by Lorna Graham
There was an excruciating pause during which Giles took a long swig from his water bottle. “Where were we?” he asked. The meeting hobbled along but Eve couldn’t follow a thing that was said.
As they filed out, Giles turned to Mark. “In my office,” he said, and Mark shot Eve a look of utter blackness.
• • •
Quirine and Russell slid behind Eve into her office and shut the door.
Eve tried to think up something to say, but before she could, Quirine pulled Eve into a hug. Not a stiff, acquaintance hug, but a deep, body-to-body embrace. The gesture brought tears to Eve’s eyes.
Russell cleared his throat. “That was frickin’ ridiculous. I’ve never seen anything like it. What got into that woman?” Eve closed her eyes tight. Russell put a hand on her back. “Can I just ask, what exactly—”
“Shhh.” Quirine cut him off. “She can tell us later. Right now, let’s just give her some peace before she deals with Mark.”
“No, it’s okay,” said Eve, pulling away. She told them what she’d done.
Russell let out a low whistle. “Wowsa.”
Quirine pushed a lock of Eve’s hair behind her ear. “I think that’s a first around here. Much as Cassandra deserved to have her segment taken away, I don’t think anyone else in the department would have dared do what you did.”
Great, thought Eve.
Just then, the phone rang. It was Mark.
• • •
Eve sat down without looking at him. He was silent for several moments. Then, quite suddenly, he leaned forward, his face red. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? I don’t know what’s worse. That you broke the chain of command. That you violated my trust. That the writers were already in the doghouse and you’ve managed to put us in the basement of the doghouse. Or the fact that you turned in a segment that was slipshod. Maybe even irresponsible.”
Now this last accusation was completely unfair. She wanted to ask Mark if he’d even read the segment, or talked to Archie about it. But this was not the time to defend herself.
“You realize you deserve to be fired, right?”
Eve nodded, miserable.
“And I would fire you, but to make the ‘cause’ argument with the union, I’d have to explain what you did yesterday, switching the assignments. Which would only make me look like an idiot in my new job and make the department look even worse. Right now they just think I took a chance on you and ‘neglected’ to explain about you to Bliss, the way Orla Knock used to do with her new writers.” Eve shifted her weight back and forth. Mark looked up at the ceiling. “God, when I think of you here, sitting at my desk, tampering with my list. It makes me sick.”
Eve felt sick, too. She saw it from his side and was horrified. All the arguments she might have made about how Cassandra had been late again, about how Eve herself was ready for a big story and ready to write for Bliss and how unfair it was that he never gave her anything serious to do, just felt empty and hollow. Why, oh why, had she done it?
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He acted as though he hadn’t heard her. “So I’m not firing you. But you might as well look for another job. You’re not going anywhere here. And don’t even think about asking for a reference.”
Eve nodded. She pushed herself up from her chair and backed out of the door.
• • •
They went to the same bar as the night Mark announced his promotion. This wasn’t a night for wine; they ordered straight scotch and sat at a small table in the back, Eve between Quirine and Russell. Nervous energy coursed through her and she chewed, hamster-like, on the end of a tiny red straw.
“So, back to your question,” said Russell, after the waitress had left. “Yes, I think Mark will be as good as his word. I think you’re going to have a rough time of it; he’s not going to be very pleasant.”
“I for one think he’s so angry because he feels guilty,” said Quirine.
Eve looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, on some level he understands what you did. He knows he kept you waiting for a lot longer than was probably fair. Maybe he was afraid to give you a big story because Cassandra has more seniority and he didn’t want an earful from her if you leapfrogged over her. She can be quite combative, you know.”
“It’s depressing,” said Russell. “I mean, I think Mark is a great guy and I know he means well, but he’s terrified of conflict. And I don’t think that bodes well for the department. He went from zero to company man in sixty seconds.”
“He’s definitely afraid to make waves,” said Quirine. “I heard he lost his temper once when he was at the Daily News. Screamed at his boss in the newsroom. I think it was during his divorce, which was apparently highly acrimonious. Anyway, he wound up being fired. I guess the lesson he took from that was to keep quiet and keep management happy.”
The three sat a few moments in silence. Divorce? Eve really hadn’t known the first thing about Mark, she realized.
“Anyway,” said Russell. “I’ll keep an eye out for jobs for you, Eve. I’ve got friends at the other networks, though I think things are pretty tight right now.”
“Yes, I am afraid this is bad timing,” said Quirine, putting her hand on Eve’s forearm. “Didn’t CBS just announce layoffs?”
• • •
Eve woke Saturday morning overwhelmed by homesickness. She lay on the bed, blinking at the window, the expanse of brick on the other side of the courtyard, and the sliver of sky visible above it. What she would give to see the endless green hills of Rolling Links. To show up for work at her father’s office, where she was treated with the respect accorded the boss’s daughter. Or to go out with a nice, undemanding young man, someone she could invite in at the end of a date.
The sharpest pang she felt was, as ever, Penelope’s absence. All of this would be so much easier if she could talk to her mother about it. Giving in to the misery swirling through her, Eve wondered for the millionth time why her mother had had to die. She rolled over, shut her eyes, and drifted off into memory.
The bedroom was dim, save for a small circle of light from the lamp on the night table. They’d fallen asleep together, a book open between them. Eve opened her eyes and looked at Penelope, serene in slumber. But something was wrong. Her mother’s breathing was labored and a fine sheen had broken out on her skin.
“Mom? Mom?” Eve reached out and shook Penelope’s shoulder. Penelope did not stir. Eve looked at the clock. It was nearly 6 p.m.; her mother was supposed to take a pill at 4:45. She grabbed for the bottle but it was empty.
She leapt off the bed. “Daddy?” she called as she ran through the house. Then she remembered: Gin had rushed off to the office for an emergency meeting about a case. Her brothers weren’t home, either. Eve, pulse racing, forced herself to concentrate. She found another bottle of pills in the medicine cabinet of the guest powder room. Each tablet had to be broken in half and dissolved in water. She tried to snap a pill in two with her fingers, but she only wound up crushing it into soft flakes. The same thing happened with a second pill.
She took a deep breath and headed into the kitchen, where she found a paring knife and used it to slice a pill right down the middle. She put half of it into a tall glass and filled it with water, stirring hard with a milkshake spoon until it became microscopic fragments swirling evenly in the liquid.
Eve carried the glass down the hall using both hands and placed it on the night table. She shook her mother for all she was worth, then pried her mouth open and poured the water in slowly. At first, Penelope coughed it right out again, soaking her nightgown. But after a few moments, she began to drink slowly, then deeply.
When the glass was empty, she clutched it to her chest, fell back against the pillows, and looked at her daughter. “God, honey, are you all right?”
Eve realized she was crying. “Yes. Are you?”
“Yes, yes. I’m all right.” She looked as though she’d been away, somewhere mystifying, and was
surprised to find herself home again. “Where’s your father?”
“At the office.”
“Your brothers?”
“I don’t know.”
“You did this all by yourself? The pill—everything?”
“Yes,” said Eve, taking the glass back and putting it on the table.
Penelope cupped Eve’s chin tenderly in her hand and regarded her daughter, her very irises seeming to widen. She held Eve’s gaze and did not let go, even when they heard the front door open and Gin come running down the hall.
Eve pulled herself back to the present. She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue and headed into the living room, where she looked at the map of the Village she had tacked up over the fireplace. Some time ago, she’d starting pushing a tiny red pin into the map, to mark the location of each of the writers’ plaques she’d found. Now she was looking at a constellation of the authors who’d kept Penelope company for so much of her life.
Eve hugged herself, running her eyes along the streets she and her mother had both called home, so many decades apart.
• • •
The coffeehouse was packed and it was hard to hold the empty chair across from her. Vadis, finally back from her extended tour with Spoilt Picnic, was twenty minutes late, and Eve ordered a second café au lait and drummed her nails on the table as she skimmed the want ads. Nothing in television at all, unless you were something called a “satellite truck operator.”
“Sorry,” said Vadis, leaning down for an air kiss. She seemed in very good spirits. Her ebony hair was longer and she wore a concert T-shirt under her trench coat. “I’ve just had so much shit to do after being away. I’ve only got about forty-five minutes. Got to go to the post office and yell at whoever forgot to restart delivering my mail. I’ve been back four days and haven’t gotten a thing.”
“Well, you look great,” said Eve, realizing she’d missed Vadis. There was something infectious about her energy and determination.
“You, on the other hand, have looked better.” She waved at a waiter, signaling she’d have what Eve was having. “Everything okay?”
“Fine, fine,” Eve replied, trying her best to sound breezy. She couldn’t bear just yet to tell Vadis that her little charity project had turned out to be a bust. “So tell me about the tour.”
Apparently, Spoilt Picnic had played to packed venues, albeit small ones, all over. The tour had extended beyond its original Northeast scope and had hit the mid-Atlantic states and some of the South. They’d garnered some decent reviews and Vadis had enjoyed the nonmusical gifts of the lead guitarist ever since Baltimore.
“Jeremy is amazing. And he actually does better press interviews than Geoff, who’s the lead singer. So I thought when they’re on Smell the Coffee, maybe Bliss could interview both Jeremy and Geoff before they launch into their big hit. I’d like to get them on right before the CD comes out next month. What do you think?”
Eve didn’t know which was worse: that it seemed the main reason Vadis had made time for her was because she wanted something or the fact that Eve couldn’t provide it. “Sounds great,” she said. “Except for one thing.”
“What?”
“Orla Knock doesn’t work at Smell the Coffee anymore.” Eve took a long time detailing Orla’s move into the entertainment division in L.A., hoping Vadis might forget what they were talking about.
“Wow. I have to call her. Sounds like another great contact,” said Vadis, dabbing the corners of her mouth with her napkin. “But anyway. You can still do it, right?”
“Do what?”
“Talk to whoever books music for the show. I’ve got some great video of the guys in concert that I shot. You can give it to them.”
Eve took another sip of coffee. “I don’t think I’m the best person to ask anyone for anything right now.”
“What do you mean?” asked Vadis.
Eve told Vadis about her misadventures in television. She thought she saw a glimmer of admiration in her friend’s eyes when she explained about taking the Stiletto segment away from Cassandra, but then she came to the part about how Mark had told her to find another job.
“I’m really sorry that I can’t help you,” said Eve. “Please believe me that I wish I could, but I’m persona non grata around there.” All Vadis had spoken about in the last few months was Spoilt Picnic; she’d been counting on getting them on TV. She had no other clients. This had to be a bad blow.
“Yeah, all right,” said Vadis. “Just so long as you’re not expecting me to help you.”
“Huh?”
“I have the feeling you’re working up to asking me to help you find the new job that Mark’s advised you to get.”
“Absolutely not!” said Eve. This was actually the truth. Eve realized, with some surprise, that she had not been expecting Vadis to help her again. She’d been here months without her; she wasn’t suddenly going to fall back into dependency. Whatever she was going to do, she was going to do it on her own.
Vadis looked at her watch. “I really do have to go.”
“Coffee’s on me,” said Eve.
“Thanks,” said Vadis. “Look, sorry I was such a bitch just now. I’m just really tired after all that traveling. And I’m sorry about your job. We’ll think of something, okay?”
Eve nodded as Vadis stood and turned to leave. Eve caught her arm. “I’ll make up for this,” she said. “I promise. One of these days, I’ll be the one helping you.”
• • •
It was Sunday afternoon and Eve sat on the floor, listening to the rain and flipping through the many sections of the paper. She’d read all the news, and was now perusing the gallery listings in the arts pages. When she’d first arrived in New York, she’d gone quite often, hoping they would provide an opening to meet the locals in a way that bars had not, but the cliques that gathered there turned out to be as hermetically sealed as those at Chumley’s and the Cedar Tavern. The art, though, riveted and energized her in a way she hadn’t experienced since senior year of college when she’d immersed herself in her thesis, “Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination After 1945.”
She wondered if there was something good in Chelsea. Maybe she could call Gwendolyn and they could go together. She needed to get out of the house. There were plenty of offerings; a mixed-media installation looked good, and so did a group show of new artists. Then Eve saw a name she recognized.
René LaForge retrospective: rare collection of the late postmodernist sculptor. October 1–16.
Today was the sixteenth.
Eve said Donald’s name, but he seemed to be on hiatus, as he had been for the last few days. She reached for the phone and dialed.
“Hello?”
“Matthias Klieg, please.”
“Who is calling?” Eve gave her name. “Ah, Miss Weldon. This is Maxine. What can I do for you?” Eve explained about the LaForge show. “I am sure Mr. Klieg would be interested. He has a lunch that should be over in about two hours. Shall I have him meet you at the gallery?”
Eve wondered if anyone held that much sway over Klieg. “Are you sure he’ll want to come?”
“I believe so. He has been meaning to call you, I think, but …” It seemed Maxine thought better of whatever she was going to say. “Anyway, it is good that you have called.”
• • •
The wind and rain had increased through the afternoon and the gallery was nearly empty. Eve and Klieg strolled around the large white space.
“I remember this one,” said Klieg, pointing at an intricate copper piece. Three layers of lacy trees and tiny deer extended from a wire attached to the wall. “Rene was inspired by the Bois de Boulogne.”
“Is there any of his early work here?” asked Eve, looking around. “Everything looks so assured, so precise.”
“Ah,” said Klieg, continuing to walk again. “Unlike most of us, René had no awkward phase. His first pieces are hardly distinguishable from his last.”
Eve hesitated to
bring up a delicate topic, but she wanted to go back to things they’d discussed at the opera. “So he never had a bad review?”
“You mean like I did?” Klieg looked sideways at her.
“Like you did.”
“No, I’m afraid he could not quite understand what that was like.”
“What was it like?”
Klieg’s eyes widened and he tilted back on his heels for a moment. “Well. I bore the scars for quite some time. I felt I couldn’t trust my own judgment. And that is one of the worst feelings one can experience.”
“Boy, are you right,” mumbled Eve, taking in an abstract piece that looked like a ball of yarn or maybe the universe. They strolled separately for a few minutes before Eve worked her way back over to Klieg. “You told me you had to return to Germany to earn money for a new collection,” she said. “That must have been difficult.”
“Yes. Going home so soon after striking out on one’s own is no picnic, as you say here. But it was not as terrible as it might have been,” said Klieg, pondering a steel orb with pinpricks all over it. “Louisa came with me.”
“Louisa?”
“She was a cashier at the Deux Magots. Graceful as a ballerina and so kind to us starving artists. I can’t tell you how much charcuterie and cheese she took from the kitchen for us, smuggled in napkins and stuffed into our satchels.”
“This is when you were hanging around with René, Lars Andersen, and the others?”
“Yes.”
“And … Donald.”
Klieg leaned in close to admire the soldering on a complicated piece of blocks and pulleys but said nothing. Maybe he hadn’t heard her.
Eve tried again. “How close were the two of you?”
Klieg looked at the ceiling. “He was quite, how shall I put it, ornery? He made a dramatic point of disparaging the everyday: the search for an affordable garret, the bills, the boring part-time jobs all artists must suffer. He would never let us wallow in those things; he insisted we talk about only the extraordinary.”
“I guess that’s what he was attempting to do in his work?”
