Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (6 page)

“Trillin who?” says Robert Schwartz of
The Newsletter of the Tarrytown Group
.

“His family’s got an awfully nice coat of arms,” Nancy Halbert says. Good old Nancy Halbert. No sour grapes for her just because someone had been forced, through no fault of his own, to stick her with an exclusive coat of arms her special heraldic artists had already researched and re-created. “It’s got a lovely border,” she continues, “with a bribed immigration officer looking away from it. The center section has crossed steerage tickets rampant on a field of greenhorns.”

“Holistically,” Schwartz says, “I think he might not interface creatively with your concepts. Also, he’s a smart aleck.”

“His home doesn’t sizzle in the least,” John Fairchild says. “I can’t imagine who advised him to hang that American Hereford Association poster in the front hall.”

The room is silent. “I guess we’ll give him a skip,” Corr, Jr., finally says. “After all, we’re only looking for a handful.”

1983

I was brought up in a Jewish home, but I haven’t been observant in years. Last summer, in a rash moment, I said publicly that if Martha Stewart got indicted, I would go back to the synagogue. Now that such an indictment seems likely, I am in a quandary. My older daughter believes that if Ms. Stewart goes to prison my obligations will include attending services regularly, maintaining a kosher home, and refraining from operating a motor vehicle on Shemini Atzereth. My younger daughter thinks that I might at least be able to get a waiver on that business about changing dishes for Passover. I want to keep my word, but I’m wondering whether a Friday-night service or two would do the trick.

C.T., New York City

My husband, who is an antiabortion activist, sincerely believes that life begins at conception. Recently, he learned that he was conceived while his parents were on vacation in Jamaica, and he has come to the conclusion that he is therefore a Jamaican and is in this country illegally. He is now talking about turning himself in and having himself deported. Am I married to a man of principle or a cuckoo bird?

D.F., Tupelo, Miss.

I am an advisor to the President of a very powerful country. In order to divert attention from the economy, which happens to stink, I’ve advised him to talk about virtually nothing but war against Iraq between now and November, when our country is holding an important election. If the economy still stinks after a war with Iraq, and I advise the President to talk about virtually nothing but war with North Korea until the next election, would I be “playing politics”?

K.R., Washington, D.C.

I am an entrepreneur whose business seriously needs the sort of intervention with the Customs Service only a high-ranking federal officeholder can provide. When I read about the gifts accepted by Senator Torricelli, I bought a home-entertainment center, intending to give it to him at an appropriate time. Now he has dropped out of the race. Would it still be ethical to deduct the home-entertainment center from my taxes? The picture on the television is excellent.

W.S., Short Hills, N.J.

For six years, I was the CEO of a large conglomerate. Then, in 2000, there was a precipitous drop in the company’s stock. Fortunately, by complete coincidence, I had sold eighty-seven million dollars’ worth of shares the week before. For the final three years of my tenure, I had a compensation package that included one of those Jack Welch riders—I was entitled to any perk that Jack got from General Electric. Now I find that Jack was getting free Yankees tickets and I wasn’t. I’m planning to sue my old company for the cost of the tickets, although given the company’s current financial situation—it’s in Chapter 11—I might get only ten or fifteen cents on the dollar. My wife says that some people might consider the suit unseemly, with so many employees having lost their retirement money and all. But don’t you think that fair’s fair? The thought of Jack sitting in that box in Yankee Stadium just burns my ass.

B.P., Naples, Fla.

We are advisors to the president of a very powerful country, and we are prominent in a group of so-called hawks urging him to wage war on Iraq. Like every other member of the group, we evaded the war in Vietnam. Some people see an ethical problem in this; they refer to us as chicken hawks. But we figure that if we had gone to Vietnam we could have been killed, and then who would be here to urge the President to wage war on Iraq?

D.C., R.P., P.W., Washington, D.C.

2002

There was a time when I responded to any new memoir about
The New Yorker
the way everyone else on the staff did: I went to a bookstore and, without buying the book, looked in the index for my name. This was before publishers realized that the way to sell more of this sort of book was not to include an index. Finding your name in the index, I should say, was not a cause for joy. Management had neglected to mention in its standard employment agreement that absolutely anything said to anyone connected to the magazine was on the record, so if, in a moment of weakness, you had unburdened yourself to a colleague about an old and completely uncharacteristic shoplifting incident or a marginally kinky sexual predilection or a devastating physical description of the editor who handled your copy, you had to hope that the colleague in question would acquire a crippling case of writer’s block before it came time for him to record everything he could recall about life at
The New Yorker
.

Even if your name in the index turned out to be unconnected to an indictable offense, it usually meant that in the author’s memory you had said something stupid or embarrassing and he had come back with a wickedly apt rejoinder. When I read about myself in those books, I usually thought I hadn’t said exactly what I’d been quoted as saying, but I could never remember the conversation well enough to be sure. I don’t know how all of these memoirists held on to such precise memories of casual water-fountain conversations that took place in 1965 or 1973. I’ll admit that in those days I never thought of patting them down for wires.

For many years, I didn’t give any thought to writing my own book about
The New Yorker
. I couldn’t remember many truly mortifying things people had said to me or many clever things I had said back.
Whenever my wife read a
New Yorker
memoir, she’d ask if it was possible that I had actually never uttered a wickedly apt rejoinder.

“I wouldn’t say ‘never,’ ” I told her at one point. “When we had that go-around about having a dental plan, someone who thought writers shouldn’t concern themselves with such petit bourgeois matters said to me, ‘Dostoyevsky didn’t have a dental plan,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, and did you ever get a load of his teeth?’ ”

“Can you remember any that didn’t have to do with the dental plan?” she asked.

“Not offhand,” I said. “But it doesn’t make any difference, because I don’t want to write a book about
The New Yorker
anyway.”

Lately, though, I’ve been getting a little edgy about that policy. It’s now clear that I could eventually find myself in the position of being the only person with any connection to the magazine who hasn’t discussed his
New Yorker
experience in excruciating detail between hard covers. It has occurred to me that there could come a day, many years from now, when my grandchildren, lacking documentary evidence issued under the imprimatur of a major publisher, refuse to believe that I ever worked for
The New Yorker
at all.

I see us all on the porch of our summerhouse in Nova Scotia. My wife and I, ancient but still quite alert in the middle of the day, are rocking to the best of our capacity in our rocking chairs and these so-far-hypothetical grandchildren are sprawled in hammocks and deck chairs and cushions around us. My wife is saying, “When Gramps was writing those pieces around the country every three weeks for
The New Yorker
, and your mothers were just tiny little …”

“Gidoudahere,” little Siobhan says. “Gramps never wrote for
The New Yorker.
”

I start to smile, in a way that I think combines fond forbearance of Siobhan’s mistake coupled with appropriate modesty, but then I hear the voice of little Deirdre (in this fantasy, for reasons I can’t imagine, all of my grandchildren have been given Irish names that I’ve always had difficulty pronouncing). “My friend Jason’s grandfather worked at
The New Yorker,
” little Deirdre says. “He wrote a book all about it.” She tells us Jason’s grandfather’s name, as if intoning the name of some rock star she’d been fortunate to catch a glimpse of in a restaurant.

“To paraphrase what A. J. Liebling once wrote of Hamlin Garland,” I say, “Jason’s grandfather couldn’t write for free seeds.”

“Did you know A. J. Liebling, Gramps?” little Seamus says.

“Well,” I reply.

“Because my friend Timmy’s nana said in her
New Yorker
book that she knew A. J. Liebling!” little Seamus says.

“In her dreams!” I say, not realizing that I’ve raised my voice a bit. “In her goddamned dreams!”

My wife shoots me one of those not-in-front-of-the-children looks, and then says, brightly, “Gramps once met J. D. Salinger. Tell us what J. D. Salinger said.”

“I can’t remember exactly,” I say, “but it may have been ‘Nice to meet you, Calvin.’ ”

“Was that in a book?” little Siobhan asks.

“Well, no,” I say.

Little Siobhan nods, as if her worst suspicions have been confirmed.

Then I hear the voice of little Moira. Until now, we have had no reason to believe that little Moira is paying any attention to the conversation. She is, after all, only three and a half. But she is definitely addressing a question to me.

“Grampy, did you ever have dinner with Mr. Shawn?” little Moira asks sweetly.

“Well, we did have lunch once,” I say. “After I’d been at
The New Yorker
only nineteen years. And I have reason to believe that if he hadn’t retired before another nineteen years had passed, it would have been quite possible that—”

“My friend Ethan’s
bubbe
used to have dinner with Mr. Shawn all the time,” little Moira says. “She wrote a book about it. Do you want to hear some of the things Mr. Shawn said to Ethan’s
bubbe
?”

“No, I do not want to hear some of the things Mr. Shawn said to Ethan’s
bubbe,
” I say. “I think I’d rather hear Al Gore’s rendering of
Finnegans Wake
than hear some of the things Mr. Shawn said to Ethan’s
bubbe.
”

“Granny,” little Moira says to my wife, “why is Grampy talking in his angry voice? Is he mad at Ethan’s
bubbe
because she wrote for
The New Yorker
and he didn’t?”

“Wrote!” I shout. “Wrote! Is that what you call what Ethan’s
bubbe
was doing, Moira? Wrote!”

“Please don’t shout at Moira,” my wife says. “At least not until you’ve learned how to pronounce her name.”

Little Moira starts to cry. Little Siobhan is looking at me as if I’ve just nicked her lunch money. As I look around at my grandchildren, I’m starting to wonder whether or not I could come up with enough wickedly apt rejoinders for a book about my life at
The New Yorker
.

2000

TALES OF A CLEAN-PLATE RANGER

“When helicopters were snatching people from the grounds of the American compound during the panic of the final Vietcong push into Saigon, I was sitting in front of my television set shouting, ‘Get the chefs! Get the chefs!’ ”

Now that it’s fashionable to reveal intimate details of married life, I can state publicly that my wife, Alice, has a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day. I also might as well admit that the most serious threat to our marriage came in 1975, when Alice mentioned my weight just as I was about to sit down to dinner at a restaurant named Chez Helène in New Orleans. Chez Helène is
one of my favorite restaurants in New Orleans; we do not have the sort of marriage that could come to grief over ordinary food.

Without wanting to be legalistic, I should mention that Alice brought up the weight issue during a long-distance telephone call—breaking whatever federal regulations there are against Interstate Appetite Impairment. Like many people who travel a lot on business, I’m in the habit of calling home every evening to share the little victories and defeats of the day—the triumph, for instance, of happening upon a superior tamale stand in a town I thought had long before been completely carved into spheres of influence by McDonald’s and Burger King, or the misery of being escorted by some local booster past the unmistakable aroma of genuine hickory-wood barbecuing into La Maison de la Casa House, whose notion of “Continental cuisine” seems to have been derived in some arcane way from the Continental Trailways bus company. Having found myself on business in New Orleans—or, as it is sometimes expressed around my office, having found it my business to find business in New Orleans—I was about to settle into Chez Helène for a long evening. First, of course, I telephoned Alice in New York. I assumed it would give her great pleasure to hear that her husband was about to have enough sweet potatoes and fried oysters to make him as happy as he could manage to be outside her presence. Scholars of the art have often mentioned Chez Helène as an example of what happens when Creole blends with Soul—so that a bowl of greens comes out tasting of spices that the average greens-maker in Georgia or Alabama probably associates with papists or the Devil himself.