Three-Martini Lunch (3 page)

O
nce I found out about Rusty's boss, I kept my eyes peeled for Rusty in the Village. Besides Rusty, there were a handful of young publishing types who ran around the hipster scene. You could tell them apart from the other Village kids because they wore turtlenecks and jackets and glasses and skewed more to the bookish side of things. They arrived in New York on Greyhounds from all over America with an air of great optimism about them, young single people willing to live in terrible apartments and work for peanuts so long as Manhattan dazzled them with her bright lights and taxi-horn siren song. Mostly the publishing folks were young men but there were tons of young women who worked in publishing, too, mostly as typists and secretaries. They came to the city after graduating from Vassar or Mount Holyoke or else some women's college in the Midwest whose name you were bound to forget two minutes after it was mentioned. Generally, they tried to behave like the good girls they had been brought up to be and confined themselves to women's hotels uptown so you weren't as likely to see them down in the Village as you were the
fellas. Mostly these girls were waiting to meet their husbands. Once that happened they were destined to quit working and return to the suburbs from whence they came and throw bridge parties and tell one another stories about the madcap year they lived as single gals in the city.

But there was one girl who Swish started bringing around on a regular basis and that was Eden. The way he had met Eden was he was cutting through Central Park and riding his bike very fast through a section where bikes aren't really allowed and where Eden was sitting on a park bench reading a book and as he dodged between a schnauzer and an old lady Eden yelled after him to slow down. Like I said, Swish was always in a hurry, but he was never in too much of a hurry to enter into a great debate with a willing adversary over his “goddamn God-given rights,” as he liked to call them. Differences of opinion excited him and arguing was like making love for Swish: He did it with passion and vigor and really it was his way of loving you and loving all the differences. When Eden yelled at him, Swish circled back and the way Eden tells it Swish was already wearing an eager grin as he turned and pedaled furiously back to her. The way
Swish
tells it, his grin got bigger when he saw the book in her hands was
The Secret Agent
by Conrad because there were few things Swish loved more than a book with a plot that revolved around a bunch of anarchists. When he saw the book he knew right away to invite her to the Village to come hear Pal's first poetry reading.

I guess I didn't think much of Eden when I first met her because even though Swish had twigged to her the way he did I took one look at her dark hair combed into a tidy ponytail and her sweater sets and figured she was only slumming it and as soon as some nice bond salesman proposed, that would be the last we saw of her.

“Hey, Cliff!” Swish shouted to me that evening as I strolled into the San Remo. “Over here!” He was standing at the bar with Eden. The San Remo was one of Swish's favorite watering holes, as it was always buzzing with lively debate and on any given day you could find someone willing to
engage you about politics or art or philosophy. Swish made the introductions and I shook hands, finding Eden's how-do-you-dos every bit as buttoned-up and boring as her sweater sets.

Eden was very petite with elfin features. She had pale skin and large black eyes. Later, people would say she looked a little like Audrey Hepburn but that was only after she went and got her hair cut very short. When I bumped into her again later that year I saw right away Eden had reinvented herself with that haircut. She was all right to look at before, but afterwards she was
really
something because the thing about Eden that got everybody in the end was her style. She became one of those sharp-looking chicks with very dark hair and her bangs cropped in a very precise line high up on her forehead, running around the Village in boat-neck shirts and black Capri pants, shimmying to jazz with a mysteriously aloof, blasé look in her eye.

But that's not how she was on the day I first met her. On the day I met Eden she hadn't transformed yet and her ponytail swung high atop her head and her Sears, Roebuck sweater hung lumpy and dull on her small frame and she looked like any other girl you might see walking the street in Des Moines or Wichita or what have you.

“We were just talking about
Sputnik
,” Swish said, by way of inviting me into the conversation. Back in those days
Sputnik
was one of Swish's favorite topics of conversation because Swish loved a good conspiracy theory and they had just announced in January that the satellite had burned up as it fell from orbit and reentered Earth's atmosphere. The physicists said this was to be expected but Swish insisted this was proof it had never existed in the first place and the whole business was a hoax. I'd had an earful of these theories because Swish could always manage to bait someone into a debate on the topic: young and old, liberal and conservative. Space travel was getting to be the great leveler of our generation.

“I mean, c'mon,” Swish said, making his argument to Eden now. “That
Khrushchev is one mad cat! Mad enough that no one'll call his bluff, but you can see it in his eyes. The whole thing was a big theater production.”

“Do you really think so?” Eden asked. I could see from her expression she was less concerned with the question of Khrushchev's sanity than she was with Swish's. Swish often had that effect on people, especially girls, and it was really too bad because it was only a question of too much intensity and sincerity because beneath his wiry, paranoid-seeming exterior he was really a sharp and decent guy.

“You bet I do!” Swish replied. “These governments, they have to control people somehow, brainwash them with patriotism and get them to comply, get them to pay their taxes and never ask where their money went when all they ever do is build more and more missiles. Right, Cliff? You agree, don't you?”

I'd been over this with him before and grown tired of the subject and I decided to say so. “I don't know, Swish,” I said. “I don't know about any missiles and maybe I should've lived during a different time because I can't seem to get very excited about the Soviets one way or another. But Russian poets, on the other hand . . . now, that's a conversation I'd be willing to weigh in on . . .”

At this, Eden whirled about and her eyes lit up. “You like Russian poetry?”

“Well, I like Pushkin, of course,” I said, naming the one poet everyone knew so as to not make her feel too dumb. “You?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “And Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova and Pasternak, too.”

This caught me off guard. She was far smarter than I'd expected and I wondered if she hadn't just said some kind of sentence in Rooskie.

“Keep it down,” I said jokingly, “too much of
that
jazz and they'll arrest us for communism.” I decided it was time for another subject change, so I asked, “What do you do in the city here again?”

“Oh. I'm a secretary at Torchon and Lyle.”

“Really? You don't say.”

Torchon & Lyle was one of the bigger publishing houses in midtown. The only one bigger was Bonwright, where My Old Man worked. I wasn't all that surprised but I could see she wanted me to be impressed, so I played along.

“Do you like it there?”

“I love it,” she said, nodding so vigorously I thought her head might come unhinged from her neck. “It's why I came to New York—my goal is to become an editor someday.”

Eden was quick enough to catch the look of surprise that crossed my face.

“You don't think I would make a good editor?”

“No, I do; you seem to me like a regular go-getter. That's swell. I thought most girls were just waiting for a ring.”

“Well, I
am
waiting for a ring,” Eden said. “On the telephone. From my boss. Telling me I've been promoted.”

I took a closer look at her face.

“What was your name again?” I asked.

“Eden,” she said, putting out her hand. “Eden Katz.”

“Well, then, I'll be sure to keep an eye out for Eden Katz, future star of publishing,” I said. We smiled at each other. She really
was
quite attractive once you'd had a chance to get a second look at her. In any event, before I could get too far considering the possibilities, Swish cut back in, putting a hand on Eden's shoulder to remind everybody who'd brought her around in the first place, irritated that we'd managed to steer the conversation away from
Sputnik
for so long.

5

W
hen I first began my employment at Torchon & Lyle, I attended as many of the company's parties as I could. If I am being honest I will tell you I was hoping to get a glimpse of all the famous literary people it publishes. Of course I was only hired on as a secretary but that didn't much matter, because even the lowest-ranking secretary in the typing pool had a standing invitation to the parties. I remember thinking at the time that this was very generous of them but now I see it was less a matter of generosity and more a matter of practicality: Secretaries are good if you want to fill up a room with fresh-faced warm bodies and in a pinch a secretary can be asked to lend a hand if the caterer turns out to need an extra smiling waitress here or there to walk around with a tray of drinks. This happened to me on a few occasions and each time it did, it made me realize it was no small feat to cater a publishing party and an even bigger feat to keep the publishing types' glasses full.

Back in those days, publishing parties were great lavish affairs, with pigs-in-a-blanket and stuffed olives and lots of other fashionable little
canapés, and of course an open bar with “enough gin and scotch to wash an elephant,” as Truman Capote might say. If you were a single girl who had to pinch pennies just to pay the rent on her room at the Barbizon it was a rather clever trick to skip dinner and fill up at the parties. Most of the parties happened on weeknights and if you played your cards right you could arrange it so you only had to buy a couple of cans of soup or beans for Saturdays and Sundays. It was a funny thing indeed to go from one night eating water biscuits heaped with miniature mountains of jewel-toned caviar and deviled eggs dusted with iron-red paprika to the next night eating nothing but canned beans on stale toast, but publishing is a funny business that way. If you worked in publishing you did it for the exciting books and authors and all the parties that went along with them; you didn't do it for the groceries your paycheck bought and if you didn't understand that much going into it, then you were a silly little fool. I should know. I was a silly little fool. I would go to the parties and if I wasn't asked to help the caterer I'd get to floating dreamily around the room with a cocktail in my hand feeling like Dorothy Parker and eventually I'd get so carried away that by the end of the night I'd even pay the extravagant sixty-five cents it cost to take a taxi back to the Barbizon. Then the weekend would roll around and I'd wonder why I had so little money that I had to cancel my visit to the hairdresser and be very careful at the grocer's. My poverty was a subject of great mystery to me and I rarely thought of it in connection with Torchon & Lyle.

Part of the reason for this is because on party nights I rarely felt poor; I felt young and lucky and full of potential, like the ingénue in a magazine serial who'd come to take on the city as a single girl, only instead of imagining myself engaged to a swell young businessman by the story's end I imagined myself one day being promoted to editor, which was my true dream. There was certainly something very electric about those evenings. Even now I get a little impressed when I picture myself attending those parties, those restaurants and private clubs and wealthy people's
apartments that were all such a far cry from my life in Indiana. The men were all artfully unshaven and the women were all very tanned or else very pale; there were practically none who were a normal color in between. The banquet rooms were wallpapered in Oriental landscape patterns and had fashionably speckled wall-to-wall carpeting that made your ankles wobble just the tiniest bit if you were wearing ladies' pumps. I found it all very exotic. As far as the famous literary people went, sometimes when the party was very good or the host was very important you would spot one or two here and there, but you usually didn't get to talk to them. The big-name authors were often flanked by their editors, and their agents, too, if they had them. You'd see them standing off in a corner holding a drink while either their editor or their agent murmured something in a low tone. No one dared cut in on them and it was difficult to eavesdrop. Of course all this only heightened the mystique. The editor would talk and at regular intervals the big-name author would nod with a glazed, far-off look and a clenched jaw and he would appear very intellectual about whatever it was that was being said.

No matter how many of these soirees I attended, each time I decided to go to another I was always very nervous and I routinely spent a great deal of time picking out my outfit the day before. This was silly because usually as soon as you mingled about and talked to people you realized they were nervous, too, and if we were smart we could have all just made a mutual pact to be easier with one another and not to get so worked up about things. People seemed more relaxed after their second or third drink but if you were to observe closely you would see it wasn't really a question of them being more at ease so much as it was a question of the volume being turned up more loudly on their nervous laughter, which made them sound like they were having the time of their lives but also made them sound slightly maniacal, like mental patients wandering around a carnival.

Once I became a veteran of these parties, I noticed there were really
only two main types of personalities: Nerves brought out eager comedy in some and cattiness in others. Just like me, most of the people at the parties were employed as somebody's secretary or else somebody's assistant and had come hoping to rub elbows with the giants of the literary world. If you do the math in this equation you are destined to realize that more often than not the eventual result of any given party turns out to be a bunch of people's secretaries meeting a bunch of other people's secretaries, and all too often that really
was
what it boiled down to. That fact alone should take some of the glamour out of my memories but somehow it doesn't. I suppose this is because a handful of those assistants went on to become important editors with a lot of power and you can see how people take it when you drop into the conversation that you met the important editor way back when.

What I'm getting at is that publishing is quite a heady business. If you aren't careful, then you can let the sparkle of a certain famous name or the memory of holding a glass of champagne on a starlit terrace with a lovely view of the park wipe out all the long hours spent writing reader's reports in your room with its one small window pointed into an air shaft while your nylons dried on the radiator and you ate beans on toast and wished you could afford a few eggs or even a can of sardines to go with it.

In any case, at that time I was over the moon to have any job at all, but especially one in publishing. It was what I had set my sights on and the entire reason I'd moved to New York. Most jobs are gotten by referral and when it comes to publishing houses this is especially true. I was lucky enough to arrive at the offices of Torchon & Lyle with a letter of introduction in hand from one of their former senior editors, and I was very aware this was an extremely unusual situation—and therefore an extremely
fortunate
situation—for a girl from Indiana to have fallen into her lap.

A man named Mr. Hightower referred me to Torchon & Lyle. Mr. Hightower was a Fort Wayne native, a lifelong bachelor who had left his publishing career in New York in order to care for his ailing mother. I can't
remember precisely what his mother had; cancer of the pancreas, I think it was. Once he'd gotten settled back into life in Indiana, Mr. Hightower was invited to teach a few seminars on popular literature at the local women's college, and this was how I made his acquaintance: I was his student.

I took his seminar in the fall of my senior year, and then I took it again in the spring for no credit at all. I was not his only repeat student, though I am certain I'm the only one who retook the course based on my fascination with the subject. Despite the fact he'd never married—or perhaps because of it—Mr. Hightower was what was referred to as
a ladies' man
, and as it was a ladies' college, I don't think I'm jumping to conclusions when I say this motivated a surge in class enrollment. In those days it wasn't uncommon for girls to have crushes on men twice their age. We all pictured riding off into the sunset with a middle-aged Clark Gable, I suppose. In any case, the young ladies of my college were taken with his debonair, middle-aged ways, with his steely blue eyes and the white streaks of hair just over his temples. I suppose he
was
good-looking in a certain fashion . . . but I wasn't so much enraptured with his looks as I was the stories he told about working in the publishing business.

Mr. Hightower told marvelous stories. Most of them involved a great deal of martinis with this-or-that famous author, and ended with him outsmarting somebody in a business deal. But the stories I liked best—the stories for which I repeated the seminar—were always about finding a gem of a manuscript in the unsolicited submission pile. According to Mr. Hightower, he had been responsible for publishing several unknown writers who later went on to become great authors.

It occurred to me that something downright magical had happened when Mr. Hightower discovered these authors. And then, not too long after that, a little voice inside me said, “I could do that!” I suppose that's awfully cocky of me to think, but my gut feeling was that I
could
do it, if given the chance. The sheer notion of reading a book
before it was a book
made me dizzy with excitement, and I realized I ought to follow where
this feeling might lead. I began to linger after class, asking Mr. Hightower more and more questions about his publishing days.

The funny thing about people is that when you take a special interest in something they know all about, they take a special interest in you. Mr. Hightower answered my questions with enthusiasm; his supply of anecdotes seemed never-ending, and he was happy to share them. Occasionally when our conversations threatened to carry on long after class had ended we adjourned to the student coffeehouse, where Mr. Hightower took off his cuff links and rolled up his shirtsleeves, as though to signify that now we were really going to get down to business. He often loosened his tie and leaned his elbows on the table and spoke in deep, confiding tones. There were whispers from the tables all around us and looking back on it now I see it was very likely the entire campus believed we were having an affair.

I don't know what Mr. Hightower thought of me as far as the prospect of an affair was concerned, but as for myself I was completely naïve to the idea. In those days I was still very ignorant about most things having to do with sex. The truth was the only thing I was conscious of wanting from Mr. Hightower was his expertise on all the major publishing houses in New York, and on discovering good writers and about becoming a successful editor. As the semester wound down and graduation drew near, I informed Mr. Hightower of my plans to go East in order to try my own hand at publishing. I remember it was after class on a Friday, following his last lecture of the year. I worked up my nerve to tell him and when I did, he looked at me with surprise, then shrugged.

“I think that's a fine idea, Eden,” he said, packing up his things. “A very fine idea, indeed. Of course you know Rome wasn't built in a day. You'll have to start at the bottom and prove yourself. But having said that, I think you'd make a fine editor—someday. Women of your generation are doing all kinds of surprising things.” He stopped packing up his briefcase and patted me on the shoulder and looked at me with glassy eyes and for
the first time the realization dawned on me that he would be sorry to see me go. While plenty of girls had crushes on him, I don't suppose there were that many other students who'd taken as strong an interest as I had in his professional life, and when I left Fort Wayne there would be one less inquisitive thread tying his past to his present.

He was still holding my shoulder when his gaze turned thoughtful. His eyes roved slowly over the entirety of my person, from my carefully combed ponytail to my blouse to my black wool pencil skirt, registering each in turn. His upper lip twitched faintly and his hand involuntarily squeezed my shoulder. He moved as though to say something. But just as abruptly as the impulse took hold, he abandoned it; he stopped himself short and relinquished his grip. “Ah, to be young again,” he finally said in a resigned, trite voice, sighing and returning his attention to the buckle on his briefcase. He looked at me one more time as he made his way out the classroom door and gave a little strange half-smile of defeat.

“Tell you what,” he said, mashing a slate-gray fedora down on his head. “You've been a sterling student. I'll write you a letter of introduction. That ought to help you get your foot in the door to start.”

The next time I saw Mr. Hightower it was in the stadium, over an expanse of green lawn steaming with the heat of high noon, just after the last graduation speech had been given and the caps had been thrown in the air. The initial hullabaloo had started to break up and all the parents had begun to mill about, each family hollering out the name of their newly-anointed alumna. I turned my head and saw Mr. Hightower striding towards me with a businesslike expression etched into his distinguished features. I was expecting an envelope containing the letter of introduction he had promised, and was surprised when he handed me not one but two.

“I took the liberty of writing one in the name of Eden Katz, and one in the name of Eden Collins.”

I squinted into the sun. My surprised hands accepted the envelopes
and turned them over, puzzled. A daunting insecurity dimly formed itself in my brain. Was I so unmemorable a student that my professor had never been sure of my name? I looked up at Mr. Hightower with a confused smile.

“It was the best approximation I could think of,” he said, as though that explained it.

“Oh!” I murmured, still not understanding but wanting to. I continued to look at him with wide eyes. I must've looked pretty stupid about it all because he seemed to read the bafflement on my face. My parents, who had been standing by my side just moments before Mr. Hightower's arrival, were now at least ten paces away from us and were busily chatting with Dolly Worthington's folks. He gave them a nervous glance, then leaned in and lowered his voice.