The Mentor Read online

  The Mentor

  Sebastian Stuart

  Sebastian Stuart

  The Mentor

  New York is Emma’s obsession. And so when she gets off work she decides to walk back to the YMCA on West Twenty-third Street where, since her arrival in the city a month earlier, she’s been living in a dingy little room that smells faintly of mildew.

  She walks across Fifty-fourth Street to Seventh Avenue and turns south-up ahead she can see Times Square’s neon bazaar beckoning like a fun house barker. It’s a warm, cloudy evening; the sky is low and a darkening gray; the humid air seems to leach the smells out of the city: food, humanity, concrete, a heady, seductive brew laced with a trace of the sea. Emma thought she knew everything about New York, but the smells surprise and tantalize her.

  She’s read everyone from Edith Wharton to Tom Wolfe, and weekly visits to her local library to pore over the latest issues of the New York Times and the New Yorker were one of her childhood’s few comforting rituals.]

  Finding a copy of the Post was a special pleasure-its lurid stories of crime, depravity, and glamour made her yearn for the city. In addition to the abstract expressionists, the Actors Studio, Warhol and the Factory, she knows all about Son of Sam and Kitty Genovese, sex clubs and Hedda Nussbaum. Emma has spent much of the last month walking, just walking from one end of town to the other until she reaches the point of sensory overload and straggles back to her room to collapse on the narrow, lumpy bed. The sounds, the lights, the people, the motion-she finds the cacophony both soothing and thrilling. It’s the anonymity that comforts her most, the sense that she can move about unnoticed, released at last from the scrutiny of evil minds. Sick evil minds. She’s free: her destiny might be waiting just up ahead, around the next corner. It’s getting dark out, a darkness that seems to enclose the city. The lights from the stores bathe Broadway in a warm glow. People stroll along, laughing and relaxed. Emma passes a hotel tower that looks as if it’s been airlifted in from Las Vegas. Snazzy and brazen, it’s fronted by a circular glass-walled lounge the size of a bus depot that’s filled with tourists enjoying their first drink of the evening. With a touch of smugness Emma realizes that she isn’t a tourist. She lives here. She has a job. And it isn’t some boring automaton job in some fluorescent-lit office, but a job working for a famous businesswoman-Anne Turner-in an office that hums with creativity.

  Ha-ha! Fuck all those pieces of shit back in Munsonville. And her good fortune is no accident. No way. Emma researched the city’s best employment agencies. She took a computer course at Allegheny Junior College. Knowing she would need a reference, she worked diligently all summer at that insurance agency. She prepared herself. And when the job at Home — Anne Turner’s chic catalog-came along, she grabbed it, and now she stays late every night, poking around the office, taking care of tiny details, organizing computer files. Even though the job is officially only temporary, it may well pay off. One thing leads to another. Now Emma can take the money she saved over the summer and start to hunt for an apartment, a real apartment. She looks around her at the teeming avenue and feels as if she’s where she belongs, in this city where she has no past. Where nobody knows.

  “Hello!” Emma turns. A woman wearing a dark business suit takes her wrist. Emma tries to pull away but the woman holds fast.

  “I know you,” the woman says, tilting her head and examining Emma with huge brown eyes. Emma notices the suit has a food stain on it and the collar is frayed. The woman leans in and Emma smells something foul-a mix of sour whiskey, ancient sweat, and madness. Emma knows that smell. She shudders and tries to pull away. The woman tightens her grip. Emma looks around wildly. No one is paying any attention; people are walking, walking so quickly. Are they trying to get away? “I know you. Don’t pretend you don’t know me.”

  “Let go, please.”

  “Why should I? I know you.” The woman twists Emma’s wrist and all the people stream by and the woman’s mouth is open and she flicks her tongue like a lizard and Emma takes a step backward and the woman twists her wrist harder and just keeps coming at her. Then Emma shoves her, hard, just shoves that filthy, horrible woman back, hard, and it’s the last thing the woman is expecting and her mouth flies open in shock and she lets go of Emma’s wrist and loses her balance and falls down on the sidewalk. She starts to say something-something vile and inhuman and evil-and Emma takes a step toward her and the woman shuts up, but she lifts her chin and smooths her filthy hair as if she’s Jackie fucking Onassis and Emma is beneath her station.

  Emma wants to bring her foot up under that filthy chin and kick that jaw shut and teach that woman to go around grabbing people who’re minding their own business. She wants to hurt her. Emma is frightened by what she wants. She mumbles “I’m sorry” and rushes away-and the memory comes back, the memory always comes back.

  BadGirlSickGirl. As Emma hurries down the street, away from the memory, she feels the sidewalk drop out from beneath her, she feels the city suddenly grow flat, she feels the rage and hopelessness that dwell-covered, caged, denied-at the core of her being. She only wants to go back, back to her room. Emma sits by the grimy window in the grimy room, looking out at the air shaft. All her lights are out and she can see into other rooms across the way. They’re all empty. Emma hates herself for pushing that woman. She lost her cool-she can’t lose her cool, not here, not in New York. This is her new life. It’s going to work out for her here. It has to, it has to.

  BadGirlSickGirl. Emma holds out her arm and looks at the expanse of pale flesh. She opens her secret box, the tiny tin box painted with flowers long faded. Inside is the worn red velvet she loves so much. She lifts the velvet and there it is-her friend. She runs her fingertip over the smooth metal of the single-edge razor blade. So cool and soothing.

  There’s a loud knock on her door. Emma freezes.

  “Jo-ey!” a drunken voice calls. Emma sits absolutely still. “Open up, ya dumb fuck!” The drunk rattles the door handle. He slams his palm against the door and mutters, “Asshole.”

  Emma listens as the footfalls retreat. She switches on the light. She isn’t going to end up like that, lurching down hallways in depressing old rooming houses. Fuck that shit. She picks up her box and for a moment considers throwing it out the window. She folds the red velvet over the razor blade and puts the box in her top drawer. Then she sits down at the small desk and gets to work.

  1

  Charles is running. Usually he runs around the reservoir once, maybe twice, but today he doesn’t want to stop, he wants to push himself. After his second time around, he jogs down the path and onto West Drive and keeps running. It’s early afternoon, the day is chilly, it looks as if it’s going to rain. He can’t remember the last time he ran this far, he’s sweating heavily in spite of the chill and his lungs burn as he sucks down oxygen, but he doesn’t want to stop, he wants to run, high on hope.

  He thinks of Anne. They’ve been so distant lately, both preoccupied with their careers. Even their lovemaking is perfunctory. They shouldn’t have bought the apartment. They overreached and they know it. Land mines of resentment dot the marriage. He hasn’t been pulling his weight financially, has been distracted, irritable. Yes, envious. But that’s all about to change.

  Charles runs past a playground. In the distance he can hear faint strains of the carousel’s calliope music. He grimaces as a sudden stitch knots his side. Age-it scares him. That low back pain that flares up after a long drive, the eyestrain after an hour at the computer, the inexorable retreat of his hairline-there’s no doubt his body is starting to betray him. He picks up his pace.

  The party for Capitol Offense is on Wednesday. The book has been in the stores for a week. He has a good feeling about this one. The publishing world has been ignoring him lat
ely. It’s all cyclical, though, and after the last two disappointments, he’s due for a measure of the success and respect his earlier books received. He’s earned it. Through some confluence of good fortune, DeLillo, Banks, and Ford are all absent from this fall’s lists. There’s room for him at the top. Again, after all these years.

  He nears the northern end of the park, where Harlem begins. A few heavy raindrops start to fall. The park is emptying out quickly. A wind comes up, damp and cold. He runs past a wide green lawn interrupted by outcroppings of gray bedrock, like whales rising from the sea. Charles tries to ignore the blister he feels opening on his left foot. He’s in great shape. Isn’t he? How many forty-nine-year-old men can run like this, just keep running? He has stamina, staying power. His best years are yet to come. After things settle down, he’ll lavish attention on Anne, make amends for his recent moodiness. She’s been so understanding.

  The rain picks up, the drops coming quicker. When he was in his twenties, he loved to run in the rain. He can still handle it. It’s wilder up in the northern reaches of the park; there are patches of trees that look like deep woods. He passes two black girls huddled under an overpass, making out, their passion stoked by the veil of rain. It’s coming down steadily now, blown by gusts of wind. Charles’s sweatshirt is soaked.

  And then his cell phone rings and he takes it out of his belly pack. Anne says it’s embarrassingly Hollywood of him to take calls while he’s running.

  “Ray’s Pizza,” he says.

  “I’d like a large pie with pepperoni and pineapple.”

  Charles laughs. It’s Nina, his agent. More important, his friend for over twenty years.

  “Where the hell are you, Charles?”

  “Somewhere in Central Park, partner. Swimming against the current.”

  “In this rain? Thank God the exercise bug never bit me. Call me when you get in.”

  Charles can hear something serious in her voice-they know each other that well. He ducks under a tree, his body heaving with each breath.

  “What have you got for me?” he asks.

  “A disappointment, I’m afraid. Call me later.”

  “Better tell me now, Nina. I like to be wet when I get bad news.”

  “Well, I just saw an advance copy of the Times Book Review.”

  Charles crouches down and leans back against the tree.

  “And?”

  “Some envious hack takes out his frustrations on you.”

  Charles hears a high-pitched screech but there’s no ambulance, no police car.

  “Charles, are you there?”

  “Who wrote it?” he asks, ready to add another name to the enemies list.

  Nina mentions someone who sounds vaguely familiar. One of those writing-program one-novel wonders?

  “How bad is it, on a scale of one to ten?”

  “You don’t need to read this one, Charles.”

  “I’ll call you later.”

  “Listen to me, Charles-”

  “I’m going to hang up now, Nina. Good-bye.”

  Charles stands up and starts to run back downtown. Faster. By the end of the day, every publisher and agent in the city will have read that review. When he gets home, he has to call Anne and tell her. He can just hear the sympathy in her voice. The concern that masks her pity.

  And then he falls-trips over himself, crashes down on his right knee, scraping flesh off his knee and his palm. He picks himself up and keeps running, ignoring the pain and the blood. He’s nearing Seventy-second Street, his route home. He splashes through a rush of water pouring down a storm drain. His running shoes are soaked and he has to blink to see through the downpour. He’s been counting on a good paperback sale from this one. Something in the mid six figures. The Times review probably lopped an easy hundred grand off that. He can’t ask Little Miss Success to take up the slack, as if he were a kept husband. He imagines, for one brief troubling instant, hitting Anne, slapping the concern off that exquisite face. His knee and palm are pulsing with pain. He sees his apartment building rising above the trees. He runs right past it and keeps on running.

  2

  Anne Turner is in her office going over the copy for the spring catalog. She’s having trouble concentrating. Outside, the rain is coming down in sheets. She’s a California girl; rain this fierce scares her; it brings mud slides-houses, dreams, lives that once seemed solid and secure, all swept away in an instant.

  She signs off on a rhapsodic description of wrought-iron furniture made at a small foundry outside Florence, gets up and paces for a moment, then pours herself another cup of coffee-her fourth so far today. Damn Trent for being on vacation. She can always count on her assistant to cheer her up with some juicy bit of celebrity gossip. That mousy little temp the agency sent over looks like she wouldn’t know gossip from wheatgrass.

  Everything is so infuriatingly unsettled right now. She’s never told Charles how precarious her position is. How could she, after insisting that they buy the apartment? Yes, in three brief years, Home had become one of the most popular catalogs in the country, but costs are astronomical. Her insistence on scouring the globe for sensational offerings, on using the most expensive paper, on hiring the best photographers, on leasing these lavish thirty-fourth-floor offices, have all stretched resources to the breaking point. There’s a little breathing room now, thank God, but only because she took drastic action-action that makes her shudder every time she thinks of it.

  Anne hates the way Charles has been sulking over every minor setback and disguising his envy of her growing fame. So much is at stake with his new book, and she’s afraid his expectations are unrealistically high. It’s a good book, but not his best, not as good as it could be, should be, with his gift. Damn, she hates it when she pities him. What she should do right this second is kick off her shoes and do ten minutes of yoga. But the truth is, yoga bores the hell out of her. Work is the only thing that releases her endorphins.

  Anne adores the gargoyle planters made by some mad old hippie deep in the Joshua Tree desert-they’re terrifying, fabulous, and unique. Just the sort of find that has made Home such a sensation. The coffee is starting to make her dizzy. Her phone lights up.

  “Your husband is on line one, Ms. Turner,” the temp says in her tentative voice.

  Anne punches on the speaker.

  “Are you warm and dry, darling?” Silence from the other end of the line. What now? “Charles?”

  “It’s the Times Book Review.”

  “Not good?”

  “Not even so-so.”

  For a split second Anne fears she’ll faint. She looks out the window at the furious storm-is the whole city coming apart? Pity won’t do; she knows that.

  “Who wrote it?” she asks.

  “Does it matter?”

  “We can discredit him. Call in all our chits. Make sure someone sympathetic writes the daily Times review.”

  There’s a pause and she can tell Charles is considering her idea. Anything to keep him from spiraling down into that morbid depression of his, the one that shrouds the apartment like cobwebs. The one that eventually winds itself around her throat, too.

  “It’s one review, Charles,” she says. “It’s a goddamn good book and we both know it. And you’re a great writer.” She realizes that in some perverse way she welcomes his crisis. At least now she has something to latch on to, a challenge. And if she can help him through this, an atonement.

  “I just wanted to let you know.”

  “Let’s go out to dinner tonight-get drunk and feel each other up under the table.”

  “Great idea. How about the Four Seasons? To complete the humiliation, why don’t I walk in naked?”

  Anne curses herself. There is simply no way to minimize the blow-the Times Book Review is Big Daddy.

  “I love you,” she says. “I can’t wait to get home.”

  Anne goes to the window. Down below, the city is a wet gray blur.

  The intercom sounds. “Ms. Turner, may I speak to yo
u a moment, please?”

  The mouse squeaks, Anne thinks.

  “What is it?”

  The temp enters. She’s small and young and quite pretty, actually, when she lets her face peek out from the unruly brown hair that keeps falling down from behind her ears. Large green eyes, lovely skin, a mouth that could be sensual if she’d let it.

  “In these catalog pages that you okayed?”

  “Yes?”

  “I found two errors.”

  “You’re kidding me.” Anne takes fierce pride in her attention to detail.

  “See the extra space between the period and the start of the next sentence here? And ‘pate’ needs an acute accent over the e.”

  The last thing most temps will do is take it upon themselves to review the boss’s work.

  “You’ve got a good eye, Edna.”

  The phone rings.

  “I’ll get it myself… Anne Turner.”

  “Anne, it’s Judith Arnold.”

  Her gynecologist. Anne stiffens.

  “The test is in. Hope you and Charles have some champagne on ice.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “No doubt. You’re going to have a baby.”

  Anne can feel the blood rush from her head and then, just as quickly, her face flushes hot red. She sits in a gray chair she’s never sat in before. Christ, she wishes the rain would let up; she can’t think through its splattery tattoo. And she needs to think.

  “It’s Emma.”

  She’s forgotten that the young woman is still in the room. “What?”

  “My name. It’s not Edna, it’s Emma.”

  “Thank you, Emma. Hold all calls.”

  When the girl is gone, Anne looks out the window again. But now all she can see is her own reflection, staring back at her with fear and contempt.

  3

  Anne strides down the cavernous hallway of the Central Park West apartment in her bra, panties, and the new Manolo Blahnik heels she paid six hundred dollars for at Bergdorf’s. She hates heels, they’re uncomfortable and send the wrong message. But today is a heels day-some days just are. Anne has spent the last week in a state of low-level panic. She called Judith Arnold back and swore her to secrecy about the pregnancy. She also asked for some pills to quell her anxiety, but was told they all carried too many risks. Anne reminds herself constantly how important it is to keep going. The next couple of weeks are going to be about Charles and the book. After that, she’ll have time to think. To decide.