Blue Plate Special (30 page)

But it didn’t matter to me whether or not I succeeded as an editorial assistant. I was just biding my time here. As soon as
I really started to write, as soon as I shook the earnest dust of the M.F.A. program out of my brain and “found my voice,” as everyone was so fond of saying at Iowa, I wouldn’t need it anymore. I looked at the towering stacks of manuscripts in Susan’s office and thought,
I’ll be better than all of them
.

If I had known that my first novel wouldn’t be published for another ten years, I might have jumped out the window.

The following fall, when our lease was up, Sam and Anne and I disbanded our household and found our own apartments. Anne moved to Cobble Hill, and Sam and I both moved north to Williamsburg. I lived on Graham Avenue just off Metropolitan, above a Laundromat, in a small one-bedroom apartment with a skylight in the tiled bathroom, a parquet floor, and a roof deck outside my bedroom door. It cost $350 a month. I had hardly any furniture; the kitchen had no refrigerator, so I only bought whatever food I could eat immediately. It never occurred to me that refrigerators were cheap and that you could have one delivered; everything was so provisional and tentative for me back then. I never planted anything on the roof deck.

I had no money because I was profligate and careless with my paychecks, so I was consequently often late with my rent. My landlord was a ginger-haired, irascible, borderline-psychotic guy who looked like a stupid Vincent van Gogh. He owned the Laundromat and was always there. When I came in to give him my week-late rent in cash (he no longer accepted checks from me), I had to walk past the rows of washers and dryers, all the people sitting in the plastic molded chairs or standing at tables folding laundry. No one ever said a word in there; every pair of eyes tracked my hangdog progress to the little office in the back. It was my own version of the Walk of Shame.

Back in those days, Williamsburg was old-world Brooklyn, a profoundly local place. Italian guys sat in lawn chairs, smoking cigars and drinking Peroni; black-haired women in cotton housedresses carried bulging shopping bags along the sidewalks. I felt very safe in that part of Williamsburg; all local crime was in the hands of the professionals—but I didn’t belong there. I was a stranger in a strange land on Graham Avenue. When I came up out of the L station, I was very obviously the only person to get off at my stop who hadn’t been born and raised within a ten-block radius. Graham Avenue felt very far from Manhattan.

There was an Italian deli on the corner between the L stop and my apartment. Because I had no fridge, I did little cooking; and so, on many weekday nights, on my way home from work, I stopped in to the deli to get a sub, some chips, and a few cold bottles of Peroni. The subs were insanely good. I sometimes salivated like a dog, watching the guy build mine. I always asked for everything except tomatoes, since raw tomatoes on a sandwich are cold and wet and unpleasant unless it’s the height of summer and they’re warm from the sun and perfectly ripe. On a foot-long Italian loaf, soft and white and spongy, he slathered about half a jar each of mustard and mayo and then piled a mound of shredded iceberg, greasy rounds of salami and ham, hot green pepperoncini, and rectangular slabs of provolone. At the end, he squirted oil and vinegar from plastic bottles, sprinkled it with black pepper and salt, folded it closed, rolled it in white paper and taped it shut and cut it in half, then slid it into a paper sack between the beer and the chips. I took my dinner straight home. In warm months, I sat outside on my bare tar roof deck, staring at the sky. I always ate and drank every drop and scrap. Later, I went inside to my hot little apartment to lie in bed with my brain in a snarl of worry and wonderment. I had no idea how my life was going to go, but I knew that no one was going to help me; it was all up to me.

I had left William Morrow after nine months to work as the personal secretary of a countess who lived on Sixty-eighth off Park Avenue in a formidably elegant apartment she referred to as her pied-à-terre even though as far as I could tell, she lived there year-round. I worked five days a week from one to six p.m. for eighteen dollars an hour. Her former secretary, a fellow writer I’d met at a party, had recommended me for the job. The countess, an American native who had been born in Pearl River, NY, had married a Spanish count in the 1940s; they’d met when she worked for the OSS as a decoder in Madrid during World War II. She had an expense account at Balenciaga (she had been a fashion model for Hattie Carnegie before she was recruited); and, after her day in the office, decoding, she went to parties and kept an ear out for useful information. The count was the richest man in Spain. By the time I came to work for her, he was long dead, and she was alone. She wrote nonfiction “spy” novels, purported memoirs of her years working for the OSS.

The countess was tall and narrow hipped and elegant, and she had a magnificent pair of boobs and tailored designer clothes to show off her beautifully maintained figure. She was in her late sixties and she looked like a photoshopped, airbrushed fiftysomething. She was rich, Republican, chic, raven haired, impeccable. She was friends with the likes of Carolina Herrera, Imelda Marcos, Betsy Bloomingdale, and Nancy Reagan. Her books were
New York Times
best sellers, and she was invited to every high-society shindig in New York, Long Island, and Newport, but she often seemed unsure of herself. She screeched at me like a bat out of hell: “Kate! I cannot find my reading glasses! That’s three pairs this week! You must be more careful of my things!” or “Kate! I was awake all night thinking of eight things you never did that I had asked you to do, and now I cannot remember what they were! You must
pay more attention
!” She reminded me of the teacher I had lived with in high
school, Mary, who had yelled at me constantly and for similar infractions: selfishness, laziness, inattention to detail. The one old sin the countess couldn’t fault me on was gluttony: I ate almost nothing all day until after work, and my clothes hung on me. They were terrible clothes, makeshift and hemmed with Scotch tape, but they fit me perfectly in that New York coat-hanger way: I was sharp and angular as a scalpel.

We were both crazy, and we were possibly more alike than either of us wanted to admit, but we intensely disliked each other and deeply disapproved of each other. Nonetheless, the countess and I spent all day alone together, buried in the gold braid and red brocade of her apartment, the dim sunlight refracted off the courtyard walls outside, the acidic, antiseptic smell of the place, the marble floor and urns of branches in her marble, mirrored foyer. She strode around her apartment like a flightless bird, flapping and cawing at me, then in a mad rush of feathers she was gone for a few hours, leaving me to dazedly decipher her scrawled instructions, to run her life when I could not in any way run my own. I was so unsuited to this job it was ludicrous. She only kept me on because I was helping her write her next book, as her previous secretaries had worked on the others. Even when I sent letters to the wrong addresses, screwed up her accounting, and wore unpresentable outfits, I was indispensable to her now, the little church-mouse Rumpelstiltskin who spun her reminiscences (“Let’s say there’s an accident in the car, maybe someone tampered with the brakes! And later on, the tent falls in because the peg’s been cut, right before the king of Morocco comes!”) into something like fool’s gold. Helping her write her book was the only fun part of my job, the only thing I was remotely good at.

Every day, I left at six after storing my little rolling desk with the laptop under the counter in her pantry with papers, letters, checkbooks, ledger, and calendar stowed away in their places, a neat pile of phone messages and letters to sign left
for her inspection on the kitchen table. Being away from the countess’s apartment, walking through the normal streets of the city like any other person entitled to breathe the air, I felt like a prisoner whose sentence was served only during afternoon hours and commuted at night, when I was free to roam at will until the next day’s incarceration.

On the days she came in, Miguelina, the countess’s South American maid, made suppers for the countess, leaving a covered plate of food warming in the oven for her which she would eat alone at her little kitchen table before she went out for the night: a poached chicken breast, broccoli florets with lemon, a baked potato. Otherwise, the countess stuck a frozen lasagna or Lean Cuisine dinner into the oven and ate that. She disparaged Miguelina’s Spanish, her “awful South American accent, the way they talk down there is so common and low-class,” and accused her, behind her back, to me, of stealing from her. Miguelina spoke no English; I had forgotten most of my high school Spanish, but we formed a quiet alliance of two lackeys. Every now and then, we would exchange a look. That was as far as it went, but I was cheered by the small display of solidarity.

I lasted a year and a half with the countess, long enough to finish writing her book, help usher it to publication and a glowing
New York Times
review with a boxed excerpt of my own writing, and also to endure enough petty humiliations and insults to fuel my determination to succeed for the rest of my life.

Meanwhile, I had left Brooklyn when my lease was up and moved in with James and his ex-girlfriend, into a crappy apartment above a dry cleaners on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was a spectacularly demented ménage that had all our friends puzzled on our behalf. In fact, none of my family or friends could stand James. I supposed I could see why objectively, although I felt compelled to defend him, to assure them that there was more to him than it appeared, that he wasn’t like
that all the time. They all thought he was supercilious, unpleasant, and not at all nice to me or anyone else.

When we fought, it was almost always about money. He disapproved of my profligacy; he took me to task for it, and of course he was right. And he was punitive about it. During the entire time we were together, although he had no debt, a trust fund, and a comfortable if small source of income, reading scripts for HBO, that allowed him to work at home or anywhere he wanted, he never treated me to dinner, except once, on my birthday, but I felt too guilty to order anything but a bowl of chowder. We always, from beginning to end, split everything to the penny: the gas bill, the Early Bird Special at BBQ, the two or three bottles of wine we drank at home every night, the expense of car rentals whenever we went camping or drove anywhere. He paid all his bills the instant they arrived and never bought something he couldn’t afford; my debt, which reached about ten thousand dollars at its worst, shocked and dismayed him. I thought nothing of treating a friend to drinks even if I was broke or of buying Christmas presents I couldn’t afford, most of them for James. That, I thought, was what my Visa was for. I yearned to have money so I could be as generous and free with it as I wanted and needed to be. James was very good at living within his means, but I didn’t see that this made him any happier, so his example failed to rub off on me.

James thought my stories and journal entries (which he read without my permission) were jejune, self-conscious, clichéd, and immature, whereas his work was the real thing, because in his mind he was the genius of our duo, he was an auteur of cinema, he knew how to tell a story with narrative arc. Consequently, he never once took my advice on how to edit his screenplays. He was openly dubious about my ability to make anything of myself, ever. Being unsure of myself, and nowhere near savvy and aware enough to protest, I took it.

As I had with Adam, I wrote long, involved, obsessive journal entries that laid bare every aspect of my life I was unhappy with, cataloged and parsed out and acknowledged what was wrong with me, with everything. This illusion of analytical self-loathing self-awareness gave me a weird, emotionally starved pleasure, similar to the one I got physically from my extreme thinness, denying myself food. It allowed me to feel some modicum of control over my out-of-control life: if I could analyze my situation clearly, I wasn’t completely lost. If I didn’t eat too much, it proved that I had discipline. Consequently, I became very good at both wallowing and starving.

At twenty-nine, I was like a street dog: undernourished, skittish, unsure of how to behave, wild, afraid to trust, and most comfortable on the street. I’d been in New York for more than two years and had never had a nice meal in a good restaurant. I ate most dinners alone at home—takeout like mu shu vegetables or slices of broccoli pizza with extra Parmesan and hot red pepper flakes, as well as the few odd little things I cooked for myself—squid with rice or steamed vegetables with baked potatoes. On other nights when I didn’t feel like cooking, I went to the Puerto Rican takeout place and ordered a big aluminum dish of rice and beans with chicken and extra hot sauce. From the deli next door, I bought a six-pack of Bass Ale, trying and failing not to haggle obnoxiously with the deli guy over the price. I also failed to convince him that his prices were criminal; I bought it anyway. I brought this feast home, took off my shoes, ate everything alone at my rickety little table with bottles of cold beer. I wriggled my feet and shivered with hard-won happiness.