The Unwitting (7 page)

Charlie was still standing there waiting for me to answer the question.

“It’s just this damn cold,” I said. “Can we go home?”

I SWORE I
was not going to tell Charlie about the incident, and I never did, but it must have weighed on my conscience, because I found myself constantly bringing up the subject of infidelity with him. I’d start discussing a new book and end up speculating whether the gossip about the author’s hectic sex life was true. I began describing
an art opening Sonia, the secretary, had persuaded me to attend with her, and got sidetracked into an anecdote about how she had gone home from it with an artist, whom she’d assumed was separated—how else could he invite her back to his apartment?—only to find that his wife was in the hospital delivering their first child. I confessed that an assistant editor in my office had asked me to say we’d had lunch together when we hadn’t. Everywhere I turned, illicit sex was on the rampage. Once, I asked Charlie if he felt he was missing something.

“What makes you think I am?”

“Very funny,” I said and let it go. If I pressed him, he’d only keep teasing me.

Another night, he put on an old Artie Shaw record after dinner and held out his arms, and I stood and stepped into them. We did that sometimes, went dancing in our small living room. He guided me around the floor, avoiding the furniture, turning one way, swirling the other. He spun me out and brought me back against him.

“Come here often?” I vamped in his ear.

“Only when I can get away from the little woman,” he said and dipped me so low my head spun.

But despite his teasing and the world we inhabited, I trusted him. I’m not suggesting he wasn’t human. I was willing to bet that when Sonia leaned over his desk, his body responded. He’d told me about what he called the Sonia effect. All she had to do was look up at a man and he checked his fly. But if Charlie’s body reacted, I was pretty sure his mind resisted. Not because of me, but because of him.

Some men thrive on worrying about lipstick on their collars, explaining wet hair from an ill-timed shower, and playing footsie with a woman across the table while a wife sits nearby. Some enjoy the flirtation with disaster as much as the flirtation. But Charlie was not one of them. He wanted no more chaos in his life.

Sex was too close to death for him to play around with it. I’m not talking about Freud’s eros and thanatos. I’m talking about something
more personal. Before the war, when he was younger, sex had been simple. But since the war, and since he had found out about that large family he had never known and now never would, sex was all mixed up with mortality and survival and guilt, always guilt. Not before or during the act—then the physical impulses took over and the mind bowed out—but after. His body spent, his defenses down, he was easy prey for all those dead relatives. They swarmed around us as we lay in our sex-rumpled bed, not blaming him exactly, merely reminding him that he was here, and they were not, and the business of living might be fragile and meaningless, but it was not trivial. And it was not unrelated to honor.

I don’t know how I knew that about Charlie, but I did. It was one thing I did not turn out to be wrong about.

Four

G
IDEON ABEL HAD
grown up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the son of Jewish immigrants from somewhere in that uneasy stretch of Eastern Europe that was always passing from Russia to Poland and back again. Nonetheless, or perhaps because of it, he had social as well as intellectual ambitions. He wanted to be not only a brilliant publisher but a gentleman publisher. To that end, he was an intentionally terrible businessman. It wasn’t merely that
Compass
lost money every year. All little magazines lose money. That was what the Drinkwater Foundation was for, to make up the shortfall. But Gideon did not believe in contracts. Surely a handshake after lunch or a slap on the shoulder at a party was sufficient. Surely gentlemen, and the occasional lady, could be counted on to honor agreements. Some said the stance was an affectation, others that it was a holdover from the tribal allegiances of the Lower East Side, which his social conscience and success hadn’t managed to stamp out completely. Whatever the origins, the repercussions could be dicey. The individuals who shook hands after those alcohol-fueled lunches and parties often remembered the matter they were shaking hands on differently. Lawsuits were not unusual. Gideon called them the cost of putting out a great magazine. Elliot McClellan, who ran the Drinkwater Foundation, called them irresponsible.

One day after lunch, Gideon sauntered into Charlie’s office, sank into a chair, draped one gray flannel leg over the arm, and told Charlie
he had just come from our friend McClellan. Our friend McClellan was the way Gideon always referred to him. Most publishers in Gideon’s position would have been grateful for not having to worry about money, but Gideon could not muster gratitude because he had never worried about money.

He chatted about articles they had assigned, pieces they might assign, various writers, and a play he had seen the night before. Then he unwound himself from the chair, stood, and when he reached the door turned back to Charlie.

“Our friend McClellan says we have to start signing contracts. I know I can count on you to take care of it.” He sauntered out as casually as he had sauntered in.

“Is that a promotion?” I asked Charlie when he told me about the incident that night.

“Surely you jest. My office just happens to be the first one he passes on his way back from lunch.”

It was a nice try, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t true—I don’t mean the geography—and I knew Charlie didn’t think so either. I suppose that was why he tried to sound cavalier when he came home several weeks later and mentioned that Elliot McClellan had called to invite him to lunch. That was something else I knew about Charlie. He wasn’t superstitious. He knew the evil eye was a primitive concept. But that didn’t stop him from trying to elude its gaze.

THIS IS WHAT
Charlie told me about his lunch with Elliot McClellan as we sat in La Cave Henri IV, where we went to celebrate that night. I’m not suggesting that my memory is infallible. All you have to do is listen to two people recount the same incident to know that no one’s is. But I’m not forgetting part of the story. I know now that Charlie never told it to me.

They met at McClellan’s club in midtown.

“I couldn’t get in the door.” Charlie took a sip of his martini and grinned. He could not stop grinning that night. His smile lit up the
shadowy corner banquette. We were possessive of the restaurant and that corner of it. I had turned twenty-three, twenty-four, and twenty-five there; Charlie twenty-six, twenty-seven, and twenty-eight; and we had celebrated all three anniversaries over the flickering candles on the red-and-white-checked tablecloth. The waiters always welcomed us like prodigal children and on the birthdays and anniversaries put a thin colored candle in the bread pudding, Charlie’s favorite dessert.

“I mean that literally,” he went on. “The building has double front doors. Any other place in town, any other place in the country, you see a pair of double doors, you open the right one, right? At this place, only the left side opens. So even before I was inside, I was feeling a bit, shall we say unwelcome, standing there rattling the knob and trying to push it open with my shoulder. Then someone came past and sailed through the door on the left.”

I laughed, though I knew that no matter how he told the story, it wasn’t a joke to him. And it could only have gotten worse after he went through the recalcitrant door into that imposing Italian Renaissance building. I had never been inside—women were not permitted—but I passed it often. His standing as an outsider in the old boys’ club, a Jew in a Gentile world, would have hit him like a punch to the gut.

But there was another side to my sweet ambivalent Charlie, and I knew that too. Where else in the world, he would have been thinking, could someone like him walk into a club like that, even through the wrong door?

McClellan was waiting for him in the lobby. I had met Elliot McClellan a few times at Gideon’s parties, and I could picture him standing in that sea of gray flannel, blue serge, and muted tweed. There would not have been a pair of high heels or nylons in sight, and that was the way the members wanted it. McClellan had the compact body of an athlete, blue eyes the color of a well-washed work shirt—a garment I was sure he had never worn—and a habit
of continually pushing back the shock of light brown hair that kept falling over his forehead. The gesture would have been effeminate if he hadn’t used the heel of his hand to do it. His features were regular, perhaps too regular. Whenever I saw him, I found myself searching for quirks and flaws. He wasn’t tall, and that probably bothered him, but women didn’t seem to mind. It wasn’t just the regular features that came together handsomely, it was the inaudible hum he gave off, like an insect’s mating call that is perceptible only to females of the species. My mother, with her determination to let no cliché go unspoken, would have said about him that still waters run deep. I didn’t know how deep they ran, but I did know that the erotic undercurrent in McClellan’s quiet gravitas was more disarming than all Frank Tucker’s sexual blitzes. That, however, was a woman’s point of view, and I had a feeling that McClellan considered himself a man’s man. During the war, he had parachuted into France several times, though when anybody mentioned it, he always insisted he’d never been in any real danger. I couldn’t decide whether he was an inveterate cynic or a true believer. Of course, you have to believe in something to be sufficiently disillusioned to become a cynic.

According to Charlie, they went up a flight of stairs to a dark paneled room with a fire going at one end and more Hudson River School paintings than he had ever seen outside a museum, as well as a Winslow Homer.

“It was hanging right over McClellan’s head, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it the whole time we were having drinks.” He shook his head and grinned again.

I asked him what they talked about while they swilled martinis and he stared at a Winslow Homer.

“Me.”

“A topic of infinite variety and interest.”

“It was the damnedest thing. He kept asking me questions, but I couldn’t get over the feeling that he already knew the answers. He had it all on wires, my year at City College before the war, the stint
at Columbia after. He said my commanding officer was a friend of his father’s.”

“What’s so strange about that? They’re both part of the old boys’ club.”

“Sure, but I hadn’t mentioned the ship I was on.”

“So even before he popped the question you knew what was coming from all the homework he’d done.”

“Pretty much. He knew about my parents leaving Budapest and what happened to the rest of the family. He even knew about the one cousin who’s still there, though as he put it, he might as well not be, because living under Uncle Joe Stalin’s boot is as good as being dead.”

He stopped for a moment, and the grin slid from his face. I knew what he was thinking. McClellan had no right to invoke the memory of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins whom Charlie himself had never known, any more than Charlie had a right to be sitting there, safe as houses, eating steak, drinking merlot, and going on with the charmed life he was sure he did not deserve.

Then, as the waiter took away their empty plates and brought coffee, McClellan got to the point. Gideon Abel was leaving the magazine.

“I still can’t believe it,” I said.

“Exactly. Gideon
is
the magazine. You know his joke about retiring. On the last day of his life, he plans to edit one long piece, then slump forward over his desk gracefully, red pencil in hand.”

“Is the foundation forcing him out?”

“That was my first thought, but McClellan says no. According to him, Gideon wants to leave. He says the foundation has turned
Compass
into a business, and he might as well be manufacturing widgets. He hates having to keep books. He thinks contracts are an insult to everyone involved. McClellan says he actually misses the lawsuits.”

I didn’t doubt it. Gideon thrived on drama.

“McClellan thinks he wants to start another magazine. A quarterly where he can say anything he wants, and it won’t matter because only twelve people in the country will read it, was the way he put it.”

“And you stood up for Gideon and insisted he was a great man who had founded one of the most influential magazines of his time.”

“You know me like a book.”

“What did McClellan say to that?”

“That the foundation wanted the magazine to go on being influential. That was why they were asking me to take over.”

Something was bothering me, but I was having trouble putting my finger on it through the haze of euphoria, gin, and wine. Then it came into focus.

“There’s only one thing,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“McClellan’s line about Gideon’s wanting to be able to publish anything he wants. Does that mean the foundation has been censoring him? More to the point, that it plans to dictate what you can and can’t publish?”