Morning, West Seventy-Sixth Street. Bea was sitting in the pre-sunrise dark, holding a cup of chamomile tea with both hands, waiting for the heat from her favorite mug—the one she’d gotten the lone year she’d capitulated during the public radio fund-raising drive and pledged a premium—to warm her stiffened fingers. The kitchen table was in its winter location, awkwardly wedged into an interior corner, partly blocking the doorway to the living room but well away from the exposed wall and the two battered windows that looked out onto an air shaft populated by a disturbing number of pigeons and God only knew how many rodents. She knew she was lucky to have windows in the kitchen, was lucky, in fact, to have a kitchen big enough to house a table, but the rope-sash windows were as insulating as a piece of ClingWrap. The abraded wood would swell in the summer heat, and the layers of old paint and putty would become malleable and gummy, making the windows impossible to open. In the winter, the wood would shrink, letting in preposterous amounts of cold air. Sitting wrapped in a bulky sweater over her nightgown, she waited for the telltale hiss and bang of the radiator pipes, signaling 6:30 A.M. and only ten more minutes until the room was decently warmed. She was up too early; it was cold.
Bea couldn’t sleep for two reasons. The first was because of the horrible party at Celia’s. The second was no doubt directly related to the first: She’d had an upsetting dream about Tuck. She didn’t dream of him often, which was good, because he was usually tense and frustrated in her dreams. Dream Tucker couldn’t speak, just as he’d been at the end of his life after the stroke. Sometimes he’d write something down in the dream, but she could never read it—either the words were blurred or she kept misplacing the piece of paper or, on the rare occasion she did manage to read what he’d written, she could never remember what it was when she woke in the morning. Sometimes the dreams clung to Bea all day, leaving her unsettled and jittery, gloomy. Like today. She wondered why a relationship that in real life had been so sustaining and even-keeled was so fraught in her dream life. She decided that Tucker represented the part of her unconscious that struggled with writing, and that made perfect sense to her: why the deep recesses of her mind and soul would seize on Tucker as the right vehicle to deliver her own dissatisfaction to herself. He’d been dead for almost three years and she still thought of him constantly, mostly as he was when she first met him, standing in front of a classroom, reading poetry to his students, mesmerizing them with his sonorous voice, the voice he’d so cruelly lost use of at the end.
Bea had taken a class with Tucker after her book came out, after a year in Seville where she found herself so disoriented and adrift that she did little else than sit in tapas bars, smoking and sipping sherry, practicing her Spanish and writing funny postcards to her friends. She came home nearly fluent but empty-handed in terms of word count.
“How about joining a writing group or taking a class?” Stephanie had suggested, not concerned yet.
“A class?” Bea said.
“Not a fiction class, something else. Poetry. Nonfiction. Just to get the wheels greased. It might be fun.”
“Like go to the New School and sign up for Introduction to Poetry?” Bea was pissed. She had an MFA.
“No, of course not. Something at your level. Like how about Tucker McMillan’s class at Columbia. He’s amazing. You could audit.”