“No,” Kyle said. “I mean, I am, but I’ll make the time. How about dinner one night? I’m in Cobble Hill. My girlfriend and I could cook for you.”
“I’d love that. Let me check my schedule.”
Kyle heard the sound of pages being flipped. He was glad to know that Professor Lansing kept things old school with a print calendar.
“Is tomorrow all right?”
Kyle scanned his mind for any possible hurdles on Tuesday. He had a thousand manuscripts to get through, but he figured he deserved a night off.
“Yeah, Tuesday works. Seven thirty? I’ll e-mail you the address. Still have the same e-mail at Bentley?”
“I do. I’ll bring the wine. I have a 2010 Sequoia Grove Cambium I’ve been saving for a special occasion. I’m looking forward to it, Kyle.”
“Me too. Thanks for calling.”
“My pleasure. I always like to see how my best students have excelled.”
Kyle couldn’t help but beam.
“Cool, I’ll see you tomorrow, Professor.”
“I haven’t been your professor in a while.” He laughed. “Please, call me William.”
“Sure. William. Okay.”
The name felt awkward on Kyle’s tongue. He traveled back ten years ago to when he was just a skinny kid in the back of the classroom. Professor Lansing had seemed so much grander, so much more refined than he ever thought he could be. He never imagined he’d be calling the professor William. That they’d be on the same level as peers.
“Timshel!” William said.
“What’s that?” Kyle asked. For a moment, he thought William had hung up.
“Quick, what great novel ends with the word Timshel?”
Kyle chuckled. This was a game he remembered playing with the professor at Bentley. The final novel they had read in his Spirituality in Literature class was East of Eden, a book he devoured and then flipped right back to its opening page to read again. It was one of the first novels that truly excited him.
“East of Eden,” Kyle said. “I reread it every few years. Except after Adam Trask says ‘Timshel,’ Steinbeck wrote, ‘His eyes closed and he slept.’ That’s how the book ends. With him dying.”
“Ah,” William replied, like he had just tasted a great sip of scotch. “The pupil surpasses the master.”
Another pause lingered.
“E-mail me your cell number as well and I’ll see you soon, Kyle. Till then.”
William ended the call.
“Till then,” Kyle said, to an empty line.
“Aren’t you glad you picked up the phone?” Sierra asked. She already had her coat on and was hanging by the door. He hadn’t even realized she was still there. He must have looked bemused.
“I am.”
“Let me know what you think of those new pages,” she said. “And I’ll have to read East of Eden if you love it so much.”
“I do,” he said, finally lowering the phone. “Although now you know the ending.”
She put the back of her hand to her forehead, as if she felt faint.
“That someone dies?” she said. “Oooh, big spoiler. Isn’t that how all great novels usually end?”
She walked away, her high heels clacking down the hallway. He turned on the computer and e-mailed William all his info, his fingertips buzzing in anticipation of Tuesday night.
3
THE REST OF the day and Tuesday passed in a mad rush. Kyle devoted his time to reading Sierra’s pages. He really had only one note for her to fix. The Girls Without Hope sisters had spent the first four chapters fighting to stay together after their freebasing father overdosed and their bipolar mother went AWOL. Now chapter 5 began with a brutal foster parent named Biggie who forced himself on the oldest girl, Alexandra. The chapter ended with Alexandra obtaining a gun from a boy who was a local meth dealer and shooting Biggie in the arm. Then the sisters all fled in the middle of a cold January night. Kyle’s suggestion was simply to stretch out the drama, since it all felt a little rushed. He guessed that Sierra wanted to have a big moment happen already, but a better way to create suspense would be for Alexandra to purchase the gun and enter Biggie’s bedroom, setting up a cliffhanger and having the readers wonder if she might kill him.
Kyle e-mailed Sierra these notes and she wholeheartedly agreed, praising his ideas as genius. The day, however, fell away from him, and he hadn’t gotten around to reading a manuscript about a future of robots that decide to recreate humankind after it’s wiped out. Sure enough, the book sold to an editor at Simon & Schuster in a very nice preemptive deal. Eh, he figured, sci-fi wasn’t really his bag. He’d discover his next big success soon enough.
Kyle also found himself preoccupied with thinking about Professor Lansing or, rather, William. The name seemed like it belonged to someone else, a man he’d never met before, not the guide who had made sure he stayed on a sound path during those dark times when he started to sway. His dad had died freshman year, not that he ever had a relationship with the guy. His father might have joined the circus for all he knew after checking out when Kyle was a little kid. But the finality of his father’s death, of never being able to rekindle a relationship, had really set him off.
He’d told Jamie snippets of his troubled freshman year, but he hadn’t gone very deep into the specifics. He could sense it made her uncomfortable to hear about those days and he worried she might see him in a different light, so he never brought it up again. In fact, he hadn’t thought about those disastrous months in a long time, not until Professor Lansing’s—William’s—call.
“How should we cook the skirt steak?” Jamie asked, shortly before William was supposed to arrive. Kyle had to admit feeling anxious about seeing him again.
“I remember he likes his steak really rare,” he said, adding homemade dressing to a bowl of greens.
Jamie made a face to that request. She liked her meat to be the consistency of shoe leather while Kyle was more in the bloody raw camp.
“So he just called you out of the blue?” she asked. She was wearing sweats and a Badgers T, her hair in a ponytail.
“I think you should change,” he said, worrying that William might show up early and Midwestern Jamie would open the door instead of Cosmopolitan Knockout Jamie dressed to impress.
“I’m not gonna risk getting meat grease on my clothes,” she said. “I’ll change when we’re done cooking.”
“It’s seven o’clock already!”
“Kyle, you need to calm down,” she said slowly.
“Professing Lansing—William—he … I just feel like I owe so much of my success to him. I was really in a bad place until—”
“I know,” Jamie said. She left the steak to go over and run her hand in a circle around his back. He found it immediately reassuring. “With your dad dying so young—I get it, Kyle. I went through the same thing.”
Their respective tragedies helped them bond on Date #2. Date #1 had been a wild, drunken whirl, practically fucking in the cab up to her apartment and then sealing the deal on the floor of the foyer once they got inside, pants around their ankles, a hiccupped shrug coming from him when she mentioned using a condom. Date #2 was their first real one. He learned that her father had died when she was in high school. He’d had a love of boating and one night took a solo trip out into Lake Michigan, to return only when a fisherman hooked his bloated body out of the water. She never knew if he drowned by accident or on purpose. Even now, Kyle could tell it still pained her to think about it. A solitary tear lingered at the corner of her eye. She brushed it away with her sleeve.
“I didn’t have someone like that,” Jamie said. “To guide me. Mom had my younger brothers to worry about. And at the University of Wisconsin? It’s not like Bentley. Classes with over a hundred students. The professors barely knew my name.”
“I bet you were something in college, with a line of boys waiting at your feet,” he said, steering the conversation into better territory.
She managed to smile wide enough to
show the dimple in her cheek. He kissed it.
“I had my nose in fashion magazines,” she said. “I didn’t notice any boys waiting.”
“All the better for me. Some quarterback would’ve snapped you up and married you right after graduation.”
He took her in his arms. She rested her chin on his shoulder.
“Those quarterback types do nothing for me,” she said. “I like a man who can quote Proust.”
“‘Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet,’” Kyle said, his foot hooked under hers, their shadows lit on the far wall, entwined.
“I love you,” she whispered.
“Love you too,” he said. They had said it before to each other, but only recently.
“I’m gonna go change into a little number.” She grinned. “Something that will let your old professor know just how well you’re killing it at life.”
She glided her fingers through his hair, left a kiss on his lips, and sashayed into the bedroom.
If he had enough time to follow her inside before William arrived, he’d already be in bed, pants around his ankles.
* * *
THE SLICED STEAK dripped blood on a wooden platter along with grilled heirloom mushrooms doused in balsamic and Caesar salad with freshly grated Parmesan and anchovies. Jamie had changed into a cream-colored dress, her left shoulder strap hanging on the groove of her arm. She wore silver earrings in a lightning bolt pattern and lipstick as red as the steak. Kyle donned a blue pinstriped jacket and a periwinkle tie, managing to finish grooming his beard with clippers before the doorbell rang.
Jamie rubbed a circle into Kyle’s back one last time before answering the door. A hand reached inside the apartment with a bottle of wine as Jamie said hello. She and William did an awkward dance that began with a handshake and ended with a hug, and then William fully stepped inside.
“Kyle,” William said after a breath. He wore a brown blazer with elbow patches—so professorial. His silvery hair had been slicked back, thick as ever, and smile lines ate at the edges of his eyes and lips. He seemed tired or, rather, more tired than Kyle remembered. Kyle wondered if that was just an inevitable product of age.
“So great to see you!” Kyle said, and the two gave each other a solid man hug, slaps on the back and a patting of shoulders. William had to put down the large satchel he was carrying.
“Notes from your conference?” Kyle asked, pointing at the satchel placed on a side table.
“It smells wonderful in here,” William said, all smiles.
“Jamie’s a fantastic cook,” Kyle said, standing beside her. “William, this is my girlfriend Jamie. Jamie this is my … well, my mentor—William.”
The two of them exchanged hellos again.
William’s eyes roamed around the apartment. “Great place you have here.”
“We can give you a tour!” Kyle said, realizing that he was speaking too loudly. He cautioned himself to simmer down a bit. “Although it’s a brief tour, the apartment isn’t too big.”
“New York City living,” William said, still all smiles.
Kyle took William around the living area that Jamie had helped style. White oak flooring. An alcove kitchen with stainless steel appliances. A coffee table that looked like it was cut and stained straight from a giant tree trunk. A sleek television mounted to the wall. Above the couch, a painting of a skeletal man played the trumpet, his face appearing as if it was melting into the notes flowing from the bell. They stepped into the bedroom next.
“I see you have a Wisconsin banner but not a Bentley one,” William said, arching his chin at Bucky Badger.
“Yeah, the aardvark doesn’t really inspire too much rah-rah.”
William nudged him the ribs. “I think they’d just run out of mascot options by the time Bentley was founded.”
Jamie came up behind them. “Ready to eat?” she asked. “I stuck the steak back in the oven for a quick hit of heat, but I heard you like it rare, William.”
William placed his hand over his chest. “A woman after my own heart. Let’s feast.”
They made their way to the “dining room,” an alcove nook that fit a small table. Jamie had lit candles, the wax dripping into the holders. William opened the Sequoia Grove Cambium, a rich red.
“It smells like chocolate,” Jamie said after William poured them all a glass.
“Yes, it has hints of mocha,” William said. “Shall we toast?”
They raised their glasses.
“To this wonderful meal you’ve prepared,” William said. “And to the start of an illustrious editorial career. Chin chin.” He clinked each of their glasses and everyone took a sip.
The meal proceeded pleasantly. Jamie really did have a knack for cooking. The bottle of wine was quickly finished and Jamie opened a second one. William asked her what she did for work, and she talked about the interior design business she was trying to get off the ground.
“It’s amazing what people in New York will pay for you to hang their curtains in a certain way,” she told him.
“She’s being modest,” Kyle said, his hand massaging her neck. “She has an eye for design.”
“I’m not saving lives or anything,” she said, slightly slurred, her teeth stained wine dark.
“None of us are,” William said.
“And how is your wife doing?” Kyle asked. “And your kids? They were only a few years younger than me, right?”
“Yes, they’re bartenders now. Took over the Royal Wee on the outskirts of Killingworth.”
“I remember having a rough night there once,” Kyle said. “Too many fireballs.”
“Plus some other things,” William added, tracing the top of his wineglass and letting it sing. “I recall having to drive you back to campus that night.”
“Do tell,” Jamie said, leaning forward.
Kyle waved his hand. “We don’t need to get into it—”
“I was a chauffeur a few times during Kyle’s freshman year,” William said. “I will say I wouldn’t have done it for just any student.”
“He told me he had a tough go of it that year,” Jamie said.
William gave her a look, which clearly said that a tough go of it was a nice way of saying complete disaster.
“An addictive personality is in my genes,” Kyle said, chewing at his cheek. “Not alcohol, but … other substances seemed to take hold.”
“Bentley was different back then.” William cleared his throat. “Killingworth was in shambles. Drugs were readily available.”
“Of which I partook,” Kyle said.
William shook his finger in admonishment. “Of which you got clean.”
“You got me clean,” Kyle said, staring at William, feeling the utmost sense of gratitude swelling. Sometimes fate drops certain people in your life at the right time—guardians—and that was what William had been.
“What I did was stop enabling him,” William said.
“And I’m thankful you did. There were a few days back then that I lost completely, like they’d been scooped from my mind.”
“It’s great that you would do so much for one of your students,” Jamie said.
“I saw bits of myself in Kyle,” William said. “I was lost when I was younger. Where I came from…”
Kyle could see William almost shudder at the thought.
“Well,” William continued, “I had to get far away from there to survive.” He took a sip, sloshed the wine around his palate and relished in its mocha hints. “But there was something special about Kyle in the way he analyzed text. I remember when reading Camus’ The Stranger, his empathy for its tragic main character was wildly divergent from the rest of the students’ opinions. So mature for an eighteen-year-old.”
Kyle could feel his face heating up. He didn’t know if it was due to the wine or if he was blushing. Or both. Jamie laced her fingers in his.
“I’m glad he had you to look after him.” Jamie picked up the seco
nd bottle of wine and saw it was empty. “Looks like we need a third. You boys up for it?”
“This night is just getting started,” William said.
Jamie rose on drunken legs. “Yes!” She shuffled out of the dining room. “I’ll be right back with the vino.”
“She’s really lovely,” William said, raising an eyebrow.
“She’s amazing,” Kyle said, a little drunk. He hadn’t allowed himself a true celebration since the Sierra Raven deal, too focused on every new manuscript coming his way. He couldn’t get past the nagging fear that his newfound success might just suddenly dry up.
“I didn’t mean to bring up the past,” William said.
Kyle shook his head. “No, no, it’s all right. She knows about my dad, about my state of mind then.”
“You were running with a bad crowd.”
“I still might be if you hadn’t helped me break away,” Kyle said, his words slurring. “Selling drugs with Stoolie and Rocco, the townie hoodlums—I think those were their names—and that girl, Mia … Mia…” Kyle let the name dance on his tongue. He puckered his lips. “Whatever happened to Mia?”
William shrugged.
“It’s good to see you, Professor … William,” Kyle said, a grin tucked into his cheek. “Real good.”
“We won’t let this many years pass again.”
“Definitely not.”
“Oh, yeah,” William said, snapping his fingers. He got up and walked to the foyer and fetched the large satchel left on the side table. Kyle could see it was heavy.
“So, I’m writing a novel,” William said nonchalantly, as if he wrote one every day.
“Really?” Kyle said. “I would love to read it.”
“I know you’re a big shot now and all…”
“Hey, it would be awesome to be your editor.”
William opened the satchel and pulled out what looked to be about five hundred pages.
“Holy shit,” Kyle said. “That’s a thick manuscript.”
“It’s only about half finished.”
“A thousand pages?”
William placed it in Kyle’s hands. The cover page said DEVIL’S HOPYARD.
“Devil’s Hopyard?” Kyle said with a laugh. “No way.”
The Mentor Page 3