Lucking Out - James Wolcott [43]
The phone rings. Mr. Shawn would like to speak to her now, if she’s available.
“I’ll be right there.” Sigh. To me: “He’s probably going to implore me to substitute ‘posterior’ for ‘rump.’ As if anyone has ever said, ‘He gave her a smack on the posterior.’ ”
Pauline had regular tussles with Shawn over the years over the fine points of acceptable slang and vulgarity, generating a defensiveness within Shawn and a resentment on the part of the staff that Pauline was pursuing liberties that others had the good grace not to drag out of the locker room. They seem almost antique today, these battles over words for body parts and suitable euphemisms, when The New Yorker of the Tina Brown–David Remnick era publishes the humorist Ian Frazier’s irregular series of Cursing Mommy routines (“Fuuuuuuuck! Ow! Jesus Christ! Fucking shit! I stubbed my fucking toe!”) and its dance critic can casually refer to a plié as “the cunt-dip,” but they were quite stressful for both parties at the time, a small-scale war of attrition that was a big wear-down. When it became too animated, Pauline was advised (by whom, she didn’t say) that Shawn had been having heart problems and pressing him just might push him over the top. Pauline had been advised this so many times that she suspected it was a form of emotional blackmail, intended to make her ease up, and so whenever the issue of Shawn’s fragile ticker came into editorial play, I would grab my chest and wave my arm in the air like Redd Foxx’s Fred Sanford staggering backward, feeling the “big one” coming on. I was careful not to do this when anyone else was around.
“This shouldn’t be long,” Pauline says. “Here’s the new issue of the magazine. Lore Segal has a wonderful story in it.”
It’s also a long story, so instead I go puddle jumping from cartoon to cartoon. Pauline returns in record time.
“Turned out he wanted to ask for some other change, and was so relieved when I just gave in without making an issue of it. It feels so good not to fight.”
“That’s what my parents used to say between bouts.”
“We’ll have to hurry now.”
Pauline brushes her thin, neatly kept gray hair (the ripplier hairdo in the jacket photo of I Lost It at the Movies a historical curio), knots a scarf around her neck, assuming it’s chilly out, which, let’s stipulate, it is, slips into her brown suede coat, and grabs her carrying case by the handle. If it’s heavy, I’ll do the carrying, but this time it’s not. Out her office door we go, passing the miniature satanic mills of Harold Brodkey’s tireless genius, muscling out countless drafts of his Proustian epic that was provisionally titled A Party of Animals, then later retitled The Runaway Soul (an alteration that Edmund White called a catastrophic mistake), or perhaps it was a separate novella or story endowing the out-tray. I never met Brodkey in the transcendent flesh during my visits to Pauline’s office. Our run-in would come later, at an Upper West Side book party, like the kind you read about in novels about the fast-fading Literary World, when I genially noted that Brodkey (who prided himself on his height, as he prided himself on everything) wasn’t as tall as James Dickey, whom I had just returned from interviewing down in Columbia, South Carolina. To which Brodkey snapped, in one of the great impromptu non sequiturs ever to fly in my direction: “Dickey doesn’t live in New York and put up with what I have to put up with.” I laughed, assuming Brodkey was kidding about the invisible ceiling restricting the towering climb of his true full height (i.e., that he’d be a few inches taller if New York literary society hadn’t stunted his growth), but a kidder he was not. It was an incident that would oil-spill into print, in the pages of the New York Observer to be precise, but Brodkey is gone now, the monumental presence