I typed past midnight, fell into bed, and when I woke a few hours later, I dropped to the floor for push-ups, made coffee, and picked up the phone to call Lucky Star with my breakfast order. Then I put the phone down.
What would Kartar notice if he was again standing at my door? I imagined him warning me, that fluted voice saying that this was not what he had meant at all, that my creative impulses were stolen and dark, already ransacking my soul, and there was little time for me to abandon my ways, scrub myself clean. I knew the diabolical truth, what I was intending to do, but I did not need someone else knowing it too.
I drank my coffee and toasted the heel of brown bread still in my fridge, and returned to my desk, to the manuscript that was already transforming into something else, regardless that I was typing her words.
It is hard to accurately explain how I managed to ambush the compunction with which I had been raised, my knowledge of right and wrong, the admonitions to never lie, cheat, or steal, how easily I threw my own morality aside. I wanted to usurp what belonged to her, felt that I had the right; she herself had lied to me all of my life. And although I knew, of course, who Joan Ashby was, that she was real, that I called her Mom in my regular life, not once did I consider her humanity, how my actions might affect her, did not once think back to Karen Sweet murdering Evan. I felt liberated from all normal constraints.
During the four days and nights it took me to type the whole novel, there were times I felt I was slogging up a muddy hill, carrying a loaded pack on my back, fighting a war of my own invention, a battle that featured revolutionary conversion and a desire for revenge, and very little guilt. It was not a no-man’s-land, but I pretended otherwise, ducking and weaving, and marching relentlessly forward until I reached the last sentence, the last word, the last period, and typed The End.
When I finished, I sat there wondering how best to mask its origins. The psychological construct of Words of New Beginnings shared little with the various emotional psychologies the characters in her collections experienced; the nature of her work had altered and was no longer as instantly recognizable. I considered how she was famous for her short stories, was known as a writer married to the short narrative form, and she had never published a novel.
I went back to what I thought was a natural breakpoint in the book, and that’s where I cut. I knew I might be doubling my risk of exposure, but I was making something new, companion books meant to be read sequentially. I named the first Paradise of Artists, the second The Blissed-Out Retreat, titles that came to me easily. It was impossible for them to bear my name, though I wished they could. I came up with a pseudonym that pleased me. I titled them and typed “by J. D. Henry” on each, and right then, the air pressure lifted. The rain had not ceased since I began reading Ashby’s work, and now, seven days later, as I put the finishing touches on the books, the black clouds blew away.
Suddenly the sun was high in the sky, and I could hear horns blaring as drivers took to the flooded streets, tires crashing through rivers of water, imprecations stoppered for days let loose into chilly air that was a little less sodden.
I stood at my wall of windows and thought how the harms from the past inform the present; how old wishes are nailed to a person’s endoskeleton, no matter that the bones have lengthened, solidified over the years; about the confluence of events in a life; the power of the written word.
Part III
WHAT IS THERE BETWEEN NEVER AND EVER THAT LINKS THEM SO INDIRECTLY AND SO INTIMATELY?
Clarice Lispector
kabhī nahī? aur sadev ke bhitar kya sambandh hai jo inko itni ghanishtha aur paroksh roop se jorhta hai?
31
“Darling, could you fix my sweater for me?”
Joan looks away from the window to the old woman slumped down in her seat with a spine as liquid as water. Even now, decades after a romantic picnic in Central Park, she remembers Martin running a slow finger down her back, saying, “The spine is comprised of twenty-six bones, twenty-four separate vertebrae interspaced with cartilage, the spinal-cord nerves carrying electrical signals and sensory information, like touch, pressure, cold, warmth, and pain, from the brain to the skin, muscles, joints, and internal organs,” and Joan wonders how this teeny old woman’s spine still has the strength to accomplish all that.
“What do you need me to do?” Joan asks.
“If you could settle my sweater back where it should be, darling.”
Joan weights down the wispy, hot pink shoulders, rolls the long sleeves up over the thin wrists.
“Thank—” the old woman begins to say, cut off by an announcement about the meals that will be served on the flight, a recitation of the movies that will play once the lunch service concludes.
“Oh, I’ve already seen all of those. What a shame. But how lovely, you and I can talk.”
Joan sighs inwardly. In the past, she enjoyed the intimacies, on a train or a plane, when strangers revealed their secrets to her, the interesting material she sometimes gathered this way. But today, she is incurious about who the big Indian man is, or why this old woman is traveling on her own to Delhi. Today, because of Daniel, she does not want anyone else in her head.
“Please,” Joan says. “I hope you won’t be offended, but I don’t want to talk at all. Perhaps the man on your other side?”
When the big man turns his head toward them, the air shifts with the invisible block he slides into place. That he has no intention of engaging is clear, and there is the hard look he sends Joan’s way, but she feels impermeable, tucked into her corner of the row, the few inches of her own buffering space. She glances quickly at the old woman, wondering how she feels hemmed in by people who have no interest at all in her. Joan turns away, sees the faintest reflection of her own face in the window.
An hour since takeoff. An hour plus two since Joan entered the airport and lifted off from her own life. The plane has climbed, evened out, and is sailing along. Outside her window, the blue of the sky is hesitant, uncommitted. How far has she traveled in this hour? Has she crossed into a different time zone, or is she in the same hour and minute as those Mannings she left behind? She tries imagining Martin surprising himself, breaking away from his regular hospital and office routine, jumping naked into their lap pool in the bright light of day, his music blaring so loudly it can be heard in the glen, or riding his bike on the nearby picturesque path along the Potomac, embracing the wind his own body creates. Joan closes her eyes, but she can’t picture him in either scenario. Even though he refuses to think so, would deny it if asked, they have long been in uncharted territory.
Last night, he’d said, “We’ve been lucky during our marriage. No event has come along that could have destroyed us. We can weather this.”
“Weather this, like we weathered Eric?” she said.
“But he’s okay now. We got through it.”