Clio Rising Page 8

  I wasn’t sure how to answer her, but I guessed she wasn’t expecting anything but praise and support. What writer wants to hear that a new story she’s excited about is the same one she published fifty years earlier?

  “It could work,” I said, trying to keep an encouraging smile on my face.

  “I’m not sure Madeleine needs to be a woman, really. She might be a transvestite. I haven’t quite decided that. And I thought about making the teenage boy a dog, although I realize some people won’t understand the point and I don’t want it to seem gratuitous.”

  “What would the point be?” I said. “Of the dog?” I didn’t add what I was thinking: except to distinguish it from The Dismantled.

  “Flora’s complete degradation, of course.”

  She sipped her coffee, oblivious that she’d said “Flora” instead of “Madeleine.”

  “You mean Madeleine,” I corrected her gently.

  Clio frowned. “That’s what I said, isn’t it? Really, Miss Bliss, I do wonder if you are up to this task!”

  At that point, I wondered, too. And I also wondered if Bea would want me off the job, if I couldn’t even tell Clio her story was soup rewarmed once too often.

  But what I ended up saying was: “I’m up to it, Miss Hartt. Would you mind if I just think about your story and maybe, I don’t know, offer a few suggestions?”

  “What sort of suggestions? Do you write fiction?”

  “No,” I admitted. “But neither does Miss Winston, and she’s guided plenty of authors in her day. Or look at that guy—” I fumbled to recall his name from the class in which I’d read Thomas Wolfe. “Maxwell Perkins! How he sculpted Look Homeward, Angel.”

  The lines in her brow deepened. “You are not Beatrice Winston. Or ‘that guy’ Maxwell Perkins. You are a girl from the mountains of North Carolina.”

  “So are you,” I rushed to add. “But we’re both girls with a pretty good ear for a story. Why not give me a try?”

  Clio nodded in a jerky way, like her head was hiccupping. “You can make suggestions, but I will probably just reject them,” she said. “Remember, I’m Clio Hartt, and you aren’t.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I grabbed my messenger bag to go. “I’ll be back on Wednesday.”

  “Not tomorrow?”

  “I need to get started looking for your stories,” I said. Maybe finding some of her other work would give me ideas about what to suggest for “Madame Louise” or help steer her toward more original material.

  Chapter 10

  Bea appeared in the door of the photocopying room as I was stapling copies for Ramona, her hands on her square hips like a linebacker. “Here you are!” she said with impatience, as if we were a gigantic agency and she’d been searching for me on several floors.

  My first instinct was to head off whatever offensive rush was coming my way. “I’ll be back there on Wednesday,” I said, “I promise!”

  Her eyebrows narrowed into points. “Do you think I know what you’re talking about?”

  “Did Clio call you?”

  “I haven’t talked to her since Saturday,” she said. “Should I be expecting another call? I thought you were keeping her happy, Livvie.”

  I explained that, instead of my usual visit to Clio’s later that day, I planned to head to the Public Library to locate her stories on microfilm or in bound journals. “It might give her momentum, seeing how productive she was.”

  Bea nodded, her hands dropping to her sides. “Not a bad plan,” she admitted. “You left me a note about some new pages she’s written. Were they good? As good as The Dismantled?”

  “Well, they’re . . . similar, yes.”

  “What’s it called? What she’s working on.”

  Instinct told me not to divulge the “Madame Louise” title, so I fished in my memory for the name of the other story she’d been crafting. “She only has a working title. She’s toying with either ‘All This’ or ‘The Less We Know.’”

  “Not very catchy,” Bea grumbled. “Well, never mind. Titles are meant to be changed. So then, just carry on as planned.” It looked like she was going to leave without addressing what she’d wanted to discuss, but then her eyes flashed. “That reminds me of another bad title. Where are your comments on Big Thunder? They weren’t in my in-box today.”

  It had been less than a week since the blue box with D. A. Westerly’s novel in it dropped onto my desk. Either Bea thought I’d had the manuscript longer or there was another trick to keeping her happy that Ramona hadn’t warned me about— do what she asks you to do immediately.

  “I’m still reading it,” I said. “Sorry, when do you need my comments?”

  “I expected to read them today,” she said. “I left my morning free for it. I’m meeting with her on Friday, so this is inconvenient. Come to my office after you finish with that copying and catch me up on what you’ve read so far.”

  “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know about the deadline.” Her appointment book was going to need more of my attention, since she didn’t give me any clues about due dates herself. “I haven’t actually read very much.”

  “How much is ‘not very much’?”

  “A chapter.” I said. All I’d read were the epigraph and the first two pages. I imagined her making a mental list of my faults with “cannot adhere to schedules” at the very top.

  Her lips tightened. “Get me your comments by the end of the day tomorrow,” she instructed. “Don’t make me regret giving you this added responsibility.”

  “Oh, you won’t, you won’t,” I said, knowing I was going to have to pull an all-nighter with the manuscript, my first since college finals.

  • • •

  I hadn’t seen Barb since our debauched Friday night together. She was locking the apartment door as I reached our floor after work.

  “Hey, stranger,” I said.

  Grunting and struggling with the keys, my roommate ignored me. Her backpack was tossed in a heap on the hallway floor.

  “You don’t need to lock it. I’m heading in for the night.”

  “Fucking keys,” she said under her breath as I stepped to the door. “Fucking fucked-up fucker lock.”

  “Yeah, it sticks,” I admitted. “I’ll tell Jesús, if you want.” It wasn’t my job to bring problems to the super because I didn’t hold the lease, but helping the woman who did seemed like a good idea.

  “Jesús is a useless piece of shit,” she said, and I recoiled from her words. “He wouldn’t know how to fix a lock if his life depended on it.” The super didn’t do very much around the building, it was true, but he was a sweet young guy who liked to share photos of his two chubby-cheeked babies. Now Barb gave the door a rude kick, like she wanted it to be Jesús. “I don’t know how I’ll get back in tonight.”

  “I’ll be up, so just knock if you have trouble,” I said. “I have to read a whole manuscript in the next—” I checked my watch. “—fourteen hours.”

  She retrieved her backpack with another grunt.

  “You okay?” I asked. The lock seemed like one more thing that had irritated her, or maybe the final thing.

  “Do I fucking look okay? And you . . .”

  What could I have done? Against my better judgment, I had not told Gerri what I suspected about Barb and Renee.

  “And me what?” I asked, because she was already trudging off down the hallway without finishing her thought. “What, Barb?”

  She stopped at the head of the stairs and turned back to me with a scowl. “Did you tell Gerri anything? Did you?”

  “About—?”

  “About Renee. About me and Renee. About last week. Don’t play so fucking coy. It annoys the shit out of me, Carolina.”

  “I told you that wasn’t my business.”

  “I know what you said. But Gerri’s your buddy, right? You two are tight. I knew I shouldn’t trust you!”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I insisted, my insides twisting. “I didn’t say anything to Gerri. In fact, you should than
k me. I was kind of your alibi.”

  Her head did its collie tilt as she considered whether to believe my innocence. “What do you mean?”

  “I saw Gerri the next day. She thought you and Renee had, you know, but I told her I’d been with you the night before. I left out the part when I wasn’t with you. She seemed satisfied. So did something new happen?”

  Barb sniffed and scratched her nose. “You haven’t talked to her since then?” she asked slowly.

  I shook my head.

  “They broke up,” she said. “Gerri moved out. She left you a message. Renee’s a mess.” Barb turned toward the stairs again and called back to me over her shoulder, her voice echoing up from the stairwell. “Don’t wait up on my account. I’ll stay at Jill’s tonight.”

  Between the gulps punctuating Gerri’s message, I made out that she had crashed on Thea’s couch and wanted me to give her a call when I could. “I’ll be hanging out at Ariel’s till late tonight.”

  Gerri needed a friend, but the blue box beckoned. My watch read just past six, so I had some serious speed-reading ahead of me.

  • • •

  For the next few hours, D. A. Westerly’s manuscript diverted my attention from the turmoil with my new roommate and friends. I’d had a memorable class in twentieth-century satire in college that led us through the likes of George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and Joseph Heller, so the style of Big Thunder was familiar.

  The year was 2013 and the unthinkable had just occurred: Mitch Woodhead, the former star of a TV western and now the host of a popular game show, was inaugurated as U.S. president. He was Ronald Reagan II, a man who rode his horse across the White House lawn and disappeared to his Wyoming ranch every weekend “because a fella’s gotta unwind.” President Woodhead’s “shucks, folks” manner had won over voters, even though he’d been born and raised in Manhattan, the privileged heir of a billionaire land developer. Stupendously unprepared for office, his Cabinet included a host of equally unqualified picks, like a TV actor who had once played Thomas Jefferson for Secretary of State and a former Miss South Carolina for Secretary of Education “because she’s just the prettiest little thing.” Woodhead’s grasp on world politics was tenuous: As one of his first moves in office, he issued an ultimatum to the country Robusta, which everyone around him knew didn’t really exist but that he insisted was the United States’ greatest enemy— and so assuredly that news anchors, fellow politicians, and the public soon believed him.

  The novel’s heroes, two freshmen members of Congress named Minnie Hanks and Bert Nowacki, were unlikely collaborators— she was a half-black, half-Korean Californian while he was a white former steelworker from Ohio. Yet together they struggled to forge a grassroots movement to eject the lunatic from office. The pages of Big Thunder turned quickly for me, with a plot that married the Cassandra story to “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

  Within a couple of feverish hours, I was more than two-thirds of the way through the manuscript. The legal pad I had poised in front of me for note-taking was almost bare. I’d scrawled, Is the shock jock too way out there for Secretary of HUD? Not sure and not much else. The writing hadn’t tripped me up, even though Bea had seemed to think it would. In fact, I’d breezed through it, wishing the book could be in print soon enough to present to family members for Christmas. Despite ridicule, I’d sported Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy campaign buttons at Christmas dinner in 1980 as a protest.

  “I hate to break it to you, Liv, but the election’s over,” one brother-in-law had said with a smirk, sending a wave of guffaws down the dinner table.

  “Now, now,” my father had said, pretending to tamp down the laughter even though he could barely contain his own. “Just ’cause we have a little liberal in the family’s no reason to rub it in.”

  I raced through more chapters of Big Thunder, getting closer to the climax. Although I didn’t want to stop, there was the question of Gerri. Just before eleven I decided to head over to Ariel’s and see if she was still there. When I got home, I reasoned, I could finish the final chapters and scrape together notes to present to Bea in the morning. With a looming deadline, I was adept at pulling off a semi-eloquent report— or at least my professors had thought so.

  • • •

  The smoke in Ariel’s choked me the moment I walked in the door. I was used to coming home from a night out and having to toss my clothes in the laundry sack because they reeked of cigarettes, but that evening a thicker-than-usual fog permeated the front room. When I spotted Gerri and Thea at a table by themselves, an overflowing ashtray between them surrounded by empty beer bottles and shot glasses, I figured they had made a significant contribution to the haze.

  “I didn’t know y’all smoked,” I said. “Marlboros, no less.” Gerri ignored my attempted buoyancy, and Thea pretended I didn’t exist.

  “Where were you?” Gerri asked. “I called you hours ago.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Big work assignment for tomorrow. I’ll be up all night, looks like.”

  Gerri gave the chair next to her a swift kick in my direction, almost toppling it over, and Thea excused herself to get another round.

  “You deserted me,” Gerri said. “Thea just got here, too. She went to hear May Sarton read.”

  “Wow, May Sarton—” I clipped off my words when Gerri shot me a scowl. She needed her friends, not a literary discussion. “So. What happened? You and Renee—”

  “Over,” she said. Her red eyes filled up. “I still can’t believe it. My suspicions were right on.”

  After blowing her nose a few times, she outlined the events of the past few days, how Renee had come home the day after their fight and admitted that she was having sex with Barb. “Barb has ‘opened her eyes’ is how she put it.”

  I swigged my beer. “To what?”

  “To sex,” Gerri said. “Well, to some new kind of sex. Liv, she says she’s into all kinds of stuff I had no idea she’d even thought about. Bondage. Butt plugs. Wax. I mean, she never even hinted that she wanted to try anything like that with me.” She shuddered. “Not that I would. I mean, I might try a dildo . . . maybe a butt plug. But candles, for Christ’s sake? That’s what your mom puts on the dinner table at Christmas. What’s next, dogs?” Gerri rested her head in her hands, as my mind flashed back to the proposed plot line for Clio’s new story. “It’s like I don’t even know this person I’ve been with since college.”

  Words failed me, but luckily Thea came back with another round— for her and Gerri.

  “Did you know about Barb and Renee?” she demanded, folding her arms across her chest. “I mean, you live with that woman. It would be hard not to know.”

  “I swear I never saw them together,” I said, which was technically true. “Barb doesn’t much like me. She tolerates me because she needs my rent money.”

  “Liv’s not the bad guy, Thea,” Gerri said. “She’s caught in the middle.” She looked at me through wet eyes. “Did you see Barb today?”

  “Briefly.” I related the story about the sticky lock and Barb’s foul mood but left out the part where she told me about the breakup. For one queasy moment, I worried that Gerri would enlist me as a spy to tell her about Barb’s comings and goings.

  “Well, when you do see her, I don’t want to know anything about what she’s doing,” she said instead. “I couldn’t stand it, hearing that Renee was at your apartment, or that you saw sex toys lying around. Those two are dead to me. I have to see Renee to get all of my shit, but that’s it.” A little cry escaped her lips. “Oh no, how are we going to share Alice?”

  “You’ll make a schedule,” Thea said firmly. “Joint custody, straight down the line. She can’t take your dog from you, too. You can bring Alice to my place for overnighters, no problem.”

  It was my turn to step up to the friend plate.

  “I wouldn’t tell you anything painful about Renee,” I assured her. “I know how that feels. Friends think they’re helping you somehow but they aren’t. When Hallie dumped me,
people were always telling me they saw her at the mall or at some restaurant with her husband. I didn’t get what they wanted me to feel.”

  Thea stared at me with interest. “When did it end?”

  “Last April. The fifteenth, to be exact.”

  I suspected Thea was doing the math in her head: Six months wasn’t a lot of mourning for a relationship, but in lesbian time it was an eternity not to have found someone new.

  “Tax day,” Gerri said with a little smile.

  “It still hurts,” I went on, which was true— but I also thought it might make me more sympathetic to Thea.

  It seemed to work. “Mine ended ten and a half months ago,” Thea admitted, as accurate a measure of time as my own. I understood why she would want to be so precise and not round up to “almost a year.” “Looks like we’re a single sisterhood now.” We clinked our bottles. Her eyes softened toward me. Even if she couldn’t forget what an asshole I’d been, maybe she’d forgive me.

  But just as the mood at the table lightened, Gerri burst into a round of gulping sobs. Thea reached across the table and squeezed her hand.

  “Honey, what?”

  “What. Will. Happen. To. The. Salon?”

  “We’ll start over, just the three of us,” Thea said, not missing a beat. “It’ll be at my place. I have to run it by Vern. She probably won’t want to join. I’ve never seen her read anything but comics, but we can add other people. There might be someone at school. Or maybe we keep it little.”

  “Little’s good,” I said.

  Chapter 11

  My report on Big Thunder was a scant double-spaced page, but well written. That wasn’t much of an argument in my favor, kind of like turning in a single page for a term paper when it was supposed to be eight to ten and pointing out to the annoyed professor that at least it was grammatically flawless.