It was fall when I arrived. The days were cold, bright and filled with colour. There was a growers’ market around the corner from my apartment where I shopped every Friday morning before work. I’d come home with large bunches of basil and bags filled with sweet tomatoes, just-plucked mushrooms, salad mixes of bitter mustard, radicchio and fresh herbs.
My apartment may have had no furniture but it was filled with light. Sleeping on a blow-up mattress in New York only added to the sense of adventure. I cooked meals in a single pot and fry pan and ate them sitting on the floor of an empty room. I was happy.
My mother wasn’t big on giving the usual parental advice – the kind of words that gently guide you away from mishaps and set you up for living in a sensible way. ‘An apple a day …’, that sort of thing. My mother considered fruit ‘empty calories’. I swore off it.
Her guidance was more along the lines of ‘Don’t wear nice underwear on a date if you don’t want to fuck the man.’ I don’t think I understood what that even meant when she first said it to me, but it was repeated often enough that I eventually got the gist.
She taught me through example, though, that if you have proper cutlery, a linen napkin, a nice china plate to eat off, and a teacup and saucer, the rest of your life circumstances can fade away. Once she took me to stay with one of her boyfriends in Sydney. There was no glass in the window frames, but when we sat down to dinner, we had napkins. Every day, when he was at work, my mother took me to the art gallery. I’ve always known that if a napkin can’t save you, art certainly can.
So along with the jar of Vegemite I’d shoved in the sock, in my luggage I had tucked away four Liberty plates and four sets of silver cutlery, my favourite teacup and saucer, and some linen napkins. You never know when you might have guests, even in an empty apartment in a city where you know virtually no one. With those things, apart from Jack’s gnawing absence and my guilt about leaving, which sometimes I could set aside, I was happy.
However, the writer I had dreamed of being closer to had become a shadowy figure. I had imagined I’d see more of him when we lived in the same country, but I had less to do with him now than when I was in Australia. I had my hands more than full with the festival and trying to get acclimatised to a new city so, thankfully, he wasn’t the focus of my attention. He reneged on carefully made plans and made excuses. I worked.
The writer’s absence was one thing, but what really shook me was that, in the weeks and months that passed after Jack’s exams finished, it became more and more evident that he had no intention of packing up and following me.
Thirty-four
In the PEN office, on Broadway in SoHo, I had a small workstation in a narrow internal corridor, wedged between an executive’s secretary and a junior member of staff. It was a crummy workspace, particularly for a senior member of the team, which I had been led to believe I was going to be. But the box of beautiful business cards – a thick cream-textured stock, a simple design with my name and new address – made me forgive the slight and, for a while in disbelief. It was a miracle that I’d pulled this off and was here in my dream job in the city I’d fallen in love with – the city that made me feel prettier, smarter. I smiled more. I was starting anew.
But nothing was quite as it had been promised. After just a few days, I began to feel like I’d walked into an environment more akin to the places an organisation like PEN might be drawing international attention to rather than its own place of business. Everything was a distortion of the truth and of what I had been told I could expect. My agreed-upon salary had been mysteriously calculated down while I was on the plane to America. My title had changed.
Most of my colleagues were wonderful, but everyone cowered around a couple of individuals. The atmosphere was toxic and, for some reason, particularly acrid when it came to me.
The day I received my first pay cheque from PEN, I left my tiny desk in the corridor and walked up Broadway to the large Crate & Barrel homewares store on the corner of Houston. A thin, well-dressed man introduced himself as Nigel. He didn’t look like a salesman; he looked like a well-dressed editor about to go out to a work lunch.
‘Does that couch over there come in another colour?’ I asked, pointing to the smart simple-lined showroom prop. ‘I don’t want it in white.’
‘Mocha or charcoal.’
‘I’ll take it in mocha.’
‘That was quick,’ he said. ‘Did you even sit on it?’
‘Yes, when I first came in. It’s perfect and I’ll take it. I’ll also need a bed, a table and chairs …’
A little under twenty minutes later, I was swiping my credit card.
‘That’s the quickest sale I have ever made,’ said Nigel. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘You have no idea,’ I said, thinking about the last time I’d bought a full house’s worth of furniture in a single outing.
After about six weeks in the job, a colleague asked me to join him for breakfast at Balthazar, a buzzing French-style bistro in the heart of SoHo.
‘You’re a lousy actor,’ he said. He ordered a café au lait which came in a large French coffee bowl, like a cereal bowl. ‘It’s very plain that you’re unhappy in your work.’
‘Well, it’s not quite what I imagined,’ I said, holding my voice in check so it didn’t waver. ‘I’m not sure why you’ve brought me here. You overrule everything I suggest. Surely my experience has to count for something.’
‘I don’t know how it is where you come from,’ he said venomously, ‘but that’s not how it works here. And this is too important.’ He sipped his coffee, taking his time for effect. A narrow line of milk froth trimmed his lip. I took a small moment of pleasure from him sitting there like a seven-year-old who’d just drunk a glass of milk, but then he leaned forward across the narrow table and began jabbing his index finger in the air a few inches from my chest.
‘Listen,’ he spat. ‘You are just going to have to get used to the fact that I am going to be all over you like a cheap suit.’ He leaned back in his chair and took another swig from his bowl. He didn’t seem like an innocent seven-year-old anymore; he seemed exactly like a thug.
A chill ran through me. ‘I can do this job. You know I can.’ In my four years at the helm of Sydney Writers’ Festival, I had more than doubled audiences, tripled box-office takings, doubled book sales. For my final festival I had curated 300 events with 300 writers, the PEN World Voices Festival was a small undertaking by comparison. From what I could tell, audiences at the first festivals had been about a tenth of the size of Sydney’s. It’s not that this was a program I could do with my eyes closed, there was a ton for me to learn and to be challenged by, but none of it was out of my reach.
‘Well, you haven’t been doing it here, not in this city. And this is too important. Until I know you can do it, I’m going to ride you.’
My breakfast stayed untouched. I’d ordered a boiled egg and toast soldiers because it was the breakfast my grandmother used to make for me. I thought it would be comforting because I knew ahead of time this meeting would be stressful. I remembered staying over in the big house where my father lived after he got polio, feeding the chickens, and then dunking strips of buttery toast into the yellow yolks of their eggs. This serve went cold on the plate.
Two weeks later another member of staff summoned me to a café where they played loud commercial radio that was more ads than music. Advertising was everywhere in America, even on subway turnstiles. Billboards appeared in the sky, plumed out from the back of tiny skywriting planes. It seemed no public space was exempt.
‘Well,’ he said with an evil chuckle, which you might have mistaken for merriment if you didn’t know better. ‘I told everyone straightaway that no one was really qualified for the position.’
I stared into my polystyrene cup of coffee in silence as he explained in detail that these first two months had been my ‘honeymoon period’.
‘Jesus,’ I thought. ‘If this is the honeymoon, I hate to see
what the divorce is going to look like.’
When I got back to my desk I was shaking. I opened the New York Times and the words ‘adversity is the first path to truth’ jumped out at me from the page. I cut out the newsprint and stuck it to the edge of my monitor. It became my daily mantra.
The next day, on the subway to work, I watched a tall man as he stepped into the carriage. My eye was drawn to his striking stature and his distinguished leather hat, which was the shape of a short top hat. When he sat down next to me I turned and smiled. He smiled back.
When I next looked up, a man with his wrist slung through the hand strap above us seemed to be dangling rather than standing. In New York you quickly learn who not to make eye contact with on the subway or on the footpath, so when I noticed the barcode tattooed on the side of his neck I averted my gaze to the ground.
But I looked up when he addressed the man sitting next to me, ‘I like your hat. I’m not bold enough to wear something like that.’
‘Bold enough to tattoo a barcode on your neck, but not bold enough to wear a beautiful hat?’ I thought.
The man in the hat nodded. ‘Thank you.’
I thought that was the end of the exchange, a compliment paid and an acknowledgement back, until the man in the hat said, ‘You know, you don’t think you’re bold enough until you are called on to be.’ And the man with the barcode, as if he was ready to be scanned and paid for at a check-out, nodded and got off at the next stop.
‘You sure are right there,’ I said to the man in the hat, thinking of my nightmare at PEN.
While this exchange had taken place, a man in an expensive suit sitting on the other side of the carriage stared into his phone playing some kind of game, earphones plugged in his ears, as New York City in all its infinite wonder passed him by.
When I got out of the subway I came upon a cavalcade of empty drink cans rolling along the footpath. The wind had whipped the cans along at quite a pace before they rolled off the lip of the footpath and stopped in the gutter.
I looked around to see a homeless man slumped up against the wall of a convenience store like a half-emptied pillow. He’d obviously collected the cans, planning to trade them for money, but in a moment of ‘Why bother?’ he’d unleashed them to roll away from him like tumbleweeds.
As I got closer, I realised the man was ripping up dollar bills in his hands, throwing the pieces into the wind and watching them dance like confetti in the air, until they fell, painting the footpath or settling in the gutter along with the cans.
It wasn’t the first or the last time that an encounter like that produced a moment of recognition. The truth, the real raw stuff of life, happens in the street, not in fancy corridors – you just have to be paying attention. I knew all too well the futility of trying to make a castle from crumbs.
Thirty-five
Work went from bad to worse. I cried on the subway. I cried at my desk. I took up smoking after having quit for more than a decade. I cried at home every night with a bottle of wine and cigarettes.
I couldn’t tell anyone the full extent of the cruelty. Who would believe me? I had no track record here and no one knew me. And most damning of all, this was PEN – one of the most respected human rights organisations in the world and the pinnacle of literary life in the United States. What chance did my reputation and word have against that? I was alone.
But there were moments of light, when the nightmare faded into the background and I remembered exactly why I’d sacrificed so much. I’m not sure these remarkable instances made up for the stress or the pain but when they appeared I grabbed them with both hands.
After the toughest six months of my life, it was opening night of my first festival. I was standing in the wings of New York Town Hall, peeping out from behind the heavy curtains at a packed auditorium.
‘Why are you dancing, Caro?’ asked Don DeLillo in a whisper, sucking on a lozenge, trying to soothe his sore throat before his reading.
‘I’m in New York, it’s opening night, there are 1500 people out there, and you are here,’ I said.
Don had been a hero since I read White Noise at university during one of my failed attempts at getting a degree. Now he was standing beside me.
Don DeLillo was cool and steady, but he smiled. After that, whenever I called or saw him, he’d ask, ‘How’s it going, kiddo?’
The festival was a hit. The closing event featured a capacity crowd at the historic Cooper Union. During the sound check before the show started, I stood on the stage at the very same podium from which Abraham Lincoln delivered his speech against slavery on 27 February 1860.
Suddenly all the strife felt worth it. To be on that stage was everything. I savoured the moment standing in the spotlight, delivering something important.
The next morning, I woke to an email from Salman. Congratulations, he wrote, expressing how much he’d enjoyed our first festival together and inviting me over to celebrate.
When I arrived at Salman’s place a few days later, a bottle of champagne was set chilling in an ice bucket on the coffee table. Seated on the same couch as for my interview, we recounted the highlights and laughed about the best and worst bits.
Salman’s highlight was the cabaret, where Patti Smith performed and Sam Shepard read at the Bowery, along with Saul Williams, the slam-rap poet as cool and well-dressed as Prince. Huang Xiang, a performance poet who fled China after repeated imprisonment and torture, delivered his show in Chinese with wild arm-waving and yelling. New Yorker cartoonist Victoria Roberts, appearing as her alter ego, a Japanese geisha, was the MC. It was a riot of a night and only just hung together, but right on the edge of chaos, it was a magical show.
Finally I plucked up the courage to tell Salman some of what had been happening in the office. For the first time in my life I had to admit defeat.
‘You should have come to me,’ he said. I knew he meant it, but I also knew it would have been my word against theirs. Salman offered to speak to the people in question. A little reluctantly, but wanting to be tough and to fight my own battles, I said I’d like to try to handle it myself. The thought of facing them made me feel sick, but knowing I had Salman’s support gave me courage.
The American writer warned me. ‘Be careful. If they can’t fuck with you straight, they’ll screw you sideways.’ He was right. I got a desk out of the corridor, but every obstacle was put in my way to make the job as difficult as possible.
Finally, Jack came to visit. The driving force of nearly my entire adult life was back. I tried to put on a good face, because that was the only way to survive the absence, but with Jack returned I realised having him gone was like missing a limb. Worse, I’d actually lost all sense of what was important to me.
I took him to all the places I thought he’d love. We went to Generation Records on Thompson Street in the West Village. The cigarette smoke a heavy fog as we pushed through the doors. I bought him CDs and limited-edition T-shirts of his favourite heavy metal bands. It was unabashed bribery.
We walked up Tenth Avenue, before it was the galleried hipster spot it is now, in search of an unmarked loft space on the western edge of Chelsea. Jack had heard about an exhibition of an underground artist who had done the cover art for his favourite band, Tool. As we walked up the steep creaking staircase, I wondered what we were getting ourselves into. The place looked more like a dive where you’d buy a hit of heroin than an art gallery. I clutched my handbag to my chest.
I did everything I could to get him to fall for the city, but no matter how shiny I tried to make it seem, or how enthusiastically I spoke about the opportunities New York could offer him, he always wanted to go home. In Sydney he had a girlfriend and a close-knit group of friends.
He visited a few times over the years, but it broke my heart each time he left. I had to accept that his life – at least for now – was in Australia. At the airport I couldn’t bear to watch him walk away or wait to see if he turned to wave goodbye before disappearing into the security line. I left
the moment I kissed his forehead and he let go of me, so he wouldn’t see how distraught I was. But he knew. Eventually he wouldn’t allow me to see him off at the airport. We bade our farewells at the apartment.
My choice to move to America seemed foolish. What was it all for? It was looking more and more as though I’d left Jack, the guiding force of my life, for a fantasy.
The American writer often said work saves us. Now I was working day and night simply to get around the roadblocks that were deliberately being put in my way.
I made good and strong friendships quickly, but I didn’t talk about what was really happening at work, or my loneliness, or my doubts. With my work life as bad as it was, these friendships were even more important to me. And besides, I felt that I couldn’t talk about my misery because it seemed to be entirely of my own making, having chosen to move from Sydney.
Many of the writers I worked with at PEN became friends, so meeting Philip Roth at John Updike’s memorial in 2009 was exciting, but this kind of event had become common enough in my work life that I wasn’t overly starstruck, even though it was a thrill to meet such a legendary figure.
I found it remarkably easy to make witty small talk with Philip on the way to the elevator that took us to a private reception on the second floor. He asked me a question to which I made a joke I no longer remember. But I remember the sound of his laughter, which was full and unbounded. When he laughed he threw his chin up and the sound echoed and bounced along the near empty marble corridor. He had the laugh of a young man.
Diving into Glass Page 20