“I want to finish my book,” he said, in a tense voice that still carried, I thought, the echoes of cell doors clanging shut.
“And you,” Professor Kennedy said, turning to face Dorrie, “Ms. Burke: what do you hope to gain?”
She shrugged, looked around the room uncomfortably.
“Let me tell you what you can gain from one another. Stories.” He coughed wetly, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Young writers—and you’re not all so young, but you are all young writers—love nothing more than to write about themselves. That won’t do. You need to broaden your palette. Each of you needs fresh material, and as it happens each of you has fresh material to give. Your life is intensely familiar to you, but to someone else? It’s an unfamiliar, untold story. So. I want you to pair up and learn each other’s stories, and then tell them. That is your assignment. Do it credit.” He looked down at the class roster on the table and began rattling off pairings in no apparent order, marking each name with a penciled ‘X’ in the margin as he went. “Ms. Waithaka, Ms. Gross. Ms. Fenner, Mr. Reynolds. Mr. Wessels, Mr. Breen.” And so on, through eight pairs until at last I was the only one left on my side of the table and Dorrie Burke was the only one left on hers. “Mr. Blake, Ms. Burke.” The professor slapped his palm down on the table. “That is all.”
Some nights later, when we were in our back booth at the West End, sipping our drinks as the clock crawled toward closing time, I asked him about his method and he smiled at me. “Ah, John, John. Who else was I going to give her to? Kurland? That would be like giving a steak to a Doberman. No, you, my friend, will treat her kindly; and perhaps, if we are fortunate, she will do the same to you.”
We sat down over dinner at Restaurant Dan, a 24-hour tempura shop on Broadway and 69th. She was as shy with me as she had been in the classroom and to fill the silences I found myself throwing questions at her as if I’d never left my old job. Where was she born? Philadelphia. How old was she? Twenty-three. Parents? Divorced. The answers came a syllable at a time, at first. But I persisted, gently, and bit by bit she started to open up. Any brothers or sisters? One sister, but she’d died when Dorrie was three. How had she died? Some sort of leukemia, apparently; Dorrie’s mother had never been willing to talk much about it. But her mother had somehow blamed her father for it, and that was when their marriage had started to come apart.
Where’d she gone to school? A semester at Moore College of Art and Design back home followed by two years at Hunter College in New York. Why had she come to New York? She’d wanted to work in fashion; fashion was in New York. Ergo. Did she still want to work in fashion? She blushed before answering this one, looked down at her plate and picked the batter off a fat slice of carrot with the point of her chopstick.
“You know what the closest I’ve come to working in fashion is? In five years?”
“What?” I said.
She shook her head and the slender smile that had crept onto her face faded. “It was at FAO Schwarz,” she said. “The toy store on Fifth Avenue? I worked as their fairy princess, greeting people as they came in. The costume—it was a Bob Mackie original, they hired Bob Mackie to design it for them. A gown and satin shoes and a tiara, and a wand; I even had a wand. Little girls would come in and they’d see me there and their little faces would light up, and sometimes they’d be scared to come near me. It was like I was the most beautiful thing they’d ever seen.” When she looked up, I saw that there was a film of tears in her eyes. “And then three o’clock would come and I’d take it off and change back into my jeans and walk out through the store, and on the way out I’d pass the afternoon princess wearing it and all the little girls would be looking at her like she was the most beautiful thing they’d ever seen.”
She dabbed at her eyes with a paper napkin, balled it up and tossed it on her plate.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“What for? Because I didn’t magically rise to the top of the fashion world on luck and looks alone? I never won the lottery either. Want to apologize for that?”
“No,” I said.
She shook her head. “Sorry.” And after the silence between us had stretched on for a bit she said, “I just don’t like talking about myself, I guess.”
“That’s going to make this assignment hard.”
“Well, half of it, anyway,” she said, and for the second time that evening she smiled. “So what did you do before you ended up working at Columbia? Let me guess. You were a talk radio host.”
“No.”
“Therapist?”
“No.”
“A priest?” We both smiled at this, and she leaned forward, closer to me. “You’re a good listener, John.”
“Want to guess some more?” I said.
“No,” she said. “I give up.”
“Well,” I said, “I was a detective. A private detective. It’s a good job if you want to learn how to listen to people.”
“A detective.”
“That’s right.”
“That sounds exciting.”
“It wasn’t very. A lot of time spent on the computer.”
“And listening to people.”
“Yes.”
“Did you help a lot of people?”
“Some.” Now I was the one doling out the one-word answers.
“Why’d you stop being a detective?” she said.
“Why’d you stop being a fairy princess?”
“I asked you first.”
I thought about it for a while. Finally I said, “A woman I’d loved died because of me, and another almost died. I couldn’t do it anymore.”
There was something in her face then, something sympathetic, something hurt in her that recognized the same in me. She looked in my eyes and held them and didn’t say anything and neither did I.
“Want to tell me about it?” she said.
I found that I did. But there are things you don’t say in a restaurant with bored waitresses standing around pretending not to listen. We paid the check, collected our coats, and started back toward the campus.
It was close to midnight, and we walked alone in the dark up Broadway. It was strangely silent, so that what few sounds there were—a single taxi whispering by on the street, a grocer at an all-night bodega scraping carrots for tomorrow’s salads—seemed like the ghosts of sounds, a lulling threnody.
I found myself telling her about Miranda, my girlfriend from high school, and the murder on the roof of the strip club. I told her about Susan and how she’d almost been killed, and I told her how it had ended, with both women’s blood on my hands. I told her more than I’d ever told anyone. I hadn’t realized how badly I wanted to tell it.
I felt tears start to come and I remember feeling grateful that in the darkness she couldn’t see them, this beautiful woman by my side, this stranger I was telling my secrets. But she must have heard it in my voice, because she stopped me and I felt her fingertips on my cheeks, and then I was in her arms and we were both crying for what we’d lost, what we’d been and were no longer.
“John,” she whispered in my ear, “I’ll tell you why I stopped being a fairy princess.”
“You don’t have to,” I said.
But she did. She told me why she’d stopped, and she told me what she’d become instead.
Dorrie died on a Sunday morning, some hours before dawn. Her landlord didn’t have a key to her top lock, so when the police came they had to break the door down. They found an apartment that was immaculate, as though it had been put in order for the benefit of visitors. Nothing was out of place: not a dish in the sink, not a piece of clothing on the carpet. There were some things missing, but they had no way of knowing that.
The police found the apartment this way because that’s the way I left it. I did have a key to her top lock, had had one for months.