Vintage Contemporaries, page 6
Emily had a clever way of avoiding that problem. If someone mentioned a book or a movie she hadn’t heard of, she simply assumed it was garbage. “Saves time,” she said.
* * *
“First of all, I’m sorry, I’m just starting your book. I’ve been swamped.”
Lucy laughed. “It’s okay, I understand capitalism. This is what happens when there isn’t a robust market for a product.”
Lucy’s apartment took up the first floor of a brownstone on a quiet street. Incongruously, it was decorated with a Southwestern theme—Navajo blankets, turquoise knickknacks, sere prints of desert landscapes. “We spent a winter in Santa Fe a few years back,” Lucy said. “It’s the most beautiful place in the world. I’m going to retire there, when I can afford to retire, which is never.”
Her daughter was staying over at a friend’s house, so Lucy said she was “a free woman.” However, “I’m a free woman who feels old and creaky and hates leaving my house, so I hope it’s okay if we just stay here and I cook for you.”
“Uh, that’s fine,” Em said. “I am ready to be cooked for.”
“What’s your kitchen like?” Lucy asked, pushing her way up from the table. Em noticed, again, how deliberately she moved. Lucy was a bit heavyset, and Em supposed she just didn’t want to knock into anything. “Do you cook?”
“I prepare,” Em said. “Pasta, or salads sometimes.”
“Your kitchen’s small.”
Em’s kitchen was pathetically small. Their silverware drawer still contained two forks, a knife, and a spoon. The kitchen was also the site of a thriving mouse community, a civilization so advanced they had probably figured out the wheel by now. “I get takeout a lot. I shouldn’t, I know.”
Em could see Lucy in the kitchen over the half-wall. “I’ve got some roast chicken in the fridge, so I’m just going to make us some curry chicken salad. Is that okay with you?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never had curry anything.”
“Pure Wisconsin,” Lucy said. There was the plonk of a cutting board being placed on the counter. “Hey, I couldn’t find my old literary magazines, but take a look at that book on the table.” Em sat down to a thin sorority yearbook, Alpha Gamma Delta, University of Wisconsin, 1964–1965. “I marked some of the pages with your mom and me,” Lucy said.
Em turned to the first bookmark. There was her mom, twenty at the outside, younger than Em was now, hairband holding back her bangs. She was standing with a group of girls in front of a sorority house, all of them holding cleaning supplies—mops, brooms, buckets—and mugging for the camera. She found Lucy to her mom’s right, holding up a dustpan and rolling her eyes.
Another page: formal portraits, each sister framed identically against a black background, all in matching off-the-shoulder dresses. The hair! Beehives, flip curls, one or two pixie cuts. “Everyone looks identical.”
“Individualism was not prized. Do you see me?” Unlike most of the girls, Lucy’s smile didn’t show her teeth. You might almost call it wry.
“Did you rush in college?” Lucy asked her.
“My school barely had a Greek system. There was like one fraternity, very unsanctioned. They had a tradition of drunken kickball matches.”
“My mother told me it was a way to make friends, and I thought I’d never make friends way up north. Your mom, honestly, is one of the only ones I keep in touch with. She was good to me.” A knife flashed under the kitchen lights as she chopped.
“No one else moved to New York?”
“Honey, no one else left the state.”
“Oh!” A color snapshot had fallen out of the book, her mother and Lucy in a blue convertible, both of them wearing swimsuits, both laughing their heads off. She didn’t think she’d ever seen her mother laugh like this, not when she was little, not in middle school after the divorce, not when her sister was raising hell. She held the photograph up for Lucy to see.
“Oh,” Lucy said. “I love that one. We are beautiful, all right.”
“Do you remember what you were laughing about?”
“We were a little hysterical, actually. I had a pregnancy scare—getting pregnant, you could kiss your life goodbye. In those days, if they caught you even staying over with a boy, you’d be expelled.”
“Expelled!”
“Needless to say, the boy would not be expelled. Anyway, I was late, and I didn’t want to tell my boyfriend. Donna was going to drive me to the doctor, but then I got my period, so we went to the beach on Lake Mendota instead.”
“I love this,” Em said. “I love you two.”
“You know,” said Lucy, “I used to come back to Madison every once in a while, to see friends. But after a few years, your dad got that job in Wausau, and I sort of lost touch with everyone. But I remember meeting you. You were a baby, and your big sister was, what, three? I held you and you cried and cried, like I was pinching you or something.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“You were insensate, I forgive you. Here, come and look what I’m doing. This is a recipe you need to know.” She saw Em’s look of panic and corrected herself. “It’s not even a recipe, it’s just a thing you can do in the kitchen and at the end you have food.”
After they ate, Em stacked the dishes in the drainer. “I’m going to go sit on the stoop,” Lucy said. “Come on out if you want some fresh air.”
The sky between the buildings was sherbet pink and scattered with clouds like confetti. “You smoke?” Lucy asked, pulling a joint from a baggie. Em, surprised and embarrassed, said no thank you. “No problem,” said Lucy. Em looked down the street as Lucy lit, puffed, exhaled. She imagined being friends with Lucy for years, imagined Lucy respectfully never offering this kindness again, and turned back to Lucy and said, “Actually, yes, can I join you?”
They smoked down the joint as the light faded from the sky. It was chilly but Em didn’t feel cold. “I’m happy,” Lucy said. “Can’t wait to tell Donna now I’ve smoked with her and her daughter. Just kidding,” she added before Em could shriek.
“I would die.”
“But you should tell her. I think it might actually make her happy to hear.” Em didn’t tell her mom until much, much later, but it did make her happy.
* * *
It was pouring for the fifth day in a row, and Em’s apartment was damp and cold and miserable. Louis was in North Carolina, anyway, so Em felt no guilt about basically setting up camp at Emily’s. Emily had a new job, at Kim’s Video, so they had videotapes to watch. Em brought beer. They watched a movie called The Unbelievable Truth, in which two deadpan misfits sort of fell in love. Em loved it, and could sense that Emily was revving herself up to argue with her about it. To head her off at the pass she asked about Emerson, her sculptor. This turned out to be exactly the right move, because Emily and Emerson had just had a falling-out. There was almost nothing Emily liked to do better than expound upon her turbulent love life.
What had precipitated the current row was that Emily had gone to the sculptor’s wife’s gallery—which represented Emerson, among a number of more famous artists—and engaged her in a long, critical conversation about her husband’s work. Toward the end of the debate, Emerson walked in and was appalled, Emily reported, to find the woman he’d been sleeping with not only talking to his wife but offering a feminist critique of the misogyny embedded in his art.
“I understand why he’d be upset,” Em put forth cautiously.
“What a fucking poseur!” Emily said. “He should be grateful to have someone engaging with his work.”
It was at moments like this, when Emily was operating at her most Emily-esque pitch, that Em most clearly saw their friendship fitting into a neat template. It was one she knew well from a lifetime of reading: She was Beth and Emily was Jo; she was Melanie and Emily was Scarlett O’Hara; she was what’s-her-name, the wallflower, and Emily was Emma. She knew she was the boring one. But she also knew that Emily depended on her for that, and that Emily was extraordinary. If sometimes Em yearned to see her friend humbled even a little by failure, she also felt wholly convinced of her eventual success. Yes, only a certain kind of person would say such a thing about her married boyfriend’s sculptures. But who among the greats was not, in some way, absurd? She believed in Emily, and the moments when she behaved at her most Emilyish were the moments Em believed in her the most.
For a while they both read their books as the rain came down outside. According to the news, a storm was creeping its way along the coast, heading out to strengthen at sea, then returning to land to dump all that ocean water on New York, where the water would then accumulate sidewalk toxins and eventually flow back into the sea. When you thought about the immense cycles of the natural world in this way, it seemed like a big waste of time.
There was a rumble of thunder like a subway, but in the sky. “Is this the end?” Emily said.
Em quoted the movie: “The world is not gonna come to an end when there’s so many people making so much money.”
Emily sprang up and headed for the stereo. “We need a song for the apocalypse.”
“Apocalypso,” Em said, a joke from the book she was reading. Emily barked a laugh and put a disc in the changer. Em had not previously imagined that Emily owned calypso music, but she did. A syncopated beat filled the room, and Emily beckoned her off the couch.
“Dance with me,” she said. “Dance a little longer, for soon it will be over, never any more to dance.”
“I called that guy Darwin,” Em said when the song was over.
“Charles Darwin?”
“From the Strand.”
“Oh! That guy! Charles Darwin is dead, I was about to say.”
“I called him on the phone.”
“Look at you!” Emily chucked her on the arm. Em’s lack of romantic courage was a frequent topic of conversation. “What did he say?”
“Well, he remembered me—”
“Fucking of course he did. You looked hot that day.”
“I didn’t, but thank you. I was all puffy. But whatever, it doesn’t matter, we’re going out this weekend.”
“What are you seeing?”
“We’re going to a reading. At NYU.”
“Honest to God, you two really are perfect for each other. I’d get a pap smear before I’d go to a reading.”
She still didn’t feel confident, but her New York self acted confident, and it turned out that went a long way. Calling a handsome man she’d met in a bookstore? College Emily never does that. But New York Em—she feels scared, but she does it anyway and bluffs her way through the call. “Should we go to that Kathy Acker reading?” he’d asked, and she’d answered, instantly, “Oh yeah, I love her.”
That reminded her: “Have you read anything by Kathy Acker?”
“Never heard of her,” Emily said dismissively.
“I need to figure out what her story is, so I know what I’m getting into at this reading.”
“Get your umbrella,” Emily said. (She didn’t own one.)
At St. Mark’s Books, Em asked the redheaded clerk where she could find Kathy Acker. She was stocked in queer fiction, her books published by small presses, with quotes on the front covers about Kathy Acker’s transgressive vision. On the back of each book was a photo of a woman with short blonde hair staring defiantly into the camera. Rather than a rectangle, the photo was a sideways triangle, which Em found striking. She read a few pages of each book, found herself struggling with the language, which was profane but dense.
Up front, the clerk and a still-dripping Emily had joined forces to argue with a customer about the store’s X case, where they kept the most-shoplifted books. “It’s not there because it’s good,” Emily said, holding up Naked Lunch.
“It’s there because dumb shits like you steal it all the time,” said the clerk.
“I didn’t steal anything!” the guy protested. He looked younger than Emily and sorely overmatched. “And everyone knows he’s a genius.”
Emily and the clerk laughed sharply. “Good luck with this idiot,” Emily said to the clerk as she and Em left the store.
Outside, Emily stomped through the rain. “I ought to get a job in customer service,” she said.
“You’re a natural.”
“You bet your ass.”
* * *
Can’t Complain by Lucy Deming was quite good, and Em didn’t think she liked it.
That is to say, her initial fears—that her mom was forcing her into a situation where she had to read some dreck and be nice to its quote-unquote author—were obviously incorrect, given Lucy’s actual history with publishers publishing her books, no matter how small her print runs. But upon reading it, Em found herself smiling at little turns of phrase—laughing at the jokes—caring which young man Lucy’s heroine, Alicia, would find love with. The novel’s characters were smart enough, but the novel wasn’t about their brains, really. It was about their hearts.
Yet Emily felt herself resisting the manuscript, even as she kept turning the pages, propped up in her bed on the big body-hugging pillow both she and Louis called their husband. Can’t Complain was set among perfectly nice young people with perfectly normal relationship problems, and thus seemed to have nothing to do with the remarkable time in which everyone was living. It was the nineteen nineties. Writers were not writing about a quiet magazine editor trying to decide between her two witty suitors. Writers were penning sizzling tales of debauchery or challenging works that speak to our age like none other. (If those weren’t actual blurbs on her collection of Vintage Contemporaries paperbacks, they might as well have been.) Em had recently seen Tina Brown, the editor of Vanity Fair, on the Today show, describing the new novel by Bret Easton Ellis as “a meteor blazing across the sky of fin-de-siècle Manhattan.” Who said things like that?! She’d immediately written it down in her new little notebook.
On the page she’d just read, the two main characters, who had been in a minor fight, resolved their differences in the space of a single paragraph:
The problem was that both Alicia and Kate expected the other to apologize, when in fact what would have solved their argument was for both of them to apologize, each to the other. And the measure of their friendship was that a day later they saw one another at the diner and, nearly in unison, said, “I’m so sorry.” Alicia laughed merrily and dabbed at her eyes; Kate cried through a smile. Kate bought Alicia’s cup of coffee, and Alicia bought Kate’s tea. To the outside eye, they each spent a dollar, but what mattered was the generosity of the impulse, not the result.
This was no meteor blazing across the sky of fin-de-siècle Manhattan! These people could be apologizing to each other any old year! It felt—Em wrinkled her nose—whatever the opposite of timely was.
Another thing: Everyone in the novel was basically always happy. There were misunderstandings and arguments here and there, but they were always wrapped up, like the one in that passage, with a quick apology or a heartfelt conversation during a walk. There was absolutely, positively nothing transgressive about the novel. She had recently read a short story collection that Darwin had recommended. It was full of sex, drugs, and cruelty. One story was about a sadist who spanked his secretary. The book was called Bad Behavior. Lucy’s novel might as well have been called Good Behavior.
She supposed she should ask Edith, a putative literary agent, about it. There were publishers, assuredly, who would buy something like this and put it in spinner racks in supermarkets in Wisconsin. But wouldn’t all the Wisconsin moms who might otherwise be interested in a story like this be put off by the descriptions of New York magazine publishing? Lucy certainly didn’t make it seem glamorous—there were no expense account lunches or limo rides to the Condé Nast offices. Alicia seemed, honestly, to be as bewildered by her job as a copy editor as Em was by hers as a putative literary agent’s putative assistant. This resemblance to herself made Em like Alicia more, but it made her worry that other readers wouldn’t like her at all. What could they possibly find admirable in an indecisive wallflower in over her head?
Now Kate, the friend: She was a firecracker. She was funny, she was confident, she had ambition where Alicia sort of drifted through her job. She didn’t agonize over a simple date; she unapologetically went out with whoever she wanted to. She was only in a few scenes, but they were all lively respites from Alicia’s head. And there, Em thought. There was her first note. More Kate. Maybe less Alicia? But definitely more Kate.
Over the course of a week, whenever she wasn’t sending out royalties or filing correspondence or making coffee, Em toggled between her two vastly different manuscripts, The Big One and Can’t Complain, assembling the material for the two edit memos she needed to write. Having never really written an edit memo before, she was pretty nervous. Edith directed her to a few examples in the files but also said airily, “Oh, you’ll feel when it’s right.” (Em had asked if Edith wanted to read the novels, and Edith said, “It’s a little early for that, isn’t it, dear?” She supposed it was good that she had autonomy, but that didn’t mean she understood what she was doing.)
Her notes for Scot Salem were a bit of a mess. His book seemed so confident in itself that all Em’s suggestions felt beside the point. Yes, developing the girlfriend character a little would be satisfying, but would that really transform the novel? Certainly not. Yes, the villain—a police captain simply referred to throughout as The Captain—was over the top, biblically evil, but clearly that was Scot Salem’s intention, and who was she to tell him that was wrong? Take the scene in which The Captain pierced a man’s cheek with an enormous hook, connected the other end to his police car, and drove through the desert dragging the man behind him, “flopping on the sand like a mackerel desperate to breathe on the deck of a trawler.” Like, typing Is this too much? seemed absurd. Of course it was too much; that was the point. “Do you need the mackerel part?” she imagined asking, and flinched at the withering scorn with which Scot Salem would surely respond.
