21

Liddy

Mario Puzo called it “the thunderbolt” in The Godfather, Rodgers and Hammerstein extolled it in “Some Enchanted Evening,” and for the first time in her life, Liddy is experiencing it. While there was plenty of passion in her early years with Garrett, and quite a bit with various boys in high school and college, none of that felt anything like this. There’s no crowded room, but Liddy knows, just as the characters in that book and musical knew, something incredible is occurring.

Marta presses Liddy’s hand between both of hers, and they look into each other’s eyes. I know you, is what Liddy hears inside her head, what she feels running through her veins. And you know me. Liddy is a woman without a spiritual bone in her body, and yet here it is. Heat rushes through her, and a flush spreads across her skin.

“Hello,” Marta says, her light Spanish inflection delicious. “It is delightful to meet you.”

“And, and,” Liddy stutters, “it’s delightful to meet you too.”

“It is delightful!” Rose cries. “I knew this was a good idea. Now it’ll be so much better. A comfort to both of you. To know the other is in the building—especially at night.”

Liddy slides her hand from Marta’s, but continues to stare into the deep-brown eyes flecked with gold. Marta nods, clearly more comfortable than Liddy is with the emotions racing between them. It’s almost as if Marta expected this to happen. Or it’s happened before. Or maybe Marta isn’t responding because she doesn’t feel the emotions at all.

“Marta is in five-oh-three,” Rose is saying, “and Liddy is in four fifty-four—also four twenty-one.” She giggles. “So now you know where to find each other.”

“Thanks, Rose,” Liddy says more sharply than she intends. “Nice to meet you, Marta. I’ve, uh, I’ve got a bunch of work to do upstairs, so I’ve got to run.” She scans Marta’s workout clothes. “And I guess you do too. Or did.” Then she steps out of Rose’s office and takes the stairs two at a time so she won’t have to wait for the elevator, where either one of them might waylay her.

When Liddy gets to her unit, she chastises herself for jumping to conclusions. What a fool. Marta is lovely and at least fifteen years her junior, and there’s no reason she would have any interest in a broken middle-aged woman like herself. Rose seemed to be unaware there was something brewing between them, so maybe it was only a thunderbolt on her end. The cocaine calls from her underwear drawer. She doesn’t answer.

She sits down at her desk, grabs a pen, and pulls her manuscript forward. She’s going to read it through, take notes on the changes she wants to make, directions she might want to go in. But she does none of these things. The title page taunts her, and the coke’s song grows more insistent. She wishes she hadn’t made that trip to Sandy’s before moving into Metropolis. Finally, she grabs the gram, cuts some lines, and snorts them.

It’s as if her brain has been switched on, which she supposes it has, and she’s able to totally engage with Clementine, whose life she created so long ago. An old friend she left behind due to Garrett’s derision, her own insecurity, and, admittedly, the demands of motherhood. It’s exhilarating to hang out with Clementine again, to jump in where they left off, as if no time has passed.

She sketches a bubble chart to assess the relationships between all the characters and begins to graph out a workable three-act structure. She devises a series of obstacles and complications to put in Clementine’s way. These may not seem nearly as brilliant tomorrow, but, hey, she’s completely enjoying herself, and she’s sure that some of the ideas are solid. A novelist, her childhood dream, what her professors at Iowa encouraged her to become, and now she’s doing it. Sure, she’s forty-four, but many writers don’t publish until they’re older. When they have something to say.

Liddy snorts and scribbles and has a terrific time until she has to snort more and more to achieve less and less. Her mind skitters to the two other grams in her bureau, but even facing the impending crash, she knows this is a disastrous idea. She takes two sleeping pills, snorts the last two lines, and drinks three glasses of water.

In the morning, it feels as bad as the last time she did too much coke. Maybe worse. With the exception of an afternoon visit to the shower—horrible, with its grit and odor of scouring power that made her lust for her clean, spacious bathroom at home—she spends the day lying on the couch, berating herself for her lack of restraint. She’s willing to give herself a partial pass, though, because she’s pleased she finally worked on her novel.

The following day, as the light streams through her windows, Liddy knows she can’t stay in the room for another minute. She’s nervous about leaving the building, but there’s little chance Garrett’s detective would be looking for her in Cambridge. Until she stashed the twins’ belongings at Metropolis, she’d never had any connection to this city, preferring the faster pace on the other side of the river. And anyway, the PI will be busy checking all the writers’ retreats in the country, after determining her passport hasn’t been used.

Her head hurts, her mouth is dry, and she feels both unstable and nauseous. But she dons one of her disguises: a dark wig and a pair of overly large sunglasses—the kind she would never wear, as the internet suggested. She exits through the rear door of the building to avoid Rose, whose eager devotion makes her uneasy. As does the episode with Marta Arvelo, which she knows Rose will want to discuss.

Liddy strides purposefully toward Mem Drive. Was it a thunderbolt, or was it a menopause moment? Hot flashes bring on flushes and high emotion. Or she could be losing her mind. While she’s fantasized about being with a woman, this doesn’t mean she’s a lesbian. It’s just as likely that she has a strong libido but can’t stomach the idea of being with a man.

The sun is strong and, although there’s a breeze off the river, the wig doesn’t breathe and her scalp is sweaty and itchy. She doesn’t like the weight of the sunglasses on her nose either. Who knew a disguise could be so unpleasant? On television, they make it look like such a lark. Liddy scoffs at herself and heads west, toward Harvard Square.

She doesn’t get far. Her legs are wobbly, her head pounds, and her bones feel as if they’re hollow inside. She drops to a bench, stares unseeing across the Charles at Boston rising on the other bank. She misses her apartment, the light and the views, the shower and the hardwood floors and the thick rugs, all of which she took for granted. She misses the freedom of her old life, to come and go as she pleased, even as she acknowledges this wasn’t actually the case. Her coke-fueled optimism is long gone, and the thought of returning to Metropolis is demoralizing. But there’s nowhere else to go.

The work she did on her manuscript when she was high isn’t half-bad. Most of it sucks, and her notes and graphs predictably ramble on into a lot of nonsense, but many of her insights into the characters’ backstories are rather good. As is her decision to turn it into a historical novel set in the midnineties, which is when she wrote it, rather than give it an update. This last wouldn’t be feasible anyway, as ubiquitous cell phones make a current story impossible. Leaving Vermont is the working title.

It’s a coming-of-age tale, as she was when she started it, yearning to know who she was, who she would become, and many of the details are autobiographical. Clementine, the protagonist, spends part of the summer after she graduates from college driving around Vermont in her old VW van, which is just like the one Liddy had at the time. Clementine calls it HoJo, because it’s blue and orange, like Howard Johnson’s restaurants, just as Liddy had. Clementine grew up in Burlington, Vermont, her father a successful attorney who bought up blocks of real estate before it turned into the upscale city it is now. He also served as mayor for twenty years. Her mother loved nothing more than being the First Lady, as she called herself, flaunting their wealth when and wherever she could.

Clementine meanders her way along the lakes and forests of the Green Mountains, listening to AM radio because it’s the only band the car can pick up. But even if the radio were more sophisticated, there just wasn’t that much FM in northern New England at the time. She dreams of becoming a novelist, but her parents won’t hear of it.

Her mother, who started Clementine in beauty pageants when she was three, wants her to find a husband of “equivalent wealth and class,” and doesn’t believe she’s going to be able to do that in a creative writing program in the “boonies of some godforsaken state no one’s heard of.” Her father wants her to do something “productive,” and if she doesn’t land in a place where this can happen, there will be no more monthly allowance. Clementine gets herself into all kinds of messes until . . . Well, that’s the problem with the manuscript. Liddy was never able to get it to end in a satisfying way. But that’s exactly what she’s going to do now.

Writing invigorates her, gives her a reason to get up in the morning, gobbles up the hours, the days, the weeks. Still, loneliness is a constant. Robin and Scott are often in her dreams, and she wants them to be with her for real. Garrett haunts her nightmares, and as much as she wants to be free of him, she’s been unable to come up with a viable long-term plan. It all seems beyond her at the moment, and it’s so much easier to solve Clementine’s problems rather than her own.

Liddy starts spending more time out of Metropolis, switching up wigs and coats and glasses. It’s well into October, and the weather is cooler, so the wigs aren’t quite as onerous, which is good, as the disguises are more necessary. It’s been two weeks since she disappeared, and the detective must have determined that she never went to a writers’ retreat. Which means that now he’ll most likely begin searching the Boston area.

Rose has been showing up at all hours, offering a home-baked muffin or presenting yet another “little gift” to “spruce up the joint.” Liddy finally had to explain to her that now that she’s working seriously on her novel, she doesn’t have much time to hang out. It’s not that Liddy doesn’t like Rose—she does, and Rose means well—but she finds the attentiveness embarrassing and feels guilty about not returning Rose’s feelings. These days Liddy always goes out the rear door to avoid her.

Sometimes she finds herself fantasizing about Marta, about what it would be like to be lovers, and she tries to stop herself from going there. She steers clear of the fifth floor, Marta’s floor, and uses the bathroom on the second so she doesn’t run into her in the one on the fourth. But this doesn’t keep her from reliving their meeting and the thunderbolt that apparently went nowhere.