by Anne Bernays
Phyllis came back carrying the ice bucket. While I talked she set about pouring two inches of Scotch whiskey into two glasses, and using tongs, carefully placed four cubes of ice into each glass. I couldn’t help admiring the grace of her hands as she moved through this simple task. Her nails were pale, gilded with a sort of nacreous pink. How I wished that I loved her as much as I admired her.
“Then you’re not denying that you and Mr. Rogers are in an intimate relationship?”
“As I told you before, I don’t think that my private life is any of your business. If your editor insists on publishing a story about me, I will, I assure you, bring a lawsuit against your paper that will not be in your best interests. Lawsuits are very costly, as you know. Also, very timeconsuming. They use up the good services of lawyers who might be doing much more interesting work.” I was bluffing, of course—you have to.
The reporter actually apologized for having to put these questions to me. Was he embarrassed by homosexuality? I was aware of how difficult this must be for him, and at the same time I began the process of grieving for an existence that I had known for a long time didn’t have a chance of maintaining itself.
“Who was that on the phone?” Phyllis asked, handing me the drink. She stood facing me.
“It was the reporter who called earlier.”
Phyllis asked me what he wanted.
This was the moment I had been dreading for the last five years. I jumped over the edge of the cliff.
“He wanted to know if Barry and I were having an intimate relationship.” As I said this the blood rushed from my head and I felt giddy; maybe I blacked out for a second, because I suddenly felt Phyllis’ hand on my arm. “Maybe you better sit down, Walt.”
She wanted to know what I had told the reporter.
“I told him to get lost or he’d have a whopping lawsuit on his hands.”
“Walter.” “What, Phyll?”
“That isn’t the way it goes, is it?”
What followed was undoubtedly the most searching and, I have to admit it, moving conversation I had ever had with my wife. Why couldn’t I love her the way she deserved to be loved? Because of some minuscule malfunction of my heart or spirit. When I touched Barry’s hand my own hand ignited. When I touched Phyllis it was if my fingers had met paper, not living flesh. Could I have changed this if, as some people theorized, I really and truly wanted to? I don’t think so. I don’t think so. It would have been so much easier to disengage from Phyllis had she been a shrew, self-absorbed, a rotten mother, a boozer, a liar. But she hadn’t given me any real excuse, and besides, she provided the perfect cover for me and Barry. Who would have imagined, given my job at Griffin House, Phyllis’ sturdy pedigree and her noble job? Given Kate and Henry, children raised with obvious care and plenty of money, given our splendid house to which no neighbor had ever had to summon the police for raucous party-giving or for any other reason.
“You know,” I said.
“Of course, I know. Do you think I’m some kind of idiot, do I have eyes in my head? Don’t I smell it, taste it?”
I asked her when she had found out. She admitted that it had taken her a while, maybe a couple of years, although she had suspected for some time before that. Kate clinched it.
“Kate told you.”
Phyllis told me not to blame Kate, she hadn’t wanted to reveal her secret. She was torn, Phyllis reported. She loved me very much but didn’t want to see her mother hurt. What a cruel place to put a child. Phyllis frowned over her drink and dropped her head. I should not have allowed Kate to be so wise. I said it wasn’t my doing. I had no idea how Kate found out about Barry and me. Children were smart, sharp, they could smell a rat a mile away.
“How could you do it?”
The conversation, so far, had been on an even keel. Now it was threatening to overturn in high seas.
“Do what? Do you mean Barry or do you mean Kate?”
“I mean Kate. I suppose you couldn’t help what you did with Barry. He’s a sneaky bastard and he’s a pretty good actor. You, on the other hand, have a lot to learn on that score. You’re a lousy actor. Your eyes.”
I had thought I was fooling her, when all along she was fooling me. I felt brainless. I felt like weeping over my own stupidity. I asked her why she hadn’t confronted me as soon as Kate proved her suspicions were valid. An unfamiliar smile crossed her face, a cat-swallowed-the-canary smile, and told me that she figured that so long as the Samsons were perceived as a solid family, she was willing to put up with the man on the third floor.
“Besides,” she said, and the smile grew and took on an ambiguous edge. “I had my own friends. Not all at once of course, one at a time. Where do you suppose I got this bracelet?” She stuck her wrist in front of my face. “Did you really believe Kate gave it to me? Where would Kate get that kind of money? This is a real ruby.” She pointed to a small red stone. “And this is an uncut emerald.”
“Who gave it to you? Arnie?”
Phyllis nodded. “We had quite a romance,” she said. “I don’t suppose you noticed how damaged I was by his suicide.” She turned her head away.
“I noticed,” I said. “But it never occurred to me that he was your lover.”
“Why not?” she said. She had a point. It should have occurred to me. Did I actually believe that I was the only one allowed to deceive?
“Is there somebody now? I guess that’s a dumb question.”
Phyllis nodded. Her eyes were misty, no doubt from thinking about dead Arnie.
“Do I know him?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “His name doesn’t matter. He’s the liaison between the mayor’s office and the station. We met a year or so ago.”
I didn’t want to hear any more, not whether he was married, not what his name was. “Does Kate know him?”
“She’s met him. Once.”
“I suppose she likes him.”
“What are you up to, Walter? What’s this all about? You bring a sexual beast to live upstairs in my house, eat my food, drive my car, and you absolutely refuse to apologize. You owe me an apology.”
I smiled in spite of myself; I didn’t want her to think that I took this lightly. But an apology was something you proffered when you spilled the sugar or ran the car into a wall or failed to show up for a dinner date. You didn’t apologize for disloyalty and deception; you blew your brains out or prostrated yourself or tore your hair out. I’m sorry didn’t have it. “You want me to apologize?” I said.
“To start with,” she said. “Then you can pack your bags— and Barry’s too. I don’t expect he has all that much stuff.”
This was going much too fast. An hour earlier we hadn’t yet picked up our shovels and now the grave was unearthed, nice and neat, with smooth edges, waiting for the corpse.
I stared at my wife, showing me her sad but determined face, and I began to regret everything. Then it dawned on me that my focus was wrong. She was handing me the perfect excuse to leave without guilt, without feeling that I had wronged her, destroyed her life, thrown her away like an old shoe, set her adrift, and all those other doleful images characterizing wronged women throughout the ages, throughout literature. While not quite strong as an ox, she did have grit; she wasn’t going to stand for any insults, not from me or any other male. In her own prickly way, she was quite wonderful, and my ultimate punishment lay in not having the desire to make love to her.
She had given me a set of horns and I deserved them. But I had done to her what she was now doing to me—tit for tat. The emotional symmetry gave me a shot of abstract pleasure.
“If we were in France I could kill your boyfriend and not go to jail for it,” I said.
“I can’t listen to you anymore. You’re acting crazy.”
There was nothing more either of us could say at this point. I headed for the door to go in search of Barry when I heard Phyllis say, “And don’t bother trying to talk to Kate. She’s spending the night at a friend’s house. I don’
t think she’s in any mood to talk to you.”
CHAPTER 11
For more than a year, Barry and I have been living together. We sleep in the same bed. We plan our meals together, although he does more of the actual cooking than I do—mainly because I’m still unsure of myself when standing at a stove. Barry likes to experiment with new recipes. But he hates anything to do with fish except on the end of a line, and won’t let it be cooked in our kitchen because of the smell. So if I want some grilled salmon I have to eat it at lunch, in a restaurant, or at the Orange Club.
I gave Phyllis almost everything, the house, the car—it nearly killed Barry to have to say goodbye to Baby; he actually cried—and a bloated sum of money called alimony. The judge who decided this frowned at me the way you would at a dog who’s pooped on the living room rug. Kate is seventeen and a senior in high school; Henry’s a junior at M.I.T. My son assures me he’ll go on for a Ph.D. in an esoteric branch of physics that I don’t begin to understand. If Henry had been younger, Phyllis would no doubt have been awarded custody of him. There is no judge on earth who would have turned him over to a deviant. To tell the truth I never really wanted a house that large— except insofar as it allowed me to bring Barry into it and hide him there.
At work, no one said a word about my unwholesome behavior—at least not to my face. This may have been because I was the boss of everyone there, except the publisher. Or it may have been because they were not only sensitive, but actually liked me, and wanted to give me privacy. Worse things had happened in and around Griffin House. Lives had not only been disrupted, but turned inside out, upside down, a suicide here, a gentle murder there. Truly, a murder: two of the mail room boys had, a few years earlier, dispatched the parents of one of them by feeding them cocktails spiked with strychnine. They were, sorry to say, homosexual. Also abandonment, betrayal, disappearance, embezzlement—the usual array of human behavior that, somehow, failed to astonish you when it was you doing it.
The fact that my wife banished me from our house and that Barry and I were now living together in a converted office building, seemed, after the first week or so, to be neither astonishing nor abnormal. I had performed the role of husband and father to near-perfection—never forgetting my lines, upstaging my partner, or chewing up the carpet—so that I began to believe this was the way things were meant to be. When Barry walked into my office that day in his awful blue pants, carrying clipboard and tape measure, a huge appetite inside me broke loose and ran around like a dog with rabies.
When I wanted to make myself nervous, I wondered what direction my life would have taken if Barry hadn’t been assigned to measure my room. Would I have met another man who would have set the beast loose? I’m not at all sure, mainly because until that afternoon I was unaware that I needed anything I didn’t already have. Passion? Maybe not, but I loved my work and took away from it moments of genuine pleasure, if not glee. I felt rushes of—dare I call it joy?—after an intricate task was completed, a plan realized, a literary strategy brought to fruition with grace (like a book of poems or tremulous short stories that fewer than a thousand people would ever buy), a passage restructured, a richer meaning uncovered by diligent digging.
Granted, it was not quite on a par with singing a Mozart aria from the stage of the Met, but it had its moments, and I cherished them.
Barry generally refrained from making fun of my occupation, although there were many times when it would have been not only apt, but also would have given us the chance to indulge in doleful hilarity. In spite of the fact that we were more than halfway through the twentieth century, publishing was still stuck in the nineteenth. It was a kind of ad hoc, buckshot, hit-or-miss commercial activity pretending to be a profession for gentlemen and, as Barry noted, “It’s a fucking miracle you guys break even.” For example, the Griffin sales and publicity departments might just as well have been occupying two separate continents, with the one speaking Aramaic and the other Finnish. With high hopes for large sales figures, an author is scheduled for a book tour. He’s flown, first class, to Chicago where Mike Royko has agreed to interview him; and the next day, after Royko’s column has appeared, he’ll show up at Kroch’s bookstore in the Loop where people will flock to see him and ask him to sign copies of his book. But the publicity department has neglected to tell the sales department about the forthcoming interview, and so the bookstore has ordered only three copies of the author’s book. Everybody gets angry, especially the author, who takes it out on his editor who’s blameless for the fuck-up. Barry wants to know why the publicity department failed to tell the sales people about the author’s tour. I explain that since the organization runs by the seat of its pants rather than by a set of sensible rules, important things tend to fall through the cracks. “Everybody assumes the other guy will do it, so it ends up with nobody doing it.”
“But,” says Barry, “if you’re the top editor, shouldn’t the buck stop with you?”
“Nobody tells me about the tour either. Remember, I have five or six authors at once.”
I should admit that I ought to be on top of the entire journey of the book from the germ of an idea until it winds up on the remainder table at Doubleday’s. “I guess maybe you’re right,” I tell Barry, “but I can’t be everywhere at once. How many balls can I keep in the air?”
But whatever spirit it was that kept publishing from growing up and competing in an adult world, it was this same spirit that allowed the publisher to keep me on in spite of my by-now unsavory reputation as a “pervert.” The publisher summoned me to his corner office on the day the Tribune piece about me appeared. Unlike the items in the Daily Mirror and the News (“What top editor at what top publishing outfit has enjoyed a peculiar ménage à trois for the past several years on the Upper East Side of the town?”), the reporter had spelled out the dramatis personae. My name along with Phyllis’ and Barry’s appeared as participants in “a cozy Grecian trio.”
The publisher held the Tribune in front of my nose as if he were trying to get me to smell it. “Is it true?” he asked.
I looked down at his shoes, premium leather, orange, polished to a fare-thee-well. I liked them very much. I looked up. “Yes. I suppose it wasn’t very smart of me to let it get out this way. But frankly, I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing.”
“I was wondering,” he said, “just how it did get out? This sort of thing is usually kept under wraps. Top secret. You know.” He paused to light a cigarette. I will say this for him—he’d made a point of not putting me at arm’s length; he had come around from his desk and was sitting in a Scandinavian-type chair next to mine in the area on the other side of his office used for mini-conferences. It amused me, in a sick sort of way, that so many people seemed to think homosexuality was catching: don’t let us work for the government, don’t let us into the armed forces, don’t let us drill your teeth, and don’t, whatever you do, let us teach math to your seventh-grader.
I told him truthfully that I didn’t know how the story had managed to burst through the walls of my house. Did it really matter? It pained me, of course, to think it might have been Kate—or even Henry. It could have been Phyllis or Grete or Marie. I didn’t care; I didn’t want to find out. What would I do with the information once I had it? And now that my secret life was hardly secret any longer, I was grateful, in a way, for its bringing my paralysis to an end. I suppose on some level I was grateful to the person who thought he was punishing me and instead had set me free.
The publisher cleared his throat, a theatrical gesture of the kind bad actors use when they don’t know how otherwise to indicate that something serious is about to be communicated. “I’ve already had a few phone calls this morning advising me to let you go.”
“You mean fire me, don’t you?” I didn’t have to remind him that this was almost an exact replica of what I had faced when Fleming tried to get me to fire Charlie McCann. I decided that I wouldn’t beg; if he told me I was through at Griffin House I would simply turn and leav
e the room, not in a huff, but with unmodified dignity.
“Well, yes,” he said, “That was more or less the idea.”
“What did you tell these busybodies?”
“I told them I’d get back to them. But, between you and me, I’m not going to do it. You’re too valuable here.”
In spite of myself I smiled.
“Please, Walter, you can thank me if that makes you feel better, but I don’t want you to misunderstand. I don’t want you to interpret my keeping you on as approving of the way you’ve chosen to live your life. I don’t know how your wife feels about this—though I could make a fair guess. But I’m not sure I want to know. It’s none of my business, you see.”
“Your business is business,” I said. The warm air of love for this cold bastard rushed over and around me. The publisher, whom I had always considered ninety-nine percent obstacle and one percent good fellow, had saved my ass. Whether he’d done this because he had principles to uphold or whether he didn’t want to lose a crack editor, didn’t seem to matter at the moment. Either way was okay with me.
“That is so,” he said. It was clear he was uncomfortable with free-floating emotions in the workplace. He picked up the paper again. “I was thinking,” he said, poking his finger at the newsprint, “that maybe we ought to go after this young senator who seems to have the presidency in mind, Jack Kennedy. Father was ambassador to the court of St. James’. Rich as Croesus. Made his money off of Scotch whiskey.”
I told him Kennedy had already written a book—with Harper’s. “His name was on the title page but somebody else wrote it.”
“A Times man, Arthur Krock,” the publisher said. “There’s a family connection between the Kennedys and the Canfields. I believe John Kennedy’s wife’s sister married one of the Canfield boys. But it wouldn’t do any harm to try and, well let’s say, urge him to try another publisher.”
