An Enlarged Heart (19 page)

The Fiction Department, housed on the twentieth floor, directly above Mr. Shawn's office, received more than fifty thousand stories a year, and I read a great many of them. Almost all of them were about things that happened, usually suddenly: a car crash, or a death, or unkind words out of nowhere, a door slamming. In my own life at that time, conversely, nothing seemed to happen suddenly: it was more like watching water circle down a drain. There was a tall file cabinet in a sort of foyer outside my office, filled with card files, in alphabetical order. When I read a manuscript, I wrote the name of the author on a card, and recorded, almost always, the day it was returned and whether I had written a personal note. Encouraging notes were sent only to writers who some day might write a story that could conceivably be published, some time in the future, in the magazine. Sometimes one sentence, glimmering in a mess of prose, would prompt a letter. (As happened more often, this was not the case, and manuscripts received a printed rejection note, from “The Editors.”) It was instructive, thumbing through the files, which dated back decades: one Jerome David Salinger, for example, had submitted twenty-eight manuscripts before the magazine had accepted a story called “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” From the notations it was clear that personal notes had been sent after the first five or six submissions. At the bottom of the second and last card was a notation, in fountain pen that had bled a little, that read
see Shawn files.

One afternoon I happened to be taking a proof down to the fact-Checking Department when I ran into Mr. Shawn. I had not seen him for some weeks. I'd been studying my own reflection in one of the oblique mirrors that were set at the bends in the face-powder halls where two walls met at a corner. The presence of these mirrors was explained by Mr. Shawn's attempt to avert encounters with persons he would rather avoid; writers who might ask him, for example, when a piece that the magazine had accepted months ago might run, or for money. Both of these topics were often obscure and difficult, because of Mr. Shawn's reluctance to hurt a writer's feelings or disclose his own: there were pieces that he accepted that he had no plans ever to run. This was linked to, and complicated by, I believe, his own ever-present feeling of hopefulness and worry, which was in turn tied to a refusal to give in to despair. (This, in turn, was tied to the
we'll get out of this somehow
mentality of “Onward and Upward …” and was just one of the ways the magazine bit its own tail.) I think he thought that if a piece just sat long enough, it would transform into something that in some issue
just might work,
that the genius that was somewhere there would announce itself and the editor who was assigned to the piece would eke it out at last and all would be well. This after all was the attitude the magazine (in the person of Mr. Shawn) took to writers who had not produced work in years, because they were blocked, or just couldn't, or in too many instances seemed to attract so very many episodes of personal tragedy or trouble that no sane person could possibly work under these circumstances. It was tacitly understood that for some people mental equilibrium was not in the cards, in the best of times, and that as a whole, people who spend a lot of time waiting for their own Boo Radley to come out will generally find that he will come out. Or they invent him.

Not surprisingly, money played a part. After all, writers were people with families, and apartments and houses and tuition and often ex-wives to support. A person who was beset by these responsibilities needed to be paid. So in a fallow time Mr. Shawn would take a piece that would not run, or in other instances writers on contract were paid a great deal, in those days, for signing that contract, and then had what amounted to a drawing account at the magazine. This meant that there were writers who were so in debt to the magazine, for amounts of money which had paid for apartments and tuition and the general high cost of living a certain kind of life in New York, that it became impossible that they would ever pay back the magazine, which was represented in the person of Mr. Shawn. This fostered the—I don't want to say
illusion,
because it had been going on at the time, that is the early nineteen-eighties, when I came to the magazine, for at least twenty years or more—the
notion,
then, of a large extended family in which the Victorian paterfamilias, in his overcoat and muffler, girded against the elements in all weather, was the giver of approval and sustenance. It was written into the contracts of fiction writers that characters who appeared in stories in the magazine could not appear elsewhere, I believe for a period of one year. Or was it ten years? Or forever? So that the landscape of the ten-point type became the only air that even the imaginary could breathe.

I
t was difficult to avoid the mirrors. At first you thought you saw someone down the length of the hall, and then you realized in the same instance in which it occurred you had bumped into yourself. (Later, when I began to write Profiles for the magazine, I often thought of these mirrors.) I was prone to this escapade because I had begun dressing up. By then I wore crocheted dresses over silk slips—the effect was vaguely Guineverish—sold by a woman on Greenwich Avenue, and I liked to catch sight of myself in the mirror. I know now I must have looked faintly ridiculous, like an extra fallen to the cutting floor in a Zefferilli production. I was wearing one of these getups on this particular afternoon, when I stopped myself from banging my head on the mirror and bumped into Mr. Shawn instead.

It took us both a moment to recover from the jar of physical contact. When we had finished apologizing (Mr. Shawn was under the impression that there was a chance I had been injured, and it took a few moments to dissuade him), he asked me if I was interested in clothes. I had no idea what he might mean by this. I also knew that if Mr. Shawn had asked me if I was interested in bison, or aerodromes, I would develop a sudden and intense interest in these things. I nodded, and he disappeared, as he was prone to do, into the ether. An hour later at my desk I was asked if I could spare a minute to see Mr. Shawn. It was my first private interview, and when I came in he asked me to sit on the only space of the white couch in his office which was free of books and galleys. He told me that the writer who had been writing the column “On and Off the Avenue,” had decided, after seven years, she'd like to stop writing it, and he was wondering if it would be possible for me to take it on. This would mean a number of things, he explained. I would need to give up my job in the Fiction Department, which I might not want to do, but it would be difficult, especially in the fall, for me to do both jobs at once. In order to be sure I understood the kind of writing I was meant to do, he would like me to write a piece of about one thousand words in which I would describe objects for sale in a shop. It could be any shop I liked, in Manhattan. I should of course submit expenses. Most important, he said, he wanted me to think about what I wanted to do, at the magazine. His voice, if possible, dropped to a lower pitch. It was clear to him, he said, that I could be either a writer or an editor, and for now I needed to choose. A writer's life, he said, with a little lift in tone, was, you might say,
unpredictable.

I was looking down, and I noticed by my feet an enormous pile of manuscripts, about a foot high, that was held together in sections by rubber bands. Since I had placed it there, months ago, I knew, from its particularly smeary feel, that it was some chapters of a novel called
The Runaway Soul,
by a writer called Harold Brodkey, who had been rewriting it for twenty years. (When this book was finally published a few years later, there was a party on a balcony of a New York hotel. I was standing in a party frock made out of almost shredded pale silk, and Harold came up to me and gestured to Central Park, which looked that evening as though it were made of fairy lights. He took the drink out of my hand and poured it slowly over the balustrade. Then he said, “You think it will always be like this. Well, it won't.” I remember feeling shocked and then sorry that he couldn't be happy at his own party, and also the feeling he was trying to look out for me—in the past months he had often sat on a chair in my office, chatting—and that already I knew he was right. He was dead a few years after that—in the years it seemed that everyone who was brilliant was dead or dying, and a few weeks later I received a note thanking me for writing to him when he was ill, which he had dictated, in his wife's hand.

The next day during my lunch hour I wandered out with a notebook toward Grand Central Station, and the following morning I handed in a story about a shop that specialized in knives. I wrote about carving knives and boning knives and special knives with bone handles for gutting fish. I had another meeting with Mr. Shawn, in which, like a character in a Thornton Wilder play, I told him I had decided to “be a writer.” He greeted the news with resignation. He then told me that I had two deadlines, one on October l8 and the other three weeks later, and in each instance I was to write eighteen thousand words. He also mentioned, in tones of embarrassment, that I would be paid a weekly salary throughout the year, rather than for each piece. (I later found out that because I was so young, he was afraid that I would be irresponsible with large sums of money given to me all at once; that this arrangement, when it ended, would have quite the opposite effect, leaving me in an unfortunate position in comparison to that of other writers who were supposedly, by virtue of age, more responsible, was not something he could have predicted.) When I left the office he raised his hand, in a gesture of both valediction and greeting.

I
left the Fiction Department, and was given an office on the eighteenth floor, a few steps from the clock. Out of a kind of desperate fear of being found out, I immediately spent three weeks in the magazine's library, among the heavy black binders, reading every single “On and Off the Avenue” column that had been written since 1921, so that I could learn how to do it. It was 1985, and I was the fourth writer to take over the assignment. It is difficult to convey, now, the feeling of longevity. When I arrived at the magazine, I was among the youngest people at the magazine. The offices were populated by people, some of whom were in their seventies and eighties, who had worked for the magazine for their entire lives. The head of the Fiction Department, for example, was the son of the editor who had decamped to Maine. He sat at a desk in what had been her office. It may have been her desk, for all I know. What I did know is that the editor, his mother, had him left him and his younger sister in New York with their father, and after a Reno divorce had spent the rest of her life in Maine, with the famous author of children's books, which I had not yet, then, read to my own children, but would, when the time came.

I filed that information away. In the office next to mine was a writer who wrote wild fey stories and film reviews, but also wrote movies, one of which was about a triangle between two men and a woman who made coffee by running cold grounds under the tap and saying damn. I didn't understand, yet, the idea of saying,
enough.
When she was in England she lived in a tall house with a daughter who wasn't speaking to her—if I had been able to project far into the future I would have been sure that such a thing would never happen
to me
—but in New York she was often passed out in her office. On occasions I called for an ambulance. Another scrap of information, filed away.
This is what happens.
What can happen.
Two writers on the eighteenth floor had been married to the same man, who was also a writer for the magazine, who had thrown himself out the window of his apartment and killed himself. Yet another. The woman whose mother threatened to blow up her house, was writing, gradually, a dreamlike book about her own family's story of murder and incest, left her husband for another woman, became a friend without whom I could not think coherently about my own life. Yet another. I did not think in the same ways about men's lives because they seemed remote from my own, with different requirements. Late one night the telephone rang. It was a friend, the boy who had chased fire engines, who for what seemed then inexplicable reasons had been invited to dinner at the apartment of the woman with whom Mr. Shawn had been living his alternate life, Goldie's owner. He was calling to tell me that he thought he was losing his mind: the furnishings of the apartment were
exactly the same
as the furnishings of the Shawns' apartment. He was calling from a pay phone on the corner. Another box. I began to arrange these files, filling them with what scraps I could find, swan feathers with tar on them, numbers to call in an emergency, as if I were filling a curio cabinet, a file chest like the one in the Fiction Department, filled with stories.

In my office on the eighteenth floor I wrote my columns in the fall, and short pieces about other things, and stared out the window at the pigeon on the ledge of the building across street. I began to write Profiles. I went to see people in theaters and on ski slopes and on movie sets, and sat still and listened, and then asked them questions about their lives. I felt adolescent, still, and covered with scabs. Through all of this I continued to read the black binders in the library as though my life depended on it. Because I was shy, and afraid, and set on not bumping into myself in the mirror, although I did again and again, I set myself to learn a kind of ventriloquism. The syntax was offhand, precise, it played catch with itself. It told a story without telling a story. It took as given that the story that wasn't told was the important one. When I had worked in the Fiction Department I wrote letters for editors, and one afternoon a letter landed on my desk with the note:
Handle this?
It was a note from Mary McCarthy, complaining that the magazine was not being properly delivered to her address in Paris, where, I knew, she was living with her fourth husband. I wrote back, saying that until she let the magazine know that her subscription was arriving weekly, I would send her the magazine myself from New York, in an airmail envelope. The letter that came back a week later thanked me for taking on this task: the magazine had arrived. She then asked if I was the person, with, she pointed out, the same name, whose poem had been printed in the magazine. She admired the poem, she wanted me to know, but I had made mistakes in my Italian geography. Frankly, she was astonished the fact-Checking Department had not picked it up. The next week when I sent her the current issue of the magazine, I enclosed a note thanking her for the correction.