Thief of Words

by John Jaffe

  He thought briefly about getting a reading—it was only $10— but Madame Chanel, who was filing her long fuscia fingernails, seemed to be more in touch with her inner manicurist than the spirits. He decided to pass on her vision of the future.

  The minutes passed by, and so did the endless parade of pedestrians. In the next half hour Jack saw more old men with thin white mustaches than he had seen in his entire life. Eventually the figurine lady departed, to be supplanted by two middle-aged women in lilac pedal pushers, who were in turn replaced by two senior citizens eating cherry water ice.

  Jack didn’t see her until she was only thirty paces away. It was as if she’d materialized out of the gray background. She was walking along the sea side of the Boardwalk, behind a family with four kids all under the age of ten, all wearing identical blue T-shirts. The ocean breeze riffled Annie’s hair and she combed it back with her fingers.

  Jack stood up.

  Years later, when Jack would tell this story, he would say that it felt like time nearly stopped at that moment. That the signs, the sunglasses, the fortune-tellers—the whole tawdry mosaic—disappeared from the Boardwalk, leaving only Jack and Annie and a sundappled, Irish Spring ending, where the happy couple floats toward each other in slow-motion joy and the world dissolves in a kiss.

  But the real story was better.

  Jack stood up. Annie saw him above the four fat, T-shirted kids. They walked toward each other and met by a plaque honoring Charles Darrow, the inventor of Monopoly. They both tried to keep from breaking into silly grins. They both said, “Hi, I’m sorry that …” at the same time. They laughed, started again, and stumbled over each other’s words again. Then Annie put her hand up and said, “Wait, stop. I’ve got to say something first.” Jack waited, the silly grin bubbling up despite his best intentions. Annie put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Are there storm clouds over Lisbon?”

  Jack didn’t answer, he simply pulled her to him. And the world dissolved in a kiss.

  CHAPTER 69

  They sat with their backs to the surf and ate orange saltwater taffy from a two-pound box Annie had bought as Jack’s initiation to Atlantic City. They talked and kissed and kissed again. Once, Annie choked back some tears, and when Jack hugged her, his face was buried in her autumn-colored hair. As the sun began to drop, Annie took Jack’s hand and led him through the casino maze at Caesar’s to find her mother.

  “Your hair is grayer than I expected,” said Joan Hollerman Silver with a smile. She was playing video poker.

  “You’re much younger-looking than Annie told me,” Jack said and hugged her. Then the three of them huddled around a single machine, playing until they lost another $75.

  “Enough of this,” Jack said. “Joan, come on, let me teach you to play craps. We’ll turn what little we have left into millions.”

  Annie caught Jack in her arms. “Craps?” she said. “You’re going to teach my mother how to play craps? Don’t encourage her. She’ll wind up broke, living in a cardboard box. Anyhow, you promised me a rolling chair ride the entire length of the Boardwalk.”

  Jack looked at Annie’s mother. “It’ll cost a hundred dollars, but she’s worth it,” he said.

  The three walked outside and Annie hailed the first empty rolling chair she saw. The chair pusher, a young man who spoke with a thick Eastern European accent, slapped a rag across the faded blue cushion and Jack and Annie climbed aboard. But before they embarked, Joan Hollerman Silver leaned in and touched her daughter on the shoulder.

  “So, I have to ask, what was it in Jack’s e-mail that made you change your mind?”

  “Let’s just say it was persuasive,” said Annie.

  “Let her read it,” said Jack.

  “Yeah, let her read it,” said her mother, looking at Annie.

  CHAPTER 70

  Joan Hollerman Silver watched the rolling chair man weave his way down the Boardwalk. She waited until he and his cargo disappeared, swallowed up by the obstacle course of tourists and tired gamblers.

  She walked back through Caesar’s, making up a song with Annie’s password in it, so she wouldn’t forget. “Worms, worms … I’m gonna go eat worms,” she hummed to herself. She thought of Annie, age eight, digging in the front yard collecting earthworms for the earthworm zoo she made out of a shoebox.

  In the room, she turned on Annie’s laptop and called up Annie’s e-mail directory. She clicked on the message entitled “Proposal.”

  To: ahollerman@aol.com

  From: jdepaul@aol.com

  Subject: Proposal

  Dear Ms. Hollerman,

  I’m looking for an agent. Laura Goodbread suggested I contact you to represent my book. She says you understand journalists.

  I’ve been in the newspaper business for 30 years and I am Laura’s editor at the Baltimore Star-News.

  My book, “Thief of Words,” is about second chances and the malleable nature of memory. But mostly, it’s about the possibility of happy endings. I know they’re old-fashioned, but I think we’re all looking for one, don’t you?

  The story goes like this: A middle-aged couple meets over lunch. Both are divorced; both work in writing and publishing; both are willing to take another chance at love. They seem like a perfect match. But it’s hard to start over, especially because the woman is troubled by secrets from her past.

  Inadvertently, the man stumbles onto something that may save them. In a series of e-mails, he rewrites the woman’s past, this time starring the two of them together. With each of these new memories the bond between them pulls tighter.

  But the bond may not be strong enough. Someone from the man’s past comes back to haunt them both, just as the woman’s secret closes in on her. And the woman refuses to believe the man doesn’t care what happened 20 years ago, that he loves her for who she is now.

  I don’t have any special qualifications to write this book. I’m just a guy working in a comma factory. And I don’t know if it’s a salable story, but it’s honest and true and from the heart.

  I realize most writers send you the first chapter of their books. But what follows is the last chapter. It’s highly unusual, I know, but I think you’ll be particularly interested in how the book ends—or could end if you take me on as a client.

  I look forward to hearing from you,

  Jack DePaul

  THIEF OF WORDS

  (final chapter) byJack DePaul

  The curtains were slightly parted, letting the morning sun paint a bright median strip across the bed. Annie lay there, on her side, with Jack spooned against her. She could feel the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest.

  Annie looked over at the clock. It was 9:35 A.M. She slid out from under the covers, walked to the window, and pulled the curtains wider apart.

  “I like the view,” said Jack. “And I don’t mean outside the window.”

  Annie turned to see Jack awake, head propped up on one elbow. “I love your body,” he said.

  She pulled the gauzy inner curtain over her nakedness, with exaggerated coyness.

  “Come back to bed,” he said.

  The next time Annie noticed the clock it was 10:35.

  “I’m starving,” said Annie, running an index finger down Jack’s thigh. “If I don’t get something to eat soon, I’ll start chomping on your arm.”

  Jack leaned over and kissed her on the nose. “Food later,” he said. “First, I’ve got a little job for us. Where’d you stash your laptop?”

  Annie pointed to the closet. “Next to your shoes,” she said. Jack got up and returned with the computer. He put it on Annie’s lap and snuggled in beside her.

  She looked at him curiously and before she had a chance to ask, he said, “Annie, I’ve been talking about the power of words for thirty years. But it wasn’t until I started writing you these e-mails that I really felt it.” He put his hand over his heart as if he were giving the pledge of allegiance. “It’s like we’ve been together since we tumbled down the face of that sand dune. But no
w it’s time for the most important rewrite of Annie Hollerman’s life. You type. It starts like this:

  “If you like rooting for the underdog, Annie Hollerman would have been a fine choice…”

  They debated a couple of the details—Princeton belt or Yale? Toyota or Honda?—and soon they were deep into Annie’s new past and racing to the future.

  “…‘Wow, great hair,’ was Jack DePaul’s opening line. He blurted it out as Annie Hollerman walked past his desk on her second day in the newsroom. It had been a long time since Annie had heard anything that inept, but she didn’t mind, this was Jack DePaul, the brash young features editor the paper had hired away from the San Diego Tribune. Her hair had stunned him into an incomplete sentence.

  The next afternoon, he came over, sat on the corner of her desk, and suggested she go after a story about a chicken farm inspector. Nobody on his staff would touch it, but he was sure it was a great yarn. In the right hands, he said, it could read like a detective story.

  Annie snapped at it like a hungry trout. Before Jack DePaul had returned to his desk, she’d made two phone calls. Twelve days later it was done. An eighty-inch feature she’d worked on between daily assignments and polished up late at night.

  The day before the chicken inspector story ran—above the fold on page one—Jack DePaul came by her desk again. “Up for an adventure?” he said. “Always,” she said. That night, they got in his ’72 VW Bug and drove twelve miles to cross the state line, where they ate fried perch and hush puppies at Bueley’s Fish Camp in Rock Hill, South Carolina. They talked until LaFontaine Bueley, the seventy-two-year-old owner, turned out the dining room lights. The next night, he took her to Country City USA, where they learned to line dance.

  Within weeks they were known in the newsroom as DeHollerman. They were wunderkind bookends, full of talent and drive. Friends could picture Jack running the Washington Post’s style section and Annie reporting from the White House. DeHollerman could picture it, too, but their newsroom pals would have been surprised to learn that the wunderkinds had other, far different, dreams as well.

  One Sunday over lox and bagels at the Park Road Deli, they read a New York Times Magazine story about Peace Corps volunteers helping street kids in Ghana. The next day, they called the New York office for applications. They imagined trips all over the world. Jack wanted to take Annie to Nepal. Annie wanted to take Jack on a train ride through countries thick with jungle. Jack read Annie some poems by Pablo Neruda. Annie, fired by the words, decided they had to make a pilgrimage to Chile.

  They made love on Annie’s secondhand sofa halfway through a late-night broadcast of Goodbye Columbus. An hour later they made love on the rug by the couch. An hour after that they made love in Annie’s bed.

  Then came an uncharacteristically cold spring day in the Queen City of Charlotte, North Carolina. The kind of cold day that makes the shiny red tulips lining the city’s main streets shiver.

  Annie got to the paper at 9:15. First she stopped at the cafeteria, where she bought coffee and joked about the cold weather. She seemed even more buoyant than usual. If the cafeteria ladies had thought to ask her why, she might have told them about the night before, when Jack, being a man who liked ceremony and flourishes, bent down on one knee before her and asked if she would move in with him.

  Her second stop was the desk of city editor Mark Snowridge, where she apologized for not bailing him out with a last-minute column. “There was no way I could finish in thirty minutes,” she said.

  “Don’t sweat it,” replied Snowridge. “What’s another license plate story? It’s all just next day’s birdcage liner anyway. You’ll have something for me next time, Hollerman. You’re still the aces.”

  She arrived at her own desk around 9:30. There on the keyboard of her computer was a small box. Taped to it was a note, in Jack’s handwriting, that read, “Open me.” Inside, resting on a pillow of white cotton, was Jack’s house key. “For you, Annie,” the note said. “Always and forever.”