You go into Clara’s office to snag the page proofs but they’re not on the desk. You ask Rittenhouse about this, and he tells you that Clara called and asked to have the proofs delivered to Typesetting. She also told him to messenger a photocopy down to her apartment.
“Well,” you say, not sure whether you are horrified or relieved. “That’s that, I guess.”
“Do you have any last-minute changes,” Rittenhouse asks. “I’m sure there’s time for some last-minute changes.”
You shake your head. “I’d have to go back about three years to make all the necessary changes.”
“I don’t suppose you remembered that bagel,” Megan says. “Not to worry. I’m not really hungry anyway. I shouldn’t be eating lunch.”
You apologize. You beg her pardon. You tell her there are so damn many things on your mind. You have a bad memory for details. You can tell her the date of the Spanish Armada, but you couldn’t even guess at the balance of your checkbook. Every day you misplace your keys or your wallet. That’s one of the reasons you’re always late. It’s so hard just getting in here every morning, let alone remembering all that you’re supposed to do. You can’t pay attention when people talk to you. So many little things. The big things—at least the big things declare open combat. But these details … When you are engaged, life or death, with the main army—then to have these niggardly details sniping at you from the goddamned trees …
“I’m so sorry, Meg. I’m really, really sorry. I’m just fucking everything up.”
Everyone is looking at you. Megan comes over and puts her arm around your shoulders. She strokes your hair.
“Take it easy,” she says. “It’s only a bagel. Sit down, just sit down and relax. Everything’s going to be all right.”
Somebody brings you a glass of water. Along the windows, the potted plants form a jungle skyline, a green tableau of the simple life. You think of islands, palm trees, food-gathering. Escape.
COMA BABY LIVES!
Everyone is so kind. They all want to cover for you, take care of the work on your desk. You have been inclined of late to underestimate the goodness of the race. But Megan, Wade, Rittenhouse—they want you to relax, go home. You don’t want to go home. Your apartment is a chamber of horrors. There are instruments of torture in the kitchen cabinets, rings in the walls, spikes on the bed. That place is must-to-avoid. Now that you have released your cramped grip on your responsibilities here, the office seems a quaint place, a place you love because you’ve already lost your lease.
You wander down to the library to browse through back issues. Marianne, the archivist, is glad to see you. She doesn’t get many visitors. All day long she slices issues of the magazine into column-width strips and pastes them into file volumes by author, subject and year. She can tell you where everything is. At first she is disappointed that you are not looking for anything in particular, then amazed when you try to talk to her. Suspicious when you ask where she lives, she gradually warms to the neutral subject of movies. She is a fiend for the comedies of the thirties and forties—Lubitsch, Capra, Cukor. “Have you seen
Trouble in Paradise
,” she asks. Oh yes. You certainly have. “Movies aren’t what they used to be,” she says, then hints that a certain so-called film critic known to both of you has trashy taste, not to mention a filthy mouth. Marianne is loyal to the magazine but concerned about infiltrators and climbers who are trying to subvert it from within. The Druid, she worries, is getting bad advice from flatterers. Ducking into the cage of bound volumes, she comes out with 1976. She flips through the pages and puts her finger under a passage containing a four-letter word, its first appearance in the magazine. Granted, it was only fiction, granted that the author had won the National Book Award. But still … The dam is crumbling. She considers it an institutional imperative to maintain standards. “If we don’t say No, who will?” You find it touching, almost heartbreaking, this ethic of appearances.
“It’s not just that—it’s the ads,” you say. “Look at the ads. Women doing suggestive things with cigarettes, diamonds set in cleavage, nipples everywhere you look.”
“It’s everywhere,” she agrees. “Do you know what a little boy—not eight or ten years old—said to me on the subway this morning?”
“What was that?”
“I can’t even repeat it. It was unbelievable.”
You know all about unbelievable; you don’t even think about it, much less repeat it.
Later you go up to the empty thirtieth-floor office of a writer on a detox sabbatical. You need a private phone. You practice your spiel aloud, trying out a British accent. You take a deep breath and dial Amanda’s agency. You don’t recognize the voice on the other end. You identify yourself as a photographer and say that you are interested in working with Amanda White. Is she in New York, by any chance? The woman on the other end is clearly new, else she would not be so forthcoming with the information. Agency policy is to treat all male callers as potential rapists until proven legitimate. This voice tells you that, as a matter of fact, you are in luck, since Amanda has recently returned to New York for a couple of weeks. “She’s based in Paris, you know.” You ask if she’s doing any shows; you’d like to see her on the runway before you book her. The woman mentions a show on Thursday before you hear someone in the background.
“Could I have your name, please?” the woman says, suddenly all vigilance and officiousness. You’re already putting the receiver back in its cradle. Now you need only the location of the show, which a quick call to a friend at
Vogue
will provide. In your mind images of revenge and carnage do battle with scenes of tender reconciliation.
Coming back down the inside stairs, you catch a glimpse of Clara marching into the Department. You bolt up the stairs and duck into the Fiction Department Men’s Room. You know you will have to face her sooner or later, so it might as well be later. Much later. Your equilibrium is fragile. Perhaps you will meet over drinks someday and laugh about this whole thing. This antic chapter of your life, “Youthful Folly,” will follow “Early Promise.” The magazine, ever forgiving, will be proud to claim you as one of its own. You’d gladly sleep through the intervening years and wake up when this part is over. In the meantime, a truckload of Librium and a nice long coma.
You are studying your face in the mirror when the door is opened by Walter Tyler, the travel editor. It’s hard to know how to greet Tyler, whether he will stand on the dignity of his position and New England lineage or be just another guy who likes the Yankees. Either way, he’ll be offended if you guess wrong. Sometimes the sound of his Christian name in an underling’s mouth is sacrilege to his ears. At other times his sense of hale fellowship is offended by a formal address. So this time you nod and say hello.
“I’ve always wanted to ask someone from Fact,” he says as he takes up his position in front of the urinal, “does Clara piss in the Men’s Room or the Ladies’?”
Now you’ve got the cue. “I don’t believe she pisses.”
“Marvelous,” he says. It’s taking him a while to get going at the urinal. To fill in the silence he asks “So how do you like it down there?” as if you had joined the staff last week.
“All in all, I’d rather be in Fiction.”
He nods and tends to business for a while, then says, “You write, don’t you?”
“That seems to be a matter of opinion.”
“Hmmmm.” He shakes and zips. At the door he turns and fixes you with a serious look. “Read Hazlitt,” he says. “That’s my advice. Read Hazlitt and write before breakfast every day.”
Advice to last a lifetime. Your advice to Walter Tyler is to give it an extra shake or two if he wants to return to his office with dry chinos.
You make for the elevator. Some troll you have never seen sticks his head out of an office door and immediately retracts it. Rounding the corner, you narrowly miss running down the Ghost.
The Ghost cocks his head to one side, peering, his eyelids fluttering. You say good afternoon and identify yourself.
“Yes,” he says, as if he knew all along who it was. He likes to give the impression that his reclusiveness is an advantage, that he knows more than you could ever expect to. You’ve only seen him once before, this legend, this man who has been working on a single article for seven years.
You excuse yourself and slide past. For his part, the Ghost glides away silently, as if on wheels. You escape the building without incident. Your jacket, small ransom, is back in the Department.
It is a warm, humid afternoon. Spring, apparently. Late April or early May. Amanda left in January. There was snow on the ground the morning she called, a whiteness that turned gray and filthy by noon and then disappeared down the sewer grates. Later that morning the florist called about the bouquet you ordered for her return. Everything becomes symbol and irony when you have been betrayed.
You slip into a bar on Forty-fourth, a nice anonymous Irish place where no one has anything on his mind except drinking and sports. On a big video screen at the far end of the long wooden bar is some kind of sporting event. You take a stool and order a beer, then turn your attention to the screen. Basketball. You didn’t realize basketball was in season this time of year, but you like the soothing back-and-forth movement of the ball. The guy sitting next to you swivels and says, “Those fucking bums don’t know how to handle the full court press.”
You nod and fill your mouth with beer. He seems to expect a response, so you ask him what period it is.
He looks you up and down, as if you were carrying a volume of poetry or wearing funny shoes. “Third
quarter,
” he answers. Then he turns away.
You keep meaning to cultivate an expertise in spectator sport. More and more you realize that sports trivia is crucial to male camaraderie. You keenly feel your ignorance. You are locked out of the largest fraternity in the country. You’d like to be the kind of guy who can walk into a bar or an eatery and break the ice with a Runyonism about the stupidity of a certain mid-season trade. Have something to hash out with truck drivers and stockbrokers alike. In high school, you went in for lone-wolf sports—tennis and skiing. You’re not really sure what a zone defense is. You don’t understand the sports metaphors in the political columns. Men don’t trust a man who missed the Super Bowl. You would like to devote a year to watching every athletic event on ABC and reading all fifty-two issues of
Sports Illustrated
. In the meantime your strategy is to view one playoff game in each sport so as to manage remarks like, “How about that slap shot by LaFleur in the third period against Boston?” Third quarter?
It’s five-twenty and raining when you leave the bar. You walk down to the Times Square subway station. You pass signs for
GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS
, and one that says
YOUNG BOYS
. Then, in a stationery store,
DON’T FORGET MOTHER’S DAY
. The rain starts coming down harder. You wonder if you own an umbrella. You’ve left so many in taxis. Usually, by the time the first raindrop hits the street, there are men on every corner selling umbrellas. Where do they come from, you have often wondered, and where do they go when it’s not raining? You imagine these umbrella peddlers huddled around powerful radios waiting for the very latest from the National Weather Service, or maybe sleeping in dingy hotel rooms with their arms hanging out the windows, ready to wake at the first touch of precipitation. Maybe they have a deal with the taxi companies, you think, to pick up all the left-behind umbrellas for next to nothing. The city’s economy is made up of strange, subterranean circuits that are as mysterious to you as the grids of wire and pipe under the streets. At the moment, though, you see no umbrella vendors whatsoever.
You wait fifteen minutes on the downtown platform. Everywhere you look you see the Missing Person. An announcement is made that the express is out of service. The tunnel smells of wet clothing and urine. The voice comes over the speaker again to say that the local will be delayed twenty minutes because of a fire on the tracks. You push through the crowd and ascend to the street.
It is still raining. Getting a cab is a long shot. Knots of people on every corner wave their arms at the passing traffic. You walk down Seventh to the bus stop, where some twenty souls huddle in the shelter. A bus packed with grim faces goes by and doesn’t stop.
An old woman breaks from the shelter and chases her ride. “Stop! You stop here!” She whacks the rear of the bus with her umbrella.
Another bus pulls over and disgorges passengers. The sheltered mob clutch umbrellas, purses and briefcases, prepared to fight for seats; but once the bus unloads it’s nearly empty. The driver, a massive black man with sweat rings under his arms, says “Take it easy,” and his voice commands respect.
You sit down up front. The bus lurches into traffic. Below Fortieth Street the signs on the corners change from Seventh Avenue to Fashion Avenue as you enter the garment district. Amanda’s old stomping grounds. Above Forty-second they sell women without clothes and below they sell clothes with women.
At the Thirty-fourth Street stop there is a commotion at the door. “Zact change,” the bus driver says. A young man standing by the change box is trying to work his hand into the pockets of his skin-tight Calvin Kleins. Peach Lacoste shirt, a mustache that looks like a set of plucked eyebrows. Under one arm he clutches a small portfolio and a bulky Japanese paper umbrella. He rests the umbrella against the change box. “Step aside,” the bus driver says. “People getting wet out there.”
“I know all
about
wet, big guy.”
“I just bet you do, Queenie.”
Finally he gets his change together and deposits the coins one at a time, with flourishes, and then cocks his hip at the bus driver.
“Move to the rear, Queenie,” the bus driver says. “I know you know how to do that.”
The young man walks down the aisle with burlesque movements of the hips and wrist. The bus driver turns and watches him go. When he gets all the way back, the driver picks up the Japanese umbrella he left behind. The driver waits until it is quiet and then says, “Hey, Tinker Bell. You forgot your wand.”
Everyone watching titters and guffaws. The bus hasn’t moved.
Tinker Bell poses at the back of the bus, narrowing his eyes and scowling. Then he smiles. He walks back up the aisle, putting everything he’s got into it. He reaches the front and picks up the umbrella. He raises it over his head and brings it down gently on the driver’s shoulder, as if he were bestowing knighthood. He does this three times, saying, in a cheery falsetto voice, “Turn to shit, turn to shit, turn to shit.”
At your apartment building you discover that you have no keys. They’re in the pocket of your jacket, which is back in the Department of Factual Verification. Much as you dislike your apartment, it has a bed in it. You want to sleep. You have attained that fine pitch of exhaustion which might make it possible. You’ve been thinking about that packet of instant cocoa in the kitchen,
Family Feud
on the TV. You were even thinking you might take some Dickens to bed with you. Run your mind over someone else’s pathetic misadventures for a change.
An image of yourself curled up on the sidewalk next to a heat vent with the other bums yields to the slightly less grim prospect of asking the super for the spare set of keys. The super, a huge Greek, has glared at you ever since you forgot to pay the customary tribute of cash or booze for Christmas. His wife is no less formidable, being the one who wears the mustache in the family.
Fortunately, the man who answers the door is one of the cousins, a young man whose lack of English and dubious visa status make him eager to oblige. You mime the problem and within minutes you are at your door with the spare set. An envelope with the logo of Allagash’s employer, an ad agency, is taped to the door. Inside, a note:
Coach: