The Mentor (7 page)

Charles grabs the bottle of Scotch off the liquor tray and heads for his office.

Emma sits at her desk sorting through months of old mail. Many of Charles’s fans, particularly the female ones, seem to project their deepest longings—for a son, a husband, a lover—onto him. In her week and a half on the job, she’s dealt with a pound cake sent by a sixty-two-year-old widow in Missouri, a naked photo from a married woman in Marina Del Rey, and an impenetrable love poem from an overwrought Wellesley freshman. And then there are the manuscripts sent in by would-be writers, and galleys sent by publishers hoping to garner a book jacket blurb. When she started, there were dozens of these lying around the office. She suggested to Charles that she read the books and write synopses for him to review. He praised her initiative, and using this system they’re working their way through the backlog. Ditto for the forty-two unreturned phone calls that greeted her on her first day.

Emma has a goal: to make herself indispensable to Charles Davis.

The mail sorted into its usual three piles—Throw Out, Answer, and Pass On—Emma looks up and surveys the office. There’s no doubt that she’s succeeded in bringing some semblance of order to the chaos. There are neat piles of papers on chairs and tabletops, each pile labeled with a Post-it note as to its eventual destination. The room is off-limits to the housekeeper and Emma spent her first days cleaning, stirring up volumes of dust that sent her into sneezing fits. But what a difference—the place shines. There’s even a vase of fresh flowers on her desk. Emma loves order—it calms her, quells her terrors.

Emma imagines Charles, on the other side of the closed door between the two offices, sitting at his desk, writing. He has told her he’s starting a new book, that he writes his first drafts in longhand in spiral notebooks he orders from the Dartmouth bookstore. She’s read all of his novels. Her favorite is
Irreparable Damage
, the story of a New England family coming apart after the sudden death of the mother. The father, a college professor, mad with grief, immediately begins an affair with one of his students. Emma understood completely the professor’s need to lose himself in passion even though he knew that the affair was wrong and would damage his children, the young woman, and himself. Emma had been moved by the book and found solace in it too. There was something about that family, floundering in the aftershock of sudden tragedy, that made her feel less alone.

And of course she’s fascinated by the man himself. Beneath his imposing manner he seems kind, even wounded, lonely somehow, like a little boy who has won first prize at the fair but now stands all alone behind the bandstand. She wonders if he has any friends, any real friends. He needs one. She loves his hands, the long fingers with squared tips. When he gets close to her she can smell his pine soap.

As for Anne Turner, Emma hates her. She’d like to take a hammer to those perfect teeth. The bitch knows exactly what she wants, is so damned articulate that words roll off her tongue as if
they were scripted. Turner lives in a parallel universe where everyone is fearless and graceful, where life is just a matter of waking up and making fabulous things happen. Emma keeps her mouth shut during their brief encounters. She listens attentively and tries to look intelligent, always remembering a secret maxim she honed in the mental hospital: What you don’t say can’t be used against you. During her week temping at
Home
, Emma had observed Anne carefully, hoping to learn some of her tricks. Even that rainy day in her office, when Anne got that phone call that seemed to disturb her so much, she never lost her composure. She was told something, some piece of news—what could it have been?—and her face went white. She even forgot Emma was in the room.

Turner had told Emma to help herself to anything in the kitchen, and two days ago, when Charles Davis was at the other end of the apartment taking a shower, she had walked down the long hallway and into the enormous room. She’d opened the refrigerator door and looked at all the cheeses and chutneys and tiny pickled vegetables. Each label was a miniature work of art; all the food seemed to come from organic farms in quaint-sounding corners of Connecticut or the Hudson River valley. Emma opened a small container of goat cheese—it smelled like goat hair. Stupid fucking rich people. She spit into it. Then, giggling to herself, she stirred the spit with her pinky until the saliva disappeared. She imagined Anne Turner spreading the cheese on a cracker and remarking on how divine it was. Then Emma took a carrot from the crisper. She’d taken only one bite when she heard Charles Davis approaching. She dashed back down to the office and stuffed the uneaten carrot into her purse. She smiled at him when he came in.

Charles’s office has antique filing cabinets, a Persian rug, and twelve-foot ceilings. Emma feels as if she’s stepped through the looking glass into a world she’s read about and seen on television. And now she’s part of it.

No you’re not
. Stupid Emma, you’re a fly to these people, a convenience. You don’t belong here. Freak! Go back to where you
came from, hide away in some rented room, be a small-town weirdo. Emma clenches her fists, digs her fingernails into her palms, harder harder.…

There’s a tentative knock on the door at the end of the hallway. Emma licks a sliver-moon of blood from her palm. Be calm be cool. She goes and opens the door. Magdalena, the housekeeper, a quiet woman from the Canary Islands who pretends she doesn’t speak English—Emma sees through
her
little act—is standing there with a FedEx letter in her hand.

As Emma walks back down the hallway, she looks at the return address and sees that the letter is from London, from Charles Davis’s British publisher. She stands still and listens and then knocks lightly. Silence. Then the door flies open.

“What do you want?” Charles Davis demands. His face looks pained, almost contorted.

“This Federal Express letter just arrived from your British publisher. I thought it might be important.”

“You
thought
it might be important?”

“Yes.”

Charles grabs the letter, tears it in two, and flings it in the trash. “I’m trying to write! I don’t care if Jesus Christ himself wants to meet me for lunch, I’m not available to the world until further notice. Is that so goddamn hard to understand?” After shooting her a look of pure condescension, he slams the door in her face.

Emma stands there, a sickening deadweight suddenly lodged in her stomach. The sensation begins as a purely physical one, but quickly moves up her body, until her mind implodes with dismay, dismay and an approaching panic. She feels herself start to sweat on her upper lip, her forehead, under her arms. She feels the first tingle of prickly heat. She knows what comes next—banishment. Out to the back landing at the top of the stairs in her thin cotton dress and her bare feet, the door slamming and then locking behind her, the hours passing, she forbidden to move, staring at the railing, at the grooves in the wood, dreading that she’ll be noticed by
the family that lives across the way. There are six kids in the family—six rowdy, unwashed, laughing, loved kids—and when they see Emma they stare, too kind to laugh. Then they whisper and run away, as if her sorrow might be catching. And evening turns to night and Emma grows colder and wants to cry, but what’s the use? And the hunger grows so intense it finally disappears and at least when it’s dark no one can see her up there on the back landing at the top of the stairs at the end of the alley in her bare feet and thin cotton dress with nothing on underneath.

Emma stands in front of the door to Charles’s office. What should she do?
Don’t panic
. She stands stock-still, her breathing shallow. She clenches her fists and wills herself not to cry. She hears what sounds like Charles Davis falling to the floor, followed by loud breathing, as if he’s doing a series of push-ups. This is followed by pacing. Then silence.

“Emma?”

“Yes, Mr. Davis?” she answers through the closed door.

“For Christ’s sake, stop calling me Mr. Davis. And will you please come in here?”

Emma opens the door and takes a step into the inner office.

He’s sitting at his desk. “It’s Charles.”

Emma hesitates a moment before saying a soft “Charles.”

“That’s better.” He smiles. “Sit down.” Emma sits across from him in a wooden armchair. “When I’m writing, or trying to write … well, it’s a difficult process, agonizing, fucking hellish is what it is. I don’t understand it. It’s physical, like football, or combat even, only the enemy is some amorphous gorilla of the soul. Or some bullshit like that. Is this making any sense?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose my point is, I become keyed up, revved, I go a little crazy. Or a lot crazy. So if I scream and yell and pound the walls … well, it’s not you.”

Emma feels a surge of gratitude and reaches past it to grasp courage. “I know that,” she says.

“You do?”

“… Charles … I’ve read all your novels. I’ve read
Irreparable Damage
twice. I can’t even imagine what it must take to create like that.”

Charles doesn’t answer, but a little smile plays at the corners of his mouth.

“I’m not afraid of a little screaming and yelling,” Emma says.

“No?”

“Not if that’s what it takes.”

He leans toward her, across his desk. “I’m very glad to hear that, Emma.”

“Scream away,” she says with a smile of her own.

He nods. Emma stands up to go.

“And, Emma?” She turns and looks at him, into his eyes. “You’re doing a very good job.”

She nods and closes the door quietly behind her. When she settles into her desk she tries to get back to work, but can’t. She’s overwhelmed by a physical sensation that moves over her body like liquid, a warm want that she has never felt before. There’s no way this job will be over in six weeks—she’ll make sure of that.

“This is it,” he bored, harried young man in the inexpensive gray suit says with undisguised distaste, before lighting a Salem to recover from the four-story climb.

Emma takes one look at the semifurnished studio and says, “I’ll take it.”

She takes out her checkbook—her first ever checkbook—and slowly writes out a check for the first and last month’s rent plus the $200 key deposit the managing agent insists on.

The agent—who Emma notices has a smudge of hair dye on one ear—examines the check and slips it into his pocket. He hands her the keys, mumbles a cynical “Enjoy,” and leaves without closing the door behind him. Emma watches him go down the stairs. There’s a ball of greasy paper on the second-to-last step. She hopes he slips and breaks his neck.

Emma loves the sound the old lock makes when she turns it and the bolt slides into the wall. Then she turns and surveys the first home that she can call her own.

The apartment is just one long room with three windows along one wall and a kitchen built into the far end. It smells faintly of soy sauce and fried dumplings, courtesy of the Chinese restaurant on the ground floor. The walls are the color of tobacco spit. There’s a double bed, a laminate desk, an ornate white dresser making a sad stab at French Regency, its top notched with cigarette burns, a frameless mirror above the dresser. Emma loves the cigarette burns; she runs her finger over the blackened hollows and imagines a poet, a bad girl, a good cop, a lost junkie from the Midwest who was once somebody’s son—all the Manhattan stories this room has hosted. Or maybe just one sad fat old woman lived here for twenty years eating junk food and smoking Winstons until her heart gave out.

The Chinese restaurant has a red neon sign that snakes up the building and suffuses the room with a rosy glow, even in the afternoon light. Emma looks down at the street and sees an old Italian woman in widow’s blacks walking a just-groomed white poodle. She loves this shabby patch of the city where Chinatown, Little Italy, and the Lower East Side converge.

Continuing her inspection, Emma pushes open the door to the bathroom. She stops—the bathtub that bathtub.

“Time for your bath, Emma.” They both knew what those words meant, the cheerful singsong a cruel mockery of their true intent. Emma would scuttle under her bed, stare up at the rusty springs, her head throbbing with dread and fear. “Didn’t you hear me, honeybunch? I said it’s time for your splish-splash.” And then the high-heeled mules would appear in the doorway and approach the bed and Emma would scoot farther under, as far away as she could get. “Where’s my little Mouseketeer? We have got to get you clean if we want Daddy to come home. You want Daddy to come home, don’t you?” And then her mother’s skinny arm with its gaggle of Bakelite bracelets would reach down under the bed, the hand grabbing at the air like a blind woman’s, grasping the first
thing it touched—an arm, a leg, a hank of hair—and pull Emma out across the slippery linoleum floor. “Oh, Emma, if you don’t watch out, that expression will freeze on your face forever. I’ll have to put you in a zoo with the other monkeys. Daddy won’t want a dirty monkey around the house.” And then that laugh, that throaty staccato laugh. “Come on, monkey.” She lift her up—Emma going as rigid as a stick—and carry her into the bathroom, set her down. “Can’t take a bath in a dirty little dress, said the owl to the pussycat!” She’d stand there watching Emma under the light of that burning naked bulb that dangled from the ceiling like a hanged man. Then she’d bang down the toilet seat and sit down casual as day, crossing her long legs, humming brightly, checking out her painted nails. Emma would hug herself and look down—then suddenly the slap would smash across her cheek and she swear she would die before her mother saw her tears. “Silly fiddle-faddle! I got all night to party.” Slowly, slowly, Emma would lift the thin dress over her head—the thin blue flannel dress that smelled like her sheets, her nubby bed-wetted sheets. “Splish-splash, I was taking a bath, all on a Saturday night.” Emma would look over at that tub, that big old clawfoot tub with the chipped porcelain finish. It looked as big as a house. Filled with two inches of the coldest water that pipes could produce. “Daddy’s gonna come back, Emma baby, and we’re all gonna move to a fishing shack on the Gulf Coast, lie in the sun and smoke reefer and paint. Now you gonna get in that water or not, you little piece of shit?” And Emma would step into the tub. At least in the tub she could huddle over, hug herself, hide her body from her mother’s eyes. The water was so cold it hurt and she’d close her eyes and clench her teeth and wait for what she knew was coming. It’d start on her lower back—the loofah mitt, the frayed loofah mitt from Walgreen’s. At first her mother used a light touch and Emma always had a moment of sweet hope that it would be different this time. “How do you get so dirty, you cute little nasty thing? Your father knew you were a dirty girl, didn’t he? That’s why he ran away, to get away from you, you dirty thing.” And as she talked, she’d
press harder with the mitt, scrubbing Emma’s back and then her shoulders and then pushing her back in the tub and scrubbing her chest and stomach and her thighs, pushing her legs open and scrubbing until little red pinpricks covered Emma’s body. “Filthy little girl, dirty dirty Emma. Daddy hates dirty girls. I’m going to make you clean. Clean clean clean. Scrubba-dub-dub, two freaks in a tub.” And that naked blinding bulb swung overhead. And finally, when her whole body burned and went numb, Emma would float up from the bathtub and look down at her mother scrubbing away, sometimes sprinkling Comet on the loofah mitt—she’d watch as the little girl’s skin got redder and redder, watch as the weird woman did mean things to the little girl. Mean mean things.