The Mentor (5 page)

John handed her a glass of wine and she took a sip. Superb. He sat back down.

“I brought you a little something,” Anne said, handing him the book.

He opened it and looked at the illustrations for a moment.

“It’s charming. Thank you.” He put the book aside and looked Anne in the eye. “Weiss faxed me your numbers. The company could go either way.”

That was Anne’s cue to rock ’n’ roll. She set her wineglass on the desk and leaned forward.

“The company is going only one way—up. People are talking about us. Our demographics are incredible: we’re selling to the highest-income zip codes in the country. I’ve just set up an exclusive licensing agreement with a three-hundred-year-old Venetian glass company. We’re going on-line; I’m talking to website designers
tomorrow. We’ll be able to sell globally, tailoring the catalog to each country’s customs and tastes, and at the same time we’ll save a fortune on paper and postage.”

As he listened, Farnsworth drummed his fingers on a leather check ledger. “You’re a very bright woman, Anne. I’m impressed. Always have been.”

“Thank you. I’m very grateful for your support.”

“You know what you want and you go for it. I used to be like that. Maybe I still am.”

“That makes us kindred spirits.”

“The market is sick with catalogs, Anne. I’d like to help you out, but I’m just not convinced.”

Anne had come prepared to offer him another five percent of the company, but only as a last resort. She stood up and stretched back her shoulders, walked over to the window. At the far end of the lawn was a statue of a woman playing a harp. She turned and faced him. It was time to cut to the chase.

“What would it take to convince you?”

He considered her question, looking down at his hands. When he looked up he seemed distracted. “You’re all business, aren’t you, Anne?”

“I hope not.” Had she played it wrong? Should she have taken a softer approach? She glanced at her watch; it was almost four o’clock. She hadn’t eaten since early that morning, and the wine was making her light-headed and slightly dazed. The only thing she knew for sure was that she wasn’t leaving that room without a commitment. “I just got back from a buying trip.” She sighed. “It was 103 degrees in Savannah. Can you believe it?”

“Sounds hellish.”

“This room is marvelously cool. These high ceilings.” She carried her glass to a cracked leather sofa on the far side of the room and took a seat, crossing her legs again. “I fell in love with all this wood when I saw it in
Architectural Digest
. That painting’s new,” she said, indicating the dog.

“You don’t miss a trick, do you, Anne?”

“I even sleep with my eyes open.”

He laughed at this, in an admiring way. His teeth were beautiful—too beautiful; they couldn’t possibly be original. She leaned forward on the couch and dropped her voice into an intimate register.

“John, this catalog is my baby. I will fight to the death to protect it. I will do
anything
to ensure its success.”

He went to the bar, refilled his glass, and held up the bottle.

“Yes, please,” she said.

In some strange way she was beginning to enjoy herself. Winning wasn’t nearly as much fun without a few hurdles to jump over and she was certain she had just cleared a major one.

After refilling her glass he returned to his desk and took a pile of folders from a drawer. “Do you know what this is?” he asked, brandishing one.

Anne shook her head.

“It’s a proposal I received three years ago from a young fellow out in Wisconsin who was producing those floppy stuffed animals my grandchildren can’t get enough of. He wanted two million dollars. If I’d given it to him I’d have tripled my money by now. This is another proposal that came in at about the same time as yours. It’s from a computer refurbishing company out in Palo Alto. They wanted three million. If I’d gone with them I would have cashed out for eight million. You don’t get it, do you, Anne? You think you can waltz in here in that ass-hugging dress and dazzle me with pie in the sky and I’ll just sit with my mouth open and cut you a check.
Home
is running twenty percent below projections, and you’re starting to make me look like a fool. I’m a businessman, not a baby-sitter.”

Anne felt as if she’d just been punched in the solar plexus. For one awful moment she missed her father. She looked down into her wineglass; her mouth tightened.

“
Home
is going to succeed,” she said finally, firmly, trying to control her voice. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of
an easy retreat. She looked up and met his stare. It was one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do.

He put the files back in the drawer and crossed to the couch, sat facing her at the other end, his arm draped across the back. There was a long silence. Anne heard the faint buzz of a lawn mower. “My wife is very ill,” he said finally in a low voice.

Why was he telling her this? Now?

“I’m very sorry.”

“We’ve made a sizable donation to the Museum of Fine Arts. They’re naming a gallery in our honor. Marnie may not live to see the dedication ceremony.”

It made Anne uncomfortable to have him so close. She should have waited until the next day, shown up bright and early with Trent in tow. This was all wrong.

“I’m not used to being alone,” he said.

He lifted his hand and gently touched the back of her hair.

Anne took a measured sip of her wine, glancing at him over the rim of her glass. He looked nothing like the benevolent WASP grandfather who might sneak a glance at her thigh and nothing more.

“There’s a superb restaurant that’s opened a few blocks from here. I’d love to take you there for dinner. We can discuss the future, our partnership.” He stroked her hair and then let his hand rest on her shoulder; it felt warm and heavy. “Some risks are worth taking, don’t you think, Anne? I suppose that’s what keeps life interesting. But I’m not in the mood to go over all the details at the moment. And you look a little tired yourself, my dear, all flushed and overheated. We can relax here for the rest of the afternoon. What do you say?”

Anne wanted to say “Fuck you and your money, you manipulative old lecher,” but when she opened her mouth, “Sounds wonderful” came out.

“Shall I make the reservations for, say, seven o’clock, give you time to catch the last shuttle back to your famous husband?”

His hand was stroking her neck, trembling slightly with anticipation. His fingers slipped under her collar, dry and insistent.

“Seven o’clock is fine,” she said.

He got up and walked to his desk and picked up the phone. “Shall I draw the drapes?” he asked.

“Please,” she said. “The sunlight is a little glaring.”

Anne wakes with a start—what’s she doing on the living room couch? Early gray light pours in the windows, and for a moment she’s afraid. And then she remembers—the baby, the life growing inside her. That goddamn unreliable diaphragm. She remembers coming home from Cambridge, the money secured, but feeling soiled, guilty, enraged. She will never give birth to Farnsworth’s child. But what if Charles is the father? Where is Charles? She sits up and rubs her neck. He’s not in the apartment; she can sense it. He didn’t come back last night. Anne feels that dreaded sense of overload. She takes the whole mess and shoves it to one side of her consciousness, out of view. Big day: she’s going to crack the whip on those website designers; she wants
Home
on-line in eight weeks or they’re history.

Tea, fruit, shower. Then it hits her—she knows where Charles has disappeared to. Fine. She has her own problems. What she
will
do is call the employment agency, hire that Emma, get Charles moving whether he likes it or not. Anne gets up and heads into the kitchen to start her day.

Charles speeds across the George Washington Bridge and onto the Palisades Parkway and then the New York State Thruway, heading north, due north, away from the city. As the first gray of morning spreads up from the eastern horizon, he drives—the speedometer on his black Jaguar hovering around
80—through the lush, mottled Indian-summer landscape of the Hudson Valley. From the car phone, he leaves Anne a message that he has to get away. He speeds past Albany and still he drives north. The ancient Adirondack Mountains, vast and virtually unpopulated, loom up and encircle the Thruway with their deep green forests.

Charles feels he’s entering uncharted terrain, a place where all measures of ourselves must be recalibrated, where the forests and lakes and mountains demand an honesty that matches their own. Charles exits the Thruway and heads west, through tiny rustic towns that survive on the trade of transient hunters and hikers. Surrounded by the glorious riot of autumn, he drives for hours, rarely seeing another car, deep into the wilderness, winding along
roads that tunnel through the endless forest. Finally he turns off paved road and onto a rutted, rocky track that jackknifes its way up a mountainside. He comes to a clearing that opens like a welcoming hand. There, perched on a rocky promontory above a small lake, sits a cottage that is the stuff of a hermit’s dreams—weathered, snug, crisscrossed by an orgy of incestuous vines. Charles gets out of his car and savors the sight. The afternoon sun is warm on his face. He listens to the dueling calls of the mountain song-birds, takes a deep breath and tastes the cool air. He knows he’s done the right thing, come to the right place.

“Take
that
, you little flickers!”

Charles smiles at the sound of the familiar voice and walks around the side of the cottage. Making her way around the periphery of her garden with the aid of a cane, sprinkling deer poison as she goes, is Portia Damron—tiny Portia, well into her eighties, a Pall Mall sticking from her scowling lips, her weathered, wrinkled face a map of the world’s sorrows.

“Hello, Portia.”

Focused on her mission, Portia ignores his greeting, doesn’t even glance in his direction. “There’s only one thing in this world I hate more than people—deer.
Bambi
was a pack of lies. They should make a sequel and reveal them for what they are: pesky, voracious, and disease-carrying.” She angrily jiggles her cane in the direction of a half-devoured cabbage.

The job done, Portia straightens up and meets Charles’s eyes for the first time. “You look like hell, Charles. Of course, you live in hell, so it no wonder.” Without waiting for a response, she heads toward the cottage. “Sun’s just about past the yardarm. Let’s have a martini and try to forget we’re alive.”

As a chicken roasts in the enormous old cast-iron oven, Charles sits by the fire with his feet up. He feels utterly at home, safe and protected in the cavelike cottage with its overflowing ashtrays and half-filled coffee cups and books, books everywhere—overflowing the shelves that line the walls, heaped in piles on the floor, spilling off tables and chairs. Across the room in the open kitchen Portia is
whipping up dinner—between drags on her Pall Mall—with a vigor that belies her years. Root vegetables, tiny red potatoes, a salad of the season’s last greens, corn bread—suddenly Charles is ravenous.

“That smells fantastic.”

“It’s all fresh. Primitive. Nothing like it.”

“God, it’s good to be up here.”

“And to what do I owe?”

“I just needed to kick back and relax.”

“My bullshit alarm just went off.” Portia looks up from the sink where she washing the greens and eyes Charles with piercing honesty. “Except for a perfunctory phone call now and then and an Anne Turner Christmas card that managed to be hideously sentimental and depressingly trendy at the same time, I’ve barely heard from you in the past year. Now you show up without notice and want me to believe you’re here to kick back and relax?”

Charles knows she has him, of course; he has traveled up here to be had. It’s time to get honest with the one person who knows him better than any other. He stands and begins to pace around the room.

“You know what I admire about you, Portia?”

“I hope more things than we have time to discuss.”

“You were a legend. You could have taught forever. But when you felt your time was up, you quit.”

“When I had nothing more to say, I quit,” Portia answers, drying the greens on a soft old dish towel.

“Exactly. You quit. With dignity and grace.”

“And a damn good pension. What’s your point?”

“Have you read the new Mailer?” Charles asks.

“It’s brilliant. Too long, but brilliant.”

“And the new Styron?”

“Short, but also brilliant.”

Charles stops his pacing and looks out the window at the lake below. It’s just past twilight—that sweet fleeting in-between time—and the lake glows like an indigo jewel. “And my latest?”

Portia stops what she’s doing and considers for a moment. “Exactly the right length.”

Charles sits back down and instead of denying his hurt allows himself to accept it. “I wondered why I hadn’t heard from you.”

“I thought I’d wait until I was asked.”

In the silence that follows, Portia begins tossing the salad. “Do you remember your story about the Vietnamese whore nursing her baby?”

“That was the first story I ever wrote,” Charles says, remembering that dusty Saigon street corner, the painted whore just past puberty, the suckling infant, the nineteen-year-old boy, Charles, who watched them, fascinated, before finally approaching the mother, the child-mother, and offering her candy and money, which she accepted greedily, with a suggestive leer, her baby still hanging off her nipple.

“When you stood up in class and read it, I started to sweat with excitement.”

Charles looks into the fire. “But what if there is no more? What if I have nothing left to say?”

“If I believed that, I wouldn’t be wasting my time listening to you.” Portia takes the chicken out of the oven. It’s a succulent golden brown, surrounded by roasted potatoes, turnips, carrots, and onions. “Let’s eat. We have a lot of talking to do.”

Later, deep in the deep Adirondack night, Portia sits in her favorite chair while Charles paces. The picked-over dinner and empty wine bottles cover the table, the air is thick with smoke from Portia’s endless stream of Pall Malls, and the fire is a rubble of glowing red embers. Charles is in that realm beyond fatigue, where the mind finds its third wind and a terrible clarity takes hold.