Garrie was handsome. Sometimes, she thought he had a little crush on her, but she didn’t want to find out—he felt too close to Tuck.
“You’re on the early side today,” Garrie said when she arrived a little before noon.
“Family lunch. I’ll take that coffee with a splash.” Garrie uncorked the Jameson’s and poured a generous amount into the mug before adding coffee. The sun was bright and low enough in the cloudless sky that it briefly blinded Bea as she sat in her favorite spot, next to the small front window. She stood and moved the rickety barstool into the shade and away from the door. It felt more like January than October. The room smelled like furnace and dirty mop and beer. “Aroma of the gods,” Tuck would say. He loved nothing more than a dimly lit bar on a sunny afternoon. The jukebox started up and Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby were singing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Bea and Garrie exchanged a smirk. People were so reassuringly unimaginative.
Bea was eager to see Leo but also nervous. He hadn’t taken any of her calls at rehab. He was probably mad at all of them. She wondered how he would look. The last time she’d seen him, the night in the hospital, they’d been stitching up his lacerated chin and he’d looked wan and petrified. For months before the accident he’d looked terrible: bloated and tired and dangerously bored.
Bea worried today’s lunch was going to be confrontational. Jack and Melody were becoming increasingly unhinged about the situation with The Nest and she assumed they were both coming prepared to stake out their respective plots of neediness. What Bea needed from Leo was not her primary concern. Today, she wanted to keep her ordinarily disagreeable siblings somewhat agreeable, if only for one afternoon, just long enough to get Leo to—well, she didn’t know what exactly. Put some kind of plan in place that would placate Jack and Melody for a bit and give Leo enough breathing room so that he wouldn’t completely shut them down—or flee.
She could feel the whiskey loosening her limbs, taking the edge off her nerves. She lifted her bag from the back of the barstool. Just feeling the heft of it gave her a little thrill. Bea was a writer. (Used to be a writer? Was a writer who—until very recently—had stopped writing? She never knew how to think about herself.) Sometimes, not often anymore, but occasionally at the literary magazine where she worked, someone would recognize her name. Beatrice Plumb? The writer? the conversation would optimistically begin. She knew the sequence by now, the happy glimmer of recognition and then the confused brow, the person trying to summon a recent memory of her work, anything other than her early long-ago stories. After a decade of practice, she knew how to head off the inevitable. She was armed with a fistful of diversionary dead-end replies about her long-awaited novel: a well-worn self-deprecating joke about writing too slowly, how if she amortized her advance over the years, it became an hourly wage best counted in half-pennies; a feigned superstition over talking about unfinished work; amused exasperation at her ongoing perfectionism.
From her oversized canvas bag she pulled out a deep brown leather satchel, one Leo had spotted while roaming around the Portobello Road Market in London years ago when she was in college and had starting writing in earnest. He gave it to her for her birthday. From the early 1900s, it was the size of a large notebook and looked like a miniature briefcase with its small handle and leather straps, like something someone might have carried around Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century. She’d loved it and had thought of it as her lucky bag until it seemed all the luck she’d once enjoyed vanished. Weeks ago, she’d found the satchel on an upper shelf of a closet and took it to a local shoe repair to have one of the straps mended. They’d cleaned and polished the leather and the case looked almost new, with just the right patina of age and use, as if it had housed years of successful manuscripts. She undid the straps and opened the flap, taking out the stack of pages covered with her loopy handwriting. Bea had written more in the past few months than she had in the past few years.
And what she was writing was really good.
And she felt horrible.
YEARS AGO, when she was newly out of graduate school, Leo had persuaded her to work with him on the staff of a magazine he’d helped launch back when starting a magazine wasn’t pure folly. SpeakEasy was smart and irreverent enough to be slightly scandalous, which made it an instant hit with the insular world of the New York media, the precise community it ruthlessly mocked. Leo wrote a column every month, media news peppered with salacious gossip that freely ridiculed the city’s old guard, rife with inherited money and nepotism and ludicrously insular. The column made him a little bit famous and a whole lot disliked. The magazine folded after only a few years, but almost everyone from the original staff had gone on to bigger media ventures or bestselling novels or other highly respected literary pursuits.
For a long time, Leo had been the major success story. He’d corralled some of the younger staff to start an online version of SpeakEasy from his tiny apartment. He kept the snide voice and expanded the scope, targeting all his favorite objectionable people and industries, growing the business from one site to seventeen in the space of fifteen months. Only three years later, Leo and his partner sold their tiny empire to a media conglomerate for a small fortune.
Bea still missed the early SpeakEasy magazine days. The office was like a raucous summer camp where all the kids were smart and funny and got your jokes and could hold their booze. Back then, it had been Leo who’d pushed her to finish those early stories. It had been Leo who’d stayed up late dissecting her paragraphs, making everything better and tighter and funnier. It had been Leo who’d passed along her first story to SpeakEasy’s fiction editor (and her current boss, Paul Underwood) for its inaugural short story issue: “New York’s Newest Voices: Who You Should Be Reading.” It had been Leo who’d used the photo of her on the magazine’s cover (with the very SpeakEasy caption: “The editor’s sister wrote our favorite story, get over it”). That picture of Bea still popped up to accompany the occasional commemorative piece about SpeakEasy (“Where are they now?”) or the group of young, female writers, including Bea, that some journalist had infuriatingly dubbed “The Glitterary Girls.” The photo had been taken on Mott Street in Chinatown in front of a window of gleaming Peking ducks hanging from silver hooks, their still-attached heads all facing the same direction. Bea was wearing a bright yellow dress with a billowing skirt and holding a lacquered green parasol painted with tiny pink and white peonies over one shoulder. The long braids she still wore were a deep auburn then, pinned up at her neck. Chin lowered, eyes closed, profile bathed by the late-afternoon August sun—she resembled a modern-day annunciation. The photo was on the back flap of her first (only) book. For years, the green parasol had hung from the ceiling above her bed. She still had that yellow dress somewhere.
BEA MOTIONED TO GARRIE and he came over with more coffee and placed the bottle of Jameson’s next to her cup. She saw him eye her notes and then quickly look away. He’d overheard enough of her whining to Tuck over the years about the novel that never appeared to know better than to ask her about work, which made her feel even more pathetic, if that was even possible.
Leo had loved—and published—her first story because it was about him. The character she called Archie was a thinly disguised version of a young Leo, a funny, self-absorbed, caustic Lothario. The Paris Review published the second Archie story. The third was in The New Yorker. Then she landed an agent—Leo’s friend Stephanie who was also just starting out and who secured a two-book deal for so much money that Bea felt faint and had to sit in Stephanie’s office and breathe into a paper bag. Her story collection (the highlight of which, the critics agreed, were the three Archie stories—“delectably wry,” “hilarious and smart,” “whether you find yourself rooting for or against Archie, you’ll be powerless to resist his dubious charms”) sold quietly.
“It’s fine,” Stephanie told her then. “This is all groundwork for the novel.”
Bea wondered if Stephanie and Leo were in touch anymore, if Stephanie even knew what was going on. The last time Bea spoke to Stephanie was well over a year ago during an uncomfortable lunch downtown. “Let’s meet somewhere quiet,” Stephanie had e-mailed, alerting Bea to the difficult but not surprising conversation to come about her long-delayed, laboriously overworked novel.
“I