Page 25 of The Last Book Party

I laughed. “My paramour? What year do you think this is? Trust me, nobody goes on dates like that anymore. Nobody even dates.”

“Don’t they? That’s a travesty—and a waste.”

Henry handed me a tiny cassette tape and asked me to type up the “writing” he had dictated into a recorder the night before. All too familiar with typing from a Dictaphone, I put on the headset and tapped my foot to start the tape. It was slow going. Henry spoke in rapid bursts and I often had to stop and rewind to catch the flow of words. But soon I realized how much I liked having my head filled with his gravelly voice as he conjured an image and told a story. Once, when a sentence took a wrong turn, I heard “No, no, that won’t do. Try this…” and I had to rewind, find the original line of thought and connect the new words, which made me feel as though I wasn’t just typing, but that we were collaborating. A few times on the tape, Henry came up with a clever turn of phrase and chuckled in a way that made me smile, so unabashed was his pleasure in his own wit. One time, I laughed out loud and looked up to find Henry at his desk watching me. Embarrassed, I said, “Well, you are kind of funny.”

After more than a week working for Henry, I had come to see how much he liked not just saying something witty or surprising, as Tillie did, but also witnessing—savoring, even—my reaction. He would say something clever and peer closely at me, waiting to see if I got his double entendre. It was egotistic but also endearing how he smiled at me as soon as I laughed at something he’d said. He clearly took joy in playing with language and soliciting a response, but I think he also craved appreciation. The cachet of being a long-timeNew Yorkerwriter probably was not enough to soothe the sting of receding from acclaim.

I couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t competition between Henry and Tillie. Tillie’s summer was affirming her growing prominence: her new collection had been reviewed glowingly inThe New York Timesin early June and she had recently had a poem accepted byPoetry. But Henry continued to suffer Malcolm’sindifference to his memoir and the uncertainty of the new regime at the magazine. This not only was an affront to Henry’s ego, but also had a potential impact on his bank account.

Downstairs that afternoon to get a glass of iced tea, I heard a conversation on the back porch. I could tell from Henry’s deep, petulant tones that he was upset and from Tillie’s slightly impatient cadence that she was trying to appease him. The pitch of their discussion got more intense, the words louder, while I looked for a clean glass. Unable to find one, I took a dirty glass from the dishwasher. As I rinsed it, I heard Henry’s voice:

“Should I just ask, then? It seems… unseemly.”

Tillie: “Have some balls.”

“Tallulah.”

Her full name was Tallulah? How had that detail not been included in his memoir?

“I am serious,” Tillie said, in a hands-on-hips voice. “You deserve it, for longevity alone.”

“I would rather not play the age card.”

“Play the hand you’re dealt. If writers are going to be given contracts with annual salaries, you should be one of them.”

“That’s a given. But asking? It makes me feel like some kind of tradesman.”

I heard a chair scraping against the back porch and walked quickly out of the kitchen and upstairs, wishing I hadn’t eavesdropped. I didn’t like to think of Henry as being propped up by his imperious wife. He wasn’t some aspiring writer; he had a prolific and acclaimed career. He was disciplined and ambitious, showing up every day at his typewriter to get the work done. Why didn’t Tillie value that? For all her poetic talent, she really wasn’t very artful with her husband.

21

I’d grown more comfortable at the house, falling into the gentle disorder of Henry’s world. Unlike my parents, who could prepare breakfast, read the paper, change clothes, go to the beach, host friends for lunch, shop for groceries, and spend the afternoon gardening, all without leaving evidence of their presence, Henry couldn’t get up to fetch a book on the other side of the room without leaving a trail of items behind him. He would routinely lose track of his reading glasses, his notes from his latest interview, his wallet, or the mug of tea he had poured himself five minutes earlier.

I could always find what he was looking for. I liked returning Henry’s things, placing them on his desk without a word. “Miraculous,” he would mumble when I presented a “lost” item, as if my finding his things was more notable than his misplacing them in the first place.

I soon realized that, unlike the impression I’d gotten from the first chapters of Henry’s memoir, Tillie and Henry spent little time together. Tillie never popped into Henry’s office, and he never mentioned her poems. They even ate separately, Tillie standing up and Henry while doing a crossword puzzle at the kitchentable. When they played tennis, they played mixed doubles with other partners. Henry loved backgammon, but played only with his male friends, usually Mark Graft, an editor atNewsweek, or Les Falcon, a retired botanist who lived up the road. Henry and Tillie were often in the kitchen when I arrived, but Tillie always seemed to be only half listening to Henry, especially if he was complaining about two of his pet peeves: the rambling ledes ofNew York Timesarticles or the ascendancy of “chroniclers of the rich and famous” like Dominick Dunne and brash, young fiction writers like Bret Easton Ellis. Tillie always seemed relieved at my arrival, presumably so I could take over the job of listening to Henry and she could get to work.

“Oh, share this all with Eve,” she’d said one morning, in the guise of being helpful, as if she was asking Henry to do a favor for me instead of getting me to do a favor for her. “This kind of talk is catnip to someone like her!”

When she wasn’t ignoring me, Tillie often spoke as if I wasn’t there. One morning when Henry offered me some leftover bacon, Tillie whisked the plate away before I could respond, dumped the bacon in the garbage, and told Henry, “Eve doesn’t eat pork!” She shook her head and smiled at me, leaving the room before I could tell her that I loved bacon.

Having noticed my disappointment, Henry picked up a strip of bacon from his own plate and held it toward me. When I hesitated, he sniffed the bacon and exhaled with pleasure. “Mmm, the two most important food groups: salt and fat.” With a mischievous grin, he held it toward me. “You know you want it.”

“OK, you win,” I said, and took the bacon.

“I knew you couldn’t resist,” Henry said as he carried his plate to the sink.

“We all have our weaknesses.”

He wiped his hands on a dishtowel and turned toward me.

“Ain’t that the truth.”

Upstairs, we worked in companionable silence, Henry clacking steadily on his typewriter while I took notes from yellowed newspaper clippings about canal construction. When the work made me drowsy, I got up to stretch and look at the books on the tall shelf by the window. Henry stopped typing.

“There are so many here that I haven’t read,” I said, not mentioning that there were several that I had never heard of. Henry came and stood by my side and pointed to the top shelf. “What would you say is the common theme here?” he asked.

I scanned the titles. They included, among others, an ancient-looking copy ofRobinson Crusoe, hardcovers ofMiddlemarchandInvisible Man, an Evelyn Waugh novel,Scoop, an old paperback of the children’s bookAmelia Bedelia, a novel calledZuleika Dobson, a few historical biographies, and a spiral-bound cookbook,Snappy Eats of 1932: From Soup to Nuts.

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