“But you haven’t—”
“So I guess it’s back to Atlanta.” She laughed. “You’re lucky, Martin. You haven’t screwed your life up—yet. You only look forward, not back at every bad decision you ever made.”
The “yet” upset me. “Are you saying I’m destined to make bad decisions?”
“Sometimes I think everyone is. And what can you do in the end but live with it? That’s my conclusion, at least. Anyway, God knows I can’t keep on burdening you boys with my tiresome—”
“Mr. Bauman!”
I glanced up, startled. “Yes?”
“Your glasses are ready.”
“Oh, great.” And I strode toward the desk where the optometrist, her arms open as if for an embrace, held them out to me, slipped them onto my face. With a kind of grave finality, not untouched by regret, the world came back into focus—teeth, lipstick, rows of frames, and when I turned, Faye’s eyes, which looked as usual as if they were about to fill with tears.
After I paid, we stepped out onto the street. “Well, good-bye,” she said sadly, peering into my newly corrected eyes. “Tonight may be the last time you see me.”
“I hope not.”
“That’s kind of you. Even so—” Her lips twisted, as if she were trying to smile. “What I mean is, I hope your day goes well. I hope all your days go well.”
“Thank you. Yours too.”
“Be sweet.” And lifting herself onto her tiptoes, she gave me a kiss on the cheek that surprised me almost as much as Joey’s had, not twenty-four hours earlier. Then she left. For a moment I watched her moving into the distance, her hair undone, her tragic sundress swaying, until a brilliant swag of light cut across the sky, and I had to cover my eyes. When I opened them again Faye was gone. I looked at my watch. “Late for work,” I said aloud, and, turning, headed back into that city, that jungle, the laws of which I was finally beginning to learn.
7. AT THE CHILDREN’S TABLE
AROUND THIS TIME I started writing a novel. This was not entirely an artistic choice: of the half dozen agents from whom I had received letters of inquiry after the publication of my story, all but one had told me that it would be impossible to launch my career with a story collection. Stories, the agents explained, simply didn’t sell, the only editors who were interested in them being those at the magazine, which of course did not need to concern itself with such trivial matters as profit—and yet from the magazine I was finding myself, with every rejection letter I received (there had now been twelve), feeling increasingly estranged. Even Anka sounded different to me on the phone, as if my calls wearied her, as if it would be only a matter of time before she changed her hang-up code and added my name to the list of people with whom she preferred not to speak. For like any great aristocrat, the magazine was both ill-tempered and eccentric, with many curious little likes and dislikes (no dream sequences, no phonetic renderings of demotic speech, exclamation points only when absolutely necessary), and now, despite my zealous adherence to her unwritten codes, the old dame had apparently decided not to be “at home” to me anymore. A novel, I saw, would at least bring me into a literary arena in which the magazine, by virtue of its very devotion to the story form, held less sway; and this realization, combined with the discovery that Stanley Flint was going to publish Julia Baylor, had the effect of jump-starting my literary ambitions. After months of lassitude I itched, once again, to write. I would call my novel The Terrorist, I decided; essendally, it would conflate the history of my own family with that of the Kellers, some neighbors of ours, a well-intentioned if weakly idealistic couple whose daughter had tried one afternoon to blow up the state capitol.
My hope was that the story of this family would provide the novel not only with dramatic backbone, but with a vehicle into which I could deposit all the lore of my sixties childhood; yet as I wrote on (and I wrote with remarkable fluidity) every day found me divagating further from my original conception. The great difficulty of constructing a novel is that one has to maintain, at the same moment, two radically different perspectives: the first that of the entirety, the book as it will be remembered by a reader who has long since finished it (and what a difficult point of view this is to adjudge, requiring an act of projection not only across space, but time), and the second, that of the thousand minutiae—details of place, expression, smell, nuance—which proliferate in this ocean of story, yet seem always to be swimming off in the wrong direction, leading you toward dead regions, or even worse, regions that prove to be far more lively than those to the exploration of which you have committed yourself. Process, in other words, begets unexpected (and not always pleasant) discoveries, and the “theme” turns out to be not the thing with which you began, but the thing with which you end.
One afternoon Baylor called me at work and invited me to have lunch with her. At her suggestion we met at one of the expensive restaurants where I often made reservations for editors. No longer the owlish girl I’d met the first night of Stanley Flint’s seminar, she had her long blond hair pulled back into a chignon, wore a natty navy blue jacket and an Hermes scarf, and most dramatically, appeared to have lost, somewhere along the way, the big glasses through which she had once scowled at her German worksheets. Now her blue eyes, which I had never really seen, accented the sculptural beauty of her cheekbones, so much so that I wondered which was the mask, this Manhattan chic or the schoolgirlishness of university days.
Almost immediately we fell into a conversation about Flint. “The thing is, when we were in school everyone used to make such a cult of him,” she said. “His origins, his family, everything. Remember the stories in class?” She laughed. “And of course the truth is always so much more banal—which, when you think about it, is one of the basic tenets of Flintism, isn’t it?”
“So what is his history?” I asked, trying not to sound too curious.
She shrugged. “Southern. He comes from the Carolinas, I think. The limp’s from some accident he had as a child. For a long time he worked on newspapers.”
“And has he been much married, like what’s-her-name—you know, ‘silvery’—said?”
“Well, twice, which isn’t that much, comparatively speaking. With his first wife he only had sons. With Ursula—she’s a psychiatrist—he has a little girl. Naomi. She’s ten.”
“Have you met them?”
Baylor shook her head. “Flint still maintains a very strict separation between church and state. But he talks about them. From what I gather, the healthiness of the whole arrangement embarrasses him, because he’s afraid it’ll take away from his reputation as an outlaw.”
“Where do they five?”
“Upper West Side. West End and ... 104th, I think.”
I gawped. “But I five at West End and 103rd!”
“Do you now.”
“But that can’t be! I’ve never seen him once on the street.”
“Why should that be so surprising?” Baylor asked. “New York’s an enormous city”—which was true. Yet if Flint lived not, as I had always assumed, in some remote and glittering comer of the East Side from which all but the wealthy and famous were barred; if, rather, he lived within spitting distance of my own daily life, in that same neighborhood where every afternoon, unconscious of his proximity, I ordered take-out Chinese food, and did my laundry, and bought groceries, then the cosmopolitan world with which I’d always associated him was both more navigable and less distant than I’d thought. And this discovery, while dulling the luster of his aura, also gave it a patina of identity to which the connoisseur in me responded with zeal.
That evening I did not go home after work. Instead, climbing out from the subway, I walked a block north of my own apartment, then stood for a few minutes on the comer of West End and 104th, gazing at the buildings that defined the intersection: four staunch brick edifices, impenetrable and murky, cozy only to their occupants, for whom they were the trees in which nests awaited. Out of one of the doors a little girl carrying a tennis racket now hurried: N
aomi Flint? If so, she looked nothing like her father. And yet why should she have been Naomi Flint? Each of these buildings had a population the size of a small town's. It was as unlikely that tonight I should see Naomi Flint, I realized, as that I should ever, in all my months on West End Avenue, have run into Stanley Flint.
Even so, in the foyer of one of the buildings (the only one without a doorman) a brass plaque proclaimed the presence within of
URSULA FLINT, MD
PSYCHIATRY
PLEASE RING 6-A
which meant that Baylor was right; Flint did live here. Standing in the foyer, fearful lest someone walking in might accuse me of loitering, I studied rows of tiny buttons on the intercom. 6-A: FLINT, I read. And across the way, beneath one of the mailboxes: FLINT, S. & U.
So this is it, then, I remember thinking: the glass door with its security bolts through which he walks each morning and each evening; the lobby, with its Naugahyde benches and sand-filled ashtray, where he gathers his mail; the old-fashioned elevator in which every day he rides up to that apartment wherein, presumably, he had read my first story, and Baylor’s novel, and the stories by the girl who designed headstones. That I could get no closer appalled and excited me, and fearful lest he should stumble upon me gaping at his name, I fled, retreating to my own humble digs. Later, though, stepping outside for some air, I couldn’t help but linger on Flint’s sidewalk for a while, staring at the illuminated sixth floor of his building; and likewise the next morning, at five, ostensibly because I wasn’t sleepy, I went out and stood on the comer of 104th Street until, just as dawn broke, he emerged, as shocking in his reality as one of those monuments, the leaning tower of Pisa or the Eiffel Tower, the impact of which a history of postcard views and miniature statues blunts so much less than we think it will; indeed, in the nakedness of selfhood, these spires startle all the more for their many cheap approximations. Unaware that his every move was being witnessed, relieved (albeit briefly) of the burden of a public image, Flint was at that moment both more himself—and less. He scratched his head, bent to tie a shoelace. Then he turned the comer. I followed him. Because he did not see me he was not, at the moment, Stanley Flint at all: instead he was simply the “I” to which all of us are reduced at those instances when we have no need to exist for other people.
Leaning on his cane, he headed for Broadway, where at a kiosk he bought a New York Times. He went into a coffee shop (I watched through the window) and sat at the counter. I thought briefly of following him in, taking the seat next to his as casually as if it really were by accident—and yet to do so, I knew, would be to spoil that brief caesura, that nameless solitude in which he was tarrying. So I waited patiently on the comer, and when he stepped out of the coffee shop and hailed a passing taxi, from behind the display of porn magazines festooning the news kiosk I watched until his cab was gone from view.
Not long after this something occurred that was destined to have far-reaching effects on my relationship with Flint. One morning I was filling in, as usual, for the receptionist at the Hudson-Terrier front desk, feeling rather bored and wondering when she would get back from her break, when the elevator doors opened and a florid woman in her mid-forties walked out. A mass of pale curls framed this woman’s face, which was overly made-up and somewhat damp. Although she was fat, her weight sat well on her, in contrast, say, to that of Marge Preston, which tended to settle in her behind and thighs. This woman, on the other hand, had the sort of firmly overstuffed body to which we allude when we describe someone as “zaftig” or “Rubenesque.” Under her green parka she wore a pink satin cocktail dress. Her lips, which were painted coral, she pursed confidently as she stepped up to me, head erect, bosom thrust forward in the manner of a Miss America striding down the runway. “Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning,” I answered. “May I help you?”
“Yes you may. I’d like to speak to the editor.”
I drew my back up. So here it was at last, I thought—human slush, slush in the flesh—and was preparing to show the woman the door when another door—the one to Hudson Editorial—clicked open, and Flint walked out. “Bauman,” he said, “I was wondering...” And he stopped in his tracks. “Hello,” he said to the woman. “May I help you?”
“Good morning,” she repeated. “As I was just telling this young gentleman, I’m here to speak to the editor. About a book I’ve written.”
“I’m the editor,” Flint answered. “Won’t you step this way, Madame?”
Then, casting a conspiratorial glance in my direction, Flint led her toward his office, from which they reemerged about twenty minutes later. “Thank you very much,” the woman said breathily, shaking his hand.
“You’re very welcome, my dear,” he answered, and pushed the elevator button for her. She stepped inside. Patting me on the shoulder, he winked at me, then returned to his office.
The door clicked closed. I flinched. Well, what was that about? I remember asking myself. Had I just witnessed Flint the womanizer in action? Or was it, on the contrary, Flint the editor who had come to the fore that afternoon, somehow recognizing in the very carriage of this overdressed woman the faint resplendence of unrefined genius?
That morning I gave in, once again, to love. Nothing would do, I decided, but Flint’s praise, and with my heart in my throat, I resolved to ask him to read the eighty pages I had so far written of The Terrorist. And yet how to approach such a daunting figure? Here lay the trouble. At first, from shyness, I tried writing him a letter, then tore it up; after all, wouldn’t a letter seem oddly impersonal given that three days a week we worked thirty feet from each other? A phone call, then—but that would be cowardly. Or perhaps I might ask Carey to talk to him on my behalf, as previously I had asked Susan to talk to Carey ... only in that case the results had been disastrous. No, I decided, the only thing to do was to confront him directly, and accordingly, at the end of a long day about a week after the episode of the woman in the parka, I knocked at his door, which was as usual half-open. (Or should I say half-shut? Dimly I recollect intelligence tests from my childhood.)
“Come in!” he called.
I peered inside. “Hello,” I said sheepishly. (I still didn’t know what to call him. Stanley? Flint? Mr. Flint?) “I wondered if I might—”
“Oh, Bauman.” Pushing aside a manuscript he was in the throes of red-penciling, he motioned me in. “And what can I do for you this fine day? Don’t just stand there, come in.”
I did as bidden. “Thank you,” I said, clearing my throat. “Actually, I wanted to ask you a favor. You see, for the last couple of months I’ve been working on a novel, my first novel. I’ve got about eighty pages now. And given the fact that at school you were pretty enthusiastic about that story I wrote, I was wondering whether you’d mind—”
“You mean you want me to read it?” He grinned. “But I’d be delighted to. And what are you doing in the doorway like that? Sit down, sit down.” He pointed to a chair in the comer. “Is that what you’re holding in your hands? Your manuscript? Bring it here.”
Approaching him, I gave him the story. He scanned the first pages. “Nice title,” he said. Then he skipped to the last page; looked at the final line; said nothing.
“I must confess, Bauman,” he continued, vaguely flipping through my pages, “that I did read that story of yours in the magazine. And I hope you won’t be offended”—he glanced up at me suddenly, guardedly—“if I tell you I wasn’t much impressed.”
“I’m not offended.”
“The trouble was, it read like a public service announcement. Also, you write as if homosexuality itself was interesting. It’s not interesting. All that’s interesting is individual experience.” He scooped my pages back into a pile. “I didn’t say anything earlier because in our capacity as coworkers, I felt it wasn’t my place. You understand, don’t you? As for this novel, The Terrorist—really a nice title—of course I’ll be more than happy to give it a look-through tonight—”
“To
night!”
“Why waste time? Then we can talk tomorrow, how does that sound?”
“Fine.” I hesitated. “Oh, and by the way, please don’t feel you have to be gende just because—”
“Have I ever been gende? You sound like a girl about to be fucked for the first time.”
“Oh, well...” I laughed, embarrassed. He waved. I backed out of the office. Gathering up my coat, I left. What was surging through me was the same sensation of dread that in high school had always preceded the mornings when I would get the results of a test; I hardly slept that night, and when dawn broke, hurried to work, where I hoped that Flint, encountering me as he arrived, might take me into the office and get the business over and done with. Yet as luck would have it, though I got in at half past seven, he had beaten me to the punch and was already holed up in his office. As usual his door was ajar. Dare I knock on it? I asked myself, then decided not to: after all, if he had come in so early, it was probably to get some reading done without being disturbed. So I drank my Diet Coke, settled down at my desk, tried to concentrate on The Horror of Hilton High ... only my eye kept wandering to the clock. Eight approached. Once again, as if casually, I swung by Flint’s office, the door to which remained ajar. Still I didn’t knock. For he had merely said that he would talk to me “tomorrow,” and there was still the whole of the day left. No doubt the best course of action would be simply to wait until he summoned me. Only he didn’t summon me. The morning waned. Passing by his desk around eleven, I asked Carey if he was in a meeting. “No, he’s alone,” Carey said. “Do you need to see him?”
I shook my head, checked my watch. Panicked now, I waited ten more minutes, then puffed up my chest and knocked on the fatal door.
“Yes?” Flint called.
“Hello,” I said, peeping my head through the crack.
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