A Bigamist's Daughter (5 page)

She went into her bedroom, closed the wide white door between us. When I turned off the light, and then the television, the room was completely black and the sounds outside, the crickets, the ocean, what might have been a buoy, seemed to rise. In bed, I tried to think of this as my mother’s house, and thus, in some way, my house too, but I was unable to bring any of it together.

I felt for my ring and realized I could have been anyone, anywhere, starting from scratch, from the womb, from the gates of Ellis Island, surrounded by strangers.

I’d taken the ring off on the train that morning. I’d made a ceremony of it. As soon as my suitcases were stored above my head and my two coats arranged neatly on the seat beside me and the train had started moving with the rhythm that was to keep me feeling strangely renewed and unfamiliar to myself the entire way to Boston, I walked back to the club car and bought a small bottle of wine. Back at my seat, I’d cracked it open, or at least twisted the cap until the plastic seal broke
with a pleasant cracking sound, and poured half of it into my clear plastic cup. I took a quick sip of the wine and put the cup on the white tray before me.

I twisted the ring on my finger, brought it up to my knuckle, thinking things like: to love, honor, cherish. To love forever, despite everything. To say this is the one I love, will always love. Everything will change but this, in me. Trying to bring tears to my eyes. But I could remember only that it was a ring I had bought for myself, one of many on a tall, black-velvet finger in a Buffalo jewelry store, on sale. I’d worn it home and waited for Bill to notice it the way Lucy would have waited for Ricky to notice her false eyelashes or blackened front teeth: fearful of his reaction, aware of my own foolishness. And when I’d explained, so coolly, that I thought it would save me a lot of explanations, he’d merely shrugged, although months later he said that he’d noticed a lot of women wearing them, women who, like me, were merely living with someone, not interested in marriage. He said there was something dishonest about it.

I pulled the ring off my finger and saw the white band of skin, the ghost of a ring, it had left there. I put the ring on the tray, took a large swallow of wine, let the tears fill my eyes. It was a lovely moment of pale light and changing colors, of the train’s sad attempts at homeyness: the carpeted floors, the soft blue-and-gold chairs, the headrests like expensive paper towels. I looked at the gold ring on the white table, the clear glass with the pale-yellow wine, the green bottle beside it, all of it trembling, swaying with the motion of the train. Perfectly, the train whistle blew.

I looked at the white scarlike mark on my finger and I took another sip of wine, quickly, like a sad woman, a woman with a broken marriage. I lifted the ring, held it in my fist, a final embrace, and then slipped it into the small ashtray at my side.

I drank some more wine and imagined the reaction of the
conductor, the engineer, the black man who cleaned the trains, whoever would find it. I imagined him taking it home, standing in his small kitchen with the ring in his palm like a beautiful dead bird, his wife drying her hands on her apron, looking at it shaking her head, and then turning back to the stove and wondering what would be the fate of her own worn band; his children peering over his thumb, wanting to ask if they can have it, the boys to store it with their foreign coins and two-dollar bills, the girls to slip it on their own fingers, to pretend it is a gift from their own imaginary lovers.

Bill had once accused me of inventing my life, re-creating it, making it into a movie or a play. He’d said he knew me too well to provide a gullible audience.

“Your mother made a new life for herself,” Ward had said in the car. “When she came here, she started over.” Among strangers, he should have added, gullible strangers willing to believe in tragedy and romance, a hard life in a comfortable home with fake black shutters and a wrought-iron porch. A marriage ending sadly on a train to Boston.

Two weeks later, I left my mother’s house for my own apartment in New York.

Chapter 3

Tupper Daniels’ novel had no ending. The last page ended with half a sentence in the middle of a paragraph in what seemed to be the beginning of a chapter. The night before, she had read the first twenty pages and then, abandoning her resolve to read the whole thing, scanned the rest and skipped to the end, where she discovered there wasn’t one. She’d drunk half a bottle of wine by then, so she gave up and went to bed. If she’d been looking for her father (as she’d been told by books and articles and countless young men that she should be), she hadn’t found him in Tupper Daniels’ long, complex sentences.

Now he smiles at her across her desk when she asks if perhaps there are some pages missing.

“No,” he says, shaking his head a little. “It has no ending.”

“I see.” She looks down at the manuscript, straightens its pages. “You don’t want it to.” She tries to make it sound like both a statement and a question. If he tells her this is his own unique literary device, she wants to be able to say that’s what she thought it was—how marvelous, what a fascinating idea.

He makes his pale eyes wide, raises his eyebrows. “No,” he says, “I want it to have an ending. I just haven’t written it yet.”

She leans back. She can’t do a page count and put a price on
the contract until she knows how long it’s going to be. “Well,” she says hesitantly, “are you writing the ending now?”

He is sitting back in his chair, his elbows on the armrests, his legs crossed. Today he is wearing lime-green corduroy pants and a yellow sweater; his blue blazer is draped over his lap. He seems to be making a great effort to seem casual. “No,” he says, matter-of-factly. “I didn’t tell you I hadn’t written the ending because a couple of other publishers refused to look at it until it was finished.” He leans forward, crossing his arms over his crossed knees. “You see, I’m stuck. I don’t know where to go with it. It’s the same thing I told the other publishers: If I could just get some help on it, just a good editor to work with me, I know I could finish it.” He smiles at her again, coyly, drawls: “Have
you
got any suggestions?”

She smiles back at him. This is a new one. Many authors ask for help but none of them really want to be told anything, except that everything they’ve written is perfect. “I guess I have a few ideas,” she says. Mr. Owens: “Sweetheart, you never tell an author no. You say maybe, perhaps, we’ll see, let me look into it for you, but never no.”

Tupper Daniels sits up on the edge of his chair and slaps her desk. “Good,” he says. “I knew I was doing the right thing coming to Vista. I knew if I had a publisher behind me I could get the thing finished.” His forehead seems to sink a little. “That is, if you’re willing to publish me.”

“Oh, yes,” she says, on safe ground again. “I loved the book. You have a wonderful style, it echoes some of our greatest Southern writers.” She pauses, looks thoughtful. “But you know, it goes beyond them too. I honestly think your voice takes the Southern tradition a step further, into a new decade, so to speak. Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Mark Twain, were all Southern writers of their time. You, it seems to me, are a Southern writer for our time.”

He is holding his lips together as if his mouth contained some small animal struggling to escape. “And the story,” he says, looking at his hands, “do you think it moves well?”

“Beautifully,” she tells him, nearly whispering the word. “I was up all night with it, couldn’t put it down. Your character, Beale, the polygamist, is so fascinating, not only for what he does, but for what he represents—as a symbol of life’s transience, unpredictability.”

Tupper Daniels is so elated his cheeks seem to bulge. Were she to put a match to him, she’s sure he would explode.

“And the women,” she goes on, having fun now. “I’m amazed that a man can write about women with such sensitivity. Honestly, not since Henry Miller have I seen such understanding.”

He deflates a little. “Henry Miller?”

She laughs. She’s overdone it. “Miller? Did I say Henry Miller?” She searches her mind. “James. I meant Henry
James.”

He grins. “You were probably thinking of
Daisy Miller.”

“Yes,” she says. “Not since James have I seen women dealt with so well.”

His neck is flushed beneath the turned-up collar of his white alligator. She fully expects him to yell, “EEE-Ha!” but instead he cries, “How about lunch? I’ll even buy. My treat to you!”

She checks the clock. It’s only eleven-thirty, but her expense account is limited and a free lunch is a free lunch.

She puts on her jacket and picks up her purse. As they walk out the door, he puts his hand on her elbow. Ann peers up over the partition and Elizabeth waves and tells her she’s going to lunch. Ann winks. Bonnie, a folded red-and-white straw stuck like a thermometer into the corner of her mouth, scowls at Tupper Daniels as they leave.

In the elevator, they stand apart. She notices he is wearing
socks today, gray ones. He has his hands crossed over his fly. She wonders what he thinks the relationship between an editor and an author should be. At the third floor, a young Puerto Rican woman gets in. Elizabeth has seen her before, she works in the styrofoam factory in the building. She chews gum impatiently and dances a little as the elevator descends. Tupper Daniels glances at her from beneath his eyelids. Elizabeth wonders if she wears her bright green high heels while she makes styrofoam.

“Well,” Tupper Daniels says when they get outside. “You’re the New Yorker, where is there a nice quiet place?”

She looks up and down the street, as if deciding. The September air is cool, full of sun and grit. There’s a strong wind blowing in from the river and the street is filled with gray trucks. This far west, there are more parking garages than quiet restaurants.

“There’s a place down the block,” she tells him, shouting over the trucks. He puts his hand out for her to lead the way.

Inside at their table, he looks around and compliments the place as if she had decorated it herself. He likes the white tablecloths, the short oak bar, the bare floors, the ferns in the one small window. He likes the candlelight at lunchtime and the waiters who wear black bow ties and white bibs. He likes the wine and the bowl of black olives and celery sticks. She wonders if this is his way of repaying her for complimenting his book. She wonders how long he’s waited for such compliments.

“So,” he says, after having raised his glass and whispered, To a wonderful relationship. “How do you usually work with your authors? Should I come in every day, every other day? Do we have lunch together a couple of times a week?”

She takes a sip of her wine. It hadn’t occurred to her that he’d actually want to spend time with her. “Well, it mostly depends on what’s convenient for you,” she tells him, improvising.
“Maybe you should just write an ending, or a couple of endings and then show them to me.”

He nods and spits an olive pit into his cupped hand. “Well, I thought maybe we could just talk about it first. You know, kick some ideas around.”

“Fine,” she says, “if that will help.” She can’t have him in her office three or four times a week. “Why don’t we start right now?”

He laughs a little, showing his square smile. “Good,” he says. “You’re dedicated. That’s what I need. I’m a terrible procrastinator—like most writers, I’m told. If it had been up to me, we’d just sit here and get drunk and get to know each other.” He sits up, smoothing the white tablecloth before him, serious. “Okay. You said you had some ideas. Shoot.”

She wonders if he thinks she’s a bore. She sips her wine again. “Well, first I’d like to know how you’re thinking,” she tells him. “How do you see the ending?” A good move, she thinks, throw the unanswerable question back to the questioner, just like the teachers used to do in college. She wonders if she might have made a good real-life editor after all.

He raises his hands and makes a tight-lipped grimace. “I don’t see it at all,” he says. “Bailey, the man who lived in Gallatin, where I grew up, the one the book is based on, is still alive. As far as I know. I left town when I went to Andover and the next year my family moved back to my grandmother’s house in Monteagle, so I never heard very much about him after that. Except that his second wife, Luanne, died—which is already in the book—and then that he was found to be a bigamist, which I don’t want to include in the book because I don’t know how to write good courtroom drama. I’ve tried.”

She puts one of the black olives into her mouth and then wishes she hadn’t. It seems to make an awkward bulge in her
cheek and the harshness makes her tongue wrap around itself. It tastes salty, foreign. She sucks the pit as he goes on.

“I’ve even done some research. I called a few people I still know in Gallatin and asked about Bailey, but they couldn’t tell me anything new.” He pours her some more wine. “So I’m stuck. I guess the novel has no end because Bailey doesn’t seem to have one either.”

The waiter brings them their soup and Tupper says, “That looks good.” She slips her pit onto the white plate under the bowl. It’s cold cucumber soup, laced with a flavor like walnuts.