Mail

by Mameve Medwed

Genres: Humor & Satire; Women's Fiction; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

Reminiscent of the novels of Nora Ephron, this brilliantly written, hilariously touching tale explores a contemporary woman's quirky love life.

Katinka O'Toole has discovered that a degree from Harvard does not always lead to fame and fortune. Divorced and struggling to make a living as a writer, the highlight of her day has become the arrival of the mail. Or, more precisely, the mailman. Yes, she hopes for an acceptance letter, but she also has a fierce crush on Louie Capetti, her gorgeous postal carrier, who she hopes will carry her away to romantic bliss. So while she has taken to receiving her mail in "discount Dior", she also has to deal with her pretentious ex-husband (a noted Joycean scholar), her class-conscious mother, the unwanted affections of a corporate lawyer, and various other roadblocks to true love that plague smart women in today's society.

Release date: January 1, 2001

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 320

Sample

Elinor Lipman has squeezed time out from her own novels to act as my fairy godmother and this book’s midwife. Her criticism
is gentle but right on the mark, her enthusiasm boundless, her generosity astounding, and her friendship a gift. My debt to
Ellie is huge; my thanks, immeasurable.


Sarah Rossiter and Lilla Waltch, two writers, and two dearest of friends, have provided years of laughter, love, and discerning
readership.


I had the good fortune to move next door to Eliza McCormack the summer her novel was coming out. Eliza signed me up for her
first writing workshop. She needed warm bodies to pad the enrollment, she told me, I didn’t have to show up. I showed up.
All beginners should have such beginner’s luck.


I am grateful to Mary Nash’s uncanny eye for every detail. And to Sally Brady, Ruth Daniloff, Marjorie Forté, Carol Magun,
Ellen Wilbur, Delsa Winer, and Marjory Wunsch who also read and commented on the manuscript. Additional thanks to Susan Goodman
for hand-holding and the zippiest ad copy in town. And to Elena Castedo’s porch-table literary salon.


My mother Mimi Stern is a natural at book promotion. My sister Robie Rogge, whose alliterative name is a welcome counterbalance
to my own, gave advice and support. My sons, Daniel and Jono, are every mother’s dream. Bedia Ahmad, Judi Levin, Jayne Merkel,
Mike Otten, Evelyne Otten, Rosie Purcell, Patrizia Smith Leoni, Patricia Welbourn, and Barbara Wheaton have been steadfast
companions on the long march. My gratitude also to the Sterns and Goldens whose hearts, if not all their feet, reside in Maine.


Jamie Raab, my editor, is as good with authors as she is with their books. For her guidance, intelligence, humor, and grace
I would like to express my deepest appreciation.


As for agents, no one is warmer or funnier or smarter than Lisa Bankoff. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks.

And finally, Howard, whom I met in nursery school, who thinks writing is noble work, and who never once, in all our years
together, said go get a job. This is for you, kid.




My mother calls me from Old Town, Maine, at eight in the morning, an hour into my writing time. “You sound grumpy, Katinka,”
she says. “Did I interrupt something?”


“Just my work.”

“As long as it’s just your work,” she says.


It’s her social-whirl voice, her social-work voice. Send this girl to the prom. I sigh. It’s my own fault for answering the
phone. But what if a publisher should want to ring me up? I turn off my computer. Some days it hums, a companionable sound.
Other times it chugs like The Little Engine That Could, an accusatory gasping that seems to imply that all the effort is coming from it, not from me. This morning it’s full of complaints.
“Can’t you write a little faster,” it seems to say. “Can’t you write at all?”


“Any news?” my mother asks.

Meaning men. “Since I talked to you two days ago?”

“You never know.”

I keep silent. What can I tell her, that I think I’m falling in love with the mailman, that the thud of his mailbag in the
vestibule makes the earth move to nine point five on my personal Richter scale.


She clears her throat. “You haven’t asked about me.”

Meaning men. I gird myself. “So?”

“So, I met someone. At the taping books for the blind place. A retired manufacturer. Princeton class of ’49.”

“Great,” I say. I can’t help but smile. I’m always amazed at how my mother, who’s sixty-three, still defines people by where
they went to school. My father, dead for thirteen years, was Harvard ’48. My mother still sends in his class dues. Her sister-in-law
is Mount Holyoke ’42. My mother is a graduate of the University of Maine. My grandfather, School of Hard Knocks 1900, didn’t
have the money to send her to Vassar, whose unaccepted acceptance sits framed on her dressing table beside her wedding picture
and me in my graduation robes.


I should have gone to the University of Maine with all my friends from Old Town High. I hated Radcliffe (called Harvard by
the time I went, but my mother clung to the R-word: “More cachet,” she explained. “My daughter the Cliffie,” she’d exult.).
Whatever the name, I hold it responsible for both my thirteen-month marriage to my Joyce professor, Yale ’60, Oxford D. Phil.
’63, and my Crimson-bred arrogance to think I can be a writer. I’d be happier teaching second grade and canning blueberries
like my girlfriends from the U of M.


Now my mother and I discuss what she’ll wear on her date with the Princeton man.

“Orange and black,” I say.

“Oh, Katinka.” She laughs and I hear her bracelets clang.

We decide on the navy dress from Neiman Marcus that we bought in Filene’s Basement when she visited me last year. And the
burgundy shoes. “With the Cuban heels,” my mother adds. I look at my sneakers. They are polka-dotted with holes.


“I’ll give you a report,” my mother says now.

“Go tiger go,” I say and hang up.

I turn on the computer. It chugs. I switch it off. I check my watch. The mail comes at eleven. I’m not kidding about the mailman.

When I wed Seamus, my Joyce professor, I looked upon it as the marriage of true minds, granted that one brain had twenty-five
more years of seasoning. Besides, he didn’t care about my clothes since he was always pulling them off me. We had seven good
days, not including our wedding night when Seamus threw his back out lifting my suitcase onto the luggage rack. After that
week, what I had imagined as evenings of blank verse before a blazing fire became in reality arguments about underdone meatloaf
in front of the stove. What I had imagined as nights of lovemaking before the same blazing fire turned into calisthenics in
his orthopedic bed. His back was delicate. His sinuses were unreliable. He piled Ian Fleming paperbacks behind the toilet
seat. His sour breath did nothing to fill my heart with poetry. Soon enough I discovered he preferred choruses to Molly Bloom
soliloquies. He left me for Melissa and Melinda, sophomores with nothing between them and their Calvins but a little baby
fat.


“Imagine, and such an educated man,” moaned my mother at the time, “with that Oxford degree.”

Unlike my mother, my friends were not surprised. “What do you expect marrying a father figure?” sighed they who’d all taken
Intro to Psychology. I’d nodded, summoning up a picture of my father, Harvard ’48, who’d died when I was nineteen, found keeled
over an actuarial report at his insurance firm with the same lack of fuss with which he’d lived his life.


Like my father, these days I’m pining for a life with little fuss. My time with Seamus, our marriage and his flight from it,
left me feeling colorized. In spite of its lofty academic ideals, Harvard has a National Enquirer soul. My fifteen minutes of fame was tabloid stuff. People snickered about Seamus and his M&M’s.


Next week it will be nine years since my divorce. I see Seamus sometimes in the Coop or in Sage’s buying wine. He married
first Melissa and then Melinda, or was it the other way around? Now he squires a TA in biology named Georgette. She wears
leather miniskirts and earrings from whose wires dangle silver skeletons of fish. I bumped into them the other day at a revival
of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown at the Brattle. I was going in, they were coming out. Seamus didn’t seem to recognize me. I don’t really think it was a snub.
He prides himself on his tolerance for past relationships. He’s nearly sixty with a matted Moses beard and glasses faceted
like prisms. He has the wild slightly exaggerated look of a bad actor playing a poet in residence. He wears sandals over argyle
socks. What did I ever see in him? What does Georgette see in him? The movie was pretty good, though I must admit my capacity
for the fey (Is Seamus fey?) is fast diminishing. Georgette, of course, loved it. I heard her telling Seamus it was awesome.
Her language, I was pleased to note, wasn’t Joycean. She herself is attractive enough if flamboyant.


I, on the other hand, am back to my black and white life. I pass a hermit’s days and nights writing, reading, going out for
an occasional movie or a dinner with old friends. I’m thirty-one now and ready to make my literary mark. I want to be a writer.
My mother thinks it time once more for me to be a wife.


But I’ve sworn off marriage. I’ve quit my library job at Widener. My apartment on the first floor of a Harvard-owned building
two down from the Fogg Museum was part of my divorce settlement. The money I’ve saved and my father’s bequest helps pay the
rent and keeps me in macaroni casseroles. Up to now, things have been going well. I’ve placed two stories in literary quarterlies
whose names you’ve never heard of. I’ve received several rejection slips that say Sorry, but please send more. These are signed by real people whose initials I spit on to test whether they blur. Still, if biology is destiny, then hormones
at thirty-one (and seventy) seem determined to waylay the best-laid plans. Which takes me to the mailman.


For starters let me explain why I got to know him in the first place. My building’s tenants are professors, teaching assistants,
grad students, administrators, librarians, and their spouses. In the logic of somebody like my mother, it would follow that
because they’re Harvard, they’re movers and shakers. And it just so happens that by nine in the morning they’re all out moving
and shaking in their offices and lecture halls. All, that is, except me, who’s moving the mouse around my Macintosh, and the
super, who’s shaking up his rum and cokes in his basement hideaway.


And who’s available to accept packages and sign for registered letters? To keep the New York Reviews from being swiped, to protect paychecks and credit cards, to pile up toothpaste samples and upscale marketing questionnaires?
Me, of course, whose apartment door is directly across from the wall of letterboxes in the vestibule.


I admit I planned it that way, picked an apartment to be mail-accessible. For a writer, mail is not just a collection of bills
and letters and offers to subscribe to Sports Illustrated. It’s an umbilical cord, a connection to the outside world, the giver of pleasure and pain. It shapes the day, is the moment,
inexorable as the tide, toward which all the hours rise and fall. If to the madras-clad clubman the day crests when the sun
has passed over the yardarm to signify the cocktail hour, to the writer the arrival of the mail charts the peak on any graph.
It’s like sex, the slow building of anticipation, the delivery itself (good news, bad, no news), and the postcoital glow or
gloom. And except for Sundays, there’s always the Scarlett O’Hara tomorrow bit.


So, within days of quitting my library job, I was out in the vestibule stalking the U.S. Post. I guess I couldn’t disguise
the mail-hungry look on my face because people coming and leaving the building began to ask me if I’d accept their UPS and
FedEx deliveries. I was all too happy. There was life out there in the front hall, grist for the mill. The exterminator confided
who had the most cockroaches, who was the biggest slob. The diaper service man for the newborn on the fifth floor flexed his
expanding biceps. The cleaner for 3E was hoping to go to community college in the spring. Mr. Sullivan, our former mailman,
was having trouble with his bunions and showed me his can of mace, which in twenty years he only had to use once on a German
shepherd north of Broadway.


Besides being able to indulge fully in my obsession (and doing good for others at the same time), I was also able to check
out the men in my building. Given Mr. Sullivan’s erratic delivery schedule, I was eventually able to observe the arrivals
and departures of most of them. Frankly, the men didn’t amount to much. Distracted scientists with terrible hours, brisk business
school types who looked you in the eye and addressed you by name three times in every sentence, the others too old, too young,
too married. For a while I had my hopes pinned on an art historian, but he, Mr. Sullivan whispered, lived with Gregory the
Florist, who always wore camel hair.


Then Mr. Sullivan’s bunions really got bad. Gregory took up a collection, and on a Saturday the building gave him a poinsettia
plant and fourteen tulip bulbs as a farewell.


The next Monday was Louie’s first day on our route. It was November, a cold morning, and my story about a UPS woman and diaper
man wasn’t going well. I decided to run around the corner for coffee since even the instant was all used up. I stuffed myself
into my down parka. I looked like a sausage. My hair was a mess. “Hi,” he said, bounding up the three front steps. “I’m your
new mailman, Louis Cappetti.” He pronounced it Louie. He thrust out his hand.


I took it. He was tall with a gleam of patent leather hair under his earflaps and a big smile which made his eyes widen not
narrow the way most people’s do. He was about my age. Maybe a little younger. He had that buttery-olive skin that doesn’t
wrinkle. “How ya doing?” he asked. The buttons on his blue uniform shone. My stomach did a little jig. I love a man in a uniform
my mother would announce, meaning West Point or Annapolis. No matter, he was the best thing I’d seen all year.


Was I holding the mailman’s hand too long? I gave a quick squeeze, then let go. “Katinka O’Toole,” I said.

“Hey, that’s an unusual name.”

“The O’Toole’s my ex’s. Katinka comes from some writer in The New Yorker during the fifties. I hope it’s prophetic. My mother had literary illusions,” I confided.


He looked puzzled.

I blushed. I was a damn fool. Insular and arrogant. Literary illusion, literary allusion … The lingua franca of Cambridge
is the literary allusion. Seamus prided himself on his common touch, which was apocryphal. Like most in our set he was the
master of the inside aside.


“I mean,” I translated, “since I’m a writer I hope having a writer’s name will bring me luck.”

“Right …” he said. “Wow,” he added. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a writer before. What do you write?”

“Stories, mostly.”

“About what?”

I lowered my eyes modestly. “Life.”

He nodded. Then gave a kind of c’est la vie shrug. “Have you published them?”


The inevitable question, in all languages, across all class lines. “Two,” I said. Sometimes I lie and say “a few” or “a couple,”
which I suppose isn’t technically a lie.


“How about that. Where can I read them?”

“In magazines you’ve never heard of.” I caught myself. “I mean, nobody’s ever heard of.”


“Except me. After all every single magazine passes through the hands of the U.S. Mail.”

“I hadn’t even thought of that.”

“Besides,” he added, “wouldn’t the library have them?”

My heart lifted. A library-goer! “Probably not. But I’ll give you Xeroxes if you’re really interested.”

“You bet.”

And that, Louie, as Humphrey Bogart said to Claude Rains, was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

* * *

Now it’s the beginning of December and my relationship with Louie is, if not something beautiful, the sun passing over the
yardarm of my days. At ten-thirty every morning I put on lipstick and brush my hair. I spray my pulse points with Arpłge.
I remember when I was at Radcliffe and how I used to sign up for conferences with Seamus on the sheet pinned to the English
department bulletin board. Inside his office he’d lock the door and pull a shade over the square of rippled glass. For the
allotted thirty minutes we’d clutch at various parts of each other’s bodies. Time up, he’d shake my hand and say “I do quite
enjoy our little chats, Miss Graham.”


“I sure do enjoy talking to you, Katinka,” Louie tells me now. I am leaning against a row of brass letterboxes. He is bent
over his mail bag. As he pulls out a sheaf of magazines, I can smell just the faintest scent of his shampoo. I wonder what
it would be like to have one of Seamus’ little chats with Louie. I stare at a lank of thigh under its U.S.-issue cover of
postal blue. I wonder what he’d look like in civilian clothes. A pair of snappy boxer shorts. I realize that I am going round
the bend. I force my eyes from his knee to the hand that is now passing me some envelopes. I take the manila envelopes from
him and recognize my punishment for all these dirty thoughts. My SASEs, my rejected stories coming back to me, the stamps
licked by my own tongue, the envelope addressed in my own hand.


Louie points to my mail. He has long graceful fingers, the tips slightly spatulate, the skin a golden sheath. “Can I ask you
a question?”


“Shoot.”

“These envelopes. I mean you get so many. All with the same writing. But from different places …”

I explain.

His eyes ooze sympathy. They have black irises wreathed in the softest brown flecked with little yellow suns. Ah, life they
say.


“That’s life,” I say now. “Some I sell, some are sent right back.” What I don’t tell him is that for the two I “sold,” the
payment for one was a year’s subscription to the quarterly. The other, three published copies of my own work.


“Geez,” he says, “and I’m the guy’s got to deliver the bad news.”

“Next time maybe you can bring me a big fat check.”

“Right,” he says, “I’m gonna get to work on that.” He pauses. “Mind if I ask you how you pay the rent?”

“I’ve got money saved. And a small inheritance.”

“That’s a relief,” he says, “after all those stories about starving artists.”

I smile. That he’s concerned about the bareness of my cupboard touches me.

We discuss the weather, the job the city’s doing salting the streets. “Hey,” he says, “about those stories, you know, those
Xeroxes …”


“Hang on a sec.” I run across the hall to my apartment where they are sitting on the table just inside the door. I have kept
them there for several weeks hoping he’ll remember them.


Carefully he folds them into his bag after first asking my permission to crease their smooth surfaces. “Great,” he says. “I
can’t wait.” And as he turns to go, he touches one of those golden fingers to my sleeve.


* * *

Seamus calls me just as the diaper man is about to ask the UPS woman out. I’m not sure … I start to type when the phone rings. My hello must be grumpier than usual because Seamus says, “You sound so mad, Katinka,
as if you knew I was on the other end.”


“What do you want, Seamus?” I ask.

“To wish you a happy Christmas, my dear.”

“Cut the crap, Seamus.”

“To find out how your writing is progressing. You know I always took, indeed still take, an interest in your literary development.”

I can’t resist showing off. For some reason that perhaps only a full course of analysis might reveal, I need Seamus to see
I’m succeeding without him. Even after all of this time. I clear my throat. “Actually, I’m doing well. Have published quite
a few stories.”


“Where?”

“You know, the usual. Literary quarterlies. Small but respectable.”

“Soon The New Yorker, I trust. Have you got Xeroxes?”


“Actually not. I’m much more interested in what I’m working on now. For me those stories are already in the past.”

Seamus seems to chew this over with a long intensifying hum which hurts my ear. “Speaking of the past,” he finally says.

“Why did you call?” I ask.

“You’ve got my Portrait of the Artist … and I’ve got yours.”


“What difference could that possibly make?”

“Mine’s a first edition.”


“And it’s taken nine years for you to discover that?”

“Georgette’s talked me into contact lenses. Now I see everything with a new and startling clarity.”

Seamus says he’ll be over in half an hour. I emphasize that I’m working and can only take a minute to exchange books through
my door. “No more time,” I joke, “than it took us to pass divorce papers.” Seamus chuckles. He understands, he says. He, of
all people, knows the vagaries of the muse.


I go to the bookcase and find Portrait. Sure enough it’s his, Seamus O’Toole scrawled possessively on a card tucked next to the frontispiece. I sit in a chair and start to read. Two hours later I am
in a slough of despair. I think of my story. It is garbage. More trivial than this fly-speck on the bottom of this page. I
should move back to Old Town and become something more suitable to my abilities: a dental hygienist, a grammar school crossing
guard. I look at my watch and realize it’s after eleven. As usual Seamus is late. And so sunk have I been in Joyce’s language,
I didn’t even hear Louie arrive. I have missed the one bright moment in my day. I get carried away and tell myself I have
missed the Joycean revelation in the story of my life. I am just about to squeeze out a perfect tear, when there’s a knock.


I open the door the width of the book.

“Wait a minute,” Seamus says. “I’ve got your mail.”

Seamus pushes through the door. Without his glasses his eyes look funny, like windows missing their shutters. He blinks rapidly.
He hands me my book on top of my mail, which contains, I notice, manila envelopes.


I give him his book. He points at my mail and blinks some more. “Had a little chat with your mailman,” he says. “Quite the
sympathetic sort. Feels terrible that your stories keep coming back like this. Maybe he’s afraid you’ll shoot the messenger.”


“If there’s any messenger I’ll shoot, it will be you.”

“And a happy Christmas!” Seamus declares after I have shut the door.

* * *

My mother has come to spend Christmas with me. Neither of us has the Christmas spirit. “We have seasonal blues,” I explain.
“It’s some kind of affective disorder having to do with the lack of sunlight at this time of year.”


“Nonsense,” my mother says. “It’s all to do with men.”

She sighs. I sigh. We tack some holly to a shelf and swoon back onto the sofa. We’ve done enough Christmas decorating, we
both agree. Things have not worked out well for my mother and the Princeton man. He turned out to have a wife, Smith ’51.
“Dowdy,” my mother says, “Lily Pulitzer and one of those lightship basket pocketbooks. But well educated,” she adds.


I nod. I know exactly how far well educated gets you. These days not even into my front hall. Since my mother’s been here,
I’ve missed my talks with Louie. By eleven every morning we’re out the door and stalking markdowns. I’m avoiding Louie, I
tell myself, because now that my mother and I are a temporary twosome, he’s not something I want to share. Am I afraid her
X-ray eyes will detect the light in mine when I raise mine to his? Or shudder at an insignia embroidered U.S. Postal, not
U.S. Naval, Academy?


After a while my mother and I force ourselves from the sofa and into my kitchen where we are making a batch of gingerbread
men. Tonight the art historian and his roommate Gregory the Florist are throwing a Christmas party for the whole building.
This isn’t such a crowd as you might imagine since the building is now nearly half empty, so many academics having gone away
during the long break. My mother and I ice extra-cheerful smiles onto the faces of our gingerbread men. Under one’s raisin
eye I place another raisin vertically. “See,” I say. “He’s smiling through his tears.”


My mother smiles through her own tears. “How about that Princeton man,” she groans.

We layer the gingerbread men into a cookie tin and put doilies between the layers. My mother presses the cover shut, and I
attach a red satin bow. There’ll be an auction at the party tonight, and we have all been asked to bring a contribution. The
proceeds will go to a shelter for the homeless. We have no right to have a seasonal affective disorder, my mother and I tell
each other, when there are people with no homes. We decide to wear our discount Diors. We are determined to have a good time.


The apartment of the art historian, who is named Derek, and Gregory the Florist is furnished in le style Rothschild, which I gather means lots of red brocade, gold tassels, and fringe on everything. My mother is immediately swept off to meet
Gregory’s mother, who herself seems to be swathed in le style Rothschild. She is wearing a tent of gold Lurex. At least she is not in Lily Pulitzer. My mother, animated, seems to be enjoying their
conversation. Perhaps they are talking about men.


Young men in black are passing trays of hors d’oeuvres. One stops in front of me and extends his platter. “These are fabulous,”
he says.


I look. The hors d’oeuvres are arranged in concentric circles like the monoliths at Stonehenge. Each round and square mound
is topped with a flower. I take one. I touch a petal of a pansy. It is not candied but feels velvety as if just seconds ago
it was thrusting up from damp soil.


I shudder. I turn my head to look at the other people in the room. They are all drinking champagne and eating flowers. All
the trays that the young men hold seem to have flowers on them. All the guests are eating flowers. “I don’t eat flowers,”
I confess.


The young man raises an eyebrow.

“You know that book, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies? I’ve taken it to heart.”


The young man shakes his head. He is not amused.

I pick up an hors d’oeuvre. I eat it. Salmon mousse with pansy. I live. I take another. A mushroom with nasturtium. It sticks
a little in my throat, but I get it down. I do not require the Heimlich maneuver. When it finally dawns on me that here I
am, Katinka O’Toole, eating flowers and still standing, I decide that nothing will surprise me. Thus when I see a familiar
face across the crowded room I am not surprised, only puzzled. Who is this person I seem to know?


He’s a tall man with dark hair, nicely dressed, not in le style Rothschild, but in jacket and tie. Then he sees me and waves. Even from this distance I recognize the spatulate fingertips. Louie, in
mufti, and looking fine. My heart turns over.


He makes his way toward m. . .