The Great Wide Open, page 55
‘I so appreciate your insights into my brother and his family.’
‘I like the guy. Genuinely.’
‘Would you like him more if he was an assistant professor of philosophy at Columbia making seventeen thousand a year?’
‘We might have more to talk about, but I wouldn’t be here tonight at the St Regis.’
‘Know this: if you do anything to hurt him, or get yourself pregnant, or try any sort of cash grab, the furies will be unleashed on you.’
She looked just a little thrown by what had come out of my mouth. But her shock morphed into a smile that verged on smugness.
‘So much for the docile, bookish, superior-minded editor.’
‘I am bookish, I am not docile, and I certainly consider myself superior to anyone who is invested in men with money. But here’s the thing: you’re clearly bright and know a thing or two about the ways of the world. Have you ever thought about writing a book about fucking your way upward?’
‘You don’t have to be such a bitch.’
I reached into my jacket pocket and fished out the small discreet leather sleeve in which I kept my business cards.
‘I’m actually serious. We could shape your sexual history into feminism meets social Darwinism: how to use the new golden boys to your advantage. It would be the perfect parable for our new age of unapologetic mercantilism.’
Ceren picked up the card I’d slid by her.
‘You’re serious about this?’
‘Indeed I am.’
‘Say I can’t write?’
‘Then we won’t work together. I don’t do ghosted books. But I sense you have this in you. Write me a chapter about the photographer who picked you up in that Istanbul cafe when you weren’t even twenty and got you to Paris. Did he leave his wife and children for you?’
‘It was love.’
‘Which lasted – what? – twelve months?’
‘Six.’
‘Perfect. Write it for me – and make it down and dirty and smart. If I like it, we’ll talk some more.’
‘You don’t have a guy, do you?’ she asked me after the second martini, that moment when the conversation starts to get even more nudist.
‘There might be someone … but he’s away for a while.’
‘And you’re just waiting for him?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Waiting for someone is romantic folly. Then again, I’ve been in love around twenty times … which probably means I love being in love. Unlike you. You’ve known it, haven’t you?’
‘Did Adam tell you that?’
‘Actually no. I’m just surmising again.’
‘Yes I’ve known love.’
‘Why did it end?’
‘Because his head was blown off in a bomb blast.’
To her credit Ceren didn’t flinch, didn’t throw her eyes heavenward, didn’t say anything inane like: ‘You’re shitting me.’ She just met my gaze, saying nothing. And then Adam showed up, immediately noting the silence between us.
‘You gals get into a fight or something?’ he asked.
‘Hardly,’ Ceren said. ‘I’m just learning that you have quite the remarkable sister.’
‘She’s tougher than me,’ Adam said, giving my shoulder a gentle locker-room-style shake.
‘That she is.’
Ceren did contact me two weeks later, telling me she had a chapter to show me. I told her to drop it by the office and that we’d be in touch.
‘Will you read it or give it to one of your minions?’ she asked.
‘Oh, I’ll read it – and I don’t have minions. Just a junior editor and a secretary. If I like it I’ll take you to lunch.’
‘If not … ’
‘We won’t be meeting – but I will tell you why it didn’t work for me.’
‘You’re very direct.’
‘That’s my style.’
Jack once noted the same thing, telling me: ‘You often offer the pill unsweetened, but you do so in a way that is never cruel or freighted with your own stuff … even though everything we do in life is completely freighted with our own stuff.’
Jack. There was a framed photo of us on my office wall; the same office which he once occupied. The photo showed me and Jack at a conference table, a manuscript in front of us, Jack indicating a much notated paragraph filled with his scribbled comments. I showed it to Cheryl Abeloff on her first day as my junior. Cheryl was a native Manhattanite, angular and serious, with a boyfriend who taught public school and Park Avenue parents who couldn’t figure out why she was rejecting their largesse and living in the Siberia that was Brooklyn (Bushwick – a near slum). Like me she was edgy. And ambitious. And willing to learn. Pointing to Jack’s photo I told her:
‘He was truly old school and someone who knew full well that editing is a skill you pass on – which I would like to do with you. But you also need to understand: I never expected to be in this job at such a young point in my life. I am making it up as I go along – not that you are ever to repeat that comment to anyone.’
‘Anything we say to each other stays between us,’ Cheryl said.
‘That’s how Jack and I operated – and one of the many reasons why it worked.’
Thinking back on my years in school, in college, the time I hid out in Vermont, I truly never saw myself as someone who aspired to be a boss. Assertion and command were foreign ideas to me. Just as having an important executive post in a company – albeit a literary one – was never an ambition. But here I was in my thirtieth year, in charge of a list, in charge of a budget, in charge of others, and accountable to the financial and commercial people whom we liked to dismiss as numbers obsessed, but who were the key to the amount of latitude I had (or did not have) as an editor. I did all the parties, all the schmoozing lunches with literary journalists and fellow members of the publishing tribe, but then I went home to my very simple apartment and worked most nights on manuscripts until at least one. I found I could get by quite well on six hours of sleep, wake by seven, go run in Riverside Park for a half-hour and be at my desk no later than nine. Every week a letter from Duncan would arrive, written in his hieroglyphic scrawl, with exotic postmarks (Casablanca, Ouarzazate, Algiers) and brimming with his traveler’s tales. I learned of his encounters with bureaucracy (he was held for five hours at the Algerian border because some guard decided that the first American he had encountered crossing in about a year was worth hassling). He wrote about riding dusty trains with blocked toilets, and meeting a French priest in Algiers whose small parish church had recently been attacked by a band of thugs. He spoke of the wonders of Moroccan souks and how he wanted to bring me to the Sahara at some juncture in the future ‘because it enforces the solitary nature of human existence and reminds you that the need to truly connect with someone is key to keeping all the encroaching darkness at bay’.
That was another constant theme in his letters – his longing for me. Reading him, so entwining myself in his smart, shrewd narratives, wishing to God he’d traveled with a typewriter (it really was a job deciphering his penmanship), yet simultaneously focusing closely on those phrases where he indicated the seriousness of his feelings for me … it was indeed wondrous when I came home and found a new Duncan missive in my mailbox. It also augmented my own desperate need to be close to him. That was the ‘didn’t see this coming’ surprise in the aftermath of all those revelations at the airport: the fact that I should have convinced him to stay for a few more days to consummate our connection to each other. I cursed myself regularly for letting that opportunity pass. But when he suggested that I join him in Tunisia for a few weeks in early August I wrote back and said that, as much as I wanted to be there with him, it was just weeks before our fall titles hit the street. As this was the first year the list was under my banner (so to speak) I simply had to be there all summer to plot and plan the best press, publicity and marketing plans for my titles, also fearing that if I was away (even for a week) all would somehow go awry. But could we perhaps think about running off somewhere after Christmas for a week (when he was due back stateside)?
‘You are turning into a poster child for Workaholism,’ Howie told me when we met in early June for our weekly night out. Cornelius Parker hadn’t pulled off the Pulitzer, but he did win the National Book Award – and we had just signed him for another two novels. But a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt – which controversially touched on her lesbianism and FDR’s many affairs – got very mixed reviews and simply did not do the business that we all were expecting.
‘Honey,’ Howie said, ‘no one wants to believe that the great social justice First Lady was also a muff diver. No wonder the book stiffed.’
‘Why don’t you say that a little louder – so the people at the far end of the restaurant can hear us?’
‘English is the minority language at this joint. And I’d recommend the blinis and smoked herring with a shot of vodka.’
We were at the Lithuanian Social Club on Second Avenue and 6th Street, a place that my friend had discovered courtesy of the newest guy he was seeing: a professional bodybuilder from Vilnius who was determined to win the Mr America contest this year.
‘Nojus is modeling himself on that Schwarzenegger clown who’s just broken into the movies after doing the rippled-muscle thing for years, while also hanging out with Warhol and his Factory crowd. Andy’s sense of irony must have gone into overdrive when Arnold the Beefcake started becoming a fixture of his vicious little circle.’
‘So Nojus is also trying to be a Warhol acolyte?’
‘I love the way you’re Frenchifying his name. No-Jeux. Very charming. But the way to say it is No-Juice … though he has no deficiencies in that department.’
‘Thanks for sharing that charming detail.’
‘Thank you for going all prudish on me. What are you doing for amusement while your beloved is fending off sultry Muslim Jezebels?’
‘Whatever Duncan is doing out in the great wide world is his business. We haven’t pledged anything to each other just yet.’
‘That’s very forward-thinking and Bloomsbury Group of you. But you still haven’t answered the question: who are you turning to for sex?’
‘My manuscripts.’
‘You are so dull, Burns.’
‘Unlike your hedonist self. I hope you’re being careful with Nojus.’
‘I’m being careful with everyone. Six more friends have just been diagnosed with it. And I know another dozen or so people who are in varying stages of dying. It’s all too relentless.’
‘And you? No signs of anything?’
‘So far so clear. My doctor tells me that they still have no idea how long the incubation period is, or when it might arise out of nowhere in anyone’s immune system. I keep thinking of Jack at the end.’
‘I try not to,’ I said. ‘It’s all too hard. I’d rather think of him before AIDS overwhelmed him.’
‘I want to think of Jack in Paradise – and that’s not just the Catholic boy in me talking. It’s also someone who’s seen too much death recently and can’t abide the idea that all this suffering results in nullity and void. After what he endured at the end he deserves no less.’
‘Do you remember his dad at the funeral? That old Marine, all leathery around the face and wheezing after a lifetime of cigarettes … ’
‘Look who’s talking … ’
‘I plan to quit on New Year’s Day.’
‘Why don’t you wait until Reagan’s second coronation?’
‘You sound as if it’s a foregone conclusion that the old guy’s going to win again.’
‘Well, I have problems supporting Mondale.’
‘Are you serious, Howie?’
‘The economy is booming. All the negative energy of the Carter years has vanished. Mondale was Carter’s veep. He radiates dreariness.’
‘Can you really vote for our current president who is in the pocket of the religious right and whose communications director – that asshole Pat Buchanan – called AIDS “nature’s revenge on gay men”?’
‘My stocks have never been higher. There is money everywhere. There is more fun out there.’
‘When your next friend dies –’
‘Please shut up, Alice. Your “voice of conscience” routine is putting me in an edgy mood. Especially as I got this rash between my toes just a few days ago, and my doctor has assured me it’s athlete’s foot – picked up in the fucking locker room of the Y on West 14th Street.’
‘If he tells you it’s athlete’s foot … ’
‘I’m still going to be paranoid. My turn is sure to come soon.’
‘Not if you’ve been practicing safe sex.’
‘A condom broke last week. A guy I picked up in the Y.’
‘Oh Jesus, Howie.’
‘At least it was me on top – which lessens the risk. Still … ’
I reached over and took his hand.
‘You’ll be okay.’
‘You really do have this Ms Optimism aspect to you.’
‘What else can I do but think positively … especially when it comes to you?’
‘I am going to quickly change the subject and give you a serious piece of advice: get on a plane to Tunis in early August, meet your man, make mad crazy love with him for a week, then get back to New York and launch your list. You need to see him … and he so wants you to come.’
‘I can’t afford the time. There is just too much going on.’
‘If you lose him … ’
‘Then it wasn’t meant to be.’
‘I hate that way of looking at the world. Especially as it’s sidestepping the fact that you have a degree of say in what will or will not happen here. You have a chance here – with a man who is good, interesting, just the right side of complicated, and rather dishy. After all those detached years with Toby you now crave entanglement. Just like the rest of us.’
‘Then why haven’t you found it?’
‘Because I am as scared as you are.’
I did get a letter a week later from Duncan, telling me all about heading deep into the south of Algeria and crossing into Mali and that fabled desert outpost, Timbuktu, and how he was genuinely longing for me.
As I was for him. But with rumors abounding that the house was being targeted for takeover by this Australian media baron named Murdoch (who was already making inroads into Britain but was still an unknown quantity in this country), the powers that be at Fowler, Newman and Kaplan were emphasizing that it was an ‘all hands on deck’ moment. The ageing chairman of the house, C.C. Fowler, took me to lunch one day at the Century Club – that sclerotic hangout for the New York literati – and remained quite lucid after drinking two very dry gin martinis (not bad for an eighty-two-year-old), telling me:
‘I won’t lie to you. My money people have been approached by Murdoch’s money people. Trust me, I want to remain independent. I think Murdoch is more interested in a bigger house like Harper and Co. than us. Still, the days when publishing was a gentlemanly pursuit are fast drawing to an end. My grandfather would have had an editor drawn and quartered for even suggesting that we publish, let alone rush through, a book like Sleeping Upward by your Turkish literary find – and yes, you can hear the irony in my voice. Still, the sales and marketing people think that the Thanksgiving weekend launch date, and the big media blitz we’ll be doing on her, should yield results.’
‘The book is going to be huge. Because it will speak exactly to the new careerist woman making her way in this new hyper-capitalist world of ours. Anyway, the fact that we can publish Cornelius Parker and Ceren … it shows the flexibility and range of our list.’
‘One small issue: please reassure me again that the press will not make a big deal about Ceren being your brother’s mistress.’
‘They will jump all over that. Let them. We’ll play it to our advantage. The media will be all over her due to her unapologetic views on using sex as a transactional tool to get where you want, and the fact that she is articulate as hell and seriously beautiful. It’s going to be the big “naughty” Christmas book that everyone will be talking about.’
‘Meanwhile your brother gets richer all the time. I read about the big bond refinancing thing for US Steel a couple of days back.’
‘The fellow does have the golden touch.’
‘Just like your realtor mom. I saw that she just closed that big deal for some empty-headed starlet … ’
‘She’s cornered the rich bimbo market, along with plutocrats and all those ambitious women who are going to read Ceren’s book.’
‘Let’s hope the golden touch runs in the family.’
Was that a warning, a veiled threat? It certainly made me focus even harder on the autumn list – and truly build Ceren’s book into a zeitgeisty blockbuster.
Just to test the book with an older demographic I gave Mom the manuscript of Sleeping Upward. She rang me up the next night, near to midnight, all worried.
‘How can Adam fuck such an operator?’ she asked.
‘He can handle Ceren – because, though lavishing stuff on her, he’s not legally spliced to her. Yet.’
‘But that’s her game plan. You know it. I know it. But your brother’s too much of a sexual sucker not to see it. When Janet and her redneck clan find out he’s been shtupping a far more accomplished and dangerously gorgeous woman they are going to try and ruin him … especially with the new baby about to arrive in a couple of weeks. He won’t listen to me. And your dad gets all Irish Catholic about anything to do with divorce.’
‘You still won’t let him move in with you?’
‘Not in this lifetime. We did that for far too many decades and we did it badly. Why recreate that? The thing is: I do well on my own. Your father is struggling. “You cannot change others; you can only try to change yourself” – as my shrink keeps telling me. He also keeps hammering home the idea that I can’t lay all blame at the feet of my yenta mother and emotionally absent father. Or continue to scream and shout that your father forced me to be a housewife in the fucking burbs. I was complicit in all that. I created my own prison. And I victimized you and the boys because of that. I see that now and am actually ashamed of it.’
