Perfect Reader (11 page)

“Even the stores lecture you,” Flora said.

Paul’s dimple approved. “Your father’s daughter, I see.”

In the hotel bar, he ordered a beer, Flora bourbon on the rocks. He looked tired. It had been a long week. She’d almost forgotten that other people still had jobs, that they worked for a living; that they lived for a living.

“So what kept you at your office till all hours this week?” she asked.

“The usual—real estate, divorce.”

“What else is there?” she said. “In life, I mean.”

“That covers it, I guess. A shocking number of divorces. I help some couple close on a house and a few years later I help sort out who keeps it. Even Darwin’s not immune to national trends.”

“I think Darwin likes to imagine it is immune to the rest of the country. I remember when I was in high school, the default banner above Pleasant Street read ‘Spay or Neuter Your Pet.’ As if that were the most pressing civic issue.”

“That’s still a favorite. That and ‘Darwin: A Nuclear-Free Zone.’”

“Oh God,” Flora groaned. “I’d forgotten.”

“The problems of the elite. Imagine if that energy were turned out rather than in—toward the intractable joblessness twenty miles away, say.”

“It would be a different history of the world if the elite looked out rather than in—hell, if the human race as a whole did.”

“Dark,” Paul said. “I like dark.”

“Who wouldn’t?” Flora said. “It’s delightful.”

She looked away from Paul and around the room. The decor of the Beagle was faux gentlemen’s club: resiny wood, green leather, bookcases stuffed with hardbound books that might not open—the hollow shells of books. They could hear the clink and clatter of dishes and silver coming from the restaurant, but they were the only two people sitting at the bar.

“Do you know any roofers? Someone who works on roofs?” she asked. The dullest possible question, but also the most urgent, and all she could think to say.

“I know a contractor in town. He might know someone. You’ve got a leaky roof?”

“Right,” she said. “It would be great if I could get his number from you.”

“Sure, no problem.”

“Great, thanks. I wasn’t sure who to ask.”

“No problem at all,” he said again. “Just remind me later.”

Flora wished she could crawl behind the bar and hide. She drank. Paul coughed.

Finally, he said, “What was it like growing up here, in Darwin?”

“You know, the usual—part wonderful, part terrible.”

“Which part won out?”

“It depended on the year.” She didn’t want to talk about herself, didn’t feel like talking. Why had she come? Who was this man? She heaved the talk away from herself: “What about you? Where did you grow up?”

“Not too far. Not far geographically. Culturally, a world away. In one of the old mill towns. Home of the intractable joblessness.”

“How was that for you?”

“Lots of exploring in the old abandoned factories. Lots of tetanus shots. My sisters and I pretended we were archaeologists, exploring a lost civilization. We’d bring old toothbrushes to carefully dust our findings—the ancient relics of beer bottles and spools of thread.”

“How many sisters?”

“Two—one older, one younger.”

“Ah, the middle child.”

“You say that so ominously. What about you—the only child?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s just me.”

Paul made conversation with the bartender, a gaunt-faced man with two rogue hairs fighting their way from the tip of his pointy nose. It was not Paul’s first time at the Beagle Bar. They each ordered another drink.

“What have you been doing since you’ve been back?” Paul asked.

“Good question,” Flora said. “These days, I feel like all I do is make coffee and clean out the coffeepot. I mean, that’s life. That’s it.”

“Good coffee at least, I hope.”

“Pretty mediocre, actually.”

“When my mother died,” Paul said, “everyone in my family gave something up.” He traced a line along the foggy edge of his glass, not quite looking at her, maybe not even talking to her. It seemed the saddest thing she’d ever heard.

“What did you give up?”

“Academic aspirations. My friends and I, at Darwin—your father called us ‘the Apostles,’ after Lytton Strachey and the Cambridge Bloomsbury lot—we were all headed that way. Now they’ve settled into tenure-track positions, or jobs at publishing houses and literary magazines. None had debts to pay. Salary was seen as distinctly secondary to integrity—a distinction I couldn’t afford. I had loans. And my dad had given up his sobriety. I couldn’t leave my sisters to take care of him.”

“How did it happen?”

It had been breast cancer. Caught too late. She never went to the doctor, never liked to make a fuss. He’d had a fellowship to Princeton. Instead, after he graduated from college, he lived at home for two years, tending bar at the local pub. Law school had seemed the easiest way out, and Darwin, ultimately, the compromise—close enough to be of use, but far enough that his father didn’t call him at one in the morning for a ride home from the pub, or, at least, didn’t call him first.

Listening, Flora felt sympathy mixed with the sinister tingle of excitement that comes from news of other people’s hard luck. It was a relief to remember other people had sad stories, that other people’s parents died. When you suffered some misfortune, other people wanted to tell you theirs; impossible, at the sight of a cast, not to show off one’s own scars, or share stories of shattered limbs. What was that? Commiseration? Competitiveness? Or was it just that life offered too few opportunities for such complaints, so when one came along, like dressing up in Darwin, you had to seize it?

“What a cheerful evening,” Paul observed. “I bet you’re wishing you’d stayed at home with your coffeepot.” Flora watched his face close like a curtain, diffidence where openness had been.

They moved toward easier topics—favorite spots in Darwin; the girls’ high school basketball team, which the year before had won the state championships; his younger sister, who lived near Flora in the city. They ordered a third round. There was nothing to eat but the infinite bowl of pretzels the bartender kept replenishing. The saltiness was making her ill, but Flora kept eating them. Such abundance of the stuff you didn’t want. Between the salt and the bourbon, she felt parched. Also drunk.

“Do you still think about it? The academic life?” she asked him.

“In another life, I’m a writer, and a scholar—like your dad.”

“Dangerous work, that. You’re better off with the real estate divorces.”

“You think so?”

“Sometimes I feel I’m
in
m
y
other life. I’m in the parallel universe and my real life is going on smoothly without me somewhere completely inaccessible.”

“So what’s it doing—your real life?”

“These friends I have from college, their parents exposed them to so many experiences growing up. You know, a sabbatical in Alexandria, or Beijing. A kibbutz here, a New Zealand sheep farm there. They’ve collected all these life experiences and now they’re experience junkies—professional excursionists. That’s what my real life is doing—it’s out there collecting experiences, international ones. Harvesting grapes in Sicily as we speak.”

Paul did not respond. She had stopped aiming for sense, or appropriate behavior. She was inappropriate for every occasion, like her shoes.

“Where do you stand on poetry?” she asked him.

“On the whole, I think I’m in favor of it.”

“Yes, yes, of course. But do you read it?”

“In college I did. As I think I said earlier, your dad made me see poetry in a whole new way. Now I don’t read as much as I should.”

“But why ‘should’? Why does one feel so obligated in the face of poetry?”

“I’m surprised to hear you, of all people, say that. With your dad’s brilliant writing on the subject—his brilliant talking. You were lucky enough to grow up in that milieu, steeped in the literary culture.
Reader as Understander
changed my life. Temporarily at least, it really did.”

“You know, he wrote his own poetry, too.” It was the first time she’d said the words out loud, acknowledged the existence of the poems to anyone. She hadn’t liked Paul’s tone—“you, of all people”—patronizing, superior. What did he know of her luck? She’d wanted to awe him, to make clear where exactly each of them stood in regard to her father. It worked.

Paul sat back in his chair. “I didn’t realize that,” he said. “I thought it was just the criticism.”

“No, no one does. Only me,” she bragged. She couldn’t help herself. “He gave me the manuscript—a full collection. Just months ago.”

“That’s amazing. How are they?”

“It’s hard to say. Difficult to describe.”

“Amazing.” Paul shook his head. “I’d love to read them.”

Her taunt had been an error. Interactions were pipped with errors; solitude and silence safer. “They’re unfinished,” she said. “Some of them. I don’t think he was ready to share them with the
world.”
She emphasized the word
world
to convey Paul’s very slight part in the one that was her father’s.

“I was confused when you called that night,” he said, “why you were making such a big deal of the literary executorship. I assumed you were asking about already published work. Now I see. Do you know if he planned to publish them?”

“We hadn’t discussed it. I was actually hoping there might be some revelatory document in his file.”

“And you say no one else knows. Even Cynthia Reynolds?”

“You know Cynthia?” Paul had seemed so benign and handsome before; her attraction now trumped by an urge to accidentally spill the dregs of her drink in his lap.

“I know of her,” he said. “I’d heard through the Darwin rumor mill that she’d shacked up with your dad.”

“‘Shacked up’?”

“Moved in with him.”

The bar had decided to orbit. That was misinformation. Flora stood. “I think I need to eat something,” she said.

“Are you all right?” He gestured to the bartender for the check.

“Fine.”

“Let me drive you home, Flora,” Paul said, handsome again. “I doubt if you’re up for the walk back in those shoes.”

She was so happy he’d noticed that she kissed him on the cheek, her frivolous self flooding gleefully to the surface. He paid the bill and drove her home in his flimsy, clean two-door, and they sat in the car, in the driveway, chatting for a minute. She remembered her parents doing this when she was little, when they came home from a party. She would look out the window of the big house and watch them, parked in the big circular driveway, talking, and wonder what it was they were talking about, and beg Mrs. J., who babysat for her, to let her go out and join them, and Mrs. J. would say, “Oh, Flora, do you have to be a part of every little thing?” And Flora would think, What a stupid question. And sometimes she would run past Mrs. J., run right outside in her pajamas and climb into the backseat and demand to know what they were talking about, what could possibly be keeping them from rushing in to see her. They would look at her, annoyed by the interruption, but fond and forgiving, and they would all get out of the car together and her father would pick her up because she was barefoot and carry her back into the house. How nice it would be to take off her shoes, which were hurting now, and to have Paul pick her up, to let him carry her inside. To let him take care of things a little—Cynthia, the roof, the poems. He seemed so capable. No taste, and possibly a jerk, but grown-up in a way she wasn’t. “I like a man who knows how to tip the concierge,” her mother said, and in all the ways Paul might not make sense, he and her father shared that competence. Was that male, that knowing how to function in the world? Or was she sexist? Or just terribly immature?

She kissed him again on the cheek. “I had a good time,” she told him, unsure if it was a lie.

She didn’t wait for him to reply, but opened the car door, stepped out, and walked herself up the short path to her father’s house.

Flora’s were not the only crimes. One night while the three of them still lived in the big house together but on the brink of apart, Flora’s mother stole the license plates from her father’s car, drove her own car twenty miles out of town, and threw his plates into the river. Her mother was handy with a screwdriver; she was good at repairs, and now they were all discovering she was equally adept at disrepair.

Flora knew this because her mother told her the next morning as she drove her to school in the car that she always drove, the one she would be driving to the city later that day, as she did every Tuesday.

“There’s a problem with the other car, your father’s car. You’ll have to get a lift with Georgia tomorrow.” Her mother’s eyelashes had finally faded to a color that appeared in nature. From the neck up, she looked almost like a mom. But she was wide-awake and excited. She was usually groggy and in bed when Flora left for school with her dad.

“What happened?”

“Vandalism, it looks like.”

“Scratches?”

“No, worse. The license plates have been stolen. You know, you can’t drive without a license plate.”

“Why would someone do that? Steal a license plate?”