The Elizas: A Novel(97)
“What do you mean, sales?”
She reaches into her bag, this time pulling out a wad of papers. The first one she hands to me has a bunch of numbers running across the top. “She self-published that novel you write about her working on a few months before she died. The Riders of Carrowae. See those numbers?” Laura points. “It earned a little money last week. If she were alive, she’d get a royalty check in a few months, though I guess it’ll go to whoever handles her estate. That you? Your mom?”
“I don’t know.” I keep staring at the book’s title on the page. I’ll be damned. She actually wrote it. That exact name had poked through the scrim of my memory and made it into the book unscathed. Funny what I’d remembered verbatim: Dorothy’s book, Thomas’s name, Dr. Singh. Part of me is dying to read Dorothy’s book. The other part needs to stay far away.
“So all’s well that ends well!” Laura crows. “Really, I’m just in here to see when you’re getting out. Your publisher really wants to talk to you about doing another book. And Roxanne wants you back.”
“After that train wreck?” I sputter, turning my head at the memory.
“Not a train wreck.” Laura points at me. “Your appearance got them the highest ratings they’ve had in years. People DVR’d the shit out of it! It’s gone viral on YouTube! Every morning show has featured it! They’ve even done segments on artists and mental illness! You’re part of a national conversation!”
“Oh my God,” I groan into my hands.
“Oh, please. Don’t worry about it, Eliza. You’re famous! You’re eccentric! You’ll come out of this and everyone’s going to be like, There’s that crazy-interesting writer who lost her marbles on Dr. Roxanne! Wonder what she’s going to do next?”
But I don’t want to be the crazy-interesting writer. Eleanor Reitman was that person. It seems like the worst thing to aspire to.
“Oh, before I forget.” She rustles in her bag and lobs me more papers. “I don’t know if you actually know this clown, but someone’s done a tell-all about you. It actually came out the same time as when your Dr. Roxanne appearance aired—I think he was trying to scoop them. It got lost in the shuffle after your breakdown onstage, so we only dug it up now.”
I turn the paper over. My love affair with Eliza Fontaine, reads the headline. And then: Dating an artist can be strange, interesting, and sometimes even exciting. And with Eliza, you really had no idea what was around the corner—but all of it was incredible.
Leonidas, is my first thought—but I hadn’t been an artist with him, had I? And besides, he knew how Eleanor died—he had a lot to lose by exposing himself. Then my gaze lands on the picture at the bottom of the page. It’s Desmond’s quirky smile. I’m standing next to him, my cheek smashed into his shoulder. It’s a selfie of us that he’d taken with his phone the second day we’d spent together.
I let the paper drop to the bed with a yelp. But then I immediately scoop it up and read everything. Desmond wrote about fishing me out of the pool (she emerged from the abyss like a mermaid, moonlight on her lashes), how I have a merry-go-round in my backyard (she was whimsical, original, and artful), how I’d come on to him at my house (good Lord in heaven, how I longed for her, but I was so afraid!), and Steadman’s junk shop (a woman who can be around petrified cat penises all day is a woman after my own heart). Stalking Leonidas’s dad’s office was, apparently, the sexiest date he’d ever been on. Even my seizure at the Tranquility was transcendent. Caesar himself would have chucked aside Cleopatra for a chance with me.
Desmond concludes the article saying that we’d parted ways, not dropping the Andrew bomb at all. It’s as though he forgot it. And then he signs it, Love you always. By the end, my face is wet. I feel foolish to be crying, and yet I can’t stop.
“Don’t feel too bad,” Laura says. “It’s flattering, really. And I doubt anyone’s going to read it.” She plucks the article from my hands and tosses it into a rolling Dumpster of trash that happens to be passing by my room. But after she leaves, I chase that Dumpster down, hurl myself into the can, and dig the article out, picking off a banana peel and dirty Kleenex and empty pill wrappers until it is flat and clean and mine and mine alone.
? ? ?
And then I can smell Desmond before I see him: mothballs, capriole ham, the carpeted interior of the Batmobile. He peers in tentatively, and because I’m turned away from the door, he darts backward. Then I roll over and sit up. “Oh.”
“Okay if I come in?” His voice cracks. “You’re not sleeping?”
I don’t say anything, but he takes that as an invitation and sits on the green plastic chair farthest away from my bed. A bouquet of roses wrapped in crinkly cellophane twists in his hands.
“Those are hideous,” I say dourly.
“I know,” he says in a small voice. “I wanted black tulips, but to be completely truthful, I came here on a whim. I didn’t even tell work, and it’s two days before the conference. This is all that was available in the gift shop.”
I sniff indignantly and face the wall. I suppose I’m supposed to feel like he’s made some sort of sacrifice by missing his precious pre-conference prep?
“You know, I forgive you,” he says. “For that . . . fellow. In the bar. I understand why you had to do that.”