Thief of Words (12 page)
“So, you were telling me about Jack,” she said.
“No I wasn’t,” said Annie, “I was telling you about your high cholesterol and clogged arteries.”
“Funny, I could’ve sworn you said Jack. By the way, Laura called. She’s already gotten her dress. And Becky’s all set to be the flower girl. Maybe we can find a brown satin dress for her to wear—you could alter it first.”
Annie threw her hands up in the air. “Okay,” she said with a stagy sigh, “I’ll stop about the steak. But no cigarettes while we’re eating. It’s disgusting.”
Annie was going to add, “And Becky’s too old to be a flower girl,” but stopped. The sudden moment of stillness caught them both by surprise, and in that moment, like a freeze frame in a movie, mother and daughter just looked at each other.
For the 197th time since Annie had arrived in North Carolina yesterday, Joan Hollerman Silver had raised the name of Jack DePaul. Annie hadn’t been able to bring herself to say what she was starting to feel about him. But now, to her own surprise, she was about to.
“You know, Mom, he’s pretty terrific. But I guess Laura already told you that.”
After all these years, her mother had finally learned when to be quiet. She just nodded.
“I mean, it’s not like I know him all that well. But it seems like I do. I don’t know, maybe it’s wishful thinking, maybe I’m just trying to obliterate my years with Trip, but when I think about Jack, it’s almost like Trip never happened.”
Annie told her mother about the Spain e-mail; how, now, it seemed as if she had gone to Spain with Jack, not Trip.
“Too bad,” Annie said, “I can’t get him to write me a new
Charlotte Commercial-Appeal
chapter.”
Annie’s mother stiffened. She hated thinking about that time even more than she hated thinking about her first husband leaving or her second husband dying. The pain of watching her only child go through that kind of hell was bad enough; what made it worse was that she blamed herself.
Annie saw the look in her mother’s eyes. “You know I’ve told you this before, but I want to say it again—I couldn’t have made it through without you.”
Her mother looked away for a second and gathered herself. “It would have never happened if I’d been a different kind of mother. If I’d been more—”
Annie grabbed her mother’s hand. “Stop. We’ve been over this before.
I
made the choice.
I
made the mistake. It was
me,
not you, who lifted someone else’s words. I was on deadline, pressed for time. I was scared that I’d lost it. That I wasn’t Annie Wondergirl anymore. I panicked and made a bad decision. Maybe the world’s worst decision. But that’s it. It had nothing to do with you or your canasta games. So what if you never read me Dr. Seuss? And, so what if you wanted me to be more like Joan Cherry and run for class president and look like her in those dorky little Villager outfits?
That’s
not why I plagiarized.”
Plagiarized. What an ugly, plundering word. It sounded like a disease, which it was to Annie. Something akin to leprosy. And she’d been a leper all these years. In fact, that had been central to the unwritten contract between her and Trip. He was the good boy, she was the fuckup.
“Plagiarized,” Annie said. “It’s not the easiest word for me to say. But Jesus Christ, Mom, it’s been almost twenty years. I’ve left Trip, my career’s going gangbusters, and I’m dating a journalist, of all things. Don’t you think it’s time I should be able to say that word without it getting stuck in my throat?”
Annie took a swig of water and made a throat-clearing noise. “Care to join me?” she said. Then, to the tune of the Toreador Song from
Carmen,
she sang, “Play-ger-her-ii-iized, play-ger-herized, play-ger-herized oh play-ger-herized…”
To the waiter at Mr. C’s Sea House, the two women at table 17 were cheap dates: one glass of wine and they were so tipsy, they were mangling
Carmen.
Annie’s mother raised her wineglass and said, “Finally.”
They were about to toast when they realized the glasses were empty. Joan motioned to the waiter for two more glasses of wine. He nodded, turned, and rolled his eyes.
“So, are you going to tell him?” Joan said.
“Huh?” Annie said.
“Tell Jack. About what happened in Charlotte.”
Annie ran her finger around the rim of the empty glass. “One step at a time, Mom.”
Both women knew there were many steps between singing an aria to plagiarism and revealing your deepest shame to someone you cared about. She’d done it with Andrew, and he’d left her. She’d done it with Trip, and he’d used it against her. The thought of doing it again made her queasy.
Joan reached her hand across the table and placed it on top of the wineglass, on top of Annie’s hand. “I hope that step comes soon. Then you can be free of it once and for all.”
Annie watched as her mother turned away, pretending to look for the waiter. “Did he go to France to get the wine?” Joan said. But Annie saw the tears in her mother’s eyes.
“Finally,” Joan said again—this time meaning the waiter, who was arriving with two glasses of wine and their meals. He put a shriveled piece of dry salmon in front of Annie and a big, oozing slab of meat in front of Joan.
Joan eyed Annie’s meal. “Looks like something I cooked,” she said.
“I didn’t think that was possible, but you’re right,” Annie said. “So much for omega-three fatty acids.”
“Hold on,” Joan said. She took the serrated knife by her plate, cut her steak in half, and put it on the bread plate. “Here. Live a little.”
A
s soon as Annie and her mother returned to their hotel room, Annie checked her e-mail. She’d been thinking about last night’s message to Jack on and off all day. Maybe she shouldn’t have said the thing about the sky. Men like mystery. There was little mystery in “Oh, by the way, there was one of those soft blue-velvet skies this evening. I thought about you.”
Annie wished she were the kind of person who could hold back. “I thought about you”—not much held back there. She wished she could be like Sofia, the Lebanese bombshell wife of her old boss, Greg Leeland. Once, when Annie was standing with some friends at a cocktail party, Sofia walked up. One of the men said, “Hey, Sofia. I haven’t seen you in a while.” Sofia speared him with a dangerous look and in her heavily accented English purred, “Eeet eees gooodt to be rrrare.”
Annie felt about as rrrare as ragweed.
“I thought about you.” Those words had nagged at her all day like a whiny three-year-old. Earlier at the Buddhist Learning Center, when she was supposed to be meditating on stillness, she was thinking about those four words and everything they might mean: she was starting to care about Jack in a way she hadn’t cared about a man for years. Somehow Jack DePaul had found the dopamine floodgates in her brain and opened them wide. She was scared and excited at the same time; it felt like her blood was carbonated.
She’d spent the next forty-five minutes sitting cross-legged on a forest green carpet with her eyes closed, trying as hard as she could to chase away conscious thought. Every time she wiped her mind clear, those four words bounced back.
“I thought about you.”
Well, Annie thought, I did think about you. Why not say it? And if that scares you away, Jack DePaul, so be it.
Annie clicked on the mail flag. There was a message from Jack, entitled “I thought about you, too.”
Maybe Sofia was wrong. Maybe eet wass goodt to be forthrrrright.
Subject: I thought about you, too
Annie,
There was a soft blue-velvet sky here, too. Not in Baltimore—has there ever been a soft blue-velvet sky over Baltimore?—but one in my memory, from an August day years ago. Your words—“soft,” “velvet”—made me think of it. And I wondered: how can I explain that particular sky, that particular day, to Annie? How it turned maroon then navy as the sun dropped away. How bright the night was, how warm. How a young boy crossed the street from his house and entered a moon-licked orchard full of ripening apricots and furrows of black water.
How he ran through that orchard, from furrow top to furrow top; ran from tree row to tree row, in and out of moonlight as bright as a neon sign. How the leaves were like wrought iron against the sky. How the boy ran from black to white to black to white, more moonchild than manchild. How the aurora of a county fair flickered on the northern horizon and how, muffled by the summer-swollen leaves, the calliope jangle of the midway sounded no louder than the ghostly twitter of bats.
I wondered about all of that. And I thought about you.
Jack
Annie slumped against the padded headboard on her bed, the laptop resting on her thighs. She’d been holding her breath and didn’t even know it. “Whew,” she said.
“You okay?” her mother said through a mouthful of toothpaste. Ostensibly, she’d been brushing her teeth at the sink, but thanks to a well-placed mirror she’d been watching Annie since her daughter had plopped down on the bed and plugged in her computer.
“Yikes,” said Annie as she fanned her face with her hand. “How’s Jack?” her mother asked.
“How’d you know?”
“Annie, what am I, an idiot? You rush in the room like there’s a fire in the hall and grab your computer before you even take your shoes off. I’m not halfway inside and you’re already checking your e-mail. There’s only one thing that gets someone to move that fast, and it’s not business. So, what’d he say?”
“Mom, he wrote me the sweetest letter. It was kind of old-fashioned. It made me feel like someone from a Jane Austen novel.”
Joan Hollerman Silver smiled, a toothpaste crescent moon on her face. “Courting through cyberspace. How modern. Annie, I don’t suppose you’d like me to read what he wrote. I could help you write a reply and—”
Annie held up her hand. “Forget it, Ma. If I let you read this, I might as well print it out and post it in your office. I’ve got it handled. I know exactly what I’m going to write back.”
Subject: Don’t Stop
Jack,
I could almost hear your calliope. Don’t stop. Send me more. And next time, take me with you. Take me to places I’ve never been. Give me a new past to remember.
Annie
A
nd so it started. For that week, Jack’s and Annie’s nights belonged to e-mail, and, message by message, memory by memory, the story of their history began to unfold.
Each evening, Annie returned to her hotel room, plugged in her computer, hit the little red flag, and found, awaiting her, chapters of a life she never knew she had. She visited jungles, rocky coasts, and deserts and never left her hotel room.
Each evening, Jack would sit in front of his outdated Mac and force inspiration to come his way. It was slow going at first. He even started to feel some sympathy for his reporters. Maybe they aren’t just whiners, Jack thought. Maybe there’s something to their bellyaching; he’d forgotten how hard it was to be creative on command.
Some nights he’d work far into the next morning, fueled by microwave pizza, calcium-fortified grapefruit juice, and Annie’s return e-mails. By the third night, the words were flying so fast from his fingers, he decided he was right the first time—reporters are whiners.
Her request, “Take me to places I’ve never been,” was lighter fluid to his imagination. He was starting to feel young again—energized, alive, swelling with possibility. The idea of rewriting— creating—Annie’s past was powerful and powerfully attractive. At first he wasn’t sure why, but later, looking past the pixels, he could see that maybe, if he could write her another life, he could write himself one, too.
Annie wasn’t the only one who’d missed the dance. For maybe the thousandth time in the past twenty years, Jack cringed at the memory of a five-minute phone call to the Peace Corps, turning down the Togo teaching assignment for a managerial position at the
San Diego Tribune.
These new chapters he was writing would have everything his old ones lacked: adventure, passion, and laughter. And this time, he’d be with the right person. He wondered if Annie was the one. And he decided, as he often did, to ask Pablo Neruda.
Subject: Annie’s Trip to Chile
Annie,
Pablo Neruda was trouble. I knew that. Of course, I knew that. I don’t know why I introduced you. I must have been crazy. He was an aging, balding man with a big round nose who looked like a chubby Picasso, but women gravitated to him like apples to Newton’s head. And he gravitated back.
He liked redheads in particular. Loved them, really. Matilde Urrutia was a redhead; he married her twice and wrote her books of poetry. And still I….
But you know the story as well as I. You were there. You met Pablo at that fancy party in Valparaiso. Remember the house—it belonged to a foreign minister—and the huge double staircase? I can still picture you in that coppery silk dress, stunning against a backdrop of tuxedos.
We had joined a circle of people surrounding Pablo, who was talking about whales, of all things. He was very funny, going on about blowholes and volcanoes, his slightly bulging eyes glinting mischievously. When I introduced you to him, he looked you over and said to me, “Well, Pablito”—he always called me “Pablito,” meaning “Iittle Paul”—“maybe I’ve underestimated you.”
He was about to say something clever—I could see in his eyes that he was making poetic calculations—when a waiter passed by with a tray of champagne glasses. Someone took a glass from the tray and, turning back, spilled its entire contents over the front of your dress. You cried out. The whole party stopped dead in its tracks and stared at the beautiful woman with the huge dark stain across her chest.