by T. Gertler
“I like the pages you sent me,” Maris said. “I feel as if I know these two men.” Her wide wry mouth might have been smiling.
“Ned and Steven?”
“Yes. That’s some shower scene. I sent the pages to Cal Thomas at B&G. He’s very good with young writers, that whole house is good for a young writer. You wouldn’t get lost there.”
“A publisher?” Dina jammed both forefingers on the underside of the chair once, twice, three times.
“You understand, it could go on for a couple of years, from one publisher to another, before someone buys it, if anyone ever does.”
“Buys it?” The tip of a gray-brown dorsal fin cut through waveless, unnaturally still ocean.
“You’d get an advance on your novel.”
Dina’s fingers stayed glued to wood. Maris asked if she wanted coffee, and she shook her head before whispering, “No, thanks.”
“Cal likes what you’ve done. He wants to meet you. He said he’s got time around two today. I think he wants to buy the book.” Maris twisted the gold band around and around her middle finger. “You’re the sixth writer Howard’s sent to me, and every one is wonderful. He’s got an incredible eye for talent. He should be locked up somewhere and prevented from doing anything else but that, looking for talent. Did you hear what he did at a party for Francine Gray?”
“No.” Croaked. She was concentrating on Cal Thomas, who had her pages and was an editor like Howard and might be like him in other ways too. She laughed at what seemed to be the end of Maris’s story about Howard.
Maris joined in with deep laughter. “He’s a character,” she said. “There’s nobody else like him. Thank God.”
—
He was sixteen, and she was afraid of him, an editor in a red bow tie. He might have been twenty-six. She expected a combination of Howard and Newman: a man who would flirt with her and then analyze her response. Her Xeroxed pages and a copy of Rosemary lay spread out before him. She crossed her legs and wrapped one foot around the other calf. Sunk in an upholstered beige chair in Cal Thomas’s large, light office, she felt like a laborer summoned from the fields into the boss’s house for a lecture.
“I like it a lot. Where do you think it’s going?” he asked. A gargle tossed the words. Light glanced off his red-framed glasses.
“I’m not sure. I’d like to write about these two men.”
“What do you think happens to them?”
“I don’t know. They meet a woman, I guess. They both meet the same woman.” She hadn’t known that would happen until she’d said it. She glared at him because he’d tricked her.
“What I’d like is for you to give me an idea of the direction of the book.”
At the word book the shark’s mouth opened larger than the desk between them. She swam inside to explore for molars. “What if I say something’s going to happen and later I change my mind?”
“Of course you can change your mind.”
He might have been twenty-eight—or the interview was aging him. Clearly he accepted her as a writer, even though she was female. And clearly he wasn’t flirting with her. He spoke to her gently and with respect. His courtesy alarmed her; his lack of flirting annoyed her. Something was wrong with him. His game might be to not have a game. Sooner or later his mask would slip and she would see what it was he really wanted.
“What happens after we talk?” She continued glaring at him, her toes curled up in her sandals.
“You start to work on that book, I hope.” He leaned back in his chair. At that angle his eyes showed through his glasses: blue, inquiring, reserved. He had light brown hair with a cowlick. His red bow tie bobbed when he swallowed.
Her leg loosened around the other leg. Her toes uncurled. She watched them. The two big toes tapped the innersoles three times. She would leap up on his desk and spring over him to burst through the closed window twenty-two floors above the street. Smiling, triumphant, bleeding, she would enter the air. Around her a corona of broken glass would flash like diamonds in the sun. Her blood would shine. Behind her the broken window would bear the silhouette of her leap, a cutout of a hurtled figure with arms upraised. Wherever the window wasn’t glass, there would be emptiness shaped into Dina. Through that cutout Cal Thomas would call “No!” too late. Thinning, the word would follow her down. She would be speeding at last in a precise direction.
It was hard to pull air past the block in her chest. She’d been holding her breath. Her lungs, which she imagined as two deflated purple balloons, expanded. The balloons scraped her rib cage, squeaking. “Okay.” She must have said that. Besides the window, talking to him was another way out of the room. She began, “The two men meet this woman. She’s running away from her husband.” She glanced at Cal Thomas.
He nodded encouragement. The room sighed. “Go on,” he said.
—
Twenty-two floors down from Cal Thomas’s office, the elevator door opened on the lobby and, queasy from motion sickness, the novelist-to-be got out. An elevator opposite hers opened too, and the plaid hulk from the bookstore, Dan’s “one of the greatest writers alive,” got out, carrying a torn Macy’s shopping bag. He was wearing a black shirt and a navy blue tie and yards of green pants shepherded by yellow suspenders.
She asked a woman with a blond ponytail and a packed briefcase, “Excuse me, do you know who that is?”
The woman sighted the plaid hulk crossing the lobby. Her earrings were silver arrows. “Doesn’t he work at the cigar stand here?” she asked.
—
There she was, uninvited again, on his sofa. He’d had the chance, after Gail announced her, to say he was too busy to see her. By not doing that, he had in a sense invited her. Honest to a fault, he thought, and muttered, “Honored by your presence.”
Something fired her small face: a breathless, hopeful look. He wondered if she intended to repeat her bare-bottom display. He should have closed the door.
“It’s been a while,” she said.
He checked to see if it was a reproach. Her eyes burned above her smile. She’d grown thinner. Or longer. Could people her age grow? She had no right to reproach him. He asked, “And how’s our friend Newman?”
“Fine.”
He liked the hesitation in her voice. Yes, Captain Marvel was in command of the situation. He folded back the cuffs of his green pima cotton shirt.
“I have something to tell you,” she said.
She needed another place to stay. She wanted to move into his apartment disguised as an au pair girl. She wanted him. “Good news, I hope.” Let her ask.
“Very. I was a few blocks away, at B&G. I’m getting a book contract.” She smiled at him so openly, with so many of her small familiar nibbling teeth, that he smiled back.
“Congratulations. A novel?”
“Yes. And I have you to thank for it.”
“Hardly.”
“You sent me to Maris, and Maris sent me to Cal Thomas.”
“Maris is a peach. Have I seen any of this novel?”
“No, I have to write most of it.”
“You’re getting a good advance?”
“I don’t know.”
“Cal Thomas’ll get you something decent. He’s pretty good. I could’ve steered you to someone better.”
“I like him.”
“He has excellent taste, but he’s not all that experienced.”
“He’s got a big office. It’s bigger than yours.”
“By that standard, any dentist is a better editor than I am.”
She seemed to be tapping her fingers on an invisible piano in her lap. Her voice was low. “I thought you’d be happy for me.”
The invisible piano played a sad song. Suzanne, beautiful in a blue nightgown, had told him at breakfast that she’d go to bed with him if he bought her a silver-backed brush. “Favor for favor,” she’d said. “More coffee?” Humming, she’d buttered toast. He’d read a marmalade label; somebody’d stolen his Times from the doormat. He could still hear her tuneless hummin
g.
“I am,” he said. “Maybe we could get together to celebrate. Lift a glass or two. Lift other things. I could call you tomorrow.”
She nodded, lowered her head, came up grinning. “What took you so long?”
—
“I can’t believe you believe that shit.” Through the store window he saw Mrs. Lotta pick up her crocheting.
“It’s not shit. And I don’t, not really.” She walked past the door to his building.
“You paid for it.” He followed her with his accusation.
“People pay you for stories and nobody believes they’re true.”
“They are true.”
“They’re fiction.”
“Yeah, but they connect to something real. They’re not toilet-paper covers.”
They were stalled in front of a dry cleaner’s. An old tailor at his sewing machine watched them through the window, his lips pursed around pins. Bask swore to himself that he would never have any clothes altered there, even if he had to wear unhemmed pants and short-cuffed jackets for the rest of his life.
“Let’s go somewhere,” he said. “Let’s go on the Staten Island ferry.” If they were saying goodbye, they could do it moving. She wasn’t his Paula, she wasn’t his Suzanne. They would free each other at the harbor. “We can eat stale potato chips, as many as you want.”
“That’s not what I want,” she cried so angrily that he put his arms around her to comfort her. She punched his shoulder hard enough to make him grunt.
Behind grimed glass the tailor took a pin from his mouth and stuck it through houndstooth check.
Bask rubbed his shoulder. “What do you want?”
“Not you,” she answered.
“Babe, let me take you home—”
“No!”
“Your home, let me—”
“Go away. I want Howard.”
The tailor might have heard her whisper, he thought. “Fine.”
“Go to hell,” she said.
“No way,” he answered, and he started walking.
—
After he walked away—after she sent him away—she waited. 1. He would return. 2. She would call to him and he would return. 3. She would run after him. None of these things happened. He kept walking. He was going somewhere. He must have caused the fight to get rid of her. He must have known all along that he would leave her like this. Seeing him disappear down the block was like seeing Howard running along the street with the halter woman from the bookstore: the shock of spying on him. She had told Vincent to go away, but he had actually gone. What remained for her was the superiority of the observer tracking the observed, the target, the prey.
Tall, with his red curls beckoning over the heads of strangers, he was easy to follow. The hard part was matching his pace. Her high-heeled sandals wobbled in potholes and stabbed subway gratings. After eight blocks she was carrying her shoes, a barefoot country girl, far from the country, cultivating urban fungus in pursuit of love. By Fortieth Street she’d lost one of the sandals. She looked back to see if it was lying behind her. Strangers’ feet stamped toward her. Before the light changed, she hurried after Bask. The shoes had cost ninety-five dollars on sale. She kept the surviving one. Her feet hurt. “Our Father which art in heaven,” she whispered. At the corner she stopped and watched him walk downtown, toward Thirty-ninth Street. The red curls flared among strangers. A man who’d been running to make the light bumped into her and kept running. The back of his jacket had a wet stain. She couldn’t see Vincent anymore. “Hallowed be thy name,” she whispered, and deposited her shoe in a mailbox. NOT FOR METERED MAIL, a sign said. USE ZIP CODES. She changed direction.
She walked east along Thirty-ninth Street and at Madison headed uptown. One foot was bleeding. Empty cabs cruised past, but she persisted with her penance. She had stolen. God helps those who help themselves. She had committed adultery. God helps those who help themselves.
Further east she hobbled past Howard’s office building, but she didn’t stop there. She had to make things right one at a time. Minutes after she passed, Dina came out the lobby door, smiling, and ran to the downtown subway.
—
Bask walked past bodegas and delis and Chock Full O’ Nuts, past arcades whining with electronic kills and home runs promising ballpoint pens free for six coupons. Two blond women, one of them black, offered him blow jobs. He parted a pack of yellow cabs honking. He followed Broadway downtown, through the theater district, past Times Square and peep shows, through the garment district. Bales of gingham trussed with wire dollied beside him. Winter coats wheeled by. Howard had told him to have something between real events. A thin man in an army shirt tried to sell him a gold Omega quartz watch for fourteen bucks cash. Bask couldn’t read what was stenciled on the man’s shirt pocket. On Twenty-third Street a bus aimed at him, and a cop yelled, “Hey, Red, watch it.” That was a real event.
He stopped at a hot-dog vendor’s wagon and asked to buy a can of salt-free seltzer. “I got Tab, I got Coke, I got Seven-Up,” the vendor said. He was Greek, no more than twenty-five, and wore a gold medallion around his neck. The medallion nestled in curly dark hair. Bask moved on to a pink and white striped wagon selling watermelon ices. Yes, the tanned young woman in a tank top and shorts informed him, the ices were made with refined sugar. She seemed genuinely sorry before going back to her book, a paperback on Noh plays. It would have been nice for Bandaged Moments to be out in paperback and for her to be reading it. At a falafel stand run by a tall, healthy-looking black woman he discussed ingredients. He ordered falafel on whole-wheat pita without sauce because he wasn’t sure about the sauce, and ate it on a shaded bench at Madison Square Park. A girl in a white sundress went by. Thongs from her shoes laced halfway up around her legs. She wore a brass collar. Her mouth was the pearly purple of the inside of conch shells. When their eyes met, he nodded and kept chewing. He tore off a few pieces of pita and threw them to an audience of pigeons.
After eating, he folded his arms across his chest and stretched his legs out in front of him and closed his eyes. The city disappeared in explosions of purples, reds, yellows. He spent several happy minutes following a stream along a meadow behind Bonnie’s house in Massachusetts. Then he was in the kitchen with her, arguing. Butter bubbled in a frypan. She chopped parsley on an antique breadboard. He admired her long, elegant fingers flecked with green.
“Just once,” she said, “you might think about what you want to be doing when you’re sixty.”
“I have. I’d like to be writing.”
“Let’s establish goals.”
“Let’s not.”
“You have to prioritize, Vince. You can’t let things happen, you have to make them happen.”
Paula, the title character of the book he was writing, entered the kitchen. She didn’t look like Suzanne. She did look angry. Before she could say anything, he opened his eyes and stood up.
He followed Broadway across Fifth Avenue, down past rug stores and furniture stores and discount drugstores, to Union Square, where a temporary greenmarket of farmers selling produce at the north end of the park abutted a permanent drug market, illegal but unquiet, in the park.
He picked an apple from a crate and asked the farmer, meaty in overalls, “How much?”
The farmer had an enormous mottled nose and not terribly kind eyes. “That’s a Molly Delicious. You try it.”
“But how much?”
“You’ll come back for more if you like it.” The farmer dropped somebody’s plastic bag of peppers on a swinging scale. Their colors, bright red with grass-green stems, hurt Bask as profoundly as a sunset. He bit into sweet and crisp Molly. “Ludes?” a man asked him. He ate the apple to the core and, after Fourteenth Street, the seeds in their hard-skinned chambers. The stem reminded him of the twiglike stub of umbilical cord on each of the Irish setter puppies he’d watched being born. He tossed it on pizza crusts in a garbage can guarded by flies. An auction gallery and an antiques store had three seatless gilded
chairs and a standing birdcage on the sidewalk. If he wanted to, he could build better chairs than those. He turned off Broadway and walked quickly until he came to the Karatasi bookstore.
He knocked on the door but didn’t wait for an answer before opening it. Wearing a red blouse and underpants, she was sitting at the foot of a white bed and toweling her hair.
“Dan said you were up here,” he said.
She pulled a white sheet over her thighs. Her wet hair made black ink lines on her forehead.
“I thought this was an office. You live here?” he asked.
She nodded.
“You and Dan?” he asked.
“He lives down the hall. Anything else you want to know?” The towel covered her ears against him.
“I was in the neighborhood. I thought I’d say hello.”
“Hello.” She smiled before the towel hid her face.
“I liked your story,” he said.
Now he had her attention. Even her hair seemed alert: drying, it curved.
“I liked yours too,” she said. “And that’s not in return for your liking mine.”
“Want to go get some juice or milk?”
“I have to go somewhere.”
“Okay.” He had to get back to his own place and write. Being with her would have taken up too much time. He wanted sympathy because he and Suzanne were through, he wanted to celebrate because he had a new book contract. But writers shouldn’t go with other writers, they should go with normal people, for balance. He decided to fall in love with an architect or a telephone repairwoman.
“We could walk part of the way together,” she said from the folds of the towel.
“Great.” He stood grinning at her.
“I have to get dressed,” she said.
“Right.” He backed out the door. Before he closed it, he thought he saw her tap the mattress.
—
By the second block she was saying, “It’s good, but it’ll be better when you take more care with it. I take too much care. I have to loosen up the language, you have to condense.”
He resented her enthusiasm. “Your friend Sykes’s criticism is catching.”