“I’m going to eat my sandwich,” Marcus said. He’d drained his cocktail and the ocean began to take on a wavy shimmer. He needed food.
“Okay,” Winnie said. “Enjoy.”
“Aren’t you going to eat?” he asked.
“I’ll wait until later.”
In just three days, Marcus had learned what this meant: Winnie would let her sandwich sit for another hour or two, then throw it away, claiming the mayonnaise had gone bad.
“You know why you’re so skinny, don’t you?”
Winnie didn’t respond.
“Because you don’t eat. If my father had to sit here and watch you waste a sandwich with turkey on it that costs, like, ten dollars a pound, he’d throw a French fit on your ass.” Marcus took a lusty bite of his sandwich. Even the food here tasted better. These sandwiches he’d been eating, for example. The bread was homemade, the smoked turkey was real turkey, not some white meat paste that was processed to taste like turkey, the lettuce was crisp, the tomato ripe. Beth used gourmet mustard. It was so superior to any sandwich that could be purchased in Marcus’s neighborhood or in his school cafeteria, that it was as if he’d been eating cardboard and ashes all these years and only now had stumbled upon actual food. “I mean, really,” Marcus said. “Why don’t you eat? Do you have some kind of problem? There was a girl at my school who had anorexia. She walked around looking like she had AIDS or something.”
“I don’t have anorexia,” Winnie said. “And I don’t have AIDS.”
“But you look like a skeleton. I haven’t seen you eat the whole time you’ve been here.”
“I eat when I’m hungry,” she said.
Marcus finished the first half of his sandwich, then wished he’d saved some of his cocktail to wash it down with. He eyed Winnie’s cocktail. She’d give it to him if he asked her for it. Then he remembered that Beth had slipped two bottles of Evian into their beach bag. That woman was improving in his eyes. Marcus drank one of the bottles down to the bottom. He felt much, much better.
“There are people in Queens, you know, and the rest of New York City, who don’t eat because they can’t afford to.”
“I’m well aware of that, thanks,” Winnie said. “I do my part to feed the homeless.”
“Do you?”
She sat bolt upright. “For your information, I gave my lunch to homeless people every day this spring.”
“Good for you,” Marcus said. He believed her. Although he’d only known Winnie for three days, he could tell that was exactly the kind of thing she would do. She loved charity cases. Him, for example. “But you should take care of yourself while you’re at it.”
Winnie stood up and her sweatshirt dropped to her waist. She put on her sunglasses, snapped up her towel and headed up the stairs without a word. Marcus had pissed off his handmaiden by telling her the truth. She looked like a skeleton. If she didn’t start eating soon, she was going to make herself sick.
Well, fine then. Marcus concentrated on his sandwich. Actually, it tasted better now that he was alone. He noticed that Winnie had left her sandwich behind, and since there was no hope that she’d ever eat it, and since the rum made him extra hungry, he finished that one, too, and drank the second bottle of Evian, and while he was at it, polished off the remains of Winnie’s cocktail. Then he lay back on his blanket and listened to the sound of the ocean. It was almost pleasant enough for him to forget about his worries. His mother. The photo of Candy, all covered up except for her shiny black shoes. The unwritten book. The tactile memory of five crisp hundred dollar bills that his editor, Zachary Celtic, handed him on the day they sealed the book deal with a handshake. Zachary gave him the cash with the understanding that at the end of the summer Marcus would have fifty pages to show him, and an outline for the remainder of the book. Marcus spent the money in less than a week, buying items for his trip to Nantucket that he’d hoped would convince the Newtons that he wasn’t a charity case after alclass="underline" the all-wrong leather bag, the uncomfortable dock shoes, the portable CD player. The best thing Marcus bought was his white shirt. He’d taken the subway into Manhattan to buy it-at Paul Stuart, where a young German woman waited on him as though he might pull a gun on her at any moment. He charmed her, though, and by the end of the transaction, she suggested the monogram and threw it in for free.
Now that the money was gone (there had been some idiotspending, too: two or three meals at Roy Rogers, a ten-dollar scratch ticket, a bouquet of red roses for his sister LaTisha as an apology for leaving her alone with their father all summer), Marcus felt an urgent pressure to write. But yesterday afternoon when he’d closed the door of his white bedroom and sat on the bed to write, he couldn’t think of how to start. Zachary Celtic had spewed forth all sorts of garbagy ideas when he pitched the book, but Marcus pushed those phrases from his mind, leaving a blank slate. And so instead of writing, he’d spent ninety minutes doing a line drawing of what he saw out his window-low lying brush, a rutted dirt road, the pond in the distance.
Zachary Celtic was a friend of Nick Last Name Unknown. Nick was the boyfriend of Marcus’s English teacher, Ms. Marchese. Nick showed up at school a lot wearing gold rings and suits paired with shiny ties, and since no kid at Benjamin N. Cardozo High School was truly stupid, it was agreed upon that Nick was in the mob. For this reason, everyone behaved in Ms. Marchese’s class and everyone, even the absolute lowlifes and basketball players, turned in the assignments. Marcus liked English class anyway, and he liked Ms. Marchese, because she was the only teacher whose attitude toward Marcus didn’t change after the murders, and plus, she was always telling him he was a gifted writer. So his guard wasn’t up like it should have been, maybe, when Nick stopped by at the end of class one day with a better-looking guy in a better-looking suit and Ms. Marchese said that the second guy was a book editor from Manhattan and he was there to talk to Marcus.
Since October seventh, Marcus had fielded hundreds of phone calls from reporters, producers, publicists-from New York One, the New York Post, the Daily News, The Geraldo RiveraShow. Everyone wanted the inside scoop on his mother. She was a black inner-city woman who had made it as far as the Ivy League-how did she end up a baby killer? In response to all publicity, Marcus’s father had issued these directives. Politely decline, then hang up! If photographers come to the door, tell them through the chain that they will never get a picture inside the apartment. But something about the phrase “book editor in Manhattan” got past Marcus’s radar. He thought, stupidly, that this guy was interested in him for a reason other than that he was a murderer’s son. He thought the editor had shown up at their high school in Queens wearing a thousand-dollar suit (which, when Marcus asked, Zachary told him he’d gotten at Paul Stuart) because Marcus was a gifted writer.
Nick and Zachary Celtic invited Marcus to lunch. Although it was two-thirty and Marcus had already eaten lunch in the cafeteria at noon, he agreed to go along. They went to a diner down the street from the school, and after Nick made it clear that Zachary was picking up the check, Marcus went crazy ordering a roast beef club, fries with gravy, chocolate milkshake, lemon chiffon pie. Zachary asked Marcus all kinds of questions about how he liked school (fine), why he liked English class (liked to read), who his favorite writers were (Salinger, Faulkner, John Edgar Wideman). It was as Marcus was slipping into a food coma induced by this second lunch that Zachary announced that he was the true crime editor at Dome Books and that he wanted to offer Marcus thirty thousand dollars to write a first-person account of life with his mother, before and after the murders.