CYNTHIA OZICK
393
They talked often about the Forbidden Thing. After a while
they began to call it the Forbidden City, because not only were
they (but Lucy especially) tempted to write-solipsistically,
narcissistically, tediously, and without common appeal-about
writers, but, more narrowly yet, about writers in New York.
"The compassionate knight," Lucy said, "lived on the
Upper West Side of Estella. He lived on the Riverside Drive, the
West End Avenue, of Estella. He lived in Estella on Central Park
West."
The Feingolds lived on Central Park West.
In her novel-the published one, not the one she was
writing now-Lucy had described, in the first person, where
they lived:
By now I have seen quite a few of those West Side apartments.
They have mysterious layouts. Rooms with doors that go
nowhere-turn the knob, open: a wall. Someone is snoring
behind it, in another apartment. They have made two and
three or even four and five flats out of these palaces. The toilet
bowls have antique cracks that shimmer with moisture like
old green rivers. Fluted columns and fireplaces. Artur Rubin–
stein once paid rent here. On a gilt piano he raced a sonata
by Beethoven. The sounds went spinning like mercury.
Breathings all lettered now. Editors. Critics. Books, old, old
books, heavy as centuries. Shelves built into the cold fireplace;
Freud on the grate, Marx on the hearth, Melville, Hawthorne,
Emerson. Oh God, the weight, the weight.
Lucy felt herself to be a stylist; Feingold did not. He
believed in putting one sentence after another. In his publishing
house he had no influence. He was nervous about his decisions.
He rejected most manuscripts because he was afraid of mistakes;
every mistake lost money.
It
was a small house panting after
profits; Feingold told Lucy that the only books his firm re–
spected belonged to the accountants. Now and then he tried to
smuggle in a novel after his own taste, and then he would
be
brutal to the writer. He knocked the paragraphs about until they
were as sparse as his own. "God knows what you would do to
mine," Lucy said; "bald man, bald prose." The horizon of
