Who is Maud Dixon?(22)

“Hi,” said Florence.

Helen turned around and sang “La tua sorte è già compitaaaaaaa” in a husky alto, drawing out the last syllable. She finished with a swig of wine. “Do you like opera?”

“Um, I’m not sure.” Pretty much the only time Florence listened to classical music was during car commercials.

“Oh, it’s divine. Divine! I saw Il Trovatore at the Met last year. I’ll take you the next time I go. Here, have some wine.”

“Thank you.” Florence took the proffered glass and tried to hide her delight at the thought of attending an opera with Maud Dixon. “Can I help with dinner?”

“No, I’m a total control freak in the kitchen.” She held up a small cherry tomato between her thumb and index finger. “Do you know what they call these in France? Pigeon hearts. Isn’t that fabulous? Isn’t that just what they are? You’ll never be able to look at a pigeon again without thinking of his little tomato-shaped heart beating away inside his puffed-up chest.”

“My mother sometimes calls people pigeon-hearted,” said Florence. “People she thinks are weak.”

“Pigeon-hearted,” Helen repeated, gesturing at her with the tip of the knife. “That’s good. I may have to steal that. Remind me, are you a Southerner? All the best sayings come from the South.”

“Florida. We’re neither here nor there.”

“That’s alright. Here and there are overrated.”

“I suppose.”

Helen stopped chopping to say, “It’s true. There’s real power in being an outsider. You see things more clearly.” Something in the oven snapped loudly enough to make Florence jump. “Chicken. You’re not a vegetarian, are you?” Florence shook her head. “Thank the lord,” Helen pronounced and resumed her quick thrusts of the knife.

“So you’re settling in all right?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Good. We’ll get started on work tomorrow.”

“How is the new book coming?”

A shadow crossed Helen’s face. “It’s coming,” she said vaguely.

“Is it a sequel to Mississippi Foxtrot?”

“No. Maud and Ruby’s story is officially finis.” She made a slicing motion at her neck.

“Oh.” Florence felt her excitement deflate a little. Like most fans of Mississippi Foxtrot, she wanted to know what happened next. “People are going to be disappointed.”

“Yes, my agent reminds me of that daily. Apparently I owe my readers an ending.” Helen rolled her eyes.

“You don’t agree?”

Helen laughed. “Owe them! Of course not. I don’t owe anyone squat. She just wants me to write a sequel because it would make more money.”

She pulled the chicken out of the oven and carved it expertly, placing a breast and a leg on each plate. These she set on the kitchen table with the bottle of wine and a bowl of salad. She gestured at Florence to sit.

Florence asked when she’d get to read the new work.

“Soon. Maybe tomorrow. If you can manage to decipher my godawful Mississippi-public-school chicken scratch.” She wrote her first drafts longhand on yellow legal pads, she said. It would be one of Florence’s jobs to type them up.

“I’m about a quarter of the way into my first draft. As soon as I started writing I realized that it was going to require a lot more research than the first one. That’s where you’ll come in. It takes place in Morocco. Have you been?”

Florence shook her head.

“There are a few authors who’ve written about it very well. Tahar Ben Jelloun and Paul Bowles come to mind.”

“I’m sorry, I haven’t read them. I can, though.”

“No need to apologize. I’ll give you a list of books that would be helpful for you to read. Let’s start with nonfiction, actually. Forget Ben Jelloun and Bowles—they may be more of a distraction than anything else.”

“What’s it about?”

“I’m still working out a lot of the details. But it follows an American woman who drops everything and moves to Morocco to work for an old childhood friend. From there, of course, disaster ensues.” Helen smiled.

Florence, more relaxed from the wine, saw her opening. “I wanted to tell you that I love the way you write about female relationships.” That had been the line she’d been rehearsing in the car from the train station. Immediately after she said it, she worried that it sounded just as trite as she’d feared it would then.

“Well, it’s only because men don’t interest me very much,” Helen laughed.

A weighted silence fell on them.

“I don’t mean that I’m a lesbian,” Helen clarified. “I sleep with men. Occasionally. But I don’t care to have relationships with them. I’ve never found one…fascinating in the way I find women fascinating. Men are blunt objects. There’s no nuance there.

“I was dating a man once,” she went on, “and we went away for the weekend. At the hotel, I realized he didn’t have a clue how to tip—not the bellman, not the housekeeper, not the concierge. He kept asking me how much to give, when should he give it, who should he give it to. I found it so off-putting. I realized then that I could never be with a man who didn’t know how to tip. But then, later, I realized I couldn’t be with a man who tipped easily and smoothly either. What smugness. What satisfaction. So who does that leave?”