The Vixen

by Francine Prose

  “Can we go on the Cyclone again?”

  “Let’s give it a minute,” I said. “Let our internal organs go back to where they’re used to being.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’m starving.”

  “Hot dogs? French fries?” I suggested Nathan’s Famous.

  “That’s one thing I hate about men,” she said. “They always try to tell you what to eat. I don’t want to go to Nathan’s. Let’s try some place smaller and simpler and not so famous.”

  I wasn’t hungry, though I hadn’t eaten all day. I hung back as Anya went from stand to stand. She kept vanishing into the fog, long enough for me to worry. Had she left me standing there? Would Ned and the car be waiting? What would become of Anya’s book? What if I never saw her again?

  Interrogating the vendors, her voice piped through the mist. “What’s the least salty and most filling and delicious thing you have?” Finally she reappeared. How glad I was to see her! She led me to a falafel stand that must have met her specifications.

  The falafel guy said, “I told her it’s all good. Maybe try the rice pudding.”

  I paid for a bucket of rice pudding and a wooden spoon. Anya ate as we walked.

  “Let’s go on a dark ride.” She’d finished most of the pudding. She offered me the rest. It was painfully sweet. The raisins tasted astringent. I ate as much as I could. Anya stuck her cold sticky hand in my pocket, and I wrapped my hand around hers.

  The Spook-A-Rama, Thrill-O-Matic, the House of Horrors, the House of Madness, the House of Laffs, Devil’s Pit, the Devil’s Playground, the Den of Lost Souls, the Viper Nest, Angry Ghosts, Ghost Castle, the Haunted House, the Mummy’s Tomb, the House of the Living Dead. Anya marched up to the booths and asked the ticket takers how long the ride lasted and how they would rate the experience for scariness on a scale from one to ten. I expected them all to say ten, but no one had ever asked them that before. Maybe it was the novelty that moved them to tell the truth. Five, one said. Six and a half.

  I knew what was going to happen. I felt as if I were watching her renting us a hotel room. Or maybe I was misreading her. Maybe we’d have a couple of laughs, skip a couple of heartbeats, and stagger back out into the light.

  At last she chose the Terror Tomb. The guy who took tickets wore a black top hat. He took our quarters and pointed at a car designed to look like a giant teacup.

  Anya said, “The ride lasts twenty-five minutes. He says that for scariness it’s an eleven.”

  The guy instructed us to lower the safety bar. Without looking to see if we had, he pulled a lever, and we bumped into the darkness. We heard shrieks. A light flashed in our eyes, stamping an image on the blackness, a shimmering bright blue sphere that lasted alarmingly long. When I could see again, I flinched as a decomposing corpse swayed toward us, so close that, if it had been real, we could have smelled rotting flesh. At the last moment it swung back, and we chugged past it down the track.

  After a few minutes Anya put her hand on my thigh. Then she took my hand and put it under her skirt.

  “Watch out.” She pushed back the safety bar. She undid our clothes and climbed, facing me, onto my lap. Her mouth tasted of cinnamon and sweet rice.

  Anya whispered in my ear, “Don’t move. Let them do the work.”

  I heard a bloodcurdling scream, and the tunnel lit up, then went dark again. I closed my eyes and gave myself over to the pleasure.

  Anya threw back her head and moaned at the same time as a ghost moaned, which made us laugh. Then we started again.

  The skeletons swooping at us just missing us, added to the excitement. Briefly illuminated by a red light pulsing around a corpse that dangled from a gallows, we came our brains out. First Anya shouted, a guttural caw, down low in her throat. Seconds later I pulled out and heard myself make a noise I’d never made, a sound I’d never heard before. It was my voice, but I wasn’t me.

  Then I was. I was myself again, back in my body, on an amusement park ride, too stunned to pull up my pants.

  NOW THAT WE are more relaxed about sex, at least in what we are willing to say, now that people boast about having sex in airplane bathrooms, I might be less surprised than I was that afternoon in the Terror Tomb, straddled by a young woman I’d known for less than a day. We were doing it in the dark but still more or less in public, in a teacup chugging past ghosts jumping out of cupboards, past cardboard genies rising from bottles, pirates slashing their swords at us, revenants clanking their chains. Probably I would still be shocked. Maybe anyone would. Especially a young person who’d only had tentative, semi-platonic sex in a college dorm room and had started the day expecting to edit a novel.

  We straightened our clothes and tidied ourselves. Anya returned to the seat beside me and rested her head on my shoulder for the rest of the ride, as we swiveled and bumped past howling werewolves and coffin lids creaking open.

  Our teacup spun one last time and came to a gradual stop.

  “Well,” Anya said. “That was something.”

  “Something,” I agreed. “That was . . . something.”

  We stepped out of the teacup into a corridor. At the far end was a fun house mirror. As Anya and I approached, hand in hand, she shrank into a doll version of herself, while I too got shorter, but also wider. My bottom swelled and I waddled like a giant duck or a circus clown with his trousers full of balloons. Why should I feel humiliated? It was just a distorting mirror. Why did I think that I was seeing a future in which I’d be punished for what we’d just done? No one would have suspected. Not even I could believe it, except that my fly was half zipped, and I was still feeling a scatter of pleasant aftershocks.

  “Don’t worry,” Anya said sweetly, pointing at the mirror. “We look nothing like that couple.”

  That was the last thing she said as we walked back toward Ned’s car, not touching. We went up onto the boardwalk. Anya gazed out at the leaden sea. I was afraid she regretted the sex, that she’d acted out of some compulsion, and now we’d have to move past that toward a more conventional working relationship.

  Now I recalled the passage I’d tried to remember when I came here the night of the Rosenberg execution. It was from Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Pet Dog.” His hero, Gurov, sits on the esplanade and watches the sea and thinks that everything is beautiful except what we do when we forget our humanity, our human dignity, and our higher purpose.

  That night, in June, I’d watched a lurid sunset. This afternoon was a monotone brooding gray, but beautiful nonetheless. Would those garish pinks and purples have distracted me from the painful awareness of Anya beside me, her hip pressed against mine? Nothing could have distracted me. Nothing existed beyond that contact.

  Anya and I said nothing. I couldn’t tell if our silence was comfortable or uneasy, if I should end it or keep quiet. Perhaps we were simply calming down, slowing our heartbeats, preparing to keep Ned from suspecting that anything unusual had occurred. Unless it wasn’t unusual. Maybe Ned dealt with crazier stuff every day. Maybe he was thankful when his passengers didn’t have sex in the car. Maybe Anya did this on a regular basis. So? I had no rights to her. I was editing her novel.

  Had Warren slept with Anya? I couldn’t let myself wonder. Elaine said she hadn’t bothered asking. I’d thought Elaine was too cool to ask, but maybe she didn’t want to know.

  I wanted to see Elaine. I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to tell her how confused I was, though I couldn’t explain why. I imagined running into her on the street after Ned took Anya home. We could go for a drink. I would edit out the last part of my meeting with Anya. I hoped Elaine would never find out. She’d be disappointed. It would show her what I really was, an animal, a male pig dressed up as a bright young editor. But maybe I was misreading her. I was misreading our times. Uncle Maddie would have felt no guilt, and Warren wouldn’t have pushed Anya away. Maybe he already hadn’t. Whether Warren did or not, Elaine wouldn’t have loved him less.

  I wanted Elaine to tell me that everything would be all righ
t. She was the only one I would believe, not Warren, not my parents. I was wasting my precious time with Anya, thinking about Elaine.

  Ned was where he’d promised. He opened the door for Anya, and as she slipped into the back seat, I waited on the sidewalk. Leaning into Ned’s window, I said it would be easier for them if Ned headed straight onto the parkway to drive Anya back. I could take the subway. I’d be at my apartment in no time, and they’d avoid the city traffic. If I’d looked at Anya, she would know that I couldn’t bear to leave her. I was ripping off the Band-Aid.

  Ned said, “Are you sure?”

  “I’m positive,” I said.

  Anya said, “That would be great.”

  I was hurt that she could let me go without even a collegial kiss. But we were aware of Ned watching. “Thank you, Simon. Thanks for a fun day. See you soon. I’ll do the work we agreed on.”

  We hadn’t agreed on any work. Was Anya saying that for Ned’s benefit, or did she think we had?

  “No,” I said. “Thank you. Thank you for everything.”

  Anya said, “I’m looking forward to working with you.”

  Ned said, “Don’t forget your briefcase, sir.”

  “Jesus Christ. Thank you,” I said.

  I waited till Ned’s car was out of sight, till the receding speck that was me disappeared in his mirror. Then I left—not toward the subway, but toward my parents’ apartment.

  My parents were so glad to see me that I felt guilty for not going there more often. It would have hurt them to know I was afraid that the rickety armature of my life might still collapse and drop me onto their candy-striped sofa in front of the TV.

  So there I was again, with my family, having just had sex in a Coney Island dark ride with the author of a lurid novel about Ethel Rosenberg, a novel I feared would exist long after McCarthy was dead and forgotten. My parents didn’t know. They never would. But there was one moment when I feared that my mother had read my mind.

  “You know, Simon, this week I remembered the oddest thing. You know that Ethel wanted to be an actress. I recalled this god-awful drama they staged in a settlement house. She played the sister of a man who was executed. He didn’t want his family to suffer, so he refused to give his real name. Is that wild or not? I mean, how life imitates art. Bad art.”

  “It’s wild,” I said. “You’re right.”

  * * *

  After my mother and father fell asleep, I went to my room and, against my better judgment, took Anya’s manuscript out of my briefcase. I opened it at random, and the sentences I read didn’t seem nearly as bad as I remembered. I told myself not to let sex cloud my editorial judgment.

  With that, it all came rushing back. Anya’s hands gripping my shoulders, her head thrown back so far that all I could see, in the pulsing red light, was the underside of her chin. I could still feel her hips under my hands, her skin against mine. All I wanted, all I would ever want, was to be with her again.

  I wanted to stay awake and think about Anya more, but I fell asleep. I dreamed of Vikings, crowded on the deck, shouting: Pillage and burn!

  Chapter 7

  Only the elderly and the stylish young person with an interest in antique equipment will understand how a typewriter’s quirks were its fingerprints. Detective stories used to turn on the half-filled circle in the lowercase g exposing the author of the ransom demand or the blackmail threat. At Alger Hiss’s 1950 trial for espionage, State Department documents copied for transmission to the Soviet Union were traced to Hiss’s typewriter and used as evidence against him.

  The page on which Anya typed the title of her novel hadn’t been done on the same machine as her manuscript. The ancient Remington hit the page so hard that its thick letters bulged on the other side. The manuscript was from a newer model. The typeface was thinner, more streamlined, but the middle prong of the capital E was broken. It appeared often, in Esther. The small j was crooked, the lowercase i had lost its dot, the upper lobe of the capital B was solid black.

  Anya said that Warren gave her book to a typist, who mostly just corrected the spelling. Anya claimed not to know the typist’s name. I was not about to ask Warren.

  On the afternoon after our trip to the Terror Tomb, Warren stopped by my office. He closed the door and leaned against it.

  “Well, old boy? How did it go?”

  I’d been expecting this moment, dreading it, and I’d worked out my reply.

  “Fine. I think Miss Partridge will be easy to work with.”

  I imagined that Warren knew every detail of my day with Anya. But why should I have thought that? It was just paranoia. Warren was opaque to me. The expression on his face, at once sly and abstracted, could have meant any number of things, none of which I could read.

  AFTER THAT I noticed that Warren was popping in to see me less often. Maybe it should have bothered me to think that he had lost interest, but I was relieved. At least he wasn’t reminding me of the approaching deadline. A few times he did ask casually—or faux casually—after The Vixen. Only Warren could project infinite patience and cranky impatience canceling each other out.

  One afternoon Warren asked if “we” would be expecting The Vixen soon.

  I said, “Anya Partridge and I have been meeting.”

  Warren raised his chin and his eyebrows, a theatrical show of patrician interest.

  I said, “She’s easier to work with than we expected. In fact she has some ideas, she wants quite a bit of input. So it’s taking a little longer—”

  “Don’t tarry,” Warren said. “Let’s not wait until the dinner is cold.”

  “Anya’s book will reheat it,” I said, mortified by how clumsily I’d latched onto his metaphor. “I’ll get you the revisions as soon as I possibly can.”

  “Sooner,” said Warren, half out the door. “Sooner than you possibly can.”

  “That’s what I meant,” I said.

  I should have left it at that. But some unruly spirit in me insisted on being heard. “You didn’t mention that our author lives in an asylum.”

  I hoped that Warren hadn’t noticed the ironic stress that had accidentally landed on our. But Warren noticed everything.

  He closed his eyes and shook his head in gentlemanly exasperation. “Asylum is a little strong, don’t you think? I’d say country club with nurses. And even if it was a lockdown psycho ward, why would that be a problem? You’re new to this game and can’t be expected to remember the giant success of Mary Jane Ward’s The Snake Pit. Perhaps you saw the film with Olivia de Havilland. You can imagine how that boosted sales, and that other book . . . A Mind That Found Itself has been in print since the Neanderthal era. In the book biz, mental illness will never go out of style. Anyway, you needn’t worry. In many ways, our author is the sanest person you’ll ever meet. Certainly compared to most other writers. Asylum? I think not.”

  “Maybe not asylum,” I said.

  “Maybe not,” said Warren.

  * * *

  Every night I rewrote part of Anya’s novel. It was like writing a parallel novel, in collaboration with Anya, a shadow novel that fit like a slipcover over the original. I wrote in notebooks and I typed up pages on my college typewriter, retrieved from my parents.

  In my version, Esther/Ethel still had plenty of love affairs but didn’t spy for the Russians. I gave her a passionate sex life, nothing wrong with that, but I toned things down. Arms yes, lips and tongues yes, breasts once, but that was as far as it went. Rewriting these scenes, I replayed some of what happened in the Terror Tomb. Flashes of it, but not all. What I remembered was enough. Changing words and rearranging paragraphs provided some of the thrill of physical contact.

  In my revision—as in life, I thought—Esther/Ethel’s guilt was more of an open question. My version represented the compromises I was willing to make. I was trying to keep Ethel’s name bright, to create something that wouldn’t make me so ashamed if someone—let’s say Mom—traced the book to me. The thought of my mother finding out made my work seem
reprehensible and pointless, and yet I labored on. Rewriting seemed more productive than worrying.

  Meanwhile, at the office, I kept up my alternately vigilant and lax assault on the Herculean stacks of submissions. If The Vixen were a secret mission, the slush pile was my cover. I liked thinking about it that way. As if Warren had recruited me into a pretend game of secret agent.

  Out in the world were witnesses who could testify that I had spent my time at Landry, Landry and Bartlett reading and returning books to the writers who loved them more than I ever could. These strangers had evidence, letters I typed and signed. I was no longer hurt by the memory of the senior editor comparing me to a heat-addled prospector panning for gold in the desert.

  When I proposed my edits to Anya, I was surprised by how readily she agreed. I was vain enough to wonder if Uncle Maddie was right: if she’d fallen a little in love with me and was willing to revise her book in any way I suggested. But I didn’t believe that, and I didn’t push my luck. I still hadn’t proposed that she change the characters’ names.

  Inspired by what I’d learned about Ethel from my mother, I suggested that Anya, who frequently reminded me that she’d studied acting and still wanted to be an actress, write a scene in which Esther performs in a play about an execution. I don’t know why I suggested it except to break up the monotony of the narrative: Sex, espionage, more sex, fighting with Junius, seducing the prosecutor, more espionage, more sex, more seduction. Death.

  “Wouldn’t that be corny?” Anya said.

  “No,” I said. “It could be great.”

  “I guess she must have been a pretty good actress to convince everybody that she was a regular housewife and not a Russian spy.” For a moment Anya seemed excited, imagining what she could do with what she’d learned in acting class. But almost at once, her shoulders slumped.