All Is Vanity (14 page)

This incident, when I’d padded it with some fictional material about Mrs. Larson and a few of the other more colorful members of our class and typed it out double spaced with wide margins, came to
eight pages and two lines, which I figured was close enough to the ten pages the New School catalog indicated were required to be considered for the class. Besides, having been a teacher, I knew that Mr. Berginsky might appreciate brevity.

Now I needed only to convince Ted that a class was worth the price of admission. Obviously, we were not poor—we had enough money to live in Manhattan—but Ted had a horror of profligacy and was convinced that the seemly way to live was never to spend more than was absolutely necessary. To this end, he’d kept track of his expenses ever since I’d known him, when they’d run heavily to books and cheese steaks. Since we’d married, one of my Christmas presents was invariably a ten-by-fourteen-inch, forest green, vinyl-bound ledger in which we both were to record every purchase, including items like shoelaces and Tic Tacs. I balked in the first few months of married life, and then often simply forgot, but when I neglected to make entries he spent hours searching for receipts, making estimates, and quizzing me four days after a meal about whether I’d had the chef or the garden salad, so disturbed was he by the notion of not knowing where our money had gone. Out of compassion for us both, I became more vigilant.

“What do you think of writing courses?” I asked casually, forcing a stack of newspapers into a brown paper bag at midnight on Sunday. We were tackling the IQ test that was New York garbage disposal. “Only cans in the blue bag, Ted!”

“Where does this go?” he held up the wastebasket from the bedroom.

I sighed impatiently. “Paper in clear, Q-Tips in black.”

“What about gum wrappers?”

“Foil or paper?” I was in charge of reading the bimonthly modifications and exhortations from the sanitation department. “And is
that plastic from hot and sour soup? Because Chinese food plastic is apparently not the same as other plastic.”

“What writing course?” Ted started down the stairs with a black plastic bag in one hand and a blue one in the other.

“Just, in general, I mean,” I said, leaning over the railing. “Do you think they’re a good idea?” I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. It was late, and I spoke quietly so as not to disturb the other tenants.

At the bottom of the stairs the door clicked shut, swung open again, and then feet tramped back up.

“Do I think someone can teach you how to write?” he whispered from the landing.

Ted had an annoying habit of cutting to the heart of a discussion.

“No,” I said, sidling past him at our apartment door with a load of newspapers, “but don’t you think that having an audience, deadlines, comments from someone who teaches in the Columbia MFA program, could be helpful?”

“It could be.” Ted followed me down with a clear bag bulging with yellow pages covered in my handwriting. “You’re throwing all this out?”

“It’s just early drafts.”

“Wow!” He looked pleased and held the door open for me with his foot. “Then you must be pretty far along.”

“Pretty far,” I said. “Not done yet, though.”

“I’ve heard Anita Brookner writes a novel every summer,” he said. “But I’d think your first one would probably take a little longer.”

“Ted.” I looked at him seriously. “It’s going to take quite a while longer, you know.”

“Oh, I know. I know.” He was holding the recycling bag at eye level, trying to read from the crumpled pages. Firmly, I wrenched the sack from his grip and set it on the sidewalk.

“Simon thinks I should take this class at the New School. Just to give me some feedback.”

“Feedback?” Ted and I agreed that jargon was one of the banes of the modern world.

“You know what I mean.” We were wandering down the street now, as was our custom.

“But won’t you have to read other people’s work, then?”

“Of course. That would be fun.”

“Well, sure it would be fun, but that’s time you could be spending on your own writing.” We’d turned into the Korean grocer’s, and he picked up a package of sesame candies. “Do I like these?”

“You like the ones from the place on Fifth Avenue better.”

He put them back, and we inspected the mélange of specialties from many lands available at the hot food buffet, including but certainly not limited to baked ziti, Swedish meatballs, corned beef and cabbage, turkey with gravy, and teriyaki chicken, and then circled the compact but impressively varied produce display. I was delighted to discover that I could buy shallots at three in the morning.

“I think I’ll get the sesame candies,” Ted said finally.

“I’d have to submit something to see if I could get in,” I began, when we were out on the street again.

“I’m sure you could get in!” Ted exclaimed. Ted also had an endearing way of letting me know he was on my side.

“I’d like to do it,” I said. “I think it would help to have other people read my work.”

“But, Margaret, how can they help you? These people will be lawyers and accountants; they won’t be writers. They’ll be …” He hesitated.

“Just like me? Except currently embarked on successful alternate careers? Is that what you were going to say?”

“Why can’t you just ask Simon to read your work without taking the class?”

“Ted! I can’t do that! He’s a published writer. We’re not equals.” I stopped. “Why do I have to fight you every step of the way with this? I’m trying to do something extremely difficult, probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, and all you do is hamper, hamper, hamper. We’re not talking about a lifetime commitment here. This is one night a week.”

“All right, all right,” Ted said, “you asked what I thought. How much does it cost?”

When I told him, he held up his package of sesame candies ruefully. “Shouldn’t have bought these,” he said.

That evening, when I logged on to explain to Letty that the external discipline and structure of a class were the key to whipping my novel together, I collected a letter from her.

M
—

Should one accept a job because one has fallen in love with a blond office?

“The finish on the paneling is … how can I describe it?…” (remember this is Michael, a man who has no trouble assigning a name to Titian’s favorite blue) “… sort of a clover honey. No, more of a maple sugar with bronze undertones.” This is what he said when he got home from another “get-acquainted” meeting tonight
.

It’s wood, Margaret. It is not edible. But there is a private chef for the staff, who serves, as far as I can tell from the menu Michael described, a sort of Asian/French/Italian/Southwestern mélange. Fusion with a twist—or a tornado
.

“I can bring a guest,” he said
.

The ultimate selling point is Paul, who would be Michael’s assistant and is engaged to the Xerox man. I sincerely believe that Michael would do anything to escape the daily strain of his relationship with the departmental secretary at Ramona. She has this habit of sighing heavily—it’s really, at least according to Michael’s imitation, almost a groan, as if someone were pushing a letter opener into her abdomen—whenever anyone other than the chair gives her work, and Michael’s afraid to ask her to do anything for him. In fact, I once caught him addressing envelopes for
her.
He always makes his own copies and the machine inevitably breaks down and then he has to sneak away and spend the rest of the afternoon peeking out of his office at half-hour intervals to see if someone’s come along who knows how to fix the thing
.

And, honestly, I can’t blame him for being dazzled by a fancy office, given the grimy, dank slot he’s working in now
.

“It doesn’t matter where I work,” I remember him saying his first week there—I’d come in to help him arrange the furniture, and I think may actually have burst into tears when I realized that I was looking not at some sort of oddly speckled gray wall, but at the sole window (university policy dictates window washing only once every three years). It was only because they wanted him so badly that he got any window at all. As far as arranging the furniture, by the way, we’d had no options; everything had to be pressed in a line against the cinderblock. That afternoon, he’d tapped his head and told me not to worry. “It’s what goes on in here that counts,” he’d said
.

This, of course, is exactly what I worry about in the case of this new wood-paneled, cuisines-of-the-world, helpful-and-well-connected-secretary job. The point of this position, as far as I can make out—which, I admit, is not extremely far, given that the only details I’ve been given are the perks—seems to be making art more accessible to the public,
when what Michael’s always been happiest doing is his theoretical work, which, quite frankly, makes art less accessible. As an academician, Michael has always been of the opinion that art exists for its own sake—whether people see it is irrelevant. (Feel free to be aghast at this—everyone else is.) But now he’s going to have to believe, or at least pretend to believe, just the opposite
.

“You’re sure there’ll be enough for you up here?” I asked, tapping my own head. Sadly, he seemed unable to recall the gesture
.

“Sure,” he said, “I’ll be helping people experience art.”

“Pod person!” I shrieked, pointing an accusatory finger. “What have you done with my husband?”

“What do you mean?” he asked. All innocent. They’re clever, those pod people
.

“Michael,” I reminded him, “you don’t care about people.”

“I care about some people,” he said, wrapping his arms around me. “I care about my wife and my children and I’d like them to have a decent life for a change.”

You see what I mean about their cleverness?

But here’s the thing, Margaret. Already I was hoping he would persuade me that it was right, that it would be good for art, for humanity, for us. I wanted him to take that job. I wanted to be a pod, too. Not for the sake of the office, of course; I would not have the office, or even very much of the food, despite the guest privileges and what I anticipate to be a liberal use of doggie bags, but because I could already sense the relief it would bring. I’ve felt for years—how can I describe this?—like I’ve been trying to stretch the double-bed-sized sheet of our resources over the king-sized mattress of our needs. It’s exhausting. Not only that, it’s impossible. And now it seems that Michael will be bringing home several large shopping bags from Bed Bath & Beyond. Also, I can imagine that it might be quite delightful when conversing with, say, Alex Prescott, to
know she knows my husband has a job with a touch of glamour and puissance
.

“Wait!” you say. “Michael will be working for a museum,” you say. “He will not be the CEO of a major corporation.” And I say to you: “this is the Otis. You know the Otis. No one has a bigger endowment than the Otis. Plus, Michael will be up there, the number four, or at the very least, the number five guy.” He explained it to me like this: the people on the next rung down have espresso makers in their offices. Michael’s espresso maker is in his assistant’s office, and Michael will not have to learn to operate it to enjoy a teeny cup of superstrong coffee with a twist of lemon peel whenever he desires. (During regular business hours, of course. Michael would never ask an assistant to stay late just to make coffee.)

“Well,” I said (this is to Michael, not to you), “it would be a change. Maybe we can put in a dishwasher.”

This is the way it is, Margaret, after four children. My first thoughts are for appliances
.

Yours, with dreams of high thread counts and low-energy drying cycles
,

L

My admission letter arrived one week later. I was ecstatic at the confirmation of my skill as a writer I believed it implied and had even decided that it meant I could easily get into Columbia’s MFA program if I so chose, when the credit card receipt also slid from the envelope and I remembered that this class was a moneymaker for the New School and for Professor Berginsky, so they were unlikely to turn many prospective students away. Nevertheless, I was in and was eager to see how quickly my novel would shoot forward, now that I would have guidance, supervision, and like-minded companionship.