The Mentor (11 page)

Emma drags herself back to reality and takes the rubber band from around the thick pile of the day’s mail. Suddenly there’s a
jangling beside her ear. She looks up to see Charles standing in the doorway, holding a single key on a metal ring.

“See this key?”

Emma nods.

“I want you to take it and lock me in this room for six hours.”

“Are you serious?”

“I don’t want you to let me out, no matter how hard I scream, pound, or wail. Understood?”

Emma looks from the key to Charles. He actually wants her to do this. “All right,” she says.

She takes the key. Charles walks into his office and turns. They look at each other. There’s something in his eyes, something yielding, teasing, that excites Emma. She slowly closes the door, inserts the key, and turns it. An unfamiliar sense of power pours over her, of having control over another human being. She likes it. She sits down and attacks the mail.

Emma is completely absorbed in making notes to herself on a yellow legal pad when she hears a rapping on the door behind her.

“For Christ’s sake, jailer, have you checked the time?”

Could six hours really have passed? Emma slips the pad into her bag and unlocks the door. Charles stands in the doorway, hands gripping the lintel above him, looking like an athlete who’s just stepped off the field.

“How was it?” Emma asks.

“Excruciating … strange … maybe a little exciting.”

Emma feels a blush rush up her body. She turns away from Charles and busies herself with some papers on her desk. “Your wife called. She won’t be home for dinner.”

“Then you and I will go out.”

“Oh, no, that’s all right, really,” Emma says, making a great show of finding a letter on the desk and taking it to the file cabinet.

“Do you have other plans?”

“Well, not exactly,” she says, searching through the file drawer for the right folder.

“Emma, we’re going out to dinner.”

The way he says it, that tone in his voice, the finality, the command. “I’m not very hungry,” she mumbles, still paging through the drawer.

Charles leans in, forces her to meet his gaze. “Would you feel better if we went Dutch?”

“Probably.”

“Dutch it is, then,” he says, going to get his coat.

Emma closes the file cabinet, crumples up the letter, and drops it in the trash.

About twice a year Charles rides the subway, as much to remind himself that it still exists as to get to his destination. So when Emma insists that they not only eat on her turf but take her means of transportation to reach it, he’s willing. Sitting beside her on the train, Charles feels loose, slightly ecstatic. The six enforced hours were good ones. The truth is, he didn’t spend them writing. He pulled down a first edition of
Irreparable Damage
—the book that Emma loved so much—and reread it from beginning to end. He was caught up in the book in a way he hadn’t expected to be, and now he feels inspired. But is it by his own words? Or by the young woman sitting beside him on this rocking train?

The Lower East Side, that city of ancient tenements, is a foreign land to Charles. As they walk down the battered streets, past old Jews, young Hispanics, and downscale artists, Charles is reawakened to what a huge and wondrous city he lives in. Emma leads him to a bare-bones Cuban restaurant tucked away on a teeming corner. They take a window booth and she orders for the two of them: avocado salad, black beans, yellow rice, and chicken that’s been cooked in a chunky tomato-onion sauce until it falls from the bone, as tender as love. After savoring the earthy food,
they sit and look out the window, slowly eating dessert—silky flan with a burnt-sugar bottom.

Charles feels that he’s in a different world somehow, a place where he isn’t Charles Davis, where he shucks that mantle, that burden, and is just another face on the street, just a man. He loves being led into this new land, eating this simple food. He can’t remember the last time he’s felt so unencumbered, as if he might be getting back to something important. He thinks of Portia, of how much she would enjoy this neighborhood, this restaurant, and, he ventures, this young woman.

“I’d forgotten how satisfying rice and beans could be,” Charles says.

Emma smiles at him and, in the glow from the streetlight coming in through the window, he notes again what lovely lips she has, how sensual the lower half of her face is. There’s even the hint of a pout about her mouth, a pout that the rest of her face isn’t sure what to do with.

“I used to come to places like this when I first moved to New York and had about fifty cents to my name. Funny how you work your ass off until you’ve priced yourself out of the things you really love,” Charles says.

“Sometimes I sit here for hours, just looking out the window. I find it soothing.”

“That’s the first time I’ve heard the Lower East Side described as soothing.”

“It’s the anonymity. I love the feeling in New York of being invisible. Small towns can suck the life out of you.”

“So can big towns. Be careful, little girl.”

“But don’t you find it stimulating? As a writer? I mean, look at those two.”

Charles follows Emma’s gaze out the window to a storefront across the street where a raven-haired middle-aged woman in stretch pants and flip-flops is exchanging heated words with a much younger man with slicked-back hair and a gold stud in one ear. Charles watches them for a moment.

“A lonely woman and her Don Juan son,” he says. “He hasn’t been home in three days. She’s telling him she’s been tearing her hair out, lighting candles at church. What she really means is that she’s insane with jealousy that some other woman is more important to him than she is.”

Emma considers Charles’s words for a moment, not taking her eyes off the couple. “I think they’re lovers,” she says.

“You do?”

“I think she’s married to a seventy-year-old grocer who brought her here from Santo Domingo. She has a Pekingese and a pet hen she keeps in a cage in the kitchen. One morning she was walking the dog in the rain and decided to take him around the block again even though her umbrella was broken and her hair was getting wet. The young man was coming out of a coffee shop—the one he eats at every morning, even though the food is bad.”

“Why does he keep eating there?” he asks.

“He’s a creature of habit. There she was with the Pekingese, her hair plastered down with the rain. Something about her touched his heart—the shoes she was wearing, the way one spoke of her umbrella was bent out of shape. He knelt on the sidewalk and petted the dog. Rain soaked through his T-shirt. He looked up at her and he was lost.”

“Why lost?”

“Because he knows he’ll never forget her. On his deathbed it’s her face he’ll see. He wants her to leave her husband, but she can’t. He’s seventy, he brought her here, there’s the hen. She’s telling her lover to leave her, even though every drop of blood in her body wants him.”

Charles looks at the couple and sees what Emma sees.

“Is there a happy ending?” he asks.

“He’ll leave her. His pride. He’ll marry a younger woman, move to Brooklyn; they’ll have babies. One day he’ll be in the city. He’ll see her across the street, walking her dog. Her hair will be gray, but he won’t notice. His heart will stop. It might start to rain.”

Emma has lost all self-consciousness, is radiant in the dim light of the coffee shop. Her story over, she’s quiet for a moment. Across the street, the couple is gone. Emma turns and looks at Charles, as if she is stepping out of another world. She is suddenly aware of herself again, and her small frame stiffens.

“I want to see where you live,” he says.

In Queens, Anne lies with her robe open on the hospital examining table, wondering why she doesn’t feel more vulnerable. The doctor, young and intense, has injected the local anesthetic into her belly, and she can feel the area growing numb. The vial containing Charles’s blood sits on the nearby countertop. How dark and thick blood is.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Brody?” the doctor asks.

“Fine, thank you.”

“I’m going to put some petroleum jelly on your stomach in preparation for the ultrasound,” he says.

Anne feels the texture of the cold jelly as the nurse spreads it. Then the doctor begins to run a metal wand over her stomach. Anne looks over at the monitor and sees the embryonic life growing inside her. She reaches out and squeezes the nurse’s hand. She’s immediately embarrassed by her gesture and withdraws her hand. The nurse pats Anne’s arm.

The nurse takes the ultrasound wand from the doctor and he picks up a long needle.

“Please,” Anne says. “Be careful.”

The doctor gives her a calm smile. Dr. Halpern has assured her of his expertise. Anne determines right then and there to stick with Dr. Halpern if she decides to have the baby. You don’t have to be rich to get good medical care, she thinks, just lucky.

She turns her head away as he inserts the needle into her stomach.

“All done,” the doctor says.

It’s dark when Anne walks out onto the sidewalk and around the corner to the brightly lit commercial street. Evening shoppers are out in force and she joins the throng. She has a sudden craving for peanut butter cookies and she ducks into the nearest grocery and buys two packs, one of which she tears open and begins to devour even as she waits in line to pay.

Charles and Emma walk under the cloudy night sky, toward Chinatown.

“Don’t expect much,” she says as they reach the old brick building. Emma unlocks the front door and begins to climb the stairs; Charles follows close behind. Her anxiety increases with each step.
Stay calm, you’ve come this far. Stay calm
.

Emma opens the door and Charles follows her inside. The restaurant’s neon sign bathes the room in a dim crimson glow. She turns on a light and stands expectantly while Charles looks around. The Saturdays she’s spent combing the thrift shops and sidewalks of lower Manhattan have yielded eclectic treasures. The fruit crates cribbed from the Chinese grocer are filled with thirdhand books. A fringed shawl is draped over her bed. There’s a Persian rug worn through in several places, a lamp in the shape of three puppies, an old manual typewriter, a wedding photo of a handsome black couple circa 1910. Her plates and glasses are mismatched and colorful. Until now Emma was proud of her apartment, but suddenly—with
Charles Davis there—it looks shabby, depressing, a place where a crazy girl trying to pass for normal might live.

Emma drops her coat and bag on the bed and goes to the stove. “Can I make you a cup of tea?” She can feel him behind her, standing there, judging her, seeing her for who she is. She fills the kettle with water. The first patter of raindrops sounds against the roof above them. She turns and he’s staring at her.

“What?” she asks. “What is it?”

“Nothing.” Then he smiles gently, almost tenderly. “I was just admiring your apartment.”

“I have Earl Grey and some lovely jasmine I found on Mott Street. Very intense,” Emma says, grateful to have something to actually
do
. She opens the tin of jasmine tea; its sweet exotic fragrance drifts up into the air. Charles leans in to smell the tea and as he does, he gently touches her hand.

“I’d better stick with the Earl Grey,” he says.

Emma turns and reaches for the box of tea bags. She wishes he’d chosen the jasmine, it requires more steps to prepare, would have given her more excuses to avoid looking at him. Reaching for two mugs, she knocks over a small plant, a sad little mum she bought on impulse and couldn’t bring herself to throw away after its single bloom died. The plant falls to the floor, spilling dirt. Emma lets out a little cry. She’s such a pathetic little fuckup. She falls to her knees to clean up the mess. Charles kneels beside her.

“I’m making you uncomfortable, aren’t I?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t have many visitors.”

“I’ll take care of this. You get the tea.”

She stands up and busies herself with the tea while he cleans up the plant.

“I’m afraid this plant has had it,” he says.

“With my brown thumb, I’m amazed it’s lasted this long.”

As she pours the boiling water into the mugs, she notices that he’s crossing the room, approaching her dresser. He picks up the framed photo, the one photo she treasures above all others, the one photo she didn’t want him to notice.

“You and your father?” he asks, holding up the faded color print of Emma and her stoned, long-haired father on the beach at Lake Canoga—scruffy, weedy Lake Canoga—her father with his goofy smile, his proud, goofy smile, proud of his nine-year-old princess, his baby, his Emma. She remembers that day so vividly, just the two of them driving through the hills to the lake, her daddy getting stoned, reaching over and rubbing her head, singing along with Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young: “Teach your children well.… Feed them on your dreams … and know they love you.”

But then he fucked her over. Too bad. So sad.

“You look like him,” Charles says.

“Do I?”

“What does he do?”

“I don’t know. Four months after that picture was taken, he left us.”

“Just left?”

“He went to work and never came back.”

“That must have been tough.”

Tough. “How do you like your tea?”

“Straight up. Do you have any pictures of your mother?”

Emma brings Charles his mug of tea and makes a point of sitting in the chair farthest from him.

“I wish I had some cookies to offer you,” she says.

“Do you have any pictures of your mother?” Charles repeats.

“My mother? She keeps promising to send me one, but she’s so busy,” Emma says as casually as she can.

“Remarried?”

“Yes.” All these questions make Emma want to scream. Instead she folds her hands in her lap and takes the plunge. “I have a confession to make.”

Charles looks at her expectantly.

“I’m a closet smoker. Could you hand me my bag?”

Charles reaches for Emma’s bag, spilling its contents. A yellow legal pad covered with writing tumbles out, followed by cigarettes,
elastic hair bands, a subway map, and a battered copy of
Play It as It Lays
. Charles picks up the pad. Emma leaps up from her chair and grabs it from him.