“I come on my knees. Metaphorically.” He stepped aside to let an immaculately dressed young man (no doubt an agent) escort an older man in jeans (an actor Theo recognized from the movies) through the rococo lobby. Business was busy today, phones ringing, doors opening and shutting as quickly as those on the set of a French farce.
Theo smiled. Miss Fitzhugh scowled. He changed approach and attempted a formal tone. “Is Mr. Middendorf in?”
“That he’s not,” she snapped. “And for you to go checking out of your hotel without a word! I’ve phoned a good dozen searching.” She picked up a small stack of memos. “There’s—”
“I’m staying at Brown’s.”
She stopped. “Are you now?” It was clear from her derisive grimace that this possibility hadn’t occurred to her. “Aren’t you the swell! Well, you might have told someone.”
“Look, Miss Fitzhugh, I’m sorry I skipped out with the play. But it did belong to me. Forgive me?”
“I’ve been in a terrible fret.”
“Forgive me? Fellow Irish?” He held out his hand with a hopeful smile. She shook her head ruefully but accepted the offered hand, and started to say something when Theo interrupted again. “Mr. Middendorf must be back by now from Capri?”
She glanced at one of the doors. “I’m not at liberty to say.” (Perhaps she’d been reprimanded for being too free with information.)
“Well, he’ll be glad to know I’ve brought Ford’s—” He held up his folder, but she waved it impatiently away by shaking the handful of memo notes at him.
“Now, you listen.” She pushed up her sleeves, a sign of her seriousness. “Miss Harte’s in a state, she is. And all this week, coming and calling and coming and calling, trying to find you before she leaves—”
“Jenny Harte? She’s in London? Is Ford?”
Miss Fitzhugh thrust the notes into his hand. “She phoned not an hour ago from her hotel. She’s flying back to the States this very day and postponed it twice now already, and all because of wanting to talk to yourself. I’ll ring her up and say you’re coming.” She reached for a telephone eagerly, still under the romantic impression that passion for Jenny Harte had driven Theo to pursue the young woman and Rexford across the Atlantic.
“She’s not with Ford?”
Miss Fitzhugh leaned toward him, motioning him closer for privacy. “Ay, Mr. Rexford’s driven her off, I’ll wager, upset as she is. And buying her off as well, is what I’m thinking, sending her here with drafts to pay and no money left in his account but what Mr. Middendorf put there out of his own pocket.” Whatever hopes the Middendorf agency might have had of drilling discretion into their young Irish receptionist would have been dashed had they overheard this indignant torrent rush past her beautifully painted lips.
Theo was horrified. “What did Jenny say?”
“What need had she to say a word, herself with those dark circles under her eyes and spooky-like with her narves all gone to pieces.” Miss Fitzhugh acted out a state of overwrought grief by trembling and clasping her hands to her face. “And her not speaking a mean word against him neither.”
Still clutching the folder, Theo ran toward the door, dodging gilded chairs and the impatient clients who waited in them, leafing without a glance through magazines. “Tell Jenny I’m in a taxi on my way. And, Miss Fitzhugh, thank you.”
The receptionist called to him, “Don’t be blaming her, Mr. Ryan. It’s you bloody men what do it to girls.”
“Too too true,” laughed an elegant woman on the brocaded settee.
Chapter 25
Sound Retreat—, Afar Off
It is my last mirth in this world. Do not grudge it to me.
When I come to the sad parting, you shall see me grave enough.
—Sir Walter Raleigh, when warned against levity on the scaffold
Jenny Harte, in jeans and sweater, her luggage beside her, sat in an ugly armchair in the small, poorly lit lobby of her hotel, the first one she’d come to when she’d walked out of the train station three days earlier. And it had been only three days, not a week. (The Irish exaggerate.) Just as Miss Fitzhugh had inflated the time Jenny had been in London, she’d overstated the havoc wrought on the young woman’s face. Jenny looked tired and she looked unhappy, but otherwise she looked the same as when Theo had seen her last, that May afternoon on the Cavendish campus. Her hair the same blonde, her eyes the same clean blue, and in her movements the same clear, resilient, unmistakably American imperviousness to experience. She had not, Theo thought with relief, been so damaged by whatever had happened with Ford that the pain was left on her face.
With too deliberate cheer, she bounced out of the chair and waited for him to come over to her. Then she said with excessive brightness, “Thanks for getting here.”
“Oh, Jenny.” Theo pulled her to him, hugging her. At that, she burst into tears. “It’s all right,” he murmured to her, and held her head against him while she cried, until she pulled away, quickly wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands.
“Oh boy,” she said, sniffling with a little laugh. “Oh boy, excuse me. It just hit me when I saw you. Somebody from home. I’m okay. I’m glad you got here; I have to go in”—she looked at her watch—“in half an hour.”
“Home?”
“To Charlotte. My parents just retired there from Minneapolis.” She laughed again, sharply. “Just don’t tell me I made a mistake, all right?” Turning, she flung herself back into the armchair. “I don’t need any more lectures. I’ve had plenty from them.”
“All right.” Theo sat down across from her. “Where’s Ford?”
As far as Jenny Harte knew, Ford was still in Cornwall—at the cottage they’d rented in a town on Port Isaac Bay, south of the Arthurian castle at Tintagel. And as far as she knew, he was still drinking. He’d been drinking for a month. He hadn’t asked her to leave, nor had he left her, nor struck her, “or anything else my parents may think.” She’d left him, and had wanted to leave him long before she finally did. When, or even if, he’d noticed that she’d actually gone, she couldn’t say. She’d told him she was leaving, and he’d given her a letter for the Middendorf agency for money out of his account to pay her plane fare home. But then he’d disappeared again, so she’d hired a taxi to take her to the nearest train station.
In the past weeks, Ford had disappeared a lot. Sometimes he stayed in his “study” for days, drinking; then he wandered through the house in the middle of the night making long-distance phone calls, knocking into things and breaking them, “talking crazy junk at nobody.” Sometimes he went away for days, driving a rented Jaguar convertible around the countryside, either by himself or with “local weirdos” he picked up in pubs. This was the second car he’d rented; he’d smashed the rear end of the first one by backing into a stone wall outside a pub. Sometimes he’d brought these local strangers to the house; other times they had carried him back there from whatever pub they’d met him in. Usually they stayed, sitting in the front room drinking until they passed out, or they got in a fight with Ford and left, or he threw them out. One of them had broken Ford’s nose. The police had come to the house. All this Jenny related with a kind of puzzled matter-of-factness, as if she were summarizing the plot of a play whose tone had taken a peculiar turn and confused her.
Theo lifted his head from his hands. “Oh, Jesus. For a month? Why didn’t you call Middendorf? Or Bernie. Somebody. Don’t you know how frantic they were?”
“He didn’t want anybody to know where he was.” She shrugged. “Look, I thought it would go away. Plus, I guess I thought I could handle it. I was never around anything like this before. It was…pretty bad.”
In researching Ford’s biography, Theo had, of course, heard from many sources stories about such prolonged binges. Twice, they’d ended with the playwright hospitalized. Even Ford himself described these episodes as “scary serious shit,” “so
ul holes,” “muzzle-in-the-mouth time.” But the last one—when he’d shot at his now ex-wife and fled to Tilting Rock—had been more than two years ago. After Rhodora had moved in with him, the drinking hadn’t stopped, but the binges had. Under her flat-out refusal to tolerate it (“I’m not hanging around watching some chickenshit asshole guzzling poison so he can kill himself without admitting it.”), even the drinking had tapered off—at least until the last few months. But in retrospect, Theo could see there’d been warning signs of another outbreak: the broken collarbone, the pint bottle hidden in the glove compartment, the Lincoln crashed and the arrest by the Rome police, the sudden bolt to England, the break with Rhodora. Had Ford, as Rhodora theorized, been “running scared” from marriage with her? Had that fear started the binge?
“Was Ford drunk when you two left Rome together? Did you plan this or what?”
Jenny Harte admitted that they both had been drinking, that in fact she’d had to drive the Lincoln most of the way to Atlanta because Ford had passed out in the backseat. And that, no, they “hadn’t exactly planned it.”
“You just left, drove to Atlanta, and took a plane to England? Just like that?” Theo tried to keep his voice calm. “Let’s don’t even talk about that you were supposed to be grading papers for my course, and I had—”
“I feel very bad about that.”
“Let’s don’t even talk about your dissertation—”
“Well, actually, I worked on it.” This struck her as humorous.
“Let’s talk about your life, Jenny, for Christ’s sake.”
She bounced in the armchair, pulling her legs under her, hands squeezing her knees. “I was always so damn good! Good kid, good student, neat room, papers on time. I wanted to do something wild, not responsible, not planned, not—”
“Well, I’d say you managed that.”
She sighed at him. “Please? No lecture.”
Theo rubbed his head hard, crossed his arms. “Fine. So he was drunk from day one.”
“Not all that much at first. The first couple of weeks were great. I mean it. He even helped me with my work. We fished, played cards; I did things that were fun for a change. We went exploring Cornwall. He taught me how to see things. Really see things.” She looked at Theo, leaning over her crossed legs. “You know what I mean?”
“Yes, I know.” He massaged his eyes.
A middle-aged couple, Americans, waved at Jenny as they entered the lobby, laden with cameras, guidebooks, and shopping bags. They stopped to ask why she hadn’t left for the airport; was anything wrong?
“They’ve been nice,” Jenny said blandly as the couple started up the dark carpeted stairs. “Look, Ford was fun, you know? He really was. Then all of a sudden…” She pulled her knees toward her chest, rocking them.
“I wish you’d called.”
“He got so he wasn’t, you know, even there, he wasn’t rational.”
“Yes.”
“I mean, sometimes he’d say he felt rotten I’d gotten messed up in it, for me to go home, and on and on, but I wanted to help. I mean, Theo, the man was a great writer.”
“What about his writing?”
She shook her head. “I mean, he’d do maybe a page, then he’d tear it up. One time he dumped a bunch of paper in a wastebasket, threw whiskey on it, and set it on fire. I think that was a big part of the problem. Anyhow, I couldn’t handle it.” She waved her hands as if brushing off the memory. “No way.”
“Jenny, if you’d only come to talk to me before you did this! Couldn’t you tell he wasn’t the kind of man to throw your life away on?”
She shook her head with annoyed impatience. “I never wanted to throw my life away on him. Are you kidding? I thought it would last the summer. I mean, I always planned on being back at Cavendish in the fall. I’m teaching! I’m on the last chapter of my dissertation. I knew it was just an affair. He’s had hundreds. I knew that.”
Her tone shocked Theo. “Didn’t you know Ford was getting married in a month!”
“Right! Obviously, he was serious.” Her look was so contemptuous, Theo blinked. Then, pulling her hands through her hair, Jenny stretched out her legs. “I really don’t think you can ask me to feel responsible for that.”
“That’s not—”
She glanced at her bright-colored watch. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to get to Heathrow. All I wanted to—”
“I’ll find a cab and take you.”
“No, thanks anyhow. The Middendorf agency’s sending a taxi for me. They’ve been really nice. All I wanted to say is, somebody ought to do something about Ford. His family or somebody. And you’re the only person I know who knows him, so…” Taking her plane ticket and passport from her purse, she checked them, put them back. Then she handed Theo a piece of paper with an address and phone number on it. “That’s where he is. Was.”
Theo rubbed slowly at his knees. “Damn it. I should have given Middendorf Ford’s manuscript soon as I got here. Maybe he would have gone back to work then.”
Jenny looked puzzled. “What manuscript?”
“Principles of Aesthetic Distance. Christ, the critics trash Out of Bounds. Then his wife throws his computer out the window. So he loses A Waste of Spirit, too. Then I act like an asshole, hold on to his new play—”
“What are you talking about?” The young woman stood up, pulling on a short suede jacket. “Ford’s got Aesthetic Distance and Waste of Spirit both. With him. They’re just not finished. That’s what I’ve been saying. That’s the problem. Pretty ironic, hunh? Here I’ve been analyzing the endings of plays, even a Rexford play, then here I was watching him not be able to finish one. It’s so ironic. I hate to think I’m leaving because I don’t think he will finish. Pretty awful thing to think about yourself.”
Flushed, Theo stood too, jamming his hands in his pants pockets. “Well, I’m sure you’ll get a good publishable chapter out of the episode.”
Her eyes widened, quickly filled with tears. “That’s not what I meant. That’s not why I came here with him.”
“Jenny, I’m sorry.” He touched her shoulder. “I apologize. I know it isn’t why you came. You came because, well…there’s nobody like him. And you left because he’s impossible. I know that. But you’re wrong about Aesthetic Distance. I’ve got his only copy.” Theo pointed at the folder on the table beside the chair. “That’s it, right there.”
The tears vanished as rapidly as they’d appeared, leaving her eyes the same clean blue. “I’m telling you, Theo. He’s got two or three copies of both of those plays. I mean, he wouldn’t let me read them, but I’ve seen the manuscripts when he was working. He locks them up in that trunk of his. The one you shipped him from Tilting Rock.”
Theo told her she must be mistaken. Then the memory of Ford’s voice rushed to his ear from that April evening back in Rome as they’d left the Pit ’n’ Grill, when he’d fretted about giving Ford Foolscap. How Ford had said, “I don’t lose plays, kid.”
“He used to joke about it,” Jenny was saying with animated interest, as if Ford Rexford the playwright had no connection to the man with whom she’d lived for two apparently horrific months. “About how his agent and producers were going nuts because I guess you’d told them how great Aesthetic Distance was, and you’d convinced them it was finished and all. I remember two or three times he said, you know the way he talks, ‘The three Bs—that’s what he called them, Bittermann, Middendorf, and Amanda Mahan: Bern, Buzz, and the Bitch—‘the three Bs had their fangs an inch from my poor tired backside, then Theo throws them this great big make-believe bone, and I slip under the fence while they’re fighting over it.’ It used to crack him up.”
Hearing Ford’s voice, even in her flat paraphrase, Theo now believed it was true. So that had all been a lie about Ford’s ex-wife destroying A Waste of Spirit. All a lie, Ford’s telling Bittermann that he’d left his only copy of
Aesthetic Distance back in Tilting Rock; all a lie, telling Adolphus and Amanda Mahan that Buzzy Middendorf had the only copy; telling Middendorf that Theo had the only copy.
And Theo had played right into it because he thought he did have the only copy. He’d told everybody he did, told everybody he would withhold it too, until Ford returned his script. He’d made the lie work since while hardly anyone believed Ford anymore, there was no reason to doubt his scrupulous, indignant biographer. All a lie, all a joke. No, Theo told himself, a delaying tactic until Ford could finish. Or a cover-up, because he couldn’t.
Theo stared at the young blonde woman. “He can’t finish the plays.”
She ducked her head under her purse strap, pulling the bag to her side. “Who could, drinking like that?”
“Maybe that’s why he’s drinking like that, Jenny.”
“It doesn’t help.”
“No.”
She made a face, sensible, dismissive. “All myths to the contrary, the talent’s not in the bottle, and the talent sure doesn’t justify the bottle, either. When Ford Rexford drinks, he’s just a drunk.” Spotting a taxi driver looking in the hotel door, she waved at him.
Theo picked up her suitcases. “Did you tell anybody at Middendorf’s?”
“Where he is? No. And not about the drinking, either.”
“That Ford has the plays? Did you tell anybody that Aesthetic Distance isn’t finished? The Mahans or Bernie. Nobody? You’re sure?”
She shook her head. “Who would ask me?”
“Well, don’t.”
She gave a defensive shrug.
After Theo helped the driver carry Jenny Harte’s luggage to the taxi, he leaned into the backseat to tell her good-bye. “I’m sorry it was so rough.”
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