Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, page 29
Jane had had the car detailed, and she’d put in a new stereo. “I’ll repay you,” Catherine said, getting into the car and closing the door. She was surprised by how much she’d missed having the car around.
“No, you won’t,” Jane said. “I can’t believe you didn’t get the car checked out sooner, though. They told me that it was completely unsafe to drive.”
Catherine thanked her, then pulled out of the driveway, not knowing where she was going, simply wanting to drive. As she did, she thought about Wyatt and the day they’d bought the car and how he’d told her that it was only temporary. “Until I sell my next novel and make a bundle, and then I’ll buy you whatever you want,” he’d said. He had not made a bundle, and he had not been able to buy Catherine whatever she wanted, yet she had never cared about any of that. Not really. She had only cared that they were together, that she would wake up beside him every morning and go to bed with him every night. She had only cared that he was in the next room, working, that he would always be around. She missed him more than ever and knew then that she always would. She would go on missing him even after the summer was over, and the winter came, and then the spring and the summer again. She would miss him, even though he’d written such horrible things about her. Despite everything, he had loved her, and she had loved him—of that she was certain—and the story of their lives together was as much about that love as it was about their mutual grievances. Wasn’t every marriage like this?
The pages of his novel had blown away that day; as they had carried her to the ambulance, she’d watched them go, watched the wind scatter them up and down the block, into the yards and the gutters and the trees. She had watched it all go, and it was as if the wind had taken her away as well. She drove into town, until she came to Broad Street, where she passed slowly by Page Turners. She had spoken to Harold briefly on the phone, and he had told her that she could come back, if she wanted, but she didn’t want to come back. “Not now,” she’d said, “maybe later,” though she knew, as she hung up the phone, that later would never come. She had spent nine years of her life behind the register, helping customers, shelving and reshelving books, ordering the bookmarks, designing the display window, which, she now saw, still held Antonia’s novel. She had heard that it was still selling well, even better than expected, and that someone, a big producer in Hollywood, had optioned it for film. Good for her, she thought as she left Broad Street and made her way to her own. She passed her house and the cottage, both of which were dark and empty, though tomorrow, when she came back, she would clean out the cottage and then put an ad in the weekly looking for a new tenant. A woman, she thought. A woman with a real job. She would run a credit check on her. She would charge her seven hundred dollars a month.
She hadn’t known it until she’d arrived at the house down the block that this had been her intention all along. It’s not that she wanted to talk to Antonia or share a cigarette with her again; it’s only that she wanted to make sure the girl was all right. Yes, even after all of that, Catherine still felt partially responsible for her. Still felt that she had, in some way, been taken advantage of. It was naive of her to think about Antonia in such a light, she knew, yet she liked being naive, she liked being the least bit gullible. It softened the edges of the world.
As she stood on the veranda and knocked, she thought about Antonia’s father, about her own, about the men who came into their lives and pushed their way through, about the detritus they left in their wake. She knocked again, but Antonia never came to the door. It was just as well, she thought, wandering back down the sidewalk and turning to look at the house. And there she was, a cigarette in her fingers, the smoke curling into the air. Though they’d become friendly, they’d never become friends, not in the way Catherine had wanted. She spoke Antonia’s name, feeling grateful for the first time that there were years and a distance between them, that Antonia was there and she was here, that their lives had briefly touched and that she’d gotten to taste what it might be like to be this girl. No, she’d never need what Antonia needed, never move through the world the way she did, and she was happy for this, happier now than she’d been. Though she’d lost a lot of her grounding that summer, she knew she’d given up much less than Antonia had. Catherine also knew that years from now, she could look back and say, Yes, I didn’t have everything, but what I had was more than enough.
She had also gone to Antonia’s house to get Wyatt’s typewriter back, but she saw that she’d leave without it. Because a typewriter without the ambitious man who used it, she realized, is just another typewriter. Ambition, she now thought, took hold of everyone, and kept everyone in a constant state of yearning, even if what they yearned for was the success that came at the expense of someone else’s failure.
Then, without saying a word, Antonia turned and disappeared into the house. As Catherine watched, the wind picked up and the cicadas went noisy in the trees, the moon shining down from a clear sky. There, while standing at the edge of the yard, she heard the sound of the typewriter, this familiar, energetic music. She listened for a minute, a minute out of a lifetime, and in this sound she heard the voices of the summer. She heard Antonia’s industry and, yes, even her love, and as she turned away from it and took a step toward her car, the typing faded into other sounds—the birds in the trees, the barking dogs—and was eventually lost for good.
The Redemptive Power of Fiction
_____
We come to stories only when we’re ready for them, Antonia once told me, though I’m not sure I was ever ready for this one. It was never mine and belonged to others, to Wyatt and Catherine, to Henry and Antonia, to Linwood and Royal. Wyatt and Linwood were dead, though, Henry and Royal gone, and I knew Catherine didn’t have the stomach to tell it—not many people would. As for Antonia—let’s just say I got there first.
Henry had been right when he’d said that Antonia would make a name for herself. She did. No publisher, however, would touch her second attempt, as Henry had also predicted (and perhaps made sure of). Even I, a complete novice when it came to writing fiction, knew enough not to slander my characters. How she made such a silly, amateurish mistake, given her talents and her smarts, still astounds me, as it must have astounded anyone who read about it. The publishing industry, like love, I have learned, has a punishing memory. To this day, I have never seen a single indication that it ever forgot or forgave Antonia her mistakes.
All this happened many years ago, however, and I’m not the same woman I was when I first sat down to write this story. I’m older now, thirty-nine, the same age Catherine was when she first set eyes on Antonia. Perhaps you knew this already, but here’s something you might not know—after Wyatt had finished writing his second novel, he uncharacteristically made a copy of it and had given that copy to me, because he loved me and because I loved him and because he wanted me to know everything. He might have still loved Catherine, yet his life with her, as he told it to me, had turned unbearable. “She’s cold,” he’d said. “She’s nothing like she used to be.”
Our affair began the way most affairs do—with an unhappy spouse turning to his wife’s best friend for support, to help him figure out what to do. I knew Catherine, better than Wyatt apparently did, and so naturally he came to me.
His death was shocking. I still like to imagine that he wasn’t on his way to my house that morning. Of course, I felt guilty. Who wouldn’t, after sleeping with her best friend’s husband?
Yet tonight, as I get ready for my reading, I have to remind myself that this is not about Catherine anymore. This is about my enduring love for Wyatt, who gave me a copy of his manuscript, a gift, because I knew he never showed his work to anyone. Ever. Such intimacy between us, such sweetness.
I knew everything, and all it took was the will to write it.
Stumbling upon Linwood’s confession that he’d written down in a copy of Antonia’s novel, however, was a coup. I’d found it when I’d picked up Catherine’s car from the garage. The novel was just sitting there, on the seat, which I found odd, given what she had been through. Clearly, Catherine hadn’t bothered to look at it, because if she had, everything might have gone differently.
Perhaps the most terrible thing isn’t that Antonia took the story from her uncle and made it her own, or that she agreed with it so willingly and thus incriminated her father in a brutal, senseless crime, but that she omitted the most important, most exonerating details that would have helped to clear his name.
Fiction is always pressed up against some truth, Wyatt used to say. I couldn’t imagine the sort of burdensome truth that Antonia had had to carry around, after running into a man who knew more about her than she knew about herself. To the best of my knowledge, this is how it happened: Poor Linwood had returned that night to deliver the novel to Antonia. He had wanted her to know the truth, as I had finally known it—that he had gone back to that cabin in the woods later and had carried that girl to her sister’s house. That she hadn’t bled to death on the mattress, as Antonia had written, but nine months later, during childbirth. Sylvie was her mother, and Sylvie’s sister, poor, single, and alone, had given the child to Linwood. The product of a rape, the daughter of the men who’d killed her mother. It didn’t matter to Linwood if he or his brother were the father. The only thing that mattered was that he would do right by Sylvie.
Yet Royal believed that he was Antonia’s rightful father, even though he had no proof of this, even though Linwood had raised her. She looked more like Royal and that was enough for him. This was the story Royal told Antonia that night at the party, before Catherine had found her in the backseat of her car. Antonia was their agreement. Linwood never wanted her to know about her origins.
Tonight I am in Manhattan, and tomorrow I will be in another city. I leave the hotel and get into my car, place my novel on the seat beside me, my picture facedown, because I cannot bear to see myself, the fine lines of my face airbrushed out, my hair highlighted and sprayed into perfection, the thin lips, the black cashmere cardigan hanging loosely open, revealingly. The publishing house hired a famous photographer to take the picture. He was twenty years old, if a day, and kept telling me to “think young, think sexy.” But I could not think young, I could not think sexy, I could only think about Wyatt and Catherine, and the way this story smashed our summer to smithereens.
These pages, I hope, are as much a testament to my friendship with her as they are an honest rendition of its loss.
It was a trade-off, it always is, I think, the lives of others for one’s own. Yet hadn’t I suffered, too? Hadn’t I nearly been shot and killed by her hand?
I never really got over it, I suppose, my anger festering over the years while I taught myself how to write. I didn’t know until I started this story, though, how much that anger had been feeding my need for revenge. Such an ugly thing, revenge, yet look at what it produced.
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I sense that Royal Lively is standing over me, or it’s Wyatt or it’s Catherine. Sometimes it’s Antonia, wielding the gun. I know she’s never that far behind me. I know one day we’ll just happen to run into each other. I bought a handgun, just in case.
I get to the bookstore—Three Lives & Company—on West Tenth Street. The bookstore is packed, I assume, because of the laudatory review I got in Modern Scrivener: “[Jane Iris Miller] could just be the greatest fiction writer of her generation, and Ms. Miller’s novel, Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, is nothing short of ingenious and nothing less than a page-turner.”
I clipped the review out and stuck it on the fridge next to Henry’s yellowing review of Wyatt’s novel. I kept it to remind myself just how cruel and random the publishing world could be. Henry remained hateful, sad, complicated, misunderstood—though without him would I have had the teeth for this story?
Some of the faces in the bookstore look familiar; most of them, though, are not. Even as I shake hands with my fans, I am taken back to Page Turners, feeling the pull to straighten the shelves, to ask someone if he needs my help locating a book. Odd, isn’t it, how things stay with us.
When Catherine steps forward, I almost don’t recognize her. Under the dim lights, she looks much older, the last youthful traces finally gone. She looks old now, I think, yet she is still the same Catherine I remember, attractive in an unassuming, unthreatening kind of way, her manner cool and reserved, as Wyatt had often complained. I did not expect to see her again, especially not after having sent her a galley of my novel. I included a short note with it, because I thought I owed her as much: You will recognize yourself in these pages. I am truly sorry about that. I have changed your name to protect you, though, as I have changed every name, including Winslow, which is and is not our town, just as you are and are not Catherine Strayed. I hope you take some comfort in this.
Though I do not believe in spirits, I suddenly feel Antonia in the room, too, as if she followed Catherine into the bookstore. I never knew her well and feel tonight like I know her even less. If I had known her better, might I have been able to change the course of that summer? Perhaps the real tragedy isn’t the friendship I lost in Catherine but the friendship I never made in Antonia.
Catherine says nothing, doesn’t even look at me, as she takes her seat in back, and I think about Wyatt, the months I grieved for him in secret, even as I kept showing up at Catherine’s house with playing cards, board games, anything to distract her. I never once let myself cry in front of her, yet every time I stepped into that house, I was meeting Wyatt again, his smell lingering in the air, his voice. In one irrevocable moment, Wyatt had gone from the man whom Catherine and I had shared into an ugly secret that would turn us into enemies.
Here, then, is my enemy, who was once my friend, and, oh, how I want to tell her how good it is to see her, but I know enough not to.
After I am introduced, and the room finishes clapping, I go to the podium and look out over the faces. Young and old, men and women, white and black—these people who have come out on this freezing winter night because my novel has touched them in some way. I thank them for coming. I tell them I hope they won’t be disappointed, that I’m not a very good reader. I take a sip of water. Then I clear my throat, open up the book, and begin.
“We thought ourselves good people who lived good lives.”
Acknowledgments
A gigantic thank-you to Emma Sweeney, who worked her agent mojo and made all of this possible; to Chuck Adams, good friend and editor rolled into one—how lucky I am; to Kelly Bowen, publicist extraordinaire, and to the rest of the amazing crew at Algonquin Books—the first time I met all of you I knew I’d found the right home.
To my awesome copy editor, Jude Grant—there will be a special place in heaven for you.
Shout-outs and much love to the following people: Angela Sinclair, Kimberly Elkins, Sarah Goodyear, Aaron Hamburger, Emily Stone, Michael Thomas, Naomi Schegloff, Jane South, Sean and Jennalie Lyons, Brian Sloan, Joel Childress, Catherine Curan, Lisa Dierbeck, Laurel Cohen-Pfister, Steven Stern, Martin Kley, Gabrielle Danchick, Yvète Morales, Kate Christensen, Beena Kamlani, and Fred Morris. Without friendships and support like yours, I probably would have hung it up ages ago.
To the lovely folks at Jentel, Yaddo, Ledig House, the Carson McCullers Center, and Gettysburg College, who gave me shelter during some of the writing of this book.
And an enduring thanks to Bret Easton Ellis and to Dale Peck, whose generosities know no limits, as well as to Gerrit Jackson, who lugged an unwieldy, unedited version of this book with him from place to place and who made my life more wonderful and more full than it has ever been. Bitte das Klischee verzeihen, denn ich werde dich immer lieben und vermissen.
Published by
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2013 by David Samuel Levinson.
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN 978-1-56512-918-4
David Samuel Levinson, Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence
