We’ve read these with interest. They’re good, but there are several problems. First, the stories are too memory-oriented, and we are off recollection these days. Second, in all four your tone is sometimes condescending. Also, there aren’t any likable characters, by which I mean characters with whom we can sympathize, whose points of view we want to share.
In the end it seems to me that you’re writing in a voice that’s too cold for you, and while objectivity is fine, that first story of yours suggests to me that your natural tendency is toward a more intimate tone.
I’m sorry not to have better news. Do keep sending me your work!
Yours,
Edith Atkinson
The letter did not distress me particularly, for the simple reason that over the last several weeks I had been coming around myself to much the same opinion that Edith expressed here, and that Stanley Flint had expressed about the last of the stories in his letter. Not that I felt inclined to write a belated note of thanks or apology to Flint, with whom I was still a little angry. Probably I should have, and yet the truth was, I no longer felt that I needed anything from him, since now it was upon Edith Atkinson alone—a woman who existed for me purely as a prose style, who had no face, voice, or age—upon whom I was pinning my hopes; she, and not Flint, would become my mentor, my sage, my guide to that mysterious and enviable universe, New York.
Accordingly, I decided to write a new story, keeping Edith in mind as an ideal reader: someone remote, intelligent, and finicky, whose enthusiasm would matter.
As had become my habit, I didn’t go home for spring break that year. Instead I stayed at school, where I spent every afternoon in the rear smoking section of the library, quiet and empty during this period when everyone else was off on vacation. The new story was oracular in nature, in that it described a scene I had not yet enacted, much less come to recognize as the essential prerequisite to my adulthood it was destined to be: namely the scene, now almost iconic, in which the young homosexual comes out to his parents.
Some further information is necessary here. Although, by this point, I was spending much of my time with Lars and Gretchen and their crowd, I still did not conceive of myself, at least consciously, as homosexual. This is a difficult state to explain to anyone who has not lived in it. Suffice it to say that instinct makes itself felt less strongly when it is indulged than when it is betrayed. For years I had tried to convince myself that the starstruck reverence I cultivated for certain girls and women really amounted to erotic love—a sleight of hand I could sustain only so long as the girls and women in question refused to take my passions seriously, as had been the case until the spring semester of my freshman year, when one evening I found myself sitting alone in the residential common room with flame-haired Nina Reilly, whose affections I had been cultivating, the lights switched off and her locks pressed into my nostrils. Even though we said nothing, even though we did not so much as look at each other, still, I could feel forming over our heads, like a cartoon speech bubble, the prelude to a kiss.
Pleading a paper to finish, I fled—the reality of what was expected of me overwhelmed me—after which I stopped pretending to have fallen in love with girls. Instead I adopted a pose of sexual nullity: so long as I didn’t declare myself, I reasoned, I would remain at least in principle heterosexual, this condition being the default program in the same way that “female” is the default program for the human embryo when the hormonal influence of the Y chromosome is suppressed. And yet on some level I must have wanted to be found out, for in a course I took on the sociology of Japan, I wrote my term paper on Yukio Mishima—but purely, I told myself, out of intellectual curiosity. Visiting my parents one Christmas, I checked out John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw and H. Montgomery Hyde’s The Other Love on my mother’s library card—but only because I was open-minded and wanted to learn.
With the story it was the same ruse: what I told myself was that I was writing about a young man who flies home to tell his parents that he is gay not because I was gay, not because I knew that soon I would have to fly home and make the same declaration to my own parents, but because I found the situation “interesting.” It was interesting to contemplate the dramatic consequences of such a revelation. It was interesting to piece together, with that same detached empathy that had guided me in writing about Aunt Lily, or Matthew Spalding, or my mother, those ordered emotions it takes but a single truthful utterance to scatter.
What I did not admit was that in telling such a story I was also engaging in one of those acts of literary palmistry by means of which writers so often predict or rehearse their own futures. Thus, even though half a year would pass before I would bring about the scene of revelation that lay at the story’s heart (and for which—irony of ironies—the story itself would serve as the springboard), even though half a decade would pass before I would bring Eli Aronson home for one of the ersatz Jewish Christmases in which my family specialized and we would scandalize my father by kissing under the mistletoe, nonetheless I was able to write these very scenes, in large part thanks, I see now, to the solitude of that spring break, that ugly, empty library, which, in its tranquil amplitude, provided for my imagination a model of spaciousness it had not known since childhood: a blank page. There I felt myself freed, for the first time, from the fear lest some suspicious figure—my mother, Donald, myself—should peer over my shoulder and deduce, from a few scrawled sentences, what it was that the story and I shared. Or is this disingenuous of me to say, when I was writing the story for Edith Atkinson, for the one magazine on which every literate American (and in particular my mother) depended as a source for fiction? I’m still not sure. What is certain is that I could never have written the story had that library not swathed me in its cool, protective, and effacing cloak.
Not that I wrote with ease; on the contrary, the construction of the story (if it could even be called that) was slow and ornery, consisting chiefly in a nervous sequence of steps backwards and forward, false starts, interruptive bouts of panic and despair. “Flow,” when it happened, never happened for long. By the end, my notebook was a mass of illegible marginalia, fierce erasures that made holes in the paper, all in sharp contrast to the tidy legal pads that Barb Mendenhall, my only companion, arranged each morning across the table from me, the textbooks over which, with methodical industry, she dragged her yellow, pink, and blue highlighters.
I finished the story just as the break ended. By then I felt as bruised as the pages themselves, for even though I had typed out a fresh copy, I still winced whenever I looked at the lumpy sentences, the infelicitous turns of phrase. Indeed, even in those instances where I had attempted literary first aid and covered over the offending passage with a bandage of rhetoric, I grimaced, for now I recognized the “repairs” to be about as seamless as the grafts that Dr. Frankenstein affixed to his monster’s face. To each repair I would then make further repairs, which would necessitate, in those years before the personal computer, typing out yet another fresh copy. Bandages piled on top of bandages until I could no longer distinguish the wound from the cure, until I was as bleary-eyed as a surgeon, emerging only half-satisfied from the operating theater, his gloves stained with the patient’s blood.
The season of midterms took me out of myself for a time. After a week I reread the story and, to my surprise, found it not nearly so bad as I had feared. Accordingly, and with a bravado I could never have mustered had I not shut down the part of my brain that worried over consequences, I sent it off to Edith Atkinson. Several weeks passed without a reply. Each morning, when I went to check my mail, I fully expected to find in my box the requisite thick envelope of rejection. Instead I found nothing, or even worse, one evil morning, a thin envelope printed with the name and address of the magazine, which I tore open in a riot of hope, only to discover inside the cut-rate subscription offer with which I had confused Edith’s original letter in the first place.
It was now the end of March. Nearly a month had passed since I’d sent the sto
ry. Was no news good news? Did the fact that Edith was taking so much longer to respond than she had on previous occasions mean that the story’s merits were being debated? That it had gotten lost in the mail? That she was on vacation? Or was the delay simply an indication (this seemed the most likely scenario) that it was being circulated among those “others” for whose collective opinion Edith served as mouthpiece? Indeed, perhaps Edith didn’t even exist; perhaps hers was simply the name the “others” used when they wanted to make cautious inquiries without jeopardizing their precious anonymity. (As I later learned, such a scenario wasn’t far off the mark.)
Then one Monday afternoon, while I was studying in my room, the phone rang, and Donald (with whom, despite our political differences, I was still living) picked it up. “It’s for you,” he said, handing me the receiver.
“Martin Bauman? Edith Atkinson.”
“Oh, hello!” I said.
“Your story’s terrific. We’d like to publish it.”
I looked at Donald. He was cleaning his ears with a Bic pen.
“Wow. Really?”
“There is some work I’d like to do on the story, though—if you’re amenable. Tell me, do you ever come to New York?”
“Sure. I mean, I could.”
“Why don’t you come next week and I’ll take you to lunch? We can talk.” '
“Great.”
“Is Thursday okay? I wouldn’t want to take you away from your classes.”
“No, Thursday’s fine. I don’t have class on Thursday.”
“Come by the office. Ask for me at fifteenth-floor reception. Oh—is one o’clock all right?”
“Fine.”
“By the way, you should be very proud. It’s a wonderful story, a very important story. We’re thrilled to be doing it.”
She hung up. The entire conversation—which changed my life irrevocably (and not only for the better)—had taken all of a minute. And now it was over, and I was still sitting on our familiar sofa with its shot springs; across the room Donald was sniffing the clot of ear wax impaled on the end of his pen.
“What’s up?” he asked.
I told him that the magazine had bought my story. He snorted. “I don’t believe it,” he said.
“Neither do I,” I said. And why should I have? Probably when I arrived next Thursday at the offices of the magazine, it would be to be told by the fifteenth-floor receptionist (no doubt a pitiless harridan, deaf, after decades, to the pleas of a thousand, a million, young aspirants) that some mistake had been made, that Edith Atkinson had made no appointment with me, that Edith Atkinson was on extended leave, that there was no Edith Atkinson.
“So what’s the story about?” Donald asked next.
I opened my mouth. I thought.
“It’s about family,” I said after a moment.
“Good subject, good subject.”
I worried that Donald might press for specifics, but he didn’t. Instead my vague answer seemed to satisfy him, just as it satisfied all the other people with whom, over the next few days, I shared my news, including my writing teacher of the previous year. “Do you want to read it?” I hazarded, not really certain what I’d do if he said yes.
“No, no,” he answered. “I’d rather wait and see it in the pages of the magazine.”
If there had been any chance my mother might have said the same thing, very likely I would have told her too. And yet I knew my mother: such an imprecise answer as “it’s about family” would never satisfy her. She would nag at me until I gave her details. So I decided not to tell her, or at least to wait until I went home at the end of the term to tell her, ostensibly because such news was far too monumental to deliver over the phone, in fact because I was trying to postpone as long as possible the moment when I would have to reveal to her and my father what the story was about—which would be tantamount, I knew, to coming out to them. For my mother was at once too clever and too suspicious to be taken in by those feints of purely “intellectual” interest by means of which, while writing the story, I had managed to delude myself.
Still, I started preparing. In my mind I rehearsed over and over the scene of inquisition, imagining any number of possible responses on the part of my parents, and for each one readying a strategy of self-defense.
If, for instance, my father said to me, “I’m so disappointed in you,” I decided that I would respond by listing all my successes: a catalogue of prizes and encomia so impressive that in its wake he could not possibly remain disappointed, especially when reminded of that catalogue’s crowning glory, the acceptance of my story by the magazine.
If he said to me, “Are you sure this isn’t just a phase you’re going through?” I would first tell him about Nina Reilly, then by way of chastising him for his narrow-mindedness read aloud some heart-stopping words on the subject (from the story, of course) that would put an end to this line of questioning altogether.
If my mother burst into tears, and said, “It’s all our fault”—but here I faltered. What could I say if my mother burst into tears? The very idea made me angry. “How dare you not admire me, how dare you cry?” I decided I would shout, thereby shaming her into a more dignified posture.
And finally, if my parents persisted in wailing and shaking their heads, if they refused obstinately to accept the news of their son’s homosexuality except in terms of tragedy, then, and only then, I would use my secret weapon: the boyfriend I was determined to have found by then, a boyfriend so handsome, well-spoken, and respectable that they would have no choice but to smile, wipe the tears from their eyes, and acknowledge that even my sister could not have done better. Yet this boyfriend—so far—had failed to materialize, no matter how diligently I crisscrossed the campus in search of him, my heart held out as if it were a Geiger counter that would beat more loudly, and with greater frequency, the closer I came.
The Thursday on which I was to have lunch with Edith Atkinson neared. The evening before, not sure what to wear, I summoned Donald, who advised a flannel jacket and a pair of green corduroy pants that my mother had given me on my last visit home. He had worn a similar outfit, he told me, to a summer job interview, and it had done the trick perfectly.
That night he headed off, as usual, to Dolly’s bar, leaving me to try to get some sleep. But I couldn’t, and at six the next morning, already showered, shaved, and dressed, I took an early bus into New York. For several hours I wandered through midtown, stopping occasionally to stare up at the many-eyed red brick edifice in which the magazine maintained its offices, not really very distinguishable, I saw now, from all the other many-eyed red brick edifices crowded together on that street, nor even the exclusive domain of the magazine at all, which I had always assumed would own its own building. Instead, if the directory posted on the lobby wall was to be believed, the magazine occupied only three of the twenty-five floors. On the others, real estate agents, advertising copywriters, accountants and dentists and the consulates of African nations went about their business, presumably unconscious of, or perhaps in some way spurred to great thoughts by, their proximity to a myth, an icon, to what was in short the quivering spirit of American literature itself.
In any case, that morning I ate too many doughnuts, drank too much Coca-Cola, browsed at Coliseum Books until I had a headache. Finally at ten to one I returned to the building, entered the great rectangular lobby, got into the elevator, and rode to the fifteenth floor. Here the doors opened onto a cramped waiting room with no windows. The walls were putty-colored. Next to a reinforced door—electrified, like the ones at the psychiatric ward to which Matthew Spalding had been banished after his suicide attempt—a young girl wearing wire-rimmed glasses, vaguely pretty and bearing not the slightest resemblance to the heartless crone I had envisioned, sat behind a bulletproof glass partition, busily depositing pills into a seven-sectioned box labeled with the days of the week.
It seemed to take her a moment to register my presence.
“Can I help you?” she asked, after I ha
d cleared my throat.
“Hello,” I answered, eager to assure her that I was not merely some hopeful with a manuscript to deposit. “I have an appointment with Edith Atkinson.”
“Your name?”
“Martin Bauman.”
She picked up the phone. I waited. “Edith? A Martin Bauman to see you ... Okay. Edith will be out in a second,” she told me as she hung up.
I sat down on one of the hard little chairs that were lined up against the wall, as at a police station, or outside a school principal’s office. Across from me posters in brass frames depicted covers of the magazine dating back to its inception in the last century. And how long would Edith keep me waiting? What would she look like? Because one naturally creates a face to match every voice, when I’d talked to her I’d imagined a woman with disorderly hair, her glasses hanging from a cord around her neck. A smoker, I assumed. And indeed, as I thought about it, I realized that this image was not invented at all, but excavated from memory, the image of my mother’s piano teacher, Helen Risko, of whose no-nonsense voice—“owe-two-three, one-two-three,” while my mother clunked out a Chopin waltz—Edith’s own voice, over the telephone, had reminded me.
Then the door buzzed open and someone walked in. “Martin?” the familiar voice asked.
I looked up. The woman who was apparently Edith Atkinson had white hair, silky and fine, pinned behind her head with a barrette. She wore pearl earrings, a beige tailored suit, sleek pumps. She was tall and svelte.
I stood. “I’m Edith,” Edith said, holding out a hand without rings, without nail polish, soft from moisturizer. From between thin, coral-colored lips smallish teeth gleamed. Her age I had trouble deducing: somewhere between fifty and seventy, I guessed. I thought her beautiful.
“Let’s go to my office,” she continued, and led me through the forbidding electrified door. Here a yellow corridor divided into further yellow corridors. The paint on the walls was thickly slavered, full gloss, as in hospitals. On a bulletin board next to a coffee machine someone had posted an advertisement for free kittens.
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