A strange thing happened, then. When she spoke, I saw everything. My mother, her husbands, each one of them. The swarm of staff, the flurry of appointments and meetings. It was ironic, I thought, the way I always found myself alone in rooms. Empty bedrooms, deserted pool decks, dining rooms with tables set for one.
I might be alone, but I could always count on a certain sound—my mother shrieking about something that was not done correctly or quickly enough or the precise way she had specified. I could always count on hearing one of her tantrums just beyond whatever empty room I was in.
It was all there.
All right there, tucked away in the back of my mind.
My eyes snapped open. “Can you take me back?” I asked, and she let go of my hand.
When she dropped me at Ambletern, I found my way through the maze back to my room. I jammed in a pair of earbuds, turned up the music, and wrote until the sky had gone from stormy black to gray to orange-streaked pink.
KITTEN
—FROM CHAPTER 6
Cappie said something back to Kitten, but Fay couldn’t hear what it was. The girl’s voice was too soft and the buzzing of the cicadas too loud. She wondered if there was lemonade in the kitchen. The girls might like some. She would like a glass.
“See, I’ll do it, then you can,” Kitten said.
Fay bolted upright. “Kitten! What are you doing?”
But Kitten was already swallowing whatever it was she’d cupped in her hand. Cappie’s face had gone ashen. Fay scrambled up and ran to the girls. The joints of her knees felt liquid.
“Kitten, what did you eat? Spit it out right now!”
Ashley, Frances. Kitten. New York: Drake, Richards and Weems, 1976. Print.
Chapter Fourteen
Writing the bad stuff was surprisingly easy. Giver that she was, Frances had provided tons of raw material to draw from.
All through my childhood, I had been the recipient of her rages, ravings, and preening. Bouts of helicoptering alternated with long stretches of forgetting I existed. My tantrums were dismissed as silly. Hers were treated like global crises. If Frances was the sun . . . I was that dinky planet at the end of the line with a number for a name.
Then there was her endless line of suitors. Men who either barely noticed me or gave me lingering, full-frontal hugs. Men who didn’t stick around long enough for me to care when they eventually, inevitably, slunk away.
Then there was the time I brought my college boyfriend home for Thanksgiving dinner. He was a lacrosse-playing English-literature major with soulful eyes and legs of Roman marble. I was smitten. At three in the morning, I found him with my mother in the living room, stretched out on the sofa in a horrifying, half-naked cuddle. She claimed she’d been on the verge of sending him away, so I went ahead and sent him myself. I followed him out, my own bags packed, less than ten minutes later.
I wrote all of it. Or almost all of it. The worst thing my mother ever did, her gravest sin, wasn’t something I intended to share with anyone. Asa might’ve acted like he’d known about it. He might’ve thrown out the name Graeme Barnish and said we’d been seen together, but he didn’t know anything. He couldn’t. I’d never said a word to anybody. Nor had Graeme.
I was sixteen, in my junior year in high school, miserable and deathly lonely at a girls’ school in Connecticut. It was the fourth school I’d attended in three years, thanks to my inability to fit in. The experimental hippie/art institute in the backcountry area of Greenwich had been recommended by Frances’s film pals. I had no friends there, not that I’d made any effort. Mostly, I drew Sharpie tattoos on my arms and took full advantage of the freedom granted upperclassmen by taking a train to the city whenever possible. I went to see the man I was obsessed with.
He was one of Edgar’s other clients, a married author known mostly for a science-fiction series he was avoiding finishing. We’d met at one of Frances’s literary events the previous summer, when he cornered me in the coat check and told me I was beautiful, in a sexy Scottish accent. I took him back to our empty apartment, let him undress me and do a lot of things to me that I’d only seen on the Internet.
I was scared out of my mind the whole time and, at the same time, exhilarated. I was a woman. A beautiful, desirable woman who now had a delicious secret. Afterward, he told me I had ruined him for anybody else, and he was completely and utterly in love. Then asked me to loan him two hundred dollars for a Town Car back to Jersey.
In the following months, our rendezvous took on a perfunctory quality. We no longer ordered room service, watched movies, and talked, in the hotels where we met. It was sex and sex only, and then he always had an appointment he had to get to afterward.
Afraid he was losing interest, I was desperate to return to New York for good. Back at school, I jumped off a low bridge into a river, breaking my ankle and dislocating my jaw. Frances brought me home. I don’t recall anyone uttering the word suicide, at least not in my presence, but I sensed the change of atmosphere. I wouldn’t be returning to Connecticut.
I saw a child psychologist and told the woman a bunch of bullshit stories about the kids who bullied me at the school—and even one true story about one of my stepfathers who used to “accidentally” walk in on me while I was in the shower. I kept the truth about Graeme to myself.
The move back to New York seemed to have renewed his interest.
I thought of him incessantly. Felt panicked when we weren’t together, euphoric when we were. We met at least once or twice a week in town at hotels, restaurants, clubs, and every time, even though we were in public and could have easily been spotted, he could barely contain himself. He pulled my chair close to him at our tables, nuzzled the crook of my neck. His hands roamed my body. He whispered that since I’d been back, he was flooded with inspiration—brilliant ideas for new books—but he couldn’t work. He couldn’t focus on anything but me.
“This is crazy, love. I’m crazy. What are you doing to me?”
I finally had a purpose: being the center of Graeme Barnish’s universe.
It never occurred to me, though I’d been raised by a master manipulator, that he was one too. It should have. I knew enough about the publishing world to understand that anyone five years over deadline would have to be spouting some pretty persuasive bullshit to still be everybody’s darling. But I ignored my inner warning bells. I ignored everything but him.
One June morning, the summer between my junior and senior years in high school, Frances caught him leaving the apartment. Not walking out the street entrance leaving the building; she literally bumped into him on our floor, waiting at the private, key-only elevator.
Later, over our ordered-in sushi dinner, she broached the subject.
“So Graeme Barnish, is it?” she asked. She was tapping away on her laptop, peering over her reading glasses at a new manuscript. Her sushi lay untouched.
I looked at her, the blood draining from my face. “What do you mean?”
“Was he here for a rousing game of bridge? To tutor you for the SATs?”
I kept my eyes on my box of rice. “He’s too old for me. And he’s married.”