Thief of Words

by John Jaffe

  “After all these years, I come to work some days and feel like a stranger. I want to ask for directions. For most of my life I was confident to bursting. I felt that ‘life piled on life were all too little,’ as Tennyson had Ulysses say.

  “Now, on bad days, I’m a stranger to myself. And yet, I can close my eyes and still be the man I knew. Hurtling down a summer road at night, clouds turning the moon to tatters overhead, porch lights shooting by like comets, drugstore signs glowing like Orion’s belt, devil wind blowing through the windows, a hand on my jeans. Someone saying yes.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t get to meet that Jack. But then there is you. There is your life and your confidence and your yes. And maybe all is not lost. And this strange new sadness may be no more permanent than a thundercloud.

  “See you Saturday night.

  “Jack”

  He read the message over. It was too earnest. He read it again. It was overwrought and even worse, purple. He cut a few phrases—though not as many as if he were working on a reporter’s story—and pressed the send button. He waited for the rush of remorse, but it never came. After all, it was the truth. And it felt good to be telling it.

  The clock over the door of Proctor’s office told him it was time for the daily afternoon news meeting with the other section editors. He gathered up the story budget for the next day and, with a cheerful readiness to his step, headed to the conference room.

  When he returned forty minutes later, the phone was ringing, as it inevitably did at Jack DePaul’s desk.

  “DePaul,” he said brusquely.

  “Hollerman,” Annie replied with a fake abruptness that made Jack laugh.

  “I’m calling with bad news, I’m afraid,” said Annie. “But first: I got your e-mail. Just so you know, you’re not the only one who feels the wind blow right through them. But you’re a wonderful writer, Jack. I think you should quit your day job and start writing. I know just the agent who could make you a star.”

  “Thanks, Annie. That’s sweet. But I don’t think so, I’m just a guy working—”

  “I know,” Annie interrupted, and then said in a melodramatic voice, “you’re just a guy working in the comma factory.”

  That made Jack laugh again. “What’s the bad news?”

  “Lynn’s melting down in Virginia Beach. You think you’ve got crybabies? She refuses to speak and she’s the keynote speaker. Now it’s up to me to get her in front of that podium Saturday night. It’s that or let her self-destruct. Then, remember, I’m off to North Carolina to go to that writers’ conference and see my mother.”

  Jack knew all about Lynn McCain’s tantrums and Annie’s odd bond to her. Annie had told him about it over coffee the previous night. How she’d found McCain’s manuscript in the slush pile at the Leeland agency, where she first worked when she moved to Washington. Greg Leeland had made his name and money selling nonfiction books by the heavy-hitting Washington journalists. He had no interest in an assistant librarian from Lexington, Virginia, with a mystery set in the Shenandoah backcountry. Greg Leeland’s idea of the Shenandoah was an evening at the uber-posh Inn at Little Washington. Annie had to beg Leeland to let her try to sell McCain’s book.

  To everyone’s surprise but Annie’s, Don’t Come Knocking wound up in a bidding war, with Simon & Schuster finally paying $300,000 for a two-book deal. A year later, Annie started her own agency and McCain, whose first book made the New York Times list, came with her, along with all her problems. Because she was Annie’s first client, Annie felt obligated to step in after McCain alienated all the publicists.

  “Well, how about tonight? I could come down to D.C. right after work. Maybe dinner?”

  “Great, let me just check my calendar.” There was a pause and Jack heard the rustle of papers. “Oh, damn,” said Annie. “I can’t. I’m meeting an author. What about tomorrow night?”

  “No. Shit, I can’t. I’m going to the opera. I promised the music critic. It’s part of his plan to make me cultured—symphony, chamber music, opera. I once tried to convince him that Bo Diddley singing ‘Who Do You Love’ was one of the masterpieces of Western music. So he made me go with him to see Turandot. It sounds like some kind of bland fish. Whatever it is, I hate opera.”

  “That’s too bad,” Annie said. “I was looking forward to seeing you. We’ll have to postpone it until I get back from North Carolina. A week in the Tar Heel state, first bonding with my mother, then having my carcass picked dry by a bunch of needy writers. Want to come?”

  North Carolina with Annie. Jack liked the thought. But North Carolina with Annie and her mother and a hundred J. R. Thelmans? “Another time,” Jack said and meant it more than Annie could guess.

  “Coward,” Annie said. “I don’t know why I ever agreed to this writers’ conference. Too late for regrets now. Oh well, if you can’t come with me physically, you’ll have to come with me cybernetically. I’m taking my laptop. I’ll write. Write me back, okay?”

  CHAPTER 26

  To jdepaul@aol.com

  From ahollerman@aol.com

  Subject: The Jewish Canon

  Jack,

  Drum roll, please. …Yesterday I cajoled (euphemism for threatened) Lynn McCain into giving her speech. She was terrific, and as far as I know, offended no one. Maybe I have a future as an editor. Isn’t that what you guys do, bully people?

  I know this runs counter to Philip Roth and the Jewish Mother canon, but my mother and I are having a blast. It’s like we’re old girlfriends, talking about everything. Everything. Tonight, I forced her and her best friend, Geri, to go to a part of Greensboro they’d never been so I could have barbecue.

  She and Geri talked about all the men they’d had in their lives—two and one, respectively. When it was my turn, I just said, “You guys were born too early. You missed the Seventies.” At that point my mother started talking about the new Piggly Wiggly that’d just opened. Some numbers are better left unmentioned.

  Off we go to Asheville tomorrow to visit my Buddhist/horse trailer salesman friend. I met him years ago when I was desperate for clients and took on anyone, and I mean anyone. Including “Mary, The Story of an Unhappy Ewe”—390 excruciating pages of New Age channelings from an English sheep who’d learned the key to happiness. I’m not making this up.

  Only desperation could explain trying to sell a book about horse trailering. But the book sold easily. You wouldn’t believe how many little girls in America (including Laura’s) have pressed their parents into buying first the horse, then the trailer. And Tom made a bundle, for a horse-trailering book.

  The truth is, I didn’t just take him on because I was desperate. I took Tom’s book because he called me one day with his pitch, and the next thing I knew we’d been on the phone for an hour talking about cosmic truths I hadn’t thought of since I’d read “Siddhartha” in high school.

  So guess where Tom’s taking us? To his Buddha-man’s meditation meeting, where you’re supposed to find that quiet place inside (I’m still looking) and be one with it while your legs are pretzeled into yogi-like contortions, your back is soldier-straight, and you pretend to ignore the spasms pumping at the base of your spine and screaming upwards. It’s worked for him. He’s the calmest human being I know. And Lord knows, I could use a little of that myself. Not to mention my mother, who makes Pee-Wee Herman seem tranquil.

  Then it’ll be on to dinner where my mother and I will rest our weary backs and have a long night of soulful discussion.

  Oh, by the way, there was one of those soft blue-velvet skies this evening. I thought about you.

  Annie

  CHAPTER 27

  That yoga thing was payback, admit it.”

  “I’m admitting nothing,” Annie said. “Except how centered I feel—and you should feel. When’s the last time you sat still for forty-five minutes?”

  Joan Hollerman Silver clicked her Peach Iced fingernails against the plastic wood-grain corner table at Mr. C’s Sea House. “Never,” she said, examining
the back of her left hand. She blew on her fingers and watched the gold whirligig on her ring twirl around.

  Annie looked at her mother’s nails. They were perfect, just like the rest of her. Ever since Annie could remember, her mother turned heads, even those of her high school boyfriends. (“Your mom’s a fox,” Joe Montone said to Annie in eleventh grade.) With her night-train hair, olive skin, and prominent cheekbones, Joan Hollerman Silver looked like a Middle Eastern Ava Gardner. Even at seventy-one, men watched as she walked by.

  Her mother always looked pulled together, carefully riding the fashion trends. In the late sixties, Annie was wearing Indian print granny gowns and trying to wrestle her unruly hair straight by sleeping with it wrapped around orange juice cans. Meanwhile, Joan Hollerman Silver transformed the funky Carnaby Street look to elegance with her tailored miniskirts, tastefully patterned panty hose, ribbed Poor Boys, and sleek dark hair that curved obediently under her chin.

  Annie’s mother liked to look good; in fact, dressing up was her biggest hobby, next to playing video poker in the casinos. So when she gave birth to a daughter forty-four years ago, she was delighted that she’d have a little girl to follow in her Bruno Magli footsteps. Except the little girl was Annie, who, in five minutes, tore, stained, or crumpled all her perfect little outfits.

  “I can’t believe I let you talk me into going there. Couldn’t we just have bonded at the beach?”

  “Mom, now we’re moving into payback territory. All those years in Atlantic City, with me blistering in the sand while you browned like a Thanksgiving turkey. That makes two things you didn’t pass along to me, your dark skin and your…”

  Annie pointed across the table to her mother’s chest.

  Joan Hollerman Silver was stacked. Built, as Annie’s high school boyfriends used to whisper, like a brick shithouse. Annie’s chest was constructed more like a wooden fence.

  “I wasn’t the only one responsible for your genes.”

  “Yeah,” Annie said, “there’s that. You could have at least chosen someone taller.”

  They laughed. It had taken them a long time to be able to laugh about Milt Hollerman, husband and father. He’d been a stocky, handsome man; some said he resembled the actor Victor Mature. On a Monday morning in May, when Annie was ten and Joan was thirty-seven, Annie woke up to find her father gone. No note, no good-bye, just an empty space in his closet—and in Annie’s heart. He didn’t come back for three years, and when he did, it was with a new wife and baby.

  Fifteen years later, also on a Monday—but in November this time—he drove his sky blue Chrysler into a highway embankment near Newark. The weather had been clear; as far as investigators could determine from the wreckage, there had been nothing wrong with the car. New Jersey state troopers called the accident “suspicious” and closed the books. Nope, not a lot of chuckles there.

  When the waiter came, Annie ordered broiled salmon, her mother a steak.

  “Stop looking at me like that. I’m the mother, you’re the daughter.”

  “Then start acting like it. Steak? Do I have to remind you how high your cholesterol is? I specifically brought you to a fish place. Omega-three fatty acids and all that stuff. If you don’t start listening to me, I swear I’ll bury you next to Milt.”

  “Such a mouth on you, Annie Beth Hollerman. You’ve been the most headstrong child since you were born—two months early. You couldn’t even wait for your own due date.”

  They were heading into family legend territory. Annie and Joan had a set of stories they tossed back and forth, the way a father and son might toss a football.

  “I know, I know,” said Annie, “and you spent twenty-five dollars on a brown satin dress from Lord & Taylor that I cut to shreds.”

  “It was thirty-five dollars,” Joan said, “and that was a lot of money forty years ago. A lot of money for a four-year-old pischer to throw away because she didn’t like the drape of the bodice.”

  “It wasn’t the drape,” Annie said. “How many times do I have to tell you? It was the elastic. It was too tight around my waist and I was trying to cut it out. Much like the surgeons will be trying to cut out the plaque in your arteries.”

  Joan Hollerman Silver assessed her daughter carefully. Willful from the day she was born.

  “So, you were telling me about Jack,” she said.

  “No I wasn’t,” said Annie, “I was telling you about your high cholesterol and clogged arteries.”

  “Funny, I could’ve sworn you said Jack. By the way, Laura called. She’s already gotten her dress. And Becky’s all set to be the flower girl. Maybe we can find a brown satin dress for her to wear—you could alter it first.”

  Annie threw her hands up in the air. “Okay,” she said with a stagy sigh, “I’ll stop about the steak. But no cigarettes while we’re eating. It’s disgusting.”

  Annie was going to add, “And Becky’s too old to be a flower girl,” but stopped. The sudden moment of stillness caught them both by surprise, and in that moment, like a freeze frame in a movie, mother and daughter just looked at each other.

  For the 197th time since Annie had arrived in North Carolina yesterday, Joan Hollerman Silver had raised the name of Jack DePaul. Annie hadn’t been able to bring herself to say what she was starting to feel about him. But now, to her own surprise, she was about to.

  “You know, Mom, he’s pretty terrific. But I guess Laura already told you that.”

  After all these years, her mother had finally learned when to be quiet. She just nodded.

  “I mean, it’s not like I know him all that well. But it seems like I do. I don’t know, maybe it’s wishful thinking, maybe I’m just trying to obliterate my years with Trip, but when I think about Jack, it’s almost like Trip never happened.”

  Annie told her mother about the Spain e-mail; how, now, it seemed as if she had gone to Spain with Jack, not Trip.

  “Too bad,” Annie said, “I can’t get him to write me a new Charlotte Commercial-Appeal chapter.”

  Annie’s mother stiffened. She hated thinking about that time even more than she hated thinking about her first husband leaving or her second husband dying. The pain of watching her only child go through that kind of hell was bad enough; what made it worse was that she blamed herself.

  Annie saw the look in her mother’s eyes. “You know I’ve told you this before, but I want to say it again—I couldn’t have made it through without you.”

  Her mother looked away for a second and gathered herself. “It would have never happened if I’d been a different kind of mother. If I’d been more—”

  Annie grabbed her mother’s hand. “Stop. We’ve been over this before. I made the choice. I made the mistake. It was me, not you, who lifted someone else’s words. I was on deadline, pressed for time. I was scared that I’d lost it. That I wasn’t Annie Wondergirl anymore. I panicked and made a bad decision. Maybe the world’s worst decision. But that’s it. It had nothing to do with you or your canasta games. So what if you never read me Dr. Seuss? And, so what if you wanted me to be more like Joan Cherry and run for class president and look like her in those dorky little Villager outfits? That’s not why I plagiarized.”

  Plagiarized. What an ugly, plundering word. It sounded like a disease, which it was to Annie. Something akin to leprosy. And she’d been a leper all these years. In fact, that had been central to the unwritten contract between her and Trip. He was the good boy, she was the fuckup.

  “Plagiarized,” Annie said. “It’s not the easiest word for me to say. But Jesus Christ, Mom, it’s been almost twenty years. I’ve left Trip, my career’s going gangbusters, and I’m dating a journalist, of all things. Don’t you think it’s time I should be able to say that word without it getting stuck in my throat?”

  Annie took a swig of water and made a throat-clearing noise. “Care to join me?” she said. Then, to the tune of the Toreador Song from Carmen, she sang, “Play-ger-her-ii-iized, play-ger-herized, play-ger-herized oh play-ger-herized…”


  To the waiter at Mr. C’s Sea House, the two women at table 17 were cheap dates: one glass of wine and they were so tipsy, they were mangling Carmen.

  Annie’s mother raised her wineglass and said, “Finally.”

  They were about to toast when they realized the glasses were empty. Joan motioned to the waiter for two more glasses of wine. He nodded, turned, and rolled his eyes.

  “So, are you going to tell him?” Joan said.

  “Huh?” Annie said.

  “Tell Jack. About what happened in Charlotte.”

  Annie ran her finger around the rim of the empty glass. “One step at a time, Mom.”

  Both women knew there were many steps between singing an aria to plagiarism and revealing your deepest shame to someone you cared about. She’d done it with Andrew, and he’d left her. She’d done it with Trip, and he’d used it against her. The thought of doing it again made her queasy.

  Joan reached her hand across the table and placed it on top of the wineglass, on top of Annie’s hand. “I hope that step comes soon. Then you can be free of it once and for all.”

  Annie watched as her mother turned away, pretending to look for the waiter. “Did he go to France to get the wine?” Joan said. But Annie saw the tears in her mother’s eyes.

  “Finally,” Joan said again—this time meaning the waiter, who was arriving with two glasses of wine and their meals. He put a shriveled piece of dry salmon in front of Annie and a big, oozing slab of meat in front of Joan.

  Joan eyed Annie’s meal. “Looks like something I cooked,” she said.

  “I didn’t think that was possible, but you’re right,” Annie said. “So much for omega-three fatty acids.”

  “Hold on,” Joan said. She took the serrated knife by her plate, cut her steak in half, and put it on the bread plate. “Here. Live a little.”

  CHAPTER 28

  As soon as Annie and her mother returned to their hotel room, Annie checked her e-mail. She’d been thinking about last night’s message to Jack on and off all day. Maybe she shouldn’t have said the thing about the sky. Men like mystery. There was little mystery in “Oh, by the way, there was one of those soft blue-velvet skies this evening. I thought about you.”