Xoxox Iger!
She writes down the names of Iger’s books, and searches for Paradise of Artists. The screen floods with links to hundreds of articles about it, and the companion book, The Blissed-Out Retreat, best sellers that have sparked a frenzy of critical analyses.
Good for Iger, Joan thinks.
She opens the New York Times review: “These books contain a literary greatness about the pursuit of beautiful art in an ugly world, integrating enormous themes.”
From the Wall Street Journal: “The author introduces readers to something serious, original, and contemplative about creation, and the creation of lives; just as cutting-edge medicine can introduce into a sickened body new cells able to target the offending disease.”
On the NPR Web site: “J. D. Henry has outstripped the feminists who made their reputational bones tearing apart the male-female paradigm of sexual desire and the exertion of control. J. D. Henry has hidden a secret treatise within these elegantly written and compelling books.”
An industry has sprung up around them.
The Rolling Stone article surmises that the two books contain a history of the sexual and artistic worlds in their current incarnations: “AIDS and STDs and computer porn and increased violence against women within the larger context of a crumbling economy, a further widening of the gap between those with and those without, a massive increase in the unfettered desire to attain celebrity without commensurate talent, a frustrated mélange of creative impulses lacking sufficient outlets, appropriate forums, satisfactory levels of funding from the NEA and every state arts foundation. Within the artistic storm that looks malevolent to J. D. Henry’s characters, to whom he/she has given names conjuring up worlds beyond America, tinged French or maybe Persian, foreign but not foreign, and just American enough, this troop, ranging from their mid-twenties to early forties, repair to an arcadia, intent on finding purity in the works they seek to create, curating their existences as carefully as they do their art—be they canvases, words, music, dance, a small forest of cannabis—through their artistic endeavors, their sexual encounters, and relationships.”
Joan’s stomach clutches. She searches for biographical information or pictures, but there is nothing in the computerized universe that indicates the author is a real person with a past, a life, parents, a wife or husband or partner, a gym membership.
She looks up from the computer, at Martin’s treasures that he set out in the study against her wishes.
There are his presentation boxes, the sun glinting off the polished steel of the instruments displayed within, the caliper gauges and intraocular lens loops, the tonometers and trephines and punches, the spatula picks, and the scleral depressor he bought in Cologne and once put in Joan’s hand. She thought she had grown used to them, but today, the antiquated ocular devices of his profession look to Joan like the tools of a serial killer. Ovoid eyes, big as dinosaur eggs, with their removable parts for use in medical school classes, line the bookshelves, sit on the coffee table, glare at her sitting behind the marble desk.
27
Joan scrolls rapidly again through the articles about Paradise of Artists and The Blissed-Out Retreat, searching now for the quotes she had skipped. She finds one and reads:
She had dreamed of this place, all shattered pewter and fluorescent silver, and bold bright greens, the natural world dancing under the sun. She felt at peace, at home as she never had before, her footsteps making no sound as she walked through the meadow to where the others were gathered. Just twenty-five of them, then, on the ground in a circle, talking quietly about the projects they were about to embark upon. One girl, pink-lipped and fair-haired, said, “Dance,” and a man with a long ponytail, eyes older than the rest, said, “A symphony of birds,” and a young couple, love-struck, held hands, and said, “Three parts of a painting.” And Bashi knew only a few of the words she wanted to use, but paragraphs floated like metallic clouds in front of her eyes. “We need a name for our community,” someone said, and Bashi, from India, by way of Tuscany, surprised herself when she spoke up and said, “There is a Hindi phrase that means ‘Land of the Gods.’”
She races to the kitchen for the copy of Words intended for Volkmann, then back to the study and places it down on the black marble desk. Then she is flipping through the pages, searching her work, finding the paragraph she just read in an article on the screen. Right here, in her own book, is the same paragraph. The only difference between Bashi in J. D. Henry’s Paradise of Artists and her Bash in Words of New Beginnings is a gender reassignment; otherwise, every word choice, every bit of punctuation in the quote is identical to the unpublished page in her hand.
She keeps on, a ravenous comparison between every excerpt from those books quoted in the articles and her own passages about Bash, Lila, Minu, Zena, Bernard, and Anton.
J. D. Henry has kept Joan’s work completely intact.
For long minutes, she sits at the edge of the ergonomic chair, her mind whirling, unable to settle. Then—
Who would have done this?
How would anyone have known where to look, when no one has known of the book’s existence?
Over the last seven years, only Eric and the Solve kids had been in the house, out to the garage.
Did Eric fire someone, give whoever it was a reason to steal?
Other than the bottles of alcohol that Eric himself stole, nothing has ever gone missing.
Only this, her book.
Her book. Someone with an ax to grind with her.
Had one of his team hated her enough to damage her in this astonishing way?
Her fingers are fumbling, but then Eric’s mobile number is ringing and ringing, from Rhome to India, and his voicemail never clicks in.
Martin is biking up some hill and out of reach.
She tries all of Iger’s numbers, but it’s a holiday weekend and likely she’s somewhere exotic.
When she tries Daniel again and again, his phone is turned off.
She sits with her breath caught in her chest as the printer whirs into action, those damning articles dropping into the tray.
On the chair in the bedroom are the shorts she wore yesterday afternoon when she and Martin took one of their meandering neighborhood walks, and the shirt Martin wore last night when they had cocktails with Miranda and Larry Sumner, and she pulls on both.
She feels like a sleepwalker, or as if she is underwater, making her way through the house, back to the kitchen, retrieving her car keys from the ceramic pot on the counter. In the garage, she hits the button and sunlight fills the space.