Watching Thorpe work the room, I tried to recall what it was about him that made me willing to tell him such personal details, things I had revealed to no one else. Now, even more so than before, his persuasiveness was in full form, as if he’d spent the last twenty years perfecting it. He’d passed the Sundays of his childhood in a Southern Baptist church in Tuscaloosa, and I couldn’t deny that he had something of the evangelist’s flair about him—a stagy, folksy presence that made everyone lean slightly forward in their seats.
There were still hands in the air when Thorpe smiled and said, “Well, if there are no more questions…” and stepped away from the pedestal.
The woman in the yellow pantsuit instructed everyone to form a line in front of the signing table.
Thorpe signed quickly, head down, exchanging a couple of words with each person before sliding the book back across the table with a smile. As the line inched forward, I felt my stomach knotting up. So many times over the years, I had wanted to confront him, but something had always stopped me; for one thing, I didn’t know that I could face him. More important, a confrontation seemed futile. The book was written, the damage done. What possible good could it do—for me or my parents, or for Lila—to open up the wound? But now, everything had changed. If the book was made of lies, as McConnell alleged, then Thorpe’s betrayal was even greater. I needed to hear from Thorpe himself how much truth was in those pages.
When it was my turn, he took the book without looking at me. “And whom should I sign this to?”
I didn’t answer.
“Would you like me to inscribe it to you or just sign my name?” he asked, growing impatient. Then he looked up, pen poised over the page. His mouth opened, but he said nothing. He laid the pen down and moved as if to stand, but then appeared to think better of it, and sat down again. “Ellie, I—”
It was the first time in my life I’d seen him speechless.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” he managed, his voice soft. His eyes looked wet, but the Thorpe I knew would never have become so emotional as to find himself on the verge of tears.
Finally he pushed his chair back and stood, leaning forward across the table, arms outstretched. Realizing he meant to hug me, I stepped back. He dropped his arms to his sides, glanced at the fans still waiting eagerly behind me in line, and sat down again. “I can’t believe you’re here. You don’t know how good it is to see you.” He was quiet again for a moment. And then, “God, Ellie, you really haven’t changed at all.” His Southern accent was all but gone. For a moment, he was the old Thorpe—the friend I knew before the whole terrible business with the book began.
The woman in the yellow pantsuit tugged at his sleeve. “Mr. Thorpe, we only have the room until one.”
“Of course,” he said, regaining his composure.
He leaned toward me, as if to talk in private, although it was clear that the woman in the yellow pantsuit and the people in line behind me were eavesdropping. “Look, I’m taking a taxi straight to the airport after this. I’m flying out to New York, but I’ll be back in a couple of days. Call me.” He wrote his phone number in the book. “No, better yet, come by, please. We have so much to catch up on.”
He was already jotting down his address. “I mean it, come by anytime.”
I tried to formulate a response, but the woman in the yellow pantsuit had me by the elbow and was ushering me on.
“Wait,” Thorpe said, coming out from behind the table. “Ride to the airport with me. I’ll pay for your cab ride back.”
Seeing him in this room full of people was unsettling enough. I pictured us together in the cab, side by side in the closed space. “I have to get back to work,” I said.
“You’ll come by my house?”
“I don’t know.”
“You will,” he said, his voice firm now, full of certainty. “I’m back on Tuesday.”
A couple of minutes later, I stood outside the restaurant in the din of Market Street traffic, clutching Thorpe’s latest best seller, feeling the same way I’d felt all those years ago, when he’d called out to me in the fog on Ocean Beach, having just told me he was going through with the book, no matter what. Then, as now, he’d had the final word. It was Thorpe’s talent, the thing he did best: every story he told, every conversation he engaged in, ended on his own terms.
Eighteen
FOR EVERY HUMAN EVENT,” THORPE USED to say, “there is a story. For every emotion, every mystery, every historical point of reference, there is narrative that seeks to explain.”
It stands to reason that there is a story for coffee. It was Henry who told me this story, on our second date. We had met just a few days before in the offices of Golden Gate Coffee, where he’d recently taken a job in sales. Henry had begun his career as a warehouse boy at Welsh’s Coffee Roaster in San Mateo when he was still in high school. By the time I met him, he was spending much of his free time working as an advocate for the farmers. At that time there was such obscene wealth among young San Franciscans, it was a turn-on to meet a guy who genuinely didn’t care much about financial profit—at least not his own.
He told me the story not over coffee but over beer, at the 500 Club in the Mission. While he could certainly appreciate the finer things, and would splurge once a year on a meal at Chez Panisse, he had a soft spot for dive bars. Early in our relationship, he would confess that the meeting at the 500 Club had been a kind of test. “If you were snobby about the red vinyl booths and pool table,” he said, “it would mean you weren’t for me.”
But I’d been too intrigued by Henry to pay much attention to the décor. At five foot ten, he seemed to own the space he walked through more authoritatively than much taller men often did. He had light brown hair, blue eyes so pale they made me think of that Velvet Underground song, and milky skin that tended to go pink in the sun. His slightly lopsided smile exuded kindness and made him appear more shy than he actually was. He rarely wore anything other than jeans and a dark sweater, but his taste in shoes tended toward the adventurous. On the day we met, he was wearing boots made of a shiny black material that looked like hair, which he jokingly referred to as his horsehair boots before reassuring me that no horses had died in their manufacture. In public he had a pleasantly resonant voice that tended to draw attention his way, but in private he spoke so quietly that I often had to make him repeat himself.
“The story begins in Abyssinia in the ninth century,” he said. Two glasses of beer stood on the small table between us. I leaned forward to hear him. “It begins with a young goatherd named Kaldi, and with his goats, who refuse, one evening, to follow him home. They are absorbed in a new discovery, a tree Kaldi has never seen before, with dark glossy leaves and red berries. They eat and eat, and it takes Kaldi a long time to coax them down from the mountain.”
Henry used his hands when he spoke. Even though he had an office job, he possessed the rough, calloused hands of a manual laborer. I would later learn that he moonlighted as a furniture mover to save money to start his own business.
“That night,” he continued, “the goats don’t sleep. The next morning, when Kaldi takes them again to their grazing place on the mountain, they return immediately to the same tree. Like Eve, Kaldi is curious; he must have some for himself. The berries of the strange plant give him a feeling of alertness and well-being. He feels more energetic, more clever. He goes back home and tells his family and friends what he has experienced. Within a fortnight, the dervishes at a nearby monastery have discovered that chewing the leaves of the mystical plant allows them to spend less time sleeping, more time enacting their passionate devotions to God.”
I wondered how it was that I’d spent years at Golden Gate Coffee without ever bothering to look this stuff up. Over time I would realize that Henry had something I’d lost a long time ago—a passion for the details, a keen memory not just for dates and place names, but for the oddities that made a story unique. He picked up the details because he paid attention, and he asked questions, a
nd he burned things into his memory by sharing them with others, repeating stories until they became his own. For me, life was a house that I passed through quietly, trying not to unsettle the dust or bump up against the furniture. Henry was just the opposite; he moved through life with his hands outstretched, picking everything up and measuring its weight in his hands, knocking on walls to test their strength.
“I wish I could be more like you,” I told him once, about six months into our relationship. “I wish I could just rush into life without analyzing everything so much.”
“What’s holding you back?” he asked. We were lying face-to-face in bed, fully clothed because of the cold, and he was looking at me with those intense blue eyes, waiting.
“I don’t know.”
It felt as though he was always waiting for me to tell him something, but I never could quite get the words out, never could let go enough to say exactly what I was thinking. With Henry I did make a sincere effort to open up, but most of the time I stopped short of the complete truth.
For a few minutes neither of us said anything, we just lay there, close together but not touching. I had closed my eyes and was beginning to drift off to sleep when his voice pulled me back. “You’re nothing like her, you know,” he said.
“What?”
“The girl in the book. She may have your name, your history, your face, but she’s a fabrication. Andrew Thorpe made her up. You’re not her.”
I wanted to believe him, but I wasn’t convinced. Really, how could Henry think that he knew me any better than Thorpe did? I had told Thorpe everything.
“Then who am I?” I asked, not expecting an answer.
“You’re you,” he said, without missing a beat. “You’re Ellie Enderlin, and I love you.”
“You do?”
It was something he’d never said before. I felt it, too, but I hadn’t planned on saying it yet. I figured we were still a bit early in our relationship to be making such an enormous statement, the kind of thing you couldn’t take back.
“I do,” he said. And then he was waiting again. I tried to work up the nerve, but the words wouldn’t come. One thing I would always appreciate about Henry was the fact that he didn’t turn away. That night, despite the fact that I failed to say I loved him, he pulled me close. My body relaxed, and I realized that, for the first time in my adult life, I was beginning to feel truly safe.
Nineteen
“It was the view which finally made us take the place.”
Aldous Huxley, Young Archimedes
I TURNED OFF MARKET AND TOOK THE WINDING road up to Diamond Heights, past rows of sixties-and seventies-era condos. I had always liked this neighborhood, which had the feel of a suburb plopped on a mountain in the middle of the city. It was just after midnight, and the steep streets were dark and quiet. I knew Thorpe would be surprised to see me show up on his doorstep so late, and I hoped this would work to my advantage. Nighttime was when my mind was most alert, and also when I felt most comfortable in my skin. If Diamond Heights was Thorpe’s territory, then nighttime was mine.
Thorpe’s house was at the top of Red Rock Hill. It was a two-story Eichler, with a white beam roof overhanging the gray front wall. A small garden was laid out in a triangle pattern in the front yard, a Japanese maple and several lavender bushes providing a bit of privacy from the street. I parked at the curb, sat in the car for a couple of minutes gathering courage, and walked up to the front door and rang the bell. Soon, I heard footsteps. The door opened, and Thorpe stood before me, clad in a striped cotton bathrobe, his head covered in gray stubble, save for a large bald patch on top. There were dark bags under his eyes, and he gave off a faint medicinal scent.
“Ellie?” he said, rubbing his eyes. “What are you doing here?”
“You told me to stop by anytime.”
He smiled and said groggily, “So I did. Come on in. I’ll make coffee.”
I followed him through the open courtyard, where a stone fountain gurgled. The courtyard led into a large living room, the back wall of which was floor-to-ceiling glass. The high ceiling featured exposed white beams. Having grown up in a pretty but cramped Victorian in Noe Valley, an Eichler on the hill was my idea of a dream house. But Thorpe had made a mess of the place. The hardwood floors were covered with tatty Turkish rugs in deep reds and drab browns, the floor-to-ceiling shelves on either side of the fireplace were filled with magazines and knickknacks. The flat-panel TV was shoved inside a huge mahogany armoire, the doors of which were open to reveal a jumble of audiovisual equipment. There were two sofas, a leather recliner, a coffee table, and a couple of mismatched side chairs. Even the glass wall was obstructed by an enormous bamboo console. Stacks of newspapers and magazines were everywhere. I imagined Joseph Eichler turning in his grave.
The house reeked of stale smoke, and I noticed several empty ashtrays strewn about. “You took up smoking?” I said.
“Not anymore. I’ve been clean for almost two months, knock on wood. The ashtrays are a visualization technique my life coach suggested to help me kick the habit.”
“Life coach? I always wondered who their clients were.”
“I hired her because I was suffering from a severe case of writer’s block.”
“Did she fix it?”
“Ask me next month. We’re currently in week nine—uncluttering my living space.” He gestured helplessly at the room. “We’ve hit a bit of a snag there. Week ten and eleven are spiritual awakening. Next stop, writer’s block. She said we had to work our way up. Laurie Giordano—she’s tough, but good—remind me to give you her card.”
I waited in the living room while he went into the kitchen to make coffee. The kitchen was separated from the living room only by a low countertop. The sink was full of dishes, the refrigerator door covered with newspaper clippings, calendars, receipts, postcards, and photographs. He rummaged around in a drawer, then another, and finally said, “I can’t find the coffee filters. We’ll have to settle for tea.”
He filled a red kettle with water and set it on the stove.
“I hope your wife doesn’t mind my showing up so late,” I said, “but I was in the neighborhood.”
“Wife?”
“I saw Second Time’s a Charm in the bookstore.”
“Ah, that. Well, the second time didn’t really turn out to be such a charm after all. Jane filed for divorce a month after that one came out.”
“I’m sorry to hear.”
“Apparently, so was Oprah.” He laughed. “I was this close. Who knows, maybe I could have been the next Deepak Chopra or Dr. Phil. Oh well, there’s always another book, eh?” He gestured toward the general chaos of the living room. “Have a seat. You’re making me nervous.”
I cleared a spot on the sofa. The cushions caved in when I sat down, so that my knees were up in the air. Something smelled weird. I realized the cloying vanilla odor was coming from an enormous, flesh-colored candle on the coffee table.
“Sorry, I couldn’t find saucers,” Thorpe said, handing me a steaming mug that bore the insignia of a hotel in Cleveland.
He sat down in the recliner across from me, adjusting the hem of the bathrobe to cover his knees. The top slid open to reveal a pale, broad nipple ringed with curly black hair. A fake palm tree rose up behind his head. On the wall beside the tree were several wooden masks bearing macabre and pained expressions. I thought of Colonel Kurtz in the jungle. I thought of the drunken night almost twenty years before when I’d ended up in bed with this man. He had been an earnest and awkward lover; the night had ended badly. Then, as now, nothing seemed quite real. I’d long ago learned that the world was filled with grotesque and unsettling encounters that could be funny or just depressing, depending upon one’s perspective; the jury was still out on this one.
“I wish you’d told me you were coming,” he said, running his hand over the gray stubble on his head. “I would have cleaned up. As you can see, I don’t get many visitors.” The Southern accent was entirely gone; as I suspec
ted, it was just part of the performance.
Because of the relative height of the recliner and the depth of the sofa cushions, my eyes were level with the soles of his feet. It had been a mistake to come here. Nighttime, after all, didn’t neutralize the territory as much as I’d hoped. I cleared my throat to speak, but I didn’t know where to begin.
“How long has it been?” he said.
“A long time.”
“I’ve wanted to see you, Ellie. Very much. Things didn’t turn out the way I hoped between us. Losing your friendship, that was harder on me than you can possibly know.”
“It was your choice,” I said.
“Hardly.”
“I begged you not to write that book.”
Thorpe gave the footrest a shove, set his feet on the floor, and leaned forward. “This is true, but I swear, I never wanted to hurt you or your family. I was at the end of my rope, and the book was my way out. Did I ever tell you about the day I decided to write it?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“It was a Sunday night, and I’d just spent three hours in a departmental meeting listening to my colleagues argue over which short story should be used for a diagnostic essay—Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use’ or Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants.’ I kid you not, three hours. About halfway through the meeting I started thinking about what had happened to Lila, and to your family. I couldn’t believe they hadn’t arrested anybody. I’m sitting there, and some uptight white guy in a turtleneck is going on and on about how we can’t ignore the literary canon, while the new women’s studies hire is harping about marginalized feminist writers, and I knew that if I was still having the same conversation in five years I’d have to kill myself. So I just tuned out and started writing. By the time the meeting adjourned, I’d filled six pages. I reread it as soon as I got home, and I knew right then it could be really good. If I hadn’t taken that chance, I’d still be holed up in some little apartment grading freshman essays, fucking around with a Hemingway story I never liked in the first place.”
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