Wycoff smiled. “As good a guess as any.”
“Probably better than most,” the senator said. “Right in the middle of a debate that has roused hackles on both sides of the aisle and filled the galleries with press and radio and TV people and just plain interested people, partisan people convinced the nation’s future is at stake and maybe it is—right in the middle of it, the senior senator from Nebraska or Oklahoma or, yes, New York, leans over to his colleague and whispers something in his ear, and the press gallery takes careful note that something is about to happen. And it is. What the senior senator is saying is, ‘George, I’ve got to pee or bust. It was all that coffee plus the bean soup. I’ll be back before the windbag is even close to done.’ And he stands up and walks solemnly out of the chamber. Everybody in the gallery thinks he’s headed straight for the White House to have it out with The Man.”
Wycoff smiled again. “What do you want for an epitaph, Jake? ‘Exit laughing’ ?”
The senator shook his head. His expression was serious. “No. I’d like to feel that I had earned the proudest epitaph of alclass="underline" ‘With what he had, he did the best he could.’ I think we might as well have a drink, don’t you?”
Joe Lewis the electrical engineer said, “We can’t know what’s happened. Maybe the motors are burned out. Maybe the cable carrying power to them is gone. All we can do is bring in another cable from the substation, splice it in, and hope that there’s enough of the rising cable left to carry power to the elevator motors.” He lifted his hands and let them fall. “That’s the best we can do.”
“Let’s get on with it,” Giddings said. “Con Edison will give us all the help they can.” He paused and stared at the sky where the great buildings seemed almost to come together. “Will you give me one good reason,” he said, “why we thought we had to build the goddam thing so big?”
“Because,” Joe Lewis said, “somebody else built a big one and ours had to be bigger. Simple as that. Let’s go.”
17
Zib was back at her desk at the magazine and unable to concentrate. It was late, but there were piles of manuscripts before her, all of which had been read and passed along as possibilities for purchase, and usually she found the reading of them at least an interesting exercise in judgment. Today, now, she found them pointless, even silly—what was the current phrase?—without relevance.
And yet that was not true. Without even looking at the pages, she knew that a good share, even most of the stories would deal with young women and their problems, and if that was not relevant, what in the world was? Because she was a young woman, wasn’t she? And God knew it was plain enough at last that she had problems like everybody else.
Like everybody else. That was the phrase that hurt, because always she had considered that she was not like anybody else.
She had grown up as Zib Marlowe, a name that had meaning, and now she was married to rising young Nat Wilson of Ben Caldwell’s firm. Those two facts alone were sufficient to set her apart. But there was more.
There was her job here, as fiction editor for one of the few remaining national magazines, and she did the job well. There was the fact of her looks and figure, and an educated intelligence far above average. There was—oh, you name the criteria, and whatever they were you would find Ms. Zib Marlowe Wilson crowding the upper limits.
Except maybe in the old-fashioned virtues that used to be considered so important? How about those, darling?
Strike the question; Zib had answered it to her own satisfaction years ago, which was one of the reasons she was where she was.
And yet, paradoxically, it was right here at the magazine, that monument to upper-middle-class sophistication, that on occasion she found reason to wonder about the solidity of those chosen beliefs. There was, for example, that Meacham story a few months back that had caught her fancy and for which she had argued without success with Jim Henderson.
“Elizabeth, luv,” Jim had said, “our readers are bright above average or they wouldn’t be reading at all, they’d be sitting glued to the tube. But they are also wives and mothers worried about budgets and mortgages and the PTA, mundane matters like those. And most of them wouldn’t know an identity crisis if it bit them. I’m not sure I would. They are the special salt of this earth, and I mean that as a compliment. Now take this navel-contemplating piece—”
“As you make abundantly plain,” Zib said, “you are the boss. But this happens to be a beautifully written, sensitive, probing—”
“Piece of crap,” Henderson said. He got up from his chair, walked around his desk, and sat down again. He was in shirtsleeves, long and bony and pitiless. “Sometimes I don’t dig you, girl. You are a hell of a good fiction editor. Most times. Then some agent, probably Soames, who knows your weaknesses sends in something like this and you flip over it ,when you know perfectly well it isn’t our kind of thing.”
“Maybe it ought to be.”
“And that is crap too, and you know it. You’re being schizo. Now send this back.” He held the manuscript between thumb and forefinger, something unclean.
Zib, furious, marched back to her office and called John Soames. “I’m sorry, John. I liked the Meacham piece—”
“Let me guess, darling. Lord Henderson did not like it, and that is that. But whatever else did we expect? There was no way.”
“Then,” Zib said, “why did you send it to me in the first place?”
He was smiling. Zib could almost see it. And in the tanned face, beneath the graying hair and the glasses, crinkling the comers of his eyes, the smile looked very avuncular and English-professorish, very much the literary man at confident ease. “Just to show you the quality of fiction your magazine might run, if it chose. What else, darling?”
The day was already slightly out of focus, and seeing behind sham seemed easy. Strange. “You wouldn’t waste your time,” Zib said. “Or mine.”
There was a short silence. Did the smile fade or perhaps let slip a little of its confidence? “I will level with you, darling,” Soames said in a different voice. “I sent you the piece on the millionth chance that you might buy it at your splendidly exorbitant rates, one-tenth of which would have gone into my coffers as commission. Instead I will try to peddle it elsewhere, and maybe end by giving it away if anyone will take it. If my commission exceeds ten dollars instead of the hundred and fifty I would have had from you, I shall be mightily surprised.”
“At least you’re being honest,” Zib said, although of course she ought to have known from the beginning how things were. “Tell me one more thing. In Jim Henderson’s place, would you buy the piece?”
“Dear God, no! Certainly not. It is offensive, pretentious, flatulent. But as we agree, it does have a certain charm, and the literary establishment would make noises over it.”
And why should she have remembered that so vividly now after all this time? Because, she thought, you never really forget the putdowns, you just tuck them off in a corner and hope they get decently covered with dust. Aloud, whispering, “What in the world am I doing here anyway? Answer me that, Elizabeth.”