The Vixen

by Francine Prose

  I hadn’t forgotten Ethel’s letter to her lawyer. You will see to it that our names are kept bright and unsullied by lies. Each time I recalled Emanuel Bloch’s voice breaking on the word lies, I thought of my mother, on the candy-striped couch, weeping for Ethel, her neighbor.

  * * *

  Around the corner from our office was a diner, George Jr.’s, where I often ate lunch after I moved out of my parents’ apartment and my mother no longer channeled all her love into a dry chicken sandwich. At the diner, a dollar bought a bowl of New England clam chowder. If you asked for extra oyster crackers and crushed them into the soup, it made a paste that filled your stomach through the day and into the evening if there wasn’t a party with free hors d’oeuvres.

  Many of us ate at George Jr.’s, except the cleaners and the mail room guys who brought their lunch, and the lucky editors with expense accounts who frequented restaurants even more costly and fashionable than Uncle Maddie’s Le Vieux Moulin. I longed to be taken, and to take others, to wherever Warren, and sometimes Elaine, disappeared at lunchtime.

  To be seen at George Jr.’s was to admit that you weren’t dining out on the company dime, and we staggered our lunch breaks to avoid running into a coworker. Only Warren enjoyed holding breakfast meetings in the diner’s coveted window booths. He liked taking foreign authors to a place that seemed so American, so ironic. So Edward Hopper. Elaine often attended these meetings, and as I passed them on the street, I’d see her glowing in the diner window, in the orange morning light.

  One afternoon I sat at George Jr.’s counter and pretended to scan the menu before I ordered the clam chowder. I looked up to see someone waving at me from the stool nearest the wall.

  Elaine. The only person at Landry, Landry and Bartlett who would invite me to join her. Elaine pointed at the empty place beside her. I felt shaky, partly from hunger and partly because I was about to have lunch with Elaine. I was glad I hadn’t ordered yet so I could change seats without further annoying the waiter and letting Elaine see that I was planning to eat glue. I would have to find another dish, something less cheap and disgusting.

  I said, “Fancy meeting you here!” Had a man ever said a sillier thing to a woman? Oh, let the A-bomb fall now. Destroy the world if that’s what it took to make Elaine forget what I’d just said. I was horrified by my selfish prayer. I didn’t deserve to be sitting there with a pure, radiant soul. Elaine was not only attractive but also powerful at the firm, like a wholesome, sexy, warmhearted female Warren, if such a thing could be imagined. Every cell in my body felt desiccated, abraded by self-consciousness and discomfort. I wanted Elaine to see me not just as the lowliest editor in the company but as a former student of Folklore and Mythology, a graduate with high honors who had channeled his scholarly expertise into becoming the brightest rising star at the firm.

  My clownish greeting hadn’t dimmed Elaine’s smile.

  The waiter loomed up behind the counter. “Hey, fella, weren’t you just sitting over there?”

  “Guilty as charged. That was me.”

  “Really? I thought it was your twin brother.” His offhand contempt sent me back to praying for world destruction.

  Elaine saved me, saved the world. “George, this is Simon. Simon, George. I made Simon move over here and keep me company. He was too nice to say no.”

  Clearly, George adored Elaine. Everyone did. He shoved the menu at me and left.

  “Friend of yours?” I asked. The wrong tone again! I was almost as nervous talking to Elaine as I’d been with Uncle Maddie. Once more my voice didn’t sound like my voice, whatever my voice meant.

  “Well, yes. I come here a lot.” Only Elaine would admit that. Everyone wanted everyone else to think they were lunching at Le Pavillon. Elaine went to those lunches. She could afford to be honest.

  A bowl of magnificent mac and cheese steamed on the counter before her. Of course Elaine would know the perfect thing to order. After lunch, I would pick up her check. I would insist. My treat. Anything else would be ungentlemanly. So what if Elaine probably earned ten times more than I did?

  She said, “Have you tasted George’s mac and cheese? It’s the most scrumptious thing in the world.” I looked at the menu. Mac and cheese: $2.50. If I had that and coffee, and paid for Elaine’s lunch, I would blow half my weekly food budget. What was money compared to the charm of that one word, scrumptious? I could live dangerously, on the edge, and if my money ran out, I could stuff myself at my parents’ house for the price of a subway token.

  For now, I could save a dollar and prove that I was my own man by forgoing the mac and cheese and ordering the grilled cheese on white. I preferred Swiss cheese, but even in those tiny details, one hesitated to seem unpatriotic. American cheese? Yes, please. American cheese.

  George took my order, shrugged, and returned too soon with two slices of barely toasted bread enclosing a half-melted, canary-colored slick—oily, hard, and doughy at once, a repulsive combination.

  Elaine regarded my sandwich. Her delicate jaw shivered with concern. “Simon, you can ask George to toast it more. I’ll ask. He won’t mind.”

  “That’s okay. I like it this way.”

  “Do you want some of my mac and cheese? There’s way more than I can eat.”

  Elaine was offering me food from her plate. We’d hardly spoken until now. Did I want our first real conversation to make her feel that she had to feed me?

  I said, “Mac and cheese takes me back to high school lunch. Back to prehistory.” By equating school lunch with prehistory, I’d clumsily hoped to minimize the fact that Elaine was older than I was. Of course she hadn’t gotten my meaning. I’d only embarrassed myself again. I took another bite, put the sandwich down, and stirred three sugars into my coffee.

  Steaming under a buttery crust, Elaine’s lunch was irresistible. She gestured at my coffee spoon, with which I awkwardly dug into her bowl and scooped up a few shells oozing tendrils of goo that stuck to my chin. I pawed at myself with a paper napkin. I wanted to weep with shame and pleasure.

  “It’s a strange time,” Elaine said, in her melodic cigarette voice and at the clip of a taxi rattling over cobblestones. “Hard to know if we’re moving from the dark to the light or vice versa. I like to think it’s getting lighter, don’t you? That’s the Indiana in me. That’s how I was raised.”

  The Brooklyn in me wasn’t raised that way, but I wasn’t going to say that. “Strange how?”

  “Did you watch Edward R. Murrow rip into McCarthy on TV last week? Finally someone has the nerve to open his mouth!”

  Was Elaine saying what I thought she was? People didn’t criticize McCarthy unless they knew you very well.

  I hadn’t heard what Murrow had done. I’d stopped thinking about McCarthy, though my parents remained obsessed. He was still spreading his poison, destroying lives, putting our democracy at risk. I knew the threat was serious, but I’d worry about our endangered democracy after I decided what to do about Anya Partridge’s novel.

  Now Elaine was putting my dilemma in perspective. How could I have imagined that my trivial ethical problem with a lousy novel was a crisis? Senator McCarthy was terrorizing the country. Tragedies were playing out in Washington and throughout the world, and I’d been acting as if the world consisted of me, Anya Partridge, Anya’s book, and Warren. Changing the novel wouldn’t bring back the Rosenbergs. I’d been thinking that it mattered because the book—my working on the book—was a betrayal. I was betraying a dead woman, betraying the truth, betraying my parents, betraying that part of myself—my integrity—that was still in the process of being born. Was I taking myself too seriously? I reminded myself: it mattered.

  Elaine said, “We’ve been watching the hearings. It’s all so gosh darned totalitarian.”

  Such is the power of sexual attraction that gosh darned totalitarian seemed like the most adorable phrase I’d ever heard. Such is the power of sexual attraction that all I could think was: We? We’ve been watching the hearings. It was painful to
picture Warren and Elaine watching TV in bed.

  “Meanwhile Eisenhower announces that we’ve had the H-bomb for two years.” Elaine shook her head, thoughtfully closing her eyes long enough for me to wipe the grease off my chin. “For two years we’ve been testing weapons that make Hiroshima look like a playground quarrel. Setting them off in New Mexico, or some South Pacific atoll where the islanders are already having babies with fifteen toes. I’m sorry. I get obsessed. Listen to me, starting off this pleasant lunch with McCarthy and the H-bomb. We skipped the weather, the office gossip, not that I know any—and boom! Straight to Armageddon. You’ve hardly touched your sandwich. Are you sure it’s okay?”

  Elaine was right to apologize, though not for the reasons she thought. I had no problem with what she considered inappropriate lunch conversation. But her mention of McCarthy and the bomb had taken me back to the Rosenbergs, back to my parents’ apartment, back to the game of the plume of smoke rising from Ethel’s head.

  The week before, at dinner, I’d told my parents that I’d heard some publishing gossip, probably false. Someone was writing a commercial novel based on the Rosenberg case. In the book, or so I’d heard, the Ethel character was definitely guilty of espionage—

  My mother said, “Is the character called Ethel?”

  “I’ve heard that the writer calls her Esther.” How would I have heard that?

  I held my breath until my mother said, “Anyone who would write a book like that will get his own private circle in hell. And his readers will be right there with him. He can autograph copies while demons stick them with blazing-hot pitchforks.”

  I said, “What makes you think the author is a man?”

  “Because,” said Mom. “A woman would never do that.”

  I’D MISSED WHAT Elaine just said. I tried to look as if I’d been having interesting thoughts. “What? Sorry. I got distracted.”

  “Bad boy. I said, ‘Remind me what you’re working on.’”

  Elaine wouldn’t have asked if she knew. Unless Warren had instructed her to test me, to see how well I kept a secret.

  I should have said Florence’s poetry. I said, “Actually, this . . . hard book.” I shouldn’t even have said that. But I wanted to know how much Elaine knew.

  “Hard how?”

  “Complicated.”

  “Another word for hard. I might as well tell you straight-out. I know about The Vixen.”

  How often had I longed to hear someone say that! But if Elaine knew, why had she asked me to remind her? Was she spying for Warren? If this was a test, I’d failed. But I was glad she knew that I was the person Warren had chosen to trust with this important and sensitive matter.

  “You know about it?” I pushed aside my plate and leaned on the counter, studying Elaine as closely as I could without seeming creepy and intrusive. I saw nothing beyond her luminous surface, no tics, no contradictions, no tells hinting at a hidden agenda.

  “Sure! I read the book.” Elaine pretended to stick her finger down her throat and gag.

  How sweet it was to laugh about this, and what a huge relief. “So you know.”

  “Didn’t I just say that?” Elaine laughed again, then touched my arm to make sure I understood that she wasn’t laughing at me. I felt as if my skin were burning inside my jacket, where she’d touched me. Her laughter suggested that my problem had a humorous side I’d missed. She would help me take myself less seriously and realize that our publishing The Vixen was funny. In a way.

  Right then my love for Elaine deepened into something richer than an office crush. It was a special kind of love, born from gratitude and attraction. A sweet, saintly woman was helping me. The few minutes I’d spent in Elaine’s company had shrunk my elephantine problem to the size of a mouse. A three-hundred-page mouse, but a mouse nonetheless. The smell of frying hamburger and the tangle of breakfast bacon had been magically alchemized into aphrodisiac incense.

  I knew my worries would return as soon as I was alone, but I was thankful for this respite from trying to decide how to ask a woman I’d never met if she could tone down the sex scenes involving a mother of two who died in the electric chair. How to ask if she would consider changing the characters’ names to something less like the real names of the people on whom they were based, consider changing the scenes in which they conspired to overthrow our democracy.

  Elaine said, “I’m the only one who knows besides you and Warren. And the author, of course. So your secret is safe with me.”

  My secret was safe with her. Safe.

  I said, “Have you met Anya Partridge?”

  “No. She’s supposed to be a recluse, or so Warren tells me. He’s met her. I think he may have slept with her, but I can’t make myself ask. He says she’s crazily ambitious, that once the book comes out she’ll be all over us, and we won’t be able to get rid of her.”

  I had never heard anyone say, I think he may have slept with her, but I can’t make myself ask. I had never heard anyone say anything that cool. But what shocked me more was the phrase once the book comes out.

  The book. It made everything real. Since that first conversation with Warren, I’d half persuaded myself that The Vixen was a bad dream I’d forget when I woke up. Once the book comes out. Five words had put a stop to my wishful thinking.

  George was spinning a milkshake. The whir of the machine made it difficult to hear. As a second milkshake followed the first, I decided to say something about how bad the novel was.

  When the machine stopped, Elaine said, “The Vixen isn’t War and Peace, that’s for darn sure.”

  The Vixen isn’t War and Peace was what Warren had said. In case I needed further proof that they were in this together. So what? Elaine had admitted as much. We laughed. I was grateful. I adored her. I trusted her. Or almost. I knew that Elaine was closer to Warren than she would ever be to me. But that seemed right. It was the natural order, like the planets’ revolution around the sun. I wanted to say that if publishing The Vixen was supposed to shore up the firm’s finances, couldn’t we find another commercial novel that was less cheap, less mean-spirited and meretricious? A book that didn’t portray my mother’s childhood neighbor as a traitor and a slut. A book that didn’t malign the newly dead whose children had survived them. I wanted to be honest. But I kept my mouth shut. Elaine didn’t need to be involved any more than she already was.

  Elaine said, “We need money. Warren thinks this book will make some.” And then—as if she’d read my mind, “There are worse books out there, believe me.”

  “And better ones?”

  “Maybe, but let’s go with Warren on this. He thinks it’s a sure thing. I keep telling him there are no sure things in publishing, but he insists. If it fails, he’ll take the blame. He’s always been good about that.”

  Take the blame for what? I wanted and didn’t want to know why he’d apologized to Elaine.

  “I understand,” I said. And I did. I had to be careful—for everyone’s sake. If I was going to complain about The Vixen, I’d have to take the literary and not the political route.

  I said, “I’ve got all these awful sentences from the book stuck in my head . . .”

  No one could resist Elaine’s trilling, melodic laugh. “Like what?”

  Weirdly, it felt like betraying Anya. Why was I protecting her? Did I already think of her as my author? Or was it because I’d looked at her photo and done the things we’d done in my dreams? Mocking Anya’s work was my mini-revenge on her for writing the book that was weighing on my conscience and occupying my waking life.

  “One sentence, Simon. Come on.”

  “Okay . . . Let me think.” I didn’t need to think. “‘Ripping open the buttons of her green prison dress, Esther said, “Prosecute this. J’accuse, Inspector Javert.”’”

  Elaine giggled. “Dear God. We do know the book is going to need work. I assume that’s why Warren picked you. He believes you can do it. He needs you to turn this into something we can publish without totally losing our cre
dibility. And if you get it right, believe me, he’ll notice.” Her crystalline blue eyes stared unblinkingly into mine. I nodded. What had Warren semi-promised me? More desirable real estate at Landry, Landry and Bartlett.

  “I wondered why he chose me.” I would have loved to tell Elaine about my mother and Ethel, to hear her reassure me that history had nothing to do with my having been assigned this novel.

  “It’s obvious,” Elaine said.

  “Obvious how?”

  “You want me to tell you how talented you are?” She smiled. Were we flirting? It crossed my mind. I dismissed it.

  “No.” But that was precisely what I wanted. I wanted to hear her say: Warren asked you to edit the book because he thinks you’re a genius. Warren didn’t pick you because you’re the most dispensable, least threatening employee, the newest, the most likely to do what he says and not ask questions. The office drone with the fewest friends. The furthest out of the loop. The one whom no one speaks to. The one most likely to keep a secret. None of that was flattering. Maybe she meant the most talented, the most promising. Maybe that was what Warren had said.

  “Warren tries not to tell me too much. He says women don’t like to see men panic about money. He’s from that generation. But I know he’s worried. He’s not sleeping. He’s up reading at three a.m. We were fine when Preston was here, but now that he’s in the loony bin—”

  The loony bin? The nature of Preston Bartlett’s illness was guarded like a state secret. Elaine had just said loony bin. So naturally, so lightly.

  “Preston tried to strangle Warren. Two Christmases ago. At the office Christmas party. It was terrifying. They knocked down a wall of books. Everybody was screaming. Preston and Warren were yelling insults and curses, slurring their speech. We couldn’t figure out what they were saying, which was probably just as well.”

  Elaine’s voice dropped, so that I had to lean even closer. “Warren has never told a soul, not even me, what the fight was about. And poor Preston’s in no shape to reminisce. Security was called, and they took him away in an ambulance. Preston’s too rich for a police car, but not so rich they didn’t shoot him up with something. He got very quiet. And from then on it’s been the usual hospital nightmare: he wakes up, has some kind of a stroke, and no one notices till morning. Or so we’ve heard. The Bartletts don’t sue. They’re not that kind of family. No one, not even Preston, is worth seeing their names in the paper. Better let their son turn into a vegetable than have their society friends find out what happened.”