Bright Lights, Big City (4 page)

“Your next three paragraphs depend on it.”

“Damn. Who told me that?”

By the end of the second call he is annoyed, as if the errors were of your devising. This is the way it goes with the writers: they resent you to the degree that they depend on you.

Late in the afternoon a memo arrives addressed to “staff.” It is signed by the Druid’s assistant, which makes it gospel.

It has come to our attention that a Mr. Richard Fox is writing an article about the magazine. Some of you may already have been approached by Mr. Fox. We have reason to believe that the intentions of this reporter are not coincident with the best interests of the magazine. We would like to remind all staff members of the magazine’s policy with regard to the press. AU queries and requests for interviews should be referred to this office. Under no circumstances should any employee presume to speak for the magazine without prior clearance. We remind you that all magazine business is strictly confidential.

The memo occasions amusement in the Department of Factual Verification. The magazine has been involved in many freedom of press trials, but in this gag order there is not a glimmer of irony.

Wade says, “I wish Richard Fox would call me.”

Megan says, “Forget it, Yasu. I know for a fact that Richard Fox is straight.”

“For a
fact
? I’d be very interested to hear about your verification procedure.”

“I know you would,” Megan says.

“At any rate,” Wade says, “I only meant that I would be fantastically curious to know how many pieces of silver some of the institutional dirty laundry is worth. But don’t get me wrong—it’s not that I don’t find Fox attractive.”

Rittenhouse is tugging at his glasses, indicating that he wishes to speak. “I, for one, do not feel that Richard Fox is an objective reporter. He has a penchant for sensationalism.”

“Of course,” Wade says. “That’s why we love him.”

The possession of dangerous information excites a brief feeling of power here in the Department of Factual Verification. You wish Richard Fox or anyone else cared enough about Clara Tillinghast to perform a character assassination.

By seven everyone is gone. They all offered to help, and you waved them away. There is a shabby nobility in failing all by yourself.

Clara sticks her head in the door as she’s leaving. “My desk,” she says.

My ass, you think.

You nod and, in token of your earnestness, hunker down over the page proofs. From this point on it’s a matter of covering your tracks, running pencil lines through anything that you have not been able to verify and hoping that nothing important slips through.

At seven-thirty Allagash calls. “What are you doing at the office?” he says. “We have plans for the evening. Monstrous events are scheduled.”

Two of the things you like about Allagash are that he never asks you how you are and he never waits for you to answer his questions. You used to dislike this, but when the news is all bad it’s a relief that someone doesn’t want to hear it. Just now you want to stay at the surface of things, and Tad is a figure skater who never considers the sharks under the ice. You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you can clean it up a little you don’t want to invite anyone inside.

Allagash tells you that Natalie and Inge are dying to meet you. Natalie’s father runs an oil company and Inge is soon to be in a major television commercial. Moreover, the Deconstructionists are playing the Ritz, one of the modeling agencies is sponsoring a bash for Muscular Dystrophy at Magique and Natalie has cornered a chunk of the Gross National Product of Bolivia.

“I’m going to be working most of the night,” you say. Actually, you are about to give up, but a night of Allagash is not the remedy for your blues. You’re thinking of bed. You are so tired you could stretch out right here on the linoleum and slip into a long coma.

“Give me a time. I’ll pick you up,” Tad says.

The phrase “last-ditch effort” jumps out from the column of print in front of you. It makes you ashamed of yourself. You think of the Greeks at Thermopylae, the Texans at the Alamo, John Paul Jones in his leaky tub. You want to rally and whip hell out of falsehood and error.

You tell Tad you will call him back in half an hour. Later, when the phone rings, you ignore it.

At a little after ten you put the proofs on Clara’s desk. It would at least be a relief if you could tell yourself that this was your best shot. You feel like a student who is handing in a term paper that is part plagiarism, part nonsense and half finished. You have scoped out and fixed a number of colossal blunders, which serves only to make you more aware of the suspect nature of everything you haven’t verified. The writer was counting on the Verification Department to give authority to his sly observations and insidious generalizations. This is not cricket on his part, but it is your job to help him out and it is your job that is on the line. There has only been one printed retraction in the magazine’s history and the verificationist responsible for the error was immediately farmed out to Advertising. Your only hope is that the Clinger won’t read it. A fire of mysterious origin might sweep through the offices. Or Clara might get sloshed tonight, fall off a barstool and crack her head open. She might get picked up by a Sex Killer. Any
Post
reader will tell you it’s possible. Happens every day.

There was a cartoon you used to watch, at least you think there was, with a time-traveling turtle and a benevolent wizard. The turtle would journey back to, say, the French Revolution, inevitably getting in way over his head. At the last minute, when he was stretched out under the guillotine, he would cry out, “Help, Mr. Wizard!” And the wizard, on the other end of the time warp, would wave his wand and rescue the hapless turtle.

•  •  •

Already you feel a sense of nostalgia as you walk down the narrow halls past all the closed doors. You remember how you felt when you passed this way for your first interview, how the bland seediness of the hallway only increased your apprehension of grandeur. You thought of all the names that had been made here. You thought of yourself in the third person:
He arrived for his first interview in a navy-blue blazer. He was interviewed for a position in the Department of Factual Verification, a job which must have seemed even then to be singularly unsuited to his flamboyant temperament. But he was not to languish long among the facts
.

Those first months seem now to have been filled with promise. You were convinced of the importance of your job and of the inevitability of rising above it. You met people you had admired half your life. You got married. The Druid himself sent a note of congratulations. It was only a matter of time before they realized your talents were being wasted in Fact.

Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating.

Mrs. Bender, the senior grammarian, is working late. You say good night. She asks you about the French piece and you tell her it’s finished.

“What a mess,” she says. “It reads as if it was translated literally from the Chinese. These damn writers want us to do all their work for them.”

You nod and smile. Her complaint is refreshing, like rain at the end of a muggy day. You linger in the doorway while she shakes her head and clicks her tongue.

“Going home soon?” you say.

“Not soon enough.”

“Can I get you something from downstairs?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t want to feel as if I’m settled in here.”

“See you tomorrow.”

She nods and returns to her proofs.

You walk to the elevator and press the Down button.

THE UTILITY OF FICTION

You see yourself as the kind of guy who appreciates a quiet night at home with a good book. A little Mozart on the speakers, a cup of cocoa on the arm of the chair, slippers on the feet. Monday night. It feels like Thursday, at least. Walking from subway to apartment, you tell yourself that you are going to suppress this rising dread that comes upon you when you return home at night. A man’s home, after all, is his castle. Approaching your building on West Twelfth Street, you observe the architect’s dim concept of European fortresses: a crenelated tower atop the building conceals the water tank and the entrance is fitted with a mock portcullis. You let yourself in the front door and gingerly unlock the mailbox. No telling what might be inside. One of these days there could be a letter from Amanda explaining her desertion, begging forgiveness or asking you to send the rest of her stuff to a new address.

Tonight there is an overdue notice from
VISA
; a solicitation from Recording for the Blind; a letter from Jim Winthrop in Chicago, college roommate, best man at your wedding; and something corporate for Amanda White. You open Jim’s letter first. It starts “Hey stranger,” and ends with “regards to Amanda.” The letter to Amanda is a printout on an insurance company letterhead, her name typed into the salutation:

Let’s face it—in your business, your face is your greatest asset. Modeling is an exciting and rewarding career. In all likelihood, you have many years of earning ahead of you. But where would you be in the event of a disfiguring accident? Even a minor injury could spell the end of a lucrative career and the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential income.

You ball up the letter and arc it into the wastebasket beside the elevator. You press the button.
Where would you be, for instance, if a spurned husband threw acid in your face?
No. Stop this. This is not your better self speaking. This is not how you feel.

The sound of the tumblers in the locks of your apartment door puts you in mind of dungeons. The place is haunted. Just this morning you found a makeup brush beside the toilet. Memories lurk like dustballs at the backs of drawers. The stereo is a special model that plays only music fraught with poignant associations.

This was the second apartment you shared with Amanda, the place into which you moved in order to accommodate the wedding gifts. Amanda wanted to live on the Upper East Side, where the other models lived. She brought home prospecti for co-ops and then, when you asked her where the money was going to come from, suggested you could get a loan from your father. You asked her what made her think that even if your father had that kind of money on hand, he would want to fork it over. She shrugged. “Anyway, I’m doing really well right now,” she said. For the first time you realized that she thought your family was rich, and by the standards of her childhood they were. “Come look at this kitchen plan,” she said.

This place was your compromise—an uptown sort of building downtown: high ceilings, daytime doorman, working fireplaces. You both liked the wood paneling and the wainscoting. Amanda said it was a place in which you would not feel ridiculous eating off the new china with the sterling flatware. Flatware, china and crystal occupied much of her concern as the wedding approached. She insisted that you buy a starter set of Tiffany sterling: the price of silver was going through the ceiling and she was convinced that it would double or triple by the time of the wedding. A famous designer told her so. With the earnings of three weeks’ showroom work she bought six settings. A few days later silver collapsed, and the six settings were worth about what she paid for one.

When she heard you had a family crest she wanted to put it on the sterling, but you drew the line at your monograms and feared the sense of urgency in her new acquisitiveness. She seemed eager to provision you all at once for a lifetime. Then, within a year of this prenuptial buying spree, she was gone. Now you eat out of paper cartons and the wainscoting doesn’t cheer you. What’s more, you can’t really afford the rent. You keep meaning to look for a new place, and to do the dishes and the laundry.

You close the door and stand in the foyer, listening. For some time after Amanda left, you would pause here in the hope that you would hear her inside, that she had returned, that you would discover her, penitent and tender, when you stepped into the living room. That hope is mostly gone, but still you observe this brief vigil inside the door, gauging the quality of the silence to see if it is only the melancholy silence of absence, or whether it is full of high-register shrieks and moans. Tonight you are uncertain. You step into the living room and throw your jacket on the love seat. You hunt up your slippers and read the spines of the books in the shelves, determined to make ago of this quiet-night-at-home idea. A random sampling of titles induces vertigo:
As I Lay Dying, Under the Volcano, Anna Karenina, Being and Time, The Brothers Karamazov
. You must have had an ambitious youth. Of course, many of these spines have never been cracked. You have been saving them up.

Nothing seems to be what you want to do until you consider writing. Suffering is supposed to be the raw stuff of art. You could write a book. You feel that if only you could make yourself sit down at a typewriter you could give shape to what seems merely a chain reaction of pointless disasters. Or you could get revenge, tell your side of the story, cast some version of yourself in the role of wronged hero. Hamlet on the battlements. Maybe get outside autobiography altogether, lose yourself in the purely formal imperatives of words in the correct and surprising sequence, or create a fantasy world of small furry and large scaly creatures.

You have always wanted to be a writer. Getting the job at the magazine was only your first step toward literary celebrity. You used to write what you believed to be urbane sketches infinitely superior to those appearing in the magazine every week. You sent them up to Fiction; they came back with polite notes. “Not quite right for us now, but thanks for letting us see this.” You would try to interpret the notes: what about the word
now
—do they mean that you should submit this again, later? It wasn’t the notes so much as the effort of writing that discouraged you. You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer biding his time in the Department of Factual Verification. But between the job and the life there wasn’t much time left over for emotion recollected in tranquillity. For a few weeks you got up at six to compose short stories at the kitchen table while Amanda slept in the other room. Then your night life started getting more interesting and complicated, and climbing out of bed became harder and harder. You were gathering experience for a novel. You went to parties with writers, cultivated a writerly persona. You wanted to be Dylan Thomas without the paunch, F. Scott Fitzgerald without the crack-up. You wanted to skip over the dull grind of actual creation. After a hard day of work on other people’s manuscripts—knowing in your heart that you could do better—the last thing you wanted to do was to go home and write. You wanted to go out. Amanda was the fashion model and you worked for the famous magazine. People were happy to meet you and to invite you to their parties. So much was going on. Of course, mentally, you were always taking notes. Saving it all up. Waiting for the day when you would sit down and write your masterpiece.

You dig your typewriter out of the closet and set it up on the dining-room table. You have some good twenty-pound bond from the supply cabinet in the office. You roll a sheet, with backing, onto the platen. The whiteness of the sheet is intimidating, so you type the date in the right-hand corner. You decide to jump immediately into the story you have in mind. Waste no time with preliminaries. You type:

He was expecting her on the afternoon flight from Paris when she called to say she would not be coming home.

“You’re taking a later flight?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m starting a new life.”

You read it over. Then you tear the sheet out of the typewriter and insert a new one.

Go farther back, maybe. Try to find the source of this chaos. Give her a name and a place.

Karen liked to look at her mother’s fashion magazines. The women were elegant and beautiful and they were always climbing in and out of taxis and limousines on their way to big stores and restaurants. Karen didn’t think there were any stores or restaurants like that in Oklahoma. She wished she looked like the ladies in the pictures. Then maybe her father would come back.

This is dreadful. You tear the sheet into eighths and slide them into the wastebasket. You insert another piece of paper; again you type the date. At the left margin you type, “Dear Amanda,” but when you look at the paper it reads “Dead Amanda.”

Screw this. You are not going to commit any great literature tonight. You need to relax. After all, you’ve been busting ass all day. You check the fridge; no beer. A finger of vodka in the bottle on the sink. Maybe you will step out and get a six-pack. Or wander over to the Lion’s Head, as long as you’re going out, to see if there’s anybody you know. It’s not impossible there to meet a woman
avec
hair,
sans
tattoo, at the bar.

The intercom buzzes while you’re changing your shirt. You push the Talk button: “Who is it?”

“Narcotics squad. We’re soliciting donations for children all over the world who have no drugs.”

You buzz him up. You’re not sure how you feel about the advent of Tad Allagash. While you could use company, Tad can be too much of a good thing. His brand of R & R is nothing if not strenuous. Nonetheless, by the time he gets to the door, you’re glad to see him. He’s looking
très sportif
in J. Press torso and punked-out red SoHo trousers. He presents his hand and you shake.

“Ready to roll?”

“Where are we rolling?”

“Into the heart of the night. Wherever there are dances to be danced, drugs to be hoovered, women to be Allagashed. It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it. Speaking of drugs, are you in possession?”

You shake your head.

“Not a single line for young Tad?”

“Sorry.”

“Not even a mirror I can lick?”

“Suit yourself.”

Tad goes over to the mahogany-and-gilt-framed mirror that you inherited from your grandmother, the one Amanda was so afraid your cousin was going to nab. He runs his tongue over the glass.

“There’s something on here.”

“Dust.”

Tad smacks his lips. “In this apartment the dust has better coke content than some of the shit we buy by the gram. All us coke fiends sneezing—it adds up.”

Tad runs his finger across the length of the coffee table. “It looks like you could teach a course in dust here. Did you know that ninety percent of your average household dust is composed of human epidermal matter? That’s skin, to you.”

Perhaps this explains your sense of Amanda’s omnipresence. She has left her skin behind.

He walks over to the table and leans over the typewriter. “Doing a little writing, are we?
Dead Amanda
. That’s the idea. I told you you’d get more nookie than you can shake a stick at if you tell the girls that your wife died. It’s the sympathy vote. More effective than saying she fit you with horns and kited off to Paris. Avoid the awful taint of rejection.”

Tad’s first reaction, when you told him about Amanda’s departure, contained a grain of genuine sympathy and regret. His second reaction was to tell you that you could make a fine erotic career for yourself by repeating the story just as you had told it to him, adding touches of pathos and cruel irony. Finally, he advised you to say that Amanda had died in a plane crash on her way home from Paris on the day of your first anniversary.

“You’re sure there aren’t any drugs around here?”

“Some Robitussin in the bathroom.”

“I’m disappointed in you, Coach. I’ve always thought of you as the kind of guy who saves something for a rainy day. The temperate sort.”

“I’ve fallen in with bad companions.”

“Let’s get on the phone,” Tad says. “We must locate party fuel.
Cherchez les grammes.
”

All the people who might have drugs aren’t home. The people who are home don’t have drugs. There is a pattern here. “Damn Warner,” Tad says. “He never answers his phone. I just know he’s sitting there in his loft on top of a pile of toot, ignoring the phone.” Tad hangs up and checks his watch, which tells him the time in selected major cities of the world, including New York and Dubai, Persian Gulf, Oman. “Eleven-forty. A little too early for Odeon, but once we’re downtown, it’s happy hunting ground for sneeze and squeeze. Ready?”

“Have you ever experienced this nearly overwhelming urge for a quiet night at home?”

Tad reflects for a moment. “No.”

The glittering, curvilinear surfaces inside Odeon are reassuring. The place makes you feel reasonable at any hour, often against bad odds, with its good light and clean luncheonette-via-Cartier deco decor. Along the bar are faces familiar under artificial light, belonging to people whose daytime existence is only a tag—designer, writer, artist. A model from Amanda’s agency is sitting at the bar. You do not want to see her. Tad cruises right over and kisses her. At the other end of the bar you order a vodka. You finish it and order a second before Tad beckons. The model is with another woman. Tad introduces them as Elaine and Theresa. Elaine, the model, has a punk high-fashion look: short, razor-cut dark hair, high cheekbones, eyebrows plucked straight. Metallic and masculine are the adjectives that come to mind. Both M words. Theresa is blond, too short and busty to model. Elaine looks you over as if you were an impulse purchase that she might return to the department store.

“Aren’t you Amanda White’s boyfriend?”