Writers & Lovers(17)

I tried, in phone calls with Janet, to get more detail than pretty day and peaceful. I wanted everything, my mother’s exact words and the smell of the clinic and the color of the walls. Were children kicking a ball outside? Was she holding Janet’s hand? Who did she sit up to call? Was there any noise at all when her heart stopped? Why did it stop? I wanted to hear my mother tell it. She loved a story. She loved a mystery. She could make any little incident intriguing. In her version, the doctor would have a wandering eye and three chickens in the back named after Tolstoy characters. Janet would have a heat rash on her neck. I wanted her and no one else to tell me the story of how she died.

Her suitcase arrived at Caleb and Phil’s house three days after the funeral. Caleb and I opened it together. We lifted out her yellow rain slicker, her two cotton nightgowns, her one-piece bathing suit with the pink-and-white checks. We pressed our noses to every item, and every item smelled of her. We found gifts in a paper bag, a pair of beaded earrings and a man’s T-shirt. We knew they were for us. When the suitcase was empty I slid my hand into the interior elasticized pouches, certain there would be something in writing, a note or a sentence of goodbye, of premonition, in case of. There was nothing but two safety pins and a thin barrette.





The rest of the week goes badly. My writing flounders. Every sentence feels flat, every detail fake. I go for long runs along the river, to Watertown, to Newton, ten miles, twelve miles, which help, but after a few hours the bees start crawling again. I scroll the 206 pages I have on the computer and skim the new pages I have in my notebook since Red Barn. I can’t find one moment, one sentence, that’s any good. Even the scenes I’ve clung to when all else seems lost—those first pages I wrote in Pennsylvania and the chapter I wrote in Albuquerque that poured out of me like a visitation—have dimmed. It all looks like a long stream of words, like someone with a disease that involves delusions has written them. I am wasting my life. I am wasting my life. It pounds like a heartbeat. For three days straight it rains, and the potting shed starts to smell like compost. I arrive at Iris soaked through and barely dry off before I have to ride back home. I try to fold my white shirt carefully into my knapsack but it wrinkles, and Marcus scolds me for it. Each way I pass the Sunoco station on Memorial Drive, the ugly marigolds in their concrete bed, and hot tears mix with the rain. The date at the end of the week with Silas, for which I have swapped a lucrative Friday night for a Monday lunch, fills me with dread. But when I am not paying attention, I remember his voice on the phone and his chipped tooth, and a ripple of something that might be anticipation passes through.

Harry and I have two doubles together, Tuesday and Thursday. I’m not an efficient waitress when Harry is working — we get lost in conversation and cajole the sous chefs into making us BLTs or crab cakes and smoke cigarettes with Alejandro out on the fire escape and are never around when Marcus is looking for us—but I am a cheerier waitress. Harry’s charm rubs off on me. My service is worse, but my tips are always better.

‘He’s not panna cotta, is he?’ he says on Thursday lunch over vichyssoise and iced coffees in the wait station while Marcus interviews someone in the office.

Harry asked me to dinner after the first shift we worked together. He was handsome and hilarious, with a sexy British accent and a flawlessly hetero shield. He told me he’d been born in Lahore, but moved when he was three to London.

‘Northeast London?’ I asked, because he sounded exactly like a friend I’d had in Paris from there.

‘Yeah, Redbridge. Who are you, Henry Higgins?’

He said he became English at age nine when he switched schools and changed his name from Haroon to Harry. ‘My skin magically lightened. It was quite a trick. After that I was just one of the lads.’

Over dessert I planned to tell him about Luke, tell him that I wasn’t ready to date yet. But when the panna cotta arrived he mentioned an ex, named Albert. I was floored. Later we called it the panna cotta revelation.

‘Who?’ I say now.

‘This Silas fellow.’

‘Shit, I hope not. You can have him if he is.’

‘A writer? No thanks.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t want someone who’s all up in here all the time.’ He waves his fingers around his glossy black hair. ‘I like a thruster. Writers aren’t thrusters. Not the good ones. And I couldn’t be with a bad writer. God, that would be awful.’ Ooful is how he says it. He goes off to drop a check at his deuce. ‘Plus,’ he says when he comes back, ‘I want to be the wordsmith. I like to dominate, verbally. Your three-top wants hot tea. Tell them it’s ninety degrees outside and their lips are going to melt like wax.’

Marcus comes out of the office while I’m dropping the tea and Harry’s taking an order and finds our bowls of vichyssoise. ‘I’m not ever scheduling you two together again.’ He always says that. It makes us feel about six years old. We make faces at each other behind his back.

When I get home that night, late—there was an anniversary party for sixty-one in the downstairs dining room — Silas is on my machine.

‘Casey, I’m sorry. I had to leave town. For a while. I’m not sure how long.’ His mouth is really close to the receiver, cars whipping by behind him. ‘I’m sorry to miss our date tomorrow. I really am. It’s the one thing that. I don’t know. I barely know you. But. I had to. I had to go. Anyway, I’ll call you when I get back. Don’t. Well, I can’t really. Take care of yourself.’ There was a pause and then, ‘Shit,’ and the receiver crashed into the cradle.