The Vixen Read online

  Julia said, “Do you know what those are?”

  “Manuscripts?”

  Julia shook her head.

  “Wrong. That pile of shit is the hourglass your life is about to trickle out of.”

  Did Julia always talk like that? I wished she was staying on. We could work side by side. We could get to know each other, and she wouldn’t hate me. I wanted to see her again. There was no point asking if I could get in touch with her in case I had questions.

  “Have fun, Mr. Ivy League Hot Shit,” she said.

  “Please call me Simon,” I said.

  “Please don’t tell me what to do,” she said and burst into tears. Her tears blotched the form rejection letter, which seemed only right, preparation for the writer’s tears that would fall on it later.

  Julia wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Just read the first twenty pages. That’s enough to tell if it’s any good. Otherwise you’ll go insane. But you should probably skim till the end. Some writers purposely leave out pages. Sometimes they glue pages together. That’s so they can claim that their books weren’t read. A few writers have tried to get our readers fired, which will never happen. Warren’s got our backs. But don’t let Warren fool you. You think he cares about you, he sees you, he understands who you are, and then you look, and your wallet is gone.”

  “My wallet?”

  Julia rolled her lovely eyes. “Obviously not your wallet. Something you care about more. Plus he’s got a lot of crazy ideas about politics he knows enough not to mention.”

  “What crazy ideas?”

  Julia said, “Why would I tell you?”

  I understood why she was angry. She’d been fired. She was pregnant. But nothing she said about my new boss, Warren Landry, could have diminished the excitement I felt after our first brief meeting, when he’d welcomed me to the firm. I was in awe of Warren, the way only the young can be in awe of a powerful and charismatic older person.

  On the long circuitous walk from one end of the office to the other, from Warren’s regal suite to Julia’s cell—now mine—I fantasized exchanges in which I impressed him with my brilliance. But in his actual presence I’d sounded like a jerk.

  “Are you okay?” asked Julia.

  “Yes. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “You turned red and sort of . . . grunted.”

  I knew why I’d blushed and made that sound. I was reliving an excruciating moment from my talk with Warren. He’d asked why I wanted to go into publishing. I should have expected the question, but all I could say was, “I’ve always liked books!” He’d smiled slightly (or was it a smirk?) and raised one perfectly arched silver eyebrow.

  Julia detached a key from a ring and handed it to me, holding it between her fingertips, as if it were covered with germs.

  “The bottom desk drawer locks.”

  “Why would I need to lock it?”

  “You can leave your purse when you go to lunch.”

  “I don’t have a purse,” I said.

  “Too bad for you,” Julia said. “By the way, I’m taking the typewriter. I’ll need to make a living somehow.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Go ahead. Take it. I’ll report it missing.” I had no idea how I would do that, or what excuse I would make to get a new typewriter from the firm. Would I get in trouble? I’d figure it out. It seemed like the right thing to do.

  * * *

  Despite Julia’s advice, I felt I owed it to the writers to read their work to the end, and to express my sincere hope that their book would find a better fit, a more suitable home, than Landry, Landry and Bartlett. I tried not to think about the recipients of these letters. I couldn’t have gone to work if I did.

  I made notes about the manuscripts in the same notebook in which I would later rewrite sections of The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic. I still have the child’s composition book with its marbleized black-and-white cover. These are some of my summaries and responses:

  The Igloo Lover: Arctic explorer infatuated with an Inuit woman “lent” by husband; couple dies on separate ice floes.

  I, Barbarian: “Have I passed the test, O Hunt Master?”

  The Bridge and the Pyramid: Dissolving suburban marriage. Autobiographical? Neglected wife finds portal to a past life: Cleopatra.

  The Second Mrs. Windfall: Rebecca with names changed.

  Mary M.: Magdalene loves Jesus. Unrequited.

  I began each manuscript in a state of hope that curdled into disappointment, then boredom, annoyance, anger, then remorse for the anger that the writer didn’t deserve. Why had these people made me disappoint them? Then I’d feel bad for feeling that way. It wasn’t their fault that life was unfair, that talent and luck were unequally distributed.

  I typed the personalized form letters on the battered Smith Corona that I’d got from the firm when I reported that Julia’s typewriter had died from overwork. I explained to an old man named Andrew, a longtime employee who signed checks and dispersed petty cash, that I’d brought the company typewriter to the repair shop. I’d been willing to pay for it to be fixed, out of my own pocket, but the repairman told me that it was hopeless. I was afraid that the part about my offering to pay would reveal that I was lying, but Andrew was hardly listening, and that same day one of the mailroom guys lugged in the replacement typewriter.

  * * *

  I often dozed off in my office. A syrupy warmth would seep up my spine, weighing down my eyelids, pulling my chin toward my chest. How delicious it felt to surrender where no one saw or cared, where my mother wouldn’t wake me and beg me to be patient.

  My dreams were pitifully transparent. Storms at sea, shipwrecks. The Titanic. I was alone in a raft. Above me the ocean liner, like a sleek Art Deco whale, tipped and vanished under the water, then reemerged as a Viking longboat, its deck crowded with warriors demanding their enemies’ hearts and livers. Until that ship too hit an iceberg, with a boom and then another boom and then—actually . . .

  Knocking. Someone was knocking on my office door.

  I stowed the remains of the chicken sandwich that my mother had so lovingly assembled (dry white meat, white bread, mustard) in the top drawer of my desk just as my boss, Warren Landry, bounded in without knocking again.

  Standing in my doorway with his arms braced against both sides, Warren was partly backlit by the low-wattage bulbs in the corridor. He had a Scrooge-like obsession with keeping our electric bills low. His white hair haloed him like a Renaissance apostle, and the costly wool of his dark gray suit gave off a pale luminescent shimmer. He was a few years older than my parents, but he belonged to another species that defied middle age to stay handsome, vital, irresistible to women. I’d spent my first paychecks on a new suit and tie, cheap versions of Warren’s, or what I imagined Warren would wear if the world we knew ended and he no longer had any money.

  Often, on his way back from lunch, Warren lurched down the hall, all jutting elbows and knees, chatting up the typing pool, leaning on the front desk, stepping into the offices of people he liked. Sometimes he lost track of who worked where. The worst insult was having him pop in, look at you, blink, shake his head, and pop out.

  I was always excited to see Warren, though excited wasn’t exactly the word. Petrified was more like it. I was ashamed of my craven desire to interest him, to impress him, even a little. Was it his confidence? His mystique? Or was it simply because he was my boss at a job I’d gotten because of my uncle, who was widely disliked and feared for the power of his journal, American Sketches, which created and ruined careers in politics, literature, and art?

  I liked the idea of having a boss. Just saying those two words, my boss, made me feel like a grown-up.

  Everyone knew Warren’s history. During World War II, he’d gone undercover for the OSS, running a psychological warfare department that spread rumors behind enemy lines. He was responsible for the spread of disinformation warning German soldiers that their wives were cheating on them with draft dodgers and Nazi bureaucrats, inspiring the
soldiers to desert and go home and throw the traitors out of their beds.

  Shortly after the war he and his Harvard classmate Preston Bartlett III started a small exclusive publishing company in a modest midtown suite. By the time I was hired, the firm’s office—divided into spaces ranging from windowless cells like mine to Warren Landry’s baronial chambers—occupied half the fourteenth floor of a limestone building with a view (for the lucky ones) of Madison Square Park. I imagined that Warren, always so frugal, must have hired the least expensive architect to design the maze of cubicles, larger offices, and minimal public spaces linked by passages in which, after working there for years, one could still get lost.

  Our founders had decided that three surnames sounded more impressive than two. But Warren also liked saying, “I am the one and only Landry!” He said it with a Cheshire cat smile, owning up to his egotism, charmingly but defiantly asserting his right to name two-thirds of a business after himself. Somehow he conveyed his freedom to do whatever he wanted, perhaps because he’d grown up in a warm bath of privilege drawn by servants, a bath cooled somewhat by his contempt for all that privilege meant, which isn’t to say that Warren didn’t look and act like a very rich white Protestant person.

  Preston Bartlett had provided the startup funds and later the fallback money. Unfortunately, the bulk of Preston’s fortune now went to the private sanitarium to which he’d been confined since suffering the breakdown that was never mentioned around the office. The firm had taken a hit without Preston on board to make up the deficits and shortfalls.

  Meanwhile Warren Landry had become a publishing legend for his persuasiveness, his decisiveness, his impeccable taste, for the boundless energy with which he oversaw the entire process, A to Z. He kept track of the numbers, costs and sales. He’d been known to hand-deliver books when a shipment was late. When a novel appealed to him, he read it in a weekend, though he preferred our nonfiction list: books about Abraham Lincoln, modern Europe, Napoleon, World War I; Calvin Coolidge and Woodrow Wilson, men who could have been, and probably were, Warren’s distant cousins.

  Even the lowliest job at Landry, Landry and Bartlett carried a certain cachet. Within days of taking the job, I began to receive, in my office mailbox, invitations to Upper East Side literary parties, where stylish young women grew more interested in me when they learned where I worked. I didn’t want to be liked because I’d been brought in to tackle the flood of unsolicited manuscripts inundating the mail room. But I welcomed the attention. Once again I was content to let people believe what they wanted about who I was and where I came from, though I did mention Harvard quite often. I tried not to dwell on the idea that encouraging a misunderstanding was first cousin to a lie. I felt disloyal to my parents, ungrateful for their love and care, but I told myself that they would approve of my need—it was time, after all—to separate my history from theirs.

  I affected the carefree air of a recent Ivy League graduate, Simon Putnam, a literary aristocrat born for the job he’d rightfully inherited. The people I met at parties were eager to assume that I was the real thing, perhaps because they were the genuine article, or because they wanted to be. I never talked about my childhood. When strangers asked where I came from, I said, “New York,” which was, strictly speaking, true. I tried to seem mysterious and enigmatic. At that time, in that world, any man who didn’t talk nonstop about himself and his ideas was thought to be hiding something. Which, I suppose, I was.

  * * *

  Since I’d been there, Preston Bartlett had twice come into the office, though no one could figure out why. Once, I’d been in the reception area when he arrived. I registered the wheelchair, the plaid ship’s blanket, the curved shoulders, the trembling lips.

  Violet, the receptionist, picked up the phone, and Elaine, our sweet-natured publicist, came out to greet the company’s ailing cofounder.

  She leaned over and took his hand in hers, but he snapped it back.

  “I want to see the boss,” he said.

  “Warren’s in a meeting,” said Elaine.

  “I want to see the real boss,” he said, louder.

  “Warren’s in a meeting,” Elaine repeated, calmly. “I’m so sorry, I really am.”

  Preston raised his hand in a gesture that signaled either objection or acceptance, I couldn’t tell. His attendant, a burly Viking in pure white scrubs, turned his wheelchair around just sharply enough so that the invalid slapped back against his pillow. From where I stood I could see the old man smile, and I thought of how the force of gravity stretched my lips into a frozen grin, in freefall on the Cyclone.

  If only I had listened to what our mad cofounder was saying, if only I had been brave enough to breach the circle of dread around him, I might have averted what happened, or at least saved myself the trouble it took to fix it.

  * * *

  Knock, knock.

  “Mr. Landry! Good afternoon!”

  “Warren. Please. Call me Warren.” Warren Landry wanted us all, from the chief editors to the mailroom guys, to call him by his first name. Apparently this would prove that the company was an enlightened democracy and not a dictatorship ruled by ambition, intimidation, and fear. Except for a few intrepid souls, we couldn’t bring ourselves to do it. Even the women he slept with called him Mr. Landry in public. The irony was that when he wasn’t around, we all referred to him as Warren. Did you hear what Warren had done? What Warren said at that meeting?

  “How goes it, Simon, old boy?” Warren called all the men old boys and dear old boys and all the women sweetheart. His diction and accent combined the elongated vowels of a New England blueblood with the dentalized plosives and flat a’s of a Chicago gangster.

  After I’d been on the job a few months, wrangling the slush pile that kept growing, no matter what I did, Warren began stopping by my office, an airless sarcophagus barely big enough for a chair, a desk, and the stacks of manuscripts. Each time he seemed surprised by the institutional grimness that was partly the result of my refusal to put up one photo, one image or personal object. Deciding what to put on the walls would have required knowing who I was, or how I wanted others to see me. Family photos and personal totems would have marred the blank surface I hoped to project.

  My boss regarded the stained green carpeting, the metal furniture, the heaps of wheat-colored envelopes. Did such squalor really exist in his airy Olympus?

  By then I’d learned that Julia, my tearful predecessor, had gotten pregnant by a married biographer on our list, the author of a critically acclaimed life of Pancho Villa. I also heard rumors that Warren was the father. When Julia decided to keep the child, ignoring those who advised her to get an illegal abortion in Puerto Rico or at a secret clinic in New Jersey, she’d been “encouraged” to resign. Several coworkers told me this, separately, my first week on the job. Their tone was confidential, as if we were old friends. They told me what they thought I should know, then never spoke to me again.

  Sometimes Warren looked surprised to find me at my desk—instead of Julia, I feared. And sometimes I thought that he stopped by my office just to annoy my colleagues.

  He gazed past me at the bare walls, then up at the low buzzing ceiling.

  “My God! How can one have room to think here? A few weeks in this cell, and we’ll have a full confession out of you.”

  “A confession of what?”

  “Joking, old boy,” he said. “I was just winding you up.” Warren used a lot of Briticisms—taking the piss, having you on, winding you up—that I assumed he’d picked up in the OSS. He smiled. “Or did you think I meant it? Hold on, dear boy. What do you have to confess?”

  “I was too,” I lied. “I mean I was joking too. I was joking.”

  “Ha. One joking would have sufficed.”

  I would have offered Warren a chair if I’d had one. It was too awkward to give him mine. So he remained standing uncomfortably close to my desk.

  This was before I understood why Warren stopped in so often, what he wanted from me. At
the time I imagined that he might be one of those Harvard graduates (I have since met many) who harbor a reflexive, misguided respect for their fellow alumni.

  Our having gone to the same school meant nothing. We’d had different educations. Warren had hosted the Fly Club’s black-tie parties, to which swan-necked women wore cocktail dresses and their grandmothers’ pearls. He’d edited the literary magazine and assembled a staff that bridged the gap between rumpled poets with fake British accents and old-money legacy students.

  And me? An undergraduate Caliban, I’d hunkered in the lowest level of Widener Library, which I left on weekends to see my Radcliffe girlfriend, Marianna, an Asian Studies major with whom I had friendly, tentative sex in my dorm. I preferred my room to hers, where I felt inhibited by her statuettes of the Buddha and Hindu gods watching what we did. At my all-male high school, I’d learned nothing about women. Marianna had gone to boarding school, where she’d learned a little more than I had. She’d decided that she was my girlfriend, and I’d seen no reason to object.

  One autumn weekend we visited her parents in Cape Ann. The rambling farmhouse was as foreign to me as Kublai Khan’s palace. Her parents liked my being a Harvard student—and the fact that Marianna and I had no plans to stay together. Her father showed me to my room, in a chilly wing of the house, far from Marianna’s. His stern face said: No sneaking around. He needn’t have worried. It wasn’t that sort of affair. I wouldn’t be lying awake all night, tormented by lust for his daughter.

  Just before the end of senior year, Marianna was awarded a graduate fellowship to study Japanese art at Yale. It was humiliating to admit, even to myself, how bitterly I resented her getting the future intended for me. I told myself that it was all about who she was and who I was: further evidence of the inequality, the unfairness of the world. I wanted to be one of those to whom success came easily. All you had to do was be born into a particular family, in a particular place, and the Three Kings rode up on camels, bringing you frankincense and myrrh, opportunities and riches.