The Mentor (22 page)

And so Emma writes, each word like blood, and dreams of when it will be over. And then what? She hears his key in the door and quickly lowers her head, hoping to feel his lips on her neck. Instead he says, “Good morning,” and moves to the kitchen area.

“Good morning,” Emma says, looking up. Charles hasn’t shaved, his hair is greasy, and there are dark circles under his eyes. He looks drawn and bloated at the same time. He’s carrying a shopping bag, which he sets down on the counter. Some food, some wonderful treats, Emma thinks. But he reaches into the bag and lifts out a fishbowl.

“What’s that?” Emma asks.

Charles pulls out a water-filled plastic bag in which two goldfish are swimming and dumps them into the bowl. “Goldfish.” He holds up the bowl like a proud little kid. “Are you all right, Emma?”

“Why goldfish?”

“Impulse. I had them when I was a boy.” Charles sets the bowl on the counter and studies the fish. “Beautiful, aren’t they?”

Emma nods.

“It’s amazing they don’t go mad, swimming around and around in such a small space all their lives,” he says.

“How would we know if they did?”

“Go mad?”

“Yes.”

He lights a cigarette.

“Did you ever have fish?” he asks.

Emma shakes her head.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“For some reason, I imagined you as the kind of girl who would have kept fish. A turtle maybe?”

“No.”

“I thought it might be interesting if Zack had them.”

“In the book?”

“Yes, silly. In the book. Don’t you think a child in his position would try to create a world, even a world as small as a fishbowl, where he could be in control? Where there was no chaos and pain, just gentle swimming hour after hour?”

Emma doesn’t answer.

“Am I working you too hard, Emma?”

“No.”

“I know this is all terribly complicated, with Anne and the book and us. I’m sorry to put you through it.”

He comes toward her and she prays he’ll touch her, stroke her. But when he gets close he turns and walks into the bathroom.

“I look a wreck, don’t I?” he asks.

“A little tired,” Emma says.

“It is a strain.” He goes and lies on her bed. “Only one thing to do, get to work. Cures all ills. Read me what you’ve got.”

Emma looks at the goldfish, swimming in restless circles around the small glass bowl. Why are they looking at her like that?

Anne watches Charles as he sits at the kitchen table and reads Portia’s obituary. He looks so shocked, so solemn.

According to the
New York Times
Portia fell from an outdoor staircase and down a rock ledge. Her decomposing body was discovered by two hikers. Animals had been at it. Anne is fascinated by these morbid details—the ignominious ending of an illustrious life. And then there’s something about accidental death—the reminder of how short the distance is from here to there, how it can be crossed in an instant, the ultimate one-way street. The way the kitchen looks in the morning light, the taste of her coffee, seem altered somehow.

Anne reminds herself that Charles has lost the person he trusted most. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“She would have wanted to die like that, quickly, by her lake.”

“She had a long and wonderful life,” Anne says, feeling slightly idiotic, as she always does when she has to summon up dishonest emotion.

“At least now I can dedicate the new book to her. After
Life and Liberty
, she never let me do that again.”

Charles carries Anne’s bags down to the car. The day is tangy and bright. Charles is blinking against the sunlight, shading his eyes. Hung over. Probably thinking about Emma, his so-called inspiration. He made his bed; now he and his creepy little muse can sleep in it.

“I hope your work goes well,” Anne says.

“And yours,” Charles answers, distracted, looking around, almost as if he’s paranoid.

They cross the sidewalk, the driver takes Anne’s bags, and she and Charles look at each other.

“I am sorry about Portia,” Anne says.

“So am I.”

Anne reaches up and touches Charles’s cheek lightly and then turns and gets in the car.

Los Angeles is just a little too close to home for Anne—she can’t face her mother, not this week—but Kayla’s Spanish-style spread in Santa Monica is warm and comfortable. She takes a long swim and a short nap, and when Kayla comes home Anne makes them a salad and an omelette.

At nine on the dot the young woman arrives. She’s not what Anne expected—she wears glasses, a black turtleneck, loose jeans, and espadrilles; her hair is tucked up in a barrette. But there’s no disguising her beauty and cool cunning. The three of them sit around the oak table in the kitchen for two hours and twenty minutes, deep in discussion.

“I think I’m going to enjoy Cambridge,” the woman says finally, gathering up her notes.

Anne opens her purse and takes out an envelope filled with twenty thousand dollars in crisp hundreds. She hands it to the young woman, who shakes her hand and leaves.

When Emma looks up from her desk, Charles is standing there, a leather suitcase in one hand. He has on a brown hunting jacket and dark gloves. He tosses the suitcase onto her bed.

“I’m staying down here this week,” he says.

He’s staying at her apartment. She’ll fall asleep with him beside her, and when she wakes up in the middle of the night he’ll be there. There’ll be lots of work, of course, but also times when they’ll lie around reading or cook pasta or laugh at something silly.

“We have to stay focused on the work, Emma. This is the crucial week. We’ll be at it twenty-four hours a day if we have to.”

There’ll be no laughs. He’ll be bearing down on her relentlessly. The apartment will become a cage.

The motherfucker.

“You understand, don’t you, Emma?”

Emma looks down at her writing. He’ll only be here for a week and then she’ll have the one thing she wants as much as she wants Charles—her book. She does still want it, doesn’t she?

“I understand,” she says.

Charles opens his suitcase and Emma sees that his clothes are jammed in, unpressed, a jumble. He empties out one of her dresser drawers. “Portia Damron died,” he says as he begins to shove his clothes into the drawer.

Portia. That remarkable old woman who came to his office that day, his mentor and idol. Emma remembers her face, ancient and deeply lined, her eyes dancing with wisdom and mischief. She showed such interest in Emma, warned her not to let Charles take advantage of her. Dead.

“How did she die?”

Charles finishes unpacking his clothes and takes a small leather kit into the bathroom. “She fell,” he says.

“Fell?”

“At her place up in the Adirondacks. I warned her that old stairway down to the lake was crumbling. She never listened.”

“At least it was quick,” Emma says.

Charles returns from the bathroom and stands over her. “We can’t be sure of that. She may have broken her legs or her back and been unable to move. There would have been no one to hear her cries for help. She could have lain there for days.”

Emma imagines the old woman lying there, helpless, beside the lake, slowly dying. What went through her mind? Was there peace, finally? Or only growing terror?

“Animals had been at her body.”

Would the animals have waited until she was dead?

Charles seems so unaffected by his loss. A fire engine shrieks in the distance. Someone’s house is on fire. Emma wishes it were cloudy out. The sunshine is so depressing. Her fingernails are dirty. She clasps her hands together beneath the desk.

“Are you sure you want to work today?” she asks.

Charles goes to the kitchen sink and washes his hands. He dries them on the last of the paper towels. She’ll have to get more. Finally he turns and leans against the counter. He looks blank somehow, oddly blank.

“Portia would have wanted me to work,” he says finally.

The first draft of the ending is nearly finished. Zack stays late at school, hangs out alone in the art room—the teacher lets him; she knows about his situation at home. He’s making a collage. And then his mother shows up, drunk, on a tear, and starts in on him, brutally, smacks him to the floor, kicks him in the head, she’s killing him—and the scissors gleam in the late afternoon sun.
And
the
snow was so pretty out the window
.

Charles is stretched out on her bed, reading what she wrote. Emma sits at her desk, waiting for his response. She’s so tired that she almost doesn’t care. She wants it to be nighttime, when they’ll be sharing the bed, climbing in together, and he’ll be warm beside her.

“It’s not up to your usual standard,” he says, putting down the pages.

“I’ll rewrite it,” she says quickly.

“You know what, it’s easier for me to fix it myself.”

“But, Charles—”

He sits up and leans forward on his elbows. “Listen to me, Emma. The ending needs some serious help. It’s erratic. There are flashes of brilliance and then whole passages that read like they were written by a profoundly disturbed teenager.”

The motherfucker.

“Hand me a pencil, would you?”

Emma brings him the pencil. He takes it without looking up at her and immediately begins to write over her words.

“Have you fed the fish?” he asks.

•      •      •

Emma takes a shower, a quick one. The water stings and she hates the way her skin feels when it’s wet, but she wants to be clean for him; she wants to smell nice. She dries herself too quickly; when she puts on her nightgown she feels damp on her thighs and inner arms. She runs a brush through her hair and takes a quick look in the mirror. She tries to smile, but it comes out all strained and weird. She has to stop looking in mirrors.

She steps out of the bathroom and sees that Charles is making up the sofa into a bed.

“It’s better this way. No distractions,” he says.

Emma nods.

Now he’s walking toward her with something in his hand.

“Here,” he says.

She looks down and sees two white pills in his palm.

“What are those?”

“Just a mild sedative. I know you haven’t been sleeping.”

“I don’t like to take pills.”

“Did you used to? Take pills?”

Emma shakes her head.

“You need rest. You’ll feel better. A good, deep sleep.” His voice is so soothing. The pills do look comforting, sweet little white pills, they’re her friends, yes, yes they are.

Emma takes the pills and Charles hands her a glass of water. He watches as she swallows them.

“Good girl,” he says.

The pills don’t work. Emma lies awake in the middle of the night, frightened. The Chinese restaurant has turned off its sign. It’s so quiet outside, as if the whole city has died. She looks up at the shadows on the ceiling. They’re wavy and remind her of water and water reminds her of the goldfish so she closes her eyes. She can
hear Charles’s rhythmic breathing. She gets up, as quietly as she can, lifting the covers slowly, holding her breath. The floor is so cold and the corners of the room so dark. Gently lowering one foot in front of the other, she crosses to the sofa. She looks down at him, curled up on his side like a little boy. He has the blanket pulled up to his chin and the tiniest smile flickers at the corners of his mouth. What would happen if she held a pillow over his face and pressed as hard as she could? She wants to crawl in beside him, but she doesn’t. She just stands there in the dark looking at him, waiting for morning to come.

Where are her notes? She wrote a page of notes to herself last night, last thing, right before her shower, and left it next to the typewriter. Now she can’t find it. She looks through all the papers on the desk.

“Charles, have you seen my notes?”

He’s sitting on the sofa, working on the manuscript, and he doesn’t look up. “No,” he says. Like it’s no big deal.

Emma is sure she saw the page on the desk earlier this morning. Where is it?

“I just saw it here.”

He still doesn’t look up. “Then it must still be there.”

“But it isn’t.”

Finally he looks up.

“Well, maybe it folded itself into a paper airplane and flew out the window. Emma, what is wrong with you this morning?”

“Those pills didn’t work.”

He puts down the manuscript and looks at her.

“I’m sorry,” he says, looking concerned. “You should have told me earlier. You must be exhausted. Don’t worry about the notes; they’ll turn up.”

Of course they will. It’s only a page of notes. Anyway, Charles will fix the chapter. He’s been so helpful with the book. Emma
feels silly. For getting so upset. And she’s so tired, almost too tired to care.

“Why don’t you knock off and take a nap?”

Emma does. She crawls back into bed with her clothes on and shuts her eyes. The bed is so soft and the sounds of the city so lulling. Charles is here and she can sleep.

Portia’s memorial service is at the Dartmouth Club. Charles has been asked to speak, of course. He leaves Emma early in the morning and takes a cab back to the apartment. He takes the book with him. It’s a cloudy morning with a chill in the air. As the cab crawls through traffic, he tries to compose a speech of some kind, but images of that day—
walking down the rickety steps, the low gray sky
—crowd his mind.

It’s strange to arrive at his own building as a visitor. The apartment feels eerily calm, as if everyone had left in a hurry, and his office is a mess, correspondence piling up, tangled bedding spilling off the couch. He carefully locks the manuscript in his desk.

In the kitchen he makes himself a cup of strong black coffee and then spikes it with Scotch. It was Portia who introduced him to the pleasures of an early morning spike—
climbing into the battered rowboat, the cold water seeping into his socks, the cry of a distant bird
.

The master bedroom looks perfect, like a page out of an
Anne Turner catalog—except that the tulips on Anne’s night table are limp and have dropped most of their petals. In the bathroom, he looks for something to lessen the sense of dread—he can’t take the Xanax he’s giving Emma; it makes him too groggy. He opens the medicine chest. The sparkling shelves look like a magazine ad: shiny tweezers, opaque glass jars, Q-Tips, and cotton balls. It’s all so fucking artful and antiseptic. He sweeps his hand over a shelf, knocking everything down onto the counter in a spray of broken glass and spilled mouthwash and witch hazel.