2. I'd Rather Eat Glass
THE DAY BEGAN with a proposal from my neighbor Jesús as I opened my front door to pick up the Times from the welcome mat that had come with the sublet. My eyes veered from the lead story to another I'd been following since the beginning, from the heat wave that had engulfed the city to my lawyer friend Evan Lambert's defense of another foreign nanny accused of killing another baby: a nineteen-year-old German girl who had allegedly shaken an infant to death in the Back Bay section of Boston. So the moniker the Back Bay Baby had entered the language. On the bottom of the front page was a story about the sleepiest presidential campaign in recent memory, festooned with the red, white, and blue banner that attempted to generate a spark of enthusiasm for ELECTION 2000. I started to back into my apartment when I heard a voice.
"Are you divorced yet?" It was Jesús, poking his head into the corridor as I skimmed Evan's strategy for defending the nanny.
"I signed the separation agreement a few days ago and sent it to my lawyer."
"Congratulations," Jesús said.
"That's one way of looking at it." He had seen me move in three months before and asked a few nosy questions, which I thought at the time would be neighborly for me to answer, not having lived in New York for the past four years, and welcoming the openness. It looked as if Evan's client was going to plead insanity, which might lead Congress to place more restrictions on all nanny visas.
"What's not to celebrate? You're free like a bird. When the divorce comes through, I know someone who wants to marry you."
I looked at him over the rim of the half-glasses I'd recently begun to need for reading. "Who might that be?" I wasn't aware we knew a soul in common, except the building's super, and he seemed an unlikely candidate.
"My Jaime."
"Your who?"
"My boyfriend. From Ecuador. He needs a green card." He went on to explain that Jaime sweeps hair from the floor at Bumble & Bumble, and that they'd pay me five thousand dollars. When I wrinkled my face, thinking not of the sum, which I could use, but of Daniel, whom I would marry tomorrow if we weren't both married to other people, Jesus said, "All right, seventy-five hundred and a perm."
"Warm, you're getting warm," I said, though of course I didn't mean it, and what I meant about marrying Daniel was not that I thought multiple orgasms could be the basis for a lifelong partnership, because even with him and his antidepressants, they don't last much longer than a bowl of chocolate mousse. What I meant was that his children were badly in need of a mother. The times I felt this most urgently, when the boys buttoned their shirts wrong and the girls forgot to put on underwear and matching socks, I often toyed with writing a note to them from their mother- Sugar plums, Dumplings, my four precious Vietnamese spring rolls: When we rescued you from the orphanage in your sad and beautiful country, this is not how I imagined the story would end-but I did not want to frighten them, or myself, with the depth of my longing or the eerie projection of their mother's. Unlikely doppelgangers, Blair and I, yearning to take proper care of the same four orphans, if only we could.
"I'll tell Jaime you're interested," Jesus said. "By the way, I saw your movie on video the other night. I didn't think it would have such a happy ending. For such a sad story."
"They changed the ending of the book when they turned it into a movie."
"What do you care, right? You must've made a mint."
"A very small mint, fifteen years ago."
"You still in touch with Whoopi?"
"No."
"So all you gotta do is write another."
"Yup, that's all. There goes my phone." It was the Eighth Deadly calling to ask if I'd consider ghosting another autobiography. "I've got my deadline on Lili." Today was the day I'd determined to get back to the manuscript, now that my separation papers were gone. "Actually, I've missed my deadline, but I intend to-"
"On who?"
"Lili Boulanger."
"Is that your French publisher?"
Sometimes I thought the Eighth Deadly played the rube only to get a rise out of me; other times I was convinced "Entertainment Tonight" was his principal frame of reference. And I knew I'd explained all of this to him before. "She was Nadia Boulanger's little sister, the first woman to win the Prix de Rome for composing, in 1913. She died five years later, at twenty-four, and Nadia dedicated her life as a music teacher to Lili's memory. My novel is about what would have happened if Lili had lived."
"Doesn't sound right for our list."
"I didn't think so. Whose autobiography do you want me to write this time?"
"Can't tell you."
"A Republican senator with AIDS?"
"That was in our spring catalog."
"Chelsea Clinton's jilted boyfriend?"
"Can you get to him?"
"Soon-Yi?"
"No such luck."
"Bruce Springsteen's plumber? Rudy Giuliani's priest?"
"I'm not asking you to sign a contract, Sophy. I'm asking if I can put your name on a list of writers who are available." I turned to the beautiful photograph of Lili that Daniel had given me and that hangs over my desk. Lovely Lili, with her big brown, heartbreak eyes; Lili, who would disappear at the age of twenty-four, unless I finished my novel and breathed decades of new life into her. But here I was, being offered the possibility of money, and I knew mine would run out in five or six months. I couldn't afford to say no so blithely to the Eighth Deadly. And ghosting happens to be something I'm good at. A kind of ventriloquism, a species of drag, out-and-out mimicry. But how low would I sink, and how often? Lili spoke to me from her place on the walclass="underline" Are you going to finish your novel about me, or are you going to take the easy way out again? Do you have your sights set on winning the Prix de Rome, as I did, or will you end up with your mongrel dog doing stupid pet tricks on David Letterman?
"Sure, put my name on the list," I said, though I hoped he wouldn't call for several months, long enough for me to tangle with Lili, to see how much farther we could take our duet.
When the phone rang the instant I had replaced the receiver, I hoped it was Will. I had called him the day before and left a message on his machine, the third or fourth, about the thousand dollars he owed me, reimbursements from our health insurance that he did not want to give me. But it was Daniel; he'd be over later, and then we would go to his house for dinner to celebrate the third anniversary of the children's arrival from Vietnam. He had ordered a cake in the shape of an airplane from Jon Vie. How had my day been so far? "Uneventful," I lied, "so far." I wasn't ready to re-enact my collision with the Eighth Deadly, and mentioning the marriage proposal was out of the question. He was so skittish about matters of the heart, at least where our hearts might overlap, that I didn't know whether he'd feel relieved or threatened to learn I might soon be unavailable. "I'm about to lavish my complete attention on Lili. What time will I see you?"
"The usual."
Our cinq à sept usually began at four, though he frequently jumped the gun, which was fine with me. The truth was that since I'd left Will, it was difficult for me to be alone. The truth was I sometimes woke up at three in the morning with my jaw clenched and the rest of me in a panic, my brain firing flares of self-doubt in the direction of Swansea. I knew Will would have me back. But even in the midst of the panic, that never felt like the direction I should be moving; it only felt familiar and safe.
I opened the top right-hand drawer of my desk and retrieved what there was of Lili. One hundred and thirty-seven typed pages, which ended in the middle of a long sentence I had not known how to finish for the last six months-about Lili's first visit to Las Vegas, where she saw Frank Sinatra at the Sands.