My Mistake by Daniel Menaker Page A

tedious piece by E. J. Kahn about efforts to establish vocational schools in Micronesia down on my desk. Then he says, “Did you notice my shoes?” I say no, I haven’t, and look down and see shoes with colorful layered heels, like alternating slices of Muenster and beets. “Wow,” I say. “Those are some shoes.”
    â€œYou like them, eh? Guess how much they cost.”
    â€œGee, I don’t know—must have been a lot. Seventy dollars?”
    â€œThirty-four fifty-nine,” he says, heavy on the
f
’s, for emfasis.
    â€œWhat a great deal,” I say.
    â€œGuess how much I paid for this shirt,” he might say. It would be burgundy with a strange sheen.
    â€œIt’s a nice one. Thirty-nine?
    â€œNope! Eight bucks. Canal Street.”
    â€œWow! Very special!”
    The second week I am in Checking, the phone on my desk rings and “Hello, is this Mr. Menaker?” a miniature voice says.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œMr. Menaker, this is William Shawn.”
    â€œOh, hi, Mr. Shawn,” I say. “What can I do for you?”
    â€œWell, there’s a sentence in Notes and Comment about the number of troops who are in Vietnam right now, and I would like you to check that with the State Department to make sure it’s right. It’s from a news story, and I don’t know if it’s reliable.”
    The people on the Vietnam Desk at the State Department always laugh when I check the reporter Robert Shaplen’s Vietcong body counts with them. They think the CIA feeds him inflated numbers. Jonathan Schell is writing powerful Notes and Comments against the war in The Talk of the Town while Shaplen is writing semi-apologias for the war in the middle of the magazine. Schell is one of the Harvard crowd. Shawn has hired three or four of his son Wallace’s fellow–Harvard undergraduates—Hendrik Hertzberg, Schell, Anthony Hiss.
    â€œSure,” I say. “I’ll do that and let you know.”
    When I hang up, a few of the other checkers within earshot are staring at me.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” I say to the person who sits across from me.
    â€œYou said ‘Hi’ to Mr. Shawn?” she says. “You don’t say ‘Hi’ to Mr. Shawn—you say ‘Hello.’”
    Â 
    Twenty-eight
    Â 
    One night, in the early-morning hours, in the apartment I share with Jerry Cotts, a friend from Swarthmore, I wake up terrified—of absolutely nothing. It is a classic panic attack—racing pulse, cold sweat, terror like none I have ever known, except maybe for a foreshadowing of it on the lower level of Grand Central back when I was eight years old, and my general trepidation as a kid. But it
feels
like absolutely out of nowhere. You may think that the classic anxiety of certain kinds of New Yorkers, tending toward the Jewish kind, is a stereotypical joke, thanks principally to Woody Allen. But I am here to tell you that it is no joke, for any locale, race, or ethnicity. If someone you know truly suffers from what is now called a generalized anxiety disorder, it is fucking
awful.
Yes, the handling of such a person, in friendship or in love or in work, is best when it’s sympathetic but matter-of-fact and even businesslike. I know that now. I can do that now. Even with myself, on those mercifully rare occasions when the old panic approaches. But for pity’s sake don’t dismiss this affliction as a chimera or a ruse or a plea for attention or any of the other at least implicitly condemnatory assessments that so many so often make of it. It is all too real, itself and nothing else, and it can be disabling. It came close to disabling me for life. The prospect of lunch with a colleague was torture. Flying was a sentence. Social life an ordeal. It’s no wonder that with Valium always on my person and the need to lose myself in something that would take my mind off this dread, I throw my energy into