Yes, there was something about Wolf’s hangdog look, the unease with which he shuffled to the bar to get a coffee, that rustled and awakened what I must shamefacedly call my own inner bully. I saw him fumble with his change at the counter, and I felt that electric rush that accompanies the sudden awareness that the power in a situation is totally up for grabs. Ions crackled the air around me; a twisted kind of pleasure narrowed my eyes. You fuck with me? I said silently to his back. I fuck with you. You disrespect me? I disrespect you. After the female praying mantis mates, incidentally, she devours the male head to toe.
“I need you to do something for me,” I said, once he’d sat back down. “Before I forget.”
I was daring him to try, just try to say no, try to gain the upper hand, but I knew as well as he that he wouldn’t dare. I had something on him now. I knew something about him—that he could not make me unknow. This didn’t mean anything among his sycophants in Brooklyn, but I was pretty sure I could parlay it into something here. Power’s too damn circumstantial. Wolf’s shoulders were slumped; he curled into himself as he took a sip of his coffee. “Sure, yeah, what’s up?”
“Take a look at these, will you?” I took Susan’s poems out of my purse and pushed them across the bar. “They need a home, and I need you to find it for them.”
“Uhhh…okay. Yeah.”
“I mean right now.”
He looked at me. “You want me to read them right now?”
“Uh, yeah, I want you to read them right now,” I said, “and I want you to tell me where to publish them.”
“Who’s Susan Anderson?” He was slumped still, leafing through the pages.
“My best friend.” I was going to use this man-child, as he used people. If I had any compunction about lowering myself to his level, I sure couldn’t feel it at the time. Helping Susan and beating him at his own game, the old two-birds-one-stone maneuver, ah, it made me feel like a ruthless Russian czarina. Life was very grand sometimes.
I let him read for a while. Then I crossed my arms and said, “So?”
“These are great.”
“I know,” I said, though I felt a flush of pride at Susan’s talent. “So what’s the plan?”
I personally watched him email three editors with a query. That seemed satisfactory to me.
“Can I keep these?” he said after he’d sent the last one. “Just in case I run into a few people.”
“Of course,” I said in what I believed was a benevolent tone of voice. I felt very queenly just then, very competent. “You bcc’d me on those emails, right? And you’ll forward me their replies?”
“Yeah, definitely,” he said. “I hope something works out.”
“Well—good.” I scratched my head. Wolf was being so obliging and diminutive, and coupled with his poor-orphan aspect—I don’t know how bullies punch down for so long, it was already giving me a backache. Perhaps Wolf wasn’t threatening after all. Perhaps he was just insecure. All the impotence he must have felt in places like the Ace got stored up, sublimated, and transmuted into aggression, because deep down he didn’t love himself, thought he never could, was too wounded to try.
To soften him up into signing with us on the spot, I asked him about his childhood. I listened for God knows how long about his issues with his mother, how as a teenager he’d gotten into drugs and it’d taken him a long time to pull out of that scene, how angry he was that other poets were prone to dismiss his work because it wasn’t canonical enough. That was the term he used: canonical. He felt alienated from the poetry community, but it wasn’t his fault that his career had taken off and he’d gotten these amazing opportunities. He worked really hard, and at the end of the day he didn’t care what they’d think about this sponsorship bullshit because, you know what, YOLO.
He went on and on like this, sometimes it was hard to be patient, but I was because I knew at the end he’d sign the paperwork. Which he did. Which he probably would have done all along, but both of us were used to a certain pas de deux when facing off with the opposite sex.
When we said goodbye outside the hotel—I was hailing a taxi to take to the train station, cutting it dangerously close to my departure—we shook hands like we were real colleagues who’d just brokered a successful deal, not two strangers who’d smashed faces not twelve hours before at a random event space in Brooklyn. It was drizzling a little, the sky was a melancholy gray, which contributed to my involuntary twinge of empathy for the sad, mixed-up man before me. After all, it was my job—wasn’t it?—to take care of men who were soft and vulnerable and needed help with their personal evolution.
“Don’t forget about those poems, yeah?” I called to him as I slid into the cab. He waved and nodded as I shut the door. I remember thinking as we pulled away from the curb: that poor thing.
* * *
—
One thing I’ve always loved about work is that it doesn’t let you dwell. Weird sexual thing with a guy you work with? No matter! Hopelessly falling for a guy you’ve only hung out with twice? Forget about it! I didn’t have control over a lot of things in life, but I did have control over my workplace performance. No, life doesn’t come with an instruction manual, but Celeste did, she was giving me instructions all the time.
Simone had emailed me a number of PDFs—commencement speeches, opinion pieces, reviews of her most recent book—to look over on the train on my way to meet Mary London, which, in the wake of my successful encounter with Wolf, I proceeded to do with a sense of extreme competence. With all the hullabaloo I hadn’t slept particularly well so I picked a sparsely populated car in order to uninterruptedly listen to soothing meditation music and focus, focus, focus. I had an app on my phone that dinged when I was supposed to work and dinged twice when it was time for a break, and I followed it as reverently as a nun to her canonical hours.
I read as much by and about Mary as I could, as well as the plan for “creative engagement” that Celeste had cooked up just for her. It was a company that People’s Republic already represented, a plus-sized clothing chain called Encore. Encore was currently undergoing massive rebranding in an attempt to get rid of their suburban-mom affiliation and get on board with the fashionable full-figured women who—smartly, I thought—had banded together on the Internet to demand better sartorial choices. Yet Encore couldn’t lose their suburban moms entirely, for they were the company’s bread and butter. It was a fine line to walk, which is where we came in.
Encore’s chief marketing officer happened to be a big fan of Mary London, and Celeste had managed to convince her that the solution for the rebranding dilemma was to employ a writer she already adored. Mary had a sterling reputation as an author and happened to be full-figured herself. She was beloved among the kind of book-clubby woman who would share Mary’s arch think piece about sexism on Facebook the same day she joined Jenny Craig. Even the suburban-mom customers who didn’t fit that bill, who had never heard of Mary London, could still appreciate whatever witty copy London would undoubtedly come up with. The biggest selling point of this offer to Mary London, so far as I could tell, was that it meant she could quit her teaching job, which allegedly she hated.
I was so engrossed with my work that I lost track of my surroundings. It was easy for me to lose track of myself; sometimes I even forgot I was a person. I’d get so into whatever I was doing, or let’s be honest, whomever I was doing, that what you might call my self sort of lost its boundaries. A malfunctioning of my cell walls’ selective permeability, I guess, to the point that the whole universe seeped in. At such moments I felt less like a human being and more like a loose jumble of thoughts and sensations held together by the equivalent of a too-stretched rubber balloon.
So you can imagine my surprise when I eventually realized not only that the train had stopped moving beneath me, but that we had arrived at my stop. “Hold that door!” I hollered, disoriented but determined to continue
on with the sense of unwavering industry that was emblematic of our countrymen. I scooped up my bag and my trench coat and swooped out the doors just as they were closing.
* * *
—
The college where Mary taught was located in a small and picturesque town right on the Hudson, two hours from NYC. Both college and town had a weird friendliness about them that reminded me of a Twilight Zone episode about women who slept in age-defying Tupperware at night. People smiled and waved on the street, and the drivers always stopped for pedestrians. These overt displays of neighborliness creeped me out, despite having been raised in the Midwest. I preferred cities like Berlin and Philadelphia and New York, where the people were rude, the smells ripe, the garbage uncollected and spilling out onto the street. Because at least then you knew where they kept it.
But here in this quaint hamlet, where the median income had to be well into the six figures, the garbage was divided into an elaborate system of recycling, composting, biodegradable trash and the shamefully unbiodegradable, et cetera. They wanted visitors to know that even their garbage was better than everyone else’s, and this impressed me, truly. I was always impressed by the minor improvements it was possible for a person and a society to make in order to live their best lives. Right then and there I vowed to devote myself to creating more civilized garbage, not the reeking stuff I took out the back door of my condo building and threw into a green dumpster with pizza stains on the side. You could buy very nice garbage cans for the home now. A couple hundred dollars, not too bad, and enough to make you feel like a less shameful person.
Mary was holding office hours that afternoon, and I was planning to go straight to her. On my walk over, I called Susan. “You’ll never guess where I am,” I said in lieu of greeting.
“Where?” It sounded like she was with other people. This made me self-conscious, like I was interrupting something I wasn’t invited to in the first place. I plunged ahead anyway.
“On my way to Mary London’s office.” I was on a winding sidewalk. On either side spread the green, expensively maintained lawn and tall oak trees of the college mall. Behind that, the ivy-covered brick and stately facades of old buildings. The names of people who had hoped to live on forever were etched into the marble at the top of these buildings, and while these people were still dead, I concluded there were plenty of worse ways to take a stab at immortality. Like starting blogs or wars, or building a casino chain.
The walk itself was filled with lively young women, trans women, women of all shapes and sizes and colors, all walking and talking with books in their arms or nodding along to music no one else could hear, courtesy of the white buds in their ears. There was an air of entitlement and self-assuredness about them that I found beautiful. But it was beautiful in the way autumn is beautiful: because winter was coming. Winter, in this case, being the world they faced as soon as they stepped off the grounds of this institution, a world that had not been especially designed for their care and maintenance as this place was, and in many cases had been designed just the opposite.
Susan said, after a pause, “Why are you on your way to Mary London’s office?”
“Because believe it or not, Celeste knows her! They went to college together, isn’t that nuts? I’m literally going to walk into her office in like three minutes.”
“That is nuts.”
“Should I get something signed? Can I tell her about you? I mean, obviously I’ll tell her about you, but what should I say?”
“Don’t tell her about me.”
“Of course I’m going to tell her about you! You’re her biggest fan!” Being around all this youthful confidence was reviving me from the unsteadiness I had felt on the train. I picked up a stick from the ground and started waving it around like a little kid. I felt vigorous, buoyant. “What if I called you while I was with her so you could talk to her yourself? I mean, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, might as well use it!” I paused, reconsidered, all the while still hacking at the air with my stick-sword. College campuses brought out the spoiled child in me. “Or at least, like, the first-time-in-your-lifetime opportunity.”
“That’s okay. Thanks, though.”
I frowned. “Why?”
“Because it’s awkward.”
“Pssssh. It’s only awkward if you make it awkward!”
“No, you’re making it awkward by trying to make me do something I don’t want to do.”
“Jesus Christ.” I paused. “Are you mad at me for being here?”
There were still ambient noises in the background. Susan said, “No.”
“If you’re mad, just say so.”
“I’m not.”
“Then”—I looked around at the Elysian lawn—“why does this feel strange?”
“It doesn’t feel strange.”
“Where even are you right now?” I blurted. She felt so far away. I wanted to find her.
“I’m at a coffee shop.”
“You’re writing?”
“I have the day off, yeah.”
There was a time, not long ago, when I knew Susan’s schedule to the hour. Now here I was, halfway across the country, and I didn’t know a thing about what she was up to. I didn’t even really know who she was, or who she was becoming, or trying to become. Just because we knew someone yesterday is no guarantee we’ll know them tomorrow. People drift away for all sorts of reasons; it’s the commoner scenario. What broke my heart was that I thought Susan was the exception. She was my sister, I had told myself, as many others among us have told themselves when it became clear they needed more family than their family. She was, not to put too mushy or melodramatic a point on it, the first and only person in my life who’d loved me unconditionally.
But not anymore, apparently. What I hated even more than the distance in her voice was the fact that she was pretending it was not there. Susan and I, we’d always been straight with each other. We didn’t fight like girls, we used to say. We fought like boys, pulled no punches. If only things could stay the same, remain as we prefer to remember them, pure idyll.
“I’ve been reading that poetry book you gave me before I go to sleep at night,” I said. A last-ditch effort to establish contact.
“Yeah?”
“I love it.” My voice got thick, I didn’t know why, or I did, but I didn’t want to.
“I’m glad.”
I said, “It makes me cry.”
“Awww.”
That was the worst—the distance of that awww. Like how an acquaintance on the street would respond if I’d said I was thinking of buying a puppy. The opposite of what I wanted to hear. I knew it would, I wanted to hear her say. That’s why I gave it to you. Your soul is starving, I know that, and I know you know it too. With others you can pretend, but you can’t with me, and I wanted you to read those poems so they could do for you what they did for me. We will never not be dying but there are ways to keep alive. We don’t always understand each other, but I will always be alive with you.
But that was not what she said.
“Anyway,” I said, “I’d better go. Just wanted to call and tell you about Mary.”
Susan sounded like she was on another planet. “Have fun.”
“I will!” I said. My eyes were getting all stupidly wet. “I’ll tell you all about it!”
After we hung up I broke my stick in half and threw the pieces on the college grounds. I did not want to play with it anymore, and I no longer liked all these happy people.
* * *
—
Mary was meeting with a student when I arrived at her office. I took my place dutifully at one of the chair-desks in the hall. Her door was partly open, and I could overhear the conversation taking place. A young woman with a chippy voice was prattling on about the witches in Macbeth. Asking if they were real or not real, that sort of thing. The question was meant
to function not as a question, but as an avenue toward getting Mary to tell her what to write about in her paper. A tactic I knew quite well, having deployed it many times myself.
“The point is not whether the witches are or are not real,” Mary drawled in reply. “The point is a matter of delusion. As a writer I’m very interested in delusion. Likely most of us live in deceit one way or another. Live by it, too.”
The student seemed very impressed by this.
“So the possibility you’re posing of the witches’ realness is both superficial and irrelevant. What’s important is that Macbeth believes they are real. He believes he has a prophecy to fulfill, and as you can see, he fulfills it with impunity.”
The young woman puzzled over this for a moment. From the hall I could almost hear her IQ straining against its boundaries. “So the witches are like, symbols?”
“We’re not meant to wonder about the witches,” Mary said. She was being patient, more patient than I could have been with this color-coded-binder sort of girl who was looking for her straight-A answer. “We’re meant to stand back in wonder at the power of belief. Even you”—she laughed—“are convinced that you have very important things to do in the world. As I was, as all young people are.” She laughed again throatily. “Some of us will go on believing this. The rest will believe right up to the point the world crudely proves otherwise.”
The hair on my arms stood up. I can’t say why, only that it felt like she had given an answer to another question entirely. A moment or two later, the girl (blond, cable-knit sweater) appeared in the doorway, and Mary London appeared behind her. Mary wore a long black dress, and her brown hair, marked with strands of silver, was parted down the middle and hung unstyled past her shoulders. She looked like she had seen a lot in her life, reseen stuff too.
A Lady's Guide to Selling Out Page 13
