1
In a room packed to the gills with New York mucky-mucks—Truman Capote was tucked into a corner of the couch; Arthur Miller, sans Marilyn, stood smoking by the window—I had my attention fixed on a waitress.
I hadn’t noticed her peeping at me until Joe and I went to stand at the fireplace beside Harry and Glenys. Scanning the party guests, I landed on her and froze, the champagne glass cold in my clammy palm. Harry began delivering his toast beside me, but I didn’t hear a word. Joe’s hand rested, warm and firm, at the small of my back.
The waitress stood apart from the crowd, tall and slim, holding her empty tray against her thighs. She wore the typical uniform: black blouse, black pencil skirt, tawny hair pulled into a chignon. Her eyes were narrowed in my direction. I knew her name: Beverly.
I prayed she didn’t remember mine.
“. . . the more anyone said, ‘Hell, you can get sports on the radio, you can get politics from the Times or the Journal,’ the more we’d pack it in!” Harry crowed to resounding laughter. “How many times did I ask you, Joe—‘How much will it cost to add another teensy four-hundred-word feature? Just another column?’ ”
“Every damn day,” Joe replied, to more laughter.
I tore my gaze from Beverly and smiled stiffly at our audience. Damn it to hell. This was supposed to be a hotshot moment for me. Sure, most of these people probably saw me simply as Joe Martin’s girl, the armpiece of one of Downtown magazine’s founders. Little did they know I had written a feature for this issue, right after the short story from Flannery O’Connor.
“Anyway, thank you for believing in us sons of bitches,” Harry continued.
Everyone cheered, lifting little bowls of champagne like sparkling breasts. We’d gathered to celebrate the launch of Downtown’s second issue in Harry and Glenys’s apartment, a sprawling classic six on the Upper East Side. There’d been a more formal party for the first issue, which had been a smashing success largely thanks to Harry’s popular article about the storied Harvard-Yale football contest, “The Oldest Man at the Game.” This should’ve been a more intimate bash, but the living room was crammed with people, three-quarters of them male. The attractiveness of the remaining quarter, the female guests, far outperformed the national average.
Joe took a step forward. “If I can add a few words,” he addressed the room in a voice that wasn’t quite his own. I could smell his sweat and the metallic tang of the Saint Christopher medal he tucked under his collar. “Harry and I—well, especially Harry—were confident we’d make it to a second issue, but we appreciate your faith in us. Thank you for spreading the word among writers, for bringing investors. . . .”
Harry lifted his foggy champagne glass. “And if Nelson Rockefeller were here, we’d say, ‘Thanks a heap for the interview, old man!’ ”
“To Rocky!” shouted a guy on the couch, lifting up his joint. Coils of smoke ribboned around him. Everyone laughed again, everyone but me.
I cleared my throat and waited for the noise to die down before delivering my planned line. Unconsciously, I glanced toward Beverly, who, thank goodness, was being led into the kitchen by the bartender. I tucked a tendril of red hair behind my ear. “Oh, boys,” I said loudly, and the din died down, a hundred eyes on me, everyone waiting to hear what this dish had to add to the speech. “You forgot to thank Miss Newmar for bringing the cheesecake!”
The room erupted in applause as a plush-lipped young actress named Julie Newmar, her mile-long legs sheathed in fishnet stockings, stood and genuflected. I, like everyone else in the room, could picture just what was under her velvet blouse; Miss Newmar had appeared topless on the inside back cover of Downtown No. 2. Harry whistled and clapped. Beside me, I sensed Glenys clenching her teeth.
The toast over, Joe and I turned to each other and clinked glasses of Veuve Clicquot. There was still a bit of bashfulness between us, a little electricity crackling in our brief kiss. We’d been inseparable for a year and a half, ever since we met at a New Yorker party while Joe was still working there.
I turned around to see that Glenys and Harry stood slightly apart from each other, both of them blitzed. A rowdy group of men were already calling him from across the room, while his wife hung back, her face grayish. Here was the tragic difference between the two of them: as they drank, she grew more limp, he the opposite. And women adored him. Harry had been first baseman at Yale and grew up sailing off Martha’s Vineyard. He made a good public face for Downtown: he was the blueblood talent, the boyish philosopher, while Joe drew the plans and raised the money.
“Where’re the kids tonight, doll?” I whispered to Glenys, squeezing her elbow as she watched her husband walk away.
“Mmph, don’t remind me I’ve got kids,” she slurred, then, after a beat, added, “They’re at the nanny’s.” She looked as if she needed a bubble bath and a long night’s sleep. Fortunately, Joe came up behind me then and rested his warm lips against my ear.
“Louise,” he said, “there’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
“Oh, darling. You’re finally introducing me to your mother,” I joked, but my heart began beating very quickly.
“My mother’s not allowed within fifty miles of this place.” He gestured to a couple getting frisky on the sofa, the man’s hand traveling past the girl’s garters. “No, it’s even better than that. This could be a big night for you, too, Lou.”
I licked my lips and took his hand. As we crossed the room, I hated that I had to worry about Beverly, to look for her tall frame among the crowd, but she was nowhere to be seen. Joe led me past men whose importance oozed from the leather patches on their elbows, past waiters with trays of canapés. Beside the bookcases, a group of guys were trying to pour champagne into a pyramid of glasses, even though everyone knows that never works, and I caught a glimpse of Glenys nervously eyeing her Oriental rug.
“Is that . . .” I said as a dashing, suntanned man brushed past me, flanked by two girls. He looked just like the actor Rory Calhoun, whom we’d seen a few weeks ago in the Western The Silver Whip.
“It is.” Joe’s grin stretched from ear to ear. Harry might’ve been the more obviously handsome of the two of them, with his blond hair and big shoulders, but he was a bit too buggy-eyed for me. Plus, I didn’t do the married-man thing. Joe had caught my eye the minute I saw him, setting off a hunger like I’d never known, and I’d been hungry in one way or another for much of my life. At twenty-eight, he was a few years my senior. His roots were nearly as humble as mine—Italian red sauce, tenement life—but that didn’t show in his exterior. He had a shock of black hair combed carefully with pomade, a wiry, strong build, and intense dark eyes that looked through you and past you and beyond, laser-pointed on the future.
I didn’t realize until we were toe to toe that Joe had brought me to the feet of Mortimer Clifton, the new publisher at Clifton & Sons now that his father had finally retired. I recognized him from pictures in the society pages: thick white hair, tufty black eyebrows. Towering over everyone at nearly seven feet tall, Mr. Clifton was a physical reminder of the famous old men he published—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, that ilk.
“Mort,” Joe said, his voice nearly squeaking in excitement to use the man’s nickname, “I’d like you to meet my friend Louise Leithauser.”
I grasped the man’s dry hand. “Mr. Clifton, it’s an honor.”
“Oh. A pleasure to meet you, too,” he replied. He’d been in the middle of a point, it seemed; the two smaller men who’d been lapping up his words glanced at us in irritation.
“Louise is an aspiring novelist,” Joe yelled over the music.
“Are you?” Clifton spoke in a somewhat unnatural-sounding accent, formal and vaguely English. “What do you write?”
“I’m writing a romance,” I replied, and the sycophants around him snickered.
Clifton raised his eyebrows politely. I had the sense he was abiding me at this point, waiting for me to leave. “We’ve done a few of those. Don’t laugh, gentlemen,” he said to his audience, even as a note of amusement lifted one of his wolfish eyebrows an inch higher. “They sell like hotcakes, especially in England, but here, too. The girls can’t get enough of them.”
I made myself smile warmly. “It’s not all that I do. I’ve also written a few political pieces for Downtown. Under my pen name, Alfred King. I wrote the last issue’s story about the unrest in Iran.”
The smirks on the two lackeys’ faces were gone, replaced by uncomfortable stares. They looked pained. Clifton inspected me as if I were something he’d discovered on a flower petal, a curious little bug. “Well!” he said, after a beat. “Mr. King, we meet at last. I read that Iran story. I found it very interesting. But if I’d known the author was a gorgeous redhead, I’d have read more closely!”
The other men laughed now, happy to be in familiar territory. Reluctantly, I tittered along with them. If it hadn’t been crass to discuss money, I’d have told them just what Joe had paid me for the article, down to the penny—probably more than either of these guys had made for a single piece in his entire career.
“Louise is one of our best writers.” Joe paused. “And certainly the most beautiful.”
Clifton laughed again, then reached out to chuck my chin, as if I were a five-year-old. I took it with my teeth set. “You should send me your book when it’s done,” he said easily, “and I’ll pass it along to our paperback team.” With that he went back to his conversation.
Joe and I drifted away, in the direction of one of the waiters. My head spun. Send something when it’s done—he’d said it to me as if it were not at all unusual, as if I were one of the boys. I felt the urge to bolt, to run home to my typewriter.
No, no, I needed to throw my manuscript away, to start anew; I suddenly realized my novel-in-the-works was shit and should be tossed into my furnace. What did I think I was doing, putting my heroine on the moon, for Pete’s sake! Was I crazy?
I had other ideas, didn’t I? Or were they all shit, too?
I needed a drink.
“Okay,” I said to Joe as I took a Manhattan, served up and filled to the brim, off the waiter’s tray. “I’m impressed.”
Joe’s face broke open in mock offense. “I knew it. You’ve been using me all this time to get your novel published.”
“How dare you even suggest it, my love,” I said, pulling him in for a kiss so that he wouldn’t see how I was blushing. I kept my eyes open, looking around for Beverly.
For the rest of the evening, I tried worming my way back into conversation with Mort Clifton, but the pack of eager dogs who followed him about the party (all with the bad haircuts and shiny elbows of aspiring writers) was difficult to penetrate. Clifton left early; I’d hoped to corner him in the bedroom where they kept our wraps and coats, but it seemed he hadn’t brought one. Dejected, I returned to the party. I watched Joe play host, hobnobbing with other writers and edging his way toward Rory Calhoun, who looked bored as he leaned away from the young women caging him in. In general, Joe seemed ecstatic. I decided not to bother him.
Copyright © 2022 by Caroline Woods. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
