I still longed for the library carrel smelling of dust and mold, for the warm dark cave where I could spend my life reading sagas about honor killings, about women with thieves' eyes bringing disaster down on the men who ignored the warnings. I felt lucky to have the job, though it wasn't what I'd planned. Sometimes I imagined that my colleagues were hiding something from me, and later, when my work required hiding something from them, I was grateful for my cloak of invisibility. Only the mailroom guys and the messenger called out, "Hey, Simon!" If my fellow editors were present, they looked surprised, as if they'd seen someone warmly greeting an apparition. I imagined that my colleagues closed their doors as I walked past them along the labyrinthine corridors, but that would have meant that they were acknowledging my presence. They looked past me, or through me, as if I were a ghost, and I began to feel like one, haunting the office. After I'd been there for months, they treated me like someone whose name they were embarrassed to have forgotten. I liked the smell of coffee that greeted me in the morning, unlike my coworkers, who ignored me and who seemed to think I wouldn't be there long enough to bother getting to know. I liked reading the modern poets and novelists we published, writers who hadn't been taught at Harvard, many of them European, nearly all of them alive.
I liked the free books I could steal from the carts in the hall and from people's offices. The sense that every day could be my last made me feel like the medieval monks who kept skulls on their desks to remind them of their final end. Officially, my job as a junior assistant editor involved going through the "slush pile" of unsolicited manuscripts, rejecting hopeful first-time authors and waiting to be fired.
By the fall, my uncle had secured an entry-level position for me at Landry, Landry and Bartlett.īy the time I was assigned to edit Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic, I had been at Landry, Landry and Bartlett for six months, much of which I'd spent trying to figure out what I was doing there. All that time, in secret, my mother was also working hard, working on her brother-in-law, my uncle, the influential literary critic and public intellectual Madison Putnam, who-through his prolific writings, relentless social climbing, strong opinions, quotable bons mots, and eagerness to enter the fray of every literary controversy-had risen above his working-class origins.
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