Made up like a ’20s vamp, Anya was delicate and slight. Her kohl-rimmed eyes stared up into mine, longer and harder than I was used to. Her face was fox-like, pale and pointed, her straight black hair bobbed and shiny as enamel. Her valentine lips were painted scarlet, her rouged cheekbones so prominent that her pale skin suggested a flawless tent stretched across a frame.
As she stepped into the hall, I saw that her eyes were a startling violet, her pupils encircled by a midnight-blue corona. At the start of Njal’s Saga, a man is warned that the woman he wants has the eyes of a thief. He ignores the warning, and it costs countless lives. Was I looking into a thief’s eyes? In college I’d thought I knew what that meant, but now I had no idea. Anya was younger and more coltish than she’d been in my dreams. I smacked my briefcase against my shin, to remind myself why I was there.
I was there to meet “my” writer. I had come for a professional meeting and not for a tryst with a sex-mad nympho with whom I’d done crazy stuff, night after night. How did I even know about some of the things we’d done? In my dreams, they were Anya’s ideas. I went along and enjoyed it. I had to forget the sex dreams and (if possible) the Rosenbergs and focus on the fact that I was here to begin a working partnership with a debut novelist.
Anya’s forthright stare, along with the slow smile that spread across her face, made me think I’d seen her before, not just in my dreams or her author photo. After a while I realized that I was looking at Esther, Anya’s heroine.
Esther Rosenstein’s eyes were violet, her hair black, her bee-stung lips painted scarlet. Anya had written about herself, about the vixen she wanted to be. It would be tricky to persuade her to make substantive changes. She wouldn’t want to see herself as a plump, trusting housewife bamboozled into committing a crime because her baby brother asked her to do some typing. Anya wouldn’t happily cross out the passage in which Esther kisses the prison matron farewell, insistently thrusting her tongue between the astonished matron’s lips.
“Please,” Anya said. “Do come in.”
Closing the door behind us, she glanced along the corridor. “Have you seen Van Gogh’s painting of the hallway in that last asylum? Saint-Rémy or Arles, I forget. All the doors are shut. It’s a picture of a suicide about to happen. The scariest painting ever.”
“No,” I said. “I haven’t seen it. I didn’t—”
I was surprised and impressed that Anya knew something I didn’t. At the same time I felt guilty for being so superior and condescending that Anya’s knowing about a painting had surprised and impressed me. She’d written a book, and I hadn’t, even if her novel was worse than anything I would have written.
“I saw the painting in a book about Van Gogh,” she said. “Look it up.”
Anya wore a short black slip beneath a cropped white fur jacket and over a long, silky burnt-orange skirt. Its hem pooled over embroidered slippers that curved up like cobras ready to strike. Bride of Dracula meets Turkish whore meets Edith Piaf, the little sparrow.
“I’ll look for it,” I said. “Presently.”
Presently? I sounded like the detective in a British murder mystery who crashes the family gathering and ruins everyone’s fun.
Anya fell back on the bed and offered me the only chair.
“Just throw all that crap on the floor.” I tried not to look at the tangle of silky garments I had to displace. She’d known I was coming. She could have straightened up. The satiny chaos had been left there on purpose so I could feel the coolness slip through my hands. The chair’s ebony arms enclosed a pair of rough Moroccan pillows so stiff I had to wriggle around to scoop out a spot for my back.
“Would you like some tea?”
I nodded, wanting tea less than the time it might give me. I looked around at the wood-paneled room, its windows divided into diamonds of smudged leaded glass, every surface fringed and covered in paisley and brocade, a bedroom for Sarah Bernhardt or Oscar Wilde. Or Mata Hari, to whom Anya’s novel had—many times—compared its heroine. It was like a stage set, the fantasy lair that a young woman with money and privilege might construct, a chamber in which to take drugs and seduce besotted young men. I thought disloyally of Marianna’s convent-like bedroom at Radcliffe, with the little Buddha and the Hindu gods that stared at us so disapprovingly as we scurried under the covers.
In one corner of Anya’s room was a handsome Mission-style writing desk. On it was a green glass vase holding a spray of pens and pencils, a stack of snowy typing paper, and a tall, old-fashioned black typewriter.
Ethel’s typewriter had looked like that. I’d seen a photo in the paper. I imagined Ethel typing: a favor for her brother. I didn’t want to think about Ethel in the presence of someone who had written three hundred pages of smut and lies about her.
I still hadn’t found out how Warren acquired Anya’s manuscript. I’d assumed she’d given it to him at one of those literary parties at which people were friendlier when they heard where you worked, gatherings where people were very friendly to Warren.
That Anya lived in an asylum suggested an alternate route of transmission. I recalled Warren warning me that other publishers might jump on The Vixen. Maybe Anya had connections. Maybe her parents knew an agent who had sent it to Warren and others. Pretty girls had an easier time getting men to do things. There was also the chance that Warren was right about how well her book would sell and about the possibility that our competitors would know that too.
Anya said, “Remind me. Did you say yes to tea? They put something in your food here. You’re always waking up with strangers leaning in your face, asking if you feel anxious or depressed. Of course you feel anxious and depressed when every morning you’re woken up by a different pervert in a white jacket. They do funny things with time. One minute it’s yesterday, and suddenly it’s tomorrow. Has that ever happened to you?”
“Yes. I mean yes, I’ll have some tea. That would be . . . that would be . . . Thank you.”
“I take that as a yes,” Anya said.
I watched her glide across the room toward the hot plate. It felt wrong to notice how her ass shifted under her skirt. I was an animal. My author was making tea, and my hands were trembling with desire. She was my writer and not my dream lover. I had to be clear about that distinction.
Anya poured us tea, handed me my cup, and set hers on the night table, then kicked off her slippers and scrambled onto the edge of the bed, perching there with her legs crossed, her bare feet twisted up and resting on her thighs. I wondered if she’d seen the famous photograph of Colette, whom she resembled, sitting like that, but without Colette’s penciled-on cat whiskers. Warren said she looked like Colette. I wondered if he’d told her that and inspired her to look more like Colette.
“So, Anya! Uh . . . How do you know Warren?” It seemed like a neutral question until I recalled Elaine saying that maybe they’d slept together. Elaine hadn’t bothered asking.
I sipped the oddly salty tea.
“Lime-blossom tea,” said Anya. “Very Proustian, no? It doesn’t taste like you’d imagine.”
Marianna had served me lime-blossom tea. This tasted nothing like that. I didn’t think this was lime-blossom tea, but I wasn’t going to contradict Anya. Yesterday Warren had stopped by my office and said, “I have two pieces of advice. One: Stand up for what you believe. Two: Pick your battles.” Whether or not this was lime-blossom tea wasn’t a battle I needed to win.
“That was Proust’s dirty little secret. His precious tisane tastes like fish food. Another joke is that queer guys say that lime-blossom tea is an aphrodisiac. I don’t believe that, do you? Unless maybe you’re queer and a Proust fan. Are you?”
“No and yes, I mean yes, I read Proust, and no, I’m not queer.”
How had we veered so far off the track?
Anya’s novel. Anya’s novel.
“Warren,” I reminded her. “How did you two meet?” Shouldn’t I have started off by praising her book? Why not begin with a few compliments, however insincere? B
ecause her book had upset me, and I’d dug in my heels, though I knew it wasn’t the best way to begin a productive working relationship.
“I’ve met Mr. Landry a few times. But the person I actually know is dear sweet Preston Bartlett. He was here when I arrived. This lovely girl used to come to visit him. She was pregnant. She worked at your firm . . . Anyhow, someone thought she should quit. Did you know her?”
“I met her once.” I wasn’t going to confess that I’d taken Julia’s office.
“I thought she should quit the minute she got pregnant. I believe in prenatal influences, don’t you? I read about this woman whose baby was born blind after she went to see a blind jazz pianist and he looked straight at her, or whatever blind people do when they seem to be looking at you. I don’t know what evil spirits that poor girl might encounter in the publishing world. I know it’s unscientific, but people have known this stuff for centuries before there was science, and now they’re always proving that ‘unscientific’ things are true. Anyway, I think it’s better to stay home so you can control what you see. If you don’t watch TV.”
“Do you watch TV?” I wondered if Anya had watched TV the day of the Rosenberg execution. Maybe it would have made her soften her harsh, unforgiving portrayal of Ethel.
“Sometimes constantly, sometimes never. I don’t have a TV in my room here. But there is one in the dayroom, and it is extremely upsetting to watch soap operas with mental patients. The screaming, the yelling, the carrying on. They feel more than normal people.
“Anyway, I wasn’t going to scare that poor pregnant girl with my silly superstitions. She was so kind to Preston. Practically his only visitor. I got to chatting with her in the family lounge. I heard she worked in publishing. I asked her all about it. Picked her brain, as they say. What a disgusting expression! So I decided to write a novel, and one thing led to another.”
“You decided to write a novel?”
“I assume that’s why you’re here.”
This was when I was supposed to tell Anya how much I admired her book, how happy I was to be working on it, how there were just a few minimal edits I hoped she would consider. This was when I should begin to find out how flexible she was, how amenable to change.
Instead, I said, “Was her name Julia?” I still cringed when I thought about Julia. I must have wanted to probe that tongue-in-sore-tooth pain. Or maybe I hoped that Anya might say something to make the memory less painful.
“Whose name?” Anya inspected her manicured fingernails, painted black.
“The pregnant woman who visited Preston.”
“Julia, right. Something like that. You’re not drinking your tea.”
As it cooled, the tea had taken on a cat-box flavor, and for a second I thought I might gag. The hero drinks from the witch’s cup, and forty years later he awakens, still in her cave. What had Crowley’s attractive teaching assistants thought the second, the fifth, the tenth time they heard that story? That story and every story. His students were enchanted. We only heard the stories once.
“I liked her . . . I mean, Julia. No one here is anywhere near my age. You’re the first one in a while. Even the nurses are ancient. I gave my novel to Julia, who gave it to someone else, and then, according to Preston, Julia got fired. I don’t think it was because she gave them my novel. I hope not.”
“Obviously not,” I said. “On the contrary! So . . . Anya. When did you start writing?”
“I’ve written since I was a girl.”
As she said this, Anya straightened her shoulders, pulled herself up to her full height, and seemed to be addressing a crowd. I was witnessing the live birth of a public author. That was what Warren wanted, and maybe he wanted me to be the first approving witness to that transformation. There was a reason for that author photo, the same reason why we were publishing a middlebrow novel by a writer who looked like Anya. We were saving our business by selling her. Selling a product. And selling the Rosenbergs, though no one said that. I would deal with that later. Today was just about meeting “my” writer.
“I wanted to write about a really strong, really powerful, really important modern woman. Someone who got famous because she had ideas.”
“Ideas about what?” I was instantly sorry I’d asked, afraid I was about to hear Anya’s take on the evils of Communism. And there was something awful about her use of the word famous.
“Ideas about personal freedom. About not acting out of altruism or sentiment or, worst of all, guilt. About a woman who has sex when she wants to, with whomever she wants to. Like what’s-her-name in The Fountainhead. I didn’t much care for the novel, but I did think Ayn Rand made some intelligent points. Have you read Gone with the Wind?”
“No.” I could have said I did, but I was already telling so many lies. Lies of omission, but still. I could be truthful about one small thing. “I think my mother read it.”
“Did she like it?”
“I don’t know.” Mom had been embarrassed when I found the novel on a shelf among the books she’d used for her classes. Oh, my poor parents! What had I done to make them ashamed of themselves, afraid of me, of my Harvard education? What could have made them feel inferior to a person whose career might hinge on his ability to charm the author of a mediocre novel?
“Scarlett O’Hara stole other women’s boyfriends and treated men like dirt, and my God, she had slaves—and everybody loves her! I was looking for a strong woman like that. So I got interested in Ethel Rosenberg, and it was off to the races.”
Ethel as Scarlett O’Hara? I couldn’t begin to make sense of that. What struck me was that Anya saw Ethel/Esther as a heroine. Then why didn’t Esther seem like one? Because she committed treason. She worked for the Russians. My thoughts chased one another and vanished, the way they sputtered and skipped at the edge of sleep. I should have asked Anya to think harder, to read more, to consider a more nuanced view of Ethel/Esther. But how could I begin?
Had Anya told Warren that her literary inspiration was Gone with the Wind? Even I knew how well that book sold.
“Preston’s the only fun person in this place. And the bar for fun has been set pretty low. Mostly it’s drooling old guys. Should I not have said that? Was that mean? I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Not at all. You can say what you want. Your secret’s safe with me.”
Who had said that? Elaine. I was quoting Elaine. It made me feel more solid and less anxious, as if Elaine were standing beside me. Not that I wanted Elaine there when I was alone with Anya.
“What secret?” Anya looked wary. What did she think I meant? What secret did she mean?
I said, “It’s just an expression.”
“Well, that’s a relief. Preston says everybody’s got secrets, and that some people think it’s their mission to find out everyone else’s. But Preston’s crazy, or so they say and . . .”
Anya wound and unwound her limbs, in a practiced, balletic series of motions. Every gesture revealed her awareness of being watched, and of the helpless intensity with which I was watching. I wished I didn’t find it sexy. Everything would have been simpler if I hadn’t wanted to touch her neck, her breast, to know how it would feel to kiss her.
“Preston’s obsessed with Mr. Landry. But everyone’s obsessed with something. Or with someone. Am I right? Right now I’m obsessed with my novel.”
“Well, I guess that makes two of us.” How had I let that slip out?
“Really?”
“Sure. That’s why I’m here.” I smiled. Anya waited for more praise, but I couldn’t.
“Preston’s a very intense old guy. Get him talking about Warren, and he’ll go on all day, saying all kinds of outrageous things—”
“For example?” I was almost whispering for fear of spooking Anya into silence. I wanted to hear what Warren’s former partner said about him.
“Oh, I don’t know. Standard-issue paranoid conspiracy stuff. I can’t remember exactly. After a while, I tune Preston out. I have to, if I want to keep what
shreds of sanity I have left. Mr. Landry came to visit me here to talk about my book, and they had to drug Preston half unconscious so he wouldn’t make a scene. I don’t know what they thought Preston would do. Run Mr. Landry down in his wheelchair?”
So much information so casually deployed, but what rose to the top was: when Mr. Landry came to visit. What did he and Anya talk about? How long did he stay? Warren was Anya’s publisher. He had every right to see her. How could I be jealous? I’d known Anya all of twenty minutes, not counting the time in my dreams.
“I don’t know why Preston goes into that office. I think he does it to scare people, to remind them the corpse is alive.”
“He scared me,” I said.
“Don’t let him. The old guy’s a sweetie. No one breathes around here until he’s back safe from his little expeditions to the office. Once Preston told me he’d been rooting around in Warren Landry’s desk to find some tax papers, and he’d found documents proving that Landry was involved in some really evil stuff.”
“Evil?” I said. “How evil?” It sounded unlikely. Why would Warren leave papers like that in his desk for anyone to find?
Anya shrugged. “Evil means evil. I don’t know. I stop listening and forget, and then Preston gets paranoid and says his room is bugged. Julia told me that Preston confronted Warren at an office party, and Warren shoved Preston up against a bookcase. I assume they were drunk. I mean, who does that at a Christmas party? Pass the eggnog, and by the way, I know your dirty deeds, pal. Once Preston said that during his first year out of college, he lived with an Amazon tribe that built a landing strip for a plane bringing back the dead. He said he’d heard a dog sing the Communist ‘Internationale.’ He said he’d seen a city carved in the eye of a needle. He said that starlings were coming to kill us. He said that honey bees speak different languages depending on where they live.”
The Vixen Page 12
