Always good advice. (But also rather controlling, wouldn’t you say?) I’d already been giving it to myself for as long as I’d been in New York, with varying levels of success. But was I even following my own warnings to self? It was possible that I was not. The worst of it—I now knew that I was starting to read suspiciously, at least sometimes. Was it possible that I was not quite approaching each new manuscript with the cheerful sense of expectation I once had?
One of my biggest mistakes as an editor: I rejected an excerpt from J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, a stone-solid masterpiece (and with the world’s most heartbreaking dog) by a writer I think the world of (I mean, who doesn’t?). The excerpt may as well have been delivered to me on a golden platter: it had gone through an early-stage edit at another magazine and was submitted as a perfect stand-alone story. But I couldn’t accept what I then viewed as the central character’s sexism. The novelist is not responsible for the views of his characters, though. Would that I had had a higher appreciation for nuance with that one.
I didn’t want to be a foe to writers. I wanted to be an ally. But I was, I knew, a little of both. Sometimes a little more of this, sometimes a lot more of that—but there was always that double movement. It was always both.
IN HIS SPECTACULAR MEMOIR, FINISHING THE HAT, SONDHEIM DESCRIBES an evening he and the composer Jule Styne had in the sixties with Cole Porter. Sondheim and Styne, who were writing the musical Gypsy, went to visit Porter in his apartment at the Waldorf Astoria Towers. Porter was despondent and in severe physical pain. (Both of his legs were by this point amputated—the tragic final outcome of a fall from a horse decades before; miraculously, some of Porter’s best work, including his late triumph Kiss Me, Kate, was to come after his accident.) Sondheim and Styne played “Together (Wherever We Go)” from Gypsy for Porter, because what could cheer a guy up more than:
No fits, no fights, no feuds and no egos—
Amigos. . . .
When Sondheim and Styne arrived at the word “amigos,” Porter gave a gasp of delight. He hadn’t been expecting the shock of that fifth rhyme, the ravishing anomalousness of it.
This is the story I think about when I need to be reminded why appreciation is important, and brave, and heroic, and why you need to hold fast to it: it’s the only thing that can triumph over the abyss. If you don’t have your appreciation, you’ve lost your life.
22
When I was a child in Marysville, Ohio, I spent my afternoons with a babysitter, a small, stolid gray-haired lady named Mrs. Albrecht. She lived with her husband in a modest ranch house across from us on our rural road. Mr. and Mrs. Albrecht seemed about eight hundred years old, but they were probably only about half that then. Mrs. Albrecht made her own dresses, made her own wine, and, of most interest to me, made her own egg noodles. Every Friday, ribbons of powdery noodles dangled down from wood drying racks placed around the kitchen counter. It always seemed such a disgrace, concealing those glorious noodles within the inelegant mass of each Friday night’s tuna noodle casserole, but on the upside, at least she’d always top the casserole with a few inches of potato chips that had been deafeningly pulverized between two sheets of wax paper with a rolling pin.
Mrs. Albrecht’s husband, the mute, balding, and craggy Mr. Albrecht, worked as a clerk at a state store, an Ohio-run liquor outlet—a holdover from old Prohibition laws and also, we may assume, a continuing boondoggle for the state. They were German Lutherans, Mr. and Mrs. Albrecht were, and given that my mother is Welsh/English Lutheran, their overall approach to life always felt familiar to me. Mr. and Mrs. Albrecht were, however, demonstrably more biblically inclined than anyone in my family and attended services every Sunday and Wednesday at their small country church. They took me with them a couple of times, on Communion Sundays, but I’d always have to hang back at the pews as they went up and received the sacrament. I hadn’t been properly baptized, I guess. And while I didn’t join them for dinner too often, I do recall that Mr. Albrecht, being the man of the house, was the designated giver of grace at the beginning of each meal. We would join hands around the table and he would recite the Lutheran dinner prayer: “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest. And let Thy gifts to us be blessed. Amen.” Still to this day, on the rare occasion I’m asked to say grace before dinner, the one and only prayer I’ve got is Mr. Albrecht’s.
Dinner would commence and, in potent contrast to my parents’ more spirited table, would continue in silence, except when Mr. Albrecht would ask Mrs. Albrecht for a second or third helping: “Is there extry, Mother?” (He called her “Mother”; she called him “Father.”) The obstacle of Mr. Albrecht’s left thumb would serve as knife substitute to assist food from plate onto fork.
Mrs. Albrecht and I didn’t talk much—she was supposed to be supervising me, I guess, but I didn’t need much supervision, and she was always busy cooking, cleaning, or doing whatever other various household chores consumed her life. My mother was also always a bustle of activity at home, of course, and my grandmother was, too . . . and so was pretty much every other adult woman I’d ever known. This, it seemed to me, was what being a female was about: a body in motion, but deeper energies unexpressed. I was concerned about this already.
Every Friday evening, during the rite known as the Drying of the Noodles, my mother would come to pick me up and, while standing at the Albrecht front door, attempt to pay Mrs. Albrecht for the week’s babysitting. The process always took an exceedingly long time; the ritual was that Mrs. Albrecht would refuse the money the first hundred or so times my mother would try to give it to her. Stagily, Mrs. Albrecht would wave the cash away, saying, “No, no, Lord, no”; there would be solemn shakings of the head. My mother was tall and rangy, with freckles and long red (“strawberry blond,” as she’d insist) hair, and might have been wearing her Navajo poncho, denim skirt, and oxblood boots; Mrs. Albrecht was small and gray, shrinking, fading to nothing, and would certainly have had on a homemade polyester-based housedress with a row of buttons down the front. Finally, the exchange would reach its inevitable conclusion as Mrs. Albrecht, contrite (but why?), accepted that filthy lucre.
Mrs. Albrecht called disabled people “crippled”; she had a shoebox full of small, eerie old dolls with delicate painted faces and another box with beautiful marbles in it; and she owned exactly two books, a Bible and a title in the Mole and Troll series. In her living room was a black-and-white TV on which The Lawrence Welk Show and The Little Rascals could be viewed, and upon the odd, mirrored cornflower blue of the coffee table top sat an emerald-colored glass candy dish, which, if you really studied it, you could see was embossed with moons and stars. She would feed me ice pops that came in dubious plastic tubes she’d snip open with orange-handled scissors, homemade rhubarb pie, and a regional candy specialty called a Buckeye—a milk chocolate–dunked orb of the most gluelike peanut butter, with a pound or two of sugar added to it for good measure. These dense little insulin bombs are fatally ubiquitous in rural Ohio, Buckeye State.
One afternoon, Mrs. Albrecht took me with her to visit Mr. Albrecht at work at the state store. Before he knew we were there, I spied him in the stockroom, through a window on a swinging door, and watched as he stood peering down at some boxes. His face was downcast, and his shoulders were stooped from some unseen accumulated weight, as if the very embodiment of injustice. I recall having some vague, very vague, thoughts (but, man, I felt them) about the pathos of each individual life, about how most people seemed to have—or was it that they believed they had?—very little control over their own being.
I wondered: Did most people ever expect their lives to change? Did they even want them to?
When Mr. Albrecht wasn’t at work, he could be found on the rocking chair on his patio—the rocking back and forth of the chair was the only sign that he was actually alive—watching the traffic, as Mrs. Albrecht weeded the garden, raked leaves, hung the laundry up on the clothesline (securing Mr. Albrecht’s white undershirts with the beguiling wood clothespins onto which I a
lways had an intense urge to draw fancy little old-fashioned ladies or flowers), or else he might be mowing their patchy, uneven lawn. (The Albrechts, as should now be clear, weren’t the sort of people to invest in lawn chemicals.) In addition to the rocking of the chair, Mr. Albrecht’s other projects on the patio involved packing down tobacco in his pipe with his fingers and cleaning his fingernails with the blade of the folding knife he kept in his overalls.
Often, and always in silence, I’d sit with Mr. Albrecht on the patio, watching the rural road for sightings of tractors and Amish carriages. Occasionally, you’d get a vintage auto out on a joy ride or, on the most auspicious of days, a truly splendid kit car. Mr. Albrecht would rock away on the chair as I’d sit cross-legged on the concrete patio floor, amusing myself by balling up blades of grass and stuffing them into the mouths of the beautiful pale-colored snapdragons I’d plucked from the Albrecht flower bed. You were always aware of the faint scent of garlic chives.
One summer afternoon when I was seven, I was sitting on Mr. Albrecht’s lap, in their living room. The chair was a recliner. Mrs. Albrecht was not home. An old show I disliked enormously, Family Affair, was on the TV at a low volume. Mr. Albrecht was reading the Mole and Troll book aloud to me. He’d never read to me before and didn’t seem to know that I was expecting an actual performance. Where were the voices? Where were the sound effects? The back of his neck was wrinkled like a peanut (or a mole’s neck? a troll’s?) and his skin smelled like pipe tobacco.
Unexpectedly, in the middle of a sentence, he stopped reading. He leaned back in the recliner. He looked at me, unbuttoned the fly of his overalls, and exposed himself.
I had a series of varying thoughts about this, but I kept them to myself—and I would continue to.
I got up from the chair.
“Now don’t tell Mother,” he said as I walked away. “She would be cross.”
Mrs. Albrecht remained my babysitter for two more years, until we moved up to the Rust Belt. After what happened, I don’t recall that I ever actually spoke to Mr. Albrecht again. He was always elsewhere in the (not large) house when I was there. I’m sure I never again watched the traffic with him out on the patio.
Years later, when I was a teenager, my parents and I went back to Columbus for a weekend trip. We visited Mr. and Mrs. Albrecht. Mr. Albrecht didn’t say a word the whole time, and he looked extremely ancient as he sat immobile in a straight-backed chair, grimly pinned to the wall.
I actually really loved Mr. and Mrs. Albrecht.
People. What can I say? They’ll break your heart every time. I suppose we’re all more profoundly vexed, all more deeply shadowed and shaded, than we otherwise let on. “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,” says Prospero in The Tempest. It’s impossible to see anyone straight, I guess. You never get anywhere near a full picture of anyone or anything, and the deeper you try to get into something, the more illegible it becomes. The more you try to know, the more you find that the thing proliferates, and changes, and assumes new forms, growing starfish tentacles that take you deeper into something else.
23
In 2001—before the world cracked open and everything changed forever, back when our biggest problem was still the installation of an illegitimate president by the Supreme Court (remember hanging chads and the dirty Floridan secretary of state? remember when we all became experts in election law?)—Esquire was finally nominated for a National Magazine Award for Fiction. These awards, the Oscars of magazines, for better or worse, are the industry’s raison d’être. It makes no difference that no one outside of the publishing world has ever heard of them. Esquire hadn’t been nominated for the National Magazine Award in Fiction since 1994 and hadn’t won one since 1991.
The lunchtime award ceremony was held in the grand ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria for an audience of fourteen hundred editors, media executives, and VIPs. Rosie O’Donnell, then the figurehead of a short-lived self-titled magazine, served as emcee. She came onstage dragging a prop IV pack and cracked jokes about a recent staph infection, the gory aftermath (the audience learned, whether they wanted to or not) of an incident with a fishing pole. Esquire had received two nominations that year for the feature writing category but lost to Rolling Stone, for David Foster Wallace’s article about John McCain. The McCain piece was long but slight, and its real subject was David’s anxiety about being less of a man than John McCain. When the winner was announced, some guys at my table wondered aloud if the elusive DFW was in attendance. Of course he was not. “I hate him for not being here,” said an Esquire writer to me. “I guess he’s just too good for this, isn’t he?” I had nothing to say about that. (Later, of his prize, David remarked, whether bullshitting or not, “I’d never even known these awards existed before. Are they a big deal?”)
Esquire ended up losing the fiction award. (“You was robbed,” said the journalist seated next to me when the winner, the upstart Zoetrope, was announced.) I disliked that I was so irritated we’d lost, and I knew I really had to watch myself and make sure I didn’t become someone I didn’t want to become. You have to be vigilant with yourself, of course. You have to be on the lookout for the first signs of psychic collapse.
Helpfully, the men’s magazine could always be counted on to locate the first signs of a woman’s physical collapse. That year, Esquire produced a special issue around the theme of the “Aging Woman.” The cover lines:
HOW WOMEN AGE
A MAN’S SURVIVAL GUIDE
The Science, the Facts, the Photos
How She Gets from 20 to 60
Sigourney Weaver, who appeared on the cover, was reduced to the headline “Sigourney Weaver Is Fifty-Freakin’-One.” The ludicrous section “How a Woman Ages” divided the “female aging process” into decades and had a photograph of a naked female model representing each number: 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s. As gormlessly stated in the introduction: “The aging of your own battered frame is confounding enough; her machinery is a complete mystery.” Not to make too obvious a point, but the men’s magazine’s paradigmatic man was governed entirely by fear: fear of the loss of potency, the loss of relevance, the loss of power—yet the judgment was always applied to women.
I felt so bad for men sometimes. I had spent the entirety of my adult professional life dealing with men’s magazines’ profound anxiety about women—their need to “define” women and reduce them to their “machinery”—and it was really getting exhausting. But it had always been exhausting: just the same damn record, played over and over again, forever. I deserved hazard pay for all of it.
But lest you think that unexamined sexism and a fear of women’s bodies were alone driving “How a Woman Ages,” please know that there was real “science” behind it. Behold the illustrated diagram of young skin versus aging skin, the sidebar “Why Do Breasts Sag?,” and the chart “Average Weight Gain by Age (In Pounds)”! And in the cover story, the clueless (male, of course) interviewer actually asked the fabulous Sigourney Weaver her feelings about the riveting topic of menopause.
Two examples of the prose quality we’re dealing with in “How a Woman Ages”: “By now, if she did not use sunscreen regularly in her twenties or if she smoked or swabbed decks on a swordfish boat for years, much of the skin damage is already done. (She can mitigate the results with exfoliation and moisturizers.)”
And: “But [fat] will soon start building in her abdomen, too, as it does with men . . . and this is bothering her, you’ll soon discover, perhaps when she starts bringing home great numbers of grapefruits.”
The copy department at Esquire was very good, and I can only imagine that they at least tried to rewrite those howlers.
Here’s the thing that most enraged me: the men who made decisions at Esquire were better than that. And the magazine was better than that, too.
When this issue arrived in my office, it was so very difficult not to throw back the judgment. You judge us, we judge you. That’s the way it works. I mockingly read that line about swabbing decks on
a swordfish boat for years to one of my excellent interns, emphasizing “for years,” and making a snarky comment about how some writers really just have no ear whatsoever. (Then I read the grapefruit line. “Great numbers of grapefruits”? Can we actually say that “great” and “grapefruits” rhyme? If so, a rhyme of what type? Assonant? Oblique? Identical?) This was my big rebellion. How toothless, how pitiful. How inconsistent I was in my opposition.
But yet: I also had the best job in the world. I was publishing stories by Don DeLillo, T.C. Boyle, Tim O’Brien, Jeanette Winterson, Richard Powers, Joanna Scott, Aleksandar Hemon, George Saunders, and Arthur Miller. I ran early stories by Nicole Krauss, David Means, Tony Earley, Heidi Julavits, and Adam Johnson (then a student; he would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction). I published a piece by young Jonathan Nolan (now one of the brilliant minds behind Westworld) that became the movie Memento. (And for reasons now unclear, I dragged young Mr. Nolan, who was a great sport about the whole thing, to a rather awkward Esquire party at a pool hall.) I was also editing front of the book columns, and I was running an Esquire reading series at the Union Square Theater.
And as reprehensible and embarrassing as the “Aging Woman” section was, this particular issue of the magazine also had a great short story in it by the novelist Richard Russo—a very long story, I should add, at a time when it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to get fiction through, especially long fiction. The Russo story had gotten a nice cover line, too. And the magazine was, in general (minus the sexist stuff), really good.
So maybe it all evened out? Was one thing recompense for another?
The questions:
Was working life a zero-sum game?
How many moral compromises was a person required to make in her job?
I posed these queries to a male colleague once, essentially pointing out the various dissonances I felt I had to deal with at work, and he replied, “I think you’re overthinking it.”
In the Land of Men Page 29