Spygirl (9 page)

This funeral was actually the second time in two years that I'd started a job and been plunged into the intimacies of death and loss in the lives of my bosses. Two weeks before I graduated college, I got my first publishing job, and a week later I was in Cape Cod, with my mom for the weekend. I went into town in the morning for a hot jelly doughnut and the
Times.
When I sat down with the paper I instantly noticed a front-page article titled P
ULITZER WINNING WRITER DIES IN CLIMBING ACCIDENT.
According to
unconfirmed sources,” the writer's body had not yet been recovered, but it was believed that, while hiking a particularly difficult part of the Himalayas, he was overtaken by altitude sickness, leading him to freeze to death. His hiking partner had managed to return to a base camp and was hospitalized in critical condition, with both legs amputated. I wasn't sure it was him at first, but I remembered some particulars my new boss Gloria had revealed to me about her husband: He was a writer, and his nickname was Newlyn or Newt Ebersol. At my you've-got-the-job-lunch at La-Grenouille, she gave me the portentous warning, “Never marry a writer.” When I read, at the end, “Mr. Ebersol leaves his wife, Gloria Nelson, a book editor, a son, Myer Tate Ebersol, and a daughter, Olivia Marcel Ebersol,” I dropped my plate and said, “Fuck!” I left the hot raspberry jelly and torn dough in a fleshy pile on the floor.

A week and a half later, I was sitting in St. Bartholomew's Church at Park Avenue and Fiftieth Street, listening to a parade of swinging dicks of the publishing world. Princeton classmates and colleagues from
The Wall Street Journal
told clever, sometimes stirring, elegiac stories about him. Newt was a social scientist who wrote vast, assiduously researched works of social conscience. There weren't many left like him anymore. The Ebersol children, Myer and Liv, sat in the front of the crescent before the stage like dolls, with tiny porcelain grimaces. The only-outside-the-establishment speaker was a black woman who had been a subject of Newlyn's Pulitzer-winning documentary book on the Crown Heights riots. She stood up in front of the 99 percent white, 98 percent male, 97 percent Century Club audience and collapsed into hysterical sobs, wailing, “Why he got to go do that? Oh, God, why? Why he gotta do that?” It seemed like the question everyone wanted to ask but no one had dared. A wave of
uncomfortable murmuring shook the otherwise stoic literati. The one-hundred-pound ivory-weave stock of the memorial programs absorbed many tears. Liv and Myer were quickly escorted by their nannies out of the auditorium. Some stiff upper lips slackened.

I spent the next year reading and talking about Newlyn, sending excerpts from his published and unpublished works to magazines and papers and speaking expertly in the hushed, sympathetic tones used to speak of the tragically dead. I, like most of the reporters I was fielding, was trying to mourn someone I'd never known. Gloria almost never talked about him, but I would hear her occasionally muted tones on the phone with friends, talking about how Newt had broken an arm on that same mountain six months earlier, and how she had forbidden him from going again, but he insisted, even going so far as to start researching an article for
Harper's
about the tradition of ice climbing. Her voice would flail up and down in a way that divulged a profound anger—anger that he would
choose
to leave his family. I wondered how he could challenge death in a way that seemed so indifferent, that even mocked the grim effect it could have on his wife and his children. I imagined Newt, sitting on that mountain in a frenzy of swirling whiteness, calmly absorbing the baptism of the snow, closing his eyes as he yielded to the cleansing, to the wiping away, of everything. Slowly, I reconstituted Newt, gathering and amplifying data and repartees and minutiae until I could almost imagine having known him.

Two and a half years later, the van ride to Sol's father's funeral was not what I expected. Instead of being somber, everyone was joking and foul-mouthed. Vinny and I talked politics a little. “Amy
Gway! You came!” he exclaimed. I climbed in the bouncing tan Chevrolet that Evan got at a rental place for reconstituted and seized vehicles. The van was swimming with profanity. Vinny was a fourth-generation Italian-American New Yorker, and his great-uncle had been a big-time trade unionist in the twenties. Hence, Vinny explained, he believed in big labor and liberal government. Gus added “big breasts” to the list in a whisper right before we pulled into the aluminum-sided Yahrzeit Jewish Memorial Home. (Vinny called them “cans,” which he saw a lot of at dance clubs out in Bay Ridge, where Giuliani's topless-only statutes weren't enforced.) I talked to Vinny about the cases a bit—he had a photographic recall of the roughly five hundred the Agency had handled since he started working there. “Oh, yeah,” he'd say, “I wemember number fifteen-one-eleven, dat one was a doozy” or “Nine fifty-seven had a hundwed and seventeen lawsuits connected to it!”

When we entered the funeral home, Sol was standing in the foyer, holding his infant son. His other son, Joshua, was holding a balloon and running in figure eights around the guests, yelling “Daddy, look, I'm an airplane. Watch me Daddy,
watch me
!” The Agency people got in line to give Sol their regards, and he kissed everyone and said, “Thanks for being here.” I held back, but Sol saw me and kissed me hello on the cheek, as he'd done with everyone else and said, “Thanks so much for being here, A. Gray,” and I was glad I'd come.

When we sat down for the service, the baby was sitting with the nanny in front of me, crossing his eyes and staring at what appeared to be nothing at all. The rabbi made a speech and talked about how Sol's dad had worked almost up until the day he died and how he almost couldn't have imagined the successes his sons would have seen in their lives, both attending college and becoming successful, self-sufficient men in the tradition of the
Rubensteins. He turned to Sol and his brother and said, “May God comfort you among all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.” Sol's mother started crying softly in the front row, and I saw him touch her shoulder from two seats away and mouth the words “I love you.”

Just then I saw a line from the baby's mouth—which was smiling widely at me—to the floor at my feet, which I realized were splattered with vomit. The nanny stood up to take the baby out of the room, and he was literally
beaming
at me as they walked away.

To my surprise, we all followed along in the van to the cemetery. Sol didn't have a lot of men in his family, and he needed pallbearers, and I almost cried when I saw Big Gus and Evan and Linus and Matt standing by the circle of black earth in the center of the snowy field in their ill-fitting blue and black blazers, looking very serious for the first time. Sol's mother threw herself on the ground and sobbed, and he and his brother pulled her up while the rest of us looked away and the boys put the casket on the webbing over the open grave. The ride back to Manhattan was subdued and by the time I headed home I barely noticed that it was way past dinnertime and all I'd had was a Big Mac at a drive-through on the way.

When I was still toiling away in publishing, one day Gloria called to say she'd be going out to the dentist and then having a meeting for Newt's memorial foundation, and I settled down in her office, which for some reason was bigger than that of my other boss, Boris, and had a beautiful view of the East River stretching below. I brought in some hundreds of pages of dreaded filing I
had to do and then spaced out (for seconds, minutes?) admiring my cute patent-leather Sigerson Morrison Mary Janes crossed at the ankle on her desk. Since I'd been working for Gloria I had completely overhauled the filing systems, putting into place an intricate and aesthetically pleasing system of color-coded folders corresponding to matching shaded laser-printed courier lettering on sleek matte transparent Filofax labels. I was proud of my accomplishment, which required extra hours of work each day, not to mention whole Saturdays and Sundays.

The filing project somehow felt like more of a triumph, more
me
than the perfunctory reports I wrote about middling manuscripts and book proposals I took home each night. The books I liked got rejected anyway, even if, as only happened a few times, I actually wrote at the end—“I strongly recommend reading this. This could be the environmentally bent, biracial, gay Rick Moody,” or “A strong commercial read, appealing to the market where Mary McCarthy and Irvine Welsh intersect.” My reports would sit on Boris's desk for months, settling over with a fine layer of dust.

On our cleanup day, which was usually once a week, I would sit in Boris's office and take dictation while he plucked unread manuscripts off his desk and pitched them into an enormous trash can I would bring in for this purpose. He would pick up the manuscript with my report, and finally say, “I have appraised that report, which was well written, but the project is not right for me.” And, with that, he would throw it in the trash, as he did with almost all the manuscripts he received, solicited or otherwise. I was constantly drafting notes to peeved agents telling them, “Please resend the proposal,” “There has been some error,” and “Boris never received it.” “But I sent it by messenger!” they would say, exasperated.

In Gloria's office, as I filed away, I came across a picture of her and Newt posing over a Scrabble board, looking engrossed and in love for the only time in any picture I'd seen of them together. I also found a piece of paper on which she'd tried to figure out how to spell the word “fugue;” it had such variations as “fewgue” “feogwe” and “fooge.” I found a note she'd written to me that said, “Amy: to do: 1) Make new Xeroxes of
all news articles
for my books and make a new Pendaflex file called ‘Current Media,’ 2) Help figre [sic] how to Back up my Personal Digital Assistant, 3) What is going on with Raffeter contract and why haven't you mentioned it? 4) Please type thank you letter to my mother which I will dictate.” I stuffed her chickenscratch in my pocket and threw it away when I got home so she couldn't dig it out of the trash.

From the glint on my shoes on her desk, I gazed over the view, watching airplanes leaving La Guardia, rising like tiny discol-orations, almost indistinguishable filaments against the bruised pale sky, and then surging up, from behind the arching girders of the Brooklyn Bridge, like tendrils rising out of the massive towers. The incoming planes followed a sweeping path to the left of the bridge, and the outgoing ones rose in a half-ellipse to the right. Together they formed a V, like the two edges of a highway meeting at a distant vanishing point.

“What are you doing in here?”

Gloria was standing, red-faced, sharp-eyed in the doorway, her language a little slurred, a cup of water in her hand. My eyes stung. I swung my feet off the desk.

“I thought you weren't coming in.” She closed her eyes for a second into slits, and looked like she might pass out, then opened them up again so wide I thought they might roll out of her head. “Amy, what the hell is going on? ” I geared up to explain why I was
in her office—I was up all night working … I was getting some tea from her desk … “I was just in your office and I saw files in there I gave you days ago,” she said. “Plus, there's a contract I haven't heard back from you about.”

I threw her a bone, albeit a false one. “The Bielman contract is signed and done.”

“No, no, that's not it.” She paused and looked confused. “Well, I can't remember what contract it is, but I'll get back to you about it, but whatever it is, you should be coming to me and not the other way around. You have to think one step ahead of me.” The one-step-ahead thing was her mantra. She was constantly telling me that. But one step ahead of her was as useless as ten steps ahead of her, since she was miles
behind
everybody else. All of her books were years behind schedule because she took months to “edit” every page, if she was doing anything at all, and 80 percent of the work I did for her was personal: organizing dinner parties, drafting thank-you notes to the socialites that seemed to be friends of hers through her dead husband, sending to-do lists to her gardener, her housekeeper, her accountant, her lawyer.

But that day, she seemed too out of it to remember to dress me down for being in her office, and instead sent me to my desk to get a pad of paper because she had something she desperately needed to get done, and by the way she'd be working late tonight and she'd need my help. I couldn't tell if she'd been crying, but she probably had. She continued to issue edicts, despite an unsteadiness and a suspect swagger when she turned corners.

That night at seven she had me follow her into the bathroom (“I'm in a huge rush—we just can't miss a
beat
here!” she said) and take dictation from her to the sound of her piss hitting the water while I scratched down a note to her mother, filling her in on who
would be attending a dinner party. My empathy for her had hardened into an angry piece of coal in my stomach, which was stoked to incandescence every time I even thought about her. A week later, I quit my job.

NINE