How Martin got involved is something I can’t remember. He was tall and gangly and perpetually stooped over as he listened to what other people had to say. He came from the South, with a lilting, musical twang, and was an assistant at a foundation that dispensed grants to artists; this suited him perfectly, because he himself seemed both courtly and impoverished. He wore chinos and bucks and looked less preppy than messy; his clothes didn’t fit well, his hair too long and his skin pocked with acne damage. He sweated even when it wasn’t hot. I remember one night, Sarah and Martin had planned to see a movie, but she went on a date instead. So Martin picked me up at work and we headed to the theater. After a block or two he abruptly said, “Excuse me,” then ducked into a bodega and emerged carrying two tallboys in a paper bag, one of which he was already drinking. “I can’t sit in the dark without drinking a bit,” he said. He sounded both apologetic and matter-of-fact. He finished the first beer before we got to the corner and the second as we reached the theater. As the movie started, he pulled out a silver flask and sipped.
I liked the flask. I was charmed by this kind of apparatus, the accessory of a more glamorous time.
Afterward, we went to a bar on Ludlow, and that’s when he asked me the question about his funeral. I asked if he thought about dying a lot, and he shook his head. He had other fears, he said. Darkness. Confined spaces. Wide-open spaces. Elevators. Escalators. Chewed pens.
“Pens?” I said.
“Those tips,” he said, and shuddered. “Bite marks in plastic. People hand you one and expect you to pick it up? With I don’t know what germs?” He shook his head again. “That’s just crazy.”
I looked at him. “It must be hard for you to get around.”
He studied me back, his head cocked to one side. His eyes were blue, watery, and kind. I felt the full force of his attention, which was not sexual but not asexual either; it felt complete somehow, as if he were taking in every aspect of me.
“Not you, though,” he said, with that soft Southern lilt. “I bet you can go anywhere and do anything. You’re made of stronger material.”
“I don’t feel particularly strong,” I said.
“Do you feel particularly weak?”
“I guess not.”
“That’s what I mean,” he said. “You’re the most normal person I know.”
I did not take this as a compliment.
But he smiled when he saw my frown, and his hair fell over his eyes. “Don’t worry about it,” he said gently. “I’m sure it’ll come in handy eventually.”
Wherever he came from, Martin started hanging out with us, and pretty soon it was clear he was there for Millie. When she was in the room he still paid attention to you, but you could tell it was an effort. I couldn’t blame him, really; Millie was the kind of person I’d come to New York to be around. Short, with dark spiky hair, she was good at poker and occasionally smoked cigars. Her skin glowed even at three in the morning after a night of drinking. She was an assistant at a gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. If, on a Saturday afternoon, we dipped into a gallery, Millie would take two seconds before pronouncing the work “shit” or “genius”—there was no in-between, in her opinion — while I tried to figure out why she’d landed to one side of the pendulum rather than the other. I myself had no idea, but I liked the confidence of these declarations.
I think Martin liked it too. She had no fear; he was afraid of everything, including rejection, so he watched her from a distance as she felt him watching, and they were locked together in this as if by contract. She must have enjoyed knowing he was always there, a gentleman beanpole on the sidelines, following her every move with those watery blue eyes. There isn’t a woman on this earth who doesn’t want to be adored.
At work, Sarah and I were also adored, albeit in a different way. Our boss, Eric, was an elderly bohemian who wore pilled woolen cardigans and too-short pants, and spent afternoons in his office reading manuscripts while twirling his beard between his thumb and index finger, making a little curl that stood out from his chin. By five o’clock his beard would be a tufted mess of curls, all fluffed out like the feathers of some preening bird. Because of this, Sarah and I called him the titmouse.
“Titmouse on the move,” one of us would mutter to the other as he came toward our desks, and we’d straighten up to look like we were actually working. There wasn’t really any need to talk in code — there was no one else around, and Eric’s hearing wasn’t great — but this was the sort of thing we found hilarious at the time. Taking flight meant he was leaving the office on some errands. Worms: he was going for lunch. Flapping wings: he was in the photocopier room, looking perplexedly at the machine. Eric seemed to think it was demeaning for him to ask a woman to help with basic office tasks, even though this was our job, a scruple we didn’t hesitate to exploit. We let him suffer for as long as we could stand over some paper jam or mailing snafu before we’d come to his aid. The photocopier, the fax machine, the FedEx label — these were newfangled technologies so complicated that in the face of them Eric simply threw up his hands. He’d grown up in a New York where any business deal was done via handshake at a cocktail party below Fourteenth Street. Sarah and I loved him. When the titmouse came back with worms, we’d drop by his office on some pretense and while he was eating we’d get him to tell us stories about parties at George Plimpton’s apartment, Mary McCarthy throwing a drink in somebody’s face, arguments that spilled out into the streets at two a.m. Eventually it would be midafternoon and he’d glance at the pile of manuscripts at his desk and sigh. “Well, my lovelies, this magazine isn’t going to publish itself.”
How exactly the magazine did manage to publish itself was a mystery. My job, nominally, was as assistant to the head of sales, Judith, who worked out of her home and besieged me with harried, confusing phone calls. I’d only met her once. She must have been good at her job, though, because she was always finding some fancy restaurant or upscale furniture store to place an ad with us. My main task was to coordinate her expense reports. I used to show Sarah the tallies for lunch or drinks. “Can you believe this?” I’d say. She spent more on cocktails than I made in a month.
Sarah just shrugged. She was Eric’s assistant. In high school she’d been an indifferent student, and I didn’t even remember her reading many books, but in New York she’d discovered a seriousness of purpose. Her job was to screen the flood of incoming manuscripts. Every time the mail was delivered, it included dozens of slush submissions in manila envelopes, and Sarah visibly shuddered. Her bag was always crammed with paper, her eyes red and shadowed, and she said she dreamed about all the poems and stories and essays floating around in the world waiting to be read. Because I didn’t have enough to do, I’d sometimes offer to help her out, but she’d shake her head. Being burdened made her feel important.
In the evenings, we’d meet up with Martin and Millie and some other combination of people — some friend from out of town, or a girlfriend or boyfriend of the moment — and head to Veselka for dinner, or to Brownies to hear some music, or, in the long, humid summer, to the park or somebody’s roof. I remember one night in July at the apartment of somebody none of us knew very well. We’d invited ourselves over because he’d mentioned central air-conditioning. It was actually his uncle and aunt’s place; they were gone for the summer on some lavish vacation, and he was apartment sitting for them in between semesters of graduate school at NYU. Skinny and bearded, he stank of smoke and talked about Harold Bloom in scathing, urgent terms, and we were willing to put up with all of this in exchange for an evening in that cold, expensive apartment. He served us chilled white wine in fancy glasses, and we took off our shoes and ran our toes over the luxurious carpets as if they were a sandy beach. At least most of us did. Millie just sat on the couch, with her legs tucked daintily beneath her.