Thief of Words

by John Jaffe

  There was a message, from a “jdepaul.” It was entitled “Lunch.” “Annie,

  “Lunch was wonderful, wish we could have stayed longer. It was the perfect afternoon to idle away over coffee. Thinking back over it, I may have in fact been too brash. You were so easy to talk to I let my defenses down and was just myself. There may be some charm in that; there may be some boorishness. I hope the former outweighed the latter.

  “However, even my brashness has its limits. Here’s something I couldn’t possibly have said to your face: You’re quite lovely. “Jack”

  CHAPTER 19

  Jack turned over the pillow to the cool side again, but it didn’t help. His brain was feverish, not his brow. He stared at the clock: it was 1:40 A.M. Friday morning. Hopeless. He couldn’t sleep. Farewell to sleep. Jack DePaul does murder sleep. Sleepless in Baltimore. Sleep has left the building.

  Thoughts tumbled around inside his head like shirts in a dryer: What if I had actually read those college econ texts? What would I be like if I had gone to Vietnam? Could I have made the NBA if I’d been six foot four? But they were just diversions to keep the witch at bay. Despite what Matthew had said over dinner, she wasn’t ding-dong dead. The nightmare bird was on the wing, soaring and circling, waiting, just waiting for a sleepless night like this.

  Jack untangled himself from the covers and lay face up, hands behind his head. To ward off the raptor, he projected another image into the dark. This one was of Annie across a white tablecloth and pasta plates. He liked her face. It was complicated and angular; there were shadows of time and experience. The nose crooked slightly to the right; the mouth was animated. Everything about Annie was quick; he liked that, too. Answers, gestures, and questions darted out of her like hummingbirds. She laughed quickly and generously, she didn’t hold back.

  Nothing like Kathleen, the nightmare bird, the queen of holding back, the woman who measured out her emotions tryst by tryst. After three years, Jack still didn’t know if she was complex and deep or just a good liar. “I can’t do this anymore,” she would say. But she could and she did. She said she loved him; sometimes he believed it. Every time he pressed her for commitment she said she couldn’t leave her husband. But she couldn’t seem to leave Jack, either. Once in a hotel bed, he had asked her why, and in a moment of naked honesty she had said, “Because you try so hard.”

  He had tried hard—from the moment they kissed drunkenly in a corridor of the Sheraton Hotel in New York three years ago. Before then, they had been merely colleagues at the Star-News. He had known her for a couple of years and found her ice queen persona sexy, in an abstract sort of way. But that was before his marriage began to fail and Matthew went off to college, before his regrets began to outnumber his dreams.

  By the time of the kiss, Jack’s midlife had become a crisis. It was a luxury, he knew—he had a car and a house and health; he didn’t live in Bosnia—but that didn’t ease the ache or the haunting questions. What had happened to the years? What did he have to show for them? Matthew was the best thing he had ever done. But his son wasn’t something that he had planned for or fought for, just a normal consequence of a mundane marriage at the usual time in the usual circumstances. He’d had no grand struggle, no great passion. And now time was running away.

  Then, at the last night of that conference in New York, after a boisterous dinner with a dozen colleagues, when he found himself by a hotel room door entwined with Kathleen, tongues deep in each other’s mouths, his hand between her legs, he knew he had found that reason, that cause, that thing to plug the hole in his heart.

  Jack stared up at the ceiling. Funny how wrong you can be, he thought.

  He pushed Kathleen away again and pulled Annie Hollerman back into his thoughts. He had told Matthew over dinner that Annie was “effervescent,” a word that had never been uttered in the same sentence with Kathleen Faulkner. Not that Annie seemed like a bubblebrain; during their lunch he had noticed something muting her, like an open window letting a cool breeze into a warm room. Nothing sinister, just complex.

  He thought again about Annie’s story of her trip to Spain (what kind of a fool was her husband anyway?). It had been the best part of their lunch. When she had told him about the flamenco dancer she had never seen, he had felt a swooping, roller-coaster sensation in his chest. He had wanted to stand up, toss some bills down on the table, reach out his hand to her, and say, “Annie, get packed. There’s a flight to Madrid, leaving at eight o’clock tonight.”

  It had made him feel, for the first time in months, like he was made of flesh and bone. Kathleen hadn’t sucked him dry after all. And when he’d written to Annie earlier in the evening, he’d felt like an athlete stretching unused muscles. Back from the injured list, he thought, and in the game again.

  E-mail was how he’d wooed Kathleen. She loved his words; she was greedy for them. Each time she said “never again,” he’d entangle her in his net of verbs, his web of nouns, and haul her back. “Fuck me with stories,” she’d say. And he would. Her husband, an executive in the local power company, never had a chance, and, as far as they knew, was oblivious to the drama being played out in his own marriage.

  Jack pulled the covers aside and sat at the edge of the bed. He wondered, not for the first time, whether it was Kathleen he had been in love with or the writing to Kathleen.

  From the widening perspective of separation, she now seemed more a fever than a relationship. After he and Kathleen spent that night together in New York, he had left Elizabeth. He couldn’t live the lie. Kathleen was willing to live it every day. For Jack, the clandestine sex, so exciting at first, became increasingly mechanical. And afterward, drowsy and sheet-tossed, they seemed no more closely bound than before. He wanted a soul mate; she wanted a playmate.

  Jack got up and put on a bathrobe. “Fuck you, and your white shirt,” he said out loud to the bookshelves in his bedroom. He walked into the den and sat down at the computer.

  Now there was Annie. “Oh well, you can’t rewrite your past, can you?” she had said at lunch. Jack signed on and called up a blank message file.

  “Dear Annie,” he wrote.

  “Where is it written that you can’t rewrite your past?

  “Do you remember that night in Jerez? That was the night we first met—the night we saw Renatta Vega-Marone. I remember, as if it were yesterday.

  “I came to the central square around eleven and got a table just twenty feet away from the wooden stage, which was raised four steps up from the pavement. Behind it, like a huge Hollywood set, were the city’s medieval stone walls.

  “You appeared about midnight. By then the place was jammed. I watched you weave your way across the cobblestones searching for an empty chair. The night was warm, even for July. You wore a sleeveless blouse, a turquoise wraparound skirt, and sandals. I knew you were a tourist here, like me. You were squeezing between some crowded tables nearby when I caught your eye and waved. ‘There’s a place over here,’ I said, removing my day-bag from the chair next to mine. ‘Join me, please.’

  “You smiled and sat down. We traded names and stories and ordered a bottle of sherry, because sherry is what people drink in Jerez after midnight. I liked you right off. I liked your smile; I liked that you were traveling alone and didn’t care that you were traveling alone.

  “Just as the sherry arrived an older woman in a red dress walked on stage accompanied by a young man carrying a guitar. The people around us applauded raucously. At the next table, an elderly man wearing a light straw hat told us the guitarist was only nineteen. The woman in the red dress was Renatta Vega-Marone, Spain’s greatest flamenco dancer. She has gypsy blood, said the man in the hat. She had jet black hair and black eyes that swallowed you up. It was hard to tell how old she was. We guessed she was forty-five, maybe fifty. The old man made a point of telling us that Renatta was also famous for her lovers and that the boy—the guitarist—was one of them.

  “But you had guessed it before he told us. Something in the way the b
oy held her hand as they walked on stage made you turn to me and say, ‘Those two won’t go to bed alone tonight.’

  “The whole evening had been filled with dancing and music. Renatta and the boy were the last to appear. He sat on a small folding chair just to the left of center stage. His fingers blurred over the strings, but at first Renatta danced very slowly. She seemed stately, like a widow in a funeral procession. Then she moved faster and faster. Her heels hit the stage like antiaircraft fire. People began to leave their tables, to get closer. We got up and squeezed in behind the first row of spectators; the crowd pressed us together.

  “She danced several numbers. She was mesmerizing, gut-wrenching. Magic. The harsh stage lights erased everything but the boldest shadows, colors, and shapes. It was like seeing a Picasso painting dance. For the final number, she began slowly again, then sped up like a locomotive. Even from where we were standing we could see her dripping with sweat. People around us were shouting ‘Jaleo! Jaleo!’ I realized that we were sweating, too. And then the most amazing thing. She began to slow down and down and down. The music tempo slowed, too. And then her steps were just: One … Two … Three/Four. One … Two … Three/Four. One…Two… And then she stopped. And the crowd went mad with joy. And you were crying.”

  “Jack”

  CHAPTER 20

  Well?”

  Without turning her head, Annie said, “Good morning to you, too, Fred.”

  Annie had been standing in line at the Firehook Bakery, trying to decide between virtue and vice, when she’d heard Fred’s voice.

  “Well, was I right?”

  She turned around and smiled.

  “Exactly how right was I?” said Fred.

  “He called me ‘lovely.’ ”

  “At least this one has eyes,” Fred said.

  Lovely. Such a simple, old-fashioned word. Like a lace doily. No one had ever called Annie Hollerman that before. When she’d read Jack’s note about lunch, the word had taken her off guard. Now it was like a song that kept looping through her brain. Lovely. She liked the way the l’s wrapped around the velvet vowels, caressing her mouth each time she said it. Lovely. An old-time wooing word. Courtly, but so eloquently sexy.

  “What’ll it be this morning, Annie, the usual?” said Sarah, the young woman behind the counter.

  Annie eyed the usual, an oozy pecan sticky bun.

  Lovely. She heard its song again.

  “Better make it the bran muffin—and a skim latte.”

  Fred, always the gentleman, pretended not to notice, even after Sarah laughed and said, “Whoever he is, he must be a hottie. How about you, Fred, the usual, or are you taking the high road, too?”

  Fred’s road never veered. It was the usual for him, double-shot espresso, twist of lemon, and a blueberry scone.

  They walked upstairs to the office. Fred had a stack of queries to sift through. The good ones, or at least the ones with some promise, went to Annie; the rest were bounced back with a “thank-you-not-without-merit-but-not-for-us” rejection note attached.

  The first thing Annie did was call Laura. “It’s me,” she said after the beep to record her message. “You were right. I was wrong. Don’t gloat. He called me ‘lovely.’ Now I’ve got to lose five pounds fast.”

  Then she got down to work. Lynn McCain, the mystery writer who hated being called a mystery writer, needed serious attention. Not only had she burned out the publicists at Simon & Schuster, but her next book was coming up for negotiation and she wanted Annie to send it around to get an auction going. It would rain in Death Valley before that happened.

  Though her books were still selling, she’d only made the bestseller list one time, and that had been five books before. Yesterday, McCain’s editor had hinted to Annie that if the numbers kept going down, so would the advances.

  Annie kept telling McCain that publishing is strictly what-have-you-done-for-me-today and how-will-your-books-sell-tomorrow? No one at Simon & Schuster gave two hoots about McCain’s refrain that she was the next Reynolds Price. Most of them didn’t even know who Reynolds Price was.

  Now Annie had to call McCain and set her straight, not only about the auction that wasn’t going to happen but about her behavior on her book tour.

  She started to pick up the phone when Fred walked in.

  “The Ghoul on line one. Shall I tell him to go back to the graveyard?”

  “Nah, I better take it.”

  Annie pressed line one. “James, just the person I was reaching for my phone to call. How are you, and congratulations on the movie deal.”

  “A lucky break,” James Gentile said. “Guess how many times it came close to falling through. This business we’re in, it’s enough to give you heartburn. In fact, I hear Bertelsmann just bought Merck so it can supply its employees with Mylanta and Prilosec.”

  Annie laughed. “I’m a Maalox girl myself.”

  While they chatted, Annie signed on to her computer. She was looking for the new last chapter of She-Power that Eda had promised to send.

  “… So what do you think about getting together?” James said. The flag was up. She had mail, tons of mail. How could all that accumulate in less than twelve hours? As she talked to James, she scanned down the list of mail. It was the usual stuff, plus Eda’s new chapter.

  James continued to talk: “… there’s a new chef at Café Atlantico who studied with Serge Sampo…”

  Then, like a smell that hits you five seconds after you walk by it, she realized it wasn’t just the usual stuff in her mailbox. Three messages below Eda’s was another e-mail from jdepaul, this one entitled “Spain.”

  Annie started reading it. “Where is it written you can’t rewrite your past?…”

  “… so Thursday night’s good then? Seven-thirty?” James said. “Oh, right,” Annie said, not taking her eyes off the computer screen, reading about Jerez and Jack and Renatta.

  “Annie? Thursday night?”

  “Sorry, James. Alright then, Thursday night. Listen, something just came up. I’ve got to run.”

  What just came up was hope.

  CHAPTER 21

  By eleven that morning, Annie had already talked to Lynn McCain three times. She’d backed her off the auction notion, but getting her to be nice on her book tour was another matter.

  “I don’t care if Katie Couric is the second coming in a dress,” McCain said. “She made me seem like an idiot. ‘I can’t remember when I’ve had so much fun figuring out who the murderer was.’ That’s not what my book’s about.”

  Actually, it was, Annie started to tell her. McCain’s readers weren’t academics who studied her works along with Faulkner and Welty. They were the mystery nuts, the women who wore cat T-shirts to the mystery conferences and spent their free time reading and posting on Dorothy-L, a listserv that gossips about mystery writers. They were the ones who had driven her first book to the New York Times best-seller list, and they were the ones she was losing with all her I’m-a-serious-Southern-writer talk.

  McCain, as usual, refused to listen. “Look, Annie, those publicists at Simon & Schuster are eleven years old. They haven’t even started menstruating yet. They can’t do anything right. You’ve got to make sure the interviewers don’t call me a mystery writer. I won’t snap at anyone else if you can do that.”

  “Lynn, get real,” Annie said. “I can’t control what comes out of the interviewers’ mouths any more than I can control what comes out of yours. Though, Lord knows, I’d like to. Just count to ten or something when you hear the M word. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t go ballistic when he was called a mystery writer. You’re only hurting yourself when you do this. So please, ease up. Okay?”

  There was a pause. Finally McCain agreed. Sort of. “Well, I’ll do the best I can. I may have to count to twenty.”

  At least Annie had accomplished something that morning. Jack, on the other hand, had accomplished nothing more than scanning the Post and the Times for stories he should have thought of first. He’d stayed up til
l 4 A.M. traveling to Spain and now he had a serious case of jet lag. Fortunately it was Friday; the weekend advance sections were already on the presses and Monday’s centerpiece was over to the copy desk.

  When the phone rang he answered sleepily, “DePaul.”

  “You must be color-blind. The skirt I wore that night in Jerez wasn’t turquoise, it was purple. I think we need to test your eyes.”

  Annie’s voice skyrocketed Jack’s lethargy out the window. He grinned into the receiver. “Are you sure? I remember turquoise. And I’m a trained observer.”

  “Purple,” said Annie firmly. “And you were wearing a light khaki shirt and blue jeans. And one of those silly berets the Basques wear. It seemed a little affected but I forgave you.”

  Any clever rejoinders that Jack might have said were derailed by his relief. His e-mail hadn’t made her think he was a psycho, or, even worse, a nitwit.

  “Well…I…did you…” he began.

  “Jack.”

  “Yes?”

  “I loved your e-mail.”

  Loved. It resonated like a temple bell. Something came out of Jack’s mouth after that, but it was nearly lost in the reverberations. Finally, a few sentences later, he managed to ask Annie out for that weekend.

  “I’m sorry, Jack. I’d love to, but this weekend’s off. I’m taking Laura’s daughter on a mother-daughter camping trip. Remember, Laura’s got this thing about peeing outdoors and so it’s up to me, the godmother.” Annie paused for a second, then said, a sly note of conspiracy in her voice, “What about next Wednesday? Are you up for an adventure?”

  “I’m all yours,” Jack said.

  CHAPTER 22

  You can do better than that!”

  The She-Devil jammed a fist in the air.

  “One more time. With all you’ve got. If you wanta be a She-Devil, you gotta shout! Okay? One…two…three: I’M A SHE-DEVIL!”

  “I’M A SHE-DEVIL!” came the crowd’s roar, followed by applause and laughter.