• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“George!” I blurt out.

George makes a noise like a vacuum cleaner that just inhaled a gerbil. Then his eyes pop open like two window shades with their drawstrings plucked.

“Who’s there?” he commands, bleary-eyed. “I say: reveal yourself.”

“George, it’s me, Ben.”

For a split second his eyes narrow and his brow deepens in an expression of what appears to be fury, but then I realize that he’s only trying to get his bearings, which he does, gradually, while remaining splayed out in a pose that would be sexy if George were, say, female and half a century younger.

“Ben …”

“George, is this a bad time? I can come back.”

“… late night, with Norman at Elaine’s, too many …”

“I see.”

“Snuphuluphuluph!!” He gives himself a good vigorous scratch on the belly, which seems to wake him up.

“Okay,” he says finally. “Shall we have our little discussion?”

“Sure.” I take a breath. George pulls close a chair and rotates it to face me, interrogation-style. I feel like I’m back in boarding school—the sense of guilt, the illicit chemicals flowing in my blood—only this time the headmaster isn’t wearing any pants.

“Ben—”

“George—”

“I—”

“You—”

“The Vollmann—”

“The what?!”

The Vollmann—a piece by the acclaimed novelist William S. Vollmann—was something I had recently brought to the magazine and was scheduled to run in an upcoming issue.

“It’s a fine story,” George says, “but it needs work. Let’s go through it line by line.”

So that’s what this is about? Here I am fearing for my job, my sense of self-worth as a human being, and all he wants is to do a little line editing? I almost want to howl with relief: a reprieve, a reprieve! I’m still an editor! For the next half hour George and I huddle over the manuscript together, and honestly it’s just as much of a thrill as it was when I first came to New York after college, as ready to be dazzled as a Nebraska farm girl stepping off a Greyhound bus in Hollywood. (The detour into porn would come soon enough.) George is a brilliant line editor, especially of dialogue, and rather mysterious in his methods. Sometimes the cuts are obvious, and sometimes not, but the results are almost always an improvement.

“You’re a genius, George,” I tell him after we finish. “Can I go now?”

He looks at me solemnly. “Actually, there’s something else.”

Uh-oh.

“As you know,” he continues, “I do not aspire to be the sort of boss who arouses fear or intrudes on personal lives, so when I say this, don’t think of me as an elder but rather as a pal, a concerned pal. I hope you will not mind my saying that for a while now you have not seemed your usual lively, intense, if somewhat too anxious self. You’ve been a bit, how shall I say, blue. Down in the dumps. And I wanted to ask, Is everything okay?”

Startled by the question, not to mention the exceedingly gentle way in which it is asked, my initial reaction is to answer it honestly. But then, knowing that the worst thing I can do is to admit that I’m burned out, I dissemble again:

“I’m fine, George, really, there’s nothing—”

“THEN WHY HAVEN’T YOU BEEN COMING TO WORK?” he thunders, and at that point I realize I must tell him something, and it better not be a promise to read the slush, so I begin by describing my life on Staten Island, the indignity of our new surroundings, the basement, the extended family from Korea wanting to share beds and clothes, and George, to whom all of this is news, listens raptly, inert, his jaw dropping lower and lower until he says:

“You poor, poor chap. What a wretched existence. I had no idea. Is there any prospect of an exit?”

So I tell him about Gab’s fast-fading hopes for a business that, in addition to repaying her parents, would provide the income necessary for regaining our independence. George’s reaction is curious. His ears prick up, his eyes brighten and he leans forward:

“Did you say a deli?” he asks.

I nod.

“As in a corner store, selling lottery tickets and the like?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“Marvelous.”

“I’m sorry?” I cannot have