I emerged into a courtyard. In the middle was a wooden cottage that seemed to have been airlifted from some family farm and dropped in East Harlem. Or maybe the owners of the house held their ground while the midsized buildings went up around them. However it got there, the cottage seemed ghostly, like Brigadoon or Atlantis, a mirage that would vanish when I left and be gone when I returned. When I returned? When would that be? I was already planning a next time. Next time I would know how to get here.
Inside, a baby was crying. Loudly. The sound rang up the fire escape, into every window, behind every shivering curtain.
Julia answered the door holding a chubby baby just old enough to ride her hip. Clearly, it wasn’t nap time. The baby was naked, red-faced. Neither of them looked glad to see me. Fat tears wobbled in the baby’s eyes, but he’d stopped crying. My arrival had shocked him into forgetting whatever he’d wanted or didn’t want. I was not going to give him a kiss from Violet.
That day at the office Julia had worn a little black dress that made a bold statement about the pregnant belly beneath it. Since then she’d adopted a more downtown boho style, rolled jeans, striped T-shirt, the espadrilles of a Venetian gondolier or a Paris newsboy. Her hair was cut short, in a boyish tangle. I longed to put my hand over her free hand, the hand not holding the baby, the hand with which she was distractedly rubbing her forehead.
She looked as if she couldn’t wait for me to drop off the manuscript and leave, as if she had no more time for me than she’d had that day in the office. Her impatience only added to the attraction I’d felt when I met her. It was as if I’d hardly thought about other women—not Anya, not Elaine—since then. But I was thinking about them now, so that wasn’t true.
Julia was prettier than I remembered, yet something about her seem faded and blurred. It was a look I would come to recognize in the faces of new mothers, expected to glow with maternity but who seem pale and drained, ravaged by sleepless terror about a helpless creature they hardly knew before they became responsible for its survival. Preoccupied by my own insecurities, I could still intuit Julia’s fear: that the world had moved on without her, that motherhood was exile, that she’d begun to feel like an abandoned child with a child of her own. Though her situation was very different from mine, she reminded me of how I’d felt when I’d been cast down from academia and landed in front of my parents’ TV.
I couldn’t look at Julia for long. It was even harder to look directly at the baby.
The dark-haired, dark-skinned baby was definitely not Warren’s. I’d heard that Julia had an affair with the Mexican author of a book about Pancho Villa. Later I would learn that the biographer was paying Julia’s rent and lived with his wife and two sons a few blocks away.
I couldn’t have said if the baby was pretty or homely, dreamy or alert. All I saw was the infant mirror of my own fear. I was terrified of the baby, afraid that he would judge and despise me because of some character flaw invisible to adults. I worried that Julia might hand the baby to me, offer to let me hold him. I would drop him, or squeeze too hard, and he would cry even louder. I wanted the baby to like me. But why would he welcome a strange man competing for his mother’s attention?
Julia and her baby gave me the same blank stare. I thought I should probably smile at the baby. I started, then stopped. My smile would be false, and the baby would know that.
I’d brought The Vixen with me. I took the manuscript out of my briefcase, an awkward maneuver made clumsier by the fact that I was still standing in the doorway, aware of the mother and child watching. I waved the pages like a peace flag. A flag of surrender. Julia and the baby regarded me with eerily similar scorn. Was contempt in a baby’s emotional range? It seemed so, with baby Evan.
“Oh, right,” said Julia. “You. Come in.”
Her house was one large room, with a bed on one side, a simple kitchen on the other. The place smelled faintly of baby shit, boiled milk, laundry soap, and cigarettes—perfumes that, it now turned out, I loved above all others.
Still holding the baby, Julia sat down at the rickety kitchen table and motioned for me to join her. She popped one breast out of her T-shirt and attached the baby to her nipple, something we’ve grown accustomed to seeing, but that startled me then.
“Yow.” Julia eased the baby away from her. “Don’t bite.”
Julia gave him her breast again, but now he didn’t want it. They grappled gently. The baby howled. Julia shrugged. She was used to whatever this was. Reattaching himself to her nipple, the baby flashed me a look of triumph that would forever affect the way I saw the Madonna and Child. I saw, in the infant Jesus, the competitive pride of being closer to his mother than anyone else would ever be.
I tried to hand Julia the manuscript. She shook her head. Then she shrugged again and took it, struggling to hold three hundred pages with one hand and a nursing baby with the other.
I said, “Do you think—”
I didn’t know what I planned to say next, which was just as well. “Think?” said Julia. “I haven’t had a thought for months.”
The baby had stopped nursing. Julia eased the baby off her breast, and he began to yell again. She put him over her shoulder and gently rubbed his back in small circles, which only seemed to make him angrier.
Julia said, “He doesn’t like company. Not that we have any, ever.”
So it was me making the baby cry. How could I calm him? By leaving. The one thing I couldn’t do.
The manuscript lay on the table between us. Julia glanced at the title page and said, “The Vixen? You’re fucking kidding me. Oh, please, dear God. Not this again. The proverbial bad penny.”
“So you’ve seen this before?” Of course she had. I’d found the page in her desk.
“I typed the goddamn thing,” she said.
“You didn’t write it, did you?” It was a risky question, but I had to know.
“Jesus. You’ve really got to be kidding. What do you think I am?”
I believed her. I believed that she hadn’t written The Vixen. Something in her tone, something in her expression, convinced me. I believed her, and I was relieved. Even if it meant that my questions about The Vixen’s origins might go unanswered, I was glad that she wasn’t the answer.
She pressed the baby to her chest and turned the first pages with her free hand.
“Sorry. I can’t even look at it. I’m desperate for money, but I can’t do this.”
“Why not?” I needed to hear her say it.
“Why? Because it’s filth. A disgusting piece of shit. Two people died, two little boys lost their parents, and now Warren’s publishing a trashy novel about executing a sex-crazed commie spy? I knew that this was in the works, but I never believed that Warren would do it. Oh, he’s a real fanatic. He thinks he’s a patriot, but he’s just an egomaniac. He lives in his own country. Population: one.”
Nothing had made me happier in the months that had passed since Warren first dropped the folder on my desk.
“I changed it,” I said. “I rewrote it. It’s different from what you typed. Go ahead. Please. Start reading around page ten.”
Lost in milky ecstasy, the baby allowed his mother to skim a few pages.
Then Julia said, “What is this?”
I TOLD JULIA everything, far more than I should have, more than she wanted or needed to know. I told her about watching the Rosenberg execution on TV, about my mother having known Ethel, about what my parents said on the night Ethel died. I told her about Uncle Madison, about our lunch, how he’d gotten me the job. Her job. I told her about meeting Anya, about the Terror Tomb and our strange affair and Anya’s disappearance and my going in search of her and my talk with Preston.
I told Julia everything except that I already loved her. Later we would look back and, like all lovers, hardly believe there was a time when we didn’t know each other well enough to say the most important things.
I shouldn’t have told her about the sex with Anya. That was a mistake. I realized that e
ven as I said it. I would pay for it later. I only hoped I would get the chance. But I was determined to be honest, and my half-crazed monologue was, for me, a sacrament of confession. The soul baring of a confused young man, about to be unemployed and broke, wanting to be forgiven and maybe even admired by an unemployed broke single mother.
I watched Julia for a reaction, but her face stayed blank. She didn’t speak. She never asked me to explain or elaborate. Meanwhile I had the sensation of speaking in my own voice, with a fluency I’d never had with Warren or Uncle Maddie, not with Anya or even Elaine.
After a while the baby fell asleep. Julia eased him into his crib, then returned to the table, poured us each a coffee cup full of red wine that I gulped in a few grateful swallows.
She said, “I typed the novel because he asked me. Just like poor Ethel, I guess. How bizarre, that typing can get you in so much trouble. Warren and I . . . I’d rather not talk about me and Warren.”
That was fine with me. I didn’t want to hear it.
I said, “Warren wants The Vixen to be the Rosenberg story read round the world. The slutty spy-witch who our government had to burn at the stake to keep from destroying the human race.”
“I know that,” Julia said.
“But my version is different. And once they figure out what it is, no one’s going to let it get out into the world.”
“Why are you bothering?” Julia said.
“Because I have to. It’s something I have to do.” I couldn’t tell her about my prayers during my mother’s surgery. It would have seemed like a pathetically obvious bid for her sympathy.
“And what do you want from me?”
“I want you to copyedit my version.”
“But why do you need me? If it’s not going to be published—”
“Because it’s become my book, my novel . . . My protest. I want it to be right.”
That wasn’t true, and Julia knew it.
The truth was: I didn’t need her. She could give the manuscript back to me, exactly as it was, and it would make no difference. Her input wasn’t required. Warren didn’t care if the book had inconsistencies and accidental repetitions. Typos and grammatical slips wouldn’t bother the CIA.
I didn’t need a copyeditor. I wanted an ally. A co-conspirator. I didn’t want to do this alone. I wanted her in this with me. I wanted to do it together. Lying to her was a bad way to begin, but telling the truth was beyond me. It was inexcusable to drag her into my protest, my low-key revenge, my barely visible act of resistance.
Julia and I can thank my selfishness, my cowardice, and my lies for everything that followed, for our happy life together. I have long ago been forgiven.
Eventually I forgave myself, always more of a challenge.
Julia rested her elbows on the table. In the dusty light, without saying much, we contemplated a plot to dominate world opinion through commercial romance fiction.
She said, “As if it’s a sure thing that the whole world will read a lousy novel. All this would almost be funny if Ethel and Julius weren’t dead.”
“Plus eighty-seven Albanians,” I said. “And who knows how many more, thanks to Warren and his pals.”
“Okay,” she said. “We’re on. Let’s do this for the eighty-seven Albanians. And for the who knows how many more.”
I loved how my words sounded in her voice. Already I saw change in Julia, a gentle lightening, a gradual turn, as if the sun were edging back into her visual field. Something larger seemed possible, beyond this room, this house, her child. I didn’t know why she wanted to do the right thing for Ethel. I could only speculate about why she wanted to do the wrong thing for Warren. Or why she wanted to help me. All I knew was I wanted her help. Her agreeing was a sign.
She smiled like someone waking from a restful nap. I said, “I took out the scene where Esther licks the Jell-O box.”
Julia burst out laughing. Her laugh was throaty and free, sweeter than Anya’s, more heartfelt than Elaine’s. She said, “Good to the very last drop.”
“The very last drop,” I said.
We laughed together. No one but Julia and I would have gotten the joke. Not even Anya, oh, Anya. There were so many reasons why I could have never joked about her book, around her, even if I’d wanted. It was nice to be able to laugh. No one except Julia knew The Vixen as well as I did and shared my vision for its future, which was to say: no future at all. Elaine and I had laughed about the book. But we couldn’t now.
I heard my voice, my real voice, catch as I asked, “Do you know who wrote it?”
Julia said, “Didn’t Warren tell you?”
“He insisted Anya did. But she—”
“I was in the office when they wrote it.”
They was more than one person. They was more than Anya. More than Warren. I braced myself to hear that Anya and Warren wrote it together so they could laugh at my efforts to improve something that was just the way they wanted.
“The three of them.”
“Three?”
“Warren, Elaine, and your uncle.”
“My uncle? My uncle Madison Putnam?”
Julia looked at me.
I’d suspected Warren. I’d steeled myself to hear his name. But my uncle and Elaine?
It took a while to sink in.
I didn’t know which defection, which . . . betrayal, hurt me more. In the sagas, the worst crime is to betray a blood relation. Uncle Maddie was my father’s only living brother. My family. My blood. My father’s brother. The man I’d wanted to follow out of those long loud family weddings. The uncle who was on my side, who not only helped me find a job but also got my parents to let me follow in his dinosaur footsteps. That lunch, that pillowy hug, his warm forgiving fatness. How safe I’d felt falling into him, not even embarrassed to be so young and drunk. The cushiony flesh of my flesh. And all that time he was mocking me, ranting about the Rosenbergs while he and Warren and Elaine were conspiring to torment me in ways that only he—knowing my mother, knowing me—could have devised and carried out. I remembered something he said that day, calling the Rosenbergs’ apartment Roosevelt-era commie housing. Only now did I recall that in The Vixen, Esther complains to the district attorney, “Our apartment is practically public housing.” It was Uncle Maddie’s line, but I hadn’t made the connection. Sometimes you don’t see something unless you’re looking for it. It shocked me that Uncle Maddie was speaking to me through the novel. It was too painful to wonder what Elaine had contributed to the book. I’d felt safe and hopeful with her. I’d thought she believed in me.
“Uncle Maddie, Warren, and Elaine? Madison Putnam? The three of them wrote The Vixen? They were in on it together?”
Julia put a consoling hand over mine. Uncle Maddie, Warren, and Elaine. It made for a confusing dynamic, the pleasure of Julia’s touch versus the pain of having been betrayed by my uncle, my boss, and the colleague with whom I’d thought I was in love.
No wonder Elaine had giggled when she asked if I could remember the novel’s worst lines. For all I knew, she wrote them. She—or Maddie or Warren or all three—they’d meant those sentences to be bad. And the idiotic sucker, the naive fool worked so hard to improve them. Those lines were funny, but I was funnier. It was like a schoolyard bully’s prank, except that the playground was the United States, the Red Scare, the Cold War.
I was wrong to have loved Elaine. Foolish to have trusted her. She was never on my side. She was like one of those duplicitous women in the Icelandic sagas, the women with the thieves’ eyes, but unlike their hapless Viking victims, I had never been warned.
Even knowing that, I missed her, or maybe I missed the idea of her. Thinking of her had been like traveling to a relaxing holiday spot that was now off-limits, forever. It was almost worse, losing someone who had never been mine. It was more embarrassing than losing a love, which was tragic. A chill seeped into the warm space that Elaine used to occupy in my thoughts.
Maybe my uncle and Elaine weren’t the ones who decided to involv
e me. Maybe that was Warren’s idea. That was still awful, but not as awful, not such a personal betrayal. I’d never imagined that Warren Landry loved me. I’d thought or wanted to think that Elaine and my uncle might.
Julia’s baby began to cry. I felt that he was crying for me, taking on my burden, shedding the tears I couldn’t cry in front of his mother. Julia lifted him out of his crib and rocked him till he fell back asleep. Then she returned to the table.
“They started writing The Vixen after the Rosenbergs died, just when it was becoming clear that many people were angry about the execution. There were all those demonstrations, in London and Madrid, Stockholm and West Berlin. After some protestors were killed in Paris, I remember Warren saying that the world needed to be reminded that we Americans were the good guys. The guys in the white hats.”
“And?”
“And what? They took turns writing chapters. They were having so much fun, it only took them a few months.”
Anya had said the book was written quickly. That, at least, was true.
“They met in Warren’s office after everyone went home and drank gallons of whiskey and read aloud what they’d written. Every Thursday evening.”
I pictured Warren’s office. The fox-hunting dogs on the walls. I wondered if they had subconsciously inspired The Vixen’s coauthors.
“You could hear them all the way down the hall. The two men bellowing like bulls and Elaine’s annoying girly giggle.”
I’d always liked Elaine’s laugh, but now I understood what Julia meant. Looking back, I saw Elaine’s geisha-like aspects, her ability to give people—Warren, me, writers, editors, lunch counter waiters—what they wanted. I hated seeing our relationship as a calculated seduction. Had Warren instructed Elaine to charm me, or had she volunteered?
Later, I would think back over every moment I’d spent with Elaine and tried to decide how much of what she did and said was sincere. What about that lunch at George Jr.’s, when she’d started off by praising Edward R. Murrow for shaming McCarthy on TV? Did she think I wanted to hear that? Warren didn’t like McCarthy, either.
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