The night before had been particularly brutal when some friends stopped by the apartment with some medical-grade pot. But if my father and Leo took note of my delicate state, they didn’t say anything about it. As usual, they were locked in an overly analytic discussion.
“Laurie is leaving the agency,” my father announced when he saw me.
Laurie Colwin, who had responded to a small ad I had put in the New York Times for a part-time assistant at the agency, had been a major step up from the low-key fellow who preceded her. Fluent in Yiddish (later, she translated for Isaac Bashevis Singer), she had been educated at Bard, the Sorbonne, the New School, and Columbia. Laurie loved chamber music and Jane Austen, but most of all she loved writing. (She went on to have her first short story published in the New Yorker, become a columnist for Gourmet, and publish a number of novels—including one loosely based on my father’s agency.)
Although my mind ached from last night’s excesses, as the realist of the group I instantly went to solving the problem of Laurie’s replacement.
“You know, I met somebody who might be interesting for the office,” I said.
“Please,” Leo mocked. “Is it one of your wealthy friends from Stockbridge? We have enough cuckoos around here already.”
Far from it. I was thinking of a classmate from Washington Irving Evening High School, which I’d been attending at night to earn my diploma. Heide Lange, the daughter of German parents who lived in Queens, was like most of the other people at Washington Irving: incredibly hardworking and admirably resourceful. Surrounded by students learning English or working full-time jobs, for the first time in my life, I actually enjoyed going to school. Everyone there struggled to get an education, which was fully respected by the teachers. They treated us like mature and highly motivated individuals instead of impulsive adolescents in need of homework to keep us in line.
With poor parents, Heide had to work to support herself. She earned $60 a week at her day job as a secretary at an engineering firm where she typed ninety words a minute. Laurie had been getting $40 a week from the agency to peck and hunt part-time. I ignored Leo’s jab—for an extra twenty my father could have a full-time, fluent German-speaking speed typist. I got out the phone book. I didn’t have Heide’s phone number, but I knew her last name. So I started going through all the Langes in Queens, of which there were about fifteen, and asking, “Do you have a daughter named Heide?”
“No.”
“Nein.”
“No.”
“No.”
On the eighth call, I found Heide, who agreed to come in for an interview and, passing my father and Leo’s unusual set of standards, was hired after an appropriate amount of “reflection” by my father.
I was far better at solving my father’s problems than I was my own. While I liked living with Hanna, none of us liked living with three people in a small one-bedroom. With her roommate out in the living room, it was, to say the least, tight. So when Hanna found a studio on West 68th Street, between Central Park West and Columbus, in the building next to the one where she worked, I happily tagged along. In retrospect, I was a lot happier than she was. It wasn’t as if she had agreed that I would live there. Under the nebulous arrangement, I was kind of looking for my own place, or something, but not finding it, whatever it was.
Despite my reluctant roommate, I entrenched myself even further in our new building by asking the landlord if I could rent two unused rooms I’d found on the top floor for an office. He was happy to make some additional money—$15 per room, per month—for rooms that were sitting empty. They didn’t have kitchens or bathrooms but were a perfect—and affordable—office for my growing empire of publishing-related businesses.
In addition to the easy money as a buyer of English-language books for Bertelsmann in Germany, I had started a cookbook mail-order business with Bernie Brown, the owner of a bookstore on 58th and Madison where my father ordered all the books he sent to his foreign clients. I had gotten to know Bernie because I was in and out of his shop all the time. Having learned of my deal with Bertelsmann, he approached me about starting a mail-order cookbook business where we’d buy remainder cookbooks for a buck and sell them by mail order for $12.50.
The business didn’t do very well, but that didn’t keep me from going into business with Bernie again after he got a tip from a salesman that the primary wholesaler of boating books, which supplied all the marinas in the country, was going out of business. With nobody else in the market, publishers of this niche market needed somebody to sell into it. Again, we didn’t do great, but now I had three book businesses—plus I was the New York representative of an Italian literary agency started by a friend. This hodgepodge fully justified my hiring a secretary. A beautiful redheaded one.
Theodosia, a friend of Laurie Colwin’s, was of Italian descent but looked more English with her thick red hair, glowing white skin, and round, John Lennon–style glasses. She had the inexplicably unfeminine nickname Peter, but somehow it suited her. An engaging and open person, she was hired to do whatever I needed her to, which turned out to be not very much.
Although Peter was very friendly and nice, my girlfriend didn’t care too much for her. There were a lot of obvious reasons for the animosity, but Hanna insisted that the main problem was Peter using our bathroom. The “office” didn’t have a bathroom, and heading to Columbus Avenue every time she had to pee was out of the question. The purely residential Central Park West was okay, but Columbus was, to put it mildly, a slum. When Hanna forbade her from using our bathroom, Peter had to walk the streets dotted with flophouses, catcalling drug dealers, and stumbling junkies to find a dicey store where she could go.
The untenable situation finally came to a breaking point one spring evening. I don’t know if it was the fact that Peter was just a little too attractive, or that after five months I still hadn’t found an apartment, but Hanna completely lost it. Our arrangement had theoretically been temporary, but I wasn’t eager to go anywhere. She, on the other hand, was extremely anxious for me to move on. She was afraid that if her parents found me in the apartment, they would stop paying for her psychiatrist, far and away the most important man in her life. It would have been pretty hypocritical of her parents, wealthy Catholics from Boston, to cut her off for shacking up with a guy, considering her father was the real-life version of The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker. (For years, according to what Hanna told me, her dad had been absent for half the week, ostensibly on business trips. In reality, though, he was visiting his other family. He went back and forth between two wives with three or four children each without them knowing a thing until they figured it out.) It seemed the least he could do was pay for Hanna’s treatment. Anyway, our fight that night came down to her psychiatrist or me—and her shrink won hands down.
“You’re out of here,” she screamed.
Then she began to throw all my stuff out the window.
My elegant Hanna, with her refined features, quiet demeanor, and conservative little dresses, was tossing my things from the third floor as I had seen women do in Italian movies. It was clearly time to go. I ran down to the street and started picking my stuff up (before other people had a chance to) while my junkie and drug dealer neighbors offered knowing glances of support.
The next day, I gathered all my stuff (as a sixteen-year-old, there wasn’t too much of it) and went to look for a cheap apartment, which I found on 58th Street between Madison and Park. It was a fifth-floor walk-up, but the location was considerably less colorful than the Upper West Side and convenient to my dad’s office on 57th and Madison. I hired moving guys to bring my limited possessions to the apartment, but having planned to spend the weekend with my parents in the country, I called Peter and asked her to deal with the move.
When I returned to the new apartment Sunday night I found Peter still there, and the draw of an interoffice romance was too strong to resist. She spent the night, then the next night, then the next. Basically, she never left,