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By Root 1284 0

take turns watching her to make sure she doesn’t slip outside for a cigarette or try to clean the house. It feels ridiculous to be babysitting a grown-up that way, especially someone as independent and vital as Kay. I don’t like it and I hope I never have to do it again. What something like that does to your own dignity makes you question whether it’s worth the cost. However, partly as a result of her confinement, Kay’s strength, if not her health, returns quickly, and soon she is begging to be let outside. It starts with a few errands—picking up her own medicine at the pharmacy, for instance—and soon she is ready to visit the store. As her jailer on that day when she first goes back, I make her swear that after dropping off some money she will come home immediately. “Oh, I promise,” says Kay, crossing her heart dramatically. The next time I see her it’s nine hours later, at the end of the night shift. The following day she slips out once more, and after that it is right back to the old schedule, and so much for our plans to close the store.

D.I.Y.

EVERYONE WAS AFRAID THAT THE PARIS REVIEW WOULD FOLD without George, but once the collective concern for the magazine became clear, folding was no longer the issue. The issue was who would run the place. The board wanted to bring in someone from outside right away and already had several candidates in mind, as we learned from the newspapers. At first it looked as if the longtime editors wouldn’t even get one issue to prove we were up to the job. However, with some clever convincing from the staff, the board members realized they had to at least give us a try if they expected anyone to stick around and help them keep the magazine going. The search was thus suspended while the board “reassessed.” No one thought they were seriously thinking about letting us run the place, but maybe, we thought, if we do a good enough job, they’ll have no choice.

Thus there’s been a change in atmosphere: with something like a year to prove ourselves, we’ve dropped the slacker routine. No more wandering into the office late or missing deadlines. No more extended absences for the sake of skiing or finishing a novel. Painfully, about half the staff has voluntarily departed or been let go, resulting in hugely increased productivity from the remaining editors. All in all, it’s considerably less “fun” now than George would have liked, but it’s also a lot more efficient. Years of accumulated errors are being purged, and one of the results is that we’ve put out some of the strongest issues in a long time.

Yet we still don’t have a circulation manager, a contracts specialist, or an IT professional. The office is still located in the Manhattan medialand equivalent of Nunavut, and we still let twenty-three-year-old nobodies edit Nobel laureates. There may be less pool playing and fewer business trips to the Playboy Mansion, but the office still feels like that of a college newspaper rather than arguably the most famous literary magazine in the world.

This is dangerous. As long as the Review clings to its amateur past, another fiasco is inevitable. And this time it’s going to matter.

WE ALL HAVE new roles at the Review since George’s death, and one of the responsibilities that has somehow ended up in my lap is overseeing the anthology series that the ten-thousand-dollar mistake came out of. Truly, it’s the sort of thing that could only happen at the Review. Not only does the ten-thousand-dollar mistake strongly argue against giving me this particular job, but overseeing the anthology means coordinating an important nationwide reading series, and as someone who once had a calendar from the wrong year hanging over his desk for eight months and couldn’t figure out why he kept missing appointments (“What do you mean my doctor’s appointment was two days ago?”), I should be banned categorically from any sort of job that involves booking people’s plane tickets or anything as logistically complicated as staging a public event.

The most stressful part of the job is dealing with the authors themselves. Some