“No,” she said. “Of course not.”
“Have you ever had an abortion?”
“Rebekah, why are you asking me this?”
“Just curious,” I said, using Ivy Vohl’s method.
“Well, I did. Yes,” she said.
I stopped walking, completely shocked that my saliva had been right.
“When?”
“I had an abortion right before your father and I decided to get divorced. I certainly did not want to have another child with that horrible man.”
“Well, I’ve had the baby’s soul attached to me for all these years, and I haven’t even absorbed my nutrients,” I yelled. “And thanks to you I had to pay five hundred dollars to have it removed. ”
“What are you talking about?” my mother said.
“I had to pay to have the soul of your child sent back into the light.”
“Rebekah, that’s insane.”
“I think it’s insane that things happen in this family that I don’t find out about until I am completely drained of my nutrients. ”
“I thought you recently told me you wanted to lose weight,” my mother said.
I was too infuriated to speak. “Nutrients!” I screamed. “Not everything is about weight. What else is going on in this family that I don’t know about?”
“What exactly is bothering you, Rebekah?”
“I’ll tell you what’s bothering me. I’m lactating and I could have an aneurysm at any minute and I don’t have a single speck of potassium left in me.”
“What? Who told you that? I think you should come stay here for a while. It would be good for you to get out of the city. The leaves are just . . .”
“Since when do I care about leaves!” I yelled. “In my whole life when have I even noticed a single leaf? If you think I give a shit about leaves then you have no idea who I am!”
“I know who you are, Rebekah. You’re a wonderful, talented girl. You should come up here and write and I’ll cook for you.”
I explained to her that I would never be able to write in the country, and all the baskets of muffins and gazebos and swim holes in the world wouldn’t change that. “You can’t even see the new Arthur Weeman there,” I said.
“Yes, you can. It’s playing at the Tinker Street Theater.”
“Did you see it?”
“No, his movies are vile. He likes to have sex with prostitutes. ”
“That was a scene in one movie. His movies are the only thing worth watching today. Grandma liked Arthur Weeman,” I said.
“Yes,” my mother admitted. “She always said he was the eighth wonder of the universe.”
I told my mother I had broken up with Derek Hassler.
“You’ll meet someone better,” my mother said. The man from the Ziegfeld, Isaac Myman, popped into my mind and I almost told her about him, but then thought better of it. I suddenly felt too sad to talk, and I got off the phone. I felt incredibly lonely without my souls attached.
4.
At 33, she rediscovers her love of literature
When I got home, there was a moving truck outside my building and a disgruntled mover who had apparently been standing around waiting for fifteen minutes. I grandly offered him and his smaller assistant a glass of water and when they accepted, I guiltily gave it to them from the tap because I didn’t have any bottled in the house. They carried the gondola up first, and while they brought the bed and all the other things up in the freight elevator, I sat in my gondola and listened to my messages.
“Hello, uh, is that Rebekah? It’s Hugh Nickelby calling.”
I couldn’t believe it. After the Grolsch incident I hadn’t thought I would ever hear from him again. The message said that he was still in town and did I want to have a coffee with him the next day at four at the Bowery Bar because he was having a meeting near there.
A coffee with Hugh Nickelby sounded a lot better than going to work for my father. And I would definitely need the whole day off. It would take all morning to get ready and then all afternoon to go over the date in my mind. Plus I was still recovering from the lie my father had told me for no reason. It would take a lot longer than one day to get over something like that. I decided not to mention the incident to Hugh under any circumstances.
I called Hugh back and left a message on his hotel voice mail that I would meet him tomorrow at four, and then I left a message with my father’s service that I wouldn’t be coming in.
The next day, at four o’clock, I walked into the Bowery Bar and looked for Hugh, but he wasn’t there yet. I sat at a table outside in the garden next to a blooming wisteria branch.
For the hundredth time that day, I thought of the sentence he had written in Thank You for Not Writing, when the main character takes a girl out for a slice of pizza and then thinks it’s pathetic that she’s all dressed up and acting so datelike. I had gone to great lengths that morning to look like I didn’t care that I was getting together with him. After Mary and Adam got married with Ma, Pa, Laura, and Hester Sue in attendance, and Pa hocked his fiddle to buy Mary a hat for her wedding and Mary made Ma return her hat because all she wanted on her wedding day was to hear Pa’s fiddle, I had gone to the hairdresser to have her blow-dry my hair straight and dressed carefully in jeans, an embroidered top, and high-heeled boots, casual and very American.
Hugh walked into the garden and saw me. I tried to wave in as un-datelike a manner as possible.
He came over and I stood up and he sort of touched my arm and we sat down at the table. I had been prepared for the single-or double-cheeked kiss but this seemed fine too.
“I thought you were going back to London,” I said. I sounded suspicious. Thanks to my father, now I was starting dates off in an antagonistic manner.
“It wasn’t a lie, I just decided to stay in New York for a few more days.”
“Sorry, I’m a little on edge. The strangest thing happened to me yesterday. My father told me he was on Eighty-sixth Street and Lexington Avenue and I ran right into him on St. Mark’s Place.”
I tried to explain the story to Hugh but he seemed really confused by it. “Why do you think he did that?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s very disturbing, isn’t it?”
We sat sort of grinning and shrugging at each other. The waitress came over and I ordered the all-American drink, a Diet Coke. He ordered a Grolsch and she instantly knew what he was talking about and hopped off to get it for him. I noticed she had been wearing a ring I had seen before, a shiny wide silver band that every single waitress who had waited on me lately was wearing. I had seen at least seven waitresses wearing that ring for some reason. It was the most boring chain mail-type thing, and I couldn’t figure out why I was seeing it all over the place. When she came back I said, “I like your ring.”
“Thanks!” she said. “It’s from Tiffany’s!” She said the word with as much pride as if she were saying, “My degree came from Harvard.” “When I saw it I was just like I just have to have it so I bought it for myself.” She stressed myself, while looking at Hugh, to let him know that she didn’t have a boyfriend buying her things from Tiffany. I instantly regretted this entire conversation. Hugh had a fake interested smile on his face, like he’d rather be writing than talking about this. I wanted to seem American, but I had gone too far. The whole thing had blown up in my face; my inner Jap had made a surprise attack on my inner Pearl Harbor.
When she walked away I tried to clear things up. “I was just curious about that ring because I’ve seen so many people wearing it lately and it’s so hideous,” I said. As soon as I said it I realized that all I had accomplished was to make myself look like a horrible person. Talking about rings was pretty much the worst thing you could possibly do on a first date.
Hugh shrugged politely. “It did seem a bit big, didn’t it?” he said.
“I don’t like jewelry,” I said. What a bizarre lie that was.
But he smiled at me then as if he was having
a nice time.
Unfortunately all he wanted to talk about was books. He asked me what I had read that I liked lately. Suddenly I panicked, I couldn’t remember reading anything at all except for a biography of Arthur Weeman.
"I’ve been reading biographies mostly,” I said. "I read the new Arthur Weeman biography, and Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography. ” I threw that one in even though it had been at least ten years since I had read it.
“Arthur Weeman?” he asked. “The director?”
I smiled and nodded enthusiastically.
“He’s a pretty big deal in New York, isn’t he?”
“Around the world!” I said.
“Somehow I don’t think he’s such a deal in parts of Africa and Asia,” Hugh said.
“They paid him a million dollars to make a commercial in Japan!” I argued heatedly.
He put his forearm on the table, his hand relaxed and rested very close to my side of the table. The hand he wrote with. He leaned in toward me.
“What novels have you liked lately?” he asked.
Besides his, I couldn’t think of a single one. I could suddenly only remember books I had read in high school, and those only vaguely. Interviewers had asked me that question a thousand times, and I’d never had trouble thinking of grown-up books, but he was looking at me so intently. I liked him so much, I just couldn’t think.
“Julius Caesar,” I said. I put my hand on the table close to his and was appalled to see that I had twisted the wrapper from my straw into a ring and knotted it around my finger without realizing it.
“Well, that’s not quite a novel, is it?” he said.
“No,” I said, dismayed. “You know, I was a literature major at Bennington. Of Mice and Men, Call of the Wild, To Kill a Mockingbird, ” I blurted out. “I’m a big Cervantes fan.”
“It’s funny you should mention To Kill a Mockingbird,” he said. “I was just thinking about To Kill a Mockingbird in relation to you.”
I couldn’t believe that Hugh Nickelby had been thinking about me at all, let alone in relation to anything else, let alone in relation to a book like To Kill a Mockingbird—a book that, at that moment, I desperately wished I had actually read. Try to think, I told myself. The cover was red. Gregory Peck played a lawyer in it, I was almost certain.
“Harper Lee had one of the hugest best sellers in history on her hands,” he said, as if it were blood, “and she never again wrote another book. Talk about world-renowned, it was the biggest best seller in something like forty languages.”
I had no idea what to say. For one thing, it had never occurred to me that Harper Lee was a woman.
“Don’t you think that it’s a shame she never wrote another book? I believe she’s now a little old lady living in a town house near Central Park,” Hugh said. “I almost feel she had a responsibility to write another book. I don’t mean to sound like your mum, but you really should write another book.”
“I don’t think you’re my mum,” I said, sort of slyly.
He smiled and looked down at his hands. “I’m sure you’re perfectly aware how many writers would kill to be in your position. You shouldn’t just throw it away, Rebekah. Your first book was so good, and what if your next book is just as good or even better and it just remains unwritten? Okay, let me put it this way. Who’s your favorite living writer?” he asked.
“You are,” I said.
Embarrassed, he became even more English. “Aside from myself, of course,” he stammered. “Whom else do you admire?”
“Arthur Weeman,” I said.
“Right, back to him. Okay. How would you feel if he never made another film?”
“I would feel terrible,” I said. In my darkest moments, I had let morbid thoughts of Arthur Weeman’s retirement, and even death, seep into my consciousness. I dreaded the death of Arthur Weeman. “In fact, I hope I die before Arthur Weeman does.”
“But he’s in his seventies,” Hugh said.
“He’s only sixty-nine,” I said.
“Well, that makes it perfectly acceptable, then.” We leaned back in our chairs away from each other.
“Anyway I’m deep in the middle of my second novel,” I lied, trying to save myself. “And I lecture from time to time at Princeton.”
“That’s wonderful!” Thankfully he brought up a more uplifting subject. Right before his book tour, he had gone to the actor Colin Firth’s wedding in Umbria.
“I’d been carrying around a roll of film from the wedding, and I only now just had it developed,” he said. He tapped his jacket pocket.
"Can I see the pictures?” I asked. Finally I could try to flirt a little and not feel like I was talking to my tenth-grade English teacher.
Hugh shyly handed me the envelope of pictures, and I looked through them with the utmost interest.
“I’m afraid I’m not very photogenic, am I?” Hugh said. He playfully tried to grab the picture from me, but I held firmly on.
“Oh, I think you are!” I said. “You look great in this one.” I held up one in which Hugh was smiling on some sort of cliff in Umbria. The scenery was magnificent, lush and green, making the cement garden we were sitting in, with its single wisteria vine, look like what it was—a converted parking garage. I wished I could be in the photo with Hugh, holding his hand in Umbria, bringing him Grolsches at Colin Firth’s wedding.
I just kept staring down at that picture.
“Not too interesting, is it?” Hugh said.
“Oh, it is!” I said. “I love this photo of you.” I could have looked into his kind, squinting eyes all day.
“Can I have this?” I asked.
Hugh looked startled. He was too polite to ask why but I felt an explanation was warranted. I couldn’t say that I was afraid I would never see him again, and I wanted this as some kind of pathetic souvenir of what my life should have been. I couldn’t say that having this picture of him was enough to make me happy for the rest of my life. It was enough of a relationship substitute to make me feel that he was my boyfriend, and we were in a long-distance relationship. I could marry the photograph and make reduced-sized color Xeroxes for children.
“I’d love to have this picture to put on my desk,” I said. I thought of Arthur Weeman’s desk in my apartment with nothing in it except for Ivy Vohl’s manuscript, which I’d been too lazy to throw away and had shoved in one of the drawers.
He shrugged and nodded, politely mumbling his surprised consent, and as I slipped the photo in my pocketbook, I realized that I really wasn’t a writer anymore. Hugh Nickelby was a writer. Hugh Nickelby read books. I was a complete fraud from the blow-dry-straight hair on my head to the Queen’s Guard Red polish on my toes. I was just a girl who worked in her father’s office and was one step away from buying the Tiffany Waitress Ring. In true American-girl style, I insisted on paying for our drinks, kissed him good-bye on both of his beautiful, kind, talented, English cheeks, and left feeling like a complete arse.
When I got home I opened my mailbox to find a fan letter from some girl in Cincinnati, forwarded by my publisher. It was pretty much the usual thing, but the end really got my attention.
Your book is the first book I have ever read that I didn’t have to and it has greatly inspired me to read more books which I have now done but I still like yours more . . .
I laughed out loud. But then, when I looked at the letter again, something about the ellipses at the end touched me. The three dots seemed to have been written with extra determination, as if she were willing me to write another book, perhaps even a trilogy. The fan had borne her blue rollerball into the loose-leaf page with such force that the three dots had made tiny holes in it.
I felt so much love in that ellipsis that I suddenly felt an incredible amount of compassion toward myself. For a moment, I wondered if I might be my own favorite living writer.
I opened the door to my apartment and went straight to Arthur Weeman’s desk and placed my Hugh Nickelby photograph on it. I looked at Hugh Nickelby in Umbria, we
aring a burgundy dress shirt and a blue sports coat with no tie.
When I had first bought my apartment, after breaking up with Nathan who I had been living with for five years, I had been lonely. I had yelled and screamed in my shrink’s office that she was married and didn’t know loneliness the way I knew loneliness. Loneliness knew my middle name and social-security number. Loneliness was my personal trainer. I was sick from it. And one night I remember I was so lonely, I crouched in the corner of my bedroom and stayed that way for hours.
But now I was different. I knew how to handle it. I learned how to almost enjoy it. All I needed was the right cappuccino or martini or big plate of spaghetti. All I had to do was watch Iris, Isabel, and Isolde, or Adopting Alice, or The Analyst. I was conquering loneliness and rising through its ranks and now I was a lieutenant and it was saluting me. I rode through the streets yelling, Loneliness is coming, loneliness is coming! until I single-handedly won my own revolution.
5.
At 33, she makes the acquaintance of Ida Williams, lifelong friend and mentor
As soon as I got to my father’s office for my first day of "work” my father took me behind the reception counter and said, "This is your desk.”
There were piles all over it of horrible insurance-type forms and about twenty Rolodexes.
“No, Dad, this is Irmabelle’s desk.”
“It’s your desk now,” he said.
I noticed a Chicken Soup for the Soul calendar and two little furry mouse dolls dressed as a nurse and a doctor. And an official-looking document titled CORONER’S REPORT. My father picked it up. “Milton Milton. His parents must have been sadists. Came in for a flu vaccine last year on 11/8. Ceased 11/12.” My father always said ceased instead of died. “Married sixty-two years. Size of a walrus.”
Thank God it was Friday.
“This is definitely not my desk. For one thing, my desk would have a computer on it.”
“We don’t need a computer,” my father said. “Computers are always going down.”
“What do you mean they’re going down?” I asked.
“You know what I mean, downloading.”
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