An Enlarged Heart (16 page)

After about five minutes, Mr. Gibbs bounded down the hall to collect me. He was wearing a navy blazer with gold buttons, blue-striped shirt with a white collar, a navy twill tie, and gray flannels. He was fresh-faced, and looked so exactly in aspect like the White Rabbit that rather than smiling I felt a small shock that I recognized as fear. “Come, come,” he said, and shook my hand. I followed him down one leg of the face-powder hall and then another, barely registering the curious fact that there was a mirror placed catty-corner where the corridor walls met, although I did catch sight of my own face in it. At the end of the second corridor, before we turned right into Mr. Gibbs's office, through the only open door I had yet seen, I saw a girl of about my own age, sitting in a dark room, at a large desk, illuminated by a gooseneck lamp. From a distance of about twenty feet I could see she had pale, sharply defined features, and she was wearing a fawn-colored crewneck sweater. Beyond her, over her right shoulder, was a closed door. Her copper hair shone in the light. She was on the phone, and she was making a little comical face at the receiver. When our glances met, she gave me a conspiratorial look and nodded her head, slightly. Mr. Gibbs held the door to his office open, and I walked through it. Half an hour later, when I left, the desk was empty, the light out, and I wondered if I had imagined her.

Mr. Gibbs, who was called Victor but whose given name was in fact Wolcott, was kind to me. The interview had a practiced air. The room was almost blindingly light after the hall and the sepulchral room I had glimpsed. One wall, as I remember it, was windowed. The office itself was cluttered with books and folders and littered, on every surface, with what I would learn to call galleys. These were sheets of mimeographed paper, in which articles that would appear, either next week, next month, next year, or never, were set up in the magazine's ghostly type, and then were reread and revised without end. Most of the galleys I saw had small blue sheets of paper clipped to them, on which writing, small as a snail's trail, took up a good deal of space. Mr. Gibbs sat me down in a captain's chair with the emblem of the college we had both attended painted on it, and asked me, genially, what I thought I might do at the magazine if I stayed for five years. I had no idea. Five years to me was an unfathomable length of time. I believe I muttered something about “being a writer.” He nodded as if he understood all that. My résumé, such as it was, was in his hand. I had been the poetry editor of a slightly dégagé college publication, which we printed on newsprint paper, and I had worked in the bookstore. During college I had been a waitress. He folded this piece of paper in half, and picked up the telephone. A few words were exchanged, among them the name “Harriet,” and “five minutes.” At the close of this cryptic conversation, Mr. Gibbs got up and it was clear I should do so too. I was acutely aware of my drooping hem. We walked back down the face-powder corridor, passing the terrible sofa, the brass lamp, and the torn magazines. The hall zigzagged. At the end of it Mr. Gibbs handed me over to a woman with reading glasses around her neck, a pencil skirt and a sweater, and a comfortable look of extra upholstery about her. Her hair was steady in nineteen-forties curls, and she introduced herself as Harriet Walden. Her accent was southern, with an overlay of Rosalind Russell in
His Girl Friday.

It transpired that I was to take a typing test. I blanched. I was a terrible typist. We entered a room in which five or six manual typewriters sat on an equal number of desks. The room was empty. The idea, as Mrs. Walden put it, was to see what I could do.
Nothing,
I thought to myself, bitterly. She ushered me into a small, glassed-in cubicle in the corner of the room—it was obviously her station. To the right of the desk was a music stand, on which she put a copy of
Naked Lunch,
by William Burroughs. It was a book I had once tried to read; I'd failed.

“Have a go at that,” she said.

She put a sheet of paper into the typewriter, and put a little stack of paper by my side. Then she departed. I looked despairingly at the text, and began to type. There was a large clock in the office but I didn't look at it. The words, clumsily, sprang up under my fingers. About five minutes later Mrs. Walden poked her head in. I stopped typing. She pulled the sheet of paper out of the typewriter. I wanted to put my head in my hands. To my surprise, she slowly ripped the piece of paper into strips. She looked me up and down. I felt sorry about the hem. I tried to stand up straighter. She looked directly into my eyes, and said, “Well, you
sound
like a typist.

“I'll be in touch, of course,” she said.

She walked me down the corridor, past another catty-corner mirror. I asked if I could use the ladies' room and she directed me—it was beside the elevator. I washed my hands, and looked in the mirror. In the mirror-view, behind me, there was a half-open door, in an alcove set apart from the toilet stalls. I wondered, idly, if there might be a shower, and I imagined myself, transformed, going out to dinner after work, in a cocktail dress. I had never owned anything remotely resembling a cocktail dress (the only dress I owned then had been made out of red-striped Mexican cloth, and my brother had told me I looked like I was wearing a bedspread, at which he had snickered). The dress I had on in my imagination, I realized with chagrin, was a blue silk dress that belonged to my mother, and I dismissed it. Instead, gazing at my reflection without looking at it—a technique I had perfected to avert despair—I thought about the ratty couch, and William Burroughs, and the man in the monocle who liked butterflies, and my shoe box of rejection letters, and I admitted to myself what I had known since the moment I stepped off the elevator: for reasons I could not explain, even to myself, I wanted to be in this place more than I had ever wanted anything in my life. I desperately hoped that Mrs. Walden would call. I felt desperate about the desperation, because I knew that I would now spend the next few days barely venturing out of my apartment, should I miss a call. I thought, fleetingly, of the girl under the gooseneck lamp, and wondered if I would see her again. Then I descended nineteen floors to Forty-third Street, and the shoe shine stand. The next day Mrs. Walden called me. If it wasn't too much trouble, could I come to work the following Monday at ten o'clock? The salary, she said apologetically, was $13,285. I sensed that she was apologetic not about the figure, exactly, but at the idea of having mentioned money at all. Mr. Gibbs would answer any questions I might have. I accepted at once.

My first few days at the magazine occurred in a kind of trance. I had been given a job in the typing pool. The typing pool, which in my mind should be capitalized, as names of places are—Lethe or Gongora—the Typing Pool—as it was a place on the map of the magazine of both literal and psychic dimensions, was run by Mrs. Walden, who had been employed by the magazine for thirty-five years: by the time she left she had been there for more than half a century. She had been the personal secretary to the magazine's first editor. The force of her own considerable personality, charm, and common sense were laced out with almost mandarin tact—of which dealing, as she did primarily, with writers, she needed a great store. Regarding the magazine, she had an encyclopedic memory. She had an incurable fondness for all the typists she hired. It was—I was to learn, slowly—the way that a good percentage of the female staff had entered into the magazine's circle dance: she functioned as a sort of benign Charybdis, and out of the typing pool had emerged many of the magazine's fact checkers, editors, and writers. At her memorial service a number of years ago, one woman, now in late middle age, told a story in which, as a girl in the typing pool, she was presented with a manuscript by a notoriously difficult writer which was completely illegible: it was written in gobbledygook. Questions were generally addressed to the writer, but this writer had apparently lost his mind. (This was a circumstance which had been addressed before, but the signs were usually more gradual.) Silently, she handed the manuscript to Mrs. Walden, who put on her reading glasses and gazed at it intently. Then she smiled, encouragingly. “Oh dearie,” she said. “Just type as written, but move your hands one key to the right.”

The job of the typing pool was to type manuscripts. When I arrived at the magazine these were typed, in the main, on manual typewriters, as they always had been. On busy days, the typing pool was a noisy place. Generally, a manuscript would be submitted to the typing pool after the editor of the magazine had read it. The editor's name was William Shawn. He was invariably referred to Mr. Shawn. In other cases though, particularly when the writer was a longtime contributor to the magazine, or what I learned was called a staff writer, these manuscripts would be handed to Mrs. Walden by the writers themselves, full of cross-outs and overwriting, by hand, between the lines, at the bottom and top of the page, and with arrows pointing to other sections, or the back of the page, or to other pages which would be connected by the writer's own hieroglyphs. Mr. Shawn read these once they were typed.

Because it was clear that typing manuscripts of any length was beyond me, I was set to work typing Mellecker letters. These were the different types of rejection letters that were returned with almost all the submissions that arrived in the mail of “Fact” or “Reporting” pieces. There were twelve versions, which ranged from encouraging notes to, most often, brief regrets (the phrase was “not quite right for us”); editors who read the submissions would paper clip a slip with a number scribbled on it to the manuscript. They were called Mellecker letters because a real person, Miss Mellecker, signed them. I was also put to work typing summations, written out by hand, of ideas for stories for the section in the front of the magazine called “Talk of the Town.” These also emanated from Miss Mellecker's office. They were about one hundred and fifty words apiece, and were gleaned from the deluge of press releases that were sent to the magazine's mail room each week. Miss Mellecker sorted these and wrote the summations. These were then typed and mimeographed, and a set of them was available in Miss Mellecker's office, and in the “second” office outside of Mr. Shawn's office, for writers to peruse. I would learn that only very few of these press releases resulted in stories: most of the story ideas were generated by the writers themselves; the best of these, according to the ethos of the magazine, were ideas that could not be summarized at all, that couldn't be pitched, because the story was simply something that happened, that the writer noticed and felt like talking about: it would be impossible to know what he thought about it, beforehand, and even
during,
until it was written: it was the
writing
that happened.

None of this was talked about. The Mellecker letters were typed on canary yellow “seconds” paper: “Oldest Garbage Scow Retired from Active Use” or “First Annual Steel Drum Festival” or “Bagel Store Celebrates One Hundred Years.” There was a small-town feel to these missives. The magazine inside its flocked urbanity retained a small-town incredulity about New York: a kind of “looky-here” that was at once put on, and not. One of the magazine's writers who had helped to establish this tone of voice had in fact found it almost impossible to live for any stretch of time in New York, and with his wife, a fiction editor whom many believed really ran the magazine, had decamped decades ago to rural Maine, where bundles of galleys and proofs arrived daily and returned with the aura of sea air and manure on them. This writer was also the author of three children's books. In two of them, animals who could not speak (a pig and a swan) were saved by writing, and in the third, a man who is born a mouse escapes from Manhattan in pursuit of a broken heart. (Many years later my children, all in turn, were entranced by these books; I found increasingly that I could not read them aloud without crying, and their father, who could trumpet like a swan but was not a writer, took over.) His wife, an avid gardener, wrote a column which was, among other things, about reading seed catalogs: the best garden, it seemed to go without saying, was the imaginary garden in the mind, in winter. Among the writers were extreme cases of the magazine's contrapuntal gait, the side step, a refusal to be quite
in line.
A recurring subject was wandering around, often by a “far-flung correspondent.” There was no place the writer wasn't a tourist, incredulous even—crucially—at home. Or in time; regular clockwork, calendar time. A friend we knew wrote, in the magazine, about her refusal to own a working timepiece: at the end of the piece her mother tells her that if she does not buy a clock, she will blow up her house. That in the end that was what happened to the life we knew—that an almost brutal recalcitrance to tell time became itself a time bomb—was then remote.

There was almost no one at the magazine then, I knew by instinct, who had not been the wistful one out in the schoolyard, the one with one fast friend, trying to get Boo Radley to come out of the house. The press release about the bagel store came back, predictably, with a note in the editor's snail track handwriting, always in pencil, as if committing to ink would be going too far: not for us, he thought, perhaps next year. What does it mean to be always
just off,
to make a point that the point isn't the point? (As I write I am trying to fit in, somewhere, that from what I can find, almost no one who wrote for the magazine during that time, including those of us who are still alive now, has a Web site—that such an idea, of putting oneself forward, runs counter to not
participating in ordinary time.
) Hopeless to imagine otherwise, really, because what might seem, now, like possible alterations we could have made in how we thought of ourselves, ways we could have gone
this way
instead of going
that way
into a sort of purdah—how it could have happened differently—were foreign to the place we literally found ourselves: the face-powder halls, the ladies' lavatory with the glimpsed door, which it took me only a day or two to discover contained a cot, with a pillow tucked into a freshly laundered pillowcase and a folded blanket, for anyone who, as the morning wore on, felt that they had to lie down in a dark room.