Like the Cheshire cat, his smile lingered long after the rest of him was gone. Richard Cantling sat staring at the empty chair, at the abandoned tumbler, watching the whiskey-soaked ice cubes melt slowly.
He did not remember falling asleep. He spent the night in the chair, and woke stiff and achy and cold. His dreams had been dark and shapeless and full of fear. He had slept well into the afternoon; half the day was gone. He made himself a tasteless breakfast in a kind of fog. He seemed distant from his own body, and every motion was slow and clumsy. When the coffee was ready, he poured a cup, picked it up, dropped it. The mug broke into a dozen pieces. Cantling stared down at it stupidly, watching rivulets of hot brown liquid run between the tiles. He did not have the energy to clean it up. He got a fresh mug, poured more coffee, managed to get down a few swallows.
The bacon was too salty; the eggs were runny, disgusting. Cantling pushed the meal away half-eaten, and drank more of the black, bitter coffee. He felt hungover, but he knew that booze was not the problem.
Today, he thought. It will end today, one way or the other. She will not go back. Byeline was his eighth novel, the next to the last. Today the final portrait would arrive. A character from his ninth novel, his last novel. And then it would be over.
Or maybe just beginning.
How much did Michelle hate him? How badly had he wronged her? Cantling’s hand shook; coffee slopped over the top of the mug, burning his fingers. He winced, cried out. Pain was so inarticulate. Burning. He thought of smoldering cigarettes, their tips like small red eyes. His stomach heaved. Cantling lurched to his feet, rushed to the bathroom. He got there just in time, gave his breakfast to the bowl. Afterwards he was too weak to move. He lay slumped against the cold white porcelain, his head swimming. He imagined somebody coming up behind him, taking him by the hair, forcing his face down into the water, flushing, flushing, laughing all the while, saying dirty, dirty, I’ll get you clean, you’re so dirty, flushing, flushing so the toilet ran and ran, holding his face down so the water and the vomit filled his mouth, his nostrils, until he could hardly breathe, until the world was almost black, until it was almost over, and then up again, laughing while he sucked in air, and then pushing him down again, flushing again, and again and again and again. But it was only his imagination. There was no one there. No one. Cantling was alone in the bathroom.
He forced himself to stand. In the mirror his face was gray and ancient, his hair filthy and unkempt. Behind him, leering over his shoulder, was another face. A man’s face, pale and drawn, with black hair parted in the middle and slicked back. Behind a pair of small round glasses were eyes the color of dirty ice, eyes that moved constantly, frenetically, wild animals caught in a trap. They would chew off their own limbs to be free, those eyes. Cantling blinked and the face was gone. He turned on the cold tap, plunged his cupped hands under the stream, splashed water on his face. He could feel the stubble of his beard. He needed to shave. But there wasn’t time, it wasn’t important, he had to … he had to …
He had to do something. Get out of there. Get away, get to someplace safe, somewhere his children couldn’t find him.
But there was nowhere safe, he knew.
He had to reach Michelle, talk to her, explain, plead. She loved him. She would forgive him, she had to. She would call it off, she would tell him what to do.
Frantic, Cantling rushed back to the living room, snatched up the phone. He couldn’t remember Michelle’s number. He searched around, found his address book, flipped through it wildly. There, there; he punched in the numbers.
The phone rang four times. Then someone picked it up.
“Michelle—” he started.
“Hi,” she said. “This is Michelle Cantling, but I’m not in right now. If you’ll leave your name and number when you hear the tone, I’ll get back to you, unless you’re selling something.”
The beep sounded. “Michelle, are you there?” Cantling said. “I know you hide behind the machine sometimes, when you don’t want to talk. It’s me. Please pick up. Please.”
Nothing.
“Call me back, then,” he said. He wanted to get it all in; his words tumbled over each other in their haste to get out. “I, you, you can’t do it, please, let me explain, I never meant, I never meant, please …” There was the beep again, and then a dial tone. Cantling stared at the phone, hung up slowly. She would call him back. She had to, she was his daughter, they loved each other, she had to give him the chance to explain. Of course, he had tried to explain before.
His doorbell was the old-fashioned kind, a brass key that projected out of the door. You had to turn it by hand, and when you did it produced a loud, impatient metallic rasp. Someone was turning it furiously, turning it and turning it and turning it. Cantling rushed to the door, utterly baffled. He had never made friends easily, and it was even harder now that he had become so set in his ways. He had no real friends in Perrot, a few acquaintances perhaps, but no one who would come calling so unexpectedly, and twist the bell with such energetic determination.
He undid his chain and flung the door open, wrenching the bell key out of Michelle’s fingers.
She was dressed in a belted raincoat, a knitted ski cap, a matching scarf. The scarf and a few loose strands of hair were caught in the wind, moving restlessly. She was wearing high, fashionable boots and carrying a big leather shoulder bag. She looked good. It had been almost a year since Cantling had seen her, on his last Christmas visit to New York. It had been two years since she’d moved back east.
“Michelle,” Cantling said. “I didn’t … this is quite a surprise. All the way from New York and you didn’t even tell me you were coming?”
“No,” she snapped. There was something wrong with her voice, her eyes. “I didn’t want to give you any warning, you bastard. You didn’t give me any warning.”
“You’re upset,” Cantling said. “Come in, let’s talk.”
“I’ll come in all right.” She pushed past him, kicked the door shut behind her with so much force that the buzzer sounded again. Out of the wind, her face got even harder. “You want to know why I came? I am going to tell you what I think of you. Then I’m going to turn around and leave, I’m going to walk right out of this house and out of your fucking life, just like Mom did. She was the smart one, not me. I was dumb enough to think you loved me, crazy enough to think you cared.”
“Michelle, don’t,” Cantling said. “You don’t understand. I do love you. You’re my little girl, you—”
“Don’t you dare!” she screamed at him. She reached into her shoulder bag. “You call this love, you rotten bastard!” She pulled it out and flung it at him.
Cantling was not as quick as he’d been. He tried to duck, but it caught him on the side of his neck, and it hurt. Michelle had thrown it hard, and it was a big, thick, heavy hardcover, not some flimsy paperback. The pages fluttered as it tumbled to the carpet; Cantling stared down at his own photograph on the back of the dust-wrapper. “You’re just like your mother,” he said, rubbing his neck where the book had hit. “She always threw things too. Only you aim better.” He smiled weakly.
“I’m not interested in your jokes,” Michelle said. “I’ll never forgive you. Never. Never ever. All I want to know is how you can do this to me, that’s all. You tell me. You tell me now.”
“I,” Cantling said. He held his hands out helplessly. “Look, I … you’re upset now, why don’t we have some coffee or something, and talk about it when you calm down a little. I don’t want a big fight.”
“I don’t give a fuck what you want,” Michelle screamed. “I want to talk about it right now!” She kicked the fallen book.
Richard Cantling felt his own anger building. It wasn’t right for her to yell at him like that, he didn’t deserve this attack, he hadn’t done anything. He tried not to say anything for fear of saying the wrong thing and escalating the situation. He knelt and picked up his book. Without thinking, he brushed it off, turned it over almost tenderly. The titl
e glared up at him; stark, twisted red letters against a black background, the distorted face of a pretty young woman, mouth open in a scream. Show Me Where It Hurts.
“I was afraid you’d take it the wrong way,” Cantling said.
“The wrong way!” Michelle said. A look of incredulity passed across her face. “Did you think I’d like it?”
“I, I wasn’t sure,” said Cantling. “I hoped … I mean, I was uncertain of your reaction, and so I thought it would be better not to mention what I was working on, until, well …”
“Until the fucking thing was in the bookstore windows,” Michelle finished for him.
Cantling flipped past the title page. “Look,” he said, holding it out, “I dedicated it to you.” He showed her:
To Michelle, who knew the pain.
Michelle swung at it, knocked it out of Cantling’s hands. “You bastard,” she said. “You think that makes it better? You think your stinking dedication excuses what you did? Nothing excuses it. I’ll never forgive you.”
Cantling edged back a step, retreating in the face of her fury. “I didn’t do anything,” he said stubbornly. “I wrote a book. A novel. Is that a crime?”
“You’re my father,” she shrieked. “You knew … you knew, you bastard, you knew I couldn’t bear to talk about it, to talk about what happened. Not to my lovers or my friends or even my therapist, I can’t, I just can’t, I can’t even think about it, you knew. I told you, I told only you, because you were my daddy and I trusted you and I had to get it out, and I told you, it was private, it was just between us, you knew, but what did you do? You wrote it all up in a goddamned book and published it for millions of people to read! Damn you, damn you. Were you planning to do that all along, you sonofabitch? Were you? That night in bed, were you memorizing every word?”
“I,” said Cantling. “No, I didn’t memorize anything, I just, well, I just remembered it. You’re taking it all wrong, Michelle. The book’s not about what happened to you. Yes, it’s inspired by that, that was the starting point, but it’s fiction, I changed things, it’s just a novel.”
“Oh yeah, Daddy, you changed things all right. Instead of Michelle Cantling it’s all about Nicole Mitchell, and she’s a fashion designer instead of an artist, and she’s also kind of stupid, isn’t she? Was that a change or is that what you think, that I was stupid to live there, stupid to let him in like that? It’s all fiction, yeah. It’s just a coincidence that it’s about this girl that gets held prisoner and raped and tortured and terrorized and raped some more, and that you’ve got a daughter who was held prisoner and raped and tortured and terrorized and raped some more, right, just a fucking coincidence!”
“You don’t understand,” Cantling said helplessly.
“No, you don’t understand. You don’t understand what it’s like. This is your biggest book in years, right? Number-one bestseller, you’ve never been number one before, haven’t even been on the lists since Times Are Hard, or was it Black Roses? And why not, why not number one, this isn’t no boring story about a has-been newspaper, this is rape, hey, what could be hotter? Lots of sex and violence, torture and fucking and terror, and doncha know, it really happened, yeah.” Her mouth twisted and trembled. “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. It was all the nightmares that have ever been. I still wake up screaming sometimes, but I was getting better, it was behind me. And now it’s there in every bookstore window, and all my friends know, everybody knows, strangers come up to me at parties and tell me how sorry they are.” She choked back a sob; she was halfway between anger and tears. “And I pick up your book, your fucking no-good book, and there it is again, in black and white, all written down. You’re such a fucking good writer, Daddy, you make it all so real. A book you can’t put down. Well, I put it down but it didn’t help, it’s all there, now it will always be there, won’t it? Every day somebody in the world will pick up your book and read it and I’ll get raped again. That’s what you did. You finished the job for him, Daddy. You violated me, took me without my consent, just like he did. You raped me. You’re my own father and you raped me!”
“You’re not being fair,” Cantling said. “I never meant to hurt you. The book … Nicole is strong and smart. It’s the man who’s the monster. He uses all those different names because fear has a thousand names, but only one face, you see. He’s not just a man, he’s the darkness made flesh, the mindless violence that waits out there for all of us, the gods that play with us like flies, he’s a symbol of all—”
“He’s the man who raped me! He’s not a symbol!”
She screamed it so loudly that Richard Cantling had to retreat in the face of her fury. “No,” he said. “He’s just a character. He’s … Michelle, I know it hurts, but what you went through, it’s something people should know about, should think about, it’s a part of life. Telling about life, making sense of it, that’s the job of literature, that’s my job. Someone had to tell your story. I tried to make it true, tried to do my—”
His daughter’s face, red and wet with tears, seemed almost feral for a moment, unrecognizable, inhuman. Then a curious calm passed across her features. “You got one thing right,” she said. “Nicole didn’t have a father. When I was a little kid I’d come to you crying and my daddy would say show me where it hurts, and it was a private thing, a special thing, but in the book Nicole doesn’t have a father, he says it, you gave it to him, he says show me where it hurts, he says it all the time. You’re so ironic. You’re so clever. The way he said it, it made him so real, more real than when he was real. And when you wrote it, you were right. That’s what the monster says. Show me where it hurts. That’s the monster’s line. Nicole doesn’t have a father, he’s dead, yes, that was right too. I don’t have a father. No, I don’t.”
“Don’t you talk to me like that,” Richard Cantling said. It was terror inside him; it was shame. But it came out anger. “I won’t have that, no matter what you’ve been through. I’m your father.”
“No,” Michelle said, grinning crazy now, backing away from him. “No, I don’t have a father, and you don’t have any children, no, unless it’s in your books. Those are your children, your only children. Your books, your damned fucking books, those are your children, those are your children, those are your children.” Then she turned and ran past him, down the foyer. She stopped at the door to his den. Cantling was afraid of what she might do. He ran after her.
When he reached the den, Michelle had already found the knife and set to work.
Richard Cantling sat by his silent phone and watched his grandfather clock tick off the hours toward darkness.
He tried Michelle’s number at three o’clock, at four, at five. The machine, always the machine, speaking in a mockery of her voice. His messages grew more desperate. It was growing dim outside. His light was fading.
Cantling heard no steps on his porch, no knock on his door, no rasping summons from his old brass bell. It was an afternoon as silent as the grave. But by the time evening had fallen, he knew it was out there. A big square package, wrapped in brown paper, addressed in a hand he had known well. Inside a portrait.
He had not understood, not really, and so she was teaching him.
The clock ticked. The darkness grew thicker. The sense of a waiting presence beyond his door seemed to fill the house. His fear had been growing for hours. He sat in the armchair with his legs pulled up under him, his mouth hanging open, thinking, remembering. Heard cruel laughter. Saw the dim red tips of cigarettes in the shadows, moving, circling. Imagined their small hot kisses on his skin. Tasted urine, blood, tears. Knew violence, knew violation, of every sort there was. His hands, his voice, his face, his face, his face. The character with a dozen names, but fear had only a single face. The youngest of his children. His baby. His monstrous baby.
He had been blocked for so long, Cantling thought. If only he could make her understand. It was a kind of impotence, not writing. He had been a writer, but that was over. He had been a husband, but his
wife was dead. He had been a father, but she got better, went back to New York. She left him alone, but that last night, wrapped in his arms, she told him the story, she showed him where it hurt, she gave him all that pain. What was he to do with it?
Afterwards he could not forget. He thought of it constantly. He began to reshape it in his head, began to grope for the words, the scenes, the symbols that would make sense of it. It was hideous, but it was life, raw strong life, the grist for Cantling’s mill, the very thing he needed. She had showed him where it hurt; he could show them all. He did resist, he did try. He began a short story, an essay, finished some reviews. But it returned. It was with him every night. It would not be denied.
He wrote it.
“Guilty,” Cantling said in the darkened room. And when he spoke the word, a kind of acceptance seemed to settle over him, banishing the terror. He was guilty. He had done it. He would accept the punishment, then. It was only right.
Richard Cantling stood and went to his door.
The package was there.
He lugged it inside, still wrapped, carried it up the stairs. He would hang him beside the others, beside Dunnahoo and Cissy and Barry Leighton, all in a row, yes. He went for his hammer, measured carefully, drove the nail. Only then did he unwrap the portrait, and look at the face within.
It captured her as no other artist had ever done, not just the lines of her face, the high angular cheekbones and blue eyes and tangled ash-blonde hair, but the personality inside. She looked so young and fresh and confident, and he could see the strength there, the courage, the stubbornness.
But best of all he liked her smile. It was a lovely smile, a smile that illuminated her whole face. The smile seemed to remind him of someone he had known once. He couldn’t remember who.
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