My Mistake (24 page)

This surprises me. I wonder what kind of transferential mechanism is operating inside this estimable man of letters to make him “really care” about this smart but mercurial boss. Her mind darts this way and that, like a pond skater, relying on surface tension to keep her afloat.

Afloat. Tina and her husband, Harry Evans, have for some time now put me ever so slightly in mind of the duke and the king in
Huckleberry Finn,
floating down the Mississippi, affecting noble lineages, and fleecing townspeople right and left with their cons and impostures.

Tina came into the magazine talking about people and subjects that were “hot,” wanting the “buzz,” the “chatter.” When somehow she and I got around to talking about this kind of thing, she said something like, “I know it all sounds awful, but we have to do something that will create
more
buzz, that will rise above all the chatter. I don't always like it myself, but we have to do it.” So this was a chicken-and-egg problem, as she saw it, but as I see it now, she is the chicken and the egg.

For all this professional skepticism about her, on a personal level Tina has always impressed me with her intelligence and charm, and there is a warm vulnerability about her, beneath the glittery trappings and despite all the Brownian motion, that makes her hard to resist. So I guess Roger's concern about her does make sense after all. Also, a lot of my colleagues much later on will say that Tina's
CERN
-like smashing of some of the magazine's old-fashioned elements was a necessary step in its development. That
The New Yorker
needed the antithesis she represented to the theses of Shawn and to some extent Gottlieb, resulting finally in the magazine's current Editor, David Remnick, as a kind of successful synthesis. Maybe that application of the Dialectic does have some merit. Maybe. But I can think of three or four other people who I believe could have done the same thing with less chaos. One in particular.

 

Sixty-six

 

Speaking again of leaving, Centrello takes me to lunch and lets me know that she would like me to step aside as Editor in Chief. Why? Numbers, evidently. Prizes—lack thereof. My high salary. It comes back to me that Harry Evans, when he hired me, said, “You have five years to fook oop, and I have barely finished four years. Centrello and I go back and forth about what role I might play if I do step aside—a prospect that doesn't displease me as much as I would have expected it to, as you may understand if you look again at the age heading of this section and if you know that I was working ten to twelve hours a day and much of the weekends. Considering proposals, reading first novels, attending one meeting after another—art meetings, marketing meetings, acquisitions meetings, retreat meetings, advance meetings, meetings about meetings, meetings about canceling meetings—going to sales conferences, the London Book Fair, the Frankfurt Book Fair, and to lunches and lunches and lunches.

At one point, I offer to help Centrello find a replacement for the job. But soon, the Era of Good Feeling ends, and I finally understand that leaving altogether might well prove more beneficial for me than staying under the conditions that Centrello is proposing. The ultimate straw descends when Centrello offers me a position as Editor at Large with no office.
No office?
Her financial guy tells me that this has to do with tax considerations, full-time employment versus a contractual arrangement, but that's hard to believe. Centrello now seems to want me out, and I now want out. I'm out. What a shame that it has to end this way!

She shuns me—except for formal politesse in all those meetings—where once she had stopped by my office every day. During this “transition” (as they say in business, spackling over fissures in the corporate plaster), a reporter quotes me as saying that publishing-job changes, including mine, remind me of speed chess. My mistake. I say to Gina, “But speed chess can be brilliant.” M.m. again.

Centrello is a good publisher. She does know the numbers. She has now stayed in this position longer, and with more success, than anyone else in recent history, including Godoff, Evans, Jason Epstein, Joni Evans, and other publishing luminaries. My numbers, insofar as they
are
mine, have been mediocre at best, though the group has had some great successes. I keep wondering if there are other, more personal factors at work, but in the end, in such situations, it doesn't matter, does it? When it comes to corporate life, especially at its higher altitudes, factors of all kinds tend to get tangled up with each other, and it's impossible to untangle them, and pointless, and fruitless, to try.

Prizes. Later, I will have to reconsider my agnosticism, as the numerous prizes “my” authors win may well be the work of an ironic deity. Elizabeth Strout wins the Pulitzer Prize for
Olive Kitteridge,
Colum McCann wins the National Book Award for
Let the Great World Spin,
and Mukherjee wins the Pulitzer in nonfiction for his book about cancer, and Reza Aslan, whom I brought to Random House, makes a huge hit with
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
.

 

 

 

Part V

 

 

 

 

Sixty-six

 

Cancer. A white shadow, about two and a half centimeters in width, in the upper lobe of my left lung, shows up on my routine chest X-ray. My GP says, “This could be very serious,” and tells me to consult with a pulmonologist. I do. The pulmonologist is a petite, confident woman. I ask her a few questions about herself, out of real curiosity but also to try to establish some kind of personal connection between us—a doctor strategy that I think usually results in closer medical attention. She mentions more than once that people have a hard time believing that she has children in their twenties.

She asks me if I ever smoked.

“Yes, from the age of twelve or so.”

“A lot?”

“Never. Never more than half a pack a day, and usually more like four or five cigarettes.”

“When did you quit?”

“Twenty-five years ago.”

“Well, that means you have no greater statistical chance of developing lung cancer, if that's what this is, than someone who has never smoked.”

“Do you believe that?” I ask.

She leans forward, as if about to impart a Mafia-grade secret, and says, “Statistically? Yes. Actually? No.”

She asks me to come back the next week, after she has consulted with some colleagues.

 

I visit Readie in her nursing home on Fifth Avenue. She is in her mid-nineties now. She says, “Oh, Lord, Danny, where we lived when you were little was so different. Bleecker Street had all them little stores owned by the Italians. Once when I was wheeling Mike up there in his baby carriage, one of the men came out of that store where all the vegetables were, and he said to me, ‘Hey! How come you iss-a so black and you baby iss-a so white?' Things has changed a lot since then, but still not enough. Maybe that black man will be President.”

 

When she dies, Readie is buried in a vast cemetery out in Queens, next to her husband, Joe Rogowski, the veteran of the Second World War who met Readie when they were both working for Uncle Enge in the summertime. Her son, Raymond, asks me to speak about her at the graveside. Those attending the memorial are mainly black. I start to talk about Readie's loving nature, her care for me and my brother and Raymond, her good sense, her generosity, and I hear “That's right” and “Uh-huh!” and “Talk about it!” coming from those seated before me. And instead of just meeting Raymond's request as best I can, I get caught up and get outside myself and mean what I'm saying—there's no distance between me and my words. No hint of irony—that addiction.

 

The next appointment with the petite pulmonologist who has two sons in their twenties:

“Well, what do you want to do about this situation?”

“Get that thing out of there.”

“Me too. When?”

“Now! I'll go over and lie naked on the street until they take me into the operating room.”

“I would recommend one of two surgeons. One is fabulous but doesn't have such a great manner. The other is just as good and I would send my mother to him.”

“I'll take Mom's.”

My wife and I go to meet the surgeon. He tells me that they will put me under and biopsy the lesion and nearby lymph nodes, and if only the lesion is malignant, they'll take the whole lobe out laparoscopically, but if there's any spread, they'll sew me back up and give me chemotherapy and then do surgery.

Near the end of the consultation, in an effort to appear casual, I say to the surgeon, “Did anyone ever tell you that you look a lot like Jeff Daniels?” He smiles in a pained way and leaves the examination room. The resident who has been with us the whole time says, “He gets that all the time. He really doesn't like it.”

 

Sixty-seven

 

“What surgery are you having today?” a nurse in what seems like a sort of pre-operative holding pen asks me before I'm wheeled into the operating room.

“An amputation,” I say.

“What?” she asks. She looks worried.

“I'm kidding. A lobectomy of the upper lobe of my left lung.”

She laughs. “Right,” she says.

“No, left,” I say.

“Hah-hah,” she says.

In the operating room, someone takes my pulse. It's something like 115. “What—are you nervous?” the surgeon asks.

“Of course,” I say.

“There's nothing to worry about.”

Yeah, right.

To start an IV, a young man who must be an intern jabs at my left wrist, which is laid out to my side, Jesus-on-the-Cross style. “No, look,” a nurse says. She rotates my wrist, so as to make the vein stand out more, I am guessing, and that's the last thing I remember, except for the reverse golden-swastika hallucination that spins faster and faster as I go under.

I come out of the anesthesia in the recovery room at Mount Sinai Hospital after the surgery. For all I know, I might be waking up to find out that the surgery was not completed. My wife, Katherine, and a nurse are standing by the gurney. I am said to have said, “Did they do everything?” The answer was yes. I do remember a great flood of relief washing through me, as if my blood were resuming its normal, warm circulation instead of feeling like the cold soup it instantly became when I first saw the white shadow on the X-ray. I am said to have said next, “Did Obama win in South Carolina?”

A few weeks later, the pulmonologist, after managing to inform me again that people are amazed to learn she has kids in their twenties, says, “You have large lymph nodes, so Dr. Williams thought there probably was some spread of the cancer. That's why he wanted the biopsy.” She leans forward confidentially and says, “I didn't think there was, and I am always right!”

 

After my recovery from surgery, I am at a big literary gala at the American Museum of Natural History, standing on the steps outside the museum, talking to Michael Cunningham, whose first
New Yorker
published story, “White Angel,” I edited many years earlier. It caused a small literary sensation at the time—a time when short stories could cause literary sensations of any size at all. We are standing outside so that Cunningham can smoke. I've liked him ever since we worked together; he is warm and genial and gives the impression of happy self-indulgence. And even though he is ten years younger than I am, he always calls me “My boy!” when we meet. (Harry Evans always calls me “yoong mahn,” but he is older, and for some reason it doesn't sit well with me.)

The Editor in Chief of a prominent publishing house is standing out there too, and smoking. She sidles up to us, and we greet each other. I introduce her to Cunningham, she goes on Alert Mode, and the next thing I know, I swear, I find myself physically elbowed out of the situation, with the EIC going at Cunningham like a terrier. It makes me glad to no longer have to be the tribal warlord that publishing and no doubt most businesses can turn you into. It also makes me concerned—as it always does after my operation—to see them both smoking. I'm tempted these days to go up to smokers on the street and beg them to stop.

 

Sixty-eight

 

A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation,
by me, is published. It does OK, gets some good notices, and also gets me interview and speaking invitations. But it has an effect on others that I should have, but haven't, anticipated: It makes some people nervous about talking to me. And I do love to talk.

 

It's hunting season in the Berkshires. Our neighbor Ernie, who hunts our land in return for plowing the driveway and giving us some venison and bear sausage—a kind of barter descended from England's feudal days, I enjoy thinking, baronially—drives up the driveway to show us the huge slain black bear, more than four hundred pounds, in the back of his pickup. Its claws are as big and black as meat hooks, and even in death it looks dreadful. “If you eat the sausage,” Ernie says, “make sure to cook it real good. You don't know what them bears have been eating—all kinds of garbage and dead things and stuff like that.”