Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, page 12
At home, Antonia washed and prepped the vegetables, located the necessary spices, and went to work on the meal, all the while thinking about this new novel of hers, mapping it out in her head. She knew she had to write another page-turner, better than the first, because, as Henry liked to remind her, you’re only as good as your last book. With Henry’s support, though, she realized she couldn’t fail. He’d already made sure she’d been well received at Chimera Books, an imprint of Beadle & Blau, one of the most reputable publishing houses in New York. He’d called his friends at the New York Times, peddling the novel as if he were its biggest and best fan. She thanked him repeatedly, yet she had no idea how to repay his generosity, except by loving him as best she could. And she did love Henry, as much as she’d loved anyone. One day she wanted to be his wife. Once, not that long ago, she and Henry had talked of marriage, but the subject hadn’t come up again since her move to Winslow.
The turkey was in the oven, the pots simmering on the stove, and the atoms in the air were bumping furiously against one another, producing an incredible heat and aroma. The aroma of the holidays, she thought, looking past the hours of preparation to the evening’s beautiful culmination—the five (or six, if Catherine showed up) of them seated around the table, drinking wine and laughing, while Henry carved the turkey. She was throwing this dinner in honor of him; a meal she trusted would launch the three-day rapprochement between him and his estranged son, Ezra. Just another thank-you among many: Thank you for your belief in me. Thank you for your support. Thank you for your love. She need not have thanked Henry, she knew, because her move to the town, he said, was thanks enough. Besides, how could she ever truly thank Henry, except by fulfilling her own promise to write another well-received book?
After she left the kitchen, Antonia unlocked the door to her study, heading immediately for the typewriter. She sat down, lit a cigarette, and stared at the few sentences she’d written this morning. Usually, she was able to sit for hours and work, as everything else fell away, and she filled one page after another. Five, ten pages later, she’d glance up to find the sun gone and the sky dark, realizing she’d been at the typewriter half the day. This novel—it balked and cried against her gentlest urgings. She was missing significant, indispensable details that would help shape the choppy, incongruous narrative and awaken her half-sleeping characters. She couldn’t get at the heart of the story because she didn’t have the body. She needed the body to get at the heart, plain and simple. Whereas the writing of her debut novel had been relatively easy—her uncle had supplied her with the blueprint, the body—the writing of this second novel was proving very difficult.
Not that fiction depends at all on truth, she thought, tapping a key, tapping another, trying to make connections where it seemed none existed. She knew they existed, because she still sensed them, had sensed them the minute she’d walked into the blue house, the minute she’d mentioned Henry, and Catherine went pale. There was more, so much more—Henry’s refusal to talk about the accident; the girl’s name, Wren, which he sometimes shouted out in sleep; the essay he’d written about Wyatt Strayed. Here were connections, however loose, and Antonia the writer was determined to get at them, while Antonia the friend and lover knew she should walk away from the entire endeavor. An hour later, after smoking several cigarettes and writing just one sentence, she pushed away from the desk, feeling defeated. In the small bedroom, she stretched out on the bed. With hours to go before anyone arrived, she shut her eyes. Sometimes all it took was a nap and she’d be able to find her way back into the narrative. She hoped when she opened her eyes that everything murky and unresolved would reveal itself to her. Yet when she awoke an hour later, the only thing that revealed itself to her was the darkening sky viewed through the window. Groggy and disoriented, she sat up, convinced that she was back in her old bedroom in Damascus, Vermont. For a moment, as she gazed out at the fleeting twilight, she had never left the safety of her father’s house. Then, that familiar landscape blurred and dimmed into this one, and she rubbed her eyes, returning reluctantly to Winslow.
The air held a heavy, alarming suggestion of smoke, which filtered under the door. Sliding out of bed, she threw open the door and froze. Someone was in the kitchen rattling around. Henry, she thought, rushing out of the bedroom, the smell of smoke more pronounced the closer she came to the kitchen. Here, she paused in the threshold, startled to find Catherine and not Henry at the sink, scrubbing a pot. Antonia knew then that her oversleeping had cost her the meal, and she gazed at the stove, where the charred, awful remains of the bird still sat, belching up whispers of black smoke. Nearly hysterical, she asked Catherine if she were able to salvage any of the food.
“No,” she said, drying the pot. “Nothing at all.”
“Oh,” Antonia said, wilting. “Now what am I going to do?”
“Don’t worry,” Catherine said, already picking up her pocketbook from the table and heading for the door. “I’ll be back in a while. Set the table in the meantime.”
Antonia glanced around the spotless kitchen, where Catherine had returned everything to its rightful place, from the knives, the cutting board, and the mixing bowl to the blender and grater. Everything shone, the counters and the porcelain sink, which the woman had scrubbed clean as well. Antonia leaned against the sink, glaring at the turkey’s smoldering carcass, tears spilling down her cheeks. I’m an idiot, she thought, hating herself for the nap, the time when she should have been more vigilant. She approached the stove and gave it a good kick, hard enough to put a tiny dent in the door.
When Henry showed up a few minutes later, Antonia was on the sofa in the dark, sobbing for all that she’d ruined—the perfect dinner that was to christen the perfect weekend. Henry sat down next to her, saying nothing, and she sank into him, sobbing even harder. “I love you, Henry. I really, really love you,” she said as he held her close, kissing the crown of her head. She shifted her body, and her lips found his, and then they were making their way into the bedroom and shutting the door, undressing in the low lamp light, his body still magnificent to her, all of him, his silver-haired chest, the constellation of minor scars that mapped the mishaps of his boyhood, the major scar on his thigh from the car accident. She traced a finger over this scar now, knowing enough not to mention it again, remembering how quickly and irrevocably he closed up when she did. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he’d say, and he wouldn’t. Won’t, she thought, as the slow rhythms of his hips met the rhythms of her own, and then he was inside her and this time it was he who was crying and she wondered why as she kissed the tears from his face. As she did, she thought she heard a car pull up to the house and footfalls on the porch and shuddered against this intrusion—was it her father?—but she didn’t care at this moment who it was, because Henry was beneath her and she was above him, and they were one, an unlikely pairing that had always made sense to her. He knew her, the depths of her ambition, and she knew him, the depths of his own. We are royalty, she thought. The king and queen of letters.
After, Henry got up to take a shower, while Antonia smoked a cigarette, loving the sweat that glistened on her young body, her breasts achy from Henry’s lips. She joined him in the shower, soaping his back, the wiry, taut muscles beneath the aging skin. How little she cared that he was fifty-nine and that she was twenty-three, that they were born of different times and generations, because they fit so well together. It still took her breath away, and when he said her name, his voice broke the surface of her daydream and awoke in her thoughts of the future, of marriage, of children, and of money. Privilege, she thought. We will get married, and I will have his children, and we will live in glamour high above the city. We will be the envy of our friends and enemies alike. We will grow old together, and I will dedicate all of my books to him, my husband. He will understand why I have done what I’ve done, and he will forgive me. Wren, she thought, but it wasn’t a thought, because, without realizing it, she’d said the name aloud; and then Henry was shrinking away from her, already climbing out of the shower, cinching a towel around his waist and hurrying out of the bathroom.
AFTER SLIPPING INTO her favorite vintage baby-doll dress and sandals, Antonia wandered out of the bedroom to find the table set and the front door ajar. She heard the low murmur of voices on the veranda and paused. Henry was talking to Catherine about his son, Ezra, the weekend plans he’d arranged—the kayaking on the Mohawk River, the hikes in the mountains, the movies at the Mayfair. “I hope it all goes well,” Catherine said, then she was saying good-bye, as Antonia headed into the kitchen. The bird was gone, a different, tin-foil-covered pan in its place. Through the open windows, a light breeze stirred the curtains, dispelling the last of the heavy stink of smoke. Now the room smelled as it had hours before, full of rich, savory odors emanating from the stove and the several brown paper bags lined up on the counter. Antonia peered into one of the bags, then another—mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, candied yams, pumpkin pie, stuffing—everything necessary for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.
Catherine, she thought, gratefully. She turned to the stove, lifting away the layers of foil that eventually revealed a modest-sized game hen, the drumsticks tied up and booted. It wasn’t as large as the turkey, but it’d do. It has to, she figured, replacing the foil, just as Henry appeared in the doorway. “That was Catherine,” he said coldly, not meeting her eyes. She suspected he’d remain like this all evening, punishing her in big ways and small for mentioning Wren. “She can’t make it tonight, which is just as well,” he said, turning his eyes to the clock on the wall. It was seven thirty; the guests would be arriving at eight. “You should have had the decency to tell me she was invited, Antonia.” She went rigid, wanting to remind him that this was her house and her dinner party, which she was throwing for him. She didn’t say any of this, because she finally understood his gruffness had nothing to do with her, that he was reacting (overreacting, overanalyzing, she thought) to the evening’s indeterminate variations.
“Henry, everything’s going to be fine,” she said, moving toward him and kissing his cheek. “You look very handsome.” More handsome than she had ever known him to be. In the three years since they’d met, she’d never seen him as vulnerable or exposed as he was at this very moment. Yes, three years of knowing him, during which there were the slow, sometimes painful baby steps of her seduction, coaxing him through the doors of his doubt and fear into the romantic rooms she’d decorated—all for him. This seduction took a far greater effort on her part, though she’d never thought about it as effort. Rather, she’d thought about it as nothing more than her right to him, to love a man like Henry Swallow. The love she had for him back then, which had been based partly on his illustrious reputation, bore little if no resemblance to the complex love she had for him now, which was based on moments like these. This was the Henry she idolized and cared about, not that other Henry, who clung to his ruthless prowess and even more ruthless, rigid ideals about literature. Look at what he did to Wyatt Strayed, she thought, and how he did it, which aren’t half as terrible as his reasons for going through with the review at all. There was a story here as well, as old and bruised and buried as his dislike of Catherine and her dislike of him. Yes, Antonia saw the way Henry glowered through his smiles and Catherine scowled through hers every time they were in the same room together. They never seemed to notice that she noticed them, yet she did. What aren’t you telling me, Henry?
Twenty minutes before the guests were due to arrive, she retired to the kitchen, organizing the food, tossing Henry’s salad, which he’d brought with him: a bag of prewashed mixed greens and a bottle of salad dressing. When he came into the room, she poked fun at him for his domestic failing.
“I’m a critic, not a househusband,” he said sulkily.
She laughed but resented the comment. Over the last few months, she’d done quite well at deflecting such offhand remarks, the insinuation that he’d never make a decent husband. He had been a decent husband at one time, but the accident had taken care of that. My wife left me, he’d told her, and that was all. That wasn’t all, though, and she knew it. She yearned to get him talking about these past six years, why he no longer drove, why he called out the girl’s name in his sleep. “Just tell me. Unburden yourself. There are ways out of this, Henry,” she would say, wanting to add, “Write it down.” Even as she thought it, she understood her own selfish impulses, her own greed, and she tamped them down; clearly, the story was too painful for him to relive. Yet she needed him to share this pain with her. It was the only way.
“I can’t, Antonia,” he’d say heatedly. “If I could tell you, I would.” And that would be that.
Certainly, if it’d been up to Antonia, if she’d been the award-winning critic, she would have found something in the ordeal to lift the story out of tragedy and make it art. She’d come across one story and that story had resulted in a novel. Now she was ready for another, but she needed Henry to tell her. Yet she had other battles to fight (and win), like the one she’d raised again yesterday about his moving in with her. The explanations Henry gave against the move were flimsy: two writers, one office, he said. The house is far too cramped as it is, he said. The work on my house will be finished soon enough, he added, turning an indifferent eye to her protestations that she’d feel safer with him around, that she didn’t see the point of living apart.
Tonight, as Antonia looked at Henry, she saw a glimmer of the man he once was and not the besieged man he had become. What she saw mostly was the accident, which was limned in his handsome face, in the etched lines around his mouth and in the dimmed brightness of his eyes. It was there every time he kissed her, made love to her, as if he were forcing all of his sadness and regret into her. Of course she wanted his sadness and regret, his suffering, because Henry was her second novel. Sometimes she’d watch him sleep, hoping that when he awoke he’d have forgotten in the night all that he’d lost. She’d forget as well, about all the secrets he kept close. She’d forget the novel altogether. How could she possibly go through with it? Yet when she heard a car pull up to the house, and she went to put on her makeup, knowledge of the secrets he kept from her swirled through her, enlivening her all over again.
From the other room came Nina Simone’s gravelly voice tumbling through the cool air-conditioned house, while beyond them lay motionless Winslow, this town she still didn’t know or like. When the car doors opened and closed, she wanted to meet her friends on the walk and tell them, “Turn around. I have no idea what I’m doing here. Let’s go,” joining them in their car and directing them back over the bridge and past Henry’s house, which led to the interstate, this four-hundred-mile ribbon of road that connected her to Manhattan.
When the doorbell rang, Antonia was applying her lipstick, imagining a different night, her upcoming book party at Leland’s, the legendary restaurant and publishing haunt on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “Everyone will know your name,” Henry had said. “I’ll make sure of it.” She believed and trusted him, even as he seemed to blanch every time she told him her latest news: “They want to send me on a twelve-city book tour,” she said. “They’re taking out a full-page ad in the Times,” she said. “I’ll be interviewed on Fresh Air by Terry Gross!” she said. She wasn’t naive enough to assume that these promotional tactics weren’t often begrudged other writers who didn’t have Henry Swallow as an ally, who weren’t sharing his bed. She relayed to Henry what her editor had told her, that she was the marketing department’s darling. “Well, of course,” he said. “You’re an easy sell: a young, beautiful, and talented woman, who’s written a deeply affecting, original novel.” Still, when he’d said this, she felt the words slice like a razor through her. She knew how he felt about originality, that he despised disingenuousness of any kind. “If I can see the writer in the work,” he said on that first day of class, “then it’s clear to me this writer is more involved with his own story than with imagining a fictional one.” Then, cautioning them, he added, “This is a fiction class, where you will share and evaluate one another’s stories. Notice the use of the word ‘stories,’ because that’s what I expect from you—stories, not journal entries or personal essays or chapters from your Great American Novel that also double as your autobiography. Fiction is about character. Fiction is never ever about you.” He flashed his eyes on the room. “Edith Wharton said that the writer must, above all, bear in mind at each step that his business is not to ask what the situation would be likely to make of his characters but what his characters, being what they are, would make of the situation. ‘Characters, being what they are,’ ” he repeated, pausing to look at every individual face. “Most of you will never understand what I’m talking about. Most of you will never go on to publish. That’s okay, because most of you couldn’t write your way out of a paper bag. I’m only here for the one or two of you who do understand what I just said. I’m here for the one or two of you who know that the most interesting characters make the most interesting mistakes—they fall from grace and keep on falling until nothing is left of them. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what I like to read. The best stories do not have happy endings. If you write a happy ending in here, I will crucify you. Understand?”
She’d found these words of his harsh, rigid, and condescending, but he was Henry Swallow, after all. (She had been warned against him, precisely for these reasons.) She’d applied for his class, only because her top choice had taken a sabbatical. She’d never expected to get into his class, but there she was, one of eight. She took his advice to heart and struggled those first few weeks to leave herself out of the story, but she failed miserably at it; she found that everything she wrote was about her. Still, because it was her turn to workshop and she had nothing else to hand in, she distributed, in her opinion, one of the least offensive pieces, which Henry ended up slamming.
