Through Janet Klass I found an apartment not far from Riverside Park. In fact, it was Janet’s apartment: she was giving it up in order to move across town, where her mother had bought a co-op “as an investment.” The place she passed on to me cost nine hundred dollars a month, and was located on the fifth floor of a tenement walk-up that belonged more to the Lower East Side than to the amplitudinous blocks of West End Avenue on which it perched, sordid and forlorn. On either side red-brick apartment houses rose up, grand and stolid, the epitome of West Side gentility with their gynecologists and piano teachers, their service entrances, their conscientious lack of thirteenth floors. Our grimy little edifice, by contrast, had neither elevator nor elevator man. Its stairwells smelled of unwashed hair. Bugs lounged in the ceiling fixtures.
Because much of this and the next chapter will take place in that apartment, I shall now describe it. It was L-shaped. When you entered, you found yourself in a corridor too narrow for most pieces of furniture to pass through. Three doors opened off this corridor, the first onto a tiny bedroom with a loft bed, the second onto an even tinier bathroom with a miniature sink and tub, the third onto a second bedroom that could only have been called spacious when compared with its neighbor. All three of these rooms looked out onto the vestibule in which the super kept his pile of used car parts and pit bulls.
After that the corridor turned a comer. Here there were two larger rooms (by larger I mean nine feet by nine feet), both of which faced west, smack onto other apartments. The “view” was of a young woman who came home every afternoon in tennis shoes, her pumps in her shoulder bag, and spent her evenings smoking joints in front of the television. One of these rooms I used as a bedroom, the other as a living room. At the far end of the corridor was the kitchen, with its bottom-of-the-line appliances and wood-grain laminate breakfast table.
I had two roommates, Dennis Latham and Will Gibson. Dennis, who came from Atlanta, was the plump, intelligent, soft-spoken boyfriend of a girl with whom I had become friends toward the end of my senior year, Wendy Stone. Evenings he sold tickets at the old Thalia movie theater, which showed revivals; mornings he spent reading avant-garde philosophers such as Benjamin, Derrida, and Adorno.
Will was tiny, at least when compared with Dennis and me: five foot two in his tennis shoes. Although he was twenty-one and in his first year at NYU Law School, he looked every inch the adolescent, with a hairless chest and spotty chin. From what we could tell he didn’t own a razor. Privately we wondered whether some drug his mother had taken during her pregnancy had stunted his growth. Yet he was far from sickly. Indeed, his nervous, animate athleticism put both of us to shame. While we slept late on weekend mornings, he would be up at dawn, riding his bicycle to the Columbia gym. In the afternoons he ran in Central Park. Not surprisingly he was much in demand in certain circles, and maintained a coterie of older admirers who took him to dinner at Le Cirque, or to Paris on the Concorde. To these gentlemen Will must have seemed a precious rarity—an articulate, legal alternative to the risky dalliances that had undignified the greater part of their lives—yet the only thing he really shared with his suitors was the very taste for “unripe fruit” that drew them to him. (Such is often—and ironically—the case.)
Despite our differences in temperament, the three of us made up a cozy, not uncomfortable little household, and though our divergent schedules meant that we rarely ate or socialized together, nonetheless we managed to pay our rent on time and keep the bathroom clean. Nor did we lack for company, especially on weekends, when we seemed always to have houseguests: Wendy Stone, down from the university, where she was finishing up her incompletes (she was a troubled girl, a brilliant rebel, whose parents—affluent pseudo-WASPs—had changed their name from Stein); or Dennis’s friend Teddy, up from Washington, where he was working as a congressional page; or someone Will had picked up at the monthly Columbia gay dance, an undergraduate usually, smallish and stylish, and a study in contrasts with the older, richer men into whose elegant East Side and East Hampton lives he sometimes disappeared on weekends.
He is dead now. Two years later a bus ran him down on his bicycle near Lincoln Center. And Dennis is teaching English in Texas, and Wendy is married to a man who dared question, once, the purpose of books in the video age, thus ruining our friendship forever. And Janet—I haven’t a clue what’s become of Janet, or her study. Years and miles separate us all from one another, as well as from those nights when we roamed the city in a pack, eating in coffee shops in groups of twelve, or going to double bills at the Thalia in gangs of fifteen, or flowing in and out of parties: it seemed that every weekend, somewhere, there was a party, given by a friend or a friend of a friend. And how many friends I had! Maureen and Ron and Tom'S. and Tom R. and Josef and Elise and Melora ... the names roll off my tongue easily today, even though I don’t remember much about any of them. Some of them I spoke to for only minutes at a time, some of them I never spoke to, yet they were my dearest friends, with whom I rolled like a puppy in the intimate, indiscriminate heap that was New York, to me, in those years.
It’s hard for me to imagine that there was ever a time when I didn’t drink coffee, but there was. No doubt a certain resistance to adult habits—of which another symptom was my aversion to wine—underlay this curious abstention; for though I was old enough to vote, pay taxes, and go to prison, in those years it comforted me to think of myself less as a grown-up than a child on the outer edge of childhood, whose father could always be counted on to rescue him from difficulties, and whose missteps would always be excused as the foibles of youth. Coffee would have spoiled the effect, which was why, on the Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings when I rode the subway downtown to Hudson-Terrier’s offices—they were located in the east teens, in a region of warehouses and lofts to which the publishing industry, driven from midtown by exorbitant rents, was gradually migrating—I always brought a can of Diet Coke with me, the contents of which, once I had settled into my tiny cubicle, I would empty into a mug emblazoned with the old pre-Hudson-Terrier logo (that ubiquitous oil lamp), where, once the bubbles had settled, it did a passable imitation of joe. In this way I could indulge my own morning habit without upsetting those of my colleagues who could not stomach the idea of a Coke at eight A.M.
My chief responsibility at Hudson was to deal with what is known in publishing circles as the “slush pile”: specifically, that stack of unsolicited manuscripts, most of them addressed to “Dear Sir” or “Dear Editor” or even “Dear Mr. Terrier,” that is the bane of every editorial department, and that never seems to get any smaller, no matter how diligently the eager-eyed slush reader (invariably a kid like me) struggles to keep it in check. And if at Hudson the slush pile was particularly huge, this was in large part because a dozen years earlier another slush reader had plucked out of the heap a novel you are certain to have heard of, one that went on to become the biggest bestseller in the company’s history, and because of which Hudson now enjoyed a reputation for sympathy among the naive and unconnected—one to which Harry Hudson HI, its owner, had only added when in an interview he’d once vowed that no manuscript would pass through the portals of his house without getting a fair reading. (This was the sort of thing Harry Hudson III had a habit of saying, and that annoyed his employees, who knew he had never read a slush manuscript in his life. Nor did his edict last long; a few years later, in his late eighties, nearly blind and hugely rich from the buyout, he gave up his nominal tide of “president” at the company he no longer owned, as well as the grand and ceremonial office that was always kept on the ready for him, even though he never once, in my tenure, visited there. After that, Hudson ceased to employ a slush reader, choosing instead to enforce the policy—already in place at other publishing houses—of returning every unsolicited manuscript unopened. The job I once held, as a result, has disappeared.)
At first I laughed a lot over the slush pile, the manuscripts and letters I was always skimming, of which a typical (though invented) example might b
e the following:
Dear Mr. Terrier:
Several years ago I was abducted by aliens and taken aboard their spacecraft, where I was subjected to surgical procedures in the private regions of my body. Since then I have tried to interest the police, FBI, CIA, Surgeon General, even the President himself in my experience, to no avail. Now my phone is being tapped. Rocks have been thrown through my window, the brakes on my car fixed. In sum, there is a conspiracy afoot to squash the valuable information I have to share. Taken: The True Story of an Alien Abduction recounts not only my experiences aboard the craft but the subsequent attempts on my life by government agents determined to keep me silent...
No, I am not being fair: this is not a typical example. I include it only to alarm and amuse. Much more typical (and sadder) were the badly written memoirs of adolescence through which at first I slogged dutifully, then later, as I grew more jaded, threw into the reject pile after reading only a sentence (shades of Edith); the children’s books with tities like Deirdre the Dodo, Fred the Fox Goes to the Doctor, Pete Puppy’s Day Out; the trashy novels about rich people written by poor people; the volumes of confessional poetry (one of them was called—quite memorably, I thought—Probing the Abscess); the trashy novels about poor people by rich people; the exposes of corruption in obscure industries that promised to be “timely.” (This latter adjective, which I encountered in nearly every letter I read, infuriated my friend Carey Finch, the youngest of the editorial assistants, and an idealist of the most irascible variety. “Don’t they understand?” he’d say, quite literally tearing at his hair. “The point is to write something time/m!”)
Most of these manuscripts were not timeless. Instead, in their coarse sincerity, they foretold the confessional talk shows that would become so popular in the nineties, the ones on which (for example) women whose sons had died from autoerotic asphyxiation would describe the horrifying scenes they’d happened upon, in bedrooms decorated with posters of baseball stars. Even so, I gave each one of them my faithful consideration, in the naive hope that if I dug long enough I might discover somewhere a piece of real literature by some winsome unknown: a fresh Flannery O’Connor, a proto-Paley, a child Salinger; instead of which I found junk—boring junk—most of which I sent back swiftly, with only form rejection letters paper-clipped to the manuscripts, in the self-addressed stamped envelopes that its authors, careful to follow the guidelines listed in the Writer’s Market, almost always took the trouble to enclose.
And yet when, on rare occasions, I did happen upon a manuscript that merited, at least in my view, a more considered response (if for no other reason than because its sincerity broke my heart), I would take the trouble to send a personal reply. Thus, to the girl from Cincinnati who had written The Michael Jackson Diet Book: How the Inspirational Music of Michael Jackson Can Help You Lose 50-100 Lbs.; to the English professor from El Paso who had gone to the heavy expense of photocopying and mailing his twelve-hundred-page, heavily annotated biography of James Ellroy Flecker; to the ex-hippie in the East Village who wrote freshly and urgently about her boyfriend’s periodic habit of emptying everything they owned onto the sidewalk and trying to sell it, yet whose work was marred by her bizarre refusal to use punctuation; to these people I wrote letters—sometimes long letters—that I signed in a purposefully illegible scrawl, a vague streak of nothing that would be impossible to decipher, and behind which I could remain safely anonymous. For as Carey had pointed out, even though I had the least power of anyone at Hudson, to those authors who sent their books in over the transom (some of whom might be psychotic) I had the most.
As I was rapidly discovering, I had come to work at Hudson during a transitional moment in its history—indeed, a transitional moment in the history of American book publishing. To understand the nature of this transition one needed only consider the layout of the Hudson-Terrier offices. The northeast comer, into which no natural light ever crept, was the domain of “Hudson Editorial,” where the assistants wore tartans, worked under brass lamps with green glass shades, and thumbtacked postcards of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce over their typewriters. The southeast comer, on the other hand, belonged to “the terrible Terriers.” Here the sunlight poured in so liberally you had to squint against it. The terrible Terriers wore contact lenses instead of glasses, went to the gym, and talked on the phone. It seemed that they were always talking on the phone. Horrifying neologisms peppered their conversations: “privish” (as opposed to “publish”), “midlist,” and perhaps most upsetting of all, “impact,” which they used as a verb, in sentences along the lines of: “How do you think the sale of Scribner’s is going to impact the industry as a whole?” (My mother’s son, I grimaced every time I heard it.)
Working there was a little bit like trying to drive in one of those medieval European cities where powerful BMWs jostle tiny Fiat 500s, or worse still, ass-drawn carts on the narrow streets. Thus, though there was a computer in the office, only one person knew how to use it. At Terrier the editorial assistants at least had self-correcting IBM Selectric typewriters. At Hudson we made do with Liquid Paper. Also, because Harry Hudson III was essentially a kind man, the Hudson staff included a number of rather useless old people he had never had the heart to fire. There was a short, white-haired lady named Mrs. Brillo who had been with the company for thirty years, and who performed, from what I could tell, only two functions: first, she talked to the photocopier, which like all the machines at Hudson was both old and ornery; second, at her little desk she maintained a large stock of offbrand supermarket cookies and pastries, of which everyone was invited to partake. I liked her. During my breaks I would often stroll over to her desk for a Danish or a few creme wafers from a fifry-for-a-dollar-ninety-nine pack, or a generic Mallomar. Then one afternoon she was fired; given two hours to clean out her desk. Nothing more. After that, no one talked to the photocopy machine, while the brisk young woman who appropriated Mrs. Brillo’s desk not only kept no treats there, she ate only carrots and breadsticks, and later had to be hospitalized for bulimia.
Of course, if we had been wiser, or less blind, we might have seen in the firing of Mrs. Brillo a grim omen for the future, just as we might have foretold the grosser hijackings to come, for example, from the memo that went around the office the week of my arrival, announcing (as if it were news) that the staff was always welcome to buy Hudson-Terrier books at a forty percent discount, but really warning us to put a stop once and for all to a practice by means of which editorial assistants had been supplementing their paltry salaries since time immemorial: namely, taking books from the office and selling them at the Strand. Upon reading this memo my young colleagues groaned and shook their heads, just as they groaned and shook their heads when they learned that our new boss, Marjorie (or Marge) Preston, had been given a mandate by Terrier—which had itself been given a mandate by its “parent” corporation, a murky multinational based in Germany—to “increase revenues and decrease spending.” And though no one was quite sure just what, on a practical level, this frightening edict might mean, nonetheless we made all sorts of doomsday predictions—less out of fear than in the spirit of the paranoid flyer who imagines that by constantl envisioning a crash he can keep the plane aloft. For when one is standing on the cusp of a new age, what is difficult to grasp is not the fact of change, but its extent. Thus, decry though we might the demise of the all-cloth binding in favor of the cardboard binding with only a strip of cloth on the spine, I doubt that any of us could have foreseen the day when books would have no cloth on them at all. Nor would we have believed him had someone told us that in a dozen years the old Scribner’s Bookshop on Fifth Avenue would have become a Benetton, or that closer to home, the terrier would have consumed the oil lamp at which he currently only barked, leaving “Hudson” a tiny imprint of Terrier, with a staff of two. For Hudson was Hudson; to suggest that one day it might simply be put to sleep was as ludicrous as to imagine that someday CDs might eclipse records, or that Mr.———would be fired as editor of t
he magazine. Our cynicism, in other words, had limits; the world did not.
Still, we were stoic. In the face of the gravest indignities—for instance, the purchase for a million dollars of a trashy novel (“a commercial novel,” the terrible Terriers corrected) no better and no worse than any of the hundreds that had come in via the slush pile—we put on a brave face. Nor did I flinch when asked to type, on behalf of a long-standing editor (who was in turn acting on orders from Marge), a wad of letters to authors long published by Hudson, of which a typical example was the following:
Dear Nancy,
What a delight it was running into you the other night at Billie Eberhart’s dinner! I must say you’re looking terrific, in addition to which we’re all thrilled here at how well the Terrier reprint of Soldiers and Sisters is doing—3,300 copies sold at last count!
By the way, you owe us $142.33 for copies of your books above and beyond those specified in your contract, and if we don’t receive payment soon, a collection agency will be notified.
Well, that’s all for now. Hope your work’s continuing apace, and that George and the lads are well. Oh, and has Lucy finished Brearley yet? She’s scrumptious!
Yours with affection,
Lorna
Later, when things got worse, a lot of my colleagues left publishing. Carey Finch, about whom I shall have more to say presently, got a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, and became an avatar of Queer Studies. Others went to business school or law school, and ended up a lot richer than the editors for whom they had once worked—those editors whose habit of going out for expense account lunches at pricey restaurants they had found, in the days when they could barely afford to buy a carton of yogurt, so galling. Only one has stuck it out in publishing: Sara Rosenzweig, the assistant to our editor in chief, and hence, back then, the editorial assistant in chief. In her late twenties and very smart, Sara was not only a Jew, but an Orthodox Jew, who lived with her mother on the Lower East Side, had to leave work early on Fridays in order to be home before dusk, and dressed, even on the hottest of summer days, in blouses the sleeves of which dropped below her elbows, pantyhose, knee-length skirts. Sara’s hair was so stiff and blond that at first I wondered whether she was compelled to wear one of those wigs that married Orthodox women must put on so that men cannot see their tempting locks. In fact, the hair was hers, and she was single. This was a problem, for though she insisted that she could never marry a man who wasn’t Orthodox, she also couldn’t bear most Orthodox men, whom she considered boorish. “Well, why not marry a Conservative Jew, then?” I’d ask her during the lunches we sometimes ate together. Why not eat shrimp, or wear pants, or cook meat with milk? To which she would respond that the arbitrariness of Orthodox practice was exactly its point: precisely because the rules were outdated, their acceptance was the ultimate proof of faith.
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