We went through a lot together. You need to help me through this. I need to know you’re safe for me.
She sent it. Instantly a reply came back, and a dialogue began.
Trust Peter.
I want to trust you.
Good, that’s fine. Trust me.
I need information!!!
Good-bye.
Come back here and fight like a man, you weenie!!!!!
Nothing. Boiling, she called Peter.
“Help me.”
“I can’t.”
“What the hell do I do?”
“Call Josh. Tell him it’s imperative that he stop immediately.”
She called Josh and argued for twenty minutes. Finally, hearing the desperation in her voice, he agreed to stop, at least temporarily.
She called Peter back and explained.
“Temporarily isn’t good enough. Make him stop until you tell him to start.”
Josh relented.
Her e-mail in-box dinged.
Good girl.
She typed back:
Don’t call me girl.
Remember, Peter said to charm me. So charm.
Crapola on you!
Call Peter for lessons.
The phone rang. It was Peter.
“He wants to meet you in LA as planned, Friday at eight P.M., but you’re to meet at the Fish House instead of the Plaza. The Fish House is-”
“I know where it is.”
“Okay. There will be a man at your door shortly. His name is Shohei. Don’t ask him a bunch of questions. He’s Sam’s man. He’s there to protect you.”
She rolled her eyes but said nothing.
“Also he says this about your meeting. Are you listening closely?”
“Yes.” She sighed into the mouthpiece.
“You know, you’re Anna Wade. You’re above whining. Not even a whisper of a whine should cross your lips.”
“Peter, how did you know to say that?”
“It’s word for word what Sam told me to say.”
“Does Sam scare you?”
“In the beginning he scared me every day.”
“Does he bug people?”
“Oh, he bugs a lot of people. I’d say he just bugged the hell out of you.”
Normally she was in control of everything and everybody in her life. Even the chaos was ordered. Nothing about what was happening with Sam felt like control.
Growing up, she had not been one of those kids who kept her things organized all the time. Her room was usually a mess. Her mother nagged her when there was a spare moment.
However, at the end of every week she picked up her things, got all the books on the shelf, the clothes in the hamper, the papers in their proper place or thrown away. She started over. Thus, as to her physical space, she presided over a gradual deterioration of orderliness that was always recovered at week’s end by a sort of reverse big bang.
Even in adulthood she lived that way when she wasn’t traveling. Her assistant was to leave her worktable alone until the end of the week. There could be no inspiration on Thursday if it didn’t look like she had been doing something on Wednesday. On Saturday morning, however, she and her assistant cleared her desk so that it was completely free of everything but the telephone and the letter opener. Things would be filed, put away, or shelved as appropriate.
Not only her desk but the entire apartment was to be put back in order at week’s end. The magazines that on Friday were on all the little tables, or the manuscripts on the couch, or the week’s opened mail at the kitchen desk, were all to be gone by Saturday morning. Normally Anna started before the cleaning lady arrived, feeling as though she had to get the place clean so that it would be presentable to the cleaners. Somehow this struck her assistant, whose back ached along with Anna’s, as slightly ironic. Anna couldn’t see it as the least bit strange.
People were different. With people she was much more cautious because unlike things, people could not be put back in place once they moved. She liked the people in her life not to move. Although she found it disquieting, she discovered that she tended to relate to people on the basis of how they fit into her plans. If they didn’t have a place in her plans, she tried to be nice, because she wanted everyone to like her, but she didn’t want that more than she wanted to get on with her plans. That was especially true by the time she reached eighteen. It made understanding Jimmy difficult because he didn’t have any plans.
After her father died, a slow determination began to build in Anna that culminated when she moved out. It wasn’t determination to be on her own, or to be a movie actress, or to find the right man. It was a determination to make life happen in place of letting life happen. That was the only way she could later explain it to herself and the few others who got to know her well.
It seemed as though the day she moved out her mother began paying attention to her. In fact they began talking almost every day. That was the year she wrote the poem. She lied when she told Sam she couldn’t recite it.
Day Care
“I’ll take you with me,” she would whisper each morning and pull strands of hair from the slick of tears that washed across my face. “Look,
I’ll put you in my coat pocket”- this made me smile, this way she had of pretending I was still tiny enough to ride in her pouch-“and you can come with me to all my classes, then at lunch
I’ll slip you little bites of my sandwich and if I get a Coke in the afternoon, you can have a sip” and I knew she would, rather than leave me at the day care with its broken games and pots of dried paint.
Because she knew what it was like to be apart, like a valve of my heart had closed, like a lung was slowly deflating.
Everyone else tore across the playground howling and flinging sand at each other as if they were born there, as if they never felt cut off from oxygen, as if they never held their breath, turned white and damp, couldn’t exhale until someone came to take them home.
Here I would wait all day, try to make myself smaller, try to imagine myself wrapped in the flannel lining of her pocket, among the lint and bread crumbs until my pulse slowed to match hers, until she began to breathe for the both of us, until I lifted my mouth to her fingers for food, went back to that place where I was a part of her.
I knew she would take me back, on those mornings when she had to leave me in the parking lot,
I knew she would shrink me and keep me with her if she could.
