Asa, as I Knew Him Page 3

  Besides Sally and me, who shared the duties of proofreading, copyediting, and organizing the flow of papers from typesetter through editor to art director, there were Roger Rowell, the editor, in his socks, and my enemy, Adrian Françoise Jessel. Adrian Françoise was Asa’s assistant, which meant that her duties were not well defined, and that meant she put her nose into other people’s duties. Her nose was long, pale, and refined; she was a long, pale, and refined-looking young woman. She had beautiful hands and tapered ankles and wrists. She was nearly a foot taller than Sally and I were, and had a number of inches on Roger and Asa as well. Like most tall women she slouched, but she moved quietly and deftly. She could be rummaging through my files before I heard her coming. That is to say, I never did hear her coming. What gave her presence away was postnasal drip, which made her sniff.

  Adrian Françoise wasn’t always my enemy. She evolved into my enemy. Competition for Asa put the finishing touches on a foundation of distrust and mutual incomprehension we had been building for about a year. We didn’t have the same style, and we didn’t have much charity for each other’s ways.

  To begin with, I couldn’t bear her name. Adrian or Françoise would have been bad enough, but being compelled to say them both—and she did compel that. “Hello. I am Adrian Françoise,” she said to me on my first day, giving equal weight to both names and pronouncing them without a pause in between. She had a suggestion of a French accent, more a deliberateness of intonation than any distortion of vowels, and that also bothered me. I felt that it was affected. I was sure that Adrian Françoise could speak normal American English if she chose to. She probably couldn’t, but she provoked that sort of thinking in people. It was Adrian Françoise who dummied up the more boring articles that Asa didn’t feel like dealing with, and she would come to me to check the changes she had made to lose or gain lines. Hers were never intelligent changes; she had a gift for torturing language. She was adept in using the passive. After I’d been there for a few months I started changing her changes, or making them before she got a chance to. That led to arguments over the cheapest way to lose lines. Adrian Françoise was also responsible for approving the composition bill and arguing with the typesetters (Asa being too well-bred to like dealing with money), and she had her eye on the penny.

  “That change will cost $3.25. Do you really think it’s necessary?”

  “I guess not,” I said lamely, for about half a year. Then I changed my mind.

  “Yes. It’s wrong as it stands.”

  “Then why didn’t you change it in manuscript?”

  “Well, I just missed it, or Sally missed it.”

  “Ohh. Mmmmm.” Adrian Françoise could say “mmmmmmm” in an extraordinarily vibrant way, owing to postnasal drip.

  And so we had a permanent state of war over lines. I would change a line or two on the galleys, she would catch the galleys before they went back to the typesetter and delete or diminish my change, I would reinstate it on the page proofs, and she would appear in my office holding a grimy Xerox she had made of my misdeed and say, “I see you made that change …”

  “What change, Adrian Françoise?”

  But this sort of stuff is neither evil nor remarkable. More noteworthy, actually quite astonishing to me, was that Adrian Françoise went through our desks. She didn’t only read everything on top of desks and hanging from bulletin boards, she went deep into drawers, into envelopes under pads of paper where one’s paycheck stubs were, in the file farthest back, where one had little notes written by—well, in my case, Asa. It was Sally who figured out she was doing this.

  “Aff [we called her this to save time, since we discussed her a lot] is going through my desk. She’s probably going through yours too. So watch out,” said Sally one grim December morning.

  “How do you know?”

  “I mentioned I wouldn’t be in on Friday and she said, ‘Oh, right, you’re going to Chatham.’ The only way she could have known that was from looking in my private calendar, which I keep in my right-hand drawer, in the back. I mean, you’d have to paw through the whole drawer to find it.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I was so stunned I just nodded. I’m taking my calendar home. Nothing’s safe here.” Sally was stacking and unstacking her dictionaries and style manuals in an attempt to impose her will on something. “No fucking privacy.”

  “Not a fucking bit,” I agreed. I loved the way Sally said “fucking.” I often egged her on when she was irritated, just to get her to the point of swearing; it took a lot to make her swear, but once she started she was impressive. She said “fucking” as though it were spelled with seven initial F’s. “But,” I continued, “you don’t really have any secrets in your desk.” I was thinking of my collection of notes from Asa. At that point they were entirely innocent: “Please see me about American history article, I need to lose a paragraph.” “Where are book column galleys?” “Can’t find manuscript we were discussing this morning, do you know where it is?” That sort of thing, not very steamy. Still, my keeping them was suspicious, and Adrian Françoise was smart enough to see that, if she’d found them.

  “I want my private life to be private,” snapped Sally. “I don’t want somebody checking up on my movements, when I’m having lunch with whom, what kind of crackers I have in my drawer, for Chrissake. I can’t stand it. I want to wash my desk.”

  I took Asa’s notes home that evening, and worried for a while over whether Aff had seen them. But she treated me no worse and no better than before, so I forgot about it. I continued to stuff my paycheck stubs into the back of my drawer, and to leave money among my pencils, and generally to behave as though I had no secrets either. Maybe I wanted to catch her out somehow.

  Still, the desk incident occurred after the erotic-dream exchange, and Adrian Françoise, with her hypersensitivity and snoopiness, didn’t miss the flirtation between me and Asa. I think it was in January, at the start of the decade, that our relations took on an edge that at first puzzled me. She began turning up in Asa’s office when I was there. She was frequently sitting at my desk, in my chair, when I arrived in the morning, as if to declare herself a licensed snooper. Our arguments about lines got worse; she once turned on her heel (Adrian Françoise actually did things that I had hitherto only read about, such as turn on her heel and wring her hands) and stamped out of my office in the middle of my explanation for why I had decided to make a certain change. Then one day Asa called me on the intercom when Aff and Sally were in my office to tell me that Harvard radio had started their Mozart Orgy, and that I should listen. We (Asa and I) were Mozart fans, and much of our flirtation consisted of discussions of music and the trading of banal rhapsodies over Mozart, which were just disguises for rhapsodies over each other. “He’s so elegant,” I’d say, staring at Asa’s immaculate shirt. “So delicate,” he’d rejoin, his eyes on my arms and neck.

  “The Mozart Orgy’s on,” I said, returning the receiver to its beige cradle. I turned on my radio.

  “Was that Asa?” asked Adrian Françoise.

  “Yup.”

  “Oh. He tells you, and then you tell us?”

  “Yup,” I said. I looked at her. “That’s right.” I felt like rubbing it in.

  “Well. We must listen,” said Aff. She made it sound like a duty. She rose, smoothed her straight skirt, and went to attend to the music.

  “She’s jealous,” I said to Sally. “That’s it, she’s in love with him too.”

  “No. She loves him. You’re in love with him.”

  “Big difference.”

  “There is. You know that.” Sally had a trick of saying “You know that” in a sly, co-conspirator tone of voice that made me feel part of an elite. “Why shouldn’t she love him? He loves her. Because of her he’ll never have to cast off another manuscript about whale migration, or write another letter to the Bettmann Archive. She makes his life wonderful, and he rewards her with money. So she loves him.”

  Money. Women who want money don
’t work for second-rate, quasi-academic journals. Nonetheless, Sally was sure she was getting a raw deal. She had been there three times as long as Adrian Françoise, and she was older, with a family to support (Dickie’s money was enough to maintain him in the style to which he was accustomed—scotch, lots of novels, raw hamburger for dinner, a month in Chatham at the family estate; it didn’t cover dentistry or new tires or school clothes for Honor). Adrian Françoise made a good deal more money than Sally did. And it was as Sally said, because Asa would pay anything to get certain things off his mind and desk. Sally and I only insured that the magazine came out on time, without errors. Somebody had to do that, and people were trained to do that. Until Adrian Françoise turned up, nobody knew that there was such a thing as a person who would do unpleasant tasks efficiently, even with relish. Oh, Adrian Françoise was crafty. Her snooping and powers of observation had aided her in finding out all the things Asa hated doing and learning how to do them.

  For Asa was the man with the money. He may have been too well-bred to want to deal with it, but he was capable of dealing with it, which was more than could be said of Roger. So it was to him that we applied for our raises, with our little tales about rent and oil prices. We didn’t get them. We got cost-of-living increases: 3 percent, 4 percent if our performances had been diligent. Two weeks before he kissed me, he gave me a raise—an actual raise. Twelve percent. I didn’t tell Sally.

  It’s almost grotesque, isn’t it? It’s such a seedy story. Were it not for the setting—the office shaded by elms, the eccentric, colorful characters, the challenging and intellectual nature of our work—this could be a story whispered in the corridors of a textile mill at the turn of the century. The boss, the young employee, her charms, his wily ways. She left in disgrace.…

  I left because I couldn’t watch him stomping on his heart and mine. That’s all he was doing in the end. He loved me—he still loves me. I know love when I feel it, and I felt it from him. It warmed me through and through, to the coldest February-chilled marrow of my thigh, the secret cells in my blood. But sometimes it doesn’t matter whether people love each other or hate each other.

  I may have been born to love him—I’m sure I was; loving him was easier than eating or sleeping—but he was surely born to stomp on my heart. He was better at that than at loving me. He loved me because I was exotic, foreign, incomprehensible, and for those same reasons he justified expelling me from his life and mind. He is a member of a ruling class, and rulers must have subjects; but it’s been more than a century since his aristocracy held power, so as a group they are softening, degrading—and these are mortal sins, for Yankees. Therefore, every opportunity to be upright, harsh, cold, and granitelike must be seized. And to temper that, there must be some nobility, some selflessness to prove that they have the right to be the ruling class. So I think Asa conceived of me as his colony; he protected me and nurtured me initially, then withdrew sternly, leaving me to fend for myself and congratulating himself on his honorable relinquishing of power. His word had been law (after all, who decided when we spent time together and how much time we had?), but he was not a tyrant; he knew when to loosen the link.

  Is that what he thought?

  Was he merely a coward, afraid of being caught? Were the half-truths and scurrying around Cambridge at lunchtime too much for him? Was it Fay, with her brown eyes looking into his every night? “You don’t know what marriage means to a man like that,” Sally said many times. “He loves comfort so. He’s been married forever. He’ll never give it up.” I refuse to wonder if he loved Fay more than he loved me. What good can asking that question do? Not even he knows the answer. There can’t be an answer. It’s a question, really, of how he wants to live, and he has a way of living. It’s his, his dogs, his oak thresholds, his history with her.

  Even now I can’t stop making excuses for him.

  Adrian Françoise loved Asa and he was indebted to her. He treated her with a perfect, warm politesse he never extended to anyone else. They mythologized each other: She considered him a handsome benefactor and overburdened man of refinement whose welfare she was tending; he considered her an angel, a model of good-tempered efficiency, an unemotional woman. I’m sure that in her deepest sleep Adrian Françoise had locked limbs with Asa, but she didn’t know it. She never turned up in his dreams—I know because I asked him. I was jealous of Adrian Françoise, probably because I never bothered being jealous of Fay.

  (“Oh, Dinah,” said Asa, “she’s so unjuicy.” And placed his palms on my breasts. We had just gotten up from bed, at two-thirty in the afternoon, and stood naked, admiring each other, tracing the lines of sweat and liquid on each other’s thighs.)

  Their mythology created problems in the office. It made Asa ignore her bad habits and unwilling to hear about them. Sally took him out for lunch to describe the desk rifling. His response was, “Tell her to stop it.” To me he said, “What can I do? What am I supposed to do? Should I talk to her?” This in a tone that pleaded with me to say exactly what I said, “No, no, darling, that wouldn’t help.” I said that because I didn’t want a confrontation between them, for Adrian Françoise had gone crazy on the trail of our affair.

  Of course she knew what was happening; everybody did. Sally knew because I told her. Roger knew—I’ve always wondered if Asa told him, bragging. He knew and he took to leering at me. One day he came into my office to ask me the generic term for a woman with whom a man is having an affair. I took up the challenge. “A mistress, Roger,” I said with equanimity. “That’s what I thought, but I don’t like the way it sounds. Isn’t there some other word?” Roger wasn’t in the habit of coming to me for help with his problems. I stared at him. “Courtesan,” I said. “Paramour.” I watched him turning a bit pink. “Popsie.” “I guess mistress will do,” he mumbled, and padded back to his office. Charlotte the receptionist knew: Her lunchtime scorecard of people’s ins and outs frequently read, “Asa & Dinah?” Entries for others read, “Roger 2:30.”

  Adrian Françoise was torn between wanting to prove it and wanting to pretend it wasn’t happening. As our passions expanded, her eavesdropping and desk rummaging became more frenzied. At the same time, the expression on her face became fixed. There was a film over her eyes. When Asa and I went out for lunch together, which, after our kiss, we did once a week, Adrian Françoise would snag us at the top of the staircase to ask Asa questions that didn’t need to be asked, and her face would be entirely clouded over with self-imposed confusion. She’d look from Asa, wearing his glasses and buttoned into an overcoat, to me, similarly buttoned, tapping my red boot on the carpet, and mystification would fairly leak from her eyes. But there was an urgency and determination in the way she kept us standing there, slowly unwinding her series of questions, wrenching from us a nugget of our most precious element, time.

  Adrian Françoise did not know where to stop. She asked me lots of questions. First they were questions like, “Why did you and Asa have lunch last week? Were you discussing the new layout for the book feature?” To which I replied, succinctly, “No.” Then she tried to be my supervisor, which technically she was. “Are you having some problems at work that you’ve been discussing with Asa? Is he giving you trouble about money? Maybe I can help.” These sorts of questions soon gave way to trap questions: “Where is Asa this morning?” “When is Asa coming back from lunch?” “Is Asa taking Friday off to go to New York?” “At the dentist, two-thirty, yes,” I would answer. I was bragging, but she had provoked me. Then she started to follow me around. She even told me she was doing it.

  “I have to pick up some tickets for the Kurosawa film tonight, I’ll stop by your house,” or “I’ll walk you home, I have to go to the post office.” What she wanted was to catch Asa. He came to my house every day after work to neck with me. We spent months inching our way to bed, as if we were fifteen. He kissed my shoulders for one month and kissed my breasts through my blouse for the next month. At five-twenty he turned the corner of my street wearing his glas
ses, carrying his briefcase, head bent—ashamed, hiding his features? Up the stairs, the dangerous wait, exposed, until I answered the bell, then avalanches, earthquakes, everything disintegrating as we devoured each other in the hall, me pushing the door shut behind him, both of us alert to Cambridge poised behind the maple panels. “Was that Asa Thayer going up those steps?” Perhaps we were the only people who cared. No, Adrian Françoise cared. I knew she dawdled at the Brattle Theatre, reading the schedule slowly as she walked down the street, waiting for Asa to walk by. I don’t know whether she ever satisfied herself by seeing him.

  By the time she was doing this I felt safe, because Asa was guilty too, and that restrained her from overstepping all the bounds. She might, in a sanctimonious panic, have called Fay and started babbling, but the fact that Asa was compromising himself stopped her. He had failed her by becoming susceptible to me. Earlier I had feared her. When I lay on my sofa and thought about him on short February afternoons, I thought also of Adrian Françoise and how she was sniffing out my passion, how she would sniff it out before he did and tattle to him and jinx my chances. I could see her standing beside him, in his swivel chair, smoothing and smoothing her straight skirt, saying I was unprofessional, I was using sexual tactics to improve my position at the magazine. And you see, I didn’t know what he was feeling then. I didn’t know he was as infected as I. She terrified me.

  Yet, with all the fear—and I feared not only Adrian Françoise but Fay, and Roger, and everybody on the street who could surely read my lunatic passion in my face—and the certainty that he would not acquiesce, I had just the opposite of these, and I was happy. I had a thousand moments of contact and exchange to fondle every evening, and I had the secret of his nascent soul. That was a secret even he didn’t know. I knew it was the key to him. I knew I’d press against him and warm his soul into being, and I knew nobody could resist an opportunity of such hot, cosmic dimensions, not even Asa.