All Is Vanity

by Christina Schwarz

  L

  The following day, I’d been typing furiously for three hours, describing a stout banker named, with delicious irony, Mr. Mercy. His lip curled in disdain as he strolled through Lexie’s house, rapping his knuckles against the wood paneling and calculating what the bank could expect to realize from the houses sale after foreclosure.

  “You have remarkable powers of concentration,” Simon said, startling me. My fingers bounced off the keys. “I’ve been standing here for five minutes.” He held his wrist up as if to show me the face of his watch.

  “Oh!” Quickly, I slid my mouse to the menu and clicked on save. “Did you want me to do something?” I turned sideways in my seat and smiled up at him. Although other members of the staff had swivel chairs, as an intern, I was obliged to make do with a metal folding chair.

  Simon did not smile back. He held out a copy of the most recent edition of In Your Dreams opened to the page on which Frederick Donaldson’s article began. “Yes,” he said. “I wanted you to see if he’d published any part of this piece anywhere else.”

  I pressed my palms to my cheeks to cool their sudden warmth. I had forgotten about the Donaldson story.

  From under In Your Dreams, Simon slid a copy of the January issue of Harper’s and held it open toward me. “And this,” he said, “is reprinted from Zoetrope. He even used the same title, Margaret! Did you even check LexisNexis?”

  “The same title?” I exclaimed, despite myself. “How did he think he could get away with that!”

  Simon stared at me. “The point is, he did.” He sighed. “And several writers have complained that they haven’t yet gotten their author’s agreements, incoming faxes haven’t been sorted since last week, and Nadine says you never gave her the clippings she wanted. What have you been doing?”

  The list of mindless tasks he expected me to perform conscientiously, coupled with my shame at failing to complete even this busywork, drove home the unbearable indignity of my situation. I tried to remind Simon that he’d once considered me more of an artist than a gofer. “You might recall,” I said, sitting tall in my folding chair, “that I have been writing a novel.”

  “The Vietnam thing? Margaret …” He broke off, shaking his head.

  “No,” I said, standing, pulling my pride around me like a bath towel, “another ‘thing’ entirely.”

  Simon sighed again. He closed the Harper’s and then the offending issue of In Your Dreams. “Well,” he said, finally, “maybe you should devote yourself to this book full-time. I mean, as your friend, I have mixed feelings. I don’t want to let you go, but I honestly think you need to focus on your real work.” He paused and looked at me steadily. “As an editor, of course, I have to think of the magazine.”

  It was unpleasant to be fired, and particularly unpleasant to sense that Simon had not been quite as enthusiastic as I’d supposed about my novel, but that, I reminded myself, as I marched indignantly down Lexington Avenue, had been a different book. Also, feelings of shame aside, it didn’t matter now that I was out of a job, the novel—the very venture I’d been supporting with that humiliating internship—was nearly finished. And it was, I reflected, tapping the disk on which I’d saved that day’s work, wonderful. It was rich in detail, full of tension, a scathing commentary on modern life. All it lacked was a dramatic ending.

  When I got home, I watered the plants. I washed my face and then mixed a glass of Ovaltine to sip as I worked. None of this demanded privacy; nevertheless, it was disconcerting to open the door to our closet/study and discover that I’d not been alone.

  Ted was seated at the desk. My manuscript lay before him in two stacks, the larger one print side down. My heart jumped, jostling my arm and sending Ovaltine in a wave over the lip of the glass. Somehow, although I’d been piling pages on that corner of the desk each night to prove my progress to Ted, it had never occurred to me that he might read them without my invitation.

  Ted’s, I realized with some confusion, as I hurried back to the kitchen for a sponge to wipe up the spilled milk, was the opinion that mattered. Ted’s and, it occurred to me, Letty’s. Their judgments mattered more than those of agents, more than those of editors, more than those of New York Times reviewers, more even than those of the Pulitzer Prize committee. I was puzzled that this should be so, since it contradicted much of what I’d striven for throughout the year.

  “Ted?” I whispered.

  He turned. In the currents of air his movement stirred up, two pages wafted to the floor. He was shaking his head.

  “What?” I said. “What do you think?”

  “Oh, Margaret!”

  “Tell me,” I insisted. My hands were shaking now. I was glad I’d left the Ovaltine in the kitchen. “What do you think?”

  “Well, I haven’t finished it,” he began infuriatingly.

  I clenched the doorframe with both hands. “But so far. So far,” I prompted.

  He turned back to the manuscript, riffling the edges of the turned-over pages with his thumb. “It’s very well written,” he began.

  “Yes?” I interrupted, encouraging him to continue. “Well written. Yes.”

  “Although the allusions might be a bit heavy going once in a while. Once in a while,” he repeated, holding up a hand when I groaned. “But what’s remarkable about it is these people!”

  “You mean the characters? Lexie and Miles?”

  “I mean, it’s unbelievable! In a good way. In a good way,” he added hurriedly, holding up both hands now. “It’s a great story—the expensive house, the new schools, the SUV, the Teutonic dishwasher. But the best part,” he said, “is that they have no idea how they got themselves into this disaster. That’s so realistic. That’s why the ledger is so important, Margaret. By the way, you must have used a couple of inkjets printing this out. Did you record those? And all this paper?”

  I was standing at the desk now, peeling back the pages of my “remarkable” work. I brought choice bits to Ted’s attention. How did he like this scene? Wasn’t this a clever metaphor? Had he noticed the sly way I’d structured a particular sentence so that it segued into the next chapter?

  He nodded. He appreciated. “It’s really very good, Margaret. As I said, it’s very realistic. On every other page I just wanted to jump in and warn those poor people.”

  Blood rushed to my head at these words. My ears rang, as if Ted had struck me. Stunned, I stared down at my feet, waiting for the sensation to pass. I was wearing a pair of narrow green flats with pointed toes, shoes I’d had since college. They’d seemed so right for me that I’d never been able to give them up, but instead got them resoled and polished, year after year. I noticed now, for the first time, how scuffed and misshapen they’d become.

  I’d talked myself out of vague misgivings. I’d overridden moments of shame. Finally, however, I realized the key fact. It was not Jeanette who was Letty’s enemy. It was I.

  CHAPTER 18

  Margaret

  WHILE TED SLEPT THAT NIGHT, I sat in the closet/study. I’d told him I wanted to work, but the manuscript, slumped in a slovenly heap on the desk after Ted and I had pawed through it, repulsed me. I snatched it up, and, holding it at arms length, I carried it to the kitchen and pulled the bin lined with the clear recycling bag from under the sink.

  But recycling was far too good for the hateful thing. I wanted it gone. I grabbed it back out of the bin in handfuls and marched again to the closet/study with it, the pages turned in every direction and doubled over on themselves.

  Getting the window open was more difficult than I’d expected. I had to pound the corners with the stapler and stand on the desk for leverage, but, finally, the old paint cracked, the iron weights sighed in their casements, and it slid open. The air shaft was sharply cold and smelled of mortar and something metallic. Crouching on the desk, I leaned out as far as I could without losing my balance, held my novel in both hands over the darkness, and let go.

  Having disposed of the incriminating pages, I felt cleaner, more
calm, almost as if I had jettisoned the deceit that had gone into their making. I slammed the window shut and went to wash my hands. Then I showered.

  “So I won’t be a writer,” I told myself, vigorously working my fingernails into my scalp. Lots of people weren’t writers. They found other, worthwhile things to do, work that endowed their lives with dignity, work that did not necessitate their feeding parasitically off their best friends.

  I brushed my teeth, thinking of all that I had swallowed in college, in the prep schools where I’d taught, in the very atmosphere of this city. I’d let these environments and the definitions of success they espoused poison my better nature. In the morning, I would convince Ted to leave New York for someplace more wholesome and together we would do something that did not stink of ambition. We could open a bed and breakfast in Oregon or a diner in Ohio. We could bake pies. Letty and Michael could join us. We could live on a commune and raise goats. Such modest endeavors, however, would earn nowhere near $145,685.

  In the morning, when Ted had gone to work and all that was left in the coffeemaker was an amber glaze, I checked my e-mail.

  M—

  It turns out that Lottie’s still paying for medical school. “Hematology isn’t a high-paying speciality, you know that,” she said. She’s very proud of choosing her field without concern for its earning power.

  I’d only asked for enough to help us through the immediate month, but my request set off her usual rant.

  “You know, if I’d wanted to make money, I’d have gone into ophthalmology or derm. Everyone assumes doctors are rich, but it isn’t true. Not anymore with all the managed healthcare.”

  I interrupted. “Yes, yes, Lottie, you’ve explained all that. HMOs, malpractice insurance, et cetera. I just hoped you might have some to spare just now. Something sitting around in a money market, not really doing very much.”

  “Are you talking about my wedding account? Because if you are, you should know I used that. I went on that trekking trip to Nepal. That’s where that went. Except the deposit I couldn’t get back on the dress.”

  “Rod should have paid that. I can’t believe he didn’t even have to pay for that”.

  “Letty, I’d give it to you if I had it,” she said. “I wish I had it to give.” Then she brightened, assuming her big-sister tone. “You know what I do, Letty? You might want to try this. I save my change. Every time I break a dollar, I take the change home and put it in this really nice antique apothecary’s jar I got at the flea market. Then every month I have all this extra money.”

  I wanted to explain that it was not more than she would have had had she spent the change and not broken another dollar, but who was I to claim any insight about finances?

  “But I thought you said Michael was doing well.” This, of course, was my father’s first line.

  “He is, Dad.” It’s all so predictable—his lines, my lines. This being an unprecedented situation I had hoped it might go differently.

  “Then why do you need money? And why is he sending you here to ask, instead of asking me himself?”

  Wait—let’s not forget my mother: “I knew it! I knew you just had too much stuff. You always had to have the best, didn’t you?”

  “When, Mother? What are you talking about?”

  “In home ec? You had to have the silk? When I told you the rayon. And the rayon had the better pattern—you even said that at the time—‘I wish I could get this pattern in the silk,’ you said.”

  “I’d earned the money, Mother. I’d saved it myself.”

  “There were better things to spend it on.”

  “Better than a prom dress?”

  “When you don’t go to the prom, I’d say yes.”

  “Letty,” my father said, “you just bring your account balances, your credit card statements, all that type of thing over here. I’ll get you kids sorted out.”

  “Louie, she doesn’t want to show you her bills, for heavens sake. She’s a grown woman. What do you needy Letty? Five thousand? Fifty-five hundred? Just write her a check, Louie. We should be happy we have it to share with our kids. Although, Lottie would never ask for money.”

  “Lottie asked to go to medical school,” I pointed out.

  “That was different. That was education. Teach a man to fish,” my father said.

  “Never mind, Dad,” I said. “It’s not such a big deal. We don’t really need it. Michael’s doing really well, you know.”

  “Are you sure?” my mother asked.

  I could see they were relieved. It’s not the money. I’m sure they could easily spare five thousand dollars. But they don’t know if giving it to me is right. Are they helping or spoiling me? Hard as they try—and often I suspect they aren’t trying at all—I will always be a child to them.

  Obviously, Michael’s mother can’t help us. We’ve been sending her checks since 1989. She already subsists on tuna and toast. When we’re bankrupt, it’ll just be the toast.

  L

  I opened the window again. I knelt on the desk and squinted down at the pages glowing white and sharp-edged in the grayish indistinguishable matter that lined the bottom of the air shaft. I might be able to dispose of the evidence of my guilt, but this did nothing for Letty. And then, as I hovered over that filthy abyss in despair, inspiration slalomed, sure and swift as a cab down Tenth Avenue, into my consciousness. Why not use Lexie’s story to redress both my obscurity and Letty’s poverty? Struck by the perfect, circular perfection of this plan, I nearly lost my balance. If I finished the novel, if the novel was as good as I suspected it might be, as good as Ted, an extremely discriminating reader, said it was, I could give my advance to Letty! Ted would understand. My interest, after all, had never been financial gain.

  Luckily, pitching a manuscript into an air shaft, while a satisfyingly dramatic gesture, didn’t mean what it would have in an age before computers. I opened my laptop and set to work to fix all of Letty’s problems by eloquently compounding Lexie’s in the final chapters of The Rise and Fall of Lexie Langtree Smith.

  Throughout the course of that day, I scarcely left my desk, and each time I did, a compelling idea or the perfect word tugged me back within minutes. When I grew hungry, which in earlier days would have sent me scurrying to the gourmet market or the A&P, likely both, for a diversionary half hour, I spread sour cream on saltines to simulate herring and carried a plateful back to my desk. By seven-thirty, when Ted got home, I was in the middle of a scene in which Lexie’s house, the quintessential symbol of the new life she and Miles had spent so hard to create, burned to the ground after the cord of the six-slice, chrome-plated Italian toaster, having been stepped on so often during it’s sojourn on the living room floor during the kitchen renovations, frayed and sparked.

  During the succeeding days I regained the intense focus I remembered from my childhood. Now that I was writing with a purpose beyond my own aggrandizement, I was able to devote a large portion of my brain, which had previously been occupied only by anticipation of critical and social reaction, to telling a good story, and my novel proceeded so quickly it seemed to sheet off the screen like a heavy rain off a roof. I only needed to catch the pages as they fell from the printer and add them to the pile. Even without Letty’s sketches, I found I could envision scenes and tap my way through the course of the action. I was at long last a writer, although I could not spare the time or the attention to enjoy the role.

  In two weeks, I was revising. By the end of the third week, I’d written something magnificent. A few scenes needed polishing; a couple of secondary characters needed sharpening; some of the language could have been more precise; but overall, it was a fantastic novel.

  I’d wanted to wait until the book was sold, until the check was in my hand, before I offered Letty the money, but it seemed suddenly crucial to let her know there was hope—that it was, in fact, nearly certain that if she could hold on a little longer, she would be able to pay her debts. Some of them, anyway. Most of them? All of them? And then some?
Sally Sternforth had bought a co-op on Carnegie Hill with her advance. I’d heard of people getting half a million dollars for their first novels. Why not me?

  “Can you hear me?” I asked, after I’d delivered the gist of my news. Letty was on her cell phone again, edging her way through Mulholland Pass on the 405. Twice so far I’d found myself talking to dead air and had to wait for her to call me back.

  “I’m not sure. Did you say your book was done? You finished it? Let me in, damn it! Sorry. Lane change.”

  “Yes, and, as I said, it’s much better than I expected it to be,” I repeated modestly, in case the mountains had cut this off earlier. With the hand that was not holding the receiver, I turned over random pages of my manuscript, admiring sentences here and there.

  “Margaret, I’m so happy for you.”

  “But, Letty,” I said, “you’re not understanding me. This is good for both of us.” And again I pressed home the prospect I’d offered her. After she finally understood that I was presenting her with my advance, we were cut off and then, when she called back, we had to slog through all the “Margaret, I can’t let you do that”s and the “This is incredibly generous of you, but no”s. It was tedious, but it had to be done. And, finally, she had to agree. She had no other options.

  “It might take us a long time, you know, to pay you back,” she said.

  “Letty, you don’t need to pay me back. What’s mine is yours. And, really, I owe you. You’ve helped me more than you realize with this book.” I was about to confess the nefarious means by which the novel had taken shape, when the connection severed again. If she tried to call me back, she didn’t get through, and I made no such attempt. She would read everything soon enough.