Sophie's Choice - William Styron [8]
All of these evening sojourners at the Hunnicutts’, I now realize, must have been in the ad game or Wall Street or some other hollow profession, but then I remained unshaken in my delusion. One night, however, just before my expulsion from the McGraw-Hill empire, I experienced a violent reversal of emotions which caused me never to gaze down into the garden again. That time I had taken my accustomed post at the window and had my eyes fixed on Mavis Hunnicutt’s familiar posterior as she made the little motions which had so endeared her to me—hitching at her blouse and tossing a blond lock back with a finger while chatting with Carson McCullers and a pale, lofty English-looking person who possessed a myopic blink and was obviously Aldous Huxley. What in God’s name were they talking about? Sartre? Joyce? Vintage wines? Summer places in the south of Spain? The Bhagavad-Gita? No, plainly they were speaking of the environment—this environment—for Mavis’s face wore a look of pleasure and animation as she gestured about, pointing to the ivy-covered walls of the garden, the miniature greensward, the bubbling fountain, the miraculous tulip bed set down in bright Flemish hues here amid these somber urban bowels. “If only...” she seemed to say, her expression growing strained with annoyance. “If only...” And then she whirled in a swift half-circle, thrusting out at the University Residence Club a furious little fist, a darling angry fist so prominent, so bloodlessly agitated that it seemed impossible that she was not brandishing it a scant inch from my nose. I felt illumined as if by a spotlight, and in my pounding chagrin I was certain that I could read her lips: “If only that goddamned eyesore weren’t there, with all those creeps peering out at us!”
But my torment on Eleventh Street was not fated to be prolonged. It would have been satisfying to think that my employment was terminated because of the Kon-Tiki episode. But the decline of my fortunes at McGraw-Hill began with the arrival of a new editor in chief, whom I secretly called the Weasel—a near-anagram of his actual surname. The Weasel had been brought in to give to the place some much-needed tone. At that time he was chiefly known in the publishing business for his association with Thomas Wolfe, having become Wolfe’s editor after he left Scribner and Maxwell Perkins, and following the writer’s death, having helped assemble into some sort of sequential and literary order the colossal body of work which remained unpublished. Although the Weasel and I were both from the South—a connection which in the alien surroundings of New York more often than not tends initially to cement the relationship of Southerners—we took an immediate dislike to each other. The Weasel was a balding, unprepossessing little man in his late forties. I don’t know exactly what he thought of me—doubtless the snotty, free-wheeling style of my manuscript reports had something to do with his negative reaction—but I thought him cold, remote, humorless, with the swollen ego and unapproachable manner of a man who has fatuously overvalued his own accomplishments. In the staff editorial conferences he was fond of uttering such locutions as “Wolfe used to say to me...” Or, “As Tom wrote to me so eloquently just before his death...”
His identification with Wolfe was so complete that it was as if he were the writer’s alter ego—and this was excruciating to me, since like countless young men of my generation I had gone through the throes of Wolfe-worship, and I would have given all I had to spend a chummy, relaxed evening with a man like the Weasel, pumping him for fresh new anecdotes about the master, voicing phrases like “God, sir, that’s priceless!” at some marvelous yarn about the adored giant and his quirks and escapades and his three-ton manuscript. But the Weasel and I utterly failed to make contact. Among other things, he was rigorously conventional and had quickly accommodated himself to McGraw-Hill