Must Read Well, page 3
As we started to talk, I saw that the faded eyes behind the glasses were still capable of a steady, considering gaze. The collapsed mouth came alive, curling into a smile—a smile of genuine pleasure, it seemed to me. In fact, old as she was, she looked a bit like a child who has just been given a toy. I wondered how often she had visitors these days.
“You’ll excuse my not getting up to shake your hand,” she informed me. Her voice was lighter, less studied, than it had been on the phone. “I’m enjoying some of the maladies that are the reward of long life—brittle bones, uncooperative joints, a soupçon of heart disease.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, neither too warmly nor too casually, I hoped.
“And, as you know, impaired vision,” she went on, ignoring me. “In the past seven years, two exciting events have occurred in my eyes, first the left, then the right. In each, a sort of ocular explosion took place that was caused by—well, never mind the exact cause, the result is that I’ve entirely, permanently, lost my focal vision. My central vision, that is. Whatever I look at isn’t there. Words have blank spots in the middle. Straight lines curve. Only my peripheral vision is intact. I have to look sidelong to see anything at all clearly.”
With this, she turned her head slightly and briefly eyed me aslant. I realized now that the terseness of her reply to my email reflected not imperious discourtesy but disability.
For a moment, I felt the bitterness of such a loss to a writer. “That must be very hard,” I said, as she turned back to face me.
“Well, you know …” She paused, smiled, and lifted an expressive eyebrow. “It beats your mother’s situation, anyway,” she said.
My mother? By February of 2011, my mother had been dead half a dozen years. It was a moment before I understood the reference.
“Yes,” I said, recovering. “Yes. She can see a little, she’s not completely blind, but she can’t really function on her own. She needs a stick to keep from bumping into things, she can’t cook or handle money, that kind of thing,” I embroidered feverishly. “And obviously, she can’t read.”
“Not Braille?”
Strangely, Weil was still smiling. It surprised me that she had so little sympathy for a fellow sufferer.
“No, she never learned. She was already in her thirties when her vision started to go,” I said, “so I guess …”
I shrugged, unable to think of what I guessed. How careless I’d been not to think out the details of my invented mother’s case in advance! Afflicted as she was, of course Anne Weil would be interested in them. While I berated myself, she began to explain that she could still read a little, provided the type was large enough or she used a powerful magnifying glass. She greatly enlarged the print on her computer and relied on glare-free Kindles, with their adjustable print, to read newspapers and books.
It was a relief when she changed the subject.
“Well,” she said, then appeared to cast about for my first name. “Well, Beth, it’s a pleasure to meet you, but I think you’d best see the room I’m offering before we go any further. If you like it, I’ll ask you to try reading some of the documents I have in mind. If not, we’ll say goodbye.”
With this, she turned to reach for a bell I hadn’t noticed on a corner of her desk. A silver bell with a long, black, tapering handle. She rang it. The sound was bright and surprisingly loud.
“I’m afraid you’ll find this very ancien régime,” she said, setting it down, “but I can’t shout anymore.”
Moments later, Marta hurried in, a dishcloth in her hand. Weil introduced us properly and asked her to show me the kitchen I’d share and the bedroom that would be mine. Trying to look as if I couldn’t wait to see them, I stood up to follow her.
We walked through a rounded archway into a dining room. This had exactly the same proportions and fabulous windows as the room I’d been sitting in but was bare and neglected. Yellowed voile curtains blocked the view from the windows, and a ragged kilim lay under a long, plain pine table. I suspected it had been many years since the ten chairs around it had last been filled.
There was a swing door opposite the windows, doubtless the entrance to the kitchen, but Marta took me through a second archway across the dining room. Here there was a corridor. The second door on the right was slightly ajar. Marta opened it wide and ushered me in, flinging her arm out in the manner of a game-show hostess exhibiting a prize.
As well she might. Like the rest of the apartment, it could do with a new coat of paint, but the two windows had the same view as the other front rooms and the blue-and-white duvet looked new. There was a small rug—Persian again—to put your feet on when you got out of bed, a small flat-screen TV atop a wide dresser, a mahogany night table and, set in front of the windows, a serviceable wooden desk.
Marta opened a door, revealing a more than adequate closet. “There is plenty of room in the front hall closet,” she told me as I peered into this one. “You can put your extra things there if you need to. And—” She crossed the room to open another door, near the dresser, “this is yours, too.” Inside was a bathroom, with a second door that I realized opened onto the corridor.
“You can keep it private,” she said, moving into the room to turn the bolt below the knob. “Mrs. Anne doesn’t use it.”
Having researched the Windrush on Zillow, I knew a good deal of its history. The bathroom in 10A still had the original fixtures. The floor was covered in the classic little black-and-white hexagons, the walls in white subway tile. There was a pedestal sink and a small glass-enclosed stall inside of which drooped a showerhead the size of a sunflower. Like the crisscross faucet handles, that showerhead was valuable now, a sought-after antique.
I turned to face Marta. “Everything’s so clean!” I thought it wise to exclaim. She gave a modest shrug, as if to say it was nothing, and I leaned toward my growing suspicion that she was a housekeeper, not a home health aide.
“You must live here, to keep the apartment so sparkling,” I ventured.
“Oh, no,” came her welcome reply. “I only come on weekdays, twelve till six. I do the cleaning and a little cooking, but Mrs. Anne likes to be alone.” She returned to the door into the corridor.
“Does she?” I asked, reluctant to follow her out during this interesting conversation. “Then it must bother her, always having someone in this room.”
She turned back, surprised.
“Oh, she never rented out the room before!” She lowered her voice to a whisper, her tone worried rather than gossipy. “I think—I know—she has a health problem. Her heart. So maybe she wants someone here now just in case… Anyway, come. I can show you the kitchen.”
We returned to the dining room and went through the swing door into a long galley kitchen at least five times the size of Petra’s. Though immaculate, it was depressing. The white Formica counter-tops were dulled and scarred, the enamel on the elderly stove chipped, and the ancient fridge three-quarters the size of a modern one. A single window faced an empty courtyard across which squinted and winked the many back windows of the opposite side of the building.
I stood a moment looking at them, disappointed that my route to the kitchen would bypass the living room, where I imagined Weil spent most of her time. Still, whenever I left or returned to the apartment, I would have to cross it. As for her bedroom, I had caught a glimpse of it at the end of the corridor, just beyond the room that would be mine. I would have no excuse for intruding there, of course, but she would pass my door whenever she left.
Marta opened the refrigerator and showed me its crepuscular interior. “I cleared a shelf for you,” she pointed out. I said thank you, though I was all too aware that I had yet to be accepted as a tenant.
Escorted by her, I returned to the living room. Anne Weil had not moved. She sat at her desk, wearing a different pair of glasses, smaller, with black frames. Reading glasses, I presumed: she was inspecting a Con Ed bill through a large, jade-handled magnifying glass. As I took my chair again, hands demurely folded in my lap, she set this down, changed back to the tortoiseshells, and turned toward me.
“So, what do you think? I imagine you’re accustomed to roommates a little closer to your age,” she said with her habitual, understated wryness. “I can’t say there’s a lot of social life around here.”
“It’s beautiful. Perfect.”
“Not too far from work? I think you said you’ve been living uptown?”
“Yes, but this is actually closer to the company I work for. It’s in Chelsea. Anyway, I only go there twice a week. The rest of the time I’m home. And I’ve always wanted to live in the Village,” I added. “This would be—if you’re willing to have me, I would love to stay here. But—the rent?”
There was a short silence before she said, “Ah, the rent.”
She looked directly into my eyes (but how well could she see them? I wondered) and made a little “hmph” sound. Her own eyes now had a thoughtful, calculating look. In that moment, I had the unnerving feeling that, for all her vision problems, she saw me more clearly than I saw her. Will it make sense if I mention that, just then, my estimation of her as a writer went up a notch?
“How much can you afford?” she asked.
Caught off guard again, I dropped my gaze and scrambled to think of an answer. Too little and she would dismiss me; too much and I really wouldn’t be able to pay, no matter how desperate I was to get the room.
I looked up again, still groping for a number, and found Weil’s head tilted to one side.
“Tell you what,” she said. “If you’re able to read my handwriting, and if you’re very good at reading aloud, and if you will make yourself available as often as possible to read to me at short notice, even Saturdays and Sundays, I will charge you one hundred sixty dollars a month. I hope that amount will be acceptable.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. A hundred sixty dollars a month? In New York, you could hardly rent a storage locker for that.
“And you’ll do your best to be within reach when I wish you to read to me?”
“Yes, sure. That won’t be hard for me. I work at home, after all. And I’m a homebody anyway.”
“Good, because I can’t know in advance when I’ll feel up to listening for an hour. That is why I’m looking for a tenant rather than hiring a reader.” She moved her gaze away from me, toward the long window beside her desk, before going on, “Now let’s see if you can do the job. Marta will take you into my study to fetch a couple of notebooks for me. What I want read aloud are excerpts from some of my journals, entries I wrote quite a long time ago. I’ve kept a journal nearly all my life. There are some three hundred of them. However, there’s only one section I want to hear. A—” she broke off, looking for a word. “An episode that took place when I was in my early forties,” she resumed. “I wish to…to revisit it.”
My mind took off. If she had been in her early forties, then Vengeance had come out a year or two after the part she wanted me to read. A moment later, I realized I was missing a far larger point. Three hundred handwritten notebooks documenting Anne Weil’s entire life! And I would be reading some of them to her. Never mind that—I would be living with them! It was like telling a four-year-old her bedroom would be located inside a candy shop. My heart started to race.
With an effort, I returned my attention to her low voice as she gave me instructions on how to locate the notebooks she wanted. The journals were stored in chronological order, she was saying as I tuned back in. I was to find one from the very early 1960s—’60 or ’61, and another from ’66 or so. Their start and end dates were recorded on the covers, and each had been numbered as well. At a guess, I’d probably want to begin my search around number 185.
“You’ll need to be very good at deciphering,” she added in a tone of warning. “Since childhood, my handwriting has been execrable, almost a sort of private code. For many years, I was ridiculous enough to pride myself on that. It was my imprimatur, proof of my unique, creative nature. I’m a writer,” she added. “Or was.”
“Or was” indeed. She had published three novels before Vengeance and, several years afterward, a last one titled The Balance. The first three were what are known as “literary” novels. They had been politely received and respectfully read when they appeared, although more, perhaps, by other writers than anyone else. They generated no money to speak of, and until her marriage—quite late in life for a woman of her time—Weil had worked fulltime as a copyeditor at the then-thriving, now long-defunct, publishing house Dodd, Mead.
The Balance was also “literary,” and not dissimilar from its three older sisters, but coming after Vengeance, it landed very differently. The great reading public, like dogs fed on the red meat of her sensational bestseller, scorned such literary kibble. Reviewers, too, were rudely dismissive, and The Balance died a quick and lonely death.
Vengeance was so different from Weil’s other, refined efforts that I had occasionally wondered whether it might perhaps have been written by someone else. Not only was it unlike those well-bred books in its slash-and-burn style and propulsive energy, there was nothing at all in her biography—nothing I could find, at least—to suggest the origin of its plot.
Her marriage had been a happy one, at least to hear her tell it. And there was only her version of events to go on: Her husband, a prosperous malpractice lawyer named Stephen Pace, had been killed in a car crash seven years after they married. According to a short piece in the Daily News, one rainy morning in July 1963, a taxi speeding east on 28th Street broadsided the cab taking him up Eighth Avenue. He was fifty-five when he died. Weil was forty-one.
In the various interviews his widow granted to newspapers and magazines after Vengeance came out, journalists repeatedly suggested that her own marriage must have given rise to its story. This she steadfastly denied. Vengeance was not about her. It was a sustained act of imagination about a set of fictional characters. She spoke warmly of her late husband, emphasized how well the two of them got along despite their disparate fields and personalities. They had bonded over a shared love of hard-boiled mysteries, she told them. They used to read Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett aloud to each other. He admired and took an interest in her work, as she did in his.
It was true that his law practice was lucrative, but equally true that he represented his clients from the heart. He worked very hard. It outraged him that a doctor’s careless mistake might forever incapacitate, not to mention kill, a patient. He was a strong supporter of and generous contributor to the civil rights movement. He had no patience with people who wanted women “kept in their place.” They skied together, played tennis together. Losing him had shaken her deeply.
She wasn’t shy about her enjoyment of the luxuries his income had brought her. It was he who had lived in the Windrush when they met, she mentioned in more than one article, staying on there after his first wife returned to her native Texas. She talked of her awed delight at occupying so large and beautiful a place after ten years in a Hell’s Kitchen studio. She said she enjoyed cooking for him, and even that she’d sewn curtains for their bedroom windows. The most interesting statement she made on the subject of her married life was that she’d never wanted children.
“I don’t think everyone is cut out for children,” she told a reporter. “I like to have my time for myself.”
And so she was—or had been—a writer.
“Are you?” I remembered to say. “That’s so interesting!”
“Yes, I thought that might interest you,” she said, tilting her head and considering me for rather a long time before she went on, “because you majored in English. Sadly, my penmanship only got worse as I got older,” she went on. “The result is that my vision impairment has left me unable to read my own journals. You can imagine my vexation,” she added after a pause.
There was venom in that last sentence, understated and deadly. I did take a moment to imagine her “vexation.” It must be monumental; mine would be. Not that I would ever have kept a journal. In those days, and with my childhood, privacy meant far too much to me. I considered keeping a written record of your thoughts and doings an invitation to disaster.
“So, let’s summon Marta,” Weil said, ringing the silver bell again. While we waited, she took a small key from her pocket and used it to open the middle drawer in her desk. From this, she withdrew a ring of old-fashioned skeleton keys. Marta appeared and she handed them to her.
“Marta, would you kindly take Beth to the study?”
She turned again to me.
“You’ll find all the journals in a glass-fronted cabinet to your right as you walk in. I’d have gotten them myself, but I’d need a new spine and new hips and knees to do it. And new eyes to find the right ones.”
I stood and followed Marta into the room that would change my life.
THREE
One sometimes reads of a “book-lined” room. Anne Weil’s study was one. Every available inch of wall was chocka-block with books, so much so that the room had no color of its own, only a kaleidoscopic rainbow of bindings. Even the windows, shuttered to block out the ugly, lightless courtyard, were all but interred in books—books jacketed and unjacketed, paperback and hardcover, old and new, famous and obscure. Almost all were novels.
It was quite a large room, nearly twice the size of the bedroom I hoped to occupy. There was yet another Persian carpet, this one predominantly dark green, and a long, narrow writing table set back a few feet from the wall on the left. This was old, its surface scratched and pitted; the term “refectory table” floated into my mind—flotsam, no doubt, from some long-ago reading I’d done. On it lay untidy stacks of mail, opened and unopened, another, even larger magnifying glass (this one with a brass handle), a large jar full of pens and pencils, a scattering of paperweights, a jumble of paper clips, and a very big desktop Mac.
Opposite this table sat an armchair covered in moss-green velvet, and beside it a tall lamp with a Tiffany-style shade. (Or, perhaps, a Tiffany shade.) The glass-fronted bookcase, surrounded by less distinguished shelves, was impossible to miss. It was a very wide, beautiful, hip-high piece of furniture made of fruitwood, with an inlaid strip of pale wood winding like a vine around its eight glass doors. Each of these was furnished with a tarnished brass keyhole.
