Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Susan Richards Shreve

  “Don’t tell Sam,” he said. “I’ll never do it again. I just forgot.”

  “You can’t forget.”

  “I know I can’t forget, and I never will again.”

  But he did.

  Sam was working too hard, sometimes way into the night after the rest of them were sleeping, getting up early, if he slept at all, before they were awake. He had set up his computer at the dining-room table of the apartment. It took too much time, he said, to pack up his work and walk to the coffeehouse for the day. Too much distraction. He had lost interest in the company of strangers.

  “I can’t stand it that Sam’s working at home,” Julia told Charlotte in early April on their way to the studio for rehearsal, Heartbreak close on their heels.

  Charlotte said nothing. She was exhausted by their lives with Sam, overcome by a constant need to sleep. He filled the living room like a gas leak, poisoning the air.

  “Can’t you move your office into one of the bedrooms, where you’d have some quiet?” she asked.

  “The noise doesn’t bother me. I like the sound of talking,” Sam said to them.

  There was no point in arguing.

  He wrote in a kind of manic fever, sometimes working all night, fifty new pages by morning.

  “What do you think?” he’d ask Oliver, who was lying on the couch, trying to keep up with Sam’s writing.

  Oliver shook his head. “I don’t know, Sam. There’s too much.”

  “What do you mean, too much?”

  “A hundred and fifty pages for a half-hour episode?” Oliver put the pages facedown on his stomach. “You used to do half that and we hardly needed to edit it at all.”

  “So you guys edit,” Sam said. “I don’t want those clowns at NBC touching this work. They haven’t got a clue what it’s about.”

  “Me either,” Julia whispered to Charlotte as they sat in the living room trying to cut the scripts in half, to make some sense of Sam’s obtuseness. Not even a standard for absurdity was observed.

  “Something new needs to happen to Sam in these stories,” Oliver said to his brother. “We now have three episodes in which he’s got Jaggers’s chair in the middle of the dining-room table and is sitting in it for the whole half-hour show.”

  “It is supposed to be funny,” Sam said coolly. “Amusing. Remember? I’m a comedy writer.”

  “I wonder if it doesn’t go on too long.”

  “It goes on for just the right amount of time.”

  Sam knew he was losing his bearings. The line between himself and the invented character of Sam McWilliams was disappearing, and he was beginning to think of himself as a genius. He would sit at his worktable reading what he had just written, even the stage directions, out loud to his siblings. He didn’t allow interruptions. Not even music, which disturbed his thinking patterns, he said. Sometimes he was too busy to eat.

  The ratings for Plum & Jaggers were falling.

  “We have bad letters and bad insider reports,” Jacob told the others at rehearsal in mid-April, when Sam was at home furiously writing to finish the final two episodes for the season.

  “Tell Sam,” Oliver said.

  “You tell him.”

  “That’s your job, Jacob. We’re his siblings.”

  “I showed him the letters, and they didn’t make a bit of difference,” Jacob replied.

  “Sam’s going through a crisis. Writers do.”

  “I know about your grandmother and the possible stalker.” Jacob paced the room. “I know it’s been a bad time for you guys, but he won’t listen to anybody.”

  “Try talking to him calmly,” Charlotte said.

  “Calmly? I may as well be dead,” Jacob said. “He blows me off and writes exactly what he wants to write. It just doesn’t happen to be what people want to watch at the moment.”

  “We know that.” Charlotte put on her cape.

  “Well, help me, then.”

  It was a Monday, the second week in April. Julia was staying at the studio to rehearse a solo scene that had been going badly, and Heartbreak was waiting for her. She had plans to go to dinner with Andy and Eric and then to a dance club.

  “You’re sure I’ll be okay?” she asked Charlotte in the ladies’ room.

  “Don’t you want to go?” Charlotte asked. “You never get to do anything.”

  “I do want to go,” Julia said. “I’m just a little scared.”

  “Then make sure Heartbreak sticks right beside you, and call us at midnight.”

  “What are we going to do about the show?” Oliver asked, as he and Charlotte headed home.

  “I’ll tell Sam what Jacob said.”

  They were walking from Fourteenth Street to their apartment, a cold, wet spring day, the wind pushing them forward, the rain soaking their hair.

  “I don’t think you should tell him.”

  “He needs to know how much trouble we’re in,” Charlotte said.

  “He knows,” Oliver said. “He knows everything that’s going on.”

  “I still plan to say something.”

  Charlotte had been unflappable for weeks, steady and cheerful, with an astonishing calm. But the cost of her supporting role in their fragile family was accumulating. Since Noli had died, she couldn’t concentrate for long enough to read a book. Sometimes she couldn’t sleep. She went days eating nothing but bread and butter and hot tea. The only real pleasure she had had since Sam had turned crazy was naming babies. She had picked up a small spiral notebook, and while they sat around the apartment editing Sam’s excessive scripts, she’d make lists of names, mostly for girls. She hadn’t even told Julia she was naming babies, although Julia was a name she had chosen. Julia Lucas. And Lucy, of course. But so far her favorite was Miranda. Miranda McWilliams. She hadn’t imagined a father.

  At the apartment, Oliver struggled to open the rain-swollen front door, leading the way up the steps to the second floor, stopping at the landing.

  “What’s up?” Charlotte asked.

  He turned. “Do you smell something?”

  Charlotte caught up with him, sniffing. “I do.”

  “Something’s burning,” he said.

  “No kidding.”

  In the living room Sam was working at the computer, his back to the kitchen, smoke around his shoulders like a cape.

  Charlotte rushed into the kitchen. “What’s on fire?”

  “Nothing that I know of,” Sam said, without looking up.

  “Can’t you smell the smoke?”

  In the toaster oven on the Formica counter under the cabinets a piece of toast was on fire, ribbons of black smoke seeping between the seams of the glass door. Charlotte pulled the plug, smothered the toast with a towel, and opened the window facing the alley.

  “It’s an incinerator in here.” Oliver threw down his umbrella on the couch. “What is going on?”

  “Toast,” Charlotte said.

  Sam looked up from the computer. “I smelled nothing. I’m working.”

  “Working?” Oliver turned the toaster upside down and dumped the charred remains of toast in the sink.

  “I did put bread in the toaster oven,” Sam said.

  “You could have burned up,” Charlotte said.

  “Don’t be extreme,” Sam said, printing the pages he’d been working on. “If I wanted to die of smoke inhalation, I’d be more professional than toast.”

  “I didn’t say you wanted to die,” Charlotte said, opening more windows. “I said you could have.”

  The rain from the east rushed through the open windows in thin sheets, soaking up the smell of burned toast. Charlotte took out the bucket of soaps from under the sink and cleaned the kitchen, sprayed the living room with lavender toilet water, tossed the toaster oven in the trash, and scrubbed the counters sticky with the residue of smoke.

>   “Are we going to mention the ratings?” Charlotte asked Oliver quietly, but Sam overheard her.

  “I don’t care about the ratings,” he said, assuming a voice of exhausted rationality. “What I’m writing now is the best work I’ve ever done.”

  He had some pages in his lap, editing with a pencil, his feet on the dining-room table next to the computer, his Orioles cap on backward.

  “Do you want to read me what you’ve written so far?” Oliver asked.

  “Nope, I don’t,” Sam said.

  Julia took the N to SoHo. Heartbreak was standing at the other end of the car, holding on to the pole in the center aisle, looking over at her, as he had a tendency to do, smiling. She wanted to keep his attention so he wouldn’t miss the stop at Prince Street. At the same time, she wished he wouldn’t watch her so enthusiastically.

  At the newsstand just outside the subway stop she pretended to look at the new issue of Currents, motioning for Heartbreak to stand beside her.

  “I’m meeting my friends at the Blue Mango for dinner and then we’re going down Broadway to a place called Pewter’s,” she said. “Stay close.”

  From the Prince Street stop, Julia walked to the Blue Mango on Mercer, checking behind to see if Heartbreak was close by, which he was, although the second time she turned her head, he was looking at some small carved boats in an antiques store, his hands on the glass, his face against it, so that he easily could have lost her if she hadn’t waited for him to catch her eye and trot along, keeping half a block behind.

  From time to time, she could see him through the window at the Blue Mango, walking by, peering in, always with the broad smile he insisted on giving her. She’d have to mention it to him.

  After dinner they went to Pewter’s—Eric and Andy and Brill, some of their friends with whom they had eaten. As they left the Blue Mango, Julia saw Heartbreak across the street and made eye contact.

  Immediately inside Pewter’s, Julia was nervous.

  The place was dark and crowded. Blue and yellow strobe lights splashed across her face and beyond her, across the room and back, a kind of syncopated light show that split the face of a person in half and she could feel the coming of panic. She grabbed Andy’s hand.

  “Dance with me,” she said.

  Andy was a good dancer, weaving in and out of the other dancers, holding her firmly at the small of her back, moving light as air over the whole dance floor, into the middle and out again.

  “Just stay with me,” she said, out of breath, when the music stopped.

  In the corner, she could see Eric and Brill leaning against the bar.

  “Let’s go over to Eric,” Andy said, leading the way.

  At first he had hold of her hand, but when someone pressed between, he dropped it. As Julia looked up, orienting herself in the brightly dotted darkness, she couldn’t find Andy. She pushed her way to the bar, searching up and down for Eric and Brill, and they seemed to be gone as well. But instead of standing where she was, waiting for them to find her, as certainly they would have, she bolted.

  Outside, there was a long line of people waiting to get in, and she walked along the inside until she spotted Heartbreak. He was just crossing the street headed in the other direction, away from Pewter’s.

  “Heartbreak!”

  He turned around and, spotting Julia, waited while she hailed a cab.

  She saw him clearly as she got into the cab. The plan had been that he would follow her in another cab, and when she looked, he was standing on the other side of Broadway just opposite and watching her. She thought she saw him nod his head, give a little wave as if he were hailing a taxi himself to follow hers.

  “One-forty-two West Eleventh,” she said to the driver, looking out the window, expecting Heartbreak any minute to appear in the backseat of one of the cabs. But when she looked behind her at the first red light, Heartbreak wasn’t in any of the taxis, and she could no longer find him on the street across from Pewter’s.

  She opened her purse and counted out six dollars, slid down in the backseat so the occupants of a passing taxi wouldn’t be able to see her, so the man with graying curly hair who had been watching her, even this afternoon on Broadway while she had a cup of tea, wouldn’t recognize her should his taxi pull up alongside hers.

  142 West Eleventh was a four-story brownstone in the middle of the block between Sixth and Seventh Avenues—eight steps up from the sidewalk, a glass front door, then a small vestibule where the mailboxes were and a second glass door to the stairs—an apartment on each floor, four apartments in all. No doorman. Sam had been willing to forget about a doorman when he hired Heartbreak.

  Julia paid the driver, asking him to wait till she got safely inside. He didn’t speak very much English, so she repeated, “Wait.” And he nodded as if he had understood.

  “Thank you,” she said, shutting the car door.

  But by the time she had zipped her wallet and stuffed it in her backpack, the cab was halfway down the block, and Heartbreak was nowhere to be seen.

  There was a light with low wattage above the glass front door, and as she put the key in the lock, she could see her own reflection in the glass.

  Behind her she heard or thought she heard a sound of footsteps, maybe in the street, maybe on the steps. She didn’t need to turn around and couldn’t have turned had she wished to, her hand frozen on the key, her heart pumping.

  In the fuzzy gray reflection in the glass door, she saw someone coming up the steps behind her, his head rising to her waist, her shoulders—it happened quickly—and before she had a chance to scream or ring the bell to her apartment, he had put his palms on the glass on either side of her, trapping her in the arc of his arms, his smoky breath floating around her head, his shadow surfacing to familiar features in the glass.

  Swiftly, before he had a chance to pin her hand, she reached under his arm and punched 4. Moments passed, maybe only a matter of seconds extending in her imagination, and then Oliver’s voice came over the speaker.

  “Who is it?” he called.

  The apparition in the glass put his hand over Julia’s mouth, flattening her lips against her teeth.

  “Sam McWilliams,” he said in an ordinary voice, barely audible above her muffled cries.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  UPSTAIRS IN the apartment, the McWilliamses were alert to trouble. It was almost 2 a.m. No one had gone to bed, Oliver pacing, looking out the window for Julia; Charlotte sitting up, half-sleeping, Sense and Sensibility facedown on her lap. Sam was at the dining-room table, too agitated to work. When he heard the buzzer, he jumped up.

  “Who is it?” Oliver asked, and Sam was out of the apartment just as the man announced himself.

  By the time Sam got downstairs, Julia was gone. The street was dark, the streetlight in front of their apartment burned out. The rain had stopped, but the night was heavy with an early spring fog. Sam caught his breath.

  The man with Julia couldn’t have had time to hail a cab, not on West Eleventh Street after midnight. Sam turned right toward Sixth, walking slowly to check the dark caves along the street, basement apartments, an alley in the middle of the block, corners where people chained their trash cans to trees, garden squares out of the circle of streetlights.

  Someone appeared to be stuffed in a rectangle between two buildings, flattened against the wall, his head tilted up, arms at his sides. Sam would not have seen him in the darkness if some animal sound, a low, almost inaudible groaning, had not escaped his lips as Sam walked past the buildings. When he turned to look into the black space, a form began to take shape, and as his eyes adjusted to the night, he saw a man whom he had seen before. He didn’t see Julia until he was between the buildings himself, and then he saw her on the ground, a pile of clothing, laundry, not even her head showing.

  At first the man didn’t even try to escape when Oliver, running from across t
he street, grabbed him by the shoulders and held him against the wall.

  A small crowd gathered from the apartments nearby. Someone had a flashlight, and Sam sat in the circle of light holding Julia’s head. She was making funny kitten sounds in her throat, a breaking noise like dry twigs, and in the distance Sam heard the siren of the ambulance coming in their direction.

  Later, not one of them knew what had happened or how—the ambulance came, the emergency medical team moved in, Sam and Charlotte stood back with Oliver, the small crowd withdrew along the sidewalk, and sometime in the moments between the arrival of the ambulance and finally the police, the man struggled out of Oliver’s grip and disappeared.

  Waiting in the Emergency room of St. Luke’s Hospital, Sam couldn’t stop talking.

  “I don’t know how he got away, Oliver,” he said, pacing in front of the chair where Oliver was sitting. “Now he’s loose somewhere in New York City. Loose, for Christ’s sake.”

  Charlotte was in the room with Julia, only one member of the family permitted. The wait for news from the doctor went on and on. A shooting victim had come in, a drug-overdose who was comatose brought in on a stretcher, an elderly man on oxygen.

  “Would you check?” Sam asked Oliver.

  “They’ll let us know when they have some news.” Oliver was thumbing through an old Life magazine to calm his nerves.

  “God, Oliver. You won’t ever act. You simply turn catatonic in an emergency situation.” Sam thrust his hands in his pockets. “The whole thing—the whole family responsibility is on my shoulders and has been forever.”

  “Your choice, Sam,” Oliver said, checking the waiting room for reactions to Sam’s temper.

  “I thought the guy after Julia was Ranier Moore. Didn’t you?”

  “Nope,” Oliver said. “I always thought it was a stranger.”

  “I had an instinct, especially when we were in Grand Rapids.” He sat down next to Oliver. “We’ve seen that curly-haired guy before, haven’t we?”

  “We’ve all seen him. I saw him in Tribeca. He came up to me and asked had I gone to Columbia. Julia saw him. He’s been around,” Oliver said. “I gave the police a detailed description.”