Riverside Drive. Laura Wormer Van
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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