Blue Angel (8 page)

“This last sentence,” he says. “You could lose it, and the piece would be stronger. You've made all that clear already.”

“Which sentence?” Angela scoots her chair forward so their foreheads are practically touching over the desk.

“This one.” Swenson reads: “‘I had a gigantic crush on my high school music teacher, and I spent every minute, outside of his class, thinking about him.' We know that from the previous sentence. You could end the chapter with: ‘The other half was wondering what Mr. Reynaud would say if I got to tell him about this tomorrow after orchestra practice.'”

Swenson finally gets it. How could he have read the manuscript—twice—and somehow never noticed that it's about a student with a crush on her teacher? Why? Because he didn't want to know. This conference has been exhausting enough without his having to deal with that.

“When did you start writing this…novel?”

“Early last summer. I was staying with my mom again and having a nervous breakdown.” Angela takes a pen out of her backpack and draws a line through the final sentence, looping jauntily at the end, with a pig's-tail curl. “Anything else?”

“No,” says Swenson. “That'll do it.”

“Can I give you another few pages?” She's already got out a fresh orange envelope and is handing it to Swenson.

“Thanks,” he says. “We'll talk about it next week after class? Like this…again?”

“Cool,” says Angela. “See you then. Have fun!”

Leaving, she slams the door by accident and calls from the other side, “Oh, man, sorry! Thanks. See you!” Swenson listens to her footsteps running down the stairs. Then he takes out her manuscript and reads the opening paragraph.

Swenson counts four pages—all he'll see this week. He reads slower, as he does when he's getting near the end of a book he likes. What the hell's going on here? This is a student novel. He reaches for the phone and dials.

A young man with a clipped British accent says, “Len Currie's line. May I help you?”

“Is Len there?”

“He's in a meeting,” says the young Brit. “May I take a message?”

“I'll try later.” Swenson hangs up. What exactly was he planning to say to Len? He can thank his lucky stars that the assistant blew him off.

Well, that's enough for one day. Swenson's earned a rest. Sherrie's waiting at the clinic. It's time to pick up his wife.

D
inner's a celebration. Of sorts. Sherrie's car's been fixed.
Swenson's attention drifts while she explains what the problem was. The garage only charged them—he can focus on that—half as much as they'd feared. So that's what they're celebrating: painless car repair. Tonight, all over America, writers are toasting works of genius, six-figure advances, successes and romances, new friendships and BMWs. While Swenson, on his desert island, clinks glasses with his wife because the Civic only needed a two-hundred-dollar alternator.

What's so bad about that? They're drinking a nice Montepulciano, tied with a grapevine twig that's traveled all the way from Abruzzo to amuse them in Vermont. They're eating chicken with garlic, white wine, and fennel fresh from Sherrie's garden. In the salad are the last tomatoes, ripened on the windowsill, because Swenson has the good luck to be married to a woman who can work all day at a clinic and still have enough consciousness about the small pleasures of daily life to leave the tomatoes on the sill—just to make his salad. Earlier, when Sherrie was cooking, Swenson came up behind her, pressed his hips against hers, and she'd arched her back against him…. Not bad for forty-seven years old, twenty-one years of marriage. Good wine, good food, dinner in a state of mild arousal. Swenson's not a lunatic. The world is a vale of tears. He's got nothing to complain about. Nor is he complaining. Exactly.

Sherrie gazes out toward her garden, though it's already too dark to see. No doubt she's thinking of all the things that need to be done before winter. But what about Swenson? Hello, I'm over here, a few steps higher up the food chain than some plants that will survive or not, regardless of what Sherrie does.

After a while she says, “You know what, Ted? I feel weird sitting here eating fennel when the rest of the fennel patch can watch us through the window.”

For a few seconds Swenson's charmed. Then he thinks, She's making sure I remember she grew the goddamn fennel.

He says, “Relax. Nothing can see in.
If
the vegetables were watching.”

“Jo-oke,” trills Sherrie. “Sorry.”

“The fennel's great,” says Swenson.

Sherrie throws her whole self into mopping up sauce with bread. Swenson loves to watch her eat. But tonight he makes the mistake of glancing past her, at the wall. On top of the flowered wallpaper that was here when they moved in, with its spreading fissures and sugary brown blotches, Sherrie's hung a row of holy pictures that she inherited from a great aunt. She'd put them up ironically, but they've stayed up in earnest, clasping their hands, some in ecstasy, some in torment, one crucified upside down.

Swenson thinks of Jonathan Edwards looming over the dean's head. Why does religion make people want to put scary images on the walls? So they'll know what they're doing in church, what they're putting in time to avoid. Give him the old Quaker Meeting House, nothing on the walls, nothing terribly frightening unless you were Swenson's father, who had the scary pictures inside of him, and was encouraged by his religion to spend an hour every Sunday touring his inner chamber of horrors. One morning after Meeting, when Swenson was twelve, his father took him out for breakfast at the Malden Diner and calmly explained that he'd come to believe that everything wrong with the world was his personal fault. As he said this, Swenson's skinny father ate three consecutive full breakfasts. It wasn't very long after that he set himself on fire on the State House steps.

Sherrie wheels around, then turns back. “Christ, Ted, the way you were looking at that wall, I thought one of those saints had started weeping.”

“I wasn't looking at the wall.”

“I thought you were,” says Sherrie.

“I wasn't looking at anything.”

Sherrie helps herself to more salad. She's not going to miss the last tomatoes just because Swenson's cranky. “Another crazy day at work. Mercury must be in retrograde, or something. This girl came in and said she was getting bad vibes from the ghosts of Elijah Euston's dead daughters.”

“What were
you
supposed to do about that?”

“Valium,” Sherrie says.

It actually cheers Swenson up to hear that clean-cut Euston kids are scamming to get drugs. “Probably one of my students.”

“Freshman. Theater major,” says Sherrie. “And then this disgusting thing happened. Some creep, this new guy in admissions, comes over with an application from some high school kid. The good news is the kid's got astronomical SAT scores. The bad news is he's got testicular cancer. They want me to call Burlington and ask about his chances. They don't want to waste a place in next year's class if the kid's not going to make it.”

“Is that how he put it?” Swenson asks.

“No,” Sherrie says. “That would have been illegal. But that's what he meant. I wasn't going to call Burlington. Or let them turn the poor kid down. So an hour later I call admissions and tell them that the guys at the medical school promised the kid would be fine. I'm feeling like a hero. And then it hits me that they could admit the guy and I could spend the next four years with a very sick kid on my hands.”

Swenson certainly hopes not. He doesn't want to spend the next four years discussing testicular cancer. Listening to Sherrie's stories about the clinic has begun to feel like hearing someone's hypochondriacal symptoms. It's not Sherrie's fault that whatever she sees in her office has started sounding like something Swenson's fated to get.

The fact (which he would never say, and rarely admits to himself) is that he's not very interested in what happens at the clinic. He married Sherrie under false pretenses—pretending to be enthralled by what she'd chosen to do with her life. But he
had
been fascinated, and not just for romantic reasons. A few days after he woke up on the emergency room floor with Sherrie's cool hand encircling his wrist, he'd started writing a story about a doctor so infatuated with a jazz singer that he ruins his career to satisfy her unquenchable thirst for love disguised as a ravening hunger for morphine and diet pills. As the story grew into his first novel,
Blue Angel,
it developed its own needs—a craving for medical information. So he went back to St. Vincent's and found Sherrie waiting for him. They fell in love so quickly, it seemed like research for the story of a man whose passion for a woman leaves him no viable option but to wreck his life. Except that Sherrie saved his. Everything changed when he met her.

That summer, they saw
The Blue Angel
at the Bleecker, and as Swenson watched the professor degraded into a slobbering clown for the amusement of the nightclub singer, Lola Lola, played by Marlene Dietrich with her smoky voice and the thighs that grabbed and held your attention, he knew where his book was going. The film gave him the name of the nightclub where his singer worked—and the title for his novel. For the first time, he felt that he was onto something larger than revenge on a doctor so starstruck by Sarah Vaughn that he'd ignored Swenson's ear infection. He understood that this period in his life—being in love instead of
wanting
to be in love, writing instead of
wanting
to write—had been arranged by magic, that a mantle of grace had settled on him and could as suddenly be whisked away. But not suddenly, as it turned out. Slowly. Thread by thread.

Sherrie says, “Arlene told me the most insane story at work today. These cousins of hers took their daughter to some amusement park near Lake George. They went to buy cotton candy and let go of the kid's hand and looked down…the kid disappeared. So they ran to park security, and the guards said, ‘This happens all the time.' They closed off all the exits but one. The guards said, ‘Stand there and look for your child. Look at the shoes, concentrate on the shoes. Everything else will be different.' So they stand at the exit, and they see the shoes and go, ‘That's her! That's my child.' The kidnappers had dyed the kid's hair and changed her clothes, but they couldn't do anything about the shoes. Kids have such different sizes.”

“That's ridiculous,” Swenson says. “What do you mean, this happens all the time? Didn't they catch the kidnappers? Do lots of kidnappers do this? Why bother changing the kid's clothes and dying her hair—where? in the public bathroom?—when they can just hustle the kid out of the park and split before anyone notices?”

“Why are you shouting at
me
?” Sherrie says. “I told you it was insane. That's why I brought it up. Forget it, Ted, okay?”

“Sorry. It's just that typical tabloid country bullshit Arlene always talks.”

Sherrie laughs. “Poor Arlene. She was hyperventilating, the story turned her on so much.”

“Her cousins told her this? They said it happened to
them
? Are they pathological liars?”

“God knows,” says Sherrie. “God knows at what point the fantasy takes over.”

“Or maybe the wishful thinking,” says Swenson.

“Don't say that.” In the silence that follows, Sherrie plays with a piece of fennel, sawing along one bumpy ridge with surgical precision.

Finally Swenson says, “Speaking of missing children…this morning I thought about leaving early for class and driving over to Burlington and going by Ruby's dorm and ringing her buzzer, finding her somewhere, somehow, taking her out for coffee….”

“And?”

“I didn't.”

“Maybe you should have,” says Sherrie. “Maybe it would've helped.”

“Time's what's going to help,” Swenson says.

They know that, and neither believes it. Ruby doesn't forget. Since she was a baby, she's always been the most stubborn person alive. A passing fright, some toy she had to have, she could keep it going forever. Why did they imagine that would have changed? Because everything else has. Their funny, gangly little girl turned into a chunky teen with dirty hair and the sullen blankness you see on vintage farm-family photos. Ruby retreated further and further. Sherrie said it would pass; girls get lost at a certain age. Sherrie brought him a book about this, which he refused to read. It depressed him that he was married to a person who would think that some self-help piece-of-shit bestseller had something to do with their daughter.

Eventually, they convinced themselves that really they were lucky. Ruby was fine. She got Bs in school. Half her classmates were pregnant or on drugs, even (or especially) up here in idyllic Euston. And then, at the start of Ruby's senior year, Arlene Shurley came into the clinic and told Sherrie she'd seen Ruby with a guy driving a red Miata.

There was only one Miata on campus, a sleek red rose of a car tucked neatly into the buttonhole of Euston's most troubled student. A southern senator's youngest son, entitled and alcoholic, Matthew McIlwaine had transferred in as a sophomore after being thrown out of two colleges, in the first case for passing bad checks, in the second for date rape. His presence at Euston was a scandal that died out within weeks, after the announcement of the library's new McIlwaine wing. The kid looked like a male model: that narcissistic, that pretty. What was he doing with Ruby? Swenson didn't want to imagine. Sherrie said that transfer students were often very lonely.

They should have been glad that Ruby
had
a secret, glad that she had a boyfriend. It used to bother Swenson that her friends at Central High were the homely-girl clique. Any boyfriend, any girlfriend would have been fine—anyone but Matt. Who could blame Swenson for wanting to save his child from a felon and a date rapist?

Swenson talked to Matt's advisor, then to Matt, who promptly cut Ruby loose. That's how Swenson saw it: a cat played with a mouse, something distracted the cat, and the mouse ran free. He'd thought the mouse would thank him.

Swenson and Sherrie know it's important not to blame each other. Sometimes it's weirdly sexy, this sharing of their grief, the two of them, connected this way that no one else can feel. But the wedge of all they can't say is busily doing its damage. Sherrie's totally innocent. She'd warned him that it wouldn't work, that Ruby wouldn't forget. And though Sherrie would never accuse him of having done everything wrong, he knows that she must think so. So he can blame her for blaming him, and because he's the one to blame.

Sherrie drains the last of her wine. “Ruby will get over it. Basically, she loves us.”

“Why would she?” says Swenson. “I mean, why would she love
me
?”

Sherrie sighs and shakes her head. “Give me a break,” she says.

 

After dinner, Swenson goes to his study. He picks up his novel, with a queasy lurch of misgiving. Holding the pages at arm's length—admit it, he's getting farsighted—he reads a sentence, then another.

Who wrote this hopeless moribund crap? Certainly not Swenson. Dead on the walls, dead on the page—a coded warning to himself. He dimly remembers how it felt when his work was going well, how sitting down to his desk each day was like slipping into a warm bath, or a warm silky river, a tide of words and sentences floating him away…. He opens his briefcase and takes out Angela Argo's manuscript. He's not going to read it. He'll just take a peek. Then he starts to read and forgets whatever he was thinking, and then, little by little, forgets about his novel, Angela's novel, his age, her age, his talent, her talent.