clamoring for a copy. I said, ‘Absolutely not-go out and buy it.’ ”
Charles sits next to her on the sofa. She reaches out and strokes his cheek. He takes her hand and kisses it. “Next time I go I’ll leave a note.”
“Make it a love note.”
He places her hand on his thigh and runs his fingertips between her fingers. He’s been boorish and self- obsessed lately-it’s time to give Anne something she wants.
“Anne?”
“Yes?”
“About a baby? There’ll always be a thousand reasons to wait.”
She turns away abruptly, withdrawing her hand. She really does look exhausted.
“I didn’t get a great deal of sleep last night. Can we discuss this some other time? Right now I need a nap. You know we have to be at Lincoln Center at eight.”
“I’m not going.” She freezes. “I’m sorry, Anne, I’ve made a decision to cut back on my socializing. It’s for my work.”
“Nice of you to tell me.”
“I really have to focus. It’s important.”
“I understand that, darling, but I think I have a right to be informed of these decisions, maybe even consulted. This is for the Fresh Air Fund, Charles, they do important work. And the tickets were five hundred dollars.”
Low blow. “If you can’t afford them you shouldn’t have bought them.”
Anne concedes the point with an almost imperceptible nod. She finishes her drink with a long swallow. “Am I supposed to just cancel our entire calendar, or should I find myself a walker? Too bad Jerry Zipkin is dead.”
“There’s that artist-what’s his name? You love his company.”
“I can’t believe this. You’re my husband, Charles.”
“I also happen to be a novelist.”
“Are the two mutually exclusive?”
“They may be for a little while.”
Anne stands up. Something hardens in her face, around the mouth. “Keep me posted,” she says, and walks out of the room.
Charles watches her go. The apartment feels polluted by their exchange. Why the hell did she bring up a piddling five hundred dollars like that, with the money she makes? She has every right to be angry about his backing out of the benefit, but it won’t last. She’ll go by herself, make some excuse for his absence, and have a terrific time. Anne’s a big girl, and she’ll soon see that he’s doing this for both of them. If he can come up with fifty really strong pages, Nina will snare a serious advance and everyone will breathe easier. But fifty pages of what? Does Portia think that some idea is just going to crash through the window and- pow! — he’ll have another great book? She sure as hell doesn’t have much respect for his process. That’s unfair. She’s part of his process. At least she used to be.
Charles grabs the bottle of Scotch off the liquor tray and heads for his office.
11
Emma sits at her desk sorting through months of old mail. Many of Charles’s fans, particularly the female ones, seem to project their deepest longings-for a son, a husband, a lover-onto him. In her week and a half on the job, she’s dealt with a pound cake sent by a sixty-two-year-old widow in Missouri, a naked photo from a married woman in Marina Del Rey, and an impenetrable love poem from an overwrought Wellesley freshman. And then there are the manuscripts sent in by would-be writers, and galleys sent by publishers hoping to garner a book jacket blurb. When she started, there were dozens of these lying around the office. She suggested to Charles that she read the books and write synopses for him to review. He praised her initiative, and using this system they’re working their way through the backlog. Ditto for the forty-two unreturned phone calls that greeted her on her first day.
Emma has a goal: to make herself indispensable to Charles Davis.
The mail sorted into its usual three piles-Throw Out, Answer, and Pass On-Emma looks up and surveys the office. There’s no doubt that she’s succeeded in bringing some semblance of order to the chaos. There are neat piles of papers on chairs and tabletops, each pile labeled with a Post-it note as to its eventual destination. The room is off-limits to the housekeeper and Emma spent her first days cleaning, stirring up volumes of dust that sent her into sneezing fits. But what a difference-the place shines. There’s even a vase of fresh flowers on her desk. Emma loves order-it calms her, quells her terrors.
Emma imagines Charles, on the other side of the closed door between the two offices, sitting at his desk, writing. He has told her he’s starting a new book, that he writes his first drafts in longhand in spiral notebooks he orders from the Dartmouth bookstore. She’s read all of his novels. Her favorite is Irreparable Damage, the story of a New England family coming apart after the sudden death of the mother. The father, a college professor, mad with grief, immediately begins an affair with one of his students. Emma understood completely the professor’s need to lose himself in passion even though he knew that the affair was wrong and would damage his children, the young woman, and himself. Emma had been moved by the book and found solace in it too. There was something about that family, floundering in the aftershock of sudden tragedy, that made her feel less alone.
And of course she’s fascinated by the man himself. Beneath his imposing manner he seems kind, even wounded, lonely somehow, like a little boy who has won first prize at the fair but now stands all alone behind the bandstand. She wonders if he has any friends, any real friends. He needs one. She loves his hands, the long fingers with squared tips. When he gets close to her she can smell his pine soap.
As for Anne Turner, Emma hates her. She’d like to take a hammer to those perfect teeth. The bitch knows exactly what she wants, is so damned articulate that words roll off her tongue as if they were scripted. Turner lives in a parallel universe where everyone is fearless and graceful, where life is just a matter of waking up and making fabulous things happen. Emma keeps her mouth shut during their brief encounters. She listens attentively and tries to look intelligent, always remembering a secret maxim she honed in the mental hospital: What you don’t say can’t be used against you. During her week temping at Home, Emma had observed Anne carefully, hoping to learn some of her tricks. Even that rainy day in her office, when Anne got that phone call that seemed to disturb her so much, she never lost her composure. She was told something, some piece of news-what could it have been? — and her face went white. She even forgot Emma was in the room.
Turner had told Emma to help herself to anything in the kitchen, and two days ago, when Charles Davis was at the other end of the apartment taking a shower, she had walked down the long hallway and into the enormous room. She’d opened the refrigerator door and looked at all the cheeses and chutneys and tiny pickled vegetables. Each label was a miniature work of art; all the food seemed to come from organic farms in quaint-sounding corners of Connecticut or the Hudson River valley. Emma opened a small container of goat cheese-it smelled like goat hair. Stupid fucking rich people. She spit into it. Then, giggling to herself, she stirred the spit with her pinky until the saliva disappeared. She imagined Anne Turner spreading the cheese on a cracker and remarking on how divine it was. Then Emma took a carrot from the crisper. She’d taken only one bite when she heard Charles Davis approaching. She dashed back down to the office and stuffed the uneaten carrot into her purse. She smiled at him when he came in.
Charles’s office has antique filing cabinets, a Persian rug, and twelve-foot ceilings. Emma feels as if she’s stepped through the looking glass into a world she’s read about and seen on television. And now she’s part of it.
No you’re not. Stupid Emma, you’re a fly to these people, a convenience. You don’t belong here. Freak! Go back to where you came from, hide away in some rented room, be a small-town weirdo. Emma clenches her fists, digs her fingernails into her palms, harder harder…
There’s a tentative knock on the door at the end of the hallway. Emma licks a sliver-moon of blood from her palm. Be calm be cool. She goes and opens the door. Magdalena, the housekeeper, a quiet woman from the Canary Islands who pretends she doesn’t speak English-Emma sees through her little act-is standing there with a FedEx letter in her hand.
