Valentine (2 page)

“Jillian Talbot!”

She glanced up sharply, lowering the steaming mug to the table in front of her, bracing herself. Here it comes, she thought as she produced the automatic smile and peered through the gloom at the enormous shapes approaching her. She’d chosen the darkest, most quiet comer of the coffeehouse to avoid just this eventuality. But there’s no hope for it, she realized. Here we go again.

The shapes came out of the darkness and formed themselves into two rather hefty middle-aged women in fur coats. Perfectly nice women, Jill was sure, but she couldn’t help her own involuntary cringe as she watched them coming toward her. The larger of the two was waving at Jill as she barged across the room. The slightly smaller, blue-rinsed model trotted dutifully behind her, an apologetic smile on her friendly face.

“Now, Phyllis,” this one bleated as they arrived at the table, “I’m sure Ms. Talbot is very—”

“Nonsense, Schatzi!” the bigger one boomed. “I just want her autograph. Hello, Ms. Talbot. I’m Phyllis Beamish, and this is Charlene Miller. We saw you on the
Today
show yesterday morning, you know, in our hotel? We’re here on a culture tour with our women’s group. That’s what we call it, anyway: Broadway and museums and—”

“Yes,” Jill interjected, the blank smile frozen in place. “How nice. Welcome to New York, Mrs.—uh—”

“Beamish. I’ve read every one of your books, and I can’t wait to read the new one.
So
exciting, they are. I was wondering”—she fished in her purse and produced a battered, leatherbound book and a pen and thrust them at the seated woman—“could I possibly—”

“Of course.” The two women stared down at her as she found the first blank page in the dog-eared volume and quickly scribbled her name.

“Thank you
so
much,” Mrs. Beamish beamed, taking back the book and returning it to the purse. “We were just enjoying a quiet cappuccino in this
authentic
Greenwich Village coffeehouse before we meet the others at the Statue of Liberty, and what do you think we find? An
authentic
New York celebrity! And I said to Schatzi . . .”

The smile on her face remained, but Jill Talbot’s
mind went briefly elsewhere, wandering away from the table and the two women and the café. She thought of her home three blocks away, and of everything she would need to make dinner: Nate was coming over as soon as he was finished for the day at his studio. In all the months they’d been seeing each other, she’d never once made a meal for him. Not a full meal, at any rate: toast and coffee, or Chinese takeout ordered in. But tonight she would surprise him with her culinary skills, cultivated from years of watching her mother and helping her in the kitchen. Galician soup, followed by fusilli pesto and a salad of mesclun greens with lemon herb dressing . . .

“. . . and I just
loved
your first book! I bought copies for all my friends—when it came out in paperback, of course. . . .”

Wine, Jill thought. Pinot Grigio, Nate’s favorite, would be perfect with the pesto. She thought about that because it was as good a way as any to get through the Beamish speech: she had no way of knowing how long this woman would be prattling.

“. . . so it’s almost as if I know you, if you see what I mean,” Mrs. Beamish concluded. “The way everyone who reads your books knows you. As they say, a writer belongs to the world—or is it an artist? An
artist
belongs to—oh, well, whatever. It was lovely meeting you, Ms. Talbot. Come along, Schatzi, we’ve taken up enough of her time. Good-bye!”

“Good-bye,” Jill said, blinking away the odd feeling of having just returned from an out-of-body experience.

“Very pleased, I’m sure,” Schatzi whispered, smiling, before following her friend away.

Jill sank back in her seat and reached for her coffee mug, the vacuous grin slowly fading. This was the part she would never enjoy: signing autographs and enduring the praise of complete strangers. Oh, well, she decided, there are worse things. Like no praise and no requests for autographs. I’m one of the lucky ones.

She sighed, gazing down at the wirebound notebook and pen on the table next to the cappuccino. More notes: she was halfway through her fifth suspense novel, and the fourth had just this month hit the bookstores. The paperback edition of her third,
Murder Me
, had been the big Christmas title for its publisher last month, and it was holding its own on the
New York Times
bestseller list. Six weeks from now, she was scheduled to leave on a whirlwind publicity tour of several major cities around the country, and at the moment her life was a seemingly endless cavalcade of polite signings and polite cocktail parties and polite televised chats with pretty blond women on morning talk shows.

“
Well
,
Joan, my new book is called
The Mind of Alice Lanyon.
It’s about a young woman who’s clairvoyant
,
and she’s receiving psychic messages from a stranger, a woman who turns out to be dead. The woman was murdered, and she’s apparently trying to communicate the identity of her murderer.”

“Gosh, that sounds exciting, Jillian! I loved your last novel
—
the one that’s now out in paperback
—Murder Me.
Tell us about that.”

“
Well, Joan
, Murder Me
is about a New York police-woman being used as bait by the FBI to find a serial killer. . . .”

She smiled now, remembering.
Well, Joan
. . .
yes, Joan
. . .
of course, Joan
. . . A vapid conversation, and it made the books sound rather silly. But it really wasn’t so bad—well, it wouldn’t be so bad, if she could only get used to being in the public eye. But that, she knew, was the problem. She would never get used to it. For a well-known writer, Jill craved nothing so much as anonymity.
Thank you, Joan
. . . .

Several couples and groups were arriving in the cavernous, oldworld café. A glance at her watch affirmed that it was five-fifteen. This place—the nineties equivalent of a singles bar—would soon be filled with people on their way home from work. She stood up quickly, put on her gray wool coat, and pulled the matching stocking cap down over her short, dark brown hair. She collected her notebook and gloves from the tiny marble-topped table, glanced at the bill lying there, and searched her bag for her wallet. She
always overpaid here because George, the waiter, was an as-yet-unpublished novelist. The fact that he was at least forty-five, more than ten years older than she, embarrassed her so much that she frequently left twice the price of the coffee on the table. She did so today, reminding herself that George was probably a very talented writer, and she was very fortunate to have been published in the first place.

A light flurry was adding itself to the carpet of snow on the ground as she emerged from the coffeehouse into the bustling, bright reality of Sheridan Square and made her way down Seventh Avenue toward home. She was thinking about dinner again. She had gone only a few steps when she slipped on a patch of ice and nearly lost her balance. She dropped her notebook, and she would have fallen had it not been for the hand that was suddenly there from behind, to steady her with a firm grip on her arm. She had a fleeting glimpse of a man’s black glove, and of the black sleeve of a leather coat. She leaned down to pick up the notebook and brush the snow from it, and by the time she turned around to thank her Samaritan he had hurried away.

Everyone was hurrying, she noticed, placing the notebook in her bag, which hung from her left shoulder. She was jostled several times by people rushing in and out of the subway entrance at Christopher Street. Others dashed to curbs, hailing cabs before
the snow really started coming down and all the taxis magically disappeared. She smiled to herself as she looked around at the activity on the avenue. Not I, she thought. I live just around the corner, in the heart of the Village, and I work at home. I don’t have to worry about subways and taxis.

This had not always been the case, she remembered. Her relative freedom was a recent innovation. A New Yorker from birth, some of her earliest memories involved one form of urban transportation or another. Waiting at curbs in front of the Central Park West apartment building she grew up in, clutching her mother’s hand while her father—and, later, her stepfather—hailed a taxi. Shuttling to and from high school on the bus with two girlfriends.

When she’d returned to the city from college twelve years ago, her first job had been a nine-to-fiver at a famous publishing house here in Greenwich Village. She’d still been living with her mother, who was by then divorced and already beginning to display the first signs of her illness. So every day, for nearly four years, Jill had taken the Seventh Avenue line all the way down to Houston Street, a half-hour each way on the train, while she worked her way up from copyeditor to associate editor. She learned a great deal about publishing, not to mention men: her first real, adult affair was with a recently divorced senior editor. And every night for those four years, when
she’d finished her publishing homework and gotten Mother to bed, she would sit at her computer in her tiny bedroom and write until nearly dawn. Her first three manuscripts were locked away in a drawer: she knew, instinctively, that they weren’t good enough to show anyone.

After four years with the first publishing company, she was wooed by another one in the midtown area with the promise of full editorship. She was not advancing anymore where she was, and her romance with the senior editor had cooled, so she accepted the offer. This had lasted three years, until she realized that editing other people’s books, though rewarding and often educational, was keeping her from her original dream of writing and publishing her own work. She handed in her notice, found suitable replacement editors in the company for her small but talented group of authors, and went home.

Her fourth attempt at a manuscript had been her first suspense story,
Darkness
. She wrote it in the few moments she had had to herself, when her brief, ill-fated relationship with a corporate tax lawyer wasn’t distracting her. She smiled now, remembering Ted and his proposal of marriage—a normal, safe existence. But she was nearly finished with the novel by then, and she knew in her heart that this thing she could do—writing—was essentially more important to her than anything else, certainly Ted. She knew,
as only a creative artist can know, that
Darkness
would be accepted for publication, and she wasn’t the least surprised when it was published, and when it was successful. Because of
Darkness
, she would never again be dependent on public transportation.

And because of Mother, she thought, crossing Bleecker at the intersection and turning into Barrow Street, where she lived. She remembered the day three years ago, a few months after the publication of her first novel, when she had finally come to the realization that the doctors were right: Mother belonged in a nursing home, where she would receive the round-the-clock care and attention she obviously required. It had not been a pleasant decision, but at least the home—okay,
hospital
—in Port Jefferson, Long Island, had pretty green lawns and a view of Long Island Sound. That’s what Jill told herself, anyway, when she took her mother there and came back to town to see about selling the apartment on Central Park West where she’d lived her entire life. Saying good-bye to that place was easier than she’d anticipated: her mother was no longer there, after all, and it held too many unpleasant memories of her stepfather.

And then the move here, to the lovely corner of Barrow and Commerce, just in from Hudson Street. To a new setting for her new career, in another part of town. To her beautiful penthouse atop the seven-story
corner building, with the tiny elevator and the north-facing picture window affording a view of the taller uptown buildings, and the side windows from which she could see the Hudson River three blocks west. From her east windows she looked down on the quiet, Y-shaped cul-de-sac itself, formed where the end of Commerce Street joined Barrow. The little Cherry Lane Theater was here, one of the oldest off-Broadway theaters still in operation. Across from it were the Twin Sisters, two identical little two-story houses, side by side, with the tiny communal garden between them. They were built by a ship’s captain years ago for his two daughters who, for reasons nobody really remembered, refused to speak to each other. Some business about a man, it was rumored, whom both sisters had loved, and who apparently ended up marrying neither of them. Even so, the two women had never forgiven each other, and they had lived out their whole lives there, next door to each other, in isolation and silence. Jill remembered staring at the two houses when she was first told their history, thinking how bizarre it was, and how oddly romantic. This little haven she now called home had been the site of deep passion, if lifelong sibling animosity could be regarded as such. . . .

The snow was falling more heavily as she crossed Bedford Street and came into her block. Everyone on the street had disappeared. The dark of the storm
had intensified the natural dark of approaching evening, and the bitter chill of the wind blowing across Manhattan bit sharply into her face. She was alone here now, alone in the snow and the gathering twilight. She paused on the sidewalk in front of the Twin Sisters, rubbing her gloved hands briskly on her cheeks to soothe the numbness.

The sensation came upon her suddenly, and for a moment she wasn’t sure what it was. Something odd, different, about the way she was feeling. Something in the air around her. She stood on the comer, staring up at her own building on the other side of the snowy street, slowly lowering her hands from her face to her sides. It was on the back of her head, her neck, and between her shoulder blades. An intensity, a warmth that cut through the chill, tingling on her skin. She was acutely aware of her hair, her wool coat, the tug of the shoulder bag, her clothes, the soft snowflakes; everything that was touching her. And something else; something that was not touching her, but was there just the same. She closed her eyes against the panic that coursed through her. Then she took a deep breath, opened her eyes, and turned around.