I said, “Hey.”
He said, “Hey, Sophie,” with warmth I’d never heard from him before.
He reminded me of someone Jack might’ve been friends with in high school. I could picture teenaged Wolfe walking past my childhood bedroom and saying, Hey, Sophie, like I might be someone he’d want to talk to if he didn’t have a gig playing air guitar to a Jimi Hendrix record upstairs with my brother.
I stood there while he looked over Honey’s expenses.
He had music playing on his stereo, and I recognized Kind of Blue, which Jack had given me for my birthday.
I said, “That’s my favorite jazz tape,” though as soon as I said, jazz tape, I worried that I’d given myself away as someone who owned only one.
He said, “Want to listen to it at lunch?”
“Okay,” I said, cool as a jazz aficionado.
He signed the form, handed it back to me, and said he’d order sandwiches in for us, and what kind did I want?
I said, “What’re you having?”
He thought a minute, in imitation of making a large decision, and said he would order turkey on pumpernickel with tomato and onion and Russian dressing.
“Two,” I said.
“Pickles?”
I said, “Obviously.”
I went back to my desk and sat there, feeling better than I had in weeks. I’d been waiting for something good to happen to me, and here it was. After Wolfe called to tell me that our turkeys had arrived, I didn’t hurry to his office; I took a minute to appreciate the full pleasure and anticipation of what I was about to do. Walking down the hall, I thought, You are walking down the hall to Wolfe’s office for lunch.
He was taking our sandwiches out of the bag.
He said, “Come on in,” at the same time he picked up the phone and dialed, which was what Honey did; Come in and sit here while I talk on the phone.
But Wolfe was calling Irene; he told her that he was going into a meeting and to hold his calls, please.
After he hung up, he said, “You have something to read?”
“Right,” I said.
When I returned with a manuscript, Wolfe was sitting on the sofa, his sandwich set out on the coffee table; mine was on the desk. Was I supposed to sit on the sofa beside him or in one of the chairs opposite his desk? Sofa or chair, sofa or chair?
I sat down on the chair.
He put on the record, and went back to the sofa and put his feet up on the coffee table. “Put your feet up, if you want to.” That was the last thing he said. When I turned around, he was reading.
I did the same. I stopped only to lift my head as though appreciating the nuances of the music.
When the first side of the record finished, he walked over to the stereo, saying, “You know, Miles recorded this in a single session.”
I said, “You’re kidding,” though it hadn’t occurred to me that any record took more than one session.
I was noticing the picture on his desk. It was a girl who looked like him, just as skinny, with his bulging eyes and kindling for arms, except she wore her hair in braids. She had only one boot on and was reaching for the other and laughing. There were mountains in the background, and she was sitting by a campfire.
Before he picked up his manuscript again, I said, “Who’s the happy camper?”
He didn’t answer right away, and I worried that I’d made a mistake. It was wrong to talk while the music was playing or wrong to ask personal questions.
“That’s my sister.” He hesitated. “Juliet.”
I didn’t know what to say, and I considered saying nothing, and later wished I had. “Where does she live?”
He seemed to think for a minute; I thought maybe he was trying to remember her address. Then he shook his head.
I was about to say, “I’m sorry”; the words were forming in my mouth at the exact moment that I heard them come out of his.
He said, “I’m sorry about your grandmother, Sophie.”
. . . . .
I took Friday off for the funeral.
I slept late, and spent the day reading two manuscripts I’d brought home with me. Honey had marked them “Wednesday,” and I wondered if when I turned them in on Monday she’d think I was two days early or realize that I was five late.
All that afternoon I worried about work and Honey, and it spread over to Josh. I hadn’t told him how much trouble I was in, which made me feel that I was lying to him, which made me feel that he loved me under false pretenses, which made me feel that he did not really love me.
It was because I felt so tenuously loved that I arrived at the restaurant almost a half an hour early. It was a beautiful French bistro, tiny and charming, with big windows, a piano, and a thousand candles; the candlelight seemed to dapple to the music. This restaurant was about ten times nicer than any of the others we’d gone to, and it occurred to me that Josh must be very proud of a new poem.
He was so surprised that I was early that he lifted me off the ground to kiss me—or rather, I felt lifted off.
All through dinner, I could see how happy Josh was. We’d be talking, and then satisfaction would appear on his face and stay there: I imagined him thinking, This steak is delicious, and also I think this is my best poem.
He seemed so excited that I thought he might not wait until dessert to read his poem. But he did wait. We ate everything and sopped up the sauces with bread, so that our plates were shiny when we’d finished.
When the waitress cleared them, Josh asked her to wrap up our leftovers, and she smiled.
He held my hand and leaned over the table and kissed me. When he said, “You’re so beautiful,” I heard, My poem is so beautiful.
I was a little nervous, as I always was, that I wouldn’t like his new poem—or rather, that I wouldn’t be able to pretend to love it.
“Well,” I said, “are you going to read it to me?”
“Read what?” he said.
It was our six-month anniversary.
. . . . .
I went to bed happy, but I woke up in the middle of the night. “What’s the matter?” Josh said.
“I’m worried about my job,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” he said.
I got up. I wandered around the dark, cavernous apartment and then went outside to the stairwell.
I smoked one cigarette, and then another.
I tried to pinpoint the problem. To myself, in the stairwell, I said, “Honey doesn’t like me.”
This brought back third grade, when I’d handed my father my report card and said, “Miss Snell doesn’t like me.” He’d said that my excuse disappointed him more than my grades.
Even though I knew that my father might be disappointed in me now, I also felt that he was the only one who could tell me what to do. But even wanting to call my father made me feel younger than I was supposed to be.
I tried to think of what he would say. It would be along the lines of, Soon you’ll find a job and get your own apartment. What he said would be simple and even obvious, so I tried to think what the simple, obvious thing was.
I got it almost right away, along with the sensation that always came with my father’s advice: How could I not have known?
I would have to work harder.
. . . . .
In the morning, when Josh asked if I wanted to go to the Met, I told him I needed to go in to the office. He went to the library for a bonus session of poetry writing.
At 375 Madison, I signed in with the guard in the lobby, and I saw that Francine Lawlor had signed in, too, at nine A.M.
She was sitting at her desk when I walked in, and, except for saying hello to me, she acted like it was a regular workday. From her waist up, it was: She had on a fluffy blouse and her orange-red jacket. When she stood, I saw that she was wearing jeans and sneakers—Wranglers cuffed over Keds.
I worked all day Saturday and went in again on Sunday. I made copies of a manuscript Honey wanted to hand out in Monday’s editorial meeting; I t
yped all the letters she’d left for me on Friday. I made a neat pile of them, along with letters for the manuscripts to be rejected. I figured out what to do with everything in my TOFILE file; I recrumpled Jenny Ling’s résumé and letter and threw them away.
I removed every piece of paper from my desk, and now I saw what was underneath: 20th-Century Typewriting. I put it in a padded envelope and addressed it to the Surrey Free Library and left it in my OUT box.
Then I turned off my tensor lamp and said a fond farewell to Francine.
In the lobby, I signed out. The guard was doing a find-the-word puzzle in the newspaper. He was drawing what looked like a long worm around a word when I told him my name and asked for his. It was Warren. We shook hands.
It was dark outside, and cold. But the air felt good. I had worked hard and now it was over. I was tired and happy, a friend to guards and a worker in the workforce, and in the morning my boss would discover that even though I hadn’t been the editor of the Yale literary magazine or received honors, honors, honors, even though I hadn’t acquired a novel or edited two, I was the best editorial assistant in New York, and possibly the world.
6.
ITTOOK HONEY a few weeks to believe that my vast improvement was not a joke I was playing on her.
I went into the office every Saturday. At first, Francine and I hardly talked, except for hello and good-bye, and when I was going out I’d tell her what I was getting—a sandwich, a soda, a bagel—and ask if she wanted anything from the outside world; she never did.
Then, one Saturday, I asked her if she wanted coffee, and she said, “I just made a fresh pot.”
I heard this as both an offer and a test; I said, “Do you mind if I have some?”
She said, “Of course not.”
Our coffeemaker was just outside the conference room. During the week a pot was always on the burner, but only the truly desperate drank it. I poured myself a cupful and spooned in some nondairy powdered creamer.
Back at the Cave, I took a sip and tasted thousands of pots of coffee that had burned themselves into black bitterness; I tasted the burner itself.
After that first sip I sipped only for show, not letting the coffee enter my mouth; I smoked the peace pipe without inhaling.
It gave me the courage to ask Francine a question: “Where are you from?”
“Pennsylvania.”
I said, “I’m from Pennsylvania,” though usually I said that I was from Philadelphia, since Surrey was only a half-hour away.
“You’re not from where I’m from,” she said.
“Where are you from?”
She said, “You’ve never heard of it.”
I waited.
“Lesher,” she said.
I said, “I think I’ve heard of Lesher,” though I hadn’t. “Do your parents still live there?”
She seemed to be considering whether to answer me. “They’re old.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say. “That’s a drag.”
. . . . .
For a while that’s how it was: I’d ask Francine questions, and she’d grudgingly answer them. Where did she live? Carteret, New Jersey. Who was her favorite writer? Theodore Dreiser. Where had she gone to college? Ursinus.
It wasn’t until the weekend after Bettina’s promotion was announced that Francine talked. I came in late that Saturday afternoon, and she said, “I was wondering when you’d show up,” the closest she had come to any familiarity. Was it a joke? In case it was, I smiled.
Once I was settled in, she said, “I can’t believe Bettina got promoted.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”
“Well, for one thing,” she said, “her knowledge of punctuation begins and ends with her own beauty mark.”
I laughed, and she did, too. I’d never heard her laugh before; it was a k-k-k-k sound, dry, like tiny twigs snapping.
. . . . .
“It’s interesting to consider why an editor hires or promotes an assistant,” she said one Saturday, handing me a cup of coffee from the pot she’d made.
“I know,” I said, as though this was a thought I’d had myself.
“Mostly, it’s narcissism,” she said.
Then she was quiet, and I worried she was thinking about herself and why no editor had chosen her as a mirror. In case she was, I wanted to distract her. I said, “Why do you think Honey hired me?”
“I was just wondering about that,” she said.
I hesitated before saying, “Honey used to go out with my brother.”
Francine nodded. “That’s perverse.”
. . . . .
Francine rewrote the form letter that Steinhardt sent out with rejected slush manuscripts and asked me to proofread it for her.
“Is there anything you would change?”
I told her that signing “The Editors” above the typed “The Editors” looked a little strange to me.
“Strange?” she said, hating me for my word choice.
I tried to explain. “I mean ‘the editors’ is so anonymous I’m not sure you want to sign it.”
She nodded, but her lips were still pursed from my strange.
I said, “Why don’t you just sign your name?”
I could see she’d agonized over this question; it worried me how much thought she devoted to slush. “Then I’d have to use my title,” she said.
“I think that’s okay.”
She said, “If I’d spent a decade writing a novel, I don’t think I’d want to have it rejected by a floating assistant.”
“Well,” I said, “then the author could say, ‘Yeah, well, what the fuck does she know? She’s just a fucking floating assistant.’ ”
I was afraid I’d offended her with my fuck and fucking, but when I turned around she was smiling to herself. Maybe she liked the idea that her low status could serve a noble purpose.
. . . . .
I noticed that she was deep into a manuscript, and I asked her if it was good.
She said, “It is frightfully bad.”
She appeared to be about four hundred pages in, so I said, “Why do you keep reading it?”
She said, “Every author deserves a chance.”
. . . . .
I helped Francine push another carton of slush from the copier to her desk. As she pulled out the first manuscript, I saw her face: It was full of hope.
It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that Francine wanted anything more than what I wanted—not to get fired. But I’d been wrong: Francine was ambitious. She was looking for her promotion in those cartons.
She was no Honey and she knew it; she wasn’t going to get a great manuscript messengered to her after a fancy lunch with a big-deal agent. No, Francine would have to read page after page, manuscript after manuscript, carton after carton to find the novel that would make her promotion indisputable.
It seemed impossible to me. I didn’t think there was a publishable novel in any of those cartons, much less a great one. Even if there was, how could Francine ever find it, reading, as she did, all the pages of all those manuscripts?
I kept thinking that as her friend I should tell her so. In my head, I practiced speeches I would give her; they were gentle, full of praise but also reality.
. . . . .
Francine and I never talked in front of the other Cave-dwellers. The few times I tried, she just shook her head. I thought she was trying to protect me—maybe from Bettina—but it wasn’t that. I think she wanted to distinguish herself from the rest of the assistants; I think she was trying to see herself as an editor whose paperwork had just been held up.
So I was surprised one Friday afternoon when I looked up from my typewriter, and she was standing above me.
“Would you read something for me?” she said. “For the editorial meeting on Monday?”
“Sure,” I said, and I realized that she thought she’d found the slush novel that would transform her career. I told her that she should probably give the manuscript to some editors t
o read, too.
Francine hesitated.
I said, “Their support is going to mean a lot more than mine.”
She didn’t answer.
“That’s what I’d do,” I said.
Then I figured out what her hesitation was, and I said, “I can ask Honey if you want.”
She said, “I’ll make another copy.”
. . . . .
I caught Honey right before she left for the weekend. She was going to the country and had dressed for it. She wore a beautiful suede jacket and a full skirt and dark brown boots.
“I need a favor,” I said.
She tilted her chin up at me.
I noticed that the novel was entitled We and its author named I. Tittlebaum, neither of which sounded too promising. I noticed, too, how heavy the manuscript was—i.e., long—and I realized what a big favor it was to ask Honey to read it over her weekend in the country.
When I repeated what I’d told Francine about Honey’s opinion meaning more than mine, her expression said, Obviously, so I said, “Obviously.”
“Sure,” she said, “that’s just how I want to spend my weekend.” But she took it.
. . . . .
We was about the principal of a high school in New Jersey the year his French-teacher wife leaves him and their children, and it was so great I forgot that I was reading the novel as a favor. I read We all weekend and I was still reading it at 3 A.M. Sunday night.
Sometimes the editorial meeting started late or was postponed until the afternoon, and this was what I prayed for when I woke up at 9:45. I left the apartment without even brushing my teeth.
Not everyone looked up at me when I walked into the conference room; Honey didn’t. Francine was sitting beside her at the table. I sat with the other assistants along the wall.
There was a huge stack of copies of We in front of Honey, and her Post-it note was still on top of the original. Without reading the note I knew it asked me to make however many copies were now beneath it.
The editors went clockwise around the table, talking about the novels and nonfiction they’d read and wanted to buy or pass on. Everyone tried to be fast, except one editor who liked to talk about all of her impressions.
Finally, it was Honey’s turn. She began by just looking around the table until everyone was looking back at her. Then she said, “Francine Lawlor found this novel in the slush pile.” I was relieved that she didn’t call Francine “Clarisse.”