Vintage Contemporaries, page 19
Jack
Oh, and here it was, the proposal, toward the back of the folder. She had missed it the first time because it was only a few pages long and had a couple of memos stapled to the front. There was a long note from Jenny, the first assistant, explaining what Futurity was, who Jack was, how he was well situated to promote the book through his speaking and business consulting networks. Then there was a long note from Jenny that Em recognized instantly as the second memo you have to write when it becomes clear that Edith never really read your first memo. Below that was a third memo, in which Jenny had forcefully made the case that Edith was wrong and the book would definitely sell. On that third memo, Edith had handwritten: “This seems like nonsense to me, but make a list and we can send it around.”
Em carefully photocopied the proposal, then put the whole original packet back in the correspondence folder so that it would be there when some future assistant needed it. “Oh, bless you,” Edith said when Em handed her the copy. “Now go change.”
The apartment was empty but for Dolly, their cat, who darted away when Em opened the door but then wove through her legs as she stood at the rolling rack where she hung up her clothes. (She’d given Louis, who wore much nicer things than her, the closet.) She took off her work pants and stood glumly before the mirror. She did not particularly want to show Jack Mortensen some leg. She didn’t like her legs. She supposed she could do her best with her cleavage, which in her experience men found distracting. She did have the right dress for that. She rummaged in her dresser and found a pair of control-top pantyhose, which she held up to the window to make sure there were no runs. After she peed so she wouldn’t have to do it at the restaurant, she wrestled her legs into the hose and put on the dress. She looked okay, still borderline professional. No, she would not put on more makeup for Jack Mortensen. She scratched Dolly, locked up, set off the three blocks back to work.
What Em also saw in the files were the occasional examples of previous assistants agenting books of their own. Sometimes the books didn’t sell. Sometimes they made small deals. But it didn’t happen very often, and sooner or later those assistants went somewhere else, leaving the books behind.
At other agencies, bigger agencies, young employees could build their own stables of writers. A girl Em had met at a writers’ conference had done that—she’d made a niche for herself working with children’s books, and now was a kind of junior partner at her agency. (At the writers’ conference, where they both were on a panel about agenting, the girl was blithe and confident, while Em found she had almost nothing helpful to say.) If such a thing had ever happened to an assistant at the Safer Agency, Em could find no evidence of it.
When she got back to the office, she was grateful to see that Edith was on the phone, which meant she could direct her craziness at people besides Em. She had to work through some slush and make notes for Lucy, who’d asked her for her thoughts on the memoir so far.
The notes first. She had a hunch Edith or Jack would insist she have a drink at lunch, and she could face the slush better with some wine in her. In her nearly two years at the agency, she had gone from finding the slush exciting to finding it a drag to finding it actively depressing. (She understood, from her acquaintances who also worked in publishing, that this was the natural progression all assistants went through.) Most of the submissions were just so awful, yet so much energy and care had been given to their preparation. Painstakingly self-addressed envelopes accompanied sample chapters full of hokum and ghastly sex scenes, evidence that most would-be writers simply had no idea how bad their writing was. As a would-be writer herself, she found this a nerve-wracking observation. She hadn’t yet turned on the fancy word processor her sister had given her for Christmas.
She knew the solution to writer’s block was supposed to be to read great books, but she found those no more helpful than reading the slush. Reading great books just convinced her that she was absolutely right about the hopelessness of toiling away at anything. How had this middle-aged man written so beautifully in the voice of a fifteen-year-old girl? This short-story writer: How was each one of her sentences so alive it seemed to spark? How did Cormac McCarthy come up with this shit?
Reading Lucy’s writing, though, didn’t depress her. In part this was because Lucy was sticking to her declaration to only write about the joy in her life; there were chapters on Lucy’s happy childhood, her Iranian grandmother, Sarah’s birth, dinners with friends, a blind date so terrible that by the end neither she nor the guy could stop laughing. (The chapter ended with them shaking hands and solemnly agreeing never to see one another again.) Each chapter was named after a certain meal—the grilled cheese and whiskey sour Lucy had consumed the night before Sarah was born, or the Manhattan clam chowder she spilled on herself during the blind date—and as much of the book was devoted to recipes and discussion of the food as to Lucy’s own story.
Em also found reading Lucy invigorating because she was starting to see that a book didn’t, in fact, have to be a bewildering work of genius to be something she loved. Reading Lucy wasn’t like reading Denis Johnson or Joy Williams, who were basically from another planet. But she understood now that it was okay for her to like, even love, something that made her feel good, that comforted her. Emily would scoff, of course.
Mostly, though, Em loved reading Lucy’s book because she knew she was part of it. She was in it, yes—the day when Lucy had taught “my friend Emily” to like olives appeared in a chapter about martinis—but she was part of it even beyond that, because she was making it better. As Lucy talked through the stories in her apartment, Em did more than simply type. She weighed in on phrasing, made suggestions on organization, warned Lucy when she was straying from the book’s tone. And now Lucy wanted her to give notes.
The chapter she was reading now was about how one of the pleasures of living in New York was the way you saw famous people and great artists being just as annoyed by the everyday problems of urban life as you. Even Susan Sontag has to sit in the terrible chairs at the Anthology Film Archives. Even Kurt Vonnegut needs to wait for the bathroom at Town Hall. One summer day, Lucy was driving with a friend down Twenty-Third Street, trying to turn right onto Ninth Avenue, and there was a young woman standing in the turn lane waiting for the walk sign to change, and the windows of the car were down, so the friend just yelled at the person to get out of the way, but in the middle of yelling realized who it was, and so ended up yelling, “Hey, move it, Mary Louise Parker!”
Most of the chapter was devoted to a potluck baby shower she had attended at “my friend Lorraine’s apartment” that was also attended by Bobby McFerrin. When Lorraine had issued the invitation several months before, her old friend Bobby had been a little-known a cappella jazz singer. When the time of the party came around, however, he had become the superstar performer of a ubiquitous number one song. He still came to the baby shower, though, and brought a peach cobbler, which he was upset about, because it hadn’t turned out the way he wanted. Lucy tried to reassure Bobby McFerrin about his cobbler, which she thought was pretty good. However, she had to stop herself, over and over again, from saying things like “Don’t worry about the cobbler,” or “Be happy about your cobbler.” Together, they worked out what had gone wrong with the cobbler—he had tried for a biscuity topping, which had gotten soggy, so Lucy suggested something more oaty, with self-rising flour. Later, Bobby McFerrin sent her a card telling her his next cobbler had turned out wonderfully.
Here was the recipe for the cobbler, which she called Cobbly McFerrin:
Find some fruit. Firm fruits work well, such as apples or pears. They can be a little underripe. Peaches are just splendid in this recipe, especially mixed with blackberries. In fact, you can make this recipe with nearly any kind of fruit, or combination of fruits. If you would enjoy it in a pie, you can put it in Cobbly McFerrin.
If the fruit has a peel, remove the peel. If it has a pit, remove the pit. Slice all the fruit up and put it in a square or rectangular baking dish. Continue until the dish is about half full of fruit. I often think of the quantity of fruit suitable for this recipe as six apples’ worth of fruit.
Now it’s time to make the oaty streusel topping. In a bowl, combine the following:
1 cup self-rising flour
½ cup sugar
½ cup brown sugar
½ teaspoon cinnamon
Dash of salt
Then add:
½ cup (1 stick) butter, melted
Dash of vanilla
⅓ cup rolled oats
You might as well mix it all up with your hands, because you’re going to get all gooey doing the next step, which is scattering the streusel mixture over the top of your fruit. No one in the entire history of the earth has ever complained that their cobbler had too much topping on it, so if you want to make more, that’s just fine.
Bake at 375 degrees until it’s golden brown and bubbly, about 25 minutes. Serve hot while whistling a jaunty tune about maintaining a positive outlook.
Em didn’t have a lot of notes. She wanted the Bobby McFerrin story to be longer. She wanted to know more about Kurt Vonnegut. She rearranged the recipe a bit so that someone like her, who couldn’t cook, wouldn’t be caught by surprise by things like an unpreheated oven. It was fine not to have a lot of notes, because the chapter was good. It did what Lucy wanted it to do. She just knew it, the way she knew which pair of her shoes were best for walking.
Jack Mortensen was not a lech, thankfully. When Edith and Em walked into the restaurant, he showily marveled at his good fortune, to be dining with two beautiful women!, but then mostly spent lunch talking about The Future. Em had guessed that he would be wearing either a cowboy hat or cowboy boots, but she was wrong; he only wore a bolo tie. As she’d expected, they both ordered martinis and made a whole thing out of insisting that Em have one too. (She silently thanked Lucy for teaching her how to order a martini.)
Before the entrees arrived Edith pulled the old proposal from her purse and showed it to Jack. “I remember the day I first read this,” Edith said. “I loved it immediately.”
“Aw,” Jack said, moved. His cheeks reddened over his beard.
“I’d never read something that explained to me, so clearly and inspirationally, how to think about the coming decade.”
“Boy, I know I owe you a new proposal,” Jack said.
“I only need a page or so. What about the millennium? Is there something there?”
“Sure,” he said. “As the great cosmic clock turns over, the human soul, that seeker of order, hungers for a commensurate reset. For those who embrace the age, the millennium offers a remarkable opportunity to tap into that elemental desire with images of renewal and rebirth.”
“Great, write that,” Edith said, and the waiter arrived with their food.
As they ate, Jack asked Em how she spent her time in New York. Well, what he said was, “A young person, the city laid out before you like a buffet; surely you partake!”
“I see a lot of movies,” Em said. “Plays when I can afford them. I don’t get to a lot of restaurants.” She was grateful when her entirely boring answer sent Jack off on an aria about how in the future, audiences would hunger for experiences unattainable by the earthbound human form, which was why he was investing heavily in pharmaceutical companies.
“It’s been a great pleasure,” Jack said as they bid farewell at the door, bestowing one lingering glance to Em’s breasts. At least she hadn’t changed for nothing. He kissed Edith’s hand and said, “My dear, I pledge to have that one-pager on the millennium to you by Memorial Day.”
“That’s exciting, a new Mortensen book,” Em said as they walked back to the office. She was taking it slowly down the sidewalk so Edith didn’t fall behind.
Edith snorted. “He’s promised me a new proposal for ten years,” she said. “If he sends anything, I’ll eat my hat.”
“Wasn’t Jenny the one who originally championed Futurity?” Em ventured. “I feel like I remember hearing that.”
“She liked it, too,” Edith said. “She wrote a really dynamite cover letter for that proposal. I knew we had gold then.”
“Where is Jenny now?”
“Connecticut, I think. She quit and got married. Beautiful children.”
“And you were the agent on Futurity, not her.”
“Oh, sure,” Edith said. “She’d only been here two or three years.”
* * *
The wind picked up and Emily and Em ducked into a vintage store on Greene Street to warm up, only to find themselves in a wonderland of weird furniture. Here a bamboo bar, there an art deco sofa. They wandered the floor, heating up inside their ugly coats. The girl at the counter, impossibly beautiful in horn-rimmed glasses, read a magazine and ignored them.
The store was called the Second Coming. Upstairs they found racks of broad-shouldered dresses of a different era, their mothers’ time or maybe their grandmothers’, they didn’t know. “These are perfect for The Open Heart,” Emily said. The Medea project had fallen apart after a bitter argument between Emily and the actor playing Jason, after which the cast took Jason’s side and quit en masse. For much of the previous year, Emily had been prepping what she now called her breakout show: a site-specific work about surgery and ghosts, meant to be performed before the ruins of the Smallpox Castle on Roosevelt Island.
They shrugged their coats to the floor and tried dresses on, or attempted to. “This was made for someone eating Depression food,” Em grunted. Emily, thinner than ever, managed to slip into a dress. She looked like the ghost who appears in the background of a photo.
* * *
That March Em was added to the eviction phone tree, so that when the city was planning an action against one of the squats, she could join the emergency mobilization. Early one Saturday, Michael, Emily’s downstairs neighbor, called and told her that police were surrounding Dos Blocos, another squat on Ninth Street. She called the two people down the tree from her, got dressed in her warmest clothes, and woke up Louis, who was always up for a protest.
They hurried through silent, gloomy streets, hands stuffed in pockets, to find chaos on Ninth. Michael was just outside the police cordon, holding a bullhorn and directing traffic. With his long strawberry blond hair and big glasses, he looked androgynous and unassuming—he reminded Em of another Michael, Stipe—but in fact he burned with an inexhaustible white-hot rage at cops and landlords and the city. “You two join that group there,” he told Em and Louis. “Tell everyone: Our goal is to bother the cops from the sides. Be loud as hell, shout for the cameras if the cameras come. But don’t engage physically, don’t get arrested—we’re gonna need all the bodies we can get.” He raised his bullhorn. “FUCK THE PIGS!” he chanted, and soon everyone had joined in.
Fuck the pigs! Em was delighted by the old-fashioned simplicity of the slogan. She could imagine her parents shouting it at a Vietnam protest in Madison, if they had been the kinds of students who protested. (She’d asked her mom once if she’d joined in the uprising at UW, and her mom told her that in 1969 they were four years out of college. “I was too busy having you.”) The pigs themselves stood around, chatting casually with one another, a counterpoint to the organized protestors and their red-haired drill sergeant. At the center of everything, two cops negotiated with three Dos Blocos residents who had chained themselves to the steel front door.
A news crew pulled up in a van, and Michael changed the chant. “WE WILL ALWAYS FIGHT!” he called. “HOUSING IS A RIGHT!” From an upper window of the squat, two young women in parkas unfurled a bedsheet on which they’d painted THIS IS OUR HOME. The neighbors, nearly all Puerto Rican or black, were starting to appear in doorways and windows. A few shouted at the squatters—“Pay some rent!” “This is our neighborhood!”—but most seemed to be on the squatters’ side, or at least not on the side of the cops.
After half an hour, the cops moved out, as coordinated and as inexplicable as a murmuration of starlings. A cheer filled the chill morning; protestors filled the space the cops had occupied, began disassembling the barricade. As the cops filed past Em and Louis, one mustached face smirked at them, and Louis said, “Call me, you bitch.” A woman brought hot coffee to the chained-up residents while the guy with the keys worked on the padlocks. They found Emily, who’d been on the far side of the cops with Joe and Frank and Lisa.
Most of the protestors, cold and anxious about their own homes, dispersed, but a handful, including Lisa, Em, and Emily, followed Michael to Life Cafe for breakfast. The waiters cheered as they paraded in and settled into three booths. Em and Emily ended up sitting back to back to Michael and one of the Dos Blocos leaders. Amid the revelry, she heard Michael’s clear, frustrated voice: “They weren’t really serious. They didn’t even bring a ram.”
“So what’s the point, then?” another person asked.
“Just harassment. A show of force.”
Around the tables, others joined in. “They want us to know they can do this anytime they want,” Lisa said.
“NYPD’s got a five-billion-dollar budget.”
“Every one of those officers is thrilled to get the overtime.”
“Come scare some squatters on a Saturday morning.”
“They’ll come back and clear that place out.”
Friedrich, a German squatter who’d spent the winter staying with Michael, interrupted the darkening conversation. “Remember our chanting, yes?” he said. “Housing is a right. It is not a privilege to have shelter. You must fight for that right when they try to take it. You are citizens, and you deserve a home.”
“Some of us aren’t citizens,” someone said.
“You deserve it, too,” Michael said. “We made these places when no one wanted them. We turned ruins into housing, for us and for anyone in Loisaida who needed it.” In fact, Em knew, this was a stumbling block to the mission of the squatters, most of whom were white: Puerto Rican squatters were rare and often didn’t feel welcome. Lisa talked all the time about how badly many of the squatters treated their nonwhite neighbors, who had been here before them and weren’t thrilled about the new faces on their blocks. Many of those families had been through so much in the ’80s that all they wanted, if they earned enough money, was to get out to New Jersey or Yonkers, not to put down roots in a building without a roof. Michael continued: “We saw value where the city saw none. Now the city sees the sweat and the money we’ve put in, and they see dollar signs. But they won’t take our homes without a fight.”
