A Bigamist's Daughter (19 page)

She shrugs a little, as if to concede the point. Perhaps, if her father had called that morning and said he was in Wisconsin with his other wife, she and her mother would have shrugged, said nothing, waited for him still. Perhaps she would have believed he was merely spreading the wealth—for what magic did her plump, plain mother have except that she was the woman her father had chosen, the one he came home to?

She presses her lips to her knee, recalls a night, the night of the East Coast blackout. She and her mother were in the kitchen, making dinner. The back door opened and her father appeared just as all the lights went out; instead of his usual greeting, there was a wild clamor for flashlight and candle, their movements through the dark made more frantic, no doubt, by his sudden presence beside them, slapping his pockets for matches, advising they try a different drawer. As soon as the flashlight was found, he went down to the basement to check the fuse and she and her mother stood side by side in the kitchen, in the hollow blue light of the gas flames under the pots on the stove, staring at the open cellar door like wives outside the black mouth of a mine.

They said nothing, exchanged no look. The only sound was the muffled tattoo of boiling water, and Elizabeth was suddenly filled with the fear that her father would never emerge. That she and her mother had shared an illusion in that single moment
before the flickering lights died, in the first few minutes of darkness, that they were sharing some strange unconsciousness now. She feared that any look, any touch, any word exchanged between them would break that unconsciousness, throw the lights back on, return them to the ordinary evening they’d been living just moments ago.

And then the faint round moon of light, so faint that at first she didn’t trust it, moving in soft loops toward the basement wall, and her father’s voice, “They’re out all over,” the solid footsteps on the wooden stairs. She and her mother moving toward him, simultaneously.

His face was cold as she kissed it and he smelled of alcohol, either a shot of whiskey or a slap of aftershave (he kept a bottle of each in his glove compartment) and when the candlelight caught his eyes, they were small, sparkling, bright as silver. He joked all night about his exquisite timing.

“So the bigamist is a hero,” she says softly, her lips touching her bare knee.

“Yes,” he whispers. He has slid closer to her. “If you look at him the right way.”

She looks down at him. He is watching her intently, smiling. There are specks of gold around her feet. A woman sings about her last chance for romance.

She laughs. “No,” she says, shaking her head, refusing it. “There has to be something wrong with your logic.”

Chapter 11

Margaret Alice Greer, author of
Gouged of Womanhood: Poems of Two Mastectomies,
wants T-shirts. Her book is due to be published in June, and the woman feels that T-shirts printed with the title will help attract beach readers.

Elizabeth smiles at her across the desk, careful to keep her eyes on the woman’s face. “I’ll mention it to our publicity department,” she says. Hard drops of rain hit the window behind her.

Margaret Alice leans forward, puts one white hand on the desk, tentatively, long fingers open, like a bad actress pretending to be nervous. She is tall, homely as Lincoln, forty-nine, according to her bio. Recently divorced. Fading orange lipstick and long feet in flat black shoes. The collar of her navy-blue dress is lacy with dandruff. “It’s important that it sell well,” she says seriously, almost sternly. “I want it to be well read.”

Elizabeth holds her smile. She could say, flicking an ash like Groucho, Then send it to college, but instead she pushes the contract across the desk. “I’m sure it will be. Your work is very powerful. I especially like the recurrent images of fruits and flowers.” She makes her eyes wide, her handiest false gesture. “It’s very exciting.”

The woman closes her fingers, catching the words, and obediently pulls the contract toward her. There is a fogged place on the steel where her hand has rested, like breath on cold glass. On the floor beside her there is a lump of wet dry-cleaner’s bags, the color of phlegm. When she came in, she’d had them wrapped like gauze around her manuscript; had the manuscript clutched to her gouged chest like a rescued child. Now she reads the contract carefully, her head down, her elbow on the desk, her fingers moving through her thin bangs, shaking white scales onto each official page. Because of the clouds outside, the light in the office seems yellow and close.

Elizabeth flips through the manuscript once again. Titles like “Empty Cups,” “Treasure Chest,” “A Plucked Rose.” Ned will ask: Is this supposed to be funny? And she’ll tell him that the woman believes the poems have “clothed her suffering with nobility.” Ned, no doubt, will mention a certain naked king who also believed he was clothed in nobility, arrayed in gold. Pure gold.

The pages of the manuscript smell like Band-Aids.

When she looks up, the woman is writing out a check, smiling smugly. Now I know why it happened to me.

Despite herself, her eyes go to the woman’s chest, the two slight yet false breasts. She imagines the poor body beneath them (And why not? Margaret Alice would not be her first naked author), imagines the chest, gouged, torn, shiny with scars, as if the woman has embraced a burning meteor. Lifted her face and stretched out her arms to declare it a beautiful day and found herself a target. A victim of chance, circumstance, some gross practical joke.

Why me, Oh Lord? Why me?

Elizabeth leans forward, checking her own soft breasts against the edge of her desk.

“I have endorsements for the jacket too,” Margaret Alice
says as Elizabeth takes the contract and the damp check that shows a field of yellow daisies and a blue sky. She leans down, searches through her rain-drenched pocketbook, pulls out a piece of paper folded into quarters. “These should help sales.”

The first line reads, Patricia Marie Randall, poetess, English teacher, Cayuga High:
If Edna St. Vincent Millay had had two mastectomies, she would have written poems like these.

Another, Linda Eli, A.A., B.A.:
I laughed, I cried. These poems chart Everywoman’s triumph over pain.

She attaches the paper to the manuscript. It occurs to her that anyone could do her job—Everywoman. If you can lie, giving assurance is no chore. “I’m sure they’ll be very useful,” she says, smiling still. She wonders if she has mentioned that the poems are powerful.

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.”