The Last Girls (20 page)

She didn't need to go to graduate school anyway in order to finish her novel. Kenneth was the scholar, not she. She could keep her job and write on the side. She could write in the early morning and at night and on holidays. Actually, she ended up writing at work sometimes, too, behind the shelves in the big hospital basement where she filed patients' charts all day long; and because of this, she did not get angry when she'd come home on the bus well after five o'clock—sometimes it was actually
dark,
in the wintertime—to find Kenneth and his friends still smoking dope and listening to jazz and talking about literature in a frenzy (as if anybody cared) with no thought of supper.
She'd
have to go out and get supper, if they were to have any, sometimes just hamburgers from McDonald's, or macaroni and cheese out of a box from the 7-Eleven. Sometimes she'd get high, too, and then fuck him when his friends finally left.

Anna and Kenneth were thin, poor, and generally
wrecked
in those years. But she loved this heightened life unaccountably, as she loved Kenneth. What
was
it about him? For starters, he was a genius—everybody said so. Anna didn't even understand his field of study;
“deconstruction,” it was called. He was the hot new thing. Anna couldn't read a word he wrote.

At six feet six inches, with poor eyesight, Kenneth was so tall he was always tripping and stumbling over things or bumping into other things with his head. He had bleeding scabs. He was the most physically awkward man Anna had ever known, except in bed, where he was wonderful. He had pale gray eyes like Anna herself, but so huge and defenseless behind his thick glasses that to look into them made her weak with love. He called her “Anna,” with a broad
A.
He read Proust aloud to her every night they weren't stoned.

At the university, he won a teaching award, then a graduate fellowship, then published a paper on postcolonialism. He presented it at the MLA in San Francisco. At the hospital, Anna received a promotion, with supervisory duties and more money, only it didn't seem like much of a promotion since it was so demanding that she couldn't write on the job anymore.

“Take it—it'll only be until graduation,” Kenneth promised.

But after receiving the Ph.D. with highest honors, Kenneth was kept on by the department for another year, and then another. When Anna finally finished her novel, she didn't know what to do with it, so she wrote to Mr. Gaines asking for advice, but she never heard back from him. Miss Auerbach recommended an agent who took the book. The agent called Anna at the hospital to say that she loved it, that it was “fabulous.” Anna wondered if the agent had read the same book she had written which was, she knew, depressing, like a lot of her stories rolled into one. Or like a landslide, like the slag heap which slid down the mountain and covered nine houses in the mining town in the book.

She bought champagne on the way home.

“Great.” Kenneth, usually so intense, exhibited a notable lack of fervor. “To you.” He raised his glass.

“What's the matter?”

“Nothing's the matter. What do you mean? Down the hatch!” Kenneth had never said “down the hatch” before.

Anna eyed him suspiciously. “Honey . . .” she said.

“It's okay,” he said. “Congratulations. Only . . .”

“Only what?”

“What name are you going to publish under?”

“Well, I hadn't thought . . . Anna Trethaway, I guess. I mean, that's my name.”

“I should think you'd want to keep your own name.”

“Anna Todd? What's wrong with Anna Trethaway? Are you
ashamed
of this book or something? You haven't even read the last chapter or that revised middle section.”

“No, it's just . . . I just . . . well, surely you understand, Anna, it's a little embarrassing for you to publish a book before I do. Why don't you use your own name?”

“But people would know anyway. I mean, our friends would know . . .”

“Not necessarily,” Kenneth said.

“
Of course
they would! There'd be reviews, and interviews . . . and we'd tell them, too, wouldn't we?
Kenneth—
”

“Fuck it. Of course. Just fuck it. I'm sorry.” Kenneth put his glass down on the telephone table so hard that it tipped over, spilling several phonebooks and the Rolodex address file onto the floor. And then he was gone, leaving the door wide open. Wintry wind rushed all around Anna as she tried to gather up the cards from the Rolodex. Sirens wailed from the police station. Finally Anna stood up and slammed the door. Then she sat down on the couch—that same tacky couch Kenneth's parents had given them years before—and took a drink of champagne straight from the bottle. She thought she ought to call somebody with her good news. She looked through the cards in her hands, almost all of them Kenneth's friends. She should
call up Baby, everybody had thought Baby was so goddamn talented. And she ought to call up Harriet and Courtney, too.

But she won't. She'll finish this champagne and then she'll drink some vodka from the freezer where Kenneth puts it now to keep it cold for the martinis which he has taken to drinking lately, ever since he got his Ph.D., and then she'll drink some more vodka, and then she'll throw up and be sound asleep when Kenneth gets home.

The next day she will throw up again, and the following day. But even when she is sure she is pregnant, even after trying to get pregnant again for so long, she won't tell Kenneth. Nor will she show him the letters from the publishers, which say “too raw” and “not commercial” and even “Since Miss Todd is undeniably talented, perhaps she should consider writing about a better class of people.” Anna will work on at her hospital job, typing theses and dissertations at night for extra money. Kenneth has to have a new suit and a root canal. She's waiting for him to apologize, which he never does. Instead, he buys the suit and flies all over the country, interviewing for jobs. He does not take her with him. He does not fuck her when he comes home; he says he is too depressed. The whole process of applying for jobs is so demeaning.

The night he came back from Chicago, she was sitting in the dark in their tiny living room, watching for him out the window.

“Hi,” she said when he opened the door. She had on his soft old wine-colored flannel shirt which smelled like him, kind of peppery somehow.

“Anna! I thought you'd be asleep.” He looked flustered, exhausted, wearing the new suit and a bottle-green trench coat she'd never seen before. The streetlight came in the window on his anguished face.

“Nice coat,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“So, did you get the job?”

“I don't know yet. You know that. I told you how it works.”

“Kenneth, I'm not going, am I? You're going, but I'm not.”

He sank to the floor by her feet, face in her lap, sobbing. “I'm sorry,” he said over and over again. “I'm just so sorry.”

Anna twisted her fingers in his wiry dark hair and looked out the window where sure enough, another siren went off before long and a cop car shot away from the curb, tires squealing. Danger was everywhere. But the thing was, she really loved him. It was like her love was something independent of herself that had taken on a life of its own and grown larger and larger with time, like the baby which she was carrying. It didn't matter if Kenneth was worthy of this love, nor if he loved her. Her love was beyond all that. For Anna knew, even in that moment, that she was privileged to be such a lover, that she was stronger and greater than he.

Kenneth knew it, too. He packed his clothes the next day and moved in with the other girl. After a week or so, Anna realized that all those friends in the Rolodex really
were
Kenneth's. She had been too busy putting him through school to make any, except for the girls in her filing unit at the hospital, of course, who were gratifyingly furious, hatching wild revenge plots.

“I know where we can get some
E. coli,
” little Barbara volunteered. “I'm not kidding, either. All you have to do is put it in his yogurt.”

But Kaye held out for arson, which would kill
her,
too.

Anna had to laugh, shaking her head.
She
wasn't even attractive. Anna had already driven over there and parked in front of the apartment.
She
was tall and thin and black-haired, like Olive Oyl, and looked even more depressed than Kenneth. Her field was eighteenth century.

Somehow it seemed inevitable to Anna when the agent wrote saying that much to her regret, she was unable to place this novel which was finally, she felt, “too disturbing,” but she would be willing to see any future efforts from Miss Todd.

“Kiss my ass,” little Barbara said.

“But you know,” Cindy spoke up timidly, “maybe you ought to listen to her, Anna, and try something different, something romantic, something people really want to read, especially since you're going to have to support yourself entirely for a while”—and she didn't even know about the baby—“unless you want to work here for the rest of your life.”

All the girls groaned.

“Like what?” Anna felt wild and strong, open to anything. She knew she would have a girl.

“Like
this
.” Cindy handed her a paperback named
Mortal Passions,
featuring a bosomy girl on the cover, running through a graveyard with a castle in the background. “No, it's
good,
” Cindy insisted over the general laughter. “I'm not kidding, just read it, you'll see, it'll make you feel
so much better
. . .”

These words echoed in Anna's head all the way to South Carolina where she planned to live on one of the barrier islands while she waited to have her baby. She'd chosen this location on a whim, having read about the area in a travel article. She read
Mortal Passions
in a motel room in Cheraw, South Carolina. She was not worried about being followed; she knew that Kenneth would feel too guilty to see her again. She had enough money for a while. She'd cashed in their joint bank account and taken their car and one small print she'd always liked, of the Blue Ridge Mountains around Linville Gorge where they'd camped on their honeymoon. On her next honeymoon, Anna vowed, there would be no camping.

Mile 437.2
Vicksburg, Mississippi
Monday 5/10/99
0500 hours

H
ARRIET SITS OUT
on the little balcony in her nightgown watching the river stream past, dark at first, then that pale ghostly luminescence as dawn comes near, so you can just barely tell the water from the tree line from the sky. She's all wrought up. She feels like she never even slept, though that can't be right, can it? A person
has
to sleep. She has read that a lot of times you're actually asleep, lightly, even when you think you're not. She hopes that's true. She remembers how Baby used to stay up for days on end sometimes. Harriet's dreams—or memories or thoughts or whatever they were, depending on whether she was actually asleep or not—were full of Baby, and now she should be exhausted, but she's not. She feels more alive than she has felt for years, a terrifying, exalted feeling. Her nerves are like wires in the wind. She leans forward to look at the river. Mist—or fog, which is it?—floats in patches on the surface. Birds swoop low then rise on flapping wings. The sky is pearl. The water lightens. Now Harriet can pick out buildings and docks along the shore. She hears men's voices. Peering down over the railing, she sees them all out on the deck below,
waiting with giant coils of rope. The engine grinds into a lower register. The boat slows down.
Vicksburg.

Suddenly aware of her nightdress, Harriet goes back inside and lies down on her bed in the dark, air-conditioned stateroom. It's actually chilly in here, completely different from the rich, sultry, river-smelling Mississippi air outside. Harriet pulls her covers up to her chin. If she could just sleep. If she could just relax and enjoy this trip as the others seem perfectly capable of doing in spite of the circumstances … But it's amazing, really, how little they seem to remember or care about why they're here. Why just yesterday, on the way to the captain's reception, Anna turned to her and said, “Now Harriet, wasn't Baby in love with some boy before she married this man who called us all up? I seem to recall something like that. Who was that boy anyway?”

“It was Jefferson Carr.” After so long a time, it gave Harriet a shock to say his name.

“And didn't he go to some odd school? How did she meet him anyway?”

“Oh, Anna, don't you remember? She met him at that literary festival when Jim Francisco made the pass at you, sophomore year. And I introduced them.”

T
HE LITERARY MAGAZINE
,
Redbud,
had come out in late fall with five of Baby's poems and two of Anna's stories, one of them named “Ring around the Moon,” in which a boy and a girl are taking a bath together in a motel after having sex. During the workshop discussion, Suzanne St. John had been much more upset by the sleaziness of the motel than by the story's graphic nature. “I just can't believe a nice girl would go to a place like that,” she squealed. The story had created a little furor on campus, and all the copies of the literary magazine were snapped up immediately, a first. Harriet had had a poem in that issue, too, but nobody mentioned it. Probably it
wouldn't have been published, she thought later, if she hadn't been a junior member of the
Redbud
staff. Or perhaps that was too harsh.

It was in her official capacity that Harriet had been presiding over the registration table for the college's annual Fall Literary Festival that year. Draped with a white sheet, the table sat under one of the oldest oaks on front quad. Its bright leaves fell all around, spangling Harriet's snowy table and the lush green grass. Harriet was there to give out programs, answer any questions, and make sure everybody had a name tag. She had worn a name tag herself. Anna had been sitting with her for a while but had disappeared to wash her hair in preparation for picking up Big Jim Francisco, the visiting poet, at the airport. Jim Francisco had a terrible reputation, but it was felt that Anna, with her coalfield smarts, could “handle him.” Baby had a date that weekend with Kevin Cahill, a picturesque graduate student from UVA, a poet with long, curly reddish hair and nearly translucent skin and green freckles. (“They are
not green!
” Baby cried, giggling, but Harriet maintained that they were.) In any case, he adored Baby. He always dressed in army coveralls with poetry books and wine bottles sticking out of various pockets, and he kept his dog, John Donne, a black lab with a red bandanna around his neck, with him at all times. Baby was cutting chemistry lab that afternoon to go hiking up Morrow Mountain with Kevin Cahill and John Donne.