The Ghost of Greenwich Village: A Novel (37 page)

“Stop. Right now. You possessed the most original mind of your generation. You didn’t get enough time to perfect your craft like your Paris friends did. But we can work on that. And we can help readers understand it in context, how you came up with that style and what it was like to write that way before anybody else did … if we do the memoir.”

“But a memoir would take months, a year. It would be a mammoth job. Why would you want to do that?”

“Because I think you have a story we can sell. And even if it never sells, I want to hear it. For myself,” she said. “So, are we in agreement?”

“I suppose we are.”

After a long soak, Eve donned a silk chemise and brewed some oolong. As it steeped, she took a rag and cleaned the bourbon from the bar and floor. Then something occurred to her, something she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of before.

“When we’re done with this work, where am I going to say I found it? And how are we going to convince them it’s yours when you’ve been gone for so long?”

“Ah. Not a problem,” said Donald. “You can use my Royal Mercury. My typewriter. It’s behind a cupboard in the bedroom.”

“You hid your typewriter? Why?”

“It was my most precious possession, and with all the impoverished would-be writers in the building, I was worried it would be stolen. As a matter of fact, it was, once or twice. My neighbors said they’d just ‘borrowed’ it but that was but a euphemism.” Eve walked into the bedroom. “If you type the new material on my old machine, it will match my previous work,”
he said. “You can claim you found it hidden under a floorboard or something. No one will be surprised to hear that. Writers always squirrel away their work, usually because they can’t stand to look at it anymore but can’t bear to throw it out. We used to tell each other about our hiding places, but only other writers, not spouses or friends. They would never understand. e. e. cummings used to put his unfinished work in the dumbwaiter. Djuna Barnes, under the floorboards of, of course, her boudoir.” He mumbled something about T. S. Eliot. “And that’s just Patchin Place! Half the buildings in the Village are home to one minor masterpiece or another. Or at least some worthy experiments. The stories I could tell you.”

“Donald, the
typewriter
.”

“All right, all right.” He guided her to the back wall of the low cupboard she used for hatpins and lace collars. As he’d promised, if the wall was pounded on the right side, the left side popped out and the whole thing came loose. Behind it, the Royal Mercury reposed like Sleeping Beauty, resting not on a pillow but on two large shoeboxes and reams of loose paper, some of which was blank and some of which appeared to contain stories.

“What’s in these boxes?” Eve asked, blowing the dust off everything and carrying it to the bed.

“Nothing interesting. Ignore them,” Donald replied as she took the top off one of them.

Inside were dozens of letters, press clippings, and small leather notebooks. His journals, she thought. The other box contained hundreds of pictures, bundled together in bunches with thick red rubber bands. Eve slipped the band off the first bundle, all black-and-whites. The top picture was of a towheaded boy in a suburban backyard. He looked about three. He was wearing a tiny straw cowboy hat and a red bandanna around his neck. His brow was furrowed as he tried to thread a toy gun into a leather holster. Next to him stood a sturdy woman, staring off into the distance with a grim look on her face. On the back Eve read,
Donnie and Mommy on D’s birthday at Maple Drive House, 1936
.

“Donnie?”

“Don’t,” he groaned.

Next came a second-grade class picture: sixteen or so children smiling broadly, with Donald, his hair slightly darker now, in the back row. Other snapshots showed Donald putting a model schooner together with a pair of tweezers and playing the piano. Then came one from what looked like a junior high play, Donald playing the Stage Manager in
Our Town
. At the end of the bundle, Eve found a picture of a group of teenaged boys and men dressed in fishing gear. A banner hung overhead, reading
Oakfield’s Father & Son Tackle Day, 1947
. Each father held the top of a fishing rod, his son grasping it underneath. Eve ran her eyes over the faces, looking for Donald. There he was, on the right-hand side. He was holding his rod all alone.

Eve felt her breath catch in her throat. She ran her finger along the curve of Donald’s chin, moved by the stoicism of his expression. She wanted to crush this boy to her chest, bake him a five-layer cake, wade into the river with him and pull out fish with her bare hands.

She pressed a tissue into the corner of her eye and pulled the band off another bundle. There was a picture of Donald behind a desk at what looked like a college newspaper, frowning at a layout, a pencil behind his ear. After it, dozens of pictures taken in Paris, like those belonging to Klieg: groups of young people around tables, men in fedoras and women in cropped jackets with funnel necks. In one picture, a perfectly pressed Klieg toasted Donald with a cloudy glass of pastis.

“Here’s a picture of you and … Mr. Klieg.” She tried to sound surprised.

“Ah yes,” said Donald. “Matthias.” Donald spoke the name with such melancholy Eve caught her breath. “He was a little younger than the rest of us. He wanted to make clothes, and was laughed at by some of the more insecure members of our crowd. But he began to trail me, like a puppy. He would show me his work. We’d get a table away from the others and he would open
his portfolio. I saw brilliance there. Rough, to be sure, but brilliance. A rare intellect. And an old soul.

“His parents traveled a lot when he and his brother were young, and he cared for his brother Henrik like a father. He would do the same for anyone who needed it. Even cats! The dreadful strays he picked up. He bought them cream, not milk, even when he was broke.”

Eve smiled at this. She found a picture of Louisa standing beside Donald, who was seated at a café table. Donald was gazing up at her and smiling.

“Donald, who’s the woman with the short hair? She’s lovely,” said Eve innocently.

Donald seemed to weigh his response. “That would be Louisa,” he said finally. “A cashier at Les Deux Magots.”

“And …?”

“And a friend. Also a writer. She wrote poems. Hundreds of them. She kept them in a trunk under her bed.”

“Did she ever publish them?”

“Not that I know of. She was afraid to let anyone but me see her work. I tried to encourage her but I was not successful.”

Eve gazed at a picture of Louisa and Donald on a boat. Louisa wore a blue and burgundy floral dress—a YSL, by the looks of it. Her head lay on Donald’s shoulder and she grinned like a child. “Did you love her?”

“I would have died for her.”

Eve let this sink in for a moment. “May I ask what happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Please.
Please
tell me.”

“She, Matthias, and I became inseparable. Matthias and I would spend all day at the café, then drive with her all night to the beach, where we’d wade into the waves and drink champagne while we watched the sunrise. We called ourselves the Three Musketeers,
les Trois Mousquetaires
. Whenever we met, we’d salute one another and proclaim ‘All for one and one for all.’ ”

“Then what?”

“I made a fatal mistake: I fell in love with her.”

“Did you tell her?”

“Not for a long time. I knew that Matthias had fallen for her as well, and I couldn’t bear to hurt him. I hoped she would see my feelings in the stories I showed her, but she never did. Because of course they were rather incomprehensible. Nevertheless, I believed that she felt something for me. She used to darn my shirts and once she embroidered a little heart inside the collar that only I could see. And then there was the way she touched my arm when I was helping her with her poems. Now I look back on it and think it was just simpatico between writers, but then I was so sure …”

Eve got back up onto the bed, putting her teacup on the nightstand.

“And then I did the stupidest thing I could have done. I wrote her a letter, stating my feelings. It was a simple little thing; a child could have written it. I included a new kind of short story as well, a very honest, inelegant little thing. In the letter, I said if she felt anything for me, she should meet me that night, and that if she did not come, I would never mention it again. Can you imagine such a thing? But it was only worth risking our troika if she was as in love with me as I with her.”

Eve drained the last of her tea and put her head on her pillow.

“You can guess where this is going. Louisa did not come and a few days later I found out why. She had agreed to marry Matthias.”

“And you kept your promise and never mentioned it.”

“Yes, I kept that promise. I should have fought for her; I see that now.”

“But you wanted to honor your word. And be a good friend to Mr. Klieg.”

“Ah, but you see, I was not a good friend. Matthias’s first collection had been a failure and now I was glad. Yes! I was glad that he received not one order and had to go back to Germany
for three years to work for his father. I could have offered to let them stay with me. But I couldn’t face sharing Paris, let alone a room, with the two of them. Louisa went with him, of course. We kept in touch for a while but I couldn’t stand the stab of my guilt that I hadn’t done more for him. Finally I stopped writing back.”

Eve hugged her pillow. “Did you ever see each other again?”

“Yes. Once. In the late sixties or early seventies. I had returned to New York by then, trying to start again, to climb the ladder of success into the clouds so I could forget everything else. But I went back to Paris for a symposium. Matthias and Louisa, with money and a new collection, were also back and we ran into each other at a café in the Fifth Arrondissement. The magic between the three of us had evaporated, of course. We held ourselves stiffly and our jokes fell flat. I think we were all relieved when it was over.”

“Oh, Donald.”

“So now, little one, you know the truth. If you’ve ever wondered what kind of man I was, what kind of life I lived that made me the kind of spirit I am … now you know. I tried to woo a woman who found me unlovable, which I was. I went behind my best friend’s back to do so and let him down when he needed me most. You once said something was wrong with me, and you were right. When I had the luck of being alive, I wasted it being wretched.”

Eve lay flat on her back, staring up at the ceiling. “You’re too hard on yourself,” she said.

“My only consolation is that Louisa chose Matthias. If she’d picked me, she would have become a widow far too early.…”

Before Eve could reply, she felt Donald’s pulse grow weaker and weaker until finally he disappeared.

Outside, the dawn broke. The first rays of sun peeked in and she rose to close the drapes. Then she fell back into bed, pulling up the covers and curling herself around Highball, who licked away her tears with a tongue soft as an angel’s wing.

E
ve received a call from the DA’s office advising her that a plea deal had been reached in the Matt Buntwiffel case and that there would be no trial. He would be going to a psychiatric hospital in the new year, and all that would be required of Eve was signing some kind of document that she’d been notified of this fact. The man on the phone seemed to assume she’d be furious, but she could not bring herself to be.

“Thank you,” she said before hanging up. She imagined Matt finally getting to unburden himself to someone about his childhood. Maybe he’d come to understand it, even free himself from it. What more could anybody ask for? Eve hung up and rubbed her arms with vigor to soothe the goose bumps that had suddenly risen.

She wrote her first increased rent check, for January, and to her horror found her bank account half depleted. Reality set in, a clammy feeling along her neck and shoulders. If she didn’t find a source of regular income fast, she was going to have to leave the apartment. She shrugged on her coat and went down to the stoop to think.

She couldn’t ask her father for money, couldn’t ask him to finance her life in New York when what he wanted was to have her back home. Plus, even asking would be a giant step backwards. And Klieg? She wasn’t sure yet what to do about him. She felt great sympathy for him yet what he’d done to Donald made her boil every time she thought about it, which she made sure never to do in Donald’s presence. He was far too fragile now for anything like that, and she needed him to be strong for the memoir.

Good manners had dictated she send Klieg a thank-you note for Christmas. At the end she’d written,
What about this as a New Year’s resolution: telling Günter everything?
Klieg hadn’t replied. She wondered if she’d been too presumptuous. He might actually be annoyed with her now. Anyway, even if she could bring herself to ask Klieg for money—which would only prove to Günter that he’d been correct in his hideous assumption—and even if Klieg said yes, what could she ask for? A month’s rent? Two? It was hardly a real solution.

That night, she went out for drinks with Quirine and Victor, just back from Paris. They told funny stories of Victor’s American-style faux pas with Quirine’s parents and Eve wished she could offer some charming anecdotes of her own, but she could only try halfheartedly to put a comical spin on her money troubles. Victor said he thought there might be a secretarial position opening up at Pratt in a few weeks and he’d see what he could find out.

The next day, Eve began pounding the pavement, hitting the bakery, the dry cleaner, and even a couple of law offices. Working in a law office again would be, in her mind, a horrible regression, yet if she got an offer, she would take it.

But no one was hiring.

   • • •

New Year’s passed quietly. Eve slipped into her mother’s Malcolm Starr cocktail dress with its white silk bodice covered in jet
beads over a full black tulle skirt and played fetch with Highball and twenty questions with Donald. In the process, she polished off an entire bottle of champagne, which knocked her out by eleven-thirty.