“I wasn’t looking at the wall.”
“I thought you were,” says Sherrie.
“I wasn’t looking at anything.”
Sherrie helps herself to more salad. She’s not going to miss the last tomatoes just because Swenson’s cranky. “Another crazy day at work. Mercury must be in retrograde, or something. This girl came in and said she was getting bad vibes from the ghosts of Elijah Euston’s dead daughters.”
“What were you supposed to do about that?”
“Valium,” Sherrie says.
It actually cheers Swenson up to hear that clean-cut Euston kids are scamming to get drugs. “Probably one of my students.”
“Freshman. Theater major,” says Sherrie. “And then this disgusting thing happened. Some creep, this new guy in admissions, comes over with an application from some high school kid. The good news is the kid’s got astronomical SAT scores. The bad news is he’s got testicular cancer. They want me to call Burlington and ask about his chances. They don’t want to waste a place in next year’s class if the kid’s not going to make it.”
“Is that how he put it?” Swenson asks.
“No,” Sherrie says. “That would have been illegal. But that’s what he meant. I wasn’t going to call Burlington. Or let them turn the poor kid down. So an hour later I call admissions and tell them that the guys at the medical school promised the kid would be fine. I’m feeling like a hero. And then it hits me that they could admit the guy and I could spend the next four years with a very sick kid on my hands.”
Swenson certainly hopes not. He doesn’t want to spend the next four years discussing testicular cancer. Listening to Sherrie’s stories about the clinic has begun to feel like hearing someone’s hypochondriacal symptoms. It’s not Sherrie’s fault that whatever she sees in her office has started sounding like something Swenson’s fated to get.
The fact (which he would never say, and rarely admits to himself) is that he’s not very interested in what happens at the clinic. He married Sherrie under false pretenses—pretending to be enthralled by what she’d chosen to do with her life. But he had been fascinated, and not just for romantic reasons. A few days after he woke up on the emergency room floor with Sherrie’s cool hand encircling his wrist, he’d started writing a story about a doctor so infatuated with a jazz singer that he ruins his career to satisfy her unquenchable thirst for love disguised as a ravening hunger for morphine and diet pills. As the story grew into his first novel, Blue Angel, it developed its own needs—a craving for medical information. So he went back to St. Vincent’s and found Sherrie waiting for him. They fell in love so quickly, it seemed like research for the story of a man whose passion for a woman leaves him no viable option but to wreck his life. Except that Sherrie saved his. Everything changed when he met her.
That summer, they saw The Blue Angel at the Bleecker, and as Swenson watched the professor degraded into a slobbering clown for the amusement of the nightclub singer, Lola Lola, played by Marlene Dietrich with her smoky voice and the thighs that grabbed and held your attention, he knew where his book was going. The film gave him the name of the nightclub where his singer worked—and the title for his novel. For the first time, he felt that he was onto something larger than revenge on a doctor so starstruck by Sarah Vaughn that he’d ignored Swenson’s ear infection. He understood that this period in his life—being in love instead of wanting to be in love, writing instead of wanting to write—had been arranged by magic, that a mantle of grace had settled on him and could as suddenly be whisked away. But not suddenly, as it turned out. Slowly. Thread by thread.
Sherrie says, “Arlene told me the most insane story at work today. These cousins of hers took their daughter to some amusement park near Lake George. They went to buy cotton candy and let go of the kid’s hand and looked down…the kid disappeared. So they ran to park security, and the guards said, ‘This happens all the time.’ They closed off all the exits but one. The guards said, ‘Stand there and look for your child. Look at the shoes, concentrate on the shoes. Everything else will be different.’ So they stand at the exit, and they see the shoes and go, ‘That’s her! That’s my child.’ The kidnappers had dyed the kid’s hair and changed her clothes, but they couldn’t do anything about the shoes. Kids have such different sizes.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Swenson says. “What do you mean, this happens all the time? Didn’t they catch the kidnappers? Do lots of kidnappers do this? Why bother changing the kid’s clothes and dying her hair—where? in the public bathroom?—when they can just hustle the kid out of the park and split before anyone notices?”
“Why are you shouting at me?” Sherrie says. “I told you it was insane. That’s why I brought it up. Forget it, Ted, okay?”
“Sorry. It’s just that typical tabloid country bullshit Arlene always talks.”
Sherrie laughs. “Poor Arlene. She was hyperventilating, the story turned her on so much.”
“Her cousins told her this? They said it happened to them? Are they pathological liars?”
“God knows,” says Sherrie. “God knows at what point the fantasy takes over.”
“Or maybe the wishful thinking,” says Swenson.
“Don’t say that.” In the silence that follows, Sherrie plays with a piece of fennel, sawing along one bumpy ridge with surgical precision.
Finally Swenson says, “Speaking of missing children…this morning I thought about leaving early for class and driving over to Burlington and going by Ruby’s dorm and ringing her buzzer, finding her somewhere, somehow, taking her out for coffee….”
“And?”
“I didn’t.”
“Maybe you should have,” says Sherrie. “Maybe it would’ve helped.”
“Time’s what’s going to help,” Swenson says.
They know that, and neither believes it. Ruby doesn’t forget. Since she was a baby, she’s always been the most stubborn person alive. A passing fright, some toy she had to have, she could keep it going forever. Why did they imagine that would have changed? Because everything else has. Their funny, gangly little girl turned into a chunky teen with dirty hair and the sullen blankness you see on vintage farm-family photos. Ruby retreated further and further. Sherrie said it would pass; girls get lost at a certain age. Sherrie brought him a book about this, which he refused to read. It depressed him that he was married to a person who would think that some self-help piece-of-shit bestseller had something to do with their daughter.
Eventually, they convinced themselves that really they were lucky. Ruby was fine. She got Bs in school. Half her classmates were pregnant or on drugs, even (or especially) up here in idyllic Euston. And then, at the start of Ruby’s senior year, Arlene Shurley came into the clinic and told Sherrie she’d seen Ruby with a guy driving a red Miata.
There was only one Miata on campus, a sleek red rose of a car tucked neatly into the buttonhole of Euston’s most troubled student. A southern senator’s youngest son, entitled and alcoholic, Matthew McIlwaine had transferred in as a sophomore after being thrown out of two colleges, in the first case for passing bad checks, in the second for date rape. His presence at Euston was a scandal that died out within weeks, after the announcement of the library’s new McIlwaine wing. The kid looked like a male model: that narcissistic, that pretty. What was he doing with Ruby? Swenson didn’t want to imagine. Sherrie said that transfer students were often very lonely.
They should have been glad that Ruby had a secret, glad that she had a boyfriend. It used to bother Swenson that her friends at Central High were the homely-girl clique. Any boyfriend, any girlfriend would have been fine—anyone but Matt. Who could blame Swenson for wanting to save his child from a felon and a date rapist?
Swenson talked to Matt’s advisor, then to Matt, who promptly cut Ruby loose. That’s how Swenson saw it: a cat played with a mouse, something distracted the cat, and the mouse ran free. He’d thought the mouse would thank him.
Swenson and Sherrie know it’s important not to blame each
other. Sometimes it’s weirdly sexy, this sharing of their grief, the two of them, connected this way that no one else can feel. But the wedge of all they can’t say is busily doing its damage. Sherrie’s totally innocent. She’d warned him that it wouldn’t work, that Ruby wouldn’t forget. And though Sherrie would never accuse him of having done everything wrong, he knows that she must think so. So he can blame her for blaming him, and because he’s the one to blame.
Sherrie drains the last of her wine. “Ruby will get over it. Basically, she loves us.”
“Why would she?” says Swenson. “I mean, why would she love me?”
Sherrie sighs and shakes her head. “Give me a break,” she says.
After dinner, Swenson goes to his study. He picks up his novel, with a queasy lurch of misgiving. Holding the pages at arm’s length—admit it, he’s getting farsighted—he reads a sentence, then another.
Julius walked into the gallery. He knew everyone there, and knew precisely how many of them wanted to see him fall flat on his face. Over the head of a woman air-kissing him on both cheeks he saw his work—the same lines that had writhed on the subway tiles—dying all around them on the gallery walls.
Who wrote this hopeless moribund crap? Certainly not Swenson. Dead on the walls, dead on the page—a coded warning to himself. He dimly remembers how it felt when his work was going well, how sitting down to his desk each day was like slipping into a warm bath, or a warm silky river, a tide of words and sentences floating him away…. He opens his briefcase and takes out Angela Argo’s manuscript. He’s not going to read it. He’ll just take a peek. Then he starts to read and forgets whatever he was thinking, and then, little by little, forgets about his novel, Angela’s novel, his age, her age, his talent, her talent.
Mr. Reynaud said, “A little-known fact about eggs. During the equinox and solstice you can balance an egg on its end.” This information struck me as more meaningful than anything I was learning about incubation and hatching. Everything Mr. Reynaud said soared above our high school class to something as large as the universe, the equinox and the solstice.
I never tried to balance an egg during the equinox or the solstice. I don’t believe in astrology. But I knew that my life was like that egg, and the point it balanced on were the few minutes I got to stay after class and talk to Mr. Reynaud.
The last ten minutes of practice were hell: how much time was left, how long the piece might take if Mr. Reynaud stopped to yell at the snare drum for missing his cue and we had to start over and finish just as the bell rang. That was how I finally learned math, figuring it all out. If the music ended early—the remainder was what I got. If not, I had a desert to cross—a night or a day or a weekend.
I was first clarinet. I made sure the others came in on time. I tapped the beat with my foot. Did Mr. Reynaud think that tapping the beat was babyish and stupid? I imagined him watching my foot. I concentrated on the measures, holding the clarinet in my lap. Mr. Reynaud glanced at my clarinet as his eyes skimmed over the band.
He’d taught us to pick up our instruments three measures ahead of our cue. We knew to put them in our mouths and come in on the downbeat. We did, more or less together, the others maybe a second behind, and then the piping of the woodwinds drove all that out of my head, the crispy bubbling precision of those perfect notes of Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, simplified for high school kids, but still miles beyond us.
Three measures from the end, the world came back. Was Mr. Reynaud watching my foot? As if my stupid ankle was all he had to worry about as he swooped his arms above us.
It had begun one afternoon the previous spring, on the way home from the All-County tryouts. The Cooperstown High School Orchestra had won the competition with a piece called “The Last Pow-Wow,” corny disgusting tom-toms, moaning cellos supposed to be warriors chanting in the longhouse, then a scream of piccolos, someone scalping somebody. The crowd in the high school gym went wild. The judges were nodding their heads. Our tinkly pitiful Mozart sounded totally pathetic.
Mr. Reynaud drove the van with the instruments and the section leaders, his elite squad. Normally we talked nonstop. Who liked this one, who liked that one, as if Mr. Reynaud wasn’t there. Actually, it was all for him: a display of our cool teenage lives. But after the tryouts we were too disappointed to talk. We’d lost, and it was our fault.
Mr. Reynaud hit the brakes. The van changed lanes. The band instruments shifted, the high hat clanged. A car horn blared and faded. From over Mr. Reynaud’s shoulder, I watched the speedometer climb. He’d always driven like my parents: a few miles under the limit. Now he was all over the road, cutting off other cars. I thought we were going to die.
He cut across three lanes of traffic, pulled into a rest stop, and said, “Okay, everyone out. Forward march.”
We looked at him. He meant it. We knew he’d been a Marine.
He’d nearly killed us in the van, but we were fine with him marching us way out into the woods beyond the deserted rest stop. This was one of those crazy stunts that made him a popular teacher. Once at rehearsal he made us switch instruments with someone in another section and rehearse the hardest piece on instruments we couldn’t play.
We followed him along the path past the map under its grimy glass, past the heavy trash cans. We entered the spongy forest. We kept losing sight of Mr. Reynaud as we trailed him into the woods. He held his shoulders very straight. We followed his dark angry head.
“All right, stop,” he said. “Look around you. This is where the Indians lived. Do you think for one second they played that corny Hollywood shit? Real Indian music was nothing like that!”
He didn’t blame us for losing. The proof was that he’d said “shit.” He only cursed around the section leaders, so we knew he still liked us.
“All right,” Mr. Reynaud said. “Everyone back in the van.”
The others started back to the van, but I couldn’t move. Suddenly I felt sleepy.
Mr. Reynaud grabbed my arm.
I was so scared I smiled. Mr. Reynaud’s face was close to mine. I stared into his eyes. I could hardly focus. I saw my own contorted face in Mr. Reynaud’s glasses. He opened his mouth. Then he shut it again.
“Go ahead,” he told me. But he was still holding my arm. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I didn’t…” And then he let me go.
It’s only their third conference, but Angela’s so much calmer that she only writhes a little as she falls into the cracked leather chair. Well, she’s got a right to be calm. Swenson called her and arranged this meeting. Probably she assumes that he does this with all his students. She crosses her legs beneath her. “Well? What did you think?”
Swenson says, “What are those words on your hand?”
Angela scowls at the smeary ballpoint. “Oh. There’s a lunar eclipse this weekend. I didn’t want to forget. Come on. What did you think of my novel?”
“Do you play an instrument?”
“Actually, no. I failed second grade music. Flunked soprano recorder.”
“Then how do you know so much about music?”
“I have friends. I asked. I made it up. You hated it. That’s what you’re saying, right?”
“Not at all. I thought it was terrific. I’ve marked a couple of places you might want to look at and change.”
“Shoot.” Angela takes out her pen.
“They’re nothing. Like here. A grammatical thing. You say, ‘As if Mr. Reynaud wasn’t there.’ Technically, it’s weren’t. Weren’t there. But you can do it either way.”
“Did you mark that?”
“I did. And over here…this is about…plausibility. Would she really be able to see her face in his glasses? Or did you just want it there, so you decided to finesse it?”
Angela drops back in her chair. “Whoa,” she says. “That hurts. Let’s look in your glasses. Okay. Forget it. Sorry. Isn’t it enough that she thinks she can see her reflection? I mean, she’s pretty stressed out at that point in the story.”
“Leav
e it in.” Swenson’s not going to argue. “Maybe you’ll look at it later….”
“What else?” Angela says.
“Well…here. This same sentence. If you do decide to keep it. ‘She sees her own contorted face.’ Contorted tells us nothing.”
“It could mean anything,” Angela says.
“Exactly,” Swenson says.
“Make sure you mark that,” Angela says.
“I already did,” says Swenson.
“I can’t believe I did that,” Angela says. “Thank you, thank you so much!”
Encouraged, Swenson checks the manuscript one more time. “Okay, look. This scene in the van. It goes by a little fast. Does she really think they’re going to get hurt, that they’re going to get in a wreck? So when he pulls over there’s real relief mixed in with this new terror…?”
Angela nods, then quits nodding. Swenson watches her think.
“You’re right,” she says. “I knew that. I was just kind of rushing ahead so I could write the part when they’re in the forest. That little moment she spends alone with him is so important to her, everything changes after that….”
After a silence, Swenson says, “Do you have other readers for this? I mean, are you showing it to anyone else?” He vaguely recalls her saying no one else has seen it. But for some reason he wants to be sure….
“No one,” says Angela. “I mean, no one except my boyfriend. Oh, my God, what do you think it means that I just called my boyfriend no one?”
“I’d hate to speculate,” says Swenson. “And what does your boyfriend think?”
“He thinks it’s great.” Angela shrugs and turns up her palms.
“Look. I brought you more pages.” Angela pulls a new orange envelope from her bag, and they exchange orange envelopes. Angela almost drops hers, and giggles.
Looking at the floor, she says, “Actually, it’s just a paragraph that I wanted to add onto the end of what I already gave you. I’ve got more, whole chapters, but I thought I’d take it slow. I don’t want to scare you. Working with you is amazing. It’s making me want to write. I can’t get it down fast enough. I have to make myself rewrite it until I’m not embarrassed to show it to you, which is usually after about a zillion revisions. Will you write a note for me when someone catches on that I’m not going to any of my other classes and the dean gets on my case?”
Blue Angel Page 8
