“Maybe she wants to get to the point,” Leighton suggested.
“And what is the point?”
Leighton shrugged. “Damned if I know. I’m only a newspaperman. Five Ws and an H. You’re the novelist. You tell me the point.”
“My ninth novel,” Cantling suggested. “The new one.”
“The last one?” said Leighton.
“Of course not. Only the most recent. I’m working on something new right now.”
Leighton smiled. “That’s not what my sources tell me.”
“Oh? What do your sources say?”
“That you’re an old man waiting to die,” Leighton said. “And that you’re going to die alone.”
“I’m fifty-two,” Cantling said crisply. “Hardly old.”
“When your birthday cake has got more candles than you can blow out, you’re old,” said Leighton drily. “Helen was younger than you, and she died five years ago. It’s in the mind, Cantling. I’ve seen young octogenarians and old adolescents. And you, you had liver spots on your brain before you had hair on your balls.”
“That’s unfair,” Cantling protested.
Leighton drank his Seagram’s. “Fair?” he said. “You’re too old to believe in fair, Cantling. Young people live life. Old people sit and watch it. You were born old. You’re a watcher, not a liver.” He frowned. “Not a liver, jeez, what a figure of speech. Better a liver than a gall bladder, I guess. You were never a gall bladder either. You’ve been full of piss for years, but you don’t have any gall at all. Maybe you’re a kidney.”
“You’re reaching, Barry,” Cantling said. “I’m a writer. I’ve always been a writer. That’s my life. Writers observe life, they report on life. It’s in the job description. You ought to know.”
“I do know,” Leighton said. “I’m a reporter, remember? I’ve spent a lot of long gray years writing up other peoples’ stories. I’ve got no story of my own. You know that, Cantling. Look what you did to me in Byeline. The Courier croaks and I decide to write my memoirs and what happens?”
Cantling remembered. “You blocked. You rewrote your old stories, twenty-year-old stories, thirty-year-old stories. You had that incredible memory. You could recall all the people you’d ever reported on, the dates, the details, the quotes. You could recite the first story you’d had bylined word for word, but you couldn’t remember the name of the first girl you’d been to bed with, couldn’t remember your ex-wife’s phone number, you couldn’t … you couldn’t …” His voice failed.
“I couldn’t remember my daughter’s birthday,” Leighton said. “Where do you get those crazy ideas, Cantling?”
Cantling was silent.
“From life, maybe?” Leighton said gently. “I was a good reporter. That was about all you could say about me. You, well, maybe you’re a good novelist. That’s for the critics to judge, and I’m just a sweaty newspaperman whose feet hurt. But even if you are a good novelist, even if you’re one of the great ones, you were a lousy husband, and a miserable father.”
“No,” Cantling said. It was a weak protest.
Leighton swirled his tumbler; the ice cubes clinked and clattered. “When did Helen leave you?” he asked.
“I don’t … ten years ago, something like that. I was in the middle of the final draft of En Passant.”
“When was the divorce final?”
“Oh, a year later. We tried reconciliation, but it didn’t take. Michelle was in school, I remember. I was writing Times Are Hard.”
“You remember her third-grade play?”
“Was that the one I missed?”
“The one you missed? You sound like Nixon saying, ‘Was that the time I lied?’ That was the one Michelle had the lead in, Cantling.”
“I couldn’t help that,” Cantling said. “I wanted to come. They were giving me an award. You don’t skip the National Literary League dinner. You can’t.”
“Of course not,” said Leighton. “When was it that Helen died?”
“I was writing Byeline,” Cantling said.
“Interesting system of dating you’ve got there. You ought to put out a calendar.” He swallowed some whiskey.
“All right,” Cantling said. “I’m not going to deny that my work is important to me. Maybe too important, I don’t know. Yes, the writing has been the biggest part of my life. But I’m a decent man, Leighton, and I’ve always done my best. It hasn’t all been like you’re implying. Helen and I had good years. We loved each other once. And Michelle … I loved Michelle. When she was a little girl, I used to write stories just for her. Funny animals, space pirates, silly poems. I’d write them up in my spare time and read them to her at bedtime. They were something I did just for Michelle, for love.”
“Yeah,” Leighton said cynically. “You never even thought about getting them published.”
Cantling grimaced. “That … you’re implying … that’s a distortion. Michelle loved the stories so much, I thought maybe other kids might like them too. It was just an idea. I never did anything about it.”
“Never?”
Cantling hesitated. “Look, Bert was my friend as well as my agent. He had a little girl of his own. I showed him the stories once. Once!”
“I can’t be pregnant,” Leighton said. “I only let him fuck me once. Once!”
“He didn’t even like them,” Cantling said.
“Pity,” replied Leighton.
“You’re laying this on me with a trowel, and I’m not guilty. No, I wasn’t father of the year, but I wasn’t an ogre either. I changed her diaper plenty of times. Before Black Roses, Helen had to work, and I took care of the baby every day, from nine to five.”
“You hated it when she cried and you had to leave your typewriter.”
“Yes,” Cantling said. “Yes, I hated being interrupted, I’ve always hated being interrupted, I don’t care if it was Helen or Michelle or my mother or my roommate in college, when I’m writing I don’t like to be interrupted. Is that a fucking capital crime? Does that make me inhuman? When she cried, I went to her. I didn’t like it, I hated it, I resented it, but I went to her.”
“When you heard her,” said Leighton. “When you weren’t in bed with Cissy, dancing with Miss Aggie, beating up scabs with Frank Corwin, when your head wasn’t full of their voices, yeah, sometimes you heard, and when you heard you went. Congratulations, Cantling.”
“I taught her to read,” Cantling said. “I read her Treasure Island and Wind in the Willows and The Hobbit and Tom Sawyer, all kinds of things.”
“All books you wanted to reread anyway,” said Leighton. “Helen did the real teaching, with Dick and Jane.”
“I hate Dick and Jane!” Cantling shouted.
“So?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Richard Cantling said. “You weren’t there. Michelle was there. She loved me, she still loves me. Whenever she got hurt, scraped her knee, or got her nose bloodied, whatever it was, it was me she’d run to, never Helen. She’d come crying to me and I’d hug her and dry her tears and I’d tell her … I used to tell her …” But he couldn’t go on. He was close to tears himself; he could feel them hiding in the corners of his eyes.
“I know what you used to tell her,” said Barry Leighton in a sad, gentle voice.
“She remembered it,” Cantling said. “She remembered it all those years. Helen got custody, they moved away, I didn’t see her much, but Michelle always remembered, and when she was all grown up, after Helen was gone and Michelle was on her own, there was this time she got hurt, and I … I …”
“Yes,” said Leighton. “I know.”
The police were the ones that phoned him. Detective Joyce Brennan, that was her name, he would never forget that name. “Mister Cantling?” she said.
“Yes?”
“Mister Richard Cantling?”
“Yes,” he said. “Richard Cantling the writer.” He had gotten strange calls before. “What can I do for you?”
She identified hers
elf. “You’ll have to come down to the hospital,” she said to him. “It’s your daughter, Mister Cantling. I’m afraid she’s been assaulted.”
He hated evasion, hated euphemism. Cantling’s characters never passed away, they died; they never broke wind, they farted. And Richard Cantling’s daughter … “Assaulted?” he said. “Do you mean she’s been assaulted or do you mean she’s been raped?”
There was a silence on the other end of the line. “Raped,” she said at last. “She’s been raped, Mister Cantling.”
“I’ll be right down,” he said.
She had in fact been raped repeatedly and brutally. Michelle had been as stubborn as Helen, as stubborn as Cantling himself. She wouldn’t take his money, wouldn’t take his advice, wouldn’t take the help he offered her through his contacts in publishing. She was going to make it on her own. She waitressed in a coffeehouse in the Village, and lived in a large, drafty, and rundown warehouse loft down by the docks. It was a terrible neighborhood, a dangerous neighborhood, and Cantling had told her so a hundred times, but Michelle would not listen. She would not even let him pay to install good locks and a security system. It had been very bad. The man had broken in before dawn on a Friday morning. Michelle was alone. He had ripped the phone from the wall and held her prisoner there through Monday night. Finally one of the busboys from the coffeehouse had gotten worried and come by, and the rapist had left by the fire escape.
When they let him see her, her face was a huge purple bruise. She had burn marks all over her, where the man had used his cigarette, and three of her ribs were broken. She was far beyond hysteria. She screamed when they tried to touch her; doctors, nurses, it didn’t matter, she screamed as soon as they got near. But she let Cantling sit on the edge of the bed, and take her in his arms, and hold her. She cried for hours, cried until there were no more tears in her. Once she called him “Daddy,” in a choked sob. It was the only word she spoke; she seemed to have lost the capacity for speech. Finally they tranquilized her to get her to sleep.
Michelle was in the hospital for two weeks, in a deep state of shock. Her hysteria waned day by day, and she finally became docile, so they were able to fluff her pillows and lead her to the bathroom. But she still would not, or could not, speak. The psychologist told Cantling that she might never speak again. “I don’t accept that,” he said. He arranged Michelle’s discharge. Simultaneously he decided to get them both out of this filthy hellhole of a city. She had always loved big old spooky houses, he remembered, and she used to love the water, the sea, the river, the lake. Cantling consulted realtors, considered a big place on the coast of Maine, and finally settled on an old steamboat gothic mansion high on the bluffs of Perrot, Iowa. He supervised every detail of the move.
Little by little, recovery began.
She was like a small child again, curious, restless, full of sudden energy. She did not talk, but she explored everything, went everywhere. In spring she spent hours up on the widow’s walk, watching the big towboats go by on the Mississippi far below. Every evening they would walk together on the bluffs, and she would hold his hand. One day she turned and kissed him suddenly, impulsively, on his cheek. “I love you, Daddy,” she said, and she ran away from him, and as Cantling watched her run, he saw a lovely, wounded woman in her mid-twenties, and saw too the gangling, coltish tomboy she had been.
The dam was broken after that day. Michelle began to talk again. Short, childlike sentences at first, full of childish fears and childish naïveté. But she matured rapidly, and in no time at all she was talking politics with him, talking books, talking art. They had many a fine conversation on their evening walks. She never talked about the rape, though; never once, not so much as a word.
In six months she was cooking, writing letters to friends back in New York, helping with the household chores, doing lovely things in the garden. In eight months she had started to paint again. That was very good for her; now she seemed to blossom daily, to grow more and more radiant. Richard Cantling didn’t really understand the abstractions his daughter liked to paint, he preferred representational art, and best of all he loved the self-portrait she had done for him when she was still an art major in college. But he could feel the pain in these new canvases of hers, he could sense that she was engaged in an exorcism of sorts, trying to squeeze the pus from some wound deep inside, and he approved. His writing had been a balm for his own wounds more than once. He envied her now, in a way. Richard Cantling had not written a word for more than three years. The crashing commercial failure of Byeline, his best novel, had left him blocked and impotent. He’d thought perhaps the change of scene might restore him as well as Michelle, but that had been a vain hope. At least one of them was busy.
Finally, late one night after Cantling had gone to bed, his door opened and Michelle came quietly into his bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed. She was barefoot, dressed in a flannel nightgown covered with tiny pink flowers. “Daddy,” she said, in a slurred voice.
Cantling had woken when the door opened. He sat up and smiled for her. “Hi,” he said. “You’ve been drinking.”
Michelle nodded. “I’m going back,” she said. “Needed some courage, so’s I could tell you.”
“Going back?” Cantling said. “You don’t mean to New York? You can’t be serious!”
“I got to,” she said. “Don’t be mad. I’m better now.”
“Stay here. Stay with me. New York is uninhabitable, Michelle.”
“I don’t want to go back. It scares me. But I got to. My friends are there. My work is there. My life is back there, Daddy. My friend Jimmy, you remember Jimmy, he’s art director for this little paperback house, he can get me some cover assignments, he says. He wrote. I won’t have to wait tables anymore.”
“I don’t believe I’m hearing this,” Richard Cantling said. “How can you go back to that damned city after what happened to you there?”
“That’s why I have to go back,” Michelle insisted. “That guy, what he did … what he did to me …” Her voice caught in her throat. She drew in her breath, got hold of herself. “If I don’t go back, it’s like he ran me out of town, took my whole life away from me, my friends, my art, everything. I can’t let him get away with that, can’t let him scare me off. I got to go back and take up what’s mine, prove that I’m not afraid.”
Richard Cantling looked at his daughter helplessly. He reached out, gently touched her long, soft hair. She had finally said something that made sense in his terms. He would do the same thing, he knew. “I understand,” he said. “It’s going to be lonely here without you, but I understand, I do.”
“I’m scared,” Michelle said. “I bought plane tickets. For tomorrow.”
“So soon?”
“I want to do it quickly, before I lose my nerve,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this scared. Not even … not even when it was happening. Funny, huh?”
“No,” said Cantling. “It makes sense.”
“Daddy, hold me,” Michelle said. She pressed herself into his arms.
He hugged her and felt her body tremble.
“You’re shaking,” he said.
She wouldn’t let go of him. “You remember, when I was real little, I used to have those nightmares, and I’d come bawling into your bedroom in the middle of the night and crawl into bed between you and Mommy.”
Cantling smiled. “I remember,” he said.
“I want to stay here tonight,” Michelle said, hugging him even more tightly. “Tomorrow I’ll be back there, alone. I don’t want to be alone tonight. Can I, Daddy?”
Cantling disengaged gently, looked her in the eyes. “Are you sure?”
She nodded; a tiny, quick, shy nod. A child’s nod.
He threw back the covers and she crept in next to him. “Don’t go away,” she said. “Don’t even go to the bathroom, okay? Just stay right here with me.”
“I’m here,” he said. He put his arms around her, and Michelle curled up under the covers with her head
on his shoulder. They lay together that way for a long time. He could feel her heart beating inside her chest. It was a soothing sound; soon Cantling began to drift back to sleep.
“Daddy?” she whispered against his chest.
He opened his eyes. “Michelle?”
“Daddy, I have to get rid of it. It’s inside me and it’s poison. I don’t want to take it back with me. I have to get rid of it.”
Cantling stroked her hair, long slow steady motions, saying nothing.
“When I was little, you remember, whenever I fell down or got in a fight, I’d come running to you, all teary, and show you my booboo. That’s what I used to call it when I got hurt, remember, I’d say I had a booboo.”
“I remember,” Cantling said.
“And you, you’d always hug me and you’d say, ‘Show me where it hurts,’ and I would and you’d kiss it and make it better, you remember that? Show me where it hurts?”
Cantling nodded. “Yes,” he said softly.
Michelle was crying quietly. He could feel the wetness soaking through the top of his pajamas. “I can’t take it back with me, Daddy. I want to show you where it hurts. Please. Please.”
He kissed the top of her head. “Go on.”
She started at the beginning, in a halting whisper.
When dawn light broke through the bedroom windows, she was still talking. They never slept. She cried a lot, screamed once or twice, shivered frequently despite the weight of the blankets; Richard Cantling never let go of her, not once, not for a single moment. She showed him where it hurt.
Barry Leighton sighed. “It was a far, far better thing you did than you had ever done,” he said. “Now if you’d only gone off to that far, far better rest right then and there, that very moment, everything would have been fine.” He shook his head. “You never did know when to write Thirty, Cantling.”
“Why?” Cantling demanded. “You’re a good man, Leighton, tell me. Why is this happening? Why?”
The reporter shrugged. He was beginning to fade now. “That was the W that always gave me the most trouble,” he said wearily. “Pick the story, and let me loose, and I could tell you the who and the what and the when and the where and even the how. But the why … ah, Cantling, you’re the novelist, the whys are your province, not mine. The only Y that I ever really got on speaking terms with was the one goes with MCA.”
Dreamsongs 2-Book Bundle Page 149
