The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

If she were smaller or younger or mine, I could simply have gone to her and held her on my lap and played with her hair, and there would have been the illusion of security for those minutes. And then we'd have separated and she would have returned to her brothers and sister, to the life that must feel to all of them like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The near-dead in this new country of theirs do not have the decency to die, and the living put on a good show, but a lot of it—Dorothy, Toto, the sight of me in their mother's place at the breakfast table—must end up feeling like make-believe.

  "The card is beautiful," I said, and she looked up, with her broad brown face, her jet-black hair, teeth as white as paper. "The most beautiful card anyone ever gave me." She cracked a tight, embarrassed smile, like a shy suitor, and looked at her lap. "In my whole life." I was laying it on thick, but the kids had too, and it was true. "I would love to live with all of you." Her eyes shot up to mine, though her face was still, reluctant to smile. She must have heard the tentativeness, the dip in my voice, in the last few syllables, indicating that a "but" would follow. "I know I'd be very happy." At this she began to smile, still shyly. "But your father's life is complicated, and so's mine. It wouldn't be the best thing to do right now."

  "You could stay for a while, and if my mom gets better and wakes up, you could go home and still visit us."

  This was a kid's somersaulting logic. It all made perfect sense in some other universe, a fantastic, Oz-like place in which, for starters, her father and I might be able to have a serious conversation.

  "You wrote the card, didn't you? I mean, you composed it?" A nod, chin at her chest. She folded her hands in her lap, interlocked her fingers obediently—a reflex, I suppose, from living in an orphanage, to show others that you're well-behaved so that maybe they'll take you home with them. "Was it your idea?"

  "No. But I won't say whose."

  "You don't have to, sweetheart."

  "We all voted."

  "That's sweet." How darling, how quickly they had made the essential democratic gesture their own. I was charmed by the theater, and touched down deep by their wanting me, but still uneasy about turning her down, and about what to tell her father about this visit. Did I need to remind him that his children's enthusiasm for me—in contrast to his own—was worthy of a splashy handmade proclamation? Did I need to rub it in his face that if his house were a democracy, they'd vote me in by a landslide?

  "It was three to one," Vicki said, "but we all signed the card."

  I felt the blow, this blow, in my chest and my eyes. I gaped at her in a gust of fury as she did what bookish children always do: she lowered her eyes and read. Or pretended to. How dare you! I almost said aloud. After all I've done for you! My thoughts caromed from one child to the next, swooping down on evidence of betrayal. Betrayal! Had I lost my mind? Did I think I was Richard Nixon in the White House? Hitler after the bomb in the briefcase?

  She glanced up with a blistering indifference, as if she wouldn't deign to notice me. "It wasn't me," she said icily, as if the transcript of my thoughts had been projected above my head in a comic strip balloon, "in case you're wondering."

  "Your father will call the police and the FBI and Scotland Yard if Toinette tells him you're missing."

  "What's Scotland Yard?"

  "Let's go." A bucket of cold water on my sentimentality, and a sharp fear that I had betrayed Daniel by not letting him or Toinette know right away where Vicki was. "Get your knapsack. Now." I was sure she could hear the rising anger in my voice.

  "Sophy?"

  "What?" I had grabbed my purse, tossed my keys into it, and was about to open the front door.

  "Is Henderson gay?"

  I looked at her, in her sorbet colors, the little wristwatch with the dinosaur face around her tiny wrist, the book in her knapsack about the girl with no parents. What made her mind loop back to Henderson, and how could she tell?

  "Yes, he is."

  "But didn't he have to get married to have a son?"

  "He changed his mind after he had his son."

  "Why didn't he know right away?"

  "It's hard to know who you'll want to love. Some people know early on and some don't."

  "But if he's gay, how come he was visiting you?"

  "We're friends. He likes women as friends but men in a romantic way"

  "Romantic like you and my dad?"

  "Something like that." Though romantic wasn't the first word that came to mind. "What made you ask if he's gay?"

  "Nothing. But I hoped he was."

  "How come?"

  "Because I didn't want him to be your boyfriend."

  In the cab going west on Eleventh Street, I did what I'd wanted to do on the couch. I drew my arm around her and pulled her to me, and she came willingly. I apologized for getting angry, apologized for not being able to live with them. I said she'd made a magnificent card, and I'd spend as much time with her and her brothers and sister as I could. Her cheek lay against my bosom and my chin on the top of her head. Her scalp smelled of coconut, and the faces of everyone I saw out the window of our air-conditioned cab were shiny and slick with the unbearable heat of the day.

  "Sophy?"

  "Yes, sweetheart."

  Her hands were curled in my lap, and I was running my fingers along her suede-soft forearm. "I lied," she said.

  "About what?"

  "That I remember when I slept in the basket on the boat. And that I remember when my mother died. I don't. I was only one."

  "That's not such a bad lie. You must miss her a lot. And Blair too." She snuggled closer. The West Village crawled alongside us—Sammy's Noodle Shop, the Espresso Café, the Arab newsstand, Patchin Place, where E. E. Cummings had lived—and I wanted our cab ride to go on forever. Maybe Vicki and I could drive around for the rest of the day, go to a drive-in food stand and a drive-in movie. I could call Daniel from the highway and confess everything, and then we'd keep driving, like fugitives, Vicki and I, like Thelma and Louise.

  "I lied about something else too."

  "What was that?"

  "The card for you."

  "What about it?"

  "I wrote the names myself."

  "That's okay, to help the littler ones."

  "I didn't help. I pretended they wrote their names, but I did."

  "But you told them afterward? You showed them the card?"

  "No."

  It took a moment for the full meaning of this to circle back through all the psychic congestion of the last hour. "That must mean there was no voting either."

  She was silent.

  "No three to one?"

  "No."

  "Hmmmm."

  "Are you angry, Sophy?"

  I didn't answer right away, not because I was angry but because I was embarrassed at being so jubilant that one of the children hadn't cast a ballot against me. And silent because I wasn't sure whether to lavish on her all the praise she deserved, aesthetically speaking, for the elaborateness of her caper, or say a few words about the ethics of deception.

  "No, sweetie, I'm not angry."

  The voting stuff was inspired, and clearly her way of retaliating. No wonder Vietnam had won the war. My husband, who had spent many of the war years there, said the Vietnamese were both dogged and absolutely mystified as to what we were doing there, why we cared as much as we did. He spoke fluent Vietnamese, and they said things to him in their language that they wouldn't say to translators, even to reporters. Do you think we have oil? one man asked him. Is that why you're here? Will's theory was that we stayed because it was a beautiful country, because the women were beautiful and the food was French, and if you were a high-ranking military man, which he was not, you got a salary differential because it was a hardship post, and you traded money on the black market, and you ended up with enough to play the stock market on your crummy army pay, and you had a magnificent Vietnamese girlfriend and your best buddy had her sister, and your wife was far, far away. Vicki might have grown up to be one of
those women, I thought. Sly, beautiful, stricken at an early age with a presentiment of loss.

  "Are you going to tell my father?" she said.

  The lengths to which she had gone to seize my attention bespoke more longing than I could bear to imagine existing inside her skin, and it echoed my own for her, and I wasn't sure I could speak of one to him without revealing the other, which was why I decided at that moment not to tell him, though I should have; believe me, I know I should have.

  "If Toinette doesn't know you're gone, and if we can whisk you into the house as sneakily as you got out, I won't tell him. But it may be too late to promise that."

  She did something then that surprised me, something else, I should say. She leaned more heavily into me and wrapped both of her arms around me and held me tight, as if she were five instead of ten. Of course I hugged her back, and I almost said something I had never said to her or the other children: I love you. I had wanted to say it a dozen times but always stopped myself, afraid it would confuse them, being loved and abandoned by so many people. I did not want to burden what went on between us with the weight of my love.

  We held on to each other until the cab turned the corner that led to her house, and I slowly loosened my grip. In another minute, another twenty-five seconds, twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one, we'd have to say good-bye and pretend this had never happened.

  3. Today, During

  I DIDN'T KNOW, when I fell in love with him, that my husband was a spy. It's not like God or infertility, the sort of thing you talk about on a first date. His cover was that he was a diplomat. My cover, to use the term more loosely, was that we met as he was about to leave the Agency, that I didn't know him in the days when he was trying underhandedly to save the Free World from the Red Menace. The truth is that Will was a reluctant Cold Warrior, an ambivalent operative, someone who'd stayed at the Agency until he retired, at the age of forty-eight, because by the time he grasped how wrong our Vietnam policy was, his wife was pregnant with their son, Jesse, he had been working in Vietnam and Cambodia on and off for five years, and the skills he had acquired there didn't translate easily, or lucratively.

  In those days, there was no market outside government for fluent Vietnamese speakers, and Will was neither an entrepreneur nor a man who spotted opportunities for his own advancement and seized them. He did his job, collected his government paycheck, and saw the world. By the time he told me that he was not entirely the person he had represented himself to be, I already trusted him more deeply than I had ever trusted anyone. I wouldn't say he'd tricked me into trusting him; more that he'd fooled himself all those years he'd worked for the CIA, doing things he didn't believe in. He never talked much about the details.

  We had met while I was hitchhiking on Swansea, on Honeysuckle Road, the blustery north end of the island. I had my thumb out, and Will picked me up in Blueberry Parfait, the old navy blue VW Bug his kids had given that name to. I was heading back to the bed-and-breakfast in the harbor town of Cummington, where I was staying with a boyfriend, though we were a reluctant couple by then, held together by habit, inertia, and fear. Will was going in my direction, on his way to an art gallery showing the drawings he had done in art therapy in the psychiatric hospital where he'd spent a month the year before.

  I knew none of this that afternoon, about the CIA or the psych ward or what led to his going there. He said only that he was a diplomat and a Sunday painter with a summer house on the island. A friend with a modest gallery on Old Settlers Road had been kind enough to hang a few drawings. I imagined seascapes, cat pictures, front porches thick with hanging plants and golden retrievers, Swansea at its cloying worst. Once we got to the gallery, I intended to hitch another ride. It's common on the island; doesn't mean you're looking for trouble. There isn't any to be had here. But there was nothing cloying about Will's drawings. They were intricate and dark and George Grosz-like, and when he offered to drive me to my destination if I could wait fifteen minutes, I said yes.

  I said yes and yes and yes to him for the rest of the summer. He was gentle and loving and sad and taught me to jitterbug to Benny Goodman and Dizzy Gillespie in the living room of his charming run-down bungalow. When we danced, his aged Labrador, Binti, thumped her tail in time to the beat. We told each other stories and secrets, the way lovers do, and, the way lovers do, we did not tell each other everything. He told me that his son, Jesse, had died the year before in a car crash, in which he, Will, had been driving, and that he had come close a month later to killing himself. But he did not tell me that he'd been a spy for the last twenty years.

  I told him that my first novel, which became a movie with Whoopi Goldberg, was inspired by a true story: after my father disappeared when I was nine, my mother and I crossed the country looking for him, accompanied by my mother's friend, a wise and funny black woman named Gladys but whom we called Gigi, because she yearned to go to Paris. We never found my father, but we had a lot of adventures on the journey, some comic, some poignant, several downright pathetic. In the movie version, we find dear old Dad when we have the good sense to give up looking, when we return home defeated. There he is in the living room, with his feet on the ottoman. In the movie version, he was having a midlife crisis that dissolved, like baking soda in water, when he set eyes on my mother and me again. In real life, Mr. Warren Chase disappeared without a trace. It is possible that he will turn up yet, that he will call me, or someone else will and announce that she is my sister or my father's wife. I hoped it would happen when my book about him came out, and again when the movie with Whoopi Goldberg came out. I sometimes imagine him in Arizona or California, renting a video or turning on the TV and seeing the Hollywood version of what happened to us when he vanished.

  My father's having left the way he did always made me fear that my husband would leave the same way, that I would end up abandoned and in pursuit of him, the way my mother pursued my father. But I surprised Will and myself: I was the one who disappeared.

  Will's life as a spy has nothing to do with the beginning of this next scene—a pivotal scene—but does play in an exchange between Daniel and me toward the end of it, and it loops in and out of much that follows.

  The scene begins on a light note, with Daniel arriving in my apartment that afternoon at the stroke of four, sweat pouring down his forehead, a soaked handkerchief in his fist. "Christ, have you been out today?"

  "Briefly."

  "It must be a hundred and bloody two. I got into a cab on Seventh Avenue and the—"

  "Do you want to shower?"

  "Just a glass of water. The windows of this cab were rolled up. I hopped in, and it was a furnace inside. The bastard was pretending he had air-conditioning."

  "Let me get you a towel."

  "Jesus, what a day. A producer from the BBC rang to see if I'd go on camera for a show about Sister Wendy and her contribution to culture. 'Her what?' I said. 'She's spreading the word,' he said, 'and she's phenomenal.' 'The word about Van Gogh? Since when is Van Gogh a secret?' 'But you don't understand,' he said. 'She can do a twenty-minute riff on Rembrandt in one take, no notes.' Guess what? So can my mother. I told him I had to take a call from the Sultan of Brunei." He pulled at the knot of his tie to loosen it while he wandered toward my desk and the swivel chair, where we often began. "You'll never guess who got married. For the third time. It happened a few weeks ago, but I only now got a fax from London. What are you doing, reading Tony Bennett's autobiography? Since when do you know him? There's a card that says Compliments of the Author."

  "The editor sent it. He must have put the card in. He called me today and wants me to ghost another book. Here, drink deep. Towel down. Who got married?"

  I'd been hoping for a somewhat more romantic entrance, as I always do from Daniel, but the extreme degree of his distraction that day was actually a relief: I was in thrall to my own distractions, wondering how I would delicately, discreetly, without betraying Vicki's confidence, bring up the subject of his paying more attention
to his children, or a different kind of attention, to Vicki in particular.

  He drank half the glass in one gulp, paused, and said, "Ginger Miles." And kept drinking.

  "Are you heartbroken?"

  Still guzzling water, he cocked an eyebrow at me, as if to say, You must be mad, and I was reminded that Daniel did not suffer easily from heartbreak, even the hokey-jokey kind I meant. "I haven't seen her in twenty years, for God's sake, and last time I did—"

  "Who'd she marry?"

  "A guy I knew at Cambridge, a barrister, a bit dodgy, I always thought. The wedding was a bash at someone's country estate. When I knew her, she was practically homeless, trying to out-Orwell Orwell. How was your day?"

  "Nothing out of the ordinary," I lied. I said no more about the Eighth Deadly's semi-offer, nothing about Jesus's proposal of marriage, Vicki's visit, or my stark encounter with Lili, which ended badly: I had no idea how to breathe life into her and no clue about what to do next.

  I didn't want Daniel to see me vulnerable, didn't want him to think I might be needy, truly needy, any sooner than necessary. It no longer seemed odd to me that I maintained multiple versions of the truth with him; that there were so many things essential to my well-being that I didn't tell him. Where had she come from, this stranger, this woman who admitted to wanting nothing from him but sex? Had I left the rest of me on Swansea with my husband and taken an imposter to New York? I wasn't sure, but I was determined to tell Daniel that the children needed more from him, determined.

  I crossed the room to turn off the ringer on the phone and to mute the voices on the answering machine, and he reached for my half-clad thigh. I was wearing running shorts and a T-shirt, and his fingers wandered to the top of my leg, and we exchanged a knowing, foreplayish laugh. "I got the fax from London an hour ago, about Ginger's wedding"—his tone low and intimate—"which got me thinking about coming over here immediately. But I restrained myself for as long as I could. Some unaccustomed impulse toward propriety."