He wasn’t someone I felt I could ask for help. I didn’t want him to think I was weak. But I welcomed his invitation to lunch. I was desperate for advice.
Forbidden by Warren to mention The Vixen, I had no one to ask: Was it ordinary for an editor to be obsessed by his author’s photo? Was it normal to spend every minute dwelling on what I thought of as my Anya Partridge problem? Was it standard procedure to dream about “my” writer?
Even then, in that ignorant era when men were no better than Neanderthals, I knew it was wrong for an editor to masturbate over his author’s picture. But wasn’t that what Warren hoped? That the book-buying public would have dreams like mine? Wasn’t that the purpose of Anya Partridge’s portrait—to make everyone, male and female, long to crawl into that rumpled Chinese bed and give her a reason to put out that vampy cigar? Now, when I woke to the smell of smoke, I didn’t think of burning houses but of Anya’s cigarillo.
No wonder I had erotic dreams. I lost count of how many men Esther Rosenstein slept with, in The Vixen. Not that the act was described in detail—this was the 1950s—but there were recurring motifs. “Esther and the FBI man were finally alone. No one would ever know what they did during their ‘clandestine’ meeting.” Or, “Esther stretched her supple body and lay back on the hotel bed as the Russian scientist opened the bottle of French champagne and double-locked the door.”
Much of the novel was about the Rosensteins’ crime, their love for the Soviet Union and hatred for the United States. But the heart of the book was the sexual tension between Esther and the attorney general, a flame ignited in Esther’s cell and complicating the trial for everyone. Would their attraction compromise the government’s “airtight” case against the Russian spy ring? Would Esther and the prosecutor steal a moment to uncork the champagne and double-lock the door? These questions were meant to hook the reader.
One dramatic subtheme was Esther’s inability to be satisfied by her husband, Junius. “Even in the act of love with Junius, in flagrante delicto—or flagrante without the delicto—Esther found herself wondering if there were really no calories in an average-sized serving of Jell-O. As much as she enjoyed making love, she could never forget that the fate of the American Communist Party depended on her keeping her figure.”
Those were some of the novel’s funnier lines. But they were also depressing. Was Anya purposely being humorous? I had no one to ask.
Until then I’d thought of sex as something you did with your Radcliffe girlfriend in your dorm on Saturday night until visiting hours were over and you got dressed and walked her home along with all the other couples who’d been doing the same thing. It was fun, it felt good, you shared a jolt of pleasure. I didn’t understand why lovers in books wrecked their lives just for the congenial warmth I felt for Marianna. My relationship with an author photo was already more passionate and obsessive than anything I had experienced with my flesh-and-blood girlfriend.
* * *
As I worked my way through Anya’s novel, I noticed a page was missing.
The gap occurred in a crucial scene involving the torn box of Jell-O, the innocent children’s dessert, the symbol of the American home that, ripped into pieces, identified one traitor to another.
Anya had changed things. It was no longer the spy and Esther’s brother who recognized each other when the Jell-O box pieces matched up. Now it was a Russian agent and the Rosenbergs/Rosensteins themselves whose secret signal was the puzzle that spelled out J-e-l-l-O.
In the manuscript, page 114 ended like this:
Esther went from man to man and took the two halves of the Jell-O box. The spies were downing vodka shots, so at first they hardly noticed. But they could hardly ignore the way Esther held the box, slightly above her head, tilted toward her mouth, as if she were eating low-hanging fruit.
While her husband and the Russian agent watched, she licked off the leftover powder. There was no leftover powder. The cardboard fragments had been in the agent’s pocket and the coffee can in Esther’s cupboard. Still she flicked at the lint, the coffee grounds, the intimate detritus that these homemade espionage tools had gathered in their dark corners.
“Mmm,” she said. “Amazing. Good to the very last drop.”
There was no page 115.
Page 116 began with the Russian agent thanking the Rosensteins for their help in securing a lasting peace through the sharing of scientific information that rightfully belonged to the workers of the world.
I thought of Julia, my pregnant predecessor. I remembered her saying that sometimes writers omitted pages to catch the reader at the publishing house for not finishing their manuscript. I didn’t think that Anya would do that, especially since her novel appeared to have come by a more direct route than over-the-transom. I still didn’t know how it got to Warren. I’d asked him twice, but he’d evaded the question. It hadn’t come through my office. I sensed that Anya Partridge wasn’t the type to exchange advice with other suspicious writers on how to expose the lazy editor who lied about reading her work.
Anya, or someone, would find the lost page or re-create the missing scene. All I had to do was be patient and not tell anyone about The Vixen.
* * *
In the midst of every conversation, every casual chat at a party, I’d think: Can this seemingly honest guy be trusted? Can I tell this perfectly nice woman about The Vixen? Talking about it—to anyone—might relieve some of the pressure. I even considered therapy. There must have been a doctor willing to help me tackle the conflict between principle and ambition. But therapy was expensive. I couldn’t afford a doctor and an apartment.
The only reason I considered confiding in my uncle was because he was my blood relative. He was the only person who knew Warren and my family. Otherwise I wouldn’t have told him anything I didn’t want the world to know. There were so many ways he could betray me at minimal risk to himself. My uncle, being the prick he was, might think it was funny. A game. The game of the plume of smoke rising from his nephew’s head. So what if he ruined my life for the fun of serving up some gossip about a junior employee? Without incriminating my parents, without mentioning my mother’s connection to Ethel, he could say I was a commie fellow traveler subverting Warren’s patriotic efforts to fictionalize the crime of a convicted spy—and keep the firm afloat.
I decided to hope for the best and approach the subject obliquely. Uncle Maddie was an editor, and my problem with The Vixen was, after all, an editorial problem. He might enjoy playing the seasoned mentor, the avuncular sage. He’d drawn me into his sphere. Maybe something he said would resign me to the fact that my future hinged on a novel “proving” the Rosenbergs were guilty.
I prepared for our lunch as if for the job interview I’d never had. I practiced what I would say. When I’d called my mother to tell her I was meeting Uncle Maddie, she said, “Don’t forget to thank him for your job. I read that they serve snails at that place he likes. Don’t order them. Snails eat dirt.”
I went to work as usual, but I didn’t eat breakfast. Still afraid, after all this time, to brew a fresh pot of coffee at the office, I drank the dregs, and the scorched acidic brew made me queasy. I felt better by 12:30, in time to meet my uncle.
In fact I had recovered enough to be thrilled by the restaurant’s smell of butter, wine, and garlic, the undertone of lilies, soap, men’s cologne. Light bounced off the maître d’s spectacles and his thinning spun-gold hair as he showed me to the bar, where Uncle Maddie was waiting.
My uncle was extremely fat. A large man, my parents said. Larger than life. Your uncle has a presence. From the back, his wide bottom overhung the bar stool like a mushroom cap on its stem.
Uncle Maddie moaned softly and grimaced as he climbed down from the stool.
“Simon! I’m sure I’ve told you the brilliant piece of advice I heard from Greta Garbo.”
“No, I don’t think so. Remind me.”
“She said the trick to seeming young is not to groan when you get up. My dear, dear nephe
w.” He gave me two hearty slaps on the shoulder, one for each dear.
Men no longer look like they did then. They don’t wear hats. Their hair doesn’t cap their heads in oily, marcelled ripples. When I try to remember my uncle’s face, I picture Henry Kissinger with several more chins, twenty more pounds, and deeper bulldog furrows.
He waved at the bartender to have his drink carried over to our table, against the wall. The coral-pink wallpaper shone with an amber light, and the diners emitted a low masculine hum like the subway rumbling beneath us.
My uncle said, “You won’t mind if I go around and take the wall side? Was it Kit Carson or Wild Bill Hickok who said, ‘Never sit with your back to the door’? Half this room would probably enjoy seeing me get shot. Ha-ha.”
He must have caught the look on my face.
“I assume you understand when someone is joking even if you don’t get the joke.”
Uncle Maddie’s insults weren’t personal, and I was relieved, not having to face the room. I was aware of being younger than everyone else and of how cheap my suit jacket was: my sad imitation of Warren. I imagined that everyone saw the gravy spot on my tie.
One consolation of age is that you no longer think that everyone is staring at you, probably because they aren’t.
I could barely even look at my uncle, let alone follow what he was saying. Uncle Maddie tucked a napkin into his shirtfront before we even got menus. I wasn’t going to do that, and I was relieved that he didn’t seem to expect it.
“What did you drink?”
Did? The past tense confused me.
“Drink when?”
“In Cambridge,” he said. “What was your poison? When you lived in Cambridge.”
He couldn’t bring himself to say Harvard. My mother said he resented my having gotten into the Ivy League. He’d gone to City College. I hadn’t believed her, but now I wondered. It seemed impossible that a man like my uncle could envy someone like me, though years later I realized that there might have been plenty of reasons, starting with youth and good looks.
The honest answer to his question was caffeine: coffee and more coffee. I hardly drank alcohol. Marianna didn’t drink. I’d drunk more at the literary parties I’d attended since I’d gone to work for Warren than in four years at college.
Despite his weight and age—still in his early fifties, he seemed ancient to me—Uncle Maddie was, my mother said, a regular Don Juan. Everyone knew he cheated on Aunt Cheryl with much younger women. It would disappoint him to know what a semimonastic life I’d led in Cambridge.
“At Harvard?” I said.
“Is Harvard no longer in Cambridge? Where the hell else would I mean?”
“A whiskey sour, please,” I told the waiter. The only drink I knew.
Uncle Maddie waited until the waiter was out of earshot. “Please, Simon, no mixed drinks.” He raised his glass of something golden, as if toasting me, but actually demonstrating the purity of whatever it was.
I had nothing to toast him with yet. He took a long, annoyed swallow.
“No cocktails please, unless you’re queer? Are you queer?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
“Don’t get me wrong. It would be fine with me if you were. Maybe not the best thing for your career. But maybe not the worst. Depending. They take care of their own, like everyone.”
“I like girls. I had a girlfriend at school.” I sounded as if I was lying.
“So do I,” said Uncle Maddie. “I mean, I like girls too. So that settles that. Now tell me one true or beautiful thing that you learned in college.”
My drink appeared, and I took several gulps of the cloyingly sweet, burning liquid.
“Easy, big fella,” my uncle said. “Pace yourself. What did those Harvard geniuses teach you?”
“Old Norse,” I said.
My uncle shut his eyes. I studied the coarse white hairs striping his eyebrows, the brown splotches, like potato-peel scraps, stuck to both sides of his forehead.
“Old Norse. Now that will be useful in the modern world. Which isn’t to say that I don’t believe in a liberal education for its own sake.”
I knew I was supposed to ask about my uncle’s ideas on liberal education. Doubtless he’d written something on the subject that I could pretend to have read.
Instead I said, “Have you read Njal’s Saga? It’s great. I wrote my senior thesis about the chapter where Njal and his family are burned alive.”
Why was I talking about myself? Why did I think he would care? If I’d wanted to impress him, it was a huge mistake. My uncle tilted his head. Beneath his heavy lids, his dark eyes glittered with a hard mean light.
“Your dear mother told me that. She’s terribly proud of you. Well, good. Good for you. You would have been the smartest guy in the thirteenth century. I suppose you can always teach. Thank God Warren Landry is introducing you to reality.”
Reality? Was that reality? Editing The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic? Being told what to do by Warren and insulted by my uncle? For four years I’d retreated into a vanished past in which the sneer on my uncle’s face could start a feud that would cost the lives of generations.
I said, “I’m very grateful. Really. Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it,” said my uncle. “By which I mean: Don’t goddamn mention it, kiddo.” By which he really meant: Mention it. Acknowledge my power, my influence.
The waiter delivered menus the size of the New York Times, bound in leather, the oxblood color of the folder that held Anya Partridge’s novel. Inside was a list of foods, illegibly handwritten in faded brown ink, in French.
Escargot. Snails eat dirt. The sugared whiskey lurched up into the back of my throat.
Uncle Maddie said, “Do you need guidance? The coquilles Saint-Jacques are delicious.”
Yes, I needed guidance. But not about seafood. “I was thinking of trying the escargots.”
My uncle looked appalled by my tentative mini-rebellion. A protest against what? Against his guidance? A protest against my mother’s advice, but he didn’t know that. I was more surprised than he was that I was ordering snails: a pointless gesture that I already regretted.
“It’s a free country,” he said. “By all means try the snails, but they get old rather quickly. Anyhow, let me suggest the steak frites for the main. Not as . . . adventurous as escargot, but dependable.”
“Sounds good.” It sounded very good: more protein than I’d eaten in weeks.
“The usual, Mr. Putnam?” the waiter said.
“That’s right. Steak frites medium rare. Hold the frites. Wait. No. My young nephew here might enjoy the frites.”
“I would,” I said. “Yes, thank you.”
“Youth! Well, it’s a trade-off. High metabolism, low finesse. Lots of vim and vigor but no experience and none of the social graces. Isn’t that right, James?” my uncle asked the waiter.
“That’s correct, Mr. Putnam.”
Another scotch for Uncle Maddie, and we’d split a bottle of Bordeaux. When the waiter motioned at my empty cocktail glass, I nodded, and Uncle Maddie winced, but not at my ordering a second mixed drink. He was looking past me.
“Fascinating,” he said. “Don’t look now. Four o’clock. With that marvelous girl.” He mentioned a writer so famous that even I knew his name. “That gourmet morsel is his daughter. He wants everyone to know that, but it’s fine with him if strangers think that she’s his latest squeeze.”
My uncle knew many of the men in the room, and when they stopped by, he introduced me. His nephew, Simon, a recent Harvard graduate currently working for Warren Landry. If he resented my having gone to Harvard, that didn’t stop him from boasting about it. Warren’s name inspired responses too complex and various for me to interpret.
When he wasn’t greeting his friends and acquaintances, my uncle gossiped about the last guy whose hand he’d just shaken. The poor slob’s divorces, disappointing book sales, rivalries, drinking, mistresses, his abysmal behavior.
Sometimes I recognized the names, sometimes I didn’t, especially since he only used first names and assumed I knew who everyone was. I wasn’t expected to speak, just to make gestures and sounds, chuckles of admiration, head-shakes of disapproval.
My uncle asked, “So how’s the job? Is my friend Warren still running the place into the ground?”
“I like it. I—I really want to thank you.”
“Honestly, I don’t envy you. Try not to drown in the slush pile of wasted lives. You would not believe the unsolicited crap that comes in even at our humble journal. That Hollywood wit who said that writers were monkeys with typewriters got it wrong. Writers are monkeys with typewriters and strong opinions on subjects they know nothing about.”
The snails were an ingenious delivery system for garlic, butter, and parsley. I liked how the individual ramekins let me track how far along I was in the eating process. The snails tasted like meaty mushrooms, neither delicious nor like dirt. I was glad they were chewy. It gave me something to do while my uncle forked up his tiny scallops, talking all the time.
It seemed there had been a party, and a writer whose mediocrity my uncle had exposed in a take-no-prisoners essay came after my uncle with a broken beer bottle, until the writer’s wife dragged him away. The next day the writer called and apologized, wanting to stay friends and obviously hoping that my uncle would review his next book. Which was never going to happen.
Somewhere around the second glass of Bordeaux, on top of whiskey sours, I began having trouble following the conversation. Every so often my uncle’s face swam out of focus, and his lips moved like those of a tropical fish, gulping air, gulping wine, gulping nothing.
I was glad to see the snail ramekin go, but daunted by the meat torpedo, smothered in skinny fries. I was hungry, but I hadn’t counted on working so hard, sawing away at my food. My uncle was briefly silenced by the demands of cutting and chewing, but he swung back into his story, which now involved lawyers—
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