Ted lived in a tiny apartment very high up above Third Avenue. He had a big window and a dark-floored single room, a small kitchen — the refrigerator contained only a pint container of milk and a plastic tub of tofu — and a bathroom with a towel. In his room were a double bed, a desk, a writing chair, a second chair, a television, and an ashtray. Just the setting for a former spy.
I went over there on my way home from the office several times, to drop off the edited manuscript, to look at his changes, to explain the copy editing. I gave Ted more personal attention because the novel demanded it, and also, although without saying a word, somehow Ted expected it. The desk was occupied by his typewriter and a few completely neat stacks of typing paper and previous drafts, so instead of interrupting his work space, I laid the box of manuscript on the bed, cracking it open and leafing through the pages, tracing the progress of one detail or another, the intricate traces of his threads. We bent over the manuscript together.
The revisions took place in the winter, so when I stopped by it was always dark out. I was working long hours, partly to get over a disappointment with a man that had happened at the time; work was a secure place for me in the middle of this unhappiness. One night it snowed and we went to the window to marvel. The snow flew in specks outside the window, tiny furry points of light in the darkness, cold dusty sisters to the lights flickering on Third Avenue below and the many apartments winking on the other side of the canyon. We stood next to the glass and watched the snow swirl, high in the heavens of New York, so far away, it seemed, from the rest of my life.
As we stood there looking at the snow in that night sky, that winter night in New York, Ted Whittemore, quite unexpectedly, ran his hand lightly down my back. Tentatively. I did not move, and he did not touch me a second time.
We went back to being an editor and a writer.
Ted left the country after the manuscript went through copy editing, but before we published the book. He took a freighter to Jerusalem. Ted said that it was a bad idea to fly to the Middle East, because you were traveling through so much time that it should take a long time to make the journey. Also a freighter was cheaper than flying, and Ted never had any money.
He read his galleys in Jerusalem, where he lived in an apartment in the courtyard of the Ethiopian Church. In the early mornings, on one side of the courtyard wall, a flock of French Nuns sang their devotions. All day, around the circular Ethiopian Church, a school of monks walked and murmured their prayers. And Ted read his galleys in July and we published in the Fall.
When I pitched the book at sales conference, I got applause, which usually doesn’t happen at a sales conference, certainly not for a novel that will advance fewer than seven thousand copies. But the sales reps, those cynical hard eggs, put their hands together, not so much for my performance as for what Ted meant to the house as a whole. His books were the books we published that proved to us that publishing could be about good writing and fearless imagination and vision.
Before he moved from New York, Ted sent me a note. “I’m glad you’re part of the Quartet,” he wrote. And so I became connected to Ted Whittemore, connected forever.
The book, as it turned out, did not sell well. It had some good reviews, but the machine of publishing did not kick in for Whittemore. The reps applauded at sales conference, but the machine did not kick in.
Great fiction is hard to sell. What happens to a person who reads a book — if it’s any good — is a profoundly private and irrational process, and the more distinctive the novel, the more private and irrational the process. That’s where the trouble with publishing begins.
Two and a half years later, I left the industry. I was frustrated by the limitations of the business end and I had fallen in love, this time, I thought, for keeps, to a man who lived in Western Massachusetts who had three kids and joint custody and who was very persuasive. Love to me was more important than work, so I moved to Massachusetts and married. But I discovered that I was not as nice, not as accommodating, as I had thought I was. Even though I had always believed that I was able to make anything succeed if I just worked hard enough at it, I was not able to respond to my husband’s demands, and he was very far from being able to help me mend my unhappiness. We were soon miserable.
After two years we divorced. Although the marriage had been horrible, still divorce was like suddenly falling into nothing.
The summer after, I got a call from Ted. I had heard from him from time to time. He had heard about my romance and my departure from New York, and now he’d heard about my divorce.
At my end, over the years, I’d also had reports of Ted back from Tom, who visited Ted in Jerusalem. Ted was with a wonderful woman, a painter named Helen, Tom reported. A year or two after that news, Tom told me that Ted had broken up with Helen, abruptly. Without so much as a day’s notice, said Tom, Ted had packed up and left Helen and left Jerusalem. Tom said Helen was heart-broken. Tom disapproved and so did I.
Although I disapproved I was still glad to hear Ted’s voice. He was back in the country and writing, up at the family home in Dorset, Vermont for the season. Would I come up to see him?
I did, twice. Dorset is beautiful in the summer, green and leafy and a good ten degrees cooler than Western Massachusetts. Ted showed me everything and how much he loved it and how much he wanted me to love it, too. We talked a little about the book he was working on, but mostly we didn’t. The Whittemore family home was big and rambling; late afternoon we sat on white Adirondack chairs on the great lawn, sloping into a meadow, and watched the young girls from the dancing school down the road mince like birds into the middle of town, to buy their sweets. Beyond, the mountains misted with blue, and flowers of all shapes and colors and sizes waved in the breeze.
We swam in the Dorset Quarry. The Dorset Quarry is a writer’s dream, because when you swim in the Dorset Quarry you are swimming in the space left by the stone that now is the New York Public Library, the great lion library at 42nd Street. The quarry’s stone walls rise high and flat, gray streaked with white. Boys in baggy bathing suits jump off the high walls screaming. Women paddle quietly. Children sit on low ledges and dip in their feet. At the far end is an island of stone; birch trees rise skinny and white from its nooks.
After we had spent some time in the water, Ted got out, but I stayed in. He threw me my swimming goggles and I went exploring around the shallower end of the quarry. Looking for what kind of gunk grew down there, where the New York Public Library used to be.
I saw something green. I went to the surface, got a big gasp of air, dove down and swam, down and down and down. I reached for the green and headed back up.
It was a twenty-dollar bill. I swam over to Ted and gave it to him. We were both amazed. “Are you coming out?” he asked.
“In a little,” I replied. I went back to see what else was down there. Again, I took a big gasp of air, dove down and swam, down and down and down. Something green. I grabbed it and headed back up.
“Ted,” I said. I waved the bill. Ten dollars.
The next time down, I found a five. And that was it. I looked, but nothing else was down there. I shook the water out of my hair and we spent the money on dinner.
It was not surprising to me that magic like this would happen around Ted. It seemed almost predictable. Ted Whittemore was a magician, not only of words, but of moments. He marveled, and any sensation, of light or sound or character or scent, was ratcheted up another notch. We walked past swaying meadows and through the graveyard where all the Whittemores are buried. We drove down roads, looked at the cows, stopped the car near a stream and took off our shoes and hopped from rock to rock and stood in the running water, listening to the leaves rustle and the water bubble, smelling the good air.