A Replacement Life (8 page)

The idea had been Beau’s. He had replaced Martin Graves, the Patriarch, deceased after forty-six years at the helm. (Mugging for history, Mr. Graves went not at the breast of some wet nurse but in his office chair, making his faint disapprobations on a sheaf of magazine copy.) Mr. Graves’s late phase had some peculiar concerns. There had been a strange piece by a Papuan cannibal (in Dani, the cannibal language), as transcribed by a Canadian linguist, and an even stranger one by Frank Moy, the war reporter, about soap operas. But no one was going to touch Martin Graves until he was retired by the angels.

In any case: An assignment had fallen through; the money had already been spent; what if, in lieu, Beau sent a Junior? These, deranged with dispossession and dreams, thought they could write articles a thousand times better than what those overpaid marquee writers turned in. They’d do it for free, too.
Century
paid writers three dollars a word: You do the math. Beau would send two just in case—two times zero in fees was still zero, and competition bred innovation. He did that sometimes even for the senior writers, which caused no small amount of consternation because book contracts were not given out to someone bylined “Staff.” The senior editors would make a clinic of the whole thing: The Monday-afternoon Senior Staff meeting would be open to the full masthead, the choice between Peter and Slava put to a vote.

Berta picked up. In his frailty, Grandfather could not be bothered to answer the telephone. “I’ll get him for you,” she said.

“Yes,” Grandfather said a minute later, as if answering an already posed question. His voice sounded like raked gravel.

“Buy a copy of the magazine next week,” Slava said, feeling stupid.

“What?” Grandfather said. “When?”

“Sorry—how are you feeling?”

“What?” he said again.

“Come on. You know what I’m saying.”

“Who is this?”

“Just buy the magazine,” Slava said.

“Why?”

“It’ll have a story I wrote.”

“Where am I supposed to find it? What is it called?”

“It’s called
Century
. You know this.”

“Sancher,” he said. “Hold on, let me write it down.”

“No—
Century
. You’re not trying.”

“I am eighty years old, and my wife died yesterday. Do you understand that, or you’re already
on with your life? S like a Russian S?”

“No. Yes. C. Like a Russian S.”

“Then?”

“E. Same in both. Then a backward Ee
—
N. Then a T—same in both. Then that horseshoe.”

“What horseshoe?”

“Just draw a horseshoe.”

“Open side down?”

“No, up.”

“I had horses. One was called Beetle, and one was called Boy.”

“Next is an R. An English R. Like our
ya
but backward.”

“Ya
backward . . .” Grandfather repeated dejectedly. “I need Berta.”

“She speaks even less English than you,” Slava said. “Come on, you can do it.
Ya
backward. And then—this is the last one—a Y. Same in both.”

On the other end of the line, Grandfather studied the paper. “Sancher,” he read.

In the preceding years, Slava had tried to propose to his superiors at
Century stories of the kind he saw in the magazine every week. He prayed and broke bread with five young evangelical men from Ohio who had come to New York to test their faith in the most depraved place they could think of. He jumped on a trampoline with a runaway to the Big Apple Circus who was a Ph.D. in semiotics and was writing a semiotics of the tightrope. One Saturday, Slava clawed ninety-one dollars from the cold, dead fingers of his bank account and took a Peter Pan bus to the Massachusetts town where the fourth synagogue built in America was going to become the first Staples in town. A town baker who had stayed kosher even though too few Jews remained to notice—he was wise to persist; soon non-Jews would be buying more kosher products than Jews, another story Slava would try to give
Century
—had appeared at the grand opening to protest. (“Destroying a heritage?” his placard said in wandering Sharpie. “Come to Staples!
That Was Easy.
™”) The baker gave Slava another lead: an underground international bidding war for Hitler’s personal map of Europe by a Belgian industrialist with neo-Nazi proclivities and the British Orthodox Jew (a third cousin of the baker) who wished to procure it first so he could destroy it.

None of it had worked, Slava did not understand why. Had his submissions been received? Slava inquired with the IT department, but his e-mail appeared to be working; Mr. Grayson was managing to get through with brainless new assignments with no difficulty. Archibald Dyson (the senior editor) probably never opened Slava’s e-mails in the first place. Slava could write Arch that he had humped his wife outside a liquor mart on Tuesday afternoon and Arch would never know. Arch thought he was spam.

An image of Slava’s grandfather spun out of the screen of Slava’s desktop one hopeless afternoon:
I have beaten a man eyeless for saying “kike” out loud. I put enough goys in my pocket to get your mother into Belarus State. We left only with what we could carry and now your parents have a Nissan Altima
and
a Ford Taurus. So, lift your ass from your ergonomic work chair and put this Dyson’s nose directly into whatever it is that you do, with a little two-finger pinch at the base of the neck if that helps. We have seen your kind, Mr. Archibald, and we have seen worse, so why don’t you give this a read.

Slava did it, minus the pinch of the neck and plus a bout of diarrhea nervosa, but this did not have the result intended by Grandfather-genie.

Slava pressed forward. On a weekend, feeling war-roomish, he bought a wipe board and wrote out on its left side the previous issue’s table of contents. To the right of each entry, he assigned the story a category:

• Profile of eccentric personage
  
• Interview with famous person
  
• Story of a stunt action
  
• International report
  
• Highlight of social issue
  
• Memoir of picayune childhood experience
  

Famous people and international reports he could do nothing about—he didn’t know any famous people, and he didn’t have the money to go to the nearest war. But the rest: They had an eccentric personage, he had an eccentric personage (the baker). They had a stunt action, he had a stunt action (the evangelicals). And while the Jewish evacuation of Rhode Island was perhaps not as pressing an issue as the epidemic of underage mothers, it was along the same spectrum, that could not be denied. Was Slava required to produce a memoir of Little League times or learning to bake with his mother? Slava cursed his mother for never teaching him how to bake, and the full Gelman clan for keeping him busy translating credit-card offers until it was too late to join Little League.

No, it couldn’t be the subjects. It had to be the style. Slava returned to the issue and reread every article. Then he went to a bin where he kept old issues and reread the last six issues, this time latitudinally: the opening story across all six; the next story across all six; the closing story. He experienced the Egyptologist’s tremor upon stumbling on Nefertiti’s lunch bowl: He had decoded the pattern. The wipe board full, Slava started taping note cards on the refrigerator, the fridge burping in acknowledgment of this first garlanding since its purchase.

Article A. Opening part: The Scene. Sentence One: Specific Date. “On January 27, 2005, Avery Coulter went outside to clear his driveway of the heavy snowfall that had blanketed Rochester, New York, the previous night.”

The prose made the obvious elegant—you could not very well shovel snow anywhere but outside, could you, but one didn’t mind with such a sinuous sentence—and though it stayed well shy of the fences, the tempered, diffident tone was like a mother’s hand on the cheek. Absent a mother, a Beau Reasons.

Onward. We watch Avery start to shovel the driveway; his neighbor owns a Range Rover; the township recently cleared a nearby creek’s overflow tubes of debris (the randomness of the details only adds to their aristocratic, mysterious elegance);
booltykh
—Avery feels a strain in his lower back. He knows something’s wrong. Section break.

Section Two: The Issue. “Tens of thousands of Americans strain their backs shoveling snow every year, leading to millions of lost workdays and tens of millions of dollars in hospital bills. Many Americans have snowblowers, but quality machines are pricey indulgences, at five hundred dollars and more. It was while Coulter, an entrepreneur, was laid up after his unsuccessful driveway clearing—according to
Forbes
, Coulter has enough money for a million snowblowers, but that morning he wanted some exercise—that he thought: There has got to be a better way.”

Section 2A: The Quote. “‘I hadn’t shoveled a driveway since I was seventeen,’ Coulter said on a recent afternoon. ‘So I guess it served me right. But it wiped me out for a week. I thought about people who don’t have the luxury of that. And that’s when I thought: SnowGlow.’

“Coulter, who specializes in domestic use of nuclear energy, imagined a negligibly radioactive field that could melt the snow in your yard [note the smooth intimacy! not
a
yard but
your
yard] at the rate of a square foot a second. Don a protective suit, warn the neighbors, flip a switch, and voilà: snow into snowmelt.”

And we’re off. A biographical section on Coulter, quotes from a current (ingratiating) and a former (passive-aggressive) associate, a skeptical comment about runoff from someone in Energy, a zoom-out about the state of nuclear, and then the semi-autistic peter-out of the end: “The winter has been especially persistent in Rochester this year. On a recent afternoon, Coulter was in his driveway, pulverizing a snowfall with SnowGlow. By his count, it was number sixteen of the season. He had been spending more time at home than ever. In his hazmat suit, he looked a little like an extra from
Red Dawn
. It was nearly dark when his wife called him to dinner. ‘In a minute!’ he yelled. He sounded like a kid reluctant to let go of a toy.”

It was too easy. Why had Slava waited to do this till now? He poured himself a celebratory glass of brandy from a bottle that Grandfather, who reacted with dismay to homes without high-quality alcohol, had pressed on him. Slava clinked the bottle with his glass. The peal rang through the room and loosed the Grandfather-genie once more. Again, the genie growled at Slava. How does the clever aspirant seal the certainty of impending success? it asked him. Slava slapped his forehead.

On Monday, he arrived at work bearing four bottles of brandy: one for Paul Shank, the editor of “The Hoot”; one for Mr. Grayson (you had to keep the home front well lubricated);
one for Arch Dyson; and one for—what the hell—Beau Reasons himself. Stammering, Slava extended the bottles to their assistants, dropping only one out of nervousness, though unfortunately, this was before Beau’s assistant, and he dropped it on her foot. A small gift from his family cellar, he explained, on the occasion of . . . ? He stared at the assistants, who awaited an explanation with puzzled distaste. Slava had failed to invent a plausible reason for the gifts; his grandfather would not have made such a rookie mistake, but the genie had wavered back into the bottle and not spoken again.

“It’s a bribe!” Slava said hysterically, but this attempt at humor failed and he didn’t dare repeat it, his only solace that he had bombed before Paul Shank’s assistant, in the firmament of the magazine not the shiniest star though Shank
was
the editor of “The Hoot,” which
was
supposed to be a humor column. Maybe the assistant would feel solidarity and not say anything. Maybe the assistant would keep the bottle for himself! It was not the tsar who failed his people but the ministers, the meddling middlemen! Slava returned to his desk jailed by a mix of anticipation, confusion, resentment, and shame. No immediate word came from the editors’ wing. That could be good—he hadn’t screwed up too badly. And he remained buoyed by the secret of his editorial discoveries, like a woman who knows she’s pregnant but no one else does. Mere days later,
Century
assigned Slava (half assigned, with Devicki, but still) to a story. Coincidence? You make your own conclusions.

The conference room, filled with four times as many persons as usual, tingled
with an impending holiday’s delirious atmosphere. Bodies crammed the slate floor and the panels over the air-conditioning vents, editorial assistants arrived with extra chairs, toes were boxed with apology, and in general everyone experienced (1) the tipsiness of being closer to one another than was the norm, and (2) the sudden collapse of hierarchy. In his corner, eyeing Arianna several seats down, Slava felt a swell of pride at being in some measure the cause of all the commotion.

At the head of the conference table, his forearms on the back of his chair, stood Beau. On the eve of his ascension to the crown of the masthead, Page Six at the
New York Post
had trotted out the most salacious thing it could wring out of the people he had met on his way to the top: “Beau is 60, looks 40, and acts 20,” an anonymous woman had said. This was untrue—wrinkles had settled around his eyes, and two silver wings flanked his butterscotch helmet of hair—but this hardly impugned his haledom. He wore a peach Winchester shirt and rolled a nugget of gum in the pink sea of his mouth with awesome control. The gum was a piece of news he was going to split open and get to the bottom of. (He was an old smoker.) Despite his name—his mother had a fetish for the South—Beau was as northern as the Union. He had
started in newspapers: crime on Cape Cod, crime in Boston, crime in New York, over to
Century
. Apparently, they taught in journalism schools the magazine piece that had endeared him to Martin Graves, a complicated twenty-thousand-word two-parter, one of the first pieces about exoneration by DNA analysis, which had set free a man imprisoned eleven years for manslaughter.

Slava had read Beau’s famous story many times, but he couldn’t build a bridge from it to the Avery Coulter story. The Avery Coulter story gave up its secrets quite readily—it was a grid, Manhattan. The DNA piece was like some kind of Moscow or Paris—everything side streets, dead ends, parabolas, though its conclusion arrived with new force each time he read it, the mystery of which was only more frustrating. Slava studied Beau at the head of the conference table as if this would dislodge from the older man’s soul some clue to the information that eluded the younger. But it didn’t.