My Last Innocent Year(71)
“Stop it. You’ve given me so much.”
“Well, I wish it could have been more.” The rain picked up. Abe got in the car and turned on the windshield wipers. Before he pulled away, he rolled down the window. “If you want to be a writer,” he said, “I know you’ll be a great one.”
21
THREE years later, Abe walked me down the aisle. Isabel, the motherless bride, handed off from one man to another in a dress Kelsey helped me pick out. It was white, which Debra derided as outdated and anachronistic, tangled up in patriarchy and the suppression of female sexuality, but I liked it. It was the white of new beginnings and fresh starts, driven snow and the blank page.
Bo Benson and I got married in a country club in Shaker Heights, Ohio. His family took up twenty tables while mine took up only four. That should have told me everything. There were clashes over invitation wording and menu planning, religion and money, of course money. Clashes that indicated future clashes, but Bo and I were young and hopeful and in love, both looking for something in the other person we hoped would make up for our own deficits, wide gaping holes that were far too cavernous to fill, but who knows that at twenty-five? Who knows that ever?
We moved into a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side not far from Kelsey and Jason. We had dinner parties and bought shower curtains. We talked about getting a dog or maybe a cat, but in the end we had a baby. While Kelsey suffered miscarriages and Debra slept her way through San Francisco, I had an easy pregnancy and, at the end of nine months, a fat, beautiful baby girl. Alice had ten fingers and ten toes and a soft, velvety head I couldn’t stop kissing. I had embraced optimism and this was where it got me. Was this how life was going to be from now on? I felt certain that it was.
Benji was working full-time at Rosen’s, and Leon, Abe’s brother, offered to pay off my student loans in exchange for Abe taking Benji into the business. Despite my feeble protests, Abe agreed, and I was released from my monthly obligation. Bo and I were engaged by then, and he probably would have offered to pay them off for me, but I let Leon do it instead as payback for my father’s long years of service, for the life he’d never chosen. In exchange, Benji did what he said he would do: extended Rosen’s reach. The store is listed in several New York City guidebooks and you can now buy whitefish salad on the World Wide Web; you can even buy a T-shirt that says “Rosen’s Appetizing, Est. 1920.” Abe doesn’t let success go to his head, though. “I don’t care how much money we have, Isabel. I still put on an apron and sell people a half a pound of cream cheese and a container of herring.”
Bo and I had money. We hired a nanny. I worked, first at Get Out! and then at Westview Day School, where I was a part-time librarian, or media specialist, as my job would eventually be called. In the afternoons while Alice napped, I started writing again. When she was three, I had a story published in a small literary magazine, the kind that paid in prestige. That’s when the letter arrived.
I hadn’t heard from Connelly in years. I didn’t know what he was up to, only that he was still in New Hampshire and still married. I’d read somewhere that what he’d done—helping Tom hide Igraine—was a criminal offense and that he could have been charged with aiding in felony kidnapping or conspiracy. That didn’t happen, as far as I knew, but he never taught at Wilder College again, which I imagined Joanna, in her position as English department chair, had had something to do with. It wasn’t clear what he was doing; other than a few stories in the Daily Citizen’s online archive, he barely existed on the internet, although in those years I wasn’t looking that hard. I didn’t like thinking about that time in my life, those afternoons in his office behind the locked door, his big hands, the leather sofa. I thought I saw him sometimes, riding the 6 train or hailing a taxi on Third Avenue or once, standing in front of EJ’s Luncheonette where I used to take Alice for pancakes bigger than her head. There was a band teacher at Westview who reminded me of him, and one summer, when Bo, Alice, and I were in California, I could have sworn I saw him riding a bike down the boardwalk in Venice Beach, zigzagging through the skateboarders, stoners, and snake charmers. After he passed, I gathered Alice in my arms, buried my face in her hair, and remembered I wasn’t that girl anymore. I had outrun her.
The letter wasn’t a letter, it was a story about a woman, newly divorced, living in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills. It’s wildfire season and she has to decide whether to evacuate. We learn she is an actress, her ex-husband a director who left her for some young starlet. The actress and her ex never had children: he hadn’t wanted them. Now the starlet is pregnant.
It wasn’t a perfect story. I remember wanting to like it more. It was clear Connelly had never been to Hollywood and knew nothing about the movie business. He once told me he liked writing from a woman’s point of view, and I thought that made him romantic and liberated. It only occurred to me now that he didn’t know how to do it. But despite its faults, the story was beautiful—the menace of the approaching fire, the flames licking the hillside, the scream of sirens. And through it all, the slow sifting of memory as the woman wanders the empty house, deciding what to take and what to leave behind. In the end, it isn’t clear if she saves herself or dies, if she leaves the house or stays behind to burn.
I turned on a television show for Alice and read the story again. There was no note, no return address. Both margins were justified so the story sat on the page like a wall of text. I marked it up, made notes, underlined parts I liked—“writer porn,” we used to call it back in English 76—but I didn’t know if that was what he wanted. I didn’t know what he wanted. Was he sending me a message or a warning? Was I this woman, or was she Connelly? Or was she Roxanne and I the young starlet he’d left her for? But he hadn’t left Roxanne, not for me, not for anyone. I wondered if he knew I was married and had a child. Did he know I was writing again? Did he want me to know he was writing, too? I hadn’t touched “This Youthful Heart” in years, not since I’d graduated. I didn’t know how to do it without him. Did he know that, too?