by Robyn Sisman
Leo attempted a fancy ricochet shot off the side, but he mishit and almost sank the white. Jack circled the table looking for something he could hit; he was distracted, and playing badly.
“Finally, there’s the gimmick,” said Leo. “This can be anything, though it’s usually something sad or bad. Former drug addiction, kooky religions, sexual abuse—though that’s a little passé now. Lesbianism sometimes works; male homosexuality is okay, but limited. Diseases can be great, so long as they’re not contagious or—what’s the word?” He snapped his fingers.
“Terminal?”
“Disfiguring. Funnily enough, terminal can be quite successful if death coincides with publication. No backlist, of course.”
Leo watched critically as Jack leaned so far across the table that he was practically lying down. “If you’re going for the blue, you need the rest.” He unhooked it from the wall and handed it to Jack, then continued. “For a woman, confessing to gross overweight is a surefire winner, providing she’s now whip-thin and comes across with the fatso pictures for the promo.
“Yup. Those are the crucial things, my golden four: youth, looks, contacts, gimmick. I made up an acronym to remind me. You Love Counting Greenbacks.” Leo chuckled. “Uh-oh, I think you’re snookered.”
But what about talent? What about style? What about passion and wit and humanity? Jack kept the words to himself. He didn’t want to appear foolish. Instead he asked, “What if the author’s sort of boring—over twenty-five, ordinary looking, no contacts, no scandal?”
“There’s always a way.” Leo spun a ball out of trouble. “I’ll give you an example. ‘Simple Kentucky rancher writes novel of love and betrayal, and is tipped for the Pulitzer.’ ”
“That’s McGuire, isn’t it?”
“Yes and no. In fact, Carson is rather well educated, and he’s a horse-owner, not a hired hand. He’s sent himself on scads of Creative Writing courses; that’s how I found him. I could see the fiction market was tiring of urban sophistication—drugs, models, mutilation—so I was hunting for some down-home macho realism. Carson was perfect, but it took me a while to figure out how to sell him. There were downsides. He’s not exactly young, and he’s no Adonis, and his real name’s Carson Blossom.”
“Blossom?” Jack couldn’t help smirking.
“I know: a real killer. With a name like that the poor guy was never going to win anything besides a dairy-cow competition. But then I discovered that his middle name was McGuire, and bingo! Look at all the writers who’ve been successful recently—Cormac McCarthy, Tom McGuane, Jay McInerney, Frank McCourt. So we dropped the Blossom, dug out Carson’s old grandmammy—a crazy Kentucky character, great copy—sent down a top photographer, and the press ran with it. We never claimed that Carson was a ranch hand; people deduced it from the cowboy hat, though we only used the hat to hide his baldness. Serendipity.”
“I guess.” Jack was reeling from these revelations. “But isn’t that kind of crass?”
“It totally sucks! But that’s the way the world is. You have to use dirty means to achieve a pure end.”
“Even lying?”
“Lying is just a different way of telling the truth.” Leo gave his leprechaun grin. “My game, by the way.”
It was true: Leo had won.
“Of course, you have to have the right product. And you”—Leo pointed his cue at Jack—“are terrific product.”
“I am?” Jack couldn’t stop a gratified smile tugging at his mouth.
“Yup. Because you are the real thing. In fact, you’re better than Carson.”
“I don’t know. . . .”
“But I do.” Leo laid down his cue along the edge of the table and looked across at Jack, controlled and confident. “Listen to me, Jack. You have talent. You are going to be a star. All you need is a little help. If you want it, I’m here. Understand?”
Jack met Leo’s intense gaze and nodded solemnly. “Thanks. I—I’ll think about it.”
“You do that. Now, what do you say to another game?”
It was past three by the time Jack stumbled out into the daylight. He walked down the street with a vague, foolish smile on his face, oblivious of passersby. His chest swelled. He was going to be a star!—not a loser like Howie. He was going to be rich!—in his own right, not dependent on his dad. There would be book signings and a coast-to-coast publicity tour. Television interviews. Fan letters. (Dear Mr. Madison, I cannot tell you how much . . .) People would no longer ask him what he “did”; they would know. Jack pictured himself dropping by Club SoHo—his club. The bartenders would get to know him. “Hey, Jack!” they’d shout in welcome (he wouldn’t object to the familiarity), setting up his favored tipple as he pushed his way through a backslapping crowd. While he waited for his dazzling lunch partner to show up, he would bitch with other writers about the hell of creative struggle. Or would he be too grand to mingle? “Better than Carson” . . . Carson Blossom! Jack guffawed loudly. A woman approaching him gave him a suspicious look and veered around him as if he were a nutcase.
Little did she know. He was an artist; artists were allowed to behave in weird and lordly ways. Jack smiled gleefully up into the sky and walked slap into a small tree. His thoughts returned to earth. He’d never leave Ella—of course he wouldn’t. He’d finish his novel and let Ella sell it for what it was worth. But what was it worth? What was he worth, without a Leo to spin him to success. “The pitch is everything”: Could that be right? Jack frowned: of course not.
But as he wandered through the streets, inhaling the smell of springtime, woozy with drink and flattery, he couldn’t help trying out something in his head. And the winner of this year’s Pulitzer prize is . . . Jack McMadison!
CHAPTER 7
Freya twisted her key in the familiar lock and pushed open the door of apartment 12B. She took a tentative step inside. There was the stale smell of trapped air, a faint purr from the refrigerator, nothing else.
“Hello?” she called out.
But of course there was no answer. Michael was safely at work. She had the place to herself.
Letting the heavy door snick shut, she walked quietly into the apartment and looked around her, feeling like an interloper. In the galley kitchen Michael’s breakfast cup and cereal bowl (muesli with extra bran) sat upturned on the drainer. The cushions on the living-room couch were rumpled and squashed where he had last sat on them. A copy of the Harvard Law Review lay folded open on the low table alongside. She noticed with a shock that all her art magazines were gone. Could he already have packed up her things, perhaps even thrown them away?
Swiftly she crossed the living room and opened the bedroom door, but no, everything in here was the same—the clutter of bottles and makeup tubes on her chest of drawers, her kimono hooked on the back of the door, a single black stocking—where had that come from?—draped over a chair. The bed was unmade. Freya was strangely touched to see that Michael still slept on “his” side. She walked over to the window and leaned her forehead across the glass, staring out. This was what she had always liked best about the apartment: its wide, calming view over Riverside Park and across the Hudson to the smokestacks of New Jersey. It was exhilarating to float here above the swarming streets, to escape the maze of dwarfing, cliff-faced buildings that blocked out the sky. Sometimes Michael used to find her like this at night, standing silent and alone in the dark, and he would exclaim in alarm and switch on lights, as if he found her behavior weird.
Michael. She sighed. Another era over. She wasn’t exactly heartbroken, but she felt . . . tired. Why was it that her life no longer seemed to progress? When she looked back over the last few years, there seemed to be no development, just one damned thing after another: another man, another job, another apartment. Something must be the matter with her.
Michael was one of the few single men in New York actively seeking a long-term partner—okay, wife—yet he had discounted her as a possibility. Why? Was she too tall? Too thin? Were her breasts too small? Her knees
too bony? Had she teased him too much about his funny little habits? Or was she simply too old—not only to win someone else’s heart, but to give her own? In the restaurant, Michael had turned sad brown eyes to hers and said simply, devastatingly: “You don’t love me.” It was true.
Other people said confidently that they were “in love.” How could they tell? Mere companionship was not enough; she knew that now. Yet there must be more to love than the skittishness that attended every new affair, the coiled-up excitement that could be triggered into passion by a single glance or the touch of a finger. Passion burned very prettily, but sooner or later the flames went out—or left a scar.
Freya blinked her eyes and hauled herself back into the present. Her breath had steamed a cloudy circle on the window. She wiped it clear with the sleeve of her sweatshirt and turned away from the window. Stop wittering; get packing. She dragged a chair over to the closet and reached for her two suitcases, old friends, stacked on a high shelf. When she yanked them down, dust and debris showered onto her head and drifted to the floor. Damn. She fetched a dustpan and brush to sweep up the mess, and a long apron to protect her clothes, then dusted off her hair and found an old cotton scarf to tie washerwoman-style around her head. It was funny to think this had been a quasi-feminist fashion some time back in the eighties. She wondered if she looked like Simone de Beauvoir.
She made the bed roughly and put her suitcases on top, lids flipped open. The good thing about having no fixed address was that you never accumulated too much stuff. Not for her the rubble of old letters and photographs and theater programs, the personal collection of books with one’s own signature written with increasing fluency on the flyleaf, the balding childhood bunny rabbit, the gewgaws and love gifts, vases, bowls, framed reproductions, and other sentimental nonsense that most people seemed unable to live without. A truly independent woman, Freya told herself, ought to be able to pack up her life in an hour, max. Besides, when you were five foot ten, no one offered to carry your luggage.
Freya filled the two suitcases, staggered to the elevator with both of them, and stowed them downstairs in the doorman’s cubbyhole until she was ready to take a cab to Jack’s. Feeling disheveled, and grumpy with hunger, she stood in the kitchen and chomped eight Ritz crackers in a row; she had bought them herself, so it wasn’t stealing. Her eyes roved around the neat, familiar room. She pictured Michael in the striped apron, sleeves rolled up, meticulously chopping and measuring, frowning over his recipe book like a small boy doing his homework. He was a good cook, and at the beginning this had pleased and impressed her. But recently it had sometimes seemed a burden to be presented with a complicated meal over which she was meant to rhapsodize, when all she’d wanted in the first place was cheese on toast and a good book in bed.
Swallowing hastily, She located her handbag and the two items that she had laid ready on top of the chest of drawers, now empty and otherwise bare. One was a small framed photograph of her mother, glamorous in boots and a Russian hat, laughing in a blur of pigeons: Paris, Place Vendôme, 1972—the last week, possibly the last day Freya had seen her. For a moment Freya held the photo in her palm, staring down at it: Why aren’t you here? The carefree eyes smiled back at her. Her mother had been only thirty-one, four years younger than Freya was now, when she died. Freya stroked the cold glass with a fingertip, then carefully slotted the picture into an inner pocket of her bag.
The other item was an airline wallet containing two tickets for England, one for her and one for . . . Well, who? The wedding was less than three weeks away. Freya felt a burst of anger that Michael couldn’t have waited a bit longer to ditch her. She couldn’t go alone; she couldn’t. Her imagination raced ahead, conjuring up scenes of embarrassment and humiliation—and that’s when she remembered the hat. She had bought it specially. Where was it? Climbing onto the chair once again, she foraged in the clutter of overnight bags, tennis-ball cans, rolled-up posters and exercise weights until she spied the smartly striped box. She quailed at adding yet another item to her heap of luggage, but without a hat it was unthinkable to—
What was that? Freya froze, arm arrested in midair. She could hear a distinct metallic scuffling, horribly like the sound of a key in a lock. Instinctively she crouched low and slid off the chair. It couldn’t be!
But it was. Freya felt a faint draft of air as the apartment door opened. She heard footsteps, the rustle of clothing or shopping bags, then a slam loud enough to make her jump. She checked her watch: barely five o’clock, much too early for Michael. Besides, she could smell perfume. She remembered Cat’s theory that Michael might have found another woman, and her own scoffing denial. Or what if it was a robber? No law said that all robbers were men. She grabbed the dustpan and brush, and holding them before her like shield and dagger, edged cautiously into the corridor.
An elderly woman was hanging something up in the hall closet. She wore a neat, old-fashioned suit of celery green, its pleated skirt falling modestly to her plump calves, and had a nimbus of fluffy white hair sculpted like a meringue. Freya must have made some small sound, for the woman suddenly turned, saw her, and clutched a hand to the pussycat bow at her neck.
“My goodness! You practically scared me to death!”
Freya stared. Who was this person?
Whoever she was, she seemed quite unabashed. “I thought you came on Tuesdays,” she said, closing the closet door with a firm hand. She advanced on Freya, head high, a tsarina approaching a serf. “Do. you. speak. English?”
Freya opened her mouth, but no words emerged.
The woman aimed an index finger at her at her own heart. “I,” she said slowly and distinctly, “am Mrs. Petersen, Mr. Petersen’s mother.” She thought for a moment. “La madre de Signor Petersen. Comprendo?”
Freya’s brain raced. What was Michael’s mother doing here? And why was she speaking in mangled Spanish? Freya knew nothing about Mrs. Petersen except that she was divorced, worshipped her son, and worked as an administrator at some fancy girls’ school in Minnesota. She had consistently refused to acknowledge Freya’s existence. On the few occasions when Freya had happened to answer the phone, Mrs. Petersen had deflected any attempts at small talk with a curt “May I please speak to my son?”—always in a tone of aggrieved suspicion, as if Freya had broken into the apartment and was holding Michael at gunpoint.
“Oh, never mind. Come with me.” Mrs. Petersen beckoned commandingly and bustled toward the kitchen.
Freya hesitated. Did she really look like a maid? A Mexican maid? She caught a glimpse of herself in a far mirror, complete with dustpan, apron, and knotted headscarf: not so much Simone de Beauvoir as Mrs. Mop. She allowed herself to be led zombielike into the kitchen where Mrs. Petersen demonstrated exactly how she was to defrost the refrigerator, empty and wipe clean the food cabinets, and polish the tea kettle. Next stop was the bathroom, where Freya was instructed to disinfect the tiles and scrub the toilet.
“Sí, sí.” She nodded meekly.
When they reached the bedroom, Mrs. Petersen eyed the open closet, and its line of bare hangers, with satisfaction. She checked that Freya’s chest of drawers was empty, ran one dustometer finger across the top, and grimaced. Freya noticed with dismay that her handbag was sitting on a chair next to the chest, conspicuous as an elephant. Giving a theatrical gasp, she ran across the room to screen the bag, and pointed openmouthed at the empty closet. “Pliss, hhhhwhere ees Mees Freya?”
“Gone.” Mrs. Petersen gestured like someone shooing geese. “Vamoose.”
Freya crossed herself.
“No, no, Juanita, or whatever your name is, it’s all for the best. No bueno muchacha. Artista.” Mrs. Petersen frowned. “Inglesi.”
“Ah.” Freya sighed in condolence.
Mrs. Petersen was now rifling through her son’s clothes, pulling out his suits and laying them on the bed. “I want all these to go to the cleaner’s, understand? Launderio.”
“Sí.” Did the woman think Freya carried the Black Death?
>
“You get started, then. I have some calls to make. Telephonio.”
Freya listened to the retreating tattoo of Mrs. Petersen’s heels. Then she took off the apron, folded it, and placed it in the middle of Michael’s bed, with the apartment key on top. She considered leaving a note, but there seemed nothing to say. Quickly she picked up her purse and hat box, wondering how she was going to sneak out of here. From the living room Mrs. Petersen’s voice rose in a girlish gush. Evidently she and an old friend had been telephonically reunited. Freya lurked just out of sight in the bedroom doorway, ears cocked, waiting for an opportunity to escape.
“. . . not too bad. I have the maid here, getting everything back into shape. I think I’ll rearrange the furniture, too. It’s so important for Mikey to have a fresh start, with no reminders.”
Mikey? Freya rolled her eyes.
“. . . Of course, it was his decision, Myra. You know I never interfere.”