by Anne Bernays
I had been around novelists long enough to know that most of them were not endowed with an abundance of scruples themselves. Among their number were adulterers, bashers, perpetrators of black eyes and swollen lips, neglecters of children and fathers of bastards, often unacknowledged. The male novelist was a wild man or a pathological loner. The female exhibited nymphomania, rampant narcissism, kinky behavior. I should not be taken too seriously. A lot of novelists were pussycats, easy to deal with, pathetically easy to please, eager for editorial criticism and long expensive lunches.
I’m certain Fleming enjoyed his reputation as a ladies’ man even though it implied that he wasn’t a genuinely serious person. But he was so confident of his powers that it didn’t matter a bit what his reputation was like when it didn’t concern his work. After all, he said, “Hemingway hunts mountain lions, I hunt girls.”
Fleming applied butter to his roll and said, “I’m getting married, Walt.”
“You’re what?”
“Yes, my friend, I’m finally going to take the plunge. Don’t you agree it’s about time. I’m not getting any younger. Excuse the cliché.”
I asked him who the girl was.
“I don’t think you know her. Her name’s Mary. Mary Severance. That’s her married name. Her maiden name was Clark, I think. Yes, I’m sure. Mary Clark. Spence and Wellesley.”
“She’s divorced?” I was trying to absorb this bit of news; I had Fleming figured for someone who would never marry.
“A few months ago,” he said. “Husband threw her against the wall. She doesn’t weigh very much. He’s a nasty fellow, nasty habits. Probably married her for her money. People do that, you know.”
In the pause that followed I made a mental note to have Fleming’s next novel vetted by a lawyer. Who knew what he might toss into it to get back at his ladylove’s ex.
A waiter appeared stealthily at the table. Pointing to the menu, Fleming ordered jellied madrilène—“please make sure it’s not too set”—the veal marsala, roast potatoes, and “that excellent endive salad of yours. No dessert. A cup of Italian coffee—you have Italian coffee?”
“Espresso, sir.”
After taking our orders the waiter moved gravely toward the kitchen, entering it through leather-skinned swinging doors.
How could you not like it?
Fleming spent the next several minutes complaining about what he viewed as a doleful trend in fiction. “All these guys seem to want to do is expose their precious little psyches. ‘Look at how I’m suffering,’ ” he said. “People don’t want to read that shit, they want to read about life and death, criminal activity. Want to stir them up? Give them a good strong dose of violence.”
I made the mistake of mentioning Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. The look on Fleming’s face said, For crissake, we’re not talking about a quilting bee or a sewing circle. We’re talking about muscle.
“Yes,” I said, “you’re probably right. What about that Ellison book?”
“Invisible Man? An exception. That’s one smart Negro.”
“Who would have thought?” I said. I don’t know whether he picked up on my sarcasm. I was annoyed at him but I shouldn’t have been surprised; this kind of thing came out of his mouth all too often. Phyllis, as I said, had a hard time keeping her expressive mouth shut. Barry, who had never officially met Fleming or shaken his hand, though he had hung his coat up in the hall closet and put his hat on the hat shelf, wrote him off as a troglodyte. “What would he do if he found out about you and me?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably never speak to me again. Funny, isn’t it, how much bigger and better his fictional characters are than he is. Where do they come from?”
“He makes it up?” Barry said.
While I was retrieving these small items of recent history, Fleming was filling me in on the current changes in his life. “I don’t really want Mary’s former marriage to end up in Leonard Lyons’ column so just keep that under your hat. The days of open scandal may be long past, but Mary and her family are mucho touchy about this divorce business. Her father’s livid. Hardly talks to her, blames her for marrying a brute. Only thing we agree about is we both voted for Eisenhower. That’s not such a big deal; everybody else did too.”
I asked him how long he had known Mary, how they had met, etcetera, etcetera, the usual basics that only skim the surface but people are eager to learn anyway. He had known her for more than a year—which surprised me, as he hadn’t mentioned her until today. No one knew about their romance except her sister, since they had met at a party at her sister’s apartment, overlooking Central Park, prime real estate. The sister was married to Fleming’s lawyer—all very incestuous, if you ask me. “From the nineteenth floor you can’t see the bums and perverts engaging in their disagreeable activities. It’s all a beautiful green blur.”
As Fleming continued to unveil his fiancée, it was clear that Mary was what some would have called “top drawer,” possessing not necessarily money but social status. She knew her way around New York along with the Astors and the Schuylers, the kind of woman who frequented Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door salon on Fifth Avenue at least once a week to be “done,” exiting with hair so sleek and smooth it looked like yellow marble. She sat on the boards of several cultural institutions like the Whitney and the New York City Opera. I figured she must also be loaded, because as neither an artist nor a musician she had to have something bankable to recommend her. There was no stopping Fleming now. From what he said I gathered that Mary’s father, an oil company executive, had promised to leave her and her sister a considerable collection of paintings and drawings, among them a Cézanne and a Braque. He ended with “and she has splendid teeth.” One would hope, I thought loftily, for nothing less. The longer he talked the more I felt I might have to adjust to a new and different man from the one I had met a decade earlier. Had he changed or had the real Edgar Fleming fought his way to the surface after almost fifty years?
“When do I get to meet this incredible lady?” I said.
“Her sister, the one I told you about, is giving us a little party in a couple of weeks. You’re the first person I’m asking—aside from family. I want to make sure you’re there. You’re family. I feel that way anyway.” He looked down at his veal, obviously unused to anything that came close to sentimentality. And I have to admit I was startled. I knew he was attached to me as most authors are to their editors, look to them for all kinds of things that have nothing to do with words on a page. But this family thing came out of the blue.
I thanked him, somewhat clumsily, and thanked him again and said of course I’d be there. Wild horses, etcetera.
ON THE day of the party, a Friday, I came home from work early, took a shower, and discovering that Phyllis was not there yet and the children not home from school, I went upstairs to visit Barry.
Barry sat at his desk, writing in a large notebook, the kind you use to take notes in class.
I asked him what he was writing.
“My journal. You know I keep a journal.”
“I guess,” I said. I wasn’t all that fond of this habit; it made me uneasy. Did Barry fancy himself a writer and would he ask me to read it with a critical eye? Or supposing someone found it and read it? Or—the worst possible case—supposing he used it to blackmail me? Would they believe him? Maybe not, maybe they’d figure he was writing a novel and all these juicy bits were products of a lively imagination. In any case, I didn’t like the idea of a written record of Barry’s life because his life was my life. I was the opposite of “torn,” which is the way you render feeling two ways at once, pulled by both equally so that you’re paralyzed. I wasn’t torn, I was compacted. The lives I led, the one sanctimoniously sanctioned, the other harshly outlawed, had melded together. Often, when I woke up in the morning, I thought the person next to me, still asleep, was Barry, not Phyllis. I told myself to for crissake keep Oscar Wilde in mind; his punishment for loving men rather than women was worse than
that meted out to embezzlers. The punishment for engaging in man to man sex was worse in this country than in the Soviet Union. As I stood there watching Barry cap his fountain pen, close the notebook and slide it into the drawer, I was struck a glancing blow by the lunatic aspect of my adventure. But it didn’t leave a mark; I wasn’t interested, then, in calculating risk. To be candid, my libido was more potent than my prudence. I was no longer good old Walter Samson who never skipped a class in school, who always did his homework, who never went out back (actually, we had no “back”) to smoke cigarettes with the guys, who never used a prostitute or called in sick when he wasn’t, and who only once in his life stole something—a pink Spaldine from Woolworth’s. And then he gave it back!
“I have thoughts and feelings I need to express,” Barry said to me. “Sometimes I forget them so I write them down while they’re still red hot. Hot off the griddle.” With this, he placed his palm on the notebook. “Ouch!”
“You better be careful with that thing,” I said. Sometimes his lighthearted attitude toward danger annoyed me. But then his risk was nothing compared to mine. He was a kept man; I was the keeper and the keeper’s the one who gets into the most trouble.
“Lock and key,” Barry said, pointing to a tiny lock in the drawer with a tiny key, which he turned, withdrew, and put in a pocket.
He seemed to have put an end to this topic. “I smell like lavender,” I said. “Phyllis buys this English soap you couldn’t get during the war. Yardley.”
Barry got up and embraced me while I buried my chin in the cup-like scoop above his collarbone. I pulled in as much air as I could, inhaling his smell, perspiration, his Kreml, and aftershave, a heady mix which had lavender all beat to hell. “You’re the best,” I said, knowing he preferred to stay away from mawkishness, and tried to keep my ardor from overflowing. “Promise me you won’t leave . . .”
“Promise,” he said, I thought a little too quickly. Barry was the more loved of the two of us and that gave him a dangerous advantage. I tried to imagine life without him. I couldn’t do it. I saw only blackness.
I told Barry I could only stay a few minutes. There was this party for my author, Ed Fleming. It would no doubt be swarming with fat cats and a discrete sprinkling of men and women whose names appeared in Cholly Knickerbocker’s and Leonard Lyons’ gossip columns. A celebrated author was always a draw. Come meet Norman Mailer’s fiancée, see John Steinbeck stand on his hands, come hear James Michener talk about the Cold War. There would also be a scattering of olde New York Society, gaunt ladies and swollen men. I enjoyed these sorts of events—up to a point and that point was generally reached when I realized that I was nodding and smiling while someone I didn’t know was talking at me about a subject I had no interest in—like sailing or golf—or didn’t want to talk about—like Communism or the weather. A certain notoriety would cling to me simply by having been present at one of the “important” social gatherings of the year, and I would thereafter be taken note of as a member of the crème de la crème—as if anyone really cared.
I began to complain to Barry that as soon as it was known that I was Fleming’s editor I would attract any number of would-be moths, dying to tell me about the book other people told them they should write. Barry stopped me. “That’s your job, man,” he said. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
I told him that Phyllis had bought a new outfit for the party. Bergdorf’s, where I believe half the price of the dress is atmosphere. She would wear high-heeled open sandals and a purse so slim it could hold only a Kleenex and a foldedup five-dollar bill for emergencies. “And you know how she gets when she’s had a couple. Her tongue takes over and she goes full throttle. Anyone in her way, watch out!”
“Your wife’s got style,” Barry said. “It’s her own style. Sort of like that chanteuse, Hildegard. Everybody loves Hildegard.”
I had to admit that Phyllis’ style was most certainly her own; she copied no one.
“Is that so bad?” Barry said, nuzzling my neck. “Look, Walt, you don’t have to prove you love me by bad-mouthing your wife. How would you like to be her?”
“Unthinkable,” I said. “I cannot make that leap.”
AS USUAL, when I found myself in a group of people most of whom I didn’t know, I tensed up, as if waiting for a doctor’s needle to do its thing. My prediction about the makeup of the guest list was more or less accurate. So I drank too much. I finished off a whiskey sour, then went ahead and ordered another, patiently waiting my turn at an amazing bar where they had just about every spirit anyone could possibly ask for. A man I didn’t recognize said hello to me and I said hello back, trying to figure out if we knew each other or whether he was just being friendly, which most of the guests weren’t. The second drink produced a tingly feeling and made me forget to care that I didn’t feel happy. Phyllis was nowhere to be seen. She was never shy like me. My brow began to bring forth tiny droplets of perspiration. The room we were in—I assumed it was the living room—was easily thirty feet long, with windows over Fifth Avenue, and elaborately draped with rose-colored brocade embedded with gold threads. On the walls were paintings and drawings Fleming had told me about. I wanted to go up to them and stand just inches away from their surfaces and look closely, but I didn’t want to seem like a hick who had never seen a Modigliani or a Dufy or a Sisley before.
I wandered through an arched opening into a somewhat smaller room where I saw Phyllis holding forth. People were listening to her, actually standing at a safe distance, but listening. I couldn’t quite make out what she was talking about, but I realized that she had misjudged her audience, most of which was looking at its shoes. She was probably talking about Senator McCarthy or Roy Cohn, who she would happily have dismembered if she thought she could get away with it. I wondered what sort of impulse pushes a person who wants everyone to listen to them. At home, Phyllis had a built-in audience. And maybe she didn’t notice the eye-rolling that went on between her children when she mounted one of her hobbyhorses. They were not the sort of children who would want to make their mother feel bad; they had been taught to be polite. I could catch only a few words but they were loaded words: “destructive,” “nasty,” “mean-spirited,” “fungus.” Fungus? It was obvious she too had been drinking more than she ought to. She claimed she was allergic to alcohol but I didn’t buy that; she simply couldn’t take more than one drink without a large chunk of her judgment falling off. I felt sorry for her, not so much because she couldn’t help doing what she was doing, but because she didn’t seem to realize how poorly her lecture was going over.
I walked out of earshot. I wanted another drink but told myself that I should wait until I got home. Let no one accuse me of not having self-discipline. At this point in my self-congratulations, Mary’s sister came up to me. She stood so close to me I could feel her breath on my cheek. “In case you didn’t know,” she said, “I’m your hostess.” Was she scolding me because I hadn’t greeted her earlier with a handshake? She was wearing a black velvet band across the top of her head. Was it meant to keep her yellow hair on her head. The thought made me smile. She said she was glad I seemed to be having a good time. She had that rocks-in-the mouth accent like FDR and all the Spence and Chapin ladies I had ever known. “I understand you’re Edgar’s publisher,” she said. She twinkled her blue eyes at me.
I explained that I was his editor, not his publisher, and she asked me to explain the difference, which I did. The one has to do solely with content, the other with content plus the money involved in producing the actual book. “I see,” she said. “Now I know.” She seemed delighted, as if grasping a difficult theory in quantum mechanics. “And I always thought they were the same thing. Editor, publisher, publisher editor.”
As for her sister, the bride-to-be, she was slim, long of limb, also blond but no velvet band. She was wearing a double strand of pearls and a black dress made of something soft and silky. Around her waist was a wide, patent leather belt pulled in so tightly it must have pinched he
r flesh. She wore the kind of smile that looked as if it could never be altered in any way, no matter what happened. It was just there, like the cat’s in Alice. It would be there when she washed her face, wrote a check, walked into the dentist’s office, engaged in sex. She exuded well-being, promise. And why not? She had hooked a rare fish in Fleming. He was a successful writer, which made it possible to overlook the fact that he was the son of a railroad conductor; it took him clear out of the worker category and put him in with the other artists: Olivier, Calder, José Limón, et al. He carried his fame lightly and handsomely, like a movie star who’s counting on everyone’s looking at him.
Mary said she was “thrilled” to meet me at last. “I’ve been so wanting to meet the man who discovered, well not exactly discovered, but helped bring to light, Edgar’s amazing talent. I’m so proud of him. Don’t you think he’s the best writer in the world? He shows me his writings before he’s even finished. Did you know that? And he asks my opinion! That’s a total laugh, isn’t it? I mean what do I know about that sort of thing? But I do know that when my little old mind begins to wander it’s not a good sign. And I tell him, too. But it never ever wanders when I’m reading something Edgar wrote. The other night I stayed up till three in the morning reading the one he’s writing now. The one about the Russian woman who kills the FBI agent in that mercantile place. Honestly, it sounds as if he’d worked there all his life. It’s completely realistic. Do you think he’s going to write the great American novel? I do!”
I couldn’t think of anything to say so I just smiled.
“I’m so glad you agree with me,” she said. I had the funny feeling that while she’d been carrying on, her little old mind was wandering. Even so, she kept her blue eyes on my face, a lock.