An Enlarged Heart (15 page)

It was windy. It began to snow again. The flakes came down softly at first, then harder. The wind which arrived with the snow began to twist and turn the flakes. Specters of snow, ghost white in the white landscape, began to follow us. No one else was distracted or concerned. They called to one another over the wind: Albert Pinkham Ryder had painted the beach in a snowstorm! The snow stung. It was impossible to see where we were. I had been tramping over the dunes a little behind the others.

On the two-lane highway into Provincetown the road curves slightly at the entrance to the Province Lands dunes. In the lay-by where we left our car that New Year's Day was a sign printed with the combination of welcome and warning that is usually found in wild places that have been domesticated.
BRING
OUT
WHAT
YOU
BRING
IN
, the sign reads.
WELCOME
TO
OUR
FRAGILE
LANDSCAPE
. There is an illustration on the sign of a huge land mass festooned with ice, like a huge chunk of dirt a bulldozer might rip out of the earth to make room for a skyscraper, and beside it the legend reads,
THE
LEGACY
OF
THE
GLACIER
.

Two of my children were in the back of the car, and I told them how exactly the same the landscape looked as when I was a little girl and drove with my mother to take my father to the Provincetown airport so that he could fly to New York. The other place I have seen a landscape that resembled it—the scrub and the rolling hills, and the places where the sand has worn away, leaving striations of clay the color of sulfur dioxide and ferrous sulfate—is in New Mexico, where recently a man who has once been and will probably be again the governor of Nambé Pueblo told me that he had found seashells in the dirt where he is irrigating, a thousand miles from the ocean.

What
am
I thinking? The landscape, the shells, the Nambé Indians who are not the Indians of Corn Hill, the sense of trying to hold on, of trying to find a thread that will hold no matter how far it is unwound, zigzagging through the pines. When a friend of mine was small—is it part of the story that she is deaf, was born deaf, or not? what is and isn't part of the story?—her mother organized treasure hunts in the woods. Lines of string wound through the branches, and each child followed a string, which unspooled to a treasure: a little tin toy, a whistle, a compass. Is it part of the story that the woods behind the house were full of brambles? What does it matter that in New Mexico, in the mountains, you can find blue columbine and delphinium, their starry blossoms the exact color of the kettle ponds in Truro two thousand miles away?

The beach we go to is the most beautiful beach in the world. What can that mean? Who is
we
? This winter, because family life as I had known it seemed to be ending—the web of string stretching over the small forest, uprooting trees, as we looked for clues and treasure—I drove the route over and over again to Truro. If you get lost, go to the last place where you knew where you were, we told the children. We once found Rose in the butterfly house, covered with butterflies.
Don't move.
I hadn't spent a winter in Truro there for twenty-five years. The storms had so abraded the back shore that the dunes were cleft. It was as if the dunes, fighting back like Cuchulain, had become waves and were throwing themselves into the sea. I wasn't sure all winter that we would be able to go to that beach again. When we went to look in March, my daughter and her friend, and my oldest friend and his children, the path down to the shore had caved in. But by May the town took itself in hand and trucked in sand to fill the gaps. In June we could walk single file down the steep slope, more than usually full of stones, to the beach.

Over and out. Later in the day, when my children and I get down to the beach—their father has his wallet, his keys, he has now landed in New York—we will spread out our towels, which are still slightly damp from the day before, which smell of salt. At a glance we know if the tide is coming in or out. The children will look for the break—the place they will paddle out on their surfboards to wait for waves. When they were small I spent every day in the summer counting heads. The girls wore the same bright bathing suits so I could see them in the water. When they were very small I spent the summer up to my waist in the water so that I could swim and fetch them out if they went under. In snapshots on the bookcases in New York the light around them shimmers. The light peers over the dunes, then disappears. I have sunspots on my right hand and on the right side of my face from sitting on the beach year after year in the late afternoon; at high noon it is as bright as the light in the house in Provincetown that so frightened me, a light without shadows. I wonder if I would be as frightened of it now.

When we are older perhaps the light is not as frightening, we are perhaps less interested in the past because the house that we carry around is ourselves. It is not as necessary to see ourselves everywhere; we have seen worlds upended and then slowly, gradually reconstitute themselves. In August, at the beach, my children will look for the break, and I will sit by the water at low tide pretending to read, looking up every few words from the page to find them in the water. When our friends come down the hill to the shore with their towels and bags of chips, with their car keys strapped to their beach bags to keep them from being lost in the sand—friends who rent other houses, under the trees—the first thing they will ask is: Are you going in?

Are you going in? Have you been in? Do you want to go in? A friend who is now dead—who lived in the woods that we love, too, the woods on the way to the beach, the trees that I picture wrapped in their web of string, gnarled, full of bayberries, the woods that have yielded their treasure—would say to us when we were young and unsure, yet surer than we are now, “You never regret a swim in the ocean or another child.”

What is regret? I lost a house, one that I loved, we are going into the interior; inside a house of wattles is a tiny shell, on the shell is a sail, inside the walnut is the fairy tale child. This is where I am now:
DO
NOT
PASS
GO,
DO
NOT
COLLECT
$200. When a child we know was very small and unhappy she was too little to play, she announced,
“The pink
money is mine.”
What is mine? When the children were younger they played Monopoly games that when it was raining went on for days, until someone tilted the board on purpose and the houses fell from the board. Are you the shoe, the dog, the rocking horse? Once I found a field mouse in a kitchen matchbox coffin, dry as a twig. When it stopped raining the children played at walkie-talkies under the window, tin cans attached by eight feet of string.
Can you hear me? Over and out.
Darning needles stitch the air. On our part of Long Nook Beach, the shelf splits off. A few steps and you are in the water. Are we going in? Where are we going and from where do we leave?

Mary McCarthy's Chest

O
ne day many years ago at the magazine where I then worked, an envelope crossed my desk. It was an airmail envelope, the kind seldom seen anymore, but then it meant news from afar. The envelope was blue, like a scrap of sky. Chevrons, red and blue, marked the corners, suggesting a shot arrow, which, in a way, it was. The postmark was Paris. The letter was addressed to me. My name, and the address of the magazine, had been typed on a manual typewriter. The lines of the address were indented, one stepped under the other. It looked at once elegant and slapdash. For some reason this entranced me. The return address, typed in the upper left corner, was Rue ——, Paris. The sender was Mary McCarthy.

At that time, I was working as an assistant in the Fiction Department. It was my second year at the magazine, and my second job there. Or, really, my third, if I count on my fingers. My first job, in the typing pool, had lasted three days. It had come about circuitously, almost haplessly, the way many things happened at the magazine, although I didn't, of course, know that then. But haplessly as a paper boat circling a pond is drawn by the current. I had graduated from college the year before, and after a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing had returned to New York, where I was living in an apartment with a Dutch door and a leaky skylight over the bathtub. When it rained the tub was splotched with dark spots, as if a dog had shaken himself off on the cracked porcelain. The apartment was twenty-eight blocks south of the apartment where I had lived until I was five, and two blocks from the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, on Riverside Drive and Ninety-second Street. When I was a little girl I had walked with my father on a winter's day from our apartment to that monument, and that event—the long walk, the snow, my attempt to keep up with him, uttering no complaints—had become mythic in our family. After I had lived in that apartment for some years, it occurred to me that besides the low rent, and the fact that it had fallen into my lap, and the equal fact that it wasn't on what we then called “a drug block” because this was the eighties, and blocks near the park were either drug blocks, or not—was that it was as far as my journey from childhood could take me, as if that distance had been foreordained. I would lie in bed at night and try to imagine the house as it had once been. When I flicked at the marred whitewash on the wall with my fingernail, blue and silver wallpaper rose up under the paint. Sometime during this period, of peeling the paint with my fingernail and peering up at the bathtub skylight, rereading Ngaio Marsh, I realized that I had almost no money at all, beside what my grandmother slipped into my pocket when I visited her in Chelsea, and I needed to get a job.

At that time the magazine was located in a large, nondescript office building on Forty-third Street, distinguished in that you could cut through from Forty-third Street to Forty-fourth, by cutting through the lobby. A number of years before, a writer affiliated with the magazine had made his way without touching the sidewalk from the office to the Chrysler Building, six blocks away, through a series of catwalks, overpasses, and tunnels: in the lore of the magazine this was viewed as an enviable, even emblematic, achievement, as then a reigning idea behind the magazine itself, implicit in its character, which reflected the life of its editor was the primacy of secret routes and power of the inner life, which was viewed as an Escher landscape, with stairways that went nowhere, punctuated by moments of transcendence in which life, usually opaque, opened by means of a hidden switch. In the lobby there was a tobacconist and a dry-cleaner and a luncheonette. You could also get your shoes shined.

The letter that I had written to “The Editor” requesting a job was not my first correspondence with the magazine. For over a decade, since I was twelve, I had been sending poems to “The Editors.” These had been returned. Tucked inside the typewritten pages was a small note on good-quality paper, with
The New Yorker
colophon, a man with a top hat and a monocle. The paper hovered between yellow and ecru, and the colophon was black. The preprinted note thanked me for my submission, but regretted the impossibility of publication. I received forty-two of those notes. I kept them in a shoe box, which one way or another has disappeared. When I dropped the letter into the mailbox on the corner, I had no expectation of a reply; then it seemed to me uncertain that any person actually worked there. This was before the Internet but not before celebrity; nonetheless the staff of the magazine, and its mysterious editor, were absent from the annals of people-watching. One of the most famous writers for the magazine had not been seen in public for almost twenty years. That this was caricature or simply an extension, played out to an extreme, of a policy I sensed I did not yet understand, nor of course could I know the effect this policy had, or would have on me, or on people that I loved. But there it was. The magazine seemed to emanate from a small, urbane, luminous planet—vaguely resembling the planet belonging to Saint Exupéry's
The Little Prince
(again, this stab in the dark was not far wrong) in which people spoke courteously and often mirthfully to each other, and in which most of their shopping needs—for embossed neckties and fly-fishing rods—were catered to by shops which advertised, discreetly, in four-point type, in the magazine's back pages.

At that time, there was no masthead or table of contents. Many of the articles, especially in what I was to learn was called the front of the book, were unsigned. There was a notion that these were written “by the magazine,” as in “We were downtown the other day when … ” If it was necessary for some reason that the article appear in the first person, the convention was “An old friend writes …” When, after a time, that person was sometimes me, this appeared as “A young woman we know writes …” When a writer's name did appear, it was in small block letters at the end of what was often a very long article, of thousands of words, so that generally, the reader discovered who had written the article only when he or she came to the end: verbosity offset by self-effacement. There were a series of sobriquets used by regular contributors to the magazine, which included the Long-Winded Lady and Our Man Stanley; these monikers were trumped, as it were, by a few that referred, consistently, to people who did not exist at all, among them Owen Kethery, the polite anagrammatic Beauregard who replied to letters sent to the editor (these did not appear in print). Thus, at the magazine's offices, there were writers who existed whose names did not appear, and others who did not appear but whose names appeared frequently, on letters that were typed and sent out into the U.S. Mail. For a short time, later, I was among those who typed them. This sense of unreality, in its most utilitarian sense, had applications outside the magazine: the ex-wife of the former editor of the magazine, a man mythically uncouth, whose exclamations of disbelief and irritation covered a steely sense of order, aesthetic and otherwise, owned a plant nursery in Connecticut, whose catalogs were studded with advice from one Amos Pettingill, who in my mind was a sort of imaginary brother to the imaginary Owen Kethery, himself a scion or nephew of the magazine's mascot, that fictive man in the top hat watching a butterfly through a monocle, whose name, I was to learn, was Eustace Tilley. A preponderance of Wildean vowels. In its less utilitarian incarnation, if unreality can be said to be utilitarian, this feeling of shifting identity—of not being quite there, wherever
there
was, of sidestepping not place but history, a refusal to
be pinned
down,
or to sacrifice equivocation to the imperative—was mother's milk. Or, better, father's. There were always so many sides to an issue. The possibilities rose up, like empty cartoon bubbles over ten-point type, suggesting the unanswerable which was the only answer. Recently a writer whom I met at the magazine when I was twenty-three, and he was almost forty—he had been one of the first critics of the war in Vietnam—was talking over dinner about what had happened in Southeast Asia since he started reporting, for the magazine, as a very young man, in l966. He said that, well, it had turned out exactly as he, or we—I don't remember whether he used “I,” or “we,” but it was probably the latter, as he has retained the habit of not calling attention to himself—had imagined it, but you know,
we could have been wrong.
It could have happened differently.

The cover of the magazine—then, as now, a weekly—was always a drawing or a painting by one of magazine's artists. There was no attempt whatsoever to advertise the current contents. The font in which the magazine was printed was not exactly black. It was almost, but not quite, ghost writing, the kind of writing I had practiced as a child which my cousin had taught me—the same cousin who, when I slept over her house woke me up, and conducted séances in the middle of the night, wearing a silk headscarf printed with stirrups which I recognized as a castoff of her grandmother's. This writing, with a special silver pen, was only truly visible if you shone a flashlight directly on the paper.

I dropped my query letter, with a résumé, if it could be called that, in the mailbox on the corner of Ninety-first Street. In two days I had a reply. Such were the mails. Could I telephone Mr. Gibbs at ALgonquin 7–7500, to make an appointment? I could, and did. My appointment was for the day after tomorrow, at 3 p.m. I later learned that Mr. Gibbs, who proved to be a well-turned-out man of any age between forty and seventy (I had no way of judging then, the age of anyone more than a few years younger or older than myself and I was as ignorant about babies as I was about the old), in addition to fulfilling a job called managing editor, also reported on yachting, or anything at all having to do with boats. The magazine, I would learn, reserved whole areas of inquiry for one writer or another. These included but were not restricted to dance, medicine, France, film, economics, law, fashion, presidential inaugurations, New York City politics, golf, fly-fishing, corn, visual art, England, theater, and outer space. This guaranteed exclusivity and was an attempt, I think, to eradicate rivalry; like many things at the magazine it had a familial aspect: so-and-so was “good at” baseball, or China, and his or her proclivities and or talents were both thus applauded and constrained, a branch, or knob, on the family tree.

The afternoon of my appointment I made my way to Midtown. I took the subway. When I first arrived in New York in September—I liked to think of it as “back in New York,” although my family moved to Long Island when I was five or six—the subway intimidated me. The year before I went to college, and the summer after my freshman year, I had had a job at a bookstore on Forty-seventh Street, shelving books—the bookstore was its own education, as the basement was not arranged in alphabetical order or by subject (although all the books were literary) but by circle, Lytton Strachey and Carrington, for example, were shelved together, and Lee next to Capote. It was also where I saw my first and only heroin overdose and fell in love with a boy a decade older, who lived in Harlem and who poured scotch into a carton of ice cream for breakfast—to get to the bookstore taken the train in from Long Island every day, and the subway uptown. My own father, I knew, had taken the subway or the trolley in Brooklyn alone from the time he was six: it was to me the equivalent of my grandfather's Russian tales of walking three miles in hip-deep snow to get to school—remote and inexplicable. In the seventies he used to say that he would never have married my mother then: she lived in the Bronx, and after a date he would take her home and then wait on the platform at midnight for the train to take him back to Brooklyn. “Now,” he said, shaking his head, “I would have been killed.” The subway was the stuff of family myth. In my grandparents' generation children went to work early (everything happened early—my grandfather and his younger sister had sailed alone on the
Philadelphia
from Minsk via Liverpool at ages five and three, respectively) and one great-aunt received a proposal from the man to whom she would be married for more than sixty years, when they met by chance on the subway after not speaking for a year, after a quarrel.

As usual, I arrived too early. I had spent time deciding what to wear, and had in the end decided on a burgundy tweed skirt my mother had made for me three or four years ago, hemmed at the knee, black tights, brown suede pumps, and a black cashmere turtleneck sweater, which I felt elevated the rest of it. It was April. I had realized as I walked from the subway that the hem of the skirt, which I thought looked appropriately “bookish” was frumpy in the extreme—by now it was too big at the waist but bunched on the hips—was coming down. By the time I arrived I was hot, and looked longingly at a girl about my own age going up in the elevator, who was wearing a loosely belted trench coat over blue jeans. I loitered by the shoe stand. It was too early for that, even, and I decided to walk around the block. This took too long, and I ended up late, staring with horror at the outsize clock with gold hands that presided over the lobby. I did not register that the lobby was peculiar in that it had five elevators, of which only one was manned, by an operator in livery, with white gloves. An automatic elevator came first, and I got into it. The letter, with its colophon of the top-hatted lepidopterist, had told me to arrive at the nineteenth floor. There must have been a receptionist, in the small, boxed-in area by the elevator—there was a receptionist on each of the three floors the magazine occupied—who unlocked the door, but I don't remember, now, who that was.

The door opened onto a barely furnished hall. In retrospect it seems to me that it was the most aggressively nondescript reception area I have ever seen. The wall immediately opposite the door held a wood-frame couch with two flat, hard Naugahyde cushions. These were brown. It was the sort of couch you wouldn't be surprised to see cast off in the street. Adjacent to this was an armchair, equally unpromising. There was a hammered brass lamp with a stained shade on a gimcrack side table, and across from the couch a small low table held two magazines. One had a torn cover. They were both at least a year out of date. The walls were painted the color of what I thought of as “face powder,” pinkish brown. Like powder, the paint seemed to be flaking. I sat down on the couch, my knees touching, my heels elevated in the uncomfortable pumps. It was 1982, but I had been brought up in another universe, and that universe at that moment came to the fore, slipping over a lengthy, troublesome and headstrong adolescence and my current life—my tiny apartment on West End Avenue where I stayed up too late, reading Penguin mysteries and running the hot water into the bathtub until it ran out, while someone sat on the ledge, smoking, and talked to me. Recently, in an early book by A. S. Byatt, I read the words “If I had been brought up by people who made allowances, I would not have had to take so many,” and thought of myself. A voice in my head said, “Nice girls don't cross their legs,” and so I sat, at the edge of my seat.