The Tell (43 page)

In a few minutes, she was on the roof. Illuminated in the stairwell, she looked small, and like the woman she was going to be for the rest of her life: open to what might awe her, humbled, no longer young. Her sculpted clavicle was both pedestal and art.

“It's a beautiful night,” he said. “I'm watching the action.”

She ran her thumb across his cheek. “You have something here. Dust. And in your hair. Everywhere in fact.”

They sat with their backs against the ledge. He told her about the bedroom walls, about how he'd seen Anya. Mira took off her glasses and folded them in her lap. Maybe the view was better to her blurred. He asked where she'd been.

“Just driving around for a bit. Looking at the city. Not where you think. Not where you're afraid I've been.”

“I'll always wonder.” He wanted to believe she was telling the truth; what more could he do? “You know that.”

“Maybe not always. But it's okay for now. You can ask, O.”

“I don't want to.”

He watched lights wash the brick building across the street and soak into the mortar. He put his nose to her neck and imagined he smelled the high, metallic stink of the slot machines. He knew he might always detect it, even when it was long washed away, even when it wasn't there. He stood and looked down again at the street. The height still scared him but there was something exhilarating about the wind blowing up in his face. He was ready to live with the uncertainty. His feet were steady. Mira was a good mystery. He wanted to feel the risk of love every day. It got the heart pumping. He might do something big. The wall pressed just below his knees. He teetered at the sight of the river running thick with diamonds. Mira said he shouldn't stand so close to the edge—he was making her nervous. His wife had saved him once before. Now she cupped her hands around his ankle to hold him down and bring him to her again.

I am enormously grateful to two women: Emily Cunningham, my exceptional and dedicated editor, and Jennifer Carlson, my remarkable agent, who always leads me in the right direction. Thanks also to friends and colleagues who read versions of this book and offered advice, endless support, and lots to make me laugh. To Michael, Tobias, Alexander—thank you, forever. You are my life.

About the author

Meet Hester Kaplan

About the book

Inside
The Tell

Read on

Further Reading

S
OMETIMES PEOPLE ASK ME
what it was like to grow up with parents who are writers. My father is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer; my mother is a novelist. Their friends were writers, too, and publishers, editors, critics, people whose lives revolved around books and writing and the business. Their talk was about who had written what, whose new book was magical or disappointing, whose publisher was rolling out the red carpet, whose publisher was quickly rolling it back up, who was still waiting to hear back from his agent and counting the minutes the phone didn't ring. They talked about novels as though the books were real life, about which character might be based on someone they knew, about scenes and image, about the power of poetry, the art of narrative, about language, tin ears, and talent.

I knew this because I listened carefully, but I also snooped. As a child, I hid under the table during dinner parties while the book and writing talk went on above me, and I watched as an esteemed novelist slipped off his shoe and caressed the ankle of the poet sitting next to him. I saw the jiggling leg of the man who admitted that sometimes, before he went to sleep, he reread terrible reviews of his new book. I saw what happened to the plumbing in the house after a tipsy poet reciting Elizabeth Bishop accidently dropped his pipe down the toilet. I heard the story of the furious writer who took an ax to the beautiful leather-bound copy of his own book his editor had sent as a present, stuffed the pieces in a mailer, and sent it back. Any one of these writer friends could show up buoyant one night and despairing the next. If I asked why someone seemed unhappy or restless or angry, my parents might say, “His writing isn't going well.”

    “I announced that I would have nothing to do with writing. Or books. Ever.”

I understood what that meant because I saw my parents enter into something unknown and unpredictable with their own work every day. On good days, I heard the typewriter keys going at top speed for hours, but on others, I heard each letter put on the page with weary uncertainty. I heard the frustrated squeak of my mother's desk chair, and my father talking to Olive and then Buddy, the dogs who slept in his office, when ideas and words weren't flowing, I knew what it was like when my parents' new books arrived in the mail; there was great optimism and the smell of new ink in that box. But I also understood that that the writing itself, the sitting in an isolated room, the putting down of words every day was not the way I wanted to live. I announced that I would have nothing to do with writing. Or books. Ever.

Which didn't mean that I didn't find these writers and their stories fascinating and amusing, or that I didn't love going to New York with my parents when they went to see their editors. This meant lunch in a restaurant, and later, at the editor's office, an invitation to go into a large closet full of new books and pick what I wanted. I touched the shiny jackets, tested the unbroken bindings, inhaled the scent of a new book like an addict. I appreciated the heft of big books and the delicacy of small ones. I still do. My declaration against the writing life didn't mean that I wasn't secretly moved when my shy father let poetry and prose speak for him, coming into the kitchen during dinner to read a stanza of Whitman or a paragraph from Henry Roth's
Call It Sleep
. Or that when my mother asked me, at age twelve, to read a short story in
The New Yorker
, I wasn't left awed by its description of an empty, sparkling asphalt parking lot, and how that image had the power to make me feel deeply and curiously alone.

    “My declaration against the writing life didn't mean that I wasn't secretly moved when my shy father let poetry and prose speak for him.”

In my college freshman writing class, I turned in sloppy and poorly written papers. I was making the point to myself that I didn't care about writing—and that, in any case, I was no good at it. I would not be another English major who gushed about Molly Bloom, Lily Bart, sestinas, point of view. Anthropology was going to be my thing. But in my senior year, I found myself in a writing class describing an old woman living alone in a version of the apartment I lived in then. Nothing happened in the story, but I wrote that she lined up her pots and pans with the handles facing in the same direction. That single detail is what has stuck with me, my first attempt to create mood and meaning beyond and beneath what we see. That challenge—those words just out my reach—was the work I decided I wanted to do. I had not found myself in the class as if by accident—I had taken myself there.

Still, I stayed away from writing for another decade.

I worked in publishing, in production and promotion because there were no aspiring authors in those departments, just people who liked books. But I was always aware that on the other side of decisions about book design or ad copy was a hopeful writer. And I knew this writer—I'd seen her wrestle, conquer, succeed, fail, and then do it all over again. I'd grown up with him. I began coming in early and staying late to write. It was a long time before I told anyone what I was doing, and I married that person, also a writer. Years later, I still feel that swaddling of privacy when I sit down to write, and I still hear the echoes of my parents at work, like faint, changing drumbeats.

    
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O
VER THE PAST DECADE
, I managed to find myself (as though
by accident
) in a few casinos, both the enormous, glitzy ones and the sad, down-on-their-luck ones. It's not because I enjoy gambling. In fact, I dislike it for the same reason some people love it: the excitement of risk. But there I was, wandering the floor, watching people at the tables, listening to the chiming of the machines and the sound of metallic rain as someone won at slots. I was especially drawn to those people playing the slots hour after hour, and wondered what enticed them and kept them there through their wins and despite their losses. I'll admit that playing the slot machines can be thrilling for a moment, but for me, it's not a good kind of thrill. It's like standing at the edge of a chasm, looking down and realizing that it wouldn't be so hard to fall.

I studied anthropology in college. I was in awe of Claude Lévi-Strauss. I heatedly discussed structuralism and
Tristes Tropiques
. I devoured
Yanomamo: The Fierce People
, a case study in cultural anthropology, as though it were a novel, and gobbled up other ethnographies. But I knew I was never going to
be
an anthropologist because my interests weren't scholarly. What interested me was more social, more personal, maybe more intimate: how people interacted; what happened when they strayed outside the norm and broke their contracts; how they understood, misunderstood, and formed their relationships with others. How a particular arrangement, formal and informal, small and large, functioned, and how it was different from any other. I also realized that my study didn't have to be of the Yanomano or the Dinka of Sudan; it could be of the people around me—family, friends, strangers on the subway, a boyfriend's parents, teachers, the women on my basketball team. Married couples. And, later, casino goers.

    “I also realized that my study didn't have to be of the Yanomamo or the Dinka of Sudan; it could be of the people around me.”

Casinos have their own particular culture. And for the women who play the slot machines—the majority of women who go to casinos choose the slots as their primary game—there is an inviting dynamic at work. Many women prefer the slots to table games because it allows them to be alone, to think or meditate, to go at their own speed without criticism or hassle. In
The Tell
, I wrote about Mira, a woman I thought I might know and admire in real life, and then I put her in front of a slot machine. I wanted to find out what would keep her going back to the slots, how she might get into money trouble, how she might hide the truth from her husband, Owen. Many of the women I talked to in researching the novel began playing the slots because it was fun, a way to release stress, an easy night out. For others, playing the slots blanketed their grief or offered addiction's instant gratification. Like so many of these women, Mira never imagined she was going to become a compulsive gambler or lose control of her life. She could not imagine how it could happen
to a woman like her
. Compulsive gambling can be devastating in any number of ways, and in
The Tell
, I wanted to know how it might test a marriage.

Every marriage is different, and
The Tell
looks at a single one. Mira's addiction, with its lies, betrayals, and secrets, threatens to destroy her marriage, which is built on the opposite notions of trust and honesty. Marriage is sometimes the context in which life happens; sometimes, as in this novel, it is the story itself. Marriage takes place within a room—and in
The Tell
, a large house of many rooms—a reminder of constancy, even as the marriage changes. As Owen deals with the damage Mira has done, their house, filled with a conflation of memories and responsibilities, holds and confuses him. Wilton, the seductive and ruthless new neighbor, wants what he thinks exists between Owen and Mira, but he can't ever really know what this marriage, or any other, is truly like as long as he's on the outside of it. Writing, like marriage and gambling, can also be a thrilling risk. Are you willing to see how far you can lean over that chasm?