Excerpt from Maiden — Cynthia Buchanan
She was a virgin and her virginity had burrowed in. So, come 1970, she was a little crazed, a little abstract...looked for symbols, answers, messages everywhere. And anxious, she knew such anxiety. It may be that all virgins feel this. Her virginity and her anxiety made her a daydreamer, a planner, a struggler, too gay, too earnest. Would life forget about her? Overlook her? Pass her by? Misdial? Anxiety became a life style.
She lived in an envelope. Sometimes she had trouble noticing things other people did. At other times she saw only too well. One thing she noticed was herself in light of her own daydreams. These were not airy, sentimental hallucinations, but deep, mournful pageants in her bloodstream. She made a fetish of herself. Her personality grew more baroque, surprised her at every turn, yet she continued to be her own friend. She consulted herself, admired her own opinions, asked advice of her own wisdom. She had a native integrity, a sense of self, which protected her. But she thought too often to play the grande dame on the strength of it. While people went on not noticing her. To the point of overkill. And she continued lusting for their approval, their esteem, their warmth.
At thirty, the idea of sex had such a grip on her that she tried to avoid, totally, thinking about sex. It was a void in her reality and her curiosity minced around it--so high you cannot get over it, so low you cannot get under it. This void obsessed her but she denied her obsession and her curiosity. On the other hand, it seemed she was somehow always hunkering around the spoor of this torrid, nameless chimera. She followed it all in raw movies and magazines...in parks, once, and once on a beach she had spied on a couple. But it was still as remote, as irrelevant as Communism or cancer.
She admitted one thing to herself, however: She was looking for a man. She sure was looking for some man. Yet she always looked in private, so secretly that she nearly hid her desperate search from herself altogether.
She worked hard on her image. she was convinced it served her well. Her airs drew on the cinema, on the 1950’s, on Loretta Young, on Ann Blyth, on the mannered billowing too, from fiction --Blanche DuBois, Jean Brodie. She had no idea how false she was.
The extravagant daydreams possessed her, she went soaring off on them. Clothes possessed her. Her wardrobe came from a mail-order catalogue, Frederick's of Hollywood...tufts, spangles, synthetic animal skins. Clothes spoke to her; inanimate things often did. She might be walking through a department store. A dress--always one with a rhinestone gewgaw or something that fluttered--would cry out, Me! Me! Buy me! She wore the clothes, thinking herself distinct and magic. Meanwhile, her affectations, her rouged grimaces...these were misread by people everywhere. (But when she got to Los Angeles, her peacock behavior and arch clothing helped her fade like a chameleon into the cityscape along the Sunset Strip.)
Language haunted her. The advertised word...the "you" in advertising, the impossible "you" spoke to her. It was part of the summons, part of the superstition that seduced her daily. Human experience and earthly lessons glanced off her like a diffracted ray. Yet inanimate objects held secrets. In an employment office a year ago, an ad, "California," had been part of the summons. There was superstition in everything.
It was all there, the truth. It was there in the hints about charm, from booklets. (One of the maxims: Be Yourself! Then she found she was often punished for this.) In the raw belief...the voodoo of her personality.
She moved perpetually in this gossamer sac of musing and advertising. She was waiting for the summons, the tap on the shoulder, the visitation, the different drums. When people spoke to her, she listened for all these, straining for the drums. The speaker might be part of the design watching her, approving, about to approve.
A man, impossibly smitten, an individual so love-sick he can scarcely walk, stumbles toward her. His arms are outstretched. In his hands, an amphora; in this vase is love. He says: Fortune Dundy, where have you been all my life? He has come to salvage and endorse her. Everyone always knew she had it in her, “a certain subterranean something." She had nothing upon which she based all this except autosuggestion.
The gleam of the summons was all around her. In the disclosures of daydreams. In the stares of strangers...all potential truth mongers. Hope lay heavily within her, corroding. Then it would give way and doubt came around. And again, hoping. Such a pinwheel of alternating hope and doubt kept her slightly beyond presence of mind. It made her happy and addled in the daytime hours. She was waiting. The intensity of this was awful. The weight of her atrophying sensuality grew. In the dark in her bed she tussled with faith and desperation. She remembered how she was then. And her maidenhood was seen floating like a kite high above a topography that seemed realm that seemed important to other people. She knew she was...gauche, denied it, contended with it. And lying there awake in bed, the pleasant muddle of daytime hours would then leave her.
Jobs! The past! Helter-skelter stints that left her panting like a rabbit! Dreaming and waiting for busses, watching, forgetting.... Finesse in the world of business, this was one of her ideas. To be a crackerjack, glib sort of person. With sparkle. Sparkle was marketable. Employers knew this! But a person had to wait and watch and, most of all, improve. She studied the hidden secrets in the backs of magazines, panting over the promises. And always she sensed the love-struck man. He read over her shoulder. He neither breathed nor moved; he just skimmed the print.
As of this smitten man...she would not accept just any. Was this America? Does a person settle for second best? Just any would not do. For one thing: no Adam's apple, nobody with one of those.
Sometimes the stricken man grabbed her into a corner, into the gloamings of the potted palms. This is where you stop dancing, lady, he says. You have got that certain subterranean. I have got plans to listen to every word you say. Not because you have got a lot to say. But because I like the way you say it, dammit. And also I would like to tell you at this time I will put my arms around you at random. And if there is a thunderstorm outside at night, we will work that out, too. Everything is going to be A.-O.-K. One more question: Tell me...where have you been all my life?
Her experience with men was limited. Their interest in her amounted to very little, or so things had proved themselves. There lay the problem.
True enough, one or two scrubby boyfriends had reared their heads a long time ago. But she was not a woman, one of those who always have someone, some parasite or some goon who needs her. She was a woman who seemed as if she had somebody...he waited for her out back at the end of a working day. She appeared that way. But, actually, she had no one. And having no one at all made it harder and harder, a time went on, to have anyone at all.
She would not admit she was alone. She did not realize or articulate her solitariness. But the opaque fact of it fed upon her. For a long time she pretended men were unimportant. Then finally she admitted their consequence; this idea, too, was still obscure. Ultimately: men were the other half of existence. No...they were all of it. For without a man a person had no measure--how could she weigh or define herself? She might wander forever, wondering to what extent she filled out her outlines.
She struggled to ignore all this. But sometimes her awareness of men hung around her like a mist. In the presence of a certain kind of man, she reduced herself to her silhouette. She laughed and gasped and blurred--what an explosion! And in time the men--the scrubby boyfriends, too--retreated. They went to a calmer corner of the universe. That the men retreated she could not avoid knowing. But she did not see the reasons for it. And she made things worse. And knowing but not knowing undermined them still more.
What sort was she? She knew exactly who she was. It only remained to tell the world. "Bert"--Bert Parks of the Misses America, "Bert" the emcee--was a device of hers. He knew who she was. He lurked in her vapors. "Bert" stood for any emcee, any interrogator, any reporter, any judge or juryman, any person or thing whose sole interest was her. Whose sole purpose was to examine her, discover, present her, and venerate her. "Bert" meant the way things should be. "Bert" was the voice of her playful, high-strung narcissism.
She fought often but not openly with "Bert." He came into her brain at times of stress...but, evilly, he came to stir up a vision even in her idleness. "Bert" was one voice and all of them...a thousand messages, reminders, chimeras, critics, and promises. And he had lived in her brain such a long time now. He was company, bitter and loving. His presence was like a persona. "Bert" was her different drummer. He pummeled her spirit without rationale. He had forms...inhabited her, incubus, succubus...she was always being interviewed or questioned or complimented and then left to doubt the praise. Examined...sometimes it was a courtroom. Other times in a contest, a review, or on television or in a movie. Bert, all Berts, were only too aware of her exalted place, her focus in the public eye.
So she waited for courtly love. An awful, abstract, improbable lover! Someone on whom she might test her disdain.
The atrophying sex...the fantasies--it had all become almost perverse. She was like a drugged woman. And she went on carrying it...this calcifying fetus, the burden of her solid maidenhead.
2
TO ALL MY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES AND THEIR KINDRED SORROWS AND EVERYONE ELSE WHO HELPED MAKE ALL THIS POSSIBLE: Good evening. Good evening to you all, she says.
He requests she speak into the microphone. The "mike." He leans with her, says, "And who have we got with us tonight! Say hello to a thirty-year-old bundle of sparkle--Fortune Dundy! Tell the folks out there..."
ATTRACTIVE PERSON WITH SPARKLE: The first thing I did, Bert? I put a higher type pronunciation on my first name. You have got to keep an eye on the last "e" in my Christian name.
HE: Fortune?
ATTR. PRSN W/SPRKLE: No. Fortunée. Rhymes with have-your-say.
HE: Why... Fortunée...say, that is French!
ATTR. PRSN W/SPRKLE: Yes, Bert, I am afraid it is!
HE: Sing it on out now, Fortunée Dundy!
ATTR. PRSN W/SPRKLE: Being new to California myself...and by the way, Bert, they surely did "break the mold," like they say, when they made this Golden State!...in the coffee shop at Hollywood and Vine, around in there. He was wearing a pair of very tight pants. Bleached blond streaks through his hair and he is a coiffure artist, he tells me, in the Eleganza Salon. Well, I will not "bluff" with you, yes, I did take to him. Then he walked, dancing kind of, over to the cigarette machine for a package of Virginia Slims. He was thin as a little tree snake. The way he walked to the cigarettes, by this time I was thinking: you are nobody's fool. Meaning me...I am nobody's, you have got to get up pretty early in the morning to...and then he walked out of the coffee shop. Left me spinning on my stool. And him not fish, not fowl! rude? Rude, you say? Mister, you do not know!
HE: Sorry to hear this.... Would you move a bit closer, just a millimeter, thank you, Fortunée. You know, you look "like a million dollars" in mauve! You...that color every day of the year!
ATTR. PRSN W/SPRKLE: I would just like to tell our crowd here tonight I am not a person that gets "down in the mouth" easily.
HE: No, sir!
ATTR. PRSN W/SPRKLE: Clear what I needed. Sunshine, suntan. I told myself, miss, what you need is one of those brown-as-a-berry suntans, one of those California berry-brown suntans. You might think I'm just a...but I keep my eyes open, you can bank your money on these two baby blues being open. To the Pacific...and I crossed the highway, almost did not cross, with it burning into my feet and the cars, they do not care if you are on your way to the beach or if you have got to wait with your feet on fire and the first sand of the beach is no different, but mostly those cars did not slow down or give an inch. Broken glass, parked cars, a snack stand--and there it is! As far as a person's eye can see: bodies stretched and flat and browner than syrup. Bodies everywhere...collapsed there like string puppets, oiling themselves and also their neighbors' backs. And then, of course, you have got your typical teen-age girls that are like women but you know they are younger. Just a word here, Bert, about lifeguarding in California: they sit up there perching, these men, these lifeguards, wearing their sunglasses in a way that does make them look like they could save your life better. The only way you could ever get these lifeguards to look down from their tower is to drown. That is an old, old joke we women know. Then I walked on through these shining puppet bodies in the sun. I excused myself.... You might think I don't know..."Beg pardon," I kept saying. I was wearing this swimsuit you see here, mauve. No, true, it is not like their suits. Mine has got its own personality and individuality. See this little skirtlet here around the bottom? This skirtlet gives it..."sass" and individuality. I could not take a solitary step, no, I was squishing suntan oil out of somebody's tube...have you ever been to Santa Monica Beach on a summer day?...or spraying sand in somebody's chiliburger. Then...found...this young middle-aged person on his back. Pestering a little Zenith radio, its dial. Next to...staked out my towel. He said exactly nothing to me at that time. I sat down on my towel...I also said nothing...could almost hear the sun, it was that hot. He...next door rummaging in his beach bag, pestering the Zenith. I sat up. I looked out at the water...like this. Maybe he would wonder, beg pardon, but who is that mystery woman fixing her bead so deep. He said exactly nothing. I ran my fingers through my hear, like this...aaaaaaah, feels so good! This wind! This beach, this sun! But he, at that time, said zero. Then I looked...at him. He had this wristwatch tattooed on his wrist. A joke! Do you believe me? It is true! So for a joke--and for "an opener," like they say--I lean over and I say in a voice like this: Beg pardon, could please happen to tell a person the time? Him? He lifted up his sunglasses for a minute. I point to the tattoo. He curls up his lip...turns up the radio music...it was a song I could sing for you...is that it? La la ba ba ba bum bum...that it? Thank you! No, Bert, no, I do not do it professionally...just in the shower...my own pleasure...no, I would not want to go pro, thank you for offering...and he laid his head back down! Well, Bert, I tried to laugh. But that laugh gurgled and died in my throat. That ever happen to you? Sun went behind a cloud of something...folded up his towel and radio, the individual with the joke on his wrist he did not want the world to laugh about. He goes to leave. He steps over...and listen to this...my legs. Down he leans, he leans down, his Our Mary medals dangling down. He says to me, "Say, now, proxy-locks, you would not want a lay, would you?" I sit up. I smile. My first inclination--do not laugh at this--to take him to mean...Hawaiian lei. But you have got to get up pretty early...morning to fool a person such as myself. He left. I was "dying a thousand deaths," like they say. Then, at our end of the beach, only me and...this one couple are left. On the beach. Sun's gone. Three people, me and them. They were standing up. The wind was blowing out her hair. It was so long...he could wrap his hands in it. And he did. Then he wrapped it...just so...like this...around her neck. Then he wrapped her up in the blanket. And then he wrapped his arms around her. Mister, something was trying to crack. Something in me, something small...like a bird's egg. And that voice, damn it, beg pardon the French, to the fires of...took me out to California in the first place, it started talking again. It talked straight this time. It said, "Fortune Dundy, life is passing you by, Fortune. It is passing you by, sister, faster than a fifty-dollar mare at a Fourth of July match race!"
(And no, I do not feel sorry for my path in life, so you can put that in your pipe.)
*
She went upstairs to her room and read "I Said 'No' a Minute Too Late" from Modern Love Story and then all of the Los Angeles Times. She tried new makeup tricks and danced with the door of the closet. While she danced, her cheek hugging the wood, she thought of the distant sun trying to come through the city nimbus. The sun landed on houses in bonbon colors, in backyards on broken tricycles and garden tools rusting like junk art in rubber play pools...patios...pubescent saplings; and always armies of children, little people and their spaniels who choked suburbia...plundering the saplings, carrying off their armature of nylon cord and doweling, stripping their branches for play whips, and the bus had passed along a eucalyptus canyon silver and green...and sometimes the leaves shifted like a school of fish. Her thoughts were cold in her cheeks. Her song tonight was "Deep Purple." She embarrassed herself singing. But she sang on anyway, sheepish, glazed, performing for herself.
After arrival at the terminal, she had locked herself in a stall in the ladies' room. She had changed from something into something...a new pair of mauve pants maybe. She forgot to remove the dangling price tag. She was listening to the first sounds of California; piped-in announcements of buses departing. San Diego. Riverside. Phoenix.
At the Hotel Paris on the glass door--she danced and read. Learn Good English! How to be Popular! Old favorites: Magic No-Strap Hidden-Suspension Plastic Cups to Clamp Underneath Breasts, Cards with Eyebrow-Shaped Cutouts to Trace-on-Arches, Wallet-Size Photos, Chihuahuas That Fit into a Teacup...she thought, what about an ad like this: Backs of Magazines!
How to Be Popular: she had sent for the booklet, studied it, a long time ago. She practiced the principles of eye-play and those of handshaking...difficult as it was to shake one's own hand, it could be done. And topical conversation...and neatness in dress...it all seemed like a blueprint for somebody else's existence. But, anyway, let us keep dancing..."Blue Moon...you knew just what I was there for...."
She went prowling into some nearby bars. In the darkness she sidled up to large-pored men and slipped away again, unannounced. She walked back to the hotel with the name backwards from inside...bar smells in her head and handkerchief.
...Makes a person embarrassed. Like the parties she goes to. She stands there alongside the militia of nuts and mints and napkins...guests too coy, too dull, people who are shells. Are there people who are shells? She stands at the party. And unstrung, truehearted, she mans an alarm bell...by sounding the ice in her glass. Nobody at the party seems to know what she is talking about. And they certainly pay no attention to the ice-cube alarm, none at all. Then what exactly did she come for? Young lady, why did you come to this foolish party? She came to find a man. But he is never there. And so all the planning what to wear and the primping make her a fool. Is there anything worse? A jackass who came to a party to debase herself in the company of fools?
Yet she keeps on coming to the party. This is what troubles her.
*
Are You Lonely? STOP!!!
You Never Will Be Again!
DATAMATE first and foremost Blah Blah in California
We Use the IBM 360 For Our Guaranteed Blah Blah Blah
People Are For Loving! Singles Widowed Divorced Blah Blah Blah!
She sent away.
Take a Few Minutes to Read This Message!
Every Word Is Important to YOU!
This is NOT a game.
If compatible friendship and/or a more meaningful relationship is not your goal, please do not use the questionnaire, as it is designed for all sincere and mature people seeking same.
If you are orthodox, devout, or sincere in your religion, please circle your answer of "2" in Question #8 on the Personality Answer Sheet.
Answer "7" to Question #8 greatly broadens the volume of names from which to select your matches.
Please DO NOT use anything but numbers in answering the questions--with the exception of Questions #5, 6, 12 and 72. (We will code these here.)
For servicemen only: Our IBM cards are limited to 18 characters (including spaces) on the ADDRESS LINE.
Please notify us immediately when you become involved, engaged, or otherwise committed to what appears to be a short-term relationship.
Many who have had experiences with Acquaintance-Dating and/or Matrimonial Computing wonder how we can do so much for only forty dollars. The answers are on Page Nine.
*
To Who It Might Concern at DATAMATE. Your questions about Additional Comments in this space is an interesting space to leave because I did not want to say at this time about your question #72 that is not really your business #72 Yes or No Previous Sexual Exp. that do not think because of my answer I have got the Bible in mind I have not the Bible is too bossy is my opinion I am not saying to #72 is a sin or the Fires of Hell no it is just that my opinion of my thinking I remember Wilma Sloan in my city every place has a girl like that and even though on the "stage and screen" this year a person can see anywhere anytime people on top of the other person that naked and squirming does not mean "the eye of a gnat" as for naked it these day is "a dime a dozen" just walk down to Spring Street or Main Street at the bookstores and racks and do not think that just because I said that in #72 that I do not know "what end is up" Hop McElroy is one person you would be interested about eleven years ago and why is it men kiss and then get busy with you There and There when you only want to think about the kiss is what makes a person feel not lonely in answer to your ad Are You? You are going to say to me men do not bother with those "frills of life" they get to business but the person you DataMate has got in mind for me has got to think frills first business second if you get what I mean. I know what I have got in mind and he will know too when he sees me too you will do well to keep that in mind when you are computing
F. Dundy
*
Two blocks away they found coffee and pie. That was when Murray Caruthers said: "So...you're La Dundy?"
"Yes, I surely am. Walking, talking in the flesh and new around here. How about yourself, Murray?"
"Yeah."
Murray Caruthers wore a small gardenia in his buttonhole. That opened her eyes right away. And even though she went on talking. "...yes, they surely did 'break the mold'...she noticed the gardenia, in ecstasy..... Blue Moon, you knew! Who wore a gardenia these days? Whoever it was, he took her to a movie, Faye Dunaway and Marcello Mastroianni, where Marcello drove a race car and Faye climbed the cyclone fence to tell him she was interested. But Murray shifted and squeaked so much in his seat...usher shushed him. Murray said to her, "I'll wait for you at the popcorn machine...where there ain't so many Gestapo ushers." The last part in a loud voice.
Then the coffee and pie. And then: "So...you're...La Dundy."
"Yes, I certainly am. Walking, talking in the flesh and new around here. How about yourself, Murray?"
"Yeah."
"Beg pardon?" she said.
"I don't know why when a man asks for blueberry pie they bring you this crap. Look at that, will you? It looks like something some dog threw up."
"Let me see."
"I didn't think I was asking for the world on a silver platter when I asked if they had any homemade blueberry pie, did you?
"No."
"Was it too much to ask?" he said.
"Would you be interested in a trade? I only bit the end off mine. It is very tasty. It is peach. Peach pie. Look."
"I don't want your pie. Why would I take your pie away from you?"
"Oh, do you think I mind? Please. Try it! I like blackberry. I will eat yours."
"You'd eat something some dog threw up?"
"I really do not mind."
"Miss! Miss! Waitress! Sssssst!"
"Please!" Fortune said, "It is all right by me! Here...look! Peach! Try it!"
Murray gave her a long, ripe look then, moving his eyes over her face. He imbedded them in her eyes. "You know how to cook?" he said.
"Certain sorts of things."
"Miss! Miss! You, miss! Sssssssst!"
In bed she winnowed through the events of The Murray Caruthers Affair. Superstition crackled in her brain. She had jinxed him. He never called again. Her two lies...How many, Miss Dundy? Two, Bert. How many, Miss? Two, I said! Hold the telephone, Miss Dundy: to begin with, there was the information about...the "modeling" assignment, if we are not mistaking.
Then let us not begin.
Step a snatch closer, Miss Dundy, and share with us how you first began to "weave your wicked web."
She had lopped off two inches on her own height? Height? said the DataMate application. And here was deception's own seed coming back at her. A lie had a life of its own. Free as a goblin, it would flit at night near the bed. Hold the telephone, not one lie, but two. Which of them had Murray seen shadowed beneath the ledges of her eyelashes? So you were false two times then, Miss Dundy?...each Regina Lashes "Real Hair" sitting on our eyelids like furry caterpillars!
And beg pardon, Miss Dundy. We were going over this file of yours, DataMate's little monthly checkup to see facts are facts. Your college? You...what? You have got the diploma somewhere but cannot...beg pardon? Sixty seconds to go...oh-oh! There it goes! And we are sorry!
*
The time came to get her money's worth. She had been remembering Tibshraeny Office Supplies painted on the door of Murray's car. But instead she finally telephoned DataMate.
A widowed engineer came. Jack Gandemutt from Jet Propulsions Lab. But he wore nothing in his buttonhole. Jack took her to an apartment in Alhambra, where middle-aged people were fussing over marijuana cigarettes and talking about going to watch the submarine races on Signal Hill. They were showing off for one another, dancing to old Harry Belafonte records: Day-oh! Day-ayaaaaaaaa--oh! Jack had prinked at his reflection in the stainless-steel rim on the elevator. He held her hand when he rang the doorbell.
During the evening, Jack followed a woman around named Inez. He kept popping back to Fortune on the couch, with a whispered and highly intimate burr of a question: "Having a good time, cookie?"
Inez stationed herself behind the Clydesdale buttocks, two immense, apple-shaped things. Fortune had become rather transfixed by those oaken thighs and that immutable, draft-horse rear end of Inez's. And Jack was always there in the vicinity of Inez's fumes. No surprise then this: In a parking spot at the Paris, Jack turned off the key in the ignition. He doubled Fortune's fist into his hand. "You're a woman, aren't you? Tell me: what do you women want?"
"Your question is you want me to tell you my opinion on what us women want?"
"Want! Want! One day you say one thing. And the next day...what in God's name do you want of a man!" Jack put his head down on the steering wheel. He strained against the diagonal safety belt on his chest.
She was wearing her friendship ring that night. Jack had squeezed her hand so hard it pinched the ring and bent it up against her other finger.
He cried in big wet rubbery sounds...hunching his shoulders, squeezing her ring hand harder, banging it lightly on his knee. "She's so...high-minded! What business she have acting that way? I want to see her settle down into the kind of life she deserves! Woman of her caliber deserves marriage! Oh, God!" Then he had leaped out of the car and bustled Fortune to the Paris door. He mashed her hand a final time and bounded off into the neon night, his pocket change and car keys the only sound she remembered. Daaaa-aaaa-oh! Da-dee-da-day-ay...oh.
She watched the California women...for a clue. Teen-agers born of sea-form and shower stalls, barefoot, in a hurry, their eyes bright with youth or drugs...nubilia on its way to where? Where are you going? Where are those women going? Back to the sea? Screen tests? Cheerleading practice? Devil worship? "College-'n-Career"-age girls passed in bright cotton, long steps. In suede fringe, in fringed hair, in huge helmets of electrified hair, dirty girls, beautiful girls passed. Fortune studied The Divorced Look...its Plexiglas glamour and ivory hair...it adjusted huge pale sunglasses behind windows of air-conditioned Thunderbirds...and there were cocktail waitresses who followed their Beverly-hillock breasts, shopping at noon in charm bracelets.
A brochure arrived in the mail. It was from Dionysus West, Incorporated, founders of DataMate. It was a "singles" club for people over twenty-five. "...Life begins where they leave off! The Real Generation Gets It Together! So...."
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***
Cynthia Buchanan, M.A., held a Fulbright fellowship in Creative Writing. Maiden was taught at Harvard, Iowa Writers Workshop, UCLA and NYU. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek and elsewhere. In 2025 she finished two novels about the Spanish Civil War and a memoir about New York publishing, Bathing in Flames with Gottlieb and Gaddis. A literary consultant she edits the work of other writers.
