Five Tuesdays in Winter(50)

“What is it?” the man asked between two loving, shut-eyed sips. “Two more years?”

He took in the gestalt of her life—the robe, the boob, the primary-colored plastic items on the floor, the cardboard books with corners chewed off, the bouquet of half-deflated balloons hovering in the corner—and shrugged.

She turned the page. It was dedicated to her mother. Of all people. “The jig’s up now, mister.” It was an odd choice of words for her, and she was reminded of walking with her mother through a parking lot, though she couldn’t say why.

“I suppose you had a reconciliation.”

“No chance of that. She’s dead.”

“But not beyond the reach of forgiveness.”

She slammed the book shut, though its flimsy galley covers did not give her the effect she wanted. “Who sent you? What is this about?” She wondered if he was, after all, a religious fanatic, one of those Mormons wanting to do a little hocus-pocus on all of her ancestors.

“As I said, if you have the time, I’d like to discuss your work.”

“Why should I discuss my work with you? You’ve never read it. No one’s ever read it.”

“No one?” he asked, doctorly, humoring her delusion.

“No. I keep it locked up.” She’d read a part of her first novel to her husband soon after they’d met, when she could have read him cereal boxes and he’d have thought she was a genius. After all his praise, she hadn’t been able to write another word of it. She was careful not to read him any of the second one, but he’d stolen glances and eventually a turn of phrase had leaked out of him, something about nests of snow in the trees. He tried to placate her with compliments, threatened to publish both books himself if she wouldn’t try, but she hid them in the basement, bought a box with a key, and never told him she’d begun a third.

“It would have been a waste of time for me to come here without having read your work.”

“This is not my work!” Oh, why had she shouted? The baby jerked awake, shot her a pissed-off glare, and began to scream. The morning—or what was left of it—was officially ruined.

“Listen,” she said above the noise, flipping madly to the first chapter. She read the first line aloud. She had approached this sentence with such resistance to ownership that the resistance momentarily outlasted the fact of her own words on the page. Then her defiance collapsed. Her baby was shrieking, and her book, half-written, locked in a box for several years, was bound in a galley in her hand.

She felt the baby’s tears rolling down her stomach inside her bathrobe. She stood up and jogged him on her hip until the crying mellowed to a low, nearly satisfied hum. The man continued to sit patiently, primly, on her couch.

“Okay,” she said. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I have a few suggestions, minor ones, really.” He held up his drained glass. “Might I bother you for another before we begin?”

She thought about having him make it himself again, then decided she’d water it down a bit, just as she’d done to her parents’ drinks before they caught on. The baby, having spied something interesting as she carried him across the room, lunged for the floor, twisting his torso out of her grip. From the kitchen she could see he’d crawled over to the sofa, pulled himself up by the piping of a cushion, and was sidestepping toward the man and the red ballpoint he’d taken from his breast pocket.

Her hands among the martini ingredients were not sure or loving. They were not even, as she half expected, the hands she’d once laid upon this bar, innocent and investigative. Her two fingers no longer fit easily in the onion jar, and the shaker, smaller too, seemed far more menacing. She felt as an atheist might, returning to the altar of her childhood. These were the tools, the chalice, cruet, and pyx, the ugly, important objects that had once worked a kind of black magic years ago.

She felt a heaviness in her limbs and spun around to tell him to go. She didn’t care how the bar got here or the book with her name and her words. All she wanted was to get back to the page on her desk. But what was the point if somehow it was already finished? She had such trouble with endings. She had to get that book. She forced herself through the steps of the martini, adding a few splashes from the tap before shaking, and returned.

The man remained exactly as she had left him, though his hair (had he removed a hat?) had changed. It now seemed his most striking feature (where was Bing? where was poor, decent Gerald Ford?), a thick white covering shorn into a square with closely cropped sides and a slightly longer, iron-straight top. She was so struck by the alteration or her own lack of observation that she forgot, until after she handed him his drink, about the baby.

He was gone.

“Did you notice where Matty went?”

“Hmm?” He looked up from his notes, notes in red ink in the margins of her book.

“My little boy. He was right there.”

He stared blankly back at her, as if she’d ceased speaking his language.

“Where did he go?” she said, faking calm, concealing suspicion for the moment. Was this how simple it was—a Faustian bargain—the book for the baby? The door to the stairway was shut, and he hadn’t crawled into the kitchen—or had he? She raced back in, bent her head to peer beneath the table and through the pantry door. She returned to accuse. What the hell did you do with my child? She opened her mouth, then she saw him, on the fourth shelf of the bookcase, face out, feet dangling between Hardy and Hazzard. She lunged for Matty and got him safely in her arms. Nothing in the course of this morning was as strange and impossible as the fact that her baby, her wriggling, restless, rarely sleeping, nonstopping baby, had been sitting still on a shelf for over a minute while she searched for him. In that minute, the man had downed his martini. Again she opened her mouth to scold him—you put him on the bookshelf, he could have fallen, he could have struck his head on the edge of that table!—but upon hearing her intake of breath, he glanced up, smiled the absent smile of a man absorbed, and patted the cushion beside him. “Come let’s talk this over,” he said.