Must Read Well, page 7
“Thank you, Carrie,” I said, and meant it. We had always been very different people, we didn’t see each other often, and it had been kind of her to use her lunch break to do me a favor.
“No worries. I’m sure you’d—I don’t know, check out a quotation from Shakespeare for me if I asked.”
“Of course. Just give me a jingle,” I said, and we moved on to ordinary topics. The war in Iraq, the protests in Egypt, the rash of cupcake shops all over the city. Eventually, she glanced at her watch and announced that she had to dash.
Off she dove, out of the packed restaurant and into the scrum of scurrying office workers, while I ignored the couple that stood two feet away from me, vulturizing my table. It bothers me that people do that, especially when it’s a couple trying to pressure someone eating alone. Only after I’d consumed the last crumb of bacon, and the final shred of coleslaw, did I stand and languidly don my coat, pull on my hat, adjust my scarf, and saunter past them. Then I took the train up to 116th Street and went to the small, somewhat grubby office I shared with two other teaching fellows.
I was happy to find myself alone. The place was crowded enough with one person in it—with no one in it, for that matter. Three little desks—desklets, really—were jammed in there for us, and three little bookcases for our books. Mine was largely filled with the many novels of my “inadvertent feminists,” and I spent the rest of the afternoon in my well-worn chair there, rereading Anne Weil’s first, Linda and the Swan. It’s the story of a college student’s infatuation with her professor, a man she discovers—with surprise and great disappointment—to be both her intellectual and moral inferior. I read it with fresh interest, thinking now and then of Tim, who was “inferior” to me intellectually only if you took a very narrow view of the meaning of intellect, and morally not at all, though it pleased me to think otherwise at the time.
–––––––––––––
Petra called me at 5:30, eager to know how I was doing, and offered to come across town and meet me for dinner at the Metro Diner. But I had insisted on paying for Carrie’s lunch as well as my own that afternoon, and there was a perfectly good can of Progresso lentil soup waiting for me in 10A. Because Tim liked to cook, I’d grown accustomed to being fed by him; but for many years before we met, Progresso had been among my best friends. So Petra and I just talked on the phone, me sitting on the uncarpeted floor of the little office, my back against the locked door.
It was good to catch up with her, even though we’d parted less than thirty-six hours before. I told her about what Carrie had said, and that I’d had my first reading session with Anne, but I kept the content of the journal entries to myself. I hadn’t thought about it ahead of time, but once we were on the phone, I just felt that it was one thing to contemplate putting Weil’s private writings to use in a scholarly work, quite another to gossip about them with a friend.
I waited till 6:15 before getting on the train and arrived at the Windrush half an hour later. The doorman on duty, Gustavo, was new to me, so I introduced myself, waited while he found my name in the book of authorized visitors, then went up and quietly let myself into 10A. Marta was gone for the day, of course, and I’d hoped that, with the house to herself, Anne might have ventured out for a few solitary hours in her living room, where I could run across her as I came in and we could exchange some friendly words. The more relaxed we got with each other, the better for me. Or rather, because I didn’t really plan on relaxing, the more relaxed she got.
But the living room was empty and Anne’s bedroom door closed. Through it came faint music. Something baroque—Vivaldi, maybe. Thwarted, I consumed my soup alone in the dining room, reading a months-old copy of The New York Review of Books I’d pulled out at random from a stack on an officemate’s shelf.
I wasn’t sorry to eat by myself. To be honest, I’ve never quite understood why dinnertime, when your mouth is at its busiest, is considered a good opportunity for company and conversation. But I did miss Tim, missed being able to share with him the extraordinary turn of events that had brought me to this table. It felt weird, wrong, that he knew nothing about this, had no idea where I was. Two years with a man is a long time.
I finished the soup, buttered a slice of bread, ate it, and tidied up the kitchen. Then I went to my room and spent some time noodling through my email before making myself turn to the task of writing down everything I could remember of my session with Anne that morning—not only what I’d read, but her responses to it. I’d begun to keep notes on our interactions immediately after our first interview, titling the file “Letters Jan-June 2008” out of a super-abundance of caution (or perhaps my childhood habit of secretiveness). After that, I ventured again into the living room in hopes of finding her.
No luck. I roamed about the common rooms a little, quietly taking a good look at the lock on the pretty little desk in the living room before retiring to my quarters. Then I had a long, contemplative shower under the porcelain sunflower.
In the course of packing up at Tim’s, I had come across a radioactive shoebox I kept on a shelf in his coat closet while we lived together. Once upon a time, the box had contained a pair of knock-off Nike running shoes my mother had bought and worn (though never run in; the only running she did was toward her problems and away from them again, poor woman).
After her death, it had fallen to me to clear out the place where she’d been living, a small “mother-in-law” apartment over the garage of a house a few blocks away from the tumbledown one where I’d grown up. Petra, angel that she is, came with me. Into this shoebox I had put every item I kept from that unhappy place. I hadn’t opened it in the six years since then, but when I’d gone to Tim’s with Petra to fetch my things, I wrote “shoebox” on the much larger carton we packed it into. Now somehow seemed to be the time to look through the shoebox again.
So I took the carton out of the front hall closet, where I’d stored it per Marta’s invitation, carried it to my room, borrowed a steak knife from Anne’s kitchen, sat down with it on the blue-and-white carpet, and sliced through the tape. The shoebox was right on top and I accidentally cut into it just enough to leave a small, open wound. I set down the knife, lifted out the box, put it in my lap, and flipped it open—it was the hinged kind you can open and close with one hand. I knew there were photos inside, pictures of my dad and my mom and me, a few of some aunts and uncles, one or two of my father’s parents.
They lived in Nevada, but I met them several times when they came to visit. My mother’s family, about whom I know little except that they were “Bible-thumpers” from Ohio, had excommunicated her at age sixteen, when she married my father, a man with no job, a dishonorable discharge from the Army, and a six-month stretch in prison for selling drugs behind him. Not even his death brought them back into our lives.
What I’d forgotten were the three VHS tapes from when I was a little kid. Right after I had emptied out my mother’s apartment, I borrowed a friend’s VCR player and played the tape labeled “LIZ SECOND BIRTHDAY.” Started to play it, at least. Seeing my parents alive and together, all three of us alive—seeing again how my dad walked, hearing his voice, his laugh, watching him scoop me up, lift me into the air—it was all too much for me. It was one thing to deal with my memories of them, these ghosts in my head who might jump out and yell “Boo!” or wrap me in their arms, or grab me and hit me, but whom I could contain, assess, label, organize. Having them come to life on a screen was another thing altogether. Almost immediately, I stopped the tape and pushed the button that spat it out of the machine, then sat sobbing and shaking for a very long time.
I doubted I would ever want to look at any of the videos again, but that night at the Windrush, I did sift through the photographs—one of me and Petra both wearing tiaras and waving plastic scepters made me laugh—and some of the little mementos I’d saved of my mother: the dangly silver-mesh earrings she wore that fascinated me when I was a kid, the little pink pocketbook the police had given me after the accident that killed her. There was a small change purse inside it, a rolled-up ten-dollar bill inside of that, and shards of a mirror she probably used to snort coke.
Also in the box was her Social Security card, a Mother’s Day card I must have made for her in kindergarten, and the lease on the mother-in-law apartment, her signature childish and shaky on the “Tenant” line. I spent a half hour crying before putting them away.
When I’d collected myself sufficiently, I put the shoebox back into its carton, returned it to the coat closet, washed the steak knife, and slipped it back into the silverware drawer. Then I sat on my bed for a while, trying to meditate—I’m very, very bad at meditating—and trying not to think about the past. Around ten o’clock, I tiptoed into the living room just in case Anne was sitting there. But she wasn’t. Just as well; I was pretty wrung out by then. Early though it was, I went to bed, reading Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black until I fell asleep. I was almost finished with it and already worried about what I was going to read next. My addiction is novels, stories, fiction. Fiction is the escape, the substance I can’t live without.
–––––––––––––
My second morning at the Windrush began much like the first. Again I slept deeply, dreamlessly, as far as I could remember. I opened my curtains with a sense of happy anticipation and was not disappointed: The sky was blue and the river glittered bluely back at it. Along the sidewalks, rows of small, bare trees stood neatly at attention. Anne was in the kitchen when I got there just after eight o’clock. Fresh coffee in the pot, a mug for her at the table. I poured myself a cup and took it to my room. No conversation except hello.
At 9:15, she knocked on my door to say she would see me at 10:00 as planned. At 9:45, I returned to the kitchen, got an apple and some yogurt, and ate them at the dining table. Then, into the living room for our rendezvous.
Anne was again already sitting at her desk when I entered. She had taken out the notebook I’d read from yesterday and sat with her hands folded on top of it. The fatigue of the day before had left her face. She looked fresh, composed, ready. She smiled but made no small talk, no inquiry as to how I was or how I liked my room, no little civilities. She was too eager to continue the reading.
As I took my own chair, she nudged the notebook over to me. I picked it up.
“I’ll look for Greg again and start there?” I asked, paging through to where we’d left off.
“Yes.” After a pause, with that dry tone of hers, she added, “You begin to see the shape of this story.”
I thought it best to answer only with a very small, noncommittal smile. Greg’s name wasn’t in the entry I’d opened to, nor did it occur in the subsequent one. In fact, I had to sweep through nearly two weeks before he reappeared—two weeks in which Anne got a haircut that was much too short, planned and hosted a cocktail party for a dozen lawyers and their wives, and took Steve on a dinner date with an old friend of hers from Boston and the friend’s lecherous husband, who lunged at Anne, mouth open, as she emerged from the ladies’ room after dessert. They also went to hear Van Cliburn perform with the New York Philharmonic. He was very good.
Finally, at nearly the end of the notebook, came a reference to Greg, now shortened to “G.” for the first time. I reported this change and Anne said, “Interesting.”
Saturday March 2, 9 p.m.
Yesterday ran into Greg yet again, the man from Len and Amy’s. (And from the mailroom, and the subway.) He happened to come into the lobby while I was down at the door picking up galleys of the debut novel by Cynthia Someone I’m to review for Prairie Schooner. This time, after saying hello, he unmistakably sought out my company. In fact, he followed me into the elevator, ostensibly to ask whether, and how much, he should tip Rodrigo for coming to 6C to clear a clogged drain. We went up alone. Standing just a bit closer to me than such an exchange would warrant (the image in my head was of a sparrow’s cautious approach toward a crumb at someone’s feet), he put to me his ostensible question. There was no doubt but that his real question was something quite other. A tentative question, I would say, speculative but also quite forward. Given the pretext, there was a certain absurdity about it that made me laugh later on, but at the time, I absolutely backed away, again resorting to the civil tone of the respectable married woman.
I told him how much Steve and I tip for what services, but in honesty (and if I can’t be honest here, where can I?), my answer had no more to do with tips than his question, and for all my wifely modesty, I know that my gaze told him that I saw him as he was, heard his real meaning. When we stopped on ten, I almost expected him to come out with me. But he didn’t, only looked at me steadily as the doors closed. I found myself watching the floor numbers drop on the dial till he reached the lobby.
Here a line had been left blank. I mentioned this to Anne and went on.
Made beef stew for dinner, and just as well, since Steve was very late getting home. This seems to happen often since he took on the Covington case—we’ve had an unfinished game sitting on the chessboard for over a week. His long hours are an inconvenience vis-à-vis knowing when to make dinner, but not wholly unwelcome, as they’ve allowed me to get through a draft of my review for the Sunday Times. I’ve always liked Muriel Spark and although this one’s certainly not “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” it’s quite well done. A relief—so much more cheerful to recommend a book than to have to tear one down. It does have its longueurs, but—
“Never mind all that,” Anne said. “Just look for Greg again.”
I scanned ahead but came to the last page of the notebook without finding him. Anne gave an impatient “pff,” took the notebook from me, withdrew the desk key from her pocket, opened the drawer, put it in, and removed the other journals. The fact that she’d locked these back up before I arrived, even though we’d be sitting there together while I read, gave me an idea about keys. I filed it away for later consideration.
“Which one is next?” she asked, fanning the books across the desk.
“This one, right on top.”
I pushed the others back toward her and again she locked them into the drawer.
“Very well. Go to it. Look for Greg again.”
I skimmed until I found his name, some ten days later. In the interim, I saw as my eyes skibbled over the entries, Anne called her father, went with “Pauline” to see a show of Gauguin paintings at the Museum of Modern Art, ate some fish that upset her stomach, and, unaccountably, found a missing ring in the pocket of her new wool jacket. It was all painfully routine and, to my disappointment, contained nothing of any interest to me about her life. But there might be something, somewhere, sometime. I looked up and told her I was afraid of flipping through too fast in case I missed Greg and was pleased when she replied that she appreciated my concern and that I should go at whatever pace I thought best.
Searching again, I found a night when she’d forgotten a leg of lamb in the oven and burned it. There was another phone call with Ginny, wretched in consequence of having had to sign her divorce papers that day. Finally, there was Greg.
“Okay,” I said. I cleared my throat.
Monday March 11, 8 p.m.
Greg and I nearly collided today on the sidewalk at 57th and Lex. I was heading home after lunch with Adrienne.
Adrienne Hedges, I knew, was Anne’s then-agent, not a heavyweight dealmaker, but widely respected.
Avoided talking about And Sometimes Y with her—it’s always better with her to keep quiet until she sees the whole manuscript—and was waiting to cross to the westbound M57 stop when I saw him. He had just gotten off an eastbound bus, on his way, he told me, to see the dentist. It’s uncanny how often we meet.
I said, “What a coincidence,” smiled and turned to cross 57th—I could see my bus leaving Third—but he put a hand on my arm to stop me. A gentle hand, light but immobilizing.
“Kismet, I’d call it,” he said.
In another context—from another mouth—I would have thought the term ridiculous. Instead—well, in short, this struck me as “instead.”
He went on, “I think you’re a novelist?”
I was surprised that he knew this but only said yes.
“Susan, my wife, and Amy Reeves belong to the same reading group,” he reminded me. “Amy mentioned to her that you write.”
“Ah.”
Our conversation was more shouted than spoken over the grinding screech of an arriving train under our feet, the rumble of passing trucks, my bus across the street and, of course, the gabble of voices usual among the pushing mob. Is it absurd of me to write that all of this “fell away,” as in pulp romances? Whether or not, it did.
“I stopped in at a library to look up what you’ve written,” he told me.
Somehow I found this a bit creepy as well as flattering.
“And did you take out one of my books?”
He smiled. “I borrowed them all. They’re waiting in my studio, where I have some privacy. Which would you recommend I start with?”
I was momentarily distracted from his question by two of my own: Why would he need a private place to read a book? And what kind of “studio”?
Then I replied, “Whichever strikes you. There are only three.”
“Then I’ll start with, ‘Linda and the Swan.’ I like the title. It’s witty but also suggestive.”
Well, now my heart was won. What writer could resist such a pithy, and accurate, formulation of her intention?
“Once I’ve read it, I hope you’ll have lunch with me so we can talk about it,” he went on. His bland delivery of the words softened their meaning. “Novelists have always fascinated me, and I’ve never known one. There’s a little restaurant I like uptown. Maybe we could meet there.”
Curiouser and curiouser. I said something about how busy I am and went on, “In fact, I’ve got to fly or I won’t be in time to—” Here my mind went blank. Take a chicken out of the freezer? See my own dentist? Meet a friend? I was unable to think of a suitable lie and left the sentence unfinished. Greg gave a slight bow to signify that he understood me and said he had to get going himself. I ran across the street, the matter of lunch unsettled. When I’d reached the stop, I saw he was still standing at the corner where we’d met, looking at me.
