A Bigamist's Daughter Page 15

  At the door, Margaret Alice grabs Elizabeth’s wrist and presses a moist piece of paper into her hand. It is, she explains, a wide smile thoroughly corrugating her cheeks, contracting her small black eyes, a poem to Vista Books, composed that very morning while she sat in the waiting room. Elizabeth thanks her for it, waves good-by and then hands the poem (“Vista, vision of all my dreams/From your summit, I view my heart’s desires”) to Bonnie. “A present for you,” she says.

  Bonnie looks up, reeking of grape gum. There is a cold sore above her lip, just under her nose, and it makes her mouth seem grossly bowed, or puckered for a kiss. “Thanks a lot,” she says.

  As Elizabeth walks back to Marv’s office she passes the conference room, where Ann is leaning over a manuscript with a fat, melon-faced man—Walter Merkill, author of My Life and It Could Have Been Verse.

  “I see it,” she hears Ann cry. She could be looking through a telescope. “I see exactly what you mean. It’s a beautiful image.”

  “You think so?” the man says, grateful, awed. She has spotted his very soul. “Really?”

  Last night, while she was with Tupper, Ann had been at her favorite bar. She told Elizabeth this morning that she met a man there who looked like Marlon Brando and claimed to be a feminist. She said she knew it was a line, but brought him home anyway—to give him credit for being innovative. She’s been in a wonderful mood all day.

  Outside Marv’s office there are piles of books in soft brown mailing bags. They remind her of sand bunkers from World War II movies. Each is addressed to the book editor of a major newspaper or magazine and each is marked, by that editor, RETURN TO SENDER. As publicity director, Marv sends free books to every major reviewer (as per contract) and stacks them up as they come back, unopened and unread.

  She thinks of Tupper Daniels, waiting in Sardi’s until morning.

  Inside the office there are more books, wrapped and unwrapped, forming a real bunker around the desk and around Marv himself. She must peer over them to see that he is sitting with his back to the door, his feet on the windowsill, reading a copy of Andy Warhol’s Interview and drinking his jasmine tea. The wall behind his desk is filled with the autographed glossies he and his friends have collected from celebrities.

  “Gouged of Womanhood,” she says and he looks up over his shoulder, under his short white bangs, as bored as Greta Garbo. “Poems of Two Mastectomies by Margaret Alice Greer. She wants you to send out T-shirts with the title on them, for beach promotion.”

  “Did you tell her it would cost her?”

  Elizabeth laughs. “Are you kidding? You’d do it?”

  He blinks slowly. “Sure, if she wants to pay for it.” Marv is not known for his wild sense of humor, only his complete, unflagging disdain, which is also very funny.

  “But it’s so tasteless,” she says.

  He sighs. “Tell me about it.” He reaches behind him. “Walk This Way, by Lou Herman.” He holds the letter away from him and moves his tongue and mouth as if the tastelessness were literal. “Legless Vietnam vet turned literary wit, Woody Allen style. Wants us to get him on the Gong Show so he can mention the book. Free air time he calls it. He wants us to book him as a ‘sit-down comic’. ”

  “Why do they do these things to themselves?” she asks, her voice louder than she’d intended. “I don’t care if they write their goddamn books, but why do they have to humiliate themselves in public? Why can’t they just write the books and leave it at that?”

  Marv’s eyes flicker over her and she throws up her hands dramatically, trying to make it into a joke. “Where’s their pride? Their self-respect?”

  He puts the letter down and turns back to his magazine. “When you’re after fame,” he says to a picture of Liza Minnelli, “there’s no such thing.” And then, to Elizabeth, “Send me a memo on the T-shirts, will you, Babe?”

  “Sure”—and if Tupper Daniels could be content that his book was written, although never read, her ass would be covered. She’d be gold to him forever.

  Ann follows her into her office. “So you’re going to travel and I’m going to be stuck with Ellis the pear,” she says, continuing the conversation they were having before Margaret Alice and Walter showed up.

  Elizabeth picks up the wet plastic, stuffs it into her waste-paper basket. Takes a tissue and wipes the remaining flakes of dandruff from her desk. “It looks that way,” she says. “Owens said this morning that I’ll do Ellis’s next trip, through New England.”

  Ann rolls her eyes. “That’s great. That’s just great.”

  Bonnie walks in with the afternoon’s mail, barking, “Mail,” sullenly, as if it is her excuse for entering where she herself would rather not be. Elizabeth takes it from her, nods thank you, and, oddly, Bonnie smiles a little, the blister cracking almost audibly. As she leaves, Elizabeth notices that the cuffs of her pants are wet and spattered with mud, that her heavy thighs make the tight beige slacks seem pock-marked.

  Ann is saying, “If that asshole feminist calls me, I think I’ll marry him and stay home and have babies. It would be better than putting up with stinky Ellis.”

  Elizabeth laughs, leaning against her desk, the steel cold under her palms. She knows once she says it she’ll have to go through with it, and so she takes a deep breath, anxious to get it said.

  “I’m going to ask Owens to give you a raise and make you an official assistant editor. I don’t think he realizes how many authors you see now. If he agrees, you’ll still have to work for Ellis, but you can do your own work, too. Make some commissions.”

  Ann stares at her. Her graying curls have turned to steel wool in the rain. Her loose beige dress seems to touch her body only at the two soft mounds of her breasts, and there the material shines, as if with wear. As if, Elizabeth thinks, she has comforted too many greasy heads. The feminist, of course, was married. But seeking divorce.

  Margaret Alice Greer’s husband divorced her before the second breast had gone.

  Ann puts her hands on her hips and looks up at the ceiling. Sends an exasperated breath in the same direction. “This job,” she says, her voice loud. “This job is getting to be more and more like my marriage every day. I know it’s dishonest. I know I’m being ripped off. It’s not what I wanted. But, hell, the people are so nice and the alternatives are so bleak.” She lets her arms fall straight to her sides. A small puff of air chugs through her dress. “Thanks. It’s really nice of you.” She smiles quickly, somewhat painfully, showing all the dry lines around her eyes. “But I’d really rather you wouldn’t. I couldn’t do your job.”

  Elizabeth feels for a moment as if she has passed through a warm spot in a cold lake. She wonders if she’s blushing. “Of course you could do it,” she says lightly. “You practically do it now. You’d just get paid for it.”

  Ann raises her shoulders, rubs her arms, smiles again. “No. That’s okay.” Her eyes are on Elizabeth’s desk. “I don’t want to get paid for it.”

  Elizabeth frowns, feels her palms growing warm. “What are you?” she says, imitating Owens, keeping it light. “Made of money?”

  Ann laughs. “I wish.” And then, suddenly, almost insistently, as if she fears Elizabeth won’t believe her, “They just depress me sometimes. Our so-called authors. Sometimes they depress the hell out of me.” She points toward the conference room. “Walter Merkill just depressed the hell out of me. He had this poem”—she rolls her eyes—“in the middle of his autobiography, he writes a poem.” She swallows, shakes her head. “It was about his little granddaughter, his only grandchild, who died, hit by a car. He said he wanted it to be a tribute to her.” She looks toward the ceiling again. “And it was so awful. Little angels with golden curls skipping along the New Jersey Turnpike.” She looks at Elizabeth. “It was embarrassing. Just the worst thing you’ve ever read.”

  Elizabeth shrugs. “I doubt it.”

  “And he put so much into it,” Ann goes on, leaning toward her. “He tried so hard.” She slips her hands into her pockets, lowe
rs her voice. “They all try so goddamn hard, that’s what depresses me. The way they blow their material.” She takes a deep breath, preparing to explain it to her. “They absolutely rack their lives,” she says, “give it all they’ve got, squeeze out every little thing they’ve ever felt, and what pops out but a bad version of a fucking Hallmark card.” She sighs, her body seems to heave. “It makes me lose faith in humanity.” Bows her head. “Not to mention poetry.”

  Elizabeth laughs, expecting Ann to, and when she doesn’t, she straightens up and walks around the desk. “Some people like Hallmark cards,” she says, sitting, wanting instead to say I know how you feel sometimes, the tastelessness, the desperation, but fearing what her admission would imply. She picks up a letter, throws it into her OUT box. “But if you really hate dealing with them …” Pushes the stapler to the front of her desk. “I won’t make you see them anymore.”

  Ann is fingering something in one of her pockets, a coin or a Lifesaver. “No,” she says. “I’ll see them, when you’re busy. I don’t mind doing it if I’m helping you out. I just don’t want to get paid for it. I don’t want to get any more mired in it than I already am.”

  Now Elizabeth knows she is blushing. She can feel the blood throbbing in the small capillaries just under her skin, feel it banging from wall to wall like a drunk in a fun house. “All right,” she says coolly. “No problem.” Is she then, mired?

  There’s an awkward silence. “Sorry I’m so irrational,” Ann says finally. She pulls her hands out from her sides, making the dress taut against her belly. Looking as if she might curtsey. “You know how stupid women are about money.”

  “No problem,” Elizabeth says again, realizing that she will not, after all, have to ask Owens for the raise, trying to let the realization calm her.

  “It must be the poet in me,” Ann says. She tosses her head back, flutters her eyes. “I too,” she says, putting her fingertips to her throat, “am a poetess, you know.”

  Elizabeth laughs, but only reflexively, only because she always laughs when Ann calls herself a poetess. Because, like her own, “We are the editor-in-chief, aren’t we?” it is a phrase, a pose, that Ann dons for her, like glasses and a fake nose, whenever a laugh is needed. Whenever one of them is taking herself too seriously.

  Until now, it never occurred to her that Ann, still, might be taking herself seriously. “I know,” she says smiling, “you’re a poetess.”

  As Ann turns to leave, they notice Bonnie standing in the doorway, partially hidden, watching them with only one eye, like a bad detective. She disappears.

  Elizabeth looks at Ann and shrugs. Ann shrugs back. “Normal,” she says. And then, “If my feminist friend calls me, I may marry him anyway. Let him take me away from all this.”

  Elizabeth smiles, getting back to work. “See if he has a friend for me,” she calls.

  With Ann gone, she goes through her mail: pleas, prayers, expressions of gratitude. She puts the letters down and pushes away from her desk. Gets up and goes to the pile of manuscript behind her. They seem damp, as if they gave off their own wet breath, moist pleas, prayers. Deliver us from our daily bread, our daily boredom.

  And she can do it; she does it every day. Yet Ann would not trade places with her.

  She glances out her window. The cars are there, beaded with rain, a small river flows along the gutter, moving papers and plastic cups, small pieces of garbage, gently, almost gracefully. She tilts her head a little to look toward midtown, where the buildings are like cardboard against the overcast sky, a badly drawn stage set. Radio City Music Hall presents … She imagines Rockettes, in brightly colored raincoats and umbrellas, kicking down the rain-drenched streets.

  She smiles. She could have told Ann: What profit it a woman if she gain the whole world, if all the world’s a stage? What profit and what harm? Morality is point-of-view. If we didn’t take their money, someone else would. Hope springs. Like a Jack-in-the-box.

  In the street, a car horn blares.

  This morning, when she woke beside him, the rain had just begun and her room, in the dim brown light, looked like a tent. The ceiling seemed to sag, the walls to billow, even the floor, covered with their shoes and socks and two pillows from the couch, seemed as soft and as lumpy as a public beach. The noise from the street—the rain, a truck, a sound like the crack of a baseball bat—seemed to fill the room easily, as if it had traveled across an empty space, passed through walls made only of canvas.

  She’d looked at his wide back and tried to keep herself from thinking by smiling and telling herself, “Well, now you’re even sleeping with them.” But the joke had lacked irony, acted not as a stop but a wedge; a wedge that split the laughter, the perspective, from her real life like flesh from a bone.

  Her bed was a tent and she had pitched it among them, in the desert of their dry hopes. And now she too had hopes, vain hopes.

  When she saw he was awake, she moved to kiss him, both their mouths parched with sleep.

  A man in soaked T-shirt and jeans wheels a rack of green and red dresses, swathed in plastic, across the street and into her building. If all the world’s a stage, better keep your costumes dry. Poet costume, artist costume. Husband and father. Feminist. Even Hector in the stockroom is, on the outside, a king of the discos. He told her once that he hoped, someday, to be taken seriously as a dancer.

  If no real editor, Tupper Daniels would surely ask her, what are you?

  She turns, picks up a manuscript and carries it to her desk. Even Time magazine says casual sex isn’t as simple as it used to be. We’re all looking for meaning. We’re all getting older.

  “Dear Mrs. Connelly, Editor-in-Chief,” the cover letter begins.

  “What does a woman do when she is so trapped in her own home that a prisoner in a Nazi camp would feel the same way?

  “Lucinda Brookefield, the plucky heroine of my enclosed novel, The Last Kiss of Love, is just such a woman. What she does is cry and pray. And then a brave man, who happens to be her boss in the frozen food factory where she works (for fear of libel, I have not mentioned the company’s name), teaches her what freedom and love is. Only to have it snatched away from her again by the greedy hands of her lawful husband.

  “Interested? Read on.

  “Lucinda Brookefield is twenty-six years old, voluptuous of figure and golden-haired. Because of her early development, she married her husband when she was sixteen and he was eight years her elder. She loved him very much, not having a mother and father who cared for her, one of nine children. When he beat her black and blue three days after their wedding, she forgave him and stayed with him. After their first child was born, she was afraid to sleep with him right away and so he tied her hands and feet and left her that way without blankets all night. She next had twins and another little boy. Her fifth baby was lost when he beat her and kicked her stomach when she fell to the ground at six months. She bore all her tragedies like a saint and became a stronger person for them.

  “Right after that, a large file cabinet fell on his head at work and he was out of a job for a long time. So she had to get a job at the aforementioned frozen food factory. There she met Randolph Wisk, her supervisor. At first he didn’t pay any attention to her, for he was very business like and could not be persuaded by a pretty face, but then he saw in her sad eyes that she had been through alot for her age and that she was mature beyond her years. And one special night, when she stayed late to work, he took her into his strong arms.…”

  Her eyes go to the last paragraph.

  “Alot of this is true. My husband is back at work now and I have secretly saved some money. Your brochure says some authors know their books are worth investing in and mine is alot like the books they sell in all the supermarkets and my friends pay $2.50 for. Only mine is modern and not set in history, but if you want me to, I will change the dates and make it all seem older.

  “I look forward to your reply and thank you in advance for your time and consideration.

  “Sinc
erely yours, Ellen Belster, p.s. Please don’t think I’ve done what I said I did with my boss. He is very respectable. I just made that part up. My husband is a good man, basically.”

  Elizabeth flips through the neat manuscript. Always, she thinks, the troubles are real, the solutions imagined.

  She could, of course, reject Mrs. Belster, tell Owens the book was pornographic. But no doubt the woman will send it off to another vanity press, and Owens, checking her list of rejections against their rivals’ lists of publications, will want to know why.

  She could make the contract very cheap, say $2,000, $3,000, forget her commission and tell Owens the woman obviously couldn’t have afforded more. Make Mrs. Belster’s dreams come true, for a while.

  Or she could make the cost of the contract so high that the woman will have to abandon her plans to publish. One more stroke of bad luck for poor Lucinda.

  She could write a normal Congratulations letter, charge the normal price for a book this size and let the chips fall where they may. Crawl out of bed with her. Gain some distance. She can’t, after all, let each author become a moral issue. It would depress her.

  She nods, turns to the typewriter. It’s out of her hands.

  The phones all over the office begin ringing.

  She turns again and sees the five lights on her phone flashing wildly. When she picks up the receiver, she hears a dozen angry voices shouting, “Hello? Hello?”

  She goes into the corridor. Marv is standing there, his plastic cup of tea in one hand, a copy of People in the other. “Bonnie’s not there,” he says calmly.

  Mr. Owens pulls open his door. “What the fuck?” he says, patiently, as if it were a sensible question. “Where’s Bonnie?”

  Elizabeth walks past them both, into the front office. The switchboard at Bonnie’s desk is blinking like a dazed robot. Connie and Maguerite, the tiny, pastel-colored grandmothers from the file room, are watching it, writing their hands, looking frightened.

  “Where the hell is everybody?” Elizabeth says.