Who is Maud Dixon?(10)
She finished several strange, unsettling stories during this period. Her favorite was about a woman who ate her husband bit by bit over many years until she’d consumed him entirely. When Vera read it, she pointed out what was, to her, a fatal lapse in logic: “Wouldn’t the husband realize his wife was eating him and call 911?”
During this post-college stint, her mother had urged her nearly every day to get a real job. After almost two years and countless rejection slips from various literary magazines, Florence had complied. She sent in applications to every publishing opening she could find and accepted the first offer that came her way: editorial assistant at Forrester Books.
Soon after this, her productivity came to an abrupt end. She could trace the origins of her condition to a single night during her first week in New York. Most of the younger staff members at Forrester gathered for drinks every Friday at the Red Lark, a bar near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. It was a grimy place whose sticky counters assured the wealthy financiers who lived in Tribeca that, despite their suits and their nutritionists and the playrooms in their high-rise luxury condos, they were still cool. The junior staffers went because they had five-dollar pitchers from five to eight.
On Florence’s first Friday, a group heading to the Red Lark had gathered at the elevators at six, and she and Lucy had silently appended themselves to its perimeter. As much as Florence hated to admit it, she was as intimidated as Lucy was. Their new coworkers were confident and well-read. They felt at ease at literary parties with brand-name writers. They wore sheath dresses and vintage jewelry. Among them, Florence felt like an imposter.
Amanda Lincoln was their self-appointed leader. She’d grown up in New York, the daughter of a New York Times columnist and a successful literary agent who sat on the board of the New York Public Library. After Dalton, she’d gone to Yale, followed by an internship at The Paris Review. Her pedigree, in other words, was immaculate. She’d probably never stepped foot in a place like Port Orange in her life.
When the group settled at a large table in the back, Amanda raised her glass and called out, “Chin-chin!” Florence and Lucy looked at each other unsurely, but mumbled “Chin-chin” back with the rest of them.
Simon’s assistant, Emily, a friendly Midwesterner, had turned to the newcomers to try to draw them into the fold. “So where are you guys from?”
“Amherst,” said Lucy in a barely audible voice.
Amanda cut in: “Did you go to school there? That’s where my brother went. Stewart Lincoln?”
Lucy nodded but it wasn’t clear which question she was answering, and she offered no further commentary.
Emily asked Florence, “What about you?”
“I went to the University of Florida. Gainesville.”
“Oh cool,” Emily said. Everyone at the table nodded supportively. She might as well have just told them that she had cancer, so aggressively tactful was their response. Nearly all of them had gone to Ivy League colleges or their equivalents.
“Have you been down to Hemingway’s house in Key West?” Fritz asked.
Florence shook her head.
“It’s awesome. They have these six-toed cats descended from his actual six-toed cat.”
“God, don’t tell me we’re still pretending Hemingway is relevant,” Amanda said. “What is this, ninth-grade English class?”
Fritz rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Amanda, all I said was that he had a six-toed cat.”
A little while later, while they were on their second round, a middle-aged man in an orange kurta circulated the bar peddling roses. When she saw him, Amanda said, “There is literally nothing tackier than a single red rose. Someone should tell that poor man to start pushing peonies. Then he’d move some merch.”
Everyone laughed except Florence, who stared quietly at Amanda, slightly awed. Who didn’t like red roses? For that matter, who didn’t like Hemingway? How could this girl, no older than Florence, hold such blasphemous opinions so cavalierly?
On it went. Throughout the rest of the night, Amanda dropped cultural references that, until Florence Googled them later, seemed like little more than a series of disordered syllables: Adorno, Pina Bausch, Koyaanisqatsi.
In Florida, Florence had grown used to being the most sophisticated person in the room. But in this grubby bar, she felt inadequate—stupid, really—for the first time in her life. She had been blithely walking around thinking she knew more than everyone and all of a sudden she realized she didn’t know a thing. If you’d asked her that morning, she would have said that red roses were just about the most elegant thing she could think of. And she hadn’t realized that maligning Hemingway was even on the table.
The next day, she stared at the blank page and felt an unfamiliar emotion: fear. If red roses were tacky, what else was she wrong about? How many other embarrassing errors would crop up in whatever she wrote? And for that matter, could she even begin to contemplate writing a novel without reading Adorno first?
She’d reread her old stories then and found them childish and clunky. She actually felt grateful to Amanda Lincoln, that smug bitch, for teaching her how little she knew before she humiliated herself.
The attainment of greatness now felt like just one possibility among many rather than her God-given right. It was entirely plausible that she would end up an editor rather than a writer. Or back in Florida, selling houses or bank loans. Nothing was guaranteed. Nothing was owed.