Why had I focused on that scene? I’d felt I had to say something.
“But they don’t have sex,” Anya said.
“Who doesn’t?”
“Esther and the agent. Sorry. Did I miss something?”
“I think we’re supposed to think they did.”
“Oh, are we?” Anya said. “You should know. I honestly don’t remember.”
“Yes, I think we are. Something happens when they lock the door and open the champagne. They’re not watching TV.”
I smiled, but Anya didn’t. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea, having our heroine get excited when a man threatens to shoot her.”
I was right, but I sounded like a stiff.
“My heroine,” said Anya. “Not our heroine. Mine. Let’s leave it for now, okay?”
“Okay. Can I ask you a favor? Can you take off your glasses?”
I expected her to refuse, but she didn’t. Her right eye was ringed with a dark purple bruise. I looked around for the waitress. I glanced at the couple behind us. I didn’t want them to think I was the one who—
Anya noticed and despised me for worrying about strangers before I worried about her. She stared at me, defiant.
I said, “Who did that to you?”
“I did.”
“Seriously?” Was she going to tell me she walked into a door? No wonder she’d had a rough night. No wonder she couldn’t sleep. No wonder she was in a bad mood.
Anya twisted a corner of her napkin, dipped it in her water glass, and scrubbed the bruise from around her eye. The purple eye makeup smeared and vanished and reappeared on the napkin. Her eye was perfectly normal. Unbruised. She must have painted on the bruise with eyeliner and shadow.
“A theater trick. Makeup 101. They teach you that in drama school.”
“Jesus, Anya. Why would you do something like that?”
“For your reaction. You should have seen your face!” She fake laughed. I thought of Warren’s range of fake laughs. What had I done to turn her against me?
In the long silence that fell, I thought of my dead uncle Mort, in the moment before that last jump out of the airplane. I thought of the sickening sensation of falling on the Cyclone, and the hope that the falling will stop. This was the moment before that, when the decision is out of your hands. You might as well do it, hang on or jump.
Say it, I thought. Just say it. See what happens next.
“A page is missing from the manuscript. You probably have it somewhere.” I’d wanted to say this so often, but I hadn’t dared until now. The fake black eye, the moody hostility. It had gotten to me. There was that. But I also wanted to know.
Anya looked out the window.
I said, “Maybe it’s with an earlier copy. Look around. You’ll find it. It’s the middle of the Jell-O box scene, so it’s important.”
“Right.” Anya turned and glared at me. “The Jell-O box scene. Important. I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about, Simon.” Her tone had the snap of patience breaking, the clipped diction of someone who has put up with a bad joke long enough.
I said. “You don’t know what?”
“Right,” she said. “The Jell-O box scene. I was kidding. You do get that it was a joke?”
Throughout this whole conversation, she’d wanted to hurt me, and she had, again and again. She’d made me feel stupid, ashamed. It was counterintuitive, that shame could be liberating. But by that point, if nothing I said could make things any worse, the good news, if you could call it that, was that I could say anything. I had nothing, or almost nothing, to lose, and I felt reckless and stupidly free.
“Listen.” I drew out the listen, to give myself a moment. “Would you consider changing your characters’ names? To something less like Ethel and Julius. It might confuse the reader who might not know if she—or he—is reading fiction or nonfiction, a novel or biography or—”
Anya’s look was cagey. What was I trying to pull?
“I was just asking—”
Anya said, “What are you not getting, Simon? You know that I didn’t write that book. You knew that from day one.”
It took me a while to be sure I’d heard what I heard, and then a longer while to realize I had no idea what it meant. Was this another trick, like the fake black eye, equally unfunny? I tried to speak several times before I said, “Are you joking?”
“I’m dead serious,” Anya said.
And this time I knew she was.
“If you didn’t write it, who did?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. I just know it wasn’t me. I had an acting job to do, and I did it. I was hired to play a writer. A novelist living in a mental asylum. Warren prepped me and gave me some notes. I decorated my room and came up with the character, which Warren liked, especially when I added some stuff that he told me about, from the book. So you’d think it was about me. That I’d put myself in the novel.”
Outside the window, a truck rolled by. On its side was a painting of two pigs, on their hind legs, dancing.
Often, when something shocking occurs, we think: I knew. I knew from the start. All the missed signals from the past flash like ambulance lights. Anya’s detachment, her spaciness. It all made sense. Unless she did write the novel and was playing with me, this time giving me the metaphorical black eye. Another bit of drama to keep things interesting. To get a reaction. I knew she cared about making money and being famous more than she cared about her book, but it had never once occurred to me that she didn’t write it. Who pretends to write a book and lets someone edit it without telling that person the truth?
She said, “Honestly, Simon. I couldn’t finish reading the goddamn thing. What a piece of garbage! How could you think I could write that trash? I’m a Death in Venice fan, remember? I assumed you knew, that you’d kind of figured it out—and we were just playing along. Having fun.”
My heart fluttered and stopped, fluttered and stopped. I pressed my chest to calm it. I looked at the couple behind us, nodding out over their coffee. No one was paying attention to us, or to how I must have looked, like a man just learning an active earthquake fault runs underneath his house.
“Are you all right?” said Anya. “You did know, didn’t you?”
“Sure, I’m fine,” I lied. “And no, I didn’t know.”
“Bad Warren. Bad, bad Warren. I’m an actress, not a writer. You must have figured out that I’m an actress playing a writer.”
“Excuse me for assuming you wrote the novel that has your name on it. Nothing that’s happened, not one word that you or Warren said, would have made me think otherwise.” This was not the moment for grouchy resentment, but that was how I sounded.
“No need to get all up in a twist. I did a good job, didn’t I? Regardless of what my parents or anyone thinks, I can actually act. Am I right?”
Had all of this been playacting? Not the sex, please not that. But what a brilliant distraction the sex had been, a distraction from any natural curiosity, from any questions I might have asked. Was nothing about Anya real? The asylum, the Chinese bed. Why wasn’t Anya contrite? Apologetic for lying to me and to how many others? What had brought on her sullen mood? And why was she telling me this now? Was it because I’d suggested she think about changing one scene? Just consider it, I’d said. Or was it because I’d asked about the missing page?
If Anya didn’t write the novel, who did? Warren seemed the most likely suspect. I could imagine him after hours, drinking whiskey, having fun. What if everyone but me was in on the joke? Who was everyone, anyway? Did Elaine know? Of course Warren couldn’t admit he’d written a book like The Vixen. It wouldn’t have been funny. It would have damaged the firm’s reputation.
“Can we talk about this the next time?” Anya said. “I told you. I had a rough night. I’m having trouble concentrating.”
Anya leaned across the table and grabbed my wrist and looked at me, hard. Her laugh was sharp, wicked, mocking.
“You should have seen your reaction, Simon! Yo
ur expression!” She widened her eyes, overacting astonishment. Or was she imitating me? “I really got you that time.”
What a relief! I forced a sad little chuckle. But also . . . what a weird joke. Why had Anya said that? She’d made me doubt something I’d taken for granted. She’d meant to unnerve me. But why? And what if she didn’t write The Vixen? I still really wanted to believe that she had. It would make everything so much . . . simpler. I needed to calm down. I needed to believe that Anya wrote the novel, that she’d been joking when she’d said she hadn’t. We’d talk about it the next time. My questions would be answered. I could handle the uncertainty. Somehow I would get through the time until I found out the truth.
Anya said, “I’ll explain. It’s not like I said. I don’t know why I said that. Meanwhile . . . I have an idea for right now. I’m going down in the basement. Follow me in three minutes.”
She put a five-dollar bill on the table and pointed toward a stairwell and was gone before I could ask her, What are we doing? I knew what we were doing. It was the only way to make things right.
The basement was damp, but I liked the wet-plaster smell. It was like a crypt beneath a church, or one of those wine caves that maintain the same temperature year-round. Giant boxes and tin cans were stacked against the walls. There were cabinets, shelves, sacks of this and that, a wooden storage chest on which Anya sat, swinging her legs.
That was how we did it. With her sitting on the chest and me standing. The chest was the perfect height. She guided me between her legs. She’d found this place for us. The idea of her having looked for it—of her thinking about us doing this here—added to the excitement.
From the moment she touched me, I forgot—forgot—her saying she didn’t write The Vixen. How could I have remembered when nothing existed beyond the pleasure of being with her. That was part of it too, the way it disappeared the world.
Only when we were finished did I recall that something was wrong. Then I remembered what it was. What was true, and what was a lie? It would have been rude, even cruel, to ask Anya just then, to segue directly from sex into interrogation. I’d wait until the next time. I’d ask again about the missing page. We’d have an honest conversation.
Later I regretted not insisting that she explain. We should have talked more, and more freely. Why couldn’t I have asked about the place where she lived? Was it an asylum or a sanitarium . . . or what? Was I afraid of offending her? Of hurting her feelings? Of turning her against me? I’d learned not to push Anya on subjects she chose to avoid. She would go silent and drift away and leave as soon as she could.
After we had sex in the cellar of the diner, she kissed me, which she’d never done. It crossed my mind that she was kissing me goodbye. I told myself I was being paranoid and sentimental.
Of all the failures of nerve in my life, this one rankles the most: the fact that I didn’t ask, didn’t insist that Anya explain, that she tell me what she knew. I assumed I would find out. I assumed I would see her again. I would figure out how to ask her.
I said I wanted to walk home. I couldn’t face a car ride with Anya, with Ned up front and my unanswered questions thickening the air. I wanted to be alone. Once more I wanted to leave her so I could think about her, but it wasn’t fun anymore. I was anxious and sad.
“Fine,” said Anya. “It’s nice out.”
It wasn’t nice at all. A fog of car exhaust hung over the West Side Highway. The pollution made my eyes sting. My misery must have been so obvious that a little boy gave me a seat on the train. Maybe I was getting old. Maybe Anya had aged me.
Alone in my apartment, my thoughts battled opposing thoughts, then surrendered to new invasions. I wondered if Anya was lying, or if she was—as Warren would say—having me on. Certainly she was capable of it. I didn’t know what she was capable of. I didn’t know her. Who could imagine that you could read and reread someone’s novel, go to Coney Island with that person, have risky sex in many unlikely places, and remain a stranger?
Maybe she hadn’t written The Vixen. She’d often seemed to forget essential plot points. When her attention lapsed, I’d assumed it was because (as Warren reminded me) some writers hate even the most minimal criticisms or suggestions. Anya wanted to be a commercial success, but she didn’t have what I imagined as a writer’s pride, the tender care and concern for her book’s future. I thought of the two different typewriters, of the way she’d spelled Vickson. She said a typist fixed her errors. Maybe there were no errors to fix. Maybe she didn’t write it.
Many of Crowley’s tales were about shape-shifting beasts: women who turned out to be foxes, warriors masquerading as ghosts. I thought about Melusine, the wife in the French fairy tale who—when her husband breaks his promise not to spy on her in her bath—turns out to be a dragon. Only now did I understand that those stories were lessons about how little we know about one another. If you can’t tell what species a creature is, or if it’s alive or dead, how could you possibly know if your lover wrote a potential bestseller?
That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake, imagining conversations I would never have, heart-to-heart talks that shifted from confrontation to disbelief to confession, penance—and, ultimately, forgiveness. Laughter! I should have let Anya give me a ride home from the diner. Maybe something else would have happened. Maybe everything would have turned out differently.
Once more there was no one to tell. Warren? Elaine? I could hear the pitch of Elaine’s voice rising on each question. Now you find out that your writer isn’t the writer? That she’s posing. That she’s a fake. If she didn’t write it, who did? What took you so long, Simon? If it wasn’t Anya, who was it? Elaine would be right to ask—unless she knew the answer. How humiliating it would be to watch her trying to make me feel less embarrassed and bewildered. I wondered if Warren had set me up, the new guy, to be the stooge, the sacrifice that bled out on the altar of someone’s bizarro plan. But what was the bizarro plan? And whose plan was it?
* * *
I went home. I skipped dinner. I opened The Vixen, but set the manuscript aside after a few sentences. I tried to read a new translation of Egil’s Saga, but it put me to sleep.
I woke up drenched with sweat. My mother used to say that everything looked brighter in the morning. But that morning everything looked gloomier than it had the night before.
Maybe Anya had simply gotten bored with me and my requests for tiny changes. Now Warren would have to deal with a writer so unhappy with her editor that she denied writing the book. How often did that happen? No wonder she’d seemed out of sorts. She lived in a sanitarium! How much criticism had I expected her fragile ego to absorb? I should have kept things professional, been more honest about who had the power. But who did have the power? Anya. Always Anya.
Warren would never forgive me for panicking. For not being able to take a joke. This was not a matter of life and death. This was a novel that may or may not have been written by its putative author. The world wasn’t ending. The A-bomb wasn’t falling. Everything would work out.
But what would happen when the Rosenberg boys went to junior high, presumably under assumed names, and someone discovered their identity, and some smut-peddling bully slipped them a copy of The Vixen? There was their beloved dead mother having kinky sex with Russian agents. It would be my fault—mine and Warren’s. No wonder Anya wanted to distance herself from this misbegotten project. I would have to live with it, no matter who wrote it.
Working for Warren was my job, my only job. My first and, for all I knew, my last. My so-called career hung in the balance. If I tried to stop the inevitable, I would wreck my future. I’d been admitted, on a trial basis, to a charmed circle of angels, to the starry heaven over which Warren presided, and I feared being cast back into the outer darkness of Coney Island.
I called the sanitarium, and a nurse told me that Anya wasn’t taking calls.
“Is she there?”
“Not at the moment,” the nurse said. Then she hung up the phone. I called
back, but no one answered. I imagined the phone ringing and ringing, echoing down the ghostly hall.
* * *
Not since my first day at work, when I’d tried on every piece of clothing I owned, was I so nervous about going to the office. I decided to get there early. I imagined the designer, the copyeditor, the colleagues who had barely bothered to learn my name now taking one look at me and assuming the worst: My departure, my doom was imminent. My professional death warrant had been signed.
If the only reason to publish The Vixen was to make money, then it hardly mattered whether Anya had written it or not. But the doubt she created had instantly depleted whatever minimal confidence I’d gained since coming to work for Warren. Why would Warren continue to employ an editor so incompetent that he didn’t even know if his author wrote the book?
As far as I knew, only Anya, Warren, Elaine, and I knew that The Vixen existed. As far as I knew. Was I the laughing stock of literary New York? If Uncle Maddie found out, he would think it was funny. Ego, pure ego, had deceived me into thinking that I’d been chosen for an important job. But why would Warren and Elaine waste the company’s precious time and money on such a complicated joke?
Walking toward my cubicle, I heard someone typing, like snowflakes tapping a window. I followed the sound down the hall. I was ready to confess everything to the early-bird typist. We had solitude in common. Solitude and insomnia. Sleeplessness and loneliness seemed like character recommendations. Trust this fellow sufferer. You are not alone.
The sound was coming from Elaine’s office. Elaine! The person I most wanted to see. The one I most needed to talk to. The woman—one of the women—I loved.
Elaine’s door was open. She glanced up and gave me a smile so warm that all my fears seemed to melt away. Or almost all my fears.
Even at that ungodly hour, Elaine looked lit from within by the milky light of human kindness.
“Hi, Elaine. What are you doing?” What did it look like she was doing?
“Writing a press release for Warren’s baby.” I must have looked startled. “France’s brilliant New Wave novel,” she explained. “Hey, Simon, are you okay?”
The Vixen Page 18