Authors: Linda Lee Peterson
Edited to Death (2 page)
Here’s something I can count on: If the phone rings twice before nine on a Friday
morning, neither one of those calls is likely to be from the California State Lottery.
It’ll be some carpool rearrangement or the automated voice at Sears telling me that,
at long last, that extra special drill bit is in. That’s about as good as early morning
news gets.
At our house, we’ve got the bell turned up to dangerous decibel levels in order to
hear it over the early morning racket—plummy voices on National Public Radio doing
stories about imperiled loons or loony voices doing stories about imperiled plums,
the kids squabbling over the last onion bagel, dogs and cats complaining about breakfast—right
here, right now, and make it snappy!—and Anya, our melancholic Nordic au pair caroling
from upstairs, “Maggie! Have you black tights without runners? Mine are too holey.”
A person could get a headache. But through the din one fine fall morning, I heard
that
brrring! brrring!
and Michael shouting, “Let the machine pick it up. It’s nobody good. I know it.”
But I couldn’t. Not in the morning. Could be the lottery. The first caller was my
freshman-year roommate, Sara Jenkins. She lives in London now, with her brilliant-but-dithery
investment banker husband. When I picked up the phone she whispered, “Maggie, it’s
me. I need to know something quick.”
“Sara? What’s wrong?”
“Listen carefully,” she said. “What happens eight days after the Nones of each month?”
“The Ides.”
“Thanks, you’re great. I knew you’d know.”
Through the transatlantic crackle, I could tell Sara had her hand cupped around the
receiver. I pictured her, dressed in her respectable English matron sweater and skirt,
huddled in a corner of their elegant but drafty Sloane Square house, making surreptitious
phone calls.
“Why? Why are you whispering? What’s going on?”
“We’re entertaining some business chums of Richard’s—all weekend. By teatime I’d run
out of small talk, so we broke out the Trivial Pursuit. I’m supposed to be upstairs
searching out a sweater—it’s like Siberia in the house, as usual. I’ve got to go.”
“You spent Richard’s cold, hard cash to cheat?”
“To get a wedge? You bet.” She giggled. “Richard’s money? What kind of a feminist
are you, Maggie? Besides, it’s English money—it’s not worth anything anyway.”
And she was gone. Without looking up from the paper, Michael said, “What’s wrong with
Sara? Her hollandaise separating again?”
“Nope. She was cheating at Trivial Pursuit.”
Michael lowered the paper and shook his head. “That woman needs to get a job. Take
her mind off all this domestic competition.”
“She said it didn’t matter. English money isn’t worth anything. Is that right? I thought
it was our money or Malaysian ringgits or something that isn’t worth anything.”
Michael said, “Mmmm,” and returned to the sports page. He looked like a man who should
be reading the business page. Six feet of respectability, packaged as usual in a starched
white shirt with French cuffs. Gray suit, red silk tie, and his father’s watch on
a chain. Of course, when he wasn’t dressed like this—as he was every work day of his
life—he looked like a not-very-successful panhandler. Threadbare blue jeans or cords
and an unfortunate collection of ratty sweatshirts. Michael was a man who’d missed
out on the entire retail concept of casual clothes. But he wasn’t reading the business
page; he was deep in some bloodthirsty recounting of an ice hockey game, wondering
if it was still too late to try out for the San Jose Sharks.
But about Sara, he had a point. She thought nothing of picking up the telephone to
ask me if making hollandaise in a blender would keep it from separating, or to read
me Colin’s sonnet for school so I could fix the rhyme scheme. Since my major accomplishment
in life is accumulating useless bits of information, we talked almost weekly. Sara
carries almost no peripheral information around in her head, preserving all that space
for life on a higher plane. She volunteers for underfunded pacifist groups and tutors
graduate students in calculus.
Half an hour later, I was enjoying five minutes of the kind of solitude and silence
only mothers with young children can appreciate. Lunches made, arguments mediated,
socks found, animals fed, family out the door.
Josh was in school, developing interpersonal skills, experimenting with spatial relationships,
and learning an occasional fact about history or grammar on the side. When I was ten,
I was busy trying to wrest the four-square court away from Elise McElroy, who outweighed
me by twenty-two pounds. If I wasn’t locked in combat with Elise, I was trying to
figure out why Dick and Jane never watched television, the activity of choice among
my peers. Josh is the worrier in the family. If something troubles his serene environment,
he develops brutal stomach cramps or throws up, usually without warning. Just as well
he’s not wrestling to the death over four square.
Zachary, my darling youngest, was in kindergarten. It was Friday. That meant he was
acting out his hostile fantasies about me with the fantasy facilitator who came in
once a week. Of course, when I was five and foolish enough to act on a hostile fantasy,
I got sent to my room.
Michael was off giving obscure and probably un-followable tax advice to the undeserving
rich.
“A tax lawyer does God’s work,” he announced to the children many a morning over breakfast.
“Especially if he’s a Democrat.” Since the boys weren’t yet up to ambiguous antecedents,
they never called him on whether the Democratic “he” was God or the tax lawyer. Nor,
for that matter, did I. I like a certain amount of peace with my bagel. Besides, Michael
took such pure, undiluted pleasure in cooking up tax dodges for his foundation and
nonprofit clients, I figured he deserved to deliver a self-righteous soliloquy or
two over the breakfast table. Plus, he dressed the part.
So was I enjoying the bliss of post-breakfast solitude? Of course not. I was fretting
over magazine deadlines. Should I go up to the computer waiting in the den and finish
the research on “The Literate Manager: Role Models in Literature for Contemporary
Business People,” do an outline for “Maturely Mozart: Learning to Love Amadeus Late
in Life,” write a book review on a promising, if inaccessible, first novel (lots of
sentence fragments and nanotech allusions) or do a first draft on “Goldilox: A Guided
Tour through the Bay Area’s Lox-and-Bagel Emporia.” Of the four, only the Goldilox
piece really stirred me. But that was probably because my bagel and cream cheese cried
out for a little company.
I sighed. There were some non-work alternatives. But they seemed like worse work than
work; there were bulbs to plant, the checkbook to balance, and flea collars ready
and waiting for our menagerie of three cats (Batman, Robin, and the Riddler) and a
dog. Raider, a German shepherd, named for Oakland’s silver and black football hooligans,
came and put his head in my lap and whimpered. He was bored, too.
I looked around the sunny kitchen. It was too nice a day to do any of those things.
Fall in Oakland is inspiring, as it is all over Northern California. Crisp, warm days,
with just enough trees turning and shedding to give the place atmosphere. Not enough,
on the other hand, to make even the most dutiful householder haul out a rake each
and every weekend.
With all the shortcomings of our sixty-year-old, five-bedroom, permanently disordered
house, there were beautiful views from every room.
I decided the choices needed further study, poured another cup of Ethiopian Mocha
Harrar (to live in the Bay Area any time in the last quarter-century and not be into
coffee was to risk treatment as a social leper) and settled down to an intensive study
of the jumbled word game in the
San Francisco Chronicle
. I looked around for a clean spoon to stir with, settled for the handle end of a
knife, and took a sip. I figured I had another hour of peace before Anya, our au pair-cum-art
student, breezed in from her “Painter-as-Poet” class with still another insight about
the references to textiles in Amy Lowell’s poetry.
Then the phone rang again.
“Margaret?”
American-born and Oxford-educated Quentin Hart was the only person who ever called
me Margaret. Of course, he was also the only person I’ve ever known who gargled with
mineral water, honestly feared for the souls of people who wore manmade fabrics, and
refused to wear contact lenses because they seemed spiritually dishonest. I was Quentin’s
“discovery.” He was my editor at
Small Town
magazine—and my friend.
“Quentin. God, it’s good to hear from you.”
“Any particular reason?”
I looked around the kitchen, still cluttered with Peter Rabbit dishes, two sick philodendra
that needed re-potting, and a week’s worth of newspapers. Quentin lived in impeccable
near-solitude. Having understood—and then transcended—the need to marry well, he had
systematically divested himself of clutter, both physical and emotional. He and his
wife owned
Small Town
, California’s chicest city magazine. Actually, Claire owned the magazine, or almost;
she stood to inherit it from her ghastly and ever-so-healthy Uncle Alf. Quentin, after
a few years of laboring in the journalistic vineyards, married the owner’s niece and
settled in to editing the magazine, with minimal meddling from both Claire and Uncle
Alf. His gift for finding and nurturing good writers with original voices had rescued
the magazine from near-collapse. Under his guidance,
Small Town
developed style, and even a little substance.
Advertisers, shocked by finding a vehicle people actually read, responded with enthusiasm.
The magazine grew fat with advertising pages that peddled spectacularly useless stuff
to the privileged. Those of us who scribbled for
Small Town
were grateful.
Almost two years ago, Claire and Quentin separated. Quentin cleared every trace of
Claire out of their flat, lived alone for a year, and then invited his companion/assistant/friend
Stuart to live in. Most people assumed that Quentin and Stuart’s relationship had
sexual overtones; but as Michael once observed early in his acquaintance with Quentin,
“How could that guy have sex with anyone? Surely he doesn’t actually undress. Don’t
you think he just goes to the dry cleaners along with his blazers to get his carnal
desires attended to?” I didn’t respond to Michael’s speculation. I saw nothing good
coming out of a discussion about what I knew about Quentin’s antiseptic-but-complex
love life.
“Well, my dear, I’m glad you’re glad I called,” Quentin was saying. “Can you come
by? I have a thing or two for the January issue.”
“Terrific,” I said, sensing rescue from the computer, the garden, and the kitchen.
“You mean besides the lox piece?”
“How’s that coming?”
“It’s just fine. I have a first draft on the screen,” I lied. “It’s fun, kind of,
um, salty,” I improvised.
Quentin sighed. “You haven’t started yet, I take it.”
Feeling courageous, I pressed on. “Listen, don’t you think I could do something besides
books and food for a bit? I’m up to it—you know that.”
Indeed, Quentin did know. He had discovered me, as he liked to insist when people
accused the magazine of precious elitism. Some suburban cousin of his had shown him
a piece I’d written for a parents’ community newspaper on what was wrong with most
children’s books. “I read this piece,” Quentin recounts, “expecting to see another
paean to non-sexist personal growth platitudes in children’s literature; and what
do I encounter? Wit, vitriol, and downright nastiness. I knew right off that Margaret
belonged in our magazine’s little stable of contributors.”
So Quentin tracked me down and lured me out of semi-retirement to write a piece for
Small Town
. I’d worked as managing editor of a trade magazine for nurses before the babies came
along, and I’d just started itching to put words on paper again. Writing was much
more fun than editing. Quentin gave me an irresistible first assignment—test driving
sports cars. He’d titled the piece “June Cleaver Hits the Road.” I had a memorable
time, after a little coaching from the National Association of Professional Drivers.
Slaloming through cones, cornering, taking “hot laps”—I did it all, and
Small Town
got a story with a distinctive angle. What’s more, I rose miles in Josh’s estimation.
He still carries a photo of me in helmet and jumpsuit, taped to the inside of his
lunch box, to show off to his buddies. That made up for the guilt I felt when Michael
brought him to the track to watch me drive and he threw up the moment I crossed the
finish line.
“Margaret,” Quentin chided. “Books and cooks are two perfectly acceptable subjects.
They represent my major passions—nowadays, at any rate.”
“Come on, you know what I mean,” I said, trying to sound more like Dorothy Thompson
and less like Dorothy Parker, and not particularly eager to discuss Quentin’s other
passions. “Front of the book hard stuff, power plays in high places, chemical spills
threatening sleepy suburbs.”