Three-Martini Lunch E-Book

Suzanne Rindell

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 789

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Back in those days My Old Man was king of what they called the three-martini lunch. This meant that in dimly lit steakhouses all over Manhattan my father made bold, impetuous deals over gin and oysters. That was how it was done. Publishing was a place for men with ferocity and an appetite for life Cliff Nelson is the privileged son of an editor at a New York publishing house. Having dropped out of college he's slumming it around Greenwich village, enjoying the nightlife, booze, drugs and the idea that he's the next Kerouac. Eden Katz arrives in New York fresh-faced and filled with ambition to realise her dream of becoming an editor. She has to develop a thicker skin and adopt an imposture of her own in order to succeed. Finally Miles Tillman, a black soon-to-be Columbia graduate and publishing house bike messenger, is an aspiring writer who feels he straddles various worlds and belongs to none. Their choices, concealments and betrayals as they reach for their goals ripple outwards leaving none of them unchanged.

Leseprobe

Three-Martini Lunch

SUZANNE RINDELL

To Amy Einhorn and Jake Morrissey, formerly ‘work-wife’ and ‘work-husband.’

It is only fitting a book about publishing be dedicated to editors

‘Nobody ever became a writer by just wanting to be one.’

– F. SCOTT FITZGERALD,

in a letter to his daughter and aspiring writer, Scottie

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraph  1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344454647484950515253545556575859606162636465666768697071727374757677  EpilogueCliffEdenMilesAcknowledgementsBy Suzanne RindellCopyright

1

CLIFF

Greenwich Village in ’58 was a madman’s paradise. In those days a bunch of us went around together drinking too much coffee and smoking too much cannabis and talking all the time about poetry and Nietzsche and bebop. I had been running around with the same guys I knew from Columbia – give or take a coloured jazz musician here or a benny addict there – and together we would get good and stoned and ride the subway down to Washington Square. I guess you could say I liked my Columbia buddies all right. They were swell enough guys but, when you really got down to it, they were a pack of poser wannabe-poets in tweed and I knew it was only a matter of time before I outgrew them. Their fathers were bankers and lawyers and once their fascination with poetic manifestos wore off they would settle down and become bankers and lawyers, too, and marry a nice debutante. If I’m being honest, I’ll admit I was mostly pissing away my time in school and not trying very hard, on account of the fact I’d lost the interest. With every passing day I was becoming increasingly convinced academia was for the birds, and the more time I spent below Fourteenth Street, the more it was becoming obvious to me that the Village was my true education.

When I finally threw in the towel and dropped my last class at Columbia, My Old Man came poking around my apartment in Morningside Heights. He ahemed quietly to himself and fingered the waxy leaves of the plants in the window and finally sat with his rump covering a water stain on a hand-me-down Louis XVI sofa my great-aunt had deemed too ugly to keep in her own apartment. Together we drank a couple of fingers of bourbon neat, and then he shook my hand in a dignified way and informed me the best lesson he could teach me at this point in my life was self-reliance. His plan mainly involved cutting me off from the family fortune and making long speeches on the superior quality of earned pleasures.

Once My Old Man broke the news about how I was going to have to pave my own road, it was all over pretty quickly after that. I threw a couple of loud parties and didn’t pay my rent and then the landlord had me out lickety-split and I had to go looking for a new place.

Which is how, as I entered into my study of the relative value of earned pleasures, I found myself renting a one-room studio in the Village with no hot water and a toilet down the hall. The lid was missing on the tank of that toilet and I remember the worst thing I ever did to my fellow hallmates was to get sick after coming home drunk one night and mistake the open tank for the open bowl. But even without my whiskey-induced embellishments the building was a dump. It was a pretty crummy apartment and when it rained the paint on the walls bubbled something awful, but I liked being near the basement cafes where people were passionate about trying out new things with the spoken word, which was still pretty exciting to me at the time. In those days you could walk the streets all around Washington Square and plunge down a narrow stairway here and there to find a room painted all black with red lightbulbs screwed into the fixtures and there’d be someone standing in front of a crowd, telling America to go to hell or maybe acting out the birth of a sacred cow in India. It was all kind of bananas and you were never sure what you were going to see, but after a while you started to come across the same people mostly.

I had seen Miles, Swish, Bobby, and Pal around the Village, of course, and they had seen me, too. We were friendly enough with one another, all of us being arty types. I knew their faces and I knew their names but the night I really entered the picture I was in such a sorry state, it was a real act of mercy on their part. I was slated to read my poems for the first time ever at a place called the Sweet Spot. Earlier that afternoon I had been looking over my pages when it suddenly struck me they were no good. The discovery had me seized up with fear until my whole body was paralysed and I sensed I was rank with the stench of my impending failure. The poems were bad and that was the truth of it. My solution was whiskey, and by six o’clock I had managed to put down half a bottle before the poems finally started to look better than they had at 3 p.m. In my foolish state I decided finishing the other half of the bottle would be the key to gaining at least a few more increments of poetic improvement. By the time I took the stage I could barely hold myself upright. Somehow I managed to get off two poems … more or less … before I heard the wooden stool next to me clatter to the ground as it fell over and I felt the cold sticky black-painted floor rise up like a swelling wave to my hip and shoulder and, seconds later, my face.

When I came to I was lying on a couch in Swish’s apartment with the whole gang sitting around the kitchen table, talking in loud voices about Charlie Parker while a seminal record of his spun on a turntable near my head. After a few minutes Pal came over and handed me a cool washcloth for my bruised face. Then Bobby whistled and commented that I had ‘some kind of madman style’ in an admiring tone of voice that made me think perhaps the two poems I could remember getting off hadn’t been so bad after all and maybe it was even true that in getting wasted I had actually made the truest choice an artist could make, like Van Gogh and his absinthe. I could see they were all deciding whether I was a hack or a genius, and the fact they might be open to the second possibility being true fortified me and filled me with a kind of dopey pride. Then Swish boiled some coffee on the stove and brought it over to me. He told me his religion was coffee and he couldn’t abide his guests adding milk or sugar and so I shouldn’t ever expect him to offer any of that stuff. The coffee was so thick you could have set a spoon in the centre of the mug and it would’ve stood up straight and never touched the sides. Later when I learnt more about Swish he told me that was how you made it when you were on the road and once you’d had your coffee like that everything else tasted like water. I guess some of Swish’s romantic passion about cowboy coffee wore off on me, because after that night I sneered at anything someone brought me that happened to have a creamy shade or sweetened taste.

Swish’s given name was Stewart and he was nicknamed Swish because he was always in a hurry. He was one of those wiry, nervous guys with energy to spare. After I’d taken a few sips of Swish’s coffee and managed to work my forehead over some more with the washcloth, I was feeling well enough to join them at the kitchen table and dive into the talk about Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and all of a sudden it was like I had always had a seat at that table and had just never known it. The frenzied tempo of their chatter was contagious. They conversed like musicians improvising jazz and I hoped some of this would find its way into my writing. Between the five of us we finished off a pot of coffee and two packs of cigarettes and fourteen bottles of beer and shared the dim awareness that a small but sturdy union had been formed.

Swish regaled us with his adventures riding the rails across America like a hobo and about the year he’d spent in the Merchant Marine. Even though he’d never finished high school he had still managed to feed his mind all sorts of good solid stuff. In talking to Swish I realised all those guys at Columbia who thought they had the edge over you because they went to Exeter or Andover were all pretty much full of horseshit because here was Swish and he was better read than anybody and his education had been entirely loaned out to him from the public library for no money at all. I worried that maybe I’d offended Swish because I said something to set him off and he went on to give a big argumentative lecture all about John Locke and Mikhail Bakunin and about Thoreau. But my worries about having offended him were unfounded because I later realised Swish was one of those guys with a naturally combative disposition.

After he’d finished harping on old Mikhail’s theories about anarchy, I asked Swish what he did for a living now that his hobo days were over.

‘Bicycle messenger,’ he replied. ‘Miles here is, too.’

I regarded Miles, who seemed like an odd fit for this group. He was a slender, athletic-looking Negro with sharp cheekbones that would’ve made him appear haughty if they had not been offset by his brooding eyes. He wore the kind of horn-rimmed glasses that were popular all over the Village just then. He nodded but didn’t comment further and I gathered that being a bicycle messenger wasn’t his primary passion and figured him for a jazz musician. He had the name and the look for it, after all.

Anyway, the topic of conversation turned to me and what my ambitions were, and sitting there at the table I already felt so comfortable and everything seemed so familiar, I found myself confessing to the fact I’d recently come to the conclusion that I’d decided to become a writer. Only problem was, ever since I’d arrived at this decision, I’d been having a spell of writer’s block.

‘I’ll tell you what you do,’ Swish said, his wiry body tensing up with conviction. ‘You hop on the next boxcar and ride until you’re full up with so many ideas you feel your fingers twitching in your sleep.’

‘Well, I for one think a good old-fashioned roll in the hay would do the trick,’ Bobby chimed in. ‘It’s important to keep the juices flowing.’

‘Says the fella who’s so busy balling two girls at once he can’t make it to any of his auditions,’ said Swish. I asked them what they meant. It turned out Bobby wanted to be an actor but his great obstacle in achieving this ambition was his overwhelming beauty. Under ordinary circumstances this wouldn’t be a problem for an actor but in Bobby’s case it kept him far too busy to get onstage much. Wherever he went, loud-shrieking girls and soft-spoken men alike tried their best to bed him and because Bobby liked to make everyone happy he went along with all of it and was loath to turn anyone down. He was presently keeping two girls in particular happy. One girl lived with a roommate over on Morton Street and the other lived in the Albert Hotel on East Eleventh and this left Bobby constantly hustling from one side of the Village to the other.

Bobby’s recommendation that I ought to ball a girl (or two or three) to get over my writer’s block appeared to disturb Pal’s sense of chivalry and make him shy: he shifted in his chair and set about studying the label on his beer. He was by far the quietest and most difficult guy to read of the pack. Later I found out Pal’s real name was Eugene and he was named after the town in Oregon where he was born and, as far as first impressions go, he often struck people as something of a gentle giant. He was a couple of inches over six feet and had the sleepy blue eyes of a child just woken up from a nap and when he read poetry or, even when he just spoke, his voice was always full of a kind of reverence that made you think he was paying closer attention to the world than you were.

‘How ’bout it, Miles?’ Swish said, continuing the conversation. ‘What do you think helps with writer’s block?’

I didn’t know why Swish had directed the question to Miles. It unnerved me that after I mentioned dropping out of Columbia, Bobby had let it slip that Miles was due to graduate from that very institution come June. The lenses of Miles’s glasses flashed white at us as he looked up in surprise.

‘Well,’ he said, considering carefully, ‘I suppose reading always helps. They say in order to write anything good, you ought to read much more than you write.’

‘Oh, I don’t know about all that,’ I said. I was suddenly in an ornery, contrary mood. The way he had spoken with authority on the subject antagonised me somehow. ‘The most important thing a writer’s gotta do is stay true to his own ideas and write. I don’t read other people’s books when I try to write, I just read my own stuff over and over and I think that’s the way the real heavyweight authors do it.’

Miles didn’t reply to this except to tighten his mouth and nod. It was a polite nod and I sensed there was a difference of opinion behind it and I was suddenly annoyed.

‘Anyway, fellas, I think I’ve given you the wrong idea about me because I’m not really all that stuck,’ I said, deciding it was time for a change of topic. ‘I’ve written piles and piles of stuff and I’m always getting new ideas.’

This was mostly true, and the more I thought about it now the more I began to think perhaps it wasn’t writer’s block at all but more a case of my energies needing to build up in order to reach a kind of critical mass. Back then everyone in the neighbourhood was talking about a certain famous hipster who had written an entire novel in three weeks on nothing but coffee and bennies and about how he had let it build up until it had just come pouring out of him and about how the result had been published by an actual publisher and I thought maybe that was how it might work for me, too. If I just soaked up the nervous energy of my generation and let it accumulate inside me until it spilt over the top, I was sure eventually a great flood would come. Swish and Bobby and Pal all seemed like part of this process and I was very glad they had inducted me into the group. Even Miles was all right in the way that a rival can push you to do better work. Perhaps it was the mixture of the whiskey and coffee and beer and bennies but I suddenly had that high feeling you get when you sense you are in the middle of some kind of important nerve centre. I closed my eyes and felt the pulse of the Village thundering through my veins and all at once I was very confident about all I was destined to accomplish.

2

Looking back on it now, I see that New York in the ’50s made for a unique scene. If you lived in Manhattan during that time, you experienced the uniqueness in the colours and flavours of the city that were more defined and more distinct from one another than they were in other cities or other times. If you ask me, I think it was the war that had made things this way. All the energy of the war effort was now poured into the manufacture of neon signs, shiny chrome bumpers, bright plastic things, and that meant all of a sudden there was a violent shade of Formica to match every desire. All of it was for sale and people had lots of dough to spend and to top it off the atom bomb was constantly hovering in the back of all our minds: its bright white flash and the shadow of its mushroom cloud casting a kind of imaginary yet urgent light over everything that surrounded us.

Shortly after the fellas revived me at Swish’s apartment, I fell in regularly with the gang and soon enough I found out Miles was a writer, too. I should’ve known all along because everyone who was young and hip and living in New York at that time all wanted to do the same thing and that was to try and become a writer. Years later they would want to become folk musicians or else potters who threw odd-shaped clay vases but in ’58 everyone still wanted to be a writer and in particular they wanted to write something truer and purer than everything that had come before.

There were a lot of different opinions as to what it took to make yourself a good writer. The people in the city were always looking to get out and go west and the people out west were always looking to get into the city. Everybody felt like they were on the outside looking in all the time; really it was just that the hipster scene tended to turn everything inside out and the whole idea was that we were all outsiders together.

I had always scribbled here and there but I didn’t try to write in earnest until I left Columbia and got cut off and moved to the Village and this was maybe a little ironic because My Old Man was an editor at a big publishing house. He had wanted to be a writer himself but had gone a different way with that and had become an editor instead, although he never said it that way to people who came for dinner. When people came over for dinner he mostly just told jokes about writers. It turns out there are lots of jokes you can tell about writers.

I had a lot of funny feelings about My Old Man. On the one hand, there was some pretty lousy business he’d gotten into in Brooklyn that he didn’t think I knew about. But on the other hand, he was one of those larger-than-life types you can’t help but look up to in spite of yourself. He had a magnetic personality. Back in those days My Old Man was king of what they called the three-martini lunch. This meant that in dimly lit steakhouses all over Manhattan my father made bold, impetuous deals over gin and oysters. That was how it was done. Publishing was a place for men with ferocity and an appetite for life. Sure, the shy, tweedy types survived in the business all right but it was the garrulous bon vivants who really thrived and left their mark on the world. Lunches were long, expense accounts were generous, and the martinis often fuelled tremendous quantities of flattery and praise. Of course all that booze fuelled injuries, too, and the workday wasn’t really over until someone had been insulted by Norman Mailer or pulled out the old boxing gloves in one way or another.

I was passionate about being a writer and My Old Man was passionate about being an editor and you would think between the two of us this would make for a bang-up combination, but my big problem was that My Old Man and I had our issues and I hadn’t exactly told him about my latest ambitions. He’d always expressed disappointment over my lacklustre performance in school and now that I’d dropped out and was spending all my time in the Village, he thought I was a jazz-crazed drunkard. His idea of good jazz was Glenn Miller and it was his personal belief that if you listened to any other kind you were a dope fiend of some sort.

But whether or not My Old Man ever helped me out, I was determined to make it as a writer. In fact, sometimes it was more satisfying to think about becoming a writer without My Old Man even knowing. I’d written a couple of short stories that, in my eyes, were very good and it was only logical that in time I would write a novel and that would be good, too. I thought a lot about what it would be like once I made it, the swell reviews I would get in The Times and the Herald Tribune about my novel, the awards I’d probably win, and how all the newspaper men would want to interview me over martinis at the ‘21’ Club. But the problem with this is sometimes I got so caught up in my head writing imaginary drafts of the good reviews I was bound to receive, it made it difficult to write the actual novel.

On days when I was having trouble punching the typewriter, I began to find little errands to run in the evenings that usually involved going down to the cafes in order to tell Swish and Bobby and Pal something important I had discovered that day about writing and being and existence. After I had delivered this message of course it was necessary to stay and enjoy a beer together and toast the fact we had been born to be philosophers and therefore understood what it was to really be. Sometimes Miles was there and sometimes he was not and I didn’t always notice the difference because he was so reserved and only hung around our group in a peripheral way.

But Miles was there one afternoon when I went to a cafe to write. I had decided my crummy studio apartment was partly to blame for my writer’s block and that I ought to try writing in a cafe. After all, Hemingway had written in cafes when he was just starting out in Paris and if that method had worked for Hemingway then I supposed it was good enough for me. The cafe I happened to choose was very crowded that day and the tables were all taken when I got there but I spied Miles at a cosy little table in the far corner of the room and just as I spotted him he looked up and saw me, too.

‘Miserable day outside,’ I said, referring to the rain.

‘Yes.’

Miles and I had never spent time together on our own and naturally now that we were alone there was an awkwardness between us and it dawned on both of us how little we truly knew each other. I squinted at the items on the table in an attempt to surmise what he had been up to before I had come in.

‘Are you writing something, too?’ I asked, seeing the notebook and the telltale ink stain on his thumb and forefinger.

‘I’m only fooling around,’ Miles answered, but I could tell this was a lie because peeking out of his notebook were a few typewritten pages, which meant whatever Miles was working on he cared about enough to take the trouble to type it up.

‘I see you own a typewriter,’ I said, pointing to the pages.

‘The library does,’ he said, looking embarrassed. I couldn’t tell whether the embarrassment was due to the fact that he was too poor to own a typewriter or because it was obvious he took his writing more seriously than he’d wanted to let on.

‘They charge you for that?’ I asked, trying to make conversation.

He nodded. ‘Ten cents a half hour. It’s not too bad. I’ve taught myself to type at a fairly good speed now.’

‘That’s swell,’ I said. ‘Say, do you mind if I settle in here and do a little scribbling of my own?’ I asked, finally getting to my point.

‘Of course not,’ Miles said, pushing a coffee mug and some papers out of the way on the table. He had a very polite, formal way about him and it was difficult to tell whether he truly minded. But whether he minded or not didn’t matter because after all he’d said yes and I needed to write and there really weren’t any other tables and I wasn’t going to go look for another cafe because by then it was really coming down cats and dogs outside. I pulled out my composition book and fountain pen and set to work staring at the thin blue lines that ran across the white paper. About ten or so minutes passed and I had made a very good study of the blank page. Then my nose started to itch and my knee began to bounce under the table. I looked up at Miles and watched him scrawling frantically in his notebook. I was curious what it was that had gotten him worked up in a torrent like that. He was so absorbed in his writing he didn’t notice me staring at him. Finally, I asked him what he was working on. The first time I asked he did not hear me so I cleared my throat and asked again, more loudly. He jumped as if I’d woken him out of a trance and blinked at me.

‘It’s a short story, I suppose …’ he said. This was news to me because, like I said, nobody had bothered to tell me Miles wrote anything at all, let alone fiction. Between his attending Columbia and writing, I was beginning to feel a little unsettled by all the things we had in common. Something about Miles was making me itchy around the collar.

‘I don’t know if it’s any good,’ he said.

‘Say, why don’t you let me have a look at it?’ I replied, catching him off guard and reaching for the notebook before he could put up a fight. ‘I know good fiction. My Old Man is an editor at Bonwright.’ His eyes widened at this and I knew it had temporarily shut him up. I flipped the notebook open and moved my eyes over the tidy cursive on the page.

It wasn’t terrible. Miles was a decent enough writer, all right – save for the fact that he wrote in a careful, old-fashioned voice, and that was probably on account of him being an educated Negro. All the educated Negroes I’d ever known were always a little stiff and took their educations a little too seriously in my opinion. But all and all, I could see he had a way with words and it wasn’t half-bad. I had to admit I liked the story okay. It was about two boys on the war front who discover they’re half-brothers but they’ve always been competitors and don’t like each other. When they get into a real bad scrape one has the option to let the other die and be off the hook for the death, but he hesitates.

‘How are you going to end it?’ I said, coming to the place where the cursive trailed off.

Miles shrugged.

‘Maybe just like that,’ he said. ‘It was the hesitation that interested me.’

I shook my head. ‘He should hesitate all right,’ I said. ‘And decide against his better sense to save his brother. But then when he does, the other fellow shoots him with the dead German’s gun, like the sucker he is.’ Miles looked at me with raised eyebrows. I could see my suggestion was unexpected.

‘I suppose that would … make quite a statement.’

‘Exactly,’ I said, feeling magnanimous for loaning out my superior creativity. ‘It’s not worth writing if it doesn’t make a statement.’ Miles looked at me and I could already see he wasn’t going to write it the way I suggested, which was a mistake. It was a good twist and I had made a nice gift out of it for him and it was awfully annoying that he wasn’t going to take the wonderful gift I had just bestowed upon him.

‘Well, anyway,’ I said, ‘suit yourself with the ending.’

I handed the journal back to him and attempted to get back to work. Miles sat there a moment looking at me with a wary expression on his face. Then he turned back to his own work. We were silent together and all at once the words started coming and I found I could write and for several minutes the only sound you could hear at our table came from the scratching of our duelling fountain pens.

But it was no good. I had helped Miles along with his plot and now I couldn’t get it out of my head. I was off and running and writing something but soon enough I realised I was just writing his story all over again, but better. The thing that really got to me as I wrote was that it really ought to have been my story in the first place. You should always write what you know and I was something of an authority on unwanted relatives, but of course Miles couldn’t know that. Now that he had started writing that story, I couldn’t go and write anything similar, even if he was going to botch the ending.

‘How’d you come up with the idea for that story, anyway?’ I asked, feeling irritated that I hadn’t thought of it first. Miles looked up.

‘I was trying to remember some of my father’s stories about the Battle of the Marne; that’s why I picked the setting. And the idea of brothers and all the rest of it’ – he shrugged – ‘just came out of my imagination. Like I said, I’m not sure it’s any good. I usually can’t tell about my own work until several drafts and a few months later.’

‘Well, it has potential. I wouldn’t take it too hard,’ I said. ‘You strike me as a guy who works pretty hard at it, and that’s what counts, right?’

Miles looked at me, not saying anything.

‘Say, I’m thirsty,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we order up something stronger than coffee?’

After a brief bout of resistance he could see I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. We spent the afternoon drinking and talking about the Pulitzer and the Nobel and the differences between French writers and Russian writers and to tell the truth I had a decent enough time talking to Miles. I decided it would be fine if we ran into each other on our own again, so long as I didn’t have to sit across from him as he scribbled away in his notebook, writing the kind of stories I should’ve been writing but with all the wrong endings.

3

After that day in the cafe with Miles, I decided to try to jump-start my writing by going on a bender and hitting each and every party I could. The idea was, I was a young guy and I ought to be gathering experiences and then once I had a bunch of wild stories inside me the writing would just flow. This had an unfortunate side effect other than the obvious, because besides hangovers this was also how I made the acquaintance of a one Mr Rusty Morrisdale.

Rusty Morrisdale was the assistant to a very important and well-known literary agent who, before the war, had been credited with making a handful of writers very famous. Rusty’s boss was quite old; no one knew exactly how old the famous agent was and just like the man’s career his age had become the stuff of legend. I won’t mention his name here but if you know anything about publishing at all then you will know exactly whom I mean. According to most people in the industry, you were not an important writer unless this literary agent had discovered you and anointed you and introduced you to all the best editors. Anyway, that’s what they all said and here Rusty was, the personal secretary to this man.

I think it must’ve been because of Bobby that Rusty came around at first. Rusty was a scrawny, rat-faced dandy of a kid who acquired his nickname by virtue of his rust-coloured hair. I mentioned Bobby was beautiful in a way that even guys who went around with girls noticed and Rusty was not the sort to go around with girls at all and so was even more likely to pay his respects to Bobby’s beauty. There was something kind of dopey and all-American about Bobby, and yet he and his lopsided grin were difficult to resist. He was a tanned, gangly kid who looked like he had spent half of his youth going to Sunday school and operating farm equipment and the other half stealing eggs out of chicken coops and lamming from the police for petty crimes. He’d taken the bus to New York from Utah and was desperate to do anything or know anybody who might scrub some of that squeaky Salt Lake rime off his skin. Bobby had great intellectual aspirations and always wanted to talk about important books but, unlike Swish, if you actually entered into a conversation with him you discovered he had not read that many important books so much as seen and admired their jackets. I’m guessing Rusty saw Bobby from afar and got the bright and thoroughly unoriginal idea it might be nice to bed him and after getting a little closer to Bobby and speaking with him, this desire had only increased in both magnitude and intensity.

When a guy named Rex Taylor who I’d been pretty chummy with at Columbia invited me to a house party he was throwing, I invited Bobby. He’d recently broken things off with both of his girls and was primed for some fun. It was always a smart thing if you were going to a party to invite Bobby, because all the prettiest chicks flocked to Bobby and if you were standing next to him it was like they were flocking to you, too. He was supposed to go drinking with Rusty that night and he told Rusty he couldn’t go because now he was going to go to the party with me, but then I guess Bobby felt pretty bad about leaving Rusty out in the cold like that because he ended up telling Rusty he could tag along if he liked and of course Rusty liked. It was a BYOB party and when Rusty met us at my apartment he showed up carrying six bottles of eighteen-year-old Scotch and so we thought maybe in the end it was all right to have him along. I didn’t know who Rusty was or who he worked for then, but I figured the math was right because anyone who showed up places with six bottles of eighteen-year-old Scotch was OK in my book and so we loaned him a shirt and helped him peg his pant legs to match ours and then set out as a group to find the party.

Rex lived rent-free in a swanky brownstone on West Seventy-Fourth Street. His parents owned the building and evidently his old man felt differently than mine did about the value of earned pleasures. The Taylors were old money and their fortune slid from one generation to the next with ease. My family was old money, too, but only on my mother’s side. This meant My Old Man had come up in the world. He had that way about him that people who are raised poor and come into money later in life do in that sometimes he was a spendthrift and other times he was a tightwad. He blew hot and cold when it came to giving me money and I guessed this was partly because of that business out in Bensonhurst. In any case it was irritating because it meant he was an unreliable source of income. Sometimes when he was in a generous mood after having drunk a lot of martinis with his lunch or else wine with his dinner he would remember how he had been the recipient of a lot of people’s benevolence and then he would soften up and slip me fifty bucks here or there but I always had to ask.

Together Bobby, Rusty, and I rode the train up from the Village, carrying two bottles of Scotch apiece. Bobby got the idea to open one of his bottles and we passed it around some on the train, our breath coming alive with the hot caramelised odour of malt and oak as middle-class businessmen with their newspapers and umbrellas frowned at us and scandalised mothers scooted away from us and hugged their children tighter. At Forty-Second Street, a real-life Indian got on the train wearing a beaded belt and a feathered headband and long black braids and all of that business and Bobby, already feeling warm and friendly from the Scotch, held out the opened bottle to the Indian and said, ‘Little sip of fire-water for ya, Chief?’ Bobby could be as obnoxious as he liked because somehow it still came out charming. No one ever said no to Bobby and neither did this Indian. The Indian regarded Bobby with a black-eyed stare, then nodded in a serious way and took a decent-sized swig of the bottle and handed it back to Bobby. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stared straight ahead again as stoic and sombre as anything and it struck me we had just had ourselves an uneasy sort of peace-pipe ceremony the way heroes did in all the westerns. We got off the train at Seventy-Second Street and it looked like the Indian was continuing on and I felt a little embarrassed when Bobby stood on the platform and raised his hand and said ‘HOW’ in a deep voice because I doubt the Indian liked that but then maybe he got it from people all the time and was used to it. Then the train doors closed and the Indian slid sideways out of our view and we went above ground where it smelt like wet leaves because we were so near Central Park and we walked westward for a few blocks until I finally recognised Rex’s brownstone.

I’d only been to Rex’s pad once before and that was for another house party and much of that night had been lost to my crummy alcoholic memory. But even if I’d forgotten what the brownstone looked like, we still would’ve been able to tell which one it was by the coloured Christmas lights blinking like a hundred tiny Roman candles going off in every window and by the sound of Latin jazz drifting into the open street. The music was some sort of bossa nova business: the sound of a xylophone being busily worked over a few sassy chords on the piano, some easy bongo drumming, and the steady shake of maracas throughout, all punctuated by the occasional angst-ridden blast of a trumpet or sax. It was frenetic and easy all at the same time.

Once inside we looked for Rex so we could present him with the six bottles of Scotch, which at that point had transformed into five and a quarter bottles of Scotch.

‘Rex!’ I shouted.

The record player was turned up full blast and Rex was in the living room tinkering with it to see if he could make it go even louder. We shouted our hellos and Rusty was quick to jump in and take credit for having brought the booze. Later I came to find out that Rusty hadn’t even paid for the Scotch at all but had swiped it instead from a delivery intended for his employer’s wet bar. He was very proud when he told the story about swiping the Scotch to me and Bobby because he bragged that the famous literary agent trusted him so much he didn’t even bat an eye when Rusty blamed it on the delivery boy, he just picked up the telephone and had the delivery boy fired right then and there. Rusty avoided mentioning this was the same six bottles he had ‘generously’ brought to Rex’s party but the math was the same and once you got to know Rusty better it was hard to picture him paying for anything at all, let alone six bottles of very expensive Scotch, and so it didn’t take a genius to figure it all out.

‘Make yourselves at home, fellas!’

Rex always had a generous indifference about him and never went in much for who paid for what. The volume on the record player suddenly got louder and Rex smiled at us. We asked Rex a few more questions but he just went on smiling and shook his head as though he couldn’t hear what we were saying over all the music and commotion, and finally just waved an arm in the direction of a table overflowing with bottles of every sort of liquor. We understood from the wave that we could deposit our bottles there if we liked or we could keep them to ourselves; it didn’t matter much to him what we did as long as we were having a swell time and enjoying all of Rex’s unearned pleasures.

It wasn’t very long until we were surrounded by girls, most of whom made it pretty clear as they clambered over one another that all the fuss was for Bobby. A lean and wiry brunette with heavy black eye make-up gave out a hoot of recognition and threw her arms around Bobby to hug him hello, then simply remained hanging on his neck as though her body were some sort of soggy scarf that had been knotted there and forgotten. A second girl – a chubby bottle-blonde who was pretty in a way but had a piggish sort of nose – stood off to the side touching Bobby’s shoulder and trying in earnest to have a conversation as he nodded and smiled and tried to listen with one ear. But it was a shy toffee-skinned girl standing in a corner who ultimately caught Bobby’s eye and who I could tell Bobby would probably ball before the night was over. I glanced over at Rusty and could see his jaw clenching and I could tell already he’d fallen in love with Bobby’s beauty in a way that reduced him to feeling stingy and mean about things. He was watching the coloured girl with a look of pure hate in his eyes and I could only guess about the kinds of ugly names he was probably calling her inside his head just then.

The roof of Rex’s brownstone had a pretty decent view and later that night Rex and Rusty and I and also Bobby and his coloured girl all ended up on it. The three of us stood there drinking and talking and flicking cigarette butts off the top while Bobby nuzzled and necked with his girl until he had her in a corner pressed up against the roof’s ledge. Bobby was always a man for steady progress and eventually he worked that coloured girl’s skirt up enough to expose the majority of her toffee-coloured buttocks and it wasn’t long afterwards that he began to press himself against her and the slow peal of a zipper sounded. We adjourned to the other side of the roof in order to give Bobby some privacy to do what he needed to do with the girl. I had tried to get the little plump blonde girl up on the roof for myself but once I’d gotten her alone she kept talking on and on about the boy she was going steady with and so eventually I got bored and gave up and had decided smoking cigarettes on the roof with Rex and Rusty wasn’t such a bad idea after all. It was a nice night out, one of those unreal reprieves from winter when you find you hardly need your coat, and we smoked in silence and looked up into that vacuous space above New York where the stars are supposed to be. We tried to relax and there was a lot of sighing but it was difficult. It was clear from the sneer on Rusty’s face he was sore about Bobby and the coloured girl, and his bitterness smouldered in a way that filled the air all around the three of us. Then finally someone spoke and it was Rusty and he was asking me what I did for a living.

‘Cliff here is going to be a writer. An important one,’ Rex answered for me, and in his voice I heard the pride he had for his friend and immediately felt myself cringe with embarrassment.

‘That true?’ Rusty asked.

‘That’s the idea, I guess,’ I said, not catching on to how the bitterness in Rusty’s sneer had twisted into something else now and he had suddenly perked up with alertness, his eyes as clear and sharp as a hawk’s. He looked me over, studying me from head to toe with what I took to be a freshly interested appraising air. I had no clue why I suddenly interested him so much. He narrowed his eyes and smiled and when I looked at him again it struck me that the expression was the Machiavellian smile of a tiny tyrant. The moans of Bobby’s coloured girl grew louder and floated over to us from the other side of the roof and we all did our best to ignore it. Then Rusty cleared his throat and looked me in the eye and told me in that deliberately slow, over-articulated way he had what it was he did for a living and who he worked for. He paused and waited for the information to blow me over sideways as he knew it would. I must’ve had a look of great hunger on my face after he told me this because the tiny tyrant’s smile stretched wider and his eyes narrowed in increased smugness and I became vaguely aware of the fact he knew he had me on the hook then.

Rex rejoined the conversation and changed the topic and we all went on talking amiably as ever about baseball and about communism and about whether or not the two things could ever exist simultaneously together in a single culture and it was a good talk and all real groundbreaking stuff, but when I think really hard on the origin of things I realise that night on the roof was when all the trouble with Rusty truly started. He knew he had me on the hook, and I knew he had me on the hook, and the only person who didn’t know it was Rex because Rex didn’t care about who wrote what or published it and how. The only thing Rex cared about was would the Cubans ever really have a league as good as the Americans.

4

Once I found out about Rusty’s boss, I kept my eyes peeled for Rusty in the Village. Besides Rusty, there were a handful of young publishing types who ran around the hipster scene. You could tell them apart from the other Village kids because they wore turtlenecks and jackets and glasses and skewed more to the bookish side of things. They arrived in New York on Greyhounds from all over America with an air of great optimism about them; young, single people willing to live in terrible apartments and work for peanuts so long as Manhattan dazzled them with her bright lights and taxi-horn siren song. Mostly the publishing folks were young men but there were tons of young women who worked in publishing, too, mostly as typists and secretaries. They came to the city after graduating from Vassar or Mount Holyoke or some women’s college in the Midwest whose name you were bound to forget two minutes after it was mentioned. Generally, they tried to behave like the good girls they had been brought up to be and confined themselves to women’s hotels uptown so you weren’t as likely to see them down in the Village as you were the fellas. Mostly these girls were waiting to meet their husbands. Once that happened they were destined to quit working and return to the suburbs from whence they came and throw bridge parties and tell one another stories about the madcap year they lived as single gals in the city.

But there was one girl who Swish started bringing around on a regular basis and that was Eden. He had met Eden as he was cutting through Central Park and riding his bike very fast through a section where bikes aren’t really allowed and where Eden was sitting on a park bench reading a book and as he dodged between a schnauzer and an old lady Eden yelled after him to slow down. Like I said, Swish was always in a hurry, but he was never in too much of a hurry to enter into a great debate with a willing adversary over his ‘goddamn God-given rights’, as he liked to call them. Differences of opinion excited him and arguing was like making love for Swish: he did it with passion and vigour and really it was his way of loving you and loving all the differences. When Eden yelled at him, Swish circled back and the way Eden tells it Swish was already wearing an eager grin as he turned and pedaled furiously back to her. The way Swish tells it, his grin got bigger when he saw the book in her hands was The Secret Agent by Conrad because there were few things Swish loved more than a book with a plot that revolved around a bunch of anarchists. When he saw the book he knew right away to invite her to the Village to come hear Pal’s first poetry reading.

I guess I didn’t think much of Eden when I first met her because even though Swish had twigged to her the way he did I took one look at her dark hair combed into a tidy ponytail and her sweater sets and figured she was only slumming it and as soon as some nice bond salesman proposed, that would be the last we saw of her.

‘Hey, Cliff!’ Swish shouted to me that evening as I strolled into the San Remo. ‘Over here!’ He was standing at the bar with Eden. The San Remo was one of Swish’s favourite watering holes, as it was always buzzing with lively debate and on any given day you could find someone willing to engage you about politics or art or philosophy. Swish made the introductions and I shook hands, finding Eden’s how-do-you-dos every bit as buttoned-up and boring as her sweater sets.

Eden was very petite with elfin features. She had pale skin and large black eyes. Later, people would say she looked a little like Audrey Hepburn but that was only after she went and got her hair cut very short. When I bumped into her again later that year, I saw right away Eden had reinvented herself with that haircut. She was all right to look at before, but afterwards she was really something because the thing about Eden that got everybody in the end was her style. She became one of those sharp-looking chicks with very dark hair and her bangs cropped in a very precise line high up on her forehead, running around the Village in boat-neck shirts and black capri pants, shimmying to jazz with a mysteriously aloof, blasé look in her eye.

But that’s not how she was on the day I first met her. On the day I met Eden she hadn’t transformed yet and her ponytail swung high atop her head and her Sears, Roebuck & Co. sweater hung lumpy and dull on her small frame and she looked like any other girl you might see walking the street in Des Moines or Wichita or what have you.

‘We were just talking about Sputnik,’ Swish said, by way of inviting me into the conversation. Back in those days Sputnik was one of Swish’s favourite topics of conversation because Swish loved a good conspiracy theory and they had just announced in January that the satellite had burnt up as it fell from orbit and re-entered Earth’s atmosphere. The physicists said this was to be expected but Swish insisted this was proof it had never existed in the first place and the whole business was a hoax. I’d had an earful of these theories because Swish could always manage to bait someone into a debate on the topic: young and old, liberal and conservative. Space travel was getting to be the great leveller of our generation.

‘I mean, c’mon,’ Swish said, making his argument to Eden now. ‘That Khrushchev is one mad cat! Mad enough that no one’ll call his bluff, but you can see it in his eyes. The whole thing was a big theatre production.’

‘Do you really think so?’ Eden asked. I could see from her expression she was less concerned with the question of Khrushchev’s sanity than she was with Swish’s. Swish often had that effect on people, especially girls, and it was really too bad because it was only a question of too much intensity and sincerity because beneath his wiry, paranoid-seeming exterior he was really a sharp and decent guy.

‘You bet I do!’ Swish replied. ‘These governments, they have to control people somehow, brainwash them with patriotism and get them to comply, get them to pay their taxes and never ask where their money went when all they ever do is build more and more missiles. Right, Cliff? You agree, don’t you?’

I’d been over this with him before and grown tired of the subject and I decided to say so. ‘I don’t know, Swish,’ I said. ‘I don’t know about any missiles and maybe I should’ve lived during a different time because I can’t seem to get very excited about the Soviets one way or another. But Russian poets, on the other hand … now, that’s a conversation I’d be willing to weigh in on …’

At this, Eden whirled about and her eyes lit up. ‘You like Russian poetry?’

‘Well, I like Pushkin, of course,’ I said, naming the one poet everyone knew so as to not make her feel too dumb. ‘You?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘And Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova and Pasternak, too.’

This caught me off guard. She was far smarter than I’d expected and I wondered if she hadn’t just said some kind of sentence in Rooskie.

‘Keep it down,’ I said jokingly, ‘too much of that jazz and they’ll arrest us for communism.’ I decided it was time for another subject change, so I asked, ‘What do you do in the city here again?’

‘Oh. I’m a secretary at Torchon & Lyle.’

‘Really? You don’t say.’

Torchon & Lyle was one of the bigger publishing houses in midtown. The only one bigger was Bonwright, where My Old Man worked. I wasn’t all that surprised but I could see she wanted me to be impressed, so I played along.

‘Do you like it there?’

‘I love it,’ she said, nodding so vigorously I thought her head might come unhinged from her neck. ‘It’s why I came to New York – my goal is to become an editor someday.’

Eden was quick enough to catch the look of surprise that crossed my face.

‘You don’t think I would make a good editor?’

‘No, I do; you seem to me like a regular go-getter. That’s swell. I thought most girls were just waiting for a ring.’

‘Well, I am waiting for a ring,’ Eden said. ‘On the telephone. From my boss. Telling me I’ve been promoted.’

I took a closer look at her face.

‘What was your name again?’ I asked.

‘Eden,’ she said, putting out her hand. ‘Eden Katz.’

‘Well, then, I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for Eden Katz, future star of publishing,’ I said. We smiled at each other. She really was quite attractive once you’d had a chance to get a second look at her. In any event, before I could get too far considering the possibilities, Swish cut back in, putting a hand on Eden’s shoulder to remind everybody who’d brought her around in the first place, irritated that we’d managed to steer the conversation away from Sputnik for so long.

5

EDEN

When I first began my employment at Torchon & Lyle, I attended as many of the company’s parties as I could. If I am being honest I will tell you I was hoping to get a glimpse of all the famous literary people it publishes. Of course I was only hired on as a secretary but that didn’t matter much, because even the lowest-ranking secretary in the typing pool had a standing invitation to the parties. I remember thinking at the time that this was very generous of them but now I see it was less a matter of generosity and more a matter of practicality: secretaries are good if you want to fill up a room with fresh-faced, warm bodies and in a pinch a secretary can be asked to lend a hand if the caterer turns out to need an extra smiling waitress here or there to walk around with a tray of drinks. This happened to me on a few occasions and each time it did, it made me realise it was no small feat to cater a publishing party and an even bigger feat to keep the publishing types’ glasses full.