The Last Book Party by Karen Dukess

Author:Karen Dukess
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

24

I returned to Truro with a heaviness and the feeling that I had been away a long time, that my giddy conversations with Henry about books had taken place weeks ago rather than only a day before. Henry didn’t ask the reason for my absence, and I didn’t share what was going on in my family. It was soothing to get back to Henry’s world, and his joy at my return—he seemed to light up when I walked into his office—took me by surprise. His eagerness gave me the sense that I was not alone in really liking our time together.

“You have no idea the battle that has been raging between me and these pages,” he said, tapping his fingers on the manuscript on his desk.

“What’s the problem?” I asked, perching on the edge of my school desk.

“Unsolvable problem: too long, yet impossible to cut.”

“Perhaps a fresh pair of eyes…?”

He frowned, and for a moment I thought I’d overstepped and that he was offended at the suggestion that I would be able to help him. But then he stood, gathered up the pages, and presented them to me with a little bow like a waiter offering a platter of food.

I took the papers to my table and settled in to read. Humming, Henry picked up the day’s crossword puzzle and went downstairs. I was happy to be alone. I became absorbed in the chapters, which chronicled a period of particular social prominence for Henry in the late 1970s.

Many of the anecdotes were funny, but more than a few seemed included only to puff up the persona of Henry Grey. The worst were the stories in which Henry quoted himself delivering what he obviously considered to be extremely clever quips. A case in point was his account of his response when Gay Talese canceled a lunch date because he had to do some additional reporting for his upcoming book on American sexuality, Thy Neighbor’s Wife. Without skipping a beat, Henry had retorted, “Too fucking busy and vice versa?” Which would have been very witty if Dorothy Parker hadn’t said it first.

After about an hour, Henry came back upstairs and asked me to show him what I had marked. I went over it slowly, easing into my criticisms, careful to tell him what I liked about the parts I was suggesting he shorten. He argued a bit, and then nodded and listened, at times looking a little pained. Gently, I tried to make him understand that by calling less obvious attention to his every witticism, his genuinely funny anecdotes would shine.

I watched, silently, as he paced the room with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the floor. I thought he might be angry, that I’d knocked him off his pedestal a bit too presumptuously. But then he stopped and, with a tired but open and accepting look on his face, said, “Thank you, Eve. As suspected, it was helpful to have another reader.”

As he picked up his manuscript, I

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