by Sandi Tan
With his laser pointer, Mr. Z brought attention to the boys’ faces: “Deep anxiety here in little Richard. Resignation in Edward—in fact, he looks like he’s falling asleep. The different ways we deal with trauma.” He pointed at the lapdog. “And of course, here you have the silly pup who gazes directly into the darkness, with no conception of fear. Just look at the tension in the scene. The drama.”
“How do you know which boy’s which?” someone asked.
“I assume that Edward is the resigned-looking one wearing the rings and stockings of royalty. As the older child, he had to know that resistance was futile.” Mr. Z paused, pursing his lips. “In the end, nobody ever knew what really happened to the boys. If they were killed, their murders were never recorded. And if they were freed . . . Well, there was no way their uncle would have let them live.”
A hush. Mr. Z clicked on the next slide.
“On to something jollier . . .”
It was a painting of five people—three women and two men—wearing costumes from the Middle Ages. The woman in the center had on a dress in blazing white. She knelt, blindfolded. Her left hand was outstretched, looking for support. A balding man in a fur cloak guided her toward the wooden block where her head was to rest. On the extreme right, a sinister guy in red tights leaned on the handle of a humongous ax. There was straw on the ground, ready to soak up blood.
“Whoa,” someone said.
“Anyone?” Mr. Z crossed his arms, smiling at the room.
“Joan of Arc?” Alicia Hwang ventured.
“Good try, Alicia. In fact this is a piece called The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, painted by Paul Delaroche in 1833. Another scene set in the Tower of London. The original hangs in the National Gallery in London and it’s huge—I’ve seen it—eight feet high and ten feet wide. When you’re standing in front of it, these figures are life-size. You feel like at any second, they’ll start moving and they’ll chop off her head.” Mr. Z looked at the picture in awe, adding softly: “It’s . . . electrifying.”
Rosemary tried to imagine the original painting. Even as a slide projection it achieved the effect of palpable dread.
“Lady Jane Grey was deposed as the Protestant queen of England after just nine days in 1553, when she was fifteen years old. Again, she was done in by a jealous relative, in this case, her sister-in-law, Mary. Mary gave Jane the option of converting to Catholicism before they executed her, but Jane politely said no thanks. So much for blood ties . . .”
To Rosemary’s mortification, Mr. Z directed his laser pointer to her chest. The red spot bounced around her left breast like a neon flea.
“How old are you, Rosemary?”
“Fifteen,” she mumbled.
“Then you can probably imagine what the poor girl must have been going through.” He gave her one of his smiles that also looked like a wince.
“Who are those two ladies lurking behind her?” someone asked.
“Her loyal maids-in-waiting. Again, look at the different ways of dealing with trauma. Jane is completely calm while her two maids are in hysterical agony. One of them has her eyes closed and the other has her back turned to the action. In fact, look . . .” Mr. Z moved his pointer across all five characters on the screen. “Not one of them is looking back at us at all. You can’t even see their eyes. That’s part of the horror of the scene. It is so intimate, so hermetically sealed-off. As a result, we feel as if we’re witnessing true, unmitigated emotion.”
He shut off the slide projector. “All right. Enough art.” He clasped his hands together. “Time for some trust exercises.”
Mr. Z offered Rosemary a ride home again, saying he had another errand to run near her house. This time, he took a different, longer route to Santa Claus Lane. They passed the Whole Foods and the Baklava Factory, even the four discount mattress stores on the other side of the freeway. She pretended she didn’t notice.
“Lot of churches around here,” said Mr. Z, like that was funny or strange. Rosemary had no idea how to respond to that.
After several minutes of silence, she said: “Those paintings you showed us, they were really cool.”
“I hope I didn’t embarrass you, calling on you in class.”
“No, it was fine. You just caught me by surprise.”
He gave her a smile so full-bodied it instantly made her feel small and insincere. He looked so kind.
“I wanted to know how you’d be about performing in front of people. You see, I’m thinking of casting you in a play.”
Again, she didn’t know how to respond. Would it be ungrateful to decline the role of the non-speaking maid or the tree? She’d told herself no more shrubbery.
“I want you as the lead.”
“No way.” He had to be kidding her.
“Yes, way!”
“What play is it?”
“A mystery play. I wrote it myself. We’ll stage it around Christmas.”
“A mystery play—like a Nativity play?”
“No, no,” he took a breath. “Mystery as in intrigue and surprise.”
“Oh. And you wrote it?”
“I thought it was probably high time I pulled it out of my drawer and dusted it off. I didn’t think I could do it until I found my leading lady, i.e. you.”
She hadn’t actually heard anyone say the letters i.e. before and suppressed her conditioned impulse to snicker. If only Mira were here.
“So what do I play?” She was almost afraid of his answer. A cat? A tree?
“The femme fatale.”
“What.”
Mr. Z turned his car onto the side street that would turn into Santa Claus Lane. “And just in case you thought I was kidding, we begin rehearsals next week.”
Rosemary kept the red plastic pen she’d stolen from Mr. Z in her underwear drawer. It was a fragile thing of beauty that felt snug in her hand. The clicker released and retracted the nib crisply. And except for the faint USA imprinted on the metal clip and the local 626 area code of the phone number on its body, the pen could have been an artifact from Italy. buca di beppo, una famiglia was printed on it in white.
Its black ink was frail and flowed unsteadily, so she used it sparingly, for crucial notation only, like marking on her calendar the rehearsal dates given to her by Mr. Z. The sessions hadn’t yet begun, and all she knew about the play was that it was a two-hander where she’d be acting opposite a cute boy named Arik Kistorian, and that the performance was tentatively set for Christmas Day.
Helicopters buzzed over the Park house as the girls ate their ramen dinner and watched Extra—Hollywood ingénues had called each other vaginal epithets again, someone was gaining weight, someone else was losing weight. The police choppers had been circling their area ever since a slew of break-ins was reported at the start of the summer. They zipped around for ten to fifteen minutes at dusk every couple of days, looking for men in hooded sweatshirts roaming the neighborhood.
“What did they just say about Lindsay Lohan’s crotch?”
“Didn’t hear it! That dumb chopper!”
“Crank it up, man!”
“You have the remote. You do it!”
They turned up the TV and immediately their mother started yelling from the kitchen: “Don’t make so much noisy! Mama have headache!”
Their mother was wrapping up ceramic dinnerware in old newspaper and stuffing it into boxes. The girls never offered to help, hoping that as Mrs. Park grew more and more exhausted, she’d come to the conclusion that her Korea plan was doomed to fail.
The girls turned off the TV and bussed their bowls to the kitchen sink. Seeing their mother packing up nice-looking plates that had never made it to their dinner table, they rolled their eyes at each other.
“When did we get these?” asked Mira. “I’ve never seen them before.”
“Wedding present,” Mrs. Park answered, her wido
w’s peak drenched in sweat. “Many years old.”
“How come we never used them? They’re so chic.”
“They too good,” Mrs. Park said, matter-of-factly.
“Too good?” Mira picked up one of the plates and turned it over. “This is, like, IKEA.”
Rosemary pinched her sister’s arm hard. She knew Mira was just trying to pick another fight with their mother.
“Ma, Rosie’s hurting me!”
Mrs. Park was wise enough not to respond. She continued packing.
The girls slumped listlessly back to the den where the ceiling fan rattled, and sprawled out on the cool tile floor.
“Do you think we’ll make it to Christmas, staying here?” Rosemary said.
Mira kept quiet.
“Hey, I’m talking to you.”
“I am be-ing hyp-no-tized by the ro-ta-ting blades . . .” Mira stared at the fan, then flaunted her crossed eyes. “Frankly, I don’t think we’re ever going to leave this gulag.”
“What do you mean? In a couple of hours, she’ll be on the phone calling people in Korea again. At some point, someone’s going to say yes!”
“I can’t let myself consider it. I’ll go insane—and then die. In that order.” Mira turned to her side and hugged her knees. Then she released a resounding fart.
Rosemary threw a pillow at her. “I really, really despise you!”
Mira cackled. Then just as suddenly, she grew grave. “Can I tell you something? It concerns both of our fates.”
“What? What?”
“I read somewhere that girls between the ages of thirteen and sixteen are especially prone to paranormal visitations. Especially poltergeists.”
Rosemary kicked her sister, and stood up.
“It’s true!” Mira insisted. “It’s to do with hormones, girls our age! We have too much estrogen.”
“I’m not even going to dignify that with a response.” Rosemary stormed off.
“I’ve been thinking about this. We could harness our rage, together! We could summon up a spirit. We could even summon up Dad, and he’ll help us against—”
Rosemary slammed her bedroom door.
“Who make a big noise?” Mrs. Park came shuffling in from the kitchen.
Mira closed her eyes, crossed her chest with her arms and became an exquisite corpse.
Rosemary pulled out the slip of paper with Mr. Z’s phone number. Would it be too weird to call him? Technically it wasn’t late at all—a little past seven-thirty, but it was well past school hours and it was dark out.
Although she’d been instructed to conserve her minutes, she used her cell so there’d be no risk her mother might pick up the extension and hear her with some man.
Her fingers were ice-cold as she punched in Mr. Z’s number. She actually didn’t need the paper—she’d already memorized the digits like a mystic PIN—but his handwriting was talismanic. He crossed his sevens. She sat by her open window, as far from her door as possible in case Mira was eavesdropping. Ringtones. Once, twice, three times. She prepared to hang up before his voicemail clicked on.
Then she heard his voice, “Hello, Rose,” on the other end. She tingled all over when she realized he’d seen her name on his caller ID.
“I hope I’m not bothering you.” Her voice was small and tight.
“You’ll never bother me, Rose,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
Raymond’s agent, Lena Ozova, was in town from New York. Five years had passed since he’d sat with the scrawny Pole, and he was curious to see if her facelift had held up. They went to Musso’s in Hollywood where they split a bottle of Albariño and shared a chef’s salad which she picked at as if eating an extra leaf might send her to Canyon Ranch. He had the calf’s liver. She was careworn and brittle—her vertebrae had not been kind—but her face looked youthful.
“I can get you into an anthology,” she said, in her Slavic lilt that men of all persuasions supposedly found irresistible back in the seventies.
“Who with?”
“What does it matter who with? You need to get yourself back into circulation, my dear. Look at Stephen King—he wrote Carrie in 1974 and there he is, still plowing away at it, top drawer, bottom drawer, all the drawers.”
“So Steve’s actually going to be in this thing?”
“No . . .” said Lena, carefully. “It’s a new crowd. Fresh blood. That’s why we think it’ll be good to have you in the mix. You get to be the éminence grise, baby.”
“You promised we wouldn’t be discussing the book business.”
“But we are not—it’s a magazine anthology.”
“Magazine?” Raymond lost his appetite. “Yeesh.”
“All right, journal. Do you want to spend the next hour talking semantics? There’ll be slots for you—two, three times a year. Mid to high word-rate, so don’t sulk. Guaranteed slots, so you won’t need to suffer the humiliation of submission.” She watched the muscles above his jowls tighten. “Raymond, I worry about you. You behave as if you’re some mummified corpse. It’s a colossal waste. All I’m trying to do is wake you up.”
“I’ve been percolating, that’s all.” Raymond called for the check.
Lena raised a kohl-painted eyebrow. “That’s not the best way to make coffee. Nespresso will tell you that. So what’s brewing?”
“I’ve been toying for some time with the idea for a book, sort of. It’ll draw parallels between modern American life and the Middle Ages in Europe. You know, the atmosphere of fanaticism, witch-hunting, the belief in the supernatural, and so on . . .”
“Fascinating.” Lena squeezed his hand, which meant shut up. “But in the meantime, why don’t you cook up a couple of short stories? You used to be able to whip those up in no time. You used to understand fear so well.” She watched him squirm, and savored it. She grinned like the Cheshire cat: “Just think of your father.”
Lena was right. His old man was the real horror. If he hadn’t had to pay for his old man’s expenses, he would have put in a pool years ago. He would have turned his garage into a gym-and-sauna combo. He would have done all that plus maybe bought a house in Cabo or the Palm Desert. Paying for his dad to live at Dartmoor was like sending two kids to Harvard for the rest of their lives. Twenty-four-hour call buttons, low-sodium cordon bleu dinners and Jazzercise with Nobel laureates.
He switched his computer on, a thimble of Glenfiddich nearby to steady his nerves. It’d been a while since he had googled anything other than “Raymond van der Holt” and he was now about to research this “new blood” Lena mentioned. His future peers, she’d said, with an insouciance that was hard to read. Was he to be flattered? Amused? Intimidated?
His indignation led him deeper and deeper into the web. What he thought would take just ten minutes, tops, kept him hooked at the terminal, clicking, clicking, clicking. These novices were mostly in their twenties. Many of their biographies listed illustrious college careers, famous mentors and bogus-sounding prizes (the Charles Bukowski Spirit Award; Bread Loaf African American Writer of the Year).
“Graduates of the Namedroppers Academy,” Raymond muttered, and poured himself more Scotch.
The majority of them had their own websites, replete with links to online retailers selling their work, printable excerpts and signable guestbooks. The page belonging to one female poet he could barely tell from a sex worker’s ad, there were so many affidavits of support under her sultry, leggy portrait. But—and this was the thing that really bugged him and kept him up looking for counterexamples—all of their writing samples had snap. In some cases, he detected the palimpsest of tricks he too had utilized: sneaky changes of POV, extended flashbacks, unannounced tone shifts; nevertheless he worried their work surpassed his in verve, content and enterprise. No doubt these young scriveners had an unfair advantage. If he’d grown up with the entire Internet at his fi
ngertips, by now he’d have won a PEN award, an Edgar, probably even a Tony for the Broadway musical of his werewolf cycle. He wouldn’t be like them, guest players in an anthology.
At Union Liquors, the only liquor store in the area not set up like it was anticipating a holdup, Kate no longer dawdled by the paper cartons of Merlot. Nor did she stop to admire the cellophane bundles of honey-roasted cashews the way she used to.
The first time she saw Raymond at the store, a couple of years ago, she observed him quietly from a distance, then as soon as he left, bought exactly what he bought because he looked so damned knowledgeable plucking whisky off the shelf, not even pausing to read the guff on the labels. Since then, she’d wasted no time, heading straight from the door to the whisky section and grabbing whatever was on special that day, two or three bottles at a go. The maker made no difference, as long as it was whisky—the Scots spelled it without the e. This guaranteed that it was made with Scottish spring water and not some kind of industrial bog runoff from a place like Kentucky; or so Raymond had said to her once at the store.
“Pour this into a crystal tumbler, two fingers deep, and give it a tender swirl,” he purred. “Highland peat is hard to beat.”
Ordinarily she hated the bossy free advice of strangers, but she’d seen the way he talked to the storekeeper and realized that this was the way he acted with everyone. His condescension was avuncular. She began looking forward to running into him in the whisky aisle. This happened every month or two, always on a Sunday. He would be dressed like a dandy on his way to the races: silk pocket square, straw fedora, but there was usually something amiss—unbuttoned fly, flip-flops, bags of sweating frozen pizzas waiting in the car.
“Absolutely no ice. To release its flavor, add a touch of water. Just a touch. But whatever you do, never, never American tap water, unless the taste of chlorine appeals to you.” “Blends are junior high; you want college, at the very least.” “A blood tub is a very small cask some distilleries use to speed up maturity. It’s faster because there’s more contact with the wood. But I prefer my whisky to fester in its own time.”