by Amy Gray
“It's Elliott!” a voice screamed.
“Oh, hi.” I flushed and looked at Edward, who was tending his Guinness and pretending not to listen.
“Look, Elliott, now's not a good time.” This was sweet justice. He wants me but he can't have me back. Did he think he could just apologize and I'd forgive him?
“I think I … you.” He was breaking up.
My eyes widened. “This reception is terrible—I can't hear you—what, what did you just say?” I was panicked.
“I think I lo—” The line went dead. Shit! I was dying. An infinitesimal world of possibilities, a Kierkegaardian labyrinth of ei-thers and ors ran through my mind. I considered life spans’ worth of love, heartbreak, and death in fractions of seconds. Finally I searched my heart, and I determined that even if Elliott was in love with me, I still felt the same way about him. He was a piece of shit.
The phone rang again. It was him.
“Hi.”
“Yeah, hi,” he seemed rushed. “I don't know what was up with that connection, but I was trying to tell you I think I left my card at your house.”
I was incredulous. “Your card?”
“Yeah—my Citibank card. Can you look for it? I think we used it when we ordered burritos last Thursday.”
I remembered. I remembered well enough to remember the credit card perched in front of my fake orchid on the ledge of my window, where I'd found it days ago and decided not to tell him. “I don't think I have it, but I'll look,” I said, and I hung up.
Another One Bites the Dust
When I looked up from the glowing red STOP button on my cell phone, Edward was talking to another girl to his right. I couldn't get a good look at her, but she seemed attractive. I felt a stabbing in my stomach. Another battle lost. To top it off, Cassie was at the other end of the bar talking to Stuart, her bartender-suitor du jour. It didn't seem to matter that their relationship consisted mainly of heavy oral flirtation and dry humping on kegs of Corona in the stockroom. Cassie enjoyed having a boy around to flirt with.
Meanwhile, Elliott had fucked up another night and possibly my entire future. I glumly nursed my Sin Cider and kept an eye on Cassie in one corner of the mirror of the bar and Edward in the other. Half an hour later Cassie was making out with Stuart next to the bathroom at the end of the bar, so I tapped her and whispered in her ear, “I'm outtie.” I was walking out the door to mourn my loss when I felt someone grab my arm. It was Edward.
“Hey,” he said, looking embarrassed. I noticed his large square hand on my arm, squeezing slightly. I have a hand fetish. I adore big, boyish hands. Goosebumps bulleted down my arm and neck. He towered over me, probably about six foot three or four. I have a tall fetish, too.
“Hey,” I said, trying to sound aloof.
“Listen,” he said, “I'm sorry, that's someone I used to know. Someone I used to date.”
“Oh.” That was reassuring.
“In high school. I had planned on meeting her and her boyfriend, but he couldn't make it. We were just catching up.” I let him continue. “Listen, can I call you? I'm going back to Massachusetts tomorrow, but I'd really like to see you again. Maybe you're up there sometimes visiting your parents? ”
“Yeah, I visit my parents sometimes.” He was winning me over. He grabbed a Heineken coaster off the bar, and I wrote my phone numbers, work and home, in a circle around the green periphery. As I walked to the F train, briskly, I said his name under my breath fifty times. Elliott was an abstract recollection, a distant dream. Edward, Edward, Edward …
EIGHT
What an odd collection the trusted professionals are. One trusts one's lawyer, one's doctor, priest I suppose, if you are a Catholic, and now I added to the list one's private detective. A detective must find it as important as a novelist to amass his trivial material before picking out the right clue. But how difficult that picking out is-the release of the real subject. How can I disinter the human character from the heavy scene?
—GRAHAM GREENE, THE END OF THE AFFAIR
God Is in the Details
As a little girl, I found God. I imagined Him not as an omnipotent or sovereign character, but more like a modest puppeteer, and His provenance was the weather—specifically, snow. I prayed for it all year long, but particularly in the fall, when my birthday started to roll around in late October and the smoky fall air pointed to a potentiality that was more ripe, more on the verge than any other time of year.
Even as I got older, I craved the equalizing and quieting effects a snowfall had on the world around me. In high school, on one of the two snow days ever, just before heading out with Cassie to smoke Larks in a Boston alleyway called the Crevice and say “Fuck you” to the world, I fell back against the door of my room, with its Lemonheads poster and picture of Johnny Rotten and Sid relieving themselves, holding their members like battling warriors, and felt tingly from the beautiful anarchy of it all. My High Holy Days were, strictly speaking, snow days. There was no more solemn time, no state of being more deserving of reverence and awe.
The day of my boss Sol's father's funeral was a snowy day. It was three weeks into my job at the Agency. I arrived at the office a little early to find Evan holding court with a Marlboro Red hanging out of his mouth and one foot on his desk. “Hey, Gray,” he said, calling me over and gesturing with his chin like a movie-made mafioso from the 1950s.
“It's freezing in here,” I said to him. It couldn't have been more than forty degrees, and the whole airy space shivered as gusts snuck through cracks in the windows, holes in the floorboards, pipes in the walls.
“I know, it's pretty bad,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you that the heat is busted and you can feel free to take your laptop and go work at home, “cause it'll probably be awhile before we get this fixed—HEY, ASSMAN!” Evan called over me to Matt to deliver him the same good news. I was blissful with the prospect of a grownup snow day, a clean white layer to erase everything— my doubts, my mistrust, my hangover. I was opening the door of the office, which swung open a little too easily with the pull of the wind behind it, when Evan made an announcement: “Nobody move!”
We all gathered around his desk. Evan explained that Sol had called in and told him that his father had just died. We could use our discretion about whether or not to attend the funeral, which would be that day in Neptune City, New Jersey. They were going to rent a van to get there.
I was quietly beset. On the one hand, I was thrilled with the gift of snow, and relieved to have another day to clear my head. On the other hand, it would be an egregious slight to blow off the funeral to have a few extra hours at the Liquor Store Bar, or, even worse, shop, which my bank account couldn't sustain right now. Still, I was used to the steadfastness of massive central heating systems, like the one in the fifty-floored building, where I'd hammered out flap copy till one or two in the morning to the soothing hum of the air flowing through ten thousand tiny grates in ten thousand tiny cubicles in a hundred thousand square feet of perfectly calibrated office space heat. A broken heating system was—a gift from God! It released me, however temporarily, from another day of professional self-flagellation. A day off was painfully alluring, but attending the funeral might be the perfect way to ingratiate myself with Sol. Or he might consider it an intrusion to have me there, a new hire, witnessing one of the most intimate moments of his life. In the end, I decided to go.
Another Baptism by Fire
This funeral was actually the second time in two years that I'd started a job and been plunged into the intimacies of death and loss in the lives of my bosses. Two weeks before I graduated college, I got my first publishing job, and a week later I was in Cape Cod, with my mom for the weekend. I went into town in the morning for a hot jelly doughnut and the Times. When I sat down with the paper I instantly noticed a front-page article titled PULITZER WINNING WRITER DIES IN CLIMBING ACCIDENT. According to unconfirmed sources,” the writer's body had not yet been recovered, but it was believed that, while hiking a parti
cularly difficult part of the Himalayas, he was overtaken by altitude sickness, leading him to freeze to death. His hiking partner had managed to return to a base camp and was hospitalized in critical condition, with both legs amputated. I wasn't sure it was him at first, but I remembered some particulars my new boss Gloria had revealed to me about her husband: He was a writer, and his nickname was Newlyn or Newt Ebersol. At my you've-got-the-job-lunch at La-Grenouille, she gave me the portentous warning, “Never marry a writer.” When I read, at the end, “Mr. Ebersol leaves his wife, Gloria Nelson, a book editor, a son, Myer Tate Ebersol, and a daughter, Olivia Marcel Ebersol,” I dropped my plate and said, “Fuck!” I left the hot raspberry jelly and torn dough in a fleshy pile on the floor.
A week and a half later, I was sitting in St. Bartholomew's Church at Park Avenue and Fiftieth Street, listening to a parade of swinging dicks of the publishing world. Princeton classmates and colleagues from The Wall Street Journal told clever, sometimes stirring, elegiac stories about him. Newt was a social scientist who wrote vast, assiduously researched works of social conscience. There weren't many left like him anymore. The Ebersol children, Myer and Liv, sat in the front of the crescent before the stage like dolls, with tiny porcelain grimaces. The only-outside-the-establishment speaker was a black woman who had been a subject of Newlyn's Pulitzer-winning documentary book on the Crown Heights riots. She stood up in front of the 99 percent white, 98 percent male, 97 percent Century Club audience and collapsed into hysterical sobs, wailing, “Why he got to go do that? Oh, God, why? Why he gotta do that?” It seemed like the question everyone wanted to ask but no one had dared. A wave of uncomfortable murmuring shook the otherwise stoic literati. The one-hundred-pound ivory-weave stock of the memorial programs absorbed many tears. Liv and Myer were quickly escorted by their nannies out of the auditorium. Some stiff upper lips slackened.
I spent the next year reading and talking about Newlyn, sending excerpts from his published and unpublished works to magazines and papers and speaking expertly in the hushed, sympathetic tones used to speak of the tragically dead. I, like most of the reporters I was fielding, was trying to mourn someone I'd never known. Gloria almost never talked about him, but I would hear her occasionally muted tones on the phone with friends, talking about how Newt had broken an arm on that same mountain six months earlier, and how she had forbidden him from going again, but he insisted, even going so far as to start researching an article for Harper's about the tradition of ice climbing. Her voice would flail up and down in a way that divulged a profound anger—anger that he would choose to leave his family. I wondered how he could challenge death in a way that seemed so indifferent, that even mocked the grim effect it could have on his wife and his children. I imagined Newt, sitting on that mountain in a frenzy of swirling whiteness, calmly absorbing the baptism of the snow, closing his eyes as he yielded to the cleansing, to the wiping away, of everything. Slowly, I reconstituted Newt, gathering and amplifying data and repartees and minutiae until I could almost imagine having known him.
New Jersey Girl
Two and a half years later, the van ride to Sol's father's funeral was not what I expected. Instead of being somber, everyone was joking and foul-mouthed. Vinny and I talked politics a little. “Amy Gway! You came!” he exclaimed. I climbed in the bouncing tan Chevrolet that Evan got at a rental place for reconstituted and seized vehicles. The van was swimming with profanity. Vinny was a fourth-generation Italian-American New Yorker, and his great-uncle had been a big-time trade unionist in the twenties. Hence, Vinny explained, he believed in big labor and liberal government. Gus added “big breasts” to the list in a whisper right before we pulled into the aluminum-sided Yahrzeit Jewish Memorial Home. (Vinny called them “cans,” which he saw a lot of at dance clubs out in Bay Ridge, where Giuliani's topless-only statutes weren't enforced.) I talked to Vinny about the cases a bit—he had a photographic recall of the roughly five hundred the Agency had handled since he started working there. “Oh, yeah,” he'd say, “I wemember number fifteen-one-eleven, dat one was a doozy” or “Nine fifty-seven had a hundwed and seventeen lawsuits connected to it!”
When we entered the funeral home, Sol was standing in the foyer, holding his infant son. His other son, Joshua, was holding a balloon and running in figure eights around the guests, yelling “Daddy, look, I'm an airplane. Watch me Daddy, watch me!” The Agency people got in line to give Sol their regards, and he kissed everyone and said, “Thanks for being here.” I held back, but Sol saw me and kissed me hello on the cheek, as he'd done with everyone else and said, “Thanks so much for being here, A. Gray,” and I was glad I'd come.
When we sat down for the service, the baby was sitting with the nanny in front of me, crossing his eyes and staring at what appeared to be nothing at all. The rabbi made a speech and talked about how Sol's dad had worked almost up until the day he died and how he almost couldn't have imagined the successes his sons would have seen in their lives, both attending college and becoming successful, self-sufficient men in the tradition of the Rubensteins. He turned to Sol and his brother and said, “May God comfort you among all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.” Sol's mother started crying softly in the front row, and I saw him touch her shoulder from two seats away and mouth the words “I love you.”
Just then I saw a line from the baby's mouth—which was smiling widely at me—to the floor at my feet, which I realized were splattered with vomit. The nanny stood up to take the baby out of the room, and he was literally beaming at me as they walked away.
To my surprise, we all followed along in the van to the cemetery. Sol didn't have a lot of men in his family, and he needed pallbearers, and I almost cried when I saw Big Gus and Evan and Linus and Matt standing by the circle of black earth in the center of the snowy field in their ill-fitting blue and black blazers, looking very serious for the first time. Sol's mother threw herself on the ground and sobbed, and he and his brother pulled her up while the rest of us looked away and the boys put the casket on the webbing over the open grave. The ride back to Manhattan was subdued and by the time I headed home I barely noticed that it was way past dinnertime and all I'd had was a Big Mac at a drive-through on the way.
Filing My Way to Heaven
When I was still toiling away in publishing, one day Gloria called to say she'd be going out to the dentist and then having a meeting for Newt's memorial foundation, and I settled down in her office, which for some reason was bigger than that of my other boss, Boris, and had a beautiful view of the East River stretching below. I brought in some hundreds of pages of dreaded filing I had to do and then spaced out (for seconds, minutes?) admiring my cute patent-leather Sigerson Morrison Mary Janes crossed at the ankle on her desk. Since I'd been working for Gloria I had completely overhauled the filing systems, putting into place an intricate and aesthetically pleasing system of color-coded folders corresponding to matching shaded laser-printed courier lettering on sleek matte transparent Filofax labels. I was proud of my accomplishment, which required extra hours of work each day, not to mention whole Saturdays and Sundays.
The filing project somehow felt like more of a triumph, more me than the perfunctory reports I wrote about middling manuscripts and book proposals I took home each night. The books I liked got rejected anyway, even if, as only happened a few times, I actually wrote at the end—“I strongly recommend reading this. This could be the environmentally bent, biracial, gay Rick Moody,” or “A strong commercial read, appealing to the market where Mary McCarthy and Irvine Welsh intersect.” My reports would sit on Boris's desk for months, settling over with a fine layer of dust.
On our cleanup day, which was usually once a week, I would sit in Boris's office and take dictation while he plucked unread manuscripts off his desk and pitched them into an enormous trash can I would bring in for this purpose. He would pick up the manuscript with my report, and finally say, “I have appraised that report, which was well written, but the project is not right for me.” And, with that, he wo
uld throw it in the trash, as he did with almost all the manuscripts he received, solicited or otherwise. I was constantly drafting notes to peeved agents telling them, “Please resend the proposal,” “There has been some error,” and “Boris never received it.” “But I sent it by messenger!” they would say, exasperated.
In Gloria's office, as I filed away, I came across a picture of her and Newt posing over a Scrabble board, looking engrossed and in love for the only time in any picture I'd seen of them together. I also found a piece of paper on which she'd tried to figure out how to spell the word “fugue;” it had such variations as “fewgue” “feogwe” and “fooge.” I found a note she'd written to me that said, “Amy: to do: 1) Make new Xeroxes of all news articles for my books and make a new Pendaflex file called ‘Current Media,’ 2) Help figre [sic] how to Back up my Personal Digital Assistant, 3) What is going on with Raffeter contract and why haven't you mentioned it? 4) Please type thank you letter to my mother which I will dictate.” I stuffed her chickenscratch in my pocket and threw it away when I got home so she couldn't dig it out of the trash.