The Man on the Third Floor

by Anne Bernays

  I told her we wouldn’t ask Barry to wear a uniform. Maybe a cap. He was down on his luck, living at the Y, a war hero, if one insisted. The lies came so easily. I told her Barry barely made minimum wage from his carpet job. And most of that went to his old crippled mother who lived in Queens. “He’s a good egg. I sort of feel we owe it to veterans to give them a break.”

  Phyllis’ ears pricked up and she asked me just how much I knew about Barry.

  “Not that much,” I said. “Actually, I’m not sure how I know even this much.”

  Phyllis was less hard to persuade than I would have predicted. But I wasn’t going to waste time trying to figure out why. “You’ll be glad in the end,” I said. I gave her a hug.

  I got a kick out of making up stories like the one about Omar Bradley, one of my heroes. Sometimes I thought I had more imagination than some of my authors, who struggled so mightily to keep their readers from hearing the gears of a plot grinding its way through the pages of a book. I suppose I ought to have felt somewhat guilty and maybe I did—who wants to admit to lying?—but after all, I assure myself, who was it hurting? Not Phyllis, not Barry, not me. Certainly not the real hero—General Omar Bradley.

  We were at the dinner table drinking coffee out of demitasse cups. It was nicely bitter. The children had asked to be excused to go upstairs to do their homework. It was one of those suspended moments at the end of a day, things having been accomplished, nothing much left to do. I had a manuscript to read waiting for me on my desk in the library but, having glanced through the first chapter at work, I knew I could dispense with it easily. (Pity, too, because it was a book about communications in general and television in particular, a baby that had just been born; most people couldn’t afford a set but I had a feeling it was something that might seduce a good many readers away from books.) The trouble with this manuscript was that the author couldn’t write and that’s a drawback for someone who wants to publish.

  “I guess there’s plenty Barry can do around the house,” Phyllis said. “When he’s not ferrying you or me around town. He can shovel snow and wash the windows—inside. He can polish the banisters. Oh, and my mother’s silver.” As more tasks sprang up, Barry began to seem indispensable. “Yes,” she said, taking her napkin off her lap and laying it next to her demitasse cup. “Are you sure we have the money?”

  The room upstairs was empty. He wasn’t going to eat that much. Besides, I was a clever investor and trusted the stock market to keep me in Mark Cross tan kid gloves.

  FRED FORSTMAN’S health began to go downhill at about this time. He coughed a lot and seemed tired. The skin on his cheeks turned from ruddy to wan. He didn’t talk about this but everyone noticed. There was whispering. The spring had gone out of his step, his loud voice grew hushed. It wasn’t wrong of me, was it, to try and figure out who would succeed him? I’m certain I wasn’t the only one to engage in this kind of speculation. The poor guy wasn’t even sixty-five but it was obvious that he would—absent a miracle— be forced to retire sooner rather than later. Over the past month or so Forstman invited me several times to have lunch with him at the Orange Club, where he insisted on talking about the book business. He asked me to sit in on meetings with the heads of the advertising and promotion departments, and to come along when he met with agents of significance and the chief honcho of the Book of the Month Club. I felt these were definite signs I was next in line to the throne upon which sat the editor-in-chief of Griffin House. There was just one fly in the soup. Forstman had gone the same route with my pal, Charlie McCann. We compared notes and joked about the openness with which Forstman seemed to be pitting us against each other. Forstman, his eyes narrowed and carrying the trace of a mean little smile, was enjoying his game so much that it wouldn’t have been a leap to infer that not only was he enjoying it, but might also enjoy watching us—me and Charlie—begin to hate each other. Unfortunately for him and fortunately for us, nothing like that occurred.

  As I get older, I’m more and more aware of the pleasures of friendship and of the price you pay if and when it breaks apart—who cares what the reasons are? A broken friendship leaves a nasty scab. In any case, Charlie and I were pals, as I said. But where I greeted each new challenge with a spurt of adrenalin and a couple of sleepless nights, Charlie walked ahead into the unknown or the challenging with remarkable calm. He had spent several nights in the waters of the South Pacific after his destroyer was torpedoed by the Japanese, bobbing around in a life jacket, convinced he was going to die wet. This experience left him with a stoical view of everything around him, sparing him the usual ups and downs. Nothing was either very up or very down for Charlie but rather a kind of straight line, his graph not dramatic but, in the end, saving him much grief—and its opposite, much joy. Charlie would express genuine detachment where other men might have raged.

  Charlie and I had both entered publishing as trainees before the war, and after it was over, climbed on parallel ladders, our feet on parallel rungs. It was eerie the way we were in lockstep. Each of us made senior editor in the same year, each had brought in so-called literary fiction and non-fiction as well as the more valued best-selling novels with breadth and sweep, guns going off, women giving birth without anesthesia, fast cars, millionaires, forbidden love, miscegenation, bloodshed, and emotional turmoil in bucketsful. Sometimes I had to hold my nose while editing one of these babies, while yearning for the purifying, sinus-clearing prose of Joseph Conrad or the sinewy language of Hemingway. But the blockbusters were, in the words of Fred Forstman, our “bread and butter.” For the less commercial fare, I followed their progress through production, promotion and advertising—if there was any—very carefully, and tried to keep their authors happy under trying circumstances. “Why don’t you run an ad for my book?” “How come [slot in author’s name] got interviewed by the Times and I didn’t?” “Aren’t you going to send me to Chicago?” These poor guys didn’t realize that in the book biz it’s a Darwinian world, a microcosm of surviving if you’re very fit. And the fittest books had the most money behind them. I could make a keen argument that without these Griffin House would have failed and closed up shop. For every ten dollars we spent promoting and advertising one of our commercial items, we spent twenty-five cents on a delicate, mid-list novel whose author was lucky if his book didn’t end up on the remainder table within six months or else shredded into bus transfers.

  When it was clear that Fred Forstman could no longer escape the consequences of cancer, when he could no longer walk up a short flight of stairs, he sent a memo to the entire management staff announcing his plans to retire the very next week. No one was surprised by the memo. In fact, they were surprised that it had taken so long. There was a subdued party at Louis XIV at which Forstman was given a Cartier watch. The watch was not my choice; why would a dying man want to be reminded of the passage of time? Forstman seemed pleased in spite of what could have been an awkward moment; he accepted the gift with a sad smile and a lame joke about not having to floss anymore. He was sixty-four and a lifelong smoker of Camels.

  After the party broke up, I suggested to Charlie that we go have a drink at Clarke’s establishment. “Was that a wake or what?” he said.

  After we settled ourselves at a small table in the back room, I said it right out: “I’ll be your pal whichever of us gets the job.”

  “Ditto,” Charlie said. “I promise that if it’s you I won’t shoot myself. I like what I do. It suits me fine. I know I should want to climb up a little further but, you see, I don’t actually care that much. Of course I care but not that much. The other day I got a manuscript about a chimpanzee who plays chess. It had possibilities. I see illustrations. What do you think?”

  “I think you’re pulling my leg.” The two of us were getting sloshed.

  “Okay, maybe,” he said. “But what I mean is if one of us gets the job, the other won’t get it. One winner, one loser. Am I not correct in that thinking?”

  “Definitely,” I said, hearing my wo
rds blur. It sounded like I said definulty. “What I want to know is if you’re not going to shoot yourself, who are you going to shoot? Me?”

  “Absolutely! I mean absolutely not! You’re my buddy, my ole buddy.”

  “I lost out on the Mailer,” I said gloomily.

  “I lost out on the Shaw,” he said. “We’re even. More money, that’s what. Fucking Boston tight-asses. We’re even tighter than they are.”

  I told him they hoarded their money, then spent it all in one lavish gesture. I had wanted the Mailer—almost as much as I wanted to see Barry when I got home each night. We didn’t talk for a while. Someone we both knew slightly from another house came over to the table and asked us if it was true about Forstman. Both of us told him we didn’t know what he was talking about. I began to wonder whether Phyllis was getting ticked off because, as my watch indicated, it was almost six-thirty. I really wanted to see Barry and my kids. “I gotta go,” I said, getting up and realizing that I was not all that steady. “I’m going to take a cab home. Can I drop you?”

  Charlie declined, saying he thought he’d better walk.

  THE NEXT morning I arrived at work headachy and dry-mouthed, carrying my attaché case, unopened since the day before. As I lay it down on my desk I saw a note asking me to go see Forstman as soon as I got in. A sliver of joy struck the back of my neck and traveled down my spine. Until this happened I hadn’t allowed myself to count on this promotion. As I knocked on the door to Forstman’s office, I realized that sweat was dripping down my flanks.

  Forstman’s voice had lost its timbre but you could still sense the energy that had worked for him for years. He was assuming I knew why he had asked me to come see him. “You want to know what tipped the scales for you?” he said. Without waiting for an answer he said that it was my work in intelligence during the war. “Nothing to do with your work here.” That was heartening. “You and Charlie, I could have flipped a coin. I figured any man who can go into the service and emerge with his balls intact has got what it takes to do this job. I mean deal with lunatic authors and greedy agents and the rest of the pack, especially those fucking show-off reviewers who think we give a hoot about how much they remember from graduate school. I want to know for crissake whether I should read the effing book, not whether he can recite the poems of Christopher Smart.” It was Forstman’s style to trash everyone he happily did business with. I reminded him that Charlie had been in the navy. “It’s not the same thing,” he said, shaking his head. “Not the same thing at all.” I really didn’t know what the difference was, just that he had chosen me and not Charlie for whatever reasons he had constructed. Did it matter?

  I was ecstatic for twenty-four hours. Then my concern for Charlie kicked in. Even Barry’s kisses and endearments failed at first to make me feel better. “Do you think Charlie’d be moping around if he got the job instead of you? You’re acting like a girl!” I thought that was pretty funny, considering what we were doing at the time. I guess I brightened up a little. I knew I was being stupid about it, but I couldn’t help putting myself in Charlie’s place and I knew how much it would hurt me. Sissy boy. I shook my head to get rid of the blazing face of my father that had appeared suddenly on my interior horizon, telling me to be a man.

  The following day I insisted that Charlie allow me to take him to lunch, a gesture that could have been read as a symbol of my newly acquired power. Charlie one-upped me by ordering a split of champagne and as it bubbled away in its flute, Charlie wished me continued good fortune and good health. “And while I’m at it, good luck to Ike—these are weird times. Who’s to say who’s American and who isn’t? Why do we have to prove anything?”

  There was not even a token argument about who was picking up the check. “For Pete’s sake,” Charlie said, “Don’t look so glum. You’re right where you want to be. God help you if something bad happens. . . .”

  “You’re right,” I said.

  “Shit, man, Charlie said, “It’s only some lousy underpaid job. There’ll be more headaches for you and more sleeping with lady authors for me. You know I get all the lady authors.”

  I looked at him sharply.

  “Just kidding,” Charlie said. “There was only that one time—and it was her idea.” He wouldn’t tell me who it was.

  I STEPPED so easily into Forstman’s shoes that I was hardly aware of a breaking-in period. Fairly soon it was obvious to me that what he had done as editor-in-chief was not all that different from my own work, except that he got paid a lot more for it than I did. I told Phyllis that I seemed to have been born for the job. My wife, whose father was a celebrated professor of English and rhetoric at City College, smiled in that superior way of hers, no doubt assuming that in sensitivity, taste, judgment, book-learning, and allround literary sensibility her father was light-years ahead of her husband even if he did have an important job in publishing. Did I mention that she had a definite thing about her father?

  When we were first married I was annoyed when, from time to time, probably when I was at my most vulnerable, she compared me to “the Prof,” as she referred to Daddy. But I had grown used to it; it seemed to be an autonomic reaction. Also, in about the same marital era, we had come to a kind of sickish understanding—her idea—which was that nothing counted if it was not said aloud. This included body language, smirk, eye-roll, frown, abrupt turning away— none of these counted as genuine messages. So her superior smile talked to me, unheard but not unfelt.

  By this time, Barry Rogers had lived in my house on Eighty-Ninth Street for about a year serving as driver, handyman, occasional butler (although he chafed at having to wear a dinner jacket and black socks and shoes, and accused me of taking advantage of his good nature). I tried to see him alone at least once a day but this wasn’t always possible. Kate was seven, Henry was ten, and they were always running from one room to another. I had taken over the library for my study. I retreated there after dinner several times a week, mostly reading manuscripts or scribbling odd ideas on a legal pad. Sometimes Barry would meet me there for a swift kiss and a few loving words and a joke or two but it wasn’t safe; we both knew how risky this was but we did it anyway.

  I was constantly amazed by how profoundly Barry’s presence in my house affected me, especially on those days when our paths did not cross. I was happy just knowing that he was walking in the same space I was or applying Butcher’s wax to the banisters, polishing the silver, or having a smoke in the servants’ tiny dining room off the kitchen with its one dusty window giving out on a still dustier air shaft. Or maybe lying on his delightful back reading one more book about fly-fishing, or tinkering with the beautifully engineered motor of our car, which he kept waxed and buffed to a fare-thee-well. The car lived in a garage a few blocks away in a reserved space I considered outrageously expensive. Barry had a strong attachment to the car, which he called Baby, not an original name but you couldn’t joke with him about the car; it really was his baby. All day long, while performing as loving husband and family man, as decision-maker, as shaper of the reading public’s taste, while talking on the phone to a tearful author or editing yet another Edgar Fleming sure-fire best seller, or sharing some in-house gossip with Charlie McCann, while listening gravely to the head of production, a whiz (though completely nuts) named Oliver, I longed to hold Barry and have Barry hold me, naked, vulnerable, exploring each other in the silence of passion and contentment. I never questioned my choice of lover—it was simply a fact accompanied by a breathtaking risk of the forbidden.

  Each night when I got home I knew that Barry would be somewhere in the house, waiting for me. “Good evening, Mr. Samson, sir. I trust you had a pleasant day.” He would lay it on, the formality. “Yes thank you, Barry. Is Mrs. Samson home? The children?” Our eyes darted quickly over each other’s features in a gesture of deep devotion and play. Did I feel the sting of guilt? Not at all. For I told myself I wasn’t hurting anyone, but never considered that if my game was discovered, my marriage would collapse and god only
knew what else would happen to me; I was breaking all the rules of conventional society and many people could get justifiably indignant.

  After being greeted by Barry, who took my topcoat and hat, I would spend the next hour or so having a nice quiet cocktail with my wife, while letting my mind wander all over the place. Kate and Henry would join us for dinner where Phyllis made certain that events then current would be brought up and discussed. Phyllis was especially vocal on the subject of Israel. Her father had always been fervidly anti-Zionist. She said, “Just watch, it will end badly. You just can’t plunk down a state where there are people already living and tell them to go find someplace else to live. Just like those poor South Pacific Indians or whatever they were when we tested the atom bomb. Just leave, get off your island! They had no choice.” Kate and Henry could be articulate enough—both their schools made them learn poetry and then recite it in front of the class—but when their mother hopped astride one of her hobby horses they wisely held back. No one could ever accuse Phyllis of being a shrinking violet.

  From the outside we were a handsome, loving family. And we were! I swear we were. The wife an unconventional beauty, the children bright-eyed and endowed with energetic curiosity. Few could have guessed that Kate, with her straight blond hair and turned-up nose, had Jewish parents. This made it easier for her to navigate through a world in which anti-Semitism had a foothold, not that she was in danger of being hauled off in the middle of the night and never heard from again. Henry, on the other hand, had thick dark curly hair, a large nose and pools of gray grief beneath his eyes—all of which were likely to tip people off as to his Hebrew origins and slam the door hard. But he was extremely bright; I figured he would go into something like theoretical physics, where he would excel. I wasn’t really worried about him. Most of the men who worked on the atom bomb were Jews, their origins conveniently overlooked because America’s life was at stake.