“That’d be perfect,” Cindy said, “if I had a computer.”
“So take mine,” Sylvia said suddenly.
“Don’t you need it for work?” Cindy said.
“Not the one in the office here,” Sylvia said. “The one I have at home. When Minnie got sick, she bought a new laptop. She wanted to be able to participate in message boards devoted to spiritual healing, and she wanted to be able to do it from any room in the condo, so that once she got sicker, she could do it on the couch or even lying in bed. Me, I used to go online when she was sleeping, look for new cures.” She paused. “But I don’t need it now. Honest. The thing’s just sitting there, gathering dust.”
“But I wouldn’t even know how to set a computer up,” Cindy said. “I’d probably electrocute the building or set myself on fire or something.”
“It’s not that hard,” Lise said, “and I’ll help you. Once you’ve got the laptop from Sylvia, just give me a call and we’ll work out a time for me to come over and set everything up for you and teach you how to use it.”
“It’s not too late,” Diana said, reiterating the message Sylvia and Lise were trying to communicate. “Look at me: I’m changing—at least my body is; the jury’s still out on the head—and I’m nearly a decade and a half older than you. Why, I’m practically old enough to be your very young mother.”
At that, Cindy’s eyes welled up.
“What did I say?” Diana asked, perplexed.
“I think I’m pregnant!” Cindy blurted out.
“But that’s wonderful news,” Diana said, “isn’t it? Isn’t this what you wanted?”
Just then, they were interrupted by an insistent pounding on the door. The woman on the other side of the glass was wearing sunglasses, even though it was almost dark, and a yellow raincoat. Tying back her dark hair was the unmistakable pattern of a Hermes scarf.
The pounding continued as Sylvia rose and went to the door, where she pointed at the sign: CLOSED.
Cindy came hustling up behind Sylvia, wiping at her eyes with one hand as she reached for the lock with the other and turned the key that was hanging from it.
“Don’t mind Sylvia,” Cindy said with an apologetic smile. “She’s very ornery, but she’s the best cook in Connecticut. What do you need?”
“I’ve got a very important person who knows food coming to my house in an hour,” said the woman in the yellow raincoat, “and I haven’t got anything to give her, certainly not anything impressive.”
“Well, I’m sure Sylvia will be only too happy to help you out,” Cindy said, ignoring the dark look Sylvia shot at her. “Hmm…let’s see…what do we have here?” Cindy walked the length of one of the display cases.
“Give her the veal,” Lise suggested. “Veal always impresses.”
“Oh, yes,” Diana agreed. “And that veal looks like it has artichokes and red peppers and all sorts of wonderful things around it.”
“But don’t they treat those baby veals awful bad?” Cindy said.
“No true foodie cares about that,” Sylvia said. “Do you think Julia Child cared about that? Julia’d toss a lobster into a pot or slaughter a calf without even blinking.” Sylvia looked at the woman in the yellow raincoat. “You did say your dinner guest knows food, didn’t you?”
The woman nodded.
“Ooh, you’ve got shrimps here!” Cindy said. “Give her the shrimps too!”
Ten minutes later, the woman in the yellow raincoat was gone, Sylvia’s three friends having helped her load up her car with covered dishes containing chilled shrimp that had been boiled in chardonnay butter, the veal with artichokes, a charlotte russe for dessert, and a dozen designer cupcakes.
“I never did cupcakes before,” Sylvia’d told the woman, delicately packing up the cakes, each one a work of art. “I always figured, you know, if people want cake, they’ll want a real cake, not some miniature thing. But then I was reading a magazine while waiting in the doctor’s office and realized they were all the rage—some people even prefer them for weddings—so I figured I’d better expand my culinary horizons. Anyway, here you go.” She handed over the bag. “Your rinky-dink cakes.”
To make up for Sylvia, Cindy handed the customer a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, twin to the one the women had been drinking, at no extra charge.
“See?” Cindy said to Sylvia. “You need us. We keep you from doing dumb things like smoking cigarettes and getting into trouble by being rude to your own customers. That only took us all ten minutes and that lady gave you two hundred dollars.”
“You really think you’re pregnant?” Sylvia said.
Cindy nodded.
“And now you’re not sure what you want to do about it?” Sylvia asked.
Cindy nodded again.
“Crap,” Sylvia said. Then she reached out and, gently, folded the younger woman into her arms.
Lise
Cindy had Tuesdays off from work, and since I had no morning classes on Tuesdays, I picked up the laptop from Sylvia the night before. I’d offered to bring it over to her right away that night, figuring she’d be eager for it, but Cindy said it would be better to wait until Eddie was out and that he was going to meet with one of his band mates the next morning to work on writing some new songs.
“I just want it to be a surprise for him,” she said brightly. “We’ve never owned a computer before.”
Their apartment, when I arrived, was not what I expected. Of course, I can’t say I expected anything specific, per se, and it’s not as though my cottage was all that much bigger than the space she and Eddie were sharing. But her apartment looked like the kind of place that people only inhabit temporarily, as a weigh station to something bigger or more permanent. And yet, Cindy and Eddie had been there for six years, ever since her dad kicked her out. And when the train passed through down the street, the windows open to catch the early spring air, it was damn loud.
“Where do you want it?” I asked.
“Right over there,” she said, indicating a round table that I guessed passed for the dining room table at the far end from the living room.
I set the laptop down, hooked her up, and explained her Internet options.
Once the setup was complete, she smiled widely, like a kid on her birthday.
“Say, do you still have a little time left?” She looked suddenly shy and hurried to say, “I don’t want to keep you if you have to go.”
“I have at least another hour. What’s up?”
“Do you know how to download songs? I just know Eddie’ll be more excited about the computer if when he comes home I have some new music waiting for him.”
So that’s what we did with the next hour: checked out bands and downloaded a sampling of the free music people were giving away.
“This is like a whole other world!” Cindy said at one point.
Before leaving for class, I showed her how to check her e-mail.
“Hey, look!” she said. “I’ve got e-mail already! Who could possibly be writing to me?”
She opened her mailbox and, as my last good deed of the day, I showed her how to use the delete button to get rid of spam.
• • •
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Lise,
I regret to inform you that I’ve received a complaint about your teaching from one of your students. I’m sure it’s just a mix-up that we’ll be able to clear up in no time, but I’d still like you to call my secretary to set up a meeting as soon as possible.
Yours,
Dean
His name really was Dean, making him Dean Dean Jones, a thing everyone in the department laughed at, but still I stared at the e-mail in perplexity: Why would one of my students complain about me? My students loved me. All anyone had to do was look at the letters they sent me after graduation to see that: letters when they placed their first stories with the Atlantic or the New Yorker, letters when they secured their first agent or publishing contra
ct. They all credited my classroom as the chief reason for their success, although I must admit, proud as their letters made me feel, for them and for me, I’d always felt a certain envy too. Was I forever destined to be the publishing bridesmaid but never the bride?
I looked at the date on Dean’s e-mail, suspecting some kind of prank. Was it April Fool’s Day? But no. April Fool’s Day had passed a few days ago.
My hand was on the phone, ready to give Dean’s secretary a ring to schedule that meeting, when I changed my mind. Dean’s secretary, Martha, was a huge chatterbox. If I so much as called and said “Hello,” she’d be filling my ear for the next half hour with news about her grandchildren and gossip about the other professors in the department. Not that I usually minded hearing about how her granddaughter was on her way to becoming the National Spelling Bee champ if only she could master the S section of her Oxford dictionary, nor did I mind hearing gossip about how Sally Markham, the poetry professor, had gotten drunk at the dean’s latest sherry soiree and made a pass at Phillip Exeter, the classics professor who was older than Homer. But I didn’t have time for all of that right now. I had more important things to do. The only reason I’d even checked e-mail in the first place was as a palate cleanser.
The first time I’d tried writing a novel, the one Dirk Peters hated so much, I’d immersed myself in it entirely, shutting myself up in the blood-colored room of my cottage for hours at a time with no more stimulation than the constant mental knitting of creativity and the white screen pages to be filled in front of me. But now that I was well into my second novel, I’d discovered it was best for me to work in short super bursts of energy, blasting out a page or a page and a half as quickly as the words came, rather than agonizing over each one to get the perfect metaphor or image. Between bursts, I distracted myself by checking e-mail or by checking on the rising Amazon ranking of Annabeth Todd, a debut novelist who had written the sort of book I was now writing. Hers was a satire, as was mine—mine being about a loveless schoolteacher who somehow gets tapped to be ambassador to Switzerland, only to find herself entangled with both the US and Swiss presidents. When she sleeps with both within a twenty-four-hour period, dramatically and enthusiastically making up for her years of lovelessness, the paternity of the baby comes into question. Oh, and there was also going to be a Clare Booth Luce style of arsenic poisoning, a subplot involving Nazi gold and a tense shootout on the Matterhorn. At least that’s how I thought it was going to go.
If I was at home, I’d step outside for a cigarette break. I hadn’t told anyone except Tony I’d taken up smoking again; if I was at school, not wanting to set a bad example by smoking in front of the students, I’d walk across to the playing fields and just watch them killing each other at rugby for as long as it would have taken me to smoke that cigarette I so badly wanted. Once I got back to work, it was as though the words were ready to pour out of me again.
It was odd, but as it turned out, as devastating as Dirk Peters’s words to me had been at the time, he was right: my first effort was an unmitigated pile of overwritten crap. I’d made all the same mistakes I usually found in my student John’s writing. It was as though I’d followed every trite piece of writing-school advice to the letter: show, don’t tell; write what you know; no backstory dumps. The problem was, I’d been so busy obeying the letter of the law that I’d forsaken the spirit entirely! And what had I wound up with for my misguided efforts? A present-tense derivative lump, the whole being all show and no telling to such an extent, that when I recalled certain passages in my mind, I wanted to scream at myself, “Stop showing us the character’s clenched teeth, narrow eyes, and metaphorical steam coming out of her ears! Why can’t you just say ‘I was angry’?”
But now, this time it was different. It was as though the unseen Dirk Peters had become a mentor for me. Before, with the first novel, I’d written as though writing for the world—writing for history, for posterity, the phrase “Great American Novel” constantly dancing in my head, even if what I was writing was more like the “Great Middle Eastern Novel” only by an American. Now all that had changed. It was as though I was writing for an audience of one: Dirk Peters. Having seen pictures of him in the publishing trade magazines, whenever I wrote now I envisioned a miniature version of him perched, legs crossed, a European cigarette dangling from one elegant hand, a snifter of Armagnac in the other, atop my computer in the office or my laptop at home. He goaded me on, employing that sexy accent I’d heard him use on Book TV. “Come on, Lise, luv, this is great stuff you’re writing here. But don’t you think you should let your heroine show a little more leg in this scene?”
What can I say? If I had to pick a muse, Dirk Peters was certainly a raunchy muse to have picked. But he was also right on the money with the editorial advice I imagined him giving. “Pace, Lise, pace! And by ‘pace’ here, I’m not talking about what you do back and forth across the floor, nor am I speaking Latin to you, although I could. I’m talking about the flow of your story. Take me to the far edge of excitement and draw me back, let me live with it for a while before bringing me back to that edge. You know those old cliffhanger movies that used to be so popular? Why do you think they were so popular? People love being teased.” Was it just me, or did Dirk just grab his crotch? “Tease me, Lise! If we were making love, would you want me to shoot my whole wad in the first five minutes? Then don’t you do it either! But also, don’t keep me too long in a lull phase. Excite me.”
“That sounds rather commercial, though,” I’d object in my head, “doesn’t it? I thought you were a literary agent.”
“Look in your Webster’s, luv,” Dirk would say. “Literary mostly means ‘of or relating to books,’ which is me. Sure, I sell literary books with all the highbrow loftiness that word has been forced to bear, but I also sell commercial too. Really, anything the market wants and will pay a lot for. I swing both ways.”
What else can I say? Dirk was also a chatty muse.
The first novel I’d written had been agony from start to finish. But this time I was having—dare I say it?—fun. The Dirk in my head kept prompting me, “If the writer isn’t having fun with her creation, how can she expect the reader to?” The Dirk in my head said, lighting another cigarette, replenishing his Armagnac. “Screw that Great American Novel crap! For one thing, the rest of the world isn’t America, now is it?”
And he was right. Screw that Great American Novel crap. The new book I was writing was—dare I say this?—commercial, even if it was a political satire, because it could also be read as a romantic comedy. And what’s so wrong with writing something commercially viable? I asked myself. If I was going to keep writing, for Dirk and for me, I might as well write something that had at least a snowball’s chance—instead of no chance—of getting published and making some money.
Even though his advice thus far was serving me well, he could still be annoying, and I promised myself I’d hit him in his insufferably priggish face, handsome as it was, for all the anguish his rejection e-mail had caused me if I ever met him face-to-face; not that that was ever going to happen.
“Fine,” I answered aloud, mildly exasperated with the relentless Dirk in my head. Good thing no one was in the office to hear me. Obeying him nonetheless, I closed the computer file with my manuscript in it. Then, before leaving for the day, I checked e-mail one last time. There was something from Sara. Seeing her name there made me realize how long it had been since I’d heard from my sister.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
You’ll probably ready to kill me for not getting in touch sooner. But then, you haven’t exactly kept in touch lately either, have you?
Now, I don’t want you to go all ballistic on me—and please, please don’t say anything to Mom and Dad!—but remember that little diarrhea bug I told you about a few months ago? Well, it never did completely go away. I’m really OK! I’m just, you know, not totally OK. So I might be going into the hospital here for a
bit. Like, maybe, tomorrow.
But enough of that. Hey, how’s that novel going?
Love
Diana
When Artemis met me at the gate at Heathrow, the shock on her face was visible.
“My God, Di, look at you! You must be four-fifths of the girl you were when you left!”
Artemis, for her part, was still a sylph. When I was younger, I used to imagine that Artemis was what I’d look like, if only I were thin.
“Not quite,” I said, unable to keep the smile from coming to my face as I did a model’s twirl for her. “But I’m down fifty American now, so I’m getting there. What do you think?”
It was probably a mistake asking her that question—she’d probably say something like “Four-fifths of a cow is still a large farm animal”—but somehow I couldn’t help myself.
“It’s just…it’s just…”
It was a moment for the ages: Artemis out of words.
“Yes?” I prompted tentatively, preparing myself for the stick that was sure to follow.
“It’s just that…you don’t look like you anymore.” And then she surprised me, reaching out to place one of her elegant manicured hands over one of my slightly larger ones as she smiled warmly. “I think it’s just great.”
Impulsively, I threw my arms around her.
“Hey, don’t get carried away!” she said, peeling me off after allowing me my moment of sisterly bonding. “And don’t get carried away with the weight loss either. You know, just because you look good now is no reason to think if you go further you’ll look better. Some people lose a lot of weight only to wind up looking like a great big sack of empty skin.”
Artemis. Stick.
“Well,” she said, all business now, “let’s gather your things.”
I’d brought two large suitcases with me. Even though the trip was just for a week, I’d gone on a shopping spree ahead of time, buying all new outfits with which to impress my family.
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