My Misspent Youth (3 page)

Everything now was for the touching. Everything was buildings and bushes, parking meters and screen doors and sofas. Gone was the computer; the erotic darkness of the telephone; the clean, single dimension of Pete’s voice at 1
A.M.
It was nighttime, yet the combination of sight and sound was blinding. We went to a restaurant and ate outside on the sidewalk. We were strained for conversation. I tried not to care. We drove to his apartment and stood under the ceiling light not really looking at each other. Something was happening that we needed to snap out of. Any moment now, I thought. Any moment and we’ll be all right. These moments were crowded with elements, with carpet fibers and direct light and the smells of everything that had a smell. They left marks as they passed. It was all wrong. Gravity was all there was.

For three days, we crawled along the ground and tried to pull ourselves up. We talked about things that I can no longer remember. We read the
Los Angeles Times
over breakfast. We drove north past Santa Barbara to tour the wine country. I stomped around in my clunky shoes and black leather jacket, a killer of ants and earthworms and any hope in our abilities to speak and be understood. Not until studying myself in the bathroom mirror of a highway rest stop did I fully realize the preposterousness of my uniform. I felt like the shot in a human shot put, an object that could not be lifted, something that secretly weighed more than the world itself. We ate an expensive dinner. We checked into a hotel and watched television. Pete talked at me and through me and past me. I tried to listen. I tried to talk. But I bored myself and irritated him. Our conversation was a needle that could not be threaded. Still, we played nice. We tried to care and pretended to keep trying long after we had given up. In the car on the way home, he told me I was cynical, and I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask him just how many cynics he had met who would travel three thousand miles to see someone they barely knew. Just for a chance. Just because the depths of my hope exceeded the thickness of my leather jacket and the thickness of my skin. And at that moment, I released myself into the sharp knowledge that communication had once again eliminated itself as a possibility.

Pete drove me to the airport at 7
A.M.
so I could make my eight o’ clock flight home. He kissed me goodbye, another chaste peck I recognized from countless dinner parties and dud dates from real life. He said he’d call me in a few days when he got to New York for his job interview, which we had discussed only in passing and with no reference to the fact that New York was where I happened to live. I returned home to the frozen January. A few days later, he came to New York and we didn’t see each other. He called me from the plane back to Los Angeles to tell me, through the static, that he had gotten the job. He was moving to my city.

PFSlider was dead. Pete had killed him. I had killed him. I’d killed my own persona too, the girl on the phone and online, the character created by some writer who’d captured him one morning long ago as he read the newspaper. There would be no meeting him in distant hotel lobbies during the baseball season. There would be no more phone calls or e-mail messages. In a single moment, Pete had completed his journey out of our mating dance and officially stepped into the regular world, the world that gnawed at me daily, the world that fed those five-night stands, the world where romance could not be sustained because we simply did not know how to do it. Here, we were all chitchat and leather jackets, bold proclaimers of all that we did not need. But what struck me most about this affair was the unpredictable nature of our demise. Unlike most cyber romances, which seem to come fully equipped with the inevitable set of misrepresentations and false expectations, PFSlider and I had played it fairly straight. Neither of us had lied. We’d done the best we could. We were dead from natural causes rather than virtual ones.

*   *   *

Within a two-week period after I returned from Los Angeles, at least seven people confessed to me the vagaries of their own e-mail affairs. This topic arose, unprompted, over the course of normal conversation. Four of these people had gotten on planes and met their correspondents, traveling from New Haven to Baltimore, New York to Montana, Texas to Virginia, and New York to Johannesburg. These were normal people, writers and lawyers and scientists, whom I knew from the real world. They were all smart, attractive, and more than a little sheepish about admitting just how deep they had been sucked in. Very few had met in chat rooms. Instead, the messages had started after chance meetings at parties and on planes; some, like me, had received notes in response to things they’d written online or elsewhere. Two of these people had fallen in love, the others chalked it up to a strange, uniquely postmodern experience. They all did things they would never do in the real world: they sent flowers, they took chances, they forgave. I heard most of these stories in the close confines of smoky bars and crowded restaurants, and we would all shake our heads in bewilderment as we told our tales, our eyes focused on some distant point that could never be reigned in to the surface of the Earth. Mostly it was the courtship ritual that had drawn us in. We had finally wooed and been wooed, given an old-fashioned structure through which to attempt the process of romance. E-mail had become an electronic epistle, a yearned-for rule book. The black and white of the type, the welcome respite from the distractions of smells and weather and other people, had, in effect, allowed us to be vulnerable and passionate enough to actually care about something. It allowed us to do what was necessary to experience love. It was not the Internet that contributed to our remote, fragmented lives. The problem was life itself.

The story of PFSlider still makes me sad. Not so much because we no longer have anything to do with one another, but because it forces me to grapple with all three dimensions of daily life with greater awareness than I used to. After it became clear that our relationship would never transcend the screen and the phone, after the painful realization that our face-to-face knowledge of each other had in fact permanently contaminated the screen and the phone, I hit the pavement again, went through the motions of real life, said “hello” and “goodbye” to people in the regular way. In darker moments, I remain mortified by everything that happened with PFSlider. It terrifies me to admit to a firsthand understanding of the way the heart and the ego are entwined. Like diseased trees that have folded in on one another, our need to worship fuses with our need to be worshipped. Love eventually becomes only about how much mystique can be maintained. It upsets me even more to see how this entanglement is made so much more intense, so unhampered and intoxicating, by way of a remote access like e-mail. But I’m also thankful that I was forced to unpack the raw truth of my need and stare at it for a while. This was a dare I wouldn’t have taken in three dimensions.

The last time I saw Pete he was in New York, thousands of miles away from what had been his home and a million miles away from PFSlider. In a final gesture of decency, in what I later realized was the most ordinary kind of closure, he took me out to dinner. We talked about nothing. He paid the bill. He drove me home in his rental car, the smell and sound of which was as arbitrary and impersonal as what we now were to each other. Then he disappeared forever. He became part of the muddy earth, as unmysterious as anything located next door. I stood on my stoop and felt that familiar rush of indifference. Pete had joined the angry and exhausted living. He drifted into my chaos, and joined me down in reality where, even if we met on the street, we’d never see each other again, our faces obscured by the branches and bodies and falling debris that make up the ether of the physical world.

P
UBLISHING AND
O
THER
N
EAR
-D
EATH
E
XPERIENCES

Why can’t book publishing be the way it is in books? Where are those heady nights on Beekman Place, those working days on lower Fifth, those underpaid trust-fund girls with the clacking Smith Coronas and the clicking low-heeled pumps from I. Miller? Where are Bennet Cerf’s entrepreneurial seeds, Maxwell Perkins’ worshipful authors, Mary McCarthy’s well-read bedfellows? Where are the editorial assistants lunching frenetically at the Oyster Bar counter? Where are the pneumatic tubes running directly from Vassar and Smith to Viking and Scribners, sucking young English majors down their chambers and depositing them at chewed, wooden desks with tins of lemon drops in the top drawers and manuscripts towering over the “In” boxes? Alas, lament entry-levelers everywhere, the thirties are gone. So are the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies for that matter.

There comes a time for every aspiring book publisher when she recognizes that her career, though inspired by Mary McCarthy’s, will not resemble it. After a few weeks steeped in proposals for self-help books or unauthorized biographies of cable-access television stars, she realizes that there is no longer a May Day parade,
The Nation
is not a publication immediately accessible to twenty-two-year-old English majors seeking reviewer positions, two-bedroom apartments on Jane Street are out of the single girl’s price range, and Webster Hall is no longer filled with the literati but with drag queens. There comes a point when she notices that although she studied Homer, Austen, and Melville, she will not be publishing them. There are a few hold-outs from the “literary” camp, to be sure (the assistant may find herself remarking on the fact that here, in the world of books, “literature” is considered a category as specific as “how to” or “occult”) but there seems to be a disproportionate number of Oprah bios, guides to better sexual relationships, and Near-Death Experience books, slugged for those on the inside as N.D.E. “A new N.D.E. title,” screams the publisher, dollar signs glowing in her contact lenses. “Isn’t this to die for?” To the publisher, N.D.E. means big excitement and big bucks. To the assistant it can also stand for “not doing editing,” or “not drinking enough.”

I’ve had a number of different editorial assistant jobs. Some of these were on high floors of midtown office buildings, stale and plasticy smelling, the kinds of places where employees fight to assert their identities by tacking Polaroids of boyfriends and cats on their cubicle walls. Others were sweet and arty, housed in the sort of loft-like office where the Mia Farrow character in a Woody Allen film always seems to work. Still another office was so mouse infested that I found myself not just tapping but actually stomping my feet underneath my desk for hours at a stretch; it seemed the moment I stopped, a rodent would make its way from the floor to an open desk drawer, wherein I would later fish around for a pen and instead discover something that made me actually weep in disgust and then yearn for a career in investment banking.

For the editorial assistant, every day is a new near-death experience. As if “going toward the light,” we chase after what literature there is, trying, at least in the beginning, to discover the genius in the slush pile who’s going to elevate us from entry-level minion to the up-and-comer with the brilliant eye. Our job entails pretty much what it sounds like: assisting editors. We open our editors’ mail and log in the submissions. We keep track of flap copy and back-cover blurbs. We notice when a typo appears on a jacket mock-up—there’s a fine line between
Prozac Nation
and
Prosaic Notion.
We request contracts, fill out invoices, and, mostly, answer the phone again and again. “Candy Whatzit’s office,” we say. “Jillian Dazzlewitz’s line,” and then, when our personal line rings with the promise of a friend on the other end or even an author whose manuscript is sufficiently unhot that
we might actually acquire it ourselves,
we answer obediently, with the name of the company, blurted unintelligibly because four other lines are on hold. As all editorial assistants know, it is not acceptable to pick up the phone and deliver a simple “hello.” This is a trapping of the editorially privileged, of those with more than one linen blazer and their own offices with radiators upon which cardboard-mounted book jackets are gleamingly displayed. I spent quite a lot of time in my editorial-assistant days dreaming about when I’d be able to answer with a “hello.” I even experimented with it intermittently, pulling it out like a pair of torn jeans on casual Fridays. “Hello,” I’d say, with faux nonchalance at 7:30 in the evening after everyone had left. This usually resulted in the person hanging up, or my mother’s voice emerging on the other end, insisting that such lack of professionalism surely wasn’t going to result in a promotion any time soon.

So it’s all in the phone greeting, the banter with authors and agents, the art of raising the pitch of our voices when we call the accounting department to ask what happened to that check for the $100,000 advance because the “author is desperately poor and the agent is ballistic.” (The truth is that we discovered the check request under a pile of magazines on our desk two months after we were supposed to process it.) But the voice will fix everything. It rises when we’re covering up our clerical errors, drops to sultry depths when we’re schmoozing or gossiping or ordering a decaf cap (with skim milk) from the deli around the corner. We’re secretaries fully versed in Derrida, receptionists who have read Proust in French. This is a land of girls. There are always at least ten of “us” for every one of “him.” We’ve got decent shoes. We’ve got B.A.s in English from fancy schools, expensive haircuts, expensive bags, and cheap everything else. We’ve got the studio apartment with the half-eaten one-hundred-calorie yogurt in the mini-fridge. We’ve got one message flashing on the answering machine (it’s Mom again), bad TV reception, and a pile of manuscripts to read before bedtime. We’ve got an annual take-home of $18,000 before taxes if we’re lucky, a $100 deductible on the health insurance, which is useful about one year into the job when we reach that milestone of entering therapy (inspired by the books we’re working on), when we have to remind ourselves that getting out of bed every morning is mandatory rather than optional, when we realize that the phrase “there’s a lot of writing involved” as it pertains to a job is subject to interpretation.