A Bigamist's Daughter (2 page)

He sits up in his chair, sighing, playing with the buttons of his shirt. “The copy editor I gave it to just brought it back. He can’t make any sense of it. He says the main character keeps changing his name. And his sex. He says on one page the author’s calling him Fess and on the other page she’s calling him Bess, and sometimes she describes the clothes as male, sometimes as female. I’ve just looked at it and I can’t make any sense of it either.” He pushed the manuscript away from him, toward her. “How am I supposed to send it to the compositor if I don’t know where it’s supposed to be B-E-S-S and where it’s supposed to be F-E-S-S, where it’s supposed to be he and where it’s supposed to be she?”

She begins to laugh a little. Ned doesn’t, and she wishes he would. She realizes that Ned takes his job seriously because he has a wife and five children and a mortgage, but she
also believes a certain amount of laughter is important, for perspective.

“It’s really very simple,” she tells him, pretending to be serious. “It’s all explained in the outline.” She sits on the edge of his desk. Blanche Willis, she knows, has already become a celebrity in her small New Jersey town, and her husband, who is an executive for the telephone company, has just given her an office in his own building, where she can begin working on the sequel. She had called just yesterday to ask Elizabeth what she thought of Dustin Hoffman starring in the movie version of her book. Blanche wondered if he was “serious” enough.

“In the beginning of the book,” she tells Ned, “Bess and Fess are twins, male and female. Bess marries a doctor and they drive cross-country for their honeymoon. Fess goes along with them because he’s gay and wants to live in San Francisco. On the way, there’s a car crash and Bess is killed. Fess is castrated.”

“Shit,” Ned whispers.

“So,” she goes on, “to calm the broken-hearted doctor, Fess proposes that he become Bess and the two of them live as man and wife. This pleases Fess because he’s always wanted to marry a doctor, and it pleases the doctor because he’s always liked Fess better anyway. The story goes on from there.”

“It’s not supposed to be a funny book?” Ned asks.

“No,” she says. “The author believes it’s a reflection of the way we live now. That’s what she wants on the jacket.”

He breathes another “shit” and then asks, “So what do I tell the copy editor?”

“Tell him it’s easy to figure out. When Fess and the doctor are in public, Fess is called Bess. When they’re alone, he’s Fess again because the doctor knows he’s not really Bess. In public, Fess is she, in private, he’s he, unless the doctor is kidding him and calling him she in private. I think the same goes for Fess’s mother because she knows Fess is Bess, too.”

Ned looks down at the manuscript and then looks up at her. Laughing a little, she slides off the desk and straightens her skirt. “Does it ever occur to you to reject a manuscript on the grounds it’s ridiculous?” he asks.

She laughs out loud, again wishing he would smile. “It occurs to me every day,” she tells him. “But if the author’s willing to pay us to publish it, what can I do?”

He shrugs, dismissing her. As she turns to leave, she sees Kevin, their art director, standing behind her. He grins through his freckles and whispers, “Bess and Fess, what a mess,” as she passes by. They both raise their shoulders and giggle into their hands. Ned ignores them.

Ann is in her office when she gets back, gathering papers from Elizabeth’s OUT basket and twisting her head around to read the name on the yellow envelope.

“What’s his name?” she asks as Elizabeth walks in. “Tupper?”

“That’s what it says.”

“As in Tupperware?”

“Yup.”

She sits down at her desk and picks up the envelope. The label says Tupper Daniels, Monteagle, Tennessee. She slides the manuscript out. It’s on nice paper, neatly typed, and she suddenly feels strangely embarrassed, as if he’d accidentally left something very private in her office, like a pair of rosary beads or a worn sock. Ann leans over her, her large breasts pressing softly against Elizabeth’s shoulder and arm. She almost wants to block the manuscript from her view.

“What’s it about?” Ann whispers.

She shrugs. “Bigamy, I think. He just recited most of the first chapter to me.”

“Oh God,” Ann says. She straightens up. She is a big woman, huge actually, but her face is thin and she dresses well, so Elizabeth only notices her size when they are standing side by side
in front of the bathroom mirror, or when, like now, she stands close enough to block out one entire side of the office.

“Bigamy?” Ann says. “My, my, he didn’t look the type.” And then she laughs that staccato, sophisticated laugh Elizabeth loves her for. “That’s an answer to the divorce problem. I wish Brian had thought of it.” She’s been divorced from Brian nearly seven years now, but his name still haunts her conversations; she seems to hold it in her mouth like a dog with a bit of coat-tail: the only part of the thief that didn’t get away.

“You would have preferred Brian to be a bigamist?”

She shrugs, hands on her wide hips. “Why not? Half a man’s better than none at all. And think of the freedom; he’d have to work double-time being two husbands, but I’d only have to work part-time being half a wife. It’s the working girl’s answer to a demanding marriage. Don’t get a part-time job, get a part-time husband! I love it.”

Elizabeth tells her she’s got a point. Had Brian been a bigamist, she knows, Ann would have made herself believe this. She has a marvelous way of turning every rotten thing her once-husband did into some kind of sly joke in which she is ultimately the winner. Her poetry, which she used to let Elizabeth read, was full of such twists.

“Well,” says Ann. “Are you going to sign old Tupperware?”

“Probably.” She flips through the manuscript and then drops it onto her desk. “And I told him I’d call him tomorrow, so be a dear and get me his file so I can make out his contract. Type a folder for him too, and find me a time tomorrow afternoon when I can see him—he’ll probably sign then.”

“Right-oh, chief,” Ann says, saluting and turning to walk out the door. The “chief” is to remind Elizabeth, nearly six years her junior, that she’s getting carried away.

“And then take the rest of the morning off,” Elizabeth calls after her. An apology.

“You’re a sport,” Ann calls back.

Tupper Daniels’ background file consists of his first letter to Vista, the questionnaire he was asked to fill out, the summary he was asked to submit and the two letters arranging this morning’s meeting.

His questionnaire says he’s submitted to all the major houses, the real publishers, and was turned down by each one. It doesn’t say why. It says he finally decided to come to Vista because he feels a writer should believe in his work enough to pay to have it published. He also adds that Stephen Crane published his own first works himself, and he’s always admired Stephen Crane.

She sits back, lights a cigarette. She recalls having read it all before, just yesterday probably, but it had no meaning then. She reads hundreds of these backgrounds a week, hundreds of letters from people with books that Vista simply must publish, no matter what the cost. Housewives with desks full of poetry, businessmen with exposés they’re sure will change the world, old people, so many old people, with memoirs and philosophies they want urgently to be preserved, recorded. So many pathetic people with dreams of immortality and a spot on the
Tonight Show.

In the beginning they had depressed her with their sad stories and hopeless ambitions, but gradually she came to see that, like anyone who dealt with
the public,
she would have to keep her sympathies, and her imagination, in check. How, she reasoned, could even the most humble shoe salesman accomplish his work if each socked or stockinged foot he held brought visions of this little piggy and pedicures and calluses earned in vain pursuits? Of mortician’s tags hung from cold toes?

She picks up his summary. It’s sketchy, but enough to allow her to discuss his book with him for hours; her own special talent.

“This is an intriguing story in the tradition of some of our greatest Southern writers. It deals with a young man who suddenly appears in a small Southern town. He camps on the outskirts of town, then buys the land under him and begins to build a home. When the home is completed, he disappears for nearly a year. On his return, he marries a young girl who is engaged to someone else, puts her in his home and then leaves again. He comes and goes with monthly and yearly intervals for nearly fifty years, fascinating the townspeople and marrying two other women from the town as each wife dies.

“The townspeople are convinced that he has other wives and families across the country, and along with the story of this man’s comings and goings the novel consists of various townspeople’s theories of who and what he has elsewhere, told from the point of view of the women themselves. So the novel is actually many stories with the same mysterious man as the center of each.”

He’d told her it was based on fact, on a man who had lived in the town where he grew up, a man later proven to be a bigamist. He’d said he was having some trouble with the ending.

She gets up and walks to her small window. A dozen cars are parked on the roof across the street. She’s been in this office nearly two years and has yet to see one car actually moving on that roof. They’re either there or not there; she never sees them coming or going.

Bigamy. She tries to remember some old joke, something about two women in love with the same man asking him, “What would you say to screwing us both?” and the man answers, “I’d say that’s big of me.”

No, she thinks, that can’t be it. She’s sure it was funnier than that.

A huge tractor trailer is backing out of the garage below. There are three little men in the street behind it, holding up
their hands, waving, yelling, shouting directions. There’s something unnecessarily frantic about their movements, as if they’re trying to wear themselves out. Perhaps, she thinks, so they’ll feel their day was well spent; like her, right now, laboring over a simple contract she need only type a name and number on: Tupper Daniels, $6,000. The simplest procedure in her delightfully simple job.

The first day she worked here, the miracle of being hired as an editor of Vista Books without any experience and only a college minor in English making her overly grateful and terribly anxious to please, she sat down with a pile of manuscripts before her and began to read, slowly, carefully, giving her full attention to each word. She was still on that first manuscript—a love story about a pioneer werewolf—when Mr. Alvin Owens, president of Vista, and son (with a name change) of Barney Goldfield, Vista’s founder, came into her office. He quickly snatched up the manuscript before her and put one piece of paper in its place.

“Sweetheart,” he said, breathing his spearmint-flavored breath on her, “you read the summary so you can talk to the author, you look at the manuscript so you can count the pages. While you’re counting the pages, you check the manuscript for pornography or slander or anything that looks like mail fraud. If it’s clean, you send the author a Congratulations letter—you know, we loved your book, we loved this sentence, this chapter, whatever. Follow the form letter until you get the hang of it. Then you fill out the contract.” He pulled one of the long, four-page documents from her desk and drummed his hairy fingers over it. “If you can find reason for the book to cost more than five thousand—it’s long, it needs illustrations, the author is a doctor—you get ten percent of the difference.” He put the contract on her desk and patted it with his hand, as if to establish a rhythm. “One contract, fifteen minutes, plus the
time you spend stroking the author’s ego. You make money, I make money and we can all go home at five o’clock.”

Since then, she hasn’t read one manuscript from beginning to end. She hasn’t had to. She merely smiles at the authors and sends them contracts and acceptance letters. They, in turn, cry in her office, kiss her hand, send her gifts. They tell her: Now I know why these things happened, why I was lonely, hurt, why my child died, my husband left me, why I lost, missed out, messed up:
So I could write about it.

She looks down into the street, at the three little men who are now sitting, exhausted, on milk crates at the entrance to the garage. She imagines titles for the books they might write:
Semi-Retirement on the Lower West Side; How I Backed a Tractor Trailer Out of a Garage, Once; My Life: In and Out of Mental Institutions.
The last is a title Vista really has published. Kevin dug it out of the storeroom and left it on her desk one morning a couple of weeks ago with a note that read, “Perhaps this will provide some insight as to why we are here.” The jacket, in two colors on cheap paper, showed a long path leading to a wide door. The print, the path and the door were all dark green, but the rest of the jacket was light blue, as if the path led not to a mental institution but to the sky or a large lake.

Kevin had taped a sketch of her on the back of the book, over the author’s picture. It was a very good sketch, even though he had made her cross-eyed. Kevin is a good artist. Under the sketch was a photo of a man with large watery eyes and big ears and a dent that looked like a huge thumbprint right in the middle of his forehead. His face was also light blue, and if it hadn’t been for that, and for the dent, he would have looked like Bing Crosby. It said in his biographical note that he’d once been hit on the head by a subway train and lived to tell about it. She pointed this out to Kevin and they laughed about it all that day.

One of the little men gets up off his milk crate, stretches, and walks slowly down the street, west toward the river. She thinks of the Steinberg poster of the New Yorker’s view of the world: the Hudson, New Jersey, Chicago, California, Russia. She thinks again about Tupper Daniels’ novel, wondering how such a story can end. What happens to a man who comes and goes for nearly fifty years? Does he come home one day and simply never leave again, making his poor wife frantic, month after month, because she’d been sure he’d be gone by now, sure by now she’d have the house to herself again? Or does he, like her own father, go away one day and come back dead? Or does he simply turn a corner as the reader turns the last page (which, she supposes, is the same as going away and dying, coming home and never leaving)?