The Man on the Third Floor

by Anne Bernays

  “Why infamous?”

  “She leaves ripples behind her wherever she’s been,” Johnnie said. I asked him what caused the ripples. He couldn’t or wouldn’t supply any details. “Maybe it’s just talk,” he said. “Anyway, she’s a looker isn’t she?”

  “Is she?” I said. “Doesn’t she seem a bit theatrical?”

  “Well, that’s part of it,” Johnnie said. “Excuse me. I think I see one of my celebrated authors . . .” And he was gone to greet a man with red hair whom I didn’t recognize.

  Phyllis saw me staring at her and gave me a look impossible to misinterpret. I was flattered, I have to admit. I also have to admit that although I hadn’t been with any men since Harmon, my dealings with women were more casual than passionate. At least they knew I wasn’t after “one thing.” I liked women a lot; they seemed to me to have a core of good sense that most men didn’t give them credit for. At this point I wasn’t sure, really, what I wanted or needed. The idea of making love to a man ever again seemed as taboo as making love to a sheep. And I don’t mean doing it; I mean just thinking about it. Terrifying. Making love to a woman, on the other hand, was okay, I had no trouble getting it up; but oh my god, how my mind traveled during the act. It went all over the place. The girl would be groaning and crying out—apparently I had something they liked a lot—calling my name and invoking the deity, and there I would be, lying over or under her and silently reciting lines from “The Waste Land”: “He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you/To get yourself some teeth.”— a statement blunt and earthy and surrounded by a vision so bleak it made me shake all over when I first read the poem. Anyway, I had girlfriends and they seemed to like me well enough; there were several who not only hinted marriage but out-and-out asked me to marry them. One even told me “I want your baby.” I demurred gracefully, telling them I was married to my work or some other bullshit. A couple of them cried; it made me feel bad, especially when they insisted that they wouldn’t have gone out with me if they had known I was only “playing” with them.

  Even at twenty-three, Phyllis was different. The look she gave me was a come-on, but when I did come on I found that she wasn’t just a flirt; she had ambitions for herself that had nothing to do with babies—or even marriage. After we courted a while, Phyllis wisely restraining her more enthusiastic impulses and I trying to out-manly myself, we married in 1935 in her parents’ apartment on Morningside Heights, went on a short honeymoon to Lake Tahoe, and then hurried back to our respective jobs. Phyllis was physically ardent and I did my best to satisfy her. It wasn’t that I actively disliked sex; it was just that it seemed on the order of eating when you like the food well enough but you’re not hungry, and your hostess is watching you so you eat it anyway.

  We lived in a small apartment near Gramercy Park, a perfectly nice place with a living room flooded with light because of the empty lot next door. Phyllis was a copywriter but she didn’t intend to stop there. She wanted to fix things, anything, even the design of kitchens—which she claimed had been done by men only, and men had no idea how high a sink should be or where to put the stove vis-à vis-the refrigerator, which she called the icebox. She wanted to fix society so that the Negroes didn’t all have to live in only one part of town. She was almost in love with FDR, and if she heard anyone saying anything negative about him she would either engage that person in loud argument or, if she was tired, walk out of the room. To Phyllis, Roosevelt was a greater leader than Washington, more compassionate than Lincoln, wiser than Jefferson. Always a Democrat, I largely agreed with her and thought the New Deal a fine idea, with a few drawbacks, none of which I chose to discuss with Phyllis.

  By this time I was back in New York—having finished my sentence as a traveler—and I have to admit, understanding a good deal more than I had when I set out, about why people bought certain books and left others on the bookstore shelf. I had done a fairly decent job and the higher-ups rewarded me by making me a junior editor, responsible both for “acquisitions” and for line editing. These two activities involve very different kinds of skills. For the first you need to make deals with agents, to feint and parry, to use exaggeration and hyperbole, even to lie a little to get what you’re after. Agents are basically peddlers, depending on the fruits of others peoples’ labor for their livelihood. On the other hand, agents, as the joke went, ought to be considered generous human beings because they give ninety percent of their earnings to their authors, keeping only ten percent for themselves. Line editing means having and employing the total focus of a good tough English teacher, dedicated to getting the words in the right relationship to each other. How many people possess both these skills? I suppose it would be immodest of me to say that I’m one of them, but what the hell. I enjoy the game-playing involved in acquiring manuscripts, and I love fooling around with words, trying to get them to say exactly what an author wanted them to say, not an approximation but a bull’s-eye.

  Meanwhile, Phyllis had left the ad agency. “Writing that stuff was cramping my style,” she told me. “I want to do more of my own thinking, get involved with the real world.” So she went and got herself hired by WNYC, the radio station started in the 1920s to focus on Manhattan and its boroughs. I considered myself a forward-looking man but I wasn’t all that happy having her work; I guess it injured my pride. The wives of most of my friends stayed home and had babies or worked gratis for the Henry Street Settlement. If professional women weren’t viewed exactly as freaks they were certainly looked upon with suspicion: why on earth would a women want to spend eight hours a day in an office when she could walk in Central Park, have lunch with her lady friends, go to a movie to watch Myrna Loy or Joan Crawford turn men inside out, stay in bed all day eating chocolates and reading The Saturday Evening Post? We hired a nanny, a French woman named Michelle, who insisted on being called “Mademoiselle.” She looked after our two children—Henry born in ’38, and Kate, in ’41— while Phyllis plied her trade. At first I felt bad about leaving them in the care of a gray-haired mother substitute, but the children hung on to her and gave her kisses so I figured she must be okay.

  Then Hitler invaded the Sudetenland after promising he wouldn’t, and in the words of John Milton, all hell broke loose. Phyllis joined the Red Cross. They sold her a snappy uniform and visored cap and she rolled bandages. During the second year of the war, I told Phyllis I was thinking of enlisting.

  “They won’t take you,” she said. “You’re too old.”

  “Thirty-five isn’t old. I’m just a pup.”

  “What would you do? You hate guns.”

  I realized I hadn’t told her about the air rifle that was now broken down and stashed away on a shelf in the hall closet. “Nothing with guns,” I said. “They’ll find something for me to do.”

  And they did. Largely I think because of my Harvard Education, they found a place for me in army intelligence, gave me a set of lieutenant’s bars, and set me to work along with fifty or so other young men, passing on more or less routine decoded German messages. This meant reading hundreds of them a day and seeing to it that they got into the right hands. It should have been more exciting than it turned out to be because a lot of the messages were about supplies of milk for the troops, some weather reports (which we already knew), and the deteriorating condition of some of the tanks on the North African front—sand in the gears. We were all housed in one large room in the recently completed five-sided building out of which the war was conducted—in the strategic sense. My job wasn’t anything like my peacetime work at Griffin House except that they both dealt with words.

  After a certain amount of good-natured grumbling, Phyllis joined me with our children: Henry, then a serious-minded four, and Kate, a one-year-old, whose face made me weep it was so beautiful. Mademoiselle, meanwhile, had gone to work for Sikorsky on Long Island where she made three times the money she had working for us. Phyllis hadn’t wanted to leave New York, because that was where all her friends lived and she was working on bei
ng a recognized “hostess.” I teased her about this, telling her that the mayor’s address book didn’t have as many names in it as hers did. Moving to D.C. meant having to make new friends to invite to small, candlelit gatherings in our Georgetown apartment, a place we rented for the duration at an exorbitant price. After a couple of weeks Phyllis was, basically, a good sport about it, finding a nearby kindergarten for Henry and wheeling Kate around in our pre-war English baby carriage. She had wonderful posture and stood as straight as Mary Poppins.

  I enjoyed wartime Washington. The odor of power floated, cloudlike, above the city, penetrating ceilings, walls, bedrooms. It amazed me to see how easily men wielded it, instructing other men (and some women) what to do without please or thank you attached. Just do it and do it now! This was something I had never been eager to do. For instance, whenever I needed something typed up or mailed or delivered down the hall I said, “Would you mind please doing so and so”—as if they had a choice. I don’t know why I was so bad at giving orders. Maybe it was because my father was a boss of the old school and never softened a command. And the odd thing was, the people who worked for him in our house didn’t seem to mind his brusque Prussian style. What was the matter with them? Could they actually enjoy being foot soldiers in my father’s army? In any case, Washington agreed with me and me with it, even though Phyllis missed New York, and I had no guarantee that my job at Griffin would be waiting for me when the war was over.

  After a month or so I began to be aware that I was being stared at. Whenever I glanced in the direction of the gaze I saw a man who looked somewhat younger than me. A man with intense gray eyes, an expression of curiosity and a snappy haircut. I was uncomfortable being stared at, and just as I made up my mind to walk over to him and ask him what the hell he was doing, the watcher himself approached me and stuck out his hand. He introduced himself as Edgar Fleming, following this with “You’re in publishing, aren’t you? I mean when you’re not here fighting this fucking war.”

  I asked him how he had found this out, wondering at the same time what he was up to. I especially didn’t want to think about him sexually; I was over that, had been for a long time and considered the incident at camp a childish experiment, not worth dwelling on. Fleming told me that he thought I looked “interesting” and had asked about me. I told him I’d been only a junior editor, low on the ladder.

  “And I’m only a junior writer,” he said. “I’ve published a couple of short stories. One in Collier’s.”

  If he was telling the truth then he really was a writer. While no Hound and Horn—rarified, often experimental— Collier’s published stories by Hemingway and Faulkner. I felt like a fisherman who discovers that the river is full of trout. I looked at Fleming’s face; it had the right amount of gloom plus something else, an element that suggested profundity that doesn’t necessarily have to deliver. He would look just fine on the back of a book jacket.

  It didn’t take long before Fleming admitted that he had written a novel. He followed this by the inevitable question: Would I read it? Of course I would read it. What did I have to lose? If I liked it, I would send it along to the editor-in-chief at Griffin, Fred Forstman. This would, at the very least, show Forstman that even while I was working away to help end the war my heart still lay in my peacetime job. If I thought the manuscript was no good, I might risk our new friendship; this was a risk I was willing to take. I called Phyllis and told her not to wait for me for dinner, and asked Fleming if he’d like to go out for a drink after work. We went to a place in Georgetown crowded with men in uniform and others who looked as if they had been recruited from the life of the professions and business to work for the government. They were making a good deal of noise and there was the kind of laughter that’s just a little too loud. We found a table just then being vacated by a gray-haired Colonel and a young girl, probably his secretary, whom he meant to bed after filling her with an expensive dinner. As they headed toward the door, his hand caressed her right buttock.

  During the next hour or so and two whiskey sours each I found out that Edgar Fleming had been born in a small town in California, where his parents still lived, had gone to U.C.L.A., had worked for General Motors writing in-house advertising copy and was not married, not yet ready to “settle down.” I put this inside quotation marks because he tended to use tired phrases when speaking, a habit I hoped hadn’t spilled over into his written prose. I wasn’t surprised when Fleming told me he was single: he had made himself famous by working his way through almost the entire cadre of secretaries who worked in our top secret department. Apparently he had the touch that combines the neediness of a boy with the emotional muscles of a “real man.” He seemed to be irresistible to women. Our waitress called him “honey” while twinkling her tired eyes at him.

  Fleming brought his manuscript to work the following day. He had packed it away neatly in a typewriter paper box. “Here’s my baby,” he said.

  I told him I would read it as soon as I could. And then I asked him to promise that if I didn’t think it publishable, he wouldn’t let it destroy our friendship. Even as I said this I was aware that the friendship, like newly poured cement, had not hardened enough to last if something came along to put a big footprint in it. I knew that if I said no the friendship would evanesce. At the very least he would not only take my rejection as a personal affront but would probably write me off as a moron. Does a couple whose marriage has shattered actually believe they can remain friends?

  The manuscript was over six hundred pages long. First novelists generally were long-winded as if the stuff had been building up for years, until it finally erupted and spewed great flows of words and ideas. The most egregious example of this was poor Thomas Wolfe who, in his first novel, disgorged thousands of pages, leaving his editor to take up (changing metaphors) his machete and whack away at the words until they could fit inside the covers of a book it didn’t take a muscleman to lift.

  It wasn’t all that easy to read at home. Home was the third floor of a house owned by a couple in their seventies who probably made a mistake renting to a family with a toddler (Kate) and a four-year-old (Henry); but, as they told us, they felt they should be doing something toward the war effort and so had made the top floor—which had previously housed their children—available to a serviceman and his family. Phyllis spent a lot of time telling Henry to be quiet and rocking Kate so she wouldn’t cry. I didn’t have a study; I worked at the table where we took our meals. It was cramped, and although I enjoyed hearing the happy—and sometimes not so happy—noises made by my children, I found it hard to focus on anything other than my surroundings. But when I started reading Edgar Fleming’s manuscript I was stuck to the chair, so to speak. It was a Saturday morning and Phyllis had taken the children to play in a nearby park. It wasn’t until they came back to the apartment that I came out of my trance, as I heard them making their way up the steep staircase, Kate crying, probably hungry, and Phyllis, being mother hen. Henry burst into the room and ran over for a hug, which I gave him, only half aware of what I was doing.

  Fleming had managed to keep his story of war in the Pacific moving ahead at a steady clip while not neglecting to flesh out his characters, one in particular who I figured was self-referential, a good guy with a touch of uncertainty who comes through in the clutch. Happily, Fleming had avoided clichés and manipulated his characters through assorted problems like a pro. The hand-to-hand scenes were especially dramatic, not to say lurid, and at one point I had to put down the page I was reading because I was too moved to read further. Adding richness and nuance to this recipe, he had delivered a story that was fresh and surprising. Fleming was one in thousands. I’d been in the business long enough to know the astronomical odds against getting a first novel published. You don’t want to think about it if you’re writing one. I’d say the odds were less favorable than playing the French horn in the New York Philharmonic. I spent the rest of the day thinking about Fleming’s novel. One more thing—and this is an editor�
��s most reliable gauge for judging a novel—I forgot that I should have been using my most critical eye, and instead I fell into the delighted reader category.

  The thing held up very well, right to the final sentence on the last page. Fleming was a thoroughbred. Aside from solidifying our friendship, he and his book would help secure my place at Griffin. I would back the right horse. This horse, a rarity, had both literary lines and the potential to fill the coffers of Griffin House. Not too many like him— Pearl Buck, John Steinbeck, Somerset Maugham, Daphne du Maurier—came to mind. I thought I was way ahead of my new author, having immediately started complicated calculations. If I allowed my enthusiasm to shine too brightly, Fleming might then get an agent who would sell his book to the highest bidder. Griffin House, though one of the three clearly “Jewish” publishing houses, was not famous for its generosity to authors. It wouldn’t have the fight to compete with, say, Harper Brothers or Macmillan.

  I figured that it wouldn’t hurt Fleming to cool his heels while building up a pool of self-doubt, and so I waited until he asked me if I had read the manuscript. “Well,” he said, Have you read it? What do you think?”

  I told him I’d finished it the night before and that “there might be something here. Yes, I definitely think you’ve got something here. Of course it needs a good deal of editing and cutting. But I’d like to pass it along to our top editor, Fred Forstman. See what he thinks.”

  “You really like it?” Fleming’s eyes glittered and widened.

  “Yes,” I said. “It moves right along. Strong characters, good plot. I can’t say how Forstman will respond but he usually likes what I like.” This last phrase was pure imagination; Forstman and I had not had that much intercourse, so to speak. “I assume you’ve got a carbon?”