Perfect Reader (7 page)

On the shows, the moment of rejection was stretched out to the most awkward extent possible and saved for the very last minute of programming, as though it were a reward held out to viewers for getting through all the optimism and pluck of the previous hour. The rejected one usually cried, his or her face crumpling into wrinkles of injury and despair, but so did the ones who had been narrowly spared from rejection for one more week—whether out of malice or relief, empathy, love, or fury, it was hard to tell.

Flora, watching, cried, too. She had a hard time not crying when she saw other people cry, as if her face were a mirror. Was that all she was? The thought was troubling. But then, it was a relief to cry, to in fact weep. To sit on the floor beneath the blue daze of the tele vision and weep. “Did you cry?” her father had once asked her after some insignificant childhood mishap, some bike or tree unfooting. “Did I cry? I weeped!” Flora had told him indignantly. It had become a family story. She did not cry; she weeped. She cried so hard, her mouth grew dry, her tongue hurt. She cried as she’d cried as a child, alone in her room at the President’s House, making ugly, desperate noises, her face hot and wet, the dog standing above her, slowly wagging his tail, watching her with interest, head atilt, waiting.

Later, sapped and waterlogged, she retreated to her little room with the cordless telephone and the phone book—her links to other human beings, but also, each in its own way, a reasonable weapon against the skull of an intruder, should the need arise. Her city cell phone, now permanently off, received spotty service in her father’s house anyway—service was spotty in Darwin in general, a metaphor for its disconnection from the larger world. If the would-be intruder thought to cut the phone lines, she’d have no way to call for help. She and Larks would be on their own.

What Flora needed was expert advice. Her fellow literary executioners and Plath and Joyce were of no practical use. Her father was not Plath or Joyce. But even when an early Plath poem had lately been discovered by some graduate student rousing long-slumbering manuscripts, it had birthed only limited curiosity. Flora knew because she’d read about the incident in the library. There was no such thing as a poem heard around the world. But still, her father had been a prominent scholar, of the Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler crowd—the triumvirate of pop poetry criticism, could there be said to be such a thing. It was not unthinkable that Lewis Dempsey’s poems could prompt limited attention, too, whether they were any good or not.

She needed to consult someone who knew things. Paul something—something Welsh, or Scottish—that was her father’s lawyer; he had drawn up the will. He’d put everything in order, officially documenting and organizing her father’s death. A former student was as much as she knew. A Darwin English major turned attorney. She opened the phone book to the business pages in the back. The last name started with a
B
, or a
D
. In the
D’s
she found “Davies, Paul, Esq.” It was nearly midnight, but she would just call the office while no one was there and leave a message, while she was thinking of it. But a man answered on the first ring.

“Oh,” she said. “I must have dialed the wrong number.”

She was about to hang up when she heard the man say, “Who are you trying to reach?”

“A lawyer. I’m sorry if I woke you. I thought I was calling an office. I was going to leave a message.”

“Is this an emergency?”

“No, no, I was just hoping to make an appointment. Please accept my apol—”

“You have called a lawyer. This is my office.”

“Who is this?” she asked.

“Who is this calling?”

Had she stumbled upon some pervert who now wanted to play late-night phone games with her? “Listen, I really am sorry to have disturbed you. I’m going to hang up.”

“This is one of the stranger phone calls I’ve ever received,” the man said. “Let’s start over. Hello, this is Paul Davies.”

“Really? That’s whom I was calling. I was assuming no one would be there, I was going to—”

“Yes, leave a message, but here I am. Who is this?”

“This is Flora Dempsey. My father—”

“Sure, Lew Dempsey. One of my favorite clients. One of my favorite teachers. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Was he? Thank you.” Almost no one called her father Lew—her mother, Ira Rubenstein. In the mouth of this stranger, it sounded overly intimate, intrusive, crass.

“A great guy—a legend in town.” He paused. “What can I do for you today, Ms. Dempsey?”

Today? Was it even, officially, one day or another? Was the lawyer always this preemptory? Was he working against a major deadline? Or had she caught him mid-tryst? “Flora, please,” she said. She was not prepared; she was in her pajamas. “Why don’t we make an appointment for another time. I’m just hoping to ask your advice on a few details of the will.”

“What sort of details?”

“Details
maybe isn’t the right word. More overview, I guess.”

“All right, overview of what?”

“These things I’ve inherited—the house, the writing. Mostly the writing. I’m not sure what to do. But it’s late, and I feel I must be keeping you from something important.”

“It’s pretty straightforward. And you’ve caught me now. Why don’t I run through what I’d tell you if you came in for an appointment.”

“If it’s no trouble—”

“As literary executor, essentially you are a stand-in for your father vis-à-vis his work. So, in that capacity, you may be asked to sign contracts or grant permission, or you may choose to edit a piece of his writing in anticipation of publication. But the extent of your involvement is entirely up to you.” He paused, as though waiting for confirmation that she was following. She muttered in compliance. “It’s presumed by the designation that your interests will be in line with his—with what he would have wanted for the work.”

“Is it?”

“That’s the assumption, yes.”

Her interests primarily concerned not reading her father’s work. How would that have squared with his? Surely there were former students like this know-it-all on the line—worshipful, ambitious, and far more capable—her father might have appointed to the job. When had he first chosen her from among all the possible literary executors? When had he said,
Flora, it must be Flora?
Had he said anything to Paul Davies about why he wanted her? She wanted to stop him now and ask him. But Paul was still explaining—a barrage of legalese, and not what she wanted from him. She wanted him to tell her that her father had said how wonderful she was, how sensitive, how she was such a good reader, and a good daughter. She wanted him to say that her father had left behind detailed instructions enumerating his expectations. She wanted him to say she didn’t have to do anything, that there was a caveat in the will, or a mistake. She wanted him to say that as it turned out, her father wasn’t dead after all. She watched the hands of the clock on the bedside table meet as though in prayer, pointing at the ceiling.

“The biggest hassles for a literary executor usually occur when there is a separate heir—the heir’s and the executor’s interests may be at odds, financially speaking,” he was saying. “But since you’re both executor and heir, your situation is relatively simple.”

Was that supposed to be reassuring? He’d said it so cheerfully. Executor and heir. Both. Her new, symbiotic, bipolar identity. Why had she admitted ignorance to the lawyer? Why had she even bothered asking? She was old enough to know not to make phone calls in her dead father’s house in the middle of the night.

“It’s like the estate,” he blazed on, an assault of information and analogy. “You’re in charge of the house now, and in that capacity you can choose to remodel or leave it sitting empty, or you can put it on the market to sell. As I said, it’s entirely up to you.”

Was he patronizing her? Would he have said the same, with such perfunctory pep, to Ted Hughes had he called for a consultation on Sylvia’s poems? “It’s that easy?” she asked him.

“Legally speaking, yes.”

Legally speaking, financially speaking. She knew his type. She could easily picture this man—he sounded young and undeservingly self-confident—a bully in his khakis, his white monogrammed pressed shirt now untucked as the single concession to the hour. Everything was neat to guys like him, the perfect soul-killing jargon holstered and at the ready. Life a series of logical legalities, spread out before him like an illuminated path to heaven. A man who comforted himself with his old, annotated paperbacks of Beat poets, who at cocktail parties with other lawyers talked about how
Naked Lunch
had changed his life. Had her father really trusted this man with his will, with his death?
Will—
it was a funny word.
This is my will. I will it to be so
.

Now all she had to do, according to this legal expert, was guess the most private hopes her father might have had
vis-à-vis
a stack of poems he wrote in the last year of his life without ever showing or telling anyone other than her. The
relatively simple
task before her a mere matter of deciding whether they were ready for publication, and, if not, how to make them so. And then, of course, there was the correspondence, the early drafts, the speeches from his presidency, the essays from his forty-year career, the whole of his life in letters, now, impossibly, hers. Executor and heir. She had it all.

“Ms. Dempsey, are you still there?”

She was, but she didn’t want to be. So she did something she hadn’t done since high school, in a fight with her boyfriend or her mother, the abruptness as satisfying as the sharp smash of a slammed door: She hung up.

They were always in different rooms: Flora’s father reading the paper in his study, her mother reading Laura Ingalls Wilder to her downstairs in the library; him falling asleep in front of some game on the television in their bedroom, her smoking her Marlboro reds in front of a murder mystery on the other television on the third floor. The excesses of the President’s House welcomed such separations. Her parents were the sun and the moon, only rarely inhabiting the same sky, and when it happened, the feeling eclipse-like—exhilarating, and unnerving. But he could make her laugh the way no one else could, the way Flora never could. Flora’s grandmother had told her mother, “Marry the man who makes you laugh—they all make you cry,” and she had taken the advice literally.

Her job now was to be the wife of the president of Darwin, and even Flora could see that she had decided not to do it well. She was certainly determined not to look the part. Her hair turned an alarming shade of purple overnight, and it was discovered she’d experimented with Manic Panic, a company whose target customer attended junior high school. She bought a pair of black combat boots and wore them around town unlaced. To complete the adolescent goth look, it could only be assumed, she, who never wore eye makeup, had her eyelashes dyed black. Her new eyes made her look depressed. And she left them every Tuesday night, Flora and her father, to return to the city and flee Darwin, back to her old life, the life she had never wanted to leave in the first place and still refused to give up, to see her friends and her analyst.

“Doesn’t everyone’s mother have an analyst?” Flora asked Georgia.

Georgia, who loved to be consulted on all matters of human behavior, paused to consider before answering. “Many do, but not all” was her assessment.

Abandoned, Flora and her father developed a Tuesday-night routine of their own. Dinner at Ponzu, a Japanese restaurant on an ugly commercial strip just out of town, with huge grills on the tables where the chefs cooked in front of you and did tricks like flipping a shrimp in the air and catching it in their pockets. They were beloved guests because they came every week and because her father tipped exorbitantly. The hostess insisted on bringing them, on the house, a soda for Flora, and for her father, plum wine, which he found cloyingly sweet but drank out of politeness. He was a man who cleaned his plate, even if he didn’t like something, and this annoyed Flora’s mother, who felt his manners missed the point. “I’d rather have you leave some food and listen to me when I talk to you instead,” she’d say, as if one had a choice about that kind of thing.

Sometimes Georgia came with them to dinner. Flora’s father called Georgia “the Wizard,” for Georgia’s love of science and magic, and because the tops of her ears came to the gentlest of points. “It’s the Wild Wizard!” he’d say to her in greeting, and they would both look delighted.

“Like sisters,” the staff at Ponzu said.

Over dinner, there were competitions. “Let the competitions commence” was her father’s rallying cry. “Who can make the best cow sound?” And the three of them mooed, one at a time, her father announcing, “I won that one,” and they would shriek with laughter at the corruption of the judging system. “I’m sorr-ry,” he’d say, exaggerating the word to show he wasn’t a bit sorry. “Even the Lithuanian judge gave mine a nine-point-eight. You two squeaked by with an eight-point-two.”

Back at the house, her father made Flora sweet, milky tea, and then he would read to her, picking up wherever her mother had left off the night before. Flora would offer a synopsis of what he’d missed, but he never seemed to mind that these weekly sessions meant he only ever heard one-seventh of a story. One month he started to read to her from a different book, a book of his choosing, one he had loved growing up and bought for her in town at Finch’s Books:
Swallows and Amazons
. But Flora had found it boring and they’d quit halfway through. It was years later, remembering her father’s hopefulness upon presenting her with the hardbound volume with a simple line drawing of a canoe or some other member of the boat family across its cover, that it occurred to her that in rejecting the story, she might have hurt his feelings—learning she had the power to wound her parents a long, slow lesson for her.