a towel over her and imagined her father making his way west, her pot-smoking, underground-comics-reading, incense-burning, bitterly unhappy father who loved Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and the Grateful Dead, off to seek his long-haired dream far from the dreary dying towns of western Pennsylvania. She imagined him in motels and rented rooms as he made his way across the country, she imagined him forgetting about his mistake, about his wife, his life, about Emma. She understood. And yet secretly, every time the phone rang, every time the mail came, she felt it-that strange sad tingle of hope.
Emma curls up into the fetal position on her bed. Fuck her father. He better not come around after she’s famous, like one of those movie-star stories you read in the tabloids. His sorry ass won’t get a dime out of her. Emma blows off that loser’s memory and turns her thoughts to Charles Davis and his piney smell. She’s seen men looking at her on the subway; she knows she’s no dog. Her breasts are as pretty as Winona Ryder’s. She lets her hands go up and explore them, running her fingertips in gentle circles. She a goddamn survivor.
15
Charles is ravenous and he can feel the beginnings of a headache taunting him from behind his eyes. It isn’t going well, the new book. Through the closed door, he hears Emma enter the outer office. With lunch, he hopes. She’s a strange girl; he can’t quite get a bead on her. Definitely not at home in her own body-today is the first day she’s worn a skirt above her knees. Her figure is decent, small but well proportioned.
“Charles?” she says softly, tentatively, from behind the door.
“Come in.”
Emma pokes her head into the office. “I’ve got your veggie burger and carrot juice.”
Charles gets up and joins her in the outer office. The crisp autumn air has brought up a touch of color on her pale skin and her eyes look especially bright. She smells faintly of peppermint soap. She hands him a tray loaded down with two hot dogs and a huge serving of french fries slathered with mayonnaise.
“I hope this is organic mayonnaise,” he says, accepting the tray. “How’s it going out here?”
“Steadily. How’s it going in there?” Something in the way she asks, her serious curiosity, pleases him. He glances at the small V of flesh her open shirt affords.
“I’m trying to have faith in the process,” he says. She nods that grave, simpatico nod of hers that he finds so touching somehow. She has such lively brown hair. Why the hell does she keep it pulled back like that, and with a tacky red elastic band? She really is determined to downplay her charms. He wonders suddenly, Is she a virgin?
“Join me?” he asks.
“I won’t interrupt your world”
“I wouldn’t have asked.”
Emma picks up her salad and follows Charles into his office. He pulls up a chair for her. She bites her lower lip in exaggerated concentration as she squeezes orange dressing out of a small plastic packet. There’s something so submissive about her, so yielding.
“That looks disgusting,” he says about the Day-Glo dressing.
Emma looks over at his tray, brimming with grease and fat and hot dogs made of who-knows-what, and smiles slyly. When she smiles like that she becomes someone different-a mischievous little girl who cuts school to sneak into the movies. Maybe she isn’t a virgin after all. Maybe she could teach him a trick or two. Not that he makes a habit of being unfaithful to Anne. In the twelve years of their marriage, there’ve been maybe half a dozen times, all when he was on the road and the opportunity was just too ripe to pass up-Charles flashes on that grad student in San Antonio who knocked on his door at two in the morning with a bottle of wine in one hand and a gram of coke in the other. Christ, she was hot. In awe of him. Like Emma. Like Anne.
“Did I get any interesting mail today?” he asks.
“There was one, from a woman in Colorado.”
“Yes?”
“She wants to have your baby. She asked if you could send a specimen for in vitro fertilization.”
“Believe it or not, I’ve had requests like that before. What did I tell her?”
“You told her you couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
That wily smile plays at the corners of her mouth again, and a flattering blush rises in her cheeks.
“Because… because you had a vasectomy five years ago.”
“I beg your pardon?!”
“You told me to use my discretion. I figured she couldn’t argue with… that.”
He chuckles. “You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?”
Emma takes too big a bite of her salad. She sits with her back straight and her legs pressed together-a strange hybrid of re-pressed librarian and runaway street kid. Would she make love like a librarian-or like a street kid?
“Who are you? Tell me a secret,” Charles says.
Emma reaches for a piece of bread, opens a tiny tub of butter, and methodically butters the bread. “I don’t have any. I’m not exactly the stuff of great fiction,” she says without looking up from her task.
“Let me see… Grew up in a suburb of Chicago. Father a geology professor, mother a second grade teacher… only child… testing yourself in Manhattan before you go back for your degree in psychiatric social work.”
Emma laughs. It sounds forced. She’s so easy for him to rattle. He must remember that and be gentle with her. He imagines opening her blouse, lifting it off her shoulders.
“Well, I am an only child,” she says.
“And the rest?”
“I had an uneventful childhood.”
“There’s no such thing as an uneventful childhood.”
“I grew up in western Pennsylvania. Nothing but cows and coal mines. I suppose you could say I’m here in New York to test myself. I’ve always been fascinated by the city. And here I am.”
“Mom and Dad?”
“Just Mom and Dad.”
She pushes at her salad with her fork. Her shy evasions only increase his interest. They could knock off early one afternoon, have a few glasses of wine. He’d go slowly, never putting his pleasure before hers. Afterward she’d nestle her small body against his and they’d talk, share a sweet and tenuous intimacy. It could well develop into an affair. Just for a month or so, a month of sex and longing and solace.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Mom never served mayonnaise with our french fries,” Emma says.
“She didn’t know what she was missing.” He holds out the tray and she nibbles at a single fry.
“I still prefer tartar sauce,” she says dryly.
Charles smiles at her and she returns his smile. There’s a moment of silence, their eyes remain locked, and then she looks away.
Suddenly Charles wonders about her stability. She seems almost to be trying on different aspects of her personality as if they’re hats and she isn’t sure which ones fit. And something in the tightness that sometimes creeps into her voice hints at a well-concealed rage. This girl could be trouble, might do something inappropriate. He could see her, strung out and pathetic, accosting Anne in front of the building. Bad news. Emma is terrific as a secretary, but potentially disastrous as a lover. It’s not worth the risk, not now. Just another distraction.
Emma reaches up and slowly traces her fingers down her neck. Is it an unconscious gesture? There’s something undeniably erotic about it, and in spite of his admonition to himself, Charles feels his cock grow hard.
16
