Thief of Words (9 page)
Jack got up and put on a bathrobe. “Fuck you, and your white shirt,” he said out loud to the bookshelves in his bedroom. He walked into the den and sat down at the computer.
Now there was Annie. “Oh well, you can’t rewrite your past, can you?” she had said at lunch. Jack signed on and called up a blank message file.
“Dear Annie,” he wrote.
“Where is it written that you can’t rewrite your past?
“Do you remember that night in Jerez? That was the night we first met—the night we saw Renatta Vega-Marone. I remember, as if it were yesterday.
“I came to the central square around eleven and got a table just twenty feet away from the wooden stage, which was raised four steps up from the pavement. Behind it, like a huge Hollywood set, were the city’s medieval stone walls.
“You appeared about midnight. By then the place was jammed. I watched you weave your way across the cobblestones searching for an empty chair. The night was warm, even for July. You wore a sleeveless blouse, a turquoise wraparound skirt, and sandals. I knew you were a tourist here, like me. You were squeezing between some crowded tables nearby when I caught your eye and waved. ‘There’s a place over here,’ I said, removing my day-bag from the chair next to mine. ‘Join me, please.’
“You smiled and sat down. We traded names and stories and ordered a bottle of sherry, because sherry is what people drink in Jerez after midnight. I liked you right off. I liked your smile; I liked that you were traveling alone and didn’t care that you were traveling alone.
“Just as the sherry arrived an older woman in a red dress walked on stage accompanied by a young man carrying a guitar. The people around us applauded raucously. At the next table, an elderly man wearing a light straw hat told us the guitarist was only nineteen. The woman in the red dress was Renatta Vega-Marone, Spain’s greatest flamenco dancer. She has gypsy blood, said the man in the hat. She had jet black hair and black eyes that swallowed you up. It was hard to tell how old she was. We guessed she was forty-five, maybe fifty. The old man made a point of telling us that Renatta was also famous for her lovers and that the boy—the guitarist—was one of them.
“But you had guessed it before he told us. Something in the way the boy held her hand as they walked on stage made you turn to me and say, ‘Those two won’t go to bed alone tonight.’
“The whole evening had been filled with dancing and music. Renatta and the boy were the last to appear. He sat on a small folding chair just to the left of center stage. His fingers blurred over the strings, but at first Renatta danced very slowly. She seemed stately, like a widow in a funeral procession. Then she moved faster and faster. Her heels hit the stage like antiaircraft fire. People began to leave their tables, to get closer. We got up and squeezed in behind the first row of spectators; the crowd pressed us together.
“She danced several numbers. She was mesmerizing, gut-wrenching. Magic. The harsh stage lights erased everything but the boldest shadows, colors, and shapes. It was like seeing a Picasso painting dance. For the final number, she began slowly again, then sped up like a locomotive. Even from where we were standing we could see her dripping with sweat. People around us were shouting ‘Jaleo! Jaleo!’ I realized that we were sweating, too. And then the most amazing thing. She began to slow down and down and down. The music tempo slowed, too. And then her steps were just: One … Two … Three/Four. One … Two … Three/Four. One…Two… And then she stopped. And the crowd went mad with joy. And you were crying.”
“Jack”
W
ell?”
Without turning her head, Annie said, “Good morning to you, too, Fred.”
Annie had been standing in line at the Firehook Bakery, trying to decide between virtue and vice, when she’d heard Fred’s voice.
“Well, was I right?”
She turned around and smiled.
“Exactly how right was I?” said Fred.
“He called me ‘lovely.’ ”
“At least this one has eyes,” Fred said.
Lovely. Such a simple, old-fashioned word. Like a lace doily. No one had ever called Annie Hollerman that before. When she’d read Jack’s note about lunch, the word had taken her off guard. Now it was like a song that kept looping through her brain. Lovely. She liked the way the
l
’s wrapped around the velvet vowels, caressing her mouth each time she said it. Lovely. An old-time wooing word. Courtly, but so eloquently sexy.
“What’ll it be this morning, Annie, the usual?” said Sarah, the young woman behind the counter.
Annie eyed the usual, an oozy pecan sticky bun.
Lovely. She heard its song again.
“Better make it the bran muffin—and a skim latte.”
Fred, always the gentleman, pretended not to notice, even after Sarah laughed and said, “Whoever he is, he must be a hottie. How about you, Fred, the usual, or are you taking the high road, too?”
Fred’s road never veered. It was the usual for him, double-shot espresso, twist of lemon, and a blueberry scone.
They walked upstairs to the office. Fred had a stack of queries to sift through. The good ones, or at least the ones with some promise, went to Annie; the rest were bounced back with a “thank-you-not-without-merit-but-not-for-us” rejection note attached.
The first thing Annie did was call Laura. “It’s me,” she said after the beep to record her message. “You were right. I was wrong. Don’t gloat. He called me ‘lovely.’ Now I’ve got to lose five pounds fast.”
Then she got down to work. Lynn McCain, the mystery writer who hated being called a mystery writer, needed serious attention. Not only had she burned out the publicists at Simon & Schuster, but her next book was coming up for negotiation and she wanted Annie to send it around to get an auction going. It would rain in Death Valley before that happened.
Though her books were still selling, she’d only made the bestseller list one time, and that had been five books before. Yesterday, McCain’s editor had hinted to Annie that if the numbers kept going down, so would the advances.
Annie kept telling McCain that publishing is strictly what-have-you-done-for-me-today and how-will-your-books-sell-tomorrow? No one at Simon & Schuster gave two hoots about McCain’s refrain that she was the next Reynolds Price. Most of them didn’t even know who Reynolds Price was.
Now Annie had to call McCain and set her straight, not only about the auction that wasn’t going to happen but about her behavior on her book tour.
She started to pick up the phone when Fred walked in.
“The Ghoul on line one. Shall I tell him to go back to the graveyard?”
“Nah, I better take it.”
Annie pressed line one. “James, just the person I was reaching for my phone to call. How are you, and congratulations on the movie deal.”
“A lucky break,” James Gentile said. “Guess how many times it came close to falling through. This business we’re in, it’s enough to give you heartburn. In fact, I hear Bertelsmann just bought Merck so it can supply its employees with Mylanta and Prilosec.”
Annie laughed. “I’m a Maalox girl myself.”
While they chatted, Annie signed on to her computer. She was looking for the new last chapter of
She-Power
that Eda had promised to send.
“… So what do you think about getting together?” James said. The flag was up. She had mail, tons of mail. How could all that accumulate in less than twelve hours? As she talked to James, she scanned down the list of mail. It was the usual stuff, plus Eda’s new chapter.
James continued to talk: “… there’s a new chef at Café Atlantico who studied with Serge Sampo…”
Then, like a smell that hits you five seconds after you walk by it, she realized it wasn’t just the usual stuff in her mailbox. Three messages below Eda’s was another e-mail from jdepaul, this one entitled “Spain.”
Annie started reading it. “Where is it written you can’t rewrite your past?…”
“… so Thursday night’s good then? Seven-thirty?” James said. “Oh, right,” Annie said, not taking her eyes off the computer screen, reading about Jerez and Jack and Renatta.
“Annie? Thursday night?”
“Sorry, James. Alright then, Thursday night. Listen, something just came up. I’ve got to run.”
What just came up was hope.
B
y eleven that morning, Annie had already talked to Lynn McCain three times. She’d backed her off the auction notion, but getting her to be nice on her book tour was another matter.
“I don’t care if Katie Couric is the second coming in a dress,” McCain said. “She made me seem like an idiot.
‘I can’t remember when I’ve had so much fun figuring out who the murderer was.’
That’s not what my book’s about.”
Actually, it was, Annie started to tell her. McCain’s readers weren’t academics who studied her works along with Faulkner and Welty. They were the mystery nuts, the women who wore cat T-shirts to the mystery conferences and spent their free time reading and posting on Dorothy-L, a listserv that gossips about mystery writers. They were the ones who had driven her first book to the
New York Times
best-seller list, and they were the ones she was losing with all her I’m-a-serious-Southern-writer talk.
McCain, as usual, refused to listen. “Look, Annie, those publicists at Simon & Schuster are eleven years old. They haven’t even started menstruating yet. They can’t do anything right. You’ve got to make sure the interviewers don’t call me a mystery writer. I won’t snap at anyone else if you can do that.”
“Lynn, get real,” Annie said. “I can’t control what comes out of the interviewers’ mouths any more than I can control what comes out of yours. Though, Lord knows, I’d like to. Just count to ten or something when you hear the M word. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t go ballistic when he was called a mystery writer. You’re only hurting yourself when you do this. So please, ease up. Okay?”
There was a pause. Finally McCain agreed. Sort of. “Well, I’ll do the best I can. I may have to count to twenty.”
At least Annie had accomplished something that morning. Jack, on the other hand, had accomplished nothing more than scanning the
Post
and the
Times
for stories he should have thought of first. He’d stayed up till 4
A.M.
traveling to Spain and now he had a serious case of jet lag. Fortunately it was Friday; the weekend advance sections were already on the presses and Monday’s centerpiece was over to the copy desk.
When the phone rang he answered sleepily, “DePaul.”
“You must be color-blind. The skirt I wore that night in Jerez wasn’t turquoise, it was purple. I think we need to test your eyes.”
Annie’s voice skyrocketed Jack’s lethargy out the window. He grinned into the receiver. “Are you sure? I remember turquoise. And I’m a trained observer.”
“Purple,” said Annie firmly. “And you were wearing a light khaki shirt and blue jeans. And one of those silly berets the Basques wear. It seemed a little affected but I forgave you.”
Any clever rejoinders that Jack might have said were derailed by his relief. His e-mail hadn’t made her think he was a psycho, or, even worse, a nitwit.
“Well…I…did you…” he began.
“Jack.”
“Yes?”
“I loved your e-mail.”
Loved. It resonated like a temple bell. Something came out of Jack’s mouth after that, but it was nearly lost in the reverberations. Finally, a few sentences later, he managed to ask Annie out for that weekend.
“I’m sorry, Jack. I’d love to, but this weekend’s off. I’m taking Laura’s daughter on a mother-daughter camping trip. Remember, Laura’s got this thing about peeing outdoors and so it’s up to me, the godmother.” Annie paused for a second, then said, a sly note of conspiracy in her voice, “What about next Wednesday? Are you up for an adventure?”
“I’m all yours,” Jack said.
Y
ou can do better than that!”
The She-Devil jammed a fist in the air.
“One more time. With all you’ve got. If you wanta be a She-Devil, you gotta shout! Okay? One…two…three: I’M A SHE-DEVIL!”
“I’M A SHE-DEVIL!” came the crowd’s roar, followed by applause and laughter.
The meeting space on the second floor at the Bethesda Barnes & Noble was packed that Wednesday night. Women were sitting cross-legged in the aisles and standing back among the magazines. In the previous half hour, Jack had learned that he and his kind were responsible for crime, pornography, MTV, AIDS, SIDS, NATO, and holes in the ozone layer. He also learned that he must hand back the planet to women, who had previously run things in a long-lost golden age, known mythologically as the Garden of Eden, until, as the She-Devil put it, “men, with swords in their hands and swords between their legs, captured the human race.”
Jack, who had nothing against NATO and kind of liked MTV, had tried to ride out the typhoon of rhetoric like a sailor, but instead of a mast, he clung to the sight of Annie sitting at the author’s table. She was wearing loose, flowing pants and a matching blouse that managed to be pale and bright green at the same time. Her hair tumbled down past her shoulders like a fallen halo. She looked cool and smart and Jack had the sudden thought that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life. But just as quickly, he cautioned himself: maybe you’re simply overreacting to the surrounding piercings and buzzcuts.
Jack had arrived just as the She-Devil began her talk, “She-Speaks.” When he squeezed himself between the last row of folding chairs and the end of the New Age/Spirituality aisle, he discovered he was the only man in the crowd.
It was when the subject turned to cloning that he finally caught Annie’s eye. The She-Devil, spotting the lone swordsman in the crowd, pointed to him and said, “In twenty years he’ll be irrelevant.” The crowd laughed and Jack looked for help from the author’s table. Annie stuck out her tongue, smiled, flushed, and looked away, brushing aside an invisible strand of hair.
The She-Devil finished up her talk to rowdy applause. When she began signing copies of
Confessions of a She-Devil,
Annie walked over to Jack. “How’d you like it?” she asked him, radiating fake innocence.