"I would be very pleased if you considered it possible to publish my book," I said. I meant it. Then noticing that the wine was gone, I asked, "Would you like some more?" and went to the kitchen to get it.
I had prepared lunch beforehand — sliced steak, something I learned to do from Jenny, although it doesn't in fact require much skill. You sauté long strips of meat cut a little thicker than for beef Stroganoff in a skillet and serve them hot. That's it. I also had a salad. And wine and some Heineken's, and cheeses for dessert. There was plenty of meat and plenty of salad — what else does a person need? We ate in the kitchen just as we were, and I asked Linda to join us too, just as she was.
We ate and talked. Nothing special — just mealtime conversation. Angeletti didn't drop any pearls of wisdom, nor did I. Linda didn't drop any either, and Louise helped herself to the food. I had the odd sensation that it was all very commonplace and ordinary. I had known Angeletti from photographs and books when I was in Russia. My poet friend Dmitri had translated his verse into Russian for me. And now he was sitting in my kitchen, and calmly eating. A mythological figure of world-class proportions. And now he'd just downed a large gulp of beer.
But why should he have been a superman? His friend Gluzberg, who had shaved off his beard for the first time only last year, was a quiet and gentle bookkeeper from New Jersey, an old, not overly tidy homosexual in spectacles who barely looked like the author of the snarling, howling verse he had been famous for in the fifties. (I generally don't like the way writers age; they do it in an ugly way.) Was Angeletti supposed to cast fiery glances perhaps? What did I want from him, anyway? That he be unique? Such were my thoughts as I gazed at Angeletti sitting in my kitchen.
Was it that I still hadn't completely rid myself of romanticism, of my provincial, Russian romanticism, or that I had anticipated a heated discussion in which certain mysteries would suddenly be revealed to me? But he was certainly no seer.
The whole "Angeletti operation" lasted three hours. Then taking my manuscript, they left. Angeletti promised to write as soon as he had finished reading it. I walked them to the door, closed it behind them, and then went upstairs to Linda and asked her, "What did you think of that person, Linda — your own opinion?"
Linda, tearing herself away from her papers, lifted her head and said without hesitating and with complete indifference, "I thought he wasn't too bright, Edward," and then stuck her head back in her papers. She was working on her closet plan, of course — Gatsby wasn't home.
It seemed to me that perhaps she hadn't formulated her opinion very precisely; I thought it was rather that Angeletti hadn't been very interesting. But maybe uninteresting and "not too bright" were one and the same? The hell with it! I thought. After all, he has somehow published good books in the past. Maybe he'll publish mine too. Anyway he came here himself. It's a great honor when a famous publisher comes to see a writer himself.
I went into the TV room, sat down on the couch, and fell into thought, trying to understand the nature of Angeletti's visit. I recalled what Angeletti had said, and what Louise had said. Was I a homosexual? No. What difference did it make anyway? I wondered. Although for her it probably did make a difference, since she was a feminist writer, as Angeletti had told me when introducing her.
"Linda, how do you feel about feminism?" I yelled into the next room.
"Shit! Don't bother me, Edward!" she answered. I couldn't tell whether «shit» was an expression of Linda's attitude toward feminism, or simply an emotional response to the fact that I had distracted her.
Leonard Angeletti's letter arrived a month after his visit. Whether by ironical decree of the post office or of fate, his letter arrived after my long-suffering manuscript, as had been the case with Mr. Atlas. I was so dismayed when I saw the package extended to me by the mailman, that I just stood there without moving. "Take it!" he said irritably, shoving it into my hands. I slammed the kitchen door and tore open the package. The manuscript. Just the manuscript. Well-trained office personnel don't include letters with their packages; they send them in separate envelopes. But the return address testified irrefutably that the manuscript had been sent from Mr. Angeletti's publishing house.
A letter will undoubtedly follow, I thought, possibly even tomorrow, but it won't change anything. Essentially it's all clear: That sixties liberal isn't going to publish my book. If he had decided to publish it, he wouldn't have sent the manuscript back.
I didn't say anything to Linda; I was ashamed and afraid she might decide I was a failure. I recalled the words of Sarah's parting letter: "The reason nobody will touch your book here is that the United States has much higher standards for literature, and your book just isn't good enough… You're a huge, gaping, empty zero."
The next day the empty zero received the letter. Another secretarial blunder obviously. The zero opened the letter and started reading. No, he hadn't restricted himself merely to apologies; he had written a long letter, sparing no pains. He wasn't even, as it turned out, refusing to publish my book. Rather Mr. Angeletti was suggesting that I cut it. Why not, why not cut it? I thought. A little bit here, a little there. After all it's my first novel. I had never rejected the idea of cutting it, although in the Russian version it was two hundred and eighty pages long, not what you would call a large book. I was just about to start celebrating when I got to the main part of the letter. Angeletti was suggesting that I change the novel's ending, introducing a "political murder." He couldn't publish the book with the ending I had now.
He doesn't understand shit about my book, I thought. My hero is trying with all his might to keep from killing himself. He wants to go on living, to continue his struggle, and accept his share of the blood and tears of this fucked-up world. A political murder in the form of a suicide. The hero struggles against his own suicidal tendencies and desires throughout the course of the book, and frees himself from them at the cost of considerable suffering, thereby shaping a new personality for himself. The hero decides to live, but Angeletti was suggesting a political murder. He didn't understand anything.
At the end of the letter was a P.S. "Now, living as he does in such a rich and beautiful home and possessed as he is of such a soft job, and no longer on the bottom of bourgeois society but already to a certain extent accustomed to its blessings, hasn't the protagonist of your book become more loyal to that society and civilization, calmer and more contented?" Angeletti wrote, adding a question mark.
I was enraged. You goddamn whore! I thought. Why drink our wine and beer and eat our meat and salad! Why take part in our "upper bourgeois" blessings, if you're going to start in with this demagoguery, you bastard? You shouldn't have eaten or drunk if you want to be consistent. Soft job! Why, you bearded cunt! I thought bitterly. I'd like to make you stand around on your feet all day from seven until midnight, and then see how you'd look and see what your tune would be then. Soft job! I'd like to see you run around the way I do: "Edward, coffee!" a dozen times a day. "Edward, an ashtray!" "Edward, go get some orange juice at the Greek restaurant right now!" But Steven doesn't remember where the restaurant is, just that it's somewhere around Third Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, and Edward runs over there like an idiot. "Edward, take Stanley to the bus station!" "Edward, go meet Mr. and Mrs. Buckley; their bags are very heavy." "Edward, where are Steven's yellow pajamas?" And at twelve I tumble off to bed and have just fallen asleep, when suddenly there's a telephone call from Japan or from an island, fuck knows which one. And once somebody called at five o'clock in the morning, identifying himself as «Rockefeller»! Soft job!