Thief of Words

by John Jaffe

  “Wrong. And if you ever try to fix me up again I’ll break into your house and snap the legs off of all those plastic horses you saved from your childhood.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “I didn’t say that. What I said was, no more fix-ups. Ever. I’m too old for this. I’m becoming a lesbian, and don’t worry, you’re not my type.”

  “That’s a relief, given what your type has been. Trip—need I say more? Besides, too old for what? What’re you talking about? It was just lunch. What can two people possibly say over lettuce to get you this riled? I knew I should have called you yesterday. But this damn John Waters assignment. Some editor actually got me a part in Waters’s new movie—a musical, of all things—and now that lunatic has me in the chorus dressed as a drag queen. A woman playing a man playing a woman. Anyway, back to Jack. Tell me everything.”

  Annie tapped her fingers against the sorrel wood of her desk, which she could do now thanks to deck-clearing.

  “Lunch was fine.”

  Silence.

  “And?” Laura said. “I hate it when you get this way. Stop pouting and just tell me what happened. Don’t make me pull it out of you. You know I can and you know you’ll end up telling me what’s really eating you. Come on, this is me you’re not talking to.”

  Annie laughed, though she didn’t want to. Then she told her everything, as they both knew she would.

  “So you sent him an e-mail and you haven’t heard from him and you’re ready to give up on men? You’re worse off than I thought. Maybe he was busy; ever think of that?”

  “That’s what Fred said, but he’s a man. I thought it was a solidarity kind of thing on his part.”

  “More like a stupidity kind of thing—on your part. You guys had a great time. You just told me so yourself. Tonight, I’ll bet you my plastic horses, there’s an e-mail waiting. And I bet it’s long and meanderingly poetic. Besides, what do you mean I’m ‘not your type’? What’s your type anyway?”

  “Quiet.”

  CHAPTER 15

  By the time Annie left her office that day, it was nearly dark. Her main successes had been twofold: the reappearance of her desk’s wood surface and the reestablishment of her self-respect. Yes, she’d checked her e-mail a couple more times that day—okay, three more times—but, she argued to an imaginary jury in her head, each time was for business. It had nothing to do with a certain editor at the Baltimore Star-News.

  Annie shivered her way home that evening. It had been sixty-three degrees, sunny, and still when she’d walked the six blocks to work in the morning. But it was one of those late spring days when the sky changes clothes more times than a teenage girl before her first date. Now the sky was prison gray, the temperature had dropped fifteen degrees, and the hard wind made it seem thirty degrees colder.

  As usual, Annie had dressed optimistically that morning— short sleeves, light slacks, no jacket. Fred had tried to give her his sweater to wear home, but she’d refused.

  “Why don’t you keep a spare something here for all the times you do this,” he’d said to her before he left. “It looks like Antarctica out there.”

  “If I did that, then I’d be giving up on spring. Someone has to be her champion. I’ll be fine, Fred, stop worrying,” Annie said, and she thought she would be until she stepped outside on P Street.

  By her fifth step, she was so cold that she ducked back into the Firehook Bakery for a cup of coffee to go. She added a sticky bun and made a dash for her apartment.

  Six blocks later Annie was cursing herself for not taking Fred’s sweater. “Let spring fend for her own damn self,” she said to no one but the wind as she finally slipped into her apartment.

  She’d never really wanted to live in a city. Given her druthers, she’d be living on a mesa overlooking magenta sunsets. But one thing had turned into another, and before she knew it she was borrowing $250,000 from Citibank for a two-bedroom apartment in Dupont Circle.

  One thing turned into another. Isn’t that always the case? One day you’re furnishing your basement apartment with Salvation Army retreads and the next day you’re filling your big suburban house with expensive antiques that look embarrassingly similar to the Salvation Army retreads.

  Well, at least she wasn’t living in Bethesda anymore. That house had been Trip’s choice, because it had a porte cochere just like the “Big House” on Long Island, where he’d eaten meals prepared by Cook and been tended to by maids and housemen. The Big House was where his paternal grandparents had lived, where Trip’s family spent every summer.

  Annie had never liked Bethesda, Washington’s toniest suburb. It was a gourmet ghetto where overpriced entrees came served on square plates. It had too many chic little stores that sold $750 hand-stamped linen dresses. And all the women looked casually perfect.

  During the divorce, Trip had claimed the house was his because he’d bought it with his family money—despite the fact that Annie had paid half the mortgage. She didn’t fight. All she wanted was her furniture, primitive pieces she’d found at auctions, garage sales, and antique stores. She liked their simple lines and the way the soft pine showed what they’d been through. She’d had to fight Trip on each purchase. His taste ran to the baronial: heavy mahogany and serious oak.

  She threw her purse on an old blue cocoa crate that doubled as an entry table. In her bedroom she pulled a thick pair of sweatpants and a heavy fleece from her most prized possession—a battered white jelly cupboard from the 1850s. “Ah, warmth,” she said as she put on her fuzzy clothes.

  Then she faced her computer. I do this every night, she thought. About this time every night. I am not checking to see if Jack has written back. This is not a John Brady, tenth-grade kind of thing. I have evolved far past that. This is a woman in her prime, in control—a Xena kind of thing.

  And if Jack DePaul hasn’t written back? I can handle it. Just because he seemed charming and smart at lunch doesn’t mean he isn’t an inconsiderate jackass jerk.

  Annie sat down and signed on.

  On the one hand, a remarkable number of messages appeared. Eda Royal wanted to send a new last chapter to her second She-Devil book; three young writers wanted her opinion on their manuscripts; there was a credit card offer, a lingerie offer, and something about online artworks; and there were seven messages she deleted without even opening.

  On the other hand, there was no message from Jack DePaul. Annie’s shoulders sagged.

  Yes, it may have been a John Brady kind of thing.

  She stared at the screen for a few seconds. Finally, she answered the She-Devil and signed off. Then she went into the kitchen, grabbed the sticky bun, and ate her dinner.

  CHAPTER 16

  So. How did it go?” Matthew’s question came out a little muffled, having had to dodge a mouthful of chips and salsa cruda.

  About the time Annie was eating her sticky bun, Jack DePaul and his son, Matthew, were sitting in a booth at El Serape, a new Tex-Mex place just three blocks from Jack’s apartment in the trendifying Federal Hill neighborhood of Baltimore.

  Jack pretended not to hear and responded with a question of his own. “How are things in the boneyard?”

  Matthew was in his second year of graduate school, a budding archeologist, a fact that confounded his father and pleased him immeasurably. Right from the start, from the time of alphabet blocks and Goodnight Moon, Matthew had been a smart kid. Too smart for his own good, Jack often thought; everything came so easily to his son.

  But by high school, Matthew had devolved. He exchanged soccer and swimming for hanging out. He drew cartoon space aliens. My son the artist. Jack tried out that phrase a few times; it never made sense. Neither he nor Elizabeth was the remotest bit artistic. Where did Matthew get it? And how did he go from rambunctious know-it-all to chubby little wiseacre with a lazy walk and dopey pals?

  Then, in his sophomore year at college, Matthew took the lowlevel geology class—rocks for jocks. Suddenly he was hooked on strata. Next came classes in anthr
opology, ancient history, and chemistry. For the first time in his life, Jack couldn’t talk to Matthew about his schoolwork. Eventually came graduate studies in archeology, something about pollen and prehistoric ecosystems in the American Southwest. Jack had gone through an archeology phase, too, but he was ten years old at the time and was only concerned about buried treasure. He definitely hadn’t supplied Matthew with the science gene. That’s why he was a journalist. Newspapers—last refuge of the data-dolt.

  “Come on, Dad. ’Fess up. How did it go?” Matthew insisted. “How did what go?” Jack said, his expression innocently blank. “Your date.”

  “Oh, that. Okay.” Jack dabbed a chip into the salsa cruda. “It wasn’t really a date. Just a lunch.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Nice.”

  “Nice?” Matthew grimaced. “Meaning fat and dumb as dirt?” “No, no. She was really nice.” Jack paused for a second. “Actually, she was great.”

  “Ah. Now we’re getting somewhere.” Matthew leaned forward, propping his elbows on either side of a salsa bowl, his chin resting atop linked fingers. He wasn’t a bad-looking kid, Jack thought, with his field-research tan, scraggly goatee, and emerging sinews (the adolescent avoirdupois that had been the despair of his father was finally melting away).

  “Start with the good stuff,” Matthew said. “Is she cute?”

  Jack pushed his glasses down his nose and gave him a schoolmaster’s frown. “Son, I’m disappointed that you would be hung up on mere appearance. The important thing is that Miss Hollerman is a woman of no small accomplishment and intelligence and sophistication.”

  “She’s a babe!” Matthew said with a lopsided grin not unlike the off-center smile that often graced his father’s face.

  Jack couldn’t help but grin back. “Yeah. I gotta admit. She’s kinduva babe.”

  “Who does she look like?”

  “You mean like somebody we know?”

  “No. Somebody famous. What movie star does she look like? If she looks like Gwyneth Paltrow, I’ll introduce myself to her,” said Matthew. “Let her meet the real stud of the DePaul family.”

  “You’re a baboon,” said Jack, with not completely mock anger. “Annie would only be attracted to higher life forms.”

  “Oh-ho. Suddenly she’s ‘Annie.’ So, what does ‘Annie’ look like?” Jack scrunched his eyes shut for a second. “Hepburn,” he said. “Hepburn!” said Matthew. “Dad, do you know anybody outside the Paleolithic era? How about Neve Campbell?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Never mind. Which Hepburn?”

  “Both Hepburns. She has those strong Katharine bones, but Audrey’s gamine charm.”

  “ ‘Gamine charm’?” Matthew raised his hands in surprise. “Whoa, this is serious. What else?”

  “Well, she’s got the damndest head of red hair you’ve ever seen.” For the next fifteen minutes Matthew pumped his father. What did Annie do? How old was she? Was she funny? Smart? Clever? Sophisticated? Warm? What did you two talk about?

  The more Jack described the lunch—no, no, it wasn’t a date— the more it became something tangible; yes, maybe a date. It was as if the tastes, colors, and textures of lunch precipitated out of the telling. He spoke of Annie and she materialized.

  “And right in the middle of pasta she started talking about a flamenco dancer in Spain she wished she had seen. Imagine that— her most vivid travel memory was something that never happened. Isn’t that sad? It made me want to …” Jack trailed off.

  “Well. Anyway,” he finished a little wistfully, “she’s nice. I had a good time.”

  There was nothing wistful about Matthew’s expression; he had a smile the size of Madrid. “Dad. I think you’re back. ‘Ding, dong, the witch is dead.’ ”

  “Which old witch?” Jack answered in a little singsong voice. But he knew exactly which witch.

  CHAPTER 17

  Jack threw the mail on the couch and the New Yorker on the coffee table. He walked to the bedroom and, from four yards out, kicked his loafers into the closet. The apartment still reeked of Tuesday’s dinner—popcorn. It occurred to him that if he were to invite someone over he’d better freshen up the place. He decided he’d bake some banana bread over the weekend, or at least keep the windows open for a day.

  The eleven o’clock news was already over but Jack was too full to sleep. Another item for the life-lesson checklist: never eat Mexican food after 9 P.M. He put on sweats and a T-shirt and sat down at his old Mac.

  Jack hadn’t signed on to his home account for two days. Fourteen messages awaited him. Between BAMBI69 (“Hot Teens”) and Zortman (“STOP SNORING NOW”) was something from “ahollerman.” It was entitled “lunch.” He clicked on it.

  “Jack,

  “Thank you for lunch. You’re charming in spite of yourself. I don’t know about that tie, however.

  “Annie”

  A short message; only three sentences. If not exactly terse, certainly compact. Just a little eddy of electrons in the big river of bits and bytes, but one that carried with it a question of great significance. Namely: What the hell do women mean?

  The guy at the computer was not much better equipped to find an answer than he had been in the days when he wore a letter-man’s jacket and clip-on ties. Does she like me? he wondered. She called me “charming.” That has to be good. But what about “in spite of yourself ”? Am I a jerk? A blowhard? Why did I tell her about the grapefruit? Was I babbling like a street-corner guy wearing taped-up shoes? What about the length? Seventeen words. It’s very short. It’s like the back of her hand. It’s an insult. “I wouldn’t go out with you again if you were the last man on earth. See ya ’round, clown. Don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out.” Cold. Stone cold.

  But wait. What about the tie remark? It’s friendly; it’s funny. A quip. A friendly tease. The tie sentence is good. The tie sentence tips the balance. Although, what’s wrong with my tie? I like that tie. It’s a Jerry Garcia tie. She doesn’t like the Grateful Dead? What? She listens to Jewel or Alanis Morissette? Whiners. Or the Indigo Girls. She’s a dyke! But she did grab my fingers. Did I have pasta on the tie? Was I a slob? Did I have spinach in my teeth, a booger hanging from my nose, earwax? My fly was open!

  On the other hand, she did write “charming.”

  The squirrel cage of Jack’s mind spun around for a few more minutes. Eventually, it began to slow. When the calmer lobes of his brain began to function again, he realized he had to write a response.

  Jack called up a blank mail screen.

  “Dear Annie,” he wrote. No, he thought, too formal.

  He began again. “Annie.”

  He stared at the screen for nearly three minutes.

  Then he wrote: “Thank you for lunch. You were charming, too, in spite of having me as your companion.”

  Jack pondered this opening. It sounded clever but didn’t really mean much. He made a sour face and deleted everything.

  “Annie. I thought lunch was superb …” Too pompous. “Annie. It’s been a long time since I have …” Too needy.

  “Annie. Appropriately, we were in an art museum …” Nerd. “Annie. There was a moment during lunch when …” Windbag.

  “Annie. I was wondering, does the hair on your head match the hair between your …” Just kidding.

  “Annie. God, I think you’re wonderful …” A little lacking in dignity.

  Jack got up from his chair and windmilled his arms a couple of times. He inhaled deeply, held it, and let it slowly out. It was midnight. He sat down again and began writing. This time he wrote straight through without stopping.

  CHAPTER 18

  Thank God for small miracles: Joan Hollerman Silver had yet to master the Internet. She didn’t even know Instant Messaging existed.

  By 10:15 P.M. Thursday, she’d already called Annie twice—“No, Mom, I haven’t heard back from him. I’m fine”—and when she called back at 10:30 the line was busy, as it was at 10:45 and 11. />
  Laura, on the other hand, was an IM junkie and knew that in times of stress Annie would take the telephone off the hook. Annie was the first buddy on her buddy list, and every time Annie signed on that evening, an Instant Message popped up on her screen.

  “Well?”

  “Nu?”

  “Nothing yet?”

  “I’ll kill him tomorrow.”

  By 12:15 Annie’s eyes were closing without her permission. In between checking her e-mail, she’d finally plowed through the She-Devil’s new manuscript. It was worse than bad. It was obnoxious, overblown, and screechy. And it was sure to be a best-seller.

  Eda Royal, the She-Devil, who’d formerly taught Beowulf to bored freshmen at Tompkins Cortland Community College in upstate New York, had tapped into something big when she dumped her husband, a nice but boring man who ran the local fish hatchery, and formed a support group for the newly divorced. She’d tapped into anger. Everyone in her group was really pissed off. Pissed off at themselves, their kids, their bosses, their lives, but mostly their husbands.

  At one particularly rowdy meeting, a once-meek bookkeeper who’d married right out of high school said, “Lord almighty, what’s gotten into us, the devil?”

  “The she-devil!” someone shouted.

  And so began Eda Royal’s new career.

  Before Annie brushed her teeth and headed to bed, she signed on to her computer. For the first time in twenty-four hours, it was not to see if Jack DePaul had written back. She wanted to write Laura, to tell her she’d been stupid to get so worked up, that it had been a fine lunch, but that was all it was, just a lunch, nothing else. And if Laura said anything to Jack DePaul the next day, that would be the end of their friendship, though she would continue to be Becky’s godmother.

  “You have mail,” her computer announced.

  “Fuck you,” Annie said as she guided the cursor to the flag and clicked.