Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [49]
“Oh, boy!” Ham laughed. “Why am I thinking All About Eve all of a sudden? If I were Jess, I’d be scared.”
He read me wrong. I didn’t want to be read at all. “If I screw up in the job, I’d be letting you down. Jess hired me because of you.” Oh, I was good.
Ham was satisfied; why burden him with truth? Jess was a stand-in, nothing more. He made me wanton. Only this time, sitting in a coffeehouse in North Beach, I heard her words as a plea. It wasn’t my fault, he was a natural force, a calamity, an act of God. A typhoon had touched down, blasted the body and flattened the soul. I got what I needed from the memory. Some are born wanton; others are born weak and made wanton. I am wanton. I kissed Ham lightly on the lips. Poor Ham.
The journalist from Bay Style/Bay View was a punctual woman in pastels. I ordered a macrobiotic salad and Evian for Starkie Boy, black coffee for her, nothing for me from room service, then shrunk into myself on the love seat to recoup.
The journalist had a mean streak. As her first question, she asked, “Why do you write these romances? Just for the money?”
“Excuse me?” The romance writer didn’t have an answer ready, but I don’t think it a ME’s job to come to his rescue.
“Mind you, I’m not against you making money.” The journalist tapped her tape recorder. It was working. “Not if you give some of it away. I was in the Peace Corps way back when Americans cared about the world. You want to know where I was? In Brazil. No Carnival where I was. You see these hands? Kids starved to death in them.” She held up her hands.
They were moisturized and manicured. I’d never have connected those hands with Brazilian street kids. You never know. Things are out there, like land mines. Even in an expensive suite at a hotel like the Stanford Court.
Starkie Boy surprised me. “You didn’t have to go to Brazil.” His voice was sad, soft, forgiving. He strode across the room on those splendid antelope-skin boots. “You should have come to the Swann shack instead.” He painted a central Florida childhood of hunger and beatings. His father must have been a nasty drunk. Some days he was so starved he’d gorged himself on live bait, knowing he’d be belted for not bringing a catch home. The romances he wrote as a tribute to his mother, to all the brave women like her who deserved better, who deserved the happy, fulfilled lives he gave his heroines. Hacks wrote for fat advances. He wrote to make reparations for what men did to women.
I’d read his promo kit. He hadn’t made up the Florida childhood. He’d grown up in Stark. And he’d gone back to Florida—to Gainesville and Orlando—for a couple of visiting-writer stints. There was nothing about abusive dads and worm diets in the publicity material, nothing about damage and despair. I warmed to him, in spite of his beads and his spray-stiffened coiffure. I saw the journalist out the door with a crisp “And when will it appear in Bay Style/Bay View?”
Swann shouldn’t have soured these feelings. I closed the door, and he said, “Frustrated lez bitch! She needs a hot-beef injection. If she hadn’t been a dawg, I’d have administered it, too.”
Zip it up, Starkie Boy!
That night in a packed bookstore in Marin, Stark Swann read from the first chapter of his new novel. On the microphone, his voice took on a low-decibel roughness and sincerity. It made you picture red barns, cornfields, grazing Herefords. I saw the weathered planks as he read, felt splinters sting a naked toe. Oh, Clint Eastwood, you should have been there. To the audience, you already were. I forced myself to stop listening, and count heads in that crowded store. The head count was part of a ME’s job.