Wit's End (10 page)

It was a hit-and-run. Nothing insulted Addison as reliably as being called conservative. She had given countless speeches to countless gatherings of mystery writers and readers arguing this very point. Why, then, did people persist in making it? But she was too pleased to have Martin gone to rise to the bait. The shock to her was not that he had left so early, but that he had stayed the night in the first place. He'd never done that before, and she'd no idea he ever would. If asked, she would have described Martin as a tireless critic. Or a tiresome one. Martin's life was clotted with utterly predictable disappointments that took him completely by surprise.

Rima was staring into her teacup. Something Tilda had said reminded Rima of something else, and she was trying to chase it down, but the tea distracted her. She was not looking into the tidy sort of cup a tea bag produced. Bits of twig and bird nest were floating on an oily surface. This was serious tea, and Rima respected that, while feeling no desire to drink it. She raised her head again.

Addison was looking very businesslike this morning in a black sweatshirt from Powell's Books Portland and with her gray hair brushed straight back. “Did you young people have a nice time last night?” she asked.

“You can read all about it on Scorch's blog,” Rima said. She meant this to be a bit rude. If Addison looked at Scorch's blog she'd know that Rima had seen the link to her own. But the minute the words were out, Rima worried that she'd sounded just as rude as she'd intended. She didn't want Addison to think she was ungrateful. She wasn't ready to be sent back to Ohio. “The band was good and loud. Control Your Dog,” she added, hoping to soften things. Which was probably more bewildering than mitigating, but it didn't matter because Addison had stopped at the main point anyway.

“Scorch has a blog?” She turned to Tilda, who shrugged to show her innocent ignorance. “Everyone turns out to be a writer,” Addison said. “Why? Why must everyone write?”

“Control Your Dog was the name of the band,” Rima said, as if someone had asked.

“Why can't they just read? There are so many very good books, already written. Written and published. I could recommend any number. Is she posting about me?”

“Me. She must have logged on the minute she got home.”

“I won't hire someone if I know they're writing,” Addison said. “I once had a handyman who sold pictures of my bedroom to the tabloids. What little privacy I have, I value.”

“Who wouldn't?” said Rima.

“I'll have to speak to Scorch.” Addison spread a spoonful of lime marmalade over a piece of wheat toast. The bed hadn't even been made when the pictures were taken, and she still remembered the accompanying headline. “Where Maxwell Lane Gets It On.” It must have happened during that week or so when disco was king. She didn't remember this; she deduced it from the finger-snapping faux hipness of the headline.

“Would anyone know anything about Margo Dumas's sex life if she hadn't had that assistant who forwarded those e-mails?” Addison asked.

Margo Dumas wrote novels involving ancient Rome and time travel. Rima had read one once. Beyond the fact that Dumas liked to detail the oddly mixed sensations of buttoned-up modern career women ravished by ancient emperors and gladiators, Rima knew nothing of her sex life. Probably the question had been rhetorical.

The three women sat in silence. Addison was thinking about Scorch's blog. Diaries used to be private things—that was the whole point. They came with those little keys so that
no one would read them.
When and why had they turned into performance art?

Tilda was thinking this was probably not the moment to tell Addison she was writing a memoir. Time enough for this confession after it was published. It was mostly about being on the street anyway. Addison would hardly be in the book at all. Though it would be nice if she blurbed it.

Rima took a sip of her tea, but it was still too hot and burned her tongue. The sun came into the room through the screen of fig leaves. The color of that rippling light gave Rima the sense of being trapped in amber, the three of them breathing more and more slowly as the air around them thickened. A hundred years from now they would be found in just these postures.

And then this end-of-the-world scenario was suddenly too comforting, so she re-created all three of them from their DNA—hangover, scalded tongue, hand with half-washed angry-pig stamp, and all—and forced them to live again.

In fact, Rima was pretty comfortable with sloth and torpor. It was Oliver who would have minded, Oliver who would have said it was time to get a message out. Which is why, when Kenny Sullivan arrived, Rima had the letter from Maxwell stamped, addressed, and ready to be taken. Rima never could deny Oliver anything if he really wanted it.

Of course the minute the letter was irretrievably gone, Rima wished it back. It occurred to her belatedly that Oliver's judgments were not a sound foundation for her own actions. He was, after all, in a spectacular lapse of judgment, dead.

But the letter did not really trouble her. What were the odds that Constance Wellington was still at the same address? What were the odds that she was even alive? The letter would be coming back on its own soon enough; Rima just had to make sure she was the one it came back to. If only all lapses could be so inconsequential.

Take the lapse of her missing shoes. They had been found in Martin's room. They had been found in Martin's room by Martin's mother. Tilda had returned them to Rima's closet without a word, but Rima's conscience was so entirely clear that she asked where they'd been, and then things were beyond awkward.

Rima was quite certain that she hadn't slept with Martin, but when she imagined saying this to Tilda it came out so unpersuasive that she didn't even try. And because she hadn't said it right away, her denial became increasingly unconvincing until even Rima herself would not have believed it. She felt that a certain something—coldness? suspicion? disapproval?—a certain bad something had entered her relationship with Tilda. The snake tattoo, which had seemed merely earthy and elemental, now had fangs.

Once the shoes had been found, she remembered taking them off. Undoing the laces had proved difficult, and going to bed with her shoes on unthinkable, so she'd asked Martin for help, only he couldn't untie them either. He'd cut the laces with a little blue Swiss Army knife he carried on his key chain. Would Rima remember that the knife was blue, but not remember that they'd had sex? She thought not.

“Thus do I loose all Gordian knots,” he'd said, which had surprised Rima; she wouldn't have pegged him as a reader. (Though when Rima's students had surprised her like that, it always turned out to be something they'd seen on an episode of
The Simpsons.
) She considered the further possibility that Martin might have also helped her into bed and heaped dachshunds on her after. She was quite moved by the picture; in fact, she felt very friendly toward Martin once she remembered enough to feel so. When he wasn't obsessing about money, he seemed like a nice-enough guy.

He'd already e-mailed her twice, offering to come down and take her out the next weekend. If the weather stayed good, they could go to the boardwalk, he'd said. They could go to something called the Mystery Spot and see a ball roll uphill. Or there was a haunted winery up in the mountains. Martin offered this last with considerable confidence. Rima could see he thought he had her measure, and her measure was a wine-tasting with ghosts. She'd said no just to prove she could. And because of Tilda. And because, what with her father, Oliver, and Maxwell Lane, she felt she had as many men in her life as she could reasonably manage.

T
uesday was Election Day. Rima, Tilda, and Addison stayed up late to see the Democrats take the House, Addison running back and forth the whole time, between the second-floor computer and the television, dachshunds at her heels. Among Addison's close friends, several blamed the absence of a new novel on the delayed shock of having seen the Supreme Court, with no pretense of legal standing, hand George Bush the presidency, and everything that had happened since. There was a list on the refrigerator of the five justices who'd done this, pinned into place with a magnet shaped like a fish, next to the five worst Bush recount outrages. And down from that, the name of every congressperson who'd voted for the Military Commissions Act and the end of democracy in this country. Recently, when Addison was asked when the new novel would be done, she answered that she wouldn't publish again until habeas corpus had been restored. Addison was an intensely political person. She kept lists.

Wednesday morning, in a post-election euphoria, she added an e-mail she'd received on her website to the hall of shame that was her refrigerator door.

“I have always been a fan of yours, but I just read what you wrote on the Huffington Post with all your snotty little remarks denigrating President Bush. So now I know you despise the present administration, and prefer people who are so sleazy and morally bankrupt as to submit to blow jobs in the oval office, raping women, committing adultery, lying under oath, and are so stupid as to ignore the threats to American safety such as the first attack on the World Trade Center.

“I'm sorry you felt it necessary to express your Bush hating aging hippie opinions. I know my comments will mean nothing to you. Liberals never change, but I thank you anyway for revealing yourself. I never have to read you again. I think Maxwell would be just as appalled as I am.” It was signed “a fan no more.”

“Who says the gracious art of letter-writing is dead?” Addison asked. She was in a magnanimous mood. “You'll see. Food will taste better, jokes will be funnier, even television, even television will be good. All because the Democrats have the power of the subpoena.” If only Rima's father had lived to see it!

(If only Oliver had lived to see YouTube. If only Rima's mother had lived to see . . . But that death was so long past, Rima was hard-pressed to think of anything her mother
hadn't
missed.)

They were celebrating. Addison was taking Rima downtown for a quick congratulatory stop at the bookstore (which was forty years old this month, and Addison remembered every single year. The Loma Prieta quake had leveled it, and Addison had been among the four hundred volunteers who carried the books out of the rubble, but that was a story for another time, or maybe it wasn't, nothing more tiresome than people's quake stories, but anyway, that old rising-from-the-ashes feeling was as powerful today as it had been back then) and then a sushi lunch. Tilda said she couldn't go, she had a thing. Rima was relieved to hear it. It was hard to share raw fish with someone who thought you were a corrupter of impressionable young men.

The scene on the street was joyful. A man on a recumbent bicycle pedaled past. He was shouting like the town crier. “The Ring-bearer has fulfilled his quest! Frodo has destroyed the Ring!”

Addison pointed out a man downtown who would, for a dollar, debate you on any subject you chose, taking whatever position you opposed. His look was eclectic—stained navy pea jacket, deer-stalker cap, ski gloves, mirror shades. His nose was purple, his cheeks veined. But he was refusing to argue. “We're all on the same page today,” he kept saying. “One day only. Out of business! Tomorrow we'll talk about how the Democrats' taking the House is not the same as the end of the Iraq War.” Addison said she'd never before seen him refuse an argument. It was unprecedented.

An a cappella group by the flower stand was leading a sing-along of “You're a Grand Old Flag.” “Aren't there any Republicans in Santa Cruz?” Rima asked.

“Apparently. They write letters to the editor,” Addison said. “And the local results weren't as invigorating as the national.

“But that'll be a cold comfort today. Today you'll recognize the Republicans by the expressions on their faces.”

She was wrong about this. The pink clown was just walking by. His umbrella was printed with little ducks, and he was wrapped in a sparkly shawl. His smile was both beatific and scary, but this had nothing to do with the election. Rima had seen exactly the same smile the weekend before. He could easily be a Republican; no one would ever know.

And once again, Rima seemed to be the only one to see him. Perhaps he was a hallucination. A visitation. Her own private clown.

A woman came toward Rima. She had wild wiry red hair and was carrying a string bag with groceries in it—loose carrots, soup cans, dinner rolls. For a moment Rima thought she was the woman from the beach. The nose seemed right, and the red-rimmed eyes, but Rima's suspicions were roused mostly by the way she stared at Addison. Rima almost said something, but then she saw another woman who could have been the woman from the beach. This one had black hair, sticking up from her forehead in spikes. Obviously Rima had no idea what the woman from the beach had looked like, beyond the fact that she was white.

And there were many people staring at Addison. Rima had forgotten how famous Addison was. Now she remembered. A famous writer going into a bookstore in her own hometown was likely to be stared at.

People came out from the stacks and behind their counters to say hello. The quick stop-in stretched to half an hour, then forty minutes, as there were remainders to be found and signed, and these were immediately bought, so they had to be re-signed, but personalized. There was the election to be exulted over, the California results discussed (schizophrenic, they all agreed), and a great many new books to be pointed out and recommended. Plus Rima had to be introduced to everyone. “My goddaughter from Cleveland,” Addison said.

Well, Ohio hadn't delivered the complete Democratic rout that had been predicted. Still—a clear winner in the “most improved” category. People in the bookstore were letting bygones be bygones.