by Joan Smith
‘You getting off, honey?’ The fat woman turned on her a smile of such transparent benevolence that Loretta felt ashamed of herself. She nodded, retrieved the remains of the Hershey bar as it slipped to the floor and received another radiant smile when she returned it. Standing passengers blocked her way to the doors and she eased herself through, reaching the exit just as the bus stopped. On the pavement she blinked in the bright sunshine and felt in her bag for her sunglasses, discovering when she put them on that she was much further down Broadway than she thought. She had somehow managed to miss the Flatiron building, one of her favourite New York landmarks, and a glance at the map told her she was almost at Union Square. She walked a couple of blocks, hot and damp but confident that the heat would soon dry her clothes, and spotted an espresso bar on the other side of the road. She crossed, dodging through stationary traffic, and studied an inviting window display of patisserie: Danish pastries, pains au chocolat and croissants studded with apricots as round and glutinously yellow as egg yolks. Her mouth began to water and she went inside, took a table near the window and ordered a double espresso, an apricot croissant and, feeling only slightly greedy, a warmed-up pain au chocolat.
Seven
Loretta was examining a secondhand copy of her most recent book, looking inside the cover to see if the person who had sold it to the huge bookshop on Broadway had left any trace. There was nothing, no name or dedication, only the price in pencil, and she was miffed to find it disposed of so quickly. The American edition had not been out long, no more than six months, and she was mildly affronted by the speed with which it had found its way on to a table displaying unsorted volumes which fell vaguely under the heading of language and literary criticism: dusty hardbacks which had long ago lost their jackets, scruffy paperbacks, books by and about Barthes and Foucault back to back with F R Leavis. Loretta’s book stood out in its shiny jacket, the bright red lettering of the title, Milton’s Cook: Fiction’s Invisible Woman, superimposed on a reproduction of Eve being expelled from Paradise from the Brancacci chapel in Florence. On the back cover was the quotation from Shirley which had suggested the title, the heroine’s complaint that Milton was unable to visualise Eve when he was writing Paradise Lost and had mixed her up with his cook.
Loretta held the book so it fell open, turning her head sideways to examine the picture of herself on the back flap. It had been taken in London by a friend of John Tracey, an occasional contributor to the Sunday Herald magazine who patiently experimented with studio lamps until the light was just right-highlighting her cheekbones and creating a soft glow around her hair. Staring at the black-and-white image now, aware of the ratty curls on her forehead and her dress sticking to her body after another torrential rainstorm, Loretta couldn’t quite connect it with herself. Nor, it seemed, could John Tracey; when she showed him the contact prints, he had paid her the dubious compliment of exclaiming ‘God, Loretta, you look quite sexy!’, a remark she had brooded over all the way back to Oxford.
Someone came and stood beside her, picking up books and discarding them with startling rapidity. She moved sideways, furtively sliding her own volume back on to the table, and the young man, who looked like a student, pounced on it and began to read the blurb. Loretta inched round the table until they were on opposite sides, her eyes flicking up every few seconds to gauge his reaction. He had a narrow, pale face under thick dark hair and although she could not see his eyes, she was not at all surprised when he flipped the book shut and slid it back on the table. She sighed, the air rushing out of her lungs like a deflating balloon even though she hadn’t known she was holding her breath.
Struggling not to take the rejection personally, Loretta lowered her head and immediately a name leapt up at her from a book jacket. Her hand shot out, colliding with the bony fingers of the pale young man who had also spotted it. ‘Sorry,’ she said, gripping the book firmly as he said, ‘Excuse me,’ and tried to take it from her. They glared at each other and Loretta said, without much justification: ‘I think I got there first.’
The student shrugged and let go with a bad grace. Loretta put down her purse, which she had taken the precaution of removing from her bag before handing it in at the front desk, and examined the plain blue volume. It was not a proof, as she first thought, but a finished copy in the style of some austere French publishing house, Gallimard say, rather than the small university press whose imprint it bore. Form, Fiction, Phallacy: Re-Reading the Victorians by Hugh Puddephat, she read in small black type, trying to ignore the scowling presence of the student on the far side of the table.
‘The late Hugh Puddephat,’ the biographical details began, and Loretta’s eyes widened in surprise. She hadn’t known of a posthumous edition of Puddephat’s work, she couldn’t recall seeing a review in the TLS but it was an American edition and expensive — almost an exercise in vanity publishing, she thought, given the quality of Puddephat’s earlier books. An explanatory note revealed that he had all but completed a collection of essays at the time of his death, and that they had been brought together in this volume by his ‘friend, colleague and admirer’, an obscure American academic called Irving Ashby. Loretta read:
The late Hugh Puddephat was one of the most brilliant minds of his generation. He was known to colleagues in France and the United States as an incisive interpreter of Foucault, Althusser, Derrida — those iconoclasts grouped loosely round the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Dr Puddephat’s project was to import their methods into the profoundly insular climate of English academe, of which his own college, St Mark’s, Oxford, was unfortunately representative.
Undeterred by the intemperate and frequently personal attacks of his critics, he was unflinching in his determination to apply structuralist theory to the icons of the English literary canon.
Loretta let out a ‘hmmph’, indicating her sceptical attitude to this hagiography of the dead don. She had never actually spoken to him, their connection had come too late for that, but as far as she knew he had got into Althusser and Paul de Mann just as everyone else was getting out. A joke in thoroughly bad taste came into her head, something about the death of the author, and she was shocked by her own callousness: after all, the man had been killed when he was in his early 40s. Apparently the habit was catching, for a moment later she came to a bit about Puddephat having been ‘cut down in his prime’ — a singularly unfortunate phrase to apply to someone who had fallen victim to a savage and still unsolved knife attack in a dingy flat in Paris. There was no mention of it in the biographical notes, just Puddephat’s dates and the information that he had died suddenly in France. Loretta chewed her bottom lip as she glanced through essays on Dickens, Wilkie Collins, the Brontës, and George Eliot, uncomfortable with the memories the book had stirred up. It was all a long time ago, she told herself, and found a welcome distraction in being able to identify the exact point in the essays at which Puddephat had discovered Jacques Lacan and Hélène Cixous.
‘Who can be said to “possess the phallus” in Wuthering Heights}’ Puddephat asked pompously. ‘The most obvious candidate, Heathcliff, runs away precisely at that moment when he is forced, by overhearing Cathy’s denunciation of him to Nelly Dean, into an admission of its ontological lack: his failure, in Lacanian terms, to act as the whip/phallus for which Cathy, in furious recognition of her own castration, begs her father at the book’s outset.’
A rumour had reached Oxford, via the French police, that Puddephat was an early victim of a serial killer who had never been caught – the Gay Ripper, as the British tabloids inevitably called him when the story got into the press. A senior detective in Paris had been quoted in the Guardian to the effect that the same man was believed to be responsible for the deaths of five gay men and a female transvestite in and around the Rue Monge, the area Puddephat had been staying in when he died. The bizarre detail about the transvestite caused a flurry of excitement at North Oxford dinner parties where former colleagues of the dead don affected always to have known he was gay,
in spite of his very public marriage to a peer’s daughter. On one occasion Loretta had even heard it whispered, as the port was being passed, that Hugh Puddephat was wearing a blonde wig, low-cut red dress and stiletto heels when he was attacked. Not only did this make no sense — the murdered transvestite was a woman dressed as a man, not the other way round — but Loretta found herself sitting miserably between her host and a Classics don from St Mark’s, Puddephat’s college, as they vied with each other to produce yet more scurrilous details. As soon as she could do it without drawing attention to herself, she made an excuse about an early lecture the following morning and left.
She closed Hugh Puddephat’s book with a snap. The pale young man had moved away and she put it on the table as far from Milton’s Cook as was physically possible. It was stiflingly hot, a foetid combination of airlessness and perspiration which seemed to be untouched by the plug-in electric fans whirring at intervals throughout the shop, and Loretta would have left at once if she hadn’t promised to look for an out-of-print book on Samuel Richardson for her friend Bridget Bennett. She picked up the cookery book she had found earlier and turned her head towards the tall bookcases at the rear, dismayed by the sheer number of books crammed into them. Doubting whether she would even be able to find the right section, she walked reluctantly towards the back of the shop, thinking that with every breath she took she was inhaling the effluvium of dead knowledge. This morbid mood was doubtless something to do with encountering Hugh Puddephat’s book and Loretta tried to shake it off, holding herself very straight and approaching the shelves in a deliberately businesslike fashion. She was standing on tiptoe, reaching upwards in the dark, narrow space between two high bookcases when a quiet voice inquired: ‘Excuse me?’
She turned. ‘Sorry, am I in your way?’
The woman who had spoken shook her head. She was shorter than Loretta, dark and fine-featured, probably in her late 40s though her immaculate make-up made it hard to tell, wearing a short black skirt, uncreased white blouse and half-a-dozen gold chains. In one hand she held a recent novel, most likely an unwanted review copy, and in the other Loretta’s purse.
‘You left this. Back there.’ She indicated with her head.
‘Did I?’ Loretta felt a belated spurt of alarm. ‘God, how stupid of me. It’s got everything in it, all my credit cards and ... well, everything.’
‘You’re English, right?’ She peered up at Loretta, holding her head at an angle that was almost birdlike. ‘Is this your first time in New York? You should take more care, it’s lucky I got there first.’
‘First?’
‘There was a guy.’ She half-turned, surveying the shop, still talking in a low, curiously unemphatic voice. ‘I don’t see him now but I thought he knew you.’
‘Oh,’ said Loretta, much relieved. ‘Young, with short dark hair? We were both after the same book, that’s all.’
The woman shook her head. ‘Guy I’m talking about was older, thirty-five, forty? It’s hard to tell with these guys who lose their hair. It happened with my first husband, he was twenty-eight when I divorced him and people regularly took him for forty.’ She patted her matt black bob, which looked dyed to Loretta. ‘I used to say, he got the knives and forks, I got the hair.’
‘What?’
‘Joke,’ she explained laconically. ‘Guy I’m talking about, he’s five nine, five ten, kind of flushed because he’s carrying too much weight — a hundred eighty, maybe a hundred ninety pounds?’ She added in explanation: ‘I’m a nutritionist, I see guys off and on the scales all the time. You’re how much, one twenty?’
Loretta said distractedly: ‘I don’t know, not in pounds. You say he ... you think he was after my purse?’
‘That’s how it looked. I see him watching from across the way’ -again she gestured towards the front of the shop –’ and at first he has a look on his face, kind of puzzled, like he’s trying to work out where he saw you before. So I’m saying to myself OK, most likely the guy knows her, no call to get spooked. But all the time I’m thinking about my friend Miriam, she’s in a store on 34th Street three, maybe four weeks ago. Guy pushes up against her, she says what-the-hell and he’s full of apologies, I’m so sorry, my wife’s sick, on his way to the hospital and so on. And you know what?’
Loretta shook her head.
‘She gets home and takes off her jacket and there’s’ — she lowered her voice — ‘stuff on it.’
‘Stuff?’
‘You know. He jerked off on her.’
Loretta stared.
‘So when I see this guy watching you, I’m thinking — uh-oh. And it’s as well I did, because soon’s you walk away I see he’s got his eye on your wallet.’
‘Five feet ten? And bald?’ There was a hollow feeling in Loretta’s throat.
‘Bald, no. He had some hair left here,’ she patted her own head, more or less on the crown. ‘I guess it was kind of brown. Mean anything to you?’
‘I’m not sure.’ She tried to think, disturbed by something the woman had said without being able to pin down what it was. ‘You’re absolutely certain it was me he was looking at?’
‘Sure I’m sure.’ She turned her wrist and read the time on a gold watch, small and elegant like herself. ‘I have to pay for my book. You want this or not?’
Loretta took her purse. ‘Sorry, I was just ... I mean, it’s not a nice thought, someone watching me.’
The woman touched her lightly on the arm. ‘This is New York, hon. You take care now.’
‘Yes,’ said Loretta, watching her walk away. ‘Yes, I will. And thank you.’
‘You’re welcome. Have a nice day.’
Loretta remained where she was, the book she was supposed to be looking for quite forgotten. The woman’s watch had said twenty past two, there was no point in going straight back to Toni’s flat because the bad-tempered porter wouldn’t be back on duty until four o’clock that afternoon. She had discovered this from his replacement when she went downstairs at five o’clock in the morning; they worked eight-hour shifts and the black porter had ended his stint the previous night at ten, while she was still worrying about whether to call a doctor for Tracey. Although he had volunteered almost nothing about the man who tried to sneak upstairs to Toni’s flat, Loretta thought the result might be different if she asked specific questions: if she were to put to him, that is, the description she had just been given by the nutritionist. She leaned back against the dusty shelves, tiredness and anxiety catching up with her again. After her stupid mistake over the wasp sting she had been willing to concede John Tracey might be right, that her imagination had been working overtime since she stepped off the plane at LaGuardia, especially when she also had Donelly’s scepticism to contend with. But this was different, this time she had corroboration from someone else that she was being watched, a description even, and the woman hadn’t seemed like a crank. She had made a rather cruel joke about her ex-husband but that hardly made her a nutter —
Loretta hugged the cookery book to her chest. She had intended to get a taxi from the bookshop to the Frick on East 70th and Fifth but now she wavered, tempted to go back to Toni’s flat and wait for the porter to come on duty so she could interrogate him at once. Then she asked herself what she would do in the meantime, other than sit miserably in Toni’s flat with only the bulldog for company. If someone was following her, she was probably safer in a public place, with other people around, than alone in a fifteenth floor flat where the neighbours might not even hear, or do anything, if she called for help. She levered herself forward from the bookshelves, ran a hand through her damp hair and moved back into the main section of the shop, glancing right and left as she headed for the tills. There was no queue and she handed the cookery book to an assistant, a puzzled look passing across her face as she watched it being wrapped and tried to remember why it had seemed so important half an hour ago to buy a collection of authentic Cajun recipes. She handed over twenty dollars, put away her change and collected her shoulder b
ag from the counter next to the door. Outside the pavement glistened with moisture under a bright blue sky but Loretta was too preoccupied to notice, struggling to fit the book into her bag while the vague outline of the man the nutritionist had described continued to trouble her. Something in the woman’s description had started a train of thought, some detail Loretta couldn’t quite pin down, and she hardly registered a distant, retreating rumble of thunder, the tail end of a storm she hadn’t even noticed in the gloomy recesses of the bookshop. Glancing up and down the street in a nervous, disjointed way, she finally recalled what she was supposed to be doing and stepped off the kerb with her hand upraised.
‘Taxi,’ she called, uncertain whether the scruffy yellow vehicle with the buckled fender was about to stop, and jumped back as it squealed to a halt and threw up a plume of dirty water which only just missed her ankles.
The eyes were heavy-lidded, languorous, as though their owner was on the verge of sleep; the nose flared gently, in perfect harmony with the smooth contours of the cheeks. Loretta stepped back, as though the slightest noise from her might break into the unknown woman’s reverie, and then laughed at herself. The marble woman had been in the same position for around five hundred years, she was not even particularly lifelike when Loretta came to study her properly, mainly because the sculptor had left the eyes blank. Loretta took out her floor plan and studied it, discovering she was not yet half way round the collection, and wished she had brought someone with her, even John Tracey; Bridget Bennett had once unfairly accused him of not knowing the difference between Canaletto and cannelloni but he did at least have a sense of humour. Loretta was surprised by the reverential posture of the other people going round the gallery, their awkward, mincing gait as they walked across priceless carpets, their acquiescent admiration of works of art which did not move her at all.