Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, page 17
“How could I possibly hate it?” Catherine asked, laughing, and thanked her for the copy.
“My agent doesn’t like the cover,” she said. “The fights we had about it! Between you and me, I almost fired him, but I think he’s finally coming around. It’s weird how proprietary he can be about me and my novel.”
Catherine ran a finger over the dust jacket, the deep red letters of the title, The Death of Her, curved delicately inside a gauzy crescent moon that hung above a ramshackle cabin. Yet this was no ordinary moon—it was in the shape of a silver lunette—and Catherine shuddered against the memory of Antonia’s father. Yes, the dust jacket was beautiful, but it was also shocking because it served as another reminder of what Catherine now believed Antonia to have done. The image on the dust jacket tied all of it together and told a further tale. Opening up the novel now, the spine tight and unyielding, she traced a finger down the unblemished, deckled pages, loving the feel of the imperceptibly raised words against her skin. “I can’t wait to read it,” she said, though she wondered if her experience of it had already been tainted by knowing too much and becoming a player herself in the larger, more sordid story.
Antonia said, “Well, I should get going. I have a lot to do.” Catherine hugged the book to her chest and gazed past the girl to the cottage. Look, she wanted to say, you will never understand him, so I wouldn’t even bother trying. Before she said good-bye, Antonia added, “You are coming to my party tomorrow night, aren’t you? I think Henry’s up to something, but I don’t know what. I can see it in his eyes. It’s like he wants to ask me—well, he’s been acting very strange the last couple of days. He wrote a speech to introduce me, and I just wonder if . . . I mean, we’ve been together long enough, and I know how much he loves me . . . Do you think—oh, wouldn’t it just be so perfect if he asked me to marry him? He hasn’t mentioned anything to you, has he?” Catherine told her that he hadn’t. “Well, don’t tell him that I’m onto him, okay. He certainly knows how to keep a secret. It’s just eating me alive.” And with that, she hugged Catherine and drifted down the steps.
The bell on the gate tinkled, and then she was gone, though not all of her. For in her wake, she’d left Catherine with some strange, unsettling news. That she and Henry had reconciled did not surprise her but that he was even contemplating marriage certainly did. Hadn’t he sat at her kitchen table not a few days earlier and announced that he was done with Antonia? Fickle, fickle man, she thought, cringing at her own experience of him.
“Marriage,” she said aloud, scoffing, and went back into the house. As she dressed, she found herself talking to Wyatt, who’d asked her to marry him just a week after Henry had ended his affair with her. It was as if he had held back asking her to marry him, until he was dead certain she was free to say yes. At the time, she had found it utterly distressing to have to grieve the loss of Henry while simultaneously giving into the idea of becoming Mrs. Wyatt Strayed. She’d had to work overtime at dismantling her love for Henry, refusing, she had told herself, to believe that his leaving her had been anything other than cowardly and spiteful. Yet the more she’d tried to rid herself of her love for him, the more this love held tight. Then one day she just woke up and realized she was sick with it and of it, worrying that it had putrified inside of her. Lying beside Wyatt in the early morning hours, she worried further that she stank of it and that if he kissed her he’d smell it on her breath.
Now, on her way to the bookstore, Catherine recalled how awful it had been to abandon Wyatt and his engagement ring—a small star sapphire set in an antique platinum band—on the nightstand and sneak out of his apartment. She knew he would find her excuse—“I just can’t”—inexplicable and cruel, but she also knew how much crueler it would have been to marry him. I am not a cruel woman, she had wanted to tell him as she wandered through the city and ran into the specter of him everywhere. He did not call her. After three long weeks of silence, though, she called him. She was planning to tell him everything—the whys and the why-nots—yet the second she heard his voice, she hung up, appalled at herself. There was a time and a place for honesty, but this wasn’t it, she knew. She had to purify herself first, before she could even think about sleeping beside him again, think of taking his name.
Back then, it seemed that her heart was in a constant state of breaking, and it was breaking again now as she thought about Wyatt, who had wanted to marry her, and Henry, who had left her. The more she had tried to reason it all out, to make sense of her wounded heart, the more she felt the ongoing strain that she was placing on it and the more she realized that in Henry she was idealizing a man whom she never should have idealized at all. She wished she had had more self-control when it came to Henry, and then later when it came to Wyatt—and then she was quickly backing out of the drive, because she couldn’t stand the sight of the cottage. She had given Wyatt the cottage out of what she had thought was her deep, steady love, although it had come at the cost of something she had held precious and dear—her mother’s diamond engagement ring, a family heirloom, which Catherine had inherited and hoped one day to pass on to a daughter of her own.
Catherine had worn the ring for years and had cherished it as she had cherished the occasional compliments people gave her. Though not garish by any means, the ring did call attention to itself, the antique oval stone large and perfectly cut, the rose gold band encrusted with pavé rubies. She had worn it so constantly that Catherine forgot she even had the ring on until someone, like Jane or Louise, took her hand to examine it.
On her way to the bookstore, Catherine remembered those three weeks after she’d left Wyatt, and after Henry had left her, and how she’d wandered around the city wearing the ring, although it felt to her as if the ring were wearing her, as if it knew far more than she did—about love, about marriage, about how to find and to keep them both, not separate but a single thing. She remembered sitting in the same cafes in which she and Wyatt used to go, taking the same paths through Washington Square Park that she and Henry used to travel—in the hope of “accidentally” running into one of them. But she never did.
During one of her marches around the island—she took to calling her walks “marches,” as she stomped through the sludgy snow in her boots—she kept thinking about her parents, specifically about her father, who was only a few years older than Henry, though without any of Henry’s spirit, and certainly with none of Wyatt’s compassion, which she craved more than anything. As she marched, her thoughts marched with her, always circling back to Henry, which inevitably led her back to Wyatt. She wanted to talk to one of them and went to use a pay phone, then realized that Henry would be at home, with his wife, and that Wyatt was at his job at the law firm. She bought a pack of cigarettes and smoked as she marched, wondering if anything was worth the effort when it left you unhappy in the end. She focused her thoughts on Henry, because had it not been for him, she would not have undertaken such a rigorous dissertation topic. Would he still keep the promises he’d made, to help her to get her articles published and to land a good job at a good university? Probably not, she realized, flinging the cigarette into the gutter and ducking into a diner to get warm.
As she sat down on a stool at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee, she removed her thin gloves and gazed at her chafed, red hands and her mother’s ring, which sparkled in the diner’s fluorescent light. She took the ring off, admiring its weight and beauty again, recalling her mother, who, before her death, had handed her daughter the ring and said, “Rings are nothing without fingers. Don’t let this sit in a drawer, Catherine. Find someone to love.”
And I did, she now thought. I found someone to love—Wyatt with his great big talent and his great big heart, Wyatt who initially slid the ring onto her finger, then, years later, without exactly saying it, wanted her to take it off again, which she did eventually, because she knew it was the only way to make him happy and, more than this, to keep herself happy, too.
We were happy, weren’t we, Wyatt? she asked herself now, as she sat at a stoplight, absently staring down at her finger, at where the ring ought to have been but wasn’t. She pictured the ring where she’d left it—at Louise’s house, in Louise’s possession. After Catherine parked the car on Main Street, she sat for a few moments, remembering the afternoon she’d gone to see Louise, the ring tucked in her pocket. She had already been to the bank, which had refused her a loan, and to the town’s sole pawnshop, which had made a ridiculously low offer, and so there was Louise left, only Louise who could help her.
They sat in Louise’s vast kitchen, at her vast kitchen table, in her vast ten-room home, and after a lull in the conversation, Catherine brought up the cottage and the renovation. “I want to do this for him,” she said, pulling the ring out of her pocket and setting it on the table.
“Just let me lend you the money, then,” Louise said. “You don’t have to—”
“If I have to sell it—and I do—then I want it to go to someone I trust,” she said. She thought there’d be tears after Louise had written her a check, and tears when she deposited the check in the bank, and then when the workmen arrived the following week. She thought there’d be tears when she looked down at her empty finger and when she went to remove the ring at night only to remember that she no longer owned it. But there weren’t any tears, only a kind of sickness in her gut, which vanished the moment she climbed into bed beside Wyatt and curled up against him.
Now, in the bookstore, as Catherine went to help a customer, she knew that, contrary to what Louise had said—that she’d act as Catherine’s pawnbroker but not forever—that she’d never have enough money to buy the ring back and that even if she did she wasn’t sure she’d want it. Like memories of Wyatt, the ring belonged to a more promising time, when the price of love hadn’t been so steep and what had been lost could always be found again. She thought they had found each other again, she and Wyatt, after the hardwood floors had been laid, the paint had dried, and Wyatt had moved into the cottage. And for a time, it seemed to her they had, as he disappeared into the cottage every morning only to reemerge at night, cheerier, it appeared, than he had been before. Catherine thought that everything would be okay at last, the cottage a beacon to vanquish the dark, shadowy doubts she still had.
But standing in the bookstore this morning, as she had stood in it for the last nine years, Catherine understood again just how fleeting and weak that light had been and, beyond this, just how much she had grown to rely on it, as she had grown to rely on Wyatt to write his way past his early disappointments and failures and in this way to secure for them what he had promised so long ago—a bright and golden future full of bright and golden dreams.
A Few Remarks on a Rainy Night in Manhattan
_____
On the morning of her book party, Antonia woke before the sun, made coffee, and took a cup of it on the terrace. Below her, the park fanned out in a dark green swath while the avenue unspooled in a quiet, empty ribbon. This yellow-lined street, she knew, connected her to Henry, whose apartment was twenty blocks north. As she lit a cigarette, she glanced uptown, thinking about him in Winslow, if he was indeed there. Yesterday evening, she’d shown up at his apartment around dinnertime only to be told by the doorman that he hadn’t seen Mr. Swallow. She might have used her key and stayed there anyway, but staying in Henry’s apartment without Henry in it seemed wrong. She left him a note, telling him she’d be at Calvin’s, yet he still hadn’t called or come by.
The sun peeked over the tops of the east-side buildings and rouged the cloudless sky. The air was already muggy and full of grit. A fleet of off-duty taxis headed downtown in an undulating yellow wave. The city hummed around her, arousing in her the fierce longing to work. Writing was the only way through. It was the only thing that could sustain her.
Back in Calvin’s small guest room that he had done up in damask, she took her place at the desk. She’d brought along Wyatt’s typewriter, which Catherine had so generously lent her, and ran a finger over the keys, staring at the blank sheet of paper. She typed a few sentences while she thought about Henry’s accident again, her conscience working on her. How could she possibly write this novel? Then again, how could she not? Without Henry, she wouldn’t be sitting here as the writer she was, whose debut novel he had helped launch into the world. How could she think about Henry without also thinking about her uncle Royal? Without him, she never would have had a story to tell. How could she ever thank either of them for such a Pyrrhic victory? Because she understood that’s all it was, just as surely as she suspected Henry of knowing more than he was letting on. She recalled that night when she’d come home from Catherine’s to find his glasses on the kitchen counter. Had he misplaced them, as he’d said? She shivered again at the idea that he’d been in her house, worse, in her study.
As the sun bled across her fingers and the typewriter and the empty page, it revealed her most disturbing thought yet: the story of Henry’s accident was getting away from her, which also meant that Henry was getting away from her as well, didn’t it? To keep him near, she set aside her fear and plunged again into his past, hauling up the accident, Wren, all the things that she knew and thought she knew. As she wrote, she renewed her own vows to this shapeless, nascent narrative. I will capture it all, no matter how ugly, no matter how awful, she thought, because the truth has to win out. Again, as she often had, she felt as if she were this new novel’s guardian. It told her where to go, to use the gift of her situation as honestly as she could. The world will go on turning, it said, and in no time at all people won’t care a fig about Henry or what he did. Yet even as she made some headway, her mind kept drifting back to her father, to the trouble she’d caused him. So how could she go on like this? How could she tell Henry’s story when she knew how much trouble it would create for him?
I can’t, she thought, lifting her fingers off the keys. I won’t, and she pushed away from the desk, disgusted at the sight of the paragraph she’d written, which was not about Henry at all but about Catherine. She said the name aloud, said it again, picturing another way into this story, perhaps an even better way in, because Antonia did not have the same regard for Catherine that she had for Henry. She liked Catherine, sure, but she didn’t love her. She valued her friendship with the older woman, yes, but not as much as Catherine apparently did. Besides, just whom did Catherine think she was fooling anyway?
Over the last couple of weeks, it had become more than obvious to Antonia that the docile, unassuming Catherine had feelings for Henry. Why else had she rented him the cottage, especially after the way he’d treated her husband? Though she’d suspected as much from the start, it wasn’t until she’d learned about Catherine’s doctoral work when something leapt out into the open, as if from behind a giant black cloud. She knew Henry would never confirm it, but it seemed to make sense: he’d always had a penchant for young, driven women. It wasn’t hard to imagine Catherine as she once had been, young and ambitious (she was still young, thought Antonia, though now utterly unambitious), or Henry as he’d once been, too, even more handsome and at the top of his literary game. It also wasn’t hard to imagine the romance the two might have shared, or the way it had ended—with Catherine leaving Henry to marry Wyatt. No, perhaps Antonia was coming at it from the wrong angle. Perhaps it was Catherine, and not Henry, whom she should have been looking at more closely.
As she wrote for another couple of hours, morning turned into afternoon, and her attention flagged. It was frustrating for her to keep writing in circles, the heart of the story like a target that kept moving out of range. What tied everything together? How could she braid the loose strands of Henry’s story into a cohesive narrative when all the strands kept unraveling? Wren was one strand, Catherine and Wyatt Strayed another. How were the two intertwined, if indeed they were? Lacking precision, her story, she knew, lacked credibility. Her uncle had given her the story for the first novel by way of an insane letter. She wondered who would give her this story, and how it would be delivered.
Right in the middle of a sentence, she heard voices in the next room. Hello, she wanted to call out. I’m working in here. Instead, she opened the door, and there was Ezra Swallow, perched on the sofa. He was smoking a cigarette.
“Ezra, Ezra, Ezra,” she said, “what a surprise,” the words breaking apart like the rings of smoke he blew into the air.
“Hello, Ms. Lively,” he said coolly, without looking at her.
Calvin appeared and offered her a glass of champagne, which she took, appreciating his show of good cheer. The cheer, however, turned out not to be for her, because he was saying, “Ezra just got some awesome news. One of the most respected lit agents in the land wants to represent him.”
“That’s wonderful,” she said, hiding her irritation by taking a sip of champagne. “Who is it?”
“George Marceau,” Ezra said, beaming, knowing how Antonia must feel to learn he had landed her agent. “I’m not even finished with the memoir yet,” he added triumphantly. “George swears he can sell it based on the first chapter. He thinks it’s going to be huge.”
“It happened so fast,” Calvin said. “Tell her the story. Go on.”
“Well, it was like this: George came to the magazine to visit my grandfather, and my grandfather told him what I was writing . . . Hmm. It doesn’t sound like much of a story after all.”
“It is. It is,” Calvin said, encouraging him.
“Yes, it most certainly is,” she agreed, despising Ezra all the more. Who was he to upstage her like this, and on today of all days?
