“Tuscan Nights, by Chelsea Tuttle,” Melissa read from the lushly drawn cover of a paperback book that still had a hot-off-the-press, fresh-glue smell.
“Her latest.” Linda handed Melissa a water-beaded glass of iced tea.
“Requiring Heculean editorial effort on your part, I’m guessing.”
“Chelsea manuscripts are indeed the Augean Stables of romance writing,” Linda acknowledged. “Her heroines are all twenty-three, but somewhere around chapter four they’ll remember Spiro Agnew resigning or Patty Hearst getting arrested. Eyes of midnight blue on page six turn up slate gray on page one-seventeen. The darlings speak faultless French, Italian, and Spanish, but have trouble with the English subjunctive. They never smoke, but if one of them has to light an improvised brushwood torch whose tongue-like flames will reflect evocatively from the gently rolling waters of the Arno, she’ll inexplicably have a Ronson ready to go in her purse.”
“And Maxwell Perkins thought Thomas Wolfe was a lot of work,” Melissa said. “Does Jackrabbit Press know what a prize you are?”
“So they say. If Tommy Quinlan’s blarney were euros I’d fly to Paris every month. He says getting ‘that stuff about Titian and Giotto and the orange roofs of Tuscany’ right separates first-rate genre fiction from soft-core porn. He calls me the difference between top-shelf romances and spinster-smut.”
“Maybe he’s just seductively stroking you, but I think he has a point,” Melissa said as a quicksilver frown marred Linda’s face for an instant. “Getting genre fiction right does matter, because it actually gets read. People committing high literature these days would have bigger audiences if they cared as much about their readers as you and Chelsea Tuttle have to.”
“I’m harboring a dangerous subversive under my own roof,” Linda giggled. “I haven’t heard such literary treason since you told the AP English class at St. Theresa’s Academy that if The Ambassadors weren’t a classic it’d be hard to tell it was any good.”
“I had to do that kind of thing at STA. Once I figured out that I didn’t particularly care for cigarettes or Coors, the conventional rebellions weren’t available to me.”
Melissa took a long, reflective sip from her iced tea. She was picking up tinny notes here and there that gave Linda’s banter an artificial ring, like the trying-too-hard public politeness of a couple who’ve had a furious row just before leaving home. Linda, from a family of Christmas-and-Easter Protestants, had bonded instantly at STA with Melissa, whose lapsed-Catholic parents bothered with religious observance only when Grammy Seton had to be mollified. Soulmates in nonconformity from early adolescence, they had known each other too well for too long to hide feelings successfully.
Melissa decided to seek conversational ground that wouldn’t risk using “seductively stroking” and “Quinlan” in the same sentence. She gestured toward a stack of typescript near the stairs.
“That can’t be Chelsea’s next. Is it the mystery you’ve been working on?”
“No. It’s a muskets-and-magnolias epic—Civil War romance by an author calling himself Luther Battle, which I desperately hope is a nom de plume. I can’t get past chapter six of my flaky little mystery, or even come up with a name for my primly plucky heroine. The only ones I’ve thought of sound like something Sara Paretsky would use if she lost a bet to Danielle Steele.”
“Give me a thumbnail sketch of this nameless protagonist.”
“Austen specialist at a toney prep school who solves genteel crimes in the crested blazer set by pulling insights from Jane Austen’s sensibility. Dead Poets’ Society meets The Preppy Murders in drag.”
“That has possibilities. You’re saying literature has a point beyond aesthetic self-indulgence. Which also happens to be what Austen was saying. You’re hearkening back to themes from Wharton and Hemingway: courage, weakness, love, sin, atonement, redemption. You’re as subversive as I am.”
“Maybe the deconstructionists will be issuing a fatwa on both of us,” Linda said with an odd wistfulness. She turned her head, but not fast enough to hide an almost shattered expression that Melissa knew had nothing to do with resonant memories of For Whom the Bell Tolls. So much for safe conversational ground.
Time to bite the bullet, Dr. Pennyworth, Melissa told herself sternly. The instant she opened her mouth to ask Linda flat out what was wrong, however, the doorbell rang. Scurrying to answer it, Linda admitted a tall, well-tanned woman lugging a large, bright red tool box with Snap-on stamped on it.
“Hi,” the newcomer said. “I’m Jessie Davidovich from Jacks (and Jills!) of All Trades.” She used the fingers of her free hand to suggest the parentheses. “I’m one of the Jills. I’m here about the stairpost thingy.”
“Right,” Linda said, showing the carpenter to the scene of the damage.
“Threads stripped and the bolt’s sheared,” Davidovich commented. “Wow. Oh wow, in fact. That guy on This Old House would be over his head on this one. Good thing you’ve got me instead. I’ll take it from here.”
“Great,” Linda said. “We can go up and change now, I guess.” She started up the stairs and Melissa obediently followed.
“Jacks (and Jills!) et cetera is a neat little offbeat name for an odd-jobs service, isn’t it?” Linda asked hastily over her shoulder—as if, Melissa thought, Linda felt she could hide her angst more effectively in chatter than in silence. “I found it advertised on the bulletin board at Community Christian Church, which is probably why it sounds a little left coast. It was posted between a meeting announcement for the Ad Hoc Women’s Committee on Getting Past St. Paul and a report from the Ministry on Inclusive Liturgical Diction.”
“How did you miss chairing that last one?” Melissa managed to ask at the top of the stairs as Linda caught her breath.
“Chelsea’s bad enough. I’m not going to edit the Bible.”
They made their way into the bedroom. Melissa closed the bedroom door behind them, then watched Linda pull two ankle-length, brown calico dresses from her closet. During the latter process Melissa stood serenely still, put her hands behind her back, and prepared the best I’m-waiting expression she could muster for when Linda turned around.
“What?” Linda asked as she saw Melissa’s demeanor.
“This is ’Lissa, carisime,” Melissa said gently. “The girl who puked with you after we shared our first joint and finished four years at STA with exactly the same number of demerits as you had. Tell me what’s wrong.”
With that, the stone wall that had been shielding Linda’s emotional turmoil collapsed on itself, like the façade of an expertly imploded building.
“Well, basically,” she said, dropping the dresses fecklessly on the bed and sketching a what’s-the-use shrug with her shoulders, “I’m a total shit.”
“Right, and I’m the next pope,” Melissa said. “Linda, I’m having a serious cognitive dissonance problem here. You edit books for love of the craft. You tutor at-risk students for free. You volunteer to teach English as a Second Language classes. You tape-record books for the blind. You’re donating blood in two days. You walk or ride a bike on any trip under three miles to help save the planet. Clarence Darrow at the height of his powers couldn’t convince a jury that you’re a bad person. As Peter said, you’re a very together lady.”
“You’re so sweet,” Linda whimpered as she sagged onto the bed and broke into soft sobs, “but you just don’t know. Peter is the sweetest guy on the face of the earth, and I cheated on him with a dirtball.”
HELLO, Melissa thought. I don’t think ‘There, there’ is going to get it, somehow. The first thing I do is listen.
She listened for eight minutes, perching on the end of the bed as Linda poured out a pitiless self-indictment. While listening, she waited impatiently for some gem of wisdom or consoling insight to emerge from her stores of academic learning. She had, after all, spent her adult life studying Literature with a capital L, and it seemed to her that if Literature with a capital L had any point it ought to be some help here. Somewhere in between The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Corrections she should have picked up something she could use now, when her best friend needed her.
“And to top it off,” Linda said, as Melissa ransacked Piers Plowman and Chaucer without result, “I think I might be pregnant. It hasn’t been long enough to miss a period, but this morning my tummy felt really different. That’s why I’m so strung out today. Peter and I have been trying so long, and if it turns out I’m carrying the baby of that scum-under-a-rock editor I’m going to be ready to kill someone.”
Spenser? Marlowe? Donne? Shakespeare? No help.
“Have you told Peter?”
“No. I can’t decide whether I should.”
Marvel? Not likely. Jonson? Butler? Hardly.
“Do you think it would help if you talked with a trained counselor?”
“I saw Reverend Siebern at Community Christian, actually. When I went over there to get the Jacks (and Jills!) number I thought, duh, paging Dr. Freud. I mean, I’m here, right? So we talked. He showed me the Power Point slides from his last sermon—There is an abundance of sin but are there any sinners? You decide.”
“Power Point slides?” Melissa asked, as Steele, Congreve, Addison, Pope, and Dr. Johnson all struck out.
“He’s a great believer in the homiletic use of visual aids. He asked if I still loved Peter and if there was any chance of the fling recurring. That’s what he called it, a fling. I said yes and no and he said good and good. No s-t-d risk because we’d used a prophylactic. I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘condom’ to a clergyman. Again, good. Then he said we all fall short and no one’s perfect, but guilt is a psychologically inefficient emotion so the important thing is to validate our feelings and move on. And that took care of that. The way he saw it, problem solved.”
“I see,” said Melissa, who was experiencing some psychologically inefficient emotions of her own. “Except apparently it wasn’t solved.”
“No. I tried to explain it to him. I told him that since I’d cheated on Peter I just didn’t feel myself anymore.”
“But he didn’t get it?”
“Clueless. He got this very understanding look on his face and said, ‘You mean you’re inhibited about masturbation?’ ”
“Oh dear.” Bronte, Austen, Dickens, Shaw, Woolf and Eliot: Nada. “Well, that won’t do.”
“’Lissa, I so want to feel like Linda Damon again. To be myself again. The old Linda Damon, who hadn’t polluted her husband’s bed.”
Hemingway? Oh, sure. Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Malamud, Albee? Not really. Updike or Mailer? Yeah, right.
“Let’s start by not beating yourself up any more. Penance may be in order, but self-flagellation is a bit too retro even for old-school types like us.”
“Penance means telling Peter, right?”
“You’re projecting. I’m not sure what I mean, but that definitely isn’t it.”
“But that’s really the bottom line, isn’t it?” Linda insisted. “That’s the choice. Telling Peter would be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I can’t even stand to think about how much it would hurt him. But if it would make me feel clean again…I don’t know. I just don’t know what to do.”
And at that moment, at the last possible instant, Literature finally came through.
“Travis McGee,” Melissa said.
“Huh? I mean, John D. MacDonald, quasi private eye in mysteries with color-coded titles, right. But still, huh?”
“Travis McGee wasn’t really a private eye, he was a moralist. He said that when you’re in a genuine moral quandary, sincerely conflicted about what to do, the right choice is almost always the one you don’t want to make.”
“So I should swallow hard and tell Peter.”
“Just the opposite, it seems to me,” Melissa said.
“You’re going to have to explain that,” Linda said, jumping up so briskly that Melissa wasn’t sure whether she was looking at perky or manic. “But I’m going to help you dress and fix your hair while you do, because we have to get a move on.”
“The worst thing I ever did was fake out my grandmother, Grammy Seton,” Melissa said as she began undressing. “I didn’t actually lie to her, but I deliberately misled her. Semester break of my freshman year in college she wanted me to swear I was still a virgin, as she insisted I had done my senior year in high school. I solemnly swore that nothing had changed since my senior year in high school. She’d apparently confused me with some less frisky young Seton, so she was happy.”
“But you weren’t?”
“Not for long. Pretty soon I stopped feeling like a clever undergraduate and started feeling like a gutless jerk who’d exploited a sweet old lady’s naivetë. So I faced the same question you’re looking at right now: tell her and get it off my conscience, or not?”
“Don’t keep me in suspense,” Linda said as she fussed with the hem of Melissa’s dress.
“I talked it over with someone very wise whom I really trusted,” Melissa said softly. “Ran up incredible long distance charges between Ann Arbor, Michigan and Lawrence, Kansas.”
“Oh my God,” Linda said. “I‘d forgotten all about that. But I don’t remember you asking me whether you should tell her.”
“I didn’t. I couldn’t make myself spit the question out. So I just talked around the issue, hoping that you’d magically say something that would make everything clear. And you did.”
“What in the world did I come up with?”
“You said I should stop wallowing in what made me feel lousy and spend a minute thinking about something that made me feel good,” Melissa said.
“Heavy, dudette,” Linda said as she fastened buttons up Melissa’s back. “If I’d copyrighted that one I’d be collecting royalties from Dr. Phil today.”
“I did exactly what you said. The last good feeling I’d had was when I’d finally admitted to myself that finessing Grammy Seton’s oath was wrong. Okay, I’ve got me: I was a jerk. I’d felt this incredible release of tension, almost an elation, that I’d stopped fighting what I knew was right. And I realized that was the key to deciding whether to come clean with Grammy Seton: not kidding myself about why I’d be doing it, or for whom, or whether it would do any good.”
“I’d say you contributed a lot more to the process than my little bit of psychobabble did,” Linda said. “But what did the answer turn out to be?”
“That if I told her I’d be doing it for myself instead of her. I’d be paying for my catharsis with her disillusionment. The harder choice was bearing the burden myself. I wasn’t a slut, but I wasn’t chaste, either, the way she thought of chastity. So I’d live with the knowledge that I wasn’t as wonderful as Grammy Seton thought I was.”
“So you’re saying I shouldn’t tell Peter? Base my marriage on deceit?”
“Your call, best friend, not mine,” Melissa said as tenderly as she could. “Deceit poisons marriage, but so does full disclosure. In Psych 101, most of the class would give the same answer Siebern did, and I’d be in the majority. But this isn’t a class, it’s your life, and Peter’s. You’ve gotta know. Just remember that whatever choice you make, I’m on your side.”
“That means a lot more to me than Reverend Siebern’s Power Points,” Linda said. “Now, why don’t you go down and see how the repair job is going while I get myself dressed?”
“Are you sure I can’t stay up here and help you?”
“No, thanks. You’ve already helped me plenty.”
Melissa nodded and withdrew. She edged her way gingerly down the stairs, feeling clumsy and uncertain in the long, itchy, unfamiliar dress. Jesse Davidovich was just coaxing a misshapen bolt segment off the bit of a compact, hand-held drill that Rep would have recognized as a Dremel tool. She noticed that Davidovich had moved the stack of typescript carefully to the coffee table and arranged a drop-cloth around the base of the stairs.
“I’ll be a while yet,” Davidovich said with only the briefest glance up from her work. “Hey, neat dress.”
“Thanks,” Melissa said, strolling over and impulsively grabbing a fistful of pages. “I’ll go out to the deck and stay out of your way.”
“That thing is a future book, isn’t it?” Davidovich said as she inserted a different bit, with sandpaper on the end, into the Dremel tool.
“It wants to be one,” Melissa said.
“It hit me when I moved it out of the way. I thought, oh wow, I’m looking at, what, like a thousand hours of a writer’s life just sitting here. Like, that miter box over there? My dad made it for me when I passed my apprenticeship exam. Took him two days, and every time I get ready to cut a perfect angle on a piece of quarter-round with it, it’s like part of dad himself is right there, helping me. Just like a piece of the writer is here, ready to tell us a story.”
Davidovich noisily sanded the base of the newel capital for ten seconds, then blew sawdust away from the wood. She offered a bashful smile to Melissa, whose expression suggested the surprised delight of revelation.
“Sorry about running off at the mouth like that. I just got on a roll and started riffing. Your eyes must be glazing over.”
“Not at all. I went months at a time in graduate school without hearing a metaphor as elegant as that one.”
“Zoom,” Davidovich laughed, passing her right hand over her head.
As Melissa headed through the dining room toward the French doors and the deck beyond them, she caught herself actually sashaying in the period clothing. She was intrigued to note that seating herself at the redwood table on the deck required a rather formal bit of body language. She smiled and started to read Luther Battle’s opus.
It didn’t start out like Melissa’s idea of a Civil War romance. No wasp-waisted belles tearing their crinoline into bandages while they bravely waited for news from the front. It began instead with a southern officer returning home through a bleak landscape in January, 1865, the war not yet over, his empty left sleeve silent proof of courage under fire at Cold Harbor. As he approaches his ruined plantation, he stumbles over a mob about to lynch a low-born local girl who’d turned to harlotry under the exigencies of war and had stooped to entertaining not just Yankees but “colored troops.”
“Well, if we’re going to hang her,” Luther Battle had the maimed hero drawl, “we’re going to have to find someone who can make a proper noose.” So-and-so couldn’t do it, he went on, because he was busy running a pharmacy out of his farmhouse under a convenient draft exemption while brave men were dying at Lookout Mountain and Yellow Tavern. And such-and-such couldn’t either, because his son had deserted Pickett’s division and he’d helped the boy skedaddle to he wouldn’t swing for it; and thus-and-so had refused to sell oats and beans to the Confederate supply agents unless they came up with hard money, so he didn’t look like noose-making material either. And so on, with each tough in turn skulking away until the despairing whore found herself with no accuser but the one-armed officer himself.
“I don’t hold with what you done,” he had informed her evenly, according to the manuscript. “But you know what you are, and you just have to live with that for the rest of your life. Just like I have to live with this empty sleeve. Your family was good people, so git back to your young ’uns and maybe some of the good in your blood will come out in them.”
A bit derivative, Melissa thought, then instantly reproached herself for the academic snideness. This was a story, not a PMLA article. She leaned back and let the gently lowering Kansas City sun warm her eyelids. Could you find God in a slaveholder? Could an arm left on some blood-soaked, godforsaken battlefield atone for one man’s share in the monstrous crime of human slavery? Could a man who’d fought and killed defending slavery redeem himself by standing Christ-like between a harlot and a mob? From the depths of her reverie, Melissa heard approaching steps and Linda’s voice.
“The newel capital looks great. How much longer for the glue to dry?”
“About an hour,” Davidovich said, “but I only have to hang around another fifteen minutes or so to make sure the set has taken and there isn’t any bleeding through the seal.”
“Perfect,” Linda said. “We don’t have to leave for another twenty minutes anyway. I’ll fix a salad to tide us over while we wait.”
Melissa’s eyes snapped open.
“Abbey Northanger,” she said.
“Excuse me?” Linda said.
“Your primly plucky heroine. Her name. It just came to me.”
“Of course!” Linda said. “It’s perfect.”
“Zoom,” Davidovich said.
“Tell you what,” Melissa said as she stood up and tendered the first chapter of Luther Battle’s text to Linda. “I’ll fix the salad. You read this.”
“Recess?” Linda asked, smiling uncertainly.
“Penance.”