God.” Bea couldn’t believe she was hearing the stock phrase she’d employed so many times when she couldn’t think of a single thing to admire about someone’s prose. “Please don’t much-to-admire me. Please. Just say what you have to say.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.” Stephanie looked frustrated and almost angry. She looked older, too, Bea was surprised to note, but then she supposed they both did. Stephanie had fiddled with a sugar packet, tearing it a little at one corner and then folding the end and placing it on her saucer. “Okay, here it is. Everything I loved about your stories, their wit and ingenuity and surprise—everything that worked in those pages—” Stephanie broke off again and now she just looked confused. “I can’t find any of it in these pages.”
The conversation had plummeted from there.
“Are you breaking up with me?” Bea had finally said, trying to joke and lighten the mood.
“Yes,” Stephanie said, wanting to leave no doubt as to where she and Bea stood. “I’m very sorry, but yes.”
“I want my novel to be big,” Bea told Stephanie and Leo the night they celebrated her book deal, a long, boozy evening when her ebullience was so uncorrupted that she could shift a room’s atmosphere when she moved through, like a weather front.
“That’s my job,” Stephanie had said. “You just write it.”
“I’m talking about the canvas. I want it to be sweeping. Necessary. I want to play a little, experiment with structure.” Bea waved at their waiter and ordered another bottle of champagne. Leo lit a cigar.
“Experimenting can be good,” Stephanie said, tentatively.
Bea was very drunk and very happy and she’d leaned back against the banquette and put her feet up on a chair, took Leo’s cigar and blew three smoke rings and watched them float to the ceiling, coughing a little.
“But no more Archie,” Leo had said, abruptly. “We’re retiring Archie, right?”
Bea had been surprised. She hadn’t been planning more Archie stories but she hadn’t thought of them as retired either. Looking at Leo across the table, clearing her throat and trying to focus her vision through the smoke and champagne and those tiny spoonfuls of coke in the bathroom some hours ago, she thought: yes. What was that Bible verse? Time to leave childish things behind?
“Yes,” she’d found herself saying. “No more Archie.” She’d been decisive.
“Good,” he said.
“You’re not that interesting, anyway.” She handed him back his cigar.
“Not anymore he isn’t,” Stephanie said, and Bea had pretended not to notice Stephanie’s fingers moving higher on Leo’s leg and disappearing beneath the linen tablecloth.
How many pages written since then? How many discarded? Too many to think about. Thousands. The novel was big all right. Five hundred and seventy-four pages of big. She never wanted to look at it again.
She poured a little more Jameson’s into her cup, not bothering with the coffee now, and looked again at the new pages nobody had seen or even knew existed. It wasn’t an Archie story. It wasn’t. But it had energy and motion, the same lightness of language that had come so easily to her all those years ago and then had seemed to vanish overnight, as if she’d somehow unlearned a vital skill in her sleep—how to tie her shoes or ride a bike or snap her fingers—and then couldn’t figure out how to get it back.
Stephanie had left the door the tiniest bit ajar at their last meeting—if you have something new to show me, she had said, really new, maybe we can talk. But Bea would have to show the pages to Leo first. Probably. Maybe. Maybe not.
“When are we going to read about your life,” he’d said, a little testily, after she published the final Archie story, the one where she’d veered a little too close to his less desirable, more predatory qualities. Well, here she was. Using her life. How dare he object? Leo owed her. Especially after the night in the hospital. What happened last July had also happened to her. It was her life, too.
NORA AND LOUISA WERE WALKING along Central Park West, hand in hand, winded from running the three blocks from the SAT classroom, breathless with anticipation. “Here we go,” Nora said, squeezing Louisa’s hand. “Straight to a certain death or sexual servitude or both.”
Louisa laughed but she was nervous. Ditching SAT prep had started as a joke. “We could leave our phones in our lockers and just take off,” Louisa had said to Nora after one excruciating session. “The only person who cares if we’re here is Mom.” Louisa knew by the look on Nora’s face that she’d unwittingly put something inevitable into motion. They both hated the classes. The tutor who ran their group seemed barely older than they were and never took attendance or remembered anyone’s name or seemed to care who did what. “This is largely self-directed,” she’d say, sounding bored and uninspired while staring out a window that faced Columbus Avenue, looking as if her most fervent wish was to leap outside and stroll back into her precious weekend. “You get out of it what you put into it.”
“You’re a genius,” Nora had said to Louisa. “Let’s do it!”
“I was kidding. Mom and Dad are paying for this.”
“Everything is in the book!” Nora’d pulled out the enormous SAT guide. “They paid for this book. All that tutor does is read from the chapter and make us do the exercises. We can work on the train and at home. It’s not even that hard. We have another year before applying anywhere. We’re juniors.”
Louisa was tempted but nervous. She agreed the classes were lame, but she felt guilty. Something was up at home concerning money—there was always something up concerning money, there was never enough money—but this time seemed different and possibly more dire. Her parents spent a lot of time heatedly whispering and had even taken their discussion to the freezing and snowy yard the night before. But she knew once Nora set her mind to something that it was just a matter of time before it happened.
“Think of how beautiful the park will be today with the snow,” Nora said, petitioning the second they were out from under their mother’s watchful eye. “Snow in the city is evanescent. See? I just used an SAT word. Come on. Today’s the perfect day.”
Nobody stopped them when they bolted out of the building through a side door and ran down the street expecting to hear their names called at any second. They buried their cell phones deep in a locker in case their mother checked their location on Stalkerville (and she was their mother; she always checked their location).
Louisa hesitated. Melody’s admonitions about Central Park and its dark pathways full of nefarious men wanting vaguely disturbing and dangerous things genuinely frightened her. But Nora wanted to find a hot dog vendor and the carousel and Belvedere Castle and other things they’d heard about but never seen. She’d downloaded and printed a map before they left home. “We’ll stick to the main paths today,” she said, unfolding the map and pointing to the spot marked “Strawberry Fields Memorial.”
“Let’s start here.”
LEO PLUMB WAS LOST. He was not ordinarily an uptown guy and what he’d thought was a shortcut through Central Park had led him into an area he didn’t recognize. It didn’t help that the park was like a disaster area after the snowstorm. The snow and ice that had settled over the still-leafy trees had perilously weighed down the branches, destroying or damaging countless trees. Many of the park’s walking paths were like obstacle courses, slippery and littered with debris. A massive cleanup was under way, and the sound of chain saws reverberated from every direction. Some areas were closed off with police tape, necessitating circuitous detours; Leo was completely turned around.
He looked up at the sky, trying to spot the distinctive peaks and gables of the Dakota on the park’s west flank and take a bearing, but from where he was standing he could only see taller, unfamiliar buildings. Leo was running late for his appointment,