Read Online Daring by Gail Sheehy - Free Book Online

Sporting News , and was editor of the Sporting Good Dealer . His mother, Cora Tyree Felker, was women’s editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch . She gave it up once she had children.
    â€œSo I was acquainted early with the discontent of an ambitious, educated woman,” Clay said. “Maybe like you.”
    This was a revelation. The fact that Clay had some concept of the discontent of women like me made him unique among the men of my acquaintance.
    â€œDid you always want to be an editor?” I asked.
    All he’d ever wanted, he said, was to have his own publication. He was around eight or nine when he printed his first broadsheet on a hexagraph in his basement, the Greely Street News . He hawked it up and down his neighborhood for five cents.
    He told me he grew up reading the magazines to which his parents subscribed, The New Yorker, Ladies’ Home Journal , and Esquire , the magazine that taught young men how to become gentlemen. He imagined the editors of Esquire all coming to work in black tie so they’d be ready to sail off to dinner at 21 with beautiful women on their arms. “When I actually went to work at Esquire ,” he said, “I realized the world it created in its pages had come out of the imagination of its original editor, Arnold Gingrich. He eventually became part of that world. I wanted to become part of that world, too.”
    â€œHow long did it take you?” I asked.
    His half smile had shyness in it, the perpetual awe of the outsider. “I’m still working on it.”
    Clay suddenly changed the subject. “I have an idea. Write that story for me.”
    â€œWhat story?”
    â€œAbout a young marriage that breaks up for no good reason.”
    â€œIt’s not a story. It’s life. Incomprehensible.”
    â€œThat’s what will make it special—being inside the writer’s head while you struggle to make sense of it.”
    â€œBut it’s personal .”
    â€œDon’t worry. You can change the names. I’ll run it as a roman à clef. Fictionalized reality.”
    Clay had seduced me. I wrote the story for him. After the Trib folded, it appeared in the stillborn World-Journal Tribune: “Lovesounds of a Wife.”
    For the first time a man I looked up to had read my work. And published it. Was it possible that he believed in me?

CHAPTER 6
Love and Death in the Year America Came Apart
    â€œ HE WANTS COMIN ’ GUP, a fancy man.”
    The voice belonged to the Ukrainian seamstress on the ground floor. A survivor of Stalin’s genocide, she had appointed herself security guard of our rent-controlled former rooming house on the Lower East Side. Years earlier, Albert and I had moved there to accommodate the new baby in cheap digs, $139 a month.
    â€œWhat’s his name?” I asked over the intercom.
    â€œHe say Clay, you will know.”
    â€œClay Felker? On the Lower East Side?”
    â€œLook like movie star.”
    I burst out laughing at the absurdity of it. Out the front window I could see a sleek black town car. It must have been dropping off Clay. Tonight was the debut party of his new magazine at the Four Seasons. I wished I could have gone.
    My block, East Seventh Street between Second and Third Avenues, was not accustomed to chauffeured town cars. This was a little Ukrainian village of immigrants who filled the streets with the smells of pierogi and kielbasa. These God-fearing immigrants shared the space with the new demimonde of the Lower East Side—proto-yuppies and promising artists with hair like the manes of wild animals who were happy to sacrifice safety and living space to pursue writing, acting, art, photography, or just joy, love. The most conspicuous new element in the neighborhood was the large influx of hippies, young fugitives from middle-class suburban privilege. They injected the dangerous element of speed (amphetamines). Accounts of stabbings, muggings, and robberies were