The Myth of You and Me (18 page)

“She was looking for nipples in his fur,” the boy said matter-of-factly.

The woman glanced up at me with amusement. No doubt I looked confused. “Just go with it,” she whispered.

The man began to read what I slowly gathered was a story about a woman having an affair with the Pink Panther. He reached a graphic description of what the panther could do with his tail. “Ugh,” the girl beside me said, turning away in disgust, but not leaving, and the woman let loose with her belly laugh again. When the story was over—the panther leaving the narrator forlorn, dreaming of their one night of passion—they all applauded. “Bravo, Andrew, bravo!” the woman cried, and the man who had been reading bowed and said, “Thank you, thank you.”

“Look for that in our next issue,” he said. “The short-fiction debut of . . .” He checked the name. “Oh, my God.” He lowered the manuscript and widened his eyes. “Her name’s Kitty.”

“You are so full of it,” the girl said.

“Would I make that up?” He handed her the story.

“Holy shit,” she said.

“What’s next?” asked Andrew’s look-alike.

Andrew lifted another story from the pile on the table. “A fine work of narrative, titled, evocatively, ‘The Undersmell.’ ”

The boy said, “What about ‘Big Tony Does His Business’? I thought you were going to read that one.”

“All in good time,” Andrew said.

The woman turned to me. “Come on. This could go on a while.” As Andrew repeated, “The Undersmell” like an announcer, I followed the woman through the office. “So, that’s not normal, you know,” she said. “We just finished an issue yesterday, so we’re blowing off steam with some atrocious fiction submissions. Not an average day at the office. I don’t want you to think we always have so much fun, especially at the expense of others.” She looked back to grin at me, then led me into a small corner office. It was full of books, some on the shelves, many stacked on the floor, and there were magazine layouts on the floor, too, marked with blue pencil. There was an odd collection of twisted metal on top of one of the bookshelves and, hung on the wall, a photograph of military cadets reading
Howl
.

The woman sat behind her desk and motioned for me to take a chair. “I’m Daisy Reid, as you’ve probably guessed.” Confused, I sat down. Daisy had an expansive, motherly sexiness, large breasts barely contained by a black shirt that snapped up the front. She wore a short denim skirt and black leather boots that seemed painted onto her generous calves. She gave a general impression of straining against her bindings, as if in medieval times she would have been a bawdy serving wench with her breasts spilling out of her gown. In fact, as she leaned way back in her chair to look up at me, the top snap on her shirt popped open. With no embarrassment, she closed it. “I have trouble staying in my clothes.” She smiled.
“Buh-dump-bump.”
She made a motion like she was hitting a cymbal. “I’m betting you know something about clothes not fitting,” Daisy said. “How big are your feet?”

“Eleven,” I said. She certainly came out swinging.

“Wow,” she said. She scooted her chair closer and leaned across her desk to look at my feet. “I’ve got one question. Will you mail anything I ask you to?”

This was so unexpected, I laughed. She stared at me. “Seriously,” she said. “That’s all I care about.”

“What’s in it for me?” I asked.

She laughed, one loud “ha.” “A paycheck, of course. The last girl quit because she didn’t want to mail things. She didn’t want to mail things, FedEx things, UPS things . . . I guess the job description escaped her notice.”

“Was that Sonia?”

“Sonia Gray?” Daisy made that “ha” sound again. I was wondering what she meant by that—surely she didn’t know about Sonia’s troubles with numbers—when she said, “You know Sonia? Did she know you were coming? She’s not in today.”

So Sonia wasn’t here. I considered lying, pretending to be whomever Daisy thought I was, taking the job, letting the package wait until Sonia returned of her own accord. Whatever this job was, it was sure to be something I could do. And I knew I’d fit in here. Those people out there had a look of pasty, indoor intensity that reminded me of our friends from the college paper. Seeing them read those submissions made me think of the way, punchy from staying up all night at the newspaper, we used to compose the sort of poetry published by the student magazine across the hall—
The moon is a blue shoe, dancing in the twilight of my soul’s memory,
and so forth. I was especially fond of this activity.

It was with considerable reluctance that I told Daisy Reid I wasn’t who she thought I was.

“You’re not Samantha Wood?”

“No,” I said. “I’m Cameron Wilson.”

“Huh.” She sat back in her chair. “So you don’t want the job?”

“Well, I don’t know. What is it?”

She seemed to think I was kidding—she laughed again, then said, “So what are you doing here?”

I explained that I was an old friend of Sonia’s, that I was looking for her.

“Why?” Daisy asked. “Is she in some kind of trouble?”

“No,” I said, puzzled. “I’m bringing her this package. It’s a gift, from my former employer.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“A first-edition Faulkner,” I lied.

She pursed her lips in a silent whistle. “I used to collect first editions,” she said. “I hunted used-book stores and garage sales, and bored the crap out of people, going, ‘Oh, I got this for ten dollars and it’s actually worth seventy-five.’ Then my husband gave me the British first of
Lucky Jim
—any idea what that goes for?—and for some reason that just killed the urge.”

I wanted to say something incisive or funny—I wanted this woman to like me—but all I could manage was a nod.

“I don’t know where Sonia is,” she said. “She called the other day when I wasn’t here and left a message that she was going out of town, not sure when she was coming back. Frankly, I’m worried.”

Out the window behind Daisy, a cat crouched on a rooftop. Daisy swiveled to follow my gaze. “Not out there,” she said. “Unless she transmogrified.”

“Is that normal? For her to just take off?”

“No.” She swung from side to side in her chair. “She’s very conscientious about this job. And she’s been planning her wedding. Maybe she just got overwhelmed.” She turned away from me to look out the window again, rubbing at the back of her head until her short hair tufted out like a duck’s tail. “I don’t want to be worried,” she said. “I love that girl.”

“Someone must know where she is,” I said. I made my voice as casual as I could. “Does she ever mention a guy named Will Barrett?”

Daisy cocked her head, thinking.

In high school, when I drove, Sonia used to sit in Will’s lap in the passenger seat. Once, I turned to look for oncoming traffic and saw Will take her earlobe into his mouth. Another time, at a high-school dance, I saw him lean over to plant a kiss at the place where her breast rose above the black satin of her dress.

“I don’t think so,” Daisy said at last. “Her fiancé’s name is Martin.”

“Martin?” Suddenly I was buoyant with relief. Martin was a wonderful name.

“But what’s his last name?” Daisy frowned. “Shit. I never know anybody’s last name anymore. It’s just, ‘Daisy, meet Martin.’ ” She jumped to her feet. “Let’s look in her office. Maybe there’s something in there with his name on it.”

Daisy led the way back through the main room, where Andrew seemed to have moved on to “Big Tony.” I could picture Sonia among that group at the table, her head thrown back in laughter, and in my current benevolent mood the image made me smile. I should’ve known I’d find her working in a place like this. Sonia and I joined the school newspaper together—she was a photographer, and I was a reporter—and there, where everyone prided themselves on their quirks, their thrift-store distinction from their J. Crew–wearing classmates, Sonia had been the quirkiest of all. She talked in funny voices, staged elaborate displays of mock despair over missing photos, stood on the sports desk to lead everyone in a chorus of “My Favorite Things.” At three in the morning, on a sleep-deprived production night, she’d emerge from the darkroom demanding cake, and one of the boys on staff would go to a convenience store to get it for her. There at the paper, she was closest to the person I knew her to be when we were alone, though of course, no one was to know anything about her mother, and we worked to keep her dyscalculia a secret. When she screwed up a measurement on a photo, people assumed she was joking, or making an artistic choice. When she said to the sports editor, after giving him the wrong-sized print, “I thought it looked better this way,” he just shrugged and adjusted his page.

We met Owen, my college boyfriend, at the newspaper. The first time I saw him he was wearing a yellow T-shirt with a wobbly drawing of a crown and the words
CROWN VIC
scrawled across it in what looked like marker—the name of the band he’d led in high school. He had shaggy brown hair and an angular face that made his big green eyes look even bigger and more vulnerable. Despite his slender frame, he had strong hands. He wrote for the Arts section, mostly music reviews, and when he finished a review he was particularly proud of, he’d shout,
“Ta-da!”
and dash over to twirl me around.

For a moment I wished I were back there, Sonia laughing while Owen and I twirled through the newspaper office, before everything went wrong.

As she unlocked the door to Sonia’s office, Daisy said, “So who was your boss, anyway?”

I told her about Oliver. She raised her eyebrows, impressed, and I felt a flash of pride. She pushed open the door. “I know who he is,” she said. “But he just died, didn’t he? I read the obit in the
Globe.
”

I stepped around her and into Sonia’s office, hoping she’d say nothing more. I didn’t want her condolences. There was nothing she could say that wouldn’t remind me how irrevocably my life had changed. At this time of day I should have been bringing his dinner to the kitchen table, laughing as he pretended surprise at the sight of the meat loaf we ate twice a week. My eyes had filled with tears—I hated that, how close my grief was to the surface, how easily my throat closed—and I tilted my head back so the tears wouldn’t fall. The office swam. I blinked, and blinked again. Photographs everywhere. A large desk, the surface bare except for a computer and a tray of in-boxes. File cabinets with long, thin drawers along one wall. “What does Sonia do here?”

“Oh,” Daisy said. “She’s the photo editor, of course. I guess you don’t know her that well.”

I said, “I guess not.” I walked over to the cabinets and opened a random drawer. A stack of photographs, the first one of a church, looming oddly, as though shot from below, with a sign in front reading
SEVEN DAYS WITHOUT PRAYER MAKES ONE WEAK
. Except for the green lushness of the cemetery to one side, the church could have been in Clovis.

“Other people took those,” Daisy said. She opened another drawer, pulled out some more photos, and began to spread them across the desk. “These are Sonia’s. I really want to run them, but she keeps saying it’s a conflict of interest.”

The pictures, every one of them, were of Sonia’s mother. They were black-and-white. One showed her mother in bed, in a room with the blinds drawn but some sunlight pushing through. One white arm was thrown over her head. Another had her laughing, but Sonia had taken this one with two of her own fingers in front of the lens, segmenting her mother’s face. In another Madame Gray looked right at the camera, her eyes tight, her mouth twisted in contemptuous anger. I knew what this expression meant, and at the sight of it my stomach tightened. I wondered if Sonia had held on to the camera when her mother slapped her face. I had to look at the prints twice before I realized that there were numbers hidden everywhere in them, turned upside down and sideways, tucked into corners, a tiny four etched into the pupil of her mother’s angry eye.

“How did she do this with the numbers?”

Daisy shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m not a photographer. I’m not an artist of any kind.” She was watching me closely. “You didn’t know she did this?”

I shook my head. “She was photo editor of our college paper, but that was mug shots and frat boys playing Frisbee on the lawn. Nothing like this. These are beautiful.”

“Beautiful? Disturbing, I think. But, yeah, she’s fucking fantastic.” She began to stack them, not looking at me. “You’re friends from college?”

“High school,” I said. “Actually, both.”

She looked up. “So you’ve met her mother?”

I said yes, I had, but I was wary. Perhaps Daisy saw my presence as a chance to learn some of Sonia’s secrets. When we were in high school, my mother had slipped up and revealed to Sonia that she knew about her dyscalculia—I’d had to tell her after she caught me doing Sonia’s math homework once. Even though my mother had sworn to keep her knowledge secret, on that day, during a Scrabble game, she offered to count up Sonia’s score. Sonia gave me a look of cold assessment, and then without a word she stood up from the table and left the house. She didn’t speak to me for a week. She’d never been angry with me before, but now she hung up on me when I called, and when I approached her in the hall at school, her left eye twitched and she walked away. Sonia and I were so often together that her absence branded me. For a week I felt like the whole world looked at me with pity and scorn.