The Vixen

by Francine Prose

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it wouldn’t add anything. It would just slow down the book.” No matter what I said, no matter how sensibly I argued, I was unable to persuade Anya to humanize Esther by adding a section about her sad acting career. Maybe Anya, who’d wanted to be an actress herself, found it too painful—too close—to have her heroine fail that way. I decided to be more careful, more circumspect in how I tried to implement my agenda.

  * * *

  After that first visit to the sanitarium and our trip to Coney Island, Anya and I met in public places that she chose: cafés, coffee shops, hotel lobbies. I liked thinking that I was one of the few young editors who tucked a packet of condoms into his briefcase along with his author’s manuscript, but I knew that Uncle Maddie would say that I was flattering myself, that it happened all the time.

  Anya agreed to my suggestions, my minor deletions and additions. Often she didn’t seem to be listening. Possibly she was distracted, as I was, by the fact that, after our “professional” conversation, we would leave the cafeteria or coffee shop or bar and find a secluded spot, also mapped out in advance and determined by Anya—the women’s bathroom in the Plaza Hotel, the stairway of a parking garage, a quiet corner of Washington Square Park, a corridor on the Staten Island Ferry—and have quick thrilling sex, which she orchestrated as well.

  My sexual experience was limited to my college affair with Marianna, with whom everything was so friendly and sweetly awkward that I never wondered who was in charge. But now that Anya was in control, it was at once relaxing and exciting to do what she wanted. It reminded me of the dreams I’d had before I met her, but my dreams had never taken place in the unlikely places we went.

  Sometimes, in the heat of passion, when looking into Anya’s face seemed more intense than I could bear, I turned away and found myself staring into the eyes of the fox pelt. It was unsettling, but highly charged. The dead fox seemed like the visible symbol of our stealthy romance. I didn’t care if what we were doing was right or wrong. Sex with Anya was a gift, a series of gifts, though I might have preferred to get those gifts in bed. I fantasized being in Anya’s comfortable Chinese bed, though I assumed the sanitarium had rules. At night I lay on my lumpy mattress and imagined caressing her.

  Not long ago I read about a Hollywood movie star whose favorite place for sex was the back seat of an open, chauffeur-driven Cadillac convertible speeding north on the 110 freeway. If Anya were young now, she might be doing that. It’s not what I chose to do later, after I fell in love with the woman who would become my wife and discovered how little I needed the risk. Or whatever Anya needed, and I needed because I wanted her.

  I can’t pretend I didn’t like it. I can’t pretend I’ve forgotten.

  Every week or so, Anya would call and arrange to meet “to work on my book.” Work on my book was like that phrase in Proust, faire les cattleyas, Swann’s code words for making love to Odette.

  Lying awake, I wondered: What if someone at the office found out? Either I’d be fired or gossiped about and secretly admired—or all those things at once. Did Warren know? Often, when Anya specified some distant meeting spot, I mentioned it to Warren, who said, “Why the hell does that crazy girl want to meet there?” But then he’d offer me his car, along with Ned, who picked Anya up and drove her to meet me. I chose to think this meant that Warren sanctioned our unusual working method.

  Ned drove us back from wherever we’d met and dropped me off in Manhattan on the way to Shad Point. It was during those rides that I learned what little I knew about Anya.

  She’d been born in New Haven. Her father was a railroad executive. Her mother gave cooking and ballroom dance classes (for fun, not for the money) to her Greenwich neighbors. Anya’s older brother was a lawyer on Cape Cod. He used to beat her up when they were kids. That was where her problems came from, though she never specified what those problems were. She’d gone to a Catholic school for rich girls where she’d got into so much trouble that she was remanded into the supervision of her parents in some complex agreement with the court. She didn’t say what the trouble was. She’d desperately wanted to be an actress, but her family wouldn’t allow it. She’d taken a class with Lee Strasberg, who’d said that she had talent. She wanted to play Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi, Hedda Gabler, Cordelia. She wanted to play Lady Macbeth, though she knew that the role was supposed to bring bad luck.

  We could have sex against the garbage cans in back of the 21 Club, but I couldn’t ask her anything that she didn’t volunteer to tell me. Was she in treatment at Elmwood? I didn’t know, and what if she was? Therapy was a fad then. Everyone was being analyzed, if they could afford it. People joked about analysis. They boasted and complained about the cost, and gossiped about their therapists. But you didn’t confide your secrets, not even to your friends, in the easy offhand way that strangers do now.

  Another thing we didn’t discuss were the “ideas” in Anya’s novel. Whenever I tried to get beyond the sentence-by-sentence critique, things went badly. Once Anya boasted that she didn’t have a patriotic bone in her body. I was the one who thought it was bad to be a Russian spy, whereas Anya didn’t care. I recalled the vehemence with which, at our first meeting, Anya told me that innocent people were never executed in America. What did Anya believe? I was less and less sure. Maybe she didn’t know, either. She believed that Ethel/Esther was brave, highly sexed, and misguided. She insisted that the real Ethel would have approved of how she was portrayed in The Vixen. I picked my battles and didn’t argue.

  Once, in a pizza spot in Queens, I said, “Are you really saying it was okay to give the atom bomb to the Russians? Not that I’m saying Ethel did, but I mean, if she did? And if so, was it okay for the government to kill her?”

  Anya daintily wrangled a cord of cheese that had slipped off her slice. “I thought you were the one who thought she was innocent.”

  Did I think that? “I don’t know. But I don’t think that anyone should be murdered for instructional purposes.”

  “Obviously!” said Anya. “Anyhow, there was no secret. The Russians already had the bomb.”

  Hadn’t someone else said that? Was it Elaine? Or had Elaine said that we already had the hydrogen bomb? “Why didn’t you put that in the book?”

  “It would have ruined the story. Anyway, who cares? After Hiroshima, no one’s going to drop another atomic bomb. It was just too awful. I don’t care if our leaders carry on like bull moose rutting in the forest.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I just am. Self-confidence is the bronze medal for surviving my screwed-up childhood. If I wasn’t reasonably sure of myself, how could a mental patient write a three-hundred-page novel?”

  “Mental patients write bestsellers all the time.” I still hadn’t read Florence Durgin’s first book, but I’d read every word of The Snake Pit. Did that make me an authority on the literature of mental illness? I hated how I sounded: pompous, above it all.

  “That’s the plan,” Anya said. “Bestseller is the plan. That’s what this is about. Surely you realize that, Simon.”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t move. I sat there recalling my uncle’s disdain when I’d used the word league about romance. I still believed that Anya was out of my league, without knowing what that meant.

  My knowledge of romantic love came entirely from books. My feelings for Anya were familiar from fiction, if not from life. I thought about her constantly when I wasn’t with her. Her name was the last word I thought at night and the first word in the morning. At every moment I wondered what she was doing. I had long conversations with her in my head. Where had I read about the lover who couldn’t wait to leave his beloved so he could be alone and think about her? I counted the hours till I saw her again, and I fought the impulse to cross off, on my desk calendar, the days until our next meeting.

  I imagined telling her secrets that no one else knew. I’d tell her my life story, not that it
was worth telling. But I hoped she’d think it was sweet. When I was a little boy, I fell in love with the hydrangea bush in front of the house across the street. I cried until my mother asked if I could have one of the blue flowers, big and round as softballs. Then I cried because the flower seemed lonely without the others. I cried again when the flower turned brown and my mother threw it out. Did I want Anya to see me as a weepy, flower-loving little boy? Did I want her to see herself as the flower I adored? I wanted her to think about me, anywhere, anyway, anytime.

  I wanted to tell her what college had been like, how much I’d loved the library. I wanted to tell her about the Icelandic sagas, though all the stories that came to mind featured destructive, treacherous women. There was so much she didn’t know about me. What I cared about, who my parents were, my secret hopes and fears. What flavor of ice cream I liked. She knew I’d grown up in Coney Island, that I worked for Warren, that I was editing her novel, that I would do whatever she wanted, whatever she dared me to do. I just wanted to be with her, to look at her, to be near her. Was this love? It wasn’t what I’d felt for my college girlfriend, or what she’d felt for me.

  Working on Anya’s novel was like immersing myself in her psyche. I wanted to go deeper. I had to keep reminding myself why her book was a problem. I questioned my reasons for trying to turn The Vixen from something cheap into something with insight and style. Was I vain to think I could do that? Was I doing it out of respect for Ethel’s memory, to help Warren and the firm, or because I was in love with Anya? Did I think that improving the novel might somehow improve her? That was the real vanity, the unforgivable sin: the pride of thinking I knew what an improved Anya might look like. I have no excuse except that I was young, confused, afraid of what might happen next. Just getting through the day felt like memorizing poetry in a foreign language, outside, in a hailstorm.

  I tried to think of a precedent. Romeo and Juliet? Forbidden love, there was that. But our relatives weren’t killing one another in sword fights, and Shakespeare’s lovers weren’t having sex in public bathrooms.

  * * *

  A hundred pages or so into my—or, as I wanted to think of it, our—work on Anya’s novel, Anya asked if we could meet in Gregorio’s, a dark café in Greenwich Village.

  By then I had grown accustomed to and fond of our “routine”: minimal small talk, perfunctory book talk, agreement, agreement, then risky semipublic sex. By then I knew to search my surroundings, in this case the café, for the spot Anya had in mind for the final aspect of our “work.” I looked, or tried to see, through the haze of smoke and darkness, past the scatter of beatniks in black, hunched over chessboards or paperback books. The room was so underpopulated, we could have been alone. We could have had sex—subtle, discreet, all the more exciting—in the café, and no one would have noticed.

  Anya was waiting for me at a table, cradling a half-empty cup of espresso. I ordered the same. The caffeine made my hands shake. They were shaking already. The waiter didn’t look at us, though we must have made a striking couple. I wondered if Anya had warned him or even paid him to let us do whatever she was planning.

  I felt high from the caffeine and the promise of sex. Something about the paradoxical privacy of that public space made me relaxed—and bold. I decided to take a risk I’d been wanting to take and dreading.

  I put the manuscript on the table.

  I said, “Anya, I’ve been working hard on this, and we’ve been discussing your book. But now I need you to look over what we’ve done and give it some serious thought.”

  “Serious thought isn’t my strong suit.” Anya gave her fox pelt a tender pat on the head.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “Serious enough for both of us.” Someone was talking: not me. An editor was speaking editor-speak. That professional drone was the only voice in which I could say what had to be said.

  “Read what I’ve written in the margins, look at the words I’ve crossed out. If you want to restore or add or change anything, just do it, and we can go forward from there. Take your time. Take as long as you want. Well, maybe not as long as you want. Warren’s going to be asking for the finished manuscript.”

  I couldn’t read Anya’s expression, but it certainly wasn’t happy. I was sorry I’d said anything. This had been a mistake. Maybe I could fix it.

  Anya twined her legs around mine underneath the table. “I don’t need to look at it. I trust you. Do whatever you want.”

  Were we talking about sex or editing? This wasn’t how writers were supposed to act, but Anya wasn’t any writer. She was also an actress, as she’d often reminded me.

  “Please.” How could one word convey such wheedling desperation? If Anya didn’t work with me now, maybe she never would. I’d be the only one making a few cosmetic improvements while still preserving the heart of this three-hundred-page crime against truth. I needed to feel that she was on board. Otherwise I alone would be beautifying the lie that Anya wrote and that Warren intended to publish. But such was the power of sex that every time we met, this lie, this crime, this potential crime, seemed more like a misdemeanor. This was how far I had fallen: I’d begun to find something intriguing, exciting, even admirable about the fact that Anya had written a book, even a book like The Vixen.

  Without picking up the manuscript, Anya flipped through the pages. “You’ve written all over it so much I can’t even read it.”

  “Then just look at it.” I was pleading again. “Make whatever changes you want.” Why did I care? The Vixen was improving, incrementally, with (despite what I’d told Warren) minimal input from Anya. I wanted something about this to seem real. I wanted to feel that this was how a real editor worked with a real writer. “Go ahead. Take the folder home. I mean . . . to you know . . . where you live.”

  I’d said the wrong thing again, but Anya didn’t seem bothered. She was already annoyed at having been made to touch her book. She grimaced as she stuffed the pages into the blood-colored folder, which she pressed against her chest, then freed the head of her fox stole from under the cardboard so it stared at me, guarding the burden I’d put on its mistress. Its beady eyes had always seemed plaintive before, but now they seemed hostile, defiant. I half expected the pelt to hiss.

  I waited for this part of our meeting to end, waited for Anya to tell me when and where to meet her now. I felt like I did on the roller coaster: exhilarated, giddy, braced for rescue or disaster.

  Anya tucked the folder under her arm. “Well, then. I guess I’d better go get to work.” As she stood and turned, the fox head bounced off the back of her black jacket appliquéd with a sequined parrot.

  “Nice jacket,” I mumbled.

  Anya said, “Can you get this?” She meant the coffees, the bill.

  “Of course.” I was the editor. This was business.

  She smiled sadly, a stagy sadness. Acting-school regret. Her shrug said, What can you do? Her shrug said, You should have known. I had no idea what her shrug said. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

  She turned and left the café.

  I finished my coffee, drank my water. I was disappointed, angry, shockingly close to tears. I waited till I was sure that Anya was gone. Where the hell was the waiter? I left more money on the table than two espressos could have cost.

  * * *

  A week passed, then another. I had made a fatal mistake. I would never see Anya again. This was heartbreak. This was what love songs were about, the sonnets, stories, and novels, though not the sagas so much. The women who leave Viking men are more trouble than they’re worth, and when the Viking men leave women, the women curse them with magic spells that keep the men from having sex with anyone ever again. Everywhere men were grieving over women, women grieving over men. Only now did I understand what lovers mourned and suffered.

  This was a whole new kind of pain, an anguish I’d read about but never felt. How strange to discover an emotion that the average teenager probably experiences long before high school graduation.

 
Getting out of bed took effort. How heroic of the lovelorn to shower and brush their teeth. I spent the weekend with my parents, who kept asking what was wrong. I answered “Nothing!” more harshly than I intended. My mother urged me to take a walk, but I didn’t want to. Anya had ruined the Cyclone for me.

  “Now we’re worried,” said Mom.

  It required massive restraint not to waylay Warren in the hall and ask if he’d heard from Anya. The only thing that stopped me was the fear of making everything worse. There was nothing to do but wait.

  * * *

  Two weeks after I gave Anya her manuscript with my corrections, she called me at the office. When I heard her voice, I felt short of breath, and I faked a cough to hide it.

  “Are you sick?” asked Anya.

  She cared how I was! “Frog in my throat.”

  “Gribbet,” Anya said.

  I was too nervous to laugh.

  She said, “Can we meet Tuesday afternoon?”

  “Yes. Of course. I mean sure.”

  “Let’s say two? Do you know where B. Altman’s is?”

  Everyone did. It was one of the majestic Fifth Avenue department stores that still existed then. An image flashed in front of me: sex in a dressing room.

  “Are you still there?” Anya asked.

  “Yes! I’m here!”

  “Let’s meet in the restaurant on the eighth floor.”

  “Great. That would be great.”

  “I have the manuscript.”

  “Even better,” I said.

  * * *

  I’d never been to the department store. It wasn’t the sort of place my parents went. What would they have bought there? It would have shamed my mother to wander around and not know where anything was.

  I chose to think that Anya’s choice of a meeting place was a good sign. It was where lady shoppers met for lunch, a civilized venue in which a genteel editor and writer could politely discuss her work. Maybe we wouldn’t have sex afterwards. I could forgo the sex in exchange for the assurance that she and I were still working together. Or anyway, so I told myself, even as I hoped that work and sex could amicably coexist.