The Broken Teaglass (31 page)

“I just want to read all the cits before I can really believe this. I mean, why her? Why then? Why
that day?”

“She probably asked the same questions,” Mona whispered. “I don’t think she’ll be able to answer them.”

“Maybe so,” I said. “But I think I’m going to do a marathon session for the rest of the cits. I’m gonna bring as many 1952 words home as I can.”

“Whatever floats your boat,” she said. “But I think we’ve got the gist.”

“I’m gonna see how many I can dig up in the next few days. I want to have the whole thing. I’m getting tired of just pieces.”

“Ah, yes,” Mona sighed, and waved the “deep-six” citation. “But we lexicographers so rarely get to have ‘the whole thing,’ as you put it. In work and in life.”

“Stop. Did I tell you I’m taking the twenty-eighth off?”

“You are? For what?”

“Mental health day, sort of. ‘Attending to personal matters,’ as they say. I’m using a vacation day.”

“You’ve already cleared it with Dan?”

“No.”

“No? Better ask him soon then. The twenty-eighth is the day after tomorrow, you know. I’d give him a little lead time. Dan never says no, but he appreciates at least a gesture of courtesy.”

I knocked on Dan’s open office
door.

“Hello there,” he said. “Come on in.”

“You have a second?”

“Certainly.”

“I wanted to ask you if I could use one of my vacation days the day after tomorrow. Something personal has come up.”

“Billy,” he said, “close the door.”

I did.

“Sit down a minute.”

Dan spread his palms out in front of him. Mildly, like a cartoon Jesus.

“First of all—yes. Of course you can use one of your vacation days this week. They’re yours to use as you wish.”

“Thanks.”

“I was hoping you had come to me to speak about a different matter.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The
Teaglass
cits …,” he began.

It took me a few seconds to compose my face. Dan seemed to be deliberately giving me ample time to do so.

“Can we speak about those for a moment?” he asked.

I nodded, mortified.

“I actually recognized some time ago that you and Mona were uncovering them.”

“I’m sorry—” I said hoarsely.

“No need to apologize. It wasn’t only your own indiscretions but also Mr. Phillips’s.” Dan chuckled.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he continued. “It’s a pretty extraordinary situation. It’s always awkward when someone makes something private public, at the wrong time, or in the wrong place. There’s no right way to handle it.

“Now, I imagine this will strike you as highly unorthodox, and I don’t usually condone this sort of thing … but I’m going to ask that you put all of the citations back where you found them. When you get a chance.”

I nodded. Dan leaned forward. Slowly, he pulled a newly sharpened pencil out of the mug on his desk.

“That’s where she wanted the story to reside, for whatever reason. I’m sure you agree it’s best to respect her wishes. Even if those wishes were wrought mostly from trauma. Now, I don’t know how much you’ve gathered—”

“She was … the girl … the girl they saw in the park?”

“They?” Dan said. He poised his pencil over his blotter calendar.

“The two witnesses who said they saw a blonde girl. I saw it in the papers.”

“I see …” He began to draw the pencil lightly back and forth across one of the calendar boxes, barely making a mark. “I didn’t realize your interest had reached that level.”

“Yeah, well …”

“It was really just a horrifying situation,” he continued, looking up at me. “It seems to me that a victim of such a random act of violence should be given the freedom to disclose on her own terms. However irrational, I’ve always felt it best just to leave it—”

“You don’t have to say anything else,” I said. “Consider it done.”

“Am I correct that the only other readers were Mona and Mr. Phillips?”

“Um … yeah.”

“Fitting,” Dan sighed. “As the cits are addressed to Mr. Phillips.”

“Maybe this will sound a little forward. But it sort of seems like they’re really, in a way, meant for you. Like she just wanted you to know why—”

As soon as I said it I regretted my presumption. I actually had no idea who Mary Anne wanted to know what or why or why not.

“They’re addressed to Mr. Phillips,” he repeated, a little huskily. “I’m part of the intended audience, but not the actual conversation…. She speaks directly to Red. She acknowledges him. But I believe ‘Dolores Beekmim’ is what’s supposed to catch
my
eye. Only I would know about Dolores Beekmim.”

“Who
is
Dolores Beekmim?”

“Dolores Beekmim is just a name.” Dan started doodling absently on his desk blotter. “It doesn’t mean much. It was a cat.”

“A cat?”

“Mary Anne’s cat. She disliked cats. She wanted a dog, but couldn’t have one in her apartment. At my urging, she decided to give a cat a try, just for company. We named the cat together.”

“So you’ve read them all? All of the cits?”

“Well. Some of them. Over the years. So many cits cross my desk, Dolores Beekmim was bound to catch my eye eventually. The first one was quite a shock.”

He chuckled stiffly, reddening a little. I glanced down at his sketch. On his blotter, he’d drawn a crude little picture of a pie. Squiggle marks spiraled out of the top of the drawing, denoting steam.

“But there’s a certain elegance to a story that’s meant to be revealed slowly, in fragments, to give its readers a little pause, a little … caution.”

He shifted in his seat.

“In any event,” he continued, adding one more curl of steam to his pie, “you’ll return them to the files.”

“Yes.”

“While you’re at it …,” he said, and then didn’t continue.

“Yeah?”

He threw down his pencil and rummaged in his desk for a moment, then handed me a cit.

“Will you do me a favor, please, Billy, and return this one as well? It caught my eye a year or two ago, and I held on to it. I’ve been meaning to return it.”

“No problem,” I said.

Dan’s face tensed. “This isn’t a
favor
I’m asking. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention this to other editorial staff. I think you can imagine how easily the information could fall into indiscreet hands.”

“Do any other staff—”

“I think what I’m saying is clear enough,” Dan cut in quietly. “A big part of what makes this job difficult is knowing how to handle silence. Can you handle silence, Billy?”

He stared at me. I clasped my hands in my lap because they were shaking.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Good,” he said icily.

Dan sighed and finally blinked. I wondered if all the sighs were out of disappointment in his wayward staff or for lost love.

“So you can handle what I’m asking you to do?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Then let’s both get back to work. I’ve an appointment with Needham in five minutes. We’ve got these geography dictionary edits to discuss. Wars and coups keep happening. Places keep changing their names.”

“But, Dan,” I squeaked.

“What?”

“Why the Korean War?”

It could be anything. Maybe she liked
M*A*S*H
. It would make about as much solid sense as Dolores Beekmim.

Dan raised a weary eyebrow.

“She considered herself,” he said, “oddly tied up in that moment of history.”

I waited for him to say more.

“It wasn’t an academic interest,” he added.

I wasn’t sure if he considered that a full explanation, so I didn’t move.

“Mary Anne’s father nearly died in Korea. Her mother’s first fiancé
did
die there, while they were still engaged. Mary Anne felt a personal obligation to understand as many details of that history as possible. Every moment of it, she told me once. As if she could narrow down the specific seconds when it was determined that she would exist and someone else wouldn’t.”

“But any moment could be like that.”

“But none is so concentrated as it is in war,” Dan said.

“You think so?”

“She thought so. But she was a little self-involved when it came to the topic. It was an odd obsession of hers. So those years were a natural choice for her. When the time came to tell the story of
this
very fateful moment. Plus it gave her more words to work with than 1985. It was a practical choice, if you look at it that way.”

Dan got out of his chair, put a hand on his lower back, and gave a slight stretch.

“And she was a practically minded young woman,” he said quietly.

“Well, thanks. Thanks for the explanation.” My voice was far too high. “I was just wondering, you know?”

Dan nodded without looking at me and then opened the door.

“No worries,” he said, and motioned for me to go ahead of him.

Once I was alone at my desk, I read the cit he’d given me:

Mona freaked when I told her
about Dan. She was pretty sure Dan was going to fire us both, and wanted to put all the cits back right then and there. But I convinced her that a day or two more with them wasn’t going to hurt anything. Dan wouldn’t check up on us, I was pretty sure. And there was no sense in putting them all back when we were so close to rounding the story out.

In preparation for the twenty-eighth, I crammed my backpack with 1952 citations and bought a bottle of gin on the way home. When I was nineteen, I’d spent my first anniversary stinking drunk, and every subsequent year had been a fading variation on that theme. This year, a couple of drinks and a decent lunch would probably suffice. It was just a nod to the tradition, after all. At the grocery store, I watched my limes, tonic water, and fancy lunch meat slide down the conveyor belt, and felt like I’d forgotten something. Later, as I carried my treats upstairs, I concluded that I hadn’t forgotten anything. The tradition had officially simply grown old. This celebration would, thankfully, be my last.

• • •

December 28 was quiet at first
. Mostly sipping and flipping. A cit here or there. Nothing too revealing. I paced myself. My phone rang about noon.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Billy,” Mona chirped. “How’s your day going?”

“Decent. Did they put a phone at your desk too?”

“No. I’m calling from my cell. I’m at our park bench.”

“Oh.”

“I’m just calling to tell you that Raymond is going apeshit because he needs to answer a letter about ‘top banana’ and all the cits have mysteriously disappeared from the file.”

“Define ‘apeshit.’ Someone going apeshit at Samuelson? I’ll believe it if I ever see it.”

“Okay. Well, it hasn’t been pretty, let’s just put it that way. You’ve got the cits there?”

“Yup. I think so. Haven’t flipped through them yet, though.”

“Well. Just make sure you bring those ones back tomorrow. You might have to say something to Dan. Tell him you didn’t get around to finishing your filing before your day off. I don’t know if we should just slip them in quietly, or stick them in the wrong spot so it looks like a filing error, but—”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll bring them. I’ll take care of them.”

As I hung up, it occurred to me that this anniversary had indeed turned out to be pretty lame. It was a day like any other day, really. I poured myself a stronger drink than my previous one. A gimlet.

I sat at the kitchen table and kept flipping. I was on my second gimlet when this one fell out:

I downed my drink as I read the cit a few more times. This cit had a satisfying finality to it—and its number, 50, was the highest I’d seen so far on any of them. But it reminded me of a question that Mona and I had never quite answered:
Why Red? Why was she narrating to Red?