The Editor

by Steven Rowley

  I swallow the last of my wine.

  “But you’re being too protective. Of your mother. It’s admirable, I admire it. I would want my own children to be as protective of me. But it comes at the book’s expense.” This is easier to digest than her edits on the printed page. It helps that the note comes wrapped in another compliment, further seduction, getting me to see her side of things. “You come into the quarantine . . .”

  “. . . Russell comes . . .”

  “Pardon me.” She smiles. “Russell comes into the quarantine with reasonable grievances, with a list of things to accomplish. Right at the outset you establish two central questions. Who is she, your mother, Who am I, you.”

  I start to protest and say “Russell” again, but it’s embarrassingly clear what she’s saying. “They remain unanswered.”

  “Not just who they are at the outset of the novel. Who do they become? What have they learned?”

  “The maturation of the soul,” I say, returning to Homer. “I struggle with my obligations.”

  “When writing fictional characters based on real people?”

  “To the truth.”

  Jackie gets up from her seat across the table, crosses around to my side, pulls out a chair next to me, and sits. She rests her hand on top of mine. “Do something for me as you write.”

  “Anything. I’ll take inspiration where I can.” Her hand on mine has a vertiginous effect, doubling the potency of the wine; I feel a little woozy.

  “Think about the difference between curing and healing.” I must have a puzzled expression on my face, because she says, “How to explain what I mean,” and then sits very still while she thinks. “Do you know the story of Isis and Osiris?”

  I shake my head no. “Did one of them fly too close to the sun?”

  “That was Icarus. Osiris was killed in a fight with his brother Set. Quite violently, in fact—he was cut into pieces and spread throughout Egypt. His wife Isis searched everywhere to collect the pieces and put him back together. In doing so, in burying him whole, she believed his spirit would be eternal.”

  “You’re not suggesting I hack my mother into pieces.” I reach for the low-hanging joke.

  “On the contrary, you already have. I’m asking you to put the pieces back together.”

  I want to disagree, but then I remember we’ve already established—I’ve already admitted—that my relationship with my mother was the main impetus for writing the book. I decide to be honest with her. “I guess I’m not sure how that explains the difference.”

  Jackie sits back and runs her hands through her hair as she thinks, piling it on her head and letting it drop. “Don’t tell your story to change something about the past; the past is inherently unchangeable. There is no cure.”

  “And yet there’s a powerful temptation to rewrite it.” I feel instantly foolish—look who I’m telling this to.

  “But that’s not the goal of the quarantine. Is it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s to find a way forward. So, instead, I want you to focus on healing. Remember, and then assemble all the lovely bits. Like Isis did. To truly remember, I believe, is to heal.”

  “Remember on the page.”

  “Exactly. I think the hardest thing to dramatize, without being cliché, is the love a mother has for her children. And you’ve done that. Not as a mother, not as a parent at all, but as a child, which I think is even more impressive. And let me worry about editing you.” She taps the table with her index finger. “Do not edit yourself.”

  I try unsuccessfully to stifle a smile.

  Jackie cocks her head. “What is it?”

  “I just can’t help but think you’d advise me differently if this book were about you.” I keep my ears perked for Joan, wondering if she will materialize and rap my knuckles or simply chide me tomorrow for each instance where I’ve overstepped.

  “This book is about me.” Jackie takes my hand again and we share an intense stare. There’s part of me, deep in the recesses of my addled brain, that wonders if I’m not being somehow conned. But I can’t quite figure out, short con, long con, what the swindle would be.

  “It’s hard. This work.”

  “Hard truths can drive people apart. But great art can bring them back together.”

  I try desperately to repeat everything she’s said in my mind so as not to forget. I will need to access all of it when I sit down with the manuscript again.

  “Now,” she says, standing and letting go of my hand, “I can’t wait to see what you come up with, now that your shackles are removed.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She collects my plate and I start to protest. “No, allow me. Please.” I look around again for Joan.

  Jackie brushes me aside and disappears into the kitchen, I can hear her setting dishes in the sink. Being here in her home makes everything simultaneously more normal and more surreal. A woman is doing dishes in her kitchen. Normal. Jackie O. just cleared my dinner plate. Surreal. I’m not sure which reality to plant myself in: Island resident shares local history; national treasure dispenses insight on writing. Either way, she seems much more human away from the heightened setting of New York.

  “Oh, and one more piece of advice?” she calls out from the kitchen.

  “What’s that.”

  “Be like Fred Astaire.”

  “Romance Ginger Rogers?” I holler, confused.

  Jackie pokes her head back into the dining room and raps her knuckles gently on the doorway. “Don’t let the hard work show.”

  ◆ ELEVEN ◆

  When I return to the guesthouse, I pick up the phone and call Daniel collect. It takes four rings for him to answer and, while I’m sure he doesn’t, it seems in my head that he pauses before accepting the charges.

  The operator hangs up and we’re alone. I listen to the electric hum for a moment, thinking there are secret messages in the static, and then I say, “Hi.”

  “Hi,” he says back.

  And then silence.

  “We just had dinner. I thought I would call.”

  “Collect, I see. She’s not springing for you to call home either?”

  “I’m a guest. In someone’s house.”

  “She must have really burned through that Onassis money.”

  I pull the receiver away from my ear and stare at it in annoyance before resuming the conversation. “Daniel. It felt like the right thing to do.” I’m certain she would not have minded—I’m all but positive she wouldn’t have even seen the bill—but there’s an element of wanting to retain my privacy. She knows enough about me from the book.

  “How’s the house?” Daniel asks.

  I pause and then, because it was such a perfect setup, say, “What. A. Dump.” I swear I can hear him smile on the other end of the line. “Hey, what’s that from?” Of course we both know what it’s from: It’s the opening of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We can quote the play endlessly to each other. I’m not really asking—that’s literally the next line in the play. So I repeat it. “Hey, what’s that from?”

  “You want to do George and Martha now?”

  “WHAT’S IT FROM, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE?”

  Daniel laughs, for real this time, and all the tension between us melts.

  “You expect me to remember all the pictures?” he says, finally playing along.

  We don’t ever remember the exact words, but we do our best to paraphrase. “Not every last epic . . .” I continue on about it being a Warner picture and Bette Davis having peritonitis. We both break into laughter and it feels good—erotic, even. This is the kind of phone sex we have, reciting Edward Albee. I debate pressing further, going on about Bette Davis trying to apply lipstick with her peritonitis and smearing it all over her face, but decide to quit while I’m ahead.

  “It’s nice, the house.”
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  “I’m sure it is.”

  “Have you heard of a Nantucket sleigh ride?” It occurs to me Daniel might delight in this bit of trivia.

  “No. Is that some kind of sex act? What are you two doing out there?”

  “What? Oh my God. No.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “I’ll tell you when I get home. How was your day?”

  Daniel sighs. I hate it when we’re even slightly out of sync. Most of the time he makes perfect sense. Not just the words coming out of his mouth but how he feels in our house, how he fits in my life. It’s so natural having him there, his presence often as unremarkable as my having a left arm. Only at times does such intimacy strike me as odd. Only late on restless nights do I lie awake wondering if he is some sort of pod person who might molt his human form and devour me. Only when he goes on one of his screeds about relationship constructs or the myth of monogamy or heteronormative paradigms am I tempted to rummage through all the pockets in his closet, through his books, looking for underlined passages and clues, through his bedside drawer for hidden pills that keep his alien lizard form from emerging. I think this paranoia stems from being my mother’s son, the assumption that everyone is guarding secrets.

  “I didn’t get the gig. You know, the off-Broadway thing,” he finally relents.

  “No! You were perfect for that.”

  “Apparently not perfect enough.”

  I want to reach through the phone and hug him. “They will regret this. You’ll see. The reviews will be terrible and they will pan the direction and the whole mess will close in previews.”

  “We don’t have to dwell on it.”

  My heart breaks for him and I reflect back on our earlier argument. “You know how suddenly this happened for me?”

  “The right opportunity will present itself, yeah, I know.”

  “It’s true! Rosalind Carter could call you tomorrow to stage her life story.”

  “They already made a musical of Peanuts,” he says glumly.

  “Do you want to do more George and Martha? Bette Davis comes home from the grocery store?”

  “Bette Davis is a grocer?” he replies, but our game fizzles.

  We finish our conversation and say good night; when he hangs up I listen to the dead connection, where he somehow only seconds ago existed, and reluctantly set the phone back on its cradle. I’m not sure how we are and where we leave things. Better, I think, than before our call. Still, when I replay our conversation it’s like watching a VCR tape when the tracking is just slightly off—our mouths are moving, but the picture sputters and the right words aren’t coming through.

  I walk outside. I’m instantly enchanted by the warm night breeze. It beckons me down the path toward the beach, and as soon as I get twenty feet from the house I regret not having a flashlight. When we were kids we would rent a camp in the Adirondack Mountains, and at night my dad would bring us down to the boat dock and we would lie on our backs, looking up at the stars. I’d never seen the night sky so bright.

  “No light pollution,” my father would say, as he set his camera on the tripod to try to take a long-exposure photo of the Milky Way.

  It was the first time I ever heard anyone refer to light as pollution. It seemed antithetical to me, even then. A contaminant, maybe—even that was a stretch. But pollution? No flashlights were allowed then either. We could count only on guidance from the summer moon.

  I creep past the pond, heel-to-toe, careful not to veer off the path. Twice I hear something rustling in the reeds and have to remind myself that there are no alligators in New England. This is only momentarily calming; I have no idea what other secret monsters the Vineyard harbors (or Jackie attracts). I pick up my pace until I feel the hard sand of the trail give way to the soft, cool grains of the beach. I realize only now I’m not wearing shoes. I take ten more steps and flop, exhausted, onto the sand. Not exhausted. Depleted.

  The beach is dark in all directions. All I can really see is the bit of surf illuminated by a thin sliver of moonlight and a few flashing beacons out on the water to guide boats. If only they were there to offer me similar direction. On the far horizon creeps the faintest glow; or maybe it’s my imagination. I’m facing south, away from Boston, so if my eyes haven’t betrayed me it just might be the never-dimming lights of Manhattan.

  Back at the house, I rinse my sandy feet in the tub and fetch the manuscript from my suitcase. I free the pages from the rubber bands that bind them together and lay the first chapter out on the bedspread in two rows of five pages. When I finish I lay the second chapter out page by page on the floor. On the far side of the bed there is just enough room for the third chapter, and so I lay chapters four and five down the hall. Chapter six runs down the stairs. Soon the entire book is laid out across the guesthouse. If Joan were to walk in here, she would think I’d gone mad, that I was no longer the collected, promising young author of a book but instead the crazed, eclectic scribbler of a manifesto.

  Here it is, my mother in pieces. It’s my job now to answer the questions, to put her back together. Not just to write beautiful prose, but to lay bare the naked truths of our relationship. Who am I. Who are you. How are these answers entwined? Seeing the manuscript laid out in this way, being able to walk from page to page, from beginning to end, I am suddenly able to see the book as a journey. One whose steps I need to retrace.

  One whose end still needs illumination.

  ◆ TWELVE ◆

  We sit on the front porch of the farmhouse, careful not to let the curls of peeling paint scrape our bare legs while a stiff night breeze shakes all the leaves in the trees, making them flutter like bats against the cobalt sky. It’s spooky for an August night. Wind like this usually waits for the haunting chill of October, but we’re grateful for it—both of us. The rustling trees fill the gaping silence.

  “Fran,” my mother starts.

  “That didn’t go . . .” I don’t know how to finish this sentence. Well? As planned? How did I think it would go?

  In the distance, crickets. You can just make them out in the shrieking wind, and I chuckle at both their literal and metaphorical presence. It strikes me how loud silence can be, or maybe it’s the distant echo of my father’s roaring disapproval. He’s a quiet man, until he’s not.

  My mother stands up and walks into the house, the screen door slapping its wooden frame behind her. I’m stunned. Were we done? Was this over? Did she walk away just as my father had? The driveway looks queer, so empty at night without my father’s sedan. Where did he go? Is he coming back? There’s a pressure in my chest, a deep weight that’s compressing my lungs into my diaphragm, slowly draining them of air. Is it possible to have a heart attack at seventeen? I try to breathe deeply, to return my lungs to their original size, but it feels like I’m a noodle-armed weakling wielding a mallet, trying in vain to win a prize in a carnival strongman game while onlookers stare and laugh. Watching the weight approach the bell but never able to make it ding. How did this happen? Why did I push? Why was any of this so important to me? Why did I want so desperately to ring a goddamn bell? To prove that I’m a man while declaring myself, in my father’s eyes, at least, unmanly? I’ve lost all sense of self.

  The screen slams again, sharply announcing my mother’s return. She holds two open bottles of beer and hands one to me as she retakes her seat. The bottle is cold in my hand. It stings; the sensation is welcome, but is this something we do? I slap a mosquito away from my neck and then massage the skin where Scott’s lips had just hours ago been, before we were interrupted by my mother—the catalyst for this whole chain of events. She would never have said anything to my father, but I didn’t want her to have to live my growing lie, and I didn’t want to avoid her gaze for the foreseeable future not talking about something we both already knew.

  “I thought we could both use it,” she says indicating her beer, before taking several sips
.

  “Aren’t you worried about the message this sends your underage son?”

  She gives this some genuine thought as we watch an unfortunate insect meet the bug zapper. “I don’t worry about you.”

  This is, of course, a lie. I am the baby. On top of that, a mama’s boy. All she does is worry about me. And tonight I’ve given her a thousand new reasons.

  I clink the neck of her bottle with mine, the way I’ve seen adults do, before taking a long, malty sip. I let it roll around in my mouth before swallowing. I’ve had beer before, at Sabrina Holcumb’s party and such, but—I don’t know—only when it was an adrenaline rush. Not when I’ve given any thought to how it fits with my palate. The bitter aftertaste reminds me of the way the neighbor’s horse’s saddle blanket used to smell when I was allowed to brush him.

  My mother starts and then stops. “Your father . . .” What is there really to say? “It’s probably all my fault.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “Make excuses.”

  “He thinks I raised you to be too . . .” She struggles with the words and I want to help her find just the right one but I don’t. She picks at the label on her bottle until it’s peeling just like the paint on the steps. “How do you know, Fran. I mean, how do you know for sure?”

  I think about the weight of Scott as he laid on top of me. The taste of Scott. How his breath felt against my collarbone. How alive I felt and how I might have exploded, literally burst into a quadrillion particles of nothingness had my mother not interrupted us. But how to put any of that in words. “You just know.”

  My mother shakes her head. Not in denial, but in acknowledgment that she doesn’t understand how the world works. Yet, unlike my father, in this instance she doesn’t seem scared by what she doesn’t know. For this I want to reward her.

  “Do you know how I learned you were beautiful?” I ask.

  My mother laughs and puts her bottle down. “You had to learn?” She jokes like this to mask her shock—I’m not sure that I’ve ever called her beautiful out loud.