Authors: Matthew Quick
I slice into my steak again. “This steak alone is worth seven hundred dollars.”
“I hope you enjoy it,” she says. “You need to fuel up, because we’ll be doing a lot of walking today.”
I focus on my food. It feels like I haven’t eaten in days. I’ve missed food.
The roses in the vase smell wonderful too, and the satisfied look on Portia Kane’s face is also a thing of beauty, I must confess. I begin to worry about disappointing her again when she fails to do what she’s set out to do.
These temporary satisfactions—travel, gourmet food, even the praise of a former student—are novelties, no match for the eternal tides of my mind, which can wear down rock given enough time.
Portia’s tricks are like the sand castles of children whose parents are smart enough to leave the beach before their efforts are inevitably destroyed and erased.
“You look happy,” Portia says.
“Just chemical reactions—my tongue and stomach sending thank-you messages to my mind. Just the hardwiring of any man who ever lived.”
“Breakfast in bed is nice.”
“It’s something.”
“I’m glad to be here with you, Mr. Vernon.”
“Don’t get too attached,” I say, and then attack my potatoes.
We gaze out the window at a beautiful winter’s day in Central Park as I finish eating and drink my coffee.
“I wish Albert Camus were here,” I say.
“Oh, fuck Albert Camus,” Portia answers.
“Not the writer you wish to sodomize with a stale baguette,” I say. “My dog, Albert Camus.”
“Why did you name your dog Albert Camus?” she says, rolling her eyes.
“Maybe because I am a former teacher of literature—a man who forever monitored the great conversation and yet never added a line himself.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?” she says.
“Nothing,” I say, thinking I really do miss Albert Camus, wondering about what my mother’s letters might say if I ever bother to retrieve them from my PO box, and sipping the best coffee ever to pass through my lips.
“Goddamn it, money is a wonderful thing,” I say.
“I thought so too, for a while,” she answers. “But the sad part is that you adjust quickly to it. I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but like what happens to the protagonist in
A Happy Death
.”
“So you’ve read it? Ms. Sodomize Camus with a Baguette has actually read his books?”
“I read everything by Camus in my early twenties—not just his novels, but his essays and plays too.”
“You were assigned Camus in college?”
“I actually dropped out of college before I read much of anything. The pressure of maintaining the grade-point average my academic scholarship required led to a breakdown. There it is. The truth. No higher-education diploma for me.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, because she’s obviously embarrassed and I don’t know what else I can offer here.
“Anyway, I read Camus while I was waitressing. Mostly because the French Nobel laureate was greatly revered by my high school English teacher, who I admired even more. He gave us these cards on the last day of school that—”
“Okay, okay, enough with the sycophantic banter. I’m not even dressed yet, for Christ’s sake. Can I not digest my breakfast first?”
“I will make you whole again, Mr. Vernon,” she says, staring into my eyes with a dangerous intensity. “I swear to you. I will not fail.”
I blow a lungful of air up toward my forehead, turn my eyes toward the barren trees in the park, and resume sipping my coffee.
This is not going to end well for either of us.
Allowing her smart phone to lead us around, Portia walks the soles off my shoes—although there are a few cab rides thrown in here and there—to several buildings, telling me to take a good look up each time we stop.
“Why?” I keep asking.
“I’ll tell you once we’ve seen all six!” she keeps replying.
I don’t know the layout of New York City, having only visited once or twice, and many years ago, and so I have no idea what connects the various buildings at which we gaze.
The city buzz induces a high level of anxiety—everyone is marching quickly with blank faces, cars and yellow cabs slice through streets like so many angry sharks eating up free inches of asphalt—and while Portia seems to benefit from the New York state of mind, being here makes me feel like one of many insignificant ants that will crawl through the city for a time before being replaced by other ants that will also be forgotten, on and on ad nauseam.
As we gaze up at the sixth building, Ms. Kane says, “So, did you figure it out yet?”
“Figure
what
out?”
“Why I showed you six buildings in New York City.”
“Does this have something to do with architecture?”
“No.”
“Some form of birds that are flourishing in nests built high above?” I guess, shading my eyes with my hand as I look up, trying to see the tops, and whether there are any nests. “I read something about falcons thriving in cities.”
“Not even close. Do you give up?”
“Does it mean we can stop running all over the city if I do?”
“The six buildings we saw house the six major publishing houses in New York—Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins, FSG, Penguin, and Random House.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Which one do you think it will be?”
“Which one will
what
be?”
Portia smiles mischievously. “Which one do you think will publish my novel?”
“You’ve written a novel?” I say.
“Well, not yet, but I’m going to.”
“Perhaps you better concentrate on writing the actual words before you start predicting who will publish,” I say. “Selling a novel to a major house is extremely difficult.”
“Have you tried?” she asks.
“Well, no—but—”
“Then how do you know?”
“I guess I don’t.” I can tell this is important to her, and even though I am beginning to sense a pattern of delusional hope, I really don’t want to be the one who urinates on Portia’s parade. I’m beginning to feel sorry for her in a way that I didn’t think was possible. I admire her moxie and determination, even as I watch her jump off an emotional cliff without a parachute.
“Then guess again, just for fun. Which one will it be?” she says.
“Which house will publish the book that you haven’t yet writ
ten?” I ask, feeling once again as though Mr. Kafka is writing my life as I live it. “I don’t know.”
“Doesn’t it give you a rush to think that one of your former students might be published by a real New York City house someday? That your teaching might have a great ripple effect? That you may have encouraged a future
New York Times
best seller just when she needed it most? Haven’t you ever dreamed of that?” she says, looking up at me from under this very cute pink hat, and I suddenly realize that she is wearing matching lipstick, eyeliner, and some sort of blush. She’s done herself up to walk around NYC with me.
Me
. To Portia Kane, this day is worth makeup.
“So that’s your dream now—to be a fiction writer?”
“It’s always been, since I was in your class. We used to talk about it, remember?”
“No,” I say, even though I have a vague recollection.
“Haven’t
you
ever dreamed of becoming a published novelist? I mean you practically worshipped—”
“Never wanted to be a writer,” I say, too quickly, I admit.
“Well, I’m going to be published someday, and I’m going to dedicate the book to you. That’s a promise. You’ll want to stick around to see your name in print, right? Right at the beginning. ‘To Mr. Vernon, the good man who first helped me believe.’”
I stare at her and try to decide if she can possibly believe what she’s saying—promising to dedicate a book to me, a book she hasn’t even written, and guaranteeing that it will be published by one of the major houses in New York City. Aside from the dedication she has presumptuously penned
before
her dreamed-up novel, she probably hasn’t even written a paragraph since her brief college stint, almost twenty years ago. It’s a delusional promise at best, and probably psychotic otherwise. And yet she’s looking up at me with these wonder
ful, childlike believing eyes, bathing me in that rare gaze I used to receive from my most promising students, who were not necessarily the most intelligent or the best read or the ones who had previously studied under the cleverest teachers, but the ones whom Kerouac called the mad ones, the people who were crazy enough to do something outside of the norm, just because it was in them to do.
Before I can stop myself, I say, “Ms. Kane, I don’t want to speak about things I know little about anymore, and this doesn’t change a thing regarding my ability to answer the first question—but that just might be a spark in your eye I see now.”
When she smiles, a happy tear leaks out, and I instantly regret giving her hope. She doesn’t deserve it—she has done nothing but dream and look up at buildings with her suicidal former English teacher—and I know that hers will most likely be what Mr. Langston Hughes called a dream deferred.
“Maybe there’s one hiding in your eye now too—a spark,” Portia says.
I shake my head. “It’s a good dream for you, Ms. Kane. I hope you accomplish your goal. But this is your course, your dharma, if you will, not mine.”
“You started it. You turned me on to this—literature, writing,” she says.
I’m tempted to ask how many books she has read in the past year, how many words she has written, but I hold my tongue. This will all be over soon.
She takes me to Central Park, and we buy warm cashews and hot dogs from a vendor and eat on a park bench, neither of us saying much, and then we stroll, people-watching and feeling a bit awkward about everything—both of us, I can tell, because Portia seems to be running out of steam herself.
We watch the sun set through the barren trees, the dying light illuminating the melting piles of snow, and then we walk through darkness back to the hotel, order room service, and eat a light dinner in our suite before we resume drinking heavily from the mini fridge.
Three or four airplane bottles in, Portia says, “You don’t believe I’ll publish a novel, do you?”
“Plenty of people publish books every year,” I say, trying to skirt the question.
“But never the daughters of hoarders—fatherless girls who grow up across the street from the Acme. No, they marry abusive men who discard them when they grow to be middle-aged and wrinkled.”
“Perhaps you’ve had too many little bottles, Ms. Kane?”
“Do you know people used to say we slept together when you were my teacher?”
I don’t know what to say to that.
“That, apparently, was the rumor. I just found out. Why do you think people would say that?”
“Funny. I thought the rumor was that I was gay,” I say.
“Are you?”
“Would it matter to you?”
“No. I just—I mean, I wish you had someone in your life, like a lover. It would make all of this easier.”
“Saving my life?”
“Yes.”
“I was in love with Mrs. Harper, but she’s going to marry the butcher—and he doesn’t even know who Albert Camus is,” I say, and suddenly realize I am a bit drunk too. “I found out he popped the question right before you showed up. That and Albert Camus
the dog’s suicide sort of triggered my . . . well, whatever we are in now.”
“What did you love about Mrs. Harper?”
“Her nose, mostly, I guess.”
“What?” Portia laughs.
I smile in spite of myself. “Mrs. Harper had a—well, a
Jewish
nose. And I have always been turned on by Jewish women, especially their noses, with the little bump. I don’t know why.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s a racist thing to say.”
“That I love Jewish women?”
“To say you love the bump in their noses, as if they only have one kind. You’d never say ‘I love the slanted eyes of Asian women.’ Or ‘the big asses of African women.’”
“Um,” I say, not sure how to proceed, because those examples seem extreme.
“Did you tell Mrs. Harper that you loved her?”
“I never even spoke with her. She was the checkout lady at the local store. She rang me up hundreds of times, but I never said anything to her other than pleasantries.”
“But you wanted to.”
“Yes,” I say. “I did. Very much.”
“There are other Mrs. Harpers in the world. Some of them have even sexier Jewish noses, you know.
Bigger bumps
.”
I sip my wine.
“You’re not dead yet,” Portia says to me. “There’s still time for love.”
“And how did love work out for you?”
“Shitty in the past, I admit, but I’m going to give love another go.”
“Okay. You do that.”
“The man who carries your Official Member of the Human Race card and reads it daily. Chuck Bass. You had him in your class back in ’eighty-eight. He put himself through college in his thirties and early forties by tending bar and taking out student loans. He’s looking for an elementary school teaching job. He has no money, lots of debt, and he takes care of his sister and her five-year-old son. Not exactly the best suitor on paper, but he has a spark in his eye, yes he does, and he loves you as much as I do.”
I’m tempted to roll my eyes, but I manage to refrain. “I don’t even remember him. Sorry.”
“He’s a lot like you,” she says.
“Then run away from this Chuck,” I answer. “Seriously. You do not want to be yoked to a man like me.”
“You’re too hard on yourself,” she says. “Too serious.”
“Tomorrow is our last day together, right?”
“Yep.”
“I’m still planning on returning to Vermont so I can kill myself. I want you to know that. And it’s not your fault. You should absolutely write your novel. Forget about me. Be with this Chuck Bass and make a good life for yourselves. Dedicate your novel to him, because—”
“I have a good surprise for you tomorrow,” she says. “It’s going to be a game changer.”
I look out the window and endure a very uncomfortable silence before I excuse myself and retire to my bedroom.
I toss and turn all night. This trip was a mistake. I’m passing on my misery by allowing Portia to get her hopes up. My suicide will destroy her, and yet that’s not a good answer to the first question—or maybe I should say it’s not a good
enough
answer for me, when I am alone with my thoughts, finally unfettered from the ridiculous notions of former students.
I rub my knees, because they ache tonight, probably from all the walking. I think about all of the metal in my body that will outlast my flesh and muscles and bones should I be buried—or maybe the metal will be found in my pile of ashes when I am cremated.
So strange to think about that.
Stranger yet to be in a presidential suite in this exclusive New York City hotel.
“This woman is not going to take her defeat very well—that’s now certain,” I whisper to myself through the darkness.