The Mentor Page 3

  The crowd breaks into applause. Charles smiles boyishly. “Aw, shucks,” he says, all tousled hair and lopsided grin.

  Anne is there quickly, ready. She gives him a kiss and leads him down the stairs, steering him through the throng with practiced grace. Her father once told her to learn from ducks on a pond: they glide across the surface seemingly without effort, but beneath the water line they’re paddling like mad. Nina goes to meet them. She gives Charles a kiss on the cheek, and he smiles at her sheepishly.

  “How did the interview go?” she asks.

  “Derek Wollman was his usual boorish self, and my co-guest was the delightful Ms. Vera Knee, flavor-of-the-week. I barely got a word in between wisecracks.” Charles reaches for a glass of champagne from a passing tray and downs it in one swallow. “Christ, I hate champagne,” he says before grabbing another.

  Nina puts a hand on Charles’s forearm and applies pressure, keeping him from raising the glass to his lips.

  “Charles, she’s a flash in the pan. Your work will endure,” Nina says, maintaining the pressure and looking him square in the eye.

  “It will, darling,” Anne adds.

  “Well, I don’t know if I can endure this party.”

  A well-dressed man who dwells somewhere on the periphery of the literary world-neither Anne nor Nina can remember his name-pushes into their circle.

  “Charles, I can’t wait to read this one,” he says.

  “Let me give you a piece of advice: don’t bother.”

  “Excuse me?” the man says.

  “I said don’t bother. Read Honey on the Moon instead,” Charles says, his voice rising. In concentric circles the room quiets.

  “Darling…” Anne begins, but Charles is off.

  “No, I’m serious, I think this charming fellow should skip my ponderous tome and escape into the giddy fucking joys of Honey on the Moon.” By now you could hear a feather drop. “That’s what they’re lapping up at every airport and supermarket, cheap little feel-good books written in ten minutes by media-created hairdos with laptops who could retype the Brooklyn phone book, call it Sugar on my Pussy, and sell it for half a million dollars.”

  Nina leans into the nearest waiter and whispers, “Coffee. Fast.”

  Anne flashes a smile and says loudly, “Oh, Charles, stop quoting Shakespeare, this is a party.”

  The party gradually regains an uneasy equilibrium. Charles and Anne’s allies pick up their conversations, a little too loudly. Many in the crowd are secretly thrilled by Charles’s public meltdown, but etiquette demands they keep their claws sheathed, at least until the guest of honor leaves. Phones will be ringing all over Manhattan on this balmy fall night.

  Nina plies Charles with coffee and hors d’oeuvres while Anne runs interference, both starting and finishing his sentences for him. As he sobers up and cools down, Charles, somewhat abashed but determined not to show it, accepts congratulations with a becoming modesty. Anne is livid with him, but more than that she’s trying to interpret what Nina told her about the book’s prospects. She has a pounding headache and knows she’ll be sleeping with her tooth guard in. When things are more or less back on track, she excuses herself to go to the ladies’ room. She dampens a paper towel and in the merciful quiet of a stall, holds it to her wrists and temples. Sitting there, she realizes how bad the timing of her pregnancy is. Morning sickness right up through the Christmas rush, dragging through the slush of February streets in maternity clothes, and then the baby coming in the spring-her busiest season, preparing the fall catalogs. But no, she admits, it isn’t really the timing that’s gnawing at her-she could schedule her way out of hell if she had to. It’s the small flicker of doubt that flares up in the back of her mind, the possibility, however remote, that Charles isn’t the father.

  When she returns to the party, it’s beginning to break up. For a moment, she can’t find Charles in the emptying room. Then she sees him, slumped in a chair by a window, momentarily alone. Framed against the glittering skyline, he looks small, half-drunk and dazed. She goes to him.

  6

  Late that night, deep in the fat, frightening marrow of the night, the demon hour, Charles lies in bed looking up at the ceiling. He’s in an implosive rage-at that asshole Derek Wollman, at the asshole critics, at his asshole publisher, his asshole readers, the asshole world. He wrote a goddamn good book and they’re all treating it like a piece of hack work. He’s Charles Davis, for Christ’s sake, he wrote one of the most important books of his generation. Do they really think people will be reading popcorn spy thrillers in a hundred years, crazy-girl memoirs, generational soap operas, trendy fluff tales? Of course they fucking won’t be-they’ll be reading Charles Davis.

  As he lies coiled and obsessed, another emotion keeps trying to push up from beneath his rage. To keep it down he clings fiercely to his fury, because what lurks below it is unspeakable-the troll under the bridge, the mad twisted taunting troll: terror. Terror that he has lost it-his talent, his nerve, his edge-that the train has passed him by and he’s the sad little man standing at the station growing smaller and smaller. Charles feels himself start to sweat.

  He’s from the most middle of middle-class backgrounds, both parents first generation off the farm and terrified of not fitting into their suburban Ohio world. His poor mother, Fran, lost without the ritual labor of farm life, was a stranger in a strange land, a walking nerve end, until the doctor put her on sedatives when Charles was about twelve, at which point she receded from her own life. Her expression grew perpetually startled, her eyes a little too wide open, startled at how frightening and incomprehensible life had turned out to be. Then there was Milton Davis, meek little Milton who lived and died by the rule book at Central Ohio Power and Light. The father who never took his son anywhere that the other middle managers weren’t taking their sons-Little League games in the summer, the skating rink in the winter. Charles always thought of his parents as refugees trying desperately to fit into a foreign culture, a culture of blaring televisions and too much leisure and sleek appliances and cars that were like living rooms and living rooms that were never lived in.

  And then Vietnam. The day after he graduated from high school, Charles enlisted, grabbing his ticket out of Fran and Milton’s discreet suburban nightmare. Using his excellent grades in English, he snared a position on Stars and Stripes. It was basically a PR rag for the war effort, but there was no disguising the horror and deceit. As a journalist he had access not only to the troops but also to the men who were running the war, and in some ways their arrogance and indifference to human life were the most harrowing things of all. Vietnam exploded Charles’s middle-class mind, made his parents’ bourgeois terrors seem like an affront to the soul, an insult to the dead and dying. After the war, he went to Dartmouth on a scholarship and never looked back. By the time he graduated four years later, Life and Liberty was almost complete.

  Milton and Fran are still living in that same box of a house, but now they spend the winter months in a stacked box on some bleak patch of Florida scrubland violated by dreary condo towers that look as if they belong in a working-class neighborhood of a Third World country. They visited New York a couple of times, but were overwhelmed by the city and ended up sequestered in their hotel room, phoning relatives back home, praising their son’s generosity and keeping track of the weather and what was on sale at the supermarket.

  Charles and his parents have whittled their communication down to three-minute Christmas and birthday phone calls in which they mouth numbingly rote sentiments. He has long since stopped seeking their approval. In truth, except for some ambiguous guilt after their phone calls, he feels virtually nothing toward them. Charles often wonders where his talent comes from, secretly believing that it’s a greater gift for having sprung full blown from such barren soil.

  Anne stirs beside him and he gets a gentle gust of her bath soap, crisp and citrusy. He hates her. He hates his parents. He even hates Nina, almost. Why hadn’t she pushed him harder on Ca
pitol Offense? She loved the idea originally. He can tell she isn’t wild about the book; oh, she’s steadfast and true, but he can tell. Charles’s rage is making his temples throb. And then, like a bolt, he knows-knows what he has to do, where he has to go.

  Charles gets out of bed and quietly slips into jeans and a T-shirt. He walks into the living room, picks up the phone, and calls his garage. “This is Charles Davis. I’ll be picking up my car in ten minutes.”

  7

  Anne lies still as Charles gets out of bed and leaves the room. The clock on her night table reads 4:36 A.M. Minutes pass and then she hears the front door close-no doubt he’s off on one of his brooding nocturnal walks. Now she’s alone in the apartment. Good. Yes, he’s a great writer, yes, she has to make allowances, but that scene he threw at the Rainbow Room was infantile; they’re going to be the laughingstock of Manhattan for the next month. She’s fighting tooth and nail to hold her company together and he throws her a curve like that. Everything is always Charles! Anne tosses off the covers and walks down the long hallway into the living room. She opens the cabinet and clicks on the television, channel-surfing until she finds an infomercial for a line of skin-care products. The pitchwoman is a pretty young blonde who’s got to be on speed; she’s talking so fast she’s almost slurring her words. Anne finds the mindless diversion comforting.

  “All you pregnant women out there? Are you breaking out? When I got pregnant with Amber, oh-my-God, I had the worst breakout of my life.”

  Anne clicks off the television and lies down on the couch. She grabs a pillow and hugs it to her. The city is so quiet it’s frightening. Try as she might to calm her mind, the memory keeps bubbling up like a toxic spring…

  It was the third week of August and New York was limping into its late summer wilt. Anne had just gotten off the plane from Savannah, the last leg of a southern buying trip in search of interesting folk art. Outside Savannah she had discovered a family living beside a tidal flat who made these extraordinary cloth dolls with hand-painted eyes, whimsical and a little spooky. Perfect. But the rest of the trip had been a bust and Anne was exhausted when she climbed into the taxi at La Guardia. She rested her head on the back of the seat and closed her eyes as the driver made his way out of the airport.

  Her cell phone rang. Anne debated whether or not to answer it and decided she had to.

  “Yes?”

  “Anne, it’s John Farnsworth.”

  Farnsworth was the seventy-two-year-old financier and venture capitalist who had provided the start-up money for Home. He was from one of New England’s oldest and wealthiest families; he and his wife, Marnie, longtime acquaintances of Anne’s mother and stepfather, were high-profile philanthropists, pillars of Boston society.

  “John, terrific to hear your voice. How are you?”

  “Brutally hot up here in Cambridge.”

  “You’re not in Maine?”

  “Marnie’s not well.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Listen, Anne, I just got off the phone with Ted Weiss.”

  Anne tensed. Ted was her chief financial officer. “I know, John, we lost money last quarter. But wasn’t that projected?”

  “It was. But not to this extent.”

  “Sales are incredible, it’s costs that are killing us, but we’re getting them down. I think it would be insane to compromise our standards; in the end they’re what sets us apart.”

  “Anne, companies that don’t make money can’t stay in business.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that I’ve got five million dollars invested in you, and now Ted Weiss tells me you need three million more. There comes a time when one has to cut one’s losses.”

  “John, please, Home wasn’t expected to turn a profit until next spring. We’re a little behind where we want to be, but we’re establishing a name for ourselves. So many exciting things are happening. Let me put together a presentation and I’ll fly up tomorrow.”

  “Anne, you’re a very talented and attractive woman and I’m always happy to see you, but I don’t think this is going to work out.”

  Anne punched mute.

  “Driver, turn around. Take me back to the airport.”

  It was Anne’s first visit to Cambridge’s Brattle Street neighborhood and she was dazzled. Enormous old mansions shaded by ancient trees lined the quiet streets, lawns stretched away to shaded dells, graceful fountains gurgled. There was a sense of order and security, of old wealth discreetly multiplying. Nothing evil would ever happen on these beautiful buffering streets.

  On the plane Anne had spent twenty minutes meditating and then changed into a white linen shirt dress that hugged her derriere. She’d noticed John Farnsworth admiring her body on more than one occasion. She had the cabby stop at an antiquarian book store at the foot of Beacon Hill, where she bought a beautiful nineteenth-century edition of Alice in Wonderland. It set her back six hundred dollars, but she hoped it would turn out to be a wise investment. She knew the next hour could make or break her company, her dream.

  The taxi turned into a circular driveway. The Farnsworth house was an immense stone Gothic surrounded by exquisite lawns and gardens. Anne got out of the cab. The air was heavy and fragrant. She closed her eyes, took two deep breaths, and rang the bell. The door was answered by a thin gray-haired woman in a uniform and crepe-sole shoes.

  The front hall was the size of a small ballroom with dual parlors opening off it. Wood gleamed and glass sparkled; carpets cushioned and silk glistened. A Degas hung over a distant fireplace. The whole house was hushed as if in deference to the ailing Mrs. Farnsworth.

  As the maid led her through a series of rooms, Anne thought: Do Americans still live like this? They came to a vaulted circular library with high stacks reached by a rolling staircase-a room that had awed Anne in Architectural Digest. The maid knocked gently on curved oak pocket doors.

  “Yes?”

  The maid slid one door open and then disappeared.

  “Anne, come in.”

  John Farnsworth’s inner sanctum was dominated by an enormous desk, a model schooner on a library table, and a painting of a black Labrador retriever over the mantel. The room smelled faintly of wood polish.

  John sat behind the desk, his large head sporting a ring of white hair, jowls, and a ruddy spray of broken blood vessels. In a Wal-Mart he’d probably be taken for a retired pipe fitter who drank too much, but sitting there in his hunter-green blazer and tie, his flinty eyes flashing, his chin held at just the right angle, he oozed old-money confidence. He stood and shook Anne’s hand.

  “Welcome.”

  “The house is beautiful. I’m afraid Home can’t compete.” The last thing she’d want to compete with was this mausoleum.

  “It’s comfortable. Sit down.”

  Anne sat in an armchair and crossed her legs. The dress rode up her thighs.

  “You look lovely, as always,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “How about a drink?”

  “I would love a drink.”

  John crossed to the bar. “Name your pleasure.”

  “It’s a long list.”

  “Why don’t I open a bottle of Chardonnay?”

  “That sounds perfect.”

  As John opened the wine, Anne looked around the room. The dog over the mantel was posed like a potentate, sitting up proudly, looking straight out. Like master, like dog. What would she do if he turned her down? Finding replacement financing would throw the company into full crisis mode, quality would suffer, and she’d have to let some people go.

  John handed her a glass of wine and she took a sip. Superb. He sat back down.

  “I brought you a little something,” Anne said, handing him the book.

  He opened it and looked at the illustrations for a moment.

  “It’s charming. Thank you.” He put the book aside and looked Anne in the eye. “Weiss faxed me your numbers. The company could go either way.”

 
; That was Anne’s cue to rock ’n’ roll. She set her wineglass on the desk and leaned forward.

  “The company is going only one way-up. People are talking about us. Our demographics are incredible: we’re selling to the highest-income zip codes in the country. I’ve just set up an exclusive licensing agreement with a three-hundred-year-old Venetian glass company. We’re going on-line; I’m talking to website designers tomorrow. We’ll be able to sell globally, tailoring the catalog to each country’s customs and tastes, and at the same time we’ll save a fortune on paper and postage.”

  As he listened, Farnsworth drummed his fingers on a leather check ledger. “You’re a very bright woman, Anne. I’m impressed. Always have been.”

  “Thank you. I’m very grateful for your support.”

  “You know what you want and you go for it. I used to be like that. Maybe I still am.”

  “That makes us kindred spirits.”

  “The market is sick with catalogs, Anne. I’d like to help you out, but I’m just not convinced.”

  Anne had come prepared to offer him another five percent of the company, but only as a last resort. She stood up and stretched back her shoulders, walked over to the window. At the far end of the lawn was a statue of a woman playing a harp. She turned and faced him. It was time to cut to the chase.

  “What would it take to convince you?”

  He considered her question, looking down at his hands. When he looked up he seemed distracted. “You’re all business, aren’t you, Anne?”

  “I hope not.” Had she played it wrong? Should she have taken a softer approach? She glanced at her watch; it was almost four o’clock. She hadn’t eaten since early that morning, and the wine was making her light-headed and slightly dazed. The only thing she knew for sure was that she wasn’t leaving that room without a commitment. “I just got back from a buying trip.” She sighed. “It was 103 degrees in Savannah. Can you believe it?”