Quin?s Shanghai Circus

by Edward Whittemore

  My editorial letter advised—but most of all it paid attention. It is not so much the comments made by a careful editor that help a writer revise, I think, but the simpler fact that these comments show the writer that he is being watched. He is being watched intently by someone who tells him, in as many ways as possible, that this matters. And so he thinks harder, he reaches in all directions — plot, character, gesture, sequence, tone, echo — and, so doing, activates the deeper and shadowed part of the brain where music and feeling are stashed. The place where stories begin.

  Ted lived in a tiny apartment very high up above Third Avenue. He had a big window and a dark-floored single room, a small kitchen—the refrigerator contained only a pint container of milk and a plastic tub of tofu—and a bathroom with a towel. In his room were a double bed, a desk, a writing chair, a second chair, a television, and an ashtray. Just the setting for a former spy.

  I went over there on my way home from the office several times, to drop off the edited manuscript, to look at his changes, to explain the copy editing. I gave Ted more personal attention because the novel demanded it, and also, although without saying a word, somehow Ted expected it. The desk was occupied by his typewriter and a few completely neat stacks of typing paper and previous drafts, so instead of interrupting his work space, I laid the box of manuscript on the bed, cracking it open and leafing through the pages, tracing the progress of one detail or another, the intricate traces of his threads. We bent over the manuscript together.

  The revisions took place in the winter, so when I stopped by it was always dark out. I was working long hours, partly to get over a disappointment with a man that had happened at the time; work was a secure place for me in the middle of this unhappiness. One night it snowed and we went to the window to marvel. The snow flew in specks outside the window, tiny furry points of light in the darkness, cold dusty sisters to the lights flickering on Third Avenue below and the many apartments winking on the other side of the canyon. We stood next to the glass and watched the snow swirl, high in the heavens of New York, so far away, it seemed, from the rest of my life.

  As we stood there looking at the snow in that night sky, that winter night in New York, Ted Whittemore, quite unexpectedly, ran his hand lightly down my back. Tentatively. I did not move, and he did not touch me a second time.

  We went back to being an editor and a writer.

  Ted left the country after the manuscript went through copy-editing, but before we published the book. He took a freighter to Jerusalem. Ted said that it was a bad idea to fly to the Middle East, because you were traveling through so much time that it should take a long time to make the journey. Also a freighter was cheaper than flying, and Ted never had any money.

  He read his galleys in Jerusalem, where he lived in an apartment in the courtyard of the Ethiopian Church. In the early mornings, on one side of the courtyard wall, a flock of French Nuns sang their devotions. All day, around the circular Ethiopian Church, a school of monks walked and murmured their prayers. And Ted read his galleys in July and we published in the Fall.

  When I pitched the book at sales conference, I got applause, which usually doesn’t happen at a sales conference, certainly not for a novel that will advance fewer than seven thousand copies. But the sales reps, those cynical hard eggs, put their hands together, not so much for my performance as for what Ted meant to the house as a whole. His books were the books we published that proved to us that publishing could be about good writing and fearless imagination and vision.

  Before he moved from New York, Ted sent me a note. “I’m glad you’re part of the Quartet,” he wrote. And so I became connected to Ted Whittemore, connected forever.

  The book, as it turned out, did not sell well. It had some good reviews, but the machine of publishing did not kick in for Whittemore. The reps applauded at sales conference, but the machine did not kick in.

  Great fiction is hard to sell. What happens to a person who reads a book—if it’s any good—is a profoundly private and irrational process, and the more distinctive the novel, the more private and irrational the process. That’s where the trouble with publishing begins.

  Two and a half years later, I left the industry. I was frustrated by the limitations of the business end and I had fallen in love, this time, I thought, for keeps, to a man who lived in Western Massachusetts who had three kids and joint custody and who was very persuasive. Love to me was more important than work, so I moved to Massachusetts and married. But I discovered that I was not as nice, not as accommodating, as I had thought I was. Even though I had always believed that I was able to make anything succeed if I just worked hard enough at it, I was not able to respond to my husband’s demands, and he was very far from being able to help me mend my unhappiness. We were soon miserable.

  After two years we divorced. Although the marriage had been horrible, still divorce was like suddenly falling into nothing.

  The summer after, I got a call from Ted. I had heard from him from time to time. He had heard about my romance and my departure from New York, and now he’d heard about my divorce.

  At my end, over the years, I’d also had reports of Ted back from Tom, who visited Ted in Jerusalem. Ted was with a wonderful woman, a painter named Helen, Tom reported. A year or two after that news, Tom told me that Ted had broken up with Helen, abruptly. Without so much as a day’s notice, said Tom, Ted had packed up and left Helen and left Jerusalem. Tom said Helen was heart-broken. Tom disapproved and so did I.

  Although I disapproved I was still glad to hear Ted’s voice. He was back in the country and writing, up at the family home in Dorset, Vermont for the season. Would I come up to see him?

  I did, twice. Dorset is beautiful in the summer, green and leafy and a good ten degrees cooler than Western Massachusetts. Ted showed me everything and how much he loved it and how much he wanted me to love it, too. We talked a little about the book he was working on, but mostly we didn’t. The Whittemore family home was big and rambling; late afternoon we sat on white Adirondack chairs on the great lawn, sloping into a meadow, and watched the young girls from the dancing school down the road mince like birds into the middle of town, to buy their sweets. Beyond, the mountains misted with blue, and flowers of all shapes and colors and sizes waved in the breeze.

  We swam in the Dorset Quarry. The Dorset Quarry is a writer’s dream, because when you swim in the Dorset Quarry you are swimming in the space left by the stone that now is the New York Public Library, the great lion library at 42nd Street. The quarry’s stone walls rise high and flat, gray streaked with white. Boys in baggy bathing suits jump off the high walls screaming. Women paddle quietly. Children sit on low ledges and dip in their feet. At the far end is an island of stone; birch trees rise skinny and white from its nooks.

  After we had spent some time in the water, Ted got out, but I stayed in. He threw me my swimming goggles and I went exploring around the shallower end of the quarry. Looking for what kind of gunk grew down there, where the New York Public Library used to be.

  I saw something green. I went to the surface, got a big gasp of air, dove down and swam, down and down and down. I reached for the green and headed back up.

  It was a twenty-dollar bill. I swam over to Ted and gave it to him. We were both amazed. “Are you coming out?” he asked.

  “In a little,” I replied. I went back to see what else was down there. Again, I took a big gasp of air, dove down and swam, down and down and down. Something green. I grabbed it and headed back up.

  “Ted,” I said. I waved the bill. Ten dollars.

  The next time down, I found a five. And that was it. I looked, but nothing else was down there. I shook the water out of my hair and we spent the money on dinner.

  It was not surprising to me that magic like this would happen around Ted. It seemed almost predictable. Ted Whittemore was a magician, not only of words, but of moments. He marveled, and any sensation, of light or sound or character or scent, was ratcheted up another notch. We walked pas
t swaying meadows and through the graveyard where all the Whittemores are buried. We drove down roads, looked at the cows, stopped the car near a stream and took off our shoes and hopped from rock to rock and stood in the running water, listening to the leaves rustle and the water bubble, smelling the good air.

  Ted put his arms around me and kissed me. I kissed him back, but then I said no.

  He could not imagine why I would not grasp this good thing. He could see it so clearly, something between the two of us, he could see it and he wanted it. The world is full of possibilities, he said. I could see it, too, when he talked about it, because Ted always made me see whatever he saw, but I still said no.

  I came back, however, the next weekend, and I told him I would sleep with him, but only one time, and then it would be over and he had to understand that this was the only way it would happen.

  I told myself this was because I was a woman who recently had been hurt, and that Ted was, after all, the man who had left Helen, but my true motives weren’t so attractive. Ted’s proposal appealed to me a lot—I had a particular weakness for writers (the man who had broken my heart that long-ago winter and the ex-husband were both writers)—but I had no intention of getting tangled up with Whittemore. Like a spoiled child, I wanted to play out this flattering scenario but without accepting responsibility for what would follow. Crazily enough, Ted agreed to my counter-proposition, and so, only once it was.

  Afterwards, back in Massachusetts, I spoke to Ted occasionally, but finally, I stopped returning his calls, his persistent, baffled, loving, persuasive, tempting calls.

  That was 1988. In February of 1994, I was planning on visiting friends in New York (from Washington, DC, where I had moved four years earlier), and so I called Tom Wallace to see if he wanted to have lunch. Tom had become a literary agent, but he was the same Tom, solid as a rock. He gave you a sense that the important things still mattered and that history counted for something. It was a good thing I had called.

  “By the way,” he said, “I meant to phone you and ask—have you talked to Ted Whittemore lately? You might want to give him a ring. He’s back in New York. Ted’s had some tough times, I’m afraid, and now there’s bad news. He’s very sick.”

  Ted had been diagnosed with a very lethal, inoperable prostate cancer. He was working on a new book and living with a woman named Annie, who had a brownstone on the upper West side, right off the park in the 90’s.

  Whittemore was completely happy to hear my voice. Yes, he was well; how was I doing? We arranged to meet at Tom’s office at 2:30 on Friday, if I could manage to get Tom back by then. We agreed that Tom could talk a person’s ear off and lunch was bound to go on forever.

  I hadn’t seen Ted for so long. Tom’s receptionist buzzed him in and he walked into the reception area and took off his knit cap, holding it in both hands, twisting it slightly. His face was puffier than before, but his smile was the same, a smile of such colossal affection that I practically fell down looking at him. He turned his head slightly to the side when he smiled, and the edges of his thin, wide mouth turned up in delighted mystification and complete charm.

  He put out his arms; I fell into them. We hugged, hard.

  It was snowy and cold. Ted and I walked through Central Park, ice crunching beneath our feet, the same way we had walked down the dusty roads of Vermont, talking, talking, talking. We stopped at a food stand for tea and sat on a patio, in a corner protected from the wind, looking out across an oval frozen pond. Although his attention seemed to be entirely on the beauty of the day, the moment, and the happiness of being together again, Ted still managed to read the notes and overhear the conversation of the man sitting next to him. Once a spook, always a spook. As we headed up the hill away from the tea shop, he told me the man had been writing poetry. Bad poetry, he said, but not as bad as it might be.

  That first long walk, he never mentioned his illness. I saw him again the next afternoon and we walked in the blistering cold wind over by the Hudson. He still didn’t talk about it. We just walked, often with our arms around one another, to be close and to keep from slipping on the ice, trooping down the streets that became Ted’s because of what he saw. “See that fellow at the corner, in front of the shop?” he’d say, giving a friendly salute to a rangy, beaten-up, leather-faced man. “Been here for years. Turkish, you know.” And then he’d explain how the junk in the guy’s store told you everything you needed to know to understand some invasion in the seventeenth century, and it would all make perfect sense.

  He didn’t talk about his illness, but we did agree that I would read his novel when it was done. He was very pleased. And so we fell back into the role of editor and writer, but of course we were something else, too, after all of this time. Time makes friendship in a way that no single action possibly can. That, after all, is what Ted’s novels are about—time, friendship, and history, the real history.

  At one point, but only once, Ted asked me about the events in Dorset, and afterwards, and how I had stopped being in touch. I didn’t have much to say about it.

  “Bad timing,” I said. He nodded.

  That summer Ted and Annie went to Italy, and I saw Ted again in the Fall. I had dinner with him and Annie, but before, he and I took a walk. That’s when he told me.

  He sat me down on a park bench, over by the wading pool where children sail their boats. It was November and getting cold. We were warm enough, though, in hats and scarves and gloves. He had something to tell me, and spoke very clearly and simply and straight. He had cancer and it could not be cured or permanently halted. He was in remission thanks to heavy doses of hormones; they had left him impotent, but that was better than being dead.

  “The trouble is, that I can go out of remission at any time,” Ted told me. “And the docs say that if that happens, I can go in as fast as three weeks.” He paused. “It changes how you view things. Some things, like politics and what’s in the newspaper, become utterly unimportant. And things like friends, family, especially friends, become the most important things in the world.”

  Ted looked at me. He reached for my hand, and held it fast. “So you see, having you come back into my life, now, all of a sudden, well it couldn’t make me happier.”

  I wrapped myself around him. My arms and also one leg hooked over his lap — actually we probably looked fairly ludicrous there on the bench—but it was a moment where it didn’t matter how we looked or what we were doing with our bodies. Ted held on tight. Nothing could change what was, the bad or the good. I said I loved him and then we said no more, just held on.

  As we walked back to the house, and Annie, and dinner, we talked. He wanted very much to finish the draft of the novel, the last book he would ever write. I wanted very much to read it.

  When Ted was still in remission, it seemed to me there were some things going on that were suspicious. Ted had always had a bad back, but it had gotten worse, why he wasn’t sure. My assumption was that this was the cancer, he just didn’t want to dignify it with the name. That would be giving it too much ground.

  I called him one Sunday, from my apartment in Washington. Annie said he was out and she didn’t know why he hadn’t returned. Several hours later, Ted called and told me the story.

  “The most amazing thing happened,” he said.

  He had gone to a hotel to meet a man who was going to do his taxes; the place was way over west on 58th Street, practically in the river. He walked down the hall to meet the man and heard some music coming out from behind a door; the hotel rented larger halls as well as rooms for people who had business to transact. After getting the tax stuff taken care of, he passed by the door again.

  This time it was open. And he could hear the music more clearly. It was gospel. There was plenty of gospel, Ted had explained to me, in the book he was working on, but he had never actually been to a live service. A woman standing by the door saw his interest, and pulled him in. He sat in the rear.

  “The music was wonderful,” he said, “just what I�
�d imagined. So full of feeling and passion and emotion and all the good things of being human. The sound just rolled over me. Everyone was singing and the sound was immense.” It went on for a long time, and then there was quiet. A small woman came to the front of the room Several people stood up, in no apparent pattern.

  Ted’s back was hurting him, so he stood up, too.

  He hadn’t understood. All of the people who had stood up were brought to the front of the room.

  The woman prayed over them. She prayed for strength and health. Calls of reassurance and encouragement came from all corners of the room. She prayed in front of Ted. And then she knocked him down.

  “I could see what was going to happen, because it happened with the other people,” Ted told me. “She stood in front of you, and behind you stood this immense black guy, and she knocked you down, and you had to fall right back. Where the man would catch you. You had to trust her, you see. You had to let yourself go, just completely.”

  “And did you?” I asked.

  “I did,” said Ted. “I can’t tell you how marvelous I feel.”

  Ted finished the novel in March 1995. I was working for the federal government at the time. It arrived in my office on Monday and I took the day off on Thursday and edited it and had it back to him on Saturday.

  “Don’t rush,” he had said, wanting not to inconvenience me. “Take your time.”

  But I knew we had no time. I read it once, all the way through. I could see the shape. The first time through, I began to understand who the people were. I read it again, slowly, and edited it, page by page, I listened to its sounds, word by word.

  I was not young, not then. I was no longer a confused and anxious assistant editor at a New York publishing house. I was no longer a damaged woman who did not know her own heart. I had no questions about who Ted Whittemore was to me; I understood in many ways what was important about his work. I concentrated.