Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence (30 page)

The Redemptive Power of Fiction

_____

We come to stories only when we're ready for them, Antonia once told me, though I'm not sure I was ever ready for this one. It was never mine and belonged to others, to Wyatt and Catherine, to Henry and Antonia, to Linwood and Royal. Wyatt and Linwood were dead, though, Henry and Royal gone, and I knew Catherine didn't have the stomach to tell it—not many people would. As for Antonia—let's just say I got there first.

Henry had been right when he'd said that Antonia would make a name for herself. She did. No publisher, however, would touch her second attempt, as Henry had also predicted (and perhaps made sure of). Even I, a complete novice when it came to writing fiction, knew enough not to slander my characters. How she made such a silly, amateurish mistake, given her talents and her smarts, still astounds me, as it must have astounded anyone who read about it. The publishing industry, like love, I have learned, has a punishing memory. To this day, I have never seen a single indication that it ever forgot or forgave Antonia her mistakes.

All this happened many years ago, however, and I'm not the same woman I was when I first sat down to write this story. I'm older now, thirty-nine, the same age Catherine was when she first set eyes on Antonia. Perhaps you knew this already, but here's something you might not know—after Wyatt had finished writing his second novel, he uncharacteristically made a copy of it and had given that copy to me, because he loved me and because I loved him and because he wanted me to know everything. He might have still loved Catherine, yet his life with her, as he told it to me, had turned unbearable. “She's cold,” he'd said. “She's nothing like she used to be.”

Our affair began the way most affairs do—with an unhappy spouse turning to his wife's best friend for support, to help him figure out what to do. I knew Catherine, better than Wyatt apparently did, and so naturally he came to me.

His death was shocking. I still like to imagine that he wasn't on his way to my house that morning. Of course, I felt guilty. Who wouldn't, after sleeping with her best friend's husband?

Yet tonight, as I get ready for my reading, I have to remind myself that this is not about Catherine anymore. This is about my enduring love for Wyatt, who gave me a copy of his manuscript, a gift, because I knew he never showed his work to anyone. Ever. Such intimacy between us, such sweetness.

I knew everything, and all it took was the will to write it.

Stumbling upon Linwood's confession that he'd written down in a copy of Antonia's novel, however, was a coup. I'd found it when I'd picked up Catherine's car from the garage. The novel was just sitting there, on the seat, which I found odd, given what she had been through. Clearly, Catherine hadn't bothered to look at it, because if she had, everything might have gone differently.

Perhaps the most terrible thing isn't that Antonia took the story from her uncle and made it her own, or that she agreed with it so willingly and thus incriminated her father in a brutal, senseless crime, but that she omitted the most important, most exonerating details that would have helped to clear his name.

Fiction is always pressed up against some truth, Wyatt used to say. I couldn't imagine the sort of burdensome truth that Antonia had had to carry around, after running into a man who knew more about her than she knew about herself. To the best of my knowledge, this is how it happened: Poor Linwood had returned that night to deliver the novel to Antonia. He had wanted her to know the truth, as I had finally known it—that he had gone back to that cabin in the woods later and had carried that girl to her sister's house. That she hadn't bled to death on the mattress, as Antonia had written, but nine months later, during childbirth. Sylvie was her mother, and Sylvie's sister, poor, single, and alone, had given the child to Linwood. The product of a rape, the daughter of the men who'd killed her mother. It didn't matter to Linwood if he or his brother were the father. The only thing that mattered was that he would do right by Sylvie.

Yet Royal believed that he was Antonia's rightful father, even though he had no proof of this, even though Linwood had raised her. She looked more like Royal and that was enough for him. This was the story Royal told Antonia that night at the party, before Catherine had found her in the backseat of her car. Antonia was their agreement. Linwood never wanted her to know about her origins.

Tonight I am in Manhattan, and tomorrow I will be in another city. I leave the hotel and get into my car, place my novel on the seat beside me, my picture facedown, because I cannot bear to see myself, the fine lines of my face airbrushed out, my hair highlighted and sprayed into perfection, the thin lips, the black cashmere cardigan hanging loosely open, revealingly. The publishing house hired a famous photographer to take the picture. He was twenty years old, if a day, and kept telling me to “think young, think sexy.” But I could not think young, I could not think sexy, I could only think about Wyatt and Catherine, and the way this story smashed our summer to smithereens.

These pages, I hope, are as much a testament to my friendship with her as they are an honest rendition of its loss.

It was a trade-off, it always is, I think, the lives of others for one's own. Yet hadn't I suffered, too? Hadn't I nearly been shot and killed by her hand?

I never really got over it, I suppose, my anger festering over the years while I taught myself how to write. I didn't know until I started this story, though, how much that anger had been feeding my need for revenge. Such an ugly thing, revenge, yet look at what it produced.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I sense that Royal Lively is standing over me, or it's Wyatt or it's Catherine. Sometimes it's Antonia, wielding the gun. I know she's never that far behind me. I know one day we'll just happen to run into each other. I bought a handgun, just in case.

I get to the bookstore—Three Lives & Company—on West Tenth Street. The bookstore is packed, I assume, because of the laudatory review I got in
Modern Scrivener:
“[Jane Iris Miller] could just be the greatest fiction writer of her generation, and Ms. Miller's novel,
Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence,
is nothing short of ingenious and nothing less than a page-turner.”

I clipped the review out and stuck it on the fridge next to Henry's yellowing review of Wyatt's novel. I kept it to remind myself just how cruel and random the publishing world could be. Henry remained hateful, sad, complicated, misunderstood—though without him would I have had the teeth for this story?

Some of the faces in the bookstore look familiar; most of them, though, are not. Even as I shake hands with my fans, I am taken back to Page Turners, feeling the pull to straighten the shelves, to ask someone if he needs my help locating a book. Odd, isn't it, how things stay with us.

When Catherine steps forward, I almost don't recognize her. Under the dim lights, she looks much older, the last youthful traces finally gone. She looks old now, I think, yet she is still the same Catherine I remember, attractive in an unassuming, unthreatening kind of way, her manner cool and reserved, as Wyatt had often complained. I did not expect to see her again, especially not after having sent her a galley of my novel. I included a short note with it, because I thought I owed her as much:
You will recognize yourself in these pages. I am truly sorry about that. I have changed your name to protect you, though, as I have changed every name, including Winslow, which is and is not our town, just as you are and are not Catherine Strayed. I hope you take some comfort in this.

Though I do not believe in spirits, I suddenly feel Antonia in the room, too, as if she followed Catherine into the bookstore. I never knew her well and feel tonight like I know her even less. If I had known her better, might I have been able to change the course of that summer? Perhaps the real tragedy isn't the friendship I lost in Catherine but the friendship I never made in Antonia.

Catherine says nothing, doesn't even look at me, as she takes her seat in back, and I think about Wyatt, the months I grieved for him in secret, even as I kept showing up at Catherine's house with playing cards, board games, anything to distract her. I never once let myself cry in front of her, yet every time I stepped into that house, I was meeting Wyatt again, his smell lingering in the air, his voice. In one irrevocable moment, Wyatt had gone from the man whom Catherine and I had shared into an ugly secret that would turn us into enemies.

Here, then, is my enemy, who was once my friend, and, oh, how I want to tell her how good it is to see her, but I know enough not to.

After I am introduced, and the room finishes clapping, I go to the podium and look out over the faces. Young and old, men and women, white and black—these people who have come out on this freezing winter night because my novel has touched them in some way. I thank them for coming. I tell them I hope they won't be disappointed, that I'm not a very good reader. I take a sip of water. Then I clear my throat, open up the book, and begin.

“We thought ourselves good people who lived good lives.”

Published by

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Post Office Box 2225

Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-­2225

a division of

Workman Publishing

225 Varick Street

New York, New York 10014

© 2013 by David Samuel Levinson.

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN 978-1-56512-918-4