The Vixen Read online

  I’d been happy at college. I’d liked my classes, my girlfriend, my roommates and friends, all of whom had scattered after graduation. Marianna and I promised to call or write, but it never seemed like the right time, and all that summer I’d had nothing to say. We’d lost touch. Every so often, I met a former classmate at one of the literary parties. We talked about getting together, but we never did.

  When I tried to imagine Warren’s college experience, I felt a sense of loss, of having missed out on something, a regret that bordered on grief. I’d gone to the wrong parties. I hadn’t had as much fun.

  “Working hard?” asked Warren.

  It took me a moment to understand what he’d said, then another to make sure that it was a question and not a crack about catching me napping. In fact the work was hard: steeling myself to read and reject the manuscripts piling up in my office. It was disturbing to realize that, after six months, I still felt overwhelmed. Each day I labored to reduce the stack of envelopes that kept growing despite my attempts to shrink it. Boredom and pity and anger still warred in my heart when I read submissions like Herod’s Daughter, a novel set in Biblical times about a young woman’s struggle to save Jesus; Prairie Dogs, a shoot-’em-up cowboy saga; Tears in the Apple Pie, a memoir by a housewife whose husband ran off with his great-aunt; and Pinocchioland, a dystopian fantasy about a future in which everyone’s nose gets longer when they tell a lie. This last one struck too close to home, and I decided to omit the consolatory postscript from my rejection letter.

  “It’s . . . fun,” I said. “I enjoy it.” I touched my nose, involuntarily. My face turned mandrill red.

  “Fun, is it?” Warren said. “Nonstop fun, I’m sure.”

  I believed (or wanted to believe) that Warren had a natural sympathy for bookish guys like me. People said he admired intelligence, that he helped young people, mostly young men but occasionally women, even some who weren’t pretty, even some he didn’t sleep with. He’d stayed cordial with several former girlfriends at the office. He had a wife and five sons at home in Darien, a family no one at work had ever seen, and, people said, a formal portrait of himself aging in his attic.

  His employees knew not to worry if he didn’t look us in the eye. During the editorial meetings, at which I was never offered a seat at the table but relegated to the chair symbolically nearest the door, Warren didn’t look directly at anyone except our chief publicist, Elaine, with whom he was rumored to be—or to have been—romantically involved. Often Warren seemed half asleep, then roused himself to deliver a remark so perceptive that the room fell silent and everything stopped. I remember him doing that, but I can’t recall even one of his famously incisive remarks.

  I do remember him turning in his swivel chair, facing the wall, and saying, “The young no longer study history, so we’re doomed to repeat it. In ten years, no one will remember the war, or what we fought for. Hitler? Who was he? We must become their memory, be their memory, because ours was nuked out of existence when we bombed Hiroshima.” He had a repertoire of speeches he used to fill a silence or change a subject.

  His favorite words were democracy and an educated electorate. Those were his deities, his ideals, though early on I sensed that those words had a different meaning for Warren than they had for me. His people had been in this country for generations before mine. I wondered: Why should it matter so much if a family came from somewhere and not from somewhere else?

  “So, Simon, old boy, what are we working on? What keeps us burning the midnight oil?”

  We both knew that no midnight oil was being burned. I was hardly about to stay up into the wee hours reading The Emperor’s Concubine or I Married a Minister. After all that pointless and discouraging reading, I’d finally been given an actual book of my own to shepherd through the final stages of production.

  Autumn Light was a slender volume of watery nature poetry by a woman named Florence Durgin, who’d had a very modest success with The Burning Boy, a suite of inspirational sonnets about adopting an orphan boy badly scarred in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. The Japanese kid, now in his late teens, hadn’t adjusted well to his new life and was facing a gun possession charge, so a sequel seemed unlikely.

  But Warren cared about Florence, who had a two-book contract. Warren hadn’t said much when he gave me the manuscript, except to warn me that Florence’s meditations on the forest would likely sell less than two hundred copies.

  For a heartbeat I forgot Florence’s name, though she was my only writer. I felt guilty for not having read her first collection. I’d promised myself that I would. I could visualize the cover. The title, the author’s name. That was as far as I’d gotten.

  “You know . . . that book of poetry.”

  “Poor Florence.” Warren’s sigh suggested that Florence’s sad fate linked us: two decent men whose hearts brimmed with manly sympathy for a damsel in distress.

  “I admire the woman,” he said. “Be kind to her.”

  “I always am.” I’d never been unkind to Florence, but I didn’t exactly fake joy when she dropped by the office with variant drafts of her book, indistinguishable poems to be added and subtracted. I promised myself to be kinder. I’d invite Florence for coffee. I didn’t have the nerve to ask Warren if the company would pay me to take her to lunch. I would read her first book. It was the least I could do.

  “A suffering human,” said Warren. “As we all are. Remind me: What’s the new one’s title?”

  “Autumn Light,” I said.

  “Good God,” said Warren. “Who in the holy Jesus hell came up with that one?”

  It struck me that Warren might have exceeded his customary two lunchtime martinis. He listed slightly to one side. His upper lip stuck to his teeth.

  He brandished a thick cardboard folder the color of dried blood.

  I prayed: Let it be a manuscript. Let it be the book that will show Warren what I can do.

  * * *

  There are moments when our desire is so powerful and so focused that the object of that desire seems to float before us, a shimmering mirage. Our longing is so intense that we can almost persuade ourselves that the hoped-for event has occurred, the dream has come true. Fate has figured out what we need and decided to hand it over.

  I had such a clear, strong idea of the book I wanted Warren to be holding that it was almost as if I’d already read it—or written it.

  The manuscript I imagined was a historical novel set among the Vikings, as stirring and eventful as the greatest sagas, but with a simpler narrative line for the modern reader without the time and patience for archaic locutions, genealogies, and subplots. This book had been written expressly for me. I was its ideal reader, the perfect choice, the only choice, to edit and improve it, to help it find its audience. My seemingly impractical education would turn out to be useful in a wonderfully unpredictable way.

  I pictured myself with my briefcase, taking the blood-colored folio to the 42nd Street public library, where I could work without distraction as editor and fact-checker both. I felt the joy of looking forward to work I respected and enjoyed. For the first time it seemed likely that I might come to love my job. At least I’d be back in the library.

  Warren said, “Let’s put Autumn Light on hold, okay? Push Florence’s poems till next season. I have something better for you. Something that might actually be, as you say, fun.”

  Since then I have learned to be on guard whenever anyone suggests I might have fun with something. But all I thought at the time was that Warren was offering to pay me to have fun. Paid and fun defined a good job. My life was about to change for the better.

  Warren suspended the blood-colored folder above my desk, holding it with both hands, goggling at it, mock-warily, as if dropping it might damage the gunmetal surface. He laughed his bark-laugh (he had several fake laughs) and dropped the folder on my desk so hard I flinched and was embarrassed.

  “Relax,” Warren smiled. “It’s a novel. Not a hand grenade. An interesting piece of fiction by
an unusual new writer. When you get around to reading it, I hope you’ll tell us what you think. No rush, I would normally say. But in this case . . . well, if we dither, one of our rivals might recognize its sales potential, pounce—and snatch it from under our noses.”

  Why did I never wonder why Warren would entrust such a potentially popular book to a beginner? Beneath my youthful diffidence and insecurity lurked the egomania of a Roman emperor.

  “I’ll start reading this afternoon,” I said.

  “Very good then,” said Warren. “It’ll require a bit of effort, but not major work. And if I may say so, it’s a damn sight better than Pinocchioland.”

  How did he know about Pinocchioland? Did he really read every word that came through the office? The manuscripts piled up on my floor always seemed to have been unopened.

  “Two months. Two and a half. It’s the middle of February now, so May Day at the latest. The international Communist holiday—what could be more appropriate? I’ll expect this on my desk by then.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I can do that.”

  He looked hard at me as if I was supposed to know what his look meant. Then he gave up and said, “Dear boy, aren’t you curious? Don’t you even want to know what this literary sensation is called?”

  “Yes! Of course!” I pried the manuscript out of its folder and read the title page:

  The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic

  A Novel

  By Anya Partridge

  “Quite a title,” I said.

  “Hot stuff, am I right?” Warren hooked his thumbs under his lapels. “I thought of it myself. The author wanted something rather artsy and inappropriate for a book of this sort.” Was he winking, or was the fluorescent light playing tricks with one eyelid?

  “What was her title?”

  I watched Warren pretend to think. “Our author wanted to call it The Burning. Yes, that was it. The Burning. Dear boy, are you feeling all right? You’ve gone quite pale.”

  “The Burning” was the title of my undergraduate thesis about Njal’s Saga. I’d focused on the scene in which a wise man named Njal and his family are burned alive in their home. Had I mentioned that to Warren? I didn’t think so. Maybe it was a coincidence. Not such a strange one, really. The and burning are common English words. There was also a chance that I’d blabbed about it at the drunken office Christmas party that I barely recalled. I hoped I hadn’t, but if I had, I was flattered that Warren remembered and was joking, or testing me in some way.

  “I thought The Burning was a brilliant title compared to the other one she suggested, which was, let me think, A Simple Box of Jell-O. I assume you know she was referencing the torn halves of the Jell-O boxes that identified the spies in the Rosenberg ring.”

  The Rosenbergs? Had I heard Warren right? Was he telling me that this novel, with its potboiler title, was about Ethel and Julius? My throat had swollen shut. I couldn’t trust myself to speak. But I had to say something.

  “I do,” I croaked. “I do know.”

  “Of course you do. An amazing detail, no? Who could make that stuff up?”

  Warren waited for me to agree. “Amazing.”

  “Most readers—our readers—will get the reference, but who in God’s name would buy a spy thriller called A Simple Box of Jell-O?”

  Warren waited. It was my turn to speak. “Maybe we could call it The Vixen, the Patriot, the Fanatic, the Burning, and a Simple Box of Jell-O.”

  Warren tried another laugh, louder and more explosive. “Good! That’s very good. You’re catching on. How about The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic Burn a Simple Box of Jell-O? Better, don’t you think? Go ahead. Give our little vixen a look-see. Read me that marvelously wild first sentence.”

  I turned past the title page and read:

  Like a handsome ocean liner slicing through the waves, the attorney general sailed through the prison hallway. He seemed confident, but he was on edge. He was finally meeting Esther Rosenstein, the notoriously buxom and beautiful Mata Hari who’d almost slithered through the dragnet the FBI dropped around her.

  I felt like a spelunker crawling through the opening of a cave that I already knew would be too narrow to squeeze out of. I imagined my mother reading this. No, I thought, I can’t do this. I felt a shiver of dread.

  “Esther Rosenstein?” I said. “Really?”

  “I know, I know. Esther and Junius Rosenstein. Maybe you can persuade Miss Partridge to change her characters’ names. If you can manage that, our lawyers will be breaking out the champagne. Our readers will know who the author means no matter what she calls them. I know the Rosenbergs are a sensitive subject. But in a way, that’s the whole point. Timely! Trust me. The book’s not bad.”

  I wanted to believe that. One paragraph wasn’t enough to be sure that the writer was slandering Ethel. You will see to it that our names are kept bright and unsullied by lies. In January, the Rosenbergs’ lawyer, Emanuel Bloch, had dropped dead of a heart attack. When I thought of him reading Ethel’s letter, how his voice had broken on lies, I felt I was hearing the voice of the dead with a message from the almost-dead: a client who predeceased him by months.

  “I know, my dear boy. It’s not War and Peace. Okay, maybe it is bad, but it’s not bad bad, and it could make some sorely needed money. It’s a little bad, in a few places. Your job would be to make those places less bad. You could even make them a little good.”

  So what if Anya Partridge, whom I pictured as a bookish woman in late middle age, had decided to make her Esther Rosenstein prettier than Ethel Rosenberg? In her photos Ethel looked like a kindly, girlish, dumpy mother of two, not a sexpot Mata Hari. But already I sensed that beautifying Ethel/Esther would be the least of the novel’s problems.

  Warren sighed. “My boy, can I be honest?”

  “Of course, Mr. Landry.”

  “Please. Call me Warren. Totally honest?”

  “Of course.” This was not going to be good news. “Warren.”

  “Look around.”

  It was awkward, pretending to look around my tiny office in which there was nothing to see.

  “Not in here. Out there.” He gestured toward the corridor. “May I close the door?”

  Even with the door closed, he lowered his voice. “Would you like to guess how long it’s been since the rent has been paid on all that talent and brains out there? Let me give you a hint. Reputation doesn’t keep the lights on. Distinguished doesn’t fend off one’s creditors. Care to take a wild guess?”

  Any answer would have been wrong. “I have no idea.”

  “Good. Save your ideas for Miss Partridge’s novel. The point is, we are hoping that the sales of the little Vixen will get us over a rough patch and allow us to continue.”

  Warren could be vague and elliptical, but now he couldn’t have been clearer.

  “I understand.”

  “Oh . . . And one more amazing detail.”

  He picked up the folder and dug around, then pulled out a photo that he placed ceremonially on my desk.

  “Presenting . . . Miss Anya Partridge!”

  A startlingly beautiful woman looked up at me. Her huge dark eyes were ringed with kohl, her black hair bobbed like the star of a 1920s silent film. She wore a trench coat, not entirely concealing a filmy black slip dress. Smoking a thin black cigar in an ivory holder, she lounged against the pillows of a canopied, elaborately carved Chinese bed.

  Ever since the outrageously seductive jacket photo of a sleepy-eyed Truman Capote had helped put his debut novel on the bestseller list, our industry was awakening to the commercial value of the author portrait.

  I said, “This will blow Capote out of the water.”

  “Smart boy! My thoughts exactly. What would you call her look? Hong Kong brothel meets Berlin cabaret? Lotte Lenya? Pinch of Marlene Dietrich? Soupçon of Rita Hayworth? Let’s find a more literary model . . . Let’s say . . . Colette, only juicier. To coin a phrase . . . a bad-girl hothouse tomato!”

  Warren a
nd Anya watched me extricate myself from her force field.

  “Simon, old boy. One caveat. Our author is a bit of a recluse. She may not agree to meet you. That shouldn’t pose a problem. But some editors might find it tricky to work with a voice on the phone.”

  “I can deal with that.” I didn’t want to work on this commodification of Ethel’s tragedy. It was morally indefensible. But I had agreed. I’d succumbed to my lowest—my least admirable—impulses. I wanted to meet its author. And I couldn’t say no to Warren.

  “Well! Good to hear. It would mean a lot to me, and”—he cleared his throat—“it will likely speed your exit from this coffin of a so-called office and into some more desirable real estate at Landry, Landry and Bartlett.”

  “That sounds great,” I said. And it did. I wanted a successful—an enviable—career. I wanted to rise in the organization. I wanted to find my place in the literary world. I wanted to be someone. Preferably someone like Warren.

  “Great,” said Warren. “Well, then.”

  He stopped on his way to the door and spun, a sharp Fred Astaire half circle that ended in a momentary totter. “One more thing. The most important thing. I almost forgot.” He put his forefinger to his lips. “Tell no one about this book. Not yet. I don’t want the word to get out. Not your mother. Not your girlfriend. Not your best pal after three scotches.”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend, and I don’t drink scotch.”

  “Not even your mother, Simon. Not even your own mother.”

  “No worries about that.” Of course I wasn’t going to tell Mom that we were publishing a bodice-ripper about the Rosenbergs. But Warren’s warning was disturbing. I considered every likely and unlikely explanation, but none of them—other than his somehow knowing about my mother’s connection to Ethel—made sense. It had to be a coincidence, like Anya Partridge wanting to call her book The Burning. Like my being asked to work on it. Me, out of all the aspiring young editors in New York.

  Warren said, “I always think the ends justify the means, but this time the ends completely justify the means. One popular novel, in let’s say questionable good taste, won’t destroy our reputation. It’s a funny thing, Simon. Usually I only care about means. I give two shits about consequences. But in this case it’s the consequences, the hoped-for consequences, that should make all of us give less than two shits about the means. The gods of literature are just going to have to take a step back and appreciate the economic realities of our business.”