An Enlarged Heart

by Cynthia Zarin

  Over the few years when went to lunch with Mr. Shawn at the Algonquin or the Oak Room, at the old Plaza, where I had crab cakes because I had once ordered them and Mr. Shawn always said, after that, “You like the crab cakes, don’t you,” and ordered them for me, with a blush of pleasure at remembering. The conversation was the same. I would think of amusing things to tell him beforehand, because I was afraid the conversation would lag, and that silence would rise between us. After a while we would circle around to the same subject. I would mention pieces I might like to write and he would nod. I was then interested in religious communities, a subject about which Mr. Shawn was not particularly keen. I had recently met a woman who lived in a cave. He would then fold his napkin and say, clearing his throat first, “Miss Zarin, have you ever thought of writing fiction?” He believed, he said, I had a fictional turn of mind.

  Sometime after that, and after Mr. Shawn had died, I read an account of that same conversation by a woman some years older than I was, and infinitely, to my mind, more glamorous, who had also written for the magazine. I think it occurred at the Oak Room, too. It was, in a way, a comfort. Gee, I thought, really? I thought about the ticking clock that became a time bomb, and secrets hidden in plain sight, and the black binders in which every word was carefully pasted down. I found myself wondering how often Mr. Shawn saw someone he wanted to talk to, in the mirror. And I thought of the story I had read so long ago, in which the story the characters were reading was the story they had asked for, scribbling themselves into a book that they read aloud to themselves as it happened.

  Acknowledgments

  The author would like to thank: Deborah Garrison and Peter Matson, Caroline Zancan and her colleagues at Knopf; Holly Brubrach, who as style editor of The New York Times Magazine commissioned pieces that became the beginning of this book; Karen Balliett, Martin Edmunds, Elizabeth Kramer, Bill McKibben, Suzannah Lessard, Jane Mendelsohn, Pamela Morton, Jonathan Schell, and Alice Truax, for reading early—and later—versions; Joe, Anna, Rose, Jack, and Beasie, who have given me the best part of the life written about in these pages, and The MacDowell Colony, for two residencies during two winters.