The Mentor (2 page)

And then his cell phone rings and he takes it out of his belly pack. Anne says it’s embarrassingly Hollywood of him to take calls while he’s running.

“Ray’s Pizza,” he says.

“I’d like a large pie with pepperoni and pineapple.”

Charles laughs. It’s Nina, his agent. More important, his friend for over twenty years.

“Where the hell are you, Charles?”

“Somewhere in Central Park, partner. Swimming against the current.”

“In this rain? Thank God the exercise bug never bit me. Call me when you get in.”

Charles can hear something serious in her voice—they know each other that well. He ducks under a tree, his body heaving with each breath.

“What have you got for me?” he asks.

“A disappointment, I’m afraid. Call me later.”

“Better tell me now, Nina. I like to be wet when I get bad news.”

“Well, I just saw an advance copy of the
Times Book Review
.”

Charles crouches down and leans back against the tree.

“And?”

“Some envious hack takes out his frustrations on you.”

Charles hears a high-pitched screech but there’s no ambulance, no police car.

“Charles, are you there?”

“Who wrote it?” he asks, ready to add another name to the enemies list.

Nina mentions someone who sounds vaguely familiar. One of those writing-program one-novel wonders?

“How bad is it, on a scale of one to ten?”

“You don’t need to read this one, Charles.”

“I’ll call you later.”

“Listen to me, Charles—”

“I’m going to hang up now, Nina. Good-bye.”

Charles stands up and starts to run back downtown. Faster. By the end of the day, every publisher and agent in the city will have read that review. When he gets home, he has to call Anne and tell her. He can just hear the sympathy in her voice. The concern that masks her pity.

And then he falls—trips over himself, crashes down on his right knee, scraping flesh off his knee and his palm. He picks
himself up and keeps running, ignoring the pain and the blood. He’s nearing Seventy-second Street, his route home. He splashes through a rush of water pouring down a storm drain. His running shoes are soaked and he has to blink to see through the downpour. He’s been counting on a good paperback sale from this one. Something in the mid six figures. The
Times
review probably lopped an easy hundred grand off that. He can’t ask Little Miss Success to take up the slack, as if he were a kept husband. He imagines, for one brief troubling instant, hitting Anne, slapping the concern off that exquisite face. His knee and palm are pulsing with pain. He sees his apartment building rising above the trees. He runs right past it and keeps on running.

Anne Turner is in her office going over the copy for the spring catalog. She’s having trouble concentrating. Outside, the rain is coming down in sheets. She’s a California girl; rain this fierce scares her; it brings mud slides—houses, dreams, lives that once seemed solid and secure, all swept away in an instant.

She signs off on a rhapsodic description of wrought-iron furniture made at a small foundry outside Florence, gets up and paces for a moment, then pours herself another cup of coffee—her fourth so far today. Damn Trent for being on vacation. She can always count on her assistant to cheer her up with some juicy bit of celebrity gossip. That mousy little temp the agency sent over looks like she wouldn’t know gossip from wheatgrass.

Everything is so infuriatingly unsettled right now. She’s never told Charles how precarious her position is. How could she, after insisting that they buy the apartment? Yes, in three brief years,
Home
had become one of the most popular catalogs in the country, but costs are astronomical. Her insistence on scouring the globe for
sensational offerings, on using the most expensive paper, on hiring the best photographers, on leasing these lavish thirty-fourth-floor offices, have all stretched resources to the breaking point. There’s a little breathing room now, thank God, but only because she took drastic action—action that makes her shudder every time she thinks of it.

Anne hates the way Charles has been sulking over every minor setback and disguising his envy of her growing fame. So much is at stake with his new book, and she’s afraid his expectations are unrealistically high. It’s a good book, but not his best, not as good as it could be,
should
be, with his gift. Damn, she hates it when she pities him. What she should do right this second is kick off her shoes and do ten minutes of yoga. But the truth is, yoga bores the hell out of her. Work is the only thing that releases her endorphins.

Anne adores the gargoyle planters made by some mad old hippie deep in the Joshua Tree desert—they’re terrifying, fabulous, and unique. Just the sort of find that has made
Home
such a sensation. The coffee is starting to make her dizzy. Her phone lights up.

“Your husband is on line one, Ms. Turner,” the temp says in her tentative voice.

Anne punches on the speaker.

“Are you warm and dry, darling?” Silence from the other end of the line. What now? “Charles?”

“It’s the
Times Book Review
.”

“Not good?”

“Not even so-so.”

For a split second Anne fears she’ll faint. She looks out the window at the furious storm—is the whole city coming apart? Pity won’t do; she knows that.

“Who wrote it?” she asks.

“Does it matter?”

“We can discredit him. Call in all our chits. Make sure someone sympathetic writes the daily
Times
review.”

There’s a pause and she can tell Charles is considering her idea.
Anything to keep him from spiraling down into that morbid depression of his, the one that shrouds the apartment like cobwebs. The one that eventually winds itself around her throat, too.

“It’s one review, Charles,” she says. “It’s a goddamn good book and we both know it. And you’re a great writer.” She realizes that in some perverse way she welcomes his crisis. At least now she has something to latch on to, a challenge. And if she can help him through this, an atonement.

“I just wanted to let you know.”

“Let’s go out to dinner tonight—get drunk and feel each other up under the table.”

“Great idea. How about the Four Seasons? To complete the humiliation, why don’t I walk in naked?”

Anne curses herself. There is simply no way to minimize the blow—the
Times Book Review
is Big Daddy.

“I love you,” she says. “I can’t wait to get home.”

Anne goes to the window. Down below, the city is a wet gray blur.

The intercom sounds. “Ms. Turner, may I speak to you a moment, please?”

The mouse squeaks, Anne thinks.

“What is it?”

The temp enters. She’s small and young and quite pretty, actually, when she lets her face peek out from the unruly brown hair that keeps falling down from behind her ears. Large green eyes, lovely skin, a mouth that could be sensual if she’d let it.

“In these catalog pages that you okayed?”

“Yes?”

“I found two errors.”

“You’re kidding me.” Anne takes fierce pride in her attention to detail.

“See the extra space between the period and the start of the next sentence here? And ‘pâté’ needs an acute accent over the
e
.”

The last thing most temps will do is take it upon themselves to review the boss’s work.

“You’ve got a good eye, Edna.”

The phone rings.

“I’ll get it myself.… Anne Turner.”

“Anne, it’s Judith Arnold.”

Her gynecologist. Anne stiffens.

“The test is in. Hope you and Charles have some champagne on ice.”

“You’re positive?”

“No doubt. You’re going to have a baby.”

Anne can feel the blood rush from her head and then, just as quickly, her face flushes hot red. She sits in a gray chair she’s never sat in before. Christ, she wishes the rain would let up; she can’t think through its splattery tattoo. And she needs to think.

“It’s Emma.”

She’s forgotten that the young woman is still in the room. “What?”

“My name. It’s not Edna, it’s Emma.”

“Thank you, Emma. Hold all calls.”

When the girl is gone, Anne looks out the window again. But now all she can see is her own reflection, staring back at her with fear and contempt.

Anne strides down the cavernous hallway of the Central Park West apartment in her bra, panties, and the new Manolo Blahnik heels she paid six hundred dollars for at Bergdorf’s. She hates heels, they’re uncomfortable and send the wrong message. But today is a heels day—some days just are. Anne has spent the last week in a state of low-level panic. She called Judith Arnold back and swore her to secrecy about the pregnancy. She also asked for some pills to quell her anxiety, but was told they all carried too many risks. Anne reminds herself constantly how important it is to keep going. The next couple of weeks are going to be about Charles and the book. After that, she’ll have time to think. To decide.

She and Charles have been moving through the house as if in parallel universes. He began to slip down that black hole of his, but then, to his credit, he started work on a short story to take his mind off things. He’s also running compulsively, for hours at a time, and then polishing off two bottles of wine during their tense,
desultory dinners. Anne knows that the less she says the better—they just have to wait and see how the release of
Capitol Offense
plays out. She yearns for the connection and release of lovemaking, but Charles loses all interest in sex when he’s depressed or resentful and right now he’s both.

In the kitchen—the kitchen that recently graced the pages of
Metropolitan Home
—Anne digs into the perfectly ripe papaya half Magdalena has left, as per instructions, on the bare white vastness of the room’s center island. Anne adores papaya—fat free, good for the digestion, and when perfectly ripe it literally melts on the tongue. Fifty percent of eating is texture, the other fifty percent is guilt. She looks around the gleaming room with its glass-front cabinets. None of that au courant clutter for her, thank you very much. The mania for baskets—woven grease-magnets she calls them—sets her teeth on edge. Anne is glad they bought the apartment, in spite of the squeeze it has put them in. She loves the space, the light, the views. In the past year their dinner parties have become coveted invitations, in no small part because people want to see what Anne Turner has done in her
own
home.

Anne listens. Beyond the door—the door that leads to Charles’s domain, the chaotic domain of Charles Davis—she hears nothing. She never does, although that never stops her from listening.

The kitchen phone rings.

“Yes.”

“Good morning, darling.”

Anne runs her fingers through her hair—this is the last person she wants to talk to today.

“Hello, Mother.”

“You didn’t answer my E-mail.”

“I’ve been swamped. Where are you?”

“Palm Beach. Did you forget? Tory Clarke’s wedding is this weekend. You were invited.”

“I’d rather book a root canal than go to Tory Clarke’s wedding.
She’s as narrow-minded and right wing as the rest of her family.”

Damn! Ten seconds into the call and she’s already regressed from successful thirty-six-year-old to hostile teenager. Her earliest memory is of her mother dragging her to riding lessons, telling her she was going to win a gold medal in the Olympics. Then there were the French lessons, the dancing class, the B-minus in math that cost her the class trip to Catalina.

“Is everything all right, Anne?”

Anne can imagine Frances—who’s on her second face-lift and third husband—flushed from her morning workout, perched on the edge of a chaise in the guest suite of some friend’s mansion, sipping tea off the tray the maid delivered, looking out at the ocean, and patting on $100-an-ounce under-eye cream.

“I sent Tory a present. Give her my best. How are you and Dwight?” Anne’s current stepfather is a real estate developer who rode the southern California population boom straight to the Forbes 400. Her real father, an aeronautical engineer whom Anne adored, died of cancer when she was eight years old. His death bewildered and terrified her and left her with a haunting fear that the worst always happens, a fear she denies, even to herself.

“We’re wonderful, although Palm Beach is awfully humid. Why does anyone live on the East Coast? Listen, darling, I just wanted to check in and see how Charles’s new book is doing. We’re all breathless with anticipation.”

Frances Allen has never really approved of Charles, and Anne is sure she’d like nothing better than for the new book to fail. She groomed her daughter to marry a titan of industry, someone with serious money, places in Bel Air and Pebble Beach, private planes and entree into the highest levels of government. Not some novelist who’s part of the condescending East Coast cultural elite.

“The book is doing well,” Anne says.

“Have any reviews come out?”

“No,” Anne lies.

“Then how do you know it’s doing well?”

Anne takes a deep breath.

“I’ve got a big day, Mom.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Give my best to Dwight.”

“Listen, darling, we’re going to be in New York next month. Or at least
I
am. You know how your stepfather feels about that city. I’ll be at the Plaza Athénée.”

“Let me know the dates. Good-bye, Mother.”

Anne hangs up and immediately scoops out the rest of the papaya. The call was par for the course—not one question about
Home
, about how Anne is doing. Frances is a raging narcissist who sees her own life in color and everyone else’s in black-and-white. She hates her daughter for being younger and prettier than she is, for forging a career that eclipses Frances, for—Stop it! Anne has no time for those old tapes. Not today. Not ever.

Suddenly the door to Charles’s office flies open. Anne gasps.

“Jesus, Charles, you scared me.”

Charles storms through the kitchen. Anne puts down the papaya and counts to fifteen. Then she heads toward the back of the apartment. In spite of everything, she’s excited by Charles—what woman wouldn’t be?