Thief of Words (8 page)
“Start with the good stuff,” Matthew said. “Is she cute?”
Jack pushed his glasses down his nose and gave him a schoolmaster’s frown. “Son, I’m disappointed that you would be hung up on mere appearance. The important thing is that Miss Hollerman is a woman of no small accomplishment and intelligence and sophistication.”
“She’s a babe!” Matthew said with a lopsided grin not unlike the off-center smile that often graced his father’s face.
Jack couldn’t help but grin back. “Yeah. I gotta admit. She’s kinduva babe.”
“Who does she look like?”
“You mean like somebody we know?”
“No. Somebody famous. What movie star does she look like? If she looks like Gwyneth Paltrow, I’ll introduce myself to her,” said Matthew. “Let her meet the real stud of the DePaul family.”
“You’re a baboon,” said Jack, with not completely mock anger. “Annie would only be attracted to higher life forms.”
“Oh-ho. Suddenly she’s ‘Annie.’ So, what does ‘Annie’ look like?” Jack scrunched his eyes shut for a second. “Hepburn,” he said. “Hepburn!” said Matthew. “Dad, do you know anybody outside the Paleolithic era? How about Neve Campbell?”
“Who’s that?”
“Never mind. Which Hepburn?”
“Both Hepburns. She has those strong Katharine bones, but Audrey’s gamine charm.”
“ ‘Gamine charm’?” Matthew raised his hands in surprise. “Whoa, this is serious. What else?”
“Well, she’s got the damndest head of red hair you’ve ever seen.” For the next fifteen minutes Matthew pumped his father. What did Annie do? How old was she? Was she funny? Smart? Clever? Sophisticated? Warm? What did you two talk about?
The more Jack described the lunch—no, no, it wasn’t a date— the more it became something tangible; yes, maybe a date. It was as if the tastes, colors, and textures of lunch precipitated out of the telling. He spoke of Annie and she materialized.
“And right in the middle of pasta she started talking about a flamenco dancer in Spain she wished she had seen. Imagine that— her most vivid travel memory was something that never happened. Isn’t that sad? It made me want to …” Jack trailed off.
“Well. Anyway,” he finished a little wistfully, “she’s nice. I had a good time.”
There was nothing wistful about Matthew’s expression; he had a smile the size of Madrid. “Dad. I think you’re back. ‘Ding, dong, the witch is dead.’ ”
“Which old witch?” Jack answered in a little singsong voice. But he knew exactly which witch.
J
ack threw the mail on the couch and the
New Yorker
on the coffee table. He walked to the bedroom and, from four yards out, kicked his loafers into the closet. The apartment still reeked of Tuesday’s dinner—popcorn. It occurred to him that if he were to invite someone over he’d better freshen up the place. He decided he’d bake some banana bread over the weekend, or at least keep the windows open for a day.
The eleven o’clock news was already over but Jack was too full to sleep. Another item for the life-lesson checklist: never eat Mexican food after 9 P.M. He put on sweats and a T-shirt and sat down at his old Mac.
Jack hadn’t signed on to his home account for two days. Fourteen messages awaited him. Between BAMBI69 (“Hot Teens”) and Zortman (“STOP SNORING NOW”) was something from “ahollerman.” It was entitled “lunch.” He clicked on it.
“Jack,
“Thank you for lunch. You’re charming in spite of yourself. I don’t know about that tie, however.
“Annie”
A short message; only three sentences. If not exactly terse, certainly compact. Just a little eddy of electrons in the big river of bits and bytes, but one that carried with it a question of great significance. Namely: What the hell do women mean?
The guy at the computer was not much better equipped to find an answer than he had been in the days when he wore a letter-man’s jacket and clip-on ties. Does she like me? he wondered. She called me “charming.” That has to be good. But what about “in spite of yourself ”? Am I a jerk? A blowhard? Why did I tell her about the grapefruit? Was I babbling like a street-corner guy wearing taped-up shoes? What about the length? Seventeen words. It’s very short. It’s like the back of her hand. It’s an insult. “I wouldn’t go out with you again if you were the last man on earth. See ya ’round, clown. Don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out.” Cold. Stone cold.
But wait. What about the tie remark? It’s friendly; it’s funny. A quip. A friendly tease. The tie sentence is good. The tie sentence tips the balance. Although, what’s wrong with my tie? I like that tie. It’s a Jerry Garcia tie. She doesn’t like the Grateful Dead? What? She listens to Jewel or Alanis Morissette? Whiners. Or the Indigo Girls. She’s a dyke! But she did grab my fingers. Did I have pasta on the tie? Was I a slob? Did I have spinach in my teeth, a booger hanging from my nose, earwax? My fly was open!
On the other hand, she did write “charming.”
The squirrel cage of Jack’s mind spun around for a few more minutes. Eventually, it began to slow. When the calmer lobes of his brain began to function again, he realized he had to write a response.
Jack called up a blank mail screen.
“Dear Annie,” he wrote. No, he thought, too formal.
He began again. “Annie.”
He stared at the screen for nearly three minutes.
Then he wrote: “Thank you for lunch. You were charming, too, in spite of having me as your companion.”
Jack pondered this opening. It sounded clever but didn’t really mean much. He made a sour face and deleted everything.
“Annie. I thought lunch was superb …” Too pompous. “Annie. It’s been a long time since I have …” Too needy.
“Annie. Appropriately, we were in an art museum …” Nerd. “Annie. There was a moment during lunch when …” Windbag.
“Annie. I was wondering, does the hair on your head match the hair between your …” Just kidding.
“Annie. God, I think you’re wonderful …” A little lacking in dignity.
Jack got up from his chair and windmilled his arms a couple of times. He inhaled deeply, held it, and let it slowly out. It was midnight. He sat down again and began writing. This time he wrote straight through without stopping.
T
hank God for small miracles: Joan Hollerman Silver had yet to master the Internet. She didn’t even know Instant Messaging existed.
By 10:15
P.M.
Thursday, she’d already called Annie twice—“No, Mom, I haven’t heard back from him. I’m fine”—and when she called back at 10:30 the line was busy, as it was at 10:45 and 11.
Laura, on the other hand, was an IM junkie and knew that in times of stress Annie would take the telephone off the hook. Annie was the first buddy on her buddy list, and every time Annie signed on that evening, an Instant Message popped up on her screen.
“Well?”
“Nu?”
“Nothing yet?”
“I’ll kill him tomorrow.”
By 12:15 Annie’s eyes were closing without her permission. In between checking her e-mail, she’d finally plowed through the She-Devil’s new manuscript. It was worse than bad. It was obnoxious, overblown, and screechy. And it was sure to be a best-seller.
Eda Royal, the She-Devil, who’d formerly taught
Beowulf
to bored freshmen at Tompkins Cortland Community College in upstate New York, had tapped into something big when she dumped her husband, a nice but boring man who ran the local fish hatchery, and formed a support group for the newly divorced. She’d tapped into anger. Everyone in her group was really pissed off. Pissed off at themselves, their kids, their bosses, their lives, but mostly their husbands.
At one particularly rowdy meeting, a once-meek bookkeeper who’d married right out of high school said, “Lord almighty, what’s gotten into us, the devil?”
“The she-devil!” someone shouted.
And so began Eda Royal’s new career.
Before Annie brushed her teeth and headed to bed, she signed on to her computer. For the first time in twenty-four hours, it was not to see if Jack DePaul had written back. She wanted to write Laura, to tell her she’d been stupid to get so worked up, that it had been a fine lunch, but that was all it was, just a lunch, nothing else. And if Laura said
anything
to Jack DePaul the next day, that would be the end of their friendship, though she would continue to be Becky’s godmother.
“You have mail,” her computer announced.
“Fuck you,” Annie said as she guided the cursor to the flag and clicked.
There was a message, from a “jdepaul.” It was entitled “Lunch.” “Annie,
“Lunch was wonderful, wish we could have stayed longer. It was the perfect afternoon to idle away over coffee. Thinking back over it, I may have in fact been too brash. You were so easy to talk to I let my defenses down and was just myself. There may be some charm in that; there may be some boorishness. I hope the former outweighed the latter.
“However, even my brashness has its limits. Here’s something I couldn’t possibly have said to your face: You’re quite lovely. “Jack”
J
ack turned over the pillow to the cool side again, but it didn’t help. His brain was feverish, not his brow. He stared at the clock: it was 1:40
A.M.
Friday morning. Hopeless. He couldn’t sleep. Farewell to sleep. Jack DePaul does murder sleep. Sleepless in Baltimore. Sleep has left the building.
Thoughts tumbled around inside his head like shirts in a dryer: What if I had actually read those college econ texts? What would I be like if I had gone to Vietnam? Could I have made the NBA if I’d been six foot four? But they were just diversions to keep the witch at bay. Despite what Matthew had said over dinner, she wasn’t ding-dong dead. The nightmare bird was on the wing, soaring and circling, waiting, just waiting for a sleepless night like this.
Jack untangled himself from the covers and lay face up, hands behind his head. To ward off the raptor, he projected another image into the dark. This one was of Annie across a white tablecloth and pasta plates. He liked her face. It was complicated and angular; there were shadows of time and experience. The nose crooked slightly to the right; the mouth was animated. Everything about Annie was quick; he liked that, too. Answers, gestures, and questions darted out of her like hummingbirds. She laughed quickly and generously, she didn’t hold back.
Nothing like Kathleen, the nightmare bird, the queen of holding back, the woman who measured out her emotions tryst by tryst. After three years, Jack still didn’t know if she was complex and deep or just a good liar. “I can’t do this anymore,” she would say. But she could and she did. She said she loved him; sometimes he believed it. Every time he pressed her for commitment she said she couldn’t leave her husband. But she couldn’t seem to leave Jack, either. Once in a hotel bed, he had asked her why, and in a moment of naked honesty she had said, “Because you try so hard.”
He had tried hard—from the moment they kissed drunkenly in a corridor of the Sheraton Hotel in New York three years ago. Before then, they had been merely colleagues at the
Star-News.
He had known her for a couple of years and found her ice queen persona sexy, in an abstract sort of way. But that was before his marriage began to fail and Matthew went off to college, before his regrets began to outnumber his dreams.
By the time of the kiss, Jack’s midlife had become a crisis. It was a luxury, he knew—he had a car and a house and health; he didn’t live in Bosnia—but that didn’t ease the ache or the haunting questions. What had happened to the years? What did he have to show for them? Matthew was the best thing he had ever done. But his son wasn’t something that he had planned for or fought for, just a normal consequence of a mundane marriage at the usual time in the usual circumstances. He’d had no grand struggle, no great passion. And now time was running away.
Then, at the last night of that conference in New York, after a boisterous dinner with a dozen colleagues, when he found himself by a hotel room door entwined with Kathleen, tongues deep in each other’s mouths, his hand between her legs, he knew he had found that reason, that cause, that thing to plug the hole in his heart.
Jack stared up at the ceiling. Funny how wrong you can be, he thought.
He pushed Kathleen away again and pulled Annie Hollerman back into his thoughts. He had told Matthew over dinner that Annie was “effervescent,” a word that had never been uttered in the same sentence with Kathleen Faulkner. Not that Annie seemed like a bubblebrain; during their lunch he had noticed something muting her, like an open window letting a cool breeze into a warm room. Nothing sinister, just complex.
He thought again about Annie’s story of her trip to Spain (what kind of a fool was her husband anyway?). It had been the best part of their lunch. When she had told him about the flamenco dancer she had never seen, he had felt a swooping, roller-coaster sensation in his chest. He had wanted to stand up, toss some bills down on the table, reach out his hand to her, and say, “Annie, get packed. There’s a flight to Madrid, leaving at eight o’clock tonight.”
It had made him feel, for the first time in months, like he was made of flesh and bone. Kathleen hadn’t sucked him dry after all. And when he’d written to Annie earlier in the evening, he’d felt like an athlete stretching unused muscles. Back from the injured list, he thought, and in the game again.
E-mail was how he’d wooed Kathleen. She loved his words; she was greedy for them. Each time she said “never again,” he’d entangle her in his net of verbs, his web of nouns, and haul her back. “Fuck me with stories,” she’d say. And he would. Her husband, an executive in the local power company, never had a chance, and, as far as they knew, was oblivious to the drama being played out in his own marriage.
Jack pulled the covers aside and sat at the edge of the bed. He wondered, not for the first time, whether it was Kathleen he had been in love with or the writing to Kathleen.
From the widening perspective of separation, she now seemed more a fever than a relationship. After he and Kathleen spent that night together in New York, he had left Elizabeth. He couldn’t live the lie. Kathleen was willing to live it every day. For Jack, the clandestine sex, so exciting at first, became increasingly mechanical. And afterward, drowsy and sheet-tossed, they seemed no more closely bound than before. He wanted a soul mate; she wanted a playmate.