Red Pen and Pencil Talk When My Name Is Not on the Cover

The new book reached the office this afternoon, its spine still smelling of glue, the cover stiffer than I remembered from the proof. I left it on my desk all day without opening it, and only at eleven at night, when the office was down to one lamp, did I turn to the copyright page.

My name was there. One line of type, the smallest on the page, under the name of the person who laid out the pages, and I had to tilt the book under the lamp to read it.

I have been editing books for eleven years. Most of my work is reading something that is not mine, very slowly, and leaving a few marks in the margin: a question mark, an underlined word, a yellow sticky note that says "are you sure about this passage?" If I do it well, the reader later sees none of those marks.

There are two voices in my head that take turns, and that night they actually talked to each other. I have written it down close to word for word.

Red Pen: Four months. It is only tonight I can see it was four months. More than four hundred places I crossed out, changed, queried with the author, then crossed out again. And on the cover, her name is as big as my thumb. Mine is the size of a grain of rice.

Pencil: Yes. It is small.

Red Pen: You say yes? That is all? Is it so much to ask, for someone to know there was a person who sat up fixing the two hundred and sixtieth sentence of this book?

Pencil: Not too much. I want it too. I am only thinking about something else: when I edit, I always use soft lead. So that whatever I change can be rubbed out, handed back to the author. That is not by accident.

Red Pen: Because you are a coward.

Pencil: Maybe. Or maybe because I want people to hear her voice when they read, not mine. I once changed "hold" to "grip" in a line about her mother's hands. She found it after the book was printed and phoned me, very calm. She said it had to be "hold," because her mother never gripped anything, she only held.

Red Pen: That one... I remember. You were wrong.

Pencil: I was wrong. I do not know whether anyone besides her noticed. I do not know whether she has fully forgiven me even though it is fixed in the next printing. What I do know is that one wrong word sits in this book, in a thousand copies, and cannot be rubbed out.

Red Pen: Then you ought to demand a bigger name, surely. If the mistake has a name, the credit should too.

Pencil: Or the other way around. When the mistake has my name, I am big enough to own it. The credit, I am not sure whose name should stand there. The three pages in chapter five that I told her to cut, she was angry for two weeks. Now nobody remembers they ever existed. The book reads smoothly. And because it reads smoothly, nobody knows a rough patch was taken out.

Red Pen: Are you sure you were right to cut it?

Pencil: No. That passage could have been better than everything around it. That day I told her in a firm voice, because I was firm at the time. Now all I remember is the firm voice. I cannot remember the reason.

Red Pen: I want to be thanked. Just once.

Pencil: She did thank you. The day she sent the proofs, she sent a long message. I have not reread it, in case it shrinks if I read it too often.

Red Pen: I do not remember her thanking me.

Pencil: Because you were busy counting the letters on the cover.

Red Pen: You keep making it sound as if I am spiteful. Remember the launch in March? I sat in the back row holding a glass of fizzy drink, and she went up and thanked the printer, the cover illustrator, her daughter for reading the first draft. I sat waiting for the name. It never came.

Pencil: I remember. You clapped.

Red Pen: Very loudly, even shouted "wonderful" at the end. Only at home did my throat taste bitter.

Pencil: You clapped sincerely, I saw it. That is the strange part: you were sad and you clapped sincerely, both at once.

Red Pen: And you? You talk as if you need nothing at all.

Pencil: No, I do. I just do not know what. Some days I think what I need is for someone to ask, who edited this chapter, it reads so smoothly. Some days I think that is enough, just the rustle of paper when I turn the manuscript after everyone has gone home. I cannot tell the two apart. Tonight nobody asked, and I am still standing here.

I stood up and poured some water. Outside the window a small streetlamp lit an empty road. On the desk the book lay open at the copyright page, and I turned it over, this time not to read my name but to open a page at random. Page eighty-seven.

The first sentence on that page is one I changed three times. The last time I took out a single extra word, then read it aloud to hear the rhythm. Nobody knows it is a sentence that was fixed three times. It sits there as if it had never been any different.

Red Pen: ... That is good.

Pencil: What?

Red Pen: That sentence. I think it is good. Not because I fixed it. Because it sounds like someone speaking the truth.

Pencil: I think so too.

Red Pen: I still want my name bigger.

Pencil: I know. Let it be a little bigger, if they will give it. Just do not ask it to stand in for the work that was done.

That night I settled nothing. Red Pen still wanted the name bigger. Pencil still wanted my hand light. I cannot say which one is right, and perhaps both are, at different times.

I closed the book and set it on top of the pile of proofs on the shelf. The red pen went back in its holder. The pencil I sharpened, for tomorrow.

Somewhere, someone will stop at page eighty-seven and read that sentence once more. They will not know that anyone stood in this spot tonight.