She looks at Elizabeth, smiling. Her eyes are dark brown and terribly bright; sharp, as if a thousand fascinating memories and thoughts milled around behind them, catching light like cymbals and sequins and small bits of glass. “That’s why I asked,” she says. “When your friend mentioned your uncle.” She sighs, an apology. “It does seem to be the latest fad.”
A man at the newspaper office sends them to the library, and the librarian sits them before a TV screen with a dozen reels of microfilm. Both seem slightly amused by their requests, as if Hedda’s daughter, or someone like her, had been in with the same questions just a day or two before—as if they’d been having a run on obituaries—and their amusement, as well as their serious willingness to help, only increases her sense of bulky foolishness. Surely she is too big to be playing Nancy Drew to Tupper Daniels’ Hardy Boy.
They find a Nelson who died in childbirth and a Neilson who drowned in 1935, at age 27, and a Nicholson survived by twelve children, and read fifty other stories of the dead before she sits up, shaking herself as if from some absorbing bad habit and declares that she has had enough.
“This strikes me,” she tells him, whispering, slipping into her jacket as he sits blinking at her, the greenish light from the screen still on his face, “as a particularly morbid way of spending a weekend.”
He laughs, and, returning the reels to the librarian, follows her out into the rain.
They have lunch at a small bar with hanging plants and Tiffany lampshades—a reproduction of every bar on the Upper East Side—and then he drives her slowly through town, up and down past the huge summer homes of the wealthy and the small, inhabited homes of the year-round people, suggesting that she might, just might, see something she had forgotten or been unaware she ever knew, that would identify the house where her father lived.
She looks carefully, but sees nothing: her inheritance.
Later, they park at the ocean, where the rain and fog obscure the sea and most of the sand, and Tupper Daniels talks about immortality, one hand on the wheel, the other on the seat beside him.
He says it is all wrapped up in his writing, it is why he writes and what he writes about. It is, he says, the only thing that anyone ever really strives for and as far as he is concerned, the only thing worth achieving: The certain knowledge that when I die, all does not die with me.
She watches him while he speaks. Watches the dunes that line the beach behind him, and which are only slightly more substantial than the fog. At first she wonders what he’s talking about. Hadn’t he, after all, sat beside her as one page after the other of names of the dead was pulled up before them? Hadn’t he heard the monotonous hum of the screen that lit, one after the other, that monotonous list of ordinary deaths, as if it were some final rolling of the credits for some long-forgotten variety show? How then could he talk about immortality?
But slowly she realizes he’s referring to his book—or maybe all books, she can’t tell—and the realization comes to her sadly; fills her not with a profound, but a helpless, loving kind of pity, as if he were a child insisting that a pet, long dead, had only run away, would be back any morning barking and wagging his tail.
He says: “To me art, especially literature, alone is immortal. Nothing else lasts. Even science can become outdated and obsolete; even political and social achievements. Even love. To me,” he says, “to stop writing would not only be to admit defeat, it would be to admit death. To say there is no hope for immortality.”
He looks at her. The fog seems to press at the windows, even the sand has given way beneath it.
“That’s why I’d hoped,” he says, “that out here you’d see something, or, I don’t know, regain something of your father. Something that I could put in my book. I’d hoped, for you, to give him some of that immortality.” He leans closer to her. “It’s really the only gift I have to give someone I love.” His pale face moves closer; with his hand on her neck, he presses her toward him. “I love you, Elizabeth,” he says.
And she answers, mouth to mouth, both to keep him from kissing her and to send the moment from sentiment or farce into reality, to turn off the fog machines, to clear the air so that the words might have a chance at true meaning, a chance to change everything. “You realize Vista is a vanity press.”
“Yes,” he says, smiling just a little and then kissing her anyway, deeply. Crushing the stick shift between them. His hand very lightly brushes her breast, and then he pulls away, still smiling.
“Vista is a vanity press,” he says. Slowly, he begins to unbutton her jacket. “And vanity presses—of which Vista is only one—are not taken seriously by the rest of the publishing world, right?” He looks up at her, raising his eyebrows. She feels ill.
“Except for 1976,” he goes on, “when the president of a very large, very American organization published a bicentennial book with Vista and made it required reading for his many members, employees and associates, Vista has never had a best seller, right? In fact, Vista books don’t even get reviewed. Right?”
He pushes her jacket aside, begins working on the buttons of her blouse, slowly. “Yes,” she says. With the fog and the sand, the car’s white interior and his sweater, his hair and face, the blue eyes seem to be the only spot of color in the universe. And they are on her.
He stops, sits up. Her blouse is opened to just above her breasts. “You must know I looked into all this—long before I came to New York.”
“Well,” she says, coolly, “I’d presumed …” But she can muster no authority, or indifference.
He shakes his head, the smile getting slightly angry, battling with insult. “I do know what I’m doing by publishing with Vista,” he says. His fingers return to her blouse. He suddenly reminds her of a gynecologist, making conversation as he works.
“To write a good novel is one thing,” he explains. “You get a few nice reviews, your books hang out on the racks for a while, and that’s that.” He pulls her shirt up out of her jeans, unbuttons the last two buttons. “But to change the course of one certain publisher. To be the first best seller of a house that’s known as a joke, to make publishing history, that’s news. That’s lasting notoriety.”
He parts her shirt as if it were a delicate curtain, and, sighing a little, moves his fingers over her chest.
“Vista doesn’t sell any books because it doesn’t advertise or distribute, not enough anyway. My father has controlling interest in a very large ad firm that will handle my account once the book is published and he’s willing to put his own money into it. We’re going to hit TV mostly, and the women’s magazines.”
He leans forward, pulling her close, and slowly runs his tongue between her breasts. “I’m going to do my own distributing, too,” he says into her throat. “Make sure the book is available everywhere.” He kisses her chin and then pushes her shirt and jacket from both her shoulders. Kisses them. “After that,” he says to her collarbone, “it will start selling itself.” He places his open mouth over her left nipple, breathes softly through his nose. Reflexively, she puts her hand to his hair. She remembers seeing an article somewhere about a man who printed his own book, loaded his car with thousands of copies and drove crosscountry, promoting it. After three or four trips, the book became a best seller. Was it possible?
She is about to ask when he suddenly pulls away from her, quickly opens his door, gets out, slams it behind him. She watches him walk around the car. Her blouse is still open, her breast still wet from his mouth, and she believes for a moment that he is leaving her for good. But then she sees the trunk open and sees him standing behind it, a green blanket in his hand, when it slams closed. He opens her door and, taking her wrist, pulls her out. With one hand, she holds her blouse and jacket around her, off her shoulders like a stole.
“But it’s raining,” she says, not sure it is rain or just a mist from the sea, or the fog. He takes her down the beach, up into some small dunes. Lays the blanket down between them. Grinning, he unbuckles his belt, slips off his sho
es, then his pants. His penis springs out with a quick rigidity that lacks only a boing.
She begins to laugh. Sitting on the damp blanket, she laughs quietly, her shirt and jacket still wrapped loosely around her, dipping down her back, gathered at her elbows, like a blanket worn by the survivor of a shipwreck. She laughs, shivering a little as the rain hits her skin. He sits beside her, sweater and socks still on, smiling at her over his raised knees.
“What’s so funny?” he asks, taking her shoulder, pulling her back. “Hmmm? What’s so funny?” She lies back on the blanket, he leans over her. “What’s so funny?” She knows he doesn’t ask the question to be answered, but only to make some noise at her, the way one might speak full sentences to a newborn and so she says nothing, merely puts her hands to her sides, letting her jacket and shirt once again fall away. He puts his mouth to her breast as if to pick up where he left off. She puts her hand to his hair.
Above them, the sky is low, gray, limitless. It doesn’t relent at some horizon or bank of clouds, but instead moves down around them, becomes what’s before and behind them, becomes the ground where they lie. Even Tupper’s head on her breast is vague, the breast itself the color of sky.
She would be a fool, she decides, to look for a dead father in this fog, when a lover, his heart beating against hers, so easily floats away. She would be a fool to think, pressed under such a sky, of future or past or a present that endures.
And yet, when he moves up over her, his hair already caked with salt, brushing her lips, she whispers, “I love you too,” closing her eyes slowly, as in a fadeout. She imagines a young boy, dancing on some invisible dune above them, claiming it goes on and on and on.
“You, I hadn’t counted on,” he tells her over dinner. “The book is for women and I wanted a woman editor—that’s why I came to Vista, not the other vanities, since all their editors are men, but I never thought you’d be you! I knew I needed a woman’s sense of how it should end, but God, when you mentioned your father, it seemed too good to be true. I sensed you were skeptical, but I was positive, even though you weren’t, that you had my ending somewhere within you.”
She smiles. “Kind of like a diaphragm.”
He smiles too, cracking open a lobster claw. “I like to think of it as a fetus,” he says. “And I planted the seed.”
She grimaces, gripping her stomach, and then pours him more wine. “But you still haven’t got it,” she says. “How can you pull off this great miracle of publishing with a book that has no ending?”
“It’ll have one,” he says. “And I just know we’ll find it here. This weekend.”
“We’ve only got tomorrow.”
“And tonight.”
She concedes, as if it were simply a matter of time.
The restaurant, a small, many-windowed place full of candlelight, is nearly empty, but the few patrons are elegant and handsome. She notices one couple in particular, a broad, high-colored man with an ascot and pure white hair brushed back and worn long, and a thin, dark woman dressed in black and silver. The waiters move silently, in and out, and the talk is low, only a murmur, but full of importance.
Tupper is wearing his blue blazer, a white shirt and khaki pants, and what looks like an old school tie. His hair is neatly combed. Anyone could mistake him for an ivy league author. A young man with talent and bright prospects.
And she, in her simple wool dress, navy trimmed with gray, four tasteful buttons at the yoke, she (if only she wore glasses) could be his young editor. Or wife. A literary pair; after all, the Hamptons are famous for them.
(As she was dressing this evening, Tupper was in the kitchen talking to Hedda. She heard him tell her that he was an author and Elizabeth his editor. That they were actually here to research, not her uncle, but his book. When she came into the kitchen, Hedda looked at her with what seemed to be new respect.)
“You said this afternoon that the book would sell itself.”
He nods.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“Word of mouth,” he says, through food. He bows his head to swallow. “No, that’s not it, really. It’s the whole bigamist thing. And women.”
“I still don’t see.”
He drinks his wine, then presses his lips together, thinking. “Well, you’re the perfect example,” he says. “You read the book and thought of your father. And most women, I think, will react in the same way. Every woman, or almost everyone, has a bigamist figure in her life. Usually, it’s a lover, but father, friends, even uncles will do too. For most women, it’s the man who got away, the one they couldn’t quite put a finger on. Maybe their first love at camp, or a teacher in college, or the boy who lived next door who never noticed them. Every woman I’ve ever met seems to have some man who touched her emotionally and then went away. My book is about that man.”
“But how does it sell itself?”
He leans forward. There’s a confidence in his manner and his speech that she’s never seen before: he has it all worked out. “What the book will provide, for all those women, is an excuse; a reason, an imagined reason, but a reason still, why that man disappeared. It will absolve them, show them that their love for him was nobel and his leaving nothing personal. He leaves everyone sooner or later. And, at the same time, it will offer them a hope of his return. A hope, I think, that every woman harbors for some man.”
She thinks of Bill and suddenly he holds up his hand. “I know what you’re going to ask, ‘Don’t some men harbor the same sort of hope for some women?’ ”
“Yes,” she says, as if he had indeed read her mind.
He sighs. “I suppose they do, but for men it’s just not that important. If a man fails to connect with a certain woman, he just goes on to someone else. But women—and I’m not condoning this, I’m just talking about the way things are—women derive so much more of themselves, their identity, their self-confidence from men. They just can’t forget a man who left them because they always take it to heart. They take it personally. But my book will help them place those men in the proper perspective. Help them to retain their dignity. And the dignity of their emotions.”
The heavyset man with the long white hair is having trouble with his bill. He shows some item to the waiter, raising his voice, and the waiter, shaking his head, snaps the check from the man’s fingers. His companion covers her eyes with her hand, apparently unconvinced of the dignity of her emotions.
“And besides,” Tupper is saying, “you’ve got to appeal to women these days. They buy more books, they’re more imaginative. They need more reassurance.”
“So women will buy it like one of those self-help books?”
He laughs, softly. “I guess I am making it all sound too clinical. The truth is I believe in this book. It’s a good book and it’s about a man all women—for whatever reason—will be intrigued by.” He smiles slyly. “You were intrigued, weren’t you?”
She lowers her head, wishes she had read it all. For it could be true, it could be a good book. There was that article about a man who printed his own book, made it a best-seller. It’s possible. “Yes,” she says. “I guess I was.”
He reaches across the table and takes her hand. “And as soon as we discover my ending and get the book out, you’ll see you were right. You’ll become the editor who turned vanity publishing on its ear.”
The woman in black and silver sweeps past them, sparkling, sprinkling her perfume over their table like fairy dust.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” she says, smiling. Lying.
He winks at her, Tracy to Hepburn. “Think of it,” he says.
Chapter 18
A dull lamp glows in Hedda’s living room and a tiny nightlight illuminates the narrow floor of the hallway upstairs. There is a bottle of brandy, its seal unbroken, and two large snifters on the dresser in their room. A note in flat, long, somewhat Oriental print that says: Help yourself to a nightcap and a fire. See you in the morning—H.C.
Elizabeth and Tupper smi
le at each other silently, knowing there’s no need to say how perfect it all is. When she comes back from the bathroom in her long flannel robe, he has lit the fire and placed the two glasses on the floor beside him. They sparkle in the firelight. The rest of the room is as dark as a cave.
She sits beside him and immediately, a little awkwardly, they lean together, as if someone were about to take their picture. As if, after today, they feel it is important to keep in touch. Then Tupper stretches out his legs and leans down on his elbow. She draws her knees close to her, feeling the fire on her hands.
“Talk to me,” he whispers.
“About my father?”
He shrugs. “About all the men in your life. Everyone before me.”
She puts her chin on her knees. The fire is just beginning to catch. Thin flames reach up and around the logs, tremble and retreat. Flare up again. There is, she knows, a book in the making here. Anything she says may be used, may be made immortal. He will know her worth by the ending he finds within her.
She begins with the Beatles.
But he turns his head to look up at her as she speaks and before she’s even gotten to “A Hard Day’s Night,” he begins to laugh.
“Be serious,” he says.
“I am being serious,” she tells him, although her voice is coy and her lips form a make-believe pout. “It was important. It was training.”
He shakes his head. “It was adolescence. It doesn’t mean a thing.” He puts his hand on her leg. “Please,” he says. “I asked you seriously. Be serious.”
She smiles at him. It occurs to her that although women are held responsible for what they have done to males through infancy and childhood, men will take no blame for anything they’ve made women feel before twenty-five. They will claim women’s silliness is inherent, not learned.
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