Must Read Well, page 11
I had by now gone online and done a little research about keys. The lock on the drawer in Anne’s lovely desk was quite a modern one, installed at least a century after the desk itself had been made, and I couldn’t possibly unlock it without the matching key. The skeleton keys to the glass-fronted bookcase, however, were another matter. Thanks to the website of a British master locksmith, I had learned that the doors to such a piece of furniture were likely furnished with locks more for convenience than for security: The keys served as handles to pull the doors open, the locks as latches to keep them shut, and it was almost certainly the case that all the keys were the same. If this were so, those little numbered tags on Anne’s key ring were either for show or because someone else had mistakenly tagged them and even she hadn’t realized she needed only one.
A second online search informed me that the city offered dozens of locksmith shops that sold antique keys. Although there were two of these within walking distance of the Windrush, I gave in to my Spy vs. Spy compulsion to cover my tracks and called one in Yorkville, near Petra’s place. The locksmith informed me I could buy a mix of twenty-five or so at a very modest cost. I didn’t mention to Petra that I’d be in her neighborhood because I didn’t want to tell her why. I might have been morally sleepwalking through those days, but I wasn’t deeply enough asleep to jump out a window.
And so, after a tuna sandwich hastily dispatched in the dining room of 10A (Marta was in the living room with the vacuum), I took the L across town and went up to East 91st Street and Zenith Locksmith and Key. The man at the counter had the look many locksmiths seem to have—a world-weary look, as if he had seen it all. Middle-aged, skinny, slouchy, with a dark, jaded, skeptical gaze. Despite the frigid weather, he wore only a thin, vintage Bruce Springsteen Tunnel of Love Express Tour t-shirt.
“How can I help you?”
I described to him my bookcase and its missing keys.
He tilted his head side to side a few times, as if to say this wasn’t much of a challenge for a guy like him.
“So you buy a couple dozen that look like they might be right size and probably you’re going to find one that works,” he said. He disappeared into the back and returned with a large wooden box filled with hundreds of skeleton keys—tiny, huge, shiny, tarnished, iron, brass, silver, and gold all jumbled together.
“Enjoy yourself,” he suggested before sauntering into the back room again.
I took out my phone, opened the photo I’d snapped of a keyhole on the cabinet, and sifted through the keys, comparing them with the picture. I had soon amassed a sizable collection. I called “Hello?” into the back. The man emerged, looked at my haul, and charged me thirty dollars. I left with the keys rattling in my purse.
Then I took the bus across 96th Street and walked up Broadway to campus. As I passed my former building and went on to my office, I turned my face resolutely away.
This time, both my officemates were there. We had long ago come to an understanding that “hello” and “goodbye” would suffice when we ran into each other, so there was no need for any pretense of conversation. When one of us had official student office hours, the others stayed away. Otherwise, we came and went more or less in silence, using phones only in the hall and generally ignoring each other. It was a congenial, mutually respectful arrangement. We were all busy, and no one visited that stuffy little office just for fun.
So I nodded hello, divested myself of coat, hat, scarf et alia, and removed my laptop from my backpack. At my desk, I plugged in a pair of earphones and googled “Gregory Morris piano” on YouTube. I wanted to hear him play the Appassionata, the sonata he’d told Anne he was to play at Carnegie Hall. I was lucky. Two people had posted recordings of the whole piece. Thanks to my music-major boyfriend, I had already heard this aptly named sonata more than once and was among the hundreds of thousands who could readily hear the opening, at least, in my head. I’m not sure exactly what I hoped to learn from hearing Morris’s interpretation, but I suppose that, as a doctoral candidate, I was simply in the habit of pursuing whatever research avenue I could. And I did find that listening to it gave me deeper insight into the man I’d been reading about in the journals. With my eyes closed, it conjured up a side of him that Anne’s notes had not.
I moved on to clips of him playing three different Haydn minuets for keyboard. Here his touch was delicate, nimble, sweet, delightful. In their sunny charm, I heard the educator and mentor who had inspired so much affection in his students. Between the roiling, sometimes thunderous Beethoven and the Haydn, I felt I had had a look at two sides of his character.
I sat for a bit in silence, letting all this sink in, then checked the time. It was just after 4:00. In a vague, unexamined way, I’d had it in mind all day to go to an Al-Anon meeting if I could. I have mixed feelings about Al-Anon, mostly because I’m not very good at it. I just drop in and out of various meetings now and then, here and there, usually without saying anything. I’ve never tried to “work” the Twelve Steps (“work the steps” is the annoying term in general use, even though the far more obvious, sensible “take the steps” is available), never asked anyone to be my sponsor, never had a “home” meeting, and have trouble with the concept of a “higher power,” not to mention “God.” What kind of God lets so many children grow up at the mercy of addicts? What kind gives so many people the constitution that makes them addicts? Still, there was something centering about it; it was a way of checking in with myself. I looked at the New York City website and saw there was a meeting at a church in the Village at six o’clock. I packed up and jumped onto the train just in time to beat the rush hour, and was back at Anne’s before five o’clock.
I found Marta in the kitchen, cooking and humming tunelessly to herself. She hadn’t heard me come in and I startled her when I said hello.
“Oh my God!” The hand that wasn’t stirring something with a wooden spoon flew to her chest. She smiled, shook her head, and laughed at herself. “You scared me!”
I apologized.
She apologized. She should pay more attention. How was I?
I was well, thanks. How was she?
Marta also was well.
Here the conversation lagged, but I hovered in the doorway. Whatever she was making, it smelled fantastic. I glanced down the hall toward Anne’s bedroom door and Marta noticed.
“Mrs. Anne is sleeping, I think,” she told me. “You need something?”
“No. Just wondered how she’s doing.”
Marta made a little “so-so” movement with her free hand. “Tired. Always tired,” she said. “But she ate lunch. A scrambled egg. Sometimes she won’t eat lunch. I am making a white bean stew for her dinner,” she added, holding up the wooden spoon in her hand.
“It smells wonderful.”
“Then you will also have some for dinner,” Marta decided.
I smiled, demurred, told her I was going out soon, admitted I’d be coming back without having eaten, gave in. Marta said she’d leave some for me in the fridge.
The meeting was good for me. In fact, I can hardly think of an Al-Anon meeting that was ever anything but good for me. It was small, which I like, and there were both newcomers and old hands, which I also like. I recognized only one person, and I didn’t know her more than to say hello, and that was okay with me too. I went in feeling tense and confused about my own motives and actions and left feeling calmer and clearer. In between, I had put my hand up and talked, when it was my turn, about my sense of being two people in the past few weeks: one who was willing to be deceitful to get what she needed, and a second person watching that deceitful one as if she were watching a play.
I heard myself talk about how familiar this sense of doubleness was for me, how much of my childhood I’d spent feeling afraid and how deceptive I’d had to be to keep myself safe, lying about my feelings and actions to escape my parents’ wrath; the volatility and loss I’d grown up with, the damage it had done to me, and my determination to “better myself” in life through education and hard work. Many people in Al-Anon have similar stories, and many struggle even to know their own emotions after a childhood spent focused on the turbulent, dangerous feelings of the alcoholic grownup whose moods rule their lives. No one answers you when you talk at an Al-Anon meeting. You just speak while other people listen, and you hear yourself in a different way.
By the time the meeting ended, it had begun to sleet. The bare little trees of the Village already glistened with what would glaze over into a solid layer of ice by morning. I slowly walked the seven or eight blocks back to the Windrush, the faces of the people at the meeting and the things they’d said tumbling in my head like flakes in a snow globe. Each of us a different world, each of us a never-ending puzzle to ourselves. All different, all the same.
It was only 7:30 when I got back to 10A, but the place was as dark and silent as if it were dead of night. I went to my room to dump my backpack and purse—and the keys jingling inside it—and saw that Anne’s door was closed. No music came through it, no sound at all. Her study door was open, the room empty. In the kitchen, I found a note from Marta taped to the fridge, telling me my dinner was in the Pyrex container with the blue top. I found it, reheated it in the small, elderly microwave oven, and ate it at the dining room table while rereading Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War for an upcoming class.
The stew was fabulous, as good as it had smelled, and the book even better than I remembered. Except for a short check-in call with Petra—she was in a hurry, on her way to meet her sort-of boyfriend Justin at the Paris Theater to see I can’t remember which film—I spent the whole evening wrapped up in the book, the fresh, forceful, driving momentum of the prose mingling with the increasingly staccato tapping of the freezing rain against the window of my room.
I waited until eleven o’clock before venturing out to try my abundant keys. Anne’s hours being what they were, I prepared carefully. For all I knew, she might have fallen asleep at seven and woken again by now. So I divided the noisy keys into two bunches and slid each into one of a pair of thick, noise-canceling athletic socks; these I buried inside the deep pockets of my terrycloth robe. I peeked out to make certain her door was still shut and no light shining elsewhere in the apartment—all clear—then closed my door behind me and slipped across the hall into the study.
I turned on the Tiffany lamp and, after a little hesitation, decided to leave the door as I’d found it, just slightly ajar, as it usually was. Then I searched among the hundreds of novels on the walls for Iris Murdoch’s The Bell. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I hadn’t read it already—I’ve read most of Murdoch, but they do sometimes run together in the mind—but I chose it because Anne had mentioned it in her journal. If she happened to discover me in here, I could hold it up and explain that I’d been intrigued by her mention of it.
I put The Bell in front of me atop the cabinet of wonders, then, heart in mouth, stomach knotted with fear, knelt and started trying the keys. Sure enough, after a dozen or so yielded no result, one turned a lock. I checked the other doors and found that this same key opened them all. For some reason, the discovery only ratcheted up my anxiety. I thought of my thesis, thought of the women whose neglected work I was trying to rescue, ordered myself to concentrate, and soon succeeded in my goal: to locate and abstract a notebook from the late fall of 1963, one that would record part of the period when I thought Weil must have written The Vengeance of Catherine Clark.
Then, a criminal in the night, I quietly locked the glass door behind which I’d found it, stuck my contraband under my pajama top and clutched The Bell over it, peeked out of the study, scurried back to my room, and quietly pulled the door shut.
Prize in hand, I flung myself onto the bed and hungrily began to read the journal. But what was it? At first, it seemed to be filled with nothing but reports of quotidian errands, meaningless (to me) phone calls from people I’d never heard of (and couldn’t find on the internet when I searched them), lunches and dinners with the same, a cold that came and went.
Yet I’d chosen the period perfectly: It was clear she was writing Vengeance. Indeed, she was barreling through it. “Eleven pages today,” she scrawled on November 12th. A week later: “Had an idea for Catherine’s visit to M’s ex-wife.” There were none of the false starts, failed characters, and roadblocks that littered her discouraged accounts of writing And Sometimes Y, no doubts about whether this or that worked, no mention of revisions at all.
As I read on, I noted with interest that Greg was never mentioned. What had happened between them? As for Steve, who I knew had died barely three months before the start date of the notebook, his name appeared only once, after a meeting with his estate lawyer.
“Took a taxi home so I could cry,” she wrote that evening. “It was wrong of me to marry him. I knew it even as I did it. I still remember so vividly the image that appeared in my mind the very first time we talked. It was a paperweight. A large, handsome, heavy, smooth glass paperweight. He was stable, substantial, a man who held things down, kept them together. A grown man, nothing like the moody beatnik boys I’d been with before. I believe he knew this, and in fairness to myself, I think that solidity was the very thing he hoped to give me.
“He wanted to protect me. And maybe even acquire me—this beautiful (as I was then), bohemian younger woman, with her tedious day job and unsafe apartment and arty literary aspirations—this woman so different from anyone he’d ever known. He could offer that untethered person a substantiality she would never achieve herself, and that pleased him. It was affectionate, a sort of largesse, but it also made him feel powerful. As did his money itself, of course, the ease of it. It flattered him to be able to shower it on me.
“I must try not to dwell on all this. His trust in me, his allowances for my alien ‘creative’ life, his awful death, my behavior toward him,” she wrote at the close of this entry, “it’s all such agony to think about, and so completely useless.”
If the wellspring of rage that gave rise to Vengeance had been her marriage, you sure couldn’t tell it from reading this.
It was almost one a.m. by the time I’d made my way through the whole, exasperating journal, and I had to force myself to stay awake long enough to photograph each of its pages. (Luckily, Tim had given me a digital point-and-shoot camera for Christmas the year I moved in with him. I hadn’t used it much, but it came in very handy now.) Exhausted, disheartened, I looked around for a good place to hide the notebook before I went to bed. In the end, I stuck it under the sink, inside the case for my blow dryer. A little frisson of terror, lest it be found there despite these baroque precautions, shivered through me as I passed out minutes later.
–––––––––––––
In the morning, as before, Anne and I went about our separate kitchen rituals in silence—a more congenial silence since we’d had our late-night talk, it seemed to me. I withdrew to my room, Anne knocked twenty minutes later and put her head in to say she’d like to proceed at 10:00, and at 9:45, I emerged to eat my frugal yogurt. This done, we duly met in the living room.
The weather had changed again. Today, the sleet was gone, leaving the sky blue and the trees bright with ice. The wind was very high, screaming around the corners of the building and punching the windows like a soundtrack for Wuthering Heights. Anne gave me the notebook we’d been reading yesterday.
“Take up where you left off,” she said, closing her eyes.
The next entry had been written later on the day of the previous one. I told her so and began.
10:30 p.m.
Through what twist of fate I have no idea, Amy Reeves called this afternoon to say that she and Len had tickets to hear Gregory Morris play at Carnegie Hall tomorrow night. The program includes Beethoven’s Appassionata, she went on. Now it turned out Len had to run an errand of mercy just then. Did I want to use his ticket?
This was, of course, the concert Greg was practicing for yesterday. The offer so rattled me that I stalled, saying I’d have to call Steve and see if he was okay with it, even though I knew he’d be more than amenable, tomorrow being the last Saturday of the month, the sacrosanct night of his poker game at Joe Lister’s house. Still, for plausibility, I waited ten minutes before calling her back to say yes. When Steve got home, I told him about it. He said he was happy I’d found something enjoyable to do while he was out. I think of my duplicity and cringe.
I looked up, the word “duplicity” ringing in my ears. Maybe Anne Weil and I weren’t so very different after all—not fox and hen, but fox and fox. Or, more precisely, since we were female, vixen and vixen.
“That’s all you wrote that night,” I said.
“Yes,” she agreed, her voice dreamy, distant. “Go on.”
March 23, 11 p.m.
Home in a haze of pleasure and pride after hearing Greg play Carnegie Hall. (Although why “pride”? I had nothing to do with it.) Spent a ridiculous amount of time this afternoon washing my hair, letting it dry, brushing it, arranging it, putting on makeup, trying one outfit, then another. As if he were going to see me! But he might see me, I couldn’t help thinking, we might somehow go backstage—Amy and Len know him, and they are Carnegie patrons. Ridiculous as it was, I couldn’t help myself, and since I couldn’t keep my mind on anything else anyway, it didn’t matter. At least I felt properly dressed when I met Amy in the lobby.
She was full of chatter as always, in this case about how Beatrice Holloway has accidentally become pregnant at the age of forty-one. This surprising event provoked many reflections from Amy—on her own life as a parent, on how she would have felt if she had become pregnant at forty-one—and speculation on whether and how Beatrice might try to have it aborted. It also provoked a certain amount of reflection in me. My period has become so irregular and infrequent—I’m pretty sure I’ve even had a few hot flashes lately!—that Steve and I stopped worrying about birth control at least a year ago. Not sure if I wrote that down at the time. I haven’t thought for a moment that I might get pregnant by Greg. Now I am going to think twice, and hard.
