My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (32 page)

Nonetheless, she agrees to come home and rest, and for a few days we take turns watching her to make sure she doesn’t slip outside for a cigarette or try to clean the house. It feels ridiculous to be babysitting a grown-up that way, especially someone as independent and vital as Kay. I don’t like it and I hope I never have to do it again. What something like that does to your own dignity makes you question whether it’s worth the cost. However, partly as a result of her confinement, Kay’s strength, if not her health, returns quickly, and soon she is begging to be let outside. It starts with a few errands—picking up her own medicine at the pharmacy, for instance—and soon she is ready to visit the store. As her
jailer on that day when she first goes back, I make her swear that after dropping off some money she will come home immediately. “Oh, I promise,” says Kay, crossing her heart dramatically. The next time I see her it’s nine hours later, at the end of the night shift. The following day she slips out once more, and after that it is right back to the old schedule, and so much for our plans to close the store.

EVERYONE WAS AFRAID THAT THE
PARIS REVIEW
WOULD FOLD
without George, but once the collective concern for the magazine became clear, folding was no longer the issue. The issue was who would run the place. The board wanted to bring in someone from outside right away and already had several candidates in mind, as we learned from the newspapers. At first it looked as if the longtime editors wouldn’t even get one issue to prove we were up to the job. However, with some clever convincing from the staff, the board members realized they had to at least give us a try if they expected anyone to stick around and help them keep the magazine going. The search was thus suspended while the board “reassessed.” No
one thought they were seriously thinking about letting us run the place, but maybe, we thought, if we do a good enough job, they’ll have no choice.

Thus there’s been a change in atmosphere: with something like a year to prove ourselves, we’ve dropped the slacker routine. No more wandering into the office late or missing deadlines. No more extended absences for the sake of skiing or finishing a novel. Painfully, about half the staff has voluntarily departed or been let go, resulting in hugely increased productivity from the remaining editors. All in all, it’s considerably less “fun” now than George would have liked, but it’s also a lot more efficient. Years of accumulated errors are being purged, and one of the results is that we’ve put out some of the strongest issues in a long time.

Yet we still don’t have a circulation manager, a contracts specialist, or an IT professional. The office is still located in the Manhattan medialand equivalent of Nunavut, and we still let twenty-three-year-old nobodies edit Nobel laureates. There may be less pool playing and fewer business trips to the Playboy Mansion, but the office still feels like that of a college newspaper rather than arguably the most famous literary magazine in the world.

This is dangerous. As long as the
Review
clings to its amateur past, another fiasco is inevitable. And this time it’s going to matter.

WE ALL HAVE
new roles at the
Review
since George’s death, and one of the responsibilities that has somehow ended up in my lap is overseeing the anthology series that the ten-thousand-dollar mistake came out of. Truly, it’s the sort of thing that could only happen at the
Review
. Not only does the ten-thousand-dollar mistake strongly argue against giving me this particular job, but overseeing the anthology means coordinating an important nationwide reading series, and as someone who once had a calendar from the wrong year hanging over his desk for eight months and couldn’t
figure out why he kept missing appointments (“What do you mean my doctor’s appointment was two days ago?”), I should be banned categorically from any sort of job that involves booking people’s plane tickets or anything as logistically complicated as staging a public event.

The most stressful part of the job is dealing with the authors themselves. Some writers are nice, ordinary people you wouldn’t mind living next to or allowing your daughter to date. Most, though, have the sort of large and colorful personalities you expect from artists. There are the flakes who, having devoted every cell in their brain to penetrating the unconscious, have forgotten how to do mundane tasks like getting themselves to a bookstore for a reading by seven
P.M
. And there are the social misfits who, as a result of cutting themselves off from the world outside their own head or spending too many years trying to climb through a blank computer screen, have a tendency to show up drunk, pick a fight with an audience member, make a pass at the person introducing them or not show up at all. In short, readings are scary, because you never know what’s going to happen when you unleash writers on the public.

On that Thursday in late July I have an evening reading with Robert Pinsky and Jamaica Kincaid scheduled at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. I’m supposed to work at the deli in the morning, then jump into the car and drive up to Cambridge in the afternoon. However, Dwayne, who’s never even a minute late for work, inexplicably fails to show up when his shift starts. Half an hour passes, then an hour. I call him, and no one answers. When I finally see him coming down Atlantic Avenue, his gait is unsteady and his face looks mangled and swollen, as if he’s been in a brawl.

“What happened?” I say.

“Had a toothache,” he says woozily. “But it’s over. I got it out.”

“You went to the dentist?”

“Hell no. I ain’t gonna pay no hundred and fifty dollars.”

“So who did it for you?”

“I did it myself.”

“With what?”

“Pliers. Then I passed out. That’s how come I’m late.” He rubs his jaw with bloody hands.

Hearing this I almost pass out myself, but there’s no time—I have to get on the road. I’m running at least an hour late, and by the time I get on the highway, the afternoon congestion has already started to build. It takes me an hour just to get out of New York City, and in Westchester there’s highway construction, and in Connecticut there’s a traffic jam that looks like it extends all the way to Hartford. This is terrible. I’ve always been bad at budgeting time, giving myself the smallest margin of error possible. And this time I’m going to pay for it by not showing up at a reading that I organized, where not only will the writers and the audience be unable to figure out what’s going on, but at which several writers and editors from the
Boston Globe
whom I personally invited will be on hand to witness the “professionalism” of the new
Paris Review
.

Even worse, this is probably the most stressful reading in the whole series. Robert Pinsky is a man who seems to have made a terrible decision going into poetry, since he is handsome enough to have been a Hollywood leading man and has a voice that sounds either like God himself or a classic rock DJ. (He could have made a fortune intoning movie previews but instead chose to translate
The Inferno.)
As maybe the best-known poet in America, he will bring a crowd that I fear will overwhelm the bookstore.

And then there is Jamaica Kincaid. Kincaid is the sort of writer who unsettles people—me in particular—maybe because she once wrote about giving herself coffee enemas, or maybe because she famously quit a staff writer’s job at the
New Yorker
because
she thought Tina Brown, the magazine’s outrageously successful editor, had sold its soul, or maybe because of the stories about her walking around Manhattan in a hospital gown and other outrageous garb. (Her best friend, the writer Ian Frazier, once wrote about the difficulties of getting a cab when accompanied by “a six-foot-tall black woman in pajamas.”) Quite possibly it’s because in the cozy little social world of writers and editors, she’s a true outsider, a writer from a poor country (Antigua) who came to New York to be a nanny for an Upper East Side family and worked her way up from there. Maybe it’s all of these things. In any case, the only thing I feel more strongly than delight in anticipation of her reading is sheer, abject terror, especially since I hassled her for months about doing the reading and never got a direct reply. She was supposed to be teaching a summer class at Harvard, but when I called her department no one seemed to know if she was in Cambridge or not, and when I tried her in Vermont, where she lives, no one answered the phone, and when I asked for her e-mail address, her department secretary said she didn’t use e-mail, so finally I resorted to sending her requests via someone at the
Review
whose brother’s Pilates instructor was married to someone who had once taken a creative writing class with her (or something like that), and eventually I got a response via this person’s second cousin saying she would come, but as the hour approaches I am anything but confident.

As a result, driving through New England I’m too stressed to eat or listen to music—all I can do is stomp on the accelerator and lean as far forward as I can, as if by doing so I can will the car faster. The state of Connecticut is so tiny that normally I feel as if I can see across it, but today it feels as wide as Kansas. Every ten minutes or so I calculate what speed I need to maintain in order to make it to Cambridge on time (according to the latest computations, two hundred and ten miles per hour), which gives me a horrible feeling—not just the physical sensation of Kay’s Honda shuddering like the
space shuttle on reentry but the uncertainty, the not knowing, the feeling of
Will I make it? And if not, when will I know? What will I do then? Stop? Give up? Run away?

Yet as unpleasant as it can be, you can’t deny that this sort of seat-of-your-pants existence, which is what George cultivated at the
Review
, has its benefits. From day to day you never really knew how things were going to turn out, and that kept you focused on the task at hand, not next year, next month or even tomorrow. It also kept you alive to the smaller pleasures, like the discovery of a new voice, or holding a brand-new issue in your hands, or even something as prosaic (yet wonderfully satisfying) as proofreading a story. You couldn’t be distracted by money because there wasn’t any, and there wasn’t the zombielike drive of large institutions to exist solely for existence’s sake. To escape inertia, the only fuel was inspiration and a kind of back-against-the-wall, holy-crap-I’m-not-qualified-for-this excitement.

In the anthology that the reading series is celebrating, my favorite piece, an excerpt from a story called “Nighthawks” by the Chicago writer Stuart Dybek, captures something of this heady feeling: the apparently mild-mannered narrator, a man driving through the Great Plains, stops by a restaurant late at night for a cup of coffee, and there he happens to meet a “gay divorcée,” who invites him to follow her home. Things subsequently turn surreal as the man finds himself chasing the woman through the wheat fields, driving faster and faster and barely maintaining control of his car as he wonders how in the world he ended up in such a situation and what he’s doing. In a mere two and a half pages, the story manages to build up, store and then release a powerful charge.

That kind of spontaneous, in-the-moment energy is what being an amateur is about, and as I myself drive like a maniac through New England, it occurs to me that frustration with George had steered me into doubt of the amateur ethos, but the store had
steered me back. The store, and of course George himself, who’d been so on my case last year, but whom as a result of all that sparring I now finally feel like I understand. I’m not sure if the
Review
can go on the way it did under him, but if I had the choice between being an amateur and being a professional, I know which one I’d pick.

Of course, if I don’t get up to Cambridge it won’t matter, because I’ll have shamed myself out of whatever chance I have of holding on to my job, and unfortunately that’s precisely how it looks like things are going to shake out. But then at five-thirty a twelve-lane toll plaza signifying the Massachusetts border comes into view, and I know that I have a chance to make it. Pushing the Honda to the limit of its structural integrity, I blaze a comet trail down the Mass Turnpike and pull into Greater Boston with less than half an hour to go. Things are looking good (who says the work of an editor is stately and boring?) and I know that God wants me to pull this off, because when I get to the bookstore, the unlikeliest of miracles—a legal parking space in the middle of Harvard Square—opens up before me.

Dashing inside wearing a crazed look, I find that crowds have begun to show up in the sizable numbers that I was worried about, and that a woman who in a nervous way looks just as crazy as me is standing by the door, scanning the faces of the crowd.

“Are you the editor from the
Paris Review?”
she says.

“Yes, I’m here!” I announce triumphantly. “I made it.”

Her expression shows that she couldn’t care less. “I’m the readings coordinator for the bookstore,” she says. Then, a bit snappishly (but with good reason): “Where are your authors?”

“What?!” I gasp. “They’re not here?” This is even worse than I had feared. Jamaica Kincaid I was nervous about, but Robert Pinsky I’d confirmed with by telephone the day before. “When does the reading start?”

“Five minutes,” the readings coordinator says. “I’m going to go
look outside—you check the aisles and see if they came in without my realizing.”

So I start inspecting the aisles: poetry, fiction, cookbooks, dictionaries. The store is like the inside of a car that’s been in a hot parking lot all day. There’s no air-conditioning, and people are taking off their clothes and fanning themselves with the books they’ve brought for Jamaica Kincaid and Robert Pinsky to autograph.

And then I see her in the classics section, sitting on the floor, almost as if she were hiding. She isn’t wearing a hospital gown. But she does seem to be wearing at least six dresses, along with a pair of baby blue running sneakers. I almost trip over her long, pretty legs.

“Ms. Kincaid,” I practically shout, “you’re here!”