When she grouped the passing years into logical increments, it didn’t feel so confounding. The story collection published and then a year in Seville, trying (failing) to write what she was calling her bildungsroman. The year after Seville when she returned to New York and accepted every invite—readings, conferences, interviews, panels—and met Tuck. The following year when Tuck made her decline every invite because she was writing (finally!) and the two subsequent years (still writing) when the invites stopped. The year she set aside what she’d started to call a spiritual coming-of-age and went to work with Paul Underwood because her advance was long spent. The year she threw that away and went back to the bildungsroman. Tucker’s stroke and aftermath—two years when she tended to him and loved him and didn’t write. His death and the year she spent broken by grief and trying, once and for all, to salvage the novel (now a combination of the first and second, a not-very-spiritual unwieldy coming-of-age disaster). Last year when she gave it up for good. Eleven years of life and heartbreak and work and failed paragraphs—when she broke it down like that, it didn’t seem so inexplicable, but what had she done every day? How had so many years of days gone by with nearly nothing to show outside of her work at Paper Fibres? No impressive salary. No children. No partner. She didn’t even have a lousy pet.
When Tucker died, she’d prepared to vacate the premises. It was the one time in her life she’d asked Francie for an advance on The Nest, the only time in her life she even thought about The Nest. She’d been stunned to receive the call from Tucker’s attorney saying that the apartment was hers. She owned it outright, no mortgage. Tucker had worried about her; he was dismissive and dubious about the nebulous legal and financial structure of The Nest.
“If you’re really receiving a trust, there should be financial statements, an executor other than that loon of a mother, someone protecting your interests.”
She’d laughed at him. “You do not understand the people you’re talking about. This is just how my family works.”
Well, he’d been righter than she could have imagined. But thanks to him, she was okay with how and when and if Leo paid her back. The apartment was her nest, literally and metaphorically. She could stay there forever and manage on a modest income. She could sell and move someplace cheaper and live contentedly for a long time. Her family didn’t know she owned; it wasn’t anybody’s business.
Bea didn’t dwell on the sum of cash Tucker also left her that was almost the exact amount of the portion of her advance she ended up having to pay back to her publisher. She preferred to think of it as an unsettling but lucky coincidence and not what deep down she knew: something Tucker recognized about her that she couldn’t admit to herself.
In last night’s dream, Tucker was trying to tell her something important. He was jabbing furiously at a piece of paper with his good hand, and she was unable to make out the words, keep her eyes open and focus. She wondered, not for the first time, what he would think of her new work. She imagined he would approve.
She stood and started straightening the mess on the table: piles of notebooks; a handful of fountain pens and two bottles of ink; spools of merino wool and a hand spindle. Bea wanted to knit mittens for Melody’s twins, had a few ideas about how to work the yarn. She picked up a small plastic bag of weed and her rolling papers. For a fleeting moment, she considered pretending it was still Sunday, getting high and knitting all day. She could call in sick; Paul wouldn’t care. But she shouldn’t. She couldn’t.
The radiator finally came on. She picked up the Collected Poems: Edna St. Vincent Millay, which she’d been reading since she awoke, thinking about Tuck and the poems he loved. Her fingers were so stiff, she dropped all 758 pages and the book landed on the uneven, hardwood floor with a boom and a healthy reverb. Before she even had a chance to brace herself, her downstairs neighbor started banging on his ceiling with a broomstick. He must carry that broom around the apartment with him, Bea thought. He must sleep with the damn broom. Did he even sleep? Or did he just sit, alert, clutching his broomstick, waiting for her auditory trespasses.
“Sorry, Harry,” she yelled down through the radiator.
She wasn’t sorry. She disliked Harry, the seventy-something widower who had always lived beneath her. Over the years, she’d realized that he was easily placated by a regular string of verbal apologies. The more she ignored his banging, the more hair-trigger the banging became. He’d pound when she dropped an apple, walked two steps in her stack-heeled boots. Harry was unpleasant but she understood he was lonely and that their ritual comforted him, connected the noises of her life with the silence of his and that even if the connection was relentless complaint and apology, their call-and-response interaction settled him.
Still, when was he going to get a little deaf? Too feeble to live on his own? Sometimes she fantasized about Harry dying and his family offering his apartment to her at a good price, well-below-market-value. His son liked her; he called her sometimes to make sure Harry was doing okay. He lived in Chicago and didn’t get back as often as he should. If she owned Harry’s apartment, she would break through the floor, put in a simple spiral staircase like the people on the D line down the hall had done. She’d have two floors and never have to move again. She could have a real office with an actual library. A guest room.