Clio Rising Read online

  Barb described her place as a two-bedroom walk-up, and Jill rolled her eyes. “Well, it started out as a one-bedroom,” Barb admitted. “I got the lease, and then Jenny carved out her own space. Not scared of heights, are you?”

  “Um, no. Why?”

  “Loft bed.”

  My mind shot to a treehouse my friends and I had built in the woods. I’d been admitted to the tight circle of boys because my dad owned a hardware store and I sweet-talked him into providing supplies. I had to share a pink bedroom with my girly sister, so I’d clambered up that treehouse ladder more times than I could count just to have a space that felt like me.

  “I’m from the mountains,” I joked. “I was born climbing.”

  I was intrigued by Barb’s offer, even though I wasn’t exactly sure what I thought about her as a roommate. She seemed critical and bossy, but then so were my three older sisters and I’d always stood my ground with them. As the elevator doors opened, Barb took my elbow in an unexpectedly gentle gesture and escorted me into the car.

  “Those were some good cookies, Carolina,” she said. “And that Southern style of yours is pretty cool. Everybody I meet’s on overdrive, but you’re like the definition of laid-back. I like that. I think we’d get along. If you could stand a wound-up Yankee.”

  I told Barb I’d consider it, and down on the street we set up a time for me to see the apartment. After Barb and Jill turned north, I noticed Thea had hung back to talk to me.

  “I’d be careful with Barb,” she said. “She’s . . . unpredictable. She’s tried to take over the salon several times. Just ask Gerri.”

  “I’d say Gerri knows how to manage Barb, if today’s any example.”

  Thea grimaced. “Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  On the walk across town, I weighed the benefits of Barb’s apartment. West Fifteenth Street was just a few blocks from Ariel’s and an easy stroll to the Village. So many possibilities could open up for me: a circle of friends, eventually a lease on my own one-bedroom, a girlfriend, a dog or cat.

  It was Sergeant Sal who really made up my mind, though. “Goodness, Livvie, you just getting back?” she said as I sauntered through the front door. “You almost missed the ice cream social!”

  One of the first to congratulate Clio on the publication of The Dismantled was journalist Janet Flanner, with whom Clio enjoyed many an evening at Café Flore and Les Deux Magots. You must be so pleased! Flanner wrote on October 10, 1936. It’s a triumph, dear one. Although knowing you, you are already scribbling notes in the margins about how you should have phrased it! She signed it, Love, JF.

  Clio filed the note in a folder called “Ephemera,” but not until she had scrawled across the top: Typical Flanner— so cheeky.

  — from Dismantling Clio Hartt: Her Life and Work, by Ingrid Coppersmith

  Chapter 5

  September 1983

  Clio and I soon fell into a routine. I called her every Monday morning to inquire how she was doing and what she needed, and depending on her response I stopped in Tuesday and Friday afternoons, either with groceries and prescription refills or just to make coffee and listen to her. She talked to so few people, a conversational riptide greeted me when I stepped through the door. Visiting old folks wasn’t new to me; my mother had dragged me and my sisters along with her while she did her Christian duty, bringing comfort to elderly people in our community.

  Bea was pleased that one of her most famous clients was being so carefully attended to— and was out of her hair. It wasn’t that Bea smiled at me more or even looked at me all that much. Instead, she offered juicy tidbits of approval, like allowing me to sit in on a meeting with a feminist author she was eager to sign.

  And then there was the morning a royal blue box dropped with a thud onto my desk. The bright manuscript boxes in the agency’s signature color were more than familiar to me: I did everything from special-ordering them from the supplier to unpacking the lids and bottoms and assembling them to laying copies of manuscripts into them and then typing and affixing the labels.

  “Is anything wrong?” I asked as my eyes caught the name “Westerly, D. A.” Bea still hadn’t spoken, and I wondered if I had not boxed this particular manuscript neatly enough for her taste. (“Think hospital corners,” had been Tip Number Something from Ramona.)

  “I want you to read this,” Bea said, a neatly trimmed nail pressing into the top of the box for emphasis.

  My heart flapped in my chest. I had no idea what the manuscript was about, whether it was fiction or nonfiction, but I said, “I would love to!” so there was no chance she would snatch the opportunity back. Ramona had hinted that Bea would give me a manuscript someday when she thought I was “ready,” but that the day would come months or years down the line, not a couple of weeks after I started my job.

  “A new author,” Bea went on, “with what looks like a tendency to overwrite.”

  “Hence the box,” I said. The two-inch model, which was ample for most of our manuscripts, couldn’t contain this one. It was probably close to the five hundred sheets in a ream of paper.

  “Hence the box.” Bea smiled. “Make notes for me, but not on the manuscript. Anywhere the story starts to ramble and you lose interest, note the page number. You know, the part of a novel when your eye starts to skip down the page.”

  “So-o-o, what’s it about?”— a bubbly question you might shoot at your best friend in junior high when you’re exchanging Judy Blume paperbacks. It wasn’t something you asked a woman who represented giants of contemporary literature, and Bea winced.

  “That is for you to find out,” she said. The sliver of pain on her face reminded me of Hallie, who was never very adept at hiding her reaction to a student’s dumb question in class. And just like a student, my chin dropped in embarrassment.

  But when I looked up, Bea was smiling again. “By the way, I spoke to Clio over the weekend. I never thought I’d say this, but she sounded happy. You must be doing something right. Just don’t tell me if you’re slipping something into her coffee.”

  • • •

  The blue box was the first thing Clio noticed when she answered the door that day. Up until then we hadn’t discussed my job or Bea or anything to do with literary agents. She mostly talked about herself or proffered her opinions about everything from Greenwich Village (“the only place to live, really”) to the local greengrocer (“Such service! But the produce could be fresher”) to her Paris literary comrades, like Gertrude Stein (“She would have been nothing without Alice”). As I listened, I noted her verbal tics, like the way she tacked “really” onto many statements as if adding to their heft. Or I watched her physical cues, like how her sapphire eyes widened jarringly when she tossed out Flora’s name or closed dreamily when she recalled their apartment on the Left Bank, how the lines around her mouth resembled sideways smiles when I said something that pleased her and then became weighty pouches when she was tired of my company and needed a nap.

  But she never seemed to notice anything about me. On our second meeting, she did say, “You’re so charmingly . . . boyish— for a minute I thought . . .” but stopped short of completing the sentence. The apartment was devoid of photos, save for one of an androgynous young woman in a slim suit and tie, her hair cut short as a boy’s, the bangs brushed into a suggestive V. If I’d been alive in the 1930s, I might have presented myself that way. Without asking, I understood the woman to be Flora.

  So I was startled when Clio observed the manuscript box, which was too bulky to fit into my messenger bag. “For me, Miss Bliss?” Clio said, clapping her hands with delight. “What a divine color!”

  “Oh . . . what? No, sorry,” I said. “It’s just a manuscript Bea asked me to read. Some up-and-coming writer who needs editing.”

  She turned away without even closing the door, and I clicked it shut behind me. By the time I put down my bag and the box, set the mail on her desk, and walked to Clio’s chair, her eyes had filmed over. On the day she believed her r
ape and murder were imminent, she had told me she never cried, but now I understood that had been bravado.

  “Are you trying to upset me?” she said, her voice as thin as a sheet of paper.

  I knelt down beside her and put a hand on the arm of her chair because I didn’t dare touch her. “Miss Hartt! I am so sorry! I’ll bring you a present soon, I promise.”

  She wiped at her eyes roughly, as cross with herself as she was with me.

  “What could you possibly bring me that I would ever need or want?”

  I leaned back to deflect the verbal blow.

  “I’m so sorry, Miss Hartt,” I repeated, because I couldn’t think of anything else. I wasn’t sure if I should put the coffee on or if everything I did now was tainted and I needed to leave before she struck again. “I don’t know what I did to make you so mad.”

  And that enraged her more. “You ‘don’t know’!” she mimicked, chuckling to herself. “Oh, wait, I see! Beatrice put you up to this! You’re just her pawn.”

  My smile felt weak, insufficient, stupid even. Put me up to what? I wanted to ask, but that would just prove her point.

  “Look around you, Miss Bliss,” Clio went on. “Peruse the shelves. Haven’t you done that when you thought I wasn’t looking?”

  I had peeked at her books, but didn’t want to admit it, so I shook my head. Her questions felt like little traps set up across the room. “No, ma’am,” I lied.

  “Well, do it now. Tell me when you find the books by Clio Hartt.”

  “Should I—?” It was the time I usually fixed her coffee, and I motioned toward the kitchen nook.

  “Just do it!”

  The task shouldn’t have taken long because there were only two tall bookshelves and one three-shelfer. But then there were the stacks of books acting like furniture, and I had to get down on all fours to inspect those spines. I finally located her titles grouped together in a pile next to her desk: her masterpiece, The Dismantled, plus a slim novella-length satire called Left Banked, which had been downplayed by scholars but revered by lesbians, according to Gerri. There were exactly seven copies of each, like a sacred numerology.

  I stood up and glanced over at her. I didn’t have to announce my finding because she was already speaking.

  “You have located my life’s output,” she said, her tone now more rueful than angry. “The novella doesn’t even count, really.”

  “I could have sworn it was more. Must be because The Dismantled is worth ten of any other book. Probably twenty of the one in that box,” I added, nodding toward the manuscript that had set off the uproar. My sincerity must have been palpable, because in the late afternoon light, it almost looked like Clio was blushing. “To have written a classic like The Dismantled, well, I can’t imagine.”

  “Publishing is a burden,” Clio said. “But not publishing— for a real writer— is worse.”

  The lightbulb went on then. I’d come to visit with the manuscript of an “up-and-coming writer” tucked under my arm, and to a blocked writer who had accomplished just one great book, it must have cut in a way she couldn’t bear.

  “You’ve been writing, though,” I pointed out. “You mentioned new stories you’re working on.” The heaped-up papers on her desk offered proof of some sort of output, though honestly they might have been shopping lists for all I knew. I had simply assumed that papers in the home of a writer equaled writing. “Maybe you’d like to talk about the stories, help get your juices flowing?”

  She looked at me like I was a peculiar object in a natural history museum whose use she had just figured out.

  “I have a better idea,” she said.

  Clio urged me to pull a chair up to the desk. At the far right corner rested an old Olympia portable she said Bea had given her. On the other side, a collection of yellowing journals and magazines sat directly in the late afternoon sunlight spilling onto the desk. In the center, papers with loopy handwriting all over them obscured the oak surface. The arrangement of paper, I noticed, seemed to be different from the last time I visited. She didn’t invite me to touch anything, and I kept my hands resting on my khakis as we sat side by side.

  “You probably don’t know I published a lot of stories in magazines,” she began. “Before The Dismantled. They paid the rent while Flora and I lived in Paris. I’d get five, six hundred a story, good money then.” I wanted to say it was still good money, but she continued. “I still have copies of some, but not all.” She waved toward the periodicals. “An editor called me a few years ago— she was with some publisher in Boston— and wanted to make a book out of them. But I didn’t know anything about her or how she got my phone number. I pay extra for unlisted, so I hung up on her.”

  I winced, wondering why she hadn’t referred the editor to Bea. “I’m sure there would be a lot of interest in a collection like that,” I said. “And if you had unpublished work to go with it? All the better.” I tried to sound like the pro I wasn’t as I nodded toward the papers on the desk.

  “You’re right. But I can’t work with someone I don’t know. Someone who calls me long distance. Someone named Louise.”

  Why would distance and the name Louise offend her? But I let the question drop out of my mind like an errant piece of paper.

  “I’m sure Bea would love to hear about this,” I said. “She could hook you up with a publisher, some smart editor who could put it all together for you—”

  “No, no, no!” Her cheeks reddened. “I had to ban Beatrice from coming here because she would not leave me alone about publishing! Such pressure! You know, when I publish, she makes money.”

  It was a stereotype I’d heard everyone at the agency complain about— that literary agents were essentially parasites, feeding off the blood and sweat of real artists. “Well, Miss Hartt, here’s the thing: When you publish, you make money, too.”

  A smile softened her eyes. “Well, that would be nice, wouldn’t it?” Her slender fingers brushed a sheet of paper in front of her. “People still know who I am. I get letters from professors praising The Dismantled. They teach it at universities. Bea arranged for that new edition they all fawn over.” The smile evaporated, replaced by a grimace. “But sometimes . . . well, last year, there was some dreadful little lesbian who camped by my front gate just waiting for me to go out. She actually touched my arm! She said The Dismantled had meant so much to her. Some horrid teacher had assigned it in a class on lesbian literature!” Derision dripped from her mouth. “She wanted me to autograph her copy. Imagine!”

  Even though Bea had warned me about Clio’s attitude, the phrase, “dreadful little lesbian” stung, and I tossed out a defiant comeback: “How dare she!”

  Clio eyed me curiously, as if weighing my sarcasm on a scale. “I thought it was rude.”

  “Fans pay the bills,” I said with a shrug. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

  Clio drew herself up straight in the chair. “I am not a beggar! I have more money than you imagine, young lady!”

  “I didn’t mean it literally, Miss Hartt.” Although, in fact, her circumstances suggested that she might be close to beggardom. When she reimbursed me for groceries, her face was pinched in pain as she extracted the bills and coins out of a cracked leather change purse. I imagined her royalty check from the new edition of The Dismantled was the only thing standing between her and destitution. Could she even collect Social Security, if she’d never worked at an actual job? “I just meant fans are good for writers. You should be happy your novel resonated with readers for so many years. Even lesbians. That means it’s a real classic!”

  She shuffled a few papers, pretending to look at them. “It is a good book. Tom Eliot said it was among the finest American novels of all time, not just of Modernism.” I didn’t catch the casual reference to T. S. Eliot at first, but as the weeks went on, I realized she had been on a nickname basis with the literary leviathans of the early 20th century— Joyce was “Jim” to her, Hemingway was “Hem,” Sinclair Lewis, “Red.”

 
; “‘American’ is the key word there,” she continued. “I did not write that book for lesbians!” Then her tone flipped from defiant to melancholy. “Flora and I . . . we loved each other. So very much. But that doesn’t make us lesbians.”

  I started at the words, which echoed something Hallie had once said to me.

  At the mention of Flora, Clio’s hands shot up to her hair, a gauzy gray cloud tinged with streaks of white, which she wore parted in the middle and then eased back into a low, loose bun. Judging from photos, she hadn’t changed the style much since the 1940s. She patted a few stray hairs back into place. The gesture touched me: She isn’t over her, I realized, and I understood that feeling all too well. I wanted to reach over and stroke her arm, but it would have cooled the space between us, so I didn’t.

  “Seems like a special relationship,” I said. The hollow words popped out automatically. Hallie had used that phrase, too.

  “Special,” Clio scoffed. “I guess you could call it that.”

  Gerri had told me that the playwright Flora Haynes had been a hellion. After she and Clio left Paris in the ’30s and settled on West Tenth Street, her moniker was the “Village Vamp.” Handsome as a matinee idol and sharp as a razor, Flora lived life a bit too fully. As “Vincent” (translation from Clio-ese: Edna St. Vincent Millay) would have said, Flora burned her candle at both ends.

  There was no more talk of Flora that day. Clio excused herself and padded off to the bathroom, waving away my offer of help like I was a pesky mosquito. “I live alone!” she snapped. “I am able to get to the toilet by myself.” When she returned to the desk, there were a few drops visible on her hairline as if she’d splashed her face with cold water.

  “Now, let’s talk about these stories,” she said, taking the seat next to me again.

  • • •