by Owen Thomas
“Julia was delighted with the idea of making the place into a romantic retreat; a place for the two of us to go and canoodle where my Selectric could not follow and call for me from the next room. It was not something I could deny her. Julia was due. She spent months obsessing over the task of decoration, transforming my father’s haven into a diminutive, budget-conscious, rustic approximation of the luxury retreats that she fawned over in her magazines. The cabin became the cottage and my father rolled over in his grave. Two to three times a week Julia made the two hour drive south and east into the woods, with the car loaded with bedding and small furnishings and supplies and area rugs and paint, all to make my Dad’s fishing cabin into a place that no self-respecting fisherman would ever enter.
“On those days – decorating days – I had our house all to myself for many hours at a time. The words flew from my fingers like sparks. I was a pearl diver on those days, able to hold my breath for seven, eight hours at a stretch. Accordingly, whenever Julia voiced an inclination to update some aspect of the cottage – to add a pillow or to change the curtains – I was all encouragement.
“But other than once or twice a year, the cottage rarely got the kind of use as a marital aid that Julia had hoped for. As one novel gave way to the next, it sat unused, slowly reacquiring the faint moldering smell I remembered as a child. When we did go, I usually took my typewriter and my books to read and she took her magazines and her knitting and we simply relocated our normal routines, to the extent they could be accommodated. An occasional walk along sun-dappled deer trails to the lake and back was the only discernible contribution the cottage made to the harmony of our marriage. There was a wooden rowboat with lots of memories, but it was not usable other than as a shelter abutting the woodpile for insects and the smaller forest fauna. Otherwise, I think the cottage mostly provided Julia with an opportunity to be ignored and marginalized from a closer distance than at home and without the benefit of intervening walls.
“Eventually, Julia lost interest in it altogether and I began making trips out to the lake so that I could be alone with my half-formed stories. I changed none of her décor, but I purchased another Selectric and set it up on a table in front of the window, looking out at the trees. What started out as monthly trips soon became weekly. And then it seemed that every few days I was loading up my Dad’s old saddle shoe pick-up with some food and a change of clothes and my draft pages and headed for the lake. I told Julia that, creatively speaking, it was important that I change the scenery. It kept the writing fresh, I explained.
“Julia understood, of course. She always understood.
“Except for one time, in all the years that I owned that place in the woods, I never had company other than Julia. It was not a place for company. Or for entertaining. Or for being entertained.” Angus gave me a scornful look. “I’m sure you would have carted in a giant television and installed a satellite dish before even worrying about whether the bed was suitable or there was food to eat.”
“Oh yes,” I said. “Definitely. And no books. Only DVD’s. The books would have gone in the woodpile so that they might keep me warm in the winter.”
I caught a hint of a smile, but it faded quickly.
“It was not a place for television. There was no reception anyway. There was no telephone service. There was no radio. It was not a place for conversation. It was a place for thinking and for writing. It was a place for me, not for me and others.”
“You said except for one time.”
“Yes. One time.” Angus finished his tea and set the cup on the table. He crossed his arms and stared through me. His lips moved in a small rhythmic pulsing as he gnawed at the thin flesh inside his mouth. “That was Iris.”
I had no conscious idea of who Iris was or her importance, either to Angus or to his story. I had no reason to think that she was more than an extraneous detail and that, without mentioning her again, he would continue to retrace the steps of his marriage. All I can say is that I felt the molecular composition of the air in my living room change at the mention of her name. I swirled the cold amber tea in my cup, staying out of his way.
“She was my editor,” he said. “Back in my days with Knopf. She was ten years my senior and a writer in her own right. A good one. A biographer. A poet. Her family had been in publishing for three generations and she was well connected. She had edited some big names. Bellow. Ellison. Cheever. Real writers. Writers I used to read and think, that’s who I want to be someday. They were the stuff of dreams. Iris told stories of these people like they were her cousins. She met them for drinks and went to their birthday parties. And she thought I had what it took to join that club. We had that in common. We both thought I had what it took. If you asked Julia, she would have told you that I would be great writer one day, and she would even say that sort of thing with conviction. But it was something she simply took on faith to be supportive.
“But Iris was altogether different. She was on the inside. Iris understood me in a way that Julia was not capable of understanding.”
“Angus,” I said, barely above a whisper. “You don’t have to…”
His face clenched, as if absorbing some invisible blow, and he flicked his hand at me in irritation.
“Don’t give me that. You pulled this cork out, Matilda. You have to finish the whole God damned bottle. I suppose it helps that I will likely never see you again.”
He sighed and his expression softened a little. His eyes spoke for him. He needed my forbearance.
“Just keep the pressure on that dressing.”
I peeled the tea towel off the stinging wound and looked at the bright red stain, an ovular blotch with thin, vein-like tributaries fanning out into the white cotton like an odd sort of tree. I refolded the towel and pressed it back against my forehead. I waited.
“She enthralled me. Iris. There was a kind of icy perfection to her. She was as American as you or me, but she had an exotic Slavic cast to her features. Pure, pale skin. Wide, glacial eyes. Hair as blonde as Julia’s was dark. Julia was the greater youthful beauty; there is no denying that. But Iris. She glowed with the integrity of her intelligence. She cut her way through the world like a razor.
“She was determinedly single. She said she could not bear the compromises, professional and personal, inherent in a committed romance. She had never needed a man. She smoked and drank and laughed like a man, as if to prove the point. I respected her immensely for that independence.
“But the same independence also made her irresistible to me. I would have married her, had she let me. I would have compromised her, professionally and personally, had she let me. But there was never any chance of that. Iris saw everything too clearly, too deeply, for that to happen.
“Not that I didn’t try. I went to New York several times to see her, always for necessary business, and yet always with the ghost of a hope floating in the back of my mind that she might allow the line to be blurred, just for a night. Just long enough for me to get my foot in the door.
“What, exactly, I intended to do if I ever got my foot in the door, I really had no earthly idea. An affair, I suppose. What else was there? Not marriage, certainly. Not for her. All I knew was that I wanted more than she was ever willing to give.
“Whenever we were alone, it was always during the daylit hours, in her office or over a sober lunch at some swanky New York restaurant for which I always seemed to be hopelessly underdressed. Whenever there was occasion to meet with her socially, in the evenings over drinks in places where music played and people danced and flirted and disappeared, Iris always turned up with someone from her office or found a way to keep our association as part of a larger group of her friends.
“I don’t mean to suggest that I in any way intimidated her or that she felt defensive in my presence. Iris was not intimidated by anyone and she was always in control. I mean only to suggest that she was smart enough to see me coming. I think she meant to protect me from myself; to protect my talent from myself. She wa
s careful to deny me the opportunity to try something I would regret, including making an ass of myself coming to New York and hounding after my own editor. She was mindful of my potential and my professional reputation from the very beginning.
“I think it is fair to assume that nothing about me or my sophomoric longing was especially new to her. Surely, she was too remarkable a woman not to have seen my kind before. Emotionally, writers are a repressed and predictable lot. Male writers, anyway. I cannot speak for the women. We spend our lives pretending to control what controls us; pretending that we can banish our demons by rendering them in ink. In point of fact, however, it is the demons that control the pen. Nothing pleases and empowers the demons more than to read about themselves.
“She did not know about Julia. I had a cheater’s heart pulling my strings. When I finally met Iris face to face, on my first trip to Manhattan, I had done so with the precautionary forethought of pocketing my ring. Our many telephone conversations up to that point, all completely professional and focused on the things I had written and the things I was writing, had left me with a writer’s imagination about the woman who owned that voice on the other end of the line and who expressed all of those favorable opinions of my work. We went for lunch and martinis that first day, after hours of work on the manuscript for Igneous Moon, which she said reminded her of an early Asimov.”
Angus paused, perhaps waiting for my own assessment of the book. Waiting for me to disagree with her comparison. To see if I had even read it. I had read it. I did not disagree. I kept quiet.
“She asked me flat out whether I was married. I lied to her so abruptly and without thinking that I shocked myself. She asked what I thought of marriage; whether that was something I wanted for my future. I gave the institution a glowing review, thinking perhaps that, being from New York, she would find something charming and refreshing in a provincial sensibility on the subject. I cannot say whether she believed me. Iris was a master of the inscrutable smile. She pretended that my character was clearly better than her own since I, unlike her, was at least theoretically capable of such a solemn commitment. The truth is that it was Iris, not me, who had the sterling character.
“Iris’ first and, as far as I am aware, her only visit to Ohio came as I was completing my third novel, Inglorious Sun. It was Cleveland’s turn to host an annual writer’s conference in which Alfred A. Knopf had some regular participation. Iris was to give a presentation on the emerging trends in American fiction. In the process of preparing her remarks, she called to ask if I minded if she included my name as an up-and-comer to watch. She wanted some local flavor to inspire Ohioan writers.
“Of course I was flattered and readily consented after pretending to mull it over just to preserve my dignity. She said she hoped to see me when she was in town, adding that if I was interested she could bring the latest galley proofs and we could take the opportunity to work through her edits. Her tone was enthusiastic. Hopeful. That was how I read it, anyway. Night after night, as I replayed it in my head.
“She came in August. With the rain. Worse in that year than any I can remember. We set records that year for falling water. Like we lived beneath a suspended ocean.
“I did not tell Julia about the conference or that my editor was visiting. She would have expected to meet her. She would have expected that I bring her to the house for drinks or to the Country Club for dinner. Julia would have wanted to finally meet my brilliant editor; the woman I was forced to visit in New York and whom I had taken to referring with a teasing derision as Ivan for her supposed masculine appearance; her large hands and long squarish face. The woman whom I had said, reassuringly, might have appeared more comfortable pushing a plowshare than a pen.”
Something in that memory paused the narrative. I watched Angus’ face darken with what I took to be shame. When it finally passed, he continued.
“The Cleveland conference was on a Friday. The preceding Sunday I began a campaign of feigning a mounting frustration at my inability to concentrate. I paced and banged around complaining about minutia in the way that, as Julia and I had previously observed, often accompanied my bouts of writer’s block. I openly threatened to pack up and spend several days at the cottage just for a change of scenery. Conveniently, Julia had taken ill and was nauseous and out of sorts herself. By Wednesday, my retreat to the lake seemed to be in our mutual best interests.
“She saw me off early Thursday morning, kissing me in the doorway and vowing to stay in bed for the day and maybe the next if she did not feel better. She was still in her robe, longer than the one you’re wearing, made of blue chenille and with big pockets set off in white piping. I remember the rain lashing at the window like it had claws. She placed her naked feet – such delicate baby’s feet – on the tops of my shoes and hugged me around the shoulders. She wished me luck at unblocking; at finding my muses. She hoped I would read her something when I came home. She told me she loved me.
“All I could think of was the airplane from New York that was probably already crossing over into Pennsylvania airspace.
“I left the truck beneath its tarp. I could not picture Iris in the truck bouncing on its worn shocks. I took the car instead. I made good time, in spite of the rain. In two hours I was at the cottage, stocking the kitchen and dusting the tops of the furniture and freshening the air. I changed quickly into clothes more suitable for a writer’s conference. They were clothes I had packed the night before, when Julia was in the bathroom. Gabardine slacks and a pressed white shirt and a tie. My Manhattan clothes. I had to take the tiny mirror in the bedroom off the wall and tilt it forward and back so that I could assure myself that I was presentable.
“I locked up the cottage and sprinted through the deluge back to the car feeling for all the world like a teenager. I felt invincible, Matilda. Like there was nothing I couldn’t do. Like the world belonged to me and I could take what I wished.
“Over roads that were steadily turning into small rivers, I sped back to Cleveland, arriving at the hotel just as the conference was opening. I stood in the back of the ballroom as Iris made her way to the dais. She was, as always, fashionable in her trousers and her silky, diaphanous shells and her jewelry. But it was her manner that was most arresting. Her confidence. Her casual but authoritative air. Her wryly observant, understated humor. And all in the company of two hundred aspiring, mostly male writers whom she had no reason to believe were any different that the over-wound, self-absorbed, hypersensitive creatures that she had spent her career editing. If at the beginning of her remarks they were dubious about the value of listening to the literary prognostications of a woman, those doubts were well resolved by the time she had reached the end of her hour. She had them all eating out of her hand and wanting her advice. When she gave examples of authors to watch – Irving Wallace and John Updike and Philip Roth – my name suddenly rang out like birdsong.
“‘And Angus Mann. I do not want to forget brilliant young Angus who lives and writes among you right here in Cleveland and whom I am distinctly proud to edit. You would all do well to keep your eyes on Angus. I would note in particular his use of disjointed memory, his simple but vivid imagery, and his restrained moral subtext. He’s right there against the wall. Literally, not figuratively. Wave hello to your fellows, Angus. There’s your next Sherwood Anderson, folks.’
“Faces rotated on shoulders like an assemblage of owls. I gave a modest salute and they all turned away. Iris gave a wink and continued. I felt like I might just float up through the ceiling, my back bumping up against the lights like a cut balloon.
“When she had finished, lightly waving away the enthusiasm of the applause, she spoke a few words to the next presenter and then gathered her things and left the ballroom. I tracked her every movement from across the room like a hawk, paying no attention to the new voice in the air. I intercepted her in the hallway above the stairs.
“As I approached, I thanked her for making me a room full of enemies. She set down her luggage and laugh
ed her famous laugh and hugged me for the first time in our acquaintance. Instinctively, I exploited the new intimacy, kissing her lightly somewhere along the jawbone. If she was surprised or off-put in some way, she did not show it.
“When we moved apart, our hands cupping each other’s elbows, her face came back into view. She was telling me that it was time I started getting used to resentful and envious writers as the surest hallmark of success.
“Her responsibilities to the conference having been discharged, Iris suggested lunch. I grabbed both of her bags and escorted her up to the hotel restaurant where we enjoyed a table overlooking Lake Erie. The rain streaked against the windows in thick, grey rivulets that combined into sheets and separated again. It could just as easily have been that Lake Erie was raining up as the sky raining down.
“We spent lunch talking about literature and the business of literature as was our way in restaurants, only that time the conversation had a lighter heart and seemed shot through with a frivolous, excited energy, as though we were two school children on a field trip out of the classroom. I suspected that there was something about Manhattan and its purlieus intrinsic to Iris and that when she was removed from her element she was liberated to be someone else, or at least to feel differently about things and to see people in a slightly different light. I speculated silently, in a rush of martini-flavored optimism, that such was all to my benefit.
“When talk turned to Inglorious Sun and the editing work ahead, I proposed, as casually as I could muster, that we strike out for my writing studio, promoting my father’s fishing cabin once again, selling her on the sound of heavy rain in the forest and other natural wonders that she owed it to herself to experience while she was out of the city. She hesitated, of course. I read on her face a hint of that familiar calculus running through her mind. I read her, reading me.