Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence (13 page)

“I can't, Antonia,” he'd say heatedly. “If I could tell you, I would.” And that would be that.

Certainly, if it'd been up to Antonia, if she'd been the award-winning critic, she would have found something in the ordeal to lift the story out of tragedy and make it art. She'd come across one story and that story had resulted in a novel. Now she was ready for another, but she needed Henry to tell her. Yet she had other battles to fight (and win), like the one she'd raised again yesterday about his moving in with her. The explanations Henry gave against the move were flimsy: two writers, one office, he said. The house is far too cramped as it is, he said. The work on my house will be finished soon enough, he added, turning an indifferent eye to her protestations that she'd feel safer with him around, that she didn't see the point of living apart.

Tonight, as Antonia looked at Henry, she saw a glimmer of the man he once was and not the besieged man he had become. What she saw mostly was the accident, which was limned in his handsome face, in the etched lines around his mouth and in the dimmed brightness of his eyes. It was there every time he kissed her, made love to her, as if he were forcing all of his sadness and regret into her. Of course she wanted his sadness and regret, his suffering, because Henry was her second novel. Sometimes she'd watch him sleep, hoping that when he awoke he'd have forgotten in the night all that he'd lost. She'd forget as well, about all the secrets he kept close. She'd forget the novel altogether. How could she possibly go through with it? Yet when she heard a car pull up to the house, and she went to put on her makeup, knowledge of the secrets he kept from her swirled through her, enlivening her all over again.

From the other room came Nina Simone's gravelly voice tumbling through the cool air-conditioned house, while beyond them lay motionless Winslow, this town she still didn't know or like. When the car doors opened and closed, she wanted to meet her friends on the walk and tell them, “Turn around. I have no idea what I'm doing here. Let's go,” joining them in their car and directing them back over the bridge and past Henry's house, which led to the interstate, this four-hundred-mile ribbon of road that connected her to Manhattan.

When the doorbell rang, Antonia was applying her lipstick, imagining a different night, her upcoming book party at Leland's, the legendary restaurant and publishing haunt on Manhattan's Upper East Side. “Everyone will know your name,” Henry had said. “I'll make sure of it.” She believed and trusted him, even as he seemed to blanch every time she told him her latest news: “They want to send me on a twelve-city book tour,” she said. “They're taking out a full-page ad in the
Times,
” she said. “I'll be interviewed on Fresh Air by Terry Gross!” she said. She wasn't naive enough to assume that these promotional tactics weren't often begrudged other writers who didn't have Henry Swallow as an ally, who weren't sharing his bed. She relayed to Henry what her editor had told her, that she was the marketing department's darling. “Well, of course,” he said. “You're an easy sell: a young, beautiful, and talented woman, who's written a deeply affecting, original novel.” Still, when he'd said this, she felt the words slice like a razor through her. She knew how he felt about originality, that he despised disingenuousness of any kind. “If I can see the writer in the work,” he said on that first day of class, “then it's clear to me this writer is more involved with his own story than with imagining a fictional one.” Then, cautioning them, he added, “This is a fiction class, where you will share and evaluate one another's stories. Notice the use of the word ‘stories,' because that's what I expect from you—stories, not journal entries or personal essays or chapters from your Great American Novel that also double as your autobiography. Fiction is about character. Fiction is never ever about you.” He flashed his eyes on the room. “Edith Wharton said that the writer must, above all, bear in mind at each step that his business is not to ask what the situation would be likely to make of his characters but what his characters, being what they are, would make of the situation. ‘Characters, being what they are,' ” he repeated, pausing to look at every individual face. “Most of you will never understand what I'm talking about. Most of you will never go on to publish. That's okay, because most of you couldn't write your way out of a paper bag. I'm only here for the one or two of you who do understand what I just said. I'm here for the one or two of you who know that the most interesting characters make the most interesting mistakes—they fall from grace and keep on falling until nothing is left of them. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what I like to read. The best stories do not have happy endings. If you write a happy ending in here, I will crucify you. Understand?”

She'd found these words of his harsh, rigid, and condescending, but he was Henry Swallow, after all. (She had been warned against him, precisely for these reasons.) She'd applied for his class, only because her top choice had taken a sabbatical. She'd never expected to get into his class, but there she was, one of eight. She took his advice to heart and struggled those first few weeks to leave herself out of the story, but she failed miserably at it; she found that everything she wrote was about her. Still, because it was her turn to workshop and she had nothing else to hand in, she distributed, in her opinion, one of the least offensive pieces, which Henry ended up slamming.

“This reads like a writing exercise,” he wrote on the back of the story. “There's no emotional depth. Try again.” Then, magically, miraculously, she stumbled across a story that had nothing (and everything) to do with her, and all of Henry's cautions suddenly made sense. Antonia was young and inexperienced in the ways of writing, the rules that governed fiction, yet she took to them with ease, clinging to and relying on her guide, Sylvie. Through the dead woman's eyes, she saw the world differently and her father differently, and she harnessed all of her imagination's power, which heated her words and seared away all trace of herself in the work. The process was mysterious and extraordinary, as close to the divine as she'd ever gotten. In the story, she was nowhere and everywhere, in every sentence and on every page, yet missing just the same.

Antonia Lively became Sylvie Adams, and Sylvie Adams became Hazel Meeks, both and neither, at once.

What would Henry say about how she'd come to find the story? What would he say about pillaging her father's past? In her mind, she defended the novel against him, even as she checked herself now in the full-length mirror. I'm his daughter, she would assert. By proxy, the story belongs to me as much as it does to him. Still, having read Henry's harsh reviews of such books—“egomaniacal claptrap,” he called them—she knew that he despised writers who ravaged their own lives and the lives of others. Did it matter where the story came from as long as the writer did it justice, as she had?

Antonia liked to laugh at Henry when he railed against memoirs and memoirists, and, in particular, the ghostwriters they'd used to do the actual work. Tonight, however, there was no laughter when she thought about how she was nothing more than a ghostwriter herself, that the novel she'd written wasn't a novel at all. Still, hadn't Henry endorsed the writing of it? Would she have written it without his encouragement? Yes, she owed him a lot, but she didn't owe him any explanations. Besides, who cares what they call it as long as it sells, she thought. Hearing in the next room Calvin's and Ernest's hellos, then Ezra, who said, “I need a drink. That drive was bullshit,” she wished suddenly for Catherine, an impartial, friendly buffer against the evening.

After switching off the bedroom light, Antonia took a deep, steadying breath and went out to greet the men, who beamed and clapped the moment she entered, as if she had just won the Pulitzer Prize.

T
O HER SURPRISE
and relief, the dinner was an undeniable success. She served Catherine's food as if it were her own, taking the compliments in stride, although the drunken Henry tried his best to expose her own domestic failing by alluding to the rickety plot of a short story he'd recently “read.” “A young chanteuse throws a dinner party for the daughter she hasn't seen in years,” he said. “Rather than keep an eye on the meal, she chooses to practice for an upcoming show and thus ruins everything.” It was mean of him, but Antonia simply smiled. Henry's drunkenness, she knew, could go any number of ways. Tonight, unfortunately, it was leading him into the cruel.

Throughout the meal, Ezra kept getting up to smoke on the veranda. Antonia followed him on one of these trips while Calvin quizzed Henry on the last great novel he'd read. She found Ezra in the near dark, tapping out a cigarette from his pack.

“Do you have another?” she asked.

He lit two, then handed one to her. They stood in the hot evening air and blew lines of smoke up to the starry sky. A tall, gaunt boy with slender, feline features, Ezra wasn't handsome like his father, but stately, more like his mother, she imagined. He wasn't that much younger than she, but young enough to have retained the soft, supple face of his boyhood. Though she tried, she didn't like him and supposed the feeling was mutual.

“This isn't such a bad place,” Ezra said, gazing at the stars, then back at her. His eyes were irrefutably Henry's.

“I've only been here for a few weeks,” she said, “but I think I'm getting used to the quiet.”

“I love Manhattan. I couldn't live anywhere else,” he said, smirking.

“I'm glad you're here,” she said with cautionary warmth. “I'm also glad Calvin could give you a ride. Aren't my friends superb?”

“Ernest's really hot,” he said.

“If you like shy, creative types from the Midwest,” she said, “then, sure,” though she herself couldn't quite see what Calvin saw in the Michigander, who Antonia believed was talentless.

“I met this one guy a few months ago at Duvet, that bar in the East Village,” Ezra said. “We sort of hooked up.”

She wondered if he were trying to be provocative but then realized that he must have felt just as uncomfortable and out of place as she did. She found his awkwardness sad yet endearing, and wondered if they might have been great friends under different circumstances.

“Sort of?” she asked.

“I fucked him,” he said. “That was all he wanted because when I called him, he'd apparently given me the number to the time and weather.”

“Ah, men,” she said. “Most of them are such assholes.”

“Men,” he said, “have assholes and that's what I care about most.” He smirked again. She laughed halfheartedly.

“Well, now that you know Calvin and Ernest, you should hang out with them,” she said. “They throw fabulous parties, by the by.”

“Thanks,” he said, “but I'm way too busy for parties at the moment.”

“You're only nineteen,” she said. “You can't possibly be too busy for fun.”

“I'm working at Granddad's magazine,” he announced proudly, as if it were the greatest coup in the world: Dillard Bloom, Henry's erstwhile father-in-law, was the editor-in-chief of
Modern Scrivener.

“That's wonderful,” she said. “So you want to be a writer?” She thought how easy it would be for him to publish, with Henry as his father and Bloom as his grandfather. He's totally set, she realized with sudden jealousy. “Are you working on something now?” she asked.

“A memoir,” he said. Then, lighting another cigarette, he added, “And wouldn't you like to read it?” Though he said it teasingly, she cringed, his announcement sending shivers up and down her back. “I'm calling it ‘Harmful if Swallowed.' You like?”

No, she didn't like, but she was intrigued. It hadn't dawned on her until this moment that Ezra might be another way in. “It sounds juicy and promising,” she said, feeling the need to say something. “You'll have to let me read it when you're done.”

“You can read it when it comes out,” he said, blowing a smoke ring, then immediately breaking it in half by dragging a finger through it. “He”—gesturing at Henry inside—“doesn't know anything about it. So if you tell him, I guess I'll just have to kill you.”

Then Henry was through the door and on the veranda, saying, “Ezra, that isn't very nice.” Antonia went rigid, wondering if he'd heard the first part of their conversation, but it seemed he hadn't, because he was smiling. “Apologize to Antonia, please,” he said, still smiling as he wrapped an arm around her.

“Henry,” she said, wrapping her own arm around his waist, “it's fine. We were just talking.”

Had they really just been talking, or had she failed to read this tête-à-tête for what it was, less personal and more menacing? Because it seemed to her now that Ezra was implying an understanding of Henry that she herself would never be privy to. It also seemed that he'd simply been goading her for a reaction, which infuriated her.

Calvin appeared with two glasses of wine and handed one to Antonia, who took it and kissed him on the cheek. She'd met Calvin and Ernest in Henry's class, though Henry hadn't remembered either of them until she reminded him about their first workshop when Ernest unveiled his wretched story and Calvin supported it vociferously. She loved Calvin, every inch of him, from the top of his large, bald head to the bottom of his large feet. He was warm, charming, and southern. In his thirties, he still looked as young as Antonia herself. Ernest was Calvin's complete opposite in every way. In his midtwenties, he was tall and blond, with a decisive cruel streak that went against everything she'd ever heard about midwesterners. Still, because he and Calvin were together, Antonia had no choice but to tolerate him, which she thought she was doing a good job of tonight, even when Ernest, who was still in the house, shouted through the window, “You better not be smoking, Watts.”