“It’s a real problem with the novel,” she said. “I was in Arizona for a few years, and my landlady there let me use her computer, so some of it’s on a disk. But most of it is typed. Somebody told me editors don’t even look at typed manuscripts anymore, they want everything in an e-mail. Is that true?”
I considered Rita’s question. The old anecdote about Thomas Wolfe’s manuscript arriving at Max Perkins’s office in an orange crate came to mind. “They’ll still look at manuscripts, but they don’t like it,” I said. “And it goes against you, right at the gate—it proves you’re out of touch.”
This amused Rita. “Out of touch!” she said. “That could be the title of my book. That’s the point, isn’t it?”
“Is the title still Dark Witness?” I said.
“You’ve got a good memory, Maxwell.”
“I know,” I said.
She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead. “It doesn’t have a title right now.” A thousand pages, I thought, and no title. Her forehead and upper lip were damp. It was stifling in the room, and she was rubbing the palm of one hand with the thumb of the other, an odd habit I attributed to nervousness.
“So when you left Alaska, you went to New Mexico,” I said.
“Not directly. We went down to Spokane and stayed there for a while, downtown in this old hotel, until we ran out of money. Danny went off the deep end; she really lost it in Spokane, and she wound up in the rehab center, so I was broke and they threw me out of the hotel. I didn’t like Spokane. Spokane is really America. That’s where they test products to see if Americans will buy them. One day I just packed up the backpack and the Olivetti and hitchhiked to Arizona. That was tough. I almost got killed doing that. Truckers should pretty much all be rounded up and shot. Except the women.”
I imagined Rita, the real Rita, standing on a highway in the rain, somewhere out there, out West, with her backpack and her typewriter case, dropping her raised thumb to her side as the eighteen-wheeler fastens her in its blinding headlights and she hears the rapid downshift of the gears. It would come to a stop well past her; she’d have to run to meet it, clamber up through the steam rising from the tires into the dark interior of the cab. “Women truckers?” I said.
“Sure,” Rita replied. “There are women truckers, Maxwell. It’s a real subculture. They’re mostly farm girls who couldn’t take the abuse and got out. A woman trucker saved my life. She loaned me the deposit on a little place in Tucson. She tried to talk me into being a trucker too. They make good money and you’re really on your own, but that life didn’t appeal to me.”
“No,” I said.
“I mean, I could have done it, but it just seemed so pointless. So I found this place in Tucson, a little house on a ranch, and the landlady, Katixa Twintree, she said I could work on the ranch for part of the rent. I got a job waitressing down the road, so I was okay there for a while. Katy is half Basque, half Indian, quite a fierce individual. She had a girlfriend, Mathilde, French, a real bitch. Katy is fantastic. I was completely in love with her, and Mathilde was completely jealous of me, so it was a mess. I couldn’t sleep at all. I was writing a lot. Katy asked to read it; she was very excited by it, that’s when she loaned me her computer, which made Mathilde insane. There was a huge scene. Katy just let Mathilde and me fight it out, she is so wise, and Mathilde left. So then I moved in with Katy, and I guess that’s the happiest I’ve ever been. Katixa Twintree was it for me, the love of my life.”
As Rita told me this ridiculous story, my eyes wandered around the dim room, trying, without much success, to make out what was actually in some of the stacks of rubble on the various tables. At her concluding remark—which I took to be rather pointedly directed at me, as if she imagined she still had the power to wound me—my attention returned to her, and I saw that she was so moved by her own history there were tears standing in her eyes. This irked me. “So why aren’t you still with her?” I asked coldly.
She gave me a wan smile. “I guess she was too good for me, Maxwell,” she said. “Just like you.” She brought her hand to her chest and the color drained from her face; even her lips turned greenish. She took a few steps toward the bedroom. “I have to lie down,” she said.
I followed, my irritation replaced by a flutter of panic. “Are you all right?” She gained the bed, falling across it with a groan, facedown. I stood in the doorway gazing at the unappealing bulk of her. Her sandals, slipping from her feet, made two sharp raps on the floor. Her skirt was pulled askew, revealing the network of broken veins inside her knees. Her ankles were bruised, swollen, and the soles of her feet were filthy. As I watched, she rolled heavily onto her side so that she was looking back at me. “Would you get me a glass of water?” she said.
I went to the kitchen, relieved to have a mission, poured out the remains of Rita’s lemonade, rinsed the glass, and filled it with water. “I’ve got to get out of here,” I said softly. There was a back door; I could easily have snuck out that way, but it was a dishonorable course. As she always had, Rita was putting me through a moral exigency. I thought of my cozy house in Vermont, and of Pamela, my neighbor, my friend, and my lover, who would know exactly how to preserve her integrity and still get the hell out of Rita’s kitchen. I longed for her, not to hold her close but to be in her kitchen, to sit at her polished oak table while she prepared our afternoon coffee, to hear her aimless conversation as I watched the slanting sun flicker among the bright leaves of the geraniums blooming lavishly in the window. Light, light, I thought. Not this shuttered obfuscation, not this universe of lies. I turned off the faucet and carried the dripping glass through the sweltering gloom to Rita’s bed.
She had turned onto her back and propped herself against the pillow, her skirt neatly spread over her legs. She was breathing slowly, consciously, her hand still open across her heart. She took the water without comment and drank half the glass, then motioned for me to set it on the table at the foot of the bed. This allowed me a close view of the clutter around the television, which included a plate of desiccated cottage cheese peppered with something that looked suspiciously like mouse droppings.
“Thank you,” Rita said.
“Are you better now?”
“I’m not getting any better,” she said.
I made no response to this self-dramatizing statement. It occurred to me that the whole thing, from the invaluable pottery through the unfinished novel to her physical frailty, was a lie. She was making it up as she went along. There was no “business proposition,” she had just wanted to get me into her wretched life and see if she could make me feel responsible for it. Outside a catfight flared up, a brief interlude of yowling, then it was quiet and the only sound was Rita’s measured, phlegmy breathing.
My eyes settled on a stack of paperbacks next to the disturbing cheese plate. They were cheap romance novels, their lurid covers featuring women in distress, barely constrained bosoms, swollen lips, streaming hair. “How can you read this stuff?” I said.
Rita sniffed. “I just read it to pass the time. It’s harmless. It’s better than television.” I picked up the book on top, anxious to avoid the vision of Rita, sprawled before me, defending her intellectual pursuits. The passionate but terrified damsel on the cover had pale eyes and a mass of golden curls, very like Rita. I wondered if this had influenced her choice. The title was something absurd.
“Will you do something for me, Maxwell?” Rita said.
I put the book down, careful not to upset the stack. “Is it the business proposition?”
“Yes,” she said. “There might be something in it for you.”
“I’m really fairly busy, Rita,” I said.
“It wouldn’t take much of your time.”
“Is it to do with the pottery?”
“Yes. It is. There’s a gallery uptown that deals in pre-Columbian stuff. I wrote to the guy and sent him some photos, but I don’t have a phone so I had to ask him to write back, but he hasn’t done it. He’s probably suspicious
because I don’t have a phone. I’m not well enough to go clear up there—I don’t have a car, and the bus stop is nearly a mile. Besides, if someone like you went to talk to him, well, he’d take it seriously.”
“But I don’t know anything about pre-Columbian art,” I protested.
“You don’t need to know anything. You just have to tell him you’ve seen the stuff in the photos and you know me and it’s not a hoax or a scam. He’ll be excited about it; he’ll be over here like a shot trying to get it for nothing. It might be good if you were here when he comes, so he won’t try to take advantage of me. I know what this stuff is worth.”
“So, basically, you just want me to vouch for your character, is that it?”
“Sure,” she said. “That’s it.”
I had not thus far looked Rita in the eye, but at this point I did. She held my gaze in that icy, still, calculating way I remembered, which had once so unnerved me that I gave in, looked away, agreed to whatever she wanted. There, disguised by puffy flesh, were the same limpid windows to her mercenary heart. Did she remember how she had reduced me to shadowing her, to crouching in the snow outside a window, too mortified to move? Did the two hundred dollars, a full month’s rent, that she took from the envelope in my sock drawer weigh more than a feather on her conscience? Even now, in desperate straits, alone, unloved, and unlovable, she looked upon me with thinly disguised contempt. A hint of a smile lifted the corners of her mouth. What was I going to do? Let her down? Wouldn’t that just be typical.
“How recklessly you’ve lived,” I said.
“Well, Maxwell,” she said, disengaging her eyes from mine, “we can’t all be successful.”
I sneered. “Is that your best shot?”
“I could give you maybe five percent of the deal,” she said.
I laughed. “You really are incorrigible, Rita. Do you seriously imagine you have anything I want?”
She brought her hand back to her heart. The color in her face drained again, but not because she was struck by my irrefutable assertion. Her voice was confident. “You’d give your soul to have written my novel,” she said.
I glanced away, to the room where the boxes gathered dust in the gloom. It occurred to me that they might be empty.
“Go ahead,” Rita said. “Have a look. You know you’re dying to.”
I turned back, regarding Rita narrowly. Another suspicion had come to mind, that I would find myself in those pages, or Rita’s version of me. Of what happened between us. She raised her head from the pillow, her lips parted in a menacing smile.
“I really don’t have the time,” I said, consulting my watch.
She dropped back onto the pillow. “You always were such a coward.”
“Right,” I said. “Let’s leave it at that. Great seeing you, Rita.” I headed for the door, fully expecting some further indictment of my character, some final cut, but she was silent. As I unlatched the screen and stepped into the blinding wall of heat, she moaned, turning ponderously toward the wall. I closed the screen behind me and went out to the street, scattering cats in my wake.
I had lied to Rita. I wasn’t particularly busy; in fact I was at loose ends that day, as I had been for weeks. My work wasn’t going well; I was avoiding the desk. As I wandered about my rented apartment, the confrontation in that depressing house began to take on color and depth, until I was convinced something had happened. I called Malcolm, who agreed to meet me for drinks near his store. I was eager to talk about Rita with someone who had known her when she was what I now thought of as the “real” Rita, the bewitching Rita, who had disappeared for twenty years and reappeared as a slovenly harridan to reproach me with the desert that was her life. Her parting remark, a continuation of an argument we’d had long ago, rankled me. Clearly, in Rita’s view, my success only proved the justice of her charge: As a writer I was eager to please, as a man I was afraid to live.
“Well, look where it got you,” I said to the specter of Rita, hovering about me as I changed my shirt. I caught sight of my torso in the wardrobe mirror; was there a thickening at the waist? Pamela had been after me to join the local gym. “Exercise,” I said. “Healthy food, hygiene, air, light, life.”
“How well did you know Rita?” I asked Malcolm. We were conveying our full martini glasses to a toadstool-sized table in the bar.
“You mean when we were in college?” he said. We sat down and pulled our chairs in close. “I guess I knew her about as well as I could.” His smile was wry; of course he’d slept with her.
“Did you ever read any of her writing?”
“No,” he said. “We weren’t that intimate. I didn’t know she was interested in that sort of thing until she left to go up there…where you went.”
“So she was secretive about it.”
“She was.” Malcolm speared an olive. “Was it any good?”
“It was different,” I said.
“In what way?”
In what way? In a way that made us all sick with envy. Even the professor was torn between his excitement to have such a student and his despair at his own turgid prose. Rita’s plot was simple enough, a love triangle, a tale of abandonment and revenge. But it wasn’t the plot that took the reader by storm; it was the style. “Brutal yet elegant,” the professor suggested, which was about right, about as close as I could get. Rita sat there, placid and opaque as a cat, while we heaped on the praise. “It’s the speed that gets me,” one of us opined, “it’s like lightning.” “The world is so sensual,” another exclaimed. “It’s lush and hot, but somehow it’s invigorating.” My turn came around. What did I say? “Original, intriguing.” Something like that. After class Rita came up to me and asked if I’d go have a drink with her and say a bit more. “Yours is the only opinion I really value, Maxwell,” she said. “Just between us, you’re the only one up here who can write worth a damn, including Simon.” Simon was the handsome professor; Rita was rumored to be having an affair with him. I took her arm, gratified. Later, when I cared, she would retract this statement. When it suited her, Rita would tell me that I was, in her opinion, just another talentless hack.
“So, did she ever get anything published?” Malcolm asked.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Then it couldn’t be too good, right?” he concluded.
“Right,” I agreed.
After our third round of martinis, Malcolm called home to say he wasn’t coming for dinner and we walked over to Galatoire’s, where I switched to whiskey and ate a piece of fish. Several old acquaintances stopped by our table to tell me I hadn’t changed. One, a pretty, vapid realtor who had sung in a band in college, enthusiastically informed me that she had seen one of my novels in a bookstore. Malcolm told me about his children: One was doing well, another had stolen a car from a priest. Well, borrowed; he took it back the next morning. We left the restaurant and went to several bars. It felt good, drinking, exchanging witticisms about the scene, laughing, eventually shouting. At the end I left Malcolm on the phone, begging his wife for a ride home, and stumbled across Esplanade to my apartment in the Faubourg. I’d forgotten about Rita, my novel, Pamela, my waistline. I burst into Donna Elvira’s aria about how much she wants to tear out Don Giovanni’s heart. A dog, investigating a garbage can, paused, offered himself as an audience. Sì, I sang. Gli vo’ cavare il cor. Sì. The dog, evidently impressed, sat down. “That’s Donna Elvira,” I confided, moving on. “She’s been betrayed.”
I turned the corner to my street. The door was, I reminded myself, the third on the right. It was dark, but I could make out the concrete steps and flimsy iron rails, what my neighbors called “the stoop,” on which, in pleasant weather, they were inclined to sit and chat with the passersby. Sociable town, I thought. It really wasn’t a bad place at all. Gradually it dawned on me that there was something on my stoop. It appeared to be an enormous cloth bag, stuffed and drooping over the rail. To my horror it moved, it rose, it came at me out of the darkness. “Maxwell,” Rita said. “You�
��ve been drinking.”
“Exactly right,” I said, veering past her. “Exactly right, and now I’m going to sleep.” I pulled my keys from my pocket, but too eagerly; they slipped through my fingers and clattered to the pavement. Rita, for such a large person, was quick. She snatched them up and went ahead to the door. “Poor Maxwell,” she said, “you need help.” In a moment the door was open and she stood inside looking out at me.
“I need help,” I agreed. I waved my arms and stamped my feet. “Help! Help!” I shouted. “A woman has broken into my house.”
Rita came down quickly, shushing me. “Stop, Maxwell. You’ll wake your neighbors.” She tried to take my arm, but I brushed her away. “You really shouldn’t drink,” she said. “You never could hold it.”
“Get away,” I said. “Stay away from me.” She had placed herself between me and the stoop.
“Stop it, Maxwell,” she said. “You’re acting like you don’t know me.”
“I don’t know you,” I cried. “You’re not Rita. You’ve killed her somehow, out there, out West. You studied her and you know a lot about her, but you’re not Rita. You’re an impostor.” I dodged around her, reached the steps, but somehow when I got inside she was so close behind me I couldn’t shut the door. I plunged into the dark interior. Rita followed, closing the door and flicking on the light switch. “I need a drink,” I said.
She leaned against the bookcase, watching me, breathing heavily, her lips parted and her tongue protruding. Panting, I thought. Like a dog. I availed myself of the whiskey bottle on the sideboard and poured out a glass. How was I going to get rid of her now that she was inside, blocking all the space between me and the door? “Why are you here, Rita?” I said, keeping my voice calm.
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