Bright Lights, Big City (6 page)

Alex is a Fiction Editor Emeritus, a relic from the early days, a man who speaks of the venerable founders by their nicknames. He started out as an office boy, made his rep as a writer of satiric sketches of Manhattan high life that abruptly stopped appearing for reasons which are still the subject of speculation, and became an editor. He discovered and encouraged some of the writers you grew up on, but he has not discovered anybody in years and his main function seems to be as the totem figure of Continuity and Tradition. Only one story has emerged from his office in the time you have been on the staff. No one can say whether his drinking is a function of his decline or whether it is the other way around. You expect cause and effect are inextricable in these cases. Mornings he is thoughtful and witty, if somewhat ravaged. In the afternoons he sometimes wanders down to the Department of Factual Verification and waxes nostalgic. You believe he likes you, insofar as he likes anyone. He attached detailed memos to several of your short-story submissions, critiques both blunt and encouraging. He took your work seriously, although the fact that it ended up on his desk was perhaps an indication that it was not taken seriously in the Department of Fiction. You are fond of this man. While others view him as a sunken ship, you have a fantasy: Under his tutelage, you begin to write and publish. His exertion on your behalf renews his sense of purpose. You become a team, Fitzgerald and Perkins all over again. Soon he’s promoting a new generation of talent—your disciples—and you’re evolving from your Early to your Later Period.

“The old crew would have thought of that,” he says. “Siamese fighting fish in the water cooler.”

You try to think of a retort along the lines of “a scale off the fish that bit you,” but it doesn’t quite come.

“Where are you headed?”

“Lunch,” you say, before you can think better of it. The last time you told Alex you were on your way to lunch you needed a stretcher to get you back to the office.

He consults his watch. “Not a bad idea. Mind if I join you?”

By the time you compose an excuse it seems too late, indeed rude, to say that you’re meeting a friend. You don’t have to match him drink for drink. You don’t have to drink anything, although one wouldn’t kill you. One pop would cut neatly through this headache. You’ll just tell him you’ve got a big piece going to press. He’ll understand. You could use a friendly presence. You might even confide in him. Tell him some of your problems. Alex is a man familiar with trouble.

“Have you ever considered getting an MBA?” he asks. He has taken you to a steakhouse off Seventh Avenue, a smoky place favored by
Times
reporters and other heavy drinkers. He is dropping ashes on his steak, which lies cold and untouched. Already he has informed you that it is impossible to get a good steak anymore. Beef isn’t what it used to be; they force-feed the cattle and inject them with hormones. He is on his third vodka martini. You are trying to stretch your second.

“I’m not saying necessarily go into business. But write about it. That’s the subject now. The guys who understand business are going to write the new literature. Wally Stevens said money is a kind of poetry, but he didn’t follow his own advice.” He tells you there was the golden age of Papa and Fitzgerald and Faulkner, then a silver age in which he played a modest role. He thinks we’re now in a bronze age, and that fiction has nowhere to go. It can run but it can’t hide. The new writing will be about technology, the global economy, the electronic ebb and flow of wealth. “You’re a smart boy,” he says. “Don’t be seduced by all that crap about garrets and art.”

He flags down two more martinis, even though your second has yet to run dry.

“I envy you,” he says. “What are you—twenty-one?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Twenty-four. Your whole life ahead of you. You’re single, right?”

First you say no, and then yes. “Yes. Single.”

“You’ve got it made,” he says, although he has just informed you that the world you are going to inherit will have neither good beef nor good writing. “My liver’s shot,” he adds. “My liver’s gone to hell and I’ve got emphysema.”

The waiter comes with the drinks and asks about Alex’s steak, if there is anything wrong, if he would prefer something else. Alex says there’s nothing particularly wrong with it and tells him to take it away.

“You know why there’s so much homosexuality now?” he says after the waiter is gone.

You shake your head.

“It’s because of all the goddamned hormones they inject into the beef. An entire generation’s grown up on it.” He nods and looks you straight in the eye. You assume a thoughtful, manly expression. “So, who are you reading these days,” he asks. “Tell me who the young hotshots are, the up-and-comers.”

You mention a couple of your recent enthusiasms, but presently his attention drifts away and his eyelids flutter. You revive him by asking about Faulkner, with whom he shared an office in Hollywood for a couple of months in the forties. He tells you about a high-speed three-day carouse soaked with bourbon and studded with bons mots.

Alex hardly notices when you say goodbye to him on the sidewalk. His nose is pointed in the direction of the office, his eyes glazed with alcohol and memories. You are a little glazed yourself and a walk is absolutely necessary by way of clearing the head. It’s early. There is still time. You are standing at the corner of Walk and Don’t Walk—staring at Mary O’Brien McCann, the Missing Person poster girl—when somebody taps you on the shoulder.

“Hey, man, wanna buy a ferret?”

The guy is about your age, acne scars, skittish eyes. He is holding a leash attached to an animal that looks not unlike a dachshund in a fur coat.

“That’s a ferret?”

“Guaranteed.”

“What does he do?”

“Makes a great conversation piece. You’ll meet a lot of chicks, I’m telling you. You got any rats in your apartment, he’ll take care of that. His name’s Fred.”

Fred is an elegant-looking animal, apparently well behaved, though you have been known to be deceived by first appearances—witness the Austin Healey you bought with a junkyard under the hood and the genuine Cartier watch. Or the time you picked out a wife. It occurs to you that this would be the perfect mascot for the Department—a real live ferret for the fact finders. You don’t really need a pet, you can’t even take care of yourself, but perhaps Fred would be the ideal companion for Clara. A parting gift; a token of your affection.

“How much?”

“A hundred.”

“Fifty.”

“All right, eighty-five. My lowest.”

You tell him you’ll have to shop around. He gives you a business card with the name of an adult magazine shop. “Ask for Jimmy,” he says. “I got boas and monkeys, too. My prices can’t be beat.
I’m
insane.”

You walk across town, east on Forty-seventh, past the windows of the discount jewelry stores. A hawker with an armful of leaflets drones in front of a shop door: “Gold and silver, buy and sell, gold and silver, buy and sell.” No questions asked on the buying end, you presume. Chain-snatchers welcome. You stop to admire an emerald tiara, the perfect gift for your next queen for a day. Fantasy shopping. Of course, when you have money you will not stop here. You’re not going to wow your dream girl with a jewelry box that reads Gem-O-Rama. You’ll head straight for Tiffany or Cartier. Sit in a chair in the president’s office and have them fetch the merchandise for your inspection.

Hasidim hurry up and down the street, holding their hats, stopping to confer with one another, taking care not to eyeball the women in miniskirts. You examine the wares in the window of the Gotham Book Mart, and take note of the sign:
WISE MEN FISH HERE
.

At Fifth Avenue you cross and walk up to Saks. You stop in front of a window. Inside the window is a mannequin which is a replica of Amanda—your wife, the model. To form the cast for the mannequin, Amanda lay face down in a vat of latex batter for ninety minutes, breathing through a straw. You haven’t seen her in the flesh since she left for the last trip to Paris, a few days after she did the cast. You stand in front of the window and try to remember if this was how she really looked.

LES JEUX SONT FAITS

You met her in Kansas City, where you had gone to work as a reporter after college. You had lived on both coasts and abroad; the heartland was until then a large blank. You felt that some kind of truth and American virtue lurked thereabouts, and as a writer you wanted to tap into it.

Amanda grew up smack in the heart of the heartland. You met her in a bar and couldn’t believe your luck. You never would have worked up the hair to hit on her, but she came right up and started talking to you. As you talked you thought:
She looks like a goddamned model and
she doesn’t even know it
. You thought of this ingenuousness as being typical of the heartland. You pictured her backlit by a sunset, knee-deep in amber waves of grain. Her lanky, awkward grace put you in mind of a newborn foal. Her hair was the color of wheat, or so you imagined; after two months in Kansas you had yet to see any wheat. You spent most of your time at zoning-board meetings duly reporting on variances for shopping malls and perc tests for new housing developments. At night, because your apartment was too quiet, you went to bars with a book.

She seemed to think you came from Manhattan. Everyone in Kansas thought you came from New York City, whether you said Massachusetts, New England, or just East Coast. She asked about Fifth Avenue, The Carlyle, Studio 54. Obviously, from her magazine reading she knew more about these places than you did. She had visions of the Northeast as a country club rolling out from the glass and steel towers of Manhattan. She asked about the Ivy League, as if it were some kind of formal organization, and later that night she introduced you to her roommate as a member of it.

Within a week she moved in with you. She was working for a florist, and thought she might eventually like to attend classes at the university. Your education daunted and excited her. Her desire to educate herself was touching. She asked you for reading lists. She talked about the day your book would be published. All your plans were aimed at Gotham. She wanted to live on Central Park and you wished to join the literary life of the city. She sent away for the catalogues of universities in New York and typed the résumés which you sent out.

The more you learned of Amanda’s early life, the less surprised you were at her desire to start afresh. Her father left home when she was six. He did something on oil rigs, and the last Amanda heard he was in Libya. She got a Christmas card with a picture of a mosque. When she was ten she moved with her mother to a cousin’s farm in Nebraska. It was not much of a home. Her mother married a feed-and-grain salesman, and they moved to K.C. The salesman wasn’t home often and, when he was, he was either abusive or amorous to both mother and daughter. Amanda had to look after herself; you gathered her mother didn’t much care about her. She left home when she was sixteen and moved in with a boyfriend, who lasted until a few months before she met you. He left a note explaining that he was moving to California.

Hers was a childhood grimmer than most, and whenever you were inclined to find her lacking, you reminded yourself to give her credit for endurance.

In the eight months you lived together in Kansas City you visited her mother only once. Amanda was skittish and snappy on the way out. You pulled up to a trailer home on a treeless street. She introduced her mother as Dolly. The feed-and-grain salesman, you surmised, was no longer in the picture. There was tremendous tension in the cramped living room. Dolly chain-smoked Kools, flirted with you, and tossed offhand jabs at Amanda. You could see that Dolly was used to trading on her looks and that she loathed and envied her daughter’s youth. The resemblance between the two was strong, except that Dolly had a bust—a difference she alluded to several times. You could tell Amanda was ashamed of her, ashamed of the velvet painting on the wall and the unwashed dishes in the sink, ashamed that her mother was a beautician. When Dolly went to the bathroom—“to freshen up,” as she put it—Amanda picked up the souvenir Statue of Liberty on top of the television set and said, “Look at this. It’s my mother all over.” She seemed afraid that you would think it was her possession, her taste, afraid that you would identify her with Dolly.

Two years later Dolly was invited to the wedding back East. Amanda was relieved when she couldn’t make it. Her father’s invitation was Returned to Sender bearing a collection of Arabic postmarks, Address Unknown. There was no bride’s side at the church, no one except a distant, aged aunt and uncle to indicate that Amanda’s past extended farther back than the day she arrived with you in New York. That seemed to be just how she wanted it.

If your parents were not thrilled with the living-together arrangement, they went out of their way to give her a home when you returned to the East Coast. Your mother never turned away a stray dog, or heard about the plight of children in other parts of the world without volunteering her time or reaching for her checkbook, and she greeted Amanda as if she were a refugee. Amanda’s need to belong was part of her attraction. It was as if you came across one of those magazine ads—“You could turn the page, or you could save a child’s life”—and the child in question was
right there
, charming and eager to please. Long before the wedding she took to calling your parents “Mom and Dad,” and the house in Bucks County “home.” You were all suckered. Your father once asked you if you didn’t think the vast difference in your backgrounds might be a problem in the long haul, the only expressed reservation you remember.

Before you had given the subject much thought, there was on all sides the imminent assumption of marriage. After two years of living together, it seemed the thing to do. You were uneasy—had you lived enough of your life yet?—but your scrutiny of the situation yielded no decisive objections. Amanda was desperate for it. She was always saying she knew you would leave her someday, as if you had to behave like all the other swine in her life, and apparently she thought that marriage would delay or perhaps even cancel your flight. You did not feel that you could open quite all of your depths to her, or fathom hers, and sometimes you feared she didn’t have any depths. But you finally attributed this to an unrealistic, youthful idealism. Growing up meant admitting you couldn’t have everything.

The proposal was not entirely romantic. It came about after you had stayed out late with some friends at a party Amanda did not choose to attend. You crept in toward dawn and found her awake watching TV in the living room. She was furious. She said you acted like a single man. She wanted someone who would make a commitment. She didn’t want the kind of bum her mother kept bringing home. Your guilt was aggravated by a headache. The sun was coming up and you felt that she was right. You were a bad boy. You wanted to amend your life. You wanted to make it up to Amanda for the shitty life she had had as a kid. You told her you would marry her, and, after sulking
de rigueur
, she accepted.

You arrived in New York with the question of what Amanda was going to do. She had talked about college, but lost interest when it came time to fill out the applications. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. For several months she watched TV.

People were always telling Amanda she could be a model. One day she stopped in at one of the agencies and came home with a contract.

At the start she hated modeling and you took this as a sign of character. It was okay by you as long as she didn’t take it seriously. When she started bringing home all this money it seemed even more okay. Once a week she said she was going to quit. She hated the photographers, the hustlers and the hype. She hated the
models
. She felt guilty making all this money on her looks, in which she didn’t believe anyway. You asked her if she thought being a secretary was fun. You told her to stick with it long enough to salt away some money, and then she could do whatever she wanted.

You thought it was kind of kinky that she was doing this as long as she was slumming, as long as she wasn’t really a model. You both joked about the
real
models, the ones who developed ulcers over pimples and thought menopause set in at twenty-five. You both despised people who thought an invitation to X’s birthday bash at Magique was an accomplishment equal to swimming the English Channel. But you went to X’s birthday bash anyway, with your tongues in your cheeks, and while Amanda circulated you snorted some of X’s very good friend’s private stash of pink Peruvian flake in the upstairs lounge.

Her agent used to lecture her, telling her that as a professional she had to take it more seriously, stop getting ten-dollar haircuts and start going to the right places. Amanda was amused. She did a fine imitation of this agent, a modeling star of the fifties who had the manner of a dorm mother and the heart of a pimp. Over the months, though, you started eating at better restaurants and Amanda started getting her hair cut on the Upper East Side.

The first time she went to Italy for the fall showings, she cried at the airport. She reminded you that in a year and a half you had never spent a night apart. She said to hell with it, she would skip Italy, screw modeling. You convinced her to go. She called every night from Milan. Later on these separations did not seem so traumatic. You postponed your honeymoon indefinitely because she had to do the spring collections three days after the wedding.

You were busy with your own work. There were nights you got home after she was asleep. You looked at her across the breakfast nook in the morning and it often seemed that she was looking through the walls of the apartment building halfway across the continent to the plains, as if she had forgotten something there and couldn’t quite remember what it was. Her eyes reflected the flat vastness of her native ground. She sat with her elbows on the butcher-block table, twisting a strand of hair in her fingers, head cocked to one side as if she were listening for voices on the wind. There was always something elusive about her, a quality you found mysterious and unsettling. You suspected she herself couldn’t quite identify the longing that she variously attached to you, to her job, to having and spending, to her missing father, and that she had once attached to the idea of getting married. You
were
married. And still she was looking for something. But then she would cook you a special dinner, leave love notes in your briefcase and your bureau drawers.

A few months ago she was packing for a trip to Paris when she began to cry. You asked her what was wrong. She said she was nervous about the trip. By the time the cab arrived she was fine. You kissed at the door. She told you to water the plants.

The day before she was due home, she called. Her voice sounded peculiar. She said she wasn’t coming home. You didn’t understand.

“You got a later flight?”

“I’m staying,” she said.

“For how long?”

“I’m sorry. I wish you well. Really I do.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m going to Rome for
Vogue
next week and then Greece for location work. My career is really taking off over here. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to hurt you.”

“Career?” you said. “Since when is modeling a fucking
career?
”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go now.”

You demanded an explanation. She said she had been unhappy. Now she was happy. She needed space. She said goodbye and promptly hung up.

After three days of transatlantic telexes and calls you located her in a hotel on the Left Bank. She sounded weary when she picked up the phone.

“Is there another man,” you asked. This was the track your mind had followed for three sleepless nights. That wasn’t the point, she said, but yes, there was. He was a photographer. Probably the sort who called himself an
artist
. You couldn’t believe it. You reminded her that she had said that they were all fags.

She said, “
Au contraire
, Pierre,” ripping the last strained tissues that held your heart intact. When you called again later she had checked out.

A few days afterward, a man purporting to be her lawyer called. The easiest thing all around, he said, would be for you to sue his client for sexual abandonment. Just a legal term, he said. His client, your wife, would not contest anything. You could split the possessions fifty-fifty, although she drew the line at the sterling and crystal. You hung up and wept.
Sexual Abandonment
. He called again a few days later to announce that the car and the joint checking account were yours. You said you wanted to know where Amanda was. He called back and asked how much money you would settle for. You called him a pimp. “I want an explanation,” you said.

This was months ago. You haven’t told anyone at work. When they ask about Amanda you say she’s fine. Your father doesn’t know. When you talk to him on the phone you tell him everything is swell. You believe your filial duty is to appear happy and prosperous. It is the least you can do for him after all he’s done for you. You don’t want him to feel bad, and as it is, he has plenty to worry about. Then, too, you feel that spilling the beans would be irrevocable. He would never be able to forgive Amanda. As long as there is a chance she might still return, you don’t want him to know about her treachery. You want to tough it out on your own. You plead work, commitments, parties with Nobel Prize-winners as your reasons for staying in the city, even though home is only two hours away. Sooner or later you will have to go, but you want to put it off as long as possible.

•  •  •

You stand in front of Saks Fifth Avenue and stare at the mannequin. Sometime last week, when you started shouting at it, a policeman came over and told you to move along. This is just how she looked at the end, the blank stare, the lips tight and reticent.

When did she become a mannequin?

Back at the office, your resolution to pursue the facts of the recent French elections has staled. A little nap in one of the upstairs offices would be the thing. But you’ve got to hang in there. You make yourself a cup of instant espresso with four tablespoons of Maxim. Megan tells you there have been three calls for you: one from the president of the Polar Explorers, one from France and another from your brother Michael.