The assistants would pitch story ideas to their bosses, and they’d get no response. They’d pitch more ideas to their bosses and still would get nowhere. One of the assistants related that she had written up a pitch and had unwisely circumvented her boss by giving it directly to Art Cooper—a bad idea that backfired in a very bad way. The easiest (only?) way into the magazine as a female writer seemed to be the celebrity profile, fitness-based pieces, or else personal essays about your romantic life.
On one very hot afternoon in Bryant Park, when three of us were sitting in the beautiful green chairs, tackling our very large sandwiches, a pregnant woman passed by us.
“Remind me never to be pregnant in the summer,” said the first assistant. The pregnant woman did look quite uncomfortable. She was wearing a black dress.
“You have to make sure you plan it right,” said the second assistant. “The best time to have a baby is in the late fall.”
I was interested to learn that other young women had given this much thought to the then (to me) seemingly abstract ideas of pregnancy and birth. I mean, I suppose I did picture myself as a parent to some unimaginable infant in some ethereal future realm, but five, ten, fifteen years stretched out in front of me like some other kind of eternity.
“I wonder if I’ll ever have a baby,” said the first assistant. “Sometimes I don’t think it will ever happen for me.”
“All I want,” said the second assistant distantly, “is for someone to save me.”
Not that I was in any way noble, but dreams of rescue had never actually occurred to me. I was from the blank soybean fields of central Ohio or the rusted factories up north—take your pick; we didn’t think that way. We couldn’t afford to. I’d just always felt that everything was up to you alone. You assumed responsibility for yourself. You were in charge of your own happiness. These women were smart and independent people, but they were giving me a glimpse into a somewhat unhappy future that I was determined would not become mine.
I PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE BEEN A MORE INACTIVE DATER THAN I WAS. In general, I found dates tedious and boring, and I was never as astonished by the guys as they seemed to think I should have been. Date situations, once I was out of college, often seemed to occur in restaurants (remember when they used to let you smoke in restaurants?), and in my view, there wasn’t much to like about the whole date-in-a-restaurant contrivance: the hard chairs, the little stage set of the restaurant, the asymmetrical-power aspect of the guy’s paying for the meal (not that I was going to pay; I never had any money), the forced camaraderie, the fake heart-to-heart. Let’s talk. The fiction of getting to know each other. The lie of Who are you? How could you possibly answer that, when you were only in your twenties (or any age, really), and you didn’t even know who “you” were?
What was closer to the truth: Let’s see if you can accept my self-inventions. And thinking about these guys’ self-inventions was never a great use of my time.
In college, I had briefly gone out with a slightly older guy who lived in Cleveland with his parents; sometimes he would make the stupendously dull five-hour drive to see me at school, although I’m not even sure why he bothered—mostly he’d just sit in my dorm room and listen to the CDs he’d brought. He’d slip on his headphones, close his eyes, and he was off, pantomiming drums; sometimes you’d get the odd strike on a phantom cymbal along to—wait for it, wait for it—Mother Love Bone, Mudhoney, or Nirvana. Old Nirvana, that is. This guy would get himself all worked up into a lather of self-righteous indignation about how there were people—“posers,” to use his striking lingo—out there in this world of ours who preferred Nevermind to Bleach.
“Sometimes I just gotta crack on them, you know?” he’d say.
Ours was not in any way a glorious or even remotely interesting pairing. Rarely have I ever been as thrilled as I was when he’d finally leave at the end of these weekend visits, and I could light my scented candle purchased from the only decent gift store in town, put on some Mozart, and get back to my reading, possibly the Anthony Burgess translation of Cyrano de Bergerac, whose rhyming couplets still, by the way, give an electric thrill:
Take down this truism in your commonplace books:
Molière has genius; Christian had good looks.
At least the futile thing with this dude did help me understand that in any kind of relationship, you have to be in the same theater together.
Where did I even meet the young men I dated during those early years in New York? I do know that they would actually have to call me to arrange a date, an act that now seems as quaint as the code of social etiquette in a Jane Austen novel. That first fall, a guy from Seattle took me to Strauss’s Arabella at the Metropolitan Opera. I’d never been to the Met before (that other great NYC Met), and I was dazzled by everything—by the scale and enormity of the proscenium and stage; by the famous golden Sputnik chandeliers as they, at curtain, ascended into the scalloped golden ceiling; by Kiri Te Kanawa, our evening’s superb star; by the costumes, the sets; by the opulent spectacle of it. I will admit that I had a hard time following along with the opera—this was the very last year before the Met installed subtitle players on the seat backs (and also, I didn’t know as much about music as I wanted to, or pretended to)—but who cared? It was just so exciting to think about all the meticulous and gifted people involved in putting on the performance that night, and I just happened to be there to get to see it.
During the intermission, my date, who was wearing a tuxedo, and I met a friend of his for a drink in the mezzanine lounge. The raffish friend, also in a tuxedo and wearing, in addition to his bow tie, a patterned silk scarf (a nice touch), ordered me a glass of champagne at the bar without asking what I wanted (helpfully, champagne).
I was keenly aware of an unwelcome new experience: feeling underdressed. I had never been to the Met before, and I’d been surprised by my date’s attire. Why had he not told me that I could use this occasion as an opportunity to ditch my wide-legged gray cashmere pants and go superformal? (I was, after all, now the owner of a floor-length John Galliano fishtail skirt, acquired at a sample sale—a new and wondrous reality.)
The friend in his tux and patterned scarf handed me my champagne. “So you are the Vassarian,” he said.
I had to think about this for a moment. I considered the walls, which were covered in velvet of the deepest, most luscious scarlet.
The Vassarian.
Vassar. Right. Some other girl.
My date, twenty-three years of age but dadlike in the extreme, seemed mildly embarrassed. He told his friend where I worked. He had a sip of his champagne.
The raffish friend with the scarf had a question for me, a blunt one: “How’d you get that job?”
“A friend of a friend,” I said. (Why not keep it vague?)
“No,” he continued. “I mean, what authority do you have? You look very young.”
I suppose this guy didn’t know that authority was not a requirement to get yourself hired as an editorial assistant, but it was becoming ever clearer that people just loved putting other people into vicious little class boxes. And it was of course true that I’d had no background in editorial or in assisting. But experience was also unnecessary—reading comprehension skills were important; taste was a plus but not mandatory. I found myself explaining that in school the previous year, I had been a teaching assistant, though I didn’t want to get into too many details about it with these young men there in the Met mezzanine lounge.
Neither did I get into my experience of reading student papers, where I’d bear witness to the authors’ struggles with the Gordian knot that is, evidently, the English language. When I read these papers, I’d picture their student-authors toiling away in lab coats, trying to work out the formula—to the voice in The Return of the Native, maybe? (No, no, it was worse than that. The voice was . . . Theodore Dreiser.) And I was never remotely clear who the students believed their audience was. Whom were they addressing? When I had conferences with students, my pep ta
lks always seemed to boil down to the following advice: “Just try to sound like a normal person! It is the twentieth century, after all.”
Essentially, I could never figure out what to do with the papers other than rewrite them, in longhand. Years later, it was pointed out to me that maybe I shouldn’t have been using a fountain pen on the papers, and not actually rewriting them, either.
So that was what my experience had amounted to.
“It’s incredible that that was good enough to get you the job,” my date’s friend said.
We never really see our own limitations, even when everyone else does. Our subjective self always exceeds our objective self, meaning you always know your own possibilities, even when no one else does.
Or, to put it another way: if you are a woman, you will always be underestimated.
Later that year, I went out with an oddball who wore eyeglasses in the then sleazy (fashions change) aviator style and who—seriously—drove a Rolls-Royce. I had a couple of very short rides in this improbable vehicle, and I can report that the interior was a universe of burled-wood and beige-leather ridiculousness and that there were about three million dials on the dashboard. The car also seemed pretty old to me, like maybe from the seventies, although who was I to judge? This guy drove his gigantic boatlike Rolls, very slowly, everywhere; the couple of times I went out with him, he bizarrely insisted on picking me up at my building, although our dates took place in restaurants only a few blocks away. He worked in some soul-withering yet highly remunerative finance job, and an elevator opened directly into his loft in SoHo.
I’d been in New York for several months by this point, and I was becoming aware that there was a whole new world of pure money that I knew nothing about, a place that had been previously hidden from view. Maybe there was some sort of closet Bolshevik lurking deep within me, because I did know that being around that kind of high net worth made me extremely uncomfortable. And it wasn’t only that—I didn’t actually believe that this man had any more innate merit than anyone I’d gone to high school with. I didn’t believe he was entitled to live like a king on earth.
But . . .
I seemed to like money, unfortunately, possibly quite a lot. (My tastes were, and remain, ruinously Palladian.) Yet at the same time, I didn’t want to get too close to anyone for whom the central emblem of his (or her) character was a desire to be around money; I’ve always been snarlingly disdainful of men who demand “luxury”—those flyers of first class, those who talk ceaselessly about restaurants and about the quality of service in hotels, five-star ones. Although having money seemed like a very pleasant thing, I couldn’t imagine doing anything you actually had to do to make money. It was like that with a lot of things you wanted in life—you wanted them, but you didn’t want to be the kind of person who wanted them.
Not too long after that one, I went to a post-holiday party hosted by a hedge fund, or whatever the things before hedge funds were called, with some other finance guy. I have no idea how drunk this young man was that night, but I must not have been drunk at all, unfortunately, because I can still vividly recall the sight of him, in his parka and with his red chapped cheeks, gazing down at a pile of discarded Christmas trees on the icy sidewalk a block away from my new apartment on Waverly Place.
Maybe it is true that we’re all telepathically sharing the same thoughts, à la Jung’s collective unconscious, because for just one moment (and only that), our minds met.
“Please don’t,” I said.
“Oh, come on,” he replied unscrupulously. “It’ll be hilarious.”
“Please don’t do it,” I said. “I mean it.”
He offered me a small evil smile. Lumberjack style, he hoisted one of the pine trees from the pile over a shoulder. He was a big preppy guy, and I watched him as he advanced a few unsteady steps with the tree, weaving down the sidewalk on Waverly Place.
He stopped. He set the tree down on the ground, holding it upright.
“Please just leave it,” I said.
“Um, OK,” he said, as he bent over and grabbed hold of the trunk.
He dragged the tree down the sidewalk, through gray puddles, over gray ice, into the lobby of my building. We went past the doorman (who was no help at all), into the elevator, up to the eleventh floor, and down my hallway, leaving a dissolute trail of brown pine needles behind.
When we got into my apartment, he leaned the tree up against a window. This sad old Christmas tree, which had been urinated on, and worse, by mammals of all kinds, still had some abandoned ornament hooks on it, errant tinsel, and it was now somehow my problem.
“I can’t believe I have to deal with this,” I said.
And deal with it I did: for years afterward I was still stepping on old brittle needles, those bad boys pricking my bare pink feet.
“Just put it in the stairwell. Who cares? Let someone else get rid of it.”
Oh man. These guys. What a total waste of time. No, I wasn’t interested in any of them in the least—these men without self-criticism or conscience. Identity just really didn’t seem to be much of a problem for these dudes to solve.
My only important relationship in those years was with a much older married man. As a result of this situation, I learned that each unreal relationship is its own Prospero’s island and that dreaming and unreality keep you on your island. I learned, too, that the false dream is better enacted than actually lived.
But there were many real-world consequences for me, too: I became a rather weird, fatalistic individual about relationships and had, for a time, the idea that they needed to be conducted under a cloak of secrecy. I became used to thinking of myself as a vaguely illegitimate presence in the life of someone important to me, and I became accustomed to providing protection to brilliant, narcissistic, charismatic, fiercely ambitious men—men who never quite thought about extending the same protection to me, no, not quite.
7
My desk has always been the place where I feel the most comfortable. This is the main thing in the world I like doing: hunching down at my desk, wherever that desk may be, and getting back to work. I was promoted at GQ after a year, from editorial assistant to assistant editor (I was still very much an assistant, though), but I tried not to get too excited about the title change. Status—any status—was subject to flux and change, I kept reminding myself. I barely told anyone I’d been promoted. Such was not my character. How could it have been? I was a nobody from nowhere; I was from the plains and the Rust Belt both. Let’s not get too excited about where we are. Let’s keep on moving forward. Let’s dream up a different drama.
Granger would take me out for lunch sometimes at a sushi place close to the office. We’d be seated, he’d rub his face with one of the refreshing hot towels they give you at Japanese restaurants, and he would inevitably ask, “So what’s next for you, A?” For my birthday that year, he took me to a French restaurant called Adrienne and said, “You’re going places, A, I can tell.” He was, or could be, excessively generous to me, and I had absorbed many lessons from him. One of those lessons was to always be on the move. He was not going to remain a number three editor at a magazine forever, and I never had any doubt that he would be an editor in chief somewhere, and soon.
I’d always liked being around ambitious people. I supposed I was ambitious, too, but I already had worries about myself: in order to succeed in this particular world, your ambition needed to be highly specific and also fairly conventional.
It’s very hard to move from assistant to non-assistant.
But was being a non-assistant even a grand enough aspiration? To be honest, wasn’t it, as far as aspirations went, just sort of boring and ordinary?
Granger’s mentorship style was indirect, to say the least, but from observing how he worked, I osmosed the following lessons: to be a good editor you have to have a curious mind and a questioning spirit; you help the writer develop a voice and a tone; you give the writer room to breathe, and explore, and live. You trust your writer enou
gh to let him follow his obsessions, but you’re the moderating influence, too, and the voice of reason. You also have to try to save the writer from his worst impulses.
This is the most important job of all, actually, for an editor: to save the writer from himself. In this manner, being an editor certainly has to be the most psychologically intimate job in the world. Frequently, I would wonder if some of Granger’s writers would even be able to function at all if they didn’t have him as their ideal reader.
There was always a very palpable buzz in the office when a story from one of his guys came sputtering out of the fax machine. I’d get a call from the writer, announcing that he was about to fax a draft of his piece, and I’d scurry back to the machine and carry the papers through the office as if holding a fragment of the True Cross. All these men were outstanding practitioners of the art of literary journalism, and it was fascinating to get to peer behind the curtain and read these pieces in their original states. (A journalist friend, by the way, has always objected to the word “piece”—“sounds like an amputation,” he says, correctly.)
Some writers tended to send in polished, spick-and-span pieces, and some of them usually needed a few more drafts to solve the puzzle. I also got to see how great journalists can, and do, fail, until they get it right. Failure, I learned early on, is a crucial part of the game, and anyone who does anything worth doing in the world is going to fail, and fail quite a lot. When a writer gets in a jam, it’s usually because he can’t find the life in the story; one of the tricks Granger would suggest to free a stuck writer was to have the writer pretend to compose a letter to him in which he’d try to explain what he wanted the story to do. I loved that.
In the Land of Men Page 7