The Nest(25)

The rental income from his building, in addition to allowing him to work and live rent-free, provided some income—enough to pay himself, Bea, and his one other full-time employee (a managing editor who spent most of her time filling out grant applications and chatting up prospective donors and trying to keep existing contributors from turning fickle) a modest income. Paper Fibres had a solid subscription base—as far as those things went—and even managed a decent amount of advertising revenue, but not enough to cover all his costs and pay writers and keep his related projects thriving.

The majority of outside funding came from Paul’s two elderly aunts, his deceased father’s sisters who’d never married and treated Paul like a son. They were a certain type of elderly New Yorker, sharing the same rent-controlled apartment within walking distance of Lincoln Center for decades and decades. Voracious readers, eager travelers, regulars at all kinds of readings and the Broadway Wednesday matinee. They had annual subscriptions to the ballet, Carnegie Hall, and the Ninety-Second Street Y and box seats at Shea Stadium. Every January since he’d started his publication, they sent an extremely generous check. The Sisters’ Fund, as he thought of it (and how he listed it on the contributors’ page, which thrilled them), was how he could pay writers and manage, once or twice a year, to publish a book under his very modest imprint. Usually a poetry collection, the occasional novella, or a book of essays.

Two years ago, the January check had been a little less. The following year, less still, and last month, nearly half what it used to be. Paul would never question them, but he worried that maybe something was wrong and they weren’t telling him. He invited them out, as he did every January, to thank them for their contribution—drinks at the Algonquin and dinner at Keens Steakhouse. Before Paul got a chance to ask if everything was all right, they brought up the diminishing checks, speaking in their typical fashion, almost as one person. He was used to their eccentricity by now, but on the few occasions they stopped by his office—“just to have a look around”—he realized how they appeared to others. “Like those Grey Gardens ladies,” one of the interns had said once, admiringly, “minus the dementia and cats.”

“We’re so sorry,” they told him over lunch. “It seems we’re going through our retirement fund a little more quickly than is ideal.”

“Our accountant has put his foot down, dear. He’s trying to get us to cut all expenses by half.”

“Especially ones he deems ‘unnecessary,’ anything charitable.”

“You can imagine our distress. Of course we initially refused, but then—”

“He summoned us to his office! Like a principal bringing truants called to account. It was mortifying—”

“Mortifying. He had charts.”

“Not charts, graphs. They were very colorful.”

“Very.” Mutual and grave nodding commenced; Paul waited.

“You see, the amount of red on the future projected income—”

“Red isn’t good.”

“I realize that nobody wants red on the charts,” Paul said.

“Graphs.” They looked so troubled, avoiding eye contact, drinking their wine too fast, that he quickly reassured them he understood.

“You’ve done so much already,” Paul said. “You’ve done more than enough.”

“Our check will be a little less every year but you can count on us for something.”

“I’m afraid we’ve lived too long. Who would have thought?”

“Especially after all those years of smoking? All the red meat? We’ll be lucky if there’s anything left for our funeral when that day comes.”

Paul decided to ignore the odd sentence construction, the assumption that two people would have one funeral—on the same day—although it was impossible to imagine one sister without the other.

Although he thought he’d have more time, Paul knew this day would come eventually; his aunts wouldn’t live forever. Countless times he’d tried to get a better handle on the business side of things, his tenuous finances, but he hated the business side of things. He was trying to figure out how to redouble his funding efforts when he serendipitously heard the chatter about Nathan and arranged a meeting. Nathan hadn’t committed to anything but he’d been engaged, curious. He’d asked lots of questions and Paul offered intelligent, thought-out answers. Why wouldn’t he? He thought all the time about what he would do if he had more money. The website was pathetic, nothing more than a place to subscribe and submit, and many of his writers were frustrated their content wasn’t available online. He wanted to publish more books, many more books. He wanted to expand the modest-but-respected reading series he ran, start a summer conference, and maybe open a writing center for at-risk youth. But it would all take more money than he’d ever had.

“Let’s both think on it a little more,” Nathan had said. “I’ll be in touch in a few weeks.”

And then there was Leo, standing in his office and looking around and asking questions.

“Unofficially,” Paul said to Leo, “is there anything specific you’d like to know about how things work here?”

Since then he and Leo had met a handful of times, usually starting at the bench in the morning. They’d stroll, get coffee, and talk—mostly about work and the challenges of running a literary magazine. But about other things, too: real estate, the rapidly expanding Brooklyn waterfront, city politics. Paul still wasn’t sure what Leo was after. He assumed more than one person would be in the running for Nathan’s dollars, so he was trying his hardest to impress Leo, walking him through every stage of putting the summer issue together, occasionally pretending to solicit Leo’s advice and then feeling pleasantly surprised at his excellent input. Paul had forgotten—it had been easy to forget given Leo’s gradual morph from new-media celebrity into his glaring life of unrepentant indulgence—how cunning Leo could be about the printed word. Leo’s instincts were infuriatingly effortless and accurate, and Paul couldn’t help enjoying him and their lively exchanges. It was, in fact, Leo’s presence that made Paul Underwood rekindle the tiny ember he’d consigned to a much smaller place that was the thought of kissing Beatrice Plumb.