A Ladder to the Sky(76)

no more words.





Interlude


The Threatened Animal





Although the phone call brought unwelcome news, it could not have arrived at a more opportune moment.

Maurice was seated behind his desk on the seventh floor of an office building next to Union Square Park, while Henrietta James, a twenty-eight-year-old writer who had tried and failed to seduce him at the New Yorker Christmas party the previous December, sat opposite, incandescent with rage.

Henrietta, who went by the name Henry Etta James in print, had first come to Maurice’s attention a little over a year before, when his then assistant, Jarrod Swanson, had turned down one of her short stories. He was well aware that submissions to Storī went through a less than rigorous screening process before they landed on his desk, but so many unsolicited manuscripts arrived each month that he simply didn’t have the time to read them all personally, even if he wanted to, which he didn’t. But this led to a singular problem: since most of the magazine’s interns, those who did the bulk of the reading, were graduates of creative-writing programmes, each one was single-minded in pursuit of his or her own publishing deal. They attended literary salons and book launches, and mixed with editors, agents and publicists, identifying their competition through a shared network of covetous hostility. In recent years, several writers who’d been discovered through the pages of Storī had seen their debuts signed up by publishing houses while a couple had even gone on to win prestigious awards, building the reputation of the quarterly magazine considerably. The pie, however, was only so big, and the interns knew that. When a manuscript arrived from someone whose talent they envied or feared, there was always the risk of their rejecting it in order to damage their rival’s chances of claiming a slice. Which meant that the stories that found their way to Maurice were not always the very best ones. But there was little he could do about that.

Occasionally, he wandered into the Trash Can – which was what he called the room in which they kept a copy of every story that had ever been submitted to the magazine – and had a look through the rejection pile, casting his eye over a few pieces there, and that was how he had discovered Henrietta’s story. A little investigative work on his part revealed that Jarrod and Henrietta had been classmates at the New School, where they’d enjoyed an ill-fated romance, and he had turned down her work as revenge for her decision to break up with him on his birthday. Maurice had published the story, which had gone on to feature in that year’s Best American Short Stories anthology, and Jarrod, as far as he knew, was now working in a Foot Locker on East 86th Street.

Henrietta’s debut novel, I Am Dissatisfied with My Boyfriend, My Body and My Career, was due to be published by FSG later that year and was already being touted as a significant work, ‘Bridget Jones meets A Clockwork Orange’. A few weeks earlier, she had submitted a new story directly to Maurice, who had passed on it, a rebuff that precipitated her unscheduled appearance in his office that morning, just when he’d been hoping to relax while watching Rafael Nadal play Andy Murray in the Wimbledon semi-final.

‘Sorry to burst in unannounced,’ she said, charging in and hurling a large carpet bag that even Mary Poppins would have rejected as being unwieldy to the floor, where it landed with a considerable thump. She peeled herself from her coat, scarf and gloves, a curious combination, considering it was July and, outside, New York was melting. The room filled with an unmistakably stale scent of musty body odour. Henrietta, Maurice knew, only bathed on Saturdays, in order to help preserve the planet’s natural resources and today, unfortunately, was a Friday. ‘But I think we need to talk, don’t you?’

‘How lovely to see you,’ he lied, moving his laptop a little to the left so he could keep an eye on the match – Murray had won the first set, but Nadal was leading comfortably in the second – while listening to whatever she was here to complain about. ‘Just passing, were you?’

‘No, I came deliberately, and the journey was horrendous.’ Despite growing up in Milwaukee, Henrietta modelled her speech on Merchant Ivory period films starring Emma Thompson or Helena Bonham-Carter. ‘First, I stood in some frightful dog poo on the pavement and had to return home to change my shoes, which was a terrible bore. Then, while travelling on the 4 train, I was forced to switch carriages as a woman nearby was, quite literally, going into labour and her screams were giving me one of my headaches. Upon changing, I found myself seated next to an Indian gentleman who proposed marriage on the basis of what he called my childbearing hips.’

‘That’s nice,’ said Maurice. ‘Did you accept?’

‘Of course not.’

‘And how did he take it?’

‘No one likes rejection, Maurice. But we’ll get back to that in a minute. Anyway, he seemed to get over it quickly enough. By 28th Street, he had proposed to a young African-American man who did not take his advances with good grace and, by 23rd, to a border collie, who seemed much more interested.’

‘Excellent.’

‘I hate coming into the city. I really do.’

‘Then you should have stayed at home.’

‘No, it was important that we confront this situation face to face.’

‘And what situation is that?’ he asked.

‘Don’t play silly beggars, Maurice. You know exactly why I’m here.’