Julia said, “I’d never seen Warren have more fun than when he was writing that book. He never had that much fun with me. Those evenings they met to work on The Vixen, Warren asked me to stay late. And the next day he’d ask me to type the pages. Keep it a deep dark secret. I knew what they were doing. I wasn’t paid extra, but there was some vague promise I’d be rewarded when the company ship came in. I shouldn’t have done it. I needed the job. I guess that’s what they all say. I needed the job.”
“I’ve certainly said it.” A horrifying little laugh escaped from between my lightly clenched teeth.
At the sound of my voice, the baby started up again, this time gasping for air between howls. Was he turning a pale blue? It was dramatic and frightening, but Julia wasn’t alarmed. She picked him up and rocked him. Her soothing him was like a magic trick. I tried to look less impressed than I was. Julia had no interest in my reaction, which impressed me even more. Neither of us moved until we heard the baby’s soft regular snuffling.
Julia said, “Anya didn’t write one word, though I’m sure she read it. Or some of it. She read it to help her play the author of that book. You do realize that she’s smarter than she pretends.”
I was afraid to look at Julia. I didn’t want her to see what I was feeling, not that I knew what that was. The floor beneath me felt gelatinous. I held onto the table.
Everyone was acting. Everyone was lying.
Anya had read the book. I knew it, just as I’d known she was smart. Perhaps her forgetting certain plot points was acting, theater, her way of signaling what she couldn’t say. Maybe she’d tried to save me. Maybe she’d begged me to save her. I’d been too self-involved to notice.
I’d assumed that Anya gave the fur fetish to her heroine, Esther, because she herself had that quirk. I assumed it was an autobiographical detail, borrowed from life. That was partly why I’d never questioned the fact that she’d written the novel.
I’d had it all wrong. I’d had it backwards. The fur piece was already in the manuscript that Anya was given to read and pretend she’d written. That was where she got the idea. Her adopting the fur piece was the sort of thing an actor might do to prepare for a part, in this case the part of Anya Partridge, the beautiful, half-mad author of The Vixen.
Now I knew why she’d left the pelt under the radiator. Why not? It was never a good-luck charm. It was a theater prop. I’d thought that it would be hard to make Anya change the details that were aspects of herself, but they were never aspects of Anya, or whoever she was. They were details in a novel that she read and pretended to have written.
Warren loved details. They were his contribution to history, the visible signs of his greatness. Once he’d discovered Anya, he’d probably tweaked the novel so that Esther resembled her putative author: the violet eyes, the black hair, the bee-stung scarlet lips.
Julia said, “I met Anya in the lounge when I went to visit Preston. I was the one who found her for Warren. That part is my fault. I take full blame. I was the pimp. The procurer. They needed someone to play the writer. Anya wanted to be an actress. Maybe she is an actress. Maybe she’s really gifted.”
Oh, she was gifted all right. A hugely gifted actress. I never doubted her for a moment, except once, when she told me the truth. Maybe the role of Anya-the-writer would turn out to be the juiciest and most challenging part of her life. It was extreme experimental theater, played out in real life, with her overdone bedroom as a set and the city as her stage.
Julia said, “I knew she’d be perfect. A smart little rich girl whose parents stashed her in a rest home to get her away from a bad boyfriend and a shitload of diet pills. The boyfriend’s dad was a doctor. They’d stolen Dad’s prescription blanks.”
Diet pills? Was Anya taking them? Her flighty affect made more sense now, though until then the only use I’d known for diet pills was to stay up all night to study for an exam.
Julia had deceived me too. Another lie of omission, the kind I’d told so often. By the time I took over her office, I’d known she was hiding something. Why should she tell me what Warren was planning? She was leaving. She’d been fired. I was taking her job. Why not let me suffer a little? And why should she—alone in that crowd—have been truthful?
We were all lying, leaving things out, deceiving one another.
“Anya gave me her headshot. She’d been trying to get acting jobs. Warren saw the photo on my desk and said, ‘Aha, the little vixen author of our little Vixen.’ That was how Anya became our writer. Their writer. Your writer.” Julia’s face clouded over. I could tell she was looking for something unkind to say about Anya. She couldn’t help it, no more than I could help being flattered that she cared enough to compete with the woman with whom she sensed I’d been enthralled. It was one of those moments, at the start of love, when you are trying to say the unsayable without having to say it.
“She and Warren met several times to work out the part she’d play for the world. And first, I suppose, the role she’d try out on you.”
So that was what I’d been to Anya: a long, leisurely rehearsal. The thought was so painful that I couldn’t look at Julia. I stared down at my hands. I’d already told Julia too much about Anya. I didn’t want her to read the rest in my face.
“Anya loves playing to the camera,” Julia said. “Her being so pretty is a plus. And they need her. What would people say if a distinguished publisher, a vicious public intellectual, and respected literary publicist admitted to writing The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic? They need a front, a beard, a pseudonym, an alter ego to hide behind.” I was relieved to hear Julia speak of Anya in the present tense. But Julia wouldn’t know what had happened to her. Where Anya was, or even if she was alive.
After a silence, I said, “And why did they want to publish The Vixen?”
“Come on,” said Julia. “Seriously?”
“For the money?” Preston had told me the truth. Warren admitted it. But part of me still clung to the bearable lie. The story about the money.
“Not even you believe that. The money was never going to come from readers. It was always covert government funding.”
I hadn’t wanted to believe Preston. But I’d known he was right.
“It was always about Warren wanting to show his pals at the Agency that he wasn’t getting older, losing it, that he was still a force to be reckoned with, still a source of the smart, creative schemes that no one else would think of.”
Julia’s voice had grown louder. Hush! I thought. The baby!
“I see.” And I did.
I finally saw what everything and everyone had been trying to tell me all along.
“Why me? Why did they give the book to me?”
“That was your uncle Madison’s idea. He thought it was hilarious. Side-splitting. He laughed so hard I was afraid he’d have a seizure. No one else thought it was that funny. But he couldn’t explain. What did you do to that guy? Because your uncle laughing like that—it’s not a pretty sight.”
It was all too easy to imagine what Uncle Maddie could have held against me. I was young; I was good-looking. I’d gone to an Ivy League college. I came from a family that reminded him of where he’d come from.
“Did you know they were going to give me the book when I came to work there?”
“I’m sorry,” Julia said. “I’m really sorry. Warren gave me a thousand dollars as severance pay. Hush money. We both knew he was buying my silence. I was pregnant, Simon. I had no savings. I needed the money. I figured you could handle it, see through it, work your way out of it. I assumed you’d know what to do. I mean . . . Warren said you’d gone to Harvard.”
As if Harvard had taught me what to do when my uncle, my boss, and a woman I thought I loved asked me—as a joke—to work on what turned out to be a piece of lying propaganda. I shut my eyes to contain the rain of tiny stars inside my eyelids, the stars that cartoon characters see when they’re hit on the head.
Uncle Maddie had tricked me, set me up to act the lea
d in a comedy that he and Warren and Elaine scripted. All that avuncular advice, those appeals to family feeling, all that make the writer fall in love with you. It was all part of the joke he was playing on the fool, the dupe, the patsy. His nephew. At our lunch, he’d known about The Vixen. His rant about the Rosenbergs was the one sincere moment in that entire conversation. The food, the gossip, the mock-professional advice was more of his famous so-called humor. My dear, dear nephew, those hearty slaps on the shoulder.
Maybe he’d thought it was funny to send me, the child of parents who believed that the Rosenbergs shouldn’t have been executed, to work on a project that “proved” that Ethel was guilty. Or maybe it had nothing to do with me. Maybe it was all about my uncle. About the dirt he’d dished at lunch about every man whose hand he shook. And now I was one of them, subject to something crueler than gossip and slander because our connection went deeper than a lunchtime acquaintance.
Julia’s hand still cradled mine. I was in pain again. I wanted Julia to see that I was in pain, which lessened the pain. My desire for her sympathy was an analgesic.
“That’s why I gave you the key to the drawer,” she said. “I knew they’d give you The Vixen sooner or later. I don’t know why it took them so long.”
I thought, but didn’t say: My uncle wanted it, but they needed to see if I would do what Warren told me.
Years would pass before I could bring myself to tell Julia that Warren had called me: malleable.
Julia said, “I thought you might want to lock it up. I used to.”
How could she know that I’d do that? She knew me. She’d understood me from the moment we met. Julia had given me the key. Maybe she would have warned me if I’d asked, but I didn’t know what to ask. But she was looking out for me, even when I’d thought she hated me simply for existing. That we’d both locked up The Vixen suggested a likeness, a connection strong enough to compensate for the fact that she should have warned me. Was there enough trust between us now for . . . what? I wanted to believe there was. I believed there was. Julia wasn’t Anya or Elaine. She was the only one who wasn’t acting.
I wanted to touch her arm. Just touch it.
She said, “I hardly know your uncle. He tried to grab my ass once when he was drunk, but I gave him a look, and he stopped. That was all it took. Warren, on the other hand, is a sadist. Not sexually. But in every other way.”
I tried to keep my face neutral.
“Though maybe Warren and your uncle are both sadistic. In different ways. I don’t know. I lost touch with the office and the whole situation. I thought about you sometimes—”
She’d thought about me. She’d thought about me. So what if she’d thought about a poor stupid dupe, a sad little pawn in a game played by the dupe’s boss, his uncle, and the CIA?
“Warren is not a good person.”
“So it turns out,” I said. The Jell-O box. The pumpkin. The fake Vixen cover. The jewfish.
I was just winding you up.
Julia could have said more, but she didn’t. I was encouraged by her lack of desire to talk about Warren. In my naive opinion that meant she’d never loved him. I still wanted to talk about Anya, though not to Julia, not anymore. I knew so little about love that the compulsion to talk about it seemed like proof of its existence.
Julia said, “Warren’s a bloodhound. There’s nothing he can’t find out. When he figured out who Evan’s father was, which I tried to keep secret, you know what that shithead said? ‘Dear Julia, don’t tell me you’re ruining your life for a biographer of Pancho Villa? We didn’t want to publish that infantile boy-on-boy love letter to some fucking bandito. But the boys in Washington decided, Let’s show the world how much we love our Central American hermanos.’”
She’d gotten Warren’s inflections, his tone.
“You sound just like him,” I said. I thought of Warren imitating Eleanor Roosevelt and the McCarthy hearing witness taking the Fifth Amendment.
“Thanks. I guess. I honestly don’t know where he and Elaine and your uncle got the idea of writing The Vixen. Cases of whiskey, maybe. Warren figured out that The Vixen could be leveraged into a guaranteed circulation, international sales, government money to do what he thought was the right thing, politically speaking, if not exactly at the highest level of art. He and your uncle agreed about the politics, about the Rosenbergs, and about not wanting to be exposed as the coauthors of a trashy novel. They had something on each other. The Vixen was their secret. It brought them closer, you could say.”
Closer than either of them was to me. I hated the thought of them talking about me. Talking and probably laughing.
I was glad that Julia seemed unaware of what this was costing me. Or maybe she just had a lot to say. Maybe a dam had broken. I remembered how, in her office, I’d thought she was holding back. At least I’d been right about one thing.
“Having Preston sent away was wrong, but Warren got sick of Preston nagging him about principles. Right and wrong!”
Preston, the medicated vulture so paranoid he thought his wheelchair was plotting against him. He was right to be suspicious. He’d learned his sad, disappointing lessons. Maybe if I’d been more mistrustful, smarter, maybe if I’d had the nerve to approach Preston when he’d visited the office and asked to see the real boss, by which he didn’t mean Warren, maybe if I’d asked what he meant, none of this would have happened.
And I might never have met Julia. Was this all working out for the best?
“Preston was right, but he was wasting his breath. And he couldn’t help himself. It broke Preston’s heart when he found out where Warren was taking the company. Straight into the arms of the spy boys. There was nothing Preston could do. Making Warren stop seeing himself as a secret agent would have been like telling him to grow a new brain.”
And you had an affair with him? The voice in my head thundered like the Sunday pulpit voice of Jonathan Edwards. If I let it preach, I would lose her. Elaine was lost. Anya was lost. I’d never really had them. I would probably lose Julia. Maybe I was wrong again to think that she was on my side.
“Warren underestimated how much he needed Preston’s money. How much money he needed. Warren’s a practical guy, but only until he regresses into a spoiled twelve-year-old rich boy. I guess he was insulted because the Agency could have made his money problems go away. But they liked watching him dangle. Just like Warren and your uncle Maddie liked watching you . . . squirm.”
I was grateful that she wasn’t including Elaine in the rapt audience for my misery.
“These guys know where power comes from, they know how to keep it. It’s not all that personal, Simon.”
I thought about my uncle and Warren chortling about my ludicrously earnest college thesis. “The Burning.” I’d told my uncle at lunch. My mother boasted about it. My uncle must have told Warren. He’d said that The Burning was Anya’s original title. Then there were the dead Albanian partisans, so much like the massacre in Njal’s Saga. Everything looped back on itself, dense as a bramble thicket in a fairy tale. I couldn’t see my way through. Maybe Warren had read my thesis, for a laugh. Robertson Crowley had recruited him even as Crowley worked his side job, transcribing folktales and teaching. Those classes were his cover, just as publishing was Warren’s. A crude formulation, according to Warren. And not even true. He loved books. That part I believed. And he loved being the boss.
A siren dopplered by, obliterating the silence in which I imagined I could hear Warren, Uncle Maddie, and Elaine laughing their heads off at my not getting their joke. I had no sense of humor. It was a fun experiment with a practical side, thanks to Uncle Maddie’s nastiness, thanks to Warren’s business skills and Cold War connections. Thanks to their deepest political beliefs. And Elaine? Warren asked her. Even if she’d had doubts, she’d thought it might be fun. She was flattered to be asked to conspire with two powerful men: literary lights. I’d flattered myself that she had feelings for me, if only just kindness and pity. I didn’t blame her as much as I
blamed Uncle Maddie. She wasn’t a relative. And yet it was more shaming to be betrayed by a beautiful woman than by a fat middle-aged man.
It took all my courage to say, “You typed it. You found Anya for them. You helped them. You helped them lie.” If Julia never spoke to me again, I would have said what had to be said.
“I had a job. I’m not proud of it. I thought that nothing would actually happen. I thought they’d lose interest and quit writing. A typing job, I thought. I was an English major. I don’t have many skills. If Ethel gets a pass for typing, I should get one too.”
I said, “That’s not funny.”
“I know,” said Julia. “I’m sorry.”
We laughed. It was wrong to laugh, but it felt good to laugh with her at something that wasn’t funny. I thought of my father’s unfunny jokes. My mother and father would like her.
“I was pregnant. Desperate for money. I would have typed Mein Kampf if Hitler paid enough.”
“Really?” I tried not to look shocked—an unattractive look, said Warren. Despite everything I was still hearing his advice on how to be a man, or at least look like one. “You know I’m Jewish, right?”
It felt a little like telling Anya I’d come from Coney Island, but more serious and important. I was startled by the ease with which I’d disclosed something that I’d never exactly concealed—but never volunteered, either. I trusted Julia. I loved her. I wanted her to know everything about me. It was a declaration, to Julia and myself. I wasn’t Warren and never would be. I felt a flicker of regret and then enormous relief.
“I do,” she said. “I do know. I assumed . . . because of your uncle.”
“You knew that Madison Putnam is Jewish?” Uncle Maddie had done an excellent job of playing a descendant of the Puritan Putnams.
“I always thought your uncle was like a child who thinks that if he closes his eyes, no one can see him. I’m sorry about the Hitler remark. I make stupid jokes when I’m nervous.”
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