The Mentor Read online

  “Sounds hellish.”

  “This room is marvelously cool. These high ceilings.” She carried her glass to a cracked leather sofa on the far side of the room and took a seat, crossing her legs again. “I fell in love with all this wood when I saw it in Architectural Digest. That painting’s new,” she said, indicating the dog.

  “You don’t miss a trick, do you, Anne?”

  “I even sleep with my eyes open.”

  He laughed at this, in an admiring way. His teeth were beautiful-too beautiful; they couldn’t possibly be original. She leaned forward on the couch and dropped her voice into an intimate register.

  “John, this catalog is my baby. I will fight to the death to protect it. I will do anything to ensure its success.”

  He went to the bar, refilled his glass, and held up the bottle.

  “Yes, please,” she said.

  In some strange way she was beginning to enjoy herself. Winning wasn’t nearly as much fun without a few hurdles to jump over and she was certain she had just cleared a major one.

  After refilling her glass he returned to his desk and took a pile of folders from a drawer. “Do you know what this is?” he asked, brandishing one.

  Anne shook her head.

  “It’s a proposal I received three years ago from a young fellow out in Wisconsin who was producing those floppy stuffed animals my grandchildren can’t get enough of. He wanted two million dollars. If I’d given it to him I’d have tripled my money by now. This is another proposal that came in at about the same time as yours. It’s from a computer refurbishing company out in Palo Alto. They wanted three million. If I’d gone with them I would have cashed out for eight million. You don’t get it, do you, Anne? You think you can waltz in here in that ass-hugging dress and dazzle me with pie in the sky and I’ll just sit with my mouth open and cut you a check. Home is running twenty percent below projections, and you’re starting to make me look like a fool. I’m a businessman, not a baby-sitter.”

  Anne felt as if she’d just been punched in the solar plexus. For one awful moment she missed her father. She looked down into her wineglass; her mouth tightened.

  “ Home is going to succeed,” she said finally, firmly, trying to control her voice. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of an easy retreat. She looked up and met his stare. It was one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do.

  He put the files back in the drawer and crossed to the couch, sat facing her at the other end, his arm draped across the back. There was a long silence. Anne heard the faint buzz of a lawn mower. “My wife is very ill,” he said finally in a low voice.

  Why was he telling her this? Now?

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “We’ve made a sizable donation to the Museum of Fine Arts. They’re naming a gallery in our honor. Marnie may not live to see the dedication ceremony.”

  It made Anne uncomfortable to have him so close. She should have waited until the next day, shown up bright and early with Trent in tow. This was all wrong.

  “I’m not used to being alone,” he said.

  He lifted his hand and gently touched the back of her hair.

  Anne took a measured sip of her wine, glancing at him over the rim of her glass. He looked nothing like the benevolent WASP grandfather who might sneak a glance at her thigh and nothing more.

  “There’s a superb restaurant that’s opened a few blocks from here. I’d love to take you there for dinner. We can discuss the future, our partnership.” He stroked her hair and then let his hand rest on her shoulder; it felt warm and heavy. “Some risks are worth taking, don’t you think, Anne? I suppose that’s what keeps life interesting. But I’m not in the mood to go over all the details at the moment. And you look a little tired yourself, my dear, all flushed and overheated. We can relax here for the rest of the afternoon. What do you say?”

  Anne wanted to say “Fuck you and your money, you manipulative old lecher,” but when she opened her mouth, “Sounds wonderful” came out.

  “Shall I make the reservations for, say, seven o’clock, give you time to catch the last shuttle back to your famous husband?”

  His hand was stroking her neck, trembling slightly with anticipation. His fingers slipped under her collar, dry and insistent.

  “Seven o’clock is fine,” she said.

  He got up and walked to his desk and picked up the phone. “Shall I draw the drapes?” he asked.

  “Please,” she said. “The sunlight is a little glaring.”

  Anne wakes with a start-what’s she doing on the living room couch? Early gray light pours in the windows, and for a moment she’s afraid. And then she remembers-the baby, the life growing inside her. That goddamn unreliable diaphragm. She remembers coming home from Cambridge, the money secured, but feeling soiled, guilty, enraged. She will never give birth to Farnsworth’s child. But what if Charles is the father? Where is Charles? She sits up and rubs her neck. He’s not in the apartment; she can sense it. He didn’t come back last night. Anne feels that dreaded sense of overload. She takes the whole mess and shoves it to one side of her consciousness, out of view. Big day: she’s going to crack the whip on those website designers; she wants Home on-line in eight weeks or they’re history.

  Tea, fruit, shower. Then it hits her-she knows where Charles has disappeared to. Fine. She has her own problems. What she will do is call the employment agency, hire that Emma, get Charles moving whether he likes it or not. Anne gets up and heads into the kitchen to start her day.

  8

  Charles speeds across the George Washington Bridge and onto the Palisades Parkway and then the New York State Thruway, heading north, due north, away from the city. As the first gray of morning spreads up from the eastern horizon, he drives-the speedometer on his black Jaguar hovering around 80-through the lush, mottled Indian-summer landscape of the Hudson Valley. From the car phone, he leaves Anne a message that he has to get away. He speeds past Albany and still he drives north. The ancient Adirondack Mountains, vast and virtually unpopulated, loom up and encircle the Thruway with their deep green forests.

  Charles feels he’s entering uncharted terrain, a place where all measures of ourselves must be recalibrated, where the forests and lakes and mountains demand an honesty that matches their own. Charles exits the Thruway and heads west, through tiny rustic towns that survive on the trade of transient hunters and hikers. Surrounded by the glorious riot of autumn, he drives for hours, rarely seeing another car, deep into the wilderness, winding along roads that tunnel through the endless forest. Finally he turns off paved road and onto a rutted, rocky track that jackknifes its way up a mountainside. He comes to a clearing that opens like a welcoming hand. There, perched on a rocky promontory above a small lake, sits a cottage that is the stuff of a hermit’s dreams-weathered, snug, crisscrossed by an orgy of incestuous vines. Charles gets out of his car and savors the sight. The afternoon sun is warm on his face. He listens to the dueling calls of the mountain song-birds, takes a deep breath and tastes the cool air. He knows he’s done the right thing, come to the right place.

  “Take that, you little flickers!”

  Charles smiles at the sound of the familiar voice and walks around the side of the cottage. Making her way around the periphery of her garden with the aid of a cane, sprinkling deer poison as she goes, is Portia Damron-tiny Portia, well into her eighties, a Pall Mall sticking from her scowling lips, her weathered, wrinkled face a map of the world’s sorrows.

  “Hello, Portia.”

  Focused on her mission, Portia ignores his greeting, doesn’t even glance in his direction. “There’s only one thing in this world I hate more than people-deer. Bambi was a pack of lies. They should make a sequel and reveal them for what they are: pesky, voracious, and disease-carrying.” She angrily jiggles her cane in the direction of a half-devoured cabbage.

  The job done, Portia straightens up and meets Charles’s eyes for the first time. “You look like hell, Charles. Of course, you live in hell, so it no w
onder.” Without waiting for a response, she heads toward the cottage. “Sun’s just about past the yardarm. Let’s have a martini and try to forget we’re alive.”

  As a chicken roasts in the enormous old cast-iron oven, Charles sits by the fire with his feet up. He feels utterly at home, safe and protected in the cavelike cottage with its overflowing ashtrays and half-filled coffee cups and books, books everywhere-overflowing the shelves that line the walls, heaped in piles on the floor, spilling off tables and chairs. Across the room in the open kitchen Portia is whipping up dinner-between drags on her Pall Mall-with a vigor that belies her years. Root vegetables, tiny red potatoes, a salad of the season’s last greens, corn bread-suddenly Charles is ravenous.

  “That smells fantastic.”

  “It’s all fresh. Primitive. Nothing like it.”

  “God, it’s good to be up here.”

  “And to what do I owe?”

  “I just needed to kick back and relax.”

  “My bullshit alarm just went off.” Portia looks up from the sink where she washing the greens and eyes Charles with piercing honesty. “Except for a perfunctory phone call now and then and an Anne Turner Christmas card that managed to be hideously sentimental and depressingly trendy at the same time, I’ve barely heard from you in the past year. Now you show up without notice and want me to believe you’re here to kick back and relax?”

  Charles knows she has him, of course; he has traveled up here to be had. It’s time to get honest with the one person who knows him better than any other. He stands and begins to pace around the room.

  “You know what I admire about you, Portia?”

  “I hope more things than we have time to discuss.”

  “You were a legend. You could have taught forever. But when you felt your time was up, you quit.”

  “When I had nothing more to say, I quit,” Portia answers, drying the greens on a soft old dish towel.

  “Exactly. You quit. With dignity and grace.”

  “And a damn good pension. What’s your point?”

  “Have you read the new Mailer?” Charles asks.

  “It’s brilliant. Too long, but brilliant.”

  “And the new Styron?”

  “Short, but also brilliant.”

  Charles stops his pacing and looks out the window at the lake below. It’s just past twilight-that sweet fleeting in-between time-and the lake glows like an indigo jewel. “And my latest?”

  Portia stops what she’s doing and considers for a moment. “Exactly the right length.”

  Charles sits back down and instead of denying his hurt allows himself to accept it. “I wondered why I hadn’t heard from you.”

  “I thought I’d wait until I was asked.”

  In the silence that follows, Portia begins tossing the salad. “Do you remember your story about the Vietnamese whore nursing her baby?”

  “That was the first story I ever wrote,” Charles says, remembering that dusty Saigon street corner, the painted whore just past puberty, the suckling infant, the nineteen-year-old boy, Charles, who watched them, fascinated, before finally approaching the mother, the child-mother, and offering her candy and money, which she accepted greedily, with a suggestive leer, her baby still hanging off her nipple.

  “When you stood up in class and read it, I started to sweat with excitement.”

  Charles looks into the fire. “But what if there is no more? What if I have nothing left to say?”

  “If I believed that, I wouldn’t be wasting my time listening to you.” Portia takes the chicken out of the oven. It’s a succulent golden brown, surrounded by roasted potatoes, turnips, carrots, and onions. “Let’s eat. We have a lot of talking to do.”

  Later, deep in the deep Adirondack night, Portia sits in her favorite chair while Charles paces. The picked-over dinner and empty wine bottles cover the table, the air is thick with smoke from Portia’s endless stream of Pall Malls, and the fire is a rubble of glowing red embers. Charles is in that realm beyond fatigue, where the mind finds its third wind and a terrible clarity takes hold.

  “What’s that line at the end of Gatsby, when Nick talks about leaving the East? ‘So when the blue smoke of leaves…’ ” Charles says, shutting his eyes as he searches for the words.

  Portia is right there: “ ‘When the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the laundry stiff on the line-’ ”

  “ ‘I decided to come back home.’ That’s it. That’s the kind of simple, clear poetry I want,” Charles says. “Nothing extra, every word exact. Not one comma out of place: ‘The blue smoke of brittle leaves

  …’ ”

  Fitzgerald’s words hang in the air. Charles sinks into a chair and feels the last years-the fearsome task of dredging up yet another book, the tightening vise of expectation, the bitter disap pointment, the seductive call of cynicism-coming home to roost on his tired bones. He’s at ground zero, defenseless.

  “I’ve lost it, Portia. My inspiration. My will. The kid who wrote that story is dead.”

  The weight of their history, their love, bears down on Charles. Portia is the closest thing to a parent, a real parent, that he has ever had. He can feel something like tears coming up inside him. He fights down the queasy feeling in his chest, the burning behind his eyes. He wants to turn and look at her, but doesn’t think he could hold her gaze. He lets his head roll back on the chair and closes his eyes.

  From across the room, Portia studies him carefully.

  Out in the moonless night the water, the forest, and the sky are endless and implacable. Portia’s living room window casts a soft yellow glow into the vastness.

  How different the world looks in the morning. What seemed like hell the night before turns out to be merely purgatory, as if the dark’s demons are unable to survive the infusion of light. Portia is up and about long before Charles wakes from a profound sleep, feeling rested for the first time in recent memory. For a long time he lies on the narrow single bed in Portia’s cluttered spare room, listening to the dense quiet of the woods.

  Something happened the night before: his logjam broke, and he can feel the cooling waters of hope flow through him. Maybe it was just admitting-to Portia, yes, but more important, to himself-how scared he is. He has begun to take measure of himself; just coming up here has been a first step.

  After a quiet breakfast of blueberry corncakes, eggs laid ten minutes earlier and fried crisp around the edges, and strong coffee spiked with chicory, Portia and Charles head outside, out to the lake, to fish. And to talk. They make their way slowly down the rickety wooden steps that lead down the steep, rocky cliff to the water. The deserted lake is glorious in the morning sun. They climb into Portia’s battered rowboat, and she takes the oars while Charles readies the fishing rods.

  “The little shits are down there laughing at us,” Portia says as they head out to the middle of the lake.

  “Let’s hope they’re laughing with their mouths open.”

  Portia pulls up the oars and takes her rod from Charles. They both cast off, breaking the still water with soft splashes. They fish in silence, a sympathetic calm settling over them.

  “Portia, I need to make a lot of money. I’m in over my head,” Charles says finally.

  “Write as if you have a hundred million in the bank,” Portia says dismissively.

  “It’s awfully easy for you to say that, up here with nothing to lose.”

  “I have you to lose, Charles, and I don’t want to… Or have I already?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Was coming up here just a little game to play with yourself, a cut-rate therapy session, a way to prove you really are an artist, to pay your psychic dues? Because if it was, I have better things to do with my time.”

  Charles closes his eyes for a moment, examining his own motives. His actions in the months ahead will determine what kind of man he really is. He needs to prove himself again, to Portia, to Anne, to Nina-and to himself.

 
“You know how important you are to me, Portia. You know how much of Life and Liberty is yours. Remember those glorious, grueling months up in Hanover? You took the raw material and molded it into that book.”

  “I did. But you wrote it.”

  “I need your help again. I’m lost. I have no idea what to write about.”

  A blue heron, majestic and prehistoric, rises up from the shore and flies away over the treetops. Portia shades her eyes to watch its ascent. She keeps her eyes on the sky long after the bird is out of sight.

  “Sometimes inspiration comes to us. Sometimes we have to go searching for it,” she says.

  “Where?”

  “Only you can answer that question. There’s a lot at stake here, Charles. Of course I’ll help you. But you’ve got to be willing to work, to break out of that velvet-lined rut you’re in.”

  And then Portia gets a bite. Bracing herself, she deftly reels in her line until a large, thrashing trout breaks the water. She grabs the fish with one hand, the hook gleaming as it pierces the scaly flesh, the animal’s body whipping wildly in her grasp.

  “Look at this fish, Charles. It’s fighting, it’s fighting for its life.” In a swift, practiced move she pulls out the hook and holds up the struggling fish. “As long as we breathe, that’s what we have to do. We have to fight. We have no choice. There’s a price tag on every gift.”

  Portia tosses the fish back into the water. Spared, it plunges down to the depths, shimmery and alive.

  “Now get back down to that city and get to work.”

  9

  Charles tosses his bag on a bench in the foyer and walks through the kitchen and down the long hallway that leads to his two-room office. He’s brought up short by the sight of a young woman sitting at the desk in the outer office. Plain as toast, she’s wearing a gray flannel skirt, a cream blouse, and a navy sweater-vest. Her wavy brown hair is pulled back with a small band and she has on no makeup at all, as far as Charles can tell. She looks up from a copy of Bleak House, startled by his abrupt arrival. She stands quickly, flustered and awkward, smoothing out her skirt.