Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, page 27
“Yes,” he said meekly. “Perfectly. I understand.”
“I know everything about you, Henry,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him. “I know what you did to Wren. I know about the settlement. I know everything there is to know. The only thing I don’t know is why, out of everyone in the world, you chose to tell Wyatt.”
“Then he did write it,” Henry said earnestly.
“Yes, he wrote it. It’s right here,” she said, patting her purse.
“May I see it?” he asked.
After reaching into her purse, she pulled out the rolled-up manuscript, though before handing it to him she said, “Don’t think for a second that this changes anything between us.”
“Oh, I don’t,” he said, taking the manuscript and removing the rubber band. “I never thought it would.” Then he was reading the title and the dedication and the first page to himself, smiling as he did. “This is good,” he said. “Very, very good. He took my advice. He took the story and ran with it.” Catherine didn’t know what to say. She could feel the tears in her eyes and turned away. He grasped her arm. “Now you must listen to me closely: I want you to find a way to publish this.”
“You must be out of your mind,” she said, spinning back around. “No one is ever going to see this book. Ever. Not while I’m alive anyway.”
“Catherine, whatever you want to believe about me, you must believe this: I gave him this story—for you.” She thought about Wyatt, who had abandoned his side of the bed to sleep here, in the cottage, and she thought about Henry, who’d made the cottage his home for several weeks. She thought about how she’d imagined having to pile all his things into the car and drop them at his house. She thought about how she’d imagined meeting him at the door and the polite small talk they’d make, how he’d eventually say, “It was good seeing you.” She’d imagined standing on his porch on that afternoon in late September. She’d always remember it, because it had been on a similar afternoon many years earlier that she’d first imagined what it would be like to be with him. A fall afternoon and a quick glance out the window at Washington Square Park while Henry had lectured. A fall afternoon before she’d ever met Wyatt. She had just been a grad student and Henry had just been her professor and the future had not yet become what it would be. She had been making a name for herself and she’d had such lofty plans and the world had still been within her reach. “Now there’s something else you need to know. It’s about Antonia,” he said. “You must never let her see this, Catherine. Do you understand me?”
She didn’t understand, not fully, though it was slowly coming to her, as slowly as the day revolving around them. “She’s writing about us,” she said at last. “She’s writing about you and me and Wyatt, isn’t she? That’s what you were saying at the book party.”
“Yes,” he said. “You can’t let her have this story, and I’m afraid the only way to stop her is to make sure it gets into print.” Then Catherine sat down in one of the plastic chairs, winded. She thought she should feel betrayed, though she didn’t, because she knew that this was an inevitability, that it had to happen like this. There was just no way to be around a writer and not have it happen. Still, that Antonia had befriended her merely to get to this story—hers, Wyatt’s, theirs—did gall her. “You’re going to have to make a decision,” he said.
“I can just . . . I can just get rid of it,” she said, thinking that, since Wyatt didn’t like making copies, this had to be the only one. A guarded man, with a touch of the paranoiac running through him, she recalled, he had been an even more guarded, paranoiac writer, who never showed his works-in-progress to anyone, especially not other writers, because, as he said, there was nothing like seeing his ideas show up in someone else’s prose.
“No, you can’t,” Henry said. “She’ll just find another way into it. She’s very crafty. She’ll speak to your friends, and they won’t even figure out what she’s doing until it’s too late.”
“I’ll warn them,” she said, though when she thought about Louise and Jane she couldn’t help but shudder.
“Your only option is to publish,” he said, handing the manuscript back to her.
“Thank you for telling me about Antonia,” she said as he turned to go back into the cottage and she thought, for some reason, that this would be last time she ever saw him. “Henry, wait. Where will you go?”
“Back to wonderful,” he said cryptically, then shut the door.
Catherine stood at the cottage for another minute. As she herself turned to go, she thought she heard typing, and paused, wondering, as she drifted to her car, how she’d ever been able to stand the sound of it.
The Rose and the Milkweed
_____
Henry sat at Wyatt’s desk and typed. He wanted to record some of it at least, if for no one other than himself. He thought about the boy he’d been who’d started reading at the age of three and hadn’t stopped since. He thought about all the stories he wrote when he was a teenager and then when he was an undergrad at Yale. His handicap as a fiction writer was well documented in the rejections he’d amassed over the years. Perhaps if he’d found a way into his own pain these stories might have succeeded. He had no way of accessing the pain, however, because he had been born without an imagination. He knew this, though he’d pressed on anyway. Even his marriage to Joyce hadn’t helped him get published in her father’s magazine, Modern Scrivener, which rejected him every time. Still, he never gave up, because what kind of writer would that make him? He kept revising, paring down, and resubmitting. In the meantime, he wrote the occasional book review for the magazine; he was good at that at least.
He enjoyed writing these reviews, because it was much easier to judge someone else’s work than to create something of his own. In reviewing, he thought he might eventually come to some better understanding of the craft, what made a good sentence, a good story, a good novel.
Henry typed. He wanted to record some of it before he went.
One editor who rejected him said that his story lacked an emotional core, as he called it. “Here, at the Armadale Review, we only publish stories with tenacity.” Such words of encouragement! He thought about the last and final story he sent to Dillard Bloom nearly thirty years ago, and the usual rejection that followed. “You know my father has particular tastes,” Joyce had reminded him. Yes, he knew. Still, why was it that some writers roll sixes, while others, like Henry, rolled twos? The numbers, it seemed, were against him.
In his youth, he’d also tried his hand at a novel, yet like the rest of his fiction, it had never found a home, either. He’d written the story of his life—a roman à clef—yet apparently the story of his life wasn’t all that compelling. Well, no matter. It was his life, and it had been good, better than good—until six years ago, of course.
Henry got up—he couldn’t sit still for long these days—and surveyed the study, then looked through the other rooms. He’d made this town his home for three years, and it had been kind to him, accepting him readily, as one of its own, even though he wasn’t, and could never be. Mostly, though, it left him alone, and he was grateful to it. His celebrity did not matter here at all, and the townspeople had not bothered with him—until recently. Now it was different, and they looked at him differently as well. Someone at the local paper had written an article about the fire at his house, speculating on its cause. Though the police had ruled it an accident, Henry had known better. He’d meant to die in the fire while Antonia had been off in Manhattan. Six years of his life spent reliving that awful night on Osprey Point. He wondered even now how he’d managed it for as long as he had. Wren was always with him, just as surely as that other girl had to have been a constant companion to Linwood Lively. It was strange for him to think how much they had in common, yet how little—one girl dead on purpose, the other dead by chance. A single second, a turn of his head, and there she’d been in the middle of the road.
Henry folded and taped the boxes he’d bought and started on the main room, dropping things into them without thought or care. Then he started on the study, dumping his books willy-nilly into one box, the folders that contained all his reviews into another. He knew that somewhere inside one of the folders was the review of Wyatt’s novel, which was, and always would be, the most perfidious review he’d ever written. He’d written it in half an hour, with a bottle of bourbon at his elbow, drinking it for clarity, he’d thought, not for courage.
He grabbed a trash bag and filled it with his students’ stories, happy to be done with that part of his life as well. They were far too young to have anything to say, far too self-obsessed to leave themselves out of their work. Antonia had been one of the only exceptions in a lifetime of rules. And at twenty years old, she’d done what it took most writers a lifetime to do—regret nothing. In the beginning, he’d admired her for it, and at the end he hated her for it. Yet he suspected now that, like him, her young life would be spent regretting and regretting.
The facts of his story, their story, were unchangeable. Fiction went where facts could not go, he thought. He’d never told anyone the story about Wren, other than Wyatt, of course. (Why couldn’t the agency of destruction also serve as the agency of mercy?) Now Catherine knew it as well, and he was glad about this. She knew about Dolores and Wren Novak, his neighbors on Osprey Point, and how Ezra and Wren used to play together in the summers. She knew how much he and Joyce adored Dolores, single working woman and mother, even though their lives were as different as the rose and the milkweed, despite living in the same garden. Like her mother, Wren had clear blue eyes and black hair, and she was precocious, reading by the time she was four. Ezra didn’t read until he turned six, and even then it was with reluctance, which infuriated Henry. Secretly, he compared Ezra to Wren, and not so secretly Joyce to Dolores. Dolores took a keen interest in everything he said and everything he published, unlike his wife, who never quite listened to him and never read his essays or reviews. Catherine also now knew about why Henry had come to Winslow College and how he had kept waiting to run into her, how horrible it was to have to see Wyatt in the hall day after day. Wyatt who never spoke a single word to Henry, which had been fine, because he felt he deserved the silence. Antonia had found Henry, as Catherine had found him years before, and although utterly different in shape and size, they shared certain qualities of spirit: ambition, intelligence, perseverance. Antonia, however, was not nearly as kind or as malleable as Catherine. So Catherine now also knew how Henry saw her, and how, if she’d only believed in herself more, he might have been able to go on being with her.
I simply couldn’t bear the weight of her selflessness, her need for me to anoint her, Henry had told Wyatt. She needed a man like you to tend to, to mold. I was already molded, hardened, and set. With every passing summer, he began to see the same fawning tendency in Wren. She belonged to Ezra, who bossed her around, and she let him, as if she were less than him, when, in truth, she was so much more. Henry loved her like she were his own, because she had a way with words from a very young age. She’ll be a writer, he told Ezra. Wait and see. Now Catherine knew about how Henry had been at the beach house and how he had been in a mad dash to get back into the city, how he’d forgotten the review he’d been working on and how he’d gone speeding back to the house for it.
He’d been drinking, not heavily but enough, and the road unwound before him like a black tongue. He’d been drinking, and he’d been tired, and he’d fallen asleep, just for a second.
At first, Henry thought he hit a deer. In all that blackness, this seemed the most logical thing, the most hopeful. It was winter and the houses along the road were dark, the stinging wind ripping across the dunes. Wren had been thrown into the reeds, and when he looked down at her, her eyes were still open, though there was not a part of her that wasn’t broken. He sprinted to Dolores’s and pounded on the door until she appeared in a nightgown and slippers, and Henry fell into her, sobbing. Wren died on the way to the hospital, and though it had been an accident, Dolores was out for blood. She didn’t want his money. All she wanted, she told the lawyers, was that he should suffer the way she suffered every day. What she wanted was that he never forget—so every week, he was to sign the girl’s name on a dollar bill and he had to have these bills ready to mail to Dolores without fail, anytime she might so request. Otherwise he would face prosecution for manslaughter. Knowing himself and that he wouldn’t last a day in jail, he signed the settlement willingly. He didn’t care about the other stipulations—that he was never to profit from the tragedy or that his driver’s license had been revoked indefinitely. He had no desire to tell this story or to put it down on paper, and he had never liked to drive anyway.
Every week for six years, Henry had signed the single dollar bill, adding them to the stacks that had become like a chain around his neck, something to drag around with him wherever he went. Once again he packed the bundled bills into boxes and stacked them by the door. He would have them collected later. For now, he just wanted to leave, to be as far away from here as possible, to be so far away he would no longer feel the urge to turn around and go back for Antonia. He would leave, and he wouldn’t stop until he found a place free of any bookstores and freer still of any fiction writers.
Chekhov’s Smoking Gun
_____
After talking to Henry, Catherine made her way slowly through the gate and up the stairs to the deck, where she sank down in a lounge chair. After all I’ve done for her, she thought, stunned at the realization of Antonia’s betrayal. She gazed down at the withered backyard, at the shriveled leaves and the lifeless bodies of insects floating across the green-tinted, still water. That summer, she realized, was not unlike the pool, a shimmering watery grave. Until Antonia had arrived on the porch, called out her name, and stepped into her house, Catherine had pictured her life in Winslow as one of these dead and dying things. Then, suddenly, she’d found the strength to let go of the mourning, so buoyed was she by the girl’s spirited friendliness and disarming flattery. How extraordinary it had been to sit with her and to hear how much Wyatt’s novel meant to her. How fabulous it had been to feel the air charged again with hope. For a writer, Antonia had none of Wyatt’s penchant for melancholy, Catherine had noticed, none of his debilitating professional jealousies. Antonia had not seemed tormented in the least, and this, too, helped to fix her star brightly in Catherine’s heavens. She had genuinely liked the girl, she sensed she might even have loved her, not only because they shared a past with Henry but because the girl reminded her so much of herself.
Now this, too, was finished. Now she knew there would be no bonding trips together, no more cigarettes to share as they talked about future plans, no more glasses of wine or dinners or parties. It amazed her that she could end up here, exactly where she’d started, even after all they’d been through. There were no tears when she finally got up and went into the house, and no tears when she opened the bedroom door, peering nervously down at the bed, relieved not to find Antonia in it. After tonight, I am done with her, she thought, wandering into the kitchen. She drank a glass of wine to steady herself, though it did nothing more than make her incredibly sleepy.
As she lay down on the sofa, Catherine pictured the evening ahead and all that could go wrong with the bookstore event. The cheap sound system Harold had installed might act up, the attendance might be poor—although she’d taken steps to make sure it wouldn’t be by placing last-minute announcements in the paper as well as posting flyers all over town—and who knew if another crazy member of Antonia’s family might turn up and cause a scene: so many possibilities for failure. Yes, failure, she thought glumly, her mind returning to Wyatt’s manuscript. She had failed him as his wife, or so she had read in his novel, yet hadn’t he failed her as well? Instead of confronting her with his grievances, he’d let her go on as if all had been well. Instead of letting her explain, he had filled the pages with every ounce of his animus and resentment he had for her. She had gone on believing that Henry’s review had led to his death, though now she had to wonder if she herself weren’t to blame. How unhappy he’d been. “Oh, Wyatt,” she said. “You should have come to me. I was your wife, not your enemy. I never meant to hurt you.” Yet hurt him she had. Worse, though, than this was that she had wasted a year and a half of her life indulging her grief, crying over a man who had apparently never even liked her very much. She wondered if this made them even. And then she was shutting her eyes, even as she shut out these thoughts, knowing that she needed a nap if she were ever going to face Antonia and the evening ahead.
CATHERINE AWOKE TO dusk out the windows and the incessant ringing of the phone. Groggily, she stood up and went into the kitchen to find Harold screaming down the line. “Where the hell are you?” he said. “Do you know what time it is?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “Time for you to get up here, Catherine. Everything—the folding chairs, the platters of food, the boxes of wine—was all just delivered right now. Tonight is your deal, remember? Do not let me down.”
She’d been asleep for three hours, and in that time she’d done something awful to her back, which ached terribly, so much she could barely stand up straight. Not now, she thought bitterly, and reached over to touch her toes, just as she heard a knock at the door and Antonia calling out her name. She wasn’t ready, not for any of this, and wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and never leave it. She willed the pain in her back gone, though even thinking about it made it hurt more. There was nothing to do but live with it, she thought, because Harold was right—tonight was her deal.
She moved slowly to the door and opened it, and there was Antonia, smoking a cigarette, looking as she did all those weeks ago, perhaps a little less young, a little less vibrant, but still Antonia Lively, still the girl that Catherine had come to know, to like, to trust. “I thought we could go up to the store together,” Antonia said, stepping past Catherine into the sitting room. In one hand, she held her purse and in the other, her novel. “I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to read. Maybe you can suggest something. Tell me your favorite scene and that’s what I’ll read,” she said.
