More impressive even than the literary luminaries at Plimpton’s party, to Roth, were the gorgeous young women he longed to flirt with, if not for Maggie’s hawkish eye. Making matters worse, her Esquire job had ended without any prospect of another, and she was having trouble making rent on her “awfully small, awfully over priced apartment” on West Thirteenth. Roth’s stature in the literary world—soon to explode with Goodbye, Columbus—seemed especially to threaten her.
