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By Root 874 0

a composer and the author of a study of Arnold Schoenberg and memoirs about his agoraphobia and his twin sister.) This was early in Shawn’s career, so early that he didn’t as yet truly have a career; his rebellious incursions against his father’s cloak of reticence and soft persuasion in Aunt Dan and Lemon, My Dinner with André (his conversational duet with André Gregory), and The Designated Mourner (the film version of which Pauline thought was a supreme feat of self-portraiture on Mike Nichols’s part, revealing his calculating worminess) lay ahead, along with those gnomic appearances in everything from The Princess Bride to Clueless to Gossip Girl. The playlets were not well received. The audience was seated on long wooden benches, designed for maximum puritan discomfort, and the monologues were so vacuum-sealed and off-putting—a fireman baroquely boasting about items he had stolen from arson sites (“That’s a terrible way to libel firemen, as a bunch of scavengers, the volunteer department here are total sweeties,” Pauline said), and, in another, a hospital patient ruminating aloud as if already dead while a mute nurse attends to duties—that one by one, then in accelerating numbers, audience members began bailing, too impatient to wait for intermission, the benches scraping loudly as we maneuvered our legs and buttocks to let the defectors pass. What kept us in our seats was the knowledge that, unbeknownst to the audience, Wally himself was seated several rows back, witnessing the exodus. Pauline felt bad for him, even though the one-acts weren’t to her liking either. “He does have talent,” she said afterward, “that’s the damned thing.” Talent wasn’t the great exonerator, but it needed to be defended, in Pauline’s view, because everything was arrayed against it. Regarding Hollywood, she would say, “Never underestimate how much those in power resent those with talent—talent being the one thing they can’t buy for themselves. But they never tire of fucking with it, that’s their talent.”

“Is she expecting you?” asked the editorial receptionist at The New Yorker when I visited Pauline at her office in the afternoon.

This may have been the receptionist whom Pauline referred to as Morticia, a chalky apparition with a remarkable ability to misplace phone messages or relay them after they were useless, to whose desk older male writers and editors were drawn, attracted to this inviting mixture of Pre-Raphaelite muse and sitting duck. In time, Morticia would write an erotic memoir of the married and single men she bedded with at The New Yorker (“bedded” being an inclusive verb, since some of the erotic action had taken place on the carpet), racking up an impressive scorecard for someone so inanimated. After enough visits qualified me as a semi-regular, she stopped asking if I was expected, simply buzzed me through. Whatever male writer or editor she was talking to would pause until I was safely out of range and then resume his erudite sales pitch.

“Hi, c’mon in,” Pauline would say, standing half-in, half-out of her office door. These were the days when The New Yorker’s offices were on West Forty-third Street and, in their beige palette, faint melancholic air of apathy, and stoic indifference to having the upholstery repaired, were usually compared to the faculty department of a small agricultural college or an insurance firm down on its luck. History may have haunted the halls, but it didn’t haunt the walls, which were bare of framed magazine covers or awards plaques that might be interpreted as showing off for visitors, institutional boasting. Ostentation was considered poor form and vulgar taste, with noise the rudest intruder of all, the sound of unmoderated laughter a breach of monastic protocol that would have the church mice poking their heads out doors and then retreating to add another link or two to the paper-clip necklace they were assembling. Some of this irritation was directed at Pauline because hers was one of the few writers’ offices that welcomed visitors and hosted conversations conducted at normal human volume