of gray bedrock, like whales rising from the sea. Charles tries to ignore the blister he feels opening on his left foot. He’s in great shape. Isn’t he? How many forty-nine-year-old men can run like this, just keep running? He has stamina, staying power. His best years are yet to come. After things settle down, he’ll lavish attention on Anne, make amends for his recent moodiness. She’s been so understanding.
The rain picks up, the drops coming quicker. When he was in his twenties, he loved to run in the rain. He can still handle it. It’s wilder up in the northern reaches of the park; there are patches of trees that look like deep woods. He passes two black girls huddled under an overpass, making out, their passion stoked by the veil of rain. It’s coming down steadily now, blown by gusts of wind. Charles’s sweatshirt is soaked.
And then his cell phone rings and he takes it out of his belly pack. Anne says it’s embarrassingly Hollywood of him to take calls while he’s running.
“Ray’s Pizza,” he says.
“I’d like a large pie with pepperoni and pineapple.”
Charles laughs. It’s Nina, his agent. More important, his friend for over twenty years.
“Where the hell are you, Charles?”
“Somewhere in Central Park, partner. Swimming against the current.”
“In this rain? Thank God the exercise bug never bit me. Call me when you get in.”
Charles can hear something serious in her voice-they know each other that well. He ducks under a tree, his body heaving with each breath.
“What have you got for me?” he asks.
“A disappointment, I’m afraid. Call me later.”
“Better tell me now, Nina. I like to be wet when I get bad news.”
“Well, I just saw an advance copy of the Times Book Review.”
Charles crouches down and leans back against the tree.
“And?”
“Some envious hack takes out his frustrations on you.”
Charles hears a high-pitched screech but there’s no ambulance, no police car.
“Charles, are you there?”
“Who wrote it?” he asks, ready to add another name to the enemies list.
Nina mentions someone who sounds vaguely familiar. One of those writing-program one-novel wonders?
“How bad is it, on a scale of one to ten?”
“You don’t need to read this one, Charles.”
“I’ll call you later.”
“Listen to me, Charles-”
“I’m going to hang up now, Nina. Good-bye.”
Charles stands up and starts to run back downtown. Faster. By the end of the day, every publisher and agent in the city will have read that review. When he gets home, he has to call Anne and tell her. He can just hear the sympathy in her voice. The concern that masks her pity.
And then he falls-trips over himself, crashes down on his right knee, scraping flesh off his knee and his palm. He picks himself up and keeps running, ignoring the pain and the blood. He’s nearing Seventy-second Street, his route home. He splashes through a rush of water pouring down a storm drain. His running shoes are soaked and he has to blink to see through the downpour. He’s been counting on a good paperback sale from this one. Something in the mid six figures. The Times review probably lopped an easy hundred grand off that. He can’t ask Little Miss Success to take up the slack, as if he were a kept husband. He imagines, for one brief troubling instant, hitting Anne, slapping the concern off that exquisite face. His knee and palm are pulsing with pain. He sees his apartment building rising above the trees. He runs right past it and keeps on running.
2
Anne Turner is in her office going over the copy for the spring catalog. She’s having trouble concentrating. Outside, the rain is coming down in sheets. She’s a California girl; rain this fierce scares her; it brings mud slides- houses, dreams, lives that once seemed solid and secure, all swept away in an instant.
She signs off on a rhapsodic description of wrought-iron furniture made at a small foundry outside Florence, gets up and paces for a moment, then pours herself another cup of coffee-her fourth so far today. Damn Trent for being on vacation. She can always count on her assistant to cheer her up with some juicy bit of celebrity gossip. That mousy little temp the agency sent over looks like she wouldn’t know gossip from wheatgrass.
Everything is so infuriatingly unsettled right now. She’s never told Charles how precarious her position is. How could she, after insisting that they buy the apartment? Yes, in three brief years, Home had become one of the most popular catalogs in the country, but costs are astronomical. Her insistence on scouring the globe for sensational offerings, on using the most expensive paper, on hiring the best photographers, on leasing these lavish thirty-fourth-floor offices, have all stretched resources to the breaking point. There’s a little breathing room now, thank God, but only because she took drastic action-action that makes her shudder every time she thinks of it.
Anne hates the way Charles has been sulking over every minor setback and disguising his envy of her growing fame. So much is at stake with his new book, and she’s afraid his expectations are unrealistically high. It’s a good book, but not his best, not as good as it could be, should be, with his gift. Damn, she hates it when she pities him. What she should do right this second is kick off her shoes and do ten minutes of yoga. But the truth is, yoga bores the hell out of her. Work is the only thing that releases her endorphins.
Anne adores the gargoyle planters made by some mad old hippie deep in the Joshua Tree desert-they’re terrifying, fabulous, and unique. Just the sort of find that has made Home such a sensation. The coffee is starting to make her dizzy. Her phone lights up.
“Your husband is on line one, Ms. Turner,” the temp says in her tentative voice.
Anne punches on the speaker.
“Are you warm and dry, darling?” Silence from the other end of the line. What now? “Charles?”
“It’s the Times Book Review.”
“Not good?”
“Not even so-so.”
For a split second Anne fears she’ll faint. She looks out the window at the furious storm-is the whole city coming apart? Pity won’t do; she knows that.
“Who wrote it?” she asks.
“Does it matter?”
“We can discredit him. Call in all our chits. Make sure someone sympathetic writes the daily Times review.”
There’s a pause and she can tell Charles is considering her idea. Anything to keep him from spiraling down into that morbid depression of his, the one that shrouds the apartment like cobwebs. The one that eventually winds itself around her throat, too.
“It’s one review, Charles,” she says. “It’s a goddamn good book and we both know it. And you’re a great writer.” She realizes that in some perverse way she welcomes his crisis. At least now she has something to latch on to, a challenge. And if she can help him through this, an atonement.
“I just wanted to let you know.”
“Let’s go out to dinner tonight-get drunk and feel each other up under the table.”
“Great idea. How about the Four Seasons? To complete the humiliation, why don’t I walk in naked?”
Anne curses herself. There is simply no way to minimize the blow-the Times Book Review is Big Daddy.
“I love you,” she says. “I can’t wait to get home.”
Anne goes to the window. Down below, the city is a wet gray blur.
The intercom sounds. “Ms. Turner, may I speak to you a moment, please?”
The mouse squeaks, Anne thinks.
“What is it?”
The temp enters. She’s small and young and quite pretty, actually, when she lets her face peek out from the
