The Last Book Party(27)
“It’s something I’ve thought about but never articulated,” I said. “And the way you describe your struggle to leave home and become a writer, it’s like that overwhelming drive you had was part of the natural world too.”
She pressed her lips together with the slightest of frowns.
Perhaps stupidly, I was not yet dissuaded from continuing the conversation.
“The columns are incredible.”
Tillie raised an eyebrow.
“Incredible? As in not to be believed? Let’s not get carried away.”
She fished into the pockets of the raincoat and pulled out an old bunch of tissue.
“Why did you stop writing them?” I asked.
She put on the raincoat, smoothed it down.
“I got bored. Being direct is dull.”
“Your writing is not dull at all.”
“I’ll tell you what’s not dull,” Tillie said, the clipped haughtiness back in her voice. “Poetry. Coming at things sideways is not only not dull, but often leads to greater clarity.”
She smiled, though not warmly, opened the door, and stepped outside.
“And … exit stage left,” I whispered.
The conversation made me wonder how Jeremy had done it, how he had not only found common ground with Tillie and Henry but had gotten enough warmth from them to feel part of the family. Had they sensed Jeremy’s extraordinary talent and welcomed him as a fellow writer, someone whose gifts reflected back on them the same way their acclaim had lifted him? Did they find it easier to connect with Jeremy than with Franny? Was Jeremy the son they’d always wanted?
It was odd how rarely Henry and Tillie talked about Franny. In this, they were unlike all other parents I knew, who seemed to have no topic of conversation as constant as the endless one about their children, no matter their age. I had seen this with my own parents, not only by listening to them talk about Danny, but in noticing that whenever I shared the most mundane news with one of them, it would be passed along to the other.
In my time at Henry and Tillie’s, I’d only heard Franny mentioned once. Tillie was pulling old books out of the shelves in the living room to make room for new ones and had asked aloud, to no one in particular, if Franny would mind if she gave away his high school yearbooks. I was in the kitchen, and though no one answered, I heard what I was sure was the thwack of the yearbooks landing in the give-away pile on the floor.
20
I avoided Tillie when I got to work the next morning, skipping my regular stop in the kitchen for coffee and heading right upstairs into Henry’s office. He greeted me with his usual gusto. “And so she arrives!” he said, looking up from his book and smiling, as if my appearance in his office was an unexpected delight rather than the fulfillment of a routine engagement he himself had instigated.
“It’s Wednesday,” I said. “Where else would I be?”
Henry rubbed his hand on his chin.
“On a beautiful day like this, at the beach with your circle of friends.”
“I’ve never been one for circles,” I said, opening my folder of notes.
“Then perhaps on a date. A picnic by the sea. A canoe ride on the pond, your paramour paddling as you run one hand in the water and use the other to feed yourself cold green grapes.”
I laughed. “My paramour? What year do you think this is? Trust me, nobody goes on dates like that anymore. Nobody even dates.”
“Don’t they? That’s a travesty—and a waste.”
Henry handed me a tiny cassette tape and asked me to type up the “writing” he had dictated into a recorder the night before. All too familiar with typing from a Dictaphone, I put on the headset and tapped my foot to start the tape. It was slow going. Henry spoke in rapid bursts and I often had to stop and rewind to catch the flow of words. But soon I realized how much I liked having my head filled with his gravelly voice as he conjured an image and told a story. Once, when a sentence took a wrong turn, I heard “No, no, that won’t do. Try this…” and I had to rewind, find the original line of thought and connect the new words, which made me feel as though I wasn’t just typing, but that we were collaborating. A few times on the tape, Henry came up with a clever turn of phrase and chuckled in a way that made me smile, so unabashed was his pleasure in his own wit. One time, I laughed out loud and looked up to find Henry at his desk watching me. Embarrassed, I said, “Well, you are kind of funny.”
After more than a week working for Henry, I had come to see how much he liked not just saying something witty or surprising, as Tillie did, but also witnessing—savoring, even—my reaction. He would say something clever and peer closely at me, waiting to see if I got his double entendre. It was egotistic but also endearing how he smiled at me as soon as I laughed at something he’d said. He clearly took joy in playing with language and soliciting a response, but I think he also craved appreciation. The cachet of being a long-time New Yorker writer probably was not enough to soothe the sting of receding from acclaim.
I couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t competition between Henry and Tillie. Tillie’s summer was affirming her growing prominence: her new collection had been reviewed glowingly in The New York Times in early June and she had recently had a poem accepted by Poetry. But Henry continued to suffer Malcolm’s indifference to his memoir and the uncertainty of the new regime at the magazine. This not only was an affront to Henry’s ego, but also had a potential impact on his bank account.