Bea had taken a class with Tucker after her book came out, after a year in Seville where she found herself so disoriented and adrift that she did little else than sit in tapas bars, smoking and sipping sherry, practicing her Spanish and writing funny postcards to her friends. She came home nearly fluent but empty-handed in terms of word count.
“How about joining a writing group or taking a class?” Stephanie had suggested, not concerned yet.
“A class?” Bea said.
“Not a fiction class, something else. Poetry. Nonfiction. Just to get the wheels greased. It might be fun.”
“Like go to the New School and sign up for Introduction to Poetry?” Bea was pissed. She had an MFA.
“No, of course not. Something at your level. Like how about Tucker McMillan’s class at Columbia. He’s amazing. You could audit.”
Bea ignored Stephanie’s suggestion only to find herself a few days later at a party standing before Tucker. She was mesmerized. He was appealingly craggy in the way of some older men who seemed to finally grow into their generous features in middle age. She’d seen pictures of him when he was younger and thinner and seemed burdened by his own physicality, nose too large, mouth too generous, ears too wide—but when she met him, some alchemy of time and girth and weathering of his face made him beautiful. And his voice. It was one of the biggest regrets of her life (and that was saying something) that she didn’t have his voice on tape anywhere.
“Ah, Beatrice Plumb,” he’d said, taking one of her hands in both of his and giving her his full attention. “As pretty as your picture.” Bea hadn’t known then if he was making fun of her. It was shortly after the “Glitterary” piece came out and although the photographer had taken what felt like hundreds of pictures of her for that article—at a desk, leaning against a window, curled in a chair—he’d chosen to use one of maybe three shots he’d snapped at the very end of the day when she was exhausted and had collapsed on her bed for a minute while he was changing lenses. “Hold it right there,” he’d said and had stood on a chair at the end of the bed and shot her from above, reclining, arms stretched to her side, looking sleepy and patently alluring (she had been flirting with the photographer a little, but not with the world). The picture had been ridiculed on various media sites, written about more than anything she said in the article. She was still angry about the stupid photo, which, in any context other than work, she would have quite liked.
“Not the one I would have chosen,” she’d said, trying to sound dismissive but not defensive.
“Why on earth not.” Tuck stared at her so intently she backed up a few steps. “The yellow dress, the parasol, those hanging ducks. I thought it was brilliant. Strong.”
“Oh,” she said, relieved. “I like that photo, too.”
“I didn’t know there were others,” he said. “I’ll have to find them.”
“That’s the best one,” she said. She could feel her face and neck flush and tried to back away. His stare was so direct. It was exhilarating.
“Stay for a bit.” He put his hand on her arm and her entire being lit up. “Everyone here is dull. Stay and tell me an interesting story.”
She showed up in his class the following week and every week after that for the rest of the year. She was a good student, serious and hardworking, quiet and unassuming. She wasn’t a great poet, but Stephanie had been right; it was fun to do something new, something without a particular result or pressure to perform attached.
Bea waited until she was no longer Tucker’s student to sleep with him. He assumed her reluctance was because he was almost twenty years older, married with grown children, but it wasn’t any of those things. Bea simply didn’t want to have sex with the teacher, didn’t want that to be the beginning of their story and by then—when it wasn’t a question of if but when they would be together—it was clear to both of them that they would, in fact, have a story.
Or at least that was the narrative she wove for Tucker, and it was partly true, but something else was true, too—she loved the power his desire afforded her. Her inability to produce anything significant of the novel made her feel like such an imposter, frightened even, and his desire was a balm. She loved the secret of what they were surely going to do. She flirted with him mercilessly at the beginning. Requesting private conferences that she dressed for as if she was going to be undressed, even though she knew she wasn’t. She carried his lust around like a magic coin in her pocket that she could spend when she decided she was ready.
He acquired the apartment on the Upper West Side shortly after they began their affair, wanting a place where he could spend time with her that was not the cockroach-infested studio she rented on the Lower East Side with the occasional junkie passed out in the lobby. He would have left his wife—his kids were grown and his wife taught in Dublin most of the year—but Bea liked their arrangement. She needed solitude.
When she grouped the passing years into logical increments, it didn’t feel so confounding. The story collection published and then a year in Seville, trying (failing) to write what she was calling her bildungsroman. The year after Seville when she returned to New York and accepted every invite—readings, conferences, interviews, panels—and met Tuck. The following year when Tuck made her decline every invite because she was writing (finally!) and the two subsequent years (still writing) when the invites stopped. The year she set aside what she’d started to call a spiritual coming-of-age and went to work with Paul Underwood because her advance was long spent. The year she threw that away and went back to the bildungsroman. Tucker’s stroke and aftermath—two years when she tended to him and loved him and didn’t write. His death and the year she spent broken by grief and trying, once and for all, to salvage the novel (now a combination of the first and second, a not-very-spiritual unwieldy coming-of-age disaster). Last year when she gave it up for good. Eleven years of life and heartbreak and work and failed paragraphs—when she broke it down like that, it didn’t seem so inexplicable, but what had she done every day? How had so many years of days gone by with nearly nothing to show outside of her work at Paper Fibres? No impressive salary. No children. No partner. She didn’t even have a lousy pet.
When Tucker died, she’d prepared to vacate the premises. It was the one time in her life she’d asked Francie for an advance on The Nest, the only time in her life she even thought about The Nest. She’d been stunned to receive the call from Tucker’s attorney saying that the apartment was hers. She owned it outright, no mortgage. Tucker had worried about her; he was dismissive and dubious about the nebulous legal and financial structure of The Nest.
“If you’re really receiving a trust, there should be financial statements, an executor other than that loon of a mother, someone protecting your interests.”
She’d laughed at him. “You do not understand the people you’re talking about. This is just how my family works.”
Well, he’d been righter than she could have imagined. But thanks to him, she was okay with how and when and if Leo paid her back. The apartment was her nest, literally and metaphorically. She could stay there forever and manage on a modest income. She could sell and move someplace cheaper and live contentedly for a long time. Her family didn’t know she owned; it wasn’t anybody’s business.
Bea didn’t dwell on the sum of cash Tucker also left her that was almost the exact amount of the portion of her advance she ended up having to pay back to her publisher. She preferred to think of it as an unsettling but lucky coincidence and not what deep down she knew: something Tucker recognized about her that she couldn’t admit to herself.
In last night’s dream, Tucker was trying to tell her something important. He was jabbing furiously at a piece of paper with his good hand, and she was unable to make out the words, keep her eyes open and focus. She wondered, not for the first time, what he would think of her new work. She imagined he would approve.
She stood and started straightening the mess on the table: piles of notebooks; a handful of fountain pens a
nd two bottles of ink; spools of merino wool and a hand spindle. Bea wanted to knit mittens for Melody’s twins, had a few ideas about how to work the yarn. She picked up a small plastic bag of weed and her rolling papers. For a fleeting moment, she considered pretending it was still Sunday, getting high and knitting all day. She could call in sick; Paul wouldn’t care. But she shouldn’t. She couldn’t.
The radiator finally came on. She picked up the Collected Poems: Edna St. Vincent Millay, which she’d been reading since she awoke, thinking about Tuck and the poems he loved. Her fingers were so stiff, she dropped all 758 pages and the book landed on the uneven, hardwood floor with a boom and a healthy reverb. Before she even had a chance to brace herself, her downstairs neighbor started banging on his ceiling with a broomstick. He must carry that broom around the apartment with him, Bea thought. He must sleep with the damn broom. Did he even sleep? Or did he just sit, alert, clutching his broomstick, waiting for her auditory trespasses.
“Sorry, Harry,” she yelled down through the radiator.
She wasn’t sorry. She disliked Harry, the seventy-something widower who had always lived beneath her. Over the years, she’d realized that he was easily placated by a regular string of verbal apologies. The more she ignored his banging, the more hair-trigger the banging became. He’d pound when she dropped an apple, walked two steps in her stack-heeled boots. Harry was unpleasant but she understood he was lonely and that their ritual comforted him, connected the noises of her life with the silence of his and that even if the connection was relentless complaint and apology, their call-and-response interaction settled him.
Still, when was he going to get a little deaf? Too feeble to live on his own? Sometimes she fantasized about Harry dying and his family offering his apartment to her at a good price, well-below-market-value. His son liked her; he called her sometimes to make sure Harry was doing okay. He lived in Chicago and didn’t get back as often as he should. If she owned Harry’s apartment, she would break through the floor, put in a simple spiral staircase like the people on the D line down the hall had done. She’d have two floors and never have to move again. She could have a real office with an actual library. A guest room.
Of course, even given some kind of ridiculously discounted insider price, she was in no position to buy anything—not without The Nest. Thinking about The Nest made her think about her new pages (they were good!) and then about Leo, which led back to Dream Tucker, and then she lit a joint. She wondered if Leo would stop by the office today. Maybe she’d ask him to lunch and take the plunge. She imagined handing him her new work and him reading and reacting with enthusiasm and excitement, saying I knew you had this in you!
He’d been her biggest fan once. He’d watched out for her. She remembered when she was a freshman in high school, Leo a senior, and she’d let Conor Bellingham do things to her in the backseat of his car in the school parking lot after a meeting for the literary magazine; Leo was the editor, she was on staff. As she and Conor made out, she was simultaneously ecstatic and disappointed. Ecstatic because she’d had her eye on Conor for weeks. In addition to being handsome and popular and the class president, he’d submitted a shockingly good story to the magazine and she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it, or him, or the last line of the story: “Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.” Disappointed because he refused to talk about writing. She didn’t get it. Or how someone who, frankly, seemed a little doltish could write something so moving.
“Have some more,” he’d said, passing a small flask. The flask was gleaming silver and heavy in her hand. “Irish whiskey. My father’s. The good stuff.”
“Some of my favorite writers are Irish,” she’d said.
“Yeah? Well, I guarantee they drink this stuff.”
“Who are your favorite writers?” She smiled brightly, trying to get him to look at her and not out the window.
Conor shook his head and laughed a little. “You have a one-track mind, you know that?”
She shrugged and bent her nose to the flask and breathed deeply, imagining she was smelling Ireland—the surprisingly sweet fermentation and then the quick sting and heat, the heady aroma of peat and smoke.
“To the old sod,” she’d said, tipping the flask and taking a long sip. She liked it. Conor liked it. Conor liked her! She drank some more and they laughed, about what exactly she wasn’t sure, and then they were kissing again and his hands started moving lower and she stiffened. “Relax,” he said. She took a long sip from the flask and then another. She could feel something on the cold, steely surface. She held it up toward the window and in the light of a streetlamp read the engraving.
“What does ‘Trapper’ mean?” she asked him.
“Nothing. A silly nickname.”
“I think I should probably go.” She realized she was getting very drunk.
“Don’t go,” he said.
“Look outside.” Her voice sounded thick. “It’s starting to snow. I should get home.” Out the window, it was dark and she was having trouble focusing. Conor moved closer, his hand successfully creeping beneath her skirt this time.
“‘The newspapers were right,’” he said, whispering into her ear, “‘snow was general all over Ireland.’”
“Joyce,” she whispered, turning back to him.
“Yes,” he said. “Joyce. I like James Joyce. So there’s a writer I like.” And that was it. Her resolve melted and her clenched knees unfurled like the petals of a ripening peony. She didn’t think anything when he didn’t call over the weekend. And told herself he must not have seen her when she walked by his locker early Monday morning. At lunch, she strolled over to the table where he was sitting and stood for a minute, waiting for him to see her and to smile and invite her to sit. After far too many beats, after his friends were staring at her, half of them confused, half of them smirking, he looked up and raised an eyebrow.
“Hi,” she said, trying to hold on to confusion because what came after that, she knew, was going to be worse.
“Can I help you with something, Beatrice?”
She knew her face was flooding with color, knew she was probably flushing from head to toe; she could feel her knees sweat. Somehow she mustered enough breath and energy to turn and walk away. She heard him mumble something to the rest of the table, and they all burst out laughing, a few pounding the table in uproarious amusement.
(Years later, in a feminist literature class during a discussion on pornography, she would hear the term “beaver” for the first time and would remember with shattering clarity the feel of that flask in her mouth, the sulfur taste of silver, the smell of whiskey and peat. She would burn with shame for days, weeks, realizing what “Trapper” indicated and what it had meant when Conor slid his hand beneath the elastic of her underwear that night and whispered, very much to himself, Seventeen.)
“I’m so dumb,” she’d said over and over to Leo, crying and wiping her nose. “I just can’t believe I was so dumb.”
“Conor Bellingham?” Leo didn’t get it. That guy was a loser.
“He wrote the best story,” she said. “Did you read it? Did you read the last line?”
“The one he lifted from The Great Gatsby? Yeah, I read it. He’s lucky I didn’t turn him in for plagiarizing.”
Bea didn’t think it was possible to feel worse, but she bent at the waist and groaned. “I’m so, so dumb.”
Leo wrote the limerick the next day using the byline “Anonymous.” He typed it up and made copies and before lunch nearly the whole school had enjoyed his handiwork, featuring an unnamed student, his string of romantic conquests, and the moment in the backseat of his car when the boy would get the girl alone and inevitably, lamentably, prematurely ejaculate. The identity of the boy was obvious to the students but so cleverly done, so easily denied, that it didn’t cause trouble for Leo. And then there was this: For Conor himself to object would mean casting himself as a premature ejaculator, which Leo knew he’d never do. At first,
everyone thought Bea was “Anonymous,” and even though she never denied it, any number of women Conor had mistreated claimed credit for the piece and then started writing their own punishing rhymes (with Leo’s subtle encouragement and often with his assistance) about Conor and soon other school miscreants. Finally the administration stepped in and put a stop to anything by the increasingly notorious and multiheaded Anonymous that became the highlight of that school year. Later, Bea would think how the silly limerick was really the start of what Leo would create with SpeakEasy—at the beginning anyway, before it turned kind of desperate and dirty.
She opened her Millay to one of the poems Tuck had loved and sometimes read to her: I pray if you love me, bear my joy. She was too antsy to read the whole thing. She refilled her cup of tea. Jesus, she was horny. How long had it been? She went into her room and rummaged through her bedside drawer for her miniature vibrator. She pulled it out and switched it on. Nothing. The batteries were dead.
She looked up and saw herself standing in front of the mirror, braids sloppy and uneven from sleep, some of the hairs around her face turned gray and wiry. She was winter pale and her eyes were bloodshot and unfocused from the weed. Was this who she was now? A middle-aged woman with a spent vibrator and a pile of typed pages that she was hoarding like they were dead cats? She was extremely high. She could hear Lena Novak’s voice as if Lena were standing in her bedroom. “It must be hard—being Beatrice Plumb.”
“Must be hard to be me,” she said to her reflection. “Hard to be Bea.” She threw the vibrator back in the drawer and went to get her coat. Bear my joy, that’s what she would say to Leo. Read these pages and tell me they’re good and let me have them and bear my fucking joy.
The Nest Page 14
