An Enlarged Heart

by Cynthia Zarin

  At that time, there was no masthead or table of contents. Many of the articles, especially in what I was to learn was called the front of the book, were unsigned. There was a notion that these were written “by the magazine,” as in “We were downtown the other day when … ” If it was necessary for some reason that the article appear in the first person, the convention was “An old friend writes …” When, after a time, that person was sometimes me, this appeared as “A young woman we know writes …” When a writer’s name did appear, it was in small block letters at the end of what was often a very long article, of thousands of words, so that generally, the reader discovered who had written the article only when he or she came to the end: verbosity offset by self-effacement. There were a series of sobriquets used by regular contributors to the magazine, which included the Long-Winded Lady and Our Man Stanley; these monikers were trumped, as it were, by a few that referred, consistently, to people who did not exist at all, among them Owen Kethery, the polite anagrammatic Beauregard who replied to letters sent to the editor (these did not appear in print). Thus, at the magazine’s offices, there were writers who existed whose names did not appear, and others who did not appear but whose names appeared frequently, on letters that were typed and sent out into the U.S. Mail. For a short time, later, I was among those who typed them. This sense of unreality, in its most utilitarian sense, had applications outside the magazine: the ex-wife of the former editor of the magazine, a man mythically uncouth, whose exclamations of disbelief and irritation covered a steely sense of order, aesthetic and otherwise, owned a plant nursery in Connecticut, whose catalogs were studded with advice from one Amos Pettingill, who in my mind was a sort of imaginary brother to the imaginary Owen Kethery, himself a scion or nephew of the magazine’s mascot, that fictive man in the top hat watching a butterfly through a monocle, whose name, I was to learn, was Eustace Tilley. A preponderance of Wildean vowels. In its less utilitarian incarnation, if unreality can be said to be utilitarian, this feeling of shifting identity—of not being quite there, wherever there was, of sidestepping not place but history, a refusal to be pinned down, or to sacrifice equivocation to the imperative—was mother’s milk. Or, better, father’s. There were always so many sides to an issue. The possibilities rose up, like empty cartoon bubbles over ten-point type, suggesting the unanswerable which was the only answer. Recently a writer whom I met at the magazine when I was twenty-three, and he was almost forty—he had been one of the first critics of the war in Vietnam—was talking over dinner about what had happened in Southeast Asia since he started reporting, for the magazine, as a very young man, in l966. He said that, well, it had turned out exactly as he, or we—I don’t remember whether he used “I,” or “we,” but it was probably the latter, as he has retained the habit of not calling attention to himself—had imagined it, but you know, we could have been wrong. It could have happened differently.

  The cover of the magazine—then, as now, a weekly—was always a drawing or a painting by one of magazine’s artists. There was no attempt whatsoever to advertise the current contents. The font in which the magazine was printed was not exactly black. It was almost, but not quite, ghost writing, the kind of writing I had practiced as a child which my cousin had taught me—the same cousin who, when I slept over her house woke me up, and conducted séances in the middle of the night, wearing a silk headscarf printed with stirrups which I recognized as a castoff of her grandmother’s. This writing, with a special silver pen, was only truly visible if you shone a flashlight directly on the paper.

  I dropped my query letter, with a résumé, if it could be called that, in the mailbox on the corner of Ninety-first Street. In two days I had a reply. Such were the mails. Could I telephone Mr. Gibbs at ALgonquin 7–7500, to make an appointment? I could, and did. My appointment was for the day after tomorrow, at 3 p.m. I later learned that Mr. Gibbs, who proved to be a well-turned-out man of any age between forty and seventy (I had no way of judging then, the age of anyone more than a few years younger or older than myself and I was as ignorant about babies as I was about the old), in addition to fulfilling a job called managing editor, also reported on yachting, or anything at all having to do with boats. The magazine, I would learn, reserved whole areas of inquiry for one writer or another. These included but were not restricted to dance, medicine, France, film, economics, law, fashion, presidential inaugurations, New York City politics, golf, fly-fishing, corn, visual art, England, theater, and outer space. This guaranteed exclusivity and was an attempt, I think, to eradicate rivalry; like many things at the magazine it had a familial aspect: so-and-so was “good at” baseball, or China, and his or her proclivities and or talents were both thus applauded and constrained, a branch, or knob, on the family tree.

  The afternoon of my appointment I made my way to Midtown. I took the subway. When I first arrived in New York in September—I liked to think of it as “back in New York,” although my family moved to Long Island when I was five or six—the subway intimidated me. The year before I went to college, and the summer after my freshman year, I had had a job at a bookstore on Forty-seventh Street, shelving books—the bookstore was its own education, as the basement was not arranged in alphabetical order or by subject (although all the books were literary) but by circle, Lytton Strachey and Carrington, for example, were shelved together, and Lee next to Capote. It was also where I saw my first and only heroin overdose and fell in love with a boy a decade older, who lived in Harlem and who poured scotch into a carton of ice cream for breakfast—to get to the bookstore taken the train in from Long Island every day, and the subway uptown. My own father, I knew, had taken the subway or the trolley in Brooklyn alone from the time he was six: it was to me the equivalent of my grandfather’s Russian tales of walking three miles in hip-deep snow to get to school—remote and inexplicable. In the seventies he used to say that he would never have married my mother then: she lived in the Bronx, and after a date he would take her home and then wait on the platform at midnight for the train to take him back to Brooklyn. “Now,” he said, shaking his head, “I would have been killed.” The subway was the stuff of family myth. In my grandparents’ generation children went to work early (everything happened early—my grandfather and his younger sister had sailed alone on the Philadelphia from Minsk via Liverpool at ages five and three, respectively) and one great-aunt received a proposal from the man to whom she would be married for more than sixty years, when they met by chance on the subway after not speaking for a year, after a quarrel.

  As usual, I arrived too early. I had spent time deciding what to wear, and had in the end decided on a burgundy tweed skirt my mother had made for me three or four years ago, hemmed at the knee, black tights, brown suede pumps, and a black cashmere turtleneck sweater, which I felt elevated the rest of it. It was April. I had realized as I walked from the subway that the hem of the skirt, which I thought looked appropriately “bookish” was frumpy in the extreme—by now it was too big at the waist but bunched on the hips—was coming down. By the time I arrived I was hot, and looked longingly at a girl about my own age going up in the elevator, who was wearing a loosely belted trench coat over blue jeans. I loitered by the shoe stand. It was too early for that, even, and I decided to walk around the block. This took too long, and I ended up late, staring with horror at the outsize clock with gold hands that presided over the lobby. I did not register that the lobby was peculiar in that it had five elevators, of which only one was manned, by an operator in livery, with white gloves. An automatic elevator came first, and I got into it. The letter, with its colophon of the top-hatted lepidopterist, had told me to arrive at the nineteenth floor. There must have been a receptionist, in the small, boxed-in area by the elevator—there was a receptionist on each of the three floors the magazine occupied—who unlocked the door, but I don’t remember, now, who that was.

  The door opened onto a barely furnished hall. In retrospect it seems to me that it was the most aggressively nondescript re
ception area I have ever seen. The wall immediately opposite the door held a wood-frame couch with two flat, hard Naugahyde cushions. These were brown. It was the sort of couch you wouldn’t be surprised to see cast off in the street. Adjacent to this was an armchair, equally unpromising. There was a hammered brass lamp with a stained shade on a gimcrack side table, and across from the couch a small low table held two magazines. One had a torn cover. They were both at least a year out of date. The walls were painted the color of what I thought of as “face powder,” pinkish brown. Like powder, the paint seemed to be flaking. I sat down on the couch, my knees touching, my heels elevated in the uncomfortable pumps. It was 1982, but I had been brought up in another universe, and that universe at that moment came to the fore, slipping over a lengthy, troublesome and headstrong adolescence and my current life—my tiny apartment on West End Avenue where I stayed up too late, reading Penguin mysteries and running the hot water into the bathtub until it ran out, while someone sat on the ledge, smoking, and talked to me. Recently, in an early book by A. S. Byatt, I read the words “If I had been brought up by people who made allowances, I would not have had to take so many,” and thought of myself. A voice in my head said, “Nice girls don’t cross their legs,” and so I sat, at the edge of my seat.

  After about five minutes, Mr. Gibbs bounded down the hall to collect me. He was wearing a navy blazer with gold buttons, blue-striped shirt with a white collar, a navy twill tie, and gray flannels. He was fresh-faced, and looked so exactly in aspect like the White Rabbit that rather than smiling I felt a small shock that I recognized as fear. “Come, come,” he said, and shook my hand. I followed him down one leg of the face-powder hall and then another, barely registering the curious fact that there was a mirror placed catty-corner where the corridor walls met, although I did catch sight of my own face in it. At the end of the second corridor, before we turned right into Mr. Gibbs’s office, through the only open door I had yet seen, I saw a girl of about my own age, sitting in a dark room, at a large desk, illuminated by a gooseneck lamp. From a distance of about twenty feet I could see she had pale, sharply defined features, and she was wearing a fawn-colored crewneck sweater. Beyond her, over her right shoulder, was a closed door. Her copper hair shone in the light. She was on the phone, and she was making a little comical face at the receiver. When our glances met, she gave me a conspiratorial look and nodded her head, slightly. Mr. Gibbs held the door to his office open, and I walked through it. Half an hour later, when I left, the desk was empty, the light out, and I wondered if I had imagined her.

  Mr. Gibbs, who was called Victor but whose given name was in fact Wolcott, was kind to me. The interview had a practiced air. The room was almost blindingly light after the hall and the sepulchral room I had glimpsed. One wall, as I remember it, was windowed. The office itself was cluttered with books and folders and littered, on every surface, with what I would learn to call galleys. These were sheets of mimeographed paper, in which articles that would appear, either next week, next month, next year, or never, were set up in the magazine’s ghostly type, and then were reread and revised without end. Most of the galleys I saw had small blue sheets of paper clipped to them, on which writing, small as a snail’s trail, took up a good deal of space. Mr. Gibbs sat me down in a captain’s chair with the emblem of the college we had both attended painted on it, and asked me, genially, what I thought I might do at the magazine if I stayed for five years. I had no idea. Five years to me was an unfathomable length of time. I believe I muttered something about “being a writer.” He nodded as if he understood all that. My résumé, such as it was, was in his hand. I had been the poetry editor of a slightly dégagé college publication, which we printed on newsprint paper, and I had worked in the bookstore. During college I had been a waitress. He folded this piece of paper in half, and picked up the telephone. A few words were exchanged, among them the name “Harriet,” and “five minutes.” At the close of this cryptic conversation, Mr. Gibbs got up and it was clear I should do so too. I was acutely aware of my drooping hem. We walked back down the face-powder corridor, passing the terrible sofa, the brass lamp, and the torn magazines. The hall zigzagged. At the end of it Mr. Gibbs handed me over to a woman with reading glasses around her neck, a pencil skirt and a sweater, and a comfortable look of extra upholstery about her. Her hair was steady in nineteen-forties curls, and she introduced herself as Harriet Walden. Her accent was southern, with an overlay of Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday.

  It transpired that I was to take a typing test. I blanched. I was a terrible typist. We entered a room in which five or six manual typewriters sat on an equal number of desks. The room was empty. The idea, as Mrs. Walden put it, was to see what I could do. Nothing, I thought to myself, bitterly. She ushered me into a small, glassed-in cubicle in the corner of the room—it was obviously her station. To the right of the desk was a music stand, on which she put a copy of Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs. It was a book I had once tried to read; I’d failed.

  “Have a go at that,” she said.

  She put a sheet of paper into the typewriter, and put a little stack of paper by my side. Then she departed. I looked despairingly at the text, and began to type. There was a large clock in the office but I didn’t look at it. The words, clumsily, sprang up under my fingers. About five minutes later Mrs. Walden poked her head in. I stopped typing. She pulled the sheet of paper out of the typewriter. I wanted to put my head in my hands. To my surprise, she slowly ripped the piece of paper into strips. She looked me up and down. I felt sorry about the hem. I tried to stand up straighter. She looked directly into my eyes, and said, “Well, you sound like a typist.

  “I’ll be in touch, of course,” she said.

  She walked me down the corridor, past another catty-corner mirror. I asked if I could use the ladies’ room and she directed me—it was beside the elevator. I washed my hands, and looked in the mirror. In the mirror-view, behind me, there was a half-open door, in an alcove set apart from the toilet stalls. I wondered, idly, if there might be a shower, and I imagined myself, transformed, going out to dinner after work, in a cocktail dress. I had never owned anything remotely resembling a cocktail dress (the only dress I owned then had been made out of red-striped Mexican cloth, and my brother had told me I looked like I was wearing a bedspread, at which he had snickered). The dress I had on in my imagination, I realized with chagrin, was a blue silk dress that belonged to my mother, and I dismissed it. Instead, gazing at my reflection without looking at it—a technique I had perfected to avert despair—I thought about the ratty couch, and William Burroughs, and the man in the monocle who liked butterflies, and my shoe box of rejection letters, and I admitted to myself what I had known since the moment I stepped off the elevator: for reasons I could not explain, even to myself, I wanted to be in this place more than I had ever wanted anything in my life. I desperately hoped that Mrs. Walden would call. I felt desperate about the desperation, because I knew that I would now spend the next few days barely venturing out of my apartment, should I miss a call. I thought, fleetingly, of the girl under the gooseneck lamp, and wondered if I would see her again. Then I descended nineteen floors to Forty-third Street, and the shoe shine stand. The next day Mrs. Walden called me. If it wasn’t too much trouble, could I come to work the following Monday at ten o’clock? The salary, she said apologetically, was $13,285. I sensed that she was apologetic not about the figure, exactly, but at the idea of having mentioned money at all. Mr. Gibbs would answer any questions I might have. I accepted at once.

  My first few days at the magazine occurred in a kind of trance. I had been given a job in the typing pool. The typing pool, which in my mind should be capitalized, as names of places are—Lethe or Gongora—the Typing Pool—as it was a place on the map of the magazine of both literal and psychic dimensions, was run by Mrs. Walden, who had been employed by the magazine for thirty-five years: by the time she left she had been there for more than half a century. She had been th
e personal secretary to the magazine’s first editor. The force of her own considerable personality, charm, and common sense were laced out with almost mandarin tact—of which dealing, as she did primarily, with writers, she needed a great store. Regarding the magazine, she had an encyclopedic memory. She had an incurable fondness for all the typists she hired. It was—I was to learn, slowly—the way that a good percentage of the female staff had entered into the magazine’s circle dance: she functioned as a sort of benign Charybdis, and out of the typing pool had emerged many of the magazine’s fact checkers, editors, and writers. At her memorial service a number of years ago, one woman, now in late middle age, told a story in which, as a girl in the typing pool, she was presented with a manuscript by a notoriously difficult writer which was completely illegible: it was written in gobbledygook. Questions were generally addressed to the writer, but this writer had apparently lost his mind. (This was a circumstance which had been addressed before, but the signs were usually more gradual.) Silently, she handed the manuscript to Mrs. Walden, who put on her reading glasses and gazed at it intently. Then she smiled, encouragingly. “Oh dearie,” she said. “Just type as written, but move your hands one key to the right.”