But it seemed that all the women wanted to do was to read from work they'd already done and have Helen praise it. And so Helen sat stiffly, trying to think of kind and insightful things to say and finally agreeing to put in a good word with her agent for the work of the worst (and pushiest) writer, when in fact she had no intention of doing so. “I'm a terrible teacher,” she says, again.
“Oh, I can't believe that's true,” Nancy says, laughing.
“Believe it, believe it,” Helen says. “Honestly, it's so very true.”
“Well, let me tell you a little about this before you decide for sure, okay?”
I have decided for sure, Helen thinks, and feels herself getting angry. But she listens as the woman describes the kind of workshop she has in mind. Thus far, the people who would be in the group are an old man who lives in an assisted care residence, a middle-aged woman who works for an insurance company and lives downtown, a young woman who is mildly retarded and lives in a group home, a forty-five-year-old day-care worker from the West Side ghetto, a man from Evanston who does the news for one of the Latino television stations, and a twenty-year-old mechanic who lives in Lakeview. And they can add one or two more.
“Hmmm,” Helen says.
“This is a kind of experiment,” Nancy says. “It's something we've talked about a lot, how creative writing can help people understand one another's points of view. We wondered what would happen if you had a group of purposely disparate types, both from a literary and a sociological point of view. We've gotten a very nice grant from a humanities foundation so that we can try it for a year, and this is the second workshop, which would be starting the first Wednesday in January. It's once a week for six weeks, it ends with a really lovely celebration, and we can pay you—”
“I'm sorry,” Helen says. “I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I've got to run and meet a friend downtown. I just wanted to let you know my answer right away.”
“Would you just think about it?” Nancy says. “I'll understand if you don't want to do it, but would you just think about it? And let me make it easier: if you don't want to do it, you don't even have to call me back. I'll assume that if I don't hear from you by tomorrow night, you're not interested. Okay? I have other writers I can call, I know that Saundra Weller is dying to teach this workshop, but I just really think you'd be perfect for it. I think you'd enjoy it. We set the time to be in the late afternoon, from four until six, and from what I've read about you, you like to work in the early morning.”
Right. When she was working. When she used to be a writer. But Saundra Weller! Helen can't stand her, with her endless self-promotion and her snotty attitude toward … well, toward Helen, for one thing. They were on a panel together at a book festival, and Saundra made no secret of the fact that she found Helen to be a vastly inferior writer. Oh, the way Saundra walks around with that tight smile! The way she gave Anne Jensen, a writer friend of Helen's whose lyrical prose raises the hair on the back of your neck, a scathingly bad review in The New York Times Book Review—the only bad one she got, incidentally, but so bad it made Anne weep for days. “I'll think about it,” Helen says, more to get off the phone than anything—she wants to call Steve and go.
“I'm so glad,” Nancy says. “Thank you!”
Helen hangs up, looks at the clock, decides to call Steve from the car. “What'd I forget now?” she asks, when he comes to the phone. She signals right and heads down Austin Boulevard toward the freeway.
“Helen,” he says, “we need to talk. I'm wondering if we could get together, maybe this afternoon?”
“I'm on the way to meet a friend downtown. We're having lunch.” No need to tell Steve about the kiss exhibit. He already finds Helen a little wacky, she knows this.
“This is very important.”
“Well, is it …” Some sense of dread begins to blossom in Helen's stomach. “Is it bad?”
A pause, and then Steve says, “Are you aware of what your balance is at Morgan?”
Helen gestures to another driver, letting him pull out ahead of her. “I think it's just short of a million, actually.” That was what Dan had told her last time they'd talked about it. They were fantasizing about what they'd do when Dan retired—he was thinking of taking an early retirement in two years. Helen had said she wanted a little one-level house in California with beautiful views and a garden full of flowers with intoxicating scents. He had said that what he would like to do was sail around the world. “You don't know how to sail!” Helen had said, and he'd said, “I've helped crew. I know a little. But that's part of the dream: we have a boat, we learn how to sail, and we go around the world. Wouldn't that be nice? We'd just sail around the world for the rest of our lives, living off our savings.”
“Oh, no,” Helen had said. “I can't help sail. It's too much like math. Plus there are all those cockamamie terms: ‘starboard’ and ‘port.’ ‘Fore’ and ‘aft.’ ‘Coming about.’ Why can't boat people just speak English? Plus we're too old to learn how to sail.”
Dan had leaned back in his wicker chair—they were on the deck, in late summer, watching a spectacular sunset—and he'd said, “Helen. In the paper not long ago, there was a story about a woman who learned to sail when she was seventy-nine, because she wanted to learn how before she turned eighty. A guy named Geoffrey Hilton-Barber sailed single-handedly across the Indian Ocean, and he's blind. Not only can you sail; I predict that you will—not help sail, but sail all by yourself. I can see it. Honestly, I see it like a vision, you sailing somewhere you've never been but always wanted to go.”
“I'd rather have the little house,” Helen had said. “I really would. I want that more than anything, Dan.” She'd told him she wanted a house respectful of nature and of human nature. She wanted whimsy and beauty and openness, she wanted a unique design that spoke to the people she and Dan were. She wanted many places to read, a stove with six burners and a griddle, oh, she had a million ideas, she actually had a folder marked “dream house” with ideas from magazines and ones she'd just made up.
“But, Helen,” he'd said. “What if your roof was the sky? What if your view changed every day, every minute? What if you could be hunkered down below with a big fat novel and a quilt, while I fished for our dinner off the stern? If we were becalmed, we could take off our clothes and go swimming at night, and the phosphorescence would make it look like we were covered with stardust. I'm talking a big boat, Helen, where we'd have a galley with a dining banquette, and a chart room with a navigation table, and a stateroom big enough for a queen-size bed. And we wouldn't be on the boat all the time! We'd put in to ports of call and stay for as long as we wanted: Corsica. Tenerife. Lisbon. We could actually do that! And if you wanted to stay in a hotel sometimes, we could do that, too.”
“But … what about Tessa?”
“We'll come home a lot. And on her vacations, she could go places with us. Helen, think of it! We've worked hard for so many years, and now we can reap our reward. It wouldn't be forever. But before we check into the nursing home, let's do something that will give us such incredible memories. Let's go together around the world.”
And she had said—oh, she remembers this now with such longing—she had said, “Wait. Isn't that a term for a sexual act, ‘go around the world’?” It was the looseness of the day, it was the wine, it was how handsome Dan looked at that moment, his hair mussed, his face colored by the sun. He'd stood up and said, “Let's make it one.” And then he'd taken her hand and led her inside.
Now Steve says, “Why don't you come in to the office? We need to talk.”
Helen pulls over, puts on her hazard lights. “What is it,” she says. Her voice is flat, nearly accusatory, and she regrets it. “Can you tell me what it is?” she asks, trying with some success to modulate herself.
“You want me to tell you now?”
“Yes. Tell me.”
“I don't know if … All right, I will tell you now, but I want you to come in and see me, too. Will you do that?”
&nbs
p; “I can't today. I could tomorrow, though. Ten o'clock?”
“That's fine. So … Look, I'm just sorry as hell to tell you this, Helen. Dan withdrew a large sum of money from this account a year ago.”
“Well,” Helen says, “he did that sometimes. He would pull money out of there and put it in our checking account sometimes. As much as fifty thousand once, when we were redoing the kitchen.”
“Yes, I saw that,” Steve says. “But this withdrawal was eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
She sits frozen, pressing the receiver of the phone hard against her ear.
“Helen? This is why I wanted you to come in. Are you all right?”
“This is a mistake,” she manages.
“It appears not to be.”
“I'm coming down there right now,” Helen says, and Steve says he thinks that's best.
She pulls back out onto the road and calls Midge. “I can't come,” she says. She is speaking oddly; it's as if her mouth won't open all the way.
“What's wrong?” Midge says. “What happened?”
When Helen tells her what the accountant said, Midge says, “Oh, honey. I'm sorry. Do you want me to come with you?”
“No,” Helen says. “It's just a mistake. It has to be. He never said a word. It's a mistake. We'll go to the museum another day.”
She snaps her phone shut, accelerates, then immediately slows down. What if she gets a ticket and has to pay some huge fine? What if she has to sell her house? What if Dan had another woman, another family, a gambling problem, he actually did gamble too much at one point in their marriage, that was part of the reason she went to the therapist.
She wipes tears off her face, sits up straighter, and tells herself to calm down, it might not be as bad as she thinks, it can't be as bad as she thinks, what will she do, what will she do, what will she do?
“Wow,” Tessa says.
She and Helen are having an early dinner at Sepia, one of Tessa's favorite places, despite the fact that Helen now worries about spending so much money on one meal. Helen figured that if she was going to tell her daughter such unpleasant news, it might as well be in beautiful surroundings. She wondered whether it was ill-advised to tell her daughter at all; she didn't want to worry her. In the end, though, she decided it was better to tell her than not. So she has just revealed that Dan withdrew a very large sum of cash and she doesn't know why. She did not tell Tessa how much Dan took out, or how much is left. Nor did Tessa ask. Thus far, she seems more intrigued than worried or suspicious. She seems to be looking at this as a kind of fun mystery that will without question be solved.
“Are you okay?” she asks her mother. “You're not worried about money or anything, are you?”
“Oh, no.”
Tessa's eyes widen. “Oh, my God. That's not why you applied at Anthro, is it?”
“No, that was just so I'd get out of the house a little bit.”
Tessa takes another bite of her dessert. “You do fine, writing!”
“How do you know?”
“Dad told me what you get for your books.”
“He did?”
“Yes. So you're okay, right?”
Helen attempts a smile. “Well … yes.”
“Right?” Tessa asks again, looking more carefully at her mother.
Helen looks directly back at her. “Yes.”
Tessa smiles. “Well, you always liked him to surprise you. You always liked that.”
What Helen likes is that the question of infidelity—of any kind—has not crossed her daughter's mind.
six
HELEN LIES ON THE SOFA TAKING DEEP BREATHS IN AND LETTING them slowly out, staring at the ceiling. She has just gone through every room of the house, looking for some shred of evidence to indicate what Dan might have used the money for, and has come up with nothing. This after she called the yacht club, asking if Dan had been there, inquiring about a berth. No.
She regrets having given away his clothes: was there a piece of paper in a pocket, a key to something that she overlooked? When she went to the accountant, Steve asked her how it was that this was not a joint account, and she looked down at her lap and said it was because she trusted Dan completely, then looked up hotly as though she were going to have to defend him. But Steve made no accusations; instead, he kept assuring her that some answer would be found, Dan was not the kind of man to … An answer would be found. In the meantime, there was a little over fifty thousand left in the account. For some, this would be an enormous amount of money.
She swallowed, not knowing how to say that for her it did not seem so. Steve read her face and told her not to panic, she'd be fine. She made a nice salary with her books, she would continue to produce just as she always had, she'd be just fine. Yes, her retirement account was gone for the time being, but in terms of day-to-day living, she'd be fine. Politely, then, he asked when her next one was coming out. He wasn't a fan, Steve, he was the kind of person who would ask her what the title of the next one was, and she would tell him and he would raise his eyebrows and say, “Huh! I'll have to look for that!” She told him the next one would be out soon and when he asked what it was called, she said, “So far I'm coming up empty.”
“Hmm. Interesting title.”
“No,” she said, laughing, despite everything. “I haven't decided what the title is.”
“Oh!” he said. “Well. You will.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, and ever so quietly cleared her throat.
Helen gets up and rubs at her neck, her shoulders. It's late. She should go to bed. But she goes once more into Dan's office to look more carefully through every desk drawer. It is awful to do this, to see his penmanship, to recall the many times she sat in the chair in his office, chatting with him while he worked at the desk. There is a group of photographs on his desktop, family shots of the three of them, and a haiku that Tessa wrote in seventh grade. Helen framed it and gave it to Dan for his birthday.
Last night we had snow
Tattered pieces of white lace
Rode the winter winds
It had been a fierce storm; Helen remembers how Dan came home early from work, how Tessa exulted in the fact that school would be canceled the next day. Helen awoke around 2:00 A.M. and went to look out the bedroom window. It had stopped snowing and the tree branches were frosted down to the tiniest twig. The sidewalks were covered with at least a foot of snow that glistened beneath the streetlights, and the street was covered, too; the plows had not yet been around.
She'd gently awakened Dan, asking him to get up and come for a walk with her. He refused and so she went alone. At first she was angry that he hadn't come with her, though she knew she had no right to be—Dan had to get up and go to work the next morning, and she should not have awakened him at all. But she trudged through the snow full of resentment for him not sharing this with her, and then her resentment was replaced with wonder, and she understood the specific kind of appreciation that comes to a person witnessing a thing of beauty alone, how the spectacle seems to sit whole inside the soul, undiminished by conversation, by any attempt at translation or persuasion. She stayed out for an hour, walking around a neighborhood transformed, and when she returned she very quietly fixed herself a cup of cocoa made with cream and topped with many marshmallows, and then she sat in the living room to drink it, only one small light burning. When she heard the sound of the snowplow, she watched with some regret as it turned the street back to normal. And then she tiptoed back upstairs and slid into a bed that had been kept warm in her absence. She felt Dan pull her close to him, heard him murmur into the back of her neck that he loved her, then fall immediately back to sleep. She and Midge talked sometimes about moments when you understood your great luck, when you experienced gratitude as a body-wide, physical sensation; that had been one of those moments.
She turns out the light in Dan's study and goes upstairs.
In the morning, Helen makes coffee and then sits at the kitchen table listing her minimum monthl
y payments. Not too bad. Then she sees that she has forgotten annual tax bills, and adds that on. And car maintenance. And home insurance. She adds those on. Then she picks up the phone to call Nancy Weldon to say she'd like to accept the job teaching.
“Well, I am thrilled,” Nancy says. “But not really surprised. I have to tell you, I knew you'd come around.”
“Did you,” Helen says. Outside, birds have congregated around the bread crumbs she sprinkled on the ground for them. It's all sparrows, a dusty, mud-brown sea of them. She has always thought of sparrows as scrappy little city birds who descend en masse to gobble up the offerings, and she used to resent them, fearing they would leave nothing for the beautiful birds who might happen by, the cardinals and the goldfinches, the blue jays, whose deep blue feathers more than made up for their terrible personalities. Now, she identifies somehow with the sparrows, and intends later to put out suet for them, fresh from the butcher.
“I just knew it,” Nancy says. “I figured you'd think about the people who were in the workshop and your curiosity would get the best of you.”
“Something like that,” Helen says.
“So, we'd like to give you complete freedom for the way you teach the classes. The only thing we ask is that at the end of the workshop, each participant shares something they've written with an audience at our ceremony—as I think I told you, we have a little ceremony at the conclusion of the classes. The students' families and friends come, and we have a stipend for bringing in some professionals—an agent and an editor, usually. We've been lucky with that so far—we've gotten some really good people.”
“Great,” Helen says. “So I'll come to the library for the first class, and where do I go?”
“It will be one of the study rooms upstairs,” Nancy says. “We haven't quite decided which one yet, but we'll let you know at least a week beforehand. I'll send the information with the contract.”