Magazine

We held the launch party for issue two, a rush job if there ever was one, at Scrublands, a bookstore-gallery-wine bar in the French Cleat District. Through the connections of everyone on the masthead except me, we had managed to draw an impressive crowd. In the low-lit space I spied a high-wattage cluster of lit-world celebrities—Hunter Duncan Harrison, Fan Hsu, Nadine Soud—in addition to representatives from the spheres of fashion, visual art, and music.

Quentin Roseman of the Haldols was there, chatting with Veronica Vector, the director, by the table of vintage paperbacks. Anele’s squatmates huddled by the shelf of feminist and Marxist theory, Manda and David were DJing bleak house from behind the sales counter, and a handful of fresh hires whose names I had yet to learn were reading quietly together in the new releases section. Lungs whirred about the room in an electric wheelchair festooned in feather boas and Christmas lights, studiously avoiding serious questions about whether his conveyance was a tasteless prop or a medical necessity.

Even seated, he was the life of the party. I stood by the bar, people-watching with Gregory Neyerwitz, one of my three new intern roommates. The other two, Molly Dogwood and Taylor Mosco, were circulating ably with the beautiful and naturally extroverted people.

And now look at them, carrying on like old friends. I wonder if he even knows?” Gregory had a chillingly extensive command of lit-world gossip, hoovered up in his relentless calendar of readings and parties and talks and launches. Much of what he gathered on these outings was so inane I wondered how he justified the time commitment, not to mention the brain space given over to who said what about whom at so-and-so’s birthday happy hour.

By the same token, I had, on several occasions, made good use of the juicy morsels he fed me, in order to insinuate myself with an intimidating personality connected with the magazine—priority contributors, editors at rival pubs. I apologized to Gregory in my heart every time I ripped him off for my own strategic reasons, but in my gut I continued to disparage him as an opportunist and a climber, more hanger-on than genuine talent. He had written a capsule review for issue two about a trio of recently released books proclaiming the death of community and human connection in the age of merciless technological advance.

While his prose was polished and devoid of technical flaws, I found something inherently, almost imperceptibly, off-putting about it. With our other writers I poked and prodded their language until it hit my ear just right. But Gregory’s contributions I left strangely under-edited, as if wishing for his words to stand and fall on their own.