“That wouldn’t do it,” I said. “It would be some other way. I think she’s been buttering someone up, but who? Some big donor, maybe.”
“Ask the staff,” Jake said. “Butter them up.” Then he changed the subject: “I did hear something about London.”
“What?”
“Some rumor about the woman she lived with.”
“What woman?”
“That’s all I know,” he said. I could hear him shrug.
The next day the Wolverine was at her desk again. She sat hunched down over her laptop as if she were about to pick it apart and eat it. She was wearing her rodent expression, squinting at the letters, ticking at her computer. Which ones was she looking at? And what had she been doing with that young man heading for the staff room?
I was buddies by now with Chelsea, and one day I asked her about the forbidden files.
She nodded pleasantly. “That’s right. Not available.”
“Is there any chance of just seeing them?” I asked. “Not taking notes, just reading them?”
Chelsea shook her head. “Absolutely not. They aren’t even kept with the other files, so they can never be taken out by accident.”
I raised my eyebrows. “By accident! Does that ever happen?”
“It has,” she said, frowning. “It won’t with these. They’re kept in the staff office.”
I nodded.
“But I’ve seen other researchers go into that room,” I said.
“Not to look at the files,” Chelsea told me. “It would be for some administrative thing. Like checking the chronology of the listings.”
“Could I do that?” I asked. “Check the chronology?” I had no idea what that meant, which was so obvious that Chelsea didn’t answer, only frowned and shook her head.
What was in the sealed files? I tried to deduce the content from their place among the rest, but there didn’t seem to be a chronological gap.
At lunchtime each day the Wolverine would fold up her laptop and speed off, as though she were meeting someone. Of course we didn’t speak to each other in the research room, where the only sound was the quiet clack of keyboards, and we also didn’t speak to each other anywhere else. When we met in the hall we nodded as we passed.
One day she was there with another woman. This one was also short, but blond, with that slick streaked-hair-gold-earrings-fuck-you look, like she’s too good to bother letting you cross her retina. The two of them sat side by side at the table. The Wolverine was showing her things, and talking quietly. The next day the new woman appeared alone. I saw her at lunchtime, walking up and down outside, talking on her cell phone, and I realized, with a horrid thrill, that she was a hired assistant. I wondered again how much the Wolverine had gotten for an advance.
The letters to Ricks’s editor, William Jens, in the beginning of the seventies, were entertaining. Ricks hadn’t been part of the hippie crowd, but she’d been amused by it. She wrote to Jens about whatever she was working on, and talked generally about the literary world. It suddenly dawned on me that Coleman was a woman, not a man; it seemed more and more likely that Ricks had been gay. Toward the end of the decade I noticed that she began to seem uncomfortable talking about her work. When Jens asked her how things were going, instead of answering she’d deflect the question. At first she was breezy: I wish I knew! but then as time went on she sounded more serious: I don’t know. I don’t know when the next will appear.
The Wolverine and I continued to nod casually to each other in the halls. One day, in the ladies’ room, I came out of the stall to see her standing with her back to me at the sink. She was examining her chin in the mirror. I looked directly at her, but she didn’t meet my eyes, and I had the feeling she was deliberately ignoring me, she was consciously denying my existence in the world, as though I was invisible. I felt affronted, in a way that had nothing to do with our competition, and I think that in that moment, when she picked sordidly at her chin, her eyes nearly crossed in her effort to focus, our relationship turned.
That night I called Jake.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“Well,” I said. “I think I have a lead.” This was not strictly true, but now I was surer about Ricks being gay.
“You find out about London?” he asked, which was the question I didn’t want to hear. I didn’t want to leave the Beinecke, with its echoing stone courtyard and the secret societies standing guard around it. I didn’t want to leave the Wolverine panting over her laptop and slipping illicitly into the staff room. I didn’t want to leave her weaselly assistant. I had the feeling that if I left, something would go wrong.
“Not yet,” I said.
“When?” Jake asked.
“I’ll book a flight,” I said.
Two weeks later I was on the plane.
During the flight I finally read Ricks’s last book. I hadn’t wanted to read it before, but now I had to. I read it high over the Atlantic, turning the pages faster and faster out of distaste: it was awful. The story was about a young woman in an abusive relationship, but the insights were puerile and simplistic, and the writing was utterly clumsy and dead. The next day she woke up and sighed. It was time for some hard thinking... Billy gave her a heavy look, like a bulldozer. It was painful to see the name Alison Ricks on the cover. Where were those golden sentences, where was that shimmering light-filled prose? I wondered if this had been her first attempt at a novel, or something written at the end, when her mind was wandering. I put it away with distaste, and also with sorrow.
I’d gotten in touch with her estate, and they’d given me permission to come to the house. There was a housekeeper in residence, and I wondered if it was the same one I’d seen twelve years earlier. Twelve or eight?
At that same tall house in Islington I knocked on the door and stood waiting on the sidewalk. For a long time I heard nothing. The street was oddly empty, and lined with high dark trees. Finally I knocked again.
The door opened suddenly. An elderly woman stood inside. I’d never seen her before. She was my height, with wide shoulders and a big bosom. Her frizzy gray hair was cut short.
“Hello. Are you the writer?” She had a loud, wheezy voice, and a slightly cockney twang.
I said yes, and she smiled and stepped back.
“Welcome!” she said theatrically.
She took me back to the kitchen, where we sat at a small wooden table. She made us tea and I asked her about Alison Ricks. I started with the basics: her name, and how long she’d worked there. I like to ask simple, factual questions first. People are sure of the answers, which gives them confidence, and then, with any luck, they open up.
“My name is Eleanor Harkwood,” she said, “and I worked for Miss Ricks for thirty years. No, I lie, it’s a bit longer, really, as I worked part-time here before I worked full-time.”
I asked lots of questions: when had Miss Ricks moved here (1980, just before her time), how did she spend her days (working at her desk, reading, working in the garden), who were her friends?
“She had many friends,” said Miss Harkwood. “Many, many friends. All writer types, I think. Very intelligent people, they were.”
“And did she go out often? Or entertain?”
“She went out often, she loved it. She liked entertaining, they both did, but it was Miss Ricks who organized it. Miss Mays liked parties, but she didn’t do the organizing.”
“Miss Mays?” I said, my head down over my pad.