Riverside Drive

“Oh, fine.”

“And here’s some coffee,” she added, walking over and handing him a cup.

“Thanks.”

Rosanne walked toward the door, stopped and turned around. “Mrs. C’s over twenty-nine,” she announced.

“Oh, yeah?” Howard said, smiling.

“Go back to work,” she said. “But remind me, Howie, before I leave I wanna talk to you about Tuesdays.”

Howard swallowed some coffee. “You want to switch days?”

“Naw,” she said. “I wanna talk to ya about Amanda, but I gotta finish the oven first.”

Howard leafed through the pile of short proposals in his lap, sighed, and let them fall back in his lap. His eyes were on Melissa’s dresser now. He rubbed his chin, thinking. It would be a low thing to do. And yet, knowing how meticulous Melissa was, he was sure the letter had been left in the couch for him to find. “Rosanne?” he called.

One second, two, three…

“Better make it short if you want an oven left!”

“Where was that envelope?” he called, rising from the chaise longue.

“The couch!” In a moment, she appeared at the door, wiping her forehead with the back of a rubber glove that was brown with gook.

“In it or on it?” Howard asked her.

“Sort of stickin’ up between the cushions.” She blew a strand of hair away from her eye. “Finished, Mr. Mason?”

Howard offered a half smile and slid his hands into his pockets. “Yes.” When Rosanne returned to the kitchen, he went over and read the letter.

Dear Melissa,

I don’t know what I would do without you these past months. No one told us it would be like this, did they? Forgive me when I say that I can’t help wondering what would have happened if we hadn’t met Howard that night. We’d both be a lot happier, I know. You told me Barbara wasn’t clever enough for me, and I told you that Howard would disappoint you—so I guess we both got what we deserved for not listening to each other.

I just wanted to thank you for listening to me the other day. My success at Beacon Dunlap would mean nothing without someone to share it with and, as always, you understand the importance of everything.

Not long until Fishers Island! (I’m seeing your father next week for lunch.)

Melissa, dear friend, you are all that is keeping me going.

Love,

Stephen

The first night of their honeymoon, spent at the Plaza, Howard had accepted that Melissa was too exhausted to have sex. So exhausted, in fact, he excused her when she pushed him away when he wanted to hold her as they fell asleep. Her excuses the next night, in London, and the next and the next and the next, were all quite reasonable. Melissa was of course shy; it would take time.

As it turned out, they did not consummate their marriage until they moved into the Riverside Drive apartment. Melissa had lain there, eyes closed, chin up, enduring Howard’s touch as though it were a prelude to being shot. When it came to actual penetration, Melissa cried and pleaded and begged Howard not to do it because it was killing her. Howard stopped, but then he thought of Mrs. Collins and Daddy Collins and the wedding and somehow he knew that if he didn’t just push ahead and do it, it might never happen. After he—ever so gently—managed to come inside of her, Melissa jumped out of bed, locked herself in the bathroom, and stayed in the bathtub for nearly an hour. Afterward, robe firmly knotted around her waist, she curled up with the telephone on the living-room couch and called, of course, Daddy. “Everything’s fine,” Howard overheard from the hallway. “Remember how you used to wake me up when you couldn’t sleep? It’s like that, Daddy.”

Howard racked his brain about how to help Melissa. (God, how to help himself.) When therapy was dismissed as ridiculous, Howard pledged his faith in time and gentle reassurance. The only problem was that Melissa seemed to hate reassurance more than she hated sex. (“Just please stop talking about it!” she would wail, clapping her hands over her ears.) But time did bring a change, a compromise, they had lived with since: Melissa used sex (a loose term, considering what it was like) to force Howard into doing whatever horrible thing she had her heart set on. If they spent the weekend in New Canaan with Daddy, if they went to Daddy’s reunion at Schnickle State College in Tennessee, or if Daddy came in and spent the weekend with them, then Howard could look forward to sex the first night after the ordeal was over. And summers! That was an interesting game, renting down the road from Daddy. The three or four weekends a summer that Daddy was not there were the weekends Melissa gave the signal, “I’ll be ready for you in twenty-five minutes, Howard.”

Howard had never cheated on Melissa. Amazing, but true. But then, life with Melissa was not all bad. No, far from it. The Stewarts enjoyed a way of life for which Howard never ceased to be grateful. They had this wonderful apartment (where Howard had the large library/study he had always dreamed of); they had their tennis and squash club memberships; they had their BMW (replaced biannually by Daddy); they had their annual three-week trip to Europe; they had their ballet and theater tickets and they had their big old rambling house in the summer (subsidized in part by Daddy).

Did anyone know what it was like for Howard to walk into Shakespeare & Company or Endicott Booksellers and buy four, five, eight hard-cover books? Did anyone know what it was like for Ray’s son to be greeted by name in Brooks Brothers? To give his family a VCR for Christmas? To quietly send his sister a thousand dollars when she got “in trouble” and tell her she never had to pay him back? Did anyone know how Howard had felt when he told Melissa of his mother’s admission of the terrible year Ray was having, and Melissa wrote out a check for ten thousand dollars, telling Howard exactly how to “invest” it in Stewart Landscaping in a way that his father could accept? Did anyone know what it was like to live like this and be an editor in trade book publishing?

Melissa was generous. The strings were long and complicated, but yes, Melissa was generous. “Just work on becoming publisher, Howard, and I’ll take care of the rest.” And she was. Melissa was now, in 1986, a junior vice-president at First Steel Citizen, pulling down some seventy-five thousand dollars a year (not counting bonuses, which, last year, had come to almost thirty thousand dollars—two thousand less than Howard’s entire salary).

Melissa’s energies and abilities—in Howard’s and everyone else’s eyes—bordered on the supernatural. (“It’s the Daddy in me,” she would say.) Dinner party for twenty—tonight? Billion-dollar loan to Madrid? Fifty pairs of tickets to the Cancer Ball? “I’d be delighted to handle it,” she would say without hesitation. And she would be delighted, moving and managing people, money and events in discreet euphoria.

But Melissa had a temper, too. And some nights Howard literally barricaded himself in his study against the sound of her tirades. “Layton Sinclair has been promoted past you!” she had recently screamed, pounding on the door. “He can’t even speak and he smells and he’s been promoted past you! God damn it, Howard, what is wrong with you?”

Nothing was wrong with him, he thought, except that he couldn’t bring himself to be the kind of editor Layton Sinclair was. Because, you see, after his marriage, Howard had truly become a good editor. No one, after 1980, after Gertrude Bristol, had ever called Howard Prince Charming again.

Gertrude Bristol had been writing bestselling romance suspense novels for thirty-five years. Her editor at G & G retired and Harrison, at an editorial meeting, queried the group as to who was interested in taking Gertrude on. To be more specific, Harrison was looking directly at his new young woman protégé, sending the kind of signal that Howard used to get from him (and foolishly ignore): Trust me, this is an author you should take on.

Howard—who had been floundering in terms of acquisitions—found himself cutting Harrison’s protégé off at the pass. “Harrison—I’d like to work with Gertrude Bristol.” The whole group had stared at him in amazement. Howard? Romance suspense? It’s-Not-as-Good-as-Cheever-So-It’s-Not-Good-Enough-for-Me Howard? “Uh,” Howard had added, “that is, if she wants to work with me.”

And so Howard had taken home ten of Gertrude’s books to read (“Hallelujah,” Melissa had said, picking one up, “someone I’ve finally heard of”) and received the first of many pleasant surprises to come. Since Howard had never read a romance suspense novel, he had always assumed they must be…well, not serious and certainly not literary. But Gertrude was both.

He flew up to Boston to meet the great lady and did so with great humility. Gertrude needed his editorial expertise about as much as Jessica Tandy needed acting lessons, and Howard was not foolish enough to make any promises to her other than that he would do his best to make sure she continued to be happily published by Gardiner & Grayson. Gertrude seemed rather bored by all this and was much more interested in whether Howard could stay over another day and speak to one of her classes at Radcliffe.

Howard stayed over another day and the single most important event of his career occurred—he listened to Gertrude’s fifteen-minute introduction to her class, in which she explained what editors do. “People working in the editorial process of book publishing today,” she said, “generally fall into two camps—the agents, who ‘discover’ new talent, and the editors, who introduce that talent in the best light possible.” But, she went on to say, the truly great editors would go mad if they did not, on occasion, make personal discoveries of their own. “How do they do this? Every newspaper they read, every magazine, every film they see, every person they meet, every short story, every poem, letter, billboard they read—everything an editor experiences in his or her life is unconsciously or quite consciously judged in terms of a possible book. Isn’t that right, Howard?”

Howard, pale, nodded.

“Editors looking for fiction attend writers’ conferences, read literary magazines, journals and short-story collections—or, if they are in the upper ranks of editorial, they make sure someone on their staff is. Editors looking for nonfiction habitually shoot off telegrams and letters in response to news stories. Editors often choose a particular city or part of the country to concentrate on, making themselves known there, getting to know the literary community. Some editors concentrate on the academic community, or the religious community, or the business community, professional sports or the recording industry…”

(Howard’s head was spinning.)

“It is the great editor’s job,” Gertrude had finished with, “to be on the cutting edge of contemporary culture, and to be on the cutting edge of discovering our past. It is an impossible job, but, as they say, someone’s got to do it, and with us today is someone who does. Class, Mr. Howard Stewart of Gardiner & Grayson.”

Oh, God. Howard had got up and fumbled and stumbled through a recitation of anything and everything he could remember Harrison having ever said to him. Gertrude’s little talk had completely thrown him; he had never done any of the things that she had talked about. Not one.

He returned to NewYork as Gertrude Bristol’s editor. And something clicked into place as he reported his trip to Harrison. A connection was made—as he stood there, watching Harrison’s smile grow wider and wider—between his old scorn for certain kinds of books and the fact that he had never read those kinds of books to find out what they were like in the first place. And so he started reading differently. And at lunch, with agents, he stopped saying he was looking for F. Scott Fitzgerald and started saying that he was looking for a new talent, someone with promise, someone whom he could work with, build with, over a period of years.

His first endeavor at “discovering” resulted in a bestseller. Driving home alone one night from Fishers Island, Howard was listening to a radio sex therapist, Dr. Ruth Hutchins. The topic was sexual dysfunction within a marriage, and Howard was (of course) listening with a great deal of interest. And then it hit him: If the radio show is so popular, and if I’m even interested in it…

He fired off a letter to Dr. Hutchins and learned that he was only one of many editors around town who had had the same idea. When Dr. Hutchins and her agent said it was not so much a question of money but which publisher best comprehended the nature of her professional goals, Howard sat down and wrote the table of contents of the book he himself would want to read. And so, on the strength of a good advance, a great marketing plan from Harriet Wyatt and the outline of Sex: How to Get What You Want and Need (with the jacket line: Without Hurting Anyone, Including Yourself), Dr. Hutchins chose Gardiner & Grayson. Sex climbed onto the Times bestseller list and stayed there for thirty-four weeks.

Howard started to experience joy. One morning he literally tore a page out of the Times and bolted from the breakfast table. “What’s wrong?” Melissa asked, running after him to the front door. “The MacArthur Foundation winners!” Howard yelled, taking the stairs down because it was faster. What fun it was writing “discovery” letters! What elation to receive a letter that said, “You have no idea what your letter meant to me. As a matter of fact, I’m in the process of expanding that short story into a novel now.” Howard was even thrilled when he got a phone call from Los Angeles that said, “Miss Margaret does not wish to write her memoirs at this time. However, she asked me to thank you for your kind letter, and to tell you that, should she decide to do so, she will certainly keep Gardiner & Grayson in mind.”

First novel! Literary biography! Collected short stories! Spy thriller! Victorian anthology! Investigative reporting! Editing Saturday and Sundays! Reading from seven until midnight! Gertrude breaks 100,000-copy mark! Sex sells for 600,000 reprint! Editorial meetings! Marketing meetings! Sales conferences! ABA! Howard was on cloud nine (exhausted, thin, bleary-eyed, but up there all the same).

And then the winds suddenly shifted at Gardiner & Grayson, marked by the arrival of a man named Mack Sperry in the business department, and the subsequent hiring of several MBAs. The old sails of power started to rend, and it was soon clear that Harrison, at sixty, was losing control of the ship. Memorandums started appearing:

7 OUT OF 10 BOOKS LOSE MONEY AT GARDINER & GRAYSON. PROFIT AND LOSS STATEMENTS ARE BEING RUN ON EACH BOOK AND EACH EDITOR.

Two editors were fired and two editors resigned. They were not replaced.