She smiled, forgiving the sharpness in his voice.
“And where today?” he said.
“You don’t know until you get outside,” she said. “That’s the point. You should come.”
The thought of wandering without editorial purpose filled Slava with anxiety. Unlike Arianna, he had things to do. Slava owed laughs to “The Hoot.” Upon ascending to the editorship two years before, Beau Reasons had decided the magazine needed humor, and so Slava was assigned to scour regional newspapers for slipups, flubs, and double entendres, to which Century appended a wry commentary (the rejoinder, in Century talk). Slava would find in the Provincetown Banner:
The dog Claude Monet, who was lost last week and whose disappearance has been extensively covered by this newspaper, was found yesterday by the banks of the Pamet River.
Century would add:
He must have thought the light superior there.
If Slava managed to clear through the pile of Union-Tribunes and Plain Dealers on his desk before quitting time, he launched into the stories he himself was trying to write. There was no time for walks to… where? They were in Midtown, a cold needle-forest of skyscrapers, striped shirts, pencil skirts, flats, barrettes, crinkling brown sandwich bags of the sort Slava had used to cover his first American schoolbooks, bodies in perpetual sidestep, instructions barked into a cell phone… No, Slava didn’t want to go outside. His life had a shape, hermetically sealed: on one end the office where he spent the daylight hours, on the other the apartment where he slept, between them the long underground rod of the 6 train. No walks.
He studied the treacherous slingshot of Arianna’s clavicle. She knew all about it — in the summer, you could count on one hand the number of times she wore sleeves. Not that Slava counted. Unlike Slava, who remained in the office to work on his writing, Arianna went home at six sharp—“I need to veg” was her announcement, as if she had depleted herself mowing a field. Arianna, a fact-checker, had the eagerness of the red checking pencil anchoring the bun of her hair. He had no time for her, if that’s how it was. Besides, Slava stayed clear of anything that could turn into something. He had precious little free time as it was.
However, sometimes curiosity bested even Slava’s leonine will, and he listened to the noise she made on the other side of the divider. White, blocky teeth eviscerating the leisure end of an old-fashioned pencil. The hollow thump of a bracelet against the Lucite of which their desktops were made. A back cracking in both directions, then the knuckles. The rabbity progress of teeth down the rims of a sunflower seed. Boots jangly with some kind of spur. Hooting laughter, as if there were no one else in the room.
Sometimes, when she wasn’t at her desk, Slava would peek over. Arianna ate almost nothing but salads, occasionally a pair of hard-boiled eggs without mayonnaise. The plastic containers remained on her desk, unfinished and open, until the end of the day, when he heard the day’s purchases hitting the walls of the garbage can: coffee cup, salad container, eggshells. Occasionally, these items missed and landed on the floor, or she left them on her desk altogether. Arianna maintained the American attitude toward help: It was their job. Souvenirs from the day’s salad decorated her tabletop: a triangle of lettuce, a streaky olive, a full anchovy. After she walked out, Slava tidied up on her side.
It was thanks to Arianna that Slava had found himself assigned to observe a new feat by an urban explorer. Beau had appeared before the Junior Staff pen — it really was a pen; the sixteen Juniors sat behind a railing like zoo rhinos — and thrown out an invitation to contribute to Century — an invitation to contribute to Century — as if he was merely adjusting ad count for the upcoming issue.
While everyone was busy being stunned — except for Peter Devicki, naturally; Peter, the only Junior to have published anything in the magazine, had his hand up before he knew what Beau was asking for — Arianna stared incandescently at Slava’s temple. He looked over. Her eyes were fixed on him like headlights. She would have raised his arm for him if she could.
“Listen,” she said now, draping her forearms on the divider. Five copper bracelets rattled against the fiberglass. Her nails were boyishly short and girlishly red. “This is tacky, but sometimes tacky’s just the thing. Imagine yourself winning this afternoon. Do something as if you got it.”
“Like what?” he said. “Champagne bath in Bean’s office?”
“Don’t make fun,” she said. “I said it was corny. What are you going to do? Get on the phone, call your parents, and tell them to buy next week’s issue. Because it’s going to have a story by you in it.”
“It’s bad luck to celebrate beforehand,” he said.
“The point is to do it when it’s impractical.”
“They think I’ve been writing for this magazine for three years,” he said. “That’s what I told them when I got hired, so they wouldn’t feel bad.”
“What would they have you do?”
Slava threw up his hands.
“All right,” she said. “I have to go.”
He was chagrined to have her give up so quickly. “How did you know I wanted to do it?” he said in a rush. “The way you looked at me when Beau came around.”
“You’d have to be deaf and mute not to know,” she said.
He watched her walk away. Despite his spying on her, it hadn’t occurred to him that she might spy in return. Arianna Bock wasn’t really a noticer. This Slava knew with a husband’s knowledge — in the last year and a half, he had spent more time within a foot of this hieroglyphic presence than within any other, a melancholy statistic. She marched around the Junior Staff pen heedless of its funereal quiet, forgot what she was told, and cast out of mind things that refused to clarify themselves with efficiency. At the Friday-afternoon Junior Staff assignment meetings, she responded to Mr. Grayson, their voluminous chief, as if they were both senior editors rather than she someone dependent on his goodwill and desire to employ her. Once he had asked her if she was interested in fact-checking a story, and she’d said: Are you really asking? Everyone laughed. Even Mr. Grayson.
He looked down at his desk phone. They were all still there, at Grandfather’s. Only Slava had left. The events of the previous day, momentarily sidelined by Arianna, refilled his mind. You had to give her that: She filled the frame of your thinking.
The idea had been Beau’s. He had replaced Martin Graves, the Patriarch, deceased after forty-six years at the helm. (Mugging for history, Mr. Graves went not at the breast of some wet nurse but in his office chair, making his faint disapprobations on a sheaf of magazine copy.) Mr. Graves’s late phase had some peculiar concerns. There had been a strange piece by a Papuan cannibal (in Dani, the cannibal language), as transcribed by a Canadian linguist, and an even stranger one by Frank Moy, the war reporter, about soap operas. But no one was going to touch Martin Graves until he was retired by the angels.
In any case: An assignment had fallen through; the money had already been spent; what if, in lieu, Beau sent a Junior? These, deranged with dispossession and dreams, thought they could write articles a thousand times better than what those overpaid marquee writers turned in. They’d do it for free, too. Century paid writers three dollars a word: You do the math. Beau would send two just in case — two times zero in fees was still zero, and competition bred innovation. He did that sometimes even for the senior writers, which caused no small amount of consternation because book contracts were not given out to someone bylined “Staff.” The senior editors would make a clinic of the whole thing: The Monday-afternoon Senior Staff meeting would be open to the full masthead, the choice between Peter and Slava put to a vote.