Thief of Words (7 page)
“Hey, Punkin.” Annie’s assistant, Fred Rassmussen, stuck his head in her office. “Don’t forget to call the Ghoul today, he’s already called twice.”
As always, Fred radiated cheerfulness. It was his only mood, kind of like a car stuck in drive. Even before the first cup of coffee or after the fourth, even while opening the office in the morning or after a late-night dinner with an ungrateful writer.
Annie tried to scowl at the friendly face in her doorway, but it was like trying to be an iceberg in Honduras.
Fred was a former Lit professor from American University who had agreed to help out Annie temporarily when she first opened an office in D.C. That was twelve years ago. Since then, he had become her bulwark and, though he’d deny it, her surrogate father.
He was a big, round-faced man who wore a little square mustache and bow ties. He loved three things most in life: Shakespeare; his wife, Lillian; and Annie. Two of them were dead. He was seventy-four now but his enthusiasm for things was undimmed; he wrapped his arms around every day as if it were a grandchild.
“Well, Ghoul-boy is just going to have to wait,” said Annie. “I have other things to do.”
Fred didn’t respond, but didn’t move either. “I bet he’s an ass-hole,” said Annie, placing a stack of books on the left side of her desk, then picking them up and putting them on the right. “And he’s practically illiterate. I don’t know why anybody reads his stuff—rats chewing through people’s faces…”
Fred remained in the half-open doorway, regarding Annie with mild benevolence, like a shepherd tending to his flock.
“The next time I suggest we even think about representing a thriller writer, just shoot me,” said Annie, putting the stack of books back on her left.
Fred, still silent, folded his arms and settled comfortably against the doorjamb.
“Okay, okay, okay,” said Annie as if she were finally confessing under torture. “I e-mailed that DePaul guy a thank-you after our date and he never wrote back, he never called.”
“You told me it wasn’t a date,” said Fred. “It was only a lunch.” “Date, lunch, whatever. He didn’t write.”
“Let me just make certain I’ve got it right. You went out to lunch with him yesterday, wrote to him last night, then he failed to write back, despite the fact that you waited by your computer all evening and fell asleep slumped across the keyboard?”
“I wasn’t slumped across the keyboard.”
“Well, don’t take it personally.”
“Fred, everything is personal. You lived with Lillian for twenty-four years and you still don’t get that? Everything with women is personal.”
“I’m sure he had a good time, Annie. I’m sure he thinks you’re wonderful. How could he not? I bet he got busy at work and then got home late. He’ll write. Just give him time. ‘How poor are they that have not patience.’ ”
“I guess that makes me destitute, then,” Annie said. “Besides, give me a break: ‘Busy’? ‘Late’? ‘Time’? Aren’t those code words for ‘inconsiderate swine’?”
“Annie, have you been reading the She-Devil again? You say nay to thriller writers, but I say nay-no-nyet-nein-never to anyone who calls herself a w-o-m-B-Y-N. As for men—that’s M-E-N— let’s just say we’re more methodical than women would like. We tend to finish our work—clear the decks—and then move on to matters of the heart. And Annie, don’t check your e-mail every fifteen minutes today. If he’s any kind of a mensch, he won’t just dash off something at work. He’ll craft an elegant response tonight.”
“Elegant response,” Annie harrumphed. “You wouldn’t have waited, would you, Fred?”
“No. But I’m old-fashioned. I don’t like e-mail. I would have called.”
Fred gave her a little salute and left. Before his cheerfulness even had time to dissipate, Annie was checking her e-mail. There was nothing but business messages and low airfare deals.
Annie had two choices. She could obsess or she could work. “Men,” she muttered. “ ‘Clear the decks’? You’re not the only ones who can clear the decks. I’ve got plenty of decks to clear.”
She jutted out her chin and turned her attention to her desk. There was the stack of books she’d been arranging and rearranging just minutes before. And the stack of phone messages. And the stack of queries. And the stack of proposals. And the stack of mail. Stacks and stacks of stuff to be cleared.
Clear decks, that’s what Annie was going for. Of the desk and of the mind.
She could have told Fred to handle the phones, but she knew who the first caller would be: Laura. And that was some deck-clearing she was looking forward to, reading Laura the I’m-finethe-way-I-am-my-life-doesn’t-need-fixing riot act.
Of course Laura called. After so many years of friendship they didn’t even bother with the hi’s or how-are-you’s of normal telephone etiquette.
“So I guess things didn’t exactly click yesterday, that’s why your phone was off the hook last night, right?” was how Laura started the conversation.
“Wrong. And if you ever try to fix me up again I’ll break into your house and snap the legs off of all those plastic horses you saved from your childhood.”
“That bad, huh?”
“I didn’t say that. What I said was, no more fix-ups. Ever. I’m too old for this. I’m becoming a lesbian, and don’t worry, you’re not my type.”
“That’s a relief, given what your type has been. Trip—need I say more? Besides, too old for what? What’re you talking about? It was just lunch. What can two people possibly say over lettuce to get you this riled? I knew I should have called you yesterday. But this damn John Waters assignment. Some editor actually got me a part in Waters’s new movie—a musical, of all things—and now that lunatic has me in the chorus dressed as a drag queen. A woman playing a man playing a woman. Anyway, back to Jack. Tell me everything.”
Annie tapped her fingers against the sorrel wood of her desk, which she could do now thanks to deck-clearing.
“Lunch was fine.”
Silence.
“And?” Laura said. “I hate it when you get this way. Stop pouting and just tell me what happened. Don’t make me pull it out of you. You know I can and you know you’ll end up telling me what’s really eating you. Come on, this is me you’re not talking to.”
Annie laughed, though she didn’t want to. Then she told her everything, as they both knew she would.
“So you sent him an e-mail and you haven’t heard from him and you’re ready to give up on men? You’re worse off than I thought. Maybe he was busy; ever think of that?”
“That’s what Fred said, but he’s a man. I thought it was a solidarity kind of thing on his part.”
“More like a stupidity kind of thing—on your part. You guys had a great time. You just told me so yourself. Tonight, I’ll bet you my plastic horses, there’s an e-mail waiting. And I bet it’s long and meanderingly poetic. Besides, what do you mean I’m ‘not your type’? What’s your type anyway?”
“Quiet.”
B
y the time Annie left her office that day, it was nearly dark. Her main successes had been twofold: the reappearance of her desk’s wood surface and the reestablishment of her self-respect. Yes, she’d checked her e-mail a couple more times that day—okay, three more times—but, she argued to an imaginary jury in her head, each time was for business. It had nothing to do with a certain editor at the
Baltimore Star-News.
Annie shivered her way home that evening. It had been sixty-three degrees, sunny, and still when she’d walked the six blocks to work in the morning. But it was one of those late spring days when the sky changes clothes more times than a teenage girl before her first date. Now the sky was prison gray, the temperature had dropped fifteen degrees, and the hard wind made it seem thirty degrees colder.
As usual, Annie had dressed optimistically that morning— short sleeves, light slacks, no jacket. Fred had tried to give her his sweater to wear home, but she’d refused.
“Why don’t you keep a spare something here for all the times you do this,” he’d said to her before he left. “It looks like Antarctica out there.”
“If I did that, then I’d be giving up on spring. Someone has to be her champion. I’ll be fine, Fred, stop worrying,” Annie said, and she thought she would be until she stepped outside on P Street.
By her fifth step, she was so cold that she ducked back into the Firehook Bakery for a cup of coffee to go. She added a sticky bun and made a dash for her apartment.
Six blocks later Annie was cursing herself for not taking Fred’s sweater. “Let spring fend for her own damn self,” she said to no one but the wind as she finally slipped into her apartment.
She’d never really wanted to live in a city. Given her druthers, she’d be living on a mesa overlooking magenta sunsets. But one thing had turned into another, and before she knew it she was borrowing $250,000 from Citibank for a two-bedroom apartment in Dupont Circle.
One thing turned into another. Isn’t that always the case? One day you’re furnishing your basement apartment with Salvation Army retreads and the next day you’re filling your big suburban house with expensive antiques that look embarrassingly similar to the Salvation Army retreads.
Well, at least she wasn’t living in Bethesda anymore. That house had been Trip’s choice, because it had a porte cochere just like the “Big House” on Long Island, where he’d eaten meals prepared by Cook and been tended to by maids and housemen. The Big House was where his paternal grandparents had lived, where Trip’s family spent every summer.
Annie had never liked Bethesda, Washington’s toniest suburb. It was a gourmet ghetto where overpriced entrees came served on square plates. It had too many chic little stores that sold $750 hand-stamped linen dresses. And all the women looked casually perfect.
During the divorce, Trip had claimed the house was his because he’d bought it with his family money—despite the fact that Annie had paid half the mortgage. She didn’t fight. All she wanted was her furniture, primitive pieces she’d found at auctions, garage sales, and antique stores. She liked their simple lines and the way the soft pine showed what they’d been through. She’d had to fight Trip on each purchase. His taste ran to the baronial: heavy mahogany and serious oak.
She threw her purse on an old blue cocoa crate that doubled as an entry table. In her bedroom she pulled a thick pair of sweatpants and a heavy fleece from her most prized possession—a battered white jelly cupboard from the 1850s. “Ah, warmth,” she said as she put on her fuzzy clothes.
Then she faced her computer. I do this every night, she thought. About this time every night. I am not checking to see if Jack has written back. This is not a John Brady, tenth-grade kind of thing. I have evolved far past that. This is a woman in her prime, in control—a Xena kind of thing.
And if Jack DePaul hasn’t written back? I can handle it. Just because he seemed charming and smart at lunch doesn’t mean he isn’t an inconsiderate jackass jerk.
Annie sat down and signed on.
On the one hand, a remarkable number of messages appeared. Eda Royal wanted to send a new last chapter to her second She-Devil book; three young writers wanted her opinion on their manuscripts; there was a credit card offer, a lingerie offer, and something about online artworks; and there were seven messages she deleted without even opening.
On the other hand, there was no message from Jack DePaul. Annie’s shoulders sagged.
Yes, it may have been a John Brady kind of thing.
She stared at the screen for a few seconds. Finally, she answered the She-Devil and signed off. Then she went into the kitchen, grabbed the sticky bun, and ate her dinner.
S
o. How did it go?” Matthew’s question came out a little muffled, having had to dodge a mouthful of chips and salsa cruda.
About the time Annie was eating her sticky bun, Jack DePaul and his son, Matthew, were sitting in a booth at El Serape, a new Tex-Mex place just three blocks from Jack’s apartment in the trendifying Federal Hill neighborhood of Baltimore.
Jack pretended not to hear and responded with a question of his own. “How are things in the boneyard?”
Matthew was in his second year of graduate school, a budding archeologist, a fact that confounded his father and pleased him immeasurably. Right from the start, from the time of alphabet blocks and
Goodnight Moon,
Matthew had been a smart kid. Too smart for his own good, Jack often thought; everything came so easily to his son.
But by high school, Matthew had devolved. He exchanged soccer and swimming for hanging out. He drew cartoon space aliens. My son the artist. Jack tried out that phrase a few times; it never made sense. Neither he nor Elizabeth was the remotest bit artistic. Where did Matthew get it? And how did he go from rambunctious know-it-all to chubby little wiseacre with a lazy walk and dopey pals?
Then, in his sophomore year at college, Matthew took the lowlevel geology class—rocks for jocks. Suddenly he was hooked on strata. Next came classes in anthropology, ancient history, and chemistry. For the first time in his life, Jack couldn’t talk to Matthew about his schoolwork. Eventually came graduate studies in archeology, something about pollen and prehistoric ecosystems in the American Southwest. Jack had gone through an archeology phase, too, but he was ten years old at the time and was only concerned about buried treasure. He definitely hadn’t supplied Matthew with the science gene. That’s why he was a journalist. Newspapers—last refuge of the data-dolt.
“Come on, Dad. ’Fess up. How did it go?” Matthew insisted. “How did what go?” Jack said, his expression innocently blank. “Your date.”
“Oh, that. Okay.” Jack dabbed a chip into the salsa cruda. “It wasn’t really a date. Just a lunch.”
“What was she like?”
“Nice.”
“Nice?” Matthew grimaced. “Meaning fat and dumb as dirt?” “No, no. She was really nice.” Jack paused for a second. “Actually, she was great.”
“Ah. Now we’re getting somewhere.” Matthew leaned forward, propping his elbows on either side of a salsa bowl, his chin resting atop linked fingers. He wasn’t a bad-looking kid, Jack thought, with his field-research tan, scraggly goatee, and emerging sinews (the adolescent avoirdupois that had been the despair of his father was finally melting away).