Broken river, p.5
Broken River, page 5
To see this girl at rest, and from a distance, might be to regard her as waifish—she appears, at first, to be very thin, malnourished, even, and she seems to have mastered the art of stillness, as though in an effort to conserve energy. Her straight hair covers much of her face, but large eyes peer out from beneath it—are they frightened? wounded?
But to see her in motion would bring doubt to one’s initial assessment of the girl, for she moves purposefully and with preternatural poise, as though holding back some hidden strength. And if you approached her, as our Observer now does, her thinness would reveal itself as, rather, a leanness. She’s tall—five feet nine or even ten inches—and she carries her army-surplus duffel bag as easily as though it were stuffed with balled-up newspapers. It is not. It’s heavy. Our Observer can tell by the thump it makes as it hits the ground at her feet. She has dropped it there, not ten yards from the bus she has just exited, in order to consult a paper map, printed from the internet. She studies the map, squints at her surroundings (the Wilson Farms convenience store, the electric power substation, the empty stucco box that once contained the local chapter of the SPCA), examines the map again. Whether what she sees is a disappointment to her is unclear. Her face is impassive.
Clearly no one has arrived to meet her. But perhaps she didn’t expect anyone. There is resignation in her eyes and in her posture: the slight stoop a tall girl learns to assume, an inward curl of the shoulders. She folds the map, jams it into her back pocket, hoists the duffel onto her shoulder. She’s wearing a gray V-necked tee shirt that conceals small breasts and, on her left arm, the lower half of a crude tattoo of uncertain design. Her well-worn jeans hug narrow hips, and her shoes are garish running sneakers bearing the logo of a popular brand. She walks briskly but without particular haste. She heads up to the light, followed by our Observer, turns left at the hospital, then beelines through the center of town, rarely turning her head to peer into a shop window or acknowledge the appraising look of a passerby. She does not invite, with her posture or facial expression, the male gaze. But certain boys and girls she passes—kids hanging around on stoops and in the doorways of abandoned storefronts—are interested in her.
The girl ignores them. She passes the strip club and medical clinic and movie theater, crosses the town’s main intersection, then heads down an incline past one, and then the other, prison-themed bar. Of course: she’s going to the prison. This is not an uncommon walk for an out-of-towner to take—the bus station to the prison, eight shameful blocks enduring the curious stares of the locals. But the girl isn’t ashamed. She isn’t anything. She’s walking to the prison, that’s all: past the museum, with its electric-chair logo, past the hot dog stand, over the train tracks, and in the main entrance.
Our Observer doesn’t follow her inside. An hour passes, then another. After a third hour has passed and the sun is low in the sky, she emerges. Now her body betrays some weariness: she carries her duffel as though aware of its weight, and her color is off—she looks a little peaked. She looks hungry.
And as though to confirm this impression (for the Observer hasn’t moved in the three hours the girl was inside), she heads toward the hot dog stand. There’s a small line there, as visiting hours at the prison have just ended, and a collection of tired- and sad-looking people is queued up at its small yellow-lit window. But the girl doesn’t get in line. She arcs around and past it, then stops in front of a pay phone bolted to a telephone pole, not fifteen feet away. It’s standing in darkness, for the insect-encrusted streetlight above it has burned out. Surely it doesn’t work, this phone? But no matter: the girl pulls an outdated folding cell phone—its fake chrome plating pitted and worn down to a patina of streaked black plastic—out of her pocket, and leans against the defunct pay phone kiosk to make a call. (The Observer can see that the cultural memory of a space apart, dedicated to communication at a distance, remains strong, despite the obsolescence of the technology that made it necessary. Where else should one go for a private conversation? Or, more to the point, what else is there to be done with such a space?) She pulls a map from her bag; this she unfolds, turns over, and holds up before her eyes, evidently trying to make out, in the light from the hot dog stand, something written there. She punches a series of numbers onto her phone’s keypad, waits a few moments. She says, “It’s me,” then has a brief conversation. Her body language changes as she speaks; it’s clear she does not savor this conversation, in which she is doubtless at some kind of disadvantage. She is, perhaps, asking for a favor.
After a minute, the girl hangs up the phone. She gazes at the hot dog line as though contemplating the possibility of eating a hot dog. Her hand burrows in her pocket as if palpating the coins there. But in the end, she walks another half block from the prison, just to the other side of the tracks, and settles onto the guardrail underneath the closest functioning streetlight.
She sits there for twenty minutes. If she wore a watch—she does not—she might periodically gaze at its face. She closes her eyes, then opens them quickly, as though wary of the consequences of falling asleep.
At last a car pulls up. It’s a four-door Ford Taurus from the nineties; rusted in places, primed and sanded in others, it sits low on its tires and emits a scraping sound as it idles. It is too dark to see the driver, but a hairy arm tells us that it is a man. The girl leans in the passenger-side window for a brief chat. Then she lifts her duffel, opens the back door, and tosses it in. Hastily, as though she’s afraid the driver might take off without her, she opens the passenger door and folds herself into the car. The Taurus continues past the hot dog stand, takes a turn around the prison visitors’ lot, then bumps over the tracks and heads toward the center of town. Before it gets there, though, it makes a right, disappears briefly behind some houses, then reappears long enough for our Observer to see it vanishing around a hillside.
The Observer could follow but chooses instead to remain. It is interested, it realizes, in the negative spaces the people leave behind, spaces they fail to occupy in the first place. Objects and events not missed but gone unnoticed, unanticipated, unconceived of. The Observer will catch up to the human beings later. They’re slow, moored to their physical forms, to each other.
In the next half hour, the hot dog crowd dwindles. Cars leave. Visitors walk toward the bus station in silence. For another hour or so, the hot dog vendor reads a magazine. Then the guard shifts change—men and women in uniform arrive in their cars; others leave through the front gate. Most of them buy a hot dog. When this rush is over, the hot dog vendor switches off his yellow light, padlocks a hinged piece of plywood over his window, and leaves on a moped that was parked, out of sight, behind the stand.
4
Several weeks later, Eleanor is doing what she has done every Tuesday and Friday afternoon since they moved here, which is to take Irina to the Broken River Public Library and sit with her in downtown’s only coffee shop with their piles of cigarette-reeking, broken-spine hard-covers. It’s unusually hot for September, and the coffee shop—it is called Frog and Toad’s and is located in a kind of difficult-to-find mini-mall behind an abandoned bank—has the air-conditioning going full blast. As a result it’s quite crowded. Eleanor is self-conscious about occupying a table in a crowded coffee shop; she can sense other people waiting, studying her for evidence of impending departure. When potential customers walk in, see the crowd, frown, and march back out, Eleanor feels responsible. She wants to leave now in order to accommodate what she perceives as other people’s more pressing needs. But she has identified this quality in herself as a personality flaw, and she doesn’t wish to pass it on to her daughter. So she pretends she belongs here and deserves this table.
Irina’s drinking coffee too. She asked for a cup, just now, in line at the counter. Their conversation went like this: Irina ordered coffee, Eleanor laughed, Irina said, “What’s so funny?”
“You’re serious? You want to try coffee?”
“I don’t want to try it, Mother, I want to drink it.”
“So you’ve had it before?”
She recognized Irina’s scowl from her father’s face: that broad forehead so effective at advertising hurt. “I have it all the time.”
“Where?” Eleanor asked, though she knew.
“Father’s studio.”
“He has a coffeemaker out there?”
The barista, through a tiny, tight mouth, said, “Two coffees, then?”
“Yes, please!” Irina chirped. “Milk in mine, please. No sugar,” she added, proudly. Eleanor immediately recognized this pride not as a manifestation of her own emerging faith in herself but rather of Karl’s natural, effortless, self-satisfied bluster. She checked herself: now stop that.
The girl poked the cash register iPad with one hand while pointing at the condiment station with the other. Irina blushed, obviously embarrassed at having blown the protocol. You’ll learn, young one, Eleanor silently reassured, and a gray funk settled over the two of them.
Now they’re sitting together at a tiny table by the window, pretending to read their books. People in business casual drag themselves damply down the street, casting the occasional envious glance into the coffee shop. Whenever one meets Eleanor’s gaze, she offers up a small, embarrassed smile. She is thinking about the coffee in Karl’s studio. What else has he got out there? Packages come for him regularly; she has seen the cardboard boxes, neatly broken down and stuffed underneath the advertising circulars and egg cartons in the recycling bin. These expenses do not show up on her credit card statement, and so he must be paying for them himself, with his own money.
She doesn’t go out to the studio very often, and when she does—to bring Karl mail or ask him if he wants lunch—she rarely steps over the threshold. He invites her in now and then to look at what he’s working on, but it seems perfunctory, an effort to demonstrate that he has nothing to hide. In New York his rented studio was where he had his girls, and, though there are no girls now, she still feels as though it’s his private space, which she shouldn’t invade.
She does not know why she is affording him this courtesy.
For her own part, she is blocked. Early on in this project, before they moved, she had been sending chapters to her agent, and her agent claimed excitement. He wanted to sell early, get her an advance. But instead of moving forward with her outline, she has decided to go back and tweak things a little. Nudge them a bit. “I’m making some changes to those chapters,” she told the agent, and he said, “No need to do that. Just move forward. Move forward, and we’ll work on it together.” Craig Springhill is his name, a smooth-faced, honey-voiced white man with prematurely silver hair and a charmingly patronizing manner that she used to find reassuring. He came from the dying world of old-school New York publishing and treats her as though she’s the only lady novelist in his stable, a titillating unicorn. When she comes to town he buys her twenty-four-dollar cocktails at the Algonquin Hotel and laughs hysterically at everything she says.
They had a relationship. Well—a thing, anyway. It was a long time ago, before he represented her, when she worked as his assistant. She was twenty-three; he was nearly twice her age. He’s the one who first called her Nell, the name all intimates now use to address her. They were in her apartment, his fingers were fondling the top button of her blouse, and a query appeared in his eyes: “May I undress you?” was the question she expected, but the actual question, which he posed while undressing her without requesting permission, was, “May I call you Nell?” Yes. Yes, you may call me Nell.
He was married then and slept with most of his assistants. Divorce was inevitable, but what came next was a surprise, at least to Eleanor: he found someone, a woman three years his elder, and entered into an evidently stable relationship with her that brought the assistant fuckings to a close. Eleanor has met this woman, a foxy, silver-haired, rather intimidating television critic named Shannon something-or-other.
Eleanor was glad when Craig settled down, or she told herself as much at the time. In truth, however, she had chosen to see Craig’s serial infidelity as a manifestation of the general incorrigibility of men, something she needed to believe was real if she was to tolerate Karl’s sexual exploits. Craig’s rehabilitation, then, could be taken to mean that she was, in fact, married to a jerk. And there was no avoiding the other plausible lesson here: that, unlike Shannon the TV critic, Eleanor was not the kind of woman who inspired men to abandon their promiscuity.
In any event, she did not take his advice. She changed the chapters, rewrote every sentence. And when she sent them to Craig, he said, “Very compelling, keep at it,” and when she sent him yet another draft of the same pages, he said, “Brilliant, genius, love them.”
“Good.”
“Of course I adored the original version, before you changed it. And the second version. But these are also fantastic.”
“The other drafts are gone now, Craig,” she told him. “They’re deleted. The new versions are the real ones.”
“Yes, got it,” he said, and then, after an awkward pause (awkward, in particular, for Craig, who is so very skilled at filling empty spaces with words): “Nell, dear, you do realize that these are all roughly the same.”
“They are not remotely the same,” she replied, attempting to suppress the stirrings, in her breast, of panic.
“The words are different—”
“Yes.”
“—but what they say is not. They are variations on the same thing. It’s the same novel.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Eleanor told him, weakly.
“I think,” Craig Springhill told her, with gentle condescension, “that it is time to move forward on this book. To write new pages.”
“These are new pages.”
“To write the pages that come after these pages, Eleanor. To write,” he said, with uncharacteristic irritation, “the rest of your novel. To begin to finish it. Don’t you agree?”
“There’s only one acceptable answer to that question, when a man asks it.”
“Eleanor,” he said, and at this point his voice had adopted the tone of exasperated finality that she had previously heard only while sitting in his office, waiting for him to get off the phone with someone else, “writing your damn book is a gender-agnostic good. Just do it, please.” And he hung up.
Eleanor’s books are about, and ostensibly for, women. Both the women she writes about and the women who read what she writes are young, smart, reasonably affluent, white, and firmly middle- to upper-middle-class. Her protagonists have been called “sassy” by leading entertainment magazines. The pastel-colored covers of Eleanor’s books are the kind that display shoe-clad disembodied white women’s legs or a fancy warm-weather hat or a signifier of free time such as a beach umbrella or shopping bag. (Eleanor was disdainful of these design clichés in the years before her name was embossed over them: reassuring expressions of conventional femininity, promising womanly universality through the promise of capitalism. She has since learned to do her sneering exclusively in private.)
The common parlance for the kind of book Eleanor writes is “chick lit.” If asked, Eleanor will say that she writes “literary chick lit,” an awkward and redundant term that nevertheless gets across the intended message: that she recognizes the essential frivolity of her work but insists upon approaching it with intelligence and a dedication to craft. She has learned, in the ten years her career has spanned, that certain other writers, ones with more intellectual cred than she possesses, read her, and regard her as a guilty pleasure. “Smart-lady trash” is what Craig calls her work. “As reliable a racket as this business has seen since the celebrity tell-all.” Each of her books has sold better than the one before, and she is on the cusp of achieving genuine entrenched semistardom. “This,” he told her, speaking of the new book, “will be your first number one bestseller.” He didn’t mean that the new book was better than the others—he meant that because it was functionally identical to them, it would not impede her career’s natural rise. The book, in Craig’s conception, should be cart, runners, and grease, all at once.
She has admitted to herself that he is right, at least in that it truly is time to move forward. But she is hopelessly blocked.
Irina lets out a noisy sigh and theatrically slams her book shut. She says, “I don’t think I’m good at reading.”
“That’s silly,” Eleanor replies, with a reflexive strenuousness that unpleasantly reminds her, every time, of her own mother. “You’re a great reader.”
“I start reading a paragraph and then something reminds me of something and by the time I get to the end I realize that I’ve been thinking of the thing in my head and not the thing I just read, and I have to start over!”
“Oh, that,” Eleanor says.
“I’ve read this paragraph five times! And I don’t know what it’s about!”
“Maybe it isn’t very good.”
Irina says, “What’s with all this reading, anyway? Like, how long have humans been doing it? Compared to all of history, I mean. A zillionth of a percent of time, I bet. It’s unnatural!”
