The Last Book Party Page 6

  Later that morning, Malcolm called me into his office. I took my steno pad, although I had a hunch he just wanted to hear some details about the progressive party—who drank too much and whether any surprising couplings came about. But when I sat down in the armchair opposite his desk, I could tell something else was on his mind. In a breathless rush of words, he told me that he was promoting Ron to assistant editor and that rather than promoting me to Ron’s job, he had offered the position to a “brilliant young man” he’d met at a Middlebury alumni gathering.

  I was too stunned to speak or look Malcolm in the eye. I fiddled with the wire of my notebook while Malcolm, who had never been anything but complimentary about my work and “perennial good cheer,” justified his decision by pointing to what he suspected was my “creeping ambivalence” about a long-term career at Hodder, Strike. It was true that I had soured on the idea of becoming an editor while also writing on the side. It wasn’t only the competitive atmosphere that put me off, but also the glacial pace of publishing and the need to scrutinize fiction rather than just get lost in it. But the fact that Malcolm had picked up on my doubts about working my way up to editor didn’t make it any less hurtful that I’d been passed over.

  Back at my desk, I slipped on the headphones of my Dictaphone and pretended to take notes so that no one would talk to me. I was too upset, convinced that being denied the editorial assistant position was equivalent to being demoted. An hour later, when I met the Middlebury wunderkind, Charlie Rhenquist, I understood that in addition to an uncomplicated eagerness to make a career in publishing, the position apparently required attributes I did not possess: an appealingly lanky male body, smooth golden hair, deep-set blue eyes, glowing references from a summer writing program at Bread Loaf, and enough WASPy self-assurance to wear shiny brown loafers without socks or irony.

  I considered quitting on the spot, but knew that the only other jobs I was qualified for were similar positions at other publishing houses. The thought of pursuing the same track somewhere else felt weighty and uninspiring. The truth was, the business of publishing had not complemented my love of books or inspired me to write. Bookstores, once welcoming havens, no longer offered a sense of discovery. Even at my beloved Burlington Book Shop on Madison Avenue, where a sales clerk named Dot never failed to introduce me to “forgotten gems” like A Wreath for the Enemy, the anticipation with which I entered the store would quickly fade. Looking over the stacks of new hardcovers in the window and on the display tables, I would realize with a sinking feeling that I had either read them already as advance copies or knew everything about them. It was difficult to get swept up in the thrill of a new book when I was privy to the uninspiring stories behind them: the writer’s excessive cocaine use; the rave blurbs a famous author gave to a young novelist he had seduced in an MFA program; negotiations on an advance that had nearly broken down because an emotional agent was going through a nasty divorce. I no longer enjoyed book parties, depressed by celebrating writers who reminded me how far I was from writing consistently and seriously, let alone writing anything someone might want to publish.

  I wasn’t sure of my next move but knew it would not be helping Charlie Rhenquist settle into a job that should have been mine. On my way home that evening, on the M104 bus pressed between a large woman who smelled like garlic and a group of boisterous teenage girls singing “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” I remembered Henry Grey’s offer back in Truro. Might he still need a research assistant?

  My mind raced as I walked up Broadway to my apartment. I could escape the muggy city for the rest of the summer. I could spend my days in a house where creativity bubbled and began, instead of where it ended in the slow, dreary process of editing and marketing. I could get inspired and set myself on a new path—learn from Henry and write more seriously. Maybe I’d see Franny and get a chance to show him that I was becoming a serious artist too. It wasn’t entirely impossible that what had happened between us in June was the beginning of the end between him and Lil.

  As soon as I got home, I called my parents to float the idea. My mother was wary, but relieved I was finally leaving Hodder, Strike, which hadn’t led to either a romance or a promotion. “Let this be a transition to something better,” she said, making me promise to send out applications for a new job in the fall. “It’s time to get more serious about your future.”

  My father, on the other extension, said, “Relax, Nancy, she’ll figure it out.” I pictured him in his plaid pajamas, robe, and slippers, a book by his side for his nightly reading of a single chapter before bed. Once I assured him that I could find someone to sublet my room in the city, he told me he looked forward to having me on the Cape during his August vacation. I appreciated my father’s readiness to welcome me home, though I knew his lack of concern about my quitting came in part from his benign sexism and unspoken belief that some industrious young man eventually would come along and provide for me.

  My plan seemed like a good one, but the next morning I woke up nervous. I hardly knew Henry. What if his offer had been complete fluff? What if he was as cranky with me as he was with Malcolm? Was I willing to move back in with my parents, even if it was only for the summer? What if the job did nothing for my writing? Or I couldn’t find a new job before Thanksgiving? By the time I got to the office, I was in such a state that when Jeremy called to speak to Malcolm, I blurted out, “Would it be completely insane for me to go work for Henry Grey for the rest of the summer?”

  “Uh … somewhat insane, yes.”

  I laid out my case, but Jeremy was still skeptical.

  “Don’t romanticize it. You’ll be isolated and underpaid.”

  I was surprised by his reaction.

  “You’ll drown in arcane research,” he said. “And be at Henry’s beck and call.”

  His resistance to the idea was puzzling. Did he want to keep Henry and Tillie’s world to himself? Was he afraid I might replace him in their affections? The more he objected, the more convinced I was that my plan was a good one.

  “Thanks for the valuable input,” I said, my tone making it clear that I wasn’t appreciative. “Please hold for Malcolm.”

  While Jeremy was talking with Malcolm, I found Henry’s phone number in Truro in my Rolodex and, my heart beating rapidly, dialed. He was quick to confirm that his offer was serious. He needed a good assistant for at least a few hours each day. With the same blustery wording of his written notes, he promised wages “not quite worthy of the name” and vowed to grant me “full rein to man the chaos” of his office and his mind—as if the only thing that stood between him and future publication was my readiness to proofread his manuscripts and alphabetize his notes. I gave my notice that afternoon.

  part three

  August 1987

  12

  Henry’s office was on the second floor of his house, with a view of a grove of silvery locust trees and an edge of the tennis court. The room was cozy and inviting, although disheveled enough to suggest that whoever worked there had more important things to do than tidy up. Oriental rugs on the rough wooden floor were threadbare. Bookshelves that rimmed the room were filled with hardcovers, worn editions of Thoreau’s Cape Cod, the Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds, a three-volume Encyclopedia of Ancient Battles, and what looked like new copies of World’s Fair and Stones for Ibarra. There were shelves of paperbacks, everything from Moby-Dick and The Moonstone to Rich Man, Poor Man and War and Peace. Half-read books were left open, facedown, on a tired-looking wingback armchair, on the small table beside it, and on the floor. Illegible notes were scribbled on legal pads and slips of paper scattered over every surface but the desk, which was the only orderly spot in the room. On it was a black Underwood typewriter, flanked by a pile of blank white paper held in place by a large dried starfish, and a ceramic bowl filled with smooth, dark rocks.

  I picked up a few of the rocks, which were all vaguely heart-shaped. Had Henry collected them? Probably Tillie had slipped them into her pockets on morning walks on
the beach and then dropped them in the bowl for Henry to discover later. The gesture was in synch with the first chapters of Henry’s memoir, which I’d read at Hodder, Strike, surprised to discover that the stodgy and self-aggrandizing writer whom Malcolm groused about having inherited was also funny and endearing.

  In those chapters, Henry described how he and Tillie had begun exchanging gifts after they’d met at a party in Greenwich Village in 1959. Henry lived on the Upper West Side at the time, and Tillie downtown. They loved surprising each other with pencil sketches of the other sleeping, rewritten versions of sappy Hallmark cards, a transfer ticket from the bus inserted into a book on a particularly relevant page. Henry’s marriage proposal, only a few weeks after they met, came in the form of a broken necklace that he found while walking down Broadway one afternoon to get a haircut. Once a whole word, all that remained of the necklace was a thin gold chain attached to two cursive letters, da, perhaps from the woman’s names Linda or Hilda, but now spelling, in English letters, the Russian word for yes. When Henry dropped to one knee and said simply, “Da,” Tillie had understood what he was asking. She repaired the chain and wore the necklace two weeks later when they went to City Hall to make their pairing official.

  I searched the bookshelves until I found Tillie’s poetry. I pulled out a slim volume, Soot. The pages were stiff, as if the book had never been read. I flipped to the last poem, which was titled “Family.” I struggled to find a foothold. There was something about a child, and a loud noise, and a breakwater. The last lines sounded important, but I wasn’t sure why:

  My father’s teacup swallows

  in disgrace,

  a filament.

  How does a teacup swallow in disgrace? Or swallow at all? Why is it a filament? What is a filament? I closed the book and listened to the wind whistle through the window frame. I’d been so happy to return here, but on this second day of my job as Henry’s assistant, and alone in the house for the first time while Henry and Tillie were in Orleans, I felt as if I didn’t speak its language.

  My first day had started awkwardly. I arrived hot and sweaty, having ridden my bicycle. Ushering me into his office, Henry apologized that he didn’t have a proper place for me to work. At least for now, I’d have to make do with sitting in the wingback chair by the window and using a small wooden side table as a desk. “I wanted to put you downstairs at the writing table in the living room alcove, as I’ve done with assistants in the past, but Tillie wouldn’t have it,” he said, glancing at my damp shirt, which I was flapping against my stomach in a vain attempt to stop sweating. Running his hand through his hair, he explained that Tillie’s office was off the kitchen, but she’d taken to writing in the dining room, reading in the living room, and pacing in the kitchen, and would find it disconcerting to have someone in close proximity.

  “And you won’t mind?” I asked, surprised that we’d be working in the same room.

  “Mind?” he said, looking amused. “I don’t expect you’ll pose a problem—unless, of course, you hum while you work?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Crack your knuckles?”

  I shuddered. “Never.”

  “Chew gum?”

  I had a pack of Wrigley’s in my pocket.

  “Only in the privacy of my own home.”

  He let out a hearty “Ha!” and said, “I knew we’d get along just fine.”

  Henry’s charming playfulness had relieved my early-morning jitters that taking this job had been a big mistake.

  Handing me a thick sheaf of paper and a pile of index cards, Henry asked me to summarize the handwritten notes he had gathered for a two-part article he was planning to write on the construction of the Cape Cod Canal. He also asked me to go through some Army Corps of Engineers documents and make a timeline of key events.

  The material was dry, but I appreciated the weight of it and lost myself in details about dredging and debris disposal. While I worked, Henry clacked away on his typewriter until he was interrupted by a phone call from a fact-checker reviewing a “Talk” piece about the Truro harbormaster. It went smoothly until they began discussing the correct term for the water just before the tide changes from incoming to outgoing. Henry had written “dead tide,” while the fact-checker was arguing for “stand of tide.” My father was an avid fisherman, and I knew they were both wrong. Uncertain if I should chime in but sitting so close it was impossible to pretend that I wasn’t listening, I whispered, “It’s slack tide.” Henry’s face lit up, as if I’d jogged his memory and returned to him the phrase he’d wanted all along. It was a small, insignificant thing, but it lifted my spirits to give Henry two of the words that would eventually appear under his byline in The New Yorker.

  Arriving on my second day, I was disappointed to find a note saying that Henry and Tillie would be out all day, and that I should continue summarizing his notes and do some filing. Alone in the house, I worked quickly, surprised to learn that the dynamo industrialist who financed the Cape Cod canal, August Belmont, Jr., had also built New York City’s first subway. I sorted through the papers to be filed. They were disappointingly dull—royalty statements, invoices, check stubs, a few letters from Malcolm that I had typed myself, and a few of my notes to Henry. I was flattered that he considered them worthy of being kept, though they were probably just documentation for the second half of his memoirs.

  When I finished my work, I sat at Henry’s desk and rested my fingers on the keys of his old typewriter, imagining banging out the beginning of a short story. Feeling a little guilty, I opened the middle drawer, hoping to find something interesting. But there were no love letters or a diary, just a jumble of things you’d expect to find in an old desk—paper clips, loose change, pencils, and a few cards for local businesses, the Top Mast Resort and Cap’n Josie’s restaurant.

  I walked down the hall and into Franny’s room. Without his clothes and sketches and paints strewn around artistically, it seemed more of a child’s room than when I had been there before. A faded patchwork quilt was folded at the end of the wooden bed, which I noticed now was a trundle. The shelves above his small desk held remnants of a boyhood by the sea: a dried-up horseshoe crab, half a clamshell, a slingshot, and a framed photograph of a young Franny standing in front of a bucket holding a clam rake and looking devilishly pleased with himself.

  I opened the desk drawer and found some cassette tapes: Elvis Costello and the Rolling Stones, a few musicians I hadn’t heard of, and some rolling papers. I sifted through a small stack of old photographs of Franny as a teenager, looking more hippie than preppy. In one photo, presumably at Choate, Franny was carrying Jeremy on his shoulders, slightly off-kilter, as though they were about to fall. Franny looked carefree and mischievous—as if boarding school presented a glorious abundance of rules to break. From their expressions, I could imagine the whoop of laughter before they tumbled to the ground. Jeremy, with long, messy hair, looked lighter, without the serious air he carried now. I envied their ease with each other.

  I heard a car pull up the gravel driveway and a door slam. I quickly put the photographs back. Out the window, I saw a pickup truck in the driveway. I walked to the top of the stairs and peered down to the first floor. “Hello?”

  I heard footsteps, and then saw a young woman holding a large pile of spiral notebooks enter the front hall. She was tall and chicly thin. Her dark hair was severe, nearly as short as a crew cut. She wore a black tank top and green painter’s pants and a silver ear cuff. With dark eyes and delicate features, her face was feminine and pretty, although her expression was stern. I guessed she was only a few years older than me, although I didn’t think I would ever look so deliberate.

  She glanced up at me.

  “And you are who?”

  “I’m Henry’s assistant, Eve.”

  I walked down the steps and put out my hand to shake hers. She looked down at the notebooks she was holding to indicate the foolishness of my gesture. She swung them around and stacked them on he
r hip, holding them with one hand, but still did not offer the other hand for me to shake.

  “How’d he find you?” she said.

  “Hodder, Strike,” I said, and then added, in an attempt to impress her, “And I’m a friend of Franny’s.”

  “Are you now?” she said, in a mannered voice. I fingered the frayed edges of the zippered purple Cape Cod sweatshirt I had grabbed that morning on the way out of the house. “It’s kind of refreshing how much you don’t look the part.”

  I didn’t know if she meant that I didn’t look like a friend of Franny’s or like any of Henry’s previous assistants. Either way, I was sure it wasn’t a compliment. I mustered up the courage to ask what she was doing there.

  “I’m Lane Baxter,” she said. “Daughter of Eric.”

  I wasn’t sure why she added that bit of trivia. Was I supposed to introduce myself as “daughter of Morris”?

  She turned toward the kitchen. “Tea?”

  I followed her and leaned against the counter as she filled the kettle, turned on the stove, and took mugs from a cabinet. She told me she had taken one of Tillie’s poetry classes at Yale and since graduating had worked for her from time to time proofreading, copyediting, managing some of the correspondence that Tillie didn’t need to do personally, and checking the French and Italian translations of Tillie’s poems. “I’m trilingual,” she said. “My father and I have moved around for his art.”

  Of course. Her father was Eric Baxter, a well-known sculptor who lived in Provincetown.

  Lane thumbed through the boxes of tea in the cupboard. She pulled out two bags of Red Zinger and asked how long I’d known Franny. I told her I’d met him at Tillie and Henry’s party in June.

  “You were there?” she said, dropping the tea bags into the mugs.