She too was on the phone. Charlotte sometimes complained that in a few years she would be forced to have an operation surgically amputating the phone receiver from her ear. But she looked up, saw Julian on her threshold (those few women at Athena whose offices were in possession of doors kept them open as an egalitarian statement), and beckoned her inside. Charlotte’s voice to her caller was vibrating somewhere between a patronizing patience-it’s-Jeremy tone and thinly disguised rage. It soon became obvious she was speaking with Maxine Duncan Brewer. Julian sank into a corner of the faded corduroy-covered sofa and waited.
She was genuinely fond of Charlotte, who understood when Julian had to turn down a job because of lecture or writing commitments, yet gave her first call on free-lance work because she knew Julian needed the money. Besides, Charlotte loved music and animals; how could you not like her? She and Julian were about the same age, and she too was married, for just under twelve years—with all the bonding such similarity could inspire between two women.
At the beginning, their colleague relationship had fed their growing friendship, not threatened it. However, as Athena suffered its sea-changes over the years, their business communications became cautious, then formal, then strained, and their private confidences showed signs of spillover pollution. Perspectives of survival figured into it—Athena’s survival in the marketplace with as much honor intact as possible, and Julian’s survival in the context of Athena, on the same terms. Meanwhile, both women mourned the loss of spontaneity between them as friends, but each suspected the other of mourning the loss less. Julian presumed Charlotte understood that however her loyalty to Athena wobbled in private, in public it was solid. But Charlotte, who rose to public attacks with the glee of a seasoned veteran, absorbed Julian’s private criticisms as if they were personal accusations. Each became increasingly defensive in her conviction that the other must think her a hypocrite.
Now Julian, wearing a faint smile meant to communicate supportiveness, sat on Charlotte’s office sofa and watched her boss send voicetone and facial expression off in two separate directions. Charlotte was nervously twisting the single braid in which she wore her pale blond hair. Strands began coming loose, like fine wisps of temper. She pushed her bangs to one side and began massaging her forehead.
“I know, Maxine. Yes, I—I know, dear. But you must understand that we lack the resources for first-class air tickets on the entire book tour, we … I know, dear. Of course you deserve—If we could, I assure you that we—But that won’t do any good, dear. Maxine, really, it … Maxine. Maxine, I’ve already spoken with Pam Bently in Publicity and Promo, and I know the problem, it’s …” Charlotte rolled her eyes at Julian, put one hand over the mouthpiece, and growled, “This woman is worse than Friedan.”
Julian picked up a copy of Ms. Magazine from the floor, where it had been either dropped by mistake or flung by intention. There was a paper clip on one particular page and when she saw it was a review of an Athena book she realized it had been flung. The reviewer was not only questioning the book but wondering in print whether the author—and in fact Athena—any longer had the right to the description “feminist.”
Charlotte slammed down the phone after one last “Bye-bye, darling” delivered through clenched teeth. She saw Julian scanning the review, and made a gesture as if tearing out her hair.
“It’s been that kind of day all day, Julian. As you may have guessed, that was Supergal herself on the phone, aiming for yet another Temperamental Diva Asshole Prize in publishing. And who in hell,” pointing accusingly at the magazine in Julian’s hands, “do they think they are? Sisters?”
“Well,” Julian began, “it’s hard for me to say, Charlotte.” Just as Julian never considered that Charlotte might lose sleep worrying about an erosion of Athena’s integrity, so Charlotte had no notion of Julian’s distaste at her own behavior in having swiftly learned the revised script: what was still permissible to say and what was now to remain unspoken. “I happen to be underfond of both this reviewer and the author she’s reviewing. Not as people, but in terms of their politics. And their writing.”
“That’s not the point. The point is that one feminist institution should goddam well have the decency to support another. What are they, suffering from acute terminal purity?”
“Hardly. They’re just trying to survive in the so-called mainstream while swimming against the current and treading water. Like Athena. And they’ve got the financial shoals of advertisers to navigate.”
“May they shoot the rapids,” Charlotte sputtered.
“Oh come on. Besides, they have a right to their integrity, too. You don’t think that just because they’re a feminist institution they should fling orchids at every book appearing under a feminist label? How does that develop a healthy criticism?”
“No, not at every book.” She snickered. “Only ours. Nor do I think we should confuse healthy criticism with a hatchet job. As for their financial shoals, I’ll match our odious stockholders against their obnoxious advertisers any day.”
Julian cleared her throat.
“Well, I brought back the finished Preston manuscript. All of my queries are flagged, as usual.” She fished the manuscript from her book-bag, walked over, and wedged it onto the crammed desk.
“Fine. That was record time, Julian. Thanks.” Charlotte riffled the pages and, seeing relatively few flags on the margins, seemed to relax. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be unfair. Unsisterly, O heinous crime. Some of my best friends work at Ms. No, seriously. I know they’re up against much the same thing we are. Everything from right-wing groups wanting to ban our books, to tons of unsolicited manuscripts from otherwise perfectly sane women suddenly seized with the inspiration to ‘write,’ to what are probably the most perfidiously difficult group of authors and readers in the literate world.”
“My my, Charlotte, we are tetchy today.”
“I’m just fed up with the double standard that seems reserved especially for us. I mean, other houses—and all right, maybe other magazines, too—get off easy. All they have to do is be minimally interesting to a general readership and show a little profit to their investors. Piece of cake. But we’re supposed to be wunderkinds financially; let us show a drop in sales figures and the New York Times announces that women’s businesses are in trouble, that women can’t cut the mustard in the corporate world, and that this means the women’s movement is now yet again dead. On the other hand, we’re supposed to be some sort of movement press—whatever that means. What it means in fact is that whatever we publish—or reject—provokes sackloads of protest mail from one disgruntled group of activists or another. They’d never think of doing this to Random House, you know, or Macmillan, or any of the big boys. Where, I’d like to know, is there such a thing as support? Remember ‘support’?”
Julian felt a squirm of suspicion that this tirade was indirectly aimed at her, then immediately felt paranoid for having entertained the suspicion.
“Nobody promised that the patriarchy would be unmade in a day, Charlotte. You folks wanted to be a bridge between the politics and the popularization of them. Admirable, but a bridge gets walked over. That’s its function, you know. What’s more, some politics—maybe the best kind—usually aren’t ‘popularizable,’ at least not until they’ve been around awhile: ‘What? Universal suffrage? Insane notion!’ You know as well as I do that a progressive idea takes time to filter through a culture—”
“We don’t have time. We have stockholders.”
“Yes. So you try to filter faster. Sometimes,” Julian blurted out, “that amounts to distorting, blanding out. Maxine Duncan Brewer.”
“Oh dear. Yet another lecture on our corruption. I notice we’re not good enough to publish Julian Travis? She might stoop to edit for Athena, but she publishes with distinguished old Hamilton Press.”
For a moment, a question poised in the silence between them: how long would it be until Charlotte would yearn for the day, painful though it might seem when it
arrived, when Julian would decline the jobs Charlotte dangled—or how long would it be until Julian would wish, however regretfully, that Charlotte wouldn’t offer anymore? Then both women backed away from the confrontation, each still clinging to her side of a bargain they believed to be mature and constructive, one in which skills and fees were exchanged for the sake of a differently interpreted greater good.
“Athena doesn’t print poetry, Charlotte,” Julian demurred, “and Hamilton does. You know my motto: Love me, love my poems; if you want my prose, you’ve got to take on the other along with it.” She threw in a submission gesture. “I’ll never be properly ‘commercial,’ anyway.”
Charlotte sighed and rearranged the pencils in her pottery mug.
“Well, maybe I’m just in a foul mood.” This time it was she who changed the subject. “So what did you think of the Preston?”
“It’s—I—liked it. I mean, well, that sort of single-girl-swinger-stuff isn’t usually my—but it’s got a bright, sassy type of writing which I suppose … It’s really a treat,” she finished lamely. Untenable to comment that there were so few flags because she’d given up on the manuscript in despair. Then, shifting into what she hoped wouldn’t appear as too drastic a non sequitur, “Of course, I still haven’t got over my fan-like reaction to the last book I did for you. The Graham biography of Katherine Mansfield? Damn, but that was good. Feminist but not jargonistic. Well researched. Doesn’t ignore the New Zealand years in favor of the English ones. Well written. Long overdue. It was a pleasure to copy-edit.”
Charlotte beamed. As if on cue, one of the poodles woke, wagged over to Julian, and licked her shoe.
“Oh that’s music to my ears. Particularly from you, Julian. Your less than subtle hoity-toity literary judgments give me indigestion sometimes.”
Nettled, Julian offered a smile in response. Charlotte smiled back. For the sake of the bargain, Charlotte would swallow her humiliation at what she assumed to be Julian’s contempt. For the sake of the bargain, Julian would swallow hers at feeling grateful for Charlotte’s forbearance and patronage. They might differ on whether the contempt or the gratitude was voluntary as well as deserved, but they shared a confusion over whether the attendant humiliation was as deserved as it was voluntary. Charlotte thrust out her chin in an unconscious gesture of pride.
“You know that the Graham was rejected by twelve houses before it came to us? Leonora fought hard for us to take it on. Books like that revive my faith in what we’re doing here. Of course it’ll bomb commercially.”
“Wait a minute, Charlotte. Not necessarily. Why?”
“A literary biography? Of a woman? And a foreigner? In the Reign of Reagan? Are you kidding?”
“But why?” Julian sounded to herself like Jeremy.
“Because, that’s why. We’ll lose money on it. But that’s all right once in a while. The sales of Maxine Duncan Brewer allow us to publish people like Joy Graham.” She had regained her dignity and her good humor returned with it. “How about lunch? Have you got time? Athena will treat.”
Julian thought longingly of her plans for revising the new sonnet sequence that afternoon; it was to have been a self-reward for having endured copy-editing the Preston. She knew that a make-nice lunch would be helpful, though not necessary, to guarantee further work. Lies and pretense. You are a hypocrite, Baby, she thought. A confused hypocrite, too, because she missed their old camaraderie. She missed Charlotte.
“Well, okay. Yes. I’d enjoy that, in fact.”
“Great!” Charlotte exclaimed. Then, a touch embarrassed at the pleasure in her voice, she added, “Just let me make out a payment slip to you for the Preston so I can drop it off at the business office on our way out. Then you might actually have a check by the end of the month, or at least before you’re eligible for a senior citizens’ bus pass.”
“Oh. Thanks. Yes, sure,” Julian tossed back casually, sitting down on the sofa again to wait while Charlotte typed up the form. They exchanged a quick glance, unanticipated, unsettling. A fidelity resonated between them, potent as nostalgia, a cranky recognition that they were still on the same side—though neither could have said with confidence of what—stuck with each other like family members who congregate only at births and funerals, who snarl over Grandma’s silver teapot being left to this cousin instead of that one, but who are there (grudgingly) when they are (grudgingly) needed. Athena was, for Julian, like the proverb about home: the place where, when you had to go there, they had to take you in. If the banner of this particular sisterhood was somewhat frayed, Julian reflected, still it fluttered in the storm, brave and bonny.
Over vegetarian won-ton soup in the kosher Chinese restaurant, Charlotte sighed,
“Sorry about the place. As you know, this neighborhood isn’t the greatest for choices in cuisine. There’s the dairy restaurant, the kosher takeout hot-dog stand, the kosher pizza shop, the deli—where the food’s fabulous, actually, but you emerge deaf from the noise—and dear old Mamaleh Yin Chow’s.”
“It’s fine, Charlotte,” Julian laughed. “So long as we stick to beef or chicken. The ersatz shrimp does me in. The first time I came here, I ordered Mu Shu Pork without thinking. The waiter almost expired with horror on the spot.”
“I yearn for the day when Athena changes neighborhoods. I abhor our building. Always have and always will.”
“Spoken like a good apostate New York Jew.” She toasted Charlotte with a glass of tea.
“You got it. Listen, if I’d stayed on as an editor at Knopf we’d be lunching at the Four Seasons.” Charlotte rummaged in her purse, came up with a bottle of extra-strength aspirin, popped two into her mouth, and downed a swig of her tea.
“You look tired, Charlotte. And it’s only Monday. Couldn’t you and Zach get to the country house for the weekend?”
“That, my dear, was the problem. We did get to the country house for the weekend. With neither of his Ivy League brats glowering at the evil stepmother. Just the two of us.”
“Oh. I see. Was this a shouting-match one or an intensive let’s-struggle-this-through one or a deadly silences one where communication runs the gamut from ‘Have you seen the newspaper?’ to ‘I’m going for a walk’?”
“This was all of the above. This was a peach. This started with my apparently pernicious question as to why, after seven years of our having the country house, Zach still has to ask me where the plastic garbage bags are kept, when they have been in the same cupboard under the same sink for all seven years. It escalated rapidly to his unsolicited on-the-spot analysis of why I am such a hostile and neurotic person. What is the matter with these people?”
“You mean psychiatrists?” Julian suppressed a laugh about the long-lost Jack Erdman of her youth.
“I mean men. I know shrinks are particularly risky to be married to, but I mean the generic category itself. Don’t forget I was married before, to a humble engineer. But he too alas was a man. Maybe they’re really another species? A different life form, possibly? Not necessarily an intelligent one?”
“Aha. Yea, verily. This, I have frequently mused to myself, is a distinct possibility. In fact, had you asked me yesterday, I would unhesitatingly have replied in the affirmative.”
“Oh. You and Larry had a fun weekend, too.”
“Smashing. And I do mean smashing. He got smashed. Also some dinnerware. Revolutionary vanguardists can, when it comes down to it, find a common brotherhood with engineers and psychiatrists.”
“On what grounds? Their penises?”
They both burst out laughing, and a second wave of cackles hit them when a passing waiter shot Charlotte an indignant glance at her overheard question, as he shuffled by bearing a tray of vegetarian spare ribs.
“I mean it, Julian,” she went on, lowering her voice with a giggle, “and they seem to have another thing in common. They’re all Jekyll-and-Hydes, have you noticed? It’s like … well, the reason I fell in love with Zach was because, in a way, he was a shrink. Certainly Ted—he was t
he engineer, you never knew him, lucky you—Ted responsed to any discussion about thoughts or feelings, any attempt to talk about what might be lying underneath one’s actions, with a glaze of sphinx-like disinterest. Zach was willing, even eager to discuss all that. I thought, ‘Here is a man who is willing to probe, who wants to know the inner me, who’s not afraid of emotion.’ So the flip side of the coin is that if I happen to put on a red scarf in the morning I get asked, ‘Feeling confrontative today, are you?’”
Julian rose to their old atmosphere of conspiracy.
“One of the reasons I married Larry was the intensity he gave off. Gentle and intense, I thought, wow. So gentle can flip over to passive and intense can display itself in shattered dishes.”
“Uh, Julian, you think maybe Larry should see somebody? I mean a shrink? Throwing things … well, that’s sort of on another level …”
“Oh no, no. This weekend was an exception. And don’t be silly. Larry would never raise a finger against me, if that’s what you’re thinking. Besides, he thinks all shrinks are brainwashing agents of the System. Anyway, you are suggesting maybe our eminently sane friend Zachary perhaps?”
“God no. But don’t you get frightened—”
“Not really. I mean, this is Larry we’re talking about. No, it’s the yo-yo effect that gets me. You’re never quite sure who’ll be there in the morning—or night, for that matter.”
“You mean: Dr. Jekyll or—”
“—Mr. Hyde, exactly. Oh, Charlotte, you are a relief. I mean, you understand. The trouble with bitching about one’s husband to a woman friend who isn’t married—or who hasn’t been married long enough—is that you get a blank look or else you feel creepy and disloyal or else she says something insightfully idiotic like ‘So why don’t you leave him?’”
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