by Alon Preiss
The TV star sat in the bright sunlight, and she broke into sobs, her tears carried by the wind out across the river. The little rowboat passed under a centuries-old stone bridge and through a narrow tunnel, and her cries echoed in the dark.
Alice had a secret that she didn’t like to think about, but which invariably surfaced when she became friendly with anyone at all, and so she would announce it simply once a certain intimacy arose. “I cannot have children,” she would say. She had told a number of the women in her little rich wives circle. No questions were ever asked. But at least now they knew not to delve further. They all knew not to ask her whether she and Blake Maurow intended to start a family; why an attractive couple such as she and Blake had not done so already, etc. etc.
But when she told Eden, a few weeks after they met, endorphins were fizzing her head.
“Sprint thirty seconds,” Eden said, her cheeks ruddy in the chilly early winter air. And they sprinted thirty seconds. Then they slowed down and ran at a slower pace for two minutes. During one of their slower jogs, Alice began talking, and she didn’t stop.
“When Blake expanded the apartment,” she said to Eden, “it was because we needed room for the baby. And another room for the nanny. And another room for another baby, if we were to have another baby. Still leaving a room for my study and Blake’s study. Needed so many rooms, for all the people who would be in our household.” After a pause, as though an explanation were necessary, she explained: “When I became engaged to Blake I was pregnant. Then shortly thereafter, I was not.”
“I’m sorry,” Eden said. Then: “Listen, let’s sprint.”
Thirty seconds later, running more slowly, her breath caught in her throat and a slow ache worked its way up her body. “I ‘lost’ the baby,” she said. “Like, absent-minded. Like whoops! Where the hell is she? Not just ‘The baby is lost.’ But instead: ‘Alice lost the baby.’ ”
“I’d always wondered about that too. The patriarchy assigning blame, or something.”
“A little early term miscarriage,” Alice said. Now, a pain in her gut, and in her head. “She was a girl. And she felt like a girl. She was alive and growing, then one day, she just died inside me. It was very early in the pregnancy. Even before the wedding.” Then, with almost no certainty, Alice added, “Almost like just having a period. Like nothing.”
“I don’t believe that,” Eden said. “Seeing your face, hearing your voice, I know I can’t believe it.”
“Well,” Alice said. “You weren’t supposed to believe it, Eden. You were supposed to think that I’m being touchingly brave.” And she was touchingly brave, she supposed, and she left it at that.
Eden said nothing.
“Having decided to get married, we went ahead and got married. I could have just said, Now you don’t have to marry me.”
“Why didn’t you?” Eden asked.
“I was afraid he wouldn’t marry me. I wanted to marry him.”
“Were you really afraid?”
“I don’t know. I really do love him, you know, Eden. I was worried he didn’t really know it. I even offered not to let him bail me out, just to prove it to him. We’d be married, but our accounts would be legally separate. He refused. I knew he’d refuse, so it didn’t really prove anything, I guess. Then he offered to bail me out even if I left him. I just laughed at that. Then I felt bad for laughing. But did he really think I could have taken his money? If I left him?”
“I’m sure he didn’t. You were both proving your honor.”
“I don’t really want his money. But I wish I had our baby. I regret that.” Their pace began to lag, and the cold of the day pressed in on Alice from all sides. “Isn’t it time to sprint?” she asked Eden, and Eden said yeah, and they took off, their breath freezing in the air.
Later on, Schubert was playing on her tape deck. The telephone rang. Alice let the answering machine pick up, and she sat at the other end of the room, listening. It was Carly Barrows. She was sobbing on an intercontinental line. She explained that her boyfriend had just left her, all of a sudden, on a gondola in the middle of a river. She was calling from a pay telephone, and she kept dropping in foreign coins. Alice thought she could hear Carly’s tears dripping into the receiver. She was all alone in an Eastern European city, and her heart was broken. “I am calling you to ask,” Carly said, “what would Andrea do?”
Alice let Carly say goodbye, listened to the click and the dial tone, and then she replied, to the open air: “If Andrea were all alone with a broken heart, she’d pull herself together and solve a murder mystery.” She sat on the couch, put up her feet, relieved that she had not answered the telephone.
The phone rang again fifteen minutes later, and it was Carly again, crying on the answering machine, her voice rising up over Schubert.
Then it rang again after another ten minutes, and it was Carly again. Then again. And again. Each time, more hysterical. Alice began to worry that Carly might kill herself. This would make Alice feel bad, and not just because it would spell the end of the Andrea movies. Carly did not deserve to die alone, in misery, the victim of a man’s rejection. And so she picked up the phone.
“Listen, Carly, just breathe. Just calm down. You’re hysterical.”
“I thought I was going to marry him.” The TV star was sobbing on the phone, hiccupping and gasping. “I’d proposed to him, and I’d bought him a ring.”
Alice put a hand to her head, reminded herself that this woman was her alter ego, that this woman meant a nationwide audience, exposure, best-seller lists....
“Carly, I’m your friend. How can I help you?”
“Tell me what Andrea would do!” she sobbed. “Tell me what she would do if she were in my position.”
“I’ll tell you what Andrea would do, Carly. Shrug. She would shrug and she would go on with her life. If she lost this guy on page 2, then on page 3 someone would be murdered, and she’d run out and figure out whodunit. It would probably be the guy who dumped her. All for the best. That would be that. Didn’t you tell me Andrea knows she can’t rely on any man, for anything? She’d be like: ‘Fuck him.’ But she wouldn’t say ‘fuck’. She would shrug it all away.”
“Shrug. Okay.”
“Can you do that?”
“Yeah.” In the long pause that followed, Alice imagined Carly practicing her shrug, bouncing her shoulders up and down to cool down her overheated, bigger-than-life Silver Screen emotions. Trying not to care so much anymore. “Yeah,” Carly said finally. “Okay.”
She sounded better.
That night, at the ballet, celebrating the publication of Alice’s second novel. Blake, Alice, Alice’s agent Toby Duggins, and Alice’s editor, Patricia Bennett. Patricia was a widow, and she was dateless, and Toby was a middle-aged homosexual who was still uncomfortable dragging his lifelong partner along to business events; Alice knew of his personal life only through Patricia’s gossip. The four of them sat in the third row, looking up into the stage lights, at dancers who seemed, from this perspective, so much bigger than life, like images on a movie screen.
On the stage, a line of young ballerinas with skinny muscular legs and long skinny necks gamboled in perfect unison, back and forth in a row. It was almost hypnotically monotonous, until Alice heard a bit of gasping, a few whispered titters, in the row behind him. Alice tapped her husband and pointed to the third ballerina from the left, whose right shoelace was untied. When she leaped, in tandem with the others, her lace flew back and forth. At one point, all the dancers held out their right legs and shook their right feet, and her shoelace spun and twisted in the air. The audience laughed. But at the end of the dance, the applause was louder than before. Louder applause for a dancer who survived adversity of her own making than for those who were perfect. Alice found that curious.
Their dinner reservations were in an upper east side restaurant. A man in a tuxedo played piano near the entrance, and a fountain flowed through hazy purple lights. The maître d’ marched them through two or th
ree rooms filled with businessmen dining with clients or young women, and then he opened a door and led them all into a dark room. Lights flickered on and happy voices shouted “Surprise!” A room full of people, friends of hers from college, from hundreds of miles away, Blake’s colleagues, some of Alice’s relatives, a few publishing types who knew someone who knew Blake, and who moved through their lives from time-to-time. A big room, filled, if not to overflow capacity, at least with enough people so that the room didn’t look embarrassingly empty. And it was all for her. Eden, standing in the corner, looking beautiful and lonely and awkward and so glad that Alice had finally arrived. Eden was all in black, in the shortest dress in the room.
Alice turned and kissed Blake on the cheek. “All this for my stupid little mystery book?” she asked, laughing at the absurdity of it. “Blake, this is so dumb, and you really really shouldn’t have.” Then, close to his ear: “But I’m glad you did.”
Alice saw Eden at the very edge of the room, talking uneasily to some book editor. The editor was trying to smile, laugh, talk her up, desperately trying to be charmed by her, and she was sending him signals, begging him to go away; at one little joke of his, the editor giggled wildly, and Eden laughed without laughing, a laugh that insulted while pretending to try to flatter. Very skillfully done, too, Alice thought. The editor’s smile faded.
When Eden was alone, Alice approached her, Blake Maurow on her arm.
“My husband,” she said. “Blake Maurow. Blake. You know.”
Eden nodded.
“You knew that,” he added, “but she said it anyway. And you must be Eden.”
Eden smiled and looked around. Alice was vanishing into the crowd, dumping her husband and circulating. “All the publishing geeks have heard of me,” Eden said. “You know, I had this big entrance into their world, and I’m just sort of sinking out of it. They all come over, introduce themselves, say they’ve heard of me and ask when it’ll be published. I’m sure it looked as though I was being awfully rude just now, but....” She shrugged. “But I don’t care.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” Maurow said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Your big entrance. Sinking without trace. I just know that you’re Alice’s devoted friend. And some other good things about you.”
Eden smiled, and now it was a genuine smile, one that she felt inside of her, and it was filled with real warmth.
“It does make me feel better, you know. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” He held out his right hand. “Nice to meet you.”
She took his hand. “Nice to meet you,” she said. “Your voice is exactly as I imagined it. Misty. Gentle. You know.” Like the fog in a painting she had seen, a painting on a scroll that stretched across an entire museum room, fog that rolled in off the sea and blanketed a village that never could have existed and settled around mountain peaks from a child’s imagination.
Blake shook his head, and he smiled a smile that looked like a laugh in his eyes.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “I don’t know what my voice sounds like. But if you say so, then I thank you.”
An empty martini glass swung from Eden’s left hand, a dim lipstick mark on the rim. Her right hand was still tightly grasping his. Her heart filled with some emotion, some mutation of affection, directed straight at him and through him at the same time. He opened his hand to loosen her grip, and she felt her vodka haze thin. She was suddenly and intensely embarrassed, but she wouldn’t have been able to explain why, even to herself.
She dropped his hand, and she let her arm fall to her side.
“I don’t know what I’m talking about,” Eden said quickly. “I guess.” Her eyes moved to the floor. “What a stupid thing to say, the first time I meet you.”
Maurow and Alice stood side-by-side, Maurow’s arm lightly around his wife’s waist.
“Have you been reading Alice’s new novel?” Toby asked, now quite drunk, and Maurow said no, and Patricia said no, and Toby plunged ahead. “I read the outline and the first five chapters yesterday morning, as soon as they arrived,” he exclaimed, “and it’s brilliant!” He went on to say that at this rate, Alice would lift the adventures of young Andrea out of the mystery genre and into the much more lucrative thriller genre. “We’ll all make a lot of money,” he said with a little laugh. “She got the idea from Carly Barrows, and she just pounded the thing out, just like that.”
“Well, good,” Maurow nodded. “What’s so exciting about it?”
Alice shot a glance at her agent. “Come on,” she said. “He’s going to read it fresh. Don’t spoil — ”
“Andrea’s working on the usual sort of case,” Toby said, ignoring her. “Computer hackers delete some files, blah blah blah. Someone’s been murdered in just an awful way. (Too awful, actually. Alice knows she need to tone down the awfulness of the murder.) But what Alice has just added is this element: since the last book, Andrea’s gotten married.”
“Toby, you’re screwing up the story,” Alice insisted.
“This older rich guy,” Toby said. “Jake Morris. Like Blake Maurow, but just a little different.”
Toby smiled, laughed awkwardly.
“You know,” he said.
Maurow nodded.
“Nothing like Blake Maurow,” Alice said quickly. “His name isn’t Jake Morris, Toby. It’s — ” Her mind groped about, lost for a moment. “It’s ... um ... Michael Richman.” She felt herself flushing. She was a terrible liar.
Toby shook his head. “I would have remembered that. A rich man named Richman? That’s beneath you, Alice.” He turned back to Maurow. “Anyway,” the agent went on. “The thing about Jake — he’s a nice guy, but who knows anything about him? Sort of Gatsbyesque. How did he earn all his money? Who’s he killed? Why won’t he tell Andrea anything about himself? What can account for all the gaps in his life? That sort of thing. Andrea has blinders on, she loves him so much. It’s a different Andrea this time. More human. Somehow — and I’m not sure how this happens — the web of crime ultimately leads to Andrea’s husband and a big climax on a cliff far above a narrow gorge. Jake goes over the edge, drives right over the edge in his fancy....” Toby was stumped for a moment. “What kind of car do you drive, Blake?”
Patricia laughed, and Maurow tried to laugh as well as his wife stood stone faced, and then Maurow awkwardly and abruptly changed the subject to politics. Both Patricia and Toby tried to feel out Blake’s views before giving any of their own, to prevent antagonizing him any further.
The conversation lay in ruins by the time the agent embarked on another awkward detour.
“I’ve been meaning to ask Alice this question, and I just forget all the time.” He took a sip of his wine and tossed an appetizer into his mouth, and then he started talking while he chewed. He could not continue talking until he had put both liquid and solid into his mouth. The sign of a man in a perpetual hurry. “Okay, are you familiar with Blake Maurow, the writer?”
Maurow nodded silently, and Alice couldn’t tell whether he were nodding in recognition, or urging Toby to continue. In spite of the joy swirling all around him, Blake was in a different place; in retrospect, Alice realized that he had seemed distracted and faraway on their way to the opera, but that emotion had not dissipated after the surprise had been revealed. While clearly proud of the intrigue he had successfully plotted, and gratified at the treat he’d brought Alice — after all, one of his marital duties seemed to be announcing each of Alice’s minor triumphs to the world — Blake seemed unusually distracted, and his easy smile, while not absent, appeared only with a certain effort. Alice knew, however, that she would receive no explanation; Blake was in a distant land, decorating one of his foreign castles, planning the rest of his life. Why tonight? Alice wondered. What had happened to take Blake from her?
“The other Blake Maurow,” Toby went on, “was an author who wrote and illustrated children’s books decades ago. Out of print forever. About a little boy named Timmy,
and the magical adventures he goes on with his guinea pig. Decades ago, maybe when you were a boy. I found a couple of these in a used book store, just by chance. I like them. Thought I’d try to track the guy down, get them back into print. It’s just that Blake Maurow is sort of an unusual name. I’ve never seen it spelled that way. I thought it might be your dad.”
“No, not my dad,” Maurow said, straight-faced. “It’s me. Little stories about little Timmy.” He seemed to smile very slightly with the memory. “And his cute little guinea pig. And their adventures. I loved drawing that little guinea pig. His little face, with his big furry smile.”
Alice felt her smile freeze; she pretended she’d heard this story a hundred times before.
“Why’d you ever stop writing them?”
Alice dimly registered a piano player warbling “That Old Feeling.”
“I didn’t want to keep telling children that magic would protect them from the world,” Maurow replied.
Alice laughed loudly, but not without affection, and she closed the door on the subject. “My husband’s joking,” she said, “and not very well. Anyone will tell you, he’s no illustrator. Believe me, I’ve seen his doodles. And Blake wouldn’t know a fairy tale if he woke up in one.”
Alice and Patricia and Toby all laughed even harder, and Maurow joined in, though Alice saw that his heart was clearly not in it.
In the cab, kissing her husband over and over again, on the lips, on the cheek, on the neck. A little nibble on the ear. She had not felt inebriated at the party, just whirring around on the energy in the room, but now she succumbed to absolute drunkenness. “I’m the luckiest woman in the world,” she said, “to have such a crazy husband, who does such funny things for me. Somehow you even got a few publishing thugs to come to a surprise publication party for a little mystery novel! Whoever heard of a surprise publication party? Do you realize that the party cost more than I will ever make in my career?”