The Vixen

by Francine Prose

  “Uncle Maddie, can I ask you something?”

  “Ask me anything, Simon. My life is an open book. Ha-ha.”

  “Have you, with all your experience—” I hated how I sounded, pitiful and wheedling. I hardly recognized my voice.

  “Oh, please,” my uncle said. “Spare me.”

  “Have you discovered a secret for dealing with difficult writers?” I hoped he wouldn’t ask if I meant anyone he knew. I couldn’t mention Anya Partridge, not that he would recognize her name.

  “What do you mean by dealing?”

  “Have you ever persuaded a writer to change the entire point of an essay?” I tried not to think about The Vixen lest something show on my face. If necessary, I would pretend to be talking about Florence Durgin’s poems. I would act as if that were my only book, as if I were asking my uncle how to make the gloomy poet rethink her mournful sonnets.

  “More times than I can tell you, I’ve . . . well . . . I’ve gotten authors to chuck every word they’ve written and start from scratch. I mean ditch the whole goddamn thing. Tear it up into tiny pieces, toss it in someone else’s wastebasket, then rewrite it top to toe with no guarantees from us. I could tell that the idea—the germ—was there. Inevitably the problem was faulty execution. Yes. Faulty execution.”

  Did I imagine that my uncle looked hard at me when he said execution. Twice. Why wouldn’t he stare at my hand when it shot out, shaking my water glass, sloshing water onto the table?

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t worry.” He slapped a napkin onto the wet spot and signaled for the waiter to bring him another napkin. “That’s what comes of drinking cocktails. Always bad news. They soften the brain. Slow the reflexes. At least it was only water.”

  I said, “I’m afraid my author’s problem goes deeper than faulty execution.”

  There. I’d said it. Execution. The planet still turned on its axis.

  “Well, then,” said my uncle. “Can I ask: Is your author by any chance a she?”

  I nodded, realizing, too late, that two fried potatoes were sticking out of my mouth like fangs. “How did you know?”

  “Instinct. Women, bless them, are much simpler creatures. One step closer to our cave-dwelling ancestors. I suggest making the writer—the lady writer—fall in love with you. Madly in love. She’ll beg for your advice. She’ll do anything to please you. She’ll write an entirely different book if she thinks that’s what you want. I could tell you about women whose names you’d recognize, tough babes but touchingly female, real women, as tender and vulnerable as any other—”

  Anya’s photo materialized before me. Despite my febrile dreams, it seemed unlikely that I would inspire her mad love, or that I could persuade her to change Esther from a nympho spy-seductress into an idealistic duped American housewife. And yet if my—to be brutally honest, frog-like—uncle had made so many women fall madly in love with him, it was obvious that I understood nothing about women. If Uncle Maddie could make them his slaves, sex had only a nominal relation to my companionable dorm-room affair with Marianna.

  The alcohol had kicked in. There and then I decided that I would persuade Anya to see me. I would assure her that it would be easy to make the changes I wanted. To fix it, sentence by sentence; to turn Esther from a scheming traitor into an overly trusting wife and sister. I would put off asking for certain concessions: renaming the characters, for example.

  I said, “I think my author is out of my league. Romantically.” I’d already said more than I wanted. What if Uncle Maddie repeated this to Warren? They would know that I hadn’t meant Florence. I doubted that Warren would tell my uncle about Anya and her novel. I wasn’t sure that Warren liked or trusted my uncle, but Warren must have respected or feared him enough to agree to hire me.

  “Leagues are for baseball. For Little League. There’s no such thing as leagues where romance is concerned.” My uncle looked insulted, as if I subscribed to some Darwinian ideas about natural selection that might inhibit his sex life. He wiped his mouth with his napkin. A judgment had been passed.

  “Well! How are your dear mother and father?”

  He was looking over my shoulder to see who he might know. He didn’t care how my parents were. It was politeness, an afterthought. Lunch was over without my having gotten the answers I’d wanted. I remembered my original plan: to approach the problem obliquely. Hadn’t I been oblique enough? It was worth one more try.

  I said, “Mom’s headaches have gotten worse since . . . I know this might sound strange, but she hasn’t been herself since . . .” I let my voice trail off.

  Mom hardly ever got off the couch. I visited them every Sunday, and though my parents and I tried to make one another laugh, I felt miserable when I left. On the subway to Manhattan, I dreaded the moment when the train descended into the tunnel, the moment when it seemed too late to get off and go back and spend another evening trying to make them happy. I told them about the slush pile, and we shared hearty but sympathetic laughs about the manuscripts I’d read that week: The Count of Monte Christmas, The Laboratory Mice’s Revenge.

  I never mentioned The Vixen.

  Not even Uncle Maddie could avoid asking, “Your mother’s gotten worse since when?”

  “Since . . . well . . . actually . . . Mom was pretty upset about the Rosenberg execution.”

  I was taking a risk. At that time you didn’t say those two words to someone who might have a different opinion of Julius and Ethel.

  My uncle turned a pinkish purple of a violent intensity that I wouldn’t see again in nature until my first desert sunset.

  “Oh, the poor, poor Rosenberg martyrs! Murdered by the Feds. You know who wanted that couple dead? The Communists, that’s who. So those stupid schmucks would live on forever as the People’s heroes. Goddamn right, the Rosenbergs should have been saved from the chair and given life sentences for stupidity. The woman was an embarrassment. Have you read her letter to Eisenhower? Comparing herself to the six million Jews killed by the Nazis, to the Jews enslaved in Egypt, calling Eisenhower the Liberator, pimping out Moses, Christ, and Gandhi, blithering about how this great democracy is ‘savagely destroying’ a small unoffending Jewish family. A small unoffending Jewish family! Have you ever heard such bullshit? They were Soviet agents, liars who even lied to each other.”

  I didn’t want to argue with my uncle. I didn’t know what I’d say. I thought about my gentle father and his sweet, unfunny jokes. How could he and my uncle be siblings? I wondered about my paternal grandparents, dead before I was born, and about the thread that tied my dad to his successful bully of a brother and to Mort, the martyred parachute soldier, the uncle I never met.

  “You know what the worst part was?” Maddie said.

  The worst part of what? I’d lost track. I shook my head no.

  “That fool Ethel and that idiot Julius, they didn’t believe they were guilty. They didn’t think they’d committed a crime. Those self-righteous Stalinist stooges. Oh, and do you know where this heroic couple lived? Knickerbocker Village! Roosevelt-era commie housing!”

  Was he holding the Rosenbergs’ apartment against them? My uncle was practically shouting. Diners at other tables must have been looking at us. I imagined that I could feel their eyes on my back. Many of them knew my uncle. Maybe he got this agitated at every lunch. He had to maintain his reputation as a curmudgeon, but also a fearless, incisive critic who could spot the hopelessly middlebrow and expose every flaw so that readers would never bother with a second-rate talent again.

  “Imagine! These backwards shtetl Stalinist Jews wanted to live in public housing. Can you feature that? They want to live among the People.”

  My parents lived in a modest apartment. Uncle Maddie knew that. At least it wasn’t public housing. At least it wasn’t public housing. I wished I hadn’t thought that. One lunch with Uncle Maddie had turned me into the kind of snob who judged people by the square footage of their homes. The minute lunch ended, I would have to turn back into a human
being.

  “They believed they were helping us by selling the bomb to the Soviet Union! To the Never-Never Land of freedom and justice for all. And who was their Peter Pan? Stalin! The murderer with more blood on his hands than Hitler!”

  My uncle’s voice rose on Hitler. The waiter glanced at our table.

  “If it were up to these left-wing Puritans, there would be no beauty, no truth, no pleasure. You know that story about Lenin and Beethoven? Lenin said he couldn’t listen to Beethoven anymore, since Beethoven makes you want to stroke people’s heads. He couldn’t listen to Beethoven because now he needed to hit people over the head. That’s what the Rosenbergs wanted! To hit us over the head. Or nuke us. Which could happen now the Russians have the A-bomb, thanks to your friends the Rosenbergs. Bye-bye, Beethoven, pal.”

  “The Rosenbergs weren’t my friends. But I don’t think they should have gotten the chair—”

  “Oh, don’t you now? Look around. Imagine this place and all these nice people reduced to radioactive ash.”

  I was grateful for his permission to turn around. The nuclear holocaust hadn’t happened. The restaurant was unchanged, except that, as I feared, people were staring at us, or trying not to.

  “Oh! And did your parents tell you the Rosenbergs were killed because they were Jews?”

  “I can’t remember.” In fact my mother had said as much when we’d watched the rabbi arrive at Sing Sing.

  “You know who hated Jews? Stalin. Stalin murdered Jews by the truckload. Stalin liked nothing better. If Ethel and Julius were citizens of their beloved Soviet Socialist Republic, they would have been dead years ago, their two little boys would be digging latrines in Siberia. They’ll tell you that the Soviets have solved the problems of poverty and hunger. Sure. If you murder half the population—fill those hungry mouths with stones and dirt—problem solved! Every Communist is a Trojan horse, a time bomb brainwashed to explode all over innocent patriotic Americans.

  “You’ll forgive the mixed metaphor, Simon, but you understand. The Rosenbergs were arrested in broad daylight. Their trial was conducted in public with journalists present. In Russia they would have been taken away under cover of darkness, thrown into prison and never heard from again. I suppose your parents would have been happy then.”

  “I don’t think my parents would have been happy about that, Uncle Maddie. I really—”

  “You realize I’m making a point.” A brilliant idea was occurring to him. He was in a hurry to write it down. “Waiter! Check, please!” He searched his pockets for a pen.

  The waiter delivered the bill in a sort of leather wallet. I watched my uncle count out twenties and slip them into the folder. I had never seen anyone pay that much for a meal. He scribbled his brilliant thoughts on the back of the receipt and stuffed it into his pocket.

  “Let’s do this again,” he said.

  Not until the waiter pulled away the table did I try to stand and realize how drunk I was. It would have been fine if I hadn’t had to say goodbye to my uncle and stay on my feet. I sagged against the table. The waiter dropped the table and propped me up like a mourner at the entombment of Jesus. Uncle Maddie stepped back, raised both hands in the air, and let the waiter support me.

  “Should I hail the young man a taxi?” said the waiter.

  “Thank you,” said Uncle Maddie. “But where should we have him delivered? My nephew is in no shape to go back to work. Perhaps he should go visit his parents who, I believe, live in Brooklyn.”

  Anger briefly cleared my head. He believed we lived in Brooklyn? Uncle Maddie had been to our apartment, and we had been—once, on Aunt Cheryl’s fortieth birthday—to his Upper West Side palace.

  “I have my own apartment now. On Twenty-Ninth and First.”

  “Big boy,” my uncle said.

  When the waiter was gone, my uncle said, “Regarding what you were asking, I have some useful advice.”

  I felt sober enough to concentrate. To listen and remember. Without my mentioning The Vixen, Uncle Maddie knew what I needed to hear. He was about to give me a nugget of publishing wisdom that would help me deal with my Anya Partridge problem.

  Uncle Maddie cleared his throat. “Listen, son. Never drink cocktails. And you’ll do very well.”

  And that was it. As I leaned forward to shake my uncle’s hand, I slumped against him. He wrapped his thick arms around me. I was shocked by his size. Embracing him was like hugging a huge spongy tree. I drunkenly tried to interpret his hug. Was he just keeping me upright or was it affection? Mild affection, I decided, but affection nonetheless.

  On my part, it was love. A boy’s love for his uncle. The unreasonable love of blood for blood, of flesh for flesh. A young person’s love for family, for history. For himself. I feared and disliked my uncle, but now I clung to him as if I were drowning instead of just drunk. He knew my parents. He’d known me as a child. The grandparents I never knew were Uncle Maddie’s mom and dad. He must have felt something for us. For me. My father was his brother. However difficult and unpleasant, he was squarely on my side. My uncle. Dad’s only living brother. Dear, dear Uncle Maddie.

  Chapter 4

  At that time I was deeply involved in love affairs with two different women, neither of whom, as far as I knew, was aware of my existence. The first was Anya Partridge, with whom my dream romance grew more heated with every night I put off deciding how to “fix” her book.

  The second was with my coworker Elaine Geller, the firm’s publicity director, a woman as pure-hearted and angelic as Anya was (in my fantasies) calculating and carnal. Unlike the fantasy Anya, Elaine was warm and thoughtful and kind. She knew the names of everyone’s spouse. She remembered children’s birthdays. My glacial fellow workers melted in her presence. She always seemed intensely aware of everyone in the room, sympathetic to whatever they might be going through, and she had a welcoming smile for the most socially awkward and least “important” employee—in other words, for me. Something about her made me want to be a better person, better than the guy having an unhealthy relationship with his writer’s author photo.

  In Professor Crowley’s folktales, Elaine would have been the good sister and Anya the evil one, the white rose and the red rose, the blond and the raven-haired beauties. The fairy-tale Elaine would have been virginal, whereas the real Elaine was having a long, on-again, off-again romance with Warren Landry. Their relationship had outlasted his affairs with other women, amusing adventures that seemed to him as natural, as reflexive as breathing. No one told me this; no one confided in me after that first blast of gossip about my pregnant predecessor, Julia. But neither did anyone bother lowering their voices when I was close enough to overhear them at the water cooler and coffee maker. My colleagues talked as if I weren’t there: an insult and an advantage.

  No one had seen Elaine and Warren together outside the office except at breakfasts and lunches with agents and writers. But everyone noticed how they looked at each other at those meetings at which Warren refused to meet anyone else’s eyes. Only lovers and close family members could gaze at each so steadily, with such openness and ease. We’d all seen Elaine leaning on Warren’s arm at the office Christmas party. But by that point in the festivities, everyone needed a strong arm to lean on. I had no memory of whom I spoke to at the party, or of what I said, which is why I thought I might have mentioned “The Burning” to Warren. Afterwards, I would have wandered the city all night had not a helpful junkie couple pointed me toward home.

  Elaine was small and blond, perky as a cheerleader, but not conceited in the way that I imagined cheerleaders were, not that I’d ever met a cheerleader. Everything about her was bubbly and forgiving. Again according to overheard gossip, she’d good-humoredly weathered the break that Warren took from their romance, long enough to impregnate my predecessor, Julia, who might also have been pregnant by her other lover, the biographer of Pancho Villa.

  It said something about Warren, about Elaine, about our office culture, and about the era in which we live
d that no one commented on the age difference between them. Elaine was probably thirty, but guessing her age would have been like asking, How old is Tinker Bell? She was an exemplary human being and also good at her job, an intelligent reader whom editors and journalists trusted, whose recommendation could persuade them to feature our books in their pages. She was often away from the office, shepherding foreign authors to interviews and lectures, soothing the anxious, distracting the homesick, charming the cranky.

  Passing me in the hall, Elaine sang out, “Hi, Simon! How are ya?” her bright voice still lightly freckled with the Midwest. I never stopped being surprised and pleased that she remembered my name, especially when so few of my colleagues seemed to know who I was. If they thought about me at all, I imagined they assumed that I owed my job to nepotism (true), that I was unqualified (false), and that I would soon be fired (maybe yes, maybe no, depending on what happened with The Vixen). Once, over the communal coffeepot, a senior editor—speaking as if I weren’t there—compared reading the slush pile to the futile labors of a heat-struck prospector panning for gold in a dry streambed. I smiled, but before I could amuse them with the latest rejected titles—Love in Venice and Death Hates the Hangman—they had gone back to their offices.

  No one, as far as I knew, suspected that I’d been chosen for a sensitive assignment. I wondered how long it would be possible to keep The Vixen a secret.

  Did Elaine know? Once she’d glanced into my office when I was working on The Vixen and held my gaze for an extra beat. Did I sense some understanding? She might have heard about The Vixen since she was intimate with Warren. I knew that people said things in bed that they would never say elsewhere, though my postcoital conversations with Marianna could have occurred, quite comfortably, in the Kirkland House dining room.

  If things went as planned, Elaine would be in charge of making Anya’s book the success that would save the company. She and Warren, Anya and I, the printer, and likely a few others would be co-conspirators, not in a crime so much as a sin, the sin of slandering the dead, the sin I happened to have written about in my college senior thesis.