The Hellfire Club (7 page)

16

“WHAT DID YOU
think you saw?”

“Nothing.”

“You went back in the bedroom. You had something on your mind. What was it?”

“Nothing.” He looked sideways at her, so shaken he was white. “It was a dumb idea. I should have just gone home.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I wanted to see that house.” He paused. “And I wanted you to see it.”

“Why?”

He waited a second before answering. “I thought if you looked at it, you might stop having nightmares.”

“Pretty strange idea,” Nora said.

“Okay, it was a rotten idea.” His voice grew louder. “It was the worst idea in the history of the world. In fact, every single idea I’ve ever had in my life was really terrible. Are we in agreement now? Good. Then we can forget about it.”

“Davey.”

“What?”

“Do you remember when I asked if you were upset?”

“No.” He hesitated, then sighed again, and his glance suggested the arrival of a confession. “Why would I be upset?”

Nora gathered herself. “You must have been surprised by what your father said about Hugo Driver.”

He looked at her as if trying to recall Alden’s words. “He said he was a great writer.”

“You said he was a great writer.” After a second of silence she said, “What I mean is his attitude.”

“Yeah,” Davey said. “You’re right. That was a surprise. He sort of jolted me, I guess.”

For Nora the next few seconds filled with a hopeful tension.

“I’ve got something on my mind, I guess I was worked up. . . . I don’t want to fight, Nora.”

“So you’re not mad at me anymore.”

“I wasn’t mad at you. I just feel confused.”

Two hours with his parents had turned him back into Pippin Little. If he needed a Green Knight, she volunteered on the spot. She had asked for a job, and here one was sitting next to her. She could help Davey become his successful adult self. She would help him get the position he deserved at Chancel House. Her other plans, befriending Daisy and moving to New York, were merely elements of this larger, truer occupation.
Start,
she commanded herself.
Now.

“Davey,” she said, “what would you like to be doing at Chancel House?”

Again, he seemed to force himself to think. “Editorial work.”

“Then that’s what you should be doing.”

“Well, yeah, but you know, Dad . . .” He gave her a resigned look.

“You’re not like that disgusting guy who takes old ladies to lunch, you’re not Dick Dart. What job do you want most?”

He bit the lining of his cheek before deciding to declare what she already suspected. “I’d like to edit Blackbird Books. I think I could build Blackbird into something good, but Dad is canceling the line.”

“Not if you make him keep it.”

“How do I do that?”

“I don’t know, exactly. But for sure you have to come at him with a plan.” She thought for a moment. “Get all the figures on the Blackbird Books. Give him projections, give him graphs. Have lists of writers you want to sign up. Print up a presentation. Tell him you’ll do it on top of your other work.”

He turned his head to gape at her.

“I’ll help. We’ll put something together that he won’t be able to refuse.”

He looked away, looked back, and filled his lungs with air. “Well, okay. Let’s give it a try.”

“Blackbird Books, here we come,” she said, and remembered seeing the row of titles by Clyde Morning and Marletta Teatime in Natalie’s bedroom. Unlike Natalie’s other books, these had not been filed alphabetically, but separated, at the end of the bottom shelf.

“You know, it might work,” Davey said.

Nora wondered if putting the books together meant they were significantly better or worse than other horror novels. Maybe what was crucial about them was that they were published by Blackbird—Chancel House.

“I was thinking once that we could do a series of classics, books in the public domain.”

“Good idea,” Nora said. Looking back, she thought that the Blackbird Books on Natalie’s shelf seemed uniformly new and unmarked, as if they had been bought at the same time and never read.

“If we can put together a serious presentation, he’ll have to pay attention.”

“Davey . . .” A sense of hope and expectancy filled Nora, and the question escaped her before she could call it back. “Do you ever think of moving out of Westerholm?”

He lifted his chin. “To tell you the truth, I think about getting out of this hole just about every day. But look, I know how much living here means to you.”

Her laughter amazed him.

BOOK II

PADDY’S TAIL

T
HE FIRST THING
P
IPPIN SAW WAS THE TIP OF A LITTLE TAIL, NO WIDER THAN FOUR HORSEHAIRS BOUND TOGETHER, BUT IN SEARCH OF THE REST OF THE ANIMAL, HE FOLLOWED THE TAIL AROUND ROCKS, THROUGH TALL WEEDS, IN GREAT CIRCLES, UP AND DOWN GREAT LOOPS ON THE GRASS, AND WHEN AT LAST HE REACHED THE END OF THE LONG, LONG TAIL, HE FOUND ATTACHED TO IT A TINY MOUSE.
T
HE MOUSE APPEARED TO
BE DEAD.

17

ALTHOUGH DAVEY SEEMED
moody and distracted, the following five days were nearly as happy as any Nora could remember. One other period—several weeks in Vietnam, in memory the happiest of her life—had come at a time when she had been too busy to think of anything but work. Looking back, she had said to herself,
So that was happiness.

Her first month in the Evacuation Hospital had jolted her so thoroughly that by its end she was no longer certain what she would need to get her through. Pot, okay. Alcohol, you bet. Emotional calluses, even better. At the rate of twenty to thirty surgical cases a day, she had learned about debride-ment and irrigation—clearing away dead skin and cleaning the wound against infection—worms in the chest cavity, amputations, crispy critters, and pseudomonas. She particularly hated pseudomonas, a bacterial infection that coated burn patients with green slime. During that month, she had junked most of what she had been taught in nursing school and learned to assist at high-speed operations, clamping blood vessels and cutting where the neurosurgeon told her to cut. At night her boots left bloody trails across the floor. She was in a flesh factory, not a hospital. The old, idealistic Nora Curlew was being unceremoniously peeled away like a layer of outgrown clothes, and what she saw of the new was a spiritless automaton.

Then a temporary miracle occurred. As many patients died during or after operations, the wounded continued to scream from their cots, and Nora was always exhausted, but not
as
exhausted, and the patients separated into individuals. To these people she did rapid, precise, necessary things that often permitted them to live. At times, she cradled the head of a dying young man and felt that particles of her own being passed into him, easing and steadying. She had won a focused concentration out of the chaos around her, and every operation became a drama in which she and the surgeon performed necessary, inventive actions which banished or at least contained disorder. Some of these actions were elegant” sometimes the entire drama took on a rigorous, shattering elegance. She learned the differences between the surgeons, some of them fullbacks, some concert pianists, and she treasured the compliments they gave her. At nights, too alert with exhaustion to sleep, she smoked Montagnard grass with the others and played whatever they were playing that day—cards, volleyball, or insults.

At the end of her fifth week in Vietnam, a neurosurgeon named Chris Cross had been reassigned and a new surgeon, Daniel Harwich, had rotated in. Cross, a cheerful blond mesomorph with thousands of awful jokes and a bottomless appetite for beer, had been a fullback surgeon, but a great fullback. He worked athletically, with flashes of astounding grace, and Nora had decided that, all in all, she would probably never see a better surgeon. Their entire unit mourned his going, and when his replacement turned out to be a stringy, lint-haired geek with Coke-bottle glasses and no visible traces of humor, they circled their wagons around Captain Cross’s memory and politely froze out the intruder. A tough little nurse named Rita Glow said she’d work with the clown, what the hell, it was all slice ’n’ dice anyhow, and while Nora continued her education in the miraculous under the unit’s other two surgeons, one a bang-smash fullback, one a pianist who had learned some bang-smash tendencies from Chris Cross, she noticed that not only did geeky Dan Harwich put in his twelve-hour days with the rest of them but he got through more patients with fewer complaints and less drama.

One day Rita Glow said she had to see this guy work, he was righteous, he was a fucking
tap dancer
in there, and the next morning she swapped assignments to put Nora across the table from Harwich. Between them was a paralyzed young soldier whose back looked like raw meat. Harwich told her she was going to have to help him while he cut shell fragments from the boy’s vertebrae. He was both a fullback and a pianist, and his hands were astonishingly fast and sure. After three hours, he closed the boy’s back with the quickest, neatest stitches she had ever seen, looked over at Nora, and said, “Now that I’m warmed up, let’s do something hard, okay?”

Within three weeks she was sleeping with Harwich, and within four she was in love. Then the skies opened. Tortured, mangled bodies packed the OR, and they worked seventy-eight hours straight through. She and Harwich crawled into bed covered with the blood of other people, made love, slept for a second, and got up and did the whole thing all over again. They were shelled in the middle of operations and in the middle of the night, sometimes the same thing, and as the clarity of the earlier period shredded, details of individual soldiers burned themselves into her mind. No longer quite sane, she thrust the terror and panic into a locked inner closet.

After three months she was raped by two dumbbell grunts who caught her as she came outside on a break. One of them hit her in the side of the head, pushed her down, and fell on her. The other kneeled on her arms. At first she thought they had mistaken her for a Vietcong, but almost instantly she realized that what they had mistaken her for was a living woman. The rape was a flurry of thumps and blows and enormous, reeking hands over her mouth” it was having the breath mashed out of her while grunting animals dug at her privates. While it went on, Nora was punched through the bottom of the world. This was entirely literal. The column of the world went from bottom to top, and now she had been smashed through the bottom of the column along with the rest of the shit. Demons leaned chattering out of the darkness.

The second grunt rolled off, the first grunt let go of her arms, and they sprinted away. She heard their footsteps and realized that now she was on the other side, with the gibbering demons; then she gathered the demons into her psychic hands and stuffed them into an inner container just large enough to hold them.

Nora did not tell Harwich what had happened until hours later, when she looked down at the blood soaking through her clothes, thought it was hers, and fainted. A grim Harwich accepted her refusal to report the incident but followed her out of the OR on a break to pass from his hands to hers a dead officer’s hand-gun. This she kept as close as possible until her last morning in Vietnam, when she dropped it into the nurses’ latrine. Even after Dan Harwich left Vietnam, vowing that he would write (he did) and that they had a future together (they didn’t), she used her awareness of the gun beneath her pillow to fend off nightmares of the incident until she could almost think that she had forgotten it. And for years after Vietnam it was as if she really had forgotten all about it—until she had reached a kind of pro-visional, static happiness in Westerholm, Connecticut. In Westerholm, the ordinary, terrible nightmares of dead and dying soldiers had begun to be supplanted by the other, worse nightmares—about being pushed through the hole at the bottom of the world.

Long after, Nora sometimes looked back at that exalted period before the war slammed down on her and thought:
Happiness comes when you are looking elsewhere, it is a by-product, of no importance in itself.

18

EVERY NIGHT THAT
week, Nora and Davey delved into Blackbird Books, playing with figures and trying to work out a presentation that would convince Alden. Davey remained moody and remote but seemed grateful for Nora’s help. To see what Blackbird Books were like, Nora read
The Waiting Grave
by Marletta Teatime and
Blood Bond
by Clyde Morning. Davey sounded out agents” he and Nora drew up lists of writers who might sign up with a revitalized Blackbird Books. They learned that Blackbird’s greatest appeal was its connection to Chancel House, but that Chancel House had done even less with the line than Davey had imagined.

In 1977, its first year, Blackbird had published twelve paperback originals by writers then unknown. By 1979, half of the ten original writers had left in search of more promotion, higher advances, and better editing. In those days an assistant editor named Merle Marvell had handled the line. Marvell’s secretary, shared with two other assistant editors, copyedited Blackbird novels for fifteen dollars a book. (Alden would not waste money on a professional copy editor.) Blackbird stubbornly refused to lay golden eggs, and by 1981 all of its original writers had moved on, leaving behind only Teatime and Morning, who had produced their first books. No longer an assistant editor, Merle Marvell bought one first novel that won an important prize and another that made the best-seller list and thereafter had no more time for Blackbird. Since then, Blackbird’s two stalwarts sent in their manuscripts and took their money. Neither had an agent. Instead of addresses, they had post office boxes—Teatime’s in Norwalk, Connecticut, Morning’s in midtown Manhattan. Their telephone numbers had never been divulged. They never demanded higher advances, lunches, or ad budgets. Clyde Morning had won the British Fantasy Award in 1983, and Marletta Teatime had been nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 1985. They went on producing a book a year until 1989, when each of them stopped writing.

“Chancel House has been publishing these people for more than ten years, and you don’t even know their telephone numbers?”

“That’s not the weird part,” Davey said. They were devouring a sausage and mushroom pizza delivered by a gnome in a space helmet who on closer inspection had become a sixteen-year-old girl wearing a motorcycle helmet. Room had been made on the table for a bottle of Robert Mondavi Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon and two glasses by shoving papers, printouts, and sheets torn from legal pads into piles. “The weird part is what I found on a shelf in the conference room today.”

Like the old Davey, he raised his eyebrows and smiled, teasing her. Nora thought he looked wonderful. She liked the way he ate pizza, with a knife and fork. Nora picked up a slice and chomped, pulling away long strings of mozzarella, but Davey addressed a pizza as though it were filet mignon. “Okay,” she said, “what did you find on this shelf?”

“Remember I told you that every new manuscript gets written down in a kind of a ledger? Now all this is on a computer. Whatever happens to the submission gets entered beside the title—rejected and returned, or accepted, with the date. I was wondering if we might have rejected books by Morning or Teatime, so I went back to ’89, the first year we used computers, and there was Clyde Morning. He submitted a book called
Spectre
in June ’89, and the manuscript never left the house. It wasn’t rejected, but it was never accepted, either. He didn’t even have an editor, so no one was actually responsible for the manuscript.”

“What happened to it?”

“Precisely. I went down to the production department. Of course nobody could remember. Most of the scripts they work on are kept for a year or two after publication, why I don’t know, and then get returned to the editor, who sends them back to the author. I looked at all of them, but I couldn’t find
Spectre.
A production assistant finally reminded me that they sometimes squirrel things away on the shelves in the conference room. It’s like the dead letter office.” Davey was grinning.

“And you went to the conference room”—he was nodding his head and grinning even more wildly—“and you . . . you found the book?”

“Right there! And not only that . . .”

She looked at him in astonishment. “You read it?”

“I skimmed it, anyhow. It’s kind of sloppy, but I think it’s publishable. I have to see if it’s still available—I suppose I have to find out if Morning is still
alive—
but it could be the leadoff in our new line.”

She liked the
our.
“So we’re almost ready.”

“I want to go in on Monday.” He did not have to be more specific. “He’s still in a pretty good mood on Monday afternoons.” This was Friday evening. “I got a call back from an agent this morning, sounding me out about a couple of writers I’m sure we could get without breaking the bank.”

“You devil,” she said. “You’ve been sitting on this ever since you came home.”

“Just waiting for the right moment.” He finished the last of his pizza. “Do you want to play around with the presentation some more, or is there something else we could do?”

“Like celebrate?”

“If you’re in the mood,” Davey said.

“I definitely feel a mood coming on,” Nora said.

“Well, then.” He looked at her almost uncertainly.

“Come on, big boy,” she said. “We’ll take care of the dishes later.”

Twenty minutes later, Davey lay with his hands folded on his stomach, staring up at the ceiling. “Sweetie,” she said, “I didn’t say it hurt, I just said it was uncomfortable. I felt dry, but I’m sure that’s just temporary. I have an appointment with my doctor next week to talk about hormone replacement. Look at it this way—we probably don’t have to worry about getting pregnant anymore.”

“I have condoms. You have your . . . thing. Of course we don’t have to worry about that.”

“Davey, I’m forty-nine. My body is changing. There has to be this period of adjustment.”

“Period of adjustment.”

“That’s all. My doctor says everything will be fine as long as I eat right and exercise, and probably I’ll have to start taking estrogen. It happens to every woman, and now it’s my turn.”

He turned his head to her. “Were you dry last time?”

“No.” She tried not to sigh. “I wasn’t.”

“So why are you this time?”

“Because this is the time it happened.”

“But you’re not an old woman.” He rolled over and half-buried his face in the pillow. “I know what’s wrong. I got too excited or something, and now you’re turned off.”

“Davey, I’m starting to go through menopause. Of course I’m not turned off. I love you. We’ve always had wonderful sex.”

“You can’t have wonderful sex with someone who wakes up moaning and groaning almost every night.”

“It isn’t . . .” This was not going to be a fruitful remark. Neither would it be fruitful to remark that you couldn’t have sex with a man who would not come to your bed, or who left your bed to worry about work or Hugo Driver or whatever it was Davey worried about late at night.

“Well, a lot of nights, anyhow,” he said, taking up her unspoken comment. “Maybe you need therapy or something. You’re too young for menopause. When my mother went through it, she had a lot of white hair, she was over fifty, and she turned into a total bitch. She was impossible, she was like in a rage for at least a year.”

“People have different reactions. It’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“People in menopause don’t have periods. You had one a little while ago.”

“I had a period that lasted more than two weeks. Then I didn’t have one for about six weeks.”

“I don’t have to hear all the gory details.”

“The gory details are my department, right. But everything’s going to be all right. This is
temporary.
”

“God, I hope so.”

What did Davey hope was temporary? Menopause? Aging? She moved across the sheet and put an arm over his shoulder. He turned his face away. Nora kissed the back of his head and slid her other arm beneath him. When he did not attempt to shrug her off or push her away, she pulled him into her. He resisted only a second or two before turning his head to her and slipping his arms around her. His cheek felt wet against hers. “Oh, honey,” she said, and moved her head back to see the tears leaking from his eyes. Davey wiped his face, then held her close.

“This is no good.”

“It’ll get better.”

“I don’t know what to
do.
”

“Try talking about it,” Nora said, swallowing the words
for a change.

“I sort of think I have to.”

“Good.”

Now he had a grudging, almost furtive look. “You know how I’ve been kind of worried lately? It’s because of this thing that happened about ten years before I met you.” He looked up at the ceiling, and she braced herself, with a familiar despair, for a story which would owe as much to Hugo Driver as to Davey’s real history. “I was having a rough time because Amy Randolph finally broke up with me.”

Nora had heard all about Amy Randolph, a beautiful and destructive poet-photographer-screenwriter-painter whom Davey had met in college. He had lost his virginity to her, and she had lost hers to her father. (Unless this was another colorful embellishment.) After graduation they had traveled through North Africa. Amy had flirted with every attractive man she met and threw tyrannical fits when the men responded. Finally the two of them had been deported from Algeria and shared an apartment in the Village. Amy went in and out of hospitals, twice for suicide attempts. She photographed corpses and drug addicts. She had no interest in sex. Davey once said to Nora that Amy was so brilliant he hadn’t been able to leave her for fear of missing her conversation. In the end, she had deprived him of her conversation by moving in with an older woman, a Romanian émigrée who edited an intellectual journal. He had never explained to Nora how he had felt about losing Amy, or spoken of what he had done between the breakup and their own meeting.

“Well,” Nora said, “whatever this is, it couldn’t have been much stranger than life with Amy.”

“That’s what you think,” Davey said.