I fiddled with my own straw, unsure how to react to any of this.
“Bear didn’t take me with him, see. I told him not to. I told him I had enough status in the company—but I was wrong. When you’re on top you always think you’re going to stay there forever, that there aren’t sharks circling beneath. But I guess Barron knew about those sharks. The one thing he knew about was the sharks. He could be one himself when he needed to.”
“You didn’t want to go back to writing?”
“Nah, I felt I’d spent my chance by that point. I think I had one lucky break in me—and it went to St. John. There wasn’t going to be another. I got by after that. I moved over to another house for a little while and convinced St. John to come do a book for us. But by that point things were different. He was a superstar and I felt spent. I had had enough of horror. It was the ’80s. Despite everything it still felt as if the world was falling apart. There was the banking crisis, the AIDS epidemic. The people weren’t reading the news though. They were reading Bear.
“I did write one more story though. I tried to sell it myself but no one would buy it. Victor Wolf had been forgotten. Bear liked it though. And he knew I was in danger of losing my mortgage. So he sent it out for me, under his name. When it sold to the New Yorker—his first real literary sale though God knows he deserved others and got them eventually—he gave me the profits.” Her smile then was bitter. “I was grateful, you know. At the time he said it was only fair. I had made his name after all. I should get the use of it whenever I wanted.
“And I was grateful at the time. I kept my brownstone, paid it off eventually. When he sold the collection he gave me the whole advance. For a while I thought about going back to Ohio but I still couldn’t admit to my parents I hadn’t been able to last in New York. So instead I stayed.”
She stared at me for a moment or two after that and I could feel the cool ripple of sadness passing over me like a shadow.
“Someone told me you died,” I said, just to break the spell of her silence.
“Of the two of us, Barron was always the shark, you see?“ she told me wryly, “No, I didn’t die. I just learned something he never figured out: how to stay alive when you stop moving.”
That evening I collected my things from Hotel 31.
Benny offered to drive me to the airport but I told him he didn’t need to do that. I could get a taxi. The university had given me a budget for that. When he said okay it sounded like there was relief in his voice, and I wondered if that meant Emmanuel was home. Or maybe it was just that he didn’t want to get so close to the airport. There were regular protests still going on. People were angry about the deportations but no one knew how to stop them.
“Did you get what you wanted from Lily Argo?” Benny asked me. “She wasn’t just a ghost?” I told him I hadn’t really known what I wanted but I was certain, despite everything, I had met Lily Argo. But probably I was going to scrap the story. My Head of Department would be pissed but that was how these things went. Sometimes you thought you had something and you didn’t.
What she had told me felt too invasive to write about. What I had wanted, I realized, was not just her story but a glimpse of her secret self. I didn’t have a right to it. And that’s what had made me want it even more. Maybe we all have a secret self: some of us keep it chained in the basement of our minds while others like St. John learn how to feed it.
“Well,” he said, “it was good to see you anyway. Give my love to Luca. You tell him to take proper care of you.”
I promised I would.
While I waited for my flight to board I watched the news. We were all watching the news. We couldn’t help it. Tense security officers patrolled the hallways with machine guns at the ready, just in case. There were fewer travelers those days, fewer coming in, fewer getting out. But I felt a kind of solidarity with the others as I eyes were glued to the screens. We were liminal people moving from one reality to another. We were going home.
So we watched the footage of explosions in Yemen. Pleas from refugees who had found themselves trapped in abandoned tenements, living in filth. It was only when I saw the story about the bomb that had gone off on a train along the Victorian Line that I remembered Luca still hadn’t called me back.
I was watching them pulling survivors out of the rubble and the blood gelled to ice in my veins. I couldn’t move. It had happened then. It had happened. Time seemed to slow. Luca mostly worked from Cambridge but the NGO had offices in London. He went there from time to time. When had I last heard from him? Who could I call to check? But by that point the attendant was calling me forward. I didn’t move. She called me again and the people behind me began to murmur. I must have had a dazed expression on my face, a look they didn’t like. The attendant called me a third time as an officer drew near. It was only then I was able to move. I showed them my passport and made my way down the ramp.
Inside the plane most of the seats were empty. The air was canned, stale tasting in my mouth. I wondered if I might have a panic attack but out on the runway I didn’t dare check my phone again. The hostesses were murmuring to each other. I could tell they were twitchy. But I already a strange calm was taking hold of me—a sense of icy horror. There was something inevitable about what was happening. There was nothing I could do to stop it. Whatever had happened had happened.
And this feeling? It wasn’t the same as all those St. John books I had read. There I could find purpose, structure—meaning in all the bad things that had happened. But outside there was only chaos. The unraveling of beautiful things into violence. It signified nothing.
As the plane taxied down the runway I settled back in my chair and tried to sleep.
The Swimming Pool Party
Robert Shearman
Once in a while a memory of Max will pop into her head, and she won’t quite know what to do with it. Totally unbidden, and triggered by nothing in particular, and sometimes she won’t mind, she’ll let the memory play out like a little movie. That time, one Christmas, when they’d given Max his first bike—it had taken Tom ages to wrap it up, and once it was done it was just so obvious, the wrapping paper did nothing to disguise what was underneath at all; “We’ll have to do it again,” she’d said, “but this time we’ll put lumps and bumps in,” and Tom hadn’t minded, they’d done it again, together, and in the end the present for Max under the tree looked like nothing on earth, and certainly nothing like a bicycle; that Christmas morning they told him to save that present for last though he was itching to open it, and he wasn’t disappointed. Oh, she still remembers that exquisite look of joy and surprise on his face when he realized Santa had brought him the bike he wanted after all. Or—there was that memory of when they were on holiday, where was it, Cornwall? It was warm, anyway. And they were all sitting out in the beer garden, Max had a lemonade. There was a wasp. It landed on Max. They shooed it off, and the wasp went onto the table, and Tom upturned his empty pint glass and put it on top. And Max was crying, and she was suddenly so frightened—had he been stung? Where was he stung? Would he have an allergic reaction? But he wasn’t stung at all—“The poor buzzie,” he kept saying, “the poor buzzie.” The poor buzzie was trapped, flying around its beery prison looking for some way out, bashing its body against the sides of the glass. Max was howling now, he said, “Please let the buzzie out, it’s so scared,” and Tom took the glass away, and the wasp didn’t sting anyone, it flew off, and Max laughed, all tears forgotten, and went back to his lemonade.