol and his fantasies of what her breasts might be like, Howard had figured out what “cocktail accouterments” were.)
Then it was Howard’s turn. Howard was an editor at Gardiner & Grayson, the youngest, he added, that they had ever had. Duke. Yes. Phi Beta Kappa. Columbus, Ohio. “Uh, well, Mom is a housewife... Dad? Oh, Dad’s in real estate.”
Miracle upon miracle, Melissa whispered to Howard that if he left now she would meet him outside in five minutes and he could walk her to the train. If he wanted to, that is. Whether it was his heart or the Heinekens talking, Howard was never sure, but Melissa to this day swore that he said, “Want to? God, I would crawl if only to see you.”
And so Melissa had given Stephen the slip that night and Howard had walked her through Grand Central to her train. At the door of the train Melissa kissed Howard on the cheek and he tried to kiss her on the mouth and she stopped him. Her hand placed lightly over his mouth, she laughed (looking so beautiful, so right, so utterly glorious in a Town and Country kind of way) and said, “It would be so wonderful if you turned out to be the man I want to give myself to.”
And then Howard went slightly mad. He had never met a girl like Melissa before. There was something about her that drove him wild inside, a kind of craving, a kind of nameless longing that he had never experienced before. Oh yeah, there had been Debbie, at seventeen, with whom he had launched his sexual career in the back of his mother’s station wagon. (“Heh-heh,” his father had said, winking, when Howard requested to drive it instead of his Camaro one night. “Make sure you take a raincoat—it might rain, heh-heh.”) And there had been Susie the Senior his freshman year, and then Cornelia Fordyce the next three. And one or two quickies in New York, and always something with Debbie whenever he was home, and all of them, all of them, were very smart, very attractive women. But they weren’t anything like Melissa. God, Melissa. Walk into a room with her on your arm and, well—everything that could be said was said just by looking at her.
But then, as it has been said, Howard had gone slightly mad.
Melissa explained to him that while she knew it was terribly old-fashioned of her, she really couldn’t even think of engaging in any sexual activity until she was married to the man she loved.
Did that—did that mean Melissa was a...
“Oh, Howard,” she would whisper, shyly touching his hand, “wonder if you turn out to be the man I love? Wouldn’t you want me to be able to say to you, ‘Everything I have belongs to you and to you alone? Always and forever?’ “
Oh, yes, but Howard wanted that, and Howard sold his car after Melissa dumped Stephen once and for all in favor of giving Howard his chance to win her heart. He learned to relish chaste kisses; he learned to meet her train in the morning and walk her to work. He took her to expensive restaurants for dinner, to the theater, the ballet, and he went out to New Canaan on Sundays to spend the day with the Collinses.
He hated “Daddy” Collins from the beginning, but—since Melissa was utterly devoted to him—Howard learned to let him beat him at golf, lecture him on the swizzle-stick business, and suffer his observations about publishing. (“Kind of a faggy way to make a living, if you ask me.”) Mr. Collins hated him too, Howard quickly realized, but things between them improved once Daddy found out that Howard—as a doubles partner—meant that he could finally “beat the shit out of those assholes at the club.”
Mrs. Collins, on the other hand, was wonderful. And it was from her that Melissa had inherited her regal looks. But Mrs. Collins was very quiet, very, very gentle, and by the time Howard met her, was bedridden with the cancer that was slowly killing her. She never complained of the constant pain she was in, and her eyes always lit up when Howard came in to see her. They spent a great deal of time together, actually. And once Howard started bringing her Anthony Trollope novels to read, even Melissa found it difficult to lure Howard away from their talks about them. (“Always see the mother before you commit,” Ray Stewart had told his son, “so you can see what you’re getting into.” Cancer or no cancer, Howard often wondered if he hadn’t fallen a bit in love with Mrs. Collins.)
It was clear to everyone in that mausoleum of a house that things were getting serious. Daddy Collins was getting ruder and ruder, Melissa started talking about how grand it was going to be when she was the president of Manchester Hannonford and Howard was the president of Gardiner & Grayson, and Mrs. Collins, well...
One Sunday afternoon Mrs. Collins took his hand (which she often did) and asked Howard if he was in love with her daughter. Howard said yes. And then Mrs. Collins had closed her eyes, thinking, and when she opened them again she said she hoped she would not offend Howard but—
But?
Did Howard realize that Melissa was—was rather special?
Yes, yes, he certainly did.
She had smiled, though her eyes had not smiled. Slowly, carefully, she said that Melissa was her only child, that she loved Melissa very, very much, but...
But?
Howard could see how spoiled Melissa was, yes?
Spoiled, nonsense!
A chuckle from the invalid lady. “Oh, Howard, she’s dreadfully spoiled, and she always will be. Her father has seen to that.” Silence. “My husband, and please, do understand, Howard—it is out of his love for Melissa that he did —”
“Did—”
“Looked into your background. Your parents, your father’s-real estate business...”
Sigh. “Mrs. Collins, my father’s not in real estate, he’s in the landscaping business.”
“Yes. I know. Howard—listen to me, Howard.”
Silence.
“You must sit down and explain to Melissa. She—and I’m sure you did not misrepresent it to her—but Melissa led my husband to believe that your father owns half of Columbus.”
Oh, boy.
“And you must set my husband straight—now, Howard, before he—
Mrs. Collins had started to cry.
“It’s okay, Mrs. Collins, it’s okay.”
“She so needs a man who understands her. She’s fragile in ways... Oh, Howard, promise me that you’ll help Melissa leave this house. She won’t be able to do it on her own and I’m too ill...”Howard explained everything to Melissa that afternoon, prompting her to moan, “Oh, my God, what will I tell Daddy?” and flee to the guest house. And then Howard found Mr. Collins in the playroom and set him straight about the exact state of his finances and those of his family. Though he had readied himself for a fight, Howard was frankly a little scared when Mr. Collins grabbed the wrong end of a cue stick and smashed the sliding glass door with it. “Goddam carpetbagger!” he screamed, face turning purple. (Mr. Collins was from the South.) He broke the cue stick on the corner of the billiard table and slammed the remaining portion down on it, again and again, ruining the mahogany. “A fraud, a goddam fraud, strutting around here like the King of England!”
(Years later, Howard realized that it was not the state of his finances that had so enraged Mr. Collins, but that he—having volunteered the information before proposing to Melissa—had disarmed Mr. Collins of the weapon he had been planning to use to get rid of him with. Ill as she was, Mrs. Collins had been quite on the ball.)
Howard did not hear from Melissa for five days, and then she had called him at work. Could he come to New Canaan? Please, could he? Right now? They needed him, Daddy and she did, desperately. “Oh, Howard, Mother died this morning.”
Harrison gave him some time off and Howard went out to New Canaan. (Poor Harrison. It had been some time since he had got any real work out of Howard, what with this time-consuming business of courtship.) Mr. Collins didn’t say a word to him, but he did seem relieved that there was someone to look after Melissa as he went through the ordeal of funeral services. And then, after the burial, Mr. Collins disappeared to have some time to himself and Melissa became so hysterical that a doctor had to be called to sedate her.
“Why did he leave? Why?” she kept crying, Valium seeming to do very little but confuse her and slur her words. But after a few days she started to come around and soon she was not hysterical but furious with her father. She started cursing Daddy and endearing Howard. She started discounting Daddy (“He has no imagination, none and overpricing Howard (“No one is smarter than you, Howard, I’m sure of it”). And then she started tearing Daddy apart (“He is heartless and cruel and selfish”) and building Howard up to ever increasing heights (“You are the finest, greatest man I have ever known”).
(Howard didn’t know what the hell was going on, but he knew he liked it a good deal better than Melissa locking herself in the guest house and Mr. Collins calling him a carpetbagger.)
And then—and then, the night Howard came upstairs to check on Melissa and found her on her knees, crying next to her mother’s bed. Howard had knelt down beside her, held her close, and told her he loved her. He was not good enough for her, he knew, but he would do everything in his power to make her happy. He loved her, God, how he loved her, and he would take care of her. He would never ever leave her. No, never, and they would have each other, forever and ever and always. “Oh, Melissa, please let me take care of you so you’ll never be hurt again.”
“Hey, Howie?” Rosanne called from the hall.
“Yeah?”
“I want ya to come see Mrs. C on TV. She’s doin’ an editorial or somethin’ and I told her I’d watch.”
“Yeah, okay.” Mrs. C? What was her name? “Fridays” was how Rosanne usually referred to her. Howard wrapped a thick elastic around the manuscript he had (not) been reading and dropped it to the floor. He certainly wasn’t getting much done this morning. But then, even when he was working full throttle these days, he still felt like he was spinning his wheels.
Howard went into the living room and sat down on the couch. “Turn to Channel 8, would ‘cha?” Rosanne said, coming in from the kitchen with a toasted bran muffin on a plate. He picked up the remote control from the coffee table and pushed 8. “Oh,” Rosanne said, sitting down cross-legged on the floor, “I found that envelope in the couch. It belongs to her highness.” Howard saw the envelope on the arm of the couch and picked it up while Rosanne hummed along with the theme song of the McDonald’s commercial.
“138 East 77th Street” the return address said in thin black type.
Jackass, Howard thought, turning the envelope over.
“Melissa Collins”
Melissa Collins Stewart, jackass.
“Oh, Howard,” Melissa had said to him when the first one arrived. “Stephen’s just lonely. The divorce really hit him hard.”
Yeah, right, Howard had thought. So hard that Stephen Manischell felt free to call and write his wife whenever he felt like it.
“Oh, Howard,” Melissa had said later, “it was entirely accidental. Stephen used to summer on Fishers Island and he rented the house this year not even knowing we’d be there.”
Yeah, right, Howard had thought.
“I thought you’d be pleased, Howard,” Melissa had wisely added. “You won’t have to play gin with Daddy.” (Daddy owned a house down the road.) “Stephen loves playing gin with Daddy.”
Hmmm, Howard had thought, brightening a little.
What the hell do I care anyway? Howard thought, tossing the envelope on the table. If he gets her in bed, I’ll pay him for the secret of how he did it.
“She’s on! She’s on!” Rosanne cried, pointing to the screen.
“Hey—I know her,” Howard said. “What’s her name again?”
“Mrs. C—now shut up, Howie.” Mrs. C was the stunning blonde who lived on the other side of 88th, in 162. Howard had been watching her in passing for years. From the way Rosanne talked about her, Howard had always visualized “Mrs. C” as looking something like his mother (slightly plump, graying, matronly). Melissa knew her from the Block Association but had never introduced him to her. (“Oh, I suppose Cassy’s all right,” Melissa would say, “but not for us.”)
“How old is she?” Howard asked.
Rosanne held her hand out to shut him up and so he did.
“Using the Oval Office as his pulpit, President Reagan recently compared abortion rights to the institution of slavery,” Cassy was saying into the camera. “He also said that we cannot survive as a free nation until the constitutional right to abortion is overturned. Mr. Reagan did not, however, bother to explain that the views he expressed are his own personal opinions, and not the shared belief of the majority of Americans, to say nothing of the highest court in the land.”
I bet she has fun in bed, Howard thought.
Abusing the powers of the executive office... Injecting religious doctrine into the political process... Defiance of the Constitution... WST does not condone or condemn abortion policy... WST vehemently opposes the merging of church and state...
“Hi, I’m Howard Stewart. I saw you today on television. If I may say so, you were wonderful.”
The editorial was over and Cassy smiled in a way that made Howard smile back. Nice. “I’m Catherine Cochran, vice-president and general station manager of WST. Thank you.”
“Wowee kazow and go gettum, baby!” Rosanne cried, rolling backward into a somersault.
With their engagement official and documented in the New York Times, Howard took Melissa to Columbus to meet his family. It was not a great trip. The nice middle-class home in the nice middle-class neighborhood was not to Melissa’s liking. Nor was Howard’s father. Oh, Melissa was polite, but Howard knew her withdrawal into silence was a condemnation. And Howard noticed that his dad’s undershirts showed in the top of his open shirts, that he brought his beer bottle to the table, and that he did not notice Melissa swooning at the suggestion that she and Howard attend the dance at the VFW Hall. And then Howard’s younger brother had clomped in, bare-chested, from his construction job, and his sister announced she had to get ready for her date, which was fine, until her date arrived and explained to Melissa that he was an undertaker’s assistant.
On the plane, flying back, Howard had dared only to ask Melissa’s opinion of his mother. “I liked her,” she said. And then, gazing out the window, she added, “But it must be very difficult for her.”
“What do you mean?”
Melissa sighed slightly, turning to look at Howard. “Well, it’s rather like being stranded for her, isn’t it? Didn’t you tell me her parents were well off?”
Melissa had not gone over very well with the Stewarts, either. And it wasn’t her money, his father claimed over the phone in the kitchen. She was, well, kinda uppity, wasn’t she? “We mean, Howard,” his mother had said from the extension in the bedroom, “do you have fun with her? Do you—laugh?”
Howard and Melissa were married in a huge wedding outside on the grounds of the Collins house. It was the most god-awful wedding Howard had ever attended, though everyone said they had had the best time of their lives. Melissa’s mother’s family, the Hastingses, adored the Millses of Shaker Heights, and they had a grand time of it at the tables by the dance floor which Melissa had designated for them. The Al Capones who comprised Mr. Collins’ business associates had a ball in the house, filling the playroom with cigar smoke, playing billiards (“stupidest pool table I ever saw”) and making phone calls to Hong Kong about missing shipments of swizzle sticks. Ray and his friends were lured away to the swimming pool by a keg of ale and a box of fireworks that Melissa thoughtfully told them about. The Stewart contingents from Maleanderville, North Carolina, Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, and Teaneck, New Jersey, conducted their family reunion under the tent Melissa had set up for them by the gardens at the bottom of the hill. As for Mr. Collins’ family, apparently he had none (or, perhaps, had none he cared to acknowledge).
And then there had been the legion of Melissa’s “friends.” Hundreds and hundreds (it seemed) of perfectly coiffeured dainties—selected and collected at Ethel Walker, Bryn Mawr, Yale, God only knew where—escorted by an army of vaguely good-looking men, all appearing to be wearing the same suit. (“Harvard,” one said to Howard, flapping his school tie at him. “Princeton,” said the one next to him, flapping his. “Manchester Hannonford,” Stephen Manischell joked. “Merrill Lynch,” said the one with the Princeton tie. “House of Morgan,” Harvard said, stopping the other two dead in their tracks. “Bragging, dear?” Harvard’s wife then asked, coming up behind him. “Stephanie told me that Wiley made over four hundred thousand at Salomon Brothers last year.”)
Had they intimidated Howard? No. They had terrified him. Round and round the floor they had danced, talking of mergers and acquisitions and what stocks would give the Stewarts a brighter future. “The publisher of my life,” Melissa kept introducing him as. “His family is over there,” she said, pointing to the Millses of Shaker Heights. “Oh, Daddy? He gave us a beautiful apartment in the city, didn’t he, Howard? Howard’s just crazy about it. On Riverside Drive. Oh, I know, but Daddy didn’t know that and he spent a great deal of money on it and I just couldn’t hurt him that way. I mean. what would I say? No, Daddy’d never believe Howard wanted to live on the East Side. Daddy says Howard would be happiest in a log cabin.”
“I’m gonna put this letter on her highness’ dresser,” Rosanne said, placing it there.
“Oh, fine.”
“And here’s some coffee,” she added, walking over and handing him a cup.
“Thanks. “
Rosanne walked toward the door, stopped and turned around. “Mrs. C’s over twenty-nine,” she announced.
“Oh, yeah?” Howard said, smiling.
“Go back to work,” she said. “But remind me, Howie, before I leave I wanna talk to you about Tuesdays.”
Howard swallowed some coffee. “You want to switch days?”
“Naw,” she said. “I wanna talk to ya about Amanda, but I gotta finish the oven first.”
Howard leafed through the pile of short proposals in his lap, sighed, and let them fall back in his lap. His eyes were on Melissa’s dresser now. He rubbed his chin, thinking. It would be a low thing to do. And yet, knowing how meticulous Melissa was, he was sure the letter had been left in the couch for him to find. “Rosanne?” he called. One second, two, three...
“Better make it short if you want an oven left!”
“Where was that envelope?” he called, rising from the chaise longue.
“The couch!” In a moment, she appeared at the door, wiping her forehead with the back of a rubber glove that was brown with gook.
“In it or on it?” Howard asked her.
“Sort of stickin’ up between the cushions.” She blew a strand of hair away from her eye. “Finished, Mr. Mason?”
Howard offered a half smile and slid his hands into his pockets. “Yes.” When Rosanne returned to the kitchen, he went over and read the letter.
Dear Melissa,
I don’t know what I would do without you these past months. No one told us it would be like this, did they? Forgive me when I say that I can’t help wondering what would have happened if we hadn’t met Howard that night. We’d both be a lot happier, I know. You told me Barbara wasn’t clever enough for me, and I told you that Howard would disappoint you—so I guess we both got what we deserved for not listening to each other.
I just wanted to thank you for listening to me the other day. My success at Beacon Dunlap would mean nothing without someone to share it with and, as always, you understand the importance of everything.
Not long until Fishers Island! (I’m seeing your father next week for lunch.)
Melissa, dear friend, you are all that is keeping me going.
Love, Stephen
The first night of their honeymoon, spent at the Plaza, Howard had accepted that Melissa was too exhausted to have sex. So exhausted, in fact, he excused her when she pushed him away when he wanted to hold her as they fell asleep. Her excuses the next night, in London, and the next and the next and the next, were all quite reasonable. Melissa was of course shy; it would take time.
As it turned out, they did not consummate their marriage until they moved into the Riverside Drive apartment. Melissa had lain there, eyes closed, chin up, enduring Howard’s touch as though it were a prelude to being shot. When it came to actual penetration, Melissa cried and pleaded and begged Howard not to do it because it was killing her. Howard stopped, but then he thought of Mrs. Collins and Daddy Collins and the wedding and somehow he knew that if he didn’t just push ahead and do it, it might never happen. After he ever-so-gently managed to come inside of her, Melissa jumped out of bed, locked herself in the bathroom, and stayed in the bathtub for nearly an hour. Afterward, robe firmly knotted around her waist, she curled up with the telephone on the living-room couch and called, of course, Daddy. “Everything’s fine,” Howard overheard from the hallway. “Remember how you used to wake me up when you couldn’t sleep? It’s like that, Daddy.”
Howard racked his brain about how to help Melissa. (God, how to help himself.) When therapy was dismissed as ridiculous, Howard pledged his faith in time and gentle reassurance. The only problem was that Melissa seemed to hate reassurance more than she hated sex. (“Just please stop talking about it!” she would wail, clapping her hands over her ears.) But time did bring a change, a compromise, they had lived with since: Melissa used sex (a loose term, considering what it was like) to force Howard into doing whatever horrible thing she had her heart set on. If they spent the weekend in New Canaan with Daddy, if they went to Daddy’s reunion at Schnickle State College in Tennessee, or if Daddy came in and spent the weekend with them, then Howard could look forward to sex the first night after the ordeal was over. And summers! That was an interesting game, renting down the road from Daddy. The three or four weekends a summer that Daddy was not there were the weekends Melissa gave the signal, “I’ll be ready for you in twenty-five minutes, Howard.”
Howard had never cheated on Melissa. Amazing, but true. But then, life with Melissa was not all bad. No, far from it. The Stewarts enjoyed a way of life for which Howard never ceased to be grateful. They had this wonderful apartment (where Howard had the large library/study he had always dreamed of); they had their tennis and squash club memberships; they had their BMW (replaced biannually by Daddy); they had their annual three-week trip to Europe; they had their ballet and theater tickets and they had their big old rambling house in the summer (subsidized in part by Daddy).
Did anyone know what it was like for Howard to walk into Shakespeare Company or Endicott Booksellers and buy four, five, eight hard-cover books? Did anyone know what it was like for Ray’s son to be greeted by name in Brooks Brothers? To give his family a VCR for Christmas? To quietly send his sister a thousand dollars when she got “in trouble” and tell her she never had to pay him back? Did anyone know how Howard had felt when he told Melissa of his mother’s admission of the terrible year Ray was having, and Melissa wrote out a check for ten thousand dollars, telling Howard exactly how to “invest” it in Stewart Landscaping in a way that his father could accept? Did anyone know what it was like to live like this and be an editor in trade book publishing?
Melissa was generous. The strings were long and complicated, but yes, Melissa was generous. “Just work on becoming publisher, Howard, and I’ll take care of the rest.” And she was. Melissa was now, in 1986, a junior vice president at First Steel Citizen, pulling down some seventy-five thousand dollars a year (not counting bonuses, which, last year, had come to almost thirty thousand dollars-two thousand less than Howard’s entire salary).
Melissa’s energies and abilities—in Howard’s and everyone else’s eyes bordered on the supernatural. (“It’s the Daddy in me,” she would say.) Dinner party for twenty—tonight? Billion-dollar loan to Madrid? Fifty pairs of tickets to the Cancer Ball? “I’d be delighted to handle it,” she would say without hesitation. And she would be delighted, moving and managing people, money and events in discreet euphoria.
But Melissa had a temper, too. And some nights Howard literally barricaded himself in his study against the sound of her tirades. “Layton Sinclair has been promoted past you!” she had recently screamed, pounding on the door. “He can’t even speak and he smells and he’s been promoted past you! God damn it, Howard, what is wrong with you?”
Nothing was wrong with him, he thought, except that he couldn’t bring himself to be the kind of editor Layton Sinclair was. Because, you see, after his marriage, Howard had truly become a good editor. No one, after 1980, after Gertrude Bristol, had ever called Howard Prince Charming again.
Gertrude Bristol had been writing bestselling romance suspense novels for thirty-five years. Her editor at G & G retired and Harrison, at an editorial meeting, queried the group as to who was interested in taking Gertrude on. To be more specific, Harrison was looking directly at his new young woman protege, sending the kind of signal that Howard used to get from him (and foolishly ignore): Trust me, this is an author you should take on.
Howard—who had been floundering in terms of acquisitions—found himself cutting Harrison’s protege off at the pass. “Harrison—I’d like to work with Gertrude Bristol.” The whole group had stared at him in amazement. Howard? Romance suspense? It’s-Not-as-Good-as-Cheever-So-It’s-Not-Good-Enough-for-Me Howard? “Uh,” Howard had added, “that is, if she wants to work with me.”
And so Howard had taken home ten of Gertrude’s books to read (“Hallelujah,” Melissa had said, picking one up, “someone I’ve finally heard of”) and received the first of many pleasant surprises to come. Since Howard had never read a romance suspense novel, he had always assumed they must be... well, not serious and certainly not literary. But Gertrude was both.
He flew up to Boston to meet the great lady and did so with great humility. Gertrude needed his editorial expertise about as much as Jessica Tandy needed acting lessons, and Howard was not foolish enough to make any promises to her other than that he would do his best to make sure she continued to be happily published by Gardiner & Grayson. Gertrude seemed rather bored by all this and was much more interested in whether Howard could stay over another day and speak to one of her classes at Radcliffe.
Howard stayed over another day and the single most important event of his career occurred—he listened to Gertrude’s fifteen-minute introduction to her class, in which she explained what editors do. “People working in the editorial process of book publishing today,” she said, “generally fall into two camps—the agents, who ‘discover’ new talent, and the editors, who introduce that talent in the best light possible.” But, she went on to say, the truly great editors would go mad if they did not, on occasion, make personal discoveries of their own. “How do they do this? Every newspaper they read, every magazine, every film they see, every person they meet, every short story, every poem, letter, billboard they read—everything an editor experiences in his or her life is unconsciously or quite consciously judged in terms of a possible book. Isn’t that right, Howard?”
Howard, pale, nodded.
“Editors looking for fiction attend writers’ conferences, read literary magazines, journals and short-story collections-or, if they are in the upper ranks of editorial, they make sure someone on their staff is. Editors looking for nonfiction habitually shoot off telegrams and letters in response to news stories. Editors often choose a particular city or part of the country to concentrate on, making themselves known there, getting to know the literary community. Some editors concentrate on the academic community, or the religious community, or the business community, professional sports or the recording industry...”
(Howard’s head was spinning.)”It is the great editor’s job,” Gertrude had finished with, “to be on the cutting edge of contemporary culture, and to be on the cutting edge of discovering our past. It is an impossible job, but, as they say, someone’s got to do it, and with us today is someone who does. Class, Mr. Howard Stewart of Gardiner & Grayson.”Oh, God. Howard had got up and fumbled and stumbled through a recitation of anything and everything he could remember Harrison having ever said to him. Gertrude’s little talk had completely thrown him; he had never done any of things that she had talked about. Not one.
He returned to New York as Gertrude Bristol’s editor. And something clicked into place as he reported his trip to Harrison. A connection was made—as he stood there, watching Harrison’s smile grow wider and wider—between his old scorn for certain kinds of books and the fact that he had never read those kinds of books to find out what they were like in the first place. And so he started reading differently. And at lunch, with agents, he stopped saying he was looking for F. Scott Fitzgerald and started saying that he was looking for a new talent, someone with promise, someone whom he could work with, build with, over a period of years.
His first endeavor at “discovering” resulted in a bestseller. Driving home alone one night from Fishers Island, Howard was listening to a radio sex therapist, Dr. Ruth Hutchins. The topic was sexual dysfunction within a marriage, and Howard was (of course) listening with a great deal of interest. And then it hit him: If the radio show is so popular, and if I’m even interested in it...
He fired off a letter to Dr. Hutchins and learned that he was only one of many editors around town who had had the same idea. When Dr. Hutchins and her agent said it was not so much a question of money but which publisher best comprehended the nature of her professional goals, Howard sat down and wrote the table of contents of the book he himself would want to read. And so, on the strength of a good advance, a great marketing plan from Harriet Wyatt and the outline of Sex: How to Get What You want and Need (with the jacket line: Without Hurting Anyone, Including Yourself), Dr. Hutchins chose Gardiner & Grayson. Sex climbed onto the Times bestseller list and stayed there for thirty-four weeks. Howard started to experience joy. One morning he literally tore a page out of the Times and bolted from the breakfast table.”What’s wrong?” Melissa asked, running after him to the front door.
“The MacArthur Foundation winners!” Howard yelled, taking the stairs down because it was faster. What fun it was writing “discovery” letters! What elation to receive to receive a letter that said, “You have no idea what your letter meant to me. As a matter of fact, I’m in the process of expanding that short story into a novel now.” Howard was even thrilled when he got a phone call from Los Angeles that said, “Miss Margaret does not wish to write her memoirs at this time. However, she asked me to thank you for your kind letter, and to tell you that, should she decide to do so, she will certainly keep Gardiner & Grayson in mind.”
First novel! Literary biography! Collected short stories! Spy thriller! Victorian anthology! Investigative reporting! Editing Saturday and Sundays! Reading from seven until midnight! Gertrude breaks 1OO,OOO-copy mark! Sex sells for $600,000 reprint! Editorial meetings! Marketing meetings! Sales conferences! ABA! Howard was on cloud nine (exhausted, thin, bleary-eyed, but up there all the same).
And then the winds suddenly shifted at Gardiner & Grayson, marked by the arrival of a man named Mack Sperry in the business department, and the subsequent hiring of several MBAs. The old sails of power started to rend, and it was soon clear that Harrison, at sixty, was losing control of the ship. Memorandums started appearing:
7 OUT OF 10 BOOKS LOSE MONEY AT GARDINER & GRAYSON. PROFIT AND LOSS STATEMENTS ARE BEING RUN ON EACH BOOK AND EACH EDITOR.
Two editors were fired and two editors resigned. They were not replaced.
ALL EDITORS ARE TO SUPPLY THE BUSINESS DEPARTMENT WITH DATA FOR THE FORECAST.
The MBAs flew into editorial waving yellow legal pads. “Data for the forecast, data for the forecast!” The editors looked up the answers to their questions in their files and in a few weeks a bound report was circulated. THE FORECAST, it said, emblazoned in bold display type on the cover. Inside were pages and pages of graphs plotting the intricate lives of factors “Y” and “X” in “ooo’s.” The editors looked at it and then at each other, wondering who (or what) on earth “Y” and “X” were. And then a bulletin was hand-delivered—DISREGARD FORECAST—and all the MBAs were fired and twice as many were hired and back into editorial they flew, rousing the now familiar cry, “Data for the forecast!”
PUBLISHING PROPOSALS APPROVED BY HARRISON DREIDEN WILL BE FORWARDED TO THE BUSINESS DEPARTMENT. No editor can make an offer until he receives written approval from the Business Department.
Seven out of ten projects approved by Harrison were killed in the business department. (“Rejected,” the business department said about Howard’s proposal to publish a biography of William Carlos Williams. “William Carlos is not famous enough.”)
EDITORS ARE TO REPORT TO CONFERENCE ROOM 2 FOR GUIDELINES ON ACQUISITIONS. ATTENDANCE IS MANDATORY.
The guidelines issued by the business department were based on a simple premise: Gardiner & Grayson would become cost conscious and commercially aware. (In plain English, they wanted editors to do thinly disguised rip-offs of everything on the bestseller lists—for cheap.)
Layton Sinclair adapted beautifully to the new guidelines. When the business department expressed the urgent desire that someone “put together” an Iacocca pronto, Layton raced out of the gate. Now, the book the business department was referring to was a brilliantly conceived and executed business autobiography published by Bantam Books in 1985. The idea for the book had been “born” within Bantam, and they teamed the hero of Chrysler with a marvelous writer named William Novak, and so carefully orchestrated the book’s debut and afterlife that, to date, it was threatening to break the two-million hard-cover sales mark. Iacocca was precisely the kind of original, breakthrough publishing Howard longed to do.
So one can imagine Howard’s disgust when Layton—sensing a powerful ally for his career in Mack Sperry of the business department—claimed that, if promoted right, the illiterate manuscript of a man who had inherited a chain of motels could be the next Iacocca. “Layton,” Harrison said at the editorial meeting, “you are an editor, not an android. This, this, this—”Lefty,” Layton said (referring to the title, taken from the author’s name of Lefty Lucerne). “Thing,” Harrison continued, “isn’t a book. Iacocca is a book, Layton. A good book. And a book is a body of work that reflects original human thought and experience. This,” he said, pushing the manuscript away from him, “is the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen let in the doors of Gardiner & Grayson.”
At the next marketing meeting, members of the business department asked how Layton’s version of Iacocca was coming and, on the strength of Layton’s verbal description, approved it on the spot. “It’s for the readers of Iacocca and The Search for Excellence.” (The latter had been a business blockbluster of a different sort.) The business department was elated and told Layton to “make the jacket look like Iacocca, but use the colors of The Search for Excellence in the background.” Harrison slammed his fist down on the table and said, “Not only is it unreadable, but I hasten to remind you that Lefty Lucerne was once imprisoned on racketeering charges, a fact that he neglects to mention in this so-called memoir.” (A murmur from the MBAs that this sounded like a good promotion angle.) And then, when Layton added that the author’s company would guarantee to buy fifty thousand copies of the book and that Gardiner & Grayson didn’t have to pay an advance if they didn’t want to, talk turned to making Lefty the lead book on the fall list.
“Promote him!” Harriet Wyatt angrily exclaimed at the next marketing meeting. “The man is brain-dead!” It was then explained that the author was so pleased to be published that he was giving a hundred thousand dollars to Gardiner & Grayson to promote the book. “Wonderful,” Harriet said, “I’ll find the best cart and coffin money can buy and launch him at Forest Lawn. Mr. Sperry,” she then said, rising from her chair, “I will be fired before I make my people work on a vanity press project. You’ll have to buy an outside publicist.”
The matter of Lefty then raged all the way to the office of G & G’s chairman of the board. There it was decided that Harriet would not be fired but an outside agency would be hired; that the book in question would not bear the Gardiner & Grayson name but would be distributed by them under a new imprint called Sperry Books; and that Layton Sinclair would receive the title of executive editor of the imprint but would remain a part of the G & G editorial staff.
And so Layton Sinclair had been promoted and Melissa was furious with Howard and Howard was sick at what was happening at Gardiner & Grayson. Oh, they were still putting up a valiant fight—encouraging one another, conspiring like members of the underground—but it was exhausting. (“Look, gang, we’ve got to get that first novel of Patricia’s through,” Harrison recently said in a closed-door meeting in his office, “so I want each of you to write a report that swears the author is the next Jacqueline Susann.” Fortunately no one in the business department liked to read. “Patricia, call it Valley of Desire, but once you get the contract signed, keep changing the title on the pub list so they’ll forget what it was supposed to have been.”)
Sigh.
It was all coming apart now for Howard. In the old days, he really had wanted to work toward becoming publisher of Gardiner & Grayson, to be on the “cutting edge” of the publishing frontier, and he had wanted to do it with the colleagues he had grown up with. The ones who had called him Prince Charming and then had rewarded him with camaraderie when he started being an editor. The people who had listened to his ideas and to his problems, and who had shared their ideas and their problems with him. The people who—over the course of ten-hour days, five days a week for eleven years—had become his family. But now, now...
“Then leave, Howard,” Melissa screamed, “find another job and leave!”
But Melissa didn’t understand and Howard didn’t think he could explain it to her. What would he say? “Melissa, you don’t seem to understand. My colleagues at Gardiner & Grayson have been filling the void of our marriage for years. If I leave them, then I have no one.”
No. Howard could not tell Melissa that.
“Amanda,” Rosanne was saying to Howard, “you know, Tuesdays.”
“And she’s writing a book?”
“Is she! It’s in boxes all over the apartment.”
Howard chuckled to himself, picking up a book from the window sill in his study.
“But like she’s really smart, Howie,” Rosanne said. But then she paused, debating a minute, and then admitted, “Well, sometimes she does get kinda loony—sort of like Esmeralda on ‘Bewitched’ or somethin’.”
Howard handed Rosanne the book. “Here. I haven’t even read it yet. A friend just sent it to me.”
Rosanne took it from him and looked at the cover. “Mickey Mantle! Oh, man, this is great, Howie. Frank’s gonna love this too.” She slid the jacket off and handed it back to him. “Better keep that to keep it lookin’ nice. Wow,” she sighed, smiling, putting the book in her bag.
Howard grinned, touching at his glasses. “So what’s Tuesdays’ book about, do you know?”
“Oh, it’s about that queen—you know, the one that everybody says screwed horses.”
“Catherine the Great?”
“Yeah—”
“She didn’t, Rosanne.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Rosanne declared, hefting her bag onto her shoulder, “’cause Amanda kinda thinks she is Catherine the Great. The way she talks—sometimes I don’t know what the heck she’s sayin’. I mean, like she’s never mad or nothin’—she’s always ‘vexed’ or some numbnuts thing.”
Howard laughed.
“You’d love the way she talks,” Rosanne added, pointing a finger at him. “So, anyway,” she continued, backing out of the room, “the way I figure it, you’re just the guy to help her.”
“Help her?” Howard said.