Degree of Guilt (39 page)

Like her characters, Terri thought, Marcy Linton was having trouble opening the door. Terri waited, wondering how much of this reticence was the woman herself, how much she owed to Ransom. When Linton said nothing more, Terri asked, ‘When did you first meet him?’

Linton seemed to be summoning a specific memory. ‘It was the last night of the conference,’ she answered. ‘At the bar of a glitzy hotel called Little Nell, jammed with writers and snow bunnies and slick men in ski clothes. But I found him right away, from the mellow voice and all that red hair. When I introduced myself to Mark, his smile of recognition thrilled me. “
Marcy Linton
,” he said, “the most famous twenty-three-year-old writer since Sylvia Plath. John Whitley says you’ll have even me reading short stories again.” He grinned down at me. “
Short stories
, of all things.”’

Linton looked pensive, as if ashamed at some secret foolishness. ‘Except when I’m on some sort of literary high, I’m not very confident at social things – I’m more of the quiet observer type, I think. But the instant Mark clasped my hand, it was as if I felt connected to the confidence he gave off: bolder, almost brash.

‘Suddenly it seemed right that America’s most famous writer was interested in me.

‘“Maybe you don’t
have
to read short stories,” I told him. “I’ve just started my first novel.”’

‘“
Good
,” he answered. “Short stories are to novels what raisins are to wine – you can either shrivel your characters or let them breathe.” He laughed. “I don’t know what kind of metaphor that is, but it’s how I
feel
.”

‘“Well, I’m going to let them breathe,” I answered. “I just hope they don’t get vertigo.”’ Linton paused; her persona shifted from an excited twenty-four-year-old to the cautious woman Terri sat with now. ‘Listening to myself,’ she said with quiet irony, ‘I know why I never talked about this. My own bravado is far too painful to remember.’

Terri waited, then asked simply, ‘What happened next?’

Linton touched her wrist, as if tracing a scar. When she spoke again, her voice seemed chastened by some hidden censor. ‘Mark looked at me for a moment. “If you’ve just started,” he told me, “I suppose I’ll have to wait.” He sipped his drink and then, as if a new thought had just struck him, asked, “Did you bring any pages?”

‘God, I thought, he wants to
read
them. I was scared and excited, but more excited than scared. “I didn’t have to bring them,” I said. “They’re here, because
I’m
here. Living in a cabin, off by myself, until I finish.”’ Pensive, Linton added softly, ‘I thought it made me seem more serious about the novel I’d just started. But what it must have told Mark Ransom was that I was available – away from the hotel, with no roommates and no boundaries, eager for him to think well of me.’

Beneath the bulk of her sweater, Linton’s frame appeared to settle, becoming smaller. ‘For a moment, as I remember it now, his eyes seemed to glitter. At the time, I thought that this was a moment when one writer recognizes another – older to younger, but members of the same species. Then, very politely, he said, “I’d be flattered if you’d let me read them.”

‘I remember imagining: What if Mark Ransom found a woman writer he admired enough to say so.’ Linton shook her head. ‘In the narcissistic way of young people who’ve been told they have talent but have yet to learn the limits of it, I began to imagine the bright dinner parties, the influential articles in the
Times
and
New York Review
, the great literary friendships that would start with this meeting. My own celebrity.’ Her voice, soft and clear, held a trace of self-contempt. ‘What a fool I was – how romantic, how unlike the people I’ve come to write about. It humilitates me just to think of it.’

‘Why?’ Terri asked. ‘Were you supposed to be immune to dreams?’

‘Not immune. But clear-eyed. Enough not to invest someone else with the power of my own fantasies.’

Terri shook her head. ‘It’s normal to look up to someone older, to want to be like them, or be close to them. It’s just that for women, that can present a special problem. Because, in his mind, the man you’ve started to invest in may already have his fingers on the top button of your blouse.’

Linton gazed at Terri. ‘We’re supposed to know that,’ she said finally. ‘
You
must have always known that. But somehow I forgot.’

‘The penalty for forgetting,’ Terri answered quietly, ‘shouldn’t be rape.’

Slowly, Linton shook her head; once more, the gesture seemed to take her inward. ‘I offered to meet him the next morning, for breakfast. “Don’t worry,” he told me. “I’d like to explore this country. If you’ll be in tomorrow, why don’t you let me find you?” He made it sound like an adventure. A game, almost.

‘The next day, I was so excited that I could hardly write. I laid out all the bottles of wine my uncles had so that Mark could make his choice, then presliced some cheese and wrapped it in cellophane to keep from running around the kitchen when he got here, acting nervous like I do. About every half hour I would get up from my desk and look out the window for a car. It got so hard waiting that I almost called him.

‘Around four-thirty, when I’d finally settled into my writing, there was a knock at the door.

‘It was Mark Ransom.

‘He had fresh sushi from town, and an expensive bottle of wine. “First things first,” he told me. “Put these in the refrigerator, and show me a quiet place to read.”’

Reflectively, Linton glanced upstairs. ‘I took him,’ she said quietly, ‘to the atelier. The place where I wrote.

‘I had fifty pages waiting for him. Fresh and clean, worked and re-worked. The absolute best that I could do.’

Her tone became flat, as if from the effort of memory. ‘He settled into my chair, leaning both arms on my desk, waving me away. He seemed totally intent on what I had written.’ Linton’s voice fell. ‘I remember thinking that he wanted to know my work. To know
me
.’

It was strange, Terri thought, to listen to Linton after reading her stories. In her speech, as on the page, Linton was a minimalist: she conveyed her pain by indirection, in a few understated words. ‘You felt that he cared,’ Terri ventured.

Linton watched her. ‘What I felt,’ she said with equal quiet, ‘was that I had opened myself to him.’

She turned to the fireplace. ‘I came down here, made myself busy. Opened the wine he had brought, to let it breathe. Started a fire. All the time wondering what he thought of my pages.’ She shook her head. ‘Writers have this great protection: unlike singers or actors, we don’t have the terror and ecstasy of confronting our audience. But now I would, and it was Mark Ransom.’ Her voice lowered. ‘I felt so vulnerable.

‘By the time he finished, an hour had passed, and it was dark.’ Once more, Linton shook her head. ‘When I heard his footsteps coming down the stairs, I wanted to run.

‘He walked into the living room.’ Linton paused. ‘He just stood there, saying nothing. Giving me this enigmatic, knowing look. I couldn’t stand the silence.

‘“So,” I said, “should I throw it out?” When he didn’t answer right away, I cursed myself: instead of sounding clever and self-confident, I was a supplicant, and the smile I pasted on to cover that felt like a rictus.’ Linton folded her hands. ‘I already felt naked, and he hadn’t even touched me.’

Terri gazed around the room. In the present, it was perhaps noon; through the windows, Terri saw that sunlight made the boughs of snow-covered pines glint with crystals, saw more sun streaking the jagged peaks on the far side of the valley. But what Terri imagined was a window blank with darkness, a room made close by firelight, dancing on the stone slabs and the skins of animals. A man with glittering eyes and a slender young woman, facing each other in silence, a few feet apart.

‘What did he say?’ Terri asked.

Linton stared at the fireplace. ‘“Oh, I wouldn’t throw it out,” he said, and gave this little smile. The smile gave the words an almost casual cruelty; what it said to me was that his answer was less about the merit of what I’d written than the pitiable way I’d asked the question.’ Linton turned to Terri, fresh pain in her eyes. ‘At night, when I still think about it, I wonder whether he’d intended all along to strip away my confidence.’

Somehow, Terri felt the fragility of her own body. ‘And did he?’

Silent, Linton nodded. ‘In school,’ she finally said, ‘before I found writing, I was a pleaser. As a young girl, I stayed out of trouble, watched everyone else to know what to do and not do, killed myself to get the best grades I could. All to
please
other people.’ She paused. ‘When Ransom said that, it was as if he’d taken away my writing and I was a little girl again.

‘All I could say was, “Can we talk about it?”’ Linton’s voice returned to the present. ‘It sounded
so
pitiful.

‘Mark just laughed. As if that, and
I
were trivial.

‘“Of course,” he said. “A little wine will warm me to the subject.”’

The first sliver of anger pierced Linton’s voice. ‘It was so completely patronizing. As if he had to drink to work up any interest. But I was helpless to say, or even feel, anything like that.’ Her tone became bitter. ‘I poured the wine, like a waitress trying to please a customer. Like the pleaser I used to be.

‘“Go ahead,” he told me, “have some wine, and sit. It’s really not so bad.”’ When Linton shook her head yet again, Terri saw it as a self-directed reflex of puzzlement and wonder. In a flat voice, Linton said, ‘That finished me.’

‘How do you mean?’

Linton seemed to swallow. ‘I’ve never liked to drink that much – it usually makes me queasy, not myself. But what he said made me feel like such a joke. I didn’t
want
to feel like myself.’ She continued with painful slowness. ‘I sat next to him on that couch, put two glasses on the coffee table. When I filled my glass to the top, Mark Ransom smiled down at it.’

Terri felt cold. There was a moment’s silence, and then Linton spoke again. ‘He waited to start in on my pages until I’d finished a glass of wine and begun another.’ Linton hunched forward. ‘And then he told me what he thought.’

‘What did he say?’

‘It wasn’t just what he said, but the cold, analytical way he said it. He made my pages sound like a slide under a microscope – something with scientific interest but no life. Which, I’ve come to believe, has become the central problem with so many of my characters.’ Linton turned back to Terri. ‘When a good editor works with young writers, he or she will let them build some confidence – get some pages under them, speak only to what is most important. But Mark Ransom was more brilliant and incisive than any editor I’d known, and he was completely without mercy, scene after scene.’ Linton stared at the coffee table. ‘Every so often, between comments, he would pour us both more wine. And of course, I was grateful to drink it.’

Linton, Terri realized, had turned pale. ‘By the time he got to his last comment,’ she said softly, ‘I felt paralyzed – with wine and with humiliation.’

There was something missing, Terri realized, from what Linton had just said. ‘What,’ Terri asked, ‘was his “last comment”?’

Linton touched her face. ‘What ruined the pages, Ransom told me, was the bloodless way I write about sex.

‘I felt myself go numb. When I could finally speak, my tongue felt thick.’ Remembering, Linton bowed her head. ‘The scenes were about David, my boyfriend, and me.’

Terri could think of nothing to say, and Linton spoke again. ‘“I
liked
that part,” I told him. “It’s
real
. They’re both intellectuals, and so young, so inexperienced. They’re still scared of feeling, and smart enough that they can hide it.” I felt desperate, almost pleading. “Later in the book,” I said, “they’ll
know.
This is just the start.”

‘It seemed almost to make him angry. “It’s like they’re negotiating a contract,” he told me. “Sex isn’t an insurance policy, you know.” He stopped, taking one long look at me. “What sex
is
,” he almost whispered, “is spontaneity, and danger.”’

Linton was staring, as if transfixed by memory. ‘That one comment,’ she said quietly, ‘and I felt the whole thing turn on me. Everything he’d done was not just about my book, but about
me
.

‘When he put his arm around me, the room started to spin.’

Linton had begun to speak without expression. It was as if Ransom were about to touch her again; Linton had not stopped him in life and so could only remove herself in memory. She became close to inaudible. ‘I went stiff, felt too sick to struggle. And then, as if I belonged to him, he reached inside my blouse and put two fingers on my nipple.’

Terri looked away; she found it easier to listen than to watch Linton’s face. But when Linton spoke again, it was in tones not of hurt but of mild astonishment. ‘Do you know what he did then? With my nipple between his fingers, he took my face in his other hand and asked, “Do you ever watch Laura Chase?”’

Terri felt herself freeze, did not know for how long. When Linton spoke again, she had been silently staring at the floor. ‘Are you all right?’ Linton asked.

It reminded Terri that Mary Carelli had asked much the same question; when, Terri wondered, had she started losing her detachment? It made her feel as fragile as Linton sounded.

‘No,’ she answered quietly. ‘This gets to me, and then I feel selfish. It’s your pain, not mine. I’m just asking you to open it up to the world.’

Linton shook her head. ‘Don’t feel selfish. You just
feel
, that’s all. It’s why I’m opening up to
you
.’

You give me too much credit, Terri thought. She told herself to be a lawyer, get Linton talking again. ‘He asked you about Laura Chase,’ she said.

Linton looked at her another moment, and then her gaze grew distant. She nodded again, her body making a rocking movement, and briefly shut her eyes. ‘When he said that,’ Linton answered softly, ‘a shiver ran through me. It was like realizing that you’d missed the clues – that someone you’ve thought of as merely singular is, in fact, insane.’