The Mentor

by Sebastian Stuart

  “That’s the one Dickens I’ve never read,” Charles says.

  “I have this stupid rule about finishing every book I start,” the young woman says.

  “I suppose that’s honorable. Let me guess-you’re that whiz of a temp who’s going to whip my office into shape and turn my life around.”

  A furious blush flies up the girl’s pale neck and Charles feels a familiar surge of power. She’s so harmless, so hopeless, no doubt incredibly efficient. And she has a certain clumsy charm. It’s so like Anne to do this without getting his okay. For a moment, Charles considers sending the girl home.

  “Your wife called my agency. She told me to wait for you to get home, that you’d arrive sometime this afternoon.”

  Charles glances around him. The room is strewn with tottering piles of unanswered mail, unfiled contracts, unread manuscripts, newspapers and magazines filled with articles he never gotten around to clipping. “Well, as a matter of fact, I do want to get this mess organized,” he says.

  “I think I could be of some help with that.”

  “Would you like to see the rest of the operation?” he asks.

  The young woman nods and Charles unlocks his inner office. He’s proud of this room, even in its current disheveled condition. There are the framed posters of his book jackets; the photographs of Charles with everyone from Jack Nicholson, who starred in the movie of Life and Liberty, to Francois Mitterrand, who made him a member of the French Legion of Honor; the Eames bookshelves filled with foreign-language editions of his work; the Frank Lloyd Wright desk. Two windows look out over the treetops of Central Park.

  “What a beautiful place to write,” the young woman says with undisguised awe.

  “I wrote my first book in a freezing trailer outside of Hanover, New Hampshire.”

  “ Life and Liberty?”

  “Yes.”

  “I loved that book.”

  “It must have seemed like ancient history to you.”

  “No,” she says, suddenly very serious and resolute. “It seemed timeless.” And then, as if taken aback by the confidence in her own voice, she looks down, running a fingertip over her thumbnail, frowning. When she looks up she manages a wan, haunted smile. “I should start on the outer office. I don’t want to disturb you.”

  Charles studies her a moment before answering. “I’m not a shrinking violet. If you’re disturbing me, I’ll let you know. Basically, I work from seven to four. Aside from that, I like my coffee black, when I smoke I smoke Marlboros, when I drink I drink Chivas, and when I’m on a roll I crave hot dogs and stacks of french fries slathered with mayonnaise. Come on, I’ll show you the filing system. Oh, by the way, I didn’t get your name.”

  The young woman looks at Charles and he’s taken aback by her arresting eyes. Up close, he can see that they’re an iridescent green, lightly flecked with brown. They meet his gaze and hold it.

  “It’s Emma. Emma Bowles.”

  10

  Charles stands by the bar in the living room mixing himself a Scotch and water and looking out at the autumn glory of Central Park. There’s something about the girl, Emma, that intrigues him. Those eyes. The nervous habit she has of rubbing her thumbnails with her fingertips. He finds her touching. It’ll be nice having her around for a while.

  The front door opens and Anne glides in, breathless, wearing a green suit with navy trim. She goes to Charles and gives him a kiss, avoids looking him in the eye.

  “Welcome home, stranger,” she says.

  “It’s good to be back.”

  “Am I interrupting something?”

  “Of course not. Drink?”

  “Yes, please-ginger ale.”

  “You look terrific,” he says. She doesn’t really; she looks tense and there are dark circles under her eyes.

  “I got a trim today. A first: Marcus came into the office to do it. I felt so decadent, like Nancy Reagan. Or Madonna.” She slips off her shoes and tucks her feet under her as she sinks down on one of the two enormous white sofas that face each other in front of the fireplace. “Next I’ll be putting in a little private gym, or maybe a whole mini-spa, with one of those tiny pools that churn a current against you.”

  Anne’s got the charm machine cranked up to overdrive-one of her diversionary tactics. She still hasn’t looked him in the eye. No doubt she’s angry at him for leaving in the middle of the night, angry and also waiting for him to mention the girl, Emma, to thank her for hiring her. There’s a silence as each waits for the other to make the next move. Charles yields.

  “Thank you for hiring that secretary. I think you’re right, it will be easier with things sorted out in there.”

  “You’re welcome,” Anne says simply, smart enough not to milk her small triumph. “She’s really quite bright and efficient.”

  “She seems to be.”

  “She certainly didn’t get where she is on her charm. Although she does have a certain wounded-fawn je ne sais quoi. In any case, I’m glad you think she’ll work out.”

  “I do. She’s unobtrusive.”

  “I must say though, Charles, I wish you’d woken me. I worry when you disappear like that.”

  His work is one issue that isn’t open to compromise. “I had to go. I went.”

  “And how’s the great lady?” Portia brings out Anne’s insecurity. She’s convinced his mentor dismisses her as shallow and unworthy, feels Charles would have been better off marrying some bookish trust-fund baby who lived only to nurture his fiery muse, who would create a cozy cocoon in some posh Vermont hollow, complete with a rustic studio out back and two apple-cheeked children.

  Charles sits on the arm of the opposite sofa and runs a fingertip along the rim of his glass. “She’s herself.”

  “And did she give you what you needed?”

  Charles resents that question, as if something as complex and painful and important as his work can be reduced to a yes or no. He crosses to the window. The October dark has arrived and the lights have come on in Central Park. The cars zipping through the park look like mad Tinkertoys. Finally he turns and looks at Anne. There’s genuine concern in her face. “It was a good trip.”

  “I’m glad, darling. Phoebe adored Capitol Offense, was up all night reading it, now everyone in the office is clamoring for a copy. I said, ‘Absolutely not-go out and buy it.’ ”

  Charles sits next to her on the sofa. She reaches out and strokes his cheek. He takes her hand and kisses it. “Next time I go I’ll leave a note.”

  “Make it a love note.”

  He places her hand on his thigh and runs his fingertips between her fingers. He’s been boorish and self-obsessed lately-it’s time to give Anne something she wants.

  “Anne?”

  “Yes?”

  “About a baby? There’ll always be a thousand reasons to wait.”

  She turns away abruptly, withdrawing her hand. She really does look exhausted.

  “I didn’t get a great deal of sleep last night. Can we discuss this some other time? Right now I need a nap. You know we have to be at Lincoln Center at eight.”

  “I’m not going.” She freezes. “I’m sorry, Anne, I’ve made a decision to cut back on my socializing. It’s for my work.”

  “Nice of you to tell me.”

  “I really have to focus. It’s important.”

  “I understand that, darling, but I think I have a right to be informed of these decisions, maybe even consulted. This is for the Fresh Air Fund, Charles, they do important work. And the tickets were five hundred dollars.”

  Low blow. “If you can’t afford them you shouldn’t have bought them.”

  Anne concedes the point with an almost imperceptible nod. She finishes her drink with a long swallow. “Am I supposed to just cancel our entire calendar, or should I find myself a walker? Too bad Jerry Zipkin is dead.”

  “There’s that artist-what’s his name? You love his company.”

  “I can’t believe this. You’re my husband, Charles.”

>   “I also happen to be a novelist.”

  “Are the two mutually exclusive?”

  “They may be for a little while.”

  Anne stands up. Something hardens in her face, around the mouth. “Keep me posted,” she says, and walks out of the room.

  Charles watches her go. The apartment feels polluted by their exchange. Why the hell did she bring up a piddling five hundred dollars like that, with the money she makes? She has every right to be angry about his backing out of the benefit, but it won’t last. She’ll go by herself, make some excuse for his absence, and have a terrific time. Anne’s a big girl, and she’ll soon see that he’s doing this for both of them. If he can come up with fifty really strong pages, Nina will snare a serious advance and everyone will breathe easier. But fifty pages of what? Does Portia think that some idea is just going to crash through the window and- pow! — he’ll have another great book? She sure as hell doesn’t have much respect for his process. That’s unfair. She’s part of his process. At least she used to be.

  Charles grabs the bottle of Scotch off the liquor tray and heads for his office.

  11

  Emma sits at her desk sorting through months of old mail. Many of Charles’s fans, particularly the female ones, seem to project their deepest longings-for a son, a husband, a lover-onto him. In her week and a half on the job, she’s dealt with a pound cake sent by a sixty-two-year-old widow in Missouri, a naked photo from a married woman in Marina Del Rey, and an impenetrable love poem from an overwrought Wellesley freshman. And then there are the manuscripts sent in by would-be writers, and galleys sent by publishers hoping to garner a book jacket blurb. When she started, there were dozens of these lying around the office. She suggested to Charles that she read the books and write synopses for him to review. He praised her initiative, and using this system they’re working their way through the backlog. Ditto for the forty-two unreturned phone calls that greeted her on her first day.

  Emma has a goal: to make herself indispensable to Charles Davis.

  The mail sorted into its usual three piles-Throw Out, Answer, and Pass On-Emma looks up and surveys the office. There’s no doubt that she’s succeeded in bringing some semblance of order to the chaos. There are neat piles of papers on chairs and tabletops, each pile labeled with a Post-it note as to its eventual destination. The room is off-limits to the housekeeper and Emma spent her first days cleaning, stirring up volumes of dust that sent her into sneezing fits. But what a difference-the place shines. There’s even a vase of fresh flowers on her desk. Emma loves order-it calms her, quells her terrors.

  Emma imagines Charles, on the other side of the closed door between the two offices, sitting at his desk, writing. He has told her he’s starting a new book, that he writes his first drafts in longhand in spiral notebooks he orders from the Dartmouth bookstore. She’s read all of his novels. Her favorite is Irreparable Damage, the story of a New England family coming apart after the sudden death of the mother. The father, a college professor, mad with grief, immediately begins an affair with one of his students. Emma understood completely the professor’s need to lose himself in passion even though he knew that the affair was wrong and would damage his children, the young woman, and himself. Emma had been moved by the book and found solace in it too. There was something about that family, floundering in the aftershock of sudden tragedy, that made her feel less alone.

  And of course she’s fascinated by the man himself. Beneath his imposing manner he seems kind, even wounded, lonely somehow, like a little boy who has won first prize at the fair but now stands all alone behind the bandstand. She wonders if he has any friends, any real friends. He needs one. She loves his hands, the long fingers with squared tips. When he gets close to her she can smell his pine soap.

  As for Anne Turner, Emma hates her. She’d like to take a hammer to those perfect teeth. The bitch knows exactly what she wants, is so damned articulate that words roll off her tongue as if they were scripted. Turner lives in a parallel universe where everyone is fearless and graceful, where life is just a matter of waking up and making fabulous things happen. Emma keeps her mouth shut during their brief encounters. She listens attentively and tries to look intelligent, always remembering a secret maxim she honed in the mental hospital: What you don’t say can’t be used against you. During her week temping at Home, Emma had observed Anne carefully, hoping to learn some of her tricks. Even that rainy day in her office, when Anne got that phone call that seemed to disturb her so much, she never lost her composure. She was told something, some piece of news-what could it have been? — and her face went white. She even forgot Emma was in the room.

  Turner had told Emma to help herself to anything in the kitchen, and two days ago, when Charles Davis was at the other end of the apartment taking a shower, she had walked down the long hallway and into the enormous room. She’d opened the refrigerator door and looked at all the cheeses and chutneys and tiny pickled vegetables. Each label was a miniature work of art; all the food seemed to come from organic farms in quaint-sounding corners of Connecticut or the Hudson River valley. Emma opened a small container of goat cheese-it smelled like goat hair. Stupid fucking rich people. She spit into it. Then, giggling to herself, she stirred the spit with her pinky until the saliva disappeared. She imagined Anne Turner spreading the cheese on a cracker and remarking on how divine it was. Then Emma took a carrot from the crisper. She’d taken only one bite when she heard Charles Davis approaching. She dashed back down to the office and stuffed the uneaten carrot into her purse. She smiled at him when he came in.

  Charles’s office has antique filing cabinets, a Persian rug, and twelve-foot ceilings. Emma feels as if she’s stepped through the looking glass into a world she’s read about and seen on television. And now she’s part of it.

  No you’re not. Stupid Emma, you’re a fly to these people, a convenience. You don’t belong here. Freak! Go back to where you came from, hide away in some rented room, be a small-town weirdo. Emma clenches her fists, digs her fingernails into her palms, harder harder…

  There’s a tentative knock on the door at the end of the hallway. Emma licks a sliver-moon of blood from her palm. Be calm be cool. She goes and opens the door. Magdalena, the housekeeper, a quiet woman from the Canary Islands who pretends she doesn’t speak English-Emma sees through her little act-is standing there with a FedEx letter in her hand.

  As Emma walks back down the hallway, she looks at the return address and sees that the letter is from London, from Charles Davis’s British publisher. She stands still and listens and then knocks lightly. Silence. Then the door flies open.

  “What do you want?” Charles Davis demands. His face looks pained, almost contorted.

  “This Federal Express letter just arrived from your British publisher. I thought it might be important.”

  “You thought it might be important?”

  “Yes.”

  Charles grabs the letter, tears it in two, and flings it in the trash. “I’m trying to write! I don’t care if Jesus Christ himself wants to meet me for lunch, I’m not available to the world until further notice. Is that so goddamn hard to understand?” After shooting her a look of pure condescension, he slams the door in her face.

  Emma stands there, a sickening deadweight suddenly lodged in her stomach. The sensation begins as a purely physical one, but quickly moves up her body, until her mind implodes with dismay, dismay and an approaching panic. She feels herself start to sweat on her upper lip, her forehead, under her arms. She feels the first tingle of prickly heat. She knows what comes next-banishment. Out to the back landing at the top of the stairs in her thin cotton dress and her bare feet, the door slamming and then locking behind her, the hours passing, she forbidden to move, staring at the railing, at the grooves in the wood, dreading that she’ll be noticed by the family that lives across the way. There are six kids in the family-six rowdy, unwashed, laughing, loved kids-and when they see Emma they stare, too kind to laugh. Then they whisper and run away,
as if her sorrow might be catching. And evening turns to night and Emma grows colder and wants to cry, but what’s the use? And the hunger grows so intense it finally disappears and at least when it’s dark no one can see her up there on the back landing at the top of the stairs at the end of the alley in her bare feet and thin cotton dress with nothing on underneath.

  Emma stands in front of the door to Charles’s office. What should she do? Don’t panic. She stands stock-still, her breathing shallow. She clenches her fists and wills herself not to cry. She hears what sounds like Charles Davis falling to the floor, followed by loud breathing, as if he’s doing a series of push-ups. This is followed by pacing. Then silence.

  “Emma?”

  “Yes, Mr. Davis?” she answers through the closed door.

  “For Christ’s sake, stop calling me Mr. Davis. And will you please come in here?”

  Emma opens the door and takes a step into the inner office.

  He’s sitting at his desk. “It’s Charles.”

  Emma hesitates a moment before saying a soft “Charles.”

  “That’s better.” He smiles. “Sit down.” Emma sits across from him in a wooden armchair. “When I’m writing, or trying to write… well, it’s a difficult process, agonizing, fucking hellish is what it is. I don’t understand it. It’s physical, like football, or combat even, only the enemy is some amorphous gorilla of the soul. Or some bullshit like that. Is this making any sense?”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose my point is, I become keyed up, revved, I go a little crazy. Or a lot crazy. So if I scream and yell and pound the walls… well, it’s not you.”

  Emma feels a surge of gratitude and reaches past it to grasp courage. “I know that,” she says.

  “You do?”

  “… Charles… I’ve read all your novels. I’ve read Irreparable Damage twice. I can’t even imagine what it must take to create like that.”