Must Read Well, page 15
During the night, in her absence, I heard nothing from Anne. But I dared to open her door slightly and left mine open as well. I slept uneasily, waking often to listen for her. I missed Tim. I felt worried and alone and at some point woke from a nightmare I have now and then in which my father slams his arm across my mother’s face. That’s all there is to the dream. I’ll never know for sure, but I suspect it’s something that really happened, and that it ends so quickly because I don’t want to remember what happened afterward.
After three days in bed, three days during which Marta came early and left late—and I, even later, shuttled various journals to and from the magic glass-fronted cabinet and photographed their contents in my room—Anne finally reappeared in the kitchen, shaky but determined to resume her morning rituals. She dismissed Marta’s offer to make her coffee and insisted on making her own and, as before, some for me as well. She sat at the dining-room table with a mug and a piece of cinnamon toast, reading something on her Kindle. At nine, she walked slowly to my room, looked in, and said we’d continue our readings again at the usual hour. Today, however, if I had no objections, we would meet in her bedroom. She was better—and sure she had nothing contagious, she added—but still weak and inclined to stay in bed.
I had no objections.
“Very good. I’ll see you in an hour. If I happen to be asleep, just leave me be and we’ll aim for later, if you’re available. Or tomorrow if not.”
“Of course.”
I was glad to find her awake and composed when I went to her at ten. I entered her bedroom with a feeling almost of triumph. Finally, I was in! The room was large and very warm. In a queen-size bed covered with a white comforter, Anne sat propped against three pillows. Peach-colored velvet curtains had been partly drawn back to admit the light. A pair of armchairs covered in peach-and-yellow brocade flanked the double doors of her closet. Facing her stood a tall bureau and a heavy wall unit that held a phonograph and hundreds of record albums. Wall-to-wall carpet, white and plush around the edges but a depressing gray in the middle, spread across the floor like dirty snow.
Anne asked me to go to the dining room and fetch a chair for myself; the armchairs in here were too far away and too heavy to drag to her bedside. I went and returned with my awkward burden, making sure to look around no more than was normal for someone orienting herself in an unfamiliar room.
“Put it here, close to me,” Anne said, waving a hand in the direction of the walnut nightstand beside her, one of a pair on either side of the bed. On its shining surface were a lamp, a clock, a phone with comically huge push-buttons and a backlit dial, yet another magnifying glass, Nyquil, nasal spray, a box of Kleenex, a bottle of Advil, a thermometer, her reading glasses, several prescription bottles whose labels I longed to inspect, and a glass of water with a little matching carafe to refill it. Beneath all this was a shallow drawer fitted with a lock.
I set the chair next to the nightstand and sat down while Anne produced a key from under the pillows beside her. It was a real key, I noticed, small, but with teeth. She unlocked the drawer and withdrew the journal we’d been reading before she got sick. I wondered with annoyance why she needed so many locked drawers. I certainly didn’t have any. Neither had Tim, nor the Smolnikovs, nor even my parents, who habitually kept a number of things (drugs, needles, booze) that really should have been locked up.
Today, for the first time, she took off the glasses she usually wore and put on the ones she used for reading. She opened the notebook herself and glanced in.
“Can’t make out a damned word.” She shut it, handed it to me, and switched glasses again. “Go ahead and look for Greg. No, wait. First close the door.”
I did so—no doubt she didn’t want Marta to overhear us—and returned to her bedside. I’d begun to page through the journal when she spoke again.
“If I should happen to close my eyes and drift off, just make a note of where we are and tiptoe out,” she said. And then, as fast as it had been born, a new hope died in me as she patted the pillow beside her and added, “Leave the notebook under here.”
“Sure.”
I skimmed ahead. The journal recommenced on Wednesday, the day after she and Greg made their hasty plans. Anne had written a lengthy entry at 5:30 that afternoon. I read aloud a passage about her growing anticipation, the tone alternating between an almost childish elation and stern reminders to herself that the unaccustomed, luxurious time and freedom she and Greg would have in Philadelphia might just possibly dilute the concentrated passion they’d felt before (or rather, that he had felt before, since she was sure her own would only increase).
She also reminded herself that, as he’d warned her, she’d be alone a lot. She had called the Barnes and made an appointment for a visit early Thursday afternoon, after her arrival and before Greg’s. She had toyed with the idea of seeing Ginny on Friday after all, while Greg would be rehearsing at the concert hall, but discarded it. She would just go to the Academy of Fine Arts. No matter how well she filled her time, she reflected, it would be humiliating to have to keep away from him, to have to hide herself from his colleagues, especially at the concert itself.
Next came an account of a second call to Ginny, to rehearse with her the details of the story Anne was going to tell Steve—the elaborate, brazen falsehood she was going to tell him—which Ginny must remember as well, just in case. Then more notes on mundane matters—Steve’s laundry, a wine stain found on a tablecloth—which I read to myself.
Soon, though, came a new entry, written that night. I read it aloud.
Wednesday April 3, 10:30 p.m.
The moment Steve got home from work today, I went into the foyer and told him something urgent had come up, something I needed to discuss with him. He asked if it could wait a few minutes, took off his coat and hat, loosened his tie, put away his briefcase, went into the dining room, and poured himself his usual Scotch before coming to find me in the kitchen, where I stood slicing mushrooms and onions. I put the knife down and we went to the living room together.
“Listen, Ginny called an hour ago. She’s at the Pennsylvania Hospital,” I began. “Her appendix burst yesterday. She had no idea what was wrong with her when it started—who thinks they have appendicitis in their forties? But the pain was so bad that she finally called an ambulance. They took out everything they could, but the rupture caused a very bad infection. She’ll have to be in the hospital for weeks, but the first days are the most dangerous and she may need emergency care again.
“So anyway, she was calling to ask me—to beg me—to come to Philly and watch over her. Keep her company, you know. Make sure the doctors are monitoring her and doing what they should, go to the nursing station if they ignore a call from her, get her a private nurse if she needs one. All that—you know what hospitals are like. She has friends there, of course, but no one she feels comfortable asking to do all this. I can sleep at her house, so that’s no problem.”
By now I’d begun to worry I was saying too much, explaining what was obvious in an abnormal and noticeable way. I throttled back.
“So I have to go there as soon as I can. I couldn’t say no. I’m sorry to leave you alone for I don’t know how long. Till she stabilizes, at least.”
Even as I said it, I was amazed at how easily it all tumbled out. It was a good lie, a well-chosen lie. Steve knows that Ginny has been my closest friend since kindergarten, and it’s natural I’d want to fly to her aid in this emergency, natural she would want me there. And he knows how alone she’s felt since her divorce. He agreed right away, even offering to reserve a train ticket for me (hurriedly, I said I’d done this already) and accompany me to Penn Station (no need, I’d be fine). I told him there was a meatloaf in the freezer and a container of leftover lamb stew to keep him going while I was gone. He said not to worry, that he’ll manage. He can easily go out to eat after work, and there was always Chinese takeout if he felt like eating at home. Why even finish making dinner tonight? he added. Why not order in right now, so I can use the evening to get ready? His kindness killed me, just as Shakespeare says.
I did make dinner, of course, and tried to keep the conversation on him and his day rather than risk having to lie in even more detail. When we’d finished eating, he spread his work out on the dining room table—he is thoroughly swept up in this Covington case—but not before asking if there was anything at all he could do to help. Everything he said reminded me why I married him, how solid he is, how good, how solicitous he can be, why I agreed to share my life with him even though I knew—and I think he knew—that I was never fully, romantically “in love” with him. He has always loved me more. Writing this makes me think of the line in Middlemarch where Eliot says that for a husband, the certainty that his wife will never love him much is easier to bear than the fear that he will fall out of love with her. I believe there’s some truth there, but—oh, I doubt Eliot had in mind a wife who flat-out betrays her husband! I’ve never felt lower than I did this evening, meaner, more despicable, not when I went to bed with Greg, not when I made love with Steve that same night.
Here Anne made a sound that I first took for a grunt of discomfort, the grunt of a sick person starting to feel worse. I paused but soon saw my mistake. Her eyes were narrowed, her jaw set, her face unusually fierce, but she wasn’t in the kind of pain I’d imagined. Her gaze was fixed on nothing of significance—a random spot in the air, it seemed. Or perhaps something of great significance: the past.
TWELVE
Anne dismissed me after I’d read the account of her lying to Steve. Five days passed before we resumed.
The night of that reading, the illness that had seemed to be waning returned in force, and Anne went back to spending all her time in her bed, where Marta obsessively waited on her. Only once did Anne emerge from her bedroom. It was the second day after our session. I was feeling restless and had decided to go out for a cup of coffee, but when I went into the foyer to get my coat, I found her standing, leaning as always on her cane, bundled up in her own coat, a fur hat, gloves, and an enormous scarf. Marta was holding her arm. I retreated at once into the living room and listened while the front door opened and closed.
I returned to my room and waited several hours for them to come back, finishing up some notes I’d been keeping on our reading sessions and also photographing a journal I’d taken from her study the night before. (I also, I admit, made a quick foray into Anne’s bedroom to see if her nightstand was unlocked, or the key lying somewhere, forgotten—but no.) I was in my room, still snapping pictures, when the front door opened and they made their slow way inside. Anne went back to bed right away; I hid my camera and the notebook and wandered out of my room, hoping to run into Marta and learn where they’d been. It was soon clear that she had been looking for me.
“Dr. Braudy told her to come and see him today,” she said, or rather, erupted, bursting with the need to share with someone else what was happening to Mrs. Anne. “Her fever is higher than I realized. Maybe the thermometer here doesn’t work, I don’t know, but he’s afraid she’ll get pneumonia. He took some blood from her and told her that she will be fine, but when he left her alone to get dressed, he waved to me to come into his office. He said her heart is weaker. It’s always been weak, I think I told you that before, but now it’s much worse. He’s not sure yet what is making her so sick, but she must not get pneumonia. That’s the main thing. Pneumonia could kill her. She has to rest. Rest and drink fluids and eat to keep her strength up. He said she is much too thin. She weighs like a feather, hardly anything.”
I had realized almost from day one that, having cleaned and shopped and cooked and “done” everything for her for almost twenty years (she had told me she started in 1992), Marta regarded Anne as much more than her employer. Over all that time, a deep attachment—on Marta’s side at least—had taken root. As she spoke, her eyes began to swim with tears.
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that!” I said. And I was sorry, but even more than sorry, I regret to say, I was alarmed, almost panicked. If she should die now, die before we came to the denouement of her affair! For a denouement there must be, and not a happy one. Like the journalists who had interviewed her at the height of her fame, I was certain that The Vengeance of Catherine Clark, with its raging anger, had to have grown out of something deeply personal in her life. But what? What? The truth behind the plot of that socially transformative book went to the heart of my dissertation. If I never learned the whole story, if she died now, Apartment 10A would become part of her estate and I would have to move out. She must survive. Not only survive: recover, live. A foxhole atheist, I shoved my shame aside and prayed to the all-powerful God I didn’t believe in to spare her.
Meanwhile, Marta put a hand on my arm and looked up at me, her tearful eyes pleading. “She has always been so good to me. She pays me for eight hours a day, even though it’s only six. She helped me become U.S. citizen. Now I don’t know what to do for her,” she said. “Will you help me? Will you be gentle with her? Don’t let her make you read too long. She can’t afford to get worn out.”
“Of course not. I’ll be very careful.”
At this, she gave me a hug. “You are a good person,” she said.
“You are a good person,” I corrected, and slunk away.
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I lived on a knife’s edge during those days. As usual, Petra and I talked or texted daily, if only to say hello. We met one night for dinner at an East Side sushi place we liked and she asked me how I was managing without Tim. I was managing, I said tightly, and asked about Justin to change the subject. I was managing, but it wasn’t always easy.
As for Justin, Petra was still seeing him and still unsure if she should go on doing so. He was a nice guy, really funny, he liked her a lot, and he wanted kids. But somehow he just wasn’t the kind of person she could imagine spending the rest of her life with. Did that matter? Maybe it was a failure of imagination? Maybe she should hang in and see what happened …?
I listened, tried to ask intelligent questions and sort through her feelings with her, but my thoughts were elsewhere, and (to my shame) I suspect she knew it. Would Anne get well, well enough to continue the readings? That was the only thing on my mind. Would she even want to revisit the journals anymore? Marta continued to come early and leave late; she went in and out of Anne’s room, eyes frightened, mouth set. When I stumbled on her heating up broth in the kitchen one afternoon, she told me she’d been trying to persuade Anne to hire a night nurse. Trying in vain: Mrs. Anne only muttered that she didn’t want to wake up at three in the morning and find some stranger dozing in her armchair. Afraid of tiring her, Marta had dropped the subject.
My fear that I might suddenly be ejected from the apartment prompted me to profit by the certainty that Anne would not be hobbling around the place in the wee hours, a silver lining if ever there was one. Every night, I went into her study to take, then return, two or three journals. These I photographed, usually without reading any of the contents. There were so many notebooks, and each held so many pages to turn, focus the camera on, and capture, that after a while my fingers would start to cramp from the repetitive motion of clicking the shutter.
From time to time, the storage chip in the camera would fill to capacity and I would have to remove and replace it with another. Though I also uploaded the photos to my computer periodically, I kept the tiny chips as backups, storing them in an empty Altoid tin at the bottom of my backpack.
I could have made better time if I’d dared to photograph the journals during the day, but I still worried this could result in disaster. When Marta was in the apartment—and she was now there fourteen hours daily, every day of the week—she might at any moment come into my room to change my towels or put fresh sheets on my bed. She always knocked before she entered, but it was a mere courtesy, to let me know she was about to open the door. I’d have locked it if it had a lock, but it didn’t.
I was also afraid to take the notebooks out of the Windrush to a copy shop, where the work could be done for me. I had an almost superstitious terror I might lose one. If, after we’d finished the “episode,” Anne happened to ask me to read from a journal and I’d lost it, I’d be sunk. And what if she were to die? Might not someone—someone she’d appointed to inherit them—or destroy them, perhaps—discover that one of the journals, numbered so prominently, was missing?
Who that someone might be I had wondered more than once. What plans had Anne made for her journals after she died? Maybe, as I’d once imagined, she had found some institution willing to house, catalog, and archive them. Maybe she’d chosen a literary executor—a long-ago student or younger friend who would do with them what she or he thought best. Anne had told me she’d written them with the expectation that they would never be read. But did she mean never during her lifetime, or never at all? If the latter, it was as I’d feared from the day we met. She either meant to get rid of them herself—soon, no doubt, maybe as soon as we came to the end of our readings—or had instructed her executor to destroy them on her death. More than one writer has sentenced their unpublished papers to such a fate.
And so, one night when my fingers had tired of clicking, I ventured out to search for her will. For thoroughness, I went first to try the drawer in the delicate desk in the living room where she’d always locked up the journals, but of course it was locked.
Then I riffled through the two unlocked drawers on either side of the kneehole. These turned out to contain only ordinary papers: paid bills, insurance policies, co-op rules and notices (the Windrush was one of the earliest rental buildings in New York to convert from rental to co-op, I’d learned), a well-worn personal phone book with many names crossed out, presumably as their owners died.
