The Wonder Spot (17 page)

“Which one?” he said.

I knew he was just dodging the topic, but I answered anyway. “Mamie. Obviously.”

We'd finished our scotches and he raised his hand to the bartender; I thought he was going to signal for the check, but he pointed to our glasses:
Another round.

Then he laughed, and his mood got about a hundred pounds lighter. “I can't believe you're going to work for Honey Zipkin.”

I said, “What happened with you two?”

“Not what she wanted to happen.”

“Meaning?”

He said, “I didn't fall in love with her.”

. . . . .

I let myself into Josh's apartment. I was a little drunk. I stood in the hall waiting for the bathroom for a long time before I figured out that the door was just closed and no one was inside.

When I got into bed beside Josh, I put my arms through his and kissed the back of his neck.

“You smell like a bar,” he said.

I thought,
You smell like a library.
But I wanted to have sex right then, so I said, “You smell like a poem.”

. . . . .

“I'm trying to think of Naomi as Robert's first wife,” I said to Josh. We were having breakfast at La Rosita.

He looked at me with something like disapproval, and I was surprised to feel disapproval right back at him.

“That was a joke,” I said.

“But you don't like her.”

“I don't like her yet,” I said. “But maybe I will.”

“I think you should at least pretend to like her,” he said. “She's going to be a member of your family.”

I was getting that caged feeling again. But right then I saw my key. When the check came, I said, “This is on me.”

. . . . .

Jack told me about the apartment, a walk-up above a cigar store on Thirty-third Street. Maura Edwards had made documentaries all over the world; now she was going to New Jersey to have a baby and needed to sublet her apartment.

When I met her at the apartment, she was eight months' pregnant, and her skin was waxy and pale. She said, “You're on time,” but her intonation said,
You're late.

She said the apartment was her refuge and spoke of it with more affection than she did either the boyfriend she was moving in with or the baby she was about to have. Her voice was almost loving when she said that the apartment had no bugs. A gecko she'd brought back from Brazil ate them. He lived in the walls.

Even by New York standards the apartment was tiny, and the few pieces of furniture were child-sized, which made the apartment feel like a dollhouse—or doll cell—though the intention was obviously to make the apartment seem bigger. What made the apartment seem smaller was that everywhere, on every surface, were vases and sculptures, tchotchkes galore.

She seemed deflated when I agreed to the terms of the sublet: It might last a month or a year, she said; she might want to use the apartment herself sometimes, and if she did she'd give me twenty-four hours' notice and a rent reduction.

Since it was an illegal sublet, I was to make myself as invisible as possible. If anyone asked, I was her sister. I couldn't receive mail here, and I would have to forward hers.

I said, “No problem,” and explained that I could easily send it from my office, which was just a few blocks away.

She wasn't listening. She was resigned now, showing me how to work the answering machine, though a moment later she asked me never to touch it. She played the outgoing message she'd recorded, which was in English first and Spanish second and gave her phone number in New Jersey. She seemed to be concentrating as she listened to her own voice, as though it might have something important to tell her.

She was more sure of herself than anyone I'd ever met, except maybe my father. You could tell that she'd gotten camera crews on overbooked flights all over the world and knew when to stand up to a customs official and when to offer a bribe. Her voice was full of certainty, even when she said, after good-bye, “I have no idea what I'm doing.”

. . . . .

I put my typewriter way in the back of my grandmother's closet. It took up a lot of room, but she didn't have many shoes. I promised that I'd come back for it soon. “I'll borrow Jack's car,” I said, even though he'd never lent it to me and I doubted that he would.

I was putting my bags by the door when my grandmother said, “You're a modern girl in every way.”

I wasn't too sure about that, but I thanked her. “Well, roomie,” I said.

She looked upset, and I thought that maybe she'd heard my “roomie” as
roomy,
as in big and fat, so I said, “Roomie as in roommate.”

Her face didn't change.

I was happy, and maybe it made her see how unhappy I'd been living with her. Or, knowing that her life lectures hadn't stuck, maybe she was envisioning my impending spinsterhood.

She double-sighed, and in a voice that sounded as sad as she looked, she said, “The world is your oyster.”

I'd heard the expression, of course, and I knew it was supposed to refer to pearls to come. But it made me think of an actual oyster, and picturing the hard gray shell and the slimy animal inside, I thought,
My world
was
like an oyster, but not anymore.

A
T
375 M
ADISON
A
VENUE
,
Steinhardt Publishers occupied three floors of a building that had once been grand. Like a faded beauty trying to conceal her age, the lobby was lit dimly; your eyes acknowledged the gold-domed ceiling and marble walls without really seeing them. The red exit sign glowed like a night-light.

I worked on the floor the elevators called 14, though it came right after 12. My desk was one of five in a makeshift secretarial pool we called the Cave, short for Bat Cave. Floor-to-ceiling file cabinets blocked all sunlight; the shredding carpet was variegated with the splash patterns of spilled coffee.

I shared the Cave with three girls and one Boy Wonder, Adam, whom I adored. He was the kind of man who might've fished Zelda Fitzgerald out of the fountain at the Plaza, draped his cashmere coat around her shoulders, never asked for it back, and never told anyone the story. He was slight, with a hairline well into recession even at twenty-two, but his character was so impeccable, his manner so graceful, that even then, when I saw him every day, I thought of him as tall and strikingly handsome.

With endless patience, he answered all my questions, even those I was too embarrassed to ask. This was lucky, as I was scared of Bettina, who'd already acquired a novel; once a week or so she'd shush us and announce, “I'm calling my author.” Sue, a broad-backed workhorse from Minnesota, was perpetually on the phone with her boyfriend, a sophomore at what she called “the U.” When they argued, as they often did, she didn't talk at all; she was a silent fumer. The phone wedged between her ear and shoulder, she typed letters and logged manuscripts, waiting for her boyfriend to grow up.

I sat across from Francine Lawlor—our desks touched—but whole days went by without our eyes even meeting. She was pale and thin, with pale, thin hair and pale, thin lips she pursed. A dozen years earlier, she'd arrived at Steinhardt to learn that the editor she'd been hired
to assist had been fired. During what should have been a brief bossless interim, a position had been created for her. Now she was thirty-three, and Floating Assistant was still her title.

. . . . .

My apartment was only seven minutes from Steinhardt, which gave me a fighting chance of being on time, though I usually wasn't. If Honey noticed, she didn't complain. She herself got to work practically at dawn, but her office, at the end of the Hall of Grown-ups, was the farthest from the Cave. If she wanted me, she called rather than walked down.

I opened her mail; I answered her phone; I typed her letters. Instead of asking me to read manuscripts, she said, “Take a look.” Sent by lesser agents and friends of friends, these were the manuscripts she herself didn't want to read; early on, I understood that my job was to tell her that she didn't have to. A few weeks after she gave a manuscript to me, I'd return it to her with a typed rejection letter for her to sign. I used the language she herself used: “This story isn't quite compelling enough”; “The characters don't quite come alive”; or the ever-popular “This isn't quite right for our list,” whatever that meant.

. . . . .

Those first weeks I worried about how to dress for work. I looked to my fellow Cave-dwellers for guidance.

Invariably, Adam wore a starched button-down Oxford-cloth shirt, khakis, and a black—not blue—blazer, his urbane twist on the classic ensemble.

Bettina had mastered the look of a bad girl from a good girls' school—a cashmere twinset with a miniskirt or a crisp little blouse slyly unbuttoned just enough to whisper,
Lacy bra.

Sue favored fuzzy angora sweaters in Easter's palette.

Francine Lawlor alternated between two suits—one gray, the other a startling red-orange—and with them, she wore fluffy once-white blouses, the worst of which had a Louis XIV flap she decorated with a Phi Beta Kappa pin. She wore coffee-colored panty hose and navy blue pumps, low of heel, round of toe.

. . . . .

As floating assistant, Francine was supposed to help us when we were busy, but we never asked and she never offered.

Mostly, she devoted herself to slush, the unending supply of unsolicited manuscripts sent by authors. No one cared about slush except as carton upon carton of it narrowed the hall where the copier lived; no one appreciated Francine's work except as it widened the path.

. . . . .

One rainy lunch, Bettina decided we should take turns reading slush aloud. She opened a fresh carton and handed out a manuscript apiece to Adam, Sue, herself, and me.

It seemed rude to leave Francine out, so I asked if she wanted to read one.

She barely shook her head, so anathema was the idea to her.

Bettina laughed as she flipped through her manuscript and said, “I'll start.” She read a sex scene from a wild Western, making her voice twangy for the cowboy, who hollers, “Ride me, baby bitch.”

Adam read: “ ‘The witty journalists walked down Madison Avenue, where cabs swarmed like fireflies.' ” He stood and raised his hand in imitation of hailing a taxi and called, “Firefly!”

Sue was about to read when her phone rang.

I got a dull thriller; every other paragraph began, “And then suddenly.” Before reading, I happened to look over at Francine. Her face was stricken.

“Is this mean?” I said.

Bettina said, “Oh, shut up.”

On principle, I returned the manuscript to the carton; the principle was I couldn't stand being told to shut up.

Adam backed me up, though: “She's right.”

. . . . .

Bettina said that Francine lived in the Cave and went through our desks at night.

Adam said, “What makes you say that?”

“She's always the first in,” Bettina said, “and always the last to leave.”

“That's your proof?” he said.

Bettina didn't answer.

“Take it back,” he said, and he kept saying it until she did.

But Francine did seem guilty of something, even if it was just hating the rest of us.

A
FTER
ABOUT
A
MONTH
,
Honey came alive to my many failings, namely that I was slow—slow at reading, slow at typing, slow at understanding her directions—and her noticing how slow I was only made me slower.

A letter that would have previously taken me a morning to type now took an entire day, and looking over that letter, Honey remarked not only on how long it had taken me to do but how badly it was done; suddenly, she was anti-Wite-Out.

When she gave me a stack of manuscripts, she now told me when they were to be read by, and each “Monday” or “Wednesday” or “Friday” seemed to be a reprimand for how long I'd taken in the past.

One afternoon when I returned a manuscript to Honey, she read my rejection letter and looked up at me. “Why?” she said.

“Why . . . ?”

“Why isn't
Temple of Gossamer
right for our list?”

By then Adam had explained that “our list” meant the books Steinhardt published, though I had no idea what unified them, except that they were books I wouldn't want to read. By that criterion,
Temple of Gossamer
fit our list perfectly.

Usually impatient, Honey now seemed to have all of eternity to wait for my answer.

I said the only thing I could think of: “It's bad.”

Honey turned the cover of the manuscript over and took a look for herself. I stood there while she read, not sure whether I was supposed to stay or go. Finally, she stopped reading and said, “Okay.”