The Mentor Read online

  “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.

  43

  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.

  After putting on a dark wool suit, Charles decides to walk down to the Dartmouth Club. The exercise will clear his head and calm him down. He goes only a few blocks before he starts to sweat. The sun has come out and burned away the morning chill, the day is turning out to be unseasonably warm and humid. Can it really be late November? “Winter feels like summer and summer feels like hell,” Portia had said. “The day is coming when the living will envy the dead.” He wishes he’d worn a lighter suit; the scarf around his neck is itchy; he’s dazed. The sun is blinding, glinting off metallic surfaces, and he didn’t bring sunglasses. Some-where below Columbus Circle he ducks into a discount pharmacy. The place is huge and assaultive. He grabs the first pair of sun-glasses off the rack, tosses the cashier a twenty-dollar bill and walks out.

  The sunglasses help-soften the sharp edges, a barrier from the world. It’s getting late and he still has no idea what he’ll say. He needs to sit and organize his thoughts. There’s a small plaza in front of an office tower; he sits on a hard bench. There are so many people everywhere, they’re all around him, moving; he’s fidgety, can’t concentrate- the squeak of the oarlocks, the flat gray of the water, the pine trees rising from the shore.

  There’s no shade in the bleak little plaza and his heart is pounding in his chest and his mouth is parched. There’s a man dressed like a clown handing out flyers, he has Bozo hair and a red plastic nose. He turns and gives Charles a grotesque smile. Charles looks away. Sitting on a bench across from him is a young woman reading a book. Charles squints to make out the title: Jane Eyre. The girl is oblivious to the world, her lips parted; she looks a little like Emma, with a wide brow, large eyes, and that intense concentration. She reaches up and brushes a lock of hair from her face- climbing out of the boat, their slow silent walk across the shore, his foot on the weathered gray step, a cold breeze on the back of his neck…

  Charles shudders and stands up. People stream by him as if he isn’t there. He walks to a pay phone on the corner and dials Emma’s number. There’s a lot of traffic and he has a hard time hearing the ringing over the rumble and honking. When Emma finally picks up, she sounds half asleep.

  “It’s me,” he says.

  “Where are you?”

  “What are we doing, Emma?”

  Charles looks out at the people rushing by. They’re so filled with purpose, as if it all mattered. Why are they all moving so quickly?

  “Should you go away, Emma?”

  “Go away?”

  “Just leave New York. Today.”

  A cab with its radio blaring stops at the light.

  “I’m sorry, Charles, I can’t hear you.”

  “Leave today.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  The light changes and the cab speeds off.

  “I don’t feel well, Emma.”

  Charles thinks he might throw up. He needs water.

  “You miss Portia.”

  “Yes.”

  Charles presses his cheek against the cool metal of the booth.

  “I love you, Emma.”

  There’s a long pause.

  “Do you really?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m so tired, Charles.”

  “I have to get to the service.”

  “Are you coming down here after?”

  A well-dressed middle-aged woman stands nearby, waiting for the phone. Does she recognize him? Of course she does. Charles straightens up.

  “Charles, are you there?”

  “I’ll come down after the service.”

  It’s getting late. He races east and then down Vanderbilt Avenue to the club. He goes into the men’s room and is shocked at how cheap and ridiculous the sunglasses look. He takes them off. His eyes are bloodshot. He takes a long drink of water, cupping his palm under the faucet.

  The memorial service has already begun. He slips into the hall, a wood-paneled room with a vaulted ceiling. An old man is reading a Rilke poem. A murmur goes around the room as Charles makes his way up to a front pew. Who are all these people? What can they tell? He forces himself to take deep breaths. Why the hell do they have the heat on in this weather? He’s suffocating. His suit chafes and he has to piss. Why didn’t he piss when he was in the men’s room? And then he hears the old man say his name and he realizes everyone is waiting for him to go up and say something about Portia.

  He gets up to walk to the front of the room- the splintering sound as the wood gives way and her body tumbles over backward, her mouth struggling to form words, her head banging on the rock, her body falling, falling. Listening, afraid to breathe. Should he go down there, down to the lake, make sure she’s dead?

  He can’t raise his eyes from the lectern, doesn’t want to see the faces staring up at him. He has to say something. How long has he been standing here in silence? It doesn’t look right. They’re all waiting and the room is so still. Someone coughs and he looks up-a woman in the back row, a handkerchief to her mouth, vaguely familiar, her face filled not with suspicion but with sympathy, sympathy for his loss. He was closer to Portia than any of them. That’s what they’re all thinking. And they’re right.

  “When I think of Portia,” he begins, “one memory above all others comes back to me. It was my first year at Dartmouth. I hated the place. All those rich kids. Of course I knew who Portia Damron was, but she didn’t teach freshmen. It was a Saturday night in the depths of January, and I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. I decided to drive over to the next town where there was a roadside bar that looked welcoming. The place was dark and nobody in there looked like they had a trust fund. I sat down and ordered a Scotch. Down at the far end of the bar I noticed Portia.”

  Starting down the steps, the low gray sky… Hurry, faster, you never know when a hiker will show up, someone could be in the woods on the other side of the lake right now, someone could have seen the whole thing.

  “She was deep in conversation with an old fella who looked as if he hadn’t drawn a sober breath in forty years. Oh, did I mention she was smoking?” There’s a ripple of warm laughter. Charles realizes his eyes are filled with tears; he isn’t crying, though; he isn’t going to cry. “Suddenly they both slapped bills down on the bar, climbed off their stools, and walked over to a pinball machine. She dropped in a quarter and began to play.”

  At the bottom-the gray pebbles, and her body, crumpled and twisted, all broken and tiny, like a little broken doll. Stop looking, get away, think think think-make sure she’s dead, check the body, make sure she’s dead.

  “Well, she worked that pinball machine like she was born behind it, twisting and turning and pumping, racking up points. Pretty soon a crowd started to gather, cheering her on. Before you knew it, every last soul in the bar, myself included, was down there. Portia was fierce, pure concentration. Then lights were going off and bells were ringing-she’d broken the all-time record score. We were all screaming and laughing, the place went wild. And Portia? She just kept on playing. But a great big smile broke across her face. That’s how I’ll always remember her-on that January night, playing pinball, passionate, engaged, alive.”

  The low gray sky, the lake gently lapping-go look, go look at her body. Her eyes are open. But she’s dead, isn’t she? One step closer-then he hears it, that wet harsh rattling somewhere in her throat, in her body. Then her eyes move. They look at him. And then he turns, runs up the steps, runs from those eyes-that look-falls twice on
the slippery splintered wood. Into the car and he’s gone. Gone. It’s over. But why does he still hear that sound? Why does he still see her eyes, looking at him?

  And now Charles is surrounded by people, people telling him how touched they were by his words and offering condolences and sharing their memories of Portia and boasting how they’ve followed his career all these years and asking about his next book. He tells them all it’s going to be dedicated to Portia. At one point his classmate Dan Leber, the prominent psychiatrist, pulls him aside.

  “That was very moving, Charles.”

  “Thank you.”

  “She was an amazing teacher. I still have my annotated copy of Crime and Punishment. Reread it every five years. Listen, Charles, how’s the situation with that young woman you called me about, your secretary?”

  From the way he says the words, Charles realizes Leber knows they’re having an affair. That’s all right; men have affairs all the time.

  “It’s not improving.”

  “Well, if you want me to see her, just call.”

  “I will, Dan. Thank you.”

  Charles has several glasses of wine and at some point begins to relax. He did it, he got through, no one knows, no one will ever know. All around him, people are trading stories and jokes about Portia and their younger selves, their days in the hills of New Hampshire. Many of them have gone on to successful careers, but none as successful as his. Finally people begin to leave, back to their jobs and their lives. Charles lingers, is one of the last to go. Someone comes up to him, a woman he barely recognizes. A secretary in the English Department?

  “You meant more to her than anyone,” she says. “She talked about you all the time. Keep writing for her. Keep her spirit alive.”

  He steps out into the afternoon sun. It doesn’t feel as oppressive anymore. He thinks of Portia one last time and knows that he can’t let her death be in vain. Then he steps off the curb and hails a cab downtown.

  44

  Emma wakes with a start. A plane is flying low and the windows are rattling. The sound is getting louder, closer, and she panics-the plane’s going to crash into her building, rip the roof off, incinerate her. She calls out for Charles but he doesn’t answer. Is he gone? What time is it? She buries her head under the pillow and prays for the sound to stop. It starts to ebb after the plane passes over. She’s never been on an airplane.