Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Susan Richards Shreve

  He seldom thought about James and Lucy as parents—not since he had stolen their affectionate names for one another, appropriated their unanticipated absence from his world and invented Plum and Jaggers as intentional truants from family life. He knew that his sense of them was a shadow of the truth—their history incomplete, dying as they had before they had a chance to fail. In the stories Sam wrote, Plum and Jaggers were members of a generation of parents who had abdicated the responsibilities of family life by choice. But somewhere between his idealization of James and Lucy and the parents he had invented for Plum & Jaggers lay Sam’s true feelings about his own.

  He was thinking about the last moments of his mother’s life. He had a clear picture of what had happened in Orvieto. Without struggling through the murky air of memory, he could bring everything from that day to the main screen of his mind.

  He imagined his mother and his father walking through the railroad cars to the lunch car, where they ordered sandwiches for their children, laughing at the pleasure of their adventure, probably buying small Italian cakes as a surprise dessert, Lucy leaning against James in the narrow passageway.

  One moment they were standing with eleven other people in the lunch car. The next moment they were dead. Not even the warning of an automobile accident. There and not there.

  But if James and Lucy had known, if there had been an abbreviated moment, an apostrophe in the clock’s ticking, time enough for them to have a sense of consequence, they would have been devastated for their children. One alteration in the arrangement—Lucy remaining with the children, for instance, or James stopping at the men’s room—and the history of the McWilliamses would have had a different text.

  It mattered deeply to Sam to believe they knew. To believe that for a moment of consciousness before the final darkness, they had understood the cost of their innocent adventures, that unlike Plum and Jaggers they were not entirely responsible for leaving.

  Charlotte noticed a change in Sam as soon as she sat down in the Café Rosa with her pot of tea and fortune cookies, reading the fortunes aloud to Julia, who took the two she wanted—“Love beckons” and “The heart is a lonely hunter”—sticking them in her pocket.

  Sam’s eyes were narrowed, his mouth drawn taut, his lips thinned across his face, his body wound tight, hard as a baseball.

  “So what did you think of the meeting today?” Oliver asked.

  “Not much.”

  “Jacob misses the point about the setting,” Charlotte said.

  “The setting is exactly right as it is.” Oliver ordered more tea and ginger cookies. “But I do worry about Julia’s role.”

  “My roles are too extreme?” Julia asked.

  “I’m afraid they’re a magnet for crazy people, and New York has a lot of those,” Oliver said. “We need to be disturbing, but just this side of sick.”

  Sam had opened the notebook in which he listed his ideas and was drawing dogs with long snouts and angular heads.

  “I worry about the line of safety we’re crossing,” Charlotte said.

  Sam looked up from his notebooks. “That’s the line we cross,” he said. “That’s who we are.”

  “We have to be careful, though,” Oliver said. “This is television, not a small theater audience who have come to see us because we’re Plum & Jaggers.”

  “But we’ve hit a funny bone.” Julia leaned against Oliver. “I don’t think we should change the show completely.”

  “We’re not changing it at all,” Sam said, getting up and putting on his coat. “I know exactly what I’m doing.” He took his papers and stuffed them in his bookbag, walking out of the café ahead of them, turning left downtown.

  In the café, Sam had been thinking about one of his father’s paintings, a small and particularly detailed one that he especially loved. He had in mind to stop at the old apartment on West Eleventh to pick up some clothes and the painting as well.

  The wind had settled to an occasional bluster of cold air at the cross street, a pale invisible sun giving the afternoon a suggestion of light. From time to time, he stopped at a corner and looked around to check the pedestrian traffic. He was aware of a young man, well scrubbed, in jeans and a leather jacket, walking just behind him from Rockefeller Center to Chelsea, a walk Sam and his siblings often took but didn’t expect of others who worked regular hours.

  “Do you have the time?” the young man asked at one corner.

  Sam checked his watch. “Four-thirty,” he said.

  “You’re taking quite a long walk,” he remarked at another intersection.

  Sam turned away. He didn’t expect incidental conversation in New York City and was bothered to have been noticed by this man. Perhaps it was nothing, or perhaps he thought he knew Sam because of Plum & Jaggers and was interested in friendship.

  “See you later,” the man said, ducking into Tall Men in Chelsea. Sam didn’t acknowledge his goodbye.

  The painting Sam had in mind was a Scottish shoreline of exquisite detail, with small brushstrokes in various shades of green, particularly lush, lit from an angle beyond the painting, the sun setting behind the landscape. A single red Wellington belonging to a child lay on its side in the grass. The sea was dark olive, a spray of orange lit the water in the distance, and under the arch of white-caps, a dangerous blackness.

  How strange a painting it was for the father Sam remembered as lightness itself. He slipped the painting in his bookbag and was immediately relieved, feeling almost a rush of happiness as if something significant had been missing in his life before. He planned to prop the painting up on his desk in the new place in Tribeca, let it shine on his computer.

  What he wanted to do with the stories of Plum & Jaggers was to walk his characters into the sea as far as they could go without drowning.

  It was a long trip to Tribeca and almost dark by the time Sam arrived at their front door. He assumed he would be the last one home, even if they had walked, because of his stop on Eleventh Street, and he was hoping Charlotte had picked up dinner on Broadway. His mind was on the beginning of a new episode.

  In the last script, the lips of the character of Sam are fixed in the permanent shape of an O. The scene begins when Sam places Jaggers’s empty chair in the middle of the dining-room table, climbs up on it, and sits facing straight forward, hands folded on his knees, in an attitude acknowledging silence as a separate character.

  Sam wasn’t even thinking when he opened the mailbox for Apartment 4A.

  Oliver, sprawled on the couch with a beer, could hear Sam run up the steps to the second floor and slam open the front door. He strode across the room and dropped a postcard on Oliver’s stomach.

  “We got mail,” he said.

  “Mail?” Oliver asked. “Who knows our address?”

  “The person who sent the postcard,” Sam said.

  The postcard, from the Museum of Modern Art, was a long-faced Modigliani, just the elongated head with black hair and tiny black eyes and a brilliant green necklace. It was addressed to Sam McWilliams in an elegant, masculine script, nineteenth-century in its perfection. In the space for messages, the writer had drawn a small cursive J.

  “We’re moving tonight,” Sam said.

  Oliver put his head against the back of the couch, staring at the ceiling. “Where in God’s name are we going now?”

  “I’ll find a place.”

  Julia sat down on the couch next to Oliver. “I was right.” She covered her face with her hands. “Someone is following me.”

  Oliver put his arm around her, kissing the top of her head.

  “I want to quit,” Julia said. “I want to move back home with Noli.”

  “No one’s quitting,” Sam said. “Not now. Not yet.”

  It was winter dusk, the darkness beginning to settle just beyond their studio windows, and they packed quickly, to be out before night. Sam ordered
a car.

  “Where are we going?” Julia asked as they headed down the steps with their luggage.

  “Hotel Moronna, until we find another place,” Sam said.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  SAM’S PLAN was to move from place to place under cover of darkness, a small army of foot soldiers, or else rats, traveling the sewers, surfacing for food. They lived at Hotel Moronna for a few days without incident, and then moved on, first to the Village Garden on West Thirteenth and then to a small hotel on the Upper West Side. It became a regular pattern in their lives. On the third or fourth day at a new location, Sam would begin calling around the city under an assumed name for a new hotel, a small place where ideally they wouldn’t be recognized, although occasionally they were.

  When Sam called the New York Police Department, Detective Howell was assigned to meet with them.

  “What can you do?” Sam asked. “We’re living like fugitives.”

  Detective Howell wasn’t optimistic. “Not much to do,” he said. “There isn’t enough to go on. You have a gasoline fire in Virginia, which is out of our jurisdiction. Only the J on the postcard is associated with New York.”

  “We know someone is following us,” Sam said. “This isn’t a guess.”

  Detective Howell shook his head. “I believe you,” he said. “It isn’t exactly surprising. You’re in a high-risk profession, comedy, and likely to attract problems. But there’s nothing we can do until something more happens.”

  “That’s a consolation,” Oliver said.

  “You could hire a bodyguard,” the detective said. “A lot of people in your situation do.”

  “But the police department can’t assign someone to keep a watch on us?” Sam asked.

  “Not on the basis of what you’ve told me,” Detective Howell said. “One postcard, evidence of arson in another state, no known enemies or past failed love affairs, no actual signs of someone following. Really, what you’re talking about is your own fear, which is not to say I don’t believe you have reason to worry.” He got up, indicating their meeting was complete. “Keep me up-to-date as you move around,” he said.

  By the first of March, an unusually soft and warm winter for New York City, except for a pervasive dampness, the McWilliamses’ lives had settled into a routine in which the only serious inconvenience was their constant change of location. Sam’s plan, which they had followed without consequence for quite a while, was based on surprise. A highly developed series of arrangements that had them moving around New York in twos or threes or fours, a different pattern every day. Even for a professional criminal, they would have been difficult to follow. Until Oliver’s March 12 birthday, they had begun to believe they had shaken the enemy.

  They were living at the Berrial Hotel off Central Park West. It was a large, impersonal establishment catering mostly to foreign businessmen, and Sam liked the anonymity of it, the unfamiliar foreign conversation in the lobby. He was beginning to talk about returning to the apartment on West Eleventh and had arranged to have a cleaning crew come and painters for the kitchen and bathroom, with plans to move back around the first of April.

  It was Thursday afternoon, early, still light, after rehearsal of a scene with Julia as Miriam and Anarchy on Prozac for his repeated depressions. Sam had stayed at the hotel rushing to finish the next episode.

  The strategy for the evening—every day had a plan designed by Sam—was that Julia and Charlotte would walk up Sixth Avenue. First, they’d stop at Vacés for gourmet takeout and a birthday cake, and then at the bookstore in Rockefeller Center for a book of Italian landscapes that Oliver had seen, and finally they’d walk along the park to the hotel.

  But Charlotte had a terrible headache and went home by taxi with Oliver, leaving Julia with the birthday chores.

  “It’s light outside,” Charlotte said to Julia. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”

  “What about Sam’s hysteria?”

  “Just do the shopping and take a cab home,” Charlotte said. “There are a zillion people on the street.”

  It was rush hour when Julia left the studio. She walked to Sixth, hoping for a cab, but none was available, so she decided to walk uptown, stopping for the hot chocolate at Leona’s teahouse on the corner of Seventh and Fifty-second. Leona’s was a small, cozy restaurant with crisp white tablecloths and sprays of flowers in tiny vases, sticky sweets rolled to the table on a trolley, a winter refuge where she and Charlotte sometimes stopped to read The Village Voice or fashion magazines, to smoke an occasional cigarette out of Sam’s sight and talk about men and babies. Sitting in a cushy chair in a corner of the room beside the window, the Voice open on the table, she was suddenly conscious that someone was watching her.

  She looked around. Two middle-aged women at the table next to her, lost in a conspiratorial conversation; a young man in a romantic quarrel with a beautiful Asian girl, whose head was turned away to avert his look; a full table, probably of students, books open, chattering across a pot of tea; no one specific, unless it was a waiter standing by the cappuccino bar looking in her direction, but not at her exactly, beyond at the street. She was suddenly agitated and got up.

  “Do you need something?” the waitress asked.

  “Just the bill,” Julia said, drinking her hot chocolate quickly, putting on her coat, her bookbag over her shoulder, dropping the sugar cookies in her pocket to eat on the way.

  Outside, she headed toward a bookstore, walking quickly, weaving through the crowd, alert to strangers on the street. The sense of being watched had followed her.

  “Stupid,” she told herself.

  It was all in her mind—she had caught Sam’s paranoia. But she couldn’t help it and sped along the street as if she were being chased, rushing into the safety of the bookstore.

  She was kneeling down in the section for garden books when something brushed across her hair, and she jumped up face-to-face with a man, taller than she was, although not tall, with graying curly hair, an oddness about him, a long black scarf wrapped around his neck.

  “Sorry to startle you.” His face had an expression of amusement.

  Julia said nothing, grabbing the book for Oliver, taking it to the counter.

  He had touched her hair. Certainly that’s what had happened, she thought, taking deep breaths, watching the man still standing in the Garden section looking at books. But she could feel his eyes on her when she turned her back to him and paid the bill. It could not have been an accident, touching her hair.

  Four blocks to Vacés. She thanked the clerk who had wrapped Oliver’s book and hurried out of the bookstore, checking behind her to see if the man was still in the Garden section. But he had disappeared.

  At Vacés, she got two Moroccan chickens and grilled vegetables and roasted potatoes and a ficelle, a raspberry-and-chocolate birthday cake and candles, two bottles of sauvignon blanc. Loaded down, she went out to the street to hail a cab, scanning the crowd for the man from the bookstore with a growing sense of peril.

  The cabs traveling uptown were full, darkness coming quickly. Her arms, weighted with packages, felt as if they would fall off her body, but she headed with the traffic toward home, walking close to the buildings, checking for reflections in the glass.

  “Marigold.”

  She heard the name distinctly above the noise of the traffic, spoken by someone close. She turned around. Marigold? Who else would have a name like Marigold?

  At the corner of Fifty-ninth there was a young man standing with his Labrador retriever, and something about the dog gave Julia a sense of safety.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I need your help.”

  He was younger close up than she’d thought he was, maybe only fourteen, but he stopped and stood with her on the corner while she told him that she was being followed, her arms were too full of packages, and would he help her get a cab.

  “Who’s follo
wing you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sure it sounds crazy.”

  “Oh no,” the boy said, standing just off the curb, his hand in the air. “I mean anything can happen in New York.”

  “I guess that’s right.” She scrambled in her pocket for money, finding only the sugar cookies. “I can’t find my money,” she said, breathlessly climbing into the taxi he had hailed. “Only sugar cookies.”

  She stuck out her hand with the cookies.

  He laughed and shook his head. “Be careful,” he called as she shut the door to the cab.

  At the hotel she paid the driver. Standing for a moment to readjust her packages, in the confusion of luggage belonging to new arrivals, she saw a man with graying curly hair and a black scarf, just the back of him.

  She turned into the hotel, rushing through the lobby, into the elevators, pushing 4. At the fourth floor she hurried down the carpeted corridor, falling against the door to their suite.

  “Do something!” she planned to say to Sam.

  But Sam, ashen-faced and quiet, met her at the door and took her by the shoulders, pulling her into the circle of his arms.

  Noli was dead.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  WILLIAM WANTED a church funeral.

  “She was religious,” he said.

  “Noli?” Oliver asked, astonished at this news.

  “As a girl, she was very religious,” William said. “So I have decided on a church funeral at First Methodist in East Grand Rapids, where she went when she was growing up.”

  “The service should be very small. Does First Methodist have a chapel?” Charlotte asked, thinking that certainly no one would come. They’d been gone so long from Grand Rapids, their tiny family would be lost in the vast Methodist church, with its long rows of white pews.

  But William shook his head.

  “People will come. We lived there all our lives.”