Molly Minturn’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
When I showed up for my interview at the magazine, I was perfectly on time. The chapel clock chimed as I put my hand on the doorknob. Before I could turn it, the door opened and I saw Kevin, the managing editor, for the first time. The way I’ve framed it sounds like something out of a romantic comedy, but instead of romance I felt something familial when I saw his face. He looked at me like we shared a secret—that’s the only way I know how to put it. His eyes actually twinkled. I stood there on the step, my mind flashing to vintage images of Santa Claus. But Kevin wasn’t jolly, a fact for which I was grateful, because neither was I.
He gave me a tour of the office, which was housed in one of the oldest buildings at the university. The general atmosphere was threadbare yet confident—WASPy, really. The wooden floors were so worn that some planks looked white, like birch trees. Each room had a fireplace, though none of them worked, which, in the end, was an apt metaphor for the soul of the place. The mantel in the main room was lined with copper Ellies, a kind of cold fire.
I remember how well dressed he was for my interview, his pressed blue shirt and loafers. When I got to know him better, I understood that he cared about his appearance even when it seemed like he hated everything in the world. In the nightmares I had about him dying before he died, he had hanged himself in his office, and he was always wearing a suit.
***
I reported to Kevin for my job, copyediting long, lugubrious pieces about war for the magazine, processing author payments, reading poems from all over the country. For all of the voices flowing into the magazine through submissions, the office was often silent, each of us in a separate bell jar. Sometimes the editor would give me a message for Kevin rather than speaking to him himself, or vice versa. I remember walking down the dark hall in between their offices, looking at the small window high up at one end. The silence of that space felt like of church.
My desk faced the fireplace and back door, the chapel through the window to my left. On rare days the chapel bells chimed on the seventh dissonant chord for funerals of the university’s preeminent secret society members. I remember looking at Waldo, my coworker who sat right behind me, and we would raise our eyebrows at each other. “The Sevens,” I would whisper and he would nod knowingly. I remember pressing myself against the window hoping to see a Seven, whose membership in the society was not to be revealed until after death. There was never anyone standing in front of the chapel.
In those moments I felt as though I’d arrived at the job I’d always envisioned for myself; it was like something out of a Laurie Colwin novel. Her protagonists often found themselves in outdated, moody offices performing obscure research and administrative tasks. “It didn’t take me long to love my job at the Race Music Foundation,” says Geraldine Coleshares in my favorite of Colwin’s books, Goodbye Without Leaving. “I did my work, which required familiarity and devotion—I had plenty of those—and did not call for special skills, of which I had none.”
I felt that way—unremarkable and lucky, cocooned in manuscripts and invoices, perfectly unseen. It was the same feeling I’d had at the cubby desks in the stacks of my college library, walled in by books, watching the sky darken through the skinny windows, which reminded me of castle arrow-loops.
In Kevin I felt a kinship in the sense that he, too, was comfortable being unseen. He was the quiet heartbeat of the office—the first to arrive in the mornings, the last to leave. He was the one who turned the lights on and off. I thought of him as the man behind the curtain (pay no attention). If I was sloppy or hasty in my work, I could count on him to walk to my desk, brow furrowed, with a pointed question, and just as quickly disappear back into his office. I could hear the floorboards creak in my mind before he even made his approach.
But what is it, this urge to be largely unseen? In college I’d read Jane Kenyon’s long poem, “Having it Out with Melancholy,” and for years, three lines from the first section hung in my mind: “And from that day on/ everything under the sun and moon/ made me sad.” Like a little ghost, the words hovered close by. Everything makes me sad, they whispered—a purple crocus blooming, a confused old man in the park, the hundreds of poems I rejected each year.
Kevin was the same, and didn’t keep his depression a secret. He would sometimes tell me about his insomnia, his trouble finding medication that worked. Occasionally he had to take a day off if he was too blue to come in, but so did I from time to time.
***
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