The Nest

by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

  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 can see the effort that went into this draft,” Stephanie had said (generously—they both knew not a lot of effort had gone into the draft in quite some time). “And while there’s much to admire here—”

  “Oh, 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 hav
e 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, the one he’d scheduled by phone the day he left rehab, to meet his old friend Rico at the Strawberry Fields Memorial. He had to find his way to higher ground. He used to know some trick about figuring out where he was in the park, something about numbers at the base of the cast-iron lampposts. He walked over to the nearest one. Yes! A small metal plaque affixed to the base was engraved with four numbers: 6107. Did that mean he was only at Sixty-First Street? But didn’t the “07” indicate something, too? East side or west side or smack in the damn middle? Fuck Olmsted and his meandering faux-bucolic pathways. He shoved his hands in his pockets and started walking in a direction that felt like he was heading west.

  “IT’S COOL, I GUESS,” Louisa said, staring down at the black-and-white mosaic on the ground with the word IMAGINE at the center. She’d pictured something very different, with an image of John Lennon maybe. Or Strawberries. Or Fields.

  Nora was bouncing on her toes, because she was excited and because it was cold. “Let’s head into the park. Look at this place. It’s full of people and families. The boathouse is right down that hill to the left.”

  Nora was right. The park didn’t feel dangerous at all. It felt lively and bright. “It’s downright ebullient,” Louisa said, summoning another SAT word. “Lead the way.”

  HURRYING AS QUICKLY AS HE COULD MANAGE given the scrim of ice coating the pavement, Leo finally came to a path he recognized. He could see the Dakota now. The path was ostensibly closed, blocked off with police tape, and beyond the tape an enormous broken branch of an old elm was swaying dangerously a few feet above the ground. He ducked under the tape and started to lightly jog up the walkway. It was steeper than it looked and the soles of his expensive shoes were paper-thin. As he maneuvered around some fallen limbs, giving wide berth to the elm, he slipped on a long, nearly invisible frozen puddle that cracked under his weight and before he could catch himself, both legs went out from under him and he landed on his backside. Hard.

  “Crap,” he said to a flock of sparrows twittering maniacally in the surrounding bushes. Leo stayed prone for a minute. He was sweating heavily even though his extremities were freezing. Above, the vivid blue sky belied the approaching winter; it was a spring sky, he thought, a sky full of promise. He almost wanted to close his eyes and forget about his meeting. (Meeting? He could hear the voice of his rehab counselor in his ear, her derisive tone, her familiar snort. Let’s call things by their real name, Leo. It’s a drug buy.)

  As he sat up, he heard a commotion up the path. Two teenaged girls rounded the corner, heading downhill. Their heads were bent close; one was animated, talking quickly and gesticulating, the other was shaking her head and frowning. Leo liked something about the way the girls kept leaning into each other as they walked, almost as if they were tethered at the shoulder or elbow. The blonde looked up, noticed Leo sitting in the middle of the icy walk, and froze. Leo smiled to reassure them, gave a little wave.

  “Careful,” he called out. “It’s treacherous down here.”

  The blonde looked alarmed and grabbed her friend who was staring at Leo with—was he imagining this?—recognition. The three of them faced off for a moment, and then the blonde grabbed the brunette’s hand and both girls turned and hurried up the path.

  “Hey,” Leo yelled. “I come in peace!”

  The girls moved faster, holding on to each other’s arms for balance.

  FOR A MINUTE, it seemed to Nora and Louisa that Melody had arranged Leo’s nearly mystical appearance, had planted him there to say: See? See what trouble lurks in the park? See how lucky you are that I’m your mother? They were always asking about Melody’s siblings,
the siblings who lived in the city and seemed so interesting and exotic, especially their uncle Leo whose picture would sometimes be in the Sunday Styles section with Victoria, their glamorous aunt. (Louisa had tried calling her Aunt Victoria once at a rare family gathering and couldn’t tell whether the woman wanted to laugh or spit at her.) Melody looked pained when the girls would point out the photos, her face clouding with a mix of disapproval and disappointment. Her expression made the girls feel so bad they stopped mentioning the pictures, hiding them instead in a Tupperware container in their shared closet. Sometimes they’d ask their father about Leo who would only say, “He’s always been perfectly nice to me. Not much of a family man.”

  And here he was. Leo. Flailing about like an upended turtle. (“He wasn’t flailing,” Nora said, dismissing Louisa’s attempts to describe the odd moment while they were heading home on the train later. “He was trying to get up. It was icy.” But Louisa was firm, Melody-like; newly out of rehab, she insisted, Leo should not have been in the park. He was supposed to be meeting his siblings for lunch!) At the top of the path they stopped and hid behind a tree trunk to spy on Leo.