1
In a room packed to the gills with New York mucky-mucks—Truman Capote was tucked into a corner of the couch; Arthur Miller, sans Marilyn, stood smoking by the window—I had my attention fixed on a waitress.
I hadn’t noticed her peeping at me until Joe and I went to stand at the fireplace beside Harry and Glenys. Scanning the party guests, I landed on her and froze, the champagne glass cold in my clammy palm. Harry began delivering his toast beside me, but I didn’t hear a word. Joe’s hand rested, warm and firm, at the small of my back.
The waitress stood apart from the crowd, tall and slim, holding her empty tray against her thighs. She wore the typical uniform: black blouse, black pencil skirt, tawny hair pulled into a chignon. Her eyes were narrowed in my direction. I knew her name: Beverly.
I prayed she didn’t remember mine.
“…the more anyone said, ‘Hell, you can get sports on the radio, you can get politics from the Times or the Journal,’ the more we’d pack it in!” Harry crowed to resounding laughter. “How many times did I ask you, Joe—‘How much will it cost to add another teensy four-hundred-word feature? Just another column?’ ”
“Every damn day,” Joe replied, to more laughter.
I tore my gaze from Beverly and smiled stiffly at our audience. Damn it to hell. This was supposed to be a hotshot moment for me. Sure, most of these people probably saw me simply as Joe Martin’s girl, the armpiece of one of Downtown magazine’s founders. Little did they know I had written a feature for this issue, right after the short story from Flannery O’Connor.
“Anyway, thank you for believing in us sons of bitches,” Harry continued.
Everyone cheered, lifting little bowls of champagne like sparkling breasts. We’d gathered to celebrate the launch of Downtown’s second issue in Harry and Glenys’s apartment, a sprawling classic six on the Upper East Side. There’d been a more formal party for the first issue, which had been a smashing success largely thanks to Harry’s popular article about the storied Harvard-Yale football contest, “The Oldest Man at the Game.” This should’ve been a more intimate bash, but the living room was crammed with people, three-quarters of them male. The attractiveness of the remaining quarter, the female guests, far outperformed the national average.
Joe took a step forward. “If I can add a few words,” he addressed the room in a voice that wasn’t quite his own. I could smell his sweat and the metallic tang of the Saint Christopher medal he tucked under his collar. “Harry and I—well, especially Harry—were confident we’d make it to a second issue, but we appreciate your faith in us. Thank you for spreading the word among writers, for bringing investors….”
Harry lifted his foggy champagne glass. “And if Nelson Rockefeller were here, we’d say, ‘Thanks a heap for the interview, old man!’ ”
“To Rocky!” shouted a guy on the couch, lifting up his joint. Coils of smoke ribboned around him. Everyone laughed again, everyone but me.
I cleared my throat and waited for the noise to die down before delivering my planned line. Unconsciously, I glanced toward Beverly, who, thank goodness, was being led into the kitchen by the bartender. I tucked a tendril of red hair behind my ear. “Oh, boys,” I said loudly, and the din died down, a hundred eyes on me, everyone waiting to hear what this dish had to add to the speech. “You forgot to thank Miss Newmar for bringing the cheesecake!”
The room erupted in applause as a plush-lipped young actress named Julie Newmar, her mile-long legs sheathed in fishnet stockings, stood and genuflected. I, like everyone else in the room, could picture just what was under her velvet blouse; Miss Newmar had appeared topless on the inside back cover of Downtown No. 2. Harry whistled and clapped. Beside me, I sensed Glenys clenching her teeth.
The toast over, Joe and I turned to each other and clinked glasses of Veuve Clicquot. There was still a bit of bashfulness between us, a little electricity crackling in our brief kiss. We’d been inseparable for a year and a half, ever since we met at a New Yorker party while Joe was still working there.
I turned around to see that Glenys and Harry stood slightly apart from each other, both of them blitzed. A rowdy group of men were already calling him from across the room, while his wife hung back, her face grayish. Here was the tragic difference between the two of them: as they drank, she grew more limp, he the opposite. And women adored him. Harry had been first baseman at Yale and grew up sailing off Martha’s Vineyard. He made a good public face for Downtown: he was the blueblood talent, the boyish philosopher, while Joe drew the plans and raised the money.
“Where’re the kids tonight, doll?” I whispered to Glenys, squeezing her elbow as she watched her husband walk away.
“Mmph, don’t remind me I’ve got kids,” she slurred, then, after a beat, added, “They’re at the nanny’s.” She looked as if she needed a bubble bath and a long night’s sleep. Fortunately, Joe came up behind me then and rested his warm lips against my ear.
“Louise,” he said, “there’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
“Oh, darling. You’re finally introducing me to your mother,” I joked, but my heart began beating very quickly.
“My mother’s not allowed within fifty miles of this place.” He gestured to a couple getting frisky on the sofa, the man’s hand traveling past the girl’s garters. “No, it’s even better than that. This could be a big night for you, too, Lou.”
I licked my lips and took his hand. As we crossed the room, I hated that I had to worry about Beverly, to look for her tall frame among the crowd, but she was nowhere to be seen. Joe led me past men whose importance oozed from the leather patches on their elbows, past waiters with trays of canapés. Beside the bookcases, a group of guys were trying to pour champagne into a pyramid of glasses, even though everyone knows that never works, and I caught a glimpse of Glenys nervously eyeing her Oriental rug.
“Is that…” I said as a dashing, suntanned man brushed past me, flanked by two girls. He looked just like the actor Rory Calhoun, whom we’d seen a few weeks ago in the Western The Silver Whip.
“It is.” Joe’s grin stretched from ear to ear. Harry might’ve been the more obviously handsome of the two of them, with his blond hair and big shoulders, but he was a bit too buggy-eyed for me. Plus, I didn’t do the married-man thing. Joe had caught my eye the minute I saw him, setting off a hunger like I’d never known, and I’d been hungry in one way or another for much of my life. At twenty-eight, he was a few years my senior. His roots were nearly as humble as mine—Italian red sauce, tenement life—but that didn’t show in his exterior. He had a shock of black hair combed carefully with pomade, a wiry, strong build, and intense dark eyes that looked through you and past you and beyond, laser-pointed on the future.
I didn’t realize until we were toe to toe that Joe had brought me to the feet of Mortimer Clifton, the new publisher at Clifton & Sons now that his father had finally retired. I recognized him from pictures in the society pages: thick white hair, tufty black eyebrows. Towering over everyone at nearly seven feet tall, Mr. Clifton was a physical reminder of the famous old men he published—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, that ilk.
“Mort,” Joe said, his voice nearly squeaking in excitement to use the man’s nickname, “I’d like you to meet my friend Louise Leithauser.”
I grasped the man’s dry hand. “Mr. Clifton, it’s an honor.”
“Oh. A pleasure to meet you, too,” he replied. He’d been in the middle of a point, it seemed; the two smaller men who’d been lapping up his words glanced at us in irritation.
“Louise is an aspiring novelist,” Joe yelled over the music.
“Are you?” Clifton spoke in a somewhat unnatural-sounding accent, formal and vaguely English. “What do you write?”
“I’m writing a romance,” I replied, and the sycophants around him snickered.
Clifton raised his eyebrows politely. I had the sense he was abiding me at this point, waiting for me to leave. “We’ve done a few of those. Don’t laugh, gentlemen,” he said to his audience, even as a note of amusement lifted one of his wolfish eyebrows an inch higher. “They sell like hotcakes, especially in England, but here, too. The girls can’t get enough of them.”
I made myself smile warmly. “It’s not all that I do. I’ve also written a few political pieces for Downtown. Under my pen name, Alfred King. I wrote the last issue’s story about the unrest in Iran.”
The smirks on the two lackeys’ faces were gone, replaced by uncomfortable stares. They looked pained. Clifton inspected me as if I were something he’d discovered on a flower petal, a curious little bug. “Well!” he said, after a beat. “Mr. King, we meet at last. I read that Iran story. I found it very interesting. But if I’d known the author was a gorgeous redhead, I’d have read more closely!”
The other men laughed now, happy to be in familiar territory. Reluctantly, I tittered along with them. If it hadn’t been crass to discuss money, I’d have told them just what Joe had paid me for the article, down to the penny—probably more than either of these guys had made for a single piece in his entire career.
“Louise is one of our best writers.” Joe paused. “And certainly the most beautiful.”
Clifton laughed again, then reached out to chuck my chin, as if I were a five-year-old. I took it with my teeth set. “You should send me your book when it’s done,” he said easily, “and I’ll pass it along to our paperback team.” With that he went back to his conversation.
Joe and I drifted away, in the direction of one of the waiters. My head spun. Send me your book when it’s done—he’d said it to me as if it were not at all unusual, as if I were one of the boys. I felt the urge to bolt, to run home to my typewriter.
No, no, I needed to throw my manuscript away, to start anew; I suddenly realized my novel-in-the-works was shit and should be tossed into my furnace. What did I think I was doing, putting my heroine on the moon, for Pete’s sake! Was I crazy?
I had other ideas, didn’t I? Or were they all shit, too?
I needed a drink.
“Okay,” I said to Joe as I took a Manhattan, served up and filled to the brim, off the waiter’s tray. “I’m impressed.”
Joe’s face broke open in mock offense. “I knew it. You’ve been using me all this time to get your novel published.”
“How dare you even suggest it, my love,” I said, pulling him in for a kiss so that he wouldn’t see how I was blushing. I kept my eyes open, looking around for Beverly.
—
For the rest of the evening, I tried worming my way back into conversation with Mort Clifton, but the pack of eager dogs who followed him about the party (all with the bad haircuts and shiny elbows of aspiring writers) was difficult to penetrate. Clifton left early; I’d hoped to corner him in the bedroom where they kept our wraps and coats, but it seemed he hadn’t brought one. Dejected, I returned to the party. I watched Joe play host, hobnobbing with other writers and edging his way toward Rory Calhoun, who looked bored as he leaned away from the young women caging him in. In general, Joe seemed ecstatic. I decided not to bother him.
I flopped down on the sofa and took out my compact, slicked my pet shade of Revlon onto my lips. Glenys sat on the opposite side of the couch. I noticed her silk scarf starting to dip into her whiskey sour. “Dear.” I reached for her knee. “Are you all right?”
Behind her, in the kitchenette, Harry already had his hand resting at the base of a young woman’s back, a girl with a stunning figure.
“Mmm, fine.” Glenys tried to slap my hand away. I knew she assumed I’d gone to bed with Harry. Everyone else had. She may not have been able to imagine it, but Joe and I were loyal to each other.
I waved, now, to Harry, and the girl he was with turned around. My skin froze when I saw that it was Beverly. She’d even removed her apron. Ignoring her, Harry came around the kitchen island and into the living room, where he slapped Glenys’s thigh as if she were a horse.
“Evening, Louise,” he addressed me, smiling with red, moistened eyes. Bourbon wafted my way. “Tell me, what’s the latest on your brother?”
I felt my face grow hot. My twin brother, Paul, had last been seen on a hill near Pyongyang. No one outside my family, aside from Joe, knew he had been declared missing in action. I feared saying it aloud would make it more real.
“Still in Korea.” I flicked my cigarette at the little tray on the coffee table. “Last I heard from him, he was doing all right.”
Last I’d heard from him was in April. This was July.
Harry nodded thoughtfully as Glenys, whose eyes had closed shut, tipped toward him. He brushed his blond hair from his forehead and offered me a dazzling smile. For a total cad, he was a brilliant writer. In “The Oldest Man at the Game,” he’d managed to sound square and glamorous at the same time. The life of enthusiasm, which he claimed the kids currently at Harvard and Yale were lacking, was one of fine whiskey, finer women, and all the spoils of postwar American capitalism. He claimed half of the Harvard kids had still been in bed at kickoff, then roused themselves only by halftime to linger in Harvard Stadium’s student sections in neither Crimson red nor Bulldog blue but disappointing black. “Dare I say it’s time,” Harry had trumpeted, “for us who came of age during the war to tell these damned kids to get excitedabout something?”
Joe teased me for how I’d fawned over Harry’s article, but I’d gobbled it up. The boys had met in the Ivy League, but I was a product of the SUNY system and took some pleasure in hearing Harry scold those indolent prep-school graduates. For my part, I’d worked hard and hadn’t had anything handed to me on a silver platter, and to me, that was the epitome of the American Dream.
“Peace talks continue, you know,” Harry said now, referring to Korea.
I took in a deep breath, letting my rib cage expand. Peace talks had been going on for two years. “Armistice any day now,” I said, willing it to be true.
Harry craned his neck; someone had called him from the kitchen. “Your brother will be out in six months,” he said. “Mark my words.” At that, Glenys plopped facedown in his lap. There was a sprinkling of laughter as he lifted her back onto the cushions, then stood up.
“Harry,” I called after him, glancing nervously at the crowd in the kitchen. I couldn’t tell if Beverly was still among them. “Can’t you just”—I gestured toward Glenys, sleeping on the couch—“keep your wife company, for once.”
“Oh, Louise. Don’t be a party pooper.” He slithered away.
I spent a few seconds chewing my nail, then went to find my purse and Joe. “Time for me to make like a banana,” I whispered into his ear, visibly irritating the chubby-faced writer who’d been deep in conversation with him about how to punctuate poetry properly in print.
“That’s a lotta ‘p’ words.” My comment produced a sourpuss look from the hanger-on.
Joe took my hand. “Just one more minute, and I’ll get you a taxi.”
I stood beside him with my arms crossed as they blathered about margins. I understood if Joe couldn’t come home with me tonight, but he’d damned better give me a proper goodbye and put me in a taxi. The magazine’s sponsors were paying for this party; I figured they could also foot the bill for my cab.
People were leaving now in twos and threes, citing the various bars and lounges where they could be found. On the sofa, Glenys began to snore. Two stoned young men managed to unlatch strands of crystals from the chandelier in the foyer and drape them around her sleeping body as if she were Bathsheba. “For the love of…” I said to Joe and the poet, who glanced over for a second. “Would you look at what’s happening over here? Does no one care?”
Glenys didn’t even stir when Harry came stumbling past her. My heart leapt to my throat when I saw he had his fingers intertwined with Beverly’s as she dragged him to the bedroom. She gave me a meaningful look as she passed.
“Can’t go in there…” Harry said, slurring his words. His blue eyes fluttered; his sandy hair was matted with sweat. He stopped at the door of the bedroom. “Can’t go in, they’re listening. They’re listening.”
Beverly giggled. I could tell she’d helped herself to several cocktails on the job. “Who’s listening?”
Harry steadied himself with a hand on the wall. “The FBI, darling, the FBI. The CIA. All of them. They’re watching…. They’re listening, they have bugs everywhere—”
In a rush, Joe came alive. He was there with his arms under Harry’s before I’d even realized he’d left my side. I followed him. “What are you on about, old chum,” Joe said, out of breath, “little green men?”
“The little green men,” Harry mumbled, nodding. “Them, too…”
“Come on,” Joe said in a lower tone, “at least have the decency to take this bird into the guest bedroom. Let your wife have her own pillow.”
Joe’s suggestion seemed gentlemanly, in a way, and I heard someone applaud, but the whole scene was nauseating. I took this as my cue to take Glenys, stumbling, to her room and lock the door. People’s damned wraps and hats were all over the bed. I took the pile and dumped it in the hallway.
“Hey!” someone yelled. I shut the door.
There were brightly painted toys scattered on her bedroom rug, a baby bottle half full of milk leaking a small puddle on her carpet. “Come on, Glenys,” I said in a gentle voice. I took off her shoes when she curled atop the blanket, and I stared at the four bulbous bedposts, considering what Harry had said about bugs.
“Louise.”
Her voice stopped me just as I reached the door. I felt depressed to think she knew more of what was going on than I’d realized. “Glenys?”
“Thank you.” I could hear tears in her voice.
I inhaled. “Get some sleep, darling.” After closing the door, I stepped over the pile of coats in the hallway. A few stragglers with red eyes and sweaty hair huddled on the sofas and armchairs. One couple argued. Another were passed out, arms around each other. The carpets reeked of spilled liquor. Joe and Harry were nowhere to be seen. I found Beverly slumped against the wall beside the spare bedroom. Her eyelids had fallen shut.
After glancing around to make sure no one could hear us, I toed her thigh with my shoe. “Go home.”
She opened one eye. “Louise Leithauser,” she said. “Didn’t you and I work a party together one time? The New Yorker Christmas party, right?”
Shit. She did remember me. “Sorry, sweetheart, you have me confused with someone else,” I said, even though she’d gotten my name spot-on. “Go home. You’re in another woman’s apartment. ...
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