Hot Desk: A Novel - 8

Jane sat at Paco’s desk, on a call with the New York Public Library. When had Elizabeth Bishop lived in Brazil? What was the exact spelling of Penobscot Bay? The librarian at the information desk had put the phone down, and Jane could hear her heels clacking as she walked away. How or where they found the answers, Jane had no idea, but the librarians of the information desk never expressed annoyance or impatience; they never scoffed at a question, no matter how seemingly unimportant or strange. Most importantly, in the five months she had been at the East River Review , Jane had never asked a question they couldn’t answer. She fiddled with the phone cord, twisting it around her finger. A flash of white caught her eye, and she looked up to see Drew posing behind the bars of the window up near the blue door. Ever since they had watched Blondie’s “Rapture” video, first on Solid Gold , then on MTV’s launch in August, Drew always did a little dance like the man from Mars before entering the East River Review office. Jane and Rose found it hilarious every single time.

“What is that boy doing?” Deedle asked, the ash from his cigarette trembling over his typewriter. He caught it in his palm, then looked around for a place to dump it, eventually choosing a sad cactus on Ellen’s desk that she used for the same purpose. The phone shrilled, and Deedle wheeled back to his desk to pick it up. Jane ignored Deedle as she usually did; she and Rose had gotten adept at dodging his plump hands and pretending not to hear his steady stream of obnoxious comments. When he was drunk, as he often was after lunch and always at parties, he affected an Irish accent and leered even more aggressively than usual. His slim volume of poetry was Dylan Thomas–esque only in the sense that Deedle also frequented Chumley’s and the White Horse Tavern, the West Village establishments that Jane had never heard of before a crash literary pub crawl that Parker insisted on leading. There had been a minor upheaval last month when one of the young poets championed by Deedle had come crying to the office and Jonathan had hastily ushered her upstairs. She hadn’t been heard from since. The next day, Deedle’s wife, Marion, until then only a scolding voice on the phone, had arrived in person, much to everyone’s delighted surprise, and delivered in public what Jonathan later referred to as “a proper tongue-lashing” that left Deedle chastened for at least two full days.

Drew came down the narrow aisle between desks, humming “Rapture” as Jane contained her laughter. He gave the Rolodex on Jonathan’s desk a spin, something he dared to do only because Jonathan was out preparing for the fall issue party tomorrow night. “Be careful!” Parker spluttered. He had given all the interns the same very serious instructions a number of times: Don’t sit at Jonathan’s desk. Don’t touch Jonathan’s Rolodex. Don’t even look at Jonathan’s Rolodex. If J. D. Salinger’s phone number got out, there would be hell to pay! Of course, the minute Jane, Rose, and Drew were alone in the office, they examined Jonathan’s Rolodex with the clandestine attention one might give an uncle’s Playboy magazine stash. Typed, written in Jonathan’s cramped script, or in EDA’s distinctive block handwriting, the Rolodex cards contained enough informational treasure to stun them: Kurt Vonnegut’s nearby address, Jackie Onassis’s phone number, Picasso’s name crossed out, the secret number to call for the best table at the Rainbow Room.

“Going upstairs?” Drew asked.

“In a minute,” Jane answered. “I’m fact-checking the Bishop interview.”

Drew started sorting through art portfolios on the table, and Deedle hung up the phone on Marion. “Never get married!” he announced to the room. Turning to Jane, he kept talking, even though she was clearly occupied. “Busy little bee! You and Rose have really improved the atmosphere in the office.” He winked suggestively. “In fact, we’re thinking of moving Paco upstairs and commemorating a permanent desk for you two.” Jane said nothing, noting that Deedle had misbuttoned his shirt, exposing an unfortunate glimpse of pale belly. “The hot desk.” He made a sizzling noise, like bacon cooking. “Because you’re both hot,” Deedle continued unnecessarily. If Jane thought about his miserable marriage and sloppy shirt, she could almost feel sorry for him.

“Jane!” Ellen came out of the back room brandishing a manuscript. Jane hung up the phone on the librarian of the information desk. She would call back later. “I like this. I like it.” Ellen sat heavily in her chair and scooted over next to Jane. She smelled of smoke, perspiration, and damp wool. It was a warm day for October, and the noisy fan Ellen insisted on had been blowing both fetid air and papers around until Parker snapped it off. “The slush you pulled? That story by the Mexican girl from Chicago?”

“Sandra Cisneros?” Jane’s pulse quickened. She had read the story to Rose only last night and put it on Ellen’s desk this morning after staying up late to write an impassioned plea for it. Ellen was notoriously difficult to impress, and her taste ran to dense excerpts of novels in translation or indecipherable prose poems. She had ignored all of Jane’s previous slush pile pulls, which was better than facing her withering judgment.

Jane had been sleeping most nights at Rose’s father’s co-op on East Eighty-Eighth Street; he commuted to Wall Street from Connecticut and almost never used the apartment where Rose was living. The first time Rose had visited Jane’s apartment in the East Village, one of the pimps had grabbed her breast while she was waiting for Jane to drop a sock with the key in it from the fourth-floor window. “It’s fine,” Rose had said. “It’s basically what Deedle tried last week!” But she had been shaken, and Jane had despaired. After she admitted to Rose that the same guy had taken to stalking up and down in front of her building, Rose insisted that Jane stay uptown with her. Jane was paying a hundred dollars a month in rent but making at least two hundred in tips over her $2.13 hourly wage working one night a week as a hostess at the Apple on Madison Avenue. It was walking distance to the co-op and the office, and once the Upper East Side ladies who lunched cleared out, the uncomfortable wicker chairs filled with businessmen eager to impress their clients. Men with expense accounts were happy to press cash on Jane, and she learned to smile flirtatiously while pocketing phone numbers that she later crumpled into the trash.

Rose referred to her father’s co-op as a “soulless box” with parquet floors, hospital-white walls, and vertical blinds that kept breaking, but at least the bathtub wasn’t in the kitchen, and there was an elevator. Rose wanted her to move in officially, but Jane didn’t enjoy her occasional run-ins with Rose’s handsome, creepy father. Anders Bergesen worked at an investment bank that Jane had just very recently learned was called “Salomon Brothers” and not “Salmon Brothers,” but her mental image of him in his double-breasted suit, barking out orders at the Fulton Fish Market—which she knew was all wrong but still amusing—had persisted. Jane preferred Deedle’s obvious, lecherous jollity to Anders’s chilly scrutiny and habit of opening closed doors without knocking, once catching Jane half-dressed in Rose’s bedroom, once standing in the bathroom doorway while Jane turned off the shower and called out “Who’s there?” until he finally left without saying a word. But Anders, between commuting and traveling, didn’t spend that much time in the apartment, so Rose and Jane had it mostly to themselves.

Both of them loved the frenetic energy of downtown much more than what Jane thought of as the mausoleum chill of the Upper East Side. They wanted to spend every minute together, and after work most of that time was below Fourteenth Street. Then they would take the subway back up to the co-op, or Rose would insist on a taxi if it was really late. Once, they used Rose’s father’s town car account to pick them up from the Pyramid Club even though they were almost next door to Jane’s apartment. That night Drew, who often joined them, also slept over, since the 7 train to Flushing was out of service again.

“I’m going to run this story by Teddy when he’s back from Southampton tomorrow,” Ellen was saying. “Good eye, Jane.”

“ She has Bette Davis eyes ,” Parker sang off-key. Parker, intimidated by Rose, spent a lot of time explaining things to Jane, such as how to pronounce Basquiat. (Jane squirmed at the memory of saying “Base-quee-at” instead of “Baa-skee-aat” in front of all of them.)

Behind Parker, Drew mouthed the word “douche,” drawing out the syllable and finishing with an audible “shaa.”

“I’m so glad you liked the story!” Jane said quickly to Ellen, turning away from Drew so she wouldn’t laugh. “Publishing her would be amazing! She’s only twenty-seven years old.”

“Well, settle down,” Ellen groused—already, Jane knew, regretting her slip in praising anyone or anything. “Teddy might not go for it. Might be too urban for him.” She relented when she saw Jane’s face. “But I’ll see what I can do,” she added grudgingly. “Go find another needle in the haystack.”

“Another pearl in the oyster,” Deedle said. “Which reminds me, one of you kids needs to go pick up the order at Citarella for the party tomorrow night.”

“And make sure there’s nothing in the refrigerator upstairs,” Parker added. “Also, Drew, would you call Jo to confirm that Clara is still across the pond?” He and EDA’s assistant in London spent hours determining who was where so as to prepare for any awkward encounters between EDA and his wife.

None of the interns had yet laid eyes on Clara, and Jane sometimes wondered if she even existed. Everyone dropped their voices when they spoke of her, and when she, Rose, and Drew compared notes, it seemed clear that Clara and EDA were living separate lives. Deedle referred to her as a “twat” more than once, and Parker screened her calls, often lying to her about EDA’s whereabouts. When he hung up, everyone pretended they hadn’t been listening.

EDA himself wasn’t around as much as Jane had hoped since she arrived at the East River Review . It had something to do with his failing marriage, a new apartment in London, an excursion to Morocco. When he burst into the office, always exuberantly, he took up all the space, as Rose had described. The rest of them fluttered around him adoringly, Parker particularly sycophantic, while even gruff Ellen cooed and touched his sleeve. He had hardly glanced at Jane, only once clapped her shoulder with a heavy hand and urged everyone to find him “the best words in the best order!”—which was, Drew told her later, a quote from the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. EDA’s latest novel, The Coldest War , was already garnering rapturous advance praise even though it wasn’t being published until early next year. There were rumors that he was to be photographed by Annie Leibovitz for an article titled “The Celebrity Writer” in Rolling Stone magazine. The interns hadn’t been invited to the summer issue party in Southampton, but tomorrow night’s soiree was at the town house, and it was all Drew, Jane, and Rose could do not to talk about it every second of every day. All three of them were officially Edward David Adams fans, as much for his magnetic good looks and commanding presence as for his writing, though they could each quote passages from his books. Jane hadn’t yet gotten used to the daily interaction—on the phone, in unpublished work, even in the occasional office drop-by—with literary stars she had only studied and read, and she was learning all the time about those she had never heard of before. Towering above all of them was EDA, whose talent, success, and charisma were the subject of much exaggerated swooning among them.

“Lord, I need a coffee,” Ellen groaned. “Jane, cull the slush dollars for me.”

Most of the unsolicited manuscripts arrived as required with self-addressed stamped envelopes to carry the firmly worded rejection letters or the slightly more encouraging rejection letters back to the hopeful writers. Some people clipped dollar bills to their envelopes, and those people never saw their precious work again. The editors often rifled through the slush box to snatch up the money, sometimes even the loose stamps, and although Jane was at first chagrined, she had become more cavalier, though she could not yet bring herself to pocket any of it. She found a few dollars, handed them over to Ellen, and plucked a stack of slush to bring upstairs.

“Don’t go far,” Parker warned. “We need you on call today.” Parker was wearing bright green corduroy pants and a canvas belt covered in little whales. Rose was convinced he used the Official Preppy Handbook as his bible; Jane, who knew Parker came from a small town just outside Pittsburgh, recognized and empathized with his desire to remake himself, though she could do without the lectures and the whales.

“I’ll just be upstairs.” Jane and Rose had arrived together, as they did most mornings. Rose had already disappeared, and Jane was eager to join her on the window seat. Jane had had plenty of friends when she was younger, and her Fishtown neighborhood was still filled with girls she had known growing up. But with each passing month she felt the distance grow between herself and everything that had come before New York.

There was no one like Rose, and already Jane couldn’t imagine her life without her. Most nights they went out, dancing at Danceteria, table hopping at the Odeon, gawking at Warhol at the Mudd Club. Even better were the nights they stayed in, ordering Chinese dumplings, perusing the Village Voice missed connections (“you: blue bag, blue eyes on the C train at dusk; me: black coat, Hemingway paperback, let you slip away at 96th”), and reading to each other. Jane basked in the glow of Rose’s enthusiasm for her writing; she carried her notebook everywhere and filled it with observations, lines, ideas. Rose’s stories were fully formed, neat, with subtle metaphors and devastating little turns. Jane loved them. She loved Rose’s fearlessness, her intelligence, her radiance. Rose wasn’t particularly passionate about her work; she got more pleasure out of tacking up her Polaroids or going over Jane’s stories with a painstaking precision that overwhelmed Jane with gratitude. With Rose’s encouragement, Jane wrote every day; she kept all her drained pens and counted them with satisfaction every time she had to buy a new one. She measured each story she plucked from the slush pile against her own stories. Hers were usually better, she and Rose agreed. But the gulf between her work and what the East River Review published still seemed wide. She and Rose kept a list of quotes from the author interviews that they transcribed, writing out their favorites and taping them to the wall above Rose’s bed. Jane hurried up the steep back stairs.

Rose was in her usual spot on the window seat, long legs tucked up under her. “I don’t even know how we’re supposed to get any work done,” she announced. “People have been in and out all day with their preparations.”

“Forget work,” Jane said. “Parker wants us at his beck and call.”

“Is Drew coming up?”

“He has to make some calls. Guess what? Ellen actually likes the Cisneros story. She’s showing it to EDA tomorrow.”

“Jane! You rock star!” Rose leaped up and gave Jane a hug, her joy immediate, genuine. “Last week Ellen told me I was ‘unpleasantly optimistic and naively undiscerning,’ so… anyway, now we can celebrate when we’re getting ready for the party! I have a surprise for you.”

“I’m not going to wear your jacket with the shoulder pads,” Jane warned. “I look like a football player.”

“That’s from the Norma Kamali show, I’ll have you know,” Rose scolded. “Trust me, you’ll be wearing shoulder pads to the office next year. But that blazer is for work! This is a party—you’ll see.”

The next night, as she and Rose waited for Drew, Jane learned the surprise was the brand-new Betsey Johnson dress that she had tried on a few weeks ago but didn’t buy. “I can’t!” she protested, but even as she said the words, she was slipping off her clothes to put it on.

“Jane, you’re sexy! You have to show it off! Lean over and pull your boobs into the bodice, like this…” Rose made a scooping motion. “If I had any boobs at all, I would totally wear this.”

Jane obediently maneuvered herself into the top and let the rest of the short dress flounce down. She spun in front of the mirrored closet doors. “I’m practically naked,” she complained, but she was dazzled by her appearance.

“Your bangs look perfect, and you can wear your black ankle boots. You can borrow my leather jacket. I’ll do your eye makeup and you’ll look just like Chrissie Hynde.” They had been listening to the Pretenders nonstop.

“Chrissie’s boobs wouldn’t be all—you know—like this,” Jane pointed out.

“Right,” Rose agreed. “She wishes!”

“Fine. What are you wearing? Still the puffy sleeves?”

“Yes, with the skinny belt and the chunky heels.”

“You’re going to be ten feet tall!” Jane flopped onto the bed, clean and cool.

“All the better to see eye to eye with Teddy.” Rose tapped her chin. “But I’ll still only be up to his shoulders. His broad shoulders.”

The buzzer interrupted their back-and-forth, and Rose ran into the other room to tell the doorman to let Drew up. Jane brought their empty glasses into the kitchen to refill them with wine and to pour a glass for Drew.

“Are you ready?” Drew asked when he came in, his hair taller and more gelled than usual. “I brought supplies.” He reached into his blazer pocket and pulled out a mixtape and a bindle of cocaine. Rose popped the tape into her dad’s stereo. Donna Summer. Drew took a framed photo of a horse off the wall. “I’ll cut some lines on Secretariat here.”

“That horse is named Betsy!” Rose corrected him. “My dad loves her more than he loves me.”

“Impossible!” Drew assured her, moving the white powder around niftily with a razor blade that he kept in his wallet.

“Is that from Paco again?” Jane didn’t know how she felt about Drew’s partying with the magazine’s art director, Paco, though their adventures did make for entertaining stories about Badlands on Christopher Street or Rawhide in the city’s gay neighborhood, Chelsea. Drew wanted Jane and Rose to come with them to a drag show, but Jane wasn’t sure she wanted to hang out with Paco outside of work. With his assertive artistic eye and confidently feminine mannerisms, Paco was like no one Jane had ever met before. Of the entire East River Review staff, he intimidated her the most: when he turned his coolly appraising gaze on her, it was as if he could see into her uncultured past and tiny closet of uninspiring clothes. She always felt as though he were one minute away from saying something so cutting that she would die.

It had been a lightning-quick education for Jane, who flushed as she remembered asking Rose if she thought Drew liked her. “Of course he likes me,” Rose had answered, looking at Jane quizzically. “Wait. Oh, Jane! You know that Drew likes boys, right?” As soon as Jane heard Rose’s revelation, it was blindingly clear. Once that got sorted, Jane thought about how Rose hadn’t teased her or made her feel stupid; she had given her the information she needed in a kind way and moved on. Now Drew sang, “ Jane’s lookin’ like hot stuff, baby, tonight ,” and he offered Rose a line. He patted his own chest. “Nice!”

“She does look hot, doesn’t she?” Rose quickly and efficiently snorted the coke through a ten-dollar bill, licked her finger, and rubbed the rest on her gums. Jane was impressed and annoyed by the rigmarole of cocaine, all its elaborate procedures and codes. The first and only time she had done it was last month with Drew in the tiny bathroom of the Blue & Gold Tavern on Seventh Street, right near her apartment. It had left a bitter taste in the back of her throat but had fueled her running the pool table for hours until Rose and Drew begged her to step away. Jane still hadn’t dared to play pool upstairs at the East End town house.

“Let me do your eyes too.” Rose hovered over Drew with an eye pencil, holding the mascara like a cigarette in her mouth.

“Make me look like Grace Jones.” Drew passed the framed photo of Betsy to Jane, who hesitated, then did the line. She shivered and sat up, her head suddenly clear.

“Truth or dare?” Rose asked around the mascara, tipping Drew’s head this way and that.

“Truth,” Jane answered, taking a long swallow of white wine to mask the taste of the coke dripping into her throat.

“What do you want most?” Drew jumped in, seamlessly continuing the game they often played.

Jane thought for a moment. “To publish a book,” she surprised herself by saying. It was a leap from her rapidly filling notebooks to an actual book, she knew, but she was getting better about saying aloud the things she hadn’t even fully articulated to herself. Her answer was a truth and a dare, she thought. Rose and Drew strode through the New York City streets drawing attention and second glances; when Jane was with them, she basked in their confidence and beauty, and when they bent toward her, she felt herself grow wittier, more assured. Bartenders showered her with free drinks, the handsome (married) chef at the Apple clutched his heart whenever she ducked into the kitchen, and, most gratifying of all, Rose and Drew seemed to believe that Jane was a real writer, that she would find success, that one day she would be featured in The New York Times with a bestselling novel and a killer outfit.

“No taking it back.” Rose smiled at her. “I know you’ll do it.”

“Truth or dare?” Jane asked Drew, a little flushed from the headiness of the truth she had told. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror again and thought briefly of her mother, whose strict rules about modest clothing, modest thoughts, and modest ambitions had dominated her childhood. Jane smiled at her own image. Hot stuff .

“Truth.” Drew did his line of coke, then submitted again to Rose’s ministrations.

“Tell us a secret,” Rose ordered.

Drew was quiet. “Okay,” he said finally. “My name is Joon-woo.”

Rose and Jane looked at each other over the top of his head. “Can we call you Joon-woo?” Rose asked.

“No,” Drew said firmly. “Joon-woo is my Flushing name. Drew is my Manhattan name.”

“Why Drew?” Jane filled everyone’s glasses with the last of the wine.

“I guess my parents thought Andrew sounded American? I lobbied for Elvis, of course.”

“Elvis would have worked.” Rose stepped back and admired her handiwork.

“Truth or dare, Rose?” Jane asked.

“Dare, obviously.”

“Tonight,” Drew said. “At the party. I dare you to tell EDA that you’d love to edit his work sometime.”

“What?” Rose laughed. “That would be crazy!”

“And,” Drew continued, “I dare you to call him ‘Teddy’ to his face.”

“That’s two dares!” Rose protested.

“Fine! Just the first one, then.”

“He’d be lucky if you did edit his work,” Jane said. She watched Rose carefully. All of them professed to adore EDA, with Drew leading the way; he had even mocked up a fake Interview magazine cover featuring himself as EDA’s “favorite girl.” Interns infatuated with the country’s most well-known writer was funny precisely because reciprocity was so far-fetched. But Rose had actually been speaking to him; she had breathlessly reported a chat about the delights of sushi and a longer discussion about what they were reading (Rose: Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred ; EDA: an unpublished manuscript in Italian by Umberto Ecco). Jane, whose faith and pride in Rose’s ability to charm anyone, still knew that EDA—older, married, famous—was out of reach. Even though they lounged around in his living room and held their breath when he careened into the office, he was from another world. Though tonight, she remembered, they would all three be entering that world officially.

“I’m sure he’ll be too drunk to remember anyway.” Drew stood up and gazed at himself in the mirror. His eyes met Jane’s. “You know what they say about an East River Review party…”

“I’ll do it,” Rose stated firmly. “You know I will.” She pulled the Polaroid out of her bag. “Smile, beauties,” she said.

To stay like this forever was what she could have answered earlier, Jane thought, as they stepped into the foyer of the town house, the whole place ablaze with lights and chatter and shrieks of laughter. It was the first time any of them had entered the town house through the front door. Deedle’s red scarf was wound around the slender neck of a marble statue, and Rose whispered, “Oh my god, Joan Didion!” and Jane saw the frail writer ahead of them. Drew plucked a white tulip from the hundreds in a vase on the round entrance table and tucked it behind his ear. Rose reached for her hand and together they started to climb the wide, curving staircase.