Three-Martini Lunch

by Suzanne Rindell

  Part of the reason for this is because on party nights I rarely felt poor; I felt young and lucky and full of potential, like the ingénue in a magazine serial who’d come to take on the city as a single girl, only instead of imagining myself engaged to a swell young businessman by the story’s end I imagined myself one day being promoted to editor, which was my true dream. There was certainly something very electric about those evenings. Even now I get a little impressed when I picture myself attending those parties, those restaurants and private clubs and wealthy people’s apartments that were all such a far cry from my life in Indiana. The men were all artfully unshaven and the women were all very tanned or else very pale; there were practically none who were a normal color in between. The banquet rooms were wallpapered in Oriental landscape patterns and had fashionably speckled wall-to-wall carpeting that made your ankles wobble just the tiniest bit if you were wearing ladies’ pumps. I found it all very exotic. As far as the famous literary people went, sometimes when the party was very good or the host was very important you would spot one or two here and there, but you usually didn’t get to talk to them. The big-name authors were often flanked by their editors, and their agents, too, if they had them. You’d see them standing off in a corner holding a drink while either their editor or their agent murmured something in a low tone. No one dared cut in on them and it was difficult to eavesdrop. Of course all this only heightened the mystique. The editor would talk and at regular intervals the big-name author would nod with a glazed, far-off look and a clenched jaw and he would appear very intellectual about whatever it was that was being said.

  No matter how many of these soirees I attended, each time I decided to go to another I was always very nervous and I routinely spent a great deal of time picking out my outfit the day before. This was silly because usually as soon as you mingled about and talked to people you realized they were nervous, too, and if we were smart we could have all just made a mutual pact to be easier with one another and not to get so worked up about things. People seemed more relaxed after their second or third drink but if you were to observe closely you would see it wasn’t really a question of them being more at ease so much as it was a question of the volume being turned up more loudly on their nervous laughter, which made them sound like they were having the time of their lives but also made them sound slightly maniacal, like mental patients wandering around a carnival.

  Once I became a veteran of these parties, I noticed there were really only two main types of personalities: Nerves brought out eager comedy in some and cattiness in others. Just like me, most of the people at the parties were employed as somebody’s secretary or else somebody’s assistant and had come hoping to rub elbows with the giants of the literary world. If you do the math in this equation you are destined to realize that more often than not the eventual result of any given party turns out to be a bunch of people’s secretaries meeting a bunch of other people’s secretaries, and all too often that really was what it boiled down to. That fact alone should take some of the glamour out of my memories but somehow it doesn’t. I suppose this is because a handful of those assistants went on to become important editors with a lot of power and you can see how people take it when you drop into the conversation that you met the important editor way back when.

  What I’m getting at is that publishing is quite a heady business. If you aren’t careful, then you can let the sparkle of a certain famous name or the memory of holding a glass of champagne on a starlit terrace with a lovely view of the park wipe out all the long hours spent writing reader’s reports in your room with its one small window pointed into an air shaft while your nylons dried on the radiator and you ate beans on toast and wished you could afford a few eggs or even a can of sardines to go with it.

  In any case, at that time I was over the moon to have any job at all, but especially one in publishing. It was what I had set my sights on and the entire reason I’d moved to New York. Most jobs are gotten by referral and when it comes to publishing houses this is especially true. I was lucky enough to arrive at the offices of Torchon & Lyle with a letter of introduction in hand from one of their former senior editors, and I was very aware this was an extremely unusual situation—and therefore an extremely fortunate situation—for a girl from Indiana to have fallen into her lap.

  A man named Mr. Hightower referred me to Torchon & Lyle. Mr. Hightower was a Fort Wayne native, a lifelong bachelor who had left his publishing career in New York in order to care for his ailing mother. I can’t remember precisely what his mother had; cancer of the pancreas, I think it was. Once he’d gotten settled back into life in Indiana, Mr. Hightower was invited to teach a few seminars on popular literature at the local women’s college, and this was how I made his acquaintance: I was his student.

  I took his seminar in the fall of my senior year, and then I took it again in the spring for no credit at all. I was not his only repeat student, though I am certain I’m the only one who retook the course based on my fascination with the subject. Despite the fact he’d never married—or perhaps because of it—Mr. Hightower was what was referred to as a ladies’ man, and as it was a ladies’ college, I don’t think I’m jumping to conclusions when I say this motivated a surge in class enrollment. In those days it wasn’t uncommon for girls to have crushes on men twice their age. We all pictured riding off into the sunset with a middle-aged Clark Gable, I suppose. In any case, the young ladies of my college were taken with his debonair, middle-aged ways, with his steely blue eyes and the white streaks of hair just over his temples. I suppose he was good-looking in a certain fashion . . . but I wasn’t so much enraptured with his looks as I was the stories he told about working in the publishing business.

  Mr. Hightower told marvelous stories. Most of them involved a great deal of martinis with this-or-that famous author, and ended with him outsmarting somebody in a business deal. But the stories I liked best—the stories for which I repeated the seminar—were always about finding a gem of a manuscript in the unsolicited submission pile. According to Mr. Hightower, he had been responsible for publishing several unknown writers who later went on to become great authors.

  It occurred to me that something downright magical had happened when Mr. Hightower discovered these authors. And then, not too long after that, a little voice inside me said, “I could do that!” I suppose that’s awfully cocky of me to think, but my gut feeling was that I could do it, if given the chance. The sheer notion of reading a book before it was a book made me dizzy with excitement, and I realized I ought to follow where this feeling might lead. I began to linger after class, asking Mr. Hightower more and more questions about his publishing days.

  The funny thing about people is that when you take a special interest in something they know all about, they take a special interest in you. Mr. Hightower answered my questions with enthusiasm; his supply of anecdotes seemed never-ending, and he was happy to share them. Occasionally when our conversations threatened to carry on long after class had ended we adjourned to the student coffeehouse, where Mr. Hightower took off his cuff links and rolled up his shirtsleeves, as though to signify that now we were really going to get down to business. He often loosened his tie and leaned his elbows on the table and spoke in deep, confiding tones. There were whispers from the tables all around us and looking back on it now I see it was very likely the entire campus believed we were having an affair.

  I don’t know what Mr. Hightower thought of me as far as the prospect of an affair was concerned, but as for myself I was completely naïve to the idea. In those days I was still very ignorant about most things having to do with sex. The truth was the only thing I was conscious of wanting from Mr. Hightower was his expertise on all the major publishing houses in New York, and on discovering good writers and about becoming a successful editor. As the semester wound down and graduation drew near, I informed Mr. Hightower of my plans to go East in order to try my own hand at publishing. I remember it was after class on a Friday,
following his last lecture of the year. I worked up my nerve to tell him and when I did, he looked at me with surprise, then shrugged.

  “I think that’s a fine idea, Eden,” he said, packing up his things. “A very fine idea, indeed. Of course you know Rome wasn’t built in a day. You’ll have to start at the bottom and prove yourself. But having said that, I think you’d make a fine editor—someday. Women of your generation are doing all kinds of surprising things.” He stopped packing up his briefcase and patted me on the shoulder and looked at me with glassy eyes and for the first time the realization dawned on me that he would be sorry to see me go. While plenty of girls had crushes on him, I don’t suppose there were that many other students who’d taken as strong an interest as I had in his professional life, and when I left Fort Wayne there would be one less inquisitive thread tying his past to his present.

  He was still holding my shoulder when his gaze turned thoughtful. His eyes roved slowly over the entirety of my person, from my carefully combed ponytail to my blouse to my black wool pencil skirt, registering each in turn. His upper lip twitched faintly and his hand involuntarily squeezed my shoulder. He moved as though to say something. But just as abruptly as the impulse took hold, he abandoned it; he stopped himself short and relinquished his grip. “Ah, to be young again,” he finally said in a resigned, trite voice, sighing and returning his attention to the buckle on his briefcase. He looked at me one more time as he made his way out the classroom door and gave a little strange half-smile of defeat.

  “Tell you what,” he said, mashing a slate-gray fedora down on his head. “You’ve been a sterling student. I’ll write you a letter of introduction. That ought to help you get your foot in the door to start.”

  The next time I saw Mr. Hightower it was in the stadium, over an expanse of green lawn steaming with the heat of high noon, just after the last graduation speech had been given and the caps had been thrown in the air. The initial hullabaloo had started to break up and all the parents had begun to mill about, each family hollering out the name of their newly-anointed alumna. I turned my head and saw Mr. Hightower striding towards me with a businesslike expression etched into his distinguished features. I was expecting an envelope containing the letter of introduction he had promised, and was surprised when he handed me not one but two.

  “I took the liberty of writing one in the name of Eden Katz, and one in the name of Eden Collins.”

  I squinted into the sun. My surprised hands accepted the envelopes and turned them over, puzzled. A daunting insecurity dimly formed itself in my brain. Was I so unmemorable a student that my professor had never been sure of my name? I looked up at Mr. Hightower with a confused smile.

  “It was the best approximation I could think of,” he said, as though that explained it.

  “Oh!” I murmured, still not understanding but wanting to. I continued to look at him with wide eyes. I must’ve looked pretty stupid about it all because he seemed to read the bafflement on my face. My parents, who had been standing by my side just moments before Mr. Hightower’s arrival, were now at least ten paces away from us and were busily chatting with Dolly Worthington’s folks. He gave them a nervous glance, then leaned in and lowered his voice.

  “Publishing is a pretty friendly business to . . . all types,” Mr. Hightower confided. “But even so, some circles are friendlier than others and with the ones that aren’t, you’ll want to play your cards right.”

  “Oh,” I said softly, my stomach still a bit uneasy from the surprise of it. Knee-jerk decorum compelled me to say thank you but I was having trouble getting the words to come out. “Oh, I see,” was all I could seem to muster. I stared down at the envelopes in my hands.

  “Now, if you take one of those letters—maybe the one written in the name of ‘Collins’ would be better in this instance—over to Torchon and Lyle, where I used to be a senior editor, well, then my name should open some doors for you,” Mr. Hightower instructed. “Got that? Torchon and Lyle—they’re in the book, of course. And be sure to ask if you can see Miss Everett, on the fifth floor. She’s in charge of hiring all the secretaries and the readers, and she’s liable to look out for anyone I’d recommend.”

  • • •

  As it turned out, graduation day was the last time I saw Mr. Hightower. Once my parents had joined our conversation, he shook their hands and complimented them for having raised such a studious, hardworking daughter with such lofty ambitions. “Let me assure you, you’ve done a wonderful job, Mr. and Mrs. Katz.” He didn’t say another word about the two letters of introduction and I was nearly convinced I’d hallucinated the whole conversation until I got home later that evening and pulled both envelopes out of my purse.

  I won’t bore you with the details of the summer I spent working as a clerk at the five-and-dime to save up for the Greyhound ticket that eventually took me the distance from Fort Wayne to New York. A few months after graduation, I found myself sitting in Miss Everett’s office at Torchon & Lyle. I watched as she lit a cigarette, unfolded a sheaf of typewritten paper and held it away from her face, almost at arm’s length, and proceeded to move her eyes over it with a careful, clinical sort of interest. I’d handed her my résumé, and one of the letters. Despite Mr. Hightower’s enigmatic admonishments, I’d decided I would only use one of them.

  “Eden Katz. How exotic. Katz . . . that’s not German, is it?”

  “Oh. Well . . . my grandparents came over from Vienna.” There was a long pause. “Before both wars,” I added. “I suppose it was sometime around 1910.”

  “I see. And you say Horatio is a . . . friend? . . . mentor? . . . of yours?” she asked. There was a cool lilt in everything Miss Everett said, a lilt that in my mind seemed somehow linked to the ash-blond tint of her poodle-cut hair. I later found out the tint came from a bottle and the lilt had been achieved by indirectly memorizing lines from Ingrid Bergman pictures.

  “Horatio?” I repeated, peering around the office. I was having trouble concentrating. My head was still spinning with the euphoric realization that I had finally made it through the doors of a publishing house, and my knees were still quivering from the elevator ride up to the fifth floor.

  Her lips moved to form a thin, stabbing sort of smile. “Horatio Hightower? The man who was kind enough to write this letter for you?”

  I began to put two and two together as I recalled the name stenciled on Mr. Hightower’s briefcase in gold lettering. Mr. H. I. Hightower. Aha! So that’s what the first H stood for. “Oh!” I said aloud. “Oh yes, of course—Mr. Hightower! He taught a seminar on popular literature at my college, you see, and he has been very encouraging ever since I told him about my interest in publishing. He’s a wonderful professor.” Miss Everett gave me a look. There was something vaguely dubious in it, something that puzzled me.

  “Can you type?”

  “Why, yes . . . I think I was up to eighty words per minute the last time someone timed me.”

  “Take shorthand?”

  “Yes; my mother made me take a summer course.”

  “That was very prudent of her,” Miss Everett said. She smiled that same thin-lipped stabbing smile and the word implacable sprang into my head and floated up invisibly between us. There was an oscillating fan sitting upon the bookshelf behind her. Every time the fan pivoted in Miss Everett’s direction, the papers on her desk fluttered under their paperweights but not a single curl of ash-blond hair wavered from the confines of her carefully pinned-up hairdo. I suspected a rather large quantity of Aqua Net had been involved in their arrangement. She discreetly exhaled a breath of smoke from her cigarette and, with a gesture that struck me as very familiar and well practiced, delicately fished a stray filament of tobacco from the tip of her tongue. Then she leaned back in her swiveling chair and regarded me with an air of cold calculation. Her silence seemed to carry on forever, but I’m sure in reality it was only seconds before a loud rap sounded at the door and a
young girl rushed in with a slip of paper in her hand and a pencil tucked over her ear.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, but Mr. Pierce said I was to deliver this phone message to you immediately.” The girl held out the slip of paper. Miss Everett rose from her chair and snatched the paper away from the girl with a frown.

  She eyed the message. “Of course he found a way out of that lunch.” She read from the note in a high, mimicking voice. “‘Would you mind terribly going in his stead?’ Hmph. Little surprise. I should’ve planned for it from the start.” She touched a hand to her shellacked curls and then looked at me as though she had forgotten I was in the room. “Tell me, dear, have you gone to lunch with many writers?” she asked. There wasn’t much question in it; she already knew the answer.

  I shook my head.

  “Well, don’t if you can help it. Most of them are either fools or madmen.”

  I took this as an attempt at humor, and forced a little laugh. I watched as she pulled her gloves on and gathered up her purse. As Miss Everett neared the open door, she stopped. She turned and gave me one last icy evaluation.