The Content of Our Character

Reunification was booked for the third of October, and a magazine on Madison Avenue spent September trying to have the last word on a thing that had not happened yet. This was a new problem, or an old problem in a new coat. The whole faith of the place was that you arrived late and arrived right, that the profile which took four months was worth the four because the world would hold its pose that long; but the world that fall was moving at the speed of a currency, and the two Germanys were folding into one on a date the treaty men had set with a calendar, and the October book would reach the newsstand a few days after the flags came down. So the building was in the position of a man composing a toast to a wedding he has not been invited to watch, working from the save-the-date and the smell of the flowers being ordered.

The book had a bet in it besides. On the cover was a man in a chair with a wall of library shelves gone soft behind him, and inside was an essay of seven thousand words arguing that a person could hold the fact of himself so tightly it became a room he could not leave; and in the back of the book, where the reviews lived, was a second piece that took the first one apart with respect. The editor's letter said, in the register of a woman removing an apology from her own paragraph, that a magazine which agreed with everything it printed was a catalogue, and that this month the staff did not agree, and that the disagreement was the issue.

Nobody at a kiosk would know the staff had split. That was the trick of the thing, and the pleasure of it. The split went out into the world looking like a single confident book.

Julian Cross heard the floor before he understood what he was hearing, which took him most of a week. It was quieter, and the quiet had a location. It was the foreign end of eight, where a desk sat with its chair pushed in and its blotter squared and a coffee ring on the blotter going to a stain, because the man who made the ring was in a hotel in a country the September book had shipped without naming, and nobody had moved the cup in time. Julian passed the desk four times a day. He did not look at it the fourth time any more than the first.

He had mailed the third letter on Tuesday. He did it as he had done the first two, with no plan he would have admitted to: four flights down in his shirtsleeves, the box on the corner, the little door swinging shut on an envelope addressed to an apartment in Washington Heights where no one would read it, where a super Charlie paid kept the radiator honest against a winter still weeks off. There were three of them in the box inside that door now, or three of them lying on the mat inside the flat, he did not know which and it did not matter, because the address was chosen for exactly that, for being the one place on earth a sentence could be set down and never have to be received.

On Saturday he went to the park, because it was Saturday and because Arthur would be at the table under the plane trees whether Julian came or not.

Arthur was seventy and had played tenor in rooms that did not exist anymore and did not read magazines and had told Julian so once, kindly, the first spring, the way you tell a man his fly is down. He set the pieces from an old cigar box and he called Julian kid, and he beat him, reliably, four games out of five, because Arthur played the board and Julian played the man across it, and the board did not care who you were on Madison Avenue. That was the whole of what Julian came for and could not have said aloud: an hour a week in front of a person on whom none of his equipment worked. Arthur did not want the profile. Arthur wanted the knight moved off f4 before it got taken.

"You're leaving your queen out in the weather again," Arthur said, not looking up, moving a pawn one square with a finger the shape of a root. "She catches cold, that's on you."

Julian looked at his queen, out in the weather indeed, and understood that he had put her there while thinking about a desk with a coffee ring on it, and moved her home, and lost anyway, eleven moves later, to a fork he saw coming for four of them and could do nothing about. He came to be beaten. Being beaten was restful, and the restfulness had a bottom to it he did not examine, and the bottom was this: he came now, this fall, more than he used to, and he came because the one other person on earth in front of whom the equipment failed was in Kuwait with no cover and a fax that told him nothing, and a man needs at least one such person, and Julian, who was down to two, had just watched the count go to one. The trouble was that small and that simple. It got smaller the longer he sat at the board, and it never once got its name.

He had pitched the reunification piece at Nora for a year — we have exactly one editor who'd hear it, December and again in June — and he had the German by ear from the affair years, and the standing, and the byline that opened doors, and in twelve months of pushing her toward the plane he had not once put his own name on the ticket. He moved his bishop, and Arthur took it.

"Mate in three," Arthur said, "if you're paying attention, which you're not."

"I'm never paying attention."

"That's why I like you, kid," Arthur said. "You lose like a gentleman. The ones who concentrate get mean about it." He began putting the pieces back in the box, the felt worn off the bottoms of the kings. At the edge of the park, on the way out, Julian fed a payphone and dialed the desk and stood in the September wind while a message was read to him, and returned it in one clause, and hung up, and went to close a magazine.

The Steele essay was his to edit, and the writer nearly walked over the tone.

Not the argument. Julian did not touch the argument — the man in the chair had written a book proposing that a race held too close became its own cage, and the book was half right and gorgeously overconfident, and the essay agreed with the half and went after the overconfidence with a scalpel. What Julian went after was the temperature. The writer had it three degrees too warm in the third section — the prose had started to enjoy being fair, had begun to admire its own even hand, the way a man admires his reflection in the act of being reasonable — and Julian bracketed the whole passage and wrote you're performing your generosity; be generous and shut up about it, and the writer took it personally, because it was personal, and the two of them went at it for an hour in the corner office with the door shut. The writer thought Julian was softening the piece. Julian was not softening the piece; he was taking Julian's own favorite sin out of another man's paragraph, the audible fairness, the reasonableness that wants applause, and he could see it there precisely because he had spent a career committing it. They fought it for an hour and Julian won, and the writer knew it, and filed the cut version Monday under a cover note of one sentence — your generosity noted — which Julian read twice and did not answer.

At one in the morning on the last close night, wired on the machine coffee and the particular clarity that came at that hour, he said the true thing to a junior writer, and disguised it as bravado so it could be said at all.

The junior was twenty-six and good and frightened of the building, and had asked Julian, because you asked Julian, whether the long pieces were worth it, whether anybody read eight thousand words anymore, and Julian leaned back with his feet on an open drawer and his right hand conducting the smoke and told him the truth in the voice of a man who did not believe it. "Nobody reads them," he said. "You're apprenticing to a dead trade. The attention it takes to read what we do is dying off with the attention it takes to make it — I give it fifteen years, maybe less, and then it's a craft fair, it's people in aprons showing children how the old machine worked." His hand made its loop. "And I don't care. You understand me. I know it's ending and I do not care, because the sentences are still the most beautiful thing a person can build with a mind, and I would rather write one good one into the dark than a thousand bad ones into a crowd. That's not courage. It's appetite. Don't confuse them." He meant every word. The junior wrote some of it on a napkin, which Julian pretended not to see. In the morning, sober, in the elevator, the junior quoted it back to him hopefully, and Julian said he had no memory of saying anything so adolescent and that the machine coffee should be regulated, and got off at eight, and denied it, and went to his desk, and did.

Dez Washington came up out of the subway into a Midtown gone September-sharp, the light handed down between the towers already carrying the first edge of the fall in it, and walked the blocks where her posture did the thing it did. On the corner two blocks from the office the same three men stood by the same shuttered store doing the same quick commerce in their palms that they did every morning, the little glassine folds passing at nine o'clock like transfers, and she crossed it without slowing, as you cross the thing that is always there, and by the lobby she was the person the building expected. The newsstand at the subway mouth had spent the week shouting at the mayor in wood type — a tourist dead on a Midtown platform defending his mother, and the tabloid's front one sentence aimed at City Hall by first name, DAVE, DO SOMETHING! — and the men on the elevator who had bought the tabloid carried it folded inside the broadsheet, and the desk checked neither, because the dailies' weather was not the magazine's beat, and six a day was the year's arithmetic and nobody at any desk said it out loud.

Her pitch had died the week before, and a sentence of it was walking around the building without her name on it.

She had sent it up the side door, a memo, because an assistant on the checking desk did not pitch in the Cathedral and everyone knew it; a City piece, her angle, the block behind the block. It came back dead. It came back dead by a Martin memo, and the Martin memo was the thing that stayed with her, because it had killed the piece by saying the piece was not what the magazine did — not a Meridian story, not the kind of thing Dave would ever have run, the standard invoked in the flat numbered hand that the whole floor feared and quoted. Two weeks later her own sentence surfaced in a meeting she took the minutes of, unattributed, in Julian Cross's mouth — polished a half-turn, said better, which was the worse part — and got the nod her memo had not gotten, and she wrote it down in its new owner's name because that was the job. Then she did the one thing the job left her. She typed the minutes with the sentence in quotation marks, exact, the way the desk set a verbatim, and she pulled the carbon of her killed memo and routed it to Julian's box under a plain slip that said, in the desk's own grammar, source for p. 2 — no name on it, no question in it, nothing a person could answer or report. The minutes went to eleven mailboxes. The next morning the slip came back to the desk with his initials in the corner where initials went, JC, nothing else, and the two of them had never once spoken and did not begin now. She banked the rest as she banked the carbon under the almanac.

The Bonn card rang out twice that week under her hand. It was soft at the corners, the ink of it gone furry, a stringer's line on a card in the foreign Rolodex that had been the magazine's ear an hour from the wall by train, and she dialed it Tuesday to clear a fact on a held dispatch and it rang into a room in Germany that answered with nothing, the transatlantic tone going long and even and empty, and she dialed it Thursday and it did the same, and she noted the line dead on the query and moved on. The desk knew before the masthead knew; the desk was the part of the building that picked up the phone, and a name went quiet on a card down here a cycle or two before anyone upstairs noticed the chair it belonged to had been filled and emptied and filled again with juniors, each one a little harder to reach than the last.

The front of the book came through the desk that week in a hurry and in pieces. There was First Funds, the notice that the President had signed the AIDS-care bill in August, a law already a month old by the time the book would carry it, and she checked the act's name and the date against two references and green-dotted it, and it said, in eighty words, that federal money existed now where it had not. There was the item on the decade the President had named the Decade of the Brain in July, and it ran because a rival had run it first and the room did not care to be second, a flinch somebody named aloud in the meeting and that ran regardless. And there was the calendar item, A Ball, Noted, four lines on an autumn benefit, and Dez knew what the four lines had been before they were four lines: a whole world of houses and the mothers who ran them, the benefits thrown and the hospital rounds walked and the funerals held for members their first families had thrown out, stripped to a date and an address because naming the houses risked a foundation on the magazine's own donor list. A checker on the desk knew what had been drained out of it, and green-dotted the date and the address, and said nothing, because the date and the address were the query and the rest was not, and the rest ran nowhere.

The September book's mail came down the same week in a bundle, the letters that claimed errors routed to the desk to be read against the record. There were no errors. There was the war, twice — a doctor in Larchmont asking, over a signature pressed nearly through the paper, how a magazine dated September had managed to print not one word about Kuwait; a man in Chicago, briefer, asking only whether the editors took August off — and for these the desk had the standing paragraph about press dates and the lead time of a monthly, which was true and answered nothing. And there was the curb piece. A paralyzed veterans' association in Washington ordered five hundred reprints, to be mailed onward under a cover letter of the association's own composing; a paving contractor in Queens sent a Polaroid of a fresh ramp, the concrete still dark, an arrow inked on the white border and no note of any kind, and the Polaroid stood propped against somebody's telephone for a week before it went wherever those things went. Dez typed the two press-date replies from the standing paragraph and logged the reprint order through to fulfillment.

She found the drawer on a Wednesday, reorganizing the paste-up archive, because the flat files on seven had drifted past the point where a person could find the model page they wanted and someone had said the assistant on the desk had the patience for it, meaning her.

The room smelled of the machine that had made everything in it. Bestine and the ghost of hot wax, the solvent standing in the still air as it stood over the boards on a close night, so that the archive of the magazine smelled exactly like the magazine being born, sweetish and volatile, a candle store with a chemistry problem. She worked the third cabinet drawer by drawer, the old boards in their manila, the years going backward under her hands, and in the second drawer under the March eighty-nine layouts, rubber-banded, foxed, three pages with no cover sheet, was a galley she had not gone looking for.

She read it standing up.

It was Susan Drake's, though it did not sign itself; she knew the green hand and the copy-desk plainness of it, declarative, no adjective doing any work grief would want done. It was a memorial. It named the disease the December obituary had called a long illness. It named the man Dave had loved. It listed the magazine's own dead, the contributing editors gone across the decade, set down beside Dave rather than mourned in their separate corners, and it did all of this in sentences a checker would build, and over the top of it, in red, in a hand Dez also knew, was the refusal — full paragraphs struck, sentences written sideways up the column, the disease-naming paragraph crossed corner to corner with a single diagonal line, no caret, no dele, no restoration. Not a correction. The red got faster toward the bottom of the second page and stopped being careful and became only crossing-out. She had learned to read a hand that started editing and ended erasing, and this hand had done both, in order, down one column.

Beside it in the same manila was the other thing, and the other thing was worse, and it took a checker's eye to see it at all.

It was an ordinary galley, an old feature, marked up in editing pencil, the graphite gone silver with the years. Dave's hand. She had seen it in the archive a dozen times that afternoon, the loops of it, the particular way the man had queried a verb. And then, on the second page, mid-sentence, in the middle of a marginal note, the hand changed. It changed and it did not change. A person who did not spend her days looking at how letters were made would have read straight through it and seen one continuous hand finishing one continuous thought. Dez stopped, and went back, and put the two halves under the north light and read them against each other, and saw it: the note began in Dave's pencil and finished in someone imitating Dave's pencil, well, better than well, well enough to fool a masthead and a printer and a widow and a decade — the ascenders a hair too even, the pressure a shade too kind, the forgery of a dying man's editing hand completed so the work could go out looking like his. She knew whose the second hand was. It was the same red that had killed the memorial in the drawer beside it. One woman had finished a dead man's edits in his own hand, out of what Dez could not name and did not try to, so that the issue would be Dave's; and the same woman had struck the true words about how Dave died. Both marks were in the one drawer, in the one hand, and three floors up the building was quoting a dead man's standards in kill memos, half of them written after he could no longer hold a pencil.

She held both truths in the amber-smelling room and did the arithmetic, present tense, because present tense was the only tense that kept you employed. A checker found reading killed galleys in the flat files was a checker who got walked to the elevator; there was no version of this she got to be caught with, no confidant it improved to tell, no upstairs it changed for the better. She squared the three memorial pages back into their rubber band, brittle, and did not snap it, and she laid the forged galley back exactly where it had lain, in the manila, under the March boards, in the drawer, and she pushed the drawer shut, and she found the model page they had sent her down for and carried it up, and she did not eat lunch, and nobody at the desk remarked on it, because the desk did not remark on a person working through.

At the water cooler on seven, on her way back, two men from the back of the book were holding a review galley between them, the Steele rebuttal, and one was reading the reviewer's own aside out loud, the part about how a critic earns the right to be hard on his own people — this is the man who called Beloved a blackface holocaust novel, he read off the galley, and called Spike Lee a propagandist in the same breath, and one of them laughed, and the laugh did not fit the sentence, and the cooler gurgled its bottle, and the two of them carried the galley back toward eight still arguing whether the aside would clear the desk. Dez went past them to her own and did not slow; she saw the thing and checked it against nothing and carried it nowhere.

The last thing she took upstairs that day was a caption query for the cover, and she took it to the light table, where Sana Farid and Martin Kaye were not yielding to each other over a photograph.

Martin wanted the shelves. The cover was the man in the chair, and behind him a wall of books, and Martin wanted the books legible, the spines readable, a man of ideas in front of his ideas. "You can see he's read them," Martin said, turning the Yale ring once. "That's the whole picture. A serious man in front of a serious wall." Sana had the frame she had shot, and in her frame the shelves fell off into a soft brown nothing a foot behind the man's head, the whole depth of the room thrown away so that only the face held, and she did not slide it or argue it; she set it on the light box and left it under Martin's hand. "You can read the spines, you read the spines," she said. "Nobody reads the man. Out of focus, there's only him. The books are what he wants you to see. The face is what's there." The out-of-focus frame went up — Nora had tapped it that morning and gone up the stairs — and Martin lost, in front of the light table and the caption query and the assistant holding it, and priced the loss on his way out: "The face, then. When the letters ask what the man actually wrote, that's the cover desk's mail." He turned the ring once and left the table to her. Sana did not watch him go; she was already stacking her frames, and the not-watching was its own arithmetic. Dez filed the caption and went back to seven.

On the way to the stairs she passed the new machine, the one Macintosh the art department had been lent on trial, its small grey screen holding a column of the front of the book set in a type that existed in none of the building's drawers, and a designer sliding the whole column sideways with the little box on its cord — the operation Sal did with a scalpel and hot wax done in silence, in seconds, by nobody's hands — and the two men watching it did not say what they were watching, and at six the machine went back under its dust cover, and the boards went on being the magazine.

She kept an error file of her own, a plain folder, the coded index cards a checker kept on the fields where she had once been wrong so she would not be wrong there twice. That evening, after the phones quieted, she pulled a fresh card and wrote on it in a shorthand only she could read — not the memorial, not the forgery, not a word a person could subpoena or a colleague could parse, only a location and a date and a mark that meant verified, do not re-open, not ours to hold — and she filed it in its alphabetical place between two cards about arrest counts and Berlin building numbers, and capped the pen, and put the folder back under the almanac where it lived, and went home to the Bronx with the getting-home five unspent.

Nora Kessler's flagship filed hollow on the Monday, and it was the third dead Berlin piece of the year, and she read it standing with her coat half off at nine-twenty and knew from the first paragraph that there was nobody left to send.

It was the reunification centerpiece, the one the whole book was built around, and it had come in from the junior who had inherited the Bonn chair a better man had left for a magazine that did not kill him, and the junior had done what a junior does, filed the fact competently and missed the six weeks the piece was for. It counted the crowds that had not gathered yet. It explained a treaty. It had been to no kitchen. She marked the first page and stopped, because marking would not fix a thing that had been born without an ear, and she reached for the phone to find the man who could have written it.

The old card was dead; the desk had told her that in a memo two days back, the line ringing out, twice, into an empty room in Bonn. So she booked a call, the long way, through the operator, the transatlantic ceremony of it — the number given, the wait, the call coming back an hour later when the circuit cleared — and the number she had for him now, the private one, the one that was supposed to reach the stringer she had priced in a sentence in a conference room in December and then read in Harper's in June, rang once and answered. It answered in a young voice, an assistant's, in accented English, at a desk that was not Meridian's. He was not there, the voice said. He was in the field. This was the Bonn arrangement for the other magazine, and could someone take a message. Nora said no message, thank you, and set the receiver down, and sat for a moment with the plain fact of it: the one man in Germany who could have heard the story was hearing it for someone else now, on a line she had reached by accident, and the chair he had asked her for twice was empty in her own book and about to run a dead piece in it, and there was nobody left to send but the person who could always, all along, have gone.

Charlie came down before she had put the fact away.

"Open a line," he said, standing in her doorway with the flat plan she had sent up as a courtesy. "For the foreign desk. You're a man down out there with Vega gone east, and this" — he tapped the hollow centerpiece where it sat on the plan — "this is what happens when you run a chair on juniors. Hire somebody. I'll find the budget. We'll take it out of the well." He meant it, and it was generous, and it was Charlie doing the thing Charlie did, believing a gap was a staffing question and a staffing question a money question and money a thing he could still get his hands on in a down year.

"No," Nora said. "I'll cover it in-house. We don't add a salary in the twelfth month the ad pages are down to hire for one story."

And Charlie, who had two folded regrets letters over his heart that morning and a twelfth month of numbers going the wrong way in the deep drawer, heard thrift, and was pleased by thrift, and read the whole of it — the decline, the no, the in-house — as his editor being a careful steward in a lean season, and approved it, and told her she was the last frugal person left in publishing and he loved her for it, and went back up to nine with his misreading intact and her cover perfect inside it.

Susan came in at the end of the day with a personal-day slip, for a date, and the date was one that two people in the building could have named.

It was near the end of summer, one year and some weeks past the week they did not discuss, the week Dave went; and Susan laid the slip on the desk without comment, because Susan asked for nothing she could not defend and did not decorate what she asked for, and Nora looked at the date and knew it, and signed it, and said nothing, and slid it back. There was a galley in a flat file three floors down that these two women had made together, one writing it and one killing it, and neither of them had spoken of it since, and neither of them spoke of it now; the whole exchange was a date and a signature and the width of a pen between thread and thread. Susan said thank you in the register you thank a person in for a small permission, and took her coat off the hook, and went to get Sam, and Nora sat with the signed slip a moment before she filed it, and then filed it.

She called her father on Sunday at seven, and the first ten minutes were the ten minutes they always were, and then they were not.

His knee was a liar and the linden was long past and the money was still the money, worth nothing and everything depending on an arithmetic he would not stop performing; and he told her about Frau Schneider's chip of Wall, and then, four minutes later, he told her about Frau Schneider's chip of Wall, coming at it fresh, the same sentences, the same small delight in them, as though the first telling had happened to another man. She named it nothing. She said ja where the places for it came, and let the story double back and go around again, and did not put a weight in her voice, because a man of sixty-two tells a story twice on a Sunday and it is a warm evening and a long week and there is no version of naming it that is not larger than the thing.

Then he reached for a word and it was not there.

It was an ordinary word, the word for the bench under the trees, and he went for it and came back with his hand empty, and there was a silence with an effort in it, a small terrible working, and she heard him hunt through the near rooms of himself for a thing that had always been in his pocket, and he said, in the low Berlin that came up when the guard went down, hast du je gelesen, was das Kind geschrieben hat. Did you ever read what the child wrote.

He had raised the child. He knew the child had written. On any other Sunday he would no more have asked it than walked into traffic; the not-asking was the floorboard the whole family had stepped around for sixteen months and sixteen years. She did not answer it. She said, Papa, and asked him about Matthias's children, and he went, gratefully, the guard coming back up over the open door, and a minute later he did not remember having left it open. Na gut, mein Kind. Schlaf. — Hab dich lieb, Papa. — Ick hab dir lieb, the Berlin coming up through the High German at the very end as it did when he meant it and had stopped pretending not to, and the line went quiet, and she sat with the receiver in her lap.

She took the letter out of the drawer that night, which she did not often do anymore, and it was at its heaviest.

She knew it by heart and did not need to open it and opened it. The thin airmail paper, the upright schooled hand, the one page a seventeen-year-old had drafted before she copied it fair; the meeting or the letter back or the nothing, whichever the reader preferred, offered in the second paragraph like a held door; the word for mother that the page did not use anywhere on it. She had opened it in December and answered it never, and the arithmetic she had run every month since had gotten her this far — that she had already been silent so long a few more weeks could not lengthen the silence, that a debt past counting is not increased by a rounding error. The arithmetic had held for sixteen months. It did not hold against a man losing the word for a bench and asking, in the gap where the word had been, the thing he had never once asked. The dead piece could be answered by going. The father could be answered by going. The letter could not be answered at all, and it came in the same week as the other two.

The next anyone at the magazine saw of it, she was booking the flight. To the floor it was the flagship, the reunification piece, the editor going hands-on for the story the juniors could not land, the chair of Meridian doing the thing she had told a full conference room in December that the chair of Meridian did not do. Nobody questioned it. It was, on its face, an editor covering a hole in her own book, and every consideration in it was real. She left one number where she could be reached, and the number she left was the checking desk on seven, not her own office, and she did not examine why. She wrote the extension on the routing slip herself and sent it down.

At the door of the apartment, the night before, she did the last small thing. The keys lived in the ceramic dish by the door, and on the ring, every day for years, rode the brass Buntbart key that opened a lock in Berlin, carried across an ocean and back on the same keyring as the mailbox and the office and the East Nineties deadbolt, a thing she touched a hundred times a week and did not think about. She lifted it off the ring. She worked the little key off the split loop with her thumbnail, the way you free a thing you are finally going to use, and she put it in her coat pocket, alone, where it would ride to the airport and across the water and into a lock it had not turned in a long time, and she set the rest of the keys back in the dish, and the dish held a ring that was lighter by one key, and she turned off the lamp.