The Mentor Page 11

  Emma laughs.

  “Dammit, the cheese!” Charles cries. They both turn to reach for it and bump into each other. Emma freezes. Then she breaks away and pours them both more wine as Charles sprinkles the cheese on the eggs.

  “So that, Emma, was my first night as a member of New York’s literary elite. I hope yours is as much fun.”

  He looks at her. She turns away. Then she’s in his arms and he’s kissing her.

  He begins by unbuttoning her shirt, slowly, gently, and she stands there and lets him, unsure what to do with her hands. How much can he tell by looking at her? She starts to tremble, and looks down, unable to meet his eyes. He puts a hand under her chin and raises her face, looking at her with his hazel eyes, his kind hazel eyes. They are kind, aren’t they? Someone on the street below is honking his horn and shouting, “Come on, come on! Let’s go!”

  Come on, she hears. Let go, let go.

  And then her shirt is off and he’s touching her breasts, touching them lightly, kissing them. If only she could stop her body from trembling. If only that sign wasn’t so bright, if only it was dark, and she could hide in the darkness.

  Let go.

  He unhooks her skirt and it falls to the floor. Is he trembling too? He kisses her while his hands slide down her back, and now she is naked.

  Let go, let go.

  But, no, she can’t let go, she’s afraid, it’s too fast, she’s naked, naked in front of him, and cold. She feels faint, wishes she would faint. But his hands are touching her, the small of her back and then her waist, her thighs. A shudder runs through her body, something she can’t control. “Charles…” she begins.

  But he puts his finger against her lips and leads her to the bed.

  Charles stares down at Emma, at her naked body bathed in the crimson light. She’s so pale, her face is shining, her eyes wide, those lovely haunted eyes. She keeps so much hidden. He wants to know her secrets, to possess her secrets. She looks so beautiful-does she know how beautiful she is? — and so afraid, this lost child. Then he knows: This is her first time.

  It feels better, being on the bed, in the shadows. If only she could stop shivering. He puts his hand on her cheek, cradles her face, kisses her eyes, her cheek, her chin, leading her, so gently, forward.

  “It’s okay,” he whispers.

  Then he runs his fingers over her body, his touch so light, floating, touching her so gently. He runs his hand up her thigh, his strong hand, up her thigh, over her scars, and her breath catches, and his hand goes higher.

  Let go.

  With each touch she feels warmer, and his fingers play on her flesh, and his mouth is warm on her skin, and her flesh is moist under his fingers, and his body is strong and he’s making love to her and, yes, she wants this, she wants him.

  Charles knows it’s time, she’s ready, and he looks into her lost eyes, and he wants, needs, to be inside her. Poised between her legs, he wants her to look at him, at his body, to take pleasure from his body. And she does look, in wonder and confusion and want, and he enters her slowly, slowly, opening her up with his eyes. And then he stops.

  Emma begins to cry. He kisses her and whispers, “Let go, Emma, let go.”

  And Emma does let go, arching her body, encircling him with her arms, her legs, pulling him in, closer, closer, until she doesn’t know what she’s doing anymore, doesn’t care-feeling, for the first time in her life, a pleasure as deep as her pain.

  25

  Emma arrives at work the next morning to find Anne Turner standing at the kitchen counter drinking a glass of grapefruit juice.

  “Hello, Emma.”

  “… Good morning.”

  “Is it?”

  “Is it?”

  “A good morning.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Outside, I mean,” Anne says.

  Emma can’t look at her, can’t answer, wonders what the rich bitch is doing in the kitchen. It’s late; Emma has come in late on purpose, just to lessen the possibility of this very thing happening. Calm down, breathe easy, don’t gulp air.

  Dumb cunt, I fucked your husband.

  “Oh. It’s chilly out.”

  Emma knows it will look suspicious if she rushes off too quickly. She has to look and sound natural, as if this is just another day. She tries to muster a smile, but it feels more like a tic.

  “I love cold weather,” Anne says.

  “I do too.”

  “Do you?”

  Anne is staring at Emma.

  “How did your speech go?” Emma asks, grateful that she’s thought of the question. She puts a hand up on the counter and tilts her head, hoping the gesture makes her look relaxed, interested, normal.

  “Sisterhood is powerful,” Anne says with a little smile.

  What does that mean? Why did she say “sisterhood”? And that little self-satisfied smile-Emma wants to slap it right off her face. To just keep slapping until she kills the bitch. Slaps her dead.

  “Sisterhood?” Emma asks.

  “We women have to stick together. We can’t start behaving like men.”

  “No, we can’t,” Emma says vehemently, shaking her head. How does Anne manage to look so good? She always looks good. Suddenly Emma feels dowdy and hopeless. And afraid. She shouldn’t be here. She’s making a terrible mistake.

  BadGirlSickGirl.

  “Charles and I are a little late getting started this morning,” Anne says.

  “Oh, he’s not…?” Emma gestures toward the office.

  Anne shakes her head. “He’s still in bed,” she says with a wifely, proprietary grin.

  “Excuse me,” Emma says, needing to get away from Anne, away to the safety of her office, her work, Charles. No-Charles offers no safety. What a fool she was to think so. She moves toward the hallway that leads to the offices.

  “Emma?”

  Emma turns.

  “Do you enjoy working for my husband?”

  Emma feels herself start to sweat. “It’s an interesting job.”

  “He’s an interesting man.” Anne reaches into a cabinet and takes out a bottle of vitamins. She shakes one into her palm and washes it down with juice. “His work seems to be going well. Does he discuss it with you?”

  “No. Just a word now and then.” Emma fidgets with the hem of her jacket and feels a pounding behind her eyes.

  “And do you have aspirations?”

  She can’t tell her about her book, about Charles helping her, about the two of them working together. Emma tries desperately to think, to think what to say.

  “Are you all right, Emma?”

  “Fine. I… I want to go back to school. I think I’d like to teach.”

  “Charles used to teach.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “He hated it.”

  Emma’s headache is making her dizzy; her eyes feel like hot grapes. She closes them for a moment. Then she gestures toward the office. “I better get to work.”

  “You and me both,” Anne says with a warm smile. “Have a good one.” She turns and goes, leaving a hint of perfume in the air, something floral, exhilarating, and very expensive.

  Emma stands there for a moment, at the edge of the vast white kitchen, stark morning light pouring in the window. The whole gleaming room seems to be mocking her: Got too big for your britches, didn’t you, dumbshit? The cold rich room knows who she really is-how sick and sad and hopeless she really is-and it wants no part of her kind.

  Emma turns and rushes down the long hallway. She collapses against her desk and tries to calm herself. Her head feels as if it’s about to explode. She reaches into her bag for her bottle of aspirin, shakes out four, and swallows them down. She rolls up her sleeve quickly quickly, lights a match and watches it burn for several seconds before blowing out the flame and pressing the glowing ember against the smooth white flesh of her inner arm. The head ache the pain the panic subside for a merciful moment. Suddenly the rug, the thick Persian rug filled with soft warm tones, looks so c
omforting, and Emma sinks down to the floor and lies on her side.

  Charles closes his eyes and lets the hot water beat down on his face. His body aches a little, in a nice way. He feels his familiar masculine pride. He thinks of last night, of how he lost himself, of how long it has been since he’s lost himself. Emma. Lovely, mysterious Emma. His need to understand her is becoming almost obsessive. And to protect her. Charles turns the faucet to cold, ice cold-he’s even back to ending with a cold rinse, a long-abandoned ritual of his twenties. He feels his skin tighten, his brain sharpen, under the frigid assault.

  Emma is sitting at her desk, so absorbed in her writing that she doesn’t look up. He walks behind her chair and puts his hands on her shoulders. He feels her stiffen.

  “Please don’t,” she says.

  Oh, here it comes, Charles thinks: the second-thoughts syndrome. He bends down and kisses her neck. She bolts out of her chair.

  “I made a mistake last night,” she says.

  He’s taken aback-she’s fierce, standing there clenching and unclenching her fists.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way. It didn’t look like a mistake to me,” he says with a slight smile.

  Emma is not amused.

  “And I don’t plan to make it again,” she says.

  “Emma…”

  “Please don’t patronize me. I’m here to work. That’s where it begins and that’s where it ends.”

  “Did you run into Anne?”

  Emma doesn’t answer.

  “I’m so sorry, Emma.”

  “So am I.”

  “Can’t we just step back and take a look at the situation?” he says.

  “The situation is that you’re a married man and my employer. That’s two strikes, and I… I can’t…”

  Emma chokes and Charles moves toward her. The phone rings in his office. He ignores it, looking at Emma. She stands there, rubbing her hands on her thighs, not looking at him, struggling to hold her ground.

  The phone rings again.

  “Fair enough, but let’s keep talking,” Charles says.

  He goes into his office, sits at his desk, and picks up the phone. “Yes?”

  “Charles, right to the point,” Nina begins. “Good news and bad. The bad is that we only got thirty thousand for the paperback of Capitol Offense.”

  “Thirty thousand?!”

  “It was the only bid. It’s a blow, yes, but fuck ’em, you’re still the best writer this country has produced in the last twenty-five years and no one’s going to doubt it once they read this new work.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s so right, going back to your small-town roots, writing from a young boy’s point of view. And the mother-she’s extraordinary! And terrifying.”

  “Nina, just a minute-”

  “Don’t be furious, but I’ve shown it to a few people, a few select people.” Through the open door, Charles sees Emma get a drink of water, take a few deep breaths. “I hope you’re writing. Don’t let me interrupt. You’re on to something, Charles. I have a very good feeling about this book. My love to Anne.”

  Charles slowly hangs up the phone, feels his chest hollow out, the room reel. Nobody wants his book, nobody wants it. He lets out a sound that’s somewhere between a whimper and a moan. Emma appears in the doorway.

  “Charles, are you all right?”

  Staring down at nothing, Charles says, “I just got the lowest paperback sale of my career. One-tenth of what I got for my last book.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Emma says. She takes a step toward him.

  Charles stands up. He doesn’t want to look at her; he needs air, needs to move, needs to be alone. “Not as sorry as I am.” He walks past Emma, into the outer office. He hates her being there to witness his humiliation, hates the praise Nina gave her work. “By the way, Nina read your chapter,” he says over his shoulder.

  “You showed it to her?”

  As he heads into the hallway, away from his shame, away from her, he turns. She has an idiotic expression on her face-apologetic hope. He hates pity. “She thought it had promise. I think you should finish the book and we can go over the whole thing before I send her any more.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Christ, he hopes she isn’t turning into just another suck-ass supplicant. Then she smooths her clothes in that awkward way of hers.

  “You’re going to be very famous,” he says over his shoulder as he walks down the hall.

  Manhattan can be the loneliest place in the world. Charles walks slowly, as he’s been walking for hours now, in counterpoint to the city’s rhythm, alone and out of step. He’s free-falling down a black hole. How humiliating it will be when he tells Nina that he didn’t write the chapter. How pathetic he’ll look. He hates Nina for loving Emma’s work, hates Emma for writing it, hates himself for hating them. As he walks the city’s grid, his spiral of recrimination makes him dizzy, nauseated.

  Finally the day begins to wane, bringing with it the comfort of late afternoon light, a softening of hard edges. Charles finds himself in Midtown, on Fifth Avenue, nearing Rockefeller Center. In his early years in New York, as success piled on success, this Art Deco kingdom was his favorite place. The statues and murals and fountains, the human scale and the soaring spirit-Charles saw it all as a metaphor for his work, as if his vision had been captured in light and water and stone. He would spend hours sitting beside the fountain, watching the people, mesmerized by the passing parade and the play of sunlight on granite and glass, knowing, on some level, that, like Fitzgerald, he was savoring a fleeting moment of grace, of simultaneous celebration and mourning.

  Charles looks down the walkway that leads from Fifth Avenue to the skating rink. It’s filled with laughing people, tourists in bright clothes, gawking at the fountains and the flowers, noisy, stuffing their faces with pretzels and ice cream. The world is so full of stupid people, bovine gimme-gimme people who don’t know literature from lunch meat. One chortling man in a canary-yellow sweater and a cowboy hat is passing out hand-held video games to his three TV-addled, toy-mad midgets, while his beaming wife can barely stand up under her load of FAO Schwarz bags.

  Charles turns and walks away from the mindless, squawking masses and finds himself staring into a bookstore window-a window littered with new books by blacks and gays and rich girls and poor people and lesbians and the diseased and the disfigured, all of them wallowing, wailing in second-rate prose their memoirs or barely veiled autobiographical tales of abuse, addiction, incest, struggle, recovery, and of course, insight and reve-fucking-lation. Or if they don’t turn out sloppy sob fests, the women, quavering with pathos in their jacket photos, write from the womb in exquisitely measured sentences that read as if they’ve been strained through a sieve, so full of sensitivity and pain and crystallized moments that the goddamn books should be sold with a shrink-wrapped estrogen patch. The publishing industry isn’t about great writing anymore, it’s all about selling identity-race, gender, affliction, whatever pity party is drawing the biggest crowd this year. What a crock of self-indulgent shit it all is.

  Next year Emma’s book will be in this window. And where will he be?

  26

  Anne is in the foyer about to leave for work. She stops and listens. The apartment is quiet. Charles is in his office. It’s a warm morning, too warm for October, with that awful New York humidity that makes your skin feel clammy. She ducks into the study, closes the door, and picks up the phone.

  When the women’s health center answers, Anne lowers her voice. “Yes, this is Kathleen Brody. I’m calling to see if my test results are in.”

  “Please hold.”

  Anne stands absolutely still. A heavy bead of sweat rolls down from her left armpit.

  “Mrs. Brody?” It’s Dr. Halpern.

  “Yes.”

  “I tried to call you last evening. The number you gave us is incorrect.”

  “Were you calling with my results?”

  “I was. The blood sa
mple you gave us doesn’t match the DNA from your embryo’s chorion.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.”

  Anne hangs up. She feels cold, as if her spine has turned to ice. And enraged. She dials again.

  “Yeah?” The voice is groggy with sleep.

  “Kayla, I’m sorry to wake you up, but…”

  “Anne, what is it?”

  “Charles isn’t the father.”

  “Tell me this is a nightmare.”

  “What am I going to do?”

  “You know your choices.”

  “It’s my child, Kayla.”

  “Not yet, it isn’t.”

  “Has Hollywood turned you into some kind of heartless monster? It’s my child!”

  Anne hangs up on her best friend. She opens the study door just in time to see Emma hurrying away toward the kitchen. The little toad had been standing outside the door listening. Maybe she’s being paranoid-Emma might just have arrived for work. But she doesn’t have her bag.

  Anne rushes into the kitchen. Emma is halfway down the hall that leads to Charles’s offices.

  “Emma?” Anne calls.

  Emma turns. She has an apple in her hand. “Yes?”

  Anne waits as Emma walks back into the kitchen.

  “Are you just arriving for work?”

  “No. I was just getting a piece of fruit. I hope that’s all right.”

  She can’t even look Anne in the eye.

  “Help yourself.”

  Emma holds the apple with both hands and looks down. “Thank you,” she says in that phony meek-little-girl voice of hers.

  “You’re among friends,” Anne says.

  “You’ve both been very nice to me.”

  “Well, you do a very good job. You’re wonderfully efficient. And cooperative. That’s very important for people like Charles and me. I’m sure you understand that.”

  Emma looks up and meets Anne’s gaze. “Of course,” she says.

  “Good.”

  Anne picks up a sponge and wipes away dirt that isn’t there. She rinses the sponge and replaces it by the sink. She dries her hands on a dish towel.

  “You know, I’m about to go through my closets-a little fall sweep-out. There might be some things that would fit you.”