thirty
HELEN READS THE LAST CHAPTERS OF CLAUDIA'S MANUSCRIPT and leans back against the pillows. She feels such admiration for this shy writer's powerful prose; such determination to help get her everything she deserves as an artist. It is ten-thirty, too late to call, but Helen gets Claudia's number and tries her again anyway.
When she hears her student say hello, Helen feels a sudden tightening in her throat. “Claudia?” she says, in a pinched voice not quite her own.
“… Mom?” Claudia says, and at this Helen begins to laugh.
“Oh! Ms. Ames! I'm sorry!”
“Call me Helen, please. And I'm the one who should apologize for calling this late. But I have to tell you, Claudia, I am absolutely overwhelmed by your manuscript. In the very very very good way!”
“You are?”
“I would love to help you try to get this published. It's beautiful, and I don't think it will be hard to find it a home. You know, the reading for the class is coming up, and there'll be an agent there, Maureen Thomas, who's very good, and I think she will absolutely love this. She comes from an all-woman agency; and I really admire the clients they have. There'll be an editor at the reading, too. For her to do anything other than listen is more of a long shot, but still, she'll be there, and she's a great editor.” Helen was in fact amazed to learn that Kate Demian was coming to the reading, and so were Saundra and Nancy—in the end, they decided that Kate must have just wanted a free trip to Chicago for some reason or another—editors of her stature didn't usually show up at things like this.
“I didn't think I could come to the reading,” Claudia says. “I missed so much class. After I gave the manuscript to you and then didn't hear anything right away, I was too embarrassed to see you. I thought you hated it. I was afraid to even answer the phone.”
“I took as long as I did because I kept rereading passages! But oh, please do come back to class! There's one left—why don't you come? Everyone will be so glad to see you—we've missed you. The last assignment is to write a piece on risk. That seems appropriate, doesn't it?”
Claudia laughs. “It does. Okay, I'll come. I'll do the assignment and I'll do the reading, too, from my book. I wonder if … Do you have any suggestions about what I should read?”
“You can close your eyes and point to a page. It's all wonderful. Truly. Pick anything you like, about five pages' worth—each person gets only ten minutes.”
“Well, I just … Thank you so much. I can't tell you how happy I am to hear you say all this. I'll see you in class tomorrow. Thank you.”
Helen hangs up the phone and lies still for a long while, imagining Claudia at the podium, reading in the darkened auditorium. Helen wants to sit somewhere where she can see Maureen Thomas's face. If she were the agent, she'd rush the stage the moment Claudia finished, an agency rep form and pen in hand.
She flips through the pages of the manuscript. What raw pain is here, but how beautifully and universally expressed. She understands now what Claudia might have been trying to ask when she first gave Helen the manuscript: If this is published, where will I hide? What will protect me? I'm writing to try to get myself out from under this pain, but will a public sharing of it only bind me more tightly to it? Helen wishes she could tell her student that moving her experience out of herself and into the open will only help. But the truth is, she's not sure. It's a risk that Claudia will have to decide to take, or not.
Helen picks up the phone again and dials Tom's number, realizing after the fact that she has it memorized. She means to exchange pleasantries, to tell him about Claudia, to make a delicate inquiry as to the next time they might expect to see each other. But when he answers and finds that it's she, he says, “God, Helen. I miss you!” And she immediately blurts back, “Midge says we should have had sex!” And then she actually blushes, covers her mouth like a schoolgirl and blushes, sitting there alone in her mismatched flannel pajamas, surrounded by books and papers, wads of Kleenex, orange peels, and the candy wrapper from one—one—piece of chocolate.
“I was thinking we should have, too,” Tom says. “I was thinking that just now, in fact.”
“You were?” She laughs. She pushes aside a stack of papers as though making room for him beside her.
“Yes. That's the truth. I was just now lying here, thinking about … what we missed.”
“Oh, but, Tom. You know, it's … I was in a marriage for a long time. And when you're with somebody that long, you see them in a certain way. I mean, I would look at Dan and I would see him as he used to be even as I saw him as he was. And I knew he saw me the same way. It was a kind of safety net, that long history. After he died, I felt like sex was just … over for me. And I didn't mind, really, until I met you and you kind of woke me up. But I feel a terrible shyness about being with someone now. I mean, I'm old.”
“You're not old. You're fifty-nine. You're a kid!”
She doesn't even start.
She hears sounds that suggest he's changing positions and she does, too; she turns on her side, hunkers down more with the phone, hears him say, “Listen. You think women are the only ones who worry about what their bodies look like? I keep a picture of me in my twenties on my bedside. It's pathetic. It's like Woody Allen's track medal—remember that movie where he swings the track medal in front of some young woman's face? I have a brief memorial service every time I take a good look into a full-length mirror. And … Okay, have you noticed the prevalence of Viagra ads? They're not for the girls, you know. They're not for the girls to take, anyway.”
“Have you …?”
“No. Not yet. Haven't had the occasion to. But it's not out of the realm of possibility that I'd need to take it, if the occasion arose. So to speak.”
She says nothing.
“I'm making you uncomfortable, aren't I? I'm making myself uncomfortable. I'm sorry; I sound like some sleazy guy with hair transplants, sitting in a bar and hoping to score. Let's start over. How are you, Helen?”
“We wouldn't have to have sex right away,” Helen says. “We could just … lie there and hold hands. I used to love watching movies and holding hands.” She sighs, a quiet thing. Dan, passing her the popcorn and kissing her temple.
“I did, too,” he says. “I loved all that. I'll tell you what, Helen, next time you come out here, we'll go to the movies and hold hands. And then if you'd let me … Here's the fantasy I was just enjoying, okay? I want you to lie on my bed with me and I want to hold you right up next to me. That's all. Except … I don't know, I'll bring you raspberries with the dew still on them; I've got a huge bank of black raspberries growing in my yard, and I'll bring you some. We'll go to Chinatown and then to hear some music—I know a bar that books great jazz acts. We'll walk through the tea garden in Golden Gate Park. I'll take you to look at puppies.”
“Only if we can get one,” Helen says, and he says, “One?”
Helen hesitates, then says, “You know, we have a Chinatown here and we have Millennium Park and we have great music to listen to, live. Blues. Would you like to come here and visit?”
“I thought you'd never ask,” he says, and Helen bites her lip so hard it hurts. And then she feels a sudden, terrible disloyalty to Dan for exulting in the fact that here is a man who can have dogs and wants to hear live music.
“I just have to tell you,” she says. “If there's a heaven, I'm going to have to be with Dan.”
“As I'm going to have to be with Laura.”
“Was that her name?” Helen asks, softly.
“That was her name,” he says. “But she is gone, and Dan is gone, and here we are on earth, Helen, with an unknown number of days left to us, and I really can't wait to come and see you.”
“How's the house?” she asks, because she cannot go further down this road. And he tells her she has time, but she should decide soon; the couple who wanted to buy it are beginning to look at other properties. She talks about real estate, and buyers, and time lines, and in her head she lies down beside hi
m, and she can feel his arms pulling her close, and she can smell his skin, and she can feel the regular rhythm of his breathing, which coincides with her own.
thirty-one
ONE HOUR BEFORE THE LAST CLASS IS SCHEDULED TO BEGIN, Helen is sitting in the café across from the library, waiting for Saundra Weller to arrive. They will be discussing the particulars of the reading, which student will read when, what they might realistically expect from the agent and editor, what they will serve at the reception. Helen is early by a good twenty minutes, and has already had two cups of coffee as well as a cherry cheese turnover, which is the counterwoman's fault, because after she gave Helen her coffee she looked right at her and said, “What else?”
All around the café are people in conversation, or sitting hunched before their computers, or eating solemnly, staring into space. There is one man reading a newspaper; otherwise, no one is reading anything.
Such a discouraging time for people who love reading. Independent bookstores are struggling, all those magical places built by people who loved books from the moment they could hold one, and wanted to share that love with others. Helen recalls one such store where she did a reading a couple of years ago, how inviting the place was, with its broken-in armchairs and lamps glowing a deep yellow, with the cat named Melville, who slept on his back in the front window. It was a browser's paradise, books so thoughtfully and attractively displayed you wanted everything you saw, whether it was a nonfiction book about cod, or a volume of poetry, or a fat novel with ragged-edged pages, or a cookbook featuring winter soups. It was a time—the only time, as it happened—that Helen had arrived far too early for her reading, and she spent forty minutes wandering around the store. In the children's section, she eavesdropped as a mother read Scaredy Squirrel to her son; both mother and child laughed aloud at the inclusion of sardines in Scaredy's emergency kit, and at his first step in what to do in case of emergency: “panic.” Helen laughed, too, and stopped just short of asking if she could sit down and listen to the rest of the story.
In the classics section, she had picked up a copy of The Magic Mountain and recalled the summer between her junior and senior years of high school, when she read it, how she lay in bed hours after she should have gotten up, the sheet growing warmer against her skin as the sun rose higher in the sky, her mother poking her head in now and then to see if she'd gotten up yet, but never suggesting that she should: Eleanor didn't have many rules about child rearing, but one of them was this: Never interrupt reading.
About ten minutes before Helen was scheduled to start her reading, the owner, Suzie, had offered her a cup of ginger tea, and they'd sat together in Suzie's cramped office at the back of the store. Suzie had told her how she'd left a high-paying job in advertising to open her store. “Now I'm on the side of the angels,” she'd said, grinning. “And every day is Christmas.” Books were everywhere: stacked up on her desk, overflowing from bookshelves, piled high in corners of the room, in boxes that needed to be unpacked.
When Suzie introduced Helen, she told the audience that one of the best things about books is that they are an interactive art form: that while the author may describe in some detail how a character looks, it is the reader's imagination that completes the image, making it his or her own. “That's why we so often don't like movies made from books, right?” Suzie said. “We don't like someone else's interpretation of what we see so clearly.” She talked, too, about how books educate and inspire, and how they soothe souls—“like comfort food without the calories,” she said. She talked about the tactile joys of reading, the feel of a page beneath one's fingers; the elegance of typeface on a page. She talked about how people complain that they don't have time to read, and reminded them that if they gave up half an hour of television a day in favor of reading, they could finish twenty-five books a year. “Books don't take time away from us,” she said. “They give it back. In this age of abstraction, of multitasking, of speed for speed's sake, they reintroduce us to the elegance—and the relief!—of real, tick-tock time.”
It was an inspiring speech, but she was preaching to the converted. The crowd gathered to listen to Helen read were people who were already convinced of the worth not only of books but of authors. But the decline of reading was continuing. It seems impossible that not so many years ago, people read newspapers twice a day, morning and evening editions. They read newspapers and came to their own conclusions about what they had read—what a notion! Helen remembers Dan once throwing up his hands in exasperation after a politician gave a stirring speech that was followed immediately by mind-numbingly repetitive analysis.
Maybe it's not such a bad time to come to the end of her career as a writer. She doesn't see how the growing trend of screens taking precedence over pages can be overcome. Books aren't loud enough; they're not showy enough; they don't move quickly enough; indeed, they don't move at all. They require stillness, reflection, imagination, and these things are out of step with the times. Thank heaven for the popularity of book clubs; sometimes Helen thinks they're the main reason publishers—and authors—are still in business.
She looks at her watch. Ten more minutes. She pulls out a pen and idly begins making a list of possible jobs for herself on a napkin. Her leave of absence, if one might call it that, is up, she's going to need to start bringing in some money.
Waitress, she writes, and stares at the word. Why not? She likes the easy camaraderie in being a waitress; as a young woman she had worked in a steak house and it was one of the best jobs she ever had. When the women customers would pass on the potatoes that came as a side, the waitresses would order potatoes au gratin and then put the oval dish of bubbling cheese, potatoes, and butter on the little table in the back of the kitchen that was reserved for them, and they'd all share. At the end of the night, the staff would gather at the bar for a couple of drinks, and Helen always liked the jokes and the casual intimacies, the raspy voice of the senior waitress, Della was her name, a onetime hot blonde who, in her words, knew her way around the block and back, and liked nothing better than to offer Helen advice about men. “Pay attention to what kinds of socks they wear,” she said. “You can tell a lot about a man from what kind of socks he wears. Hole in the back, okay; hole in the front, forget about him.”
Helen liked wearing the black uniform and the white waitress shoes; she liked coming home with leftovers every night—she rarely bought groceries in those days. But then she remembers the gigantic trays of food she hauled around and the very notion makes her back ache.
Nanny? she writes. She looks up and sees Saundra Weller coming toward her, and she crumples the napkin.
Saundra sits down at the table, slides her heavy winter coat from her shoulders. “How are you?” she says, and, without waiting for an answer, pulls from her enormous black bag a thick bound manuscript. “Guess what this is.”
“No idea.”
“Margot Langley's novel.”
Helen sits back in her chair. “Really.”
“Yes, and I have to tell you, it is simply magical. I told her I'd get her a few blurbs before we even submitted it. Patricia Honey-wood just called and gave it a wonderful quote. And her last book was on the list for twenty-three weeks!”
“You're going to submit it?”
“Well, I spoke to my agent, who's agreed to represent Margot, but we've all agreed that I should personally hand it to Kate Demian. Who is wonderful, so discerning. I am absolutely sure she'll want it and I'm thinking she'll offer high six figures, easily. A million isn't out of the question. I made a few editing suggestions, of course, and Margot was just so good in recognizing the need for those changes and … Well, here we are!” She holds out the manuscript. “Pour vous!”
“You know, I'm actually buried with galleys that publishers have sent.” Not true. Number of galleys Helen has at present? Zero.
“Oh, come on, Helen. Really. A favor for a colleague? I just had this copy made for you—why don't you have a look, read twenty pages or so. I promise you, you'
ll love it. And then if you would just quickly get the blurb to me before the reading, something beyond the usual plot summary, of course, something that talks about the lyricism of the prose, and the great intelligence and imagination shown here. Four sentences should be just right.”
“Let me ask you something. Does Margot know you're asking me to do this?”
“Yes. She does. I had to talk to her a little about … She was unaware of the importance of gathering blurbs from a number of sources. She had a wish list, but your readers represent a segment of the population she can't afford to ignore.”
“I'm sorry. I really haven't time right now.” Helen looks at her watch. “We need to talk about the reading. Funny thing, I have a student who has completed a manuscript, as well. And it's really good.”
“Oh. Ooookay.” Saundra offers Helen a weary smile. “I'll read your student's book, all right?” She looks at her watch.
“Oh! No. No, thanks.”
Saundra mutes her astonishment at this refusal and finally puts Margot's manuscript back in her bag. On her face Helen can read a kind of anger. But she will not read one page of Margot's manuscript. Absolutely will not. Not a single word. Still, she's curious about something. “What's the title?” she asks, and Saundra says the book doesn't have one yet. It has to be a great one. Saundra says she will think of one.
Helen sits in the empty classroom, her coat on, though open: she is not willing to leave quite yet. Her students, after having presented her with parting gifts of a silver pen and The Book of Positive Quotations, have all gone. Their pages today on risk were the best yet: some funny, some poignant, all full of the telling kind of detail she has been urging them to display. Claudia read first at the request of her classmates, who were delighted to see her back. She wrote about sneaking into her parents' room when she was twelve, examining the contents of every one of their dresser drawers. In her father's drawer, she found a stash of cigars beneath his underwear along with a roll of fifty-dollar bills bound by a deteriorating rubber band, and she found a box of condoms whose pale yellow color sickened her. She described the filmy negligees wrapped in tissue paper that she found in her mother's drawers, garments she had never seen or imagined before—she held the blue one up before her, and saw her own blouse clearly through it. She found a stack of letters written to her mother by a former suitor, and she found her mother's unlocked diary. She read to the point where her mother wrote about her disappointment in her daughter—her plainness, her debilitating shyness; then she stopped reading and very carefully repositioned the diary back under her mother's slips.
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