The Editor

by Steven Rowley

  “Who?”

  “Chinatown Reggie.” I look for any glint of recognition but get none; it’s obvious I’m letting some cat slip out of the bag.

  “Don’t worry about those.” She points at my effort to make sense of the magazines.

  I stack the last few copies on top of the pile before nearly knocking them over again. I set my bag on the floor on the far side of the chair. “Looking forward to Christmas, Donna?” I’m grasping for small talk.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “My son wants a . . . I don’t know what you call it . . . some big squirt gun he wants.”

  “Super Soaker.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “My nephews want the same thing.”

  “We took him to see a mall Santa this weekend and when he asked for a Super Soaker, I shot Santa a look, which he picked up on like we were psychically connected. ‘Santa doesn’t bring guns,’ he said, and now my kid has it in for him. I said, Joshie, what are you going to do with a water gun in December? All his friends were getting them, he says. He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to protect himself. I said it’s New Jersey. Unless they shoot icicles, you’re safe until May.”

  “Did that put him at ease?”

  “His birthday’s in April so I said we’d revisit it. He’s still pissed at Santa though. I swear to God if he had the gun, he’d shoot up the North Pole. What about you? What are your plans?”

  “Staying here in the city.” Even if I wanted to see my mother right now (I don’t), I can’t risk any more family secrets gurgling to the surface. On the drive back to the city after Thanksgiving, Daniel and I didn’t really speak. Silence felt like a favorite sweater; it wrapped us in just enough comfort to get us home. We watched a little TV and each picked at a slice of pizza and went to bed early but didn’t really sleep. It was just easier to say nothing under the cover of darkness. I drifted off for a few hours and had a dream that I don’t remember. All day Sunday I vacillated between denial and white-hot rage—it’s a miracle Daniel didn’t suffer whiplash trying to keep up. First thing this morning I called Allen. “I need to see you as soon as humanly possible,” I said, and he told me to come in today.

  “How’s things with your mom?” Donna asks.

  “My mom?”

  “Allen said you were having some issues.”

  “It’s tough,” I tell her. “Things are tough right now.”

  “Because of the book?”

  “Something like that.” I smile, remembering a simpler time—last week, in fact—when that was my biggest problem.

  “Can I tell you something?”

  “Of course.”

  Donna pushes back from her desk and scoots her desk chair around to the side so we’re sitting face-to-face. “I hate my mother.”

  “Donna!” I exclaim. I burst out laughing from her unexpected candor; it’s the first time I’ve laughed in three days.

  “No, I’m serious. She’s a bitch, always has been, always will be. I can’t do anything right. She hates my husband; she hates my kid. That may be harsh, but she certainly hates how we’re raising him. My hair? It’s the wrong color. And do not get her started on my nails or why I won’t have them professionally done. She doesn’t understand why I would work in the city when I could be a bank teller near my house, or why I ride the train or who makes dinner to feed the kid that I’m raising incorrectly. I wouldn’t be surprised if she buys all the Super Soakers in a ten-mile radius so that when I cave and want to give him one I can’t, because she thinks he should spend more time with a book. Look where I work! As if I don’t know reading is important.” Donna exhales deeply.

  “That feel good?” I ask.

  “You have no idea.” She tosses her head back and laughs, released of a burden that somehow feels transplanted in me. “What was my point?”

  “It’s okay if there isn’t one. This can just be cathartic for you.”

  Donna smiles and I shift in my seat to hear where the rest of this goes.

  “If you did everything wrong like I apparently do, your mother would have no problem with you publishing this book. She would just turn the other cheek and quietly disapprove. If she takes real issue with it, it’s because she knows deep down that you’ve done something right.”

  And if she hasn’t read it? I want to ask, but Donna cuts me off.

  “And it’s clear you love your mother. It comes through on every page of your manuscript.”

  Allen bursts through the door, a cyclone of dry cleaning and apologies. “James, James, hi. Donna, take this.”

  Donna leaps up and takes his dry cleaning and his coat and hangs them both on the back of the door.

  “Give me one minute, then come on in. Donna, did you get him some coffee?”

  “I’m fine, thank you,” I say, covering for Donna, who never offered.

  “Did she tell you about the fatwah her son put out on Santa?”

  “I told him!” They interact like a married couple who spends too much time alone.

  Allen steps into his office and I stand to gather my things. I can hear him rummaging through papers as Donna crosses back to her desk.

  “I’m serious,” she whispers. “If my kid ever wrote something, like you did, about me? I would be thrilled. Because that would mean I was seen.” Her eyes get a little misty. “Really seen. As a person. You know? Not his waitress. Not his maid. Not his jailer. A person.” She nods and I place my hand on her arm and I start nodding too until we’re just a couple of bobbing heads. I may have seen my mother as a person, but up until now—I never saw her so human.

  “All right, James! Come on in.”

  Donna pats my hand and I let go, entering Allen’s office with caution. Thankfully, he remains fully dressed and exhibits no outward signs of physical distress.

  “Sit, sit, sit.”

  I take a seat opposite him, the same chair where I signed the contracts less than a year ago. My stomach churns thinking of all I’ve lost between then and now—my identity, for starters.

  “What’s the emergency?”

  No chitchat, I guess.

  “The book.” I feel like a child in the principal’s office, sent here for mistakenly causing a disruption when, in fact, the one who was disrupted is me.

  “I figured the book. What about it?”

  Somehow it’s already my turn to talk again. “It’s just. I need more time.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s come to my attention that I may have written the wrong one.”

  “The wrong book?”

  “Exactly.”

  Allen combs his eyebrows upward with his fingers. “How do you mean?”

  “I’m wondering if it’s possible to write another one.”

  “I hope you’ll write another one.”

  “A different one, I mean.”

  “They bought this one.”

  “Yeah, and maybe they’d buy another one. Instead.” How do I explain that I can’t publish a book about the search to understand a woman who is clearly not to be understood?

  “What’s this really about, kid?” Allen picks up his glasses, puts them on like he’s about to read something, and then tosses them down on his desk. He probably wants to strangle me, but he remains outwardly calm.

  I lie and say, “I don’t know.” But I do know. I look down at my hands and I don’t know whose they are. I mean, obviously mine, but are they also Frank’s? I have such long fingers, piano-playing fingers, Daniel once called them, although childhood piano lessons never stuck. Kenny doesn’t have fingers like these, my father doesn’t. What other qualities do I have that I now don’t know their origin? I’m supposed to be writing an ending, but it feels like I’m playing a game—Chutes and Ladders, perhaps, or Sorry!—and just when I’m about to win it all my game piece gets sent back
to the start.

  “Please tell me you haven’t discussed this with Jackie.”

  “I’m discussing it with you.”

  Allen scrutinizes me, choosing his next words carefully. “Have you read Pat Conroy?”

  “The novelist?” I make a face. What does Pat Conroy have to do with anything? “Yes.”

  “I met him once at some Houghton Mifflin event a friend bullied me into attending. Usual bullshit chatter, but then later in the evening I overheard him say it was a year or so after he published The Great Santini that it dawned on him he’d written exactly the wrong book about his family life.”

  “A year later?” It had never occurred to me that the particulars of my situation maybe aren’t that particular. Is this what writers endure?

  “So, I’d say by comparison you’re early.” Allen picks up his glasses again and starts opening the mail with an ivory-handled letter opener, as if my problem is totally solved. He proceeds to read some sort of query letter while I sit there and stew.

  I can feel my frustration rising like bile until it gurgles over. “And what on God’s green earth did he do about it?” My volume surprises even me.

  Allen doesn’t look up, despite my raised voice. “Pat?” He pauses while he finishes reading. “He went and wrote the right one. And that was The Prince of Tides.” He balls up the letter and tosses it into the garbage before moving on to the next piece of mail. “But he had to write the first one in order to write the second. It’s just an ending we’re talking about, right? That’s what Jackie’s been riding you for? You can’t come up with an ending?”

  “I . . . I . . .”

  “Has she been difficult to work with? Has she not given you clear instructions?”

  “No, she’s been very clear.”

  “Then just do what she’s asking.” Allen doesn’t wait for me to say what she’s asking is impossible. “That reminds me, I got a note from Doubleday. They’ve locked in a pub date for the book.”

  “Oh?” Even in my agitated state, this piques my interest.

  “Summer. August, I think.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “Is it? It feels like more of a winter book.” He shrugs.

  “Beach read,” I say, and we both chuckle, but me more than him. August. That’s eight months away. Do I have it in me to deliver? Jackie’s words come roaring through. Don’t tell your story to change the past. What if I don’t want to change it—what if I just want to change it back? That’s still change, I think, answering my own question.

  “Nothing’s perfect, kid. You figure that out by now? You wrote a good book. You’ve done everyone proud.”

  “Everyone?”

  Allen switches his grip on the letter opener so that he’s holding it like a knife ready to stab; I really am wearing on his last nerve. “You know how many writers would kill to be in your shoes?”

  Immediately I know that he’s right. Something awakens in me. I have to make this work; an opportunity like this might not come around again. Like Jackie said, I can’t write to change the past. I have to go through the door that’s been opened in front of me. Isn’t that the way? The world only spins forward, after all. I’ve been overwhelmed trying to find my right ending. But isn’t it just that, if I’m being reductive? Isn’t this whole situation simply an ending? An ending to secrecy. An ending to lies. The closing of the space between us that has kept my mother and me apart. An end to this book. If I want to really be a writer, I have to tell the whole story. I have to follow the narrative wherever it may go.

  The realization racks through my body, jolting right down to my toes. I don’t want to publish the wrong book only to correct it with another, I want to make this one right. It may, after all, be my only one. To find my ending—to find myself—I have to find my father. I have to find Frank Latimer.

  Allen snaps his fingers to get my attention. “All we can do is roll with the punches.”

  I’m going to meet Frank.

  “Roll with the punches. You still with me?”

  I laugh.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” And then, my mood suddenly shifted, I tell him, “Says a man who pays to get punched.”

  Allen makes a playful fist at me, Ralph Kramden–style. “Get out of your head and out of my office. Go find your ending.”

  Go find Frank.

  ◆ TWENTY-FOUR ◆

  I feel hands on my shoulders and jump. It’s Daniel.

  “What are you doing?” he asks, coming around to my side.

  The young woman sitting across the table from me looks up from her work, annoyed. We’ve shared an unspoken camaraderie over the past few hours, two silent people in the cavernous research room at the New York City Public Library lost in our work; now I’m responsible for breaking our carefully negotiated quietude. The chairs are hard and uncomfortable and the room is cold, but the lighting is soft, both chandeliers and table lamps casting a warming glow, which makes it a good place to concentrate. A casual observer would see the stacks of medical textbooks that dwarf my tablemate and think her work more noble than mine, but I would have to protest; the search for Frank Latimer is about healing too.

  “I thought you were coming home. I made popcorn.”

  “What time is it?” I whisper, hoping to lower Daniel’s voice by example. Having spent so much time in this library, I know how bothersome anything but total silence can be. A stray cough can send me spiraling for ten minutes.

  Daniel looks at his watch. “Two-forty-five.” He says it hoarsely, an approximation of a whisper.

  “Shhh.” I look up at the mural framed by the ornately carved ceiling for strength; there’s just enough pink in the swirling cumulus clouds to imagine they hold the answer to life’s questions.

  “Do you pay rent here now?”

  I offer a silent apology to my table partner. She looks back kindly, as if she too has a boyfriend who doesn’t know boundaries and library etiquette. I grab Daniel by his coat and lead him away from the worktables. “I lost track of time.”

  Jackie has given me until the end of the month to write an ending; it’s clear her patience, like Allen’s, is growing thin. I’m doing my best to avoid her until I can deliver, sending just enough notes through Mark to let her know I’m working—like I’m a spy checking in with my handlers while stationed out in the cold. I started spending time at the library in December, convinced that understanding why my mother would harbor such a devastating secret was an intrinsic part of my ending. That meant finding Frank Latimer and hearing his side of the story too.

  Of course, like any quest, it wasn’t as easy as opening a phone directory. In fact, there wasn’t a listing for him in any of the phone books in the Ithaca area. That by itself didn’t mean much—he could have moved or had an unlisted number—but I had this hunch that he stayed close. That maybe he never stopped shadowing my mother. That he never stopped keeping tabs on me, his second child. I thought about asking the hospital where I was born, but Frank was, of course, never listed on any forms. I found a few teaching commendations and even a picture of him in the Steuben County Courier, strapping students into some new contraption called the “seatbelt convincer.” (He also, apparently, taught driver’s ed.) The photo was grainy and his face in the crowd of students was not much more than a smudge. The father of two ghosts, barely more than an apparition himself.

  After admitting to myself one night that I make a lousy detective, I asked my mother for help.

  “I can’t assist you right now,” she said, as if she were in the middle of planning a state dinner. “Please don’t ask me again.”

  So it was back to the books. I researched his name, Latimer, to try to get some fragment or sense of him, of a new familial history, to try and see if I could recognize something about myself. It’s of French origin, introduced to the English after the Norman conquest of
1066, deriving from the Old French latiner, translated literally as “a speaker of Latin.” In the Middle Ages, all important documents were recorded in Latin, making the position of Latiner an important one. Like a teacher today, perhaps. (Although I don’t know what’s so esteemed about sending a bunch of sophomores careening into a wall to convince them to wear a seatbelt.)

  All of this research was getting me nowhere, so I’ve doubled down, pushing myself around the clock, desperate to find something—anything—more on Frank, to prove that my mother is mistaken, or prove that she’s telling the truth. It’s the uncertainty of it all that’s eating away at me, the circumstantial nature of the evidence that’s preventing me from writing a single word. I can’t decide if my mother’s story would hold up in a court of law, or if the whole thing would fold like a house of cards. In a perfect world, I would just go home and write. Put a pin in this, meet my deadline. But this new obsession is bordering on addiction—I try for a day to stop, to just work on the manuscript, and my hands shake and my brain sputters like I’m going through withdrawal. Am I a fool to think this is all related? Am I just using Frank to procrastinate, afraid of even further rejection if I can’t make things just right on the page?

  I pull Daniel over to the reference section, alongside a row of fat, forgotten books. “I’m sorry. There was an issue with the microfiche reader and the only woman who could fix it didn’t come in until noon.”

  He pulls a neglected tome from the shelf, confused by our change of venue. He reads the spine and says, “What’s a gazetteer?” I want to delight in his not knowing something for once, but I can’t really explain what a gazetteer is either. He places the book back on the shelf. “You said you were writing. Why do you need microfiche?”

  I don’t say anything, which tells Daniel everything.