by Ann Birch
She needs someone to talk to. If James were here, she could tell him. It’s the sort of wild and crazy leap over the cliff that would catch his fancy. But if James were around, she wouldn’t have to do this, would she? She could phone Carl. He told her to call him. She picks up the phone, puts it down again. No, he’s got enough on his plate looking after Claire.
Two cups of coffee later, she calls Marianne Blackman.
“You’ve got some reason for this crack-brained idea?” her agent asks.
“I need extra money. That’s about all I want to tell you right now.”
“I don’t often handle mass-market stuff. That’s one of the PC phrases for erotica — but what the hell. You could probably get a good advance, and I’d come in for my share of it too. Thing is, you’re going to need an aka.”
“A what?”
“You know, an alias, a … what’s the fancy term? Fill me in, you’re the scholar.”
“Nom de plume. I’ve thought about that. Of course, I’ll have to keep it all under wraps.” Now, the full horror of what she’s doing comes home to Roberta. “One of the university’s most prestigious scholars,” wasn’t that what the Provost had called her at her launch of The Cretan Manuscripts?
“Hey, are you still there, Roberta?”
“Sorry, you were saying?”
“You didn’t read about that babe who got fired from her law firm for publishing an online erotic novel? But she didn’t bother to cover her ass apparently. You don’t want to lose your day job the way she did, but you’d probably be okay as long as you have a good what-do-you-call-it, and don’t tell anyone what you’re up to. I mean anyone. Especially those sons of yours. Let them have one too many beers in the pub and the whole thing could blow up in your face.”
Roberta hates the way Marianne drags Charlie and Ed into this. Of course, she won’t tell them, but not because she’s worried that they’ll be bragging about her erotic novel to their pals in a pub. She just doesn’t want them to know anything at all about her plunge into the abyss.
“So get me the synopsis and the first thirty pages ASAP, and I’ll contact Korda. You’re right, I think we’ve got a good fit there, and he’s coming to Toronto for a conference in a couple of months, so we could talk to him then. One on one. Or two on one, whatever you like.” She pauses and laughs. “Bit of a double entendre there, I think. Anyway, go for it, girl.”
Roberta hangs up and looks out the front window. The sunshine has died. ASAP, well that’s a given, but how is she going to do it? In her academic writing, she always has a fund of facts and opinions roiling in her brain to draw upon. Maybe it will be easy enough to write about Mira’s adolescent yearnings for Papino, but how is she going to write the sex stuff?
She puts on a warm jacket and heads out the front door for a walk in the neighbourhood, hoping that by moving her legs, she’ll get her brain functioning as well. It’s drizzling rain now, and she comes back to get an umbrella and put a long red slicker over her jacket. Off again, she decides to take a path along the creek through open fields. It’s a local bike route, but there are few cyclists on it this fall afternoon. James never cycled this way. “Too boring,” he said. He preferred the challenge of the traffic along four-lane Bloor Street.
And of course, the thought of James on his bicycle leads Roberta back to the horror of his broken body in the morgue and the aftermath. She comes to the one steep hill on the route. It rises on her right, and she decides to run up it. If she wears herself out, she may be able to get away from her thoughts.
At the top of the hill, she pauses, completely winded, and looks out at the rainy meadows below and the solitary cyclist weaving his way along the narrow paved path beside the creek. The leaves of the trees lining the creek have already turned from green to rusty brown, but there’s not a splash of red or gold anywhere.
Rainy meadows; they are a metaphor for her. In another two months, snow will cover these fields, and there’ll be another morose metaphor then. The rain is pelting down now, soaking her feet and one shoulder that the umbrella has not completely protected. She turns towards home.
It hasn’t been a completely wasted afternoon. She thinks, at least I’ve got the “aka” Marianne was talking about. Rainy Meadows — that will be my nom de plume. I’ll spell it “Renee” and hope it goes over with hoi polloi. It’s a good one — silly enough that no one will ever connect it with Roberta Greaves.
“So, Renee Meadows,” she says aloud, “all you have to do now is to write the damn book.”
12.
IT’S EARLY NEXT MORNING, and Roberta needs caffeine. Charlie has ground some coffee beans, fortunately, and Roberta makes herself a pot of coffee. She tries reading the online erotic stuff first, but her head keeps drooping over the keyboard of her computer. The same phrases occur again and again. Several sites even seem to have the same online survey on the effectiveness of dildos in foreplay. She starts to wonder if there is any police surveillance of these sites and if her name will appear on someone’s records.
She switches to articles that set out the rules for “creating” sexy stories. The writers of these have a tenuous grasp of diction. Someone called Suzy Possum, for example, doesn’t know the difference between complimentary and complementary. And there’s flaunt where the writer means flout. She’s soon lost track of Suzy’s “advice.”
But at least she’s found out that writers make a distinction between erotica and pornography. The former is apparently more subtle, employing the imagination. There has to be a plot along with the sex, it would seem, while pornography omits the plot. Well then, Ovid’s story of Myrrha would certainly be classed as “erotica.” She looks over her own story outline again. It looks more or less okay. Get to it.
More strong coffee while she centres the phrase CHAPTER ONE exactly one-third of the way down the screen. An auspicious beginning. Then she spends the next hour staring at the blankness that follows it. She feels she can handle the scenes that show Mira’s crush on Papino, her anguish over it, and her rationalizations. But at the back of her mind, she knows that the nitty-gritty of the sex scenes — when she gets to them — will be too much for her. A wave of heat suffuses her cheeks. Too early for hot flashes, she acknowledges. This is pure embarrassment.
When she hears the front door open, she closes down her computer and goes to greet Charlie. Not much difference between me and James, she reflects. Like him, I’m up to something I’m ashamed of, and I don’t want my family to know about it.
Two days later, Marianne phones her. “You’ve got a chapter or two ready, Roberta?”
“Call me Renee.” And she tells her agent about her new name.
“Good start. But what have you written?”
“A few paragraphs, but I can’t do the sex scenes. I just can’t. I’m a classical scholar, and I just can’t turn into a pornographer the way Clark Kent turns into Superman.”
“Hey, forget pornography. This is erotica. The Blackman Agency does not handle porn. Get it?”
“Okay, okay. Sorry.”
“And what makes your case so special? Didn’t Dorothy Sayers have a double life? Noted scholar, acclaimed translator of The Divine Comedy, wasn’t she?
“I know, I know. But the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries she came up with are a far cry from what Renee Meadows’s trashy little novel will be. As I recall, Lord Peter and Harriet copulate only between the hours of midnight and seven in the morning — always fully clothed and always talking in complete sentences.”
“Look, Renee baby, it’s a role, so get into it. Know what I’d suggest? Go online. There’s all that stuff on YouTube. I’ll give you a few—”
“No.”
“No?” There’s a long pause. “Oookay. How about The Happy Hooker? You’ve read Xaviera Hollander’s memoir, haven’t you?”
“No.”
Marianne’s deep sigh wafts into Roberta’
s ear. “You’ve got one of those mom-and-pop convenience stores nearby?”
“There’s one near the subway. I’ve never been in it, though.”
“All the better. They won’t know you. So go in there, go to the back where the magazines are, and look on the top shelf. That’s where they keep all the horny stuff. Buy a bundle of the worst of them, bring them home, and read, read, read. You’ll get ideas there.”
Roberta can hear Marianne tapping her pencil against her teeth as she says all this. She pictures her small wiry body, the gnawed-off lipstick, and the bitten-down fingernails. There is a reason why Marianne is Toronto’s most successful agent. She has a sharp eye for manuscripts that work — in every genre — and she never lets up.
“Have you any sales figures for The Cretan Manuscripts?” Roberta asks. “Any chance of it bailing me out?”
“Doing well, but it’s an academic audience we’re selling to. Paula Piper at Unicorn wants to talk to you about a popular translation for the unwashed. What do you think?”
“Great idea, but not now. I guess I’ve got to work on this other thing.”
“So who’s holding you back, Renee? Get with it. I know you’ll have something for me by the weekend.”
Yeah, sure. But she puts on her coat and considers how much money she will need. She has no idea how much this stuff will cost. Better take plenty. She heads out to the Korean convenience store, walking several blocks past the solid brick, middle-class houses that make up her neighbourhood. She wonders if any of the denizens of these places are — like her — embarking on a double life.
As she closes the door of the shop behind her, she pauses a moment to look around and orient herself. Then she hears a loud voice.
“Hello, Roberta. If you’re looking for bargains, the bananas are on sale, and they look good.”
Uh-oh. It’s Mrs. Schubert, her next-door neighbour. She’s a sweet old lady, rather deaf, so everything she says reverberates. Roberta notices the two store clerks glance in their direction.
“John tells me your new book about the manuscripts is such a success,” she says. “Congratulations. I know he gave it a good boost in The Gazette.” She puts a package of hot-dog buns into her basket. “I’m so sorry I didn’t get to James’s funeral. My latest housecleaner has flown the coop, and I’ve had to deal with so much housework lately my back hurts. But John is looking around for someone new for me.”
Roberta can picture her: late teens, yearning for a job, even housework, but unprepared for the fringe duties imposed by Schubert. Aloud she says, “Well, John was able to be at the funeral, and I appreciated that.” Liar, liar, pants on fire.
While Mrs. Schubert is paying for her groceries, Roberta makes a pretence of studying the bananas. Finally, the old woman makes her exit, and she heads for the back of the store. There, she removes a dozen magazines from the top shelf and takes them to the cash register where she manages to stare down the pimply adolescent behind the counter who asks, “Don’t you want the bananas?”
The magazines are in a pile on the counter, and she’s just retrieving a folded plastic bag from her purse when she hears the door open and in walks Mrs. Schubert again. She’s holding a sales slip.
“I just came back because you’ve charged me for two packages of buns. I only purchased one.” As she says this, she looks at Roberta and the magazines that are still on the counter.
Mrs. Schubert makes no comment, but Roberta knows she’s taken in the titles. And there’s no way she could miss that top cover showing two women with their tongues in each other’s mouths. She takes her refund and leaves for the second time, saying goodbye over her shoulder.
Roberta gets her purchases stashed away, but all the while she is thinking: What if Mrs. Schubert tells her son what I am doing? It’s bizarre enough that I can certainly see her commenting to him. But if the book gets published, will he connect Renee Meadows with Roberta Greaves? Probably not.
Roberta moves towards the door of the shop, and just as she’s closing it behind her, she hears the clerks laugh. She is painfully aware of how she must look to those kids. Middle-aged, respectable, wearing an ankle-length black coat, like a priest’s soutane, and polished high-heeled leather boots, she’s everyone’s stereotype of the uptight WASP. Suddenly, she is as angry as she is embarrassed. She turns around, walks back in, click click click to the counter. She fishes into her bag and pulls out the first magazine her hand touches. When she looks at it, she sees its title, Big Ones.
“Just remembered I’ve read this already,” she says to the youth with the rotten teeth. She slaps it down in front of him along with her eight-inch cash receipt. “I need a refund.”
Back home, she catches a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror. Her cheeks are very red from the stresses of that excursion. And they get even redder as she ploughs through the sordid, poorly written stories that unfold in the magazines she’s bought. Each of the wretched things can be summarized in three words: bang, bang, bang.
But by the end of the day, fuelled by six cups of coffee and a glass of white wine, she’s written the first chapter of Mira. As she reads it over, she wonders how she could have actually put those words onto her screen. “Gross,” she says out loud. It’s a word she’s borrowed from her Trinity students, and it’s exactly right. Probably she could follow it up with one of the phrases her street kids enjoy using: “Yes, it’s a piece of shit.” But she’s on a roll now. There’s something weirdly exhilarating about breaking loose from the carefully argued content of her usual research papers. She’s got the thing started, and it’s going to be full steam ahead to the shitty conclusion.
CHAPTER ONE: WAITING FOR PAPINO
Mira stretches herself full length on the living-room rug of her stepfather’s Greenwich Village apartment in Manhattan. Beside her, just above her eye level, his two Lab retrievers are having fun. Bud, the yellow one, is humping Queenie, the black one.
“Hey, cut it out,” Mira says. “She’s your daughter.” She waves her book at them. But they ignore her. Bud keeps at it, making a strange kind of ongoing comment, halfway between whine and woof.
“Woo, woo, woo, WOO, woo, woo, woo, WOO.”
“Huffa, huffa, huffa, huffa,” from Queenie.
Mira puts down her book and watches. She is so close to them she can see Bud’s long pink thing pushing into Queenie’s bum. Yes, Bud is humping his very own daughter in the slanting light of a late September afternoon. But no one seems to care. Except perhaps Flossie, the housekeeper, who may have to wipe up some doggy mess afterwards.
There will be nothing in the papers to record the event. No headlines blasting from The New York Times: “Incest Scandal in Prominent Publisher’s Pad.” No dumb journalist rushing to gather the juicy details in order to write a novel. Maybe something like Lolita, the one she’s just finished reading. All about a thirteen-year-old girl humping her stepfather. Or vice versa. Some good bits, but too many boring words, and not enough hot stuff. Animals can just go ahead and have their fun without words. It is so easy for animals.
Outside, in the street below, Mira hears shouts. She moves to the open window and looks down. A crowd of young women are waving placards. Some wear blue jeans and Indian cotton tops; some are in gypsy dresses and hand-knit shawls. She has seen these groupies outside the window a dozen times before. She is sick of their dumb placards: ROLL JOINTS NOT TANKS; DEAD DROP; JOHNSON IS A MORRON; WAR — IT AIN’T PEACEFUL; SMOKE POT, NOT PEOPLE; LBJ IS A FASHIST PIG; and a new one, DO WE REALLY NEED A WARGASM? “God,” Mira says.
A taxi pulls to the curb, and a tall, slender man with curly brown hair climbs out of the back seat. Papino, of course, just home from his day at The New Socialist. He is wearing that elegant Italian three-buttoned suit and the blue tie she’d picked out special for his birthday because it matches his eyes. She has only a glimpse, then loses sight of him as the crowd closes in. Kisses. Hugs. Screams. Pla
cards and pens pushed in his face for autographs. A fat slut even flashes her boobs and pokes her sign at him: “MAKE LOVE NOT WAR.” All of them loving Papi, just home from his day at work and the radio broadcast he’d told her about at breakfast.
She’d listened to it just before Bud and Queenie got to their afternoon’s entertainment. When Papino spoke, when he talked about his interview with Hanoi Hannah in that lovely Boston accent she tries so hard to copy, she had felt her heart go bibbidi-bobbidi-boo. Right now, she can smell armpits. She turns around to see Flossie standing just behind her, her hair a frizzy mess as usual. “Man, your stepdaddy sure is a hunk,” she says, grinning at Mira.
Mira slams the window shut. “Go get his bottle of champagne ready.”
“Shut your face, girl. You ain’t payin’ my wages.”
But a minute later, Mira hears the fridge door slam, and then the pop of the cork. She backs away from the window, catches her reflection in the ornate gold-framed mirror above the mantel. Tall, with black hair and black eyes. Papi likes dark-haired women. Her dead mother, gone now for so many years Mira can barely remember her, had dark hair. No need to worry about Mama getting in the way now. She has Papi all to herself. Her Italian friend Gina from school calls her brother her “bambino.” Gina told her the word means “baby.” So she, Mira, has made up a little rhyme to sing when Papi comes through the door: “Dearest Papino, I’m your darling bambino.” Then she’ll give him a squeeze, and things may progress from there.
The dogs are no longer on the Persian rug. Now, they are standing at the door, ears perked, tails flashing back and forth.
Everyone, it seems, is waiting for Papino.
13.
ROBERTA LIES IN BED in the mornings until Charlie and Ed leave. She can’t face the questions they might ask about how she’s spending her time while she’s on leave from Trinity. The minute the front door slams shut, she’s got her computer turned on and she’s in full flight across the keyboard. Things are easier at the end of the day. Then, her sons are often out with their girlfriends, or if they’re at home, there’s the television, or talk about their own work. In their absence, she’s got rid of all the magazines, two by two, slipping them into the recycling box in the shopping area two blocks from the house. By the end of five weeks, she’s finished the manuscript.
