Perfect Reader (27 page)

“Goddamn it,” she said out loud to herself. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” It was hard not to ascribe a willfulness to the pages as they eluded her. They were gleeful. They somersaulted and nipped one another’s heels. “Come back,” she called after them. Her ineptitude was boundless. “Fuck these fucking poems.” There had been a quiet dignity in the act of theft she had just committed. Now all was undone. The dignity replaced with absurdity. When did sadness simply become absurd? She ran, and tamped down the paper with her feet. She caught every page but one, one Lewis Dempsey original masterpiece lost to Darwin’s vernal breezes. The remaining pages looked windswept and stepped on, as they had been, the manuscript inscribed now also by the elements.

On the ground by the edge of the road, Flora found a good-size rock and placed it in the basket, pinning the poems down. What was she going to do with the cursed papers? She’d stolen them without thinking, to prove she could, maybe; but what pleasure would keeping them bring? None. She would return them to Cynthia’s. Pretend this had never occurred. The elision and the soiling would not go unnoticed, but maybe Cynthia would think it was she who had somehow misplaced the page, it was she who had chased them through a field and trampled them. And if one page was missing, it mattered little to take one more. Flora flipped through till she found the poem “The Wizard.” That one she would keep. She folded the page neatly in quarters and tucked it into the back pocket of her jeans. She got on her bike and pedaled back to Cynthia’s.

A Darwin Campus Security cruiser was parked in the driveway, a compact uniformed man standing, talking to Cynthia’s neighbor. Flora stopped, and the neighbor pointed. She was a large woman, hunched and wide and over eighty, Flora guessed. Still, it seemed unlikely she could outpedal the cruiser on the old Peugeot.

“Excuse me, miss,” the officer called over. “Can we have a moment of your time?”

Flora walked her bike toward them.

“Miss …”

“Dempsey, Flora Dempsey.”

“Any relation to our former President Dempsey?” he asked.

“My father, yes.”

“What do you know. Very pleased to meet you, Flora Dempsey.” He took off his sunglasses and shook her hand. He did not introduce himself. His eyes were too close together, which made him look either threateningly stupid or benign and lenient. “Mrs. Bianchi here was just telling me she saw a young lady with a bicycle—who may have, in fact, been you—walking around the back of her neighbor’s house. Would you know anything about that?”

“She knows about it, because it was her,” Mrs. Bianchi contributed. “I recognize her little pink sweater. And she was more sneaking than walking.”

“Yes, that was me you saw,” Flora said to the woman, who had the musk of near death about her. “Cynthia Reynolds, your neighbor—she and my father … she’s practically my stepmother. We’re practically family.” She turned to the Darwin cop. “I was supposed to meet her here to pick something up—these papers—but she was running late and she told me to go ahead in and pick them up. The back door was unlocked, so that’s what I did, what I was doing, when Mrs. Bianchi saw me.”

Mrs. Bianchi did not look satisfied. “You see someone you don’t know snooping around and you worry. You say you’re family, but I’ve never seen you before. We’ve had burglaries around here. People are foolish not to lock their doors.”

“I’m sorry I worried you. But I assure you I’m not a burglar.”

“Petty larceny is a problem in the town of Darwin,” the officer informed them, hands on belt. “Maybe if we gave Ms. Reynolds a call now, to verify your version of events, Ms. Dempsey, we could put this whole matter to rest.” He moved toward his car.

“Flora, please,” Flora said calmly. She was Flora-Girl, an innocent, the perfect thief. “And that really is a good idea. But I’m afraid I don’t know how to reach her. As I said, she wasn’t available to meet me and—”

“She’s on faculty, isn’t she? It is a faculty house, after all. I’ll just call down to the station, find the number of her office, and we’ll see if she’s there. Put this whole episode to rest so both of you can get on with your day.”

There was nothing to be said to that. He got into the cruiser and sat with one leg hanging sloppily out the door, conjuring the obscenity of an unzipped fly. This wouldn’t end well. The information was easily attained. In moments, Flora could hear that the officer had Cynthia on the phone.

“This is Doug Daniels, Darwin Campus Security here,” he was saying. “I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am, but I’ve got a Flora Dempsey here, at your residence 340 Chestnut Lane.”

Would Cynthia have her arrested? Did a Darwin Campus Security officer even have the authority to arrest anyone? The editorialists of the
Gazette
would be in fits. She could see the headline in the
Witness:
dempsey daughter reaches new low.

“According to Ms. Dempsey, you two had an appointment you were unable to keep this afternoon,” Officer Daniels went on. “This circumstance resulted in you giving her permission to enter the premises at 340 Chestnut to retrieve an item. It appears to be a stack of papers.”

A silence. Flora stopped breathing. Mrs. Bianchi’s glare orbited from Cynthia’s house to the cruiser to Flora’s face as she strained to hear.

“Uh-huh,” Daniels said. “That’s right. Very good. Okay, then. Thanks very much.”

He approached them slowly, the highlight of his fucking day.
Guess what happened to me today, boys
, he’d tell his fellow Division Three cops, Darwin’s Finest.
Caught the ex-prez’s daughter in some petty larceny
. But then he held out his arms in a gesture of understanding and said, “Ms. Reynolds confirms the story. No cause for alarm. We can all be on our way. Though she’s lucky to have such a vigilant neighbor, Mrs. Bianchi. We in law enforcement rely a great deal on responsible citizens like yourself.”

Was it a trick, a trap? Why was Cynthia being nice? Her way of apologizing for the bad press? Was she claiming the moral high ground, counting on the malleability of a guilty conscience? Or simply planning to use this information to blackmail Flora, to let her know in some noirish way,
The poems see print or I send you to lockup?

Mrs. Bianchi and the officer were staring at Flora, waiting for her to leave. She could not return the poems to the house. She was stuck holding the evidence against her.

“Okay, thanks a lot,” Flora said, and waved good-bye. “Sorry for the misunderstanding.” She walked toward her bike. The officer nodded and got back in his car. Mrs. Bianchi edged away, eyeing Flora over her shoulder.

Flora rode away again, free and clear. But there was no surge of relief. After the excitement of the break-in, the malevolent wind act of a bored God, the near arrest, and the benevolent pardoning, she felt very tired. She tried to concentrate on the insect noise the wheels made in spinning, but she could barely push the pedals, or keep a firm grip on the handlebars. She couldn’t make the short ride home. She could make it just to town. There was a pay phone by the common; she could call someone to pick her up. But the pay phone cost fifty cents—when had that happened? She had no change and no one to call. She could see the windows of Paul’s office, and Dr. Berry’s below, but she had no great wish to render herself pathetic to either one of them, no urge to return to that building ever again. She would never return to that building; it was decided. She’d cross a small part of Darwin off the list. Excise something. One fewer place to return to. Enough returning to the scene of the crime. Though it might be a nice gesture to present to Dr. Berry as a parting gift the fact that she’d been sleeping in her father’s bed—an irresistible Freudian morsel as an adieu.

She propped the Peugeot against the pay phone and sat on the adjacent bench. She pulled the poem she had intended to keep from her back pocket. With it came two business cards: one rather chaste, with the name Bill Curtis, and the title Editor, which Cynthia had foisted on her over breakfast at the Spotted Salamander; the other bescriptured—
And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. John 1:5
—and decreeing Esther Moon, Executive Director and Founder, Intelligent Darwin. Good Lord. How long had it been since she’d washed those jeans? She put the cards back in the pocket and unfolded the poem.

The poem tells of dinners at Ponzu, of watching the two side by side, his daughter “in her day-old braids,” and her friend, the Wizard, “neater, stricter.” “The first love affair,” he writes, “like most won’t end well.” “She is mine and not my own,” the poem goes on, “this other / self I’ve grown, separates from me, cell-like / and utterly. The truth of Oedipus not Freud’s / dirty murder incest romp, but that we / cannot protect our children from their lot.” It ends with a conversation between Georgia and Lewis, Georgia young and battered, and Lewis young and battered, too, though in a different way. She claims she is no wizard—how else to explain the fall? No, he counters, it’s further proof of wizardry—who else survives such Icarus heights? None of us is unscathed, he says. I was before, she tells him. He tells her, Blame me, if you blame anyone at all; I’m at fault, if someone is. She won’t reply but curls her wounded wing around herself and disappears.

“Flora.” It was Paul Davies, walking toward her. But he hadn’t said it in the nice way, not like the boy you had a crush on acknowledging your presence; he’d been called to the headmaster’s office; he’d been caught by the cops. Though it was he who had caught her unprepared.

“Hi, Paul.” She tucked the poem away. Was he stalking her?

“Do you have a minute? Do you want to get a cup of coffee?” he asked.

They hadn’t spoken since their argument, though as they’d never spoken every day, it was possible to imagine that it was not that they had completely given up on each other, but had simply fallen into a patch of busyness and preoccupation.

He noticed her bike. “So you got that back,” he said.

“I’m not in the mood for coffee,” Flora said.

“Mind if I sit, then?”

He sat but didn’t speak. He looked nervous, and handsome. He played with his hands as if they were some fresh, weird discovery.

“How have you been?” she asked.

“I think I may owe you an apology, Flora.”

“For that fight? I don’t think so. We both said stupid things. I certainly wish I’d drunk less and said less that night.”

“Not for the fight per se.”

“Per se?”

“After the fight.”

“Not calling? I didn’t call, either, Paul. We both behaved childishly. But there’s no need to rehash all that. Really.”

“I think I may be responsible for the story in the
Witness
, and I guess, by extension, that nonsense in the
Gazette
today.”

“You
think
?” She stared at him, but he would not look at her.

“I told someone about your dad’s work, and he told someone else, and then that was it. I saw it in the paper.”

Flora lowered her head. She would not throw up in front of him, Paul Davies, Esq., though the revelation was nauseating, her stomach empty and metallic. The worst of it was Cynthia’s kindness, Cynthia’s generosity, Cynthia saying to Officer Daniels of the elite Darwin squad,
Yes, of course she had permission to enter my house. Yes, those papers were hers to take
.

“Please, say something, Flora.”

“Why would you do that? You knew I wasn’t ready for anyone to know.”

“I was so furious, after that fight, I wasn’t myself. You seemed so spoiled, so entitled. And your sense of superiority—as if you were trying to control the way I thought. I felt you didn’t deserve your father’s poetry, that you had no right to be the person in control.”

“For an apology, this is shaping up just great,” she said.

He had talked to his friend Jim, the Apostle who edited the online journal, and Jim had told a colleague, and eventually the Darwin College intern who worked for Jim, and whose job it was to troll the Web site for the most scurrilous postings and delete them, heard, and told his friend at the
Witness
. “At least I think that’s what happened,” Paul said.

“And the anonymous source—that quote?” Flora asked.

“It was an approximation of what I’d said to Jim, passed down second-or thirdhand. Not the world’s most responsible journalism.”

“Or lawyerism, or boyfriendism,” Flora said. “Jesus, Paul.”

Paul looked at her in his old curious way. “We all do things we’re not particularly proud of, because in the short term they make us feel the smallest bit better. Don’t we?”

Flora stood up and moved to her bike, her escape vehicle. As someone who hated to apologize, she accepted that. “So much for attorney-client privilege,” she said.

“You going to have me disbarred?”

“It’s tempting.”

“Is there anything I can do?” he asked. “To make amends?”

She was sure she could think of something.

For Thanksgiving that year, Flora and her mother flew south to see her grandparents and soak up a bit of warmth while her father did God knows what in the President’s House. They lived in a coral-colored world, as old people often did, faded colors for fading lives, in a narrow two-story condo near the beach. Flora’s mother had been closest to her father, but now he was losing himself, every day one further idea or story or proper noun missing or gone. He read excerpts from newspaper articles again and again—always the same sentences from the same stories, his memory failing but his mind remarkably consistent. Each morning, Flora’s grandmother helped him to bathe, and to shave, and to dress. After breakfast, she’d say, “I’ve got to go put my face on”—a creepy expression—before disappearing into the bathroom for what felt like hours. Now it was as if she had to put his face on, too.