A Dangerous Fiction

by Barbara Rogan

  “Or maybe it was just the luck of the draw,” I said. “That’s what he said when I asked. Chance, serendipity, they’re part of the real world too, aren’t they?”

  “Touched a nerve, did I?”

  “Not at all.”

  “You still like him, is that it?”

  “Not at all,” I said again, realizing even as I spoke that I was lying. I stowed that useless revelation away for the next millennium, when I might have time to consider it.

  “If you say so.” Max looked at his watch and stood. “Gotta scoot. Nice ’do, ladies. Jo, do me a favor: stay away from Tommy Cullen.”

  I walked him to the door. “I thought you were just playing devil’s advocate.”

  “Sometimes,” he said, “even the devil gets it right.”

  Chapter 18

  Saturday morning, Mingus and I went for a walk. Tommy had advised me to stay out of Central Park, but that stricture could not possibly have applied to a beautiful autumn day like this one. We strolled down a tree-lined path beneath a thinning canopy of gold and scarlet until we reached the baseball fields, where the change of season was marked by overlapping ice-cream and hot-chestnut vendors. A woman in spandex jogged past us in the opposite direction, a sleek saluki high-stepping it at her side. Mingus turned his head to watch them pass, and I swear he’d have whistled if he could have. He’d been neutered, according to Gordon, but apparently nobody told the dog.

  “Knock it off,” I said. “You’re on duty.” He grinned up at me and wagged his tail.

  We went home. Mingus settled in the kitchen with his breakfast and a big bowl of water. I took a key from the utility drawer, walked down the hall, and unlocked the door to Hugo’s office. Intended as a third bedroom, it had been converted long before my time into a writer’s den. The room faced east, and two tall windows overlooked the park. The opposite wall was all custom cabinetry, the others were lined with mahogany bookcases. Atop the cases was a seemingly artless but endlessly fussed-over array of framed photos, prizes, and small treasures. There was a Hopi mortar and pestle, given to Hugo by the composer Isabel Delgado, an inscribed photo of Sonny Rollins, an Oscar wedged between a Pulitzer and a candid shot of Hugo arm-wrestling with Rudy Giuliani (and winning, as he was always quick to point out). The Oscar was for Best Adapted Screenplay, based on his novel Colossus. Hugo had bought this apartment with that movie money. He also met his second wife on the set, but there were no pictures of the beautiful Noelle Braeburn, or any of his other former wives.

  “Why is that?” I’d asked him once. We were at that stage early in our marriage when we could not be in the same room without touching, and I sat on his lap, my hair damp from the shower. “I hope you don’t think I’d be jealous of a few pictures.”

  “Don’t have any,” Hugo said, nuzzling my neck.

  “Why not?”

  “Tossed ’em.”

  I leaned back to examine his face. “All of them, really? Why?”

  “Why, why, why,” he said teasingly. “You’re like a little kid. When a snake sheds his skin, does he carry the old skin with him?”

  “Are you a snake?”

  He laughed. “Let’s just say I’m a shedder.”

  “But don’t you think about them sometimes?” I asked. “Wonder how they’re doing?”

  Hugo cupped my face between his hands. “Silly girl,” he’d said. “Why would I?”

  Now I crossed the room to open the blinds, which I kept shut against the sun. Light flooded the room, which looked much as it had when Hugo was alive. The desk was neater—I’d gathered all the loose papers and stuck them in a storage box, leaving only his computer and the lucky Yankees cap he always wore while writing. His annotated manuscripts, drafts, and galleys had gone to his alma mater, as Hugo had instructed. Otherwise the room was untouched and hideously quiet.

  It wasn’t a shrine; I hated that word. If anything, it was a testament to my inertia. This space could have served me well these past few years, if I’d cleared away Hugo’s stuff. I’d thought about doing it, planned to do it, even blocked out time on my calendar; yet somehow it never got done. Teddy’s incursion was an opportunity.

  No, not an incursion. I had to break the habit of seeing the biographer as my enemy. Hugo’s cupboards were not the only ones that needed airing out.

  I took a storage box from the cupboard and assembled it. Then I turned to the filing cabinet, but it was locked. It took half an hour of searching till I found the key in an earthenware bowl on the bookcase, buried in an assortment of old stamps, rubber bands, and paper clips. It was a Hopi bowl, incised with stylized antelopes: another gift from Isabel Delgado, Hugo’s partner in the musical adaptation of his first book, Distant Cries. We’d spent a week in Santa Fe, staying at the La Fonda while Hugo worked with Isabel on the project. She gave me the bowl on the last day of our stay. It was of museum quality and really deserved a place of honor in the living room, yet somehow I’d never loved it as much as I should have; and eventually it migrated into Hugo’s office.

  The key fit, and the cabinet drawers slid open. I started with the files on each of the novels, figuring that publishers’ correspondence would be safe to share. Hugo’s letters to his primary editor, David Axelhorn at Random House, were particularly meaty, ranging in tone from charming to tempestuous. I was mentioned in several, as in “Jo thinks the first scene’s a bit hinky; what do you say?” Hugo accepted editorial advice from very few people, but those whom he trusted, he trusted implicitly and credited generously. It was his boasting about my editorial prowess that had other writers—friends and protégés of Hugo’s—lining up to have me read for them, too. Pimping out my services, he used to call it, but I built my career on that start. Molly didn’t bring me back into the agency purely out of friendship. I had a name and a following, and many of the writers whose work I’d edited became clients when I turned pro.

  There were many letters to and from Molly, who’d been his agent throughout his career. As I read through them in order, I noticed a certain stiffness in tone that set in around the time Hugo and I met. Molly’s letters were suddenly all business; Hugo’s replies were uncommonly terse. Then, several months after our marriage, Hugo had appended a P.S. “Your little chick thrives in my nest, dire predictions notwithstanding, and is far more useful to me than she could have been to you. It’s not like you, my dear, to begrudge a man his comforts. The world is full of bright young things. Choose another, and be friends again.”

  An olive branch, and Hugo the one to extend it! It shed an interesting light on their relationship. I tossed it in the box for Teddy, then pulled it out and read it again. “Useful,” he’d called me. “A comfort.” Someone who didn’t know us could get a skewed notion of our relationship. I replaced the letter in its file.

  I worked steadily for several hours and got through dozens of files. The box was filling up nicely. Teddy would be too delighted to inquire closely about what was missing, not that I had to justify myself to him. Most of the withheld letters had unkind comments about writers or other people we knew. A few referred to me in ways that would look different in print from the way they were meant, like this one to his editor: “Jo’s a fine, lusty wench. She wears me out, yet I work the better for it. Life right now consists of fucking and writing, with an occasional meal thrown in. At this rate I’ll be dead in three years and count it a bargain.” Probably wrote it drunk, the idiot. Now I understood the gleam in David’s eyes every time we met.

  I took a break, walked the dog, brought home some Cuban-Chinese takeout. Mingus and I ate together in the dining room while I listened to phone messages: a bunch of people thanking me for Rowena’s memorial, and Max, checking in from L.A. to repeat his warning to stay away from Tommy Cullen. As if I had any intention of seeking him out! I would avoid Tommy, I decided, not because I suspected him but because I felt uneasy around him. Ever since our last encounter, vivid but useless mem
ories had been welling up, and with them longings of a sort I thought I’d put behind me. Tommy hadn’t been my first lover, just my first good lover. Hugo was the second, and he had eclipsed the first; but Hugo’s eclipsing days were over.

  Mingus finished his kibble and looked sideways at my plate. I off-loaded my leftovers into his bowl and cleaned up. Then I went back to Hugo’s office. This time, I opened a window. It hadn’t been touched in a long time, and I had to wrestle the sash up. At once, cool, fresh air rushed into the overheated room, and the oppressive silence gave way to the ceaseless murmur of traffic ebbing and flowing. Hugo’s desk stood in the middle of the room, facing the windows, whose framed views of the park were like living Monets. My desk, I thought. My office. Hugo doesn’t need them it anymore.

  I hadn’t come back in for Teddy’s sake. There was more than enough material in the carton to keep him off my back for weeks. Rather, I’d returned to reclaim the room for myself by clearing it out. Hugo may have been a shedder of women, but he was a world-class hoarder of paper. In files dated by year, he’d saved ancient taxi receipts, laundry lists, utility bills, canceled checks, fading bank statements, and stock prospectuses yellowed with age. Some of this minutiae might conceivably have interested Teddy Pendragon, but as far as I was concerned, it was all dross. I shook open a plastic garbage bag and set to work, starting with the oldest files. Every piece of paper had to be checked before I discarded it, in case anything important had been misfiled. After a couple of hours, I reached the year of our marriage, 1996. The file contained the usual mishmash of bills and receipts, plus a few odd ones: rent receipts for an apartment on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn, dated September through December. I opened the file for 1997 and found three more receipts, through March.

  This made no sense. I couldn’t imagine why Hugo would have rented an apartment in Brooklyn. I knew what Molly would say, cynic that she was, but this was no love nest. Once he came back to the city, Hugo and I were inseparable. I left my apartment to live with him. At his request, and despite Molly’s admonitions, I’d quit my job at the agency to help him with his work. They say that when John Lennon and Yoko first got together, they went everywhere together, even to the bathroom. Hugo and I didn’t go quite that far, but we weren’t apart long enough for him to eat a sandwich, let alone travel all the way to Brooklyn to bed some woman. There had to be another explanation for the Brooklyn apartment, but even though my mind kept turning in circles like a neurotic dog, I couldn’t think what it was.

  Putting the rent receipts aside, I turned to the utility bills. Hugo had spent all of that summer we met in a friend’s guesthouse in Sag Harbor. His city apartment had stood empty, so the bills should have been minimal. And they were, all except the phone bill. In July and August, someone had made hundreds of dollars’ worth of long-distance calls to a number I recognized instantly as Hugo’s Sag Harbor number.

  • • •

  Teddy Pendragon came on Sunday afternoon, carrying a briefcase and a big bouquet of mums. He was especially resplendent today, in a fawn cashmere jacket, a red bow tie, and a walking stick that was pure affectation. I wore jeans and a Henley shirt, showing no more flesh, though a bit more face, than you’d find in a Saudi souk. Not that Teddy noticed; he was ogling the carton on the coffee table with a look that reminded me of Brer Rabbit eyeing the briar patch. For some reason I never understood, Uncle Remus’s Tales of the South had been the only book in my grandmother’s house, apart from the Bible, so I pretty much knew it by heart before I was seven.

  “Is that for me?” he asked.

  “Yes. You can keep them; they’re photocopies.”

  “Bless you, Jo.”

  I managed a smile. I’d been anticipating this visit with the same blend of determination and fear I felt on my annual excursions to the dentist. Rooting through Hugo’s papers had stirred up questions and fractured memories. After photocopying the papers, I’d stacked the copies in a cardboard box and carried them out of the office; and as I did, I had a sudden, visceral memory of doing the same thing once before. Hugo had just come back from Sag Harbor, and I was moving in with all my worldly possessions: a small suitcase full of clothes and toiletries and half a dozen boxes of books. As I began to settle in, I found empty drawers waiting for me, but also bits and pieces left behind by other women. I’d tossed them all in a cardboard box, covered the box with a lid, carried it out to the trash chute, and tossed it.

  I put the flowers in water and offered Teddy a drink. He said he’d have what I was having, swallowing his disappointment when that turned out to be coffee. We sat in the living room and I asked him how the book was coming along.

  “Really well,” Teddy said. “Of course, a lot of the research was done in advance for the Vanity Fair piece. Now I’m focusing on the books.” He was rereading them in chronological order and had to come see them as falling into three periods, as distinct as Picasso’s Blue, Rose, and Cubist periods. The first was Hugo’s angry-young-man phase: raw talent fueled by Irish working-class rage. In the second period, he abandoned the conventionally structured plotting of his earlier work to experiment with language and perspective, layering one version of a story over another. And in the third, which Teddy called the culmination, everything came together: the intense narrative drive, the passion, the technical virtuosity, and, for the first time, female characters that equaled the males in complexity and gravitas.

  “Those,” Teddy said, “were the books he wrote while married to you. I suspect that you were not only his editor but the model for those characters.”

  “Aha! A theory is born.”

  “I’m not married to the period idea, but it is a starting point for exploration.”

  “With three trailheads.”

  “Nicely put. I may have to steal that.”

  So he is a writer after all, I thought. It reminded me of the time I saw a Chihuahua trying to mount a Lab and realized that they’re all just dogs, regardless of breed. I warmed toward him, just a degree or two. Then Teddy took a small recorder out of his briefcase and placed it on the coffee table.

  “But I didn’t come here to talk about Hugo’s work,” he said, “so much as his life. Specifically, his marriage. I need to know more about you, Jo.”

  “You know all that.”

  “Next to nothing. And no one I’ve talked to, which by now is lots of people, knows anything about your life before Hugo.”

  I told him what I’d told the police. “My life’s an open book.”

  “Highly abridged,” he said, “and one senses that the story’s in the gaps. Tell me about your childhood.”

  I stared into my mug and within the dark liquid a room took shape, a room with a cast-iron, wood-burning stove, a cottage sink with a drainer beside it, a padlocked refrigerator, a chipped linoleum table, pegs on the wall for a flyswatter and a switch. A mutinous spirit rose up in me. What business is it of his, this pompous little mole? But Chris’s eulogy came back to me, and I thought of all the doors I’d shut and locked behind me. I wanted to be one person again, like Rowena was.

  I was born in Memphis, I told Teddy. When I was three, my parents died together in a car crash. Their names were Jesse and Rose LeBlanc. I believe my father was Cajun, although I don’t know for sure. At the time, he was working as a studio musician, backing up bluegrass and Cajun singers, but when he first met my mother, he was traveling with an itinerant revival meeting. A couple of preachers, father and son, had set up a big tent near the crossroads of three little towns in the hills of southwest Virginia, and all day long for a week, they took it in turns to preach fire and brimstone. It was a good show. There was snake handling and speaking in tongues and much laying-on of hands, not all of it in the tent. At night there was gospel music under the stars.

  Jesse LeBlanc was one of the musicians. He preferred the fiddle, but he could play guitar or banjo or just about anything with strings. He was there for the music an
d the money; the preaching just rolled right off his hide, and that was something he and my mother, whose name was Rose Cunningham, had in common. Rose, who to her mother’s despair was not saved and cared more about this world than the next one, attended the revival that first night only because her mother made her.

  Bertha Cunningham would have cause to regret her insistence. At the end of the week, Jesse quit the revival, and my mother ran away with him. He was twenty-three, and she was seventeen. They married in Memphis. Rose never went back to Hoyer’s Creek, and from the day she left she had no contact with my grandmother. Bertha had no idea she was a grandmother until the day the sheriff came knocking at her door.

  My grandmother did her Christian duty; she took me in. But no power in heaven or on earth could force her to love me or regard me as anything other than a burden and a trial. I never had a kind look or word from her, never a word of praise. She told me there was bad blood in me, swamp-nigger blood. She said my mother was a whore.

  My grandmother did not hold with sparing the rod. For ordinary infractions she used a paddle, but for special occasions there was that switch kept handy in the kitchen. The worst offenses were sassing her, taking the Lord’s name in vain, and telling stories.

  “Which is ironic,” I said to Teddy, “when you think of who I married.”

  Teddy straightened the recorder and when it couldn’t get any straighter, he picked a tiny bit of lint off his jacket. Finally he said, “I’ve been to Hoyer’s Creek; through it, more accurately. Real Dorothea Lange country. What I can’t fathom is how you got from there to here.” His wave took in the large, high-ceilinged living room, the park views outside my windows, the city beyond.

  “I ran away, like my mother before me.”

  “But you didn’t elope, and you didn’t join the army, which is how most folks who want out get out. You went to Vassar. How would it even occur to you? It’s a whole other world, isn’t it?”