“The one and only Casey Pendergast, I presume,” she said with a faint smile. She motioned me into her office. “Come in. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Mary’s office was eclectic, to say the least. One wall was covered with tapestries, a Japanese tea set sat on a side table, books overflowed from the floor-to-ceiling shelving and onto the large windowsill and floor. I hung up my coat on a rickety scrolling coat-tree, and she gestured for me to take a seat on one of the two matching armchairs situated on either side of the tea set. “Would you like some tea?” she asked me in her odd, drawling voice. Yes, sure, I said. “Love some.”
We were quiet as she prepared the tea, a ritual that she seemed to move through as effortlessly as breathing or walking. She struck me as the kind of person who preferred silence, who digested words like they were a heavy meal. I tried not to pepper her with questions and conversation, though, boy, was it difficult to sit in the quiet. I was not used to being quiet with another person. Quiet meant sadness. Didn’t it? It was my job to entertain her. Wasn’t it?
I’m not sure what Mary London was thinking about in the quiet, but I doubt she was thinking about how quiet it was and wondering if the quietness was all right and worrying that it wasn’t. Something told me that Mary did not think about stuff like that, she just did what she wanted, and I immediately liked that about her.
“So, you went to college with Celeste?” I said as the electric kettle came to a boil, when I couldn’t stand it any longer, bursting into speech like a Casey-in-the-box.
Mary poured some kind of loose leaf tea into an infuser and dropped it into her teapot. She didn’t answer at first, and I assumed she hadn’t heard me. Then she said, pouring the water into the teapot, “Do you know what we called her back then? Fleabag.”
I laughed, then I clapped a hand over my mouth. Thou shalt not defame thy boss! “Why?!”
“She’d go down to the city on the weekends. Wouldn’t return for days at a time. Told us she was staying at fleabag hotels with older men like it was her badge of honor, proof that she was leaving the rest of us behind.” Mary laughed, not unkindly, as she recollected. “She made her own life difficult. Girls are merciless. Care for a scone and fresh cream?”
She reached under the table and pulled out a paper plate covered with tinfoil. “Would I!” I said. I pulled back the tinfoil and grabbed a hunk of buttery biscuit, dipped the corner of it into a Dixie cup filled with clotted cream. It was a treat I might not have indulged in on my own, but it felt right to eat pastry with Mary. She was not vain; I could sense it. Her lack of vanity must have rubbed off on me, because I pushed the whole scone into my mouth with one steady movement, like a suitcase at an airport’s security checkpoint. “Wow,” I mumbled, still with my mouth full. I realized that, besides the espresso and macaron I’d had at the Ace, I’d eaten nothing all day. “This is really good.”
“Have another then!” she said. She was so genuinely kind. “Have some tea!”
We ate, we drank, we talked and talked. Mary was exceedingly reasonable about Nanü and, I thought, rather flip about how her role might affect her status as high literary icon, maybe because she’d resigned herself to doing pretty much anything to get out of her tenure. She was tired of the academy. “Don’t let them fool you,” she said. “Though they’ll go on and on about my awards and show me off like a prized donkey when the donors come around, the academy is just as tired of me.”
Though the college had afforded her financial stability—“I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m a woman of rather enormous appetites”—she’d started teaching later in life, and the income wasn’t enough to allow her to save for retirement. Nanü was a fast and easy way out of what she kept calling her “capital pickle.”
“It’s either that, or die tomorrow,” she said. “As of now I can’t afford old age.”
“Don’t say that!” I said. I did not think the macabre was funny. Far from it.
“Growing old is expensive, at least in this country. No safety net, and it’s getting worse.”
“What about the money from your books?”
Mary laughed and laughed. “You little lamb,” she finally said. “There’s still so much of the girl in you.”
I stiffened. “Well, I don’t know about that. I’m twenty-eight, almost twenty-nine, after all.”
Mary’s eyes glinted. “I see.”
“The books, though? What about the prizes? Didn’t you win a MacArthur at one—?”
“What there was”—Mary made a gesture like smoke disappearing into the atmosphere—“is all gone now. You could say I specialized in divestments.”
Mary spoke cryptically like this from time to time: she enjoyed, like many teachers, making le grand statement. Though I felt obligated to bang out the fine print of her “creative engagement” contract—she’d create the tag for Encore’s national rebranding campaign, rewrite the website, write the product descriptions for their new capsule collection, dress in their clothes (gratis, natch) for her new author photo—she seemed uninterested in these particulars. She’d already decided to make her bed; it was time to lie in it, no matter what that meant. For some reason this made me feel strange. I guess it’s not fun to sell an idea to someone who’s resigned themselves to it before you even arrived.
“May I ask you,” she said as she was signing the paperwork, “how you ended up here?”
“You mean here here? Well, I flew in yesterday afternoon and this morning I took the Metro-North after, well, that’s a whole other—”
“No, no,” she said, capping her pen and handing the manila file folder back to me. “Working with Celeste, I mean.”
“Well, I was an English major—always had a way with words, I guess. Actually that reminds me, I almost forgot.” I rummaged into my bag, which was resting at my feet, and pulled out Susan’s crumpled short story. “This might be a little, you know, unprofesh, but my best friend Susan is also a writer. Insanely talented. Afraid to put herself out there but she’s got the”—I snapped my fingers—“you know. The thing. The thing that makes you really feel something. She’d die if she knew I was doing this but”—I pushed the crumpled pages toward her—“would you read her story? I think it’s good. I mean, I don’t know much, but—”
Mary smiled. Her eyes were bottomless. “You’re a good friend.”
“Well, depends on who you ask, and on which day.”
“I’m happy to read your friend’s story.”
I clapped, involuntarily, and clasped my hands to my chest. “You will?!”
She blinked a couple times. Her pupils were large, nearly swallowing up the ambers of her irises. “At my age, I’m rarely moved,” she said after a moment. “But I remain moved by loyalty. You still haven’t answered my question.”
“Question? Oh, right. I guess Celeste just liked me right away. I mean, I liked her too,” I added quickly. “She’s been good to me, we’ve been working together for a long time. And the chance to help out amazing writers like you? Celeste says I’ve got a real knack for it.”
Mary’s eyes were bright and watery now, like the sea. “Careful what people in power tell you about yourself,” she said. “Most often what lies behind it is greed.”
* * *
—
On the train ride back to the city I thought about what Mary said. The expense of old age, loyalty, greed. It reminded me of something that a professor had said about Chekhov. Chekhov had worked by day as a country doctor, and said the writer’s job was not to cure—there was no cure—but rather accurately identify the symptoms of the human condition. Later, when I’d finished reading Uncle Vanya, I remembered sitting, stunned, at my library carrel, reeling from Sonya’s last speech about work and death and work being the only thing to do until death. Not because it was sad, necessarily, or because I was sad. Because it was true. Meeting with Mary London had provoked a sim
ilar, albeit milder, combination of unsettledness and solace. It was clear the woman didn’t miss a thing. And it was increasingly possible that since the salad days of Uncle Vanya, maybe I had.
I stared out the window at the row houses and cinder block buildings framing the train tracks as we rumbled and lurched back to Manhattan. It was early evening, and the twilight gave a romantic purpled hue to even the most run-down of developments. I had no concrete thoughts, no plans, no judgments; I just pressed my nose to the glass and watched the world go by with the wistfulness of a creature far from home.
I took out my phone and texted Ben. Why? I’d lost my mind and temporarily gotten a better one, one less self-conscious yet more self-aware.
Hey, turns out I’m still in New York. Any chance you’re around? Staying at the Ace.
When he didn’t text back right away, I put my phone on Do Not Disturb and sat on it. I vowed not to look at it again. I looked back out the window and I tried to find my inner peace. I heard someone yelling at their kid and I thought: I will have inner peace. It was getting harder to find my inner peace because we were almost back at Grand Central, and the other passengers were already jostling and crowding to be the first ones out the door. Right around the time a big bald guy pushed me out of the way on the stairs and then said “Excuse you,” my inner peace peaced out completely.
I walked back to the Ace, instead of cabbing, in the hopes of finding it again. I broke my vow on that walk and checked to see if Ben had texted. He hadn’t. Oh, what was the point of these human relationships. Putting yourself out there, being vulnerable, opening your heart, was all so humiliating and would in one way or another end in tragedy. Perhaps it was time to give up on humans and become one of those ladies who carries a dog in her purse, feeds it specialty foods from the organic market, and clones it so there’s a replacement waiting when the first one’s dying.
And then, what do you know, who do I see sitting on a leather wingback chair the moment I walk into the hotel lobby?
Ben stood up when he saw me. We hugged, and he smelled just as I remembered, like himself.
“Hi,” he said into my hair.
Of course we were going to sleep together. We’d both known it from the minute he sat down at Horse & Stable a few weeks prior. I’d gone back and forth in my head so many times about how to play it with him. I was going to make him work for it, I was going to appear aloof, I was going to make him guess and beg until I was good and ready.
Or I didn’t have to do any of that. After one drink at the bar I asked him, plain and simple, “Do you want to go upstairs?”
Once we were upstairs I took off all my clothes and said, “Oh hell, here goes nothing.”
He took one finger and traced it up the center of my sternum, over my clavicle, down my arm. “Here goes everything.”
Whoever has starry-eyed notions of falling in love doesn’t know love; they only know television. Physically, falling in love is a rather awful ailment. Stomachaches, loss of appetite, sleeplessness, not to mention the debilitating anxiety—not that much different from a particularly rough bout of food poisoning. And yet, that spring, I was happier than I’d ever been.
Or no, that’s not right. I don’t much cotton to happiness; at least, not in the way it’s talked about these days, with the tracking apps and how-to books and self-proclaimed gurus with packed stadiums. What I felt with Ben, in those first days, I don’t have words for it. And I don’t want to look for them, because they’ll sound boring and trite when they come out of my mouth, when in fact those days were the most beautiful to me, perhaps the most beautiful of my life. Oh, my heart! My heart. I feel them still.
And still, while love is the best experience a person can have, it’s the worst to try and talk about. Not only because every listener has not only heard it a thousand times before, but because she secretly believes that no love can compare with what she herself has had already.
But since we’re here, the best I can do is explain that it felt like Ben and I took hands that night and leapt headfirst into the ocean, and since then had been swimming farther and farther beneath the surface in the hopes of touching bottom. I had never known a person all the way before, not even Susan, wouldn’t even say I had really known myself—or that my self was fully formed enough to know. But we were learning together, he and I. We revealed, and the other revealed us. The first time I cried in front of him wasn’t because I was hurt or mad, it was because he was looking at me so kindly when I was talking, about what I can’t even remember, that I didn’t know what to do with myself. “What’s the matter?” he said, and gathered me in his arms. I used the opportunity to dry my eyes and blow my nose on his T-shirt. “Nothing!” I honked muffledly into his shoulder. “I’m just…not used to feeling so…not-alone!”
And it was the same for him too, I think. There was a melancholy to Ben that not everyone could sense beneath his joviality, but I sensed it, and he could tell I sensed it, though we never talked about it directly. It relaxed him, maybe, my knowing it was there and not minding. Brought his walls down faster, walls he camouflaged with politeness and humor but were, beneath the ivy, thick as brick. The sadness was partly circumstantial, having something to do with his mother’s illness, but the other part, I’m pretty sure he was born with. Most writers are born sad, live sad, die sad, which is not to say sadness is their only capacity. Indeed, Ben’s novel, which I read on the plane ride home from New York, was hilarious and very joyful. But one cannot know joy without knowing its opposite, cannot be funny without too being sad, and this, I have to say, was Ben’s great gift: a full and lively spectrum. Yet unlike Susan, he did not tend toward the extremes of this spectrum; he was grounded by a practical nature and good instincts, which made him less ruminative, and easy to be around.
A couple weeks after I got back from New York Ben met Susan for the first time. There was a gallery opening uptown that I knew Susan would go to, so I made a point of inviting Ben to go with me. The art at the gallery was mediocre, but honestly, that’s true most of the time. The accompanying book called it “mixed media.” The bo-, bro-, and fauxhemian crowd was full of the usual suspects, a mix of creatives and professionals and a new subgenre called creative professionals. There were women in loafers and odd hats, queers talking about queerness, men who generally looked uncomfortable. I asked Ben to get us glasses of wine while I went and tracked down Susan, whom I eventually found peering at a large photograph of a hairy man’s arm holding a flower.
“Hi!” I said three octaves higher than my usual speaking voice, the universal female code for Let’s play nice. I went in for a hug. “How are you?!”
“Hello pooky!” Susan said, hugging me back. She was with Gina again, who began inching away as soon as I appeared, or perhaps with her introvert camouflage she just blended in with the wall. “Fancy seeing you here!”
“I wanted to see you! And the art, of course. Kinda. I brought Ben. You want to meet him?”
“Obviously.” Susan was smiling, her cheeks flushed. “How are you? I miss you!” She was in a jovial mood, or the red wine was making her so. Either way I was happy for the warmth. Before I could answer Ben’s arm snaked around my right side, wineglass in hand.
“Speak of the devil,” I said, taking the plastic wineglass and turning around to smile at him in thanks. “Ben, Susan, Susan, Ben.”
I looked on anxiously while they exchanged hellos, like the parent of a kindergartner who really hopes their kid won’t fuck up and humiliate them by proxy. I found myself trying to engineer the entire social situation so as to dictate a successful outcome for my loved ones. Before either of them could finish a sentence, I would interject something like, “That’s just the sort of thing Ben would say,” or, “Did you know Susan is also left-handed?”
When it was clear they didn’t need me anymore—turned out they had lots to say to each other; they were both reading the same book, some Span
ish novel in translation by a guy I’d never even heard of—I hung back and listened for a few moments, proud and happy. I left them alone and wandered the gallery for a while, looked at papier-mâché sculptures of meat. When I came back, they didn’t seem to notice me at all. As the minutes ticked by, I began to sulk. Pardonnez-moi, remember me? I wanted to interrupt. The very special and important person who brought you together in the first place? This incredible gal right here with a heart of gold, Friday-night attitude, and tight booty?
Frustratingly, it appeared they did not remember, immersed as they were in a comparison between the literature that came out in Franco’s Spain with that of Pinochet’s Chile. Meanwhile, I got progressively drunker by comparing the wine that I’d stolen from Ben in my left hand—if he was too busy talking about dictatorships to drink it, I grumbled, someone might as well—with that in my right.
When Susan finally excused herself to use the restroom, Ben turned to me with a grin on his face. “She’s fun,” he said. “Really smart. I can see why you like her.”
“Mmmhmmm.” I stacked the wineglasses and crossed my arms over my chest.
“You two are sweet together.” He looked at me. “You okay? You look tired.”
“I’m not tired.” Men should know by now that saying a woman looks tired is like sticking a fat bear paw in a hornet’s nest.
“You want to get something to eat?”
“No, thanks. I’m pretty tired.”
“What?” Ben laughed. “You just said you weren’t!”
“That’s not what I meant.” I shifted my weight. After a beat: “Did you just forget I was standing there or something? Or did you not want to talk to me anymore? Or what.”
A Lady's Guide to Selling Out Page 14