Broken River, page 22
Driving here a couple of days ago, she thought about everything she could do, alone, to pass the many hours of solitude that she had committed herself to. New York things, she decided: things that tourists do. Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty. Central Park. MoMA and the Met. The Empire State Building. Why haven’t they taken Irina there? She wants to go, Eleanor is sure of it. Irina would never admit it, of course—she prefers to assume her father’s stance of ironic detachment and casual disdain: “Why don’t we just hang out in Times Square all afternoon?” she said once, with an eyeroll, in response to the suggestion. But that merely makes it Eleanor’s job to insist upon a family outing there, to lead them into Manhattan and into the elevator some sunny day, and up to the top, where they will all have a lovely time and thank her for making them go.
By hour three of her journey here, her lower back ached with a familiar, almost homey, pulsing intensity that bordered on nausea. She had completed the decrepit-barn-and-speedway portion of the trip and had entered the domain of inexplicable traffic lights, roadside diners, and auto dealerships outlined in colorful flags and punctuated by convulsing forced-air tube men. (She doesn’t understand the tube men. They catch the eye, yes, as only a madly flailing twenty-foot-tall monster can; but who decided such a sight could make you buy a car?) Sewn-on smile notwithstanding, the tube men appeared to her earnestly, even violently, repulsive. Turn back, their frantic motions seemed to say. There’s danger here. We’re tall enough to see over the trees, and only nightmares await.
Town and country gave way to highway and tunnel, and to the claustrophobic and clotted arteries of Midtown; by the time she arrived, her mind was tired of arguing with itself and had settled into its default state in times of uncertainty and doubt: mild depression and embarrassment and boredom. It couldn’t be all bad, she reasoned, thudding over the speed hump of Shannon’s apartment building’s underground garage; maybe she’d have a posthumous bestseller.
The plan was to park, take the elevator upstairs, unpack, and hit the town. What happened instead was that she entered the apartment, put her bags down, climbed into bed, and, after a hallucinatory fifteen minutes alone with the golden grid, slept for fourteen hours. She awoke shivering in this spartan and largely unlived-in Midtown apartment. It belongs to Shannon, Craig’s girlfriend, who has resided primarily at Craig’s much larger, much hipper loft in the Village (family money, of course—you don’t maintain a place like his on literary agent money, even if you’re an uber-agent, and he is not) for more than five years. “A woman with my kind of luck doesn’t give up her own apartment,” Shannon is fond of saying, in an evident effort to ward off triple widowhood (a goal she will likely achieve, in fact, by not marrying again).
After that, what she ended up doing, instead of all the things she told herself she would do, was to read a couple of novels on her phone, sleep some more, and eat ibuprofen and Chinese takeout. She avoided calling home. She didn’t have the energy to push through Karl, to get him to hand the phone to Irina. And really, she didn’t want to talk to Irina, either. Instead, as a way of proving to herself that she was still capable of some sort of human contact, she impulsively emailed the author of the thrillers she was reading, saying that she was enjoying them, and thank you very much for writing them. And got a reply within the hour that read,
Dear Eleanor, thank you so much for the kind words! My readers mean so much to me. Sincerely, Kelly
Which was unexpectedly depressing. What did she think, that the woman would recognize the name of a fellow novelist and indulge in some impromptu shop talk? Why would she assume this writer would have heard of her? Or worse, maybe the writer had heard of her but disrespects her, or perhaps her entire subgenre of literature, and this stock email was a not-so-subtle insult.
She figured the email would prevent her from enjoying the rest of the thriller, but no—after half a page, she forgot about her brief personal contact with the author and allowed herself to be absorbed by the protagonist’s escape from a Slovenian prison cell, her choking murder of a potential rapist, and her confrontation of a mustachioed and sexually deviant human-trafficking kingpin. At least things fucking happen in these books, she thought: it’s not just people lying in bed and thinking about their fucking feelings. This thought made her hate herself enough to actually call home. Tapping Karl’s face in her contacts was physically painful. She limped through a meaningless exchange with him, and an exhausting one with Irina, and then fell asleep again.
And now, once again, she’s awake. She doesn’t really want to go to the Met or Ellis Island or anywhere else because she fears that it will be the last time she ever goes there. She doesn’t want to go to Sloan Kettering because she doesn’t want to see the truth written on the face of a doctor as she shuffles papers on the desk in front of her, papers covered with horrible facts that it is her job to convey to the doomed.
Eleanor wriggles into her favorite black wool dress and gray leggings, pulls on her Doc Marten boots and earflap hat, shrugs on her coat, and leaves the apartment with a pang of regret. Her back hurts. Her shoulders and neck hurt. The pain is not acute, but it’s comprehensive. She is one big, exhausted throb. In a café she orders and doesn’t eat a scone, drinks a coffee, reads a bit more, sits with her notebook open to a blank page that she fails to fill with words. When MoMA opens, she goes to it, in defiance of her desires. Even on an ordinary day she can’t stand in front of a painting for more than a few seconds—she doesn’t understand these people who linger, chin in hand, for ten minutes, gazing deeply at a work of art. She thinks they must be faking it. But today she can barely drag herself through the hushed and antiseptic rooms. When the time comes, she leaves the museum, gets on the train, and hauls herself into Craig’s office building. The assistant is there, comely and bright, answering the phone and offering people bottled water. Eleanor doesn’t have to wait long. She stands when Craig emerges, arms open; chooses not to judge the brief expression of dismay that darkens his face as he takes her in. Has she changed that much? (Not cancer, she reminds herself. Misery. I have been transformed by misery and self-doubt.)
He leads her into his office, and not, as she might have expected, out to lunch. This is the first piece of evidence.
If Eleanor has changed for the worse, Craig Springhill has changed for the better. Age suits him, as it often does for certain men of means. He is studiedly scruffy, his salt-and-pepper hair mussed, his wool cardigan askew over a designer tee shirt. He’s very handsome. He slides behind the desk and says, “Nell. Nell.”
She lowers herself into one of his slightly-too-low leather-upholstered armchairs, the ones that make him seem larger and more important than his clients, and her lower back, dozing until now, wakes up and begins to protest. “Hi, Craig.”
“So glad you’re back. So glad. Your upstate sojourn has taken you away from us too long.”
She does not point out that it has been only six months since they’ve seen each other, a perfectly reasonable amount of time, even when she lived in Brooklyn. Which, to Craig Springhill, might as well have been upstate. Instead she says, “I’ve missed it here.”
“And how is our budding genius.”
For a second she thinks he means her. But no, he means Irina. “Adjusting. Obsessed with writing. Evidently being homeschooled?”
He laughs, though this isn’t terribly funny. “You’ve embraced rurality in all its splendor. The shade of the pines. The old lady down the road sells you eggs. Cutting your own firewood. A kitchen garden, the song of the crickets.” Craig likes clichés. In books and in life. She nods, smiling, feeling very uneasy.
Craig says, soberly now, “And Karl. Are you working out your differences?”
“Not really,” she says, and now she remembers: she called him that night, called his cell after they decided to leave New York and Karl lumbered out, door slamming behind him, to stalk the streets with his shaggy head hanging low, presumably in order to appear sexily tortured to any woman who happened to be walking by. She called Craig in tears and he said “Just a moment, dear Nell” and held a whispered conversation with Shannon and sequestered himself inside his home office in order to receive her confession.
He shakes his head. “I was no better at forty than your husband. Men, Nell. We’re weak. Weak in the face of our carnal nature, alas.”
Does he not recall that it was she he was fucking at forty? He reaches across the desk, not far enough to pat her hand, as the desk is too large; but he pats the air eighteen inches away with apparently genuine feeling. “I’m very sorry,” he continues. “You deserve better.”
“I’m not here to talk about that.”
He brings his hands together in a silent clap. “No, you are not. You are here to discuss this strange and compelling manuscript.” He punctuates this statement with another pat, this one targeting, and actually connecting with, a neat pile of paper that must be her printed-out manuscript. Strange and compelling, she thinks. Oh dear.
“Why don’t you tell me,” Craig goes on, “what your thoughts are on this book. Where you wanted to take it. Where it actually went.”
What the fuck, she thinks, kind of question is that? It’s the kind of question you ask a condemned prisoner when you fervently wish she would just kill herself, to save everyone the trouble of an expensive and gruesome execution. “I have to admit I don’t know,” she says, though she does. She does know. She wanted to write something for herself, for once. She wanted to write something fucking depressing, something that her fans would email her angrily about. She wanted to not be a hero of the educated middle-aged middle-class woman of leisure, to not get invited onto any talk shows, to not bask in the adulation of fans at readings. She wanted to do something besides what Craig Springhill wanted her to do! For a decade he has perpetuated the idea that their interests are aligned, that it benefitted them both to go to bed together, to let him represent her, to give him editorial dominion over her novels, to let him run interference between herself and the marketing department over such trivial matters as her author photo, her book covers, her public appearances, her interviews and magazine pieces. It’s all beneath her, he told her more than once, and of course that always felt good to hear. It was the dirty work that his 15 percent bought her freedom from. And she can’t think of anything in particular from the past ten years that she would retroactively change if she could. But now, what she wants is for her agent to do what she tells him to, and for her husband to fall out of love with the other woman, and for her back to stop hurting, and for the umpteen hours of sleep her body just experienced to have been enough. She took the book exactly where she wanted it to go. Those are her thoughts. But she keeps them to herself, and Craig goes on talking, as men do.
“The writer’s prerogative,” he says with a chuckle, as if that notion is quaintly amusing. “The pleasure of not knowing. Giving the imagination free reign. The vagaries of the creative mind.” Each phrase is like a match that fizzles out before it hits the puddle of gasoline.
“Maybe you can tell me what you think,” Eleanor says. “That’s why I’m here, I’m pretty sure.” Her voice sounds thin to her, thin and ragged as a flailing tube man. Her back is spasming like one, too. She shifts in her chair to ease the pain, and it responds by galloping up into her neck and scalp. She tries not to wince.
“Yes, yes, yes. What I think.” He leans back, makes a cage with his hands, taps his pursed lips with his two index fingers. “I think what we have here is a novel that shifts its focus. A novel that changes its identity midway, yes? On the one hand, it’s, as I said, compelling. On the other hand, it’s confused. It’s uncertain of its aims.”
“Okay,” she says, but she stretches it out, turns it into a question. Because the novel is not uncertain of its aims. It is Craig, rather, who is uncertain of whether those are legitimate aims. Isn’t that what’s going on here?
Craig says, “I’m seeing a challenge for your audience. A conflict.”
She doesn’t speak.
“It begins …,” he goes on, pausing as though he doesn’t know how to continue, but of course he does, “… quite splendidly, more in keeping with your established work, yes? with Paul and Nora trapped in their respective lives. Your evocation of marriage, the ambiguities of marriage, is, as always, peerless. These pages are very beautiful, of course. Very beautiful.”
He hesitates as if awaiting gratitude for the compliments. As well he should, she thinks—this is how we talk to each other. These are the workings of our professional friendship. So why is it so hard to play her role? Even though she knows he’s about to criticize her; he’s done it before. Just smile. Say thanks.
She says, “Thank you, Craig.”
But it comes across too sardonically. He doesn’t like it, shifts in his seat, tugs his sweater sleeves up over his finely haired forearms, of which she can tell he is inordinately proud. But why think this about him? Why condemn his vanity in her mind, this man who has made her a success, who has given her a beautiful apartment to stay in?
Her back is killing her, it’s taking her breath away. She would like to lie down on her back on the floor of this office right now. She is aware that she’s panting a bit. She ought to be hungry, but she isn’t, and the nonhunger gnaws at her. She says, “Go on.”
“And then,” Craig says, his voice rising in pitch, dropping in volume, as his fingers drum the desktop, “and then everything falls apart. Is that how you’d put it?”
“That’s fair to say, yes.”
“The child reads her email, asks her about it in front of Paul. They fight. And meanwhile, we learn in the next chapter, Paul has become deathly ill.”
“Right.”
“At this point I’d expect … that is …” He suddenly leans forward, folding his arms on the desk and looking intently into her face, though not her eyes. She surveys his idiotically organized, immaculate, dustless desk, with its little tray of fountain pens and its unobtrusive Scandinavian clamp lamp and its sleek black telephone. Her manuscript, even in its tidy little pile, is the only mess in the room. He says, “I’ll put it this way. I don’t mind an unhappy ending.”
“Oh, goody,” she can’t resist saying.
“Don’t mind at all,” he says, more forcefully now. “Star-crossed lovers, heartbreak. Sadness and misery. Even death. Romeo and Juliet. That’s a kind of book you can write …”
“Why, thank you, Craig.”
But he’s already talking again, before she has even finished speaking his name: “… but what you’ve done here is you’ve separated them halfway through, Paul and Nora, and their lives unravel … in parallel. Each without regard to the other.”
“Correct.”
“They never see each other again, after page …” His fingers find a sticky note, and he splits the pile of pages long enough to glance down at the page number she knows he has already memorized. “One hundred forty,” he says, letting the pages fall, straightening them again with those delicate hands. “They never again speak to each other. They don’t, if I remember correctly, even think about each other again. Ever.”
“Yes.”
“Your romance novel, if I may be so bold, splits and becomes two tragedies. Two unrelated tragedies.”
“Not unrelated,” she protests. Because they are not! They are two things she thought of all by herself and put in a book together, goddammit. And she is not happy with the words “romance novel.” That is not what it is. That is not what she is.
“But separate. Utterly separate but equally bleak. Her suicide, his wasting away. Ruin. The affair no longer relevant.”
“Of course it’s relevant,” she says.
“Yes, sure, of course,” he replies, stepping on her words, talking quickly now, clearly annoyed by her reaction. “They die alone. The affair has ruined their marriages, and they die alone. Because of the affair.”
“Not because of the affair,” she says. “It isn’t a morality tale.”
“The affair is the thing that drives them apart, drives the narrative apart. Infidelity results in loneliness and death. That’s the moral, if you will. The thesis.”
“No,” she says, “I won’t.”
He appears genuinely confused. “Pardon?”
“If you will, you said. And I’m saying I won’t. It’s not a moral. It’s not a thesis.”
His jaw works. His brow creases. She’s annoying him. If this is a different Craig—and it’s clear to her now that yes, he is, he’s a new Craig, a Craig who says no—then it may also be true that she is a different Eleanor, as well. She is, of course. She can imagine how she must look to him right now—fatigued, depleted, disagreeable. Desperate. She doesn’t want to be this way, and neither does he. But here they are.
“Nell—” he starts to say, and the flirty lilt is gone from his voice. She doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t want to hear this voice say anything at all. The pain has found her shoulders now, and it’s sharp and deep, as though angel wings are trying to push themselves out through the flesh.
“It’s an evocation of what life is like,” Eleanor says, aware that she is making an ass of herself, that even she doesn’t agree with a single word she’s saying. “Things end. People become irrelevant. It’s the kid’s world now. The daughter’s.”
“But you don’t even tell us what happens to the daughter.”
