Me Times Three

by Alex Witchel

And she did. That one moment may have been the closest we’d been all through Paul’s illness. We had each kept praying that the illegal pills or the empathetic priest or the tooth fairy would step in and save him. We were neither one of us prepared for this moment.

  “How’s Marie?” I asked.

  “Okay, considering. She’s very strong.”

  “And his dad?”

  “Not so good.”

  I didn’t ask how much he knew. It didn’t seem to matter.

  “I have to think awhile, Sally. Let me call you back. But if there’s anything you need, just call me. Okay?”

  I put the phone down. I couldn’t seem to feel anything. I tried to think about Paul, what it had been like before he died, how he looked and how he felt. But my mind wouldn’t let me. I tried picturing the funeral instead. It would be at the church we had been to together, what seemed like a hundred years ago. I would finally meet Marie, who would sob and glare in her toeless shoes. And all the other agents, who’d sent get-well flowers and muffins, would be there, air-kissing each other on their way out to dinner with clients. Why waste the night?

  No, I decided. I didn’t think I could stand one minute of it. I would not go, after all. The only person I wanted to see wouldn’t be there. He was gone.

  I went home that night and got right into bed. Mark called, at one point, sounding tentative. I had completely forgotten about him. Though he tried to keep his voice casual, I could tell he was worried—was he crazy, or had we not had the most wonderful night together? In the midst of sobbing I told him what had happened, and he offered to come right over. I thanked him but said no. I needed to be alone. He said he understood, that I should call when I was ready. I thought it best not to mention I might never be.

  The following week, I got to the office early each day, earlier than Susie. I read someplace that people who are trying to overcome addictions are often assigned chores in order to help them center themselves, to prove that they can do simple things, like make the bed or take out the garbage. That strategy made sense, too, I thought, for people who were grieving. I thought about Paul as often as I tried not to think about him. He was everywhere.

  Sally called. The funeral Mass was perfect, she said. There were tons of flowers, but mine—long-stemmed peach-colored roses, Paul’s favorite—were especially beautiful. The church was packed, and the service was moving. Paul would have been pleased.

  I found that hard to believe, but then again, maybe it was true. Sally had said he was genuinely at peace when he died, surrounded by the nuns who had nursed him and the priest who had administered the last rites. In the end, his searching had led him back to exactly who he was when he started. That is who he had chosen to be.

  Wednesday afternoon, I got a call from Peter Garber, the very young, very hot editor of Manhattan Week, whom everyone had been writing about recently. He told me how much he had liked Mark’s Philadelphia piece and wanted it for his travel issue, but that he couldn’t afford to outbid Condé Nast. “I found it to be extremely well edited, and Mark said that was your doing,” he said.

  “Well, when you’re editing someone like Mark Lewis, it’s hard to look bad,” I answered, flattered that someone like Peter Garber thought I had done a good job.

  “That may be, but I was wondering if you’d like to come in and talk. We have a few positions to fill here. I thought you might be interested.”

  Might be? “That sounds great, I’d love to,” I said as sedately as I could, arranging a time the following week, my heart thumping wildly. Could it one day be possible to live life without Susie Schein?

  I wanted to thank Mark. We hadn’t spoken in almost a week, though I had left him a message one afternoon when I knew he was out seeing his son, saying I would call soon. He was in Chicago now, trying to bring his divorce settlement to an end. I called his hotel and left a message, and he called back later that night, when I was already in bed, reading magazines. “It’s so good to hear from you,” I exclaimed. “I wanted to call you again today, but I didn’t want to bother you.”

  “Bother me,” he said. “I’m seeing too much of my parents and my almost-ex-wife, closing down the apartment we kept here and deciding who gets the Baccarat Champagne flutes. I’d give anything to be back in New York.”

  “Why would she want Champagne flutes if she doesn’t like to drink?” I asked.

  “It’s not that logical.”

  “Are you going to let her have them?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You know, a friend of mine who’s a divorce lawyer once told me that most people don’t want half the things they ask for—they just don’t want the other person to have them.”

  “Now she’s definitely not getting them.” He laughed. “Tell me about New York. Tell me how you’ve been feeling. Tell me everything.”

  I did. We talked for almost two hours, much of it about Paul. At one point, he put me on hold to order room service. I had helped him choose his dinner (Caesar salad; sirloin, rare), and I told him I’d never had a Caesar salad. “I don’t like the idea of it,” I said. “Raw eggs and anchovies. How could that be good?”

  “You should try it,” he said. “I think you’d like it.”

  “Yick.” I poured a drink, and we resumed our conversation until, finally, it was midnight.

  “Can I call you again tomorrow?” he asked.

  “You’d better,” I said, then hung up feeling excited, as if I’d just seen both him and Paul. It took me a while to quiet down and fall asleep.

  True to his word, he called the next day, and the day after that and the day after that. One night he asked what I was eating.

  I was mortified. “How did you know I was eating?”

  “I can hear you. What is it?”

  I decided to tell the truth. “Heinz beans out of the can,” I said. “Still want to talk to me?”

  He laughed. “That’s disgusting. Why don’t you heat them up?”

  “I was too hungry.”

  Then he told me that he had discovered this great method of microwaving bacon, which I thought was more disgusting than eating beans from a can, so we were even.

  These conversations were lifesavers. I must have reached for the phone to call Paul fifty times a day, and whenever I was in my Rolodex and passed by his card, I touched it, looked at it, and left it in its place. If I left it there long enough, maybe he’d come back. Sally called a few times, but past “hello” there wasn’t much to say. I never felt I was getting through to her, never puncturing her polite veneer. One of the things I had discussed with Mark was how badly I felt about Sally. She had willingly paid every debt that Paul had incurred—and they were sizable, from the flowers to the drugs. She had replaced her rugs and was repainting her apartment. But she had no one to share it with. I so hoped that she would meet someone, soon, who could make her happy without exacting such a terrible price. I wished I could be more of a comfort to her. And I secretly wished that she could be more of a comfort to me.

  The meeting with Peter Garber went well. He seemed to be about my age, and he was small, scarcely taller than me. He was teenybopper cute, with long hair flopping into his eyes and a big, guffawing laugh that never managed to detract from how piercingly intelligent his questions were. He asked a lot of them, and seemed riveted by my every answer. He was the kind of editor who made you want to get it right, be smart, have a good idea. Unlike Susie, he seemed decisive, determined, and unafraid.

  He asked me to prepare some story ideas, and we arranged another meeting for the following week. “Do you have any clips from the writing you’ve done?” he asked as I was getting ready to go.

  “Um, sure,” I said hesitantly. I handed him the Nazi hunter piece and the Idina Lhasa interview.

  “That’s all you’ve written?” he asked.

  I flushed, embarrassed. “Well, no, I’ve written a ton of kids’ stories, sort of fairy tales, but nothing you’d want to see.”

  “You’re wrong. I would want to se
e them,” he said. “Bring them with you.”

  I nodded, trying to figure how much typing and copying it would take for me to get them together. More important, I needed to focus on the story ideas.

  “I’ll be interested to see what you come up with,” Mark said when we spoke that night, and after we finished talking I stayed up until I had twenty ideas on paper. The next morning, I still liked ten of them. I loved the way it felt to experiment, to try anything. It was the opposite of what I’d been told to do at Jolie!, where each feature was prescribed at a certain length for a certain reason, and where the photo was the real draw of any feature, be it fashion or celebrity. I liked the prospect of a place that was about words first.

  I decided not to tell Mark my ideas until after the meeting, and he agreed. “Your ideas are your currency,” he said. “You have the skills to do the line-editing part of the job, but ideas in magazines are the most important thing. This is next week?”

  “Yes. Will you be back by then?” I asked.

  “Probably not,” he said. “It’s taking longer than I thought. Which is bad news, because I’m going to have to move out of the hotel and into my mother’s apartment. I can’t ask the magazine to keep paying for it. I’ve done plenty of work while I’m here, but it wouldn’t be right.”

  “What’s taking so long? You’re not moving back there after all, are you?” I felt strangled, just saying the words. I had conveniently forgotten that possibility.

  “Divorces usually do take so long, but when you’re divorcing a tax lawyer and her former boss is your father, they take even longer,” he said. “But no, I’m not moving back here, thank God. The good news is that she’s decided to stay in New York. She doesn’t want to live here with her parents butting into her life any more than I want mine hanging over me. So, all things considered, it’s going well. I think if I can last another week or so, I’ll be back and done with it for good.”

  I was more relieved than I expected to be. I knew that just because he was getting divorced didn’t mean he was necessarily ready to fall madly in love with me, either. Or vice versa. But I liked him. I really did. And maybe my mother would turn out to be right: Maybe I would get involved and it wouldn’t last forever. Maybe it would be a month. Or a year. Was that so terrible? It was like the perfect circle in the second-grade story. Because I couldn’t make one, I shut out an entire art form. Was I going to do the same thing with men? Certainly, no one was going to appear at my door vacuum-packed with a lifetime warranty.

  But still. What if he betrayed me?

  What if he didn’t?

  By the following week, my ideas list had grown to twenty-five. I knew it was overkill, but I couldn’t help myself. I met Peter Garber at the Manhattan Week office, which was filled with people my age running around in jeans, holding huge cups of coffee as if they were pulling all-nighters for finals. Everyone seemed to be the tiniest bit scared of him, and he seemed to enjoy that the tiniest bit, too. Observing only a few of his conversations with staff members before we left for lunch, I could see that blood was also spilt here, but the denouement was different than at Jolie! At the end of the drama, there was actually something to read.

  We sat in the restaurant eating omelets, and he listened carefully to each idea. He nodded a lot. He asked questions. As I was getting up to leave, he asked me for my clips. I half-winced, and handed over a folder that included ten fairy tales. He told me he’d call. I left feeling doubtful and hopeful in equal measure.

  That night, I told Mark everything. I started at the beginning of the meeting and the top of the list and went through every detail.

  “Great,” he repeated throughout the story. “That’s great.” We spoke about some ideas at length, and he told me about his own experiences working with Peter at other magazines, before Manhattan Week. I got lots of details. By the time Peter called back the next day, I felt as if I had known him forever.

  He said that though he had initially intended to offer me the job of Arts Editor, my experience at Jolie! hadn’t sufficiently prepared me for the responsibility of putting out a weekly. Would I accept an associate editor position instead?

  I didn’t feel disappointed at all. I liked that he told me what he thought, without dressing it up. I told him I would love to come—as long as it didn’t mean taking a cut in pay. It didn’t. I got a slight raise. Not enough to get rid of my lovely roommate, but better than nothing. I decided I would rather be paid badly in a place where I could learn than stay in a place where all I could do was fight. And lose.

  “I also liked your fairy tales,” he said, much to my surprise. “I was thinking that we could use them in some way to comment about New York. As an occasional column sort of thing.”

  “Really?” I couldn’t believe it. A high school conception of a suburban mom’s pastime had turned into an actual career? Life was too funny. “Sure,” I said. “We’ll figure it out.”

  As soon as I hung up, I went straight to Susie’s office.

  “Can I talk to you?” I asked from the doorway.

  She squinted at me from her computer.

  “Can’t it wait?” she asked impatiently.

  “No,” I said.

  She seemed taken aback. I came in, closed the door behind me, and sat down. The slightest bit of alarm registered on her face, but she folded her arms in front of her and stiffened against the back of her chair.

  “Manhattan Week has offered me a job, and I’ve decided to take it.”

  She stared, her chin jutting out against me.

  “I feel it’s time for me to be exposed to a world other than women’s magazines,” I went on. “It’s been a great experience, but—”

  “Fine.” Her tone was flat.

  “Of course I’ll give you two weeks’ notice,” I said hurriedly. “Or three, if you need it. I don’t want to leave you in the lurch closing next month’s issue.”

  She focused her eyes on mine. They were as dead as her voice. “In my experience,” she said, “I have found that giving too much notice is never a good idea. Your heart won’t be in it, and neither will ours. What’s today? Tuesday? Why don’t we say Friday is your last day and leave it at that? That way you can turn your full attention where you want it to be.”

  I knew perfectly well that she was trying to belittle me and my position by showing me that even with three days’ notice she could close the new issue all by herself, and that nothing I could contribute would be of any importance. But all I felt was relief.

  I nodded. “You’re right,” I said. “Thanks for being so understanding.”

  She looked surprised. All she’d had to say was “thank you” and use me to finish the next issue the right way, and she would have preserved one shred of dignity for each of us. Fuck her.

  “I’ll speak to payroll and call the writers and let them know they’ll be working directly with you,” I said. Her face was alarmingly white. “Should I see Miss Belladonna, or will you let her know?”

  “I’ll speak to her,” she said quickly.

  “I’m sure you will,” I said sharply.

  She looked up at me as I stood, but said nothing. Her face had the same hardened expression as when Mark had pulled his piece.

  “Thank you, Susie,” I said. “I know this launch hasn’t been easy, but I appreciate having been part of it.”

  She nodded, saying nothing.

  I turned and left. Back in my office, I started to pack.

  Mark was as excited as I was. “This will be so great for you,” he said. He praised Peter Garber to the heavens, praised the magazine, praised what a great town New York was and how many story ideas it held. He was coming home the following Friday. And to celebrate my new job, he said, he’d like to take me out to dinner. Had I ever been to the Trustees Dining Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

  No, I hadn’t.

  I’d love it, he assured me. We’d meet at the main entrance and go from there. But, he added, we would speak before then. Many times.


  The day I left Jolie! was hard. Neither Miss Belladonna nor Susie bothered to say goodbye. But after lunch, the assistants came in to give me a scarf they had pitched in for, and they all gave me their phone numbers, in case something opened up at the new place. I promised I would call.

  I actually went to the fashion closet to see if I could find Buffy Parks, maybe give her a big wet kiss to remember me by, but she was in Cabo San Lucas on a shoot. She had dysentery, one of the girls told me with a giggle. Too bad.

  Pimm and Coco and Pascal took me for drinks to the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis Hotel. After two martinis Pascal left, kissing the air near both my cheeks. Pimm teared up behind her Coke-bottle glasses but pulled it together—she was off for yet another wedding-dress fitting.

  I looked at Coco. “So?” I asked. “Who’s the gentleman du jour?”

  “Remember the banker from Nell’s?” she asked. “He’s going back to London for good, so we’re meeting tonight for a goodbye drink. Oh, look. That’s him now.”

  I turned and saw a tall, pasty-faced boy in an expensive suit, holding a cigarette between his third and fourth fingers. When I said hi, he barely acknowledged me, and I could see Coco, lips parted, leaning across the table, offering her cleavage by way of greeting. I waved goodbye, and she winked. I knew I would see her again soon. She was going to be my roommate at Pimm’s Southampton wedding.

  I walked down Fifth Avenue, past Jolie!’s building. It was late enough for the front entrance to be closed, so I went to the side, stepping in to see if the night doorman was there. He looked up from his newspaper, and when he saw it was me, he waved. I thought about telling him that this was it, that my first job in New York was over and I wouldn’t be coming here anymore. But I liked the idea of him expecting me, wondering where that girl was, the one who always worked late, with the odd assortment of fellows coming and going at the side entrance.

  “ ’Night,” he called out. “Have a good weekend now.”

  My eyes filled. “Thank you,” I said, waving back. “You too.”

  From the moment I walked into Manhattan Week, it felt like an adrenaline shot. The pace of a weekly was lightning-fast, and the volume of mail alone required two assistants just to open it. I learned the computer system, went to meetings, made calls. We agreed to start my column in the fall so that I could get my bearings as an editor first.