“Remarkable,” he’d called my poems at our first meeting. “So urban and breezy. So droll and cosmopolitan. It’s rare to find such profusion of wit in a woman.” This remark, I now suspect, was neither as thoughtless nor as innocent as it seemed at the time; it was an experiment, intended to see how gracefully I’d handle being patronized. I responded with what seemed an appropriate blend of honey and vinegar, suggesting that wit, like anything else, is rarely found where rarely sought, and that in my experience it was damned uncommon in men as well. Artie beamed; if it was a test, I had passed.
From the beginning Artie understood that my poetic career had as much potential to advance through the society column as through the book review—as much to gain by well-documented bons mots as by publications in prestigious magazines. The trick was to cultivate a compelling public persona—the Girl Poet—that was a simplified and amplified version of my best-composed self. I didn’t squirm away from this initiative. Au contraire, I was all in favor, having arrived independently at similar conclusions: By then I’d grown skilled at crafting disciplined messages on behalf of R.H. Macy’s, and I was eager to ply those skills on the product I endorsed most heartily of all—namely, me.
To be sure, ambition wasn’t my only motive. The voice of the Girl Poet also let me say the things I most wanted to say, to whom I most wanted to say them. It set me up to play with popular preconceptions about girls, and poets, and especially girl poets, and to do so in a way that made people listen to me and remember what they heard. The day would come when I’d have second thoughts about this approach—or at least consider the degree to which playing with those preconceptions also meant embracing them—but as I laid the corrected proofs on Artie’s desk, that day was still far in the future.
After the Great War it had become acceptable for women to smoke and to apply makeup in public. I avoided the latter habit as one best left for the powder room, but I’d taken up the former as soon as I’d come to the city. Smoking helped me think and calmed my nerves, which I had in excess.
Before I’d even gotten the cigarette from my engraved gold case—a present from a beau of a few years back—to my lips, Artie was leaning over with a filigreed lighter. He smelled clean, like lavender and lemons, and was dressed in his typical fashion: tweed jacket, wool pullover, off-white Oxford bags, all slightly out of date and a bit too casual for the office.
“Thank you for coming by,” he said. “So much more pleasant than an impersonal messenger.”
“I hardly needed to get these back to you. By messenger or in person. The copy was sparkling clean.”
“We do strive for excellence. Especially with such sophisticated vers de société as yours.”
I liked that Artie never called my light verse “light verse,” instead referring to it by its French name, “vers de société,” and doing so with the intention of giving it the seriousness the English had when they used that term—a nod to my work’s dignity, he’d once explained: its epigrammatic and aphoristic qualities.
I wouldn’t have minded if he had called it light verse. My verse was light—though I couldn’t abide when anyone called it “lighthearted,” as that seemed a poor reading and against my intent. My rhymes were not sappy, were meant neither to comfort nor inspire.
I also liked that Artie would garnish his speech with foreign morsels, much as I’d adorn my apartment with vases of cut flowers. I kept a list of them in my mind, and sometimes put them in my poems for him to find, which he did with delight: caelum, non animum mutant, for instance—climate may change, but not character—and chacun à son go?t—people have their own taste.
“So is that it?” I said. “We send it to the printer, and then we wait?”
“That’s almost it,” said Artie. “Apart from one fairly minor thing, Miss Boxfish.”
He had averted his eyes and was fully engaged in the important business of straightening the already very straight edges of my stacked proofs. His expression was sheepish enough to supply a Highland village with wool and milk.
I cocked a loaded eyebrow.
“It’s about the title,” he said, picking up a pen and holding it above the thing of which he spoke: the words Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises centered on my manuscript’s top page. “The sales department and I think it might need to be changed.”
“The title?” I said, trying to keep my question mark from shading into an exclamation point. Artie blanched, raising the pen slightly, as if he might need it to defend himself. “How embarrassing,” I said, “after all these years, and so many verses written, to learn that I have been misusing the word minor.”
“Of course, Miss Boxfish, you’re right. I misspoke,” Artie said. “It’s not a tiny thing. But if you’ll permit me, I shall make our case.”
“Very well,” I said. “Fire away.”
“Our concern is that Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises does not speak to the full range of your poetic flowering. Your emotional gamut.”