Being an assistant to a literary agent meant being her secretary: at some point in time I guess someone had decided that the bright young educated things who were hired for the job with dreams of becoming agents themselves wouldn’t like to be called secretaries, but that’s what we were. We typed and filed and made restaurant reservations for long lunches, and if our bosses left their coats behind in the restaurants because they’d drunk a bit too much at the lunches, we retraced their steps to find and reunite the coats with their owners. In my final interview before I got the job offer, the MD of the company looked at me coolly across the room and said, There’s no space for advancement here, and I smiled back at him and said: That’s fine with me! because by then I had learned that my American-style ambition was not welcome in this old-fashioned English industry. A few weeks after I joined the company that same MD was sacked from his job. We were summoned on his last Friday to toast his involuntary departure with champagne that was poured into glasses arranged attractively on top of a vast filing cabinet. I’m not sure this is normal? I whispered to one of the other glorified secretaries as we sipped our drinks, and she shrugged.
At the agency I sat in a cubicle with the other assistants in an open-plan windowless section at the centre of the office. Our bosses, the agents, had their own separate offices around the perimeter of the building, where they took meetings, drank tea, marked up writing. One of them even smoked. In the space between our cubicles and the perimeter offices was a half-wall constructed of heavy metal filing cabinets that stretched down the length of the office, in which it was our job to file every piece of correspondence that came and went, including the emails. It was our job to print those and then to take the paper copies of the emails and put them in the vast filing cabinets. I didn’t really like to file the hard copies of the emails, because I thought it was stupid to print them out, and I’ve never been very good at doing things I find stupid. I thought perhaps it should have been sufficient, more than, for us to keep digital copies. And now that I look back, if I’m honest with myself, I can acknowledge that maybe part of the reason that I was not very good at this job was that I often just did not file the hard copies of the emails. Sometimes I didn’t print them at all, or sometimes I printed them and then filed them in the secure recycling bin, or under a stack of books on my desk.
I was issued with a Dictaphone on my first day of work, and a handful of cassette tapes. It was 2005 but still I was expected to use a Dictaphone, so it was lucky that I’d honed my skills in the office of the penis doctor. The agent I worked for would sit at her desk in her office across from my desk and I would watch her speak into the Dictaphone and brace myself for when she crossed out of her office and leaned over the edge of my cubicle and handed me a tape. Here you go, Jean, she would say, do you have any fresh tapes? and I’d have to hand back the ones that I’d rewound for her to re-use, maybe because you couldn’t really buy them any more, because it was 2005.
Every morning it was my job to go into my boss’s office and delete all of the spam emails from her inbox before she got in, maybe because she was too grand to deign to look at spam email, and maybe because – so rumour had it – she had engaged in a long correspondence with an ‘African prince’ who had recently suffered the loss of a wealthy and elderly relative.
My boss had a distinctive voice, it carried far, and for that reason there were many complaints about the way that she spoke to me. When disappointed in me, which was most of the time, she’d cry out, OH, JEAN, across the room, and I’d go scurrying through to see what I had done wrong, which was everything on days when she was in a bad mood, and nothing on days when she was feeling happy and relaxed. On the rarest of these days, the most happy and relaxed ones, she’d take me to lunch in the fancy restaurants in Covent Garden where dealmakers made deals and left behind coats.
In the restaurants, we’d drink negronis – she’d order them, we’d never have fewer than two – and then she would tell me more than I would have liked about her life outside of work, which is to say anything at all. I think this is what made her feel close to me: I think this is probably how she treated all of the people who she employed to work for her, which was quite a few people.
Maybe this close feeling was why, on one of the days when she was in a good mood, the boss invited me to a fancy publishing party. I wasn’t getting paid very much and the party sounded like it would have good canapés, so I went. When at that party my boss asked me, in a group of people, if I would promise to ensure that she had a particular kind of ham at her funeral, if I would make sure to get some special ham from one of the restaurants where I made the reservations, as if funeral catering was the responsibility of a literary agent’s assistant, I said yes. Yes, I will organize the ham at your funeral.
After all, I had never had a real job before, and as such I understood that what I was experiencing was simply the nature of having a job, that having a job involved saying yes to whatever your boss wanted, and to being shouted at.
Here are some things that my boss shouted at me about in her distinctive voice:
When I brought her a lunch that she claimed to be allergic to, although I’d asked her beforehand if she had any allergies.
When she didn’t like the end of a manuscript that an author had submitted. On that occasion she accused me of failing to print the whole thing for her; and when I advised that was, in fact, the end, she said, in a bad-tempered tone: Well, it’s very abrupt!
She also shouted at me when I discovered that the previous assistant, no doubt in an act of rebellion, had ignored a large payment due to a writer that was now outstanding for three months.
She shouted when she dug through the piles on my desk when I went on vacation and discovered that I had not filed all of the printed-out emails.
She shouted at me when a book that a writer had sent to her was sold by another agent to a publisher for a great deal of money, a book that she hadn’t read because she thought it was too long, and had dumped the box it came in – she was right, it was too long – on my desk. It made her angry, somehow, that I hadn’t identified that the book would be a critical success, that I hadn’t carried the reams of paper back and forth from my desk to hers during our morning meetings until she agreed to read them. You need to know what I’m thinking before I think it! she told me during one of the worst times, one of the occasions when she shouted so much that I started crying.
There was no one to help me in the company, not really: my fellow assistants were kind to me, and the office manager listened to my woes, but none of the people who had the power to make anything better for me did anything to make it better. For the most part the extent of the powerful people’s acknowledgement of my existence was to leave Jewish-themed books and magazines on my desk: I thought this would interest you, one said, pressing a novel into my hands that was about a Hasidic woman, as if she believed that was a way for me to feel seen.
Maybe it would be better if you were a boy, another colleague remarked in a thoughtful tone, when I appealed to him for advice on how to navigate the situation.
At night in the flat on Cephas Street, I would wake often and stare out the skylight in the slanted ceiling above my bed, at the glowing and starless London sky. I’d lie there and think about invoices, about writers who hadn’t delivered their manuscripts on time, about publishers who hadn’t paid their writers, of hard copies of emails that I had not filed, about the distinctive voice. OH, JEAN, I’d hear, OH, JEAN. OH, JEAN. And then I’d wonder whether I had made the right decision to stay in London, after all. I’d wonder if the job was some kind of karmic punishment.
Sometimes Paul and I emailed each other, fragile words of apology and acceptance, and then at Christmas, when I went back to America to see my family, I saw Paul, too. We kissed, and I thought we might get back together, and then after one particularly bad run of days at work I wrote to him: Should I move to Boston? I will. He responded, a few days later: No. Don’t.
Whatever part of my h
eart that had healed was broken again.
Each Monday a tremendous bouquet of flowers was delivered to the company to decorate the reception desk at the front of the office, and each Friday the office manager would run a raffle to select who would be given the flowers – a little wilted, but still abundant and lovely – to take home. The office manager would send an email round the office and if you were a person who would like the flowers to brighten your depressing London apartment with limited running water, you could email her back to have your name put in the hat. When things got especially bad for me, when the people who sat on the floor below my desk started remarking that even they could hear what was going on above them, the office manager started picking me as the winner for the flowers most of the time. Jean wins again! she’d write in an all-office email, and everyone else would smile and nod, as if I was lucky, instead of the opposite of that.
The office manager would wrap the dripping stems of the flowers in a plastic bag and hand them to me with an expression that resembled a smile but acknowledged that the situation was really about pain. I’d lug the flowers home on the tube, clutching them to my chest as if I was on my way to a funeral for my happiness, smudging indelible orange pollen from lily stamens into my navy trench coat. One Friday I felt so bad that I couldn’t bear to bring the flowers into my flat, to have them all weekend as a fragrant reminder of my failure, so as I walked towards Cephas Street I ripped the plastic bag off the stems and stashed the flowers up high in a tree. To rot, or maybe to bring pleasure to someone who knew how to experience that.
Mark was a friend of a colleague at my horrible job, and when my colleague decided to set us up on a blind date I think it was partly because she thought we’d get along, and partly because she wanted to do something to make me look less mournful as I sat at my desk, rewinding and fast-forwarding the Dictaphone tapes, trying not to cry. Mark and I met the first time at Tate Britain and I immediately thought he was wonderful: he was sitting on the front steps, reading the New Yorker with nonchalance, or a careful performance of it. I thought he looked ideal. It took a few more encounters for me to notice that he also looked exactly like my father.
The breakup with Paul devastated me, but I never thought it would lead to a long period of being alone. Before him I’d been in two long relationships, as much as relationships can be a thing when you’re sixteen and your boyfriend is fifteen and neither of you has a driver’s licence. When Paul and I had broken up I was wretched, but I also assumed that his replacement would swim into vision within a matter of weeks, because that’s what I was used to. But that is not what happened. After Paul, before Mark, I’d dated a few men with unsatisfactory results, which I measured in terms of their lack of interest in longterm relationships with me, not really accounting for my interest in long-term relationships with them. I was waiting to be chosen, not to choose.
Mark was sophisticated, which is to say that he was thirty-one years old, which was old enough to remember a substantial amount of the 1970s, a decade in which I had not been alive. Mark owned an apartment in Kensal Rise that he lived in with a friend of his from college, had a job as a consultant where he had responsibilities above and beyond getting shouted at. Mark had gone to a fancy university, fancier than mine, one that he mentioned by name every time we met, even though he had graduated from it nearly a decade before. Until recently he had been in a rock band that he assured me had been on the verge of tremendous fame before there had been some kind of a fissure brought on by someone’s girlfriend. Mark compared the girlfriend to Yoko Ono. He carried his Tate membership card in his wallet and owned a part-share in a racing greyhound, even though, or maybe because, he didn’t like dogs. Each time Mark and I slept together the first thing he would say to me, in the post-coital glow, was: Thank you. He said it with real warmth and gratitude, as if he was full of genuine polite appreciation for my contribution to the experience. It was an expression of thanks that was not inappropriate, per se, but also would not have been inappropriate if I had made him a very nice casserole. ‘Thank you’ was not what I wanted to hear, but I took it. Mark was English, after all, and in three years of living in his country I had come to understand that the English were not explicit about how they felt.
My life at work that autumn continued to be terrible. My boss continued to lose her temper and I continued to hide more swathes of printed-out emails in my desk, stuffing them into a drawer that I locked so that she could not find them, like a shameful stash of cocaine. I was not allowed my own space at work, and so I decided to take it. Rifling through my desk was now of her favourite occupations: I’d see her hovering there when I entered the floor, from the other end of the room, and my heart would drop into my stomach. But for those few weeks when Mark was around, I stopped minding the rifling quite so much, because he would email me once a day and sign each correspondence with three kisses. Maybe, I thought to myself, it’s unrealistic to think that everything in my life should be good all at once. Maybe I don’t need to worry so much about how much I hate my job, or how the career for which I studied and worked so hard is going nowhere. Not when I have this really nice boyfriend. Maybe I was right to stay in London after all.
I have a new boyfriend, I told my parents on one of our weekly phone calls, even though Mark had never called himself my boyfriend, even though I would not have dared to say that to his face, because I knew, just like all of my friends knew, that the worst possible thing you could do with a man you were dating was to express a personal preference. We talked about this, my girlfriends and I, over bottles of house white wine: someone would tell us a story of how she had been wronged, of how a man had denied her request for a little bit of time, attention, or respect, and we’d shake our heads with pity but also understanding of how the young woman in question had fatally erred: by wanting something, by asking for it.
I dared not do such a thing with Mark. I accepted his choices of restaurants, of films, of not holding my hand when we were out in public, but I believed that he was my boyfriend: the symptoms were present. We were seeing each other a couple of times a week, we were texting each other on nights apart with our Nokia phones, we were having the kind of sex that I didn’t believe you could have with more than one person in a month. What does he look like? my mother said, and I laughed and said, Well, I guess he kind of looks like Dad! and then I didn’t really think about that again until a few days later when my father sent me an email, with the subject line: Picture.
In the email was a diptych he had created: a photo of Mark that he’d found on MySpace. A photo of him, at a similar age, wearing a similar hat. They looked nearly identical. I was sitting at work when I got the email, in my cubicle, and it was so shocking that I climbed out of my rolling desk chair and lay down on the carpet.
I showed the diptych to my friends. Why are you showing me a photo of Mark and his father? they said, or in some cases, they said: This is so creepy! When is Dad coming over? my flatmate said. I met him on a blind date, I told people. It would be awful if I had picked him out of a room myself but it’s not my fault.
At last I decided I had to tell Mark about it, one night as we were falling asleep.
So, I said, I have to tell you something. You really look a lot like my dad.
For a moment he was silent. Oh, Mark said, at last, I guess that’s creepy for you.
That Mark and my boss broke up with me on the same day was just a coincidence, I’m sure. It was a couple of weeks before Christmas, and a couple of years before the financial crisis, which meant that everyone in publishing was out every night, drinking excessive amounts of mulled wine. My boss came in that morning with a look on her face that made me think she probably had a hangover – she’d been out at one of those parties the night before, I’d seen it in her calendar – and as she approached my whole body stiffened, in the way that a body stiffens when it’s preparing to receive a punch. She rifled through the pile of books and papers on her desk and then came through to ask me where one item was.
Oh, I said, you asked me to give it to the accounts department, so it’s on the accountant’s desk. But I can make you a photocopy right now, it will just take a minute.
What the hell is wrong with you? my boss said. Are you crazy?
I was sitting down at my desk. She was leaning over the edge of the cubicle, glaring down at me. I swallowed.
I don’t think it’s fair for you to speak to me this way, I said, in a voice that was meant to sound strong but instead sounded weak, and shaky.
Jean! she said. Come in to my office!
I followed, and then she told me that the time had come for me to find a new job.
The other thing that I remember from that day is someone telling me, helpfully, that if you drink a glass of water you can’t cry at the same time.
Later that evening, after a meal and a lot of wine at Pizza Express with one of my friends from the office, I saw that I had a missed call from Mark. We had never spoken on the phone before, so I knew it wasn’t good. I also remembered the previous Sunday morning, when he’d kissed me goodbye as I was leaving his house and yet I felt not embraced, but dismissed.
How are you? Mark said on the phone, and I said, Well, I got fired today, and he said: Oh. Well. I’m sorry.
And I said: Yup.
And he said: I’m sorry, but I don’t think we can see each other any more.
I persuaded him to come over to talk to me in person, I don’t know why, except perhaps that I already felt hurt and alone, would rather process the information in the company of another warm body, even if it was a body that didn’t care for me. Mark sat opposite to me on the sofa and explained, slowly and carefully, as if I was a child and he was my thirty-one-year-old father, that sometimes two people can have great sex but aren’t meant to be a couple. It was patronizing but also: it was a lesson I had not yet learned, and one that he, older than me by seven years, evidently knew deep in his heart.
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