celebrated her book deal, a long, boozy evening when her ebullience was so uncorrupted that she could shift a room’s atmosphere when she moved through, like a weather front.
“That’s my job,” Stephanie had said. “You just write it.”
“I’m talking about the canvas. I want it to be sweeping. Necessary. I want to play a little, experiment with structure.” Bea waved at their waiter and ordered another bottle of champagne. Leo lit a cigar.
“Experimenting can be good,” Stephanie said, tentatively.
Bea was very drunk and very happy and she’d leaned back against the banquette and put her feet up on a chair, took Leo’s cigar and blew three smoke rings and watched them float to the ceiling, coughing a little.
“But no more Archie,” Leo had said, abruptly. “We’re retiring Archie, right?”
Bea had been surprised. She hadn’t been planning more Archie stories but she hadn’t thought of them as retired either. Looking at Leo across the table, clearing her throat and trying to focus her vision through the smoke and champagne and those tiny spoonfuls of coke in the bathroom some hours ago, she thought: yes. What was that Bible verse? Time to leave childish things behind?
“Yes,” she’d found herself saying. “No more Archie.” She’d been decisive.
“Good,” he said.
“You’re not that interesting, anyway.” She handed him back his cigar.
“Not anymore he isn’t,” Stephanie said, and Bea had pretended not to notice Stephanie’s fingers moving higher on Leo’s leg and disappearing beneath the linen tablecloth.
How many pages written since then? How many discarded? Too many to think about. Thousands. The novel was big all right. Five hundred and seventy-four pages of big. She never wanted to look at it again.
She poured a little more Jameson’s into her cup, not bothering with the coffee now, and looked again at the new pages nobody had seen or even knew existed. It wasn’t an Archie story. It wasn’t. But it had energy and motion, the same lightness of language that had come so easily to her all those years ago and then had seemed to vanish overnight, as if she’d somehow unlearned a vital skill in her sleep—how to tie her shoes or ride a bike or snap her fingers—and then couldn’t figure out how to get it back.
Stephanie had left the door the tiniest bit ajar at their last meeting—if you have something new to show me, she had said, really new, maybe we can talk. But Bea would have to show the pages to Leo first. Probably. Maybe. Maybe not.
“When are we going to read about your life,” he’d said, a little testily, after she published the final Archie story, the one where she’d veered a little too close to his less desirable, more predatory qualities. Well, here she was. Using her life. How dare he object? Leo owed her. Especially after the night in the hospital. What happened last July had also happened to her. It was her life, too.
NORA AND LOUISA WERE WALKING along Central Park West, hand in hand, winded from running the three blocks from the SAT classroom, breathless with anticipation. “Here we go,” Nora said, squeezing Louisa’s hand. “Straight to a certain death or sexual servitude or both.”
Louisa laughed but she was nervous. Ditching SAT prep had started as a joke. “We could leave our phones in our lockers and just take off,” Louisa had said to Nora after one excruciating session. “The only person who cares if we’re here is Mom.” Louisa knew by the look on Nora’s face that she’d unwittingly put something inevitable into motion. They both hated the classes. The tutor who ran their group seemed barely older than they were and never took attendance or remembered anyone’s name or seemed to care who did what. “This is largely self-directed,” she’d say, sounding bored and uninspired while staring out a window that faced Columbus Avenue, looking as if her most fervent wish was to leap outside and stroll back into her precious weekend. “You get out of it what you put into it.”
“You’re a genius,” Nora had said to Louisa. “Let’s do it!”
“I was kidding. Mom and Dad are paying for this.”
“Everything is in the book!” Nora’d pulled out the enormous SAT guide. “They paid for this book. All that tutor does is read from the chapter and make us do the exercises. We can work on the train and at home. It’s not even that hard. We have another year before applying anywhere. We’re juniors.”
Louisa was tempted but nervous. She agreed the classes were lame,