“I am just a little anxious about the snow,” she said with a chirpy insouciance that sent a chuckle rippling around the table. “I wish I could just grow a beard, like Maxwell has.” All eyes turned briefly upon me. In that moment, I hated Rita.
“That’s right,” the professor said. “You’re from New Orleans too, aren’t you, Max? I’d forgotten. And you two know each other?”
“Yes,” Rita said. “Maxwell and I go way back.”
“It’s Max, Rita,” I said. “Not Maxwell. Just Max.”
Rita laughed. “Will I have to change my name too?”
“Well,” the professor said, “you’ll have to work that out with Max.” He cast me the nervous smile of a man who avoids even the outskirts of a quarrel and continued the roll call.
That spring, every Tuesday from four until six-thirty, I sat across the table from Rita in a steadily intensifying state of mystification. After the first day my expectations were naturally minimal. I was prepared to spend my time in class alternating between outrage and humiliation. I was determined to keep my distance from her. The first discussions in these venues are necessarily tentative and anxious, the air laden with portentous questions: Is the professor competent, hostile, does someone talk too much or not at all, is there a peer whose writing one actively despises, do we take a break, is coffee allowed, is the room over- or underheated?
There were eight of us, so it was not until the fifth meeting that we had each exhibited our wares and established a pecking order. Rita’s turn came up at the end of the first rotation, by which time most of us had been treated to her personal critique. She invariably began with some specious disclaimer: “Now I know this isn’t mine, but if it were,” or “I may have gotten too involved in this story,” after which she laid out her argument with the confidence of a general presenting a foolproof strategy for battle. Her recommendations were original and intuitive; she was able to enter into the writer’s intentions with an open, inquisitive mind. My initial relief at not having to take issue with her every week gave way to admiration; she really had the requisite knack. It was clear that she read every piece several times. When we passed in the manuscripts to the author at the end of the class, I noticed that hers were copiously annotated, her comments neatly printed in the margins in purple ink.
By the time my own story came up for review, I was as eager to hear Rita’s reaction as the professor’s. Of course, though I had found her to be critically acute about the efforts of our peers, I didn’t think Rita’s remarks about my work were particularly useful. She made a few suggestions for structural changes that, if not improvements, presented provocative options. She observed, as others have over the years, that my female characters were shallow, lacking complexity and dimension. She said this with a laugh that made the professor inquire whether, in her opinion, this vacuity presented a serious problem. “No,” she said. “I don’t think it matters at all. In fact, I think it’s intentional, at least I hope it is.” Here she gave me her faux-naïf smile. “It mirrors forth the myopia of the narrator, doesn’t it?”
Twenty years have passed and I can reproduce that sentence exactly as I heard it. I can still feel the soft osculation of Rita’s voice, the full two syllables she gave to the word mirrors as she swept back the ever-encroaching mass of her curls and raised her eyes to mine. Ostensibly she was giving me credit for having created a contemptible persona, but the coolness of her eyes on my suddenly burning cheeks left me with the sensation of having been rendered pitifully transparent. I looked away, at my own hands, at the table, at the professor, who studied the open pages of my manuscript, compressing his lips to contain a smile. Just you wait, I thought.
That very evening I carried to my chilly apartment the first thirty pages of Rita’s work in progress, a novel or, as she put it, “Maybe a novel?”
I made a cup of coffee and sat down at the desk, uncapping my red pen, intent on vengeance. An hour later I laid the pen across the unmarked pages and rested my head in my hands.
St. Ann is a long street that runs from the French Quarter all the way to Bayou St. John. On either end, near the river and near the park, it’s respectable enough, but there is a stretch that curves around a derelict canning factory that is decidedly unsavory. As I followed the numbers descending into this area, I was increasingly conscious of my car, a late-model Volvo, which announced to the loitering residents the status of its owner as an alien, possibly a landlord. Because I had to keep one eye out for the house numbers and the other on the minefield of potholes in the road, some so deep the wheel sank in to the hubcap, my progress was slow. The houses were all rickety structures, single or double shotguns, raised on chunky brick piers, sagging in various directions, all in need of paint. Some of the porches were packed with junk; a few sported melancholy potted plants or plastic garden chairs. The sidewalk undulated over tree roots, cracked in places and sprouting fierce patches of weeds. Erosion had worn away the edges of the road, leaving a ditch in which all parking was on an angle.
I spotted the correct number, four iron digits nailed into the porch column of a house as shabby as its neighbors, and guided the Volvo cautiously into the ditch. A worn-out man in an undershirt, sitting on the front step of the neighboring house, got up and went inside. From a narrow alley between his house and Rita’s, a cat came stealthily toward my car. I got out and stood gazing at the house front. Rita’s porch was bare. One side was obscured and softened by the bright green curtain of a plantain tree, and there was a vine curling in the rails, some adventitious weed intent on destruction. On a neighboring porch a huddle of teenagers shouted at one another in their secret language, doubtless making plans to flatten my tires or scratch the paint with a broken bottle, such as the one glinting in the ditch at my feet. I pressed the remote device in my pocket, and the car emitted a brief yelp and click as the locks closed down. The cat let out a screech, which sounded dire, though it didn’t move from its station on the sidewalk. I like cats, so I walked around the car to speak to this one. As I approached the animal slunk away, but I determined that it was in poor condition, spectrally thin, with a sparse coat and ears so infected by mites they were malformed.
I’d had the air conditioning on in the car, and the heat enveloped me, closing over my face like a hot iron mask, so severe and sudden I gasped for breath. I could see that Rita’s door was open behind the screen, which meant there was no air conditioning. I scanned the side for a window unit—maybe she cooled only one room—but there was nothing. How does anyone live in this heat? I thought. Then, from under Rita’s porch, from the plantain’s grove of stems, from beneath a dust-clad azalea in the neighbor’s yard, from the alley of the house next door, from the open window of the rusted Dodge Dart corroding in the ditch behind my Volvo, there issued a legion of cats.
They didn’t press me, they didn’t even approach, but their intention was clearly to appraise me, to determine whether I might be, in any sense, a potential source of food. Their collective gaze was chilling. If our respective sizes had been reversed, I would have stood in fear for my life. I looked from one to another; they were uniformly thin and scant of coat; every one of them had the encrusted, deformed ears that denote severe infection. I resisted an impulse to get back in the car, drive to the nearest vet, and purchase a gallon of ear-mite cream and a dozen Havahart traps. Hostility toward the human residents of this street animated me. Of course they were all poor, but couldn’t they see this suffering in their midst and organize to do something about it? Wasn’t there one among them who sympathized with these luckless scavengers, which surely provided them the service of keeping their vicinity rat-free?
Rita, for example. I cast an accusing eye at her door. She was standing there in the semidarkness behind the screen, looking back at me. She’s certainly getting enough to eat, I thought, and I scowled at her as she pushed the door open and stepped out into the light.
“Hello, Maxwell,” she said. “I thought you might not come.”
At the so
und of the screen door, the cats scattered. “Something should be done about these cats,” I said, going up the cement steps to her porch. “They’ve all got ear infections.”
“They’re feral cats,” she observed. “You could never catch them.”
“At least the SPCA could be notified,” I insisted. “The cats in Rome are in better shape than these.”
“Are they?” Rita said, without interest.
I was about to extol the virtues of the Roman cat association, which cares for the feline populations of various public areas, but before I began I looked at Rita, who so impossibly filled the doorway, and the shock of her transformation struck me anew. I searched for some dissembling remark. “It’s very hot,” I said.
“It’s a little better inside.” She stepped back, opening the screen door, and I looked past her into the house. When my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I realized I was looking into her bedroom. I was fixed between curiosity and foreboding, and stymied by the unsettling feeling of having done this before. It wasn’t déjà vu, it was an actual memory: Rita, the real Rita, with her slender wrists and light, penetrating eyes, opening another door while I hesitated, stamping snow from my boots. “For God’s sake, Maxwell,” she was saying. “Come on in. You know you’re dying to.” As I had then, I summoned my courage and stepped inside. Rita came in behind me, pausing to latch the screen. “Go on through to the kitchen,” she said. “There’s a fan in there.”
The shotgun house, so named because a rifle fired at the front door can hit a target, presumably fleeing for his life, on the back porch, is a singularly ungracious yet practical architectural development. The rooms are lined up with central doors opening from one to the other; the kitchen is always at the back. They are composed of from two to six rooms; most have four; Rita had three. My impression of the place, as I made for the promised fan, was of disorder and penury. The bed was a double—Rita would need the space—pushed into a corner, gray sheets rumpled, the single pillow afloat near the center. There was a chipped table pushed up against the metal footboard, on which a small television perched amid heterogeneous stacks that included books, dishes, and bags of chips. The next room was furnished with tables, though none for dining. They were pushed into the four corners and piled with more junk. Some of it was pottery of a brickish hue, much of it broken. As in the front room, the shades were drawn, the air stifling. There wasn’t a chair in sight.
The kitchen, while not welcoming, was a relief. A ceiling fan whirred overhead, churning the oppressive air. The back door was open, letting in a block of softened light. This room had wooden shutters, which were partly opened and latched, admitting the light in muted slashes. The furnishings were minimal, the appliances venerable, the countertops covered in chipped red linoleum, as was the floor; everything was clear and clean. In the center of the room a porcelain-topped table and two sturdy white chairs suggested the possibility of a tête-à-tête.
Rita followed me, taking down two plastic glasses from a shelf as I sat at the table. “Would you like some lemonade?” she asked.
“I would, yes,” I said. She opened the refrigerator, and I had a view of the largely empty shelves. She took out a plastic pitcher and set it on the table with the glasses. “So, Maxwell, how long will you be in town?” she said.
“Not long,” I replied. “It’s too hot.”
She poured out two glasses of lemonade—it was freshly made, not from a can—pulled out the other chair, and sat down across from me. “Sorry, I don’t have any ice,” she said.
I took a swallow from the glass. It was good, not too sweet. Rita watched me, but I wasn’t able to meet her eyes. I looked instead at her thick fingers wrapped around the glass. The nails were neatly filed, painted a babyish pink.
“So I heard you were married,” she said, “but I don’t see any ring.”
“I was,” I said. “It didn’t work out.”
“Any children?”
“No.”
“Me neither,” she said wistfully, which surprised me, as I had not imagined for one minute that Rita wanted children. I made no response, and a brief, studied silence fell between us. “So you’re a famous writer now,” she said.
“I wouldn’t say I was famous.”
“Well, you are around here.”
I shrugged. “What about you?” I said. “What are you doing?”
“Oh,” she said. She brushed her hair back in the familiar gesture that forced me to look at her face, that puzzling combination of Rita and not-Rita. “I’m still writing. I’ve almost finished the novel. It’s over a thousand pages, though. I guess I’ll have to cut it to get it published.”
So that was it, I thought, the “business proposition.” I was to help her find a publisher for a book she had been writing for twenty years.
“I work so slowly,” she said. I did a quick mental calculation: less than fifty pages a year. “I’ve been busy with other things, of course. And my health has not been good.”
“But you’re nearly done,” I said. “That’s great.”
Rita took a sip of her lemonade, allowing another heavy pause between us. “Do you think so, Maxwell?” she said. “Do you really think it would be great if I finished my novel?”
It was always games with her, I thought, and I was sick of playing already. There was a time when she could have baited me in this way for an hour or so and I would have gone along, reassuring her of my good intentions toward her, driven by lust to excessive civility, but those days were gone. What I really wanted now was to get as far away from her as I could. “What is it you want from me, Rita?” I said.
“I want to show you something.”
“The novel,” I said, keeping my voice interest-free.
She laughed. “No, Maxwell, not the novel. It’s not finished yet.” She pushed her chair back noisily and stood up, leaning on the table with the care of someone who expects to suffer in the process. I noticed a hectic flush rising from the fold of her neck to her cheeks, and a rough exhalation escaped her, not a groan but harsher than a sigh. “It’s in here,” she said, leading the way to the darkened, cluttered room. I followed her, consoling myself with the observation that this brought me closer to the street. Rita switched on a floor lamp, which shed a dull light over a table laden with pottery. She took up a piece and held it out to me. “It’s this,” she said.
I accepted it, as I was evidently intended to, and turned it over in my hands. It was a section of a bowl, poorly made of hard, red clay, the rim imprinted with uneven scoring, such as might be made with a stick. The clay was of uneven thickness, but smooth and cool to the touch. There was something about it, a lack of artifice, a naïveté that was not without charm. “What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a thousand years old,” Rita said, taking it from me. She took up another piece, a flat disk, chipped at one corner, scored at the edges like the other. “Look at this one.”
“Really?” I said. “How do you come by it?”
She smiled her it’s-a-secret smile, her wouldn’t-you-like-to-know smile, which had always infuriated me. “I’m the agent for it,” she said. “It’s extremely valuable. This stuff here is worth a million dollars, and there’s more to be had when I go back to New Mexico.”
I laid the disk on the table, careful to place it well away from the edge. So Rita, lovely Rita, hadn’t just gained a lot of weight, she’d also lost her mind. Did she really think I would believe a million dollars’ worth of antiquities had somehow made its way through history to a rickety table in this mildewed shack in the City That Care Forgot? Actually one could hardly find a better place to hide it—her neighbors were doubtless criminals, but they weren’t likely to steal a bunch of broken crockery. I ransacked my brain for something to say, something that would release me from this suffocating room.
Rita picked up another bit, a platelike piece, and raised it toward the lamp. “This is my favorite,” she said.
I was struck by the alteration in her profile, which had once bee
n very fine, though she’d always had a weak chin. Now she had no chin. Malcolm was right: Her skin was sallow, unhealthy; the crescents beneath her eyes looked bruised. Time had gone hard on her, worn her down, her, who had been so rebellious, so uncompromising. As she set the plate back among the curious rubble, my irritation turned to sadness, and I resigned myself to accepting whatever story she had to tell. It wouldn’t be true, any of it, but it would be revealing. “Where did you get this stuff, Rita?”
“From the Zuni,” she said. “I was out there with them for a long time. They’re a matriarchal culture, you know, they don’t much trust men. I got pretty involved, trying to help them deal with the Bureau. I’m the only white woman they trust. The museums are wild to buy this stuff, but the council is afraid they’ll get cheated, so I agreed to handle it for them.”
“Is that where you went when you left Vermont?”
“No,” she said. “Not right away.” She turned to me with an absurdly coquettish smile that suggested she detected the subtext of my question—when you left me in Vermont, when you ran away from me.
“Danny and I went to Alaska first. You can make a lot of money up there. We worked in a fish canning factory.”
“Good lord,” I said. “I hope you finally bought a pair of practical shoes.”
She laughed. “I did. I had to. It was very strange up there. It’s light all the time. The factory runs in twelve-hour shifts, everyone drinks a lot of coffee. In an odd way I liked it, but maybe it was because Danny was happy there.” She waved her hand across the room. “It’s all in there,” she said, “in the novel.”
I followed her gesture through the gloom to a table strewn with debris: piles of audiotapes, a Walkman, envelopes stuffed with paper, several bags of chips—did she live on potato chips?—crumpled tissues, a stapler, a coffee cup, and in the midst of it all, with a narrow space cleared all around like a castle brooding over a moat, a stack of four white stationery boxes with a pair of reading glasses neatly folded on top. On the floor, leaning against one of the table legs, was the battered typewriter case I recognized across the expanse of twenty years. It had spent a month of its mechanical life on the kitchen table in my cramped apartment in Vermont. I’d written a brief note on it once, which came back to me in its entirety: Back at 10. adore you. M. “So you’re still using the Olivetti,” I observed.
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