He must have encouraged her along the way, but it was difficult to remember how. Ellen’s writing initially seemed to have been like the hobbies she had adopted when their other two children had gone to college. Decoupage when Eliot left for Kent State, beading with Carrie’s departure for Vassar, and now this.
He had noticed how committed she was to her writing, sticking to a daily schedule of two hours every evening after dinner and Sunday afternoons. It had worked well for both of them. Charlie had spent many happy afternoons undisturbed, watching golf without the little shade of guilt he had occasionally felt in the past that his attention was being sought elsewhere.
Shortly before Tara was due to come home for her summer vacation, Ellen announced that she was taking a break for a few months and Charlie assumed she was finished with writing for good. The manuscript pages would be placed in a box in the attic, beside the table with the garish decoupage top gone wrong, once destined for their enclosed porch. He would not prod her to clear either one out. Watching the children leave had to have been harder for her than for him. She had spent so many hours with them, wiping noses, making doctors’ appointments, and responding to their emotional crises once they entered their teens. She had been the receiver of their confidences too. Their marriage had been traditional in that way. But he hadn’t shirked his responsibilities, he thought. He had tried to be close to the children, to explain practical things to them: how to change the oil in the car, manage their money, and choose a college. But they seemed to prefer the company of their mother, who was, admittedly, more patient.
He knew that they thought them old-fashioned. Carrie, especially, who had always been the most observant of the three; he remembered her as a baby sitting in her bouncy seat, gazing at him seriously for minutes at a time. She had even said as much during her summer break after sophomore year.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she had said. “I’m glad Mom was always there for us. But didn’t you two ever think of mixing it up a little?”
“It works for us,” Charlie had told her, shrugging, and Carrie did not pursue the conversation, although later the same year she started telling him he should check his privilege. Whatever the hell that meant.
The review of Ellen’s first book in the Clarkstown Gazette was practically a love letter. “Ellen Porter has produced a work worthy of serious attention. Could the next heir to Ruth Rendell live right here in town?” But the critic was a friend from church who liked to drop literary names and was seldom known to take a harsh view of any creative endeavor in her circle. This review notwithstanding, it came as a not altogether pleasant shock to Charlie when the same novel was praised by the Plain Dealer as “a remarkable debut, a slice of small-town Americana with a dark underbelly.” Charlie had made a bad joke about his own underbelly and Ellen had paused and given him an indecipherable look before offering up a perfunctory chuckle.
Apart from Ellen’s editor, no one had read the new book yet. Not even Charlie. Ellen was superstitious that way. She had kept the first book a secret too, up until the day the Book Nook had it in stock and she’d brought him in triumphantly to see the display the staff had created for their local author. Charlie was surprised to find that he was a little hurt, but was mollified after she told him, “I wanted it to be a wonderful surprise. I wanted to make you and the kids proud.”
He even played along.
“Can you believe it?” he asked the Johnsons at a dinner party they threw to celebrate. “Our Ellen. And she didn’t tell a soul! That’s not like her.”
Ellen’s face was flushed. It must have been the wine, which she seldom drank. He put his arm around her waist with what must have been a little too much enthusiasm, because he felt her flinch for a moment before she moved away.
Their friends knew they would have to wait to read the new book too. Ellen never revealed anything in advance and she never pushed them to buy it. “Come get it at the library in a few months,” she told them, though she knew that many of them would head to the bookstore as soon as it was in stock.
“Just tell us one thing,” Annie Johnson had called back over her shoulder as she was leaving the house the night before. Her face was animated — and looked almost greedy in the overhead porch light that illuminated the front walkway. “How does he die this time?”
Ellen had shaken her head and laughter had followed as the group scattered to their cars.
The question had become a joke among their friends and a minor obsession among her growing number of fans, after a reviewer used it as a headline. The murder victims were almost always men — often cheating husbands or lovers — and their deaths were always gruesome.
What had struck more than one interviewer was the seeming mismatch of author to content. Ellen, in her unremarkable clothes, with her kind pedantry when in her librarian mode — she particularly liked to talk to children about geography — wrote chillingly explicit murder scenes. There had been the unfaithful lover whose entrails had been lovingly arranged around a photo of the dead man and his betrayed partner. The injection of poison into the back of the hand of the cheating husband, exactly where the wedding ring had been removed before a liaison, and the electrocution in prison of one miscreant, cleverly planned by the brother of one of his victims. Some had thought the husband who died with a fork in his forehead, placed perfectly in the center, after the man had been shot twice directly into his heart, was too much. But the diehards loved it, and the blurb from a popular crime writer that appeared on the book jacket of that particular novel read “Stick a fork in it — Ellen Porter has done it again.”
There was more to the novels than these murders, of course, but Ellen’s descriptive powers were at their most vivid (“florid” prose, one unsupportive critic had noted) in these scenes. Blood flowed like raspberry syrup; an open eye stared glassily at detectives while the mouth of the dead man was frozen in a rictus of passion or terror; the color of the poisoned man’s skin recalled the yellowish-grey skies that one sometimes sees before a storm. It was those images her readers would refer to at signings as they eagerly offered up their copies to be inscribed. Ellen always used a red fountain pen and liked to shake it so that after the inscription, a few drops of ink appeared on the page like a bit of spattered blood. She made a ceremony of it, blowing lightly on the ink before closing the book and returning it to the owner.
Charlie didn’t read much fiction, and though he told no one, the bloodiest passages in Ellen’s books made him feel queasy. But he knew that some people’s taste ran that way and he understood the curiosity of Ellen’s readers. How much of the protagonist was Ellen and how much was a figment of her imagination? And he had seen some of the e-mails she received, most of them from women.
My husband was just like Bradley in Esther’s Last Stand, but instead of killing the bastard I divorced him. LOL KathywithaK.
And I feel like you really understand me, Sandee12 had written after Ellen had been interviewed on the Book Comer segment of AM Cleveland Live.