A Replacement Life

by Boris Fishman

  On Monday, he arrived at work bearing four bottles of brandy: one for Paul Shank, the editor of “The Hoot”; one for Mr. Grayson (you had to keep the home front well lubricated); one for Arch Dyson; and one for—what the hell—Beau Reasons himself. Stammering, Slava extended the bottles to their assistants, dropping only one out of nervousness, though unfortunately, this was before Beau’s assistant, and he dropped it on her foot. A small gift from his family cellar, he explained, on the occasion of . . . ? He stared at the assistants, who awaited an explanation with puzzled distaste. Slava had failed to invent a plausible reason for the gifts; his grandfather would not have made such a rookie mistake, but the genie had wavered back into the bottle and not spoken again.

  “It’s a bribe!” Slava said hysterically, but this attempt at humor failed and he didn’t dare repeat it, his only solace that he had bombed before Paul Shank’s assistant, in the firmament of the magazine not the shiniest star though Shank was the editor of “The Hoot,” which was supposed to be a humor column. Maybe the assistant would feel solidarity and not say anything. Maybe the assistant would keep the bottle for himself! It was not the tsar who failed his people but the ministers, the meddling middlemen! Slava returned to his desk jailed by a mix of anticipation, confusion, resentment, and shame. No immediate word came from the editors’ wing. That could be good—he hadn’t screwed up too badly. And he remained buoyed by the secret of his editorial discoveries, like a woman who knows she’s pregnant but no one else does. Mere days later, Century assigned Slava (half assigned, with Devicki, but still) to a story. Coincidence? You make your own conclusions.

  The conference room, filled with four times as many persons as usual, tingled with an impending holiday’s delirious atmosphere. Bodies crammed the slate floor and the panels over the air-conditioning vents, editorial assistants arrived with extra chairs, toes were boxed with apology, and in general everyone experienced (1) the tipsiness of being closer to one another than was the norm, and (2) the sudden collapse of hierarchy. In his corner, eyeing Arianna several seats down, Slava felt a swell of pride at being in some measure the cause of all the commotion.

  At the head of the conference table, his forearms on the back of his chair, stood Beau. On the eve of his ascension to the crown of the masthead, Page Six at the New York Post had trotted out the most salacious thing it could wring out of the people he had met on his way to the top: “Beau is 60, looks 40, and acts 20,” an anonymous woman had said. This was untrue—wrinkles had settled around his eyes, and two silver wings flanked his butterscotch helmet of hair—but this hardly impugned his haledom. He wore a peach Winchester shirt and rolled a nugget of gum in the pink sea of his mouth with awesome control. The gum was a piece of news he was going to split open and get to the bottom of. (He was an old smoker.) Despite his name—his mother had a fetish for the South—Beau was as northern as the Union. He had started in newspapers: crime on Cape Cod, crime in Boston, crime in New York, over to Century. Apparently, they taught in journalism schools the magazine piece that had endeared him to Martin Graves, a complicated twenty-thousand-word two-parter, one of the first pieces about exoneration by DNA analysis, which had set free a man imprisoned eleven years for manslaughter.

  Slava had read Beau’s famous story many times, but he couldn’t build a bridge from it to the Avery Coulter story. The Avery Coulter story gave up its secrets quite readily—it was a grid, Manhattan. The DNA piece was like some kind of Moscow or Paris—everything side streets, dead ends, parabolas, though its conclusion arrived with new force each time he read it, the mystery of which was only more frustrating. Slava studied Beau at the head of the conference table as if this would dislodge from the older man’s soul some clue to the information that eluded the younger. But it didn’t.

  Beau was talking to Kate Tadaka. She clutched a phone in each hand and laughed into his ear, the plums of her cheekbones bruising into a blush. Kate edited the critics and collected National Magazine Awards in her spare time. Even at twenty feet, it was clear that she was someone who smelled as fine at the end of a long summer day as at the beginning. This filled him with an aimless, futile desire.

  He switched to Arch Dyson, in cream linen. Here was a man to make cream linen look fine on a man. Now, Arch could be anywhere between forty and seventy-five. One day the previous year—had so much time passed since Slava’s embarrassment?—while Arch was perched in Mr. Grayson’s office, Slava took notes on the editor’s outfit down to the belt. The next weekend, instead of scrolling and typing, Slava shopped. On the way home, the bags tugged at his hands with the weight of two weeks’ salary, and he felt like an ostrich striding into the Century office on Monday, but he had purchased for himself an understanding of the American maxim “clothes make the man.” Indeed, several Juniors whistled and demanded to know the occasion for his lilac jacket and paisley tie. However, no matter how many times Slava strode past Arch’s office, the editor took no note of the sartorial kindred spirit wandering the halls. In the late afternoon, Slava, desperate and defeated, gave up on Arch and, in a final hail mary, redirected himself to Kate Tadaka’s many-windowed suite. As Slava neared the consequential doorway, he slowed down, the world shrinking to the airplane roar in his head, and as he came into its field of vision, he hurled in Kate Tadaka’s direction the most meaningful look of his life. In the direction of Kate Tadaka’s desk, to be exact—she was gone for the day. When, back in their pen, Avi Liss became the one hundredth Junior to ask after Slava’s insane costume, Slava barked out that his cousin had died giving birth. The waxy rictus of Avi’s face melted, and Slava felt the first satisfaction of the day.

  Archibald Dyson, Kate Tadaka, Paul Shank: They shouted at their children for forgetting to compost tea bags, donated old clothes to the homeless with bloodthirsty fervor, and in the pages of the magazine (leaving no room for Slava), broke the nibs of their quills agitating for equitable health care, gay rights, and foods made of whole wheat. What did it mean that Slava couldn’t get their attention, may they all get covered up to their heads. Now, in the conference room, he felt the familiar sensation of being in the presence of information obvious to all but himself.

  Finally, it was time. Beau took a long sip of his seltzer. An overstimulated sun beat at the office windows, just another aspiring contributor. Across the street, the scaffolding had just vanished from a beaux arts office building, and it stood there not knowing what to do, an old dame amid the sharp-elbowed steel jostling all around it.

  The faint rev of a truck rose from the street. Twenty-seven stories below, dots flurried across the pavement with exquisite oblivion. The staff of Century was sealed in a chilled container of chrome, glass, and Lucite—for the hundredth anniversary the previous summer, the parent company had gifted a makeover. No more cigarette burns in the carpets. Now the staff walked on radiant concrete.

  “I would say we had success with this idea,” Beau said, mopping his mouth. “My niece said to me last fall—she’s just graduated college, she admires what I do—‘Uncle Beau, should I go to journalism school?’ And you know what I said? I said, ‘Come work at Century for a year. Just like journalism school, except you get paid for it.’” Several editors laughed lightly, Arch Dyson baring his fangs like a beached seal.

  “All right,” Beau said. He squinted at the page in his hands and read out loud: “‘Fred Duncan is an urban explorer.’”

  Fred Duncan scaled and spelunked municipal constructions. He once hiked the D line, tunnels included, from Coney Island to its terminus in the Bronx. Next up was Ulysses S. Grant in Morningside Heights. The Grant mausoleum—a mere 165 feet—would be far beneath Duncan’s highest achievement (the Municipal Building, at 580 feet) but its gray limestone walls were smoother than anything he had summited. “You try to go up the blank face of a wall,” Duncan said testily when Slava asked on the phone why the tomb was a target. Slava decided not to point out that it was actually administered by the National Park Service.

  Morningside Heights had been l
eafy and serene, just like the Upper East Side, except here blacks and Dominicans also wandered. Duncan looked about fifty, a clump of seawater-gray hair gathered at the base of his scalp, a bald nest in the middle. He bristled with ropes and carabiners. Peter Devicki was journalistic in a spiffy checked blazer.

  “Glad I wore this,” Peter said, holding up the collar. The ham. Slava considered him hatefully: the indifferently barbered thatch of ginger hair; the bumpy nose; the mouth slightly ajar; faint whiskers sprouting across the unplanted field of his pale, splotchy face.

  “Try wearing thirty pounds of equipment,” Duncan said, and spat. Brackets of nicotine separated his teeth. He nodded at the mausoleum, two hundred yards away. “Here’s what you need to know,” he said. “I don’t know if one of you wants to write it down and the other’s holding his hand?”

  “It’s an experiment,” Peter alerted him brightly.

  “Largest mausoleum in North America,” Duncan said. “Never been scaled, far as I know. Not—repeat, not—illegal. Not clearly, anyway. Not that that fazes me. Half the judges in this town know who I am. Ready?” The young men nodded and withdrew two crisp, slim reporter’s notebooks. Duncan, his crotch cinched like an infant’s, jangled off toward the mausoleum.

  Slava reviewed the notes he had made the previous evening. A history of the mausoleum and its occupant; a New York Post story about Duncan’s childhood riding subway cars in the Bronx; the equipment Duncan said he was going to use. (Beau liked when you mentioned the brands: It drummed up advertising.) The two of them watched Duncan begin his ascent.

  So did many others. They pointed, they shrugged, they kept going. Even an iridescent pigeon at Slava’s feet—as a flying creature, arguably prone to curiosity about the gentleman invading its airspace—was more concerned with a triangle of pizza on the ground, approaching it as shyly as a girl at a dance.

  Slava marveled, in Russian. There had been a famous mausoleum in the Soviet Union, too. Lenin’s Tomb in Red Square. The Gelmans had gone there en famille while they were in Moscow to fix immigration papers. Leaving Russia or not, it seemed heretical to visit the capital without visiting Grandfather Lenin, and only Slava’s grandfather resented having to waste time on “that dead dick.”

  They had waited in a cold, prickly rain. Only a small number of mourners could file through at a time, and no consideration had been given to those who would have to wait outside for their glimpse of the Great Teacher. When the Gelmans finally reached the interior, Slava’s chest rattling in dress rehearsal for a cold and Grandmother hissing about the injustice, Slava was impressed to find himself completely unfrightened by the dead dick inside the glass. Lenin was as tiny as an old grandfather, his waxy lips on the precipice of a joke only he understood. It was the militsionery guarding him who were frightening. Slava had expected them to be young, crisp, and clean-skinned, but they were heavy men with slow, drunk eyes ringed by ripples of fat.

  On the opposite side of the glass encasement, a young boy—Slava’s age but with straw-yellow hair and limpid blue eyes—also studied the dead man’s face. Slava had slipped his hand free from his mother’s to demonstrate his adultness to the man under the glass and noted with pitying sympathy that the other boy still clung to his.

  Grandfather had said Slavs were vicious and vulgar, but here was Slava’s Slav twin and Slava loved him. They understood each other. So when, drawing nearer to Lenin, the other boy lifted his finger, Slava knew as if the hand were his own that he meant merely to point out Lenin’s curious expression to his mother and not to touch the glass, as the nearest policeman assumed, his eyes irradiating with purpose and his nightstick slicing down from his shoulder. Like Slava, the boy had small, easily retractable fingers. The baton sliced through empty air and came to rest in the policeman’s own thigh. He wailed. Slava nearly slapped his hands together. “Scum!” the boy’s mother cried at the policeman. It was as if she had spoken out loud the patter of objection that had been coming from Slava’s grandmother all morning. “Tikho tikho tikho tikho,” Grandfather whispered toward the commotion on the other side of the tomb. Quiet quiet quiet quiet. Grandfather never went at the law directly, but he couldn’t resist making himself useful.

  Compare Ulysses S. Grant, as considered from the freshly paved squares of Riverside Park: a fall-down failure across the professions—farmer, real estate man, passed over for county engineer—before stumbling onto the battlefield and inducing his country to remain in one piece, like a bullheaded mother. However, those early disasters endeared his late-inning renaissance to his countrymen only more. Meanwhile, Lenin’s syphilis was a state secret, his childlessness with his wife, Krupskaya, supposedly the result of his unstraying devotion to the Revolution. You could not touch the man’s sarcophagus without corporal punishment. In America, however, love did not require nightsticks.

  When Slava remembered Duncan, he was back on the ground, barking impressions as Peter scrawled in his notebook, nodding richly. Slava considered the blankness of his. He moved over and tried to record some of what Duncan was saying, but his mind kept wandering.

  It cannot be said that, that evening, Slava obeyed every bit of guidance he had wrung from his exegesis of Century’s glimpse into Avery Coulter’s entrepreneurial soul. It wasn’t hard at all to start with a scene, but by the time Slava remembered the rest of the rules, he was midway done and adrift in a far sea of essayistic remembrance. Slava shrugged: Such is the impulsive tyranny of the artistic heart. Here was the memoir they wanted! Beau hadn’t specified the format; why not an essay. With a little patriotism shining from its heart—that couldn’t hurt.

  Now, in the office, Beau positioned a pair of tortoiseshell glasses on the bridge of his nose. “So, what about these two?” he said.

  They didn’t talk long. With each comment, Slava slipped lower in his chair. The thirty-four editorial staffers present that day, not counting Peter Devicki and Slava Gelman—fourteen Junior Staffers, eight editors, and the twelve staff writers who were in that day—voted. There were no abstentions. When Beau called out “Piece number one,” rereading its opening line, thirty-two hands rose into the air. When Beau followed with “Piece number two”—why was it necessary, for God’s sake—the two remaining rose: Arianna Bock, one other fool. As Slava’s eyes swept across Peter Devicki, something more terrible than thirty-two hands against began to take place. No, Peter, no, Slava pleaded silently, but in this, too, Peter was going to humiliate him, his hand rising to join two others to vote for Slava.

  “I’m taking you out,” she said. “You need to drink and forget.”

  “Like I needed to visualize victory?” Slava said. “I got half of Brooklyn going out to buy the issue.”

  She looked down.

  “No, no,” Slava said, waving his hands. “I’m sorry.”

  “What you wrote was lovely,” she said. “But what did it have to do with Fred Duncan? They liked it! But that wasn’t the assignment.”

  Instinctively, he looked around to see who could hear. “You saw that as soon as you read it this morning,” he said. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I’m not an editor,” she said. “The meeting was in an hour.”

  “You went for a walk instead.”

  “You would’ve listened to me?” she said. “I doubt it. You would have looked at me and thought, She has no idea what she’s talking about.”

  He looked away.

  “You have two options,” she said. “Poetry reading.” She counted out on the fingers of one hand: “Bad poems, bad booze, somehow it all works. Personally, I think a little slow for tonight. Number two.” The fingers on the other hand: “Band, bar, music, booze. Door prize if you can spot what the two have in common.”

  “Poetry?” he said.

  “Poetry, poetry.”

  “Do you write poetry?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. Let’s go to the bar. You need a drink.”

  “Honestly, Arianna,” he said. “No charity required.” />
  “Slava,” she said. She came closer, so close he looked away. She waited until his gaze returned to her. “There will be other chances.”

  “Thanks,” he said feebly.

  She leaned over Slava’s desk, giving him a temporary view of her rear end, and wrote something on his legal pad. “Address,” she said, turning back to him, his eyes rising to meet hers a moment too late. “Have a good night.” As she walked away, he peered at the scribble. “Bar Kabul. Little Darlings. 361 East Fifth.”

  Slava surveyed the office. You couldn’t give the other Juniors money to look in his direction right now, so he looked freely. How many evenings he had spent staying after all of them had left. There was no printer or fax at his apartment, and here the legal pads were free. As Consuela (Honduras), Piotr (Poland), and Ginger (St. Kitts) vacuumed up the day’s traces of editorial life, restoring the office to the errorlessness with which it greeted everyone in the morning, Slava tapped and scrolled, searching out story ideas. He chased them down on the weekends, or mornings when he could invent a doctor’s appointment. (“You are the least hale member of Junior Staff, Mr. Gelman,” Mr. Grayson, no triathlete himself, apprised him one afternoon.) Slava had lied and lied.

  What if, indeed, he went to Bar Kabul? Might Kate Tadaka shudder in disappointment at his lack of diligence? Might Arch Dyson shake his head regretfully as he strode past Slava’s empty work chair? Would Beau Reasons howl at his dashed hopes for Slava Gelman, that promising boy on Junior Staff? Slava wanted to dangle each of them off the terrace adjoining Beau’s office. Then they would notice.

  He sprang from his chair and hurtled after Arianna, colliding with Avi Liss, who was striding contemplatively past the Junior Staff pen, his mouth cheek-deep in a green apple. Avi nearly toppled to the floor, a wounded expression in his eyes. “Sorry,” Slava muttered, trying to help him up. Avi’s teeth remained sunk in the apple throughout the ordeal. By the time Slava burst into the vestibule, the doors of the elevator were closing with an unperturbed ding.