The Ghost of Greenwich Village: A Novel (12 page)

It was a slow and awkward walk, what with Eve’s resin waves dancing all around her as she moved, but eventually they arrived at their destination.

“This is Zander. A and R for Multiplatinum,” Vadis said,
touching the arm of a barrel-chested young man with ruddy cheeks and a goatee, who nodded and held his glass up in greeting. “And this,” Vadis continued with emphasis, “is Alex. The next Graydon Carter.”

He reached for her hand and brought it to his lips. She noticed how his top lip came to two distinct and perfect points, like twin mountains. Eve tried to adjust her posture into something alluring but her encasement in plastic made it rather difficult. “Alex … and Zander?” she asked, finally.

“You picked up on that,” said Alex, smiling as he let go of her hand. “Short version: We’re both named Alexander. We met in kindergarten. It got confusing when our parents and teachers tried to call one of us, so they decided we should split the name. We did a coin toss when we were seven, with
his
dad officiating, which is why I got boring ole ‘Alex.’ ”

“Would you stop perpetrating this nonsense?” said Zander. “When I introduce myself, people think I’m a magician at children’s birthday parties or something.”

Alex motioned to Eve’s glass. “Looks like you’re empty. More champagne?” Eve nodded and Alex sailed off into the crowd. His neatly cut chestnut hair revealed that he was indeed wearing a collar stay.

   • • •

Zander and Vadis went off to dance.

“I’d ask you, but I’m not sure if you can rumba in that thing,” said Alex.

“Probably not,” Eve replied.

“And you’re wearing it because …?” he asked.

Eve told the story of the Klieg interview, enjoying holding the stage. Working for her father had rarely occasioned any interesting tales. “The next thing you know, there’s this dress in my office and I’m being invited here. And it was my very first interview, too.”

“I guess they better watch out who they have you talk to,” said Alex. “If you interview Donald Trump, you might get one of those hideous apartment buildings by the West Side Highway. Or the president might give you a state.”

“Just as long as I don’t have to wear it to a party,” said Eve. Alex had a charming laugh. She wondered what he did for a living. At home, one would never ask, relying on back channels for information. New Yorkers, however, seemed quite open about these things.

“And what about you? Vadis said something about Graydon Carter.
Vanity Fair
, right?”

“Yeah. Well, that’s probably overstating it a little. Right now, I work for a publishing house. Marketing. But I
am
starting a magazine with some friends.”

Eve balanced her champagne flute on the top wave, where it wobbled slightly with her movements. “Really? What kind?”

“Top secret for now. But,” he said, winking, “I’ll keep you informed if you give me your number.”

Vadis and Zander came back from the dance floor, arms looped over each other’s necks and laughing. The rest of the evening flew by in a blur of drinking and flirting. Alex, Zander, and Vadis thrust and parried like characters in a thirties movie, though Alex did give Eve a private smile or two and once he traced the outline of a silvery nautilus shell on her dress with his finger while listening to Zander tell a story about valet stroller parking at the Park Slope YMCA. Everyone else laughed, but Eve, hampered by the dress, and not feeling quite up to speed with local mores yet, stood mostly mute. She didn’t really mind, though.

Her New York life was starting to happen.

   • • •

The next morning, Eve took Highball out for a walk and bought one of everything at the nearest newsstand. She spread the papers out on the living room floor, which was almost completely
covered. With discipline she didn’t know she had, she read all of the news sections before allowing herself to peruse the arts and gossip pages. And that’s when she saw it.

In a column called “On the Town,” she spied a series of pictures from the gala. The fourth one down was of her, standing next to Klieg. She had her arms in the air, lengthening her silhouette and showing off the dress to full effect. She didn’t remember making such a demonstrative gesture. Eve’s eyes dropped to the caption. “Unidentified staffer from
Smell the Coffee
holds attention of evening’s honoree.” Eve retrieved her scissors from her kitchen jumble drawer, cut the picture out, and stuck it to the refrigerator. She stared at it for several minutes before making coffee.

“Greetings,” said Donald, buzzing around her temples. “What about a little dictation? ‘The Numbered Story’ is ready to pop out of me.”

Eve was in a munificent mood. “Let me get some paper.” She found the pad and settled down at the bar. “Ready when you are.” Her usual reluctance had abated. She would start looking at this as fun, as a unique bond that she and Donald could share. Writer to writer, and all that.

There was a pause, followed by a soft whirring. “One: I came upon a porcelain ladder. Two: It was up to me to scale it. Three: The ladder stands at the corner of Waverly and Waverly. Four: The polished rungs glinted in the sun, daring me to try.”

“Um, Donald? You don’t need to number the sentences, I can keep track.”

“The numbers aren’t for you; they’re part of the story. Now. Four—”

“Part of the story?” asked Eve, loosening the neck of her favorite of her mother’s kimonos, the one with the peacock spreading its feathers across the back. “What do you mean?”

“I told you I wanted to experiment with structure. Continuing on. Five: People went on about their business. Six: They are intimidated by anyone extraordinary.”

Who would want to read this? The subject matter was tedious and the numbers were just strange. “Donald, are you sure about this?” Eve asked. “What are these numbers for? I’m not sure they work. They sort of break up the narrative, don’t you think?”

“Thank you for that bit of bright and shiny ‘Intro to Fiction’ analysis. You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “I’m breaking up the ‘narrative’ in order to call into question the whole
notion
of narrative.”

“All right, all right.
Sheesh
,” she said. Then a thought struck. “Before we go on, can I ask you something else?”

“What?”

“Did you know Gregory Corso?”

“Why? You think
he
could have come up with this?”

“Why do you always have to be so competitive about everything? It’s just that I walked by a building on Bleecker Street where he used to live. He was about your age. I thought you might have known him, that’s all.”

“I knew him. I knew all of them.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“What did you think of him?” This was like pulling the proverbial teeth.

“Talented, everyone acknowledges that. But troubled. Extremely troubled. Used to pull his pants down in the street as some kind of political statement. You think
I’m
a handful.”

“Did you ever share your work with him? Did you ever—?”

“Will you stop hijacking my session with these pointless questions? Can we please get back to my story? Where was I? Eight?”

“Seven.” Eve put pen resignedly to paper, wondering why he was so edgy. As he got started again, she also pondered exactly how many blotters of LSD he’d sucked in his day.

“Seven: The higher I got, the smaller they looked. Eight: I pulled myself up, rung after rung, into the clouds. Nine …”

   • • •

Eve picked up the pace as she neared the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal. According to everything she’d read, she was about to lay eyes on the San Remo, where Penelope had caroused in the sixties, and where Corso and the other founding Beats—Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac—had held court in the fifties.

Eve had been so busy trying to get a career going that she hadn’t had time to track down her mother’s haunts the way she’d wanted to. The conversation with Donald had piqued her interest and she was determined to reignite her quest. Plus, today was a beautiful late April day, the kind that heightened the pleasant naughtiness of lingering indoors. There really was nothing to beat a dark bar on a bright afternoon. It was so decadent, so willful. While everyone else jostled hysterically in the parks,
making the most of it
, Eve would spend the next few glorious hours in noir-y dim with sallow strangers. Strangers who might become friends. Because that was the way it happened here. Penelope and Donald both had attested to the effortlessness of connecting with fellow Villagers, who responded warmly to like minds and for whom the next lifelong friendship was but a drink away.

It would all start here, on this corner. Eve tingled as she looked up at the flapping awning. Then her face fell; the San Remo was nowhere to be seen. It had become something called Thai Kitchen. She pressed a curved hand up to the glass to shade her eyes. Dozens of small tables stood lined up on a carpeted floor, each with a tiny bamboo plant in the middle. From the maps spread out on various laps and the cameras slung over shoulders, most of the patrons inside seemed to be tourists.

Luckily, the Gaslight Café, which had showcased Beat poets before becoming a folk club and a haven for a new generation of artists in the sixties, lay just a couple of blocks north on MacDougal. But it too turned out to be a thing of the past, replaced by a chain burrito bar. A man bumped into Eve roughly as she stared in disappointment at the large plastic letters spelling out Taco Bueno.

At least Chumley’s remained. Thanks to the Village streets having minds of their own, including some that went north–south until they felt like going east–west, it took some time to find it again, and Eve’s feet ached as she sank onto a bar stool. As she rubbed them she realized she was neglecting to affect a welcoming posture, signaling to the assembled that she was open to approach. Somebody might remember her from her first night here, and she wanted to encourage any impulse they might feel to strike up a conversation.

She ordered a sidecar, tossed her hair, and straightened her back. The group on her left was talking about the stock market; the one on the right, the Mets. Neither was her favorite topic, but she did her best to catch the eyes of those on the edges. Their eyes proved uncatchable. She cleared her throat. Nothing. She joined in when the stock marketers laughed loudly, but no one noticed. Finally, she “accidentally” bumped the elbow of the young man next to her.

“ ’Scuse me,” he said, without even turning to look her way.

Maybe the Village wasn’t what it used to be.

   • • •

At work, Eve tried to learn the names of her dozens of new co-workers, from Giles Oberoy, the executive producer, to Franka Lemon, the show’s line producer, to Jerry Chisolm, the new intern. All in all, the editorial staff—producers, associate producers, bookers, and writers—proved a formidable group. Repartee at meetings sped by so quickly and was so topical it was breathtaking. Perhaps the San Remo spirit lived on, uptown. Eve’s colleagues spoke with authority on every subject—and in any language, too. Just the other day an office-wide email had gone out asking if anyone spoke Mandarin; within minutes four people had responded asking which was preferable: Southwestern or Northeastern?

Then came the technical staff, an army of directors, cameramen, tape editors, sound engineers, production assistants, satellite
coordinators, and others whose titles she couldn’t keep straight.

Eve intended to impress them all, but especially the writers. She knew that privately they questioned her hiring. But if she could earn their respect at work, she thought, the pool of good feeling might spill over into life outside the office. Perhaps, she mused, as she sat squashed between a paint-splattered construction worker and an overperfumed dowager on the subway one day, she had inadvertently stumbled upon a ready-made clique, the kind her mother had run with, the kind Klieg had belonged to in Paris.

The key to all this was pleasing Mark. Much to Eve’s relief, Orla Knock did indeed go to L.A. after the management retreat. It was rumored she was in meetings with network brass about something big. Mark continued to coach Eve, often staying late to do so. After the last writer had left for the evening, he would say something like “Want to hang out and go over graphics requests again?” Eve always did. Both because she liked the way he explained things in a commanding yet gentle way and because she was determined to let him know how much she appreciated his faith in her.

And this meant doing every bit of the assigned homework. Eve devoured the morning papers, along with piles of magazines and shelves of books. Periodicals and tomes multiplied around the apartment, taking up every available surface, including much of the floor.

But it wasn’t just preparation that was proving to make Eve a good interviewer. She genuinely found other people interesting and enjoyed listening to them. This likely had its roots in the long afternoons during her mother’s illness, when they’d talked, really talked, for the first time. The newfound intimacy made Eve feel special and every drop of information she extracted felt like a revelation about life itself.

It was also true that, given the choice, Eve preferred to ask
questions rather than answer them. She didn’t think of herself as very interesting. Plus, when you revealed yourself, you left yourself open to judgment. If you let someone in, there was always the chance they wouldn’t like what they saw.

At first, Donald expressed approval about her new lifestyle; she was expanding her mind. But by week three, he began to carp.
The Dallas Morning News
was all very well, but not if it meant delaying work on “The Numbered Story.” Week four brought the complaint that all the new information stored in her memory was leaving him less and less room to deposit his own. This protest was followed by Donald’s retaliation: monologues that went on and on just when Eve most needed to concentrate.

Eve suspected that there was something else that upset Donald far more than her new workload. Her other offense, she guessed, was her obsession with two new men. First, Alex. Eve was spending way too much time looking at the phone, willing him to call, frustrated and confused by his silence. Though she couldn’t say she was unfamiliar with the inconstant and perplexing ways of young men. Certainly they didn’t always do what they said they’d do. But at home, the incestuousness of the golfing community meant it was virtually impossible to hide from those you’d wronged. If a boy who said he’d call didn’t (and it was always the boys who called the girls, never the other way around) and you mentioned it to your father, he would no doubt say something pointed to the father of the young man at the next club dinner.