The Nest(28)

“You look exactly the same!” Lena held Bea at arm’s length and gushed. “Come sit and talk to me.” She clapped her hands, and her bared cleavage bounced a little. Had she bought herself new breasts, too? Bea didn’t remember Lena ever being voluptuous. They sat in a quiet corner of the dining room next to an enormous table covered with trays of meticulously made canapés. Bea positioned herself with her back to the room and steeled herself for Lena’s interrogation only to realize, within minutes, that of course Lena wanted to talk about Lena.

“Here she is,” she said, handing Bea her phone and swiping through what seemed like hundreds and hundreds of photos of her daughter. “She’s three. I finished the edits on my last book on a Wednesday morning, e-mailed the pages to my editor, stood up from my desk, and my water broke.”

“You were always really efficient,” Bea said.

“I know!”

“What’s her name?” Bea asked, looking at the photo of a little girl with a party hat sitting in front of a birthday cupcake.

“Mary Patience.”

“Patience?” Bea wasn’t sure she’d heard properly.

“Oh, you know,” Lena said, as if it were obvious, “one of those old family Mayflower names.”

“Have you been adopted by a new family?” Bea knew Lena had grown up in a trailer park somewhere in central Ohio with a single mother who managed to raise four kids working a variety of minimum-wage jobs. You had to listen closely these days to hear any echo of the broad and nasal midwestern vowels in Lena’s speech, and her unruly black hair had been straightened, and somewhere along the line Nowaski had become Novak—and there were those new impressive breasts—but there was no way Lena’s round and freckled face with the slightly bulbous nose that looked like it had been raised on kielbasa had anything to do with the Mayflower.

“My ridiculous husband,” Lena said, her voice full of admiration. “He’s in the blue book.”

Bea looked down at the picture of Lena’s daughter again and was secretly pleased to see that the girl’s nose had been inherited from the kielbasa not the Mayflower side of the family. She looked kind of sweet.

“So tell me about her?” Bea said, sending a fat one across the plate to Lena. “Tell me everything about being a mom.”

Forty-five minutes later, she’d neatly extracted herself from the predictably dull conversation. (“They say being a mother is the hardest job in the world and it’s true,” Lena had said, solemnly, “many, many times harder than writing an international bestseller, harder than figuring out that NEA grant application!”) She stood and hugged Lena good-bye. “Don’t fall off the face of the earth again, okay,” Lena had said, giving Bea a little shake, pressing her thumbs just a little too hard into Bea’s upper arms. “Get in touch. Find me on Twitter.”

Bea went to collect her things and to tell Paul she had a headache. Her coat was in a small maid’s room adjacent to the kitchen, underneath an inexplicably huge pile of fur coats (didn’t anyone in New York have any shame anymore?) and rooted around the left sleeve for the mittens she’d tucked there for safekeeping. She could hear Lena in the kitchen now, animatedly talking to Celia.

“—Absolutely no idea,” Lena was saying, sounding more thrilled than confused. “I haven’t spoken to her in years. I know she still works at Paper Fibres.” Bea froze.

“God,” Celia said, a touch of satisfaction in her voice, too. “Still? How depressing. Is she married?”

“She had that boyfriend for a long time, that older guy? The poet? Did he die? I think he was married.”

“So she’s not writing at all?”

“From what I gather, no.” Bea could hear Lena chewing something crunchy, a carrot or a celery stick or a lesser mortal’s finger bone. “Do you hear anything from Stephanie?” Lena asked Celia. “They’re not working together anymore, right?”

“No, they’re not. I can’t ever get any good gossip from Stephanie. All she would tell me is they went their separate ways and it was mutual, which I’m sure isn’t true.” Celia’s voice lowered a bit. Bea inched closer to the open doorway, flattening herself against the wall. “I did hear something interesting from another source.”

“Yessss?” Lena said.

“She had to pay back part of her publishing advance a few years ago. It was a lot of money.”

Bea winced, frozen in place, afraid to move.

“That’s rough,” Lena said, and this time the concern in her voice was genuine. Bea felt a wave of nausea move through her and she had a terrible and sudden urge to defecate. Being scrutinized or mocked by Lena was leagues better than being on the receiving end of her pity.

“Terrible,” Celia said, momentarily chastened by Lena’s sincerity. “Really terrible.”

Both women were quiet, as if they’d just read Bea’s obituary or were standing over her gravestone.

“But you know what?” Celia said, resummoning her nerve. “I’m just going to say it since Stephanie’s not here. I never loved her stories. I never got what all the fuss was about. I mean, they were cute—the Archie stuff—it was clever, but The New Yorker? Please.”

“They were of a place and time,” Lena said, her register lowering into the interview or public reading voice Bea recognized and remembered loathing. “They worked in that late ’90s kind of navel-gazing, where-did-we-come-from thing. We were all doing it. We were so young. Not everyone was able to figure out how to transition to more mature material.” Bea couldn’t believe how regal Lena sounded, as if someone had appointed her the f*cking Emperor of Fiction.