Well, I wasn’t.
Every night in Chicago for dinner, I’d pick up a falafel sandwich from the same place and bring it back to my hotel room. (Now, with hindsight, I think, Why didn’t I go to Charlie Trotter’s?) I sat at the desk in my room, fomenting my plan.
I understood that I would not be anyone’s first choice to be the literary editor of Esquire. I understood that I would not be anyone’s 100,000th choice to be the literary editor of Esquire. Yes, I got that I wasn’t “qualified” to do the job, but my thought was Who is? It’s not as if one can earn a Ph.D. in “literary editor.” Instinct, taste, and judgment can’t be taught. And I knew I had instinct, taste, and judgment. I was my own first choice, and that’s all that mattered.
At the hotel, I worked on a letter to Granger, developing, as I composed it, a range of techniques I believed to be epistolarily persuasive. I promised that I would deliver him vibrant, necessary fiction. When I returned to NYC, I lobbied hard for the job. Granger had me come in for a few interviews with him. I probably should have prepared a PowerPoint presentation (though it was 1997, and I’d never seen a PowerPoint presentation), but I loved Granger and was confident in my ability to talk to him, and I was also confident in my ability to talk about short stories and books. The interviews went well, I thought. But I was also aware that on my visits to the office, I’d been observed by the Venticelli of Esquire editorial: some sour male assistants from the old regime who were hanging on by a thread. They were spies—the Venticelli always are—but they weren’t terribly clever ones, I’d soon discover.
One morning after one of those Esquire interviews, I came to work at GQ. Yes, there it was, the old workspace, shrinking by the second. It was not where I wanted to be, yet I was ready for business, as always: I had my bagel, my coffee; I had my four newspapers.
I flipped through my morning gossip pages and discovered something of interest: an item in one of those gossip columns—the granddaddy of them all—was, ludicrously, about me. I was named in it, and identified as a twenty-five-year-old GQ assistant who was interviewing for the revered, indeed famous, job of literary editor of Esquire. The tone of the item was an aghast, pearl-clutching How could this be?
How, one might wonder, did this item make its way onto a gossip page in a New York paper? My hypothesis: persons of insidious intent had planted the gossip item after they viewed me in the Esquire office for an interview.
As calmly as you please, I continued gnawing away at my gigantic bagel.
The big black phone on my desk rang. Two rings: the call was external; one: internal. This was a one-ringer. The fun calls were always from the outside.
“Would you come and see me, kiddo?” said the female voice on the other end.
Our woman in HR always called me “kiddo.” I would see her on our floor every now and then, when she was en route to or from Art Cooper’s office—her presence on the floor typically signaling some sort of personnel issue—and in passing I could count on a hasty “Hi, kiddo!” from her.
I had been in this woman’s office only once before—three years ago, when I had my interview with her. In college, I had been an assistant at my university’s poetry press, and my claim to fame there had been that they’d used a detail from a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Hay Harvest, I’d suggested for a book’s cover. On GQ interview day, I’d brought a copy of the published book with me to show off. As I handed it across the desk, the HR woman had something interesting to say about Bruegel.
“He’s so great at painting regular people,” she had said.
Now, three years later, I stood again at her open door.
“Come in,” she said, indicating the chair across from her desk. “Sit.”
I came in. I sat.
She placed both hands upon her desk, locked her fingers together. (The careful reader might perhaps notice that the author doesn’t dwell too much on women’s appearances. Men are fair game, but because I’ve spent so much of my reading life tussling with physical descriptions of females [fictional females and nonfictional ones], I find that I’ve now become protective of the women. Even the one who would attempt to demote me to professional Siberia.)
“We would like to offer you a job,” she said.
She wasn’t evil, though, this lady, not even in an Eichmann-banal way. I understood my place in the system, more, probably, than I ought to have. She was just doing what she had to do. My beloved grandfather, a great and good man, had worked for years in HR at Western Electric, and I’m sure he’d had to fire his fair share. Not that we, his family, would have known—like so many men of that greatest World War II generation (with the gregarious exception of that era’s crop of white male novelists), he had a mum’s-the-word approach to life.
The new job, as she explained it, was at a women’s fashion magazine. In the fashion closet. As an exceedingly junior-level assistant. A sub-junior-level assistant, really.
“You will be apprenticed to Rachel Archambault,” she said. (Note: Rachel Archambault was not this person’s name, but it definitely could have been.)
“You’re kidding me,” I said.
So much for my pose of equanimity.
“This is the job you have been offered,” the HR woman replied.
In her famous attack on Diane Arbus, Susan Sontag condemns Arbus for, among other atrocities, photographing her subjects—those “assorted monsters and border-line cases—most of them ugly”—smiling. Essentially, Sontag’s argument is: How self-aware are the Arbus deviants? Are they in on the joke? Can the Grand Guignol ghouls even see how ridiculous they are?
Arbus (a famed Esquire contributor of the legendary Harold Hayes era) always had a great defense: her people smile because they’d already experienced the trauma the rest of us spend our lives dreading. The freaks laugh because they know it can’t get any worse.
Back at my desk, I gathered up my crafty duplicate copies of my Rolodex cards and stuffed them into my bag. This was the moment for which I’d been sending myself all those messages in a bottle for all those years: when you get thrown back into who you are, you’d better have something there.
I could have counted on two hands the number of times I’d been in Art’s office: that first day, a time or two when I was summoned in to have drinks with him and some other assistants, a couple of occasions when the collective had something to toast, and once (because he was the one among us with a TV) to watch the greatest American trauma of the era: the O.J. verdict, back when the only Kardashian we had to worry about was Robert. I had never been to his office unbeckoned.
I walked in, smiling. He was at his desk, smoking. There was a sharp look in his oystery eyes when he saw me.
I advanced to his desk and stood before him. “I was not aware that interviewing for a job was a fireable offense,” I said.
Art’s face went ashen. He leaned back in his chair, the cigarette smoldering between his fingers. I could see the gears in his head moving. I tended to be either debilitatingly shy or really brashly forthright—these were two modes between which I tremulously vacillated. One never knew what to expect with me—even I never quite knew what to expect of my reactions to things.
“You’ll be a star,” Art said.
I watched the cigarette, which remained immobile.
“I have always said that,” he continued.
He had? News to me. Of course I knew that I was but a pawn in the chess game between him and Granger. But I could play, too. I’d been thinking a lot about this line from A Room of One’s Own recently: “I refuse to allow you, Beadle though you are, to turn me off the grass.” I was always fortified by it.
“You,” I said, jabbing my finger at him (I was no longer smiling), “are a bully.”
He leaned back in his chair, paused a few beats. The cigarette had still not proceeded to his mouth.
“You’re a star,” he said again, wearily now.
Was it a craven reiteration? A magnanimous one? He looked at me straight on. In three years
he had never really looked at me. Art talked at you, not to you. This isn’t even a criticism.
“You don’t need me,” he said.
The very first piece of mail I received when I started my job at Esquire was a card written in opulent purple ink with an immoderate hand, the likes of which will never be seen again: “I told you you’d be a star.”
12
What I knew was this: I was twenty-five years old and I had my dream job. I was the literary editor of Esquire. I was responsible for finding, acquiring, and editing all the short stories published in Esquire. There was no editorial board, no circle of readers; there was only me and my judgment, and Granger. I also controlled the book coverage—choosing what books to review and to whom to assign the reviews—and I could also edit feature stories, front-of-the-book pieces, and anything else I happened to bring in. I had a job that others would, as I was continually told, kill for. (Male editors and writers of a certain type are fond of their martial metaphors.) Imagine that. What a mad thing it was.
Why had Granger hired me? No idea. We got along well, and I must assume that he believed I was smart (or at least smart enough to read short stories) and also that he believed I had the potential to be a good editor . . . but, honestly, was that enough? You didn’t have to tell me: I’d been an assistant for three years. That was all I had done in the world. I was just some dumb kid from Ohio. I knew that I had been given a far bigger opportunity than I deserved. I understood that I had little of the grounding I would need to do this job. I would have to prove myself. And in order to prove myself, I would need to get smarter, fast.
Previously, only men had had the Esquire literary editor position, including the legendary Gordon Lish and Rust Hills, both pivotal figures in the landscape of mid- to late twentieth-century American literature. Lish, so associated with a swashbuckling persona cultivated at the magazine that he had an actual nickname, “Captain Fiction,” was, famously, Raymond Carver’s closest editor. Unlike most other editors, who understand that their work is best when it is invisible, Lish had what might have been called an exhibitionistic approach to editing. Through his aggressive cutting of Carver’s stories, Lish helped to engineer the dry, reticent, menacing (minimalists scare me) tone that would come to be so influential on a generation of American writers. (The famed title of the Carver story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” was itself a Lish creation.) Lish also championed authors as varied as Jane Smiley, Amy Hempel, Stanley Elkin, Cynthia Ozick, Hilma Wolitzer, Barry Hannah, Mary Robison, and Ben Marcus and acted as a mentor to many others. (There were also the notorious private writing seminars that further burnished the Lishian myth.) If you happen to have some picture of a wildly charismatic and conceited male literary editor from the golden age of magazines (the flowing white hair, the wacky ex cathedra pronouncements, the Zorro-like slashings with the red editorial pen), it probably has a lot to do with the role created and performed by Gordon Lish.
Rust was still at Esquire in a somewhat emeritus role when I started, and he would stay on at the magazine for two more years. He’d been intermittently associated with Esquire since 1957 and had been integral to the careers of Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, Richard Ford, John Cheever, Ann Beattie, William Gaddis, Cormac McCarthy, and Rust’s own spouse, the amazing Joy Williams. He was in his seventies when I knew him.
The first thing Granger said after he told me I had the job: “You’re going to have to find a way to work with Rust.”
I didn’t meet Rust that first week, though; he didn’t have an office at the magazine and mostly worked from home.
The first person I did meet was Dave Eggers. Yes, Dave Eggers, of the bundle of Might magazines I’d delivered to Granger at GQ a couple of years before. Dave was a new editor/writer at Esquire and had the office next to mine. We started our jobs the same day.
We met when we were both taking a “tour” of the Esquire mail area. The mail area was not a fancy setup: on a long table back by the service elevators were chrome trays for each editor’s mail (although, what with the quantities of fiction submissions the magazine received, I had a rather different situation: two of those big white UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE bins).
“Whoa,” Dave said of the mail zone, unimpressed. “Low budge.”
I have no memory of my response, although I can guarantee that I replied with something sarcastic—too sarcastic, I’m sure.
“We’re going to have a problem someday, you and me,” Dave said, and regarded me skeptically.
The Esquire office was in a Hearst satellite building along with some corporate back offices and a couple of magazines I’d never heard of before. It was on a dingy block in midtown west; downstairs was an Irish pub, and across the street was a food stand, the real-life inspiration for Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi. (I went there only once, though—you’d have to wait in line for hours and hours unless you wanted to pick up your lunch at some irrational time like 4:15.) No longer were there town cars awaiting magazine staffers as if winged chariots. It’s fair to say that Hearst was more of a no-frills/no-drama place than Condé Nast, and it was honestly kind of a culture shock, as well as a bit of an all-dressed-up-and-no-place-to-go situation, after the society-of-the-spectacle situation that was the Condé building, to ride these empty Hearst elevators that, spookily, never even seemed to stop at any other floors.
Esquire editorial was on the seventh floor, and the art, copy, and research departments were on eight. Everyone kept saying that the office had been designed by a famous architect, but no one could recall which one: there were translucent glass walls, a shiny black floor that was buffed nearly nightly, and a waiting area with black leather Corbusier-esque furniture. A metal staircase connected floors seven and eight.
On the wall by the stairs were rows of framed past Esquire covers, with an emphasis on those weird and brilliant George Lois ones from the sixties: the boxer Sonny Liston scowling furiously in a Santa hat, Muhammad Ali in the pose of arrow-pierced martyr Saint Sebastian, and Andy Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell’s tomato soup. But my personal favorite was from the eighties and designed by the artist Barbara Kruger: a black-and-white close-up of Howard Stern overlaid with the caption “I hate myself.”
I had an office now, an interior one with a glass front wall: clear glass up top and glazed glass down below. The walls of my office were lined with empty black bookcases that would soon find themselves bloated with review copies of books. My desktop computer came with the flying toasters screensaver installed on it. My metal tanker desk had a distinctly retro vibe, and I usually tried to keep some fresh flowers on it. My salary was $45,000. A princely sum, that, it seemed to me—at first. My starting salary at GQ had been $18,000.
When I started the job, of course, I needed to introduce, or reintroduce, myself to my professional “contacts,” those names and numbers I’d compiled from the verboten duplicate Rolodex cards back at GQ. The first calls were to some writers and literary agents whom I gauged to be friendly—or at least neutral—parties. Manuscripts were submitted to me in various ways: directly by authors, by referrals, and by literary agents. It was important to get the agents on my side ASAP.
There had been two shocking and gruesome celebrity deaths that summer: Princess Diana and Gianni Versace. During these agent calls, the first minute or two of perfunctory chitchat would inevitably focus on how crazy it was to lose two big stars back-to-back like that; some speculation might follow about who’d be the next celebrity to go down (the smart money mean-spiritedly said Elton John). Some of these folks might express their ire that the media—albeit the scuzzy paparazzi division that had nothing to do with us (did it?)—were being blamed for Diana’s death; there might be a comment that all these celebrities who moaned about their fame were self-pitying egomaniacs, because in the whole history of Western civilization, no person had ever become famous who did not want to become famous (which is true).
Now the call with the agent could finally get down to business. As I’d half observ
e the flapping wings on those pixilated toasters and toast on my computer screen, I’d go into my little spiel about my professional mandate: to make it new (apologies to Ezra Pound) but also to reintroduce a refurbished Esquire to some of the more notable literary grayheads of yore.
During one of these calls—I had believed it was actually going pretty well—a male literary agent said, “You don’t have any authority to do this job, you know.”
At that moment, I happened to be gazing at the word “zwieback” floating by on my computer screen (this particular flying toasters screensaver had captions running across the bottom). Vaguely, I thought: Zwieback, zwieback, zwieback. I also thought: This jackass is actually right. Authority is never automatically granted. I knew that.
Also, I intuitively understood that few people go around rooting for the career success of a very young woman. A man’s early professional success may be attributed to . . . well, if not to merit at such a young age, let’s just say to his self-evident brilliance. Watch and enjoy as the world coalesces around the myth of his greatness. He was the most astounding student I ever had, etc. The woman, conversely, gets the job perhaps thanks to . . . what? Well, surely not as the result of her brilliance, because no one is ever going to accuse her of that. Luck? Appearance? Favoritism? Her ability to play the game? Something somewhat darker?
Early on, I was haunted by the fear that my presence at the magazine was largely ornamental. I never could quite shake the fear that I’d been hired because I was young, female, and (seemingly) controllable. And while I understood how self-defeating this line of thinking was, was it further possible that I was there because the magazine maybe didn’t actually even care all that much about its literary program? An Esquire dinner my first week, attended by my new colleagues, did nothing to assuage my worries.
We went to an Italian restaurant. I ordered, I regret to report, the veal. (What was I thinking? I always just get the vegetarian pasta.) After my order was placed, a coworker declared to the table, “Veal? You are veal.” This fellow was a friend of mine, and I must assume that he was trying to be funny, and if I’d been in a different mood, I might have laughed right along. But I wasn’t in an indulgent frame of mind that night. I wasn’t concerned about protecting men and had no interest in sublimating my ego; I was thinking about how on earth I was going to do this job. I rose from my chair, bolted into the ladies’ room, and exploded into tears.
In the Land of Men Page 12