Meanwhile, I have other contributions to make here at this literary conference. I dress in my post–Labor Day tour clothes—blue button-down Oxford, khakis, suit jacket, tie; I cannot abide my fellow male writers who present themselves for literary events in burrito-stained T-shirts. Such disrespect for the readers. But I fibbed to Simone. I already had my panel today. The event this evening is a cocktail party, and as I descend in the elevator to the hotel lobby, I can already feel it, the tingle that accompanies a hunt. This is nothing serious, of course, just a little sportfucking. Merely a maneuver to keep limber. But I feel great satisfaction when I spot my quarry before I even reach the revolving door at the hotel entrance. It makes everything so easy.
She is at the bar, a pallid young woman with long, unbound sandy hair, in an ill-fitting navy dress she probably hopes looks sophisticated, poor dear, and a name tag that proclaims her to be part of the conference. There she is, my evening project. I will help her with her confidence by tending to her, by making her feel she’s the most beautiful creature in the world. What woman would not want that? She’ll be walking differently tomorrow because of me.
I stroll to the bar to stand next to her, take out my phone, swipe away a text from Simone, shake my head sadly, and turn to the young woman, who is eyeing me.Ava Hallam, Debut Author, her name tag says. I incline toward her as I almost always have to, as I am tall and she is petite. She has dark freckles that I know form constellations beneath her clothes, and I look forward to making alternate patterns on her skin.
“Hello,” I say. “You’re here for the writing conference as well? I have no signal in here. Can you remind me where the cocktail party is, please?”
Chapter 17
Mille-Feuille
The next time I see Simone is at the White Lion Inn, in the Berkshires. She is not a guest of the inn; she is ensconced at Woodstock Hill, a nearby writers’ retreat where our publisher is now putting her up so she can make progress on her novel. God bless Simone’s editor. Although Simone is, thanks to me, now working onThe Rumrunnerinstead ofThe Gold Digger’s Mistress, she’s so flighty and easily susceptible to distraction in the city where she lives, her teaching and her so-called codependents’ support group and what have you. Literary lockdown for her is imperative.
I know Woodstock Hill, a charming white farm of the colonial era, repurposed for the housing, feeding, and coddling of writers trying to jump-start, revise, or complete projects. I myself once spent a very productive few weeks there—which is why I can’t return now to rendezvous with Simone. The rules mandate monklike silence throughout the day, no socializing until evening, and there are always a handful of writers tempted to violate the sanctuary with fraternization, a walk or conversation on the grounds, or activities of a more boisterous and salacious kind behind closed doors. Again, I know. I have partaken. I cannot repeat my past indiscretions, and my presence there, especially as I am between projects, would be disruptive.
Therefore I have rented us a prohibitively expensive room at this eighteenth-century inn, with its deep front porch and line of Adirondack rockers surveying the mountains, its historic staircase with alarmingly narrow risers and its creaking slanted floors. The wallpaper is toile, the air museum-musty, the laboring AC unit—certainly not a fixture in George Washington’s time—failing to dispel humidity. There is a replica antique bed whose four posts I intend to put to good use. Ours is a top-floor suite for which I paid extra so my sweet can make all the noise I can make her make, and before the door even closes behind us I am upon her, lifting her shirt, stripping her pants, undoing her bra with one hand, an ambidextrous talent of mine, even as I’m biting her nipple through the lace. It has been a week since we last saw each other.
Once our initial thirst has been slaked, we stroll around the grounds exchanging catch-up conversation: My tour travels—with some salient details omitted; her room at the retreat—which has no bedposts, sadly, but does feature a gas fireplace—and the other writers she knows there. One of them, Simone says, arrived with her own mattress, kombucha brewer, and meditation instructor, and has mandated that a retreat employee visit a local farm every morning to fetch fresh goat milk. We both know who this woman is. I laugh at Simone’s impression of her—“Are you sure this milk is fresh? Was itsqueezed from the goat this morning?” Unlike some of the other women I’ve been involved with, Simone is really very funny. It’s not a requisite, but it is refreshing.
We eat dinner by candlelight in the inn’s restaurant, with its stone fireplace and original floorboards, pretending to be like all the other genteel, genial couples dining there, although my hand is busy under the table the entire time. Simone is as wet as a fountain, whether from earlier or now. This is another characteristic of hers I appreciate; it makes my situation so much more pleasant. When we’re done with dinner, I suggest we sit on the rockers and watch the moon rise; I want her to read whatever progress she’s made onThe Rumrunner, but Simone is ready to go back upstairs. This is another thing about Simone that I have notfound in another woman: Her sexual appetite matches mine. And she has no shame about it. It’s astonishing, really.
A man doesn’t want to be rude, so I follow her back to our chamber, contemplating the black lace thong she is wearing beneath her demure sundress and feeling myself hardening again, which proves two things: (1) I continue to be a not-very-imaginative, typical heterosexual adult male, easily titillated by straps and lace—a cheap sexual date, if you will; and (2) the pill I took this afternoon is still in effect. God bless pharmaceuticals.
By the time we are done, the moon has risen above the mountains and is peering through the nearest window. We are parched and both drink a bottle of the water the inn has provided. I check my watch; it has been eight hours since I last took my medication, so I fetch the prescription bottle from my satchel and take a pill. Just to be on the safe side. Simone watches from her pillow, naked now, as God intended.
“That’s for your heart, right?” she says.
“Yes.” I get back in bed, and she nestles next to me, her head on my chest.
“Do you mind if I ask... what the condition is, exactly?”
I put my other arm behind my head. I’m feeling expansive. I am genuinely fond of Simone, and there’s no harm in her knowing. It’s a pretty moment, actually, our bodies sated and happy, the ceiling glowing blue.
“When I was a boy, I had a fever,” I say. “Rheumatic fever. It sounds like something from a children’s book, doesn’t it?”
I feel Simone nod. “LikeHeidi,” she says, “orLittle House on the Prairie. But that was scarlet fever. I don’t know rheumatic fever.”
“It’s a form of strep,” I say, “or rather it’s a reaction to the bacteria that causes strep. Other children get it and just have sore throats. I contracted it, maybe on the playground, and...”
. . . and for a moment I am in my boyhood bedroom, which unlike this one was dark as a cave and to which the door was always locked. I remember the pain in my throat, and trying and failing to call for help, so it was not until the following morning that my sister, Penelope, Pen, unlocked my door and found me unconscious on the floor with a 106-degree temperature.
I relay all this to Simone. “It took my father—he was a surgeon—a few tries to diagnose what it was,” I continue. “At first he suspected tonsils, so they came out.” At home, I do not add. “When I didn’t improve, he treated me for strep. By that time the bacterium had infected my heart, and I was in bed for a year.”
I feel Simone’s head shift on my chest as she looks at me. “I’m so sorry, William. That’s horrible.”
“It was,” I agree. “I was in bed like an old man. An invalid. I used to try to get out, but if I was caught, I was punished. So I stayed in bed until my father pronounced me well, and my sister, Pen, brought me books from the library. She sat with me and read to me,Tom Sawyer, Robinson Crusoe, all the Narnia and Oz books—have you read the whole series? They are hair-raising. And imaginative. And it was then that...”
I stop. Simone looks up at me again.
“Then that what?”
“I started to write,” I say. “I wrote my first story. It was about, predictably, a sick little boy whose imagination took him everywhere, and it was published in the local paper. Pen submitted it to a contest for me. That’s how I got the writing bug, via the bug that causes strep. So that little schoolyard bastard who gave it to me really did me a favor.”
Some of this may actually be true. How much, I don’t know. My life until I reached college is shrouded in a kind of mist, from which only certain memories emerge like deadly promontories. I recall the pain of my throat, monstrous and searing. My father did remove my tonsils. I was always locked in my room at night, purportedly to cure me of sleepwalking. The rest is a fiction.
My heart is fine. There was no playground; Pen and I were homeschooled. I was not the natural writer in the family; Pen was. Nor did she bring me anything from the town’s public library, as my tale implies; we were not allowed off the mountain to visit it, although my father had a den from which Pen habitually and at her own peril snuckbooks. And I did eventually and secretly mail a submission to the town newspaper, and then to a popular children’s magazine, and things grew from there.
It used to trouble me, my cloaked past and the necessity of invention, but now I think it’s like writing novels. Realities get layered atop each other in a mille-feuille of experience, and often I find myself wondering: Did that really happen, or did I write it? And: What does it matter?
