The Vixen

by Francine Prose

  The boots were so tight that I had to gently compress Anya’s calf to ease the zipper up, but she could have done it without me.

  “There you go,” I said.

  “Thanks,” Anya said. “Look. You’re shivering. Poor baby. Dress up warm.”

  ANYA SIGNED OUT in the ledger on the reception desk, and the two nurses chimed, “Have a nice time, Miss Partridge.” It seemed awfully casual for a patient leaving an asylum, and again I wondered what kind of place this was. Nothing made sense, but I wasn’t going to ask questions and risk my chances of going to Coney Island with Anya.

  The heavy door slammed behind us. We exploded into the gray day that seemed so much brighter than it had earlier. Anya ran ahead. I had to speed-walk to keep up. It was still misty and cold. In the soft wet light the gardens looked like I imagined England.

  I said, “How long since you’ve gone outside?”

  “I don’t know. I told you. Time gets strange around here.”

  Ned was waiting for us in the driveway. Anya scrambled into the car. Unlike me, she seemed used to riding in luxury sedans. She slouched against the back seat. It might have seemed like harmless fun, daring but innocent, two kids playing hooky from school. But zipping her boots had changed that.

  “Ned, do we have any champagne on board?”

  “Not today, Miss Partridge,” said Ned.

  “Too bad,” said Anya. “Warren never stocks anything good.” Never? Anya said he’d visited once. How did she know that Warren never stocked champagne, and why did she need it now? Maybe she wanted to celebrate. Maybe she just liked it.

  “What’s on your mind, Mr. Editor? Why the tragic frown?”

  I said, “I’m not frowning. I’m thinking.”

  “I bet you think too much.”

  I didn’t want Anya thinking she knew how much—or what—I thought. Ned’s presence made me self-conscious. I concentrated on the back of his neck just to focus on something. Then I looked out the window, where the landscape had magically turned green, though the sky was still gray. Half-open blossoms hung like yellow rags from the forsythia.

  After a while Anya said, “I thought I’d be able to go home for Easter. But that’s not going to happen. Easter’s my favorite holiday. I like resurrection. Who doesn’t? I don’t mean zombies. I mean rising from the dead to save the human race. Not to eat human brains. How strange that we’re having this conversation. Because look!”

  We were passing a vast cemetery.

  Anya said, “It’s so crowded in there, the dead must be standing up.”

  I laughed even as I sensed that she’d heard that somewhere and had probably said it before.

  It was a Jewish cemetery. Were my grandparents there? I knew they were in one of those massive graveyards just outside the city. Did my parents visit their parents’ graves? I didn’t even know that. I prayed for my grandparents to help me, though why would they? They’d never met me. I missed them suddenly, painfully. Was it possible to miss someone you never knew?

  Where was Ethel buried? Her gravestone would be unveiled in June. Who would attend the ceremony meant to mark the year of mourning? Anya’s novel had resurrected the Rosenbergs, not brought them back to life so much as dragged them from their graves. You will see to it that our names are kept bright and unsullied by lies. The Vixen had turned the Rosenbergs into Soviet sex zombies.

  “I wonder where the Rosenbergs are buried.” I knew that I shouldn’t be saying that even before I reached the end of the sentence.

  Anya shot me a quick, dark look.

  “How should I know?” She stared out her window and didn’t look at me when she said, “Easter. The bunny, the egg hunt. It’s the only holiday not about death. The dead turkey, the dead presidents. Even our birthdays are about our death, if you see it that way—”

  “Not Christmas,” I said. “That’s a birth. And Easter is about death. A crucifixion, to be exact.” I sounded like a professor or, worse, a Sunday school teacher. Why couldn’t I stop lecturing and have a normal conversation?

  “Christmas has other problems. Must you always have the last word?”

  “I don’t, I mean, I—”

  “I always go to St. Patrick’s for Easter. They have the best choir and incense from actual Bethlehem. Sometimes you see celebrities. Once I saw Joan Crawford looking a million years old, in a pink Easter bonnet like a flying saucer landed on her head.”

  “What does your family do for Easter?”

  “We argue,” Anya said. “We drink and argue and get in the car and slam the door and drive off.”

  The back of Ned’s shoulders revealed nothing but his concentration on the highway and the vehicles streaming by.

  It was a long drive to the far edge of Brooklyn. But the excitement of being with Anya made the time go quickly. When the traffic stalled on the parkways, Ned displayed his encyclopedic knowledge of the backstreets of Yonkers and Flatbush. I welcomed every delay. I needed time to figure out what to do once we got to Coney Island. Should I take the lead and be the experienced man in charge—or should I defer to Anya? What would you like to do?

  Anya was still rattling on about life holidays and death holidays, and I was no closer to solving my Anya problem than before. The foxy little novelist who’d done such crazy stuff in my dreams had turned out to be a wacky ambitious girl who didn’t much care about whether the Rosenbergs sold the bomb to the Russians. She didn’t care about literature or publishing. She didn’t care about art. She cared about fame and money, about how her book would sell. She cared about being a bad girl, about having fun and breaking the rules, whatever she thought the rules were. Warren’s May Day deadline was approaching, and it seemed unlikely that I would be able to make it.

  Anya was right about one thing: the freewheeling spicy drama of the sexy spy and her international lovers was a livelier story than the mournful tale of the Communist stooge, good mom, and loyal housewife. Readers would prefer it. It would make them feel safer. The problem was: Anya’s version was a lie. But so what? As Anya said, it was a novel. It wasn’t supposed to be true.

  So many things didn’t add up. Where had Anya come from? What had she done before? A rich girl with fantasies of becoming an actress who’d scared or enraged her parents so much that they’d sent her . . . where? What kind of sanitarium lets its residents decorate their rooms like opium dens and breeze out whenever they want? And how had she gotten in contact with Warren?

  Ned picked up speed on Ocean Parkway. I said, “Anya, where are you from?”

  Anya hesitated. “If you start from where we were today and drive due east and a little north and don’t stop until it gets so white bread and pastel and boring you feel like you’re suffocating, that’s where I come from. I don’t think my parents noticed I was alive until I started bringing home scary boyfriends. They would never have let me go to Coney Island. They never approved of anything fun.”

  “I grew up in Coney Island.” Even as I said it, I knew that it was a sentence I’d never said before, not even to Marianna, who believed I’d come from Manhattan. A sentence I’d never thought I’d say. Saying it made me feel closer to Anya than I’d felt to anyone since I’d left my parents’ apartment. I reminded myself I’d just met her. But I’d stared at her photo. I’d dreamed about her, night after night.

  Anya’s bracelets clinked as she clapped her hands. “That’s fantastic! What a fabulous place to be young! It must have been like growing up in freakshow Oz.”

  “Not exactly,” I said. But it was. Coney Island was cooler than the suburb where Anya grew up, or the Darien mansion where I pictured Warren living. I had loved it, as a child, and then I had forgotten. Last summer, after graduation. I’d gone there every day, but I’d forgotten that too. I was grateful to Anya for having reconciled me to the truth.

  It took me several trippy heartbeats to trace the tightness in my chest to the fact that we would be so near my parents’ apartment, and I wasn’t going to see them. I certainly wasn’t going to bring
Anya home. Hi, Mom, hi, Dad, meet the author of the sleazy novel about Ethel! Anya, meet Dad and Mom, Ethel’s childhood friend.

  My mother still had migraines, but they seemed to be improving. The Army-McCarthy hearings had begun, and when Dad came home, they watched them. The good guys appeared to be winning. McCarthy had said that the army was “soft on Communism,” and the army had gone after him.

  My mother believed that McCarthy’s goose was cooked. My father was less certain. I tried not to see a connection between the hearings and Mom’s headaches subsiding. Thinking that her pain had peaked with Ethel’s execution and was improving now that the senator’s power was waning would have made me hate McCarthy even more. It was one thing to endanger American democracy, but something else—something personal—to cause my mother pain.

  Visiting them was nicer than it had been in a while. And yet I didn’t go as often as I should, as often as I sensed they wanted. I was leading my life. They were proud, forbearing, respectful, but also, I knew, sad. They would have been sadder if they’d known what I was doing with Anya, sadder still if they found out that I’d been so near them and hadn’t stopped by.

  BY THE TIME Anya and I got to Coney Island, it was after three. The sea was a mean glassy gray, and the waves that licked the sand beside the road were bullying and insistent. The smell of sea salt was sharp and strong. The streets were half deserted. The season hadn’t begun. I’d feared the amusement park might be shuttered, but a few rides and food stands were open for anyone crazy enough to be here on such a cold day.

  Ned pulled over and stopped. I was anxious, here in the place I knew best. Being there with Anya had turned me into an outsider. Well, fine. Fear was part of the fun. You were supposed to feel jittery when you got to Coney Island.

  I put my briefcase on the car floor.

  Anya said, “Relax. I told you. Ned will take care of it.”

  Maybe some part of me wanted the manuscript stolen. There was a chance, a tiny chance, that it was the only copy. Then my problem would be solved by the thief, who would be crushed to open a stolen briefcase full of used typing paper.

  “I’ll be waiting,” Ned said. “Come back when you want. Button up. It’s cold. Have fun.”

  THE FOG MADE everything private. Mist swirled around us like a storm in a snow globe. The shooting galleries and food stands lit up and went dark as we passed. Warming their hands over trash can fires, the carnival barkers were silent, and the ticket takers seemed like ghosts waiting for the dead to ride the Wild Mouse. The world was waiting, stilled. The signs and marquees blurred and faded like a vintage postcard of an amusement park, a Japanese print of fog and clouds from which the Parachute Jump rose where Mount Fuji should have been.

  Anya held my hand in a girlish, playful grip. Maybe I’d overreacted when she’d asked me to zip her boots. I blamed my dreams for my misunderstanding, for my assuming too much. I blamed her author photo. She’d asked a simple favor. It had meant nothing more.

  Walking in the crisp sea wind restored our innocence, in a way, and the salt air repaired us. I felt as if we were teenagers, about to fall into a dream of love. As we walked along Neptune Avenue, I forgot everything except Anya’s small, chilly hand in mine. And then I’d think: Boots. Zippers. The Vixen.

  “Oh, look,” Anya said. “Can we go on that?”

  Of course she meant the Parachute Jump. I knew by the lift of her chin. There had been several accidents in recent years. Everyone knew it was dangerous. How ironic to be killed on the one ride my father begged me to avoid. I imagined my parents and Anya’s parents brought together by grief. At least Anya and I wouldn’t be there, mortified by the awkwardness of our families meeting, even or especially under those tragic circumstances.

  “We’ll freeze up there!” My voice sounded high and metallic. “Let’s stay closer to the ground.”

  Anya pulled the hood of her cape over her head. My fingertips were numb. My jacket was too thin. When I’d left my apartment, I hadn’t planned on winding up so near the ocean. “There’s plenty to do without that.”

  I was grateful that she didn’t insist we ride the Parachute Jump. Maybe she was eccentric, even daffy at times, but she wasn’t willful or stubborn. She’d sensed my reluctance to go on the Parachute Jump, and the ease with which she’d let it go hinted at a natural sensitivity and kindness. I felt a surge of affection for the young writer who just wanted to see her novel in print. My job was to help her.

  As we passed the game stalls, only some of which were open, the carnies glared at our leisure, our privilege, our youth, at something they might have mistaken for love. What would the cotton candy spinner think if she knew the truth? What was the truth? Maybe she could have told me.

  The pavement was cracked and buckled. Anya made tripping and stumbling look like a dance step, but still she grabbed my elbow for balance. I longed to be suspended in time, in Coney Island forever, about to have fun, free from under the shadow of Warren, unburdened by Anya’s novel. To stay like that, with Anya’s hand, just like that, on my arm.

  “Should we go on a ride?” Anya said. “Or eat something first? I’m starving.”

  “If we’re going to go on the big rides,” I said, “we should ride first and eat after.”

  “Brilliant point,” Anya said.

  Already we’d developed a rapport, sharing advice on how not to get sick. In Anya’s novel, Esther vomits when the Feds knock on her door.

  We passed the Tunnel of Love, its boats bobbing on a fetid ditch. From across the street we smelled mildew.

  “Let’s skip that one,” Anya said. It wasn’t funny, but we laughed, relieving the tension somewhat. “Have you read Death in Venice?”

  I nodded. Thomas Mann. Shakespeare. Margaret Mitchell. Ayn Rand. Van Gogh. Anya’s tastes were eclectic. Was she trying to confuse me? She was just being her own unique self. I’d never met anyone like her. Certainly not at Harvard.

  “Bingo!” said Anya. “Death in Venice is my all-time favorite story. Mr. Editor College Graduate comes from a better class of guy than the ones I usually date.”

  Was I supposed to feel flattered? Did she think we were dating? Were we? By now she was so excited, looking around, I couldn’t be the stodgy fun-spoiling pedant asking why she was drawn to the story of the dying baron stuck in plague-ridden Venice because of his passion for a beautiful boy. A passion for the wrong person. Or the right person. Was Anya warning me . . . or was it simply her favorite book?

  The Wild Mouse, the Bobsled, the Thunder Train, the Whirl-a-Whirl, the Rocket Launch, the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Twister, the Bone-Shaker, the Sky Chaser, the Cannon Coaster, the Rough Rider, the Widowmaker, the Spine Cracker. Anya read the name of each ride aloud, and each one spiked her glee.

  “What do you like to do here, Simon?”

  What did I like? I liked hearing her say my name.

  “Personally, I like the Cyclone.”

  “Wow. I didn’t see you as a Cyclone kind of guy.”

  “That does it,” I said. “Let’s go for the hard stuff.”

  I would never again be so proud of being a “regular,” not at the most iconic roadside diner or the trendiest restaurant or the most beautiful bookstore. I was thrilled that they knew me by name at a vintage roller coaster with a sketchy safety record.

  Barb was taking the tickets, Angus working the switches.

  “Simon,” said Angus. “How goes it?”

  “Come here often?” Anya doubled over laughing. A laugh so free it might have made Barb and Angus assume we were lovers. Wrong! We were an editor and writer riding the Cyclone instead of working. But maybe we were working, building a mutual trust that might help me persuade her to change her novel into something I could live with—and that no one would publish.

  Anya said, “Can we ride in the front car?”

  “That’s what I usually do.” I always stayed in the middle. The last car was supposed to be the scariest. I wasn’t going to tell her. We were the only two passengers. What if Bar
b and Angus forgot us and quit for the day and left us at the top? But the smile that Anya gave Angus as he helped her into the car and pulled down the safety bar ensured that he would wait around.

  After the first precipitous drop Anya put her arms around my waist.

  “Hold on tight, girl!” Was that my voice? What had I said? Anya bent forward to feel the wind in her face.

  When we plummeted a second time, Anya yelled into my ear, “This is how I imagine childbirth. Wave after wave of pain.”

  Anya didn’t flinch, no matter how fast and far we fell. Faster than I remembered. The wheels had never rattled so loudly. Could Angus have ramped up the speed? Anya sat with her hands on the safety bar, like a puppy waiting to be taken for a walk, as we climbed and fell so fast that I thought the scaffolding would collapse, or our heads would fly off, or we would vault into space.

  We smiled at each other as the ride slowed. Anya had tears in her eyes. We’d been through something. Angus lifted the safety bar, and Anya missed a step as she climbed out of the car. Angus leapt forward to steady her, but I beat him to it.

  Anya whispered in my ear, “I want my book to sell a zillion copies.” Her face was flushed, like a child’s.

  “So do I.” Breathlessness made our voices sound heartfelt.

  As we drifted away from the roller coaster, I felt scared. A delayed reaction—to what? I kept thinking of executions, of blindfolded men lined up against a wall. Where were the Rosenberg boys now? What would I do about Anya’s novel?

  Maybe this was simpler than I thought. I could work with the standard disclaimer at the front of works of fiction: “Any resemblance between the characters and real people, living or dead, is accidental, etc.” We could run that in bold type. So it would be understood. After all, as Anya said, it was fiction.