In the Night Room

With the feeling that Faber had once again proved his worth in absentia, Willy prepared a light, nearly gravity-free lunch of two tablespoons of tuna salad smoothed along a piece of crispbread, half an heirloom tomato cut into tiny wedges, and a can of caffeine-free Diet Coke. She dined upon this feast while watching One Life to Live on the little TV from her former apartment, now installed on the kitchen counter. To a narrative-drenched mind, One Life to Live presented an astonishing banquet. Each new course was richer and more florid than the last; and the banquet went on forever, endlessly, at the rate of one hour per day. In the past, the day’s installment had often returned Willy to her desk with the sense that a river of story flowed through her, ready always to be tapped.

Unfortunately, the spell cast by her soap opera seemed not to have survived the move from East Seventy- seventh Street to Guilderland Road; and Willy spent hours pushing at stubborn sentences that trickled along until they dried up.

That evening, the two glasses of wine she had with dinner put her to sleep somewhere in the middle of the first chapter of The Ambassadors. (Willy typically read English novelists, A. N. Wilson, A. S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark. When out of sorts, she devoured crime novels; when depressed, she enjoyed Tim Underhill’s books, which were not crime novels, exactly, except that they always had crimes, usually appalling ones, in them; in exceptionally good moods, she picked up nonfiction books with titles like The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.)

At 11:00 P.M. she came awake and decanted herself into her bed, almost immediately to suffer through one of the worst nightmares of her life.

From a point about eight feet off the ground, she was observing, camera-like, the back of a teenaged boy staring at an abandoned house. He had short, dark hair and wore floppy jeans and layered T-shirts. His posture struck her as oddly poised, even graceful, and she thought he must have a nice-looking face. With the unquestioned conviction of dreams, another thought came to her: the boy’s face would be a more youthful, more masculine, but otherwise virtually identical version of her own. The boy took a tentative step toward the empty house. As soon as he moved forward, Willy understood that the house, which was empty only technically, represented a mortal danger to this boy. If he went through that door, the house would close around him like a trap; the filthy, ravenous spirit that looked out from the front windows would claim him forever. Willy’s consciousness of his danger did not slow the boy in his steady progress toward the door. Inwardly, the entire building trembled to devour him—she could feel the bottomlessness of its hunger. She could not move; she could not speak. Her dread redoubled itself, and the dread deepened her paralysis.

The boy took another step forward on the little broken path leading to the porch and the awaiting door. As if within a snow globe emptied of its snow, the house and the boy stood isolated in a no-place defined entirely by themselves. Within the globe, intolerably to our watching Willy, a sick desire fattened upon itself. As it whispered to the boy, his hesitant footsteps carried him nearer and nearer to the porch. At last she could bear it no longer: the sheer pitch of her dread let her overflow her confinement and fly, out of control, deep into the sacred space. She sped toward the advancing boy as if on a silver rail, and when she was within the minutest possible time fraction of somehow not knocking him over but gliding into his body she jolted into wakefulness, the scream in her throat already fading to a gasp.

For hours that night Willy alternated between pitching back and forth on her sheets and lying still. When she rode into Manhattan the next day, seated in the passenger seat of Mitchell’s car while Giles Coverley chatted about trivia of no interest to either of them, she felt nearly as dislocated and displaced as Tim Underhill on a difficult day. Thanks to Kimberley Todhunter, the helpful young woman conjured up by her fiance, Bergdorf Goodman folded itself around her like a velvet purse. Under Ms. Todhunter’s guidance, Willy pared down a dozen dazzling choices to a final two, and finally chose the shimmering Prada garment over its counterpart from Oscar de la Renta, then moved on to a pair of terrific sexpot shoes from Jimmy Choo and a number of other accessories previously voted in by her tactful guide. Having spent an astonishing amount of Mitchell Faber’s money, Willy got back into the car and told Giles to take her to the Metropolitan Museum.

Willy meandered through the impressionist rooms, only half-seeing the paintings as she speculated about what Tom Hartland thought was so serious. Coverley had dropped her off at the entrance and driven away to perform sundry mysterious duties. On reflection, Tom’s subject probably had nothing to do with publishing. Tom seldom talked shop with her. It kept occurring to her that Tom had never been entirely supportive about Mitchell Faber, and that it seemed likely that he had arranged this meeting, this date between two old friends, to try to dissuade her from getting married.

Monet’s views of haystacks and Rouen cathedral, once sources of almost infinite pleasure, today seemed merely pictorial. It was predictable that Tom should have turned against Mitchell, she thought. Not only did they have nothing in common, Tom’s political views automatically made anyone who worked for outfits like the Baltic Group a dupe or a villain. What had Mitchell said, at their first meeting? From time to time, they call me in to make murky issues even murkier. She had thought he was telling her he was a kind of corporate lawyer. (It was, she realized, the first and last time she had heard Mitchell say anything that sounded witty.)

Willy found herself before a painting by Corot. She had always loved this painting. About the size of a window, it depicted the onset of a storm in a rural landscape. The air was a luminous gray and, like everything else in the painting, hummed with anticipation. Beneath a great tree on the banks of a river, a cowherd huddled beside his charge. Overshadowing the cow, its attendant, and the riverbank, claiming center stage, the enormous tree—a linden, Willy thought—threw up its arms in the gathering wind. Its hands shook, and the leaves were blown backward on their stems. That was the painting’s center, its heart. The undersides of the leaves gleamed gray- green, beautiful to behold. Undoubtedly they rattled as they shook. Something sacred, an inhuman force deep within and beneath the rind of the physical world, spoke from the flipped-over, gleaming, vibrant leaves. They had been seen, those leaves, and in the midst of her turmoil Willy was able to think, I, too, have seen you, leaves, and feel the onset of the storm.

Later, she thought the painting had driven her from the museum. The storm it promised to the French countryside had arrived in New York City, and Willy’s body had known it before she reached the top of the immense staircase and looked down to the tide of wet jackets and umbrellas streaming in past the guards. The Dellray men scrambling across the roof, the Santolinis and their concerns about the oak tree . . . it seemed wrong to keep Giles Coverley from his job, and she nearly decided to cancel her drinks date with Tom Hartland. But if any problems came up, Roman Richard had only to use his cell phone for a consultation; and she found herself unwilling to give up her hour with Tom.

The interval between the Met and the St. Regis seemed to pass in an instant, and when Willy, who had arrived in advance of her friend, took her seat on the banquette and waved away the hovering waiter, it was with literally no memory of how this period had been spent. Two and a half hours had gone by, leaving not even the memory of rain bouncing off the windshield of Giles Coverley’s car. She could, just, remember leaving the car and moving toward the hotel’s marquee under the shelter of a uniformed doorman’s immense black umbrella. Even that had the slightly dreamy, black-and-white quality of something remembered from an old movie.

It was true, she was going crazy. How could all that time have disappeared? The missing hours felt as though they had been carved from her body like Shylock’s pound of flesh. Looking back to what remained in her memory from the museum, Willy came across another inexplicable lapse. She retained a clear picture of three paintings only: a Monet haystack, a Monet rendering of the Rouen cathedral, and the Corot. On either side of all three of these pictures hung fuzzy daubs like paintings seen through a layer of Vaseline—this gauzy stuff had filled whole galleries. The only real paintings in the Met had been the ones she had paused to look at.

A familiar voice inquired why Willy was looking so incredibly grim, and she looked up to see handsome, kind Tom Hartland bending down toward her. As her heart surprised her by knocking in her chest, Willy resolved to keep these indications of mental chaos to herself. Instead, she blurted, Oh, Tom, please don’t tell me you wanted me to come here so you could say terrible things about Mitchell. Then she apologized for this outburst; then tears flew from her eyes, and an ugly sound of distress escaped her lips. The nearest patrons of the King Cole Bar slid a few inches away on the banquette.

Tom Hartland conjured up a glass of white wine and a vodka martini, and under his tactful guidance Willy tried to describe the afternoon’s bizarre experiences.

—Well, Tom said, it sounds like a kind of temporary, stress-related amnesia. You’re not going crazy, Willy. You’ve just been drifting along, letting other people tell you what to do, and now that you are coming to an irrevocable moment in your life, part of you is starting to rebel. I think that is a very positive sign.