by Tosca Lee
“I know, Sheila. But what happened tonight to cause this breakdown?” I hated the calm, measured sound of my own voice. It reminded me of the way Lucian talked to me that day in the bookstore.
“He—he doesn’t know if he’s coming back. Oh, Clay!” My name became a tight keen.
I sighed, tried to summon empathy. Had Aubrey cried like this when she left me? Had she ever shed a tear even? “Sheila, where are your children?”
“With Dan. They’re with Dan. He took them. I don’t mean he took them, but for the night.”
“All right. And you’re not worried about them, right?” I couldn’t imagine either one of them doing anything stupid when it came to their children.
“No. I’m not. I’m all right.” She inhaled sharply, her breath catching. “He doesn’t know what he wants. It’s all right. I’m not angry.”
I stared at the receiver. She wasn’t angry? She had cheated on him, and she wasn’t angry? I had to work to suppress my rage, rising like tar on hot pavement. “I don’t know what to tell you. It sounds like you have it figured—”
“You can’t hate her,” she said suddenly.
“Who?”
“Aubrey. She just didn’t know what she wanted. It was a mistake. She knew it. She had to know it.”
“Sheila, you’re babbling,” I said more firmly. I was trying to be diplomatic but found it more and more difficult. I was glad I wasn’t in town where I might feel compelled to ask if I ought to check on her. I was sick of being a good guy. “You know what I think? I think you need to figure out what you want.”
Silence. And then a sniffle. “You’re right. You’re right, Clay.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Thank you.”
I nodded, though I knew she couldn’t see it. I waited a moment more to hear the soft click of the line before hanging up the receiver.
25
On the morning I left Cabo, my plane sat on the tarmac for an hour. The storm had caused cancellations and delays, and now that the sun was shining again, planes were baking in line on the runway like fish laid out to dry. I glanced repeatedly at my seatmate, trying to ascertain if he was less human than he looked in his Bermudas and flip-flops, until he dropped his head back, let his mouth fall open, and started snoring.
Gazing out the window, I stared at the gray cement until I, too, dozed. I woke, dry mouthed, just before the plane began its descent into the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. I wondered if I should have kept Sheila on the phone longer or called Helen, wondered where Lucian had been these five days, what the committee thought of my book.
My book. Sometime in the last few days it had evolved from my manuscript to “my book.” I had already decided that if Brooks and Hanover didn’t take it, I would submit it elsewhere. Maybe I would ask Katrina to represent it, to take it to one of the Titans—Random House, perhaps, or Hachette.
But I needed to know how it ended.
Sitting in a bank of seats at my gate in Dallas, I reached for my cell phone but hesitated before turning it on. Pushing that button carried so much finality; either there would be a message waiting from Helen, or there wouldn’t. If there were, I might know now, before I even boarded my plane, the fate of my book. Or at least whether I should be calling Katrina.
What I would not know is how to finish it.
I didn’t turn it on. I told myself that I should welcome this limbo. I had languished in purgatory through my separation, in between appointments with Lucian, nearly every moment of the last three months. Now, perhaps on the cusp of something—some new direction—I should sit here during this layover and savor the feeling of truly being in transit. In between.
I put the phone in my bag, shoved it toward the bottom, pulled out a pen and the last few pages of one of the manuscripts I had taken with me. My legs felt swollen again, the skin tight across my calves. I had meant to walk around for a little while, but they would only swell again on the next flight, and I had promised myself I would return home with every piece of work I had brought with me finished. Every piece except my own.
My pen hovered above the page as, with the same apprehension with which I noticed Aubrey’s increasingly frequent absences in the months leading up to my discovery of her affair, I wondered where Lucian could be, where he went when he was not with me.
That’s so pathetic.
Someone was staring at me—a woman, sitting in a row of boarding area seats across from mine and one row over. Her legs were crossed beneath a long, stretchy skirt. Her brown hair was slightly frizzy, pulled back into a ponytail that gave her a girlish appearance, though a closer look at the lines around her eyes and mouth put her, I guessed, in her forties. She wore one of those fabricated pieces of jewelry they sold at women’s stores, the kind Aubrey used to disdain for looking like an antique or an art piece, though they were mass-produced and sold at exorbitant prices. Except for the jewelry, she would have fit in perfectly in Boston; she was wearing all black.
“Look at that sunburn,” she said to me, the furrow above her lip marred by a thin scar. “The committee loved what we gave them, by the way.”
I almost dropped the pages on my lap, so great was my relief. It was quickly followed by anger. “Where have you been?” I hated how transparent I was, how desperate I sounded.
“Roaming.” She pursed her lips into a little kitten mouth. “I thought you deserved a vacation before things got busy.”
“Busy? What do you mean busy? You said our time was short.”
She came over to sit next to me. She was broad-hipped but not ungainly, her nails manicured with those square, white tips, the appeal of which I had never understood.
“They called it compelling, brilliant. They compared you to Poe, to Blake’s Urizen.”
I exhaled a silent exclamation, unable to speak.
“I’d ask for a slightly larger advance than what they’re offering, but otherwise, I think we’re almost set.”
It was happening. It would happen. I fell back against the seat, papers sliding to the floor around me. And then I lowered my head to my hand. And laughed. It bubbled out of me, grew in volume until I was laughing so hard that the sound came out with the same near-hysteria I had noted in Lucian—and then I laughed harder.
Long moments later, that wild, roiling laugh still in my ears, Lucian regarded me with patronizing calm before reminding me that my story was not finished.
“You’re right. And I have”—I checked my watch, which struck me as so ironic I almost laughed again—“a half hour before I board.”
“Then calm down and listen.”
I was going to publish. The advance didn’t matter. But I would negotiate anyway.
“As you’ve noticed, I’m something of a philosopher. Now, after the ascension of the God-man and the conversion of these believers, I thought perhaps he was tired of being abandoned by the strongest of his creations, the most favored of his people. Who can guess the reasoning of El? I only know this: He is the author of the paradigm of the unlikely. Clay, listen!”
“I’m listening.” I could buy a new table. I would get some new pants. I would go out on dates. Would Aubrey hear? Would she call to congratulate me?
“I’ve said Israel was special to El. But now something happened. Up until those days there was a great separation between the Jews and everyone else. The Jews were set apart by law and favor of El, and the rest of the world was on its own unless someone converted. El was a faithful lover of his people. But now these new believers were going out and giving this message indiscriminately to anyone they met, Jew and non-Jew alike. The rich man, the widow, the priest, the fishwife, the orphaned beggar on the street.
“Let me tell you something, these non-Jews, upon hearing and believing and accepting this new grace, this new gift, looked exactly the same as the other believers to my eye. All those shining stones like luminescent pearls in the muddied waters.”
I recalled my vision on the beach. I had thought it a daydream.
“I saw this with appalled fascination. I laughed like a fool, much like you just now, and heard something wild in my voice. Why not? Why not. Tell them all. How like El to be so extravagant and so longsuffering. Why limit his affection—and now it had grown to a great and totally undeserved gift—to any one race? Soon enough the entire ball of earth would be populated with pardoned, shining souls, a great deposit of glowing stones, imperfect yet brought into the fold of that relationship as only that first man and woman had experienced so long ago.
“I was manic, despairing. El had bestowed upon these believers the rights of his own children, authority over all fallen things, if they wanted it. Over me.” She shoved a square-tipped fingernail into her sternum. “Imagine! And now I was being ordered about, told to leave, cast out of homes and presences by an authority belonging only to El himself.”
I had never, in a thousand years, thought of this. And now my thoughts returned to Mrs. Russo, to the steeliness about her the day at the co-op, at the seeming sanctuary of our apartment building.
“I had found my place with Lucifer, and among you. How could I bear to be ordered about, ruled over by humans so frail and filthy and base?” At some point she had gripped my arm, and now those square nails dug into it. I remembered again the sight of her on the T, pulling at her skin as though it were covered with fungus.
“But I need not have worried. Lucifer, clever prince, had a plan. His efforts until then were paltry by comparison. We had been a haphazard force at best, only tenuously united—if you haven’t noticed, loyalty and devotion are not our strong suits. Now Lucifer unleashed a great storm of demons, myself among them, a battery of guerilla assaults, and attacked the children of El with every imaginable weapon.” Her eyes were mad, her lips animated by a terrible smile.
“How he hated these new children of El! They might be assured of a future, but they were mortal yet.”
“What did you do?” I sat very still.
“We killed many of them. A dead believer is a believer who cannot spread the word of redemption to any others. And I’m certain their ends made a good many humans think twice about making the same choice.”
In my mind I saw the slain woman, the blood mottling her blonde hair on the pavement. My jubilation over my manuscript sobered.
“Lucifer conscripted us all. He would show the Almighty how quickly the redeemed would forget him, how little this covenant would change anything. The clay people were a miserable disappointment, and so they would continue to be, redeemed or not. They would scoff at El’s great act of grace, and Lucifer would see to it. Lucifer, the accuser called Satan, declared war.”
A rustle of gray passed in the periphery of my vision. Two nuns in orthopedic shoes and stockings were looking for seats. Lucian stood up and, with a gracious smile and flash of a white watch face on her wrist, indicated her seat and the empty one next to it. “Sisters, please.”
The nuns thanked her, and Lucian, demurring, glared at me over a perfect smile.
26
My burn had turned to a tan in some places—and a moist, bubbling peeling in others—the day Helen called me in to her office.
“Clay, you did something here. It’s really amazing.” She gestured to the pile of pages on her desk, my manuscript—my book. It seemed such a part of me, now severed and handed over, that it might as well have been my arm in front of her, my hand with the crooked pinky and calloused middle finger. And I felt both pride and bereavement, staring at it as she told me Anu would get me a contract to look over by Friday, that they’d like to release it in next year’s second season if I thought I could finish it in the next two months. Unable to take my eyes off it, I asked for five thousand dollars more than what I knew they would offer me, and Helen shrugged, saying she didn’t see why they couldn’t make that happen.
“Marketing is excited about this one. I think they’re going to have a heyday with it.”
I smiled as one who comes out of a dream.
“Sheila wasn’t at her desk,” I said as I was about to leave. I had spent my short morning commute wondering what I would say to her, if I should even acknowledge our strange conversation or if she might be embarrassed by it, as I was by my lack of sensitivity. I had since realized that it wasn’t just her call that had been so disturbing but her alarming emotional state. She had always been the one to listen with limpid gaze and sympathetic tilt of her head, the one who communicated as much by her silence as her simple words.
Of late those blue eyes, the girlish curves of her face and peak of her chin had struck me as somehow dangerous, a weapon wielded as recklessly as a sleepwalker with a gun. But after talking with her, I worried and wondered whether I ought to have invited her to call me back later, whether I should have called her the next morning to see how she was.
“She’s taking a few days off for personal reasons,” Helen said with a slight smile that seemed to say she knew exactly what those personal reasons were, that it was good of me to ask, though she had no intention of telling me.
As I turned at the door to thank her, I found the small floral back pillow abandoned on her chair and Helen coming toward me, her glasses swaying on their chain against her breasts. I could not remember when Helen had actually gotten up from her chair to hold the door for me and see me out. I could not remember the last time I had actually felt respected for my work as an editor or a writer.
But I liked it.
Inside the men’s room, Phil stared bleakly into the mirror as he washed his hands. He looked beyond tired, which was strange. Always upbeat, even through his divorce and whirlwind wedding and birth of his son only a year and a half later, he had been the first—the only one, actually—to invite me out after my separation from Aubrey. We had drunk a few beers together at a couple of Red Sox games, but it had felt mechanical, our arranged camaraderie, and I had politely declined his invitations since.
“You all right?”
He nodded. “A lot happened while you were gone.”
“Yeah?” I asked, trying to sound interested. “Helen said Sheila took a few days off. Is she doing all right?”
Phil sighed, tugged a paper towel from the dispenser. “She went to the hospital for alcohol poisoning a few nights ago.”
I stared, my stomach contracting in on itself. “What?” In my mind I calculated the days, thinking back to the night she called. I felt guilty and not a little reprehensible.
“She’s going to be all right, though I guess it was close. If Dan hadn’t come back to pick up Amanda’s epilepsy pills, who knows.”
“I can’t believe it. It’s so uncharacteristic of her,” I said woodenly. “It’s the last thing Dan needs right now.”
Phil looked at me strangely. “She’s going through a tough time right now, Clay. People do stupid things at times like this.” I didn’t know whether he meant to insinuate it or not, but I remembered my own drinking after Aubrey left.
“I guess you’re right.” But I didn’t believe our situations were similar at all.
“We’ve been helping with the kids so Dan can get some work done.”
Now I understood the look of fatigue. Sheila’s three children were, if I remembered correctly, between the ages of two and eight.
I almost said to let me know if I could do anything to help, but I stopped. “I’m sorry to hear all of this,” I said instead.
“Hey, I meant to tell you, your manuscript is something. You need to get that thing finished, man, because I can’t wait to see how it ends.”
Me, too.
MY VISION SPECKLED AS I paused on the first floor, midway up from the basement laundry. My legs felt swollen, tight, and wooden. I caught my breath.
I need to get more exercise. And while that was true, I also knew I was neither overweight nor terribly out of shape. When I was done with this manuscript, when I finished and it was out the door, I would see a doctor.
As I let myself back into my apartment, I wondered again if Lucian, once he had accomplished his
mission, would disappear from my life. Or would he loiter, watching me without my knowing it, as he had on the T? There was a time when I could not imagine enduring his intrusions. Now I found I could not imagine a life without them.
That night I stayed up well past two o’clock working on my book.
By the time I went to bed, I tallied more than 300 pages, over 85,000 words—a perfectly respectable length for a book. It needed nothing now but an ending. But my calendar remained empty.
Our time was getting shorter, he had said. Then where was he?
TWO DAYS LATER SHEILA’S desk stood empty. Not only empty of Sheila herself and the perennial cardigan on the back of her chair but of the framed photos of her family, the pencil holder her son Justin made out of a frozen juice can, the painted rock frog paperweight with googly eyes and Caleb’s name carefully painted on the side. Only her candy dish remained.
When I asked Phil what had happened, he said she had given her notice, that she was taking the kids and moving to South Carolina where her parents had retired to a golf course.
“Has anyone called Dan?” I felt vaguely like a schmuck. I should have done it myself, had thought I should many times.
“I’ve tried, but he won’t answer. I don’t think he wants to talk.”
I knew that feeling. And I didn’t blame him.
FOUR DAYS. IT HAD been four days.
That evening I tried to work in spite of my gnawing anxiety and annoyance, but there was nothing more to add to the manuscript. I felt powerless, creatively stunted, and my calendar remained empty.
I tried to finish editing jacket copy for next season’s releases, to remember what I had loved about a new author’s manuscript enough to go to bat for a larger advance . . . and then went back to my book, to tinker with grammar, rephrase sentences that had nothing wrong with them, check for overuse of hyphens—a writing tic I had only recently discovered that I possessed. I did all of this with growing disquiet, merely for the sake of doing it, unable to quell the unease snaking through my gut.