It is only the softening of a vowel and a shortening in full. It is not as though she is asking anyone to call her Xiaolan, the name on her birth certificate and adoption papers. Still, her father resists.
“Edith was my mother’s name.” He has a tendency to become mawkish, crying over outgrown dresses and broken dolls.
Edith’s mother is game for anything. She says, “It’ll be one in the eye for the old lady.” Even though the old lady has been dead for ages, Edith’s mother still likes to think of putting one over on her.
* * *
—
Ed has been known as Ed for eleven years when she begins an affair with a middle-aged novelist named Owen Grant, who is the writer-in-residence at Beaton College in New York City, where she is taking a summer course. She meets him on the first day of June at one of his readings, after he signs her well-loved copy of his second novel, Blue Virginia. There are notes to herself scribbled in the margins, thick pencil lines under particularly beautiful sentences, paragraphs hugged by stubby, eager exclamation marks; Ed only realizes they are embarrassing as Owen flicks through the pages and raises his eyebrows, which are crinkled and wry, before drawing a line through his printed name on the title page and signing underneath.
“I really love the character of Naomi,” says Ed. “She’s so forthright and principled.” Owen is wearing a white T-shirt under an olive button-down dress shirt, and as he nods, she can see the sinewy muscles of his neck. “She’s like a beacon to everyone around her,” Ed adds, already blushing.
“Do you think so?” he says. Delight transforms his chiselled features. His ice blue eyes are mischievous but somehow still sincere. “That’s exactly how I imagined her when I wrote the book.”
He asks Ed to have a drink with him and she accepts without hesitation. His voice is a gravelly baritone that plucks at the base of her spine until she feels her every nerve strumming. Just before making love to her the first time, he tells her that he is married.
She writes a great deal in her diary during the early days of their affair: filmic reports of their sexual encounters, and snippets of song lyrics which have begun to seem meaningful. She stays up late worrying about his wife and the integrity of her own soul. There’s a line from the new Dove Suite single that she can’t get out of her head: A woman in the small hours / waiting in the dark. She tells herself that there is a kind of nobility in being reduced to the emotional banality of pop music. In becoming so absolutely simple. Girl wants boy. Boy is trouble. Love hurts.
Outside of the fleetingness of Owen’s touch, she exists for his words. Fragments of things he wrote before meeting her, the graphic longings and stunning compliments he utters when they’re in bed. Pretty lies, she reminds herself, a Joni Mitchell lyric she copies out in swirling cursive. Still, his words creep in, envelop her, trap her in the impression of wanting him, inspire an urge to get down to the source of his language, his vision, his point of view.
And beyond that, there is the invisible pull of Owen’s celebrity. Ed is drawn to the aura of fame as though it might catch her in its glow and light her up from within. And then, maybe, people will finally see her.
* * *
—
When the affair starts to cool off after just a few weeks, she mopes, reads the London Review of Books, buys herself chocolate and stockings. Counts it as a good day when she goes half an hour without picturing Owen naked, kneeling over her in his final exertions, falling into the moments when words fail him. Their trysts have become sporadic and unpredictable; somehow he always sends her a message just when she has made peace with never seeing him again.
She stalks the campus with a view to finding a replacement, stopping whenever she sees a man broad in the back with a book in his hand. But she fears the men she might bring to herself this way, with her hungry, sidelong looks. She worries everyone can hear it: the pulsing call from her groin. She imagines it as a kind of current, a sucking sound. A tongueless mouth aiming for speech.
* * *
—
Ed gets a job at a new restaurant at the beginning of July to pay