The Nest

by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

  Bea seemed revived lately, there was something newly engaging and ardent about her. He’d overheard her make reference to a new writing project. He knew better than to ask; he’d wait for her to bring it up. He wondered if she’d shown Leo the new stuff yet. He hoped so because he would trust Leo’s opinion. If Leo thought whatever she was doing had potential, well, who knew? What could be more perfect for a newly expanded fiction imprint than the long-awaited debut novel by Beatrice Plumb. Anything she wrote would attract attention, along with the entity that published the work. Maybe he would pull Leo aside and ask if he’d heard or seen anything.

  He could picture it perfectly: the publishing party at a local independent bookstore, Bea surrounded by an eager, appreciative crowd, her bright eyes and fluttering fingers, her long braids coiled and pinned up at the nape of her neck just how he loved. She would turn to him tender and eager with gratitude, flush with accomplishment, and he would touch her elbow, kiss her cheek as he’d done a thousand times before, but this time he would linger just a little longer, long enough for her to notice, a shadowy declaration. A first kiss in the book stacks. Now that was romantic.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The sole reason Bea Plumb agreed to accompany Paul Underwood to the dinner party at Celia Baxter’s on the Upper West Side, sure to be jammed with the exact type of people—writers, editors, agents—she couldn’t avoid at work but desperately tried to avoid at all other times, was because Celia was one of Stephanie’s closest friends from college. Celia was not of the publishing world, she was of the art world, but those worlds often collided, especially over cocktails. Bea hoped to see Stephanie at the smallish gathering in Celia’s intentionally stark and underdecorated apartment, which was only a few blocks—but worlds away—from Bea’s place; it would be easy for her to duck out if the event was unbearable.

  Just past the new year, heading into the dreariest weeks of the calendar, almost three months since the Oyster Bar lunch, and Bea was still dithering about showing her new work to any of the three people (Leo, Paul, Stephanie) who could or should see it. After her phone call with Jack earlier in the week, she felt a new urgency. Jack said he was heading out to Brooklyn to see Leo. He was vague about why.

  “Do I need a reason to visit my brother?” he’d said. “I want to see how he’s doing.”

  “And?” Bea had asked.

  “And, okay, I want to see what’s going on. Has he said anything to you?”

  “No,” Bea’d said, trying to think of something to tell Jack that might assuage him but also be the truth. “He looks good.”

  “What a relief,” Jack said, his tone sour.

  “I mean he looks healthy. Alert and focused. He seems optimistic. He’s been hanging out with Paul. I think they’re working on something.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Why would that be a joke?”

  “This is his big plan? Working for that putz Paul Underwood?”

  “I work for Paul Underwood,” Bea said.

  “I realize that—and I mean this as a compliment—there are lots of things you would be willing to do that Leo wouldn’t.”

  “I know.” Bea did know. Leo’s interest in Paul was bewildering. Paul seemed to believe Leo was working with Nathan Chowdhury again, but Bea found that unlikely. And Leo had never liked Paul. Ever. He’d called him Paul Underdog behind his back for years and had only shown a grudging kind of interest in Paper Fibres or what Bea did every day. He’d been visibly shocked to discover that Paper Fibres was a thriving publication. Not that she ever volunteered to talk about work; nobody was more dismayed than she was to find herself still going to the same office every day. Over the years, she’d managed to assume mostly managerial duties. She eagerly took on any job that removed her from working with writers and let Paul be the editing face of the magazine, which he loved. He still sought her input and shrewd pen, but those exchanges happened between the two of them, in private.

  “Apparently Leo’s meeting with Nathan,” Bea told Jack.

  “Nathan? Nathan Nathan?”

  “Yes.” She knew Jack would be happy to hear Nathan’s name. Everyone would.

  “Well, that’s very interesting. Sounds like the perfect time for an in-person progress report.”

  She didn’t tell Jack what else she thought about Leo, that for all the moments he seemed terrifically healthy and eager and nearly like his old self—his old, old self, the Leo she loved so much and missed even more—there were nearly an equal number of times he seemed remote and anxious. Bea knew Leo better than anyone. On the surface he was fine, stellar even. But she’d also seen him staring out the office windows, jiggling his leg, eyeing the harbor and the ocean beyond like a death row prisoner from Alcatraz who was wondering exactly what distance the body could survive the open water in February. That was partly why she’d chickened out every time she thought to talk to him about what she was writing. If Jack was going to start putting pressure on Leo—and Bea realized it was a bit of a miracle he’d held off for this long—she needed to do something. Once his divorce was final, Leo would be free to roam. She didn’t understand what was going on with him and Stephanie, but those two made Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton look like slouches in the on again/off again department. But this she knew: She needed to figure out what to do. She needed to commit to what she was writing or move on to something else while she was writing, before her confidence and inspiration fled. Again.

  She’d been hiding in a corner of Celia’s enormous living room, pretending to examine the bookshelves, which were full of what she thought of as “fake” books—the books were real enough but if Celia Baxter had read Thomas Pynchon or Samuel Beckett or even all—any!—of the Philip Roths and Saul Bellows lined in a row, she’d eat her mittens. In a far upper corner of the bookcase, she noticed a lurid purple book spine, a celebrity weight-loss book. Ha. That was more like it. She stood on tiptoe, slid the book out, and examined the well-thumbed, stained pages. She returned it to the shelf front and center, between Mythologies and Cloud Atlas. Satisfied, she waded into the crowd to find Paul; maybe he wouldn’t mind if she left. If Stephanie wasn’t here by now, she wasn’t coming.

  Bea heard Lena Novak before she saw her, that old familiar hyena laugh. She froze, thinking she had to be wrong, only to see her old—her old what? They hadn’t been friends but they hadn’t exactly been enemies either—heading in her direction. Bea could not handle Lena Novak right now, absolutely could not. She turned on her heel and fled into a nearby powder room, nearly slamming the door behind her. Seeing herself in the mirror she was only mildly surprised by how terrified she looked.

  Lena Novak was another one of the Glitterary Girls who, unlike Bea, had gone on to publish a well-regarded book every few years. Bea had recently stumbled across a feature in a glossy magazine on Lena and her handsome architect husband and adorable daughter and their “ingeniously” renovated Brooklyn town house and the horse-barn-turned-weekend-home in Litchfield, Connecticut. She’d been increasingly nauseated by every paragraph and had finally tossed the magazine into the recycling bin at work. “Hey, I wanted to read that!” one of the interns had said, fishing it out of the bright blue receptacle. “I love Lena Novak!”

  In the powder room, Bea washed her hands and found an old lipstick in the corner of her purse. She carefully applied the color, checking to make sure none of it was on her teeth. She used her dampened fingers to calm the hair around her face that had frizzed under her winter hat. She moved as slowly as possible, trying to remember where her coat had been ferried off to and the most direct route to the front door. She eyed a glass shelf housing an impressive collection of tiny antique perfume bottles. Really? she thought. Where do people get the time? (And then: Who am I kidding? I have the time.) Someone rapped gently on the door.

  “Hold on,” she said. She squared her shoulders, happy that she’d worn her favorite zebra-print wrap dress from her favorite secondhand clothing store. She took a deep breath and opened the door.
Maybe Lena wouldn’t even recognize her, she thought, as she walked into the front hall. But the moment she emerged from the tiny powder room, Lena pounced, squealing and pulling Bea into an alarmingly fierce hug. “I heard you were here, but I didn’t believe it!” she said, rocking Bea a little as if they’d just been reunited after a lengthy, involuntary separation.

  The Glitterary Girls were just an invention of some journalist for an urban magazine. Bea had been horrified when the article came out, which made them sound like silly socialites. (“Perched on a Soho rooftop on a languid summer night, the most buzzed about writers in Manhattan glitter like beads on a particularly smart necklace.”) The breathless writing was awful, the designation didn’t even make sense, a meaningless phrase assigned to a group of female writers who happened to live in New York City at the same time, happened to be around the same age, and, for the most part, disliked one another. At best, they were grudging acquaintances bound by a name they all wished they could shake—except for Lena, who had adored the catchphrase and taken it literally. (Gliterally, Bea had joked to the one woman in the group she actually liked, a poet from Hoboken who had also seemed to drop off the face of the earth in the ensuing years.) Back then, Lena was always trying to gather “the girls,” for drinks or dinners or suggesting they go to events together, as if they were a lounge act in Vegas.

  “You look exactly the same!” Lena held Bea at arm’s length and gushed. “Come sit and talk to me.” She clapped her hands, and her bared cleavage bounced a little. Had she bought herself new breasts, too? Bea didn’t remember Lena ever being voluptuous. They sat in a quiet corner of the dining room next to an enormous table covered with trays of meticulously made canapés. Bea positioned herself with her back to the room and steeled herself for Lena’s interrogation only to realize, within minutes, that of course Lena wanted to talk about Lena.

  “Here she is,” she said, handing Bea her phone and swiping through what seemed like hundreds and hundreds of photos of her daughter. “She’s three. I finished the edits on my last book on a Wednesday morning, e-mailed the pages to my editor, stood up from my desk, and my water broke.”

  “You were always really efficient,” Bea said.

  “I know!”

  “What’s her name?” Bea asked, looking at the photo of a little girl with a party hat sitting in front of a birthday cupcake.

  “Mary Patience.”

  “Patience?” Bea wasn’t sure she’d heard properly.

  “Oh, you know,” Lena said, as if it were obvious, “one of those old family Mayflower names.”

  “Have you been adopted by a new family?” Bea knew Lena had grown up in a trailer park somewhere in central Ohio with a single mother who managed to raise four kids working a variety of minimum-wage jobs. You had to listen closely these days to hear any echo of the broad and nasal midwestern vowels in Lena’s speech, and her unruly black hair had been straightened, and somewhere along the line Nowaski had become Novak—and there were those new impressive breasts—but there was no way Lena’s round and freckled face with the slightly bulbous nose that looked like it had been raised on kielbasa had anything to do with the Mayflower.

  “My ridiculous husband,” Lena said, her voice full of admiration. “He’s in the blue book.”

  Bea looked down at the picture of Lena’s daughter again and was secretly pleased to see that the girl’s nose had been inherited from the kielbasa not the Mayflower side of the family. She looked kind of sweet.

  “So tell me about her?” Bea said, sending a fat one across the plate to Lena. “Tell me everything about being a mom.”

  Forty-five minutes later, she’d neatly extracted herself from the predictably dull conversation. (“They say being a mother is the hardest job in the world and it’s true,” Lena had said, solemnly, “many, many times harder than writing an international bestseller, harder than figuring out that NEA grant application!”) She stood and hugged Lena good-bye. “Don’t fall off the face of the earth again, okay,” Lena had said, giving Bea a little shake, pressing her thumbs just a little too hard into Bea’s upper arms. “Get in touch. Find me on Twitter.”

  Bea went to collect her things and to tell Paul she had a headache. Her coat was in a small maid’s room adjacent to the kitchen, underneath an inexplicably huge pile of fur coats (didn’t anyone in New York have any shame anymore?) and rooted around the left sleeve for the mittens she’d tucked there for safekeeping. She could hear Lena in the kitchen now, animatedly talking to Celia.

  “—Absolutely no idea,” Lena was saying, sounding more thrilled than confused. “I haven’t spoken to her in years. I know she still works at Paper Fibres.” Bea froze.

  “God,” Celia said, a touch of satisfaction in her voice, too. “Still? How depressing. Is she married?”

  “She had that boyfriend for a long time, that older guy? The poet? Did he die? I think he was married.”

  “So she’s not writing at all?”

  “From what I gather, no.” Bea could hear Lena chewing something crunchy, a carrot or a celery stick or a lesser mortal’s finger bone. “Do you hear anything from Stephanie?” Lena asked Celia. “They’re not working together anymore, right?”

  “No, they’re not. I can’t ever get any good gossip from Stephanie. All she would tell me is they went their separate ways and it was mutual, which I’m sure isn’t true.” Celia’s voice lowered a bit. Bea inched closer to the open doorway, flattening herself against the wall. “I did hear something interesting from another source.”

  “Yessss?” Lena said.

  “She had to pay back part of her publishing advance a few years ago. It was a lot of money.”

  Bea winced, frozen in place, afraid to move.

  “That’s rough,” Lena said, and this time the concern in her voice was genuine. Bea felt a wave of nausea move through her and she had a terrible and sudden urge to defecate. Being scrutinized or mocked by Lena was leagues better than being on the receiving end of her pity.

  “Terrible,” Celia said, momentarily chastened by Lena’s sincerity. “Really terrible.”

  Both women were quiet, as if they’d just read Bea’s obituary or were standing over her gravestone.

  “But you know what?” Celia said, resummoning her nerve. “I’m just going to say it since Stephanie’s not here. I never loved her stories. I never got what all the fuss was about. I mean, they were cute—the Archie stuff—it was clever, but The New Yorker? Please.”

  “They were of a place and time,” Lena said, her register lowering into the interview or public reading voice Bea recognized and remembered loathing. “They worked in that late ’90s kind of navel-gazing, where-did-we-come-from thing. We were all doing it. We were so young. Not everyone was able to figure out how to transition to more mature material.” Bea couldn’t believe how regal Lena sounded, as if someone had appointed her the fucking Emperor of Fiction.

  “Well, her clothes are of another place and time, too,” Celia said. “God. What is she wearing? Who still shops at thrift stores? Hasn’t she heard about bedbugs?”

  “Stop,” Lena said, sounding guilty but still laughing.

  “And those braids. Honestly,” Celia said. “How old are we?”

  “I feel bad for her, though,” Lena said. “Stuck at Paper Fibres. People in that world know who she is, still recognize her name. It must be hard, being Beatrice Plumb.”

  Bea was grateful that she was still leaning against a wall, had flattened both hands on the cool plaster and felt sturdy, supported, and able to withstand the wave of rage and humiliation roaring over her. She closed her eyes. The room smelled like cat even though there wasn’t a cat in sight and no other signs of an animal in the house. She wondered if Celia made a housekeeper or a neighbor hide the cat when she had guests so her pristine apartment wouldn’t be sullied by a bowl of pet food or a scratching post; she seemed like that kind of traitor.

  Bea stepped away from the wall and hurried to button her coat and pull on her hat. Celia and
Lena were gossiping about someone else and moving into the living room. Bea entered the now-empty kitchen, heading for the front door; she stopped in front of an impressive array of expensive cookies destined for the dessert table. She opened her canvas tote and carefully slid all the cookies inside. Celia walked back into the room just as Bea was covering the stash with paper napkins. “Bea!” she said, stopping short, looking slightly abashed but also annoyed. “Where did you come from?”

  “Nowhere,” Bea said. Celia eyed the empty plate and Bea’s bulging tote. “I can’t stay for dessert,” Bea said, “but thank you for a lovely evening.” They stared at each other for a few laden seconds, each daring the other to speak, and then Bea turned and walked straight out the front door.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jack was winded when he ascended the stairs after arriving at the Bergen Street stop in Brooklyn. How could he be so out of shape? He’d been to Stephanie’s once before, years ago, right after she moved in and she and Leo were doing whatever it was she and Leo did on and off for all those years: fucking, teasing, staging their hetero melodramas. He and Walker had casually considered buying a brownstone once, but Jack didn’t want to live so far from his shop, and reopening in Brooklyn was unthinkable; he believed he’d lose too many customers, which was probably no longer the case now that Brooklyn was unaffordable and unrecognizable. Jack remembered Stephanie’s street as being fairly derelict. Today it seemed as if every third house had a construction Dumpster out front. He stopped in front of one brownstone under renovation. The doors were open and the curving mahogany staircase with freshly painted white risers was visible. He could see straight through into the rear open kitchen where two workers were laboring to fit a massive stainless-steel refrigerator into a cutout in the back wall.