Was he her friend? Yes, she supposed he was, if your benefactor could be your friend, if someone you saw a couple of times a year, in a small dusty office, in order to determine whether your prose was tripping over your ideas, or your ideas tripping over your prose, if someone who laughed out loud with pleasure when you improved a sentence and then peevishly wondered why you hadn't written it that way to begin with could be your friend, yes, he was her friend.
She thought fondly of him, the way his pink finger tapped at a word (his fingers were oddly flat on the pad, probably from all that tapping), a direct, visceral code of irritation and disapproval. She thought of his hands when she thought of him because that's what she knew best, sitting beside him and watching him tap. He would hop up periodically and bustle away in irritation to look after other books in other stages of production. He would purse his lips and snort in annoyance when the phone rang, reach for it with a severe swoop of his arm, and then, in his soft, insinuating, melodious voice, as if he welcomed the call, and knew who was calling, too, he would say, so gently, "Hello?" Margaret wondered which reaction, the preliminary show of fury, or the gracious, musical greeting, was sincere. She loved his voice and called him often, braving the flourish of anger she could always picture as the phone rang, rewarded by his hello. His finger pressing against a page, his seductive voice, the nape of his neck. Only when he saw something he liked did he lean back from the table and turn his face to hers, and she was always, even after so many years, startled to see his perfectly pleasant, ordinary face.
They spoke on the phone almost daily. He had discovered her, or so he liked to say. In fact, she had attained her odd crossover success while under his tutelage, to his surprise as much as hers. Art had given him the manuscript of a graduate student of intellectual history. He liked it and agreed to publish it; there was a meager advance, a token printing the next spring. She was thrilled, and then one day, or so it seemed, it happened so fast, she was suddenly reading about her "theories," first in little magazines, then in big ones. No one actually read the book, but it had somehow hit a nerve and people talked about it—and bought it. They discussed it at the cocktail parties and dinners that Margaret disliked; they argued about it on the phone. She was Margaret Nathan, author of the best-selling biography, The Anatomy of Madame de Montigny, did you ever read it, I have it at home, it's marvelous, I'll lend it to you, but give it back, I've never actually finished it.
Everyone had never actually read anything she'd written, and yet everyone knew who Margaret was, every member of the little circles that for her overlapped into one large, bulging, media-academic-literary-political-Washington-New York ring.
I know no one, she thought. I remember the jangle of a woman's bracelet rather than her face. I know nothing. I remember gossip but forget whom it is about.
She called Richard. The phone rang twice and she imagined him, pushing his chair back with an outraged clatter, thrusting his hand at the phone, pulling it violently off the receiver and to his ear.
"Hello?" he said, so gently, a caress.
"Hello. Busy?"
"No, I'm just stretched out here on my chaise longue doing my nails."
Oh, how very clever, such repartee, she said to herself. But his sarcasm, however tired and predictable, always delighted her and made her laugh, in much the same way puns did. "I'd like to have lunch with you."
"Why?"
"Richard, really, people do have lunch together. Frequently. Particularly people like you, editors, and people like me, writers. I'm sure I'm right about this."
SOMETIMES MARGARET wondered at her good fortune. She, Margaret Nathan, who knew nothing, who experienced ideas the way other people experienced landscapes, who drove through them admiringly and wrote scholarly articles about the view, snapshots that became more real for her than the memory of the original—was she a fraud? Or was her success the reward for her hard work, for the loyal, desperate clicking of her camera?