Signs and Wonders

The Assistants

“If I died, would you come to my funeral?”

“Why would you ask me that? We barely know each other.”

“That’s why I wondered,” Martin said. We were drinking Red Stripes, just the two of us, in a dive bar on the Lower East Side. “Would you come? Would you be that person who everybody at the service was wondering about? You know, whispering in the pews, ‘Who is she?’ ”

“Nobody would say that.”

“But really — would you come?”

“Would it be in New York?”

“Probably not.”

“I doubt it, then,” I said. “I doubt I could get off work.”

“They wouldn’t give you time off for a funeral?”

I drank my beer. “I just started,” I said. “I’m just an assistant.”

Back then, we were all assistants. We worked at magazines, galleries, or nonprofits. We lived with roommates in tiny apartments in questionable neighborhoods. My bedroom was just big enough for a twin mattress. My friend Sarah shared a room with a guy who was a bartender in Chelsea; she slept there at night, and he slept there during the day. Martin lived by himself, which sounded luxurious until we went over there one night and discovered his studio was a converted supply closet; he washed his dishes in a deep sink spattered with stains. Millie also lived by herself, we assumed under similar conditions, until we went over one night and found she had a corner one-bedroom in the West Village with Pottery Barn furniture and jute rugs. It was a surprise to us, learning that Millie was rich, and it upset me in particular; I was shocked anyone under thirty could live like that, which will tell you something about how young I was at the time. It would have splintered our group, except that things were coming apart already.

Sarah and I worked together, at a literary magazine whose downtown office was a dusty shambles of manuscripts and review copies and file cabinets stuffed with carbon copies of letters, author contracts, galleys, and production details. At first Sarah was my only friend in the city, and she’d gotten me the job. I knew her from high school; she’d gone to college with the bartender roommate, who knew Millie from his hometown in Connecticut, which he’d always presented as hardscrabble and blue-collar but which description, after seeing Millie’s apartment, we began to doubt. The five of us invited one another to whatever work-related parties we knew about, improvising dinners out of the cheese cubes and cheap wine; we bartered the tickets and CDs and passes and book galleys that were the currency of assistants, and cadged free drinks at the bar in Chelsea if it was a busy night and the manager wasn’t around. Six months after I moved to New York, straight out of school, we’d become a running pack. We hung out on the weekends and called one another nearly every day. When my mother, back home in Toronto, worried I might be lonely, I laughed and said, “I have three roommates, I’m never alone,” but the running pack was a secret I clutched close to myself, better than money.

How Martin got involved is something I can’t remember. He was tall and gangly and perpetually stooped over as he listened to what other people had to say. He came from the South, with a lilting, musical twang, and was an assistant at a foundation that dispensed grants to artists; this suited him perfectly, because he himself seemed both courtly and impoverished. He wore chinos and bucks and looked less preppy than messy; his clothes didn’t fit well, his hair too long and his skin pocked with acne damage. He sweated even when it wasn’t hot. I remember one night, Sarah and Martin had planned to see a movie, but she went on a date instead. So Martin picked me up at work and we headed to the theater. After a block or two he abruptly said, “Excuse me,” then ducked into a bodega and emerged carrying two tallboys in a paper bag, one of which he was already drinking. “I can’t sit in the dark without drinking a bit,” he said. He sounded both apologetic and matter-of-fact. He finished the first beer before we got to the corner and the second as we reached the theater. As the movie started, he pulled out a silver flask and sipped.

I liked the flask. I was charmed by this kind of apparatus, the accessory of a more glamorous time.

Afterward, we went to a bar on Ludlow, and that’s when he asked me the question about his funeral. I asked if he thought about dying a lot, and he shook his head. He had other fears, he said. Darkness. Confined spaces. Wide-open spaces. Elevators. Escalators. Chewed pens.

“Pens?” I said.

“Those tips,” he said, and shuddered. “Bite marks in plastic. People hand you one and expect you to pick it up? With I don’t know what germs?” He shook his head again. “That’s just crazy.”

I looked at him. “It must be hard for you to get around.”

He studied me back, his head cocked to one side. His eyes were blue, watery, and kind. I felt the full force of his attention, which was not sexual but not asexual either; it felt complete somehow, as if he were taking in every aspect of me.

“Not you, though,” he said, with that soft Southern lilt. “I bet you can go anywhere and do anything. You’re made of stronger material.”

“I don’t feel particularly strong,” I said.

“Do you feel particularly weak?”

“I guess not.”

“That’s what I mean,” he said. “You’re the most normal person I know.”

I did not take this as a compliment.

But he smiled when he saw my frown, and his hair fell over his eyes. “Don’t worry about it,” he said gently. “I’m sure it’ll come in handy eventually.”

Wherever he came from, Martin started hanging out with us, and pretty soon it was clear he was there for Millie. When she was in the room he still paid attention to you, but you could tell it was an effort. I couldn’t blame him, really; Millie was the kind of person I’d come to New York to be around. Short, with dark spiky hair, she was good at poker and occasionally smoked cigars. Her skin glowed even at three in the morning after a night of drinking. She was an assistant at a gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. If, on a Saturday afternoon, we dipped into a gallery, Millie would take two seconds before pronouncing the work “shit” or “genius”—there was no in-between, in her opinion — while I tried to figure out why she’d landed to one side of the pendulum rather than the other. I myself had no idea, but I liked the confidence of these declarations.

I think Martin liked it too. She had no fear; he was afraid of everything, including rejection, so he watched her from a distance as she felt him watching, and they were locked together in this as if by contract. She must have enjoyed knowing he was always there, a gentleman beanpole on the sidelines, following her every move with those watery blue eyes. There isn’t a woman on this earth who doesn’t want to be adored.

At work, Sarah and I were also adored, albeit in a different way. Our boss, Eric, was an elderly bohemian who wore pilled woolen cardigans and too-short pants, and spent afternoons in his office reading manuscripts while twirling his beard between his thumb and index finger, making a little curl that stood out from his chin. By five o’clock his beard would be a tufted mess of curls, all fluffed out like the feathers of some preening bird. Because of this, Sarah and I called him the titmouse.

“Titmouse on the move,” one of us would mutter to the other as he came toward our desks, and we’d straighten up to look like we were actually working. There wasn’t really any need to talk in code — there was no one else around, and Eric’s hearing wasn’t great — but this was the sort of thing we found hilarious at the time. Taking flight meant he was leaving the office on some errands. Worms: he was going for lunch. Flapping wings: he was in the photocopier room, looking perplexedly at the machine. Eric seemed to think it was demeaning for him to ask a woman to help with basic office tasks, even though this was our job, a scruple we didn’t hesitate to exploit. We let him suffer for as long as we could stand over some paper jam or mailing snafu before we’d come to his aid. The photocopier, the fax machine, the FedEx label — these were newfangled technologies so complicated that in the face of them Eric simply threw up his hands. He’d grown up in a New York where any business deal was done via handshake at a cocktail party below Fourteenth Street. Sarah and I loved him. When the titmouse came back with worms, we’d drop by his office on some pretense and while he was eating we’d get him to tell us stories about parties at George Plimpton’s apartment, Mary McCarthy throwing a drink in somebody’s face, arguments that spilled out into the streets at two a.m. Eventually it would be midafternoon and he’d glance at the pile of manuscripts at his desk and sigh. “Well, my lovelies, this magazine isn’t going to publish itself.”

How exactly the magazine did manage to publish itself was a mystery. My job, nominally, was as assistant to the head of sales, Judith, who worked out of her home and besieged me with harried, confusing phone calls. I’d only met her once. She must have been good at her job, though, because she was always finding some fancy restaurant or upscale furniture store to place an ad with us. My main task was to coordinate her expense reports. I used to show Sarah the tallies for lunch or drinks. “Can you believe this?” I’d say. She spent more on cocktails than I made in a month.

Sarah just shrugged. She was Eric’s assistant. In high school she’d been an indifferent student, and I didn’t even remember her reading many books, but in New York she’d discovered a seriousness of purpose. Her job was to screen the flood of incoming manuscripts. Every time the mail was delivered, it included dozens of slush submissions in manila envelopes, and Sarah visibly shuddered. Her bag was always crammed with paper, her eyes red and shadowed, and she said she dreamed about all the poems and stories and essays floating around in the world waiting to be read. Because I didn’t have enough to do, I’d sometimes offer to help her out, but she’d shake her head. Being burdened made her feel important.

In the evenings, we’d meet up with Martin and Millie and some other combination of people — some friend from out of town, or a girlfriend or boyfriend of the moment — and head to Veselka for dinner, or to Brownies to hear some music, or, in the long, humid summer, to the park or somebody’s roof. I remember one night in July at the apartment of somebody none of us knew very well. We’d invited ourselves over because he’d mentioned central air-conditioning. It was actually his uncle and aunt’s place; they were gone for the summer on some lavish vacation, and he was apartment sitting for them in between semesters of graduate school at NYU. Skinny and bearded, he stank of smoke and talked about Harold Bloom in scathing, urgent terms, and we were willing to put up with all of this in exchange for an evening in that cold, expensive apartment. He served us chilled white wine in fancy glasses, and we took off our shoes and ran our toes over the luxurious carpets as if they were a sandy beach. At least most of us did. Millie just sat on the couch, with her legs tucked daintily beneath her.

The grad student, whose name is lost to me, was also supposed to be taking care of the two elderly cats, sickly and long-haired, who trailed around the couch sneezing. He had to feed them special medicine twice a day, inside of hollowed-out liver treats. Despite all this special care they looked mangy, like they lived in some alley and foraged in trash cans for food.

“Those are the saddest cats I’ve ever seen,” I said.

“They live better than you do, I bet,” the guy said.

I flushed, not sure if he was insulting me or commenting on his aunt and uncle. “They do have air-conditioning,” I said.

Martin got down on the floor and reached out to pet them, making clicking noises with his tongue. With his long legs and other arm folded up, he looked like a cricket. The cats ignored him.

“Here, kitties,” he said, fixated on them, his pale face sheened with sweat. Millie was sitting behind him, and she put her feet down on the floor as she leaned over to sip from her glass of wine. This put the smooth, glowing skin of her calves right next to his face, and I saw how it pained him to be so close. Millie didn’t notice. She was arguing with the grad student about Barbara Kruger’s art, which she thought was profound and he said was overrated. It was the kind of argument I’d come to New York to witness, perhaps even participate in, but I was distracted by the little drama on the floor and the contrast between Martin’s pale, pockmarked chin and Millie’s lovely legs.

“Martin,” I said softly. “Martin.” I shook my head at him, and he stared back blankly.

“Cats usually like me,” he said.

We were all drunk. It was so cold in the apartment I wished I’d brought a sweater, which seemed ridiculous given that the night before I’d emptied a tray of ice cubes into my pillowcase before finally falling asleep.

“You’re so pretty,” the grad student said to Sarah, who was lounging on the couch with a cat wedged between her ankles. “What are you into?”

“Leftist bohemians with wealthy relatives,” Millie answered for her, and laughed. Sarah didn’t say anything. “Guys with intellectual rather than physical brawn.”

“You’re a bitch,” he said.

“It’s not true,” I said.

“Of course it’s not true,” Millie said. “It’s never true.”

“Anyway, you’re the one with wealthy relatives,” the guy said, pronouncing it like a swear, and I realized they had some kind of history, that maybe Millie was into him, or had been, and that’s why she was so mad.

Martin looked up as their voices got louder and said, “Hey, now. Come on.” Because he was drunk, his Southern accent was stronger than usual. “Everybody calm down.”

“Shut up, Martin,” Millie said casually. She was still looking at the grad student, her eyes practically shooting out sparks.

Martin’s whole face buttoned, closed itself like an envelope. His blue eyes went vacant. Then he did an odd thing. He put one hand on the floor, as if to brace himself in order to stand up, then curled the palm of his other hand around Millie’s ankle, grasping it as tightly as a bar in the subway. She looked down at him, surprised, but he was focused on his own operation and didn’t say anything. Drawing his face close to her knee, he stuck out his tongue and licked it — more than once, quite thoroughly, as if he were cleaning it. As if he were a cat.

I remember Millie staring at me, eyes wide and frozen, wondering what she was supposed to do.

I remember our host laughing, a shrill squeal like a girl’s.

Then Martin said, “Gotta go.” He unfurled his tall frame, bowed slightly to everyone, and left the apartment.

“What the hell was that?” Sarah said.

At first it seemed like just another night when something weird happened, like the time when Sarah and I left the office at dusk and a guy in a gorilla suit came up and gave me a hug, or the day in Tompkins Square Park when we met some backpackers from Denmark who’d run out of money, and we bought them lunch and they thanked us by performing Scandinavian folk songs until other people in the park told them to go away.

The next day, Sunday, Sarah and I had a picnic in the park, if you can call two bagels and the New York Times a picnic, then on Monday we went back to work, and it was probably Thursday or Friday before we realized that nobody had heard from Martin.

“I should call him,” I said to Sarah in the office, my hand hovering over the phone. She shrugged. I left him a message, but he didn’t call back. I guessed he was embarrassed, and lying low for a while.

Millie told us that she thought the whole thing was funny. “I was talking,” she said, “and I felt something wet, and I thought it was some wine or something. But then I looked down and … I couldn’t really take it in, you know? It was like my brain couldn’t absorb what was happening. And before I could even say anything, it was over!”

They both keeled over laughing, and then Sarah made us go to the bar in Chelsea so we could tell the story all over again, to her roommate.

“But so nobody’s heard from him?” I said.

“He must be mortified,” Sarah said.

We gave him some time: that week, and the week after. Then one day at work I called his office, and his voice mail didn’t pick up. His phone at home was disconnected, too.

I looked over at Sarah. “Martin’s gone,” I said.

As soon as I said it I felt it was true. Sarah must have heard it in my voice; for the first time since that night, she didn’t laugh when she heard his name.

We called Millie, and she invited us over to her apartment that evening to discuss the situation. This was when we saw how nice it was. Her place reminded me of a story I’d heard about an assistant at Condé Nast. “I assume you have other income,” the person interviewing her had said, because the salary was so low. At the time, I interpreted that story as having to do with the cluelessness of bosses. But I understood now it was true, true of Millie and other assistants all over the city, that for some of us this life was a game, and for some of us it wasn’t. I felt duped, although no one had lied to me. I just hadn’t known.

Millie handed us each a beer and we sat around on her Pottery Barn furniture.

“Wow, you have a balcony,” Sarah said. “That’s great.”

“It’s tiny,” Millie said, dismissing it with a wave of her hand.

There was a new awkwardness between us that wasn’t just due to the apartment. It had to do with our understanding how Martin felt about Millie and how she’d enjoyed stringing him along, letting him hope for something that was never going to happen.

It turned out that none of us knew any of his other friends. He’d briefly dated my friend Kim, but when we called her she said she hadn’t spoken to him in months. After a few more beers, we decided to go his place. He lived on a shabby block in the East Twenties, and we’d only been there once before, when we were walking home from the movies and somebody had to go to the bathroom. We hung out on his stoop for a while and kept ringing his buzzer. No one answered. Eventually, because of the beer, we had to find a bathroom somewhere else.

There were no stories in the news about anyone fitting Martin’s description getting in trouble, or injured, or dying. There was never any news of him at all. He was just gone. I had a hard time accepting that someone we’d hung around with so much could simply vanish. Every once in a while I’d call his numbers or ring his buzzer, but there was never any trace of him. Sometimes I’d ask Sarah where she thought he went and if he was all right, but she never wanted to speculate. She’d give me an odd, weary look, as if my concern was naïve. “If he wanted to be in touch, he’d be in touch,” she said.

So I stopped bringing it up. Occasionally I thought about our weird conversation about his funeral. But even in retrospect it didn’t strike me as morbid. This was how Martin was — he wasn’t afraid to ask a strange question or make a peculiar gesture. It was a way for him to figure out where he stood with you. I guessed he’d wanted that with Millie, too. He must have gotten his answer.

For whatever reason, after Martin went away the rest of us stopped calling one another so much. What had felt like a tight, permanent pack turned out to be loose and temporary. We still met up, just not as often, and the daily phone check-ins slowed to a trickle. Millie got a new, serious boyfriend. Sarah’s roommate left the city for grad school. She and I buckled down at work. We stopped talking about the titmouse and laughing so much at the office.

One day, without warning, Eric died. Janet called and said, “He had a massive heart attack! They found him in bed. It’s going to be a mess cleaning that place up, I think he kept the accounts in a shoe box under his bed or something. Anyway, you should probably take the day off. Take the week.”

I hung up. Sarah was bent over her desk, her shiny black hair brushing the manuscript pages she was reading. Her hands were clasped over her ears, as they always were when I was on the phone.

“Eric’s dead,” I said.

“Yeah, right.”

“No, seriously.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Janet just told me.”

She looked up and shook her head slightly, as if shaking herself awake. Then, to my surprise, she burst into tears. I reached over and hugged her. We huddled there together, like little kids.

The next day, when we showed up for work, the office was locked. We each got a letter with a severance check from the nonprofit that ran the magazine. I was puzzled but Sarah was irate; she kept talking about breaking into the office and writing to the authors. “There’s a proper way of doing things,” she kept saying, “and this most certainly is not it.” I’d never heard her say things like proper and most certainly. When I suggested maybe we should just move on, she turned on me like I was a traitor. “Don’t you care?” she said.

“Of course I do,” I said, but I could tell she didn’t believe me.

We attended Eric’s funeral together, at a pretty church in the West Village. He seemed to have no family but tons of friends, and they told stories about him as a young man, funny, romantic, and reckless: how he accepted a dare to swim in the East River at midnight, and almost drowned; how he tried to bribe Susan Sontag to publish in the magazine by bringing osso buco to her apartment. He never married, and the magazine seemed to have been his greatest love. Sarah and I nudged each other when we spotted writers we recognized. We didn’t talk to anybody. We were the youngest people there, and nobody knew who we were.

After that, we scrambled to find new jobs. With my supposed sales experience, I found a position in market research, and Sarah was hired by a glossy women’s magazine. Within a year she was promoted. I remember her calling me from her office, a rare occurrence by that point.

“Guess what I’m doing,” she said.

“Why are you whispering?”

“I’m about to have a meeting,” she said. “With my assistant.”

We were on the other side. I got promoted too, and though I didn’t have an assistant I had what felt like a real salary, and I left my closet-sized bedroom and rented a studio in Park Slope. Sarah and I were both working long hours, and didn’t have much time to hang out. We never saw Millie at all. Sarah moved to L.A. for a few years to help launch a new magazine, then returned to New York. As a market analyst, I drifted away from the media world that consumed Sarah’s time, and we rarely crossed paths. She and I would make plans to get together, but it was hard to schedule around our jobs and families. Our arrangements kept falling through. Finally we were able to catch up over lunch, at a garden café near her apartment on the Upper West Side. She was the editorial director of a multimedia company; she asked me about my work and smiled politely through the answer. We showed each other pictures of our children, her five-year-old daughter and my twin boys.

Over coffee she said, “By the way, did you hear that Martin Horst died?”

I set my cup down. Though it was summer and we were eating outside, I felt cold. “No,” I said. “When?”

“A couple months ago.”

“What happened?”

“Unclear. There were prescription drugs involved. He had a bad back and some other health problems. Maybe it was an accident, maybe it was an OD? Nobody seems to know for sure.”

“This was in New York?”

“No, in South Carolina. He’d been back home for quite a while, I think.”

“How did you hear about this?”

“The usual. Friends forwarding e-mails. Facebook.”

“Martin was on Facebook?”

“No, but Millie is, and she heard about it from his ex-wife. I guess they were friendly. She’s an art dealer or something and Millie knows her.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I should’ve guessed something was up. Martin used to send all these funny group e-mails, especially during the election, he was really worked up about that, but then he went pretty quiet.”

For some reason my fingers were trembling. Learning that Martin was dead — he would’ve been forty, maybe forty-five? — was part of it. To think of his dying, to think of the pain that must have accompanied it, made my stomach hurt. But I was also shaken to learn that Sarah had been in touch with him, and with Millie, who’d been in touch with an ex-wife I hadn’t even known existed. A web I was no longer part of.

Across the table, Sarah squinted as the afternoon sun hit her face. “Oh dear,” she said. “You have that look on your face all over again.”

“What look?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know he broke your heart.”

I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. When I thought back on that time, I didn’t register any heartbreak. I did recall Martin, vividly: his hunched shoulders; his attentive, watery eyes; and his disappearance, a loose thread unraveling a world I was just beginning to know. But I could barely picture the person I’d been back then, probably because I was vague even to myself. I hadn’t become anybody yet.

Sarah put on her sunglasses. She’d paid the bill, and now she stood up.

“Remember when he licked Millie’s knee that time?” I said.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think I was there.”