In the movies he would have seized her on that line.
“We could do that later,” he said. He came a step closer.
“This isn’t some joke, right?”
“No,” she said.
“Nobody knows where you are.”
“No,” she said. “I told you: I didn’t see any point in saying anything.”
“That the way you generally feel about stuff like this?”
She nodded.
“Yeah,” he said, coming close enough that he touched her. “I guess it figures that you wouldn’t have gotten where you are by being a dummy.”
18
ANDREW STEINBORN, ghostwriter of Puts and Calls for Fun and Profit, author of Mazie, the Mouse Who Came to Stay, and I Will Always Love You, the unauthorized biography of Dolly Parton, was in reality a novelist. He had completed his first, after his nonfiction achievements, while a student at Iowa; it concerned a talented, misunderstood man who never completed novels. It was taken to be comic by his professor, and after being stunned in the conference, Steinborn decided to go along with this notion. “Evelyn Waugh couldn’t have done these scenes better,” the professor said. “You’ve created a character who has no humanity, no humor, no saving graces — but I warn you, the reviewers are going to pounce because you’ve been so uncompromising.” The novel — the first Steinborn had finished, although he had worked on four others before he went to Iowa — was never published and never reviewed, though after a year of getting up at six to write for two hours before jogging and going to work, he had recently completed a novel called Buzz, which was about people at a fashionable resort in Southampton, as seen from the perspective of a mosquito.
Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, he was also waiting for the call from his agent to tell him the book was sold, so that he could use this good news to persuade Lillian Worth, the woman he loved, to marry him. She was a nurse who had quit her job at Mass. General and moved to Iowa to live with him his last six months there. Creativity was just in the air: she had written about a dozen poems. It was Andrew’s idea that she might put together a book of verse for the terminally ill and dying — a realistic yet inspirational, no-holds-barred book influenced by her reading of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her personal experience of watching people die. She thought of them as people who had died, not, as all her colleagues did, as patients who had passed. “Passed” seemed a silly euphemism; it carried with it, for Lillian, connotations of life being a long exam, and then at the end the payoff was death.
Lillian had moved back to Massachusetts a month before Andrew left Iowa. She was almost out of money, and the money he was inheriting wouldn’t materialize for two or three months. She had found out that she could get her job back at Mass. General, and as long as Andrew was now willing to move back to the East Coast, she thought that it made sense to leave early. Things had gone well in Iowa City — good but not great — and she thought he was being crazy when he talked about her departure as her “leaving him.” She was going back to find an apartment during the summer, before everyone got back into town in late August to start school; her friend had a lead on a railroad flat on a street behind Porter Square. She hoped that the apartment was as good as her friend made it seem. She was sure that if she and Andrew could live in a sunny, spacious apartment, many of the problems they had would disappear; it had been close quarters in the converted garage they lived in on a farmer’s property just outside the city.
Lillian had had no intention of seeing anyone else when she got back to Boston. When she told Andrew that, it was certainly the truth. He took her to the airport and they said goodbye. He liked public passion, and she was learning to tolerate it. He attracted a lot of attention even when they weren’t touching, because he dressed in amusing suits with boxy jackets and wide legged pants. In the winter he wore a fedora.
“Don’t leave me,” he said, clutching her to him at the airport.
“Shit, man, be cool,” a man who was stacking peanuts in a vending machine said.
Andrew loved it that the man had entered into their conversation. That was real life: just try to put that in a novel and have people believe it.
He kissed her passionately. “Never leave me,” he said.
“No. All right,” she said, putting her hands on his shoulders and trying to push him back. She was getting flustered. “I’ll call you tonight.”
“You’re the most beautiful girl in the world,” he said, kissing her across the forehead.
“Shee-it,” the vending-machine man said, slamming the door shut.
Andrew loved that.
Finally she got on the plane. About an hour into the flight, the man sitting across the aisle from her struck up a conversation. When he referred to Andrew, he called him “your husband.” She didn’t correct him. He didn’t seem to be flirting, but she was prepared. She had never found anyone on a plane attractive and wondered who all those stewardesses found to marry. It said something about planes that she never desired anyone when she was a passenger, but the thought had crossed her mind quite a few times in the hospital.
The man said his father was picking him up at the airport. He all but insisted that since where she was going was right on their route, she must come with them. His father: what could be the harm? As they waited for the luggage, he looked around for his father. “Maybe he parked out front,” he said. Their bags finally came out, and she followed him to the door. He didn’t seem to know what to do when he didn’t see his father’s car. “I’ll call him,” he said, “but you go ahead. Sorry it didn’t work out.” By this time she felt some loyalty to him. Where was his father? She stood by his bags while he went inside and phoned. He came back shaking his head. “He forgot. He just plain forgot,” he said.
The man’s name was Evan. He asked if she would like to share a cab. They waited in line for a cab. It was hot, and the heat was visible, waving up from the asphalt. They finally got a cab. Her back stuck to the seat the minute she leaned against it. They talked about Andrew’s comic novel. Evan smiled politely but he didn’t really seem amused. Perhaps, like any joke, it was better in the telling — or reading — than in paraphrase. She didn’t tell stories well. Andrew was a great storyteller, and being with him, she realized that her speech was never very exciting, that she didn’t say witty things, that her stories lacked punch lines. Evan had seemed interested in talking to her on the plane — it was just when she began telling him about the book that he began to lose interest. When the cab pulled up in front of Lillian’s apartment building, he offered to carry her suitcase, but she told him that she could manage with no trouble. He gave her his card. “Call if you have time for coffee or a drink,” he said. She felt awkward suddenly, and wondered if he did too. Walking up the front steps, she thought of her friend Anita’s “Isn’t She Lovely” test. The categories were often changed to protect the innocent. Sometimes Anita would just hum the first bars of the Stevie Wonder song and Lillian would find herself making up categories and scoring everyone from the man in the car next to theirs to the elevator operator. Anita didn’t change the pronoun when the test applied to men. One of the first judgments made was that they fit the category. Evan got a 9 for looks, a 2 for economically feasible (he was a carpenter) and a 10 for chutzpa (he kissed her before she got out of the cab, then sat back, smiling, and let her carry the suitcase, as she said she would).