In Central Park with Petunia.
An interview at the New Yorker! It was an exciting email to get. I sat in my borrowed apartment, in the window I liked to sit in, with a view of a concrete courtyard below filled with pigeons and sparrows. I’d only lived in Manhattan for a few months and already I had my little routines that made me feel like I owned my life, despite the fact that I was underemployed and pretty broke. I walked for miles and miles every day, sometimes with my dog, Petunia, who I’d take to the park early in the mornings to chase squirrels off-leash (until I was apprehended by a policewoman who threatened to confiscate Petunia unless I showed my ID so that I could be properly ticketed).
I was surviving mostly on $2 egg sandwiches, $2 slices of pizza, deli coffee, and the joy of discovery and possibility. So far, I loved New York.
Yes, I replied to the email, I would like to come in for an interview with Peter Canby, head of fact checking. I might not know a lot of facts, I admitted to myself, but I was fully willing to check them.
This was 2002. The subway cars were dominated by ads for special services available for anyone suffering from September 11 trauma. Apartments in the Financial District were going for cheap thanks to city subsidies to lure renters back downtown. I was going to need my own apartment, and so I made an appointment to see a luxury high-rise blocks from where the World Trade Center buildings had been. Riding the elevator up with the real estate agent, I noticed that all the other passengers looked fit and rich and well-moisturized and like I’d expected people working in finance to look. This was before everyone walked around with their cell phones out. We rode the elevator blank-faced, watching the floor numbers light up, but alive to each other.
The empty apartment, on the 16th floor, had floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls, shiny herringbone floors, a marble kitchen countertop, and a dishwasher. The rent was $1,350. I told the lady I’d think about it, but when I got off the train back in Hell’s Kitchen, I felt the relief of returning home to my people. This was the New York City that made my heart race with excitement, that made me feel proud of myself: a city where the mechanisms of commerce were in plain sight. Early in the mornings, brown paper bags filled with pastries and bagels were delivered directly onto the sidewalks in front of stores that had not yet opened. An hour later, the bodega managers stood outside their shops hosing down the sidewalks for a fresh new day. Their extravagant use of water was another clue to the city’s uniqueness, its magic. They must know something I didn’t, something about scale, about inexhaustible resources, about the relative value of things.
Commuters pedaled bikes fast down the still empty streets. Young stage actors and waitresses leaned against light posts to stretch their quads before springing off on their jogs, headed toward the entry to Central Park at Columbus Circle or west toward 10th and 11th Avenues, which back then were still industrial and unpeopled. I loved the smell of deli coffee brewing, stale beer spilled or puked onto the pavement the night before, bacon cooking, and morning breezes off the river. Men were speaking Spanish and laughing. Men were speaking Arabic and laughing. We were not bankers; we were New Yorkers.
The New Yorker magazine offices occupied two floors—the 20th and 21st—of 4 Times Square, a 54-story building that also housed one of the world’s premier international mergers and acquisitions law firms, Scadden & Arps, and a dozen or so other Condé Nast magazine offices, including Vanity Fair, Self, GQ, Allure, Bon Appetit, and Vogue. Consequently, the lobby was filled in the mornings with an interesting mix of languid, well-dressed Vogue staffers and unhappy lawyers.
Entering the Condé Nast building in Times Square for a job interview, I was basically Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. When I saw the line of uniformed security people behind the high counter answering phones and checking in visitors, I immediately imagined them at night, bored and watching a bank of grainy security camera outputs, trying to stay awake while a band of Swedish terrorists breaks in by taking over the circuitry.
After I was checked in and swiped past the security turnstiles, I had ten or more elevators to choose from. I cannot remember what I was wearing, but I’m sure it was something Eliza-approved. She’d not only given me advice, but she’d hosted a little dinner party at her parent’s house and invited Jon, an elegant and handsome fact checker at the New Yorker who gave me helpful interview tips.
“Martin Baron is going to ask you what the greatest movie of all time is. If you say Sunset Boulevard, he will be impressed with your good taste. Peter will want to know that you are well read and informed. Be familiar with all the major publications.”
And so, in the weeks leading up to my interview, I’d bought as many magazines and newspapers as I could afford and read them cover to cover, sometimes for the first time in my life: the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Popular Science. Not that I’d been a total illiterate beforehand (I was a regular reader of Vogue and the New York Times and Harper’s already, and I read a lot of fiction and poetry), but this crash course in periodicals was thrilling, like cramming to join the class of people who become congressional staffers. It was heady, walking the crowded streets of Manhattan knowing the latest on the Polish elections, housing shortages in California, South American mining disasters, tech stock prices …
One thing I didn’t have to work to catch up on was U.S. Supreme Court decisions. What’s juicier than a nice, long Ruth Bader Ginsberg dissent? I always read the decisions. My other areas of deep familiarity included film and film criticism, C-SPAN programming, fashion, astrology, and military intelligence, because I’d just recently served active duty for three years in the army, followed by a few more years in the reserves in a PSYOP battalion.
Now I will fast forward, because I don’t feel like describing my interview with Peter Canby and the subsequent interviews with the lovely Anne Stringfield and equally lovely Nandi Rodrigo, or with the famous elderly fact checker Martin Baron, a chain-smoker with humorously stiff manners and a giant Rolodex of expert sources. Martin quizzed me, as he did all applicants, on a series of topics that ranged from classical music and math to politics and sports. If you answered a question correctly, he would move on to a harder question on that same subject, until he stumped you. When he asked me what I thought was the greatest movie of all time, I didn’t have the heart to say Sunset Boulevard, which I’ve never seen. I think I may have said something like, “Well, that’s hard to narrow down to one, isn’t it? But I really liked Cabaret.”
Long story short, the interviews were the most thorough I’d ever experienced. Peter even wanted to know where my parents went to college. Just how proficient was my Russian? What was the toughest story I’d ever reported in my previous work at college magazines?
To my delight, he also wanted to know what I thought of a recent Supreme Court decision. His eyebrows shot up when I quoted a line from the dissent that I’d read earlier that week.
In a second round of interviews a week later, Anne wanted to know my favorite New Yorker writers and what exactly I liked about their writing. I remember saying “Lane,” because I couldn’t for the life of me remember if it was Nathan Lane or Anthony Lane who was the film reviewer for the magazine. Martin Baron wanted me to tell him everything I knew about the Brown v. Board of Education decision. When I mentioned that the decision was largely based on the idea that segregation caused psychological damage—an inferiority complex in black children at being rejected—Martin puffed up and shared that two of the psychologists who had authored that key study the court had cited were his friends.
There was radio silence for two whole months after the interviews. It was a snowy Christmas and I luxuriated in walking a city hushed by fresh snowfall. Finally, in January, just as I was about to accept a job offer to be a college counselor at a private school outside the city, I got a call from Peter Canby: Would I like to work at the New Yorker as a fact checker for $42,000 a year? It was a $20,000 pay cut from my job in Baltimore, a much cheaper city, but I accepted it on the spot.
Even without knowing that I’d meet my husband there and become a cartoonist, I was overjoyed with the rare opportunity to join the editorial staff of what I had recently surmised was the greatest magazine in America.
To be continued…