Three-Martini Lunch (45 page)

April 21, 1980

I
had been waiting a long time for that envelope.

When it finally arrived, I'd been at Farbman & Company for over twenty years. I followed in the footsteps of my mentor, the great Mavis Singer, until she eventually retired and I stepped into her shoes as editor-in-chief and associate publisher. It seemed as though the years had flown by rather quickly, and yet I knew I was not the same person anymore. There were times I fantasized about going back in time and shaking hands with my former self, that nervous, excited girl, fresh out of college, young and energetic and at the same time a little bit exhausted from the bus ride that took her from Indiana to New York. She would be so shocked to see where I wound up; perhaps she might not even believe it. But then I reminded myself: I hardly needed a time machine. Every time I interview a new secretary, I know I am looking at a former version of myself. The bouffants and shoulder pads may shift in the tides of time, but some things remain the same.

I suppose the truth is there will always be young Edens pouring into this city, some of them hoping to end up in publishing. The second
version of myself—the version I'd become after leaving Bonwright and after Cliff and I annulled our marriage; the version of myself who'd managed to stick it out in New York and make it as an editor after all—she was more rare. I didn't realize I'd become this second version of myself until I finally bumped into Miss Everett at a publishing party, a year or so after Ms. Singer hired me to work at Farbman. It was bound to happen, our bumping into each other; we may live in a large metropolis, but the publishing business is a very small world. She was icy to me, as I had expected. But what I hadn't expected was how little I'd care. I had been afraid that seeing her would remind me of my terrible failure at Torchon & Lyle. But standing there, suddenly realizing Miss Everett had no power over me, I also realized I did not regret my journey. I did not even regret the mistakes. It had been a mistake to allow myself to be bullied, but that had forced me to learn how to stand up for myself. It had been a bigger mistake still, to abandon my last name and everything that came with it. But having recovered it since, I'd learned just how precious it was to me.

•   •   •

N
o, there was only one thing I regretted, one thing I would take back if I could.

•   •   •

I
had never been truly sure that envelope would come, but when it landed on my desk, I recognized the handwriting immediately. I opened the envelope; the contents were exactly what I'd expected. I picked up the telephone and booked a flight. I'd long ago decided this was something I would deliver in person.

I'd been keeping track of Miles from a distance. I knew that he'd written poetry, gone to graduate school, and eventually settled down in Berkeley, California, to teach poetry at the university. The travel agent was able to book me on a Pan Am flight in two weeks' time. I confirmed
immediately and gave her my Visa card number. By that time, my life had long since taken on a simple, straightforward shape. There was no husband to phone at work and tell about my little business trip, no children whose care would need to be coordinated. Not even a cat for which a cat-sitter must be arranged. I suppose that sounds awfully sad, but the truth was I enjoyed my life. Books were my children; their spines smiled out at me from on the shelf. I worked with colleagues I admired and respected. And I knew I had, myself, become something of a character. I first took note of this development about a decade or so ago, when I came into the office one morning wearing one of my impeccably tailored suits (Mavis had given me the name of her seamstress), wrapped in a fox coat, two freshly-edited manuscripts peeking from my attaché case, and saw myself through my assistant's rather wide, expressive eyes. I laughed to understand what a caricature I'd become, but I wasn't bothered a bit. No, my life was a creation of my own making, and I embraced it. There was only one thing I regretted, and when that envelope arrived, I saw in it my chance to set right what little I could.

And so, two weeks, a six-hour flight, and one rental car later, I found myself wandering Telegraph Avenue, a sea of lively young people milling about and the smells of ethnic food thick in the crisp bay air.

I missed him at his office, but a group of his students told me which bar I'd be most likely to find him in. They were somewhat charming about it; they seemed to have sympathy for him as a romantic figure. His wife had recently died of cancer, they told me. “I think he just likes to sit by himself and write poetry,” one girl said. I wondered how much he'd changed, whether I'd recognize him, but as soon as I entered the bar I spotted him: the same handsome face, even the same horn-rimmed glasses, and now the tiniest bit of gray at the temples.

“Hullo, Miles,” I said, pulling out the barstool next to his and sitting down. He turned to study my face and I wondered how much I'd changed. A woman never knows. But I saw the spark of recognition in his eyes, even if he didn't smile.

“Hello, Eden,” he replied in a neutral voice, as if we'd just bumped into each other in the Village.

“I hear you're teaching poetry these days,” I said. “I stopped by your office, but you weren't there. Your students seem to like you.”

“They tolerate me. They're good students.”

I paused, trying to think of what to say next. As soon as I had opened the envelope with Cliff's return address on it I knew what I needed to do. But now that I'd come clear across the country, it was awkward trying to figure out how to bring the subject up.

“Cliff passed away two days ago,” I said. “I got the news just before I left for the airport.” I paused, to give him a chance to absorb this information, and eventually Miles nodded. He didn't ask what had become of my marriage to Cliff, though he seemed to intuitively know. He also didn't say
I'm sorry
, which was fine, because we both knew he couldn't be.

“Before he died, he mailed me this.” I pulled the composition book out of my purse and put it on the bar. Miles's eyebrows shot up and his brow furrowed. I could tell he never thought he would see that composition book ever again. He lifted a hand and, with trembling fingers, lightly touched the cover.

“With Cliff,” I said, “it's difficult to tell whether this is an apology, or a confession . . . or just an impulse. But this belongs to you.” I paused and cleared my throat. “It always belonged to you.”

He picked up the composition book, stuffed thick with papers and wrapped in rubber bands, and gazed at it with a faraway look in his eyes.

“You had a near-complete draft of your own in there,” I said. “I ought to know. I edited Cliff's manuscript until I was close to exhaustion. Before . . . before everything that happened at Bonwright.”

“I suppose,” Miles murmured. “I don't know what complete would be—I wasn't sure what I was aiming for. I was just writing. It felt important to write it, whatever it was.”

“The events you wrote about . . . the parts with the war stories, that
is . . . I did a little digging, and most of what you describe matches up with the 369th Regiment. They were known as the Harlem Hellfighters,” I said. “Your father was one of them, wasn't he? These are his stories.”

“Yes,” Miles replied, and he frowned as though something had just occurred to him. “Why would you look up battles fought by a black regiment from New York?”

I felt my cheeks color slightly with shame. “I knew the manuscript was yours,” I confessed. “Cliff never admitted it to me, but I found the composition book hidden in our apartment after Cliff's father had acquired the manuscript as a novel.”

Miles looked at me and I could see he was rethinking his way through the past, determining what matched up and what didn't.

He stared at me for a long moment. “You tipped off your own publishing company against your husband,” he said abruptly. There was no question in it, and little accusation. He was simply stating a fact.

“Yes,” I said. “And I've come to apologize to you. I'm sorry I didn't do more. There are, well . . . there are reasons I didn't.” Hearing it for the first time, I was aware of how feeble my apology sounded. There was too much to explain, and now that we were middle-aged, explanations didn't seem to matter as much as they used to. At the time, I'd thought reporting the plagiarism via the anonymous letter would be enough to make Cliff back down and do the right thing. But I underestimated Cliff's pride, his stubborn streak, and I hadn't counted on Rusty getting involved. Before I even knew what was happening, Cliff and Rusty had moved the manuscript to a different publishing house—Torchon & Lyle, as a matter of fact. I knew then that Cliff was done with me and, what's more, that I was done with him. When I went to look under the floorboard for the composition book a second time, it was gone. I was a girl working under a false name accusing somebody of plagiarism, and I hadn't a shred of proof to show anyone.

“You didn't put up much of a fuss,” I said to Miles now. I'd wondered about the way Miles had quietly disappeared and not fought back. “Not
that I'm shifting the blame onto your shoulders,” I continued. “Only that I assumed they had something on you.”

He looked at me.

“Whatever it is, Cliff's gone now.”

“Rusty's not,” he said, then paused. “But it wasn't about that anyway,” he added in a much quieter voice.

Ready to make my final plea, I took a breath. “I think you should come forward and set the record straight. It goes without saying, I'll support you. It would be my honor to support you.”

Miles didn't reply. I took another breath and continued.

“Something else, too . . .” I said. He turned and raised an eyebrow at me. “I wish you'd write about it,” I plunged forward. “It was a special time in Greenwich Village, in Harlem. Lots of people have written about it, but none with your story, none with your voice. I'm not saying this because I'm trying to buy your story—work with another editor if you'd rather, or another publishing house if you must—but . . . I know this hardly makes sense, and you have no reason to trust me, but sometimes editors, we're passionate about certain books . . . We simply want them to exist, to point to them on a shelf and to tell another person: ‘Here. Read this.'”

“You want me to write about . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Yes . . . about what happened with Cliff, with Rusty . . . about all of it. Everything that happened. No matter how it makes any of us look, including me. You are the right man for the job, Miles. You always were.”

I took a business card out of my purse and laid it on the bar next to the composition book. Miles stared at the card with a pained expression. My spirits sank, but it had been worth a try.

“Think about it,” I said, and rose to go. We shook hands and I left him there, nursing a glass of whiskey, one hand lying on the composition book, staring blankly into the mirror behind the bar.

April 21, 1980

I
left the bar to go home shortly after Eden departed. Cob would be there, taking a nap on the living room couch and waiting for me. It had become our custom to eat dinner together. “You shouldn't eat your meals alone,” Cob was always warning me. “It's not good for you.” He had come out to California to help with the arrangements for Janet's funeral, and he'd stayed on for several weeks. We had not discussed when he would leave, but I knew he was waiting for some incremental shift in me, some small sign that I would be all right. I told him not to worry, that he had his own wife and family to worry about, and I had Marcus. But Cob knew that despite the fact Marcus lived at home—Marcus was twenty-one and preparing to graduate soon—we didn't see much of each other. Janet and I had kept Marcus far too close for too long, cajoling him into attending Berkeley for the discounted tuition and guilting him into living at home while his mother was sick.

Now he was angry. I understood this. The parent he had loved most
had died, and he was stuck rattling around the house with me. Mostly he went out these days, making a life for himself anywhere but here.

So Cob had come to save me from myself, to weed the yard and mow the lawn and buy a barbecue from the hardware store. It was a warm spring and California was bursting with flowers and humming with bees, the Pacific breeze blowing gently and gulls squawking in the distance over the bay. It was a strange time to lose someone, during a California spring. It made it not quite real somehow.

That evening, when I got home, Cob had already woken up from his nap and was in the backyard adding briquettes to the grill. He held up a package of hot dogs.

“I was listening to the game,” he said. “It gave me an idea for dinner.” He grinned, and I caught a glimpse of his seven-year-old self lurking just beneath the surface of his thirty-year-old face.

I went into the kitchen and filled a bucket with ice and six bottles of beer, and brought them, along with an opener, back outside. Cob roasted the franks until they were a deep reddish brown and splitting at the seams like ripe fruit. We loaded them up with mustard and relish and ate, cutting the salty brine of the franks with sips of cold, bitter ale.

We were slow to make conversation at first, but eventually I told him about Eden, and about the composition book I'd kept long ago.

“I remember seeing that notebook,” he said.

I had never told him about what had become of the composition book, about Cliff and all the rest of it. I never saw a reason to. Cob had grown up to be an intelligent man and an engineer, but he did not keep up with the literary world. I had preferred to spare him the insult of it all. Now I told a dumbed-down version of it, and how Eden had petitioned me to set the record straight by writing a longer, more encompassing memoir.

“Will you do it?” Cob asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “I think of . . . Marcus,” and as I said it I knew that this was true. I let my mind drift. There were so many complications knotted into the past, things I wanted to remember, things I didn't want to remember, and things I couldn't bear to remember.

“Do you remember that young man you saw at the museum?” I asked Cob abruptly.

Cob looked at me. “I do,” he replied. “I remember him.”

“I met him out here in San Francisco,” I said. “He helped me find our father's journal from the war. The locker Mama mentioned wasn't as easy to find as I had thought it would be. I began to think the story Father told Mama had been made up, that it was just his crazy talk, that maybe there was no journal to find, but Joey—my friend—he wouldn't let me give up. He was a good friend to me.”

Cob looked at me for a long time, saying nothing. “Where is he now?” Cob asked finally.

“Dead,” I answered, and suddenly I found it difficult to breathe.

We fell into silence. Cob detected my difficulty and, wisely, knew just to sit there with me. The glow of dusk slowly faded from the sky, the light leaving with a steady certainty, like water draining from a bathtub. Somewhere a mourning dove called for its mate. I thought, strangely, of Mister Gus.

After a while Cob got up. He reached to clear my plate. I leaned over to pick up the bucket of beer, now full of six empty bottles knocking around in the cool water. We tidied everything, made a plate for Marcus—in case he decided to come home—and watered down the remaining coals in the barbecue. In the kitchen Cob announced he was going to bed, and I reloaded the bucket with ice and beer from the refrigerator.

“Miles?” Cob said.

“Yes?”

“About the memoir . . . I don't know much, but I think the best kind of
role model a guy can be is a truthful one.” He bid me good night, and I heard the sound of the stairs creaking.

I went back out into the yard and sat down on the lawn chair. I thought about what Cob had said. Children didn't always want the truth, but withholding it only accomplished so much, because the lie was always felt. I understood that now; it was something you understood after you had children of your own, after you had tried to protect them with lies and failed.

It was good advice, but too simple. Cob believed he knew the extent of my shame, but he did not. Eden had confessed to being the one who'd tipped off Bonwright, but she had not been the only one to betray the person she loved. I'd gotten the idea from Cliff, of all people. The threat was clear: All it would take was one call to the State Department. At first I was afraid for Joey: I wanted to protect him. But something changed, and all too quickly I went from being afraid
for
Joey to being afraid
of
Joey.

That phone call marked the darkest hour of my life.

I made up some bogus claims to communist ties—claims that could never be substantiated—and I figured at worst he would be investigated, only to be absolved. I thought it would make Joey back off a bit. The plan was to distance myself until there were no ties between us—none that anyone could prove—and we would revert to the strangers we were intended to be. I had the notion in my head that, when it was safe, I could use my father's journal to stake my claim against Cliff.

But Joey must've been more careless in his personal life than I knew, for while the FBI didn't find evidence of communism, the agents found plenty of other fodder. Their interrogations had been enough to make even the sanest person paranoid, fragile. And then I had been late—too late.

I was lost in these thoughts again when I heard the back door open and saw a long square of light stretch out upon the lawn.

“Dad?”

It was Marcus.

“Out here,” I called. I listened to the hushed swishing of his feet moving over the grass. He sat down in the lawn chair next to me. I bent over and lifted a beer from the bucket.

“Thanks,” he said. I heard the faint, high-pitched sound of the beer splashing in the neck of the bottle as he took a deep swig. We sat in silence together and looked at the stars. I stole surreptitious glances at Marcus. As a child, he resembled the handsome boy in the photo, the uncle he never knew but for whom he was named. He had grown up tall and strong, with a steady, loyal spirit I knew his friends loved in him. So did his mother. His teachers praised him for his diligence, his persistence, his discipline.

There'd been a time, after Joey had died, that I'd wanted to stand up for him, to claim the love between us, to confess my betrayal. But the day Janet came to see me at my mother's apartment, she told me she was pregnant. A result of that night in the hotel room, my attempt to purge Joey from my heart. It had been a foolish mistake, but one that had made me a father, and in thinking about fathers I had to consider what kind of father I wanted to be. In the end, Janet and I had built a peaceful, quiet life together. It had been love, but not the kind born of passion; more like two trains headed towards the same destination, their tracks running in perfect parallel to each other, never to cross. I never told her about Joey, and if she discerned his ghostly presence in our lives, she never let on. We were creatures who relied on harmony and shared a deep mistrust of the joy we were never quite certain we deserved.

But now, with Janet gone and Eden returning my old composition book to me, goading me to put the unspeakable into words, I found myself considering the question of what kind of father I wanted to be all over again. Perhaps that's what it is to be a parent: You never stop considering it. I wondered if I was strong enough to put pen to paper again and write the truth. I wondered, selfishly, if Marcus was strong enough to love me in spite of the truth.
I wish you would write about it,
Eden had said to me.
About all of it. Everything that happened. No matter how it makes any of us look. You are the right man for the job, Miles. You always were.
Memoirs are a tricky genre. It is a little-known secret: We are never the heroes of our own stories, unless we are lying.

If we choose to count ourselves among the brave, we write ourselves as the villains we are, hoping for redemption.