Archibald Full Frontal, page 21
I am silent for a moment. “And that’s why — the drinking?” I ask.
“That’s why a lot of things. He was a great writer, a magnificent man, and everyone knew it. But he wasn’t as resilient as he needed to be.”
“Do you think he’ll recover?” I ask.
“No,” Archibald says. “He may improve, resume his life, but he will never recover. But that does not mean he should be abandoned.”
I regard him as he picks up his sandwich and begins to chew. I hope that I never come to understand what he really means. But I know enough to know that he had been rescuing more than Marcell from that institution. And I saw that he, too, was haunted, like Marcell. That is what they share.
Not a Bedtime Story
Penelope clatters past me in her heels. “Maggie, the tailor is with Archibald now. Could you type this for me? ASAP?” She gives me a smile, dazzling teeth between parted, glossed lips.
“Well, actually I was just…”
“It really is urgent.” She is only a few years older than me but acts like my mother: bossy and in my face all the time. She makes Eddie seem like a dreamboat. I grimace and thud to the dining room, where a new computer is set up, like a petulant teenager. As I am typing up the gala itinerary, I can hear her on the phone talking to her assistant. “That is an issue for the events coordinator. Rob, really, if you do not learn to delegate I will have to reconsider your fit for this role. There are many other candidates who would gladly take your place.”
The gala planned for Archibald’s book launch is just three days away. I have never seen anything like this frenzy of preparations before. Penelope, formerly a publicist, has taken over as Archibald’s manager, which means she thinks she’s in charge of me too. I had been down at the gallery to check on my paintings earlier that day. The gallery owner had set things up so that people would pass each painting as they entered the reception area. They would “interface,” to use her word, with snippets of Archibald’s life. I had come to accept that up until recently Archibald’s life and mine overlapped to the degree that his cast of his characters was also mine. The Deliahs, Rita, Leo, Marcell, Archibald, Sam, even my self-portrait in the cosmos, we were all there in painted form. It all looked quite impressive. It was exciting to be exhibiting my work in this way. I almost felt guilty for not having read Archibald’s book. Eddie had left a copy in an envelope for me more than six weeks ago. When he had reminded me about it last week, I gave it to Sam, the best reader I know.
“Maggie, are you busy?” Sam appears around the corner.
I leap off my seat. “You scared the bejesus out of me!”
“Do I know you?” Penelope says, covering the mouthpiece with her hand.
“No,” Sam says more tersely than I have ever heard him. “Maggie, I need to see you now. Downstairs. It’s important.”
“Is there a problem?” Penelope’s eyes shift from me to him, always willing to interfere. But he is gone before she has finished her question. I shrug.
Ten minutes later, I enter Sam’s apartment. He has left the door open.
“Sorry about that. Things are so crazy. I never knew Archibald was such an important literary figure,” I joke.
Sam is standing in the middle of the room, holding Archibald’s book.
“I just finished this.”
“And?” I ask. “Is it that bad? No, don’t tell me. I really do not want to know. It’s too late to pull my paintings due to Archibald’s mediocrity.”
“It isn’t that. It’s … you really know nothing about this book? At all?”
“No. I’ve been too busy to care. Besides, why would I want to? What you don’t know can’t hurt you, right?” I flop on the couch.
“Maggie, you might want to really rethink that.”
He hands me the novel.
I examine the cover. Not a Bedtime Story by Archibald Weeks is in large white letters. The background is completely black. In its centre stands a rose bush. A red rose bush with all of the flowers in bud except one, which is lush and open, coloured a bright, primeval red. On the bush, instead of thorns, are large metallic nails. Pooled around the rose bush is a puddle of bright scarlet, which I can only assume is blood, and beside the blood is a discarded lipstick, open, also the colour of blood. Mildly titillating, disturbing even, I think. Not bad. I instinctively flip to the back inside cover. Staring at me is a picture of Archibald as a sweet intellectual, smiling into the camera, air brushed, looking at least fifteen years younger.
On the inside jacket it reads:
When the naïve Zoë begins work as a personal assistant to a notable author, she finds herself caught in a whirlwind of love, intrigue, and, ultimately, scandal. With an enigmatic mentor and a group of well-intentioned oddballs at her side, she’s about to learn that family does not mean fidelity, and love can not only blind, it can also maim.
In Not a Bedtime Story, Archibald Weeks has created a coming-of-age story filled with predictable pitfalls, unexpected heartache, and disturbing outcomes. Zoë, beguiled by each of the men in her life, is a loser who loses so big you cannot help but root for her.
“It sounds a bit derivative, but so what?” I place the book beside me, a little too carefully. “Is Dan coming to the Thunderbird concert next week?” I hoped so. I liked using him as a human forklift. From his shoulders, I would have the best view in the auditorium.
“Maggie. You don’t see the parallel? This book is about a girl who begins work as a personal assistant to an old writer—”
“So, that doesn’t mean the book is about me, does it? It’s just a coincidence. Come on.” I roll my eyes, trying to conceal my accelerating pulse. “At worst, I might have inspired him.”
“In it, she carries on an affair with a famous writer who lives above the other writer, who she, incidentally, learns is her grandfather.”
“What? That’s in the book?”
“It’s in the book.”
“So, what are you saying, Sam? It is about me?”
“It’s not you, no. But it’s not not you. You need to read it.”
“Well, then, maybe I won’t.” I pick up a magazine about hiking. “This looks interesting.”
He removes the magazine from my hand. “Maggie, this is real.”
“I have never read a single one of his books to date. I won’t start now.” Now I’m sweating.
Sam sits on the coffee table across from me, knees against mine, eyebrows knitted in his most sober expression. “As your friend, Maggie, I think you need to read it. I understand why you may not want to. But I think you should. Before you go back to work for him and before you attend a reception for this book.” We stare at each other. He doesn’t move. We are riveted to each other. A car could crash through the window, and we would not be shaken.
“Okay,” I say, breaking the tension, taking up the book again, nauseous and dizzy. I read a few of the chapter titles: A Good Girl, Before He Was Famous, The Kama Sutra. “Which one is about me? Not all of them?”
“Maybe you should start here.” He takes the book from my hands and finds a chapter.
I read: The Golden Vagina.
“Not this one?” I ask in a tiny, pea-sized voice.
Sam puts a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “It covers some of the stuff relating to you.” I rest the book on my knees to stop my hands from shaking.
The Golden Vagina
The elevator purred like a feline whose fur was tenderly caressed by loving fingers. She felt its vibrations tickling the soles of her naked feet. She was a sight: she had emerged from the night’s adventures battered and bruised. Her skirt was torn up the side from her mad scramble through the old-fashioned rose bushes as she escaped the clutches of the police officer. The jagged thorns had ripped at her clothes and teased her flesh. And from above her apple shaped knee, from the tiniest of pin pricks, pulsed a fine trickle of blood. She absently rubbed her wrists, almost wishing he had been brave enough to snap the metal cuffs tightly there and take her captive. He had been tall and strong, intimidatingly male, if not attractive.
She had providentially managed to toss the offending marijuana cigarette in the bush as she went. When he caught her at the park’s edge and pulled her to him, the cigarette in question was too well hidden for him to decipher. As he searched for it, bending low with a standard issue flashlight in the sawdust-coated earth, she seized the opportunity and made her escape. He didn’t know who she was. When he had asked her name, she had summoned her defiance and told him it was Diana, Princess of Wales. He would never successfully trace her whereabouts. She fancied herself as a slippery criminal, as she raced through the streets, all the while imagining she was being pursued by the cop, hot on her heels. She arrived at the apartment building, panting and quite out of breath, in a frisson.
As she rode the elevator, it seemed to take an interminable length of time. She sighed inwardly. Her employment responsibilities for Edward, although glamorous at first, had become predictable. She craved excitement, the fulfillment of her youth. Her twenty-three years of indifferent life had been an exercise in lassitude. Edward had encouraged her to get out, take in the air. She had been reluctant at first. But her date with Bud had gone dreadfully wrong. It had never occurred to her that a man could suffer from sexual dysfunction, especially not one with such appealing hazel eyes. But she could claim not an ounce of expertise on the matter. Her only source of sexual education, teenage romance novels, had described it as a female predicament brought on by fear in the embrace of an overly brutish lover. That he could be impotent at such a young age was not only sad, but indescribably disappointing. And an aspiring poet too! She had been picturing herself in his arms all day, anticipating a great climatic release from her unresolved sexual tension at the evening’s culmination.
After she had run off, unable to bear the humiliation of throwing herself at Bud, the marijuana cigarette she had kept hidden in her purse for the past year and a half seemed like a panacea, just what the doctor ordered. She found herself in the park, on the swing, heavy limbed and fatigued, after midnight. Rifling through her purse, she had discovered the joint, concealed in the plastic sarcophagus of an empty lipstick tube, since she purchased it, on impulse, from a youth at a Jamaican festival on Salt Spring Island. When she lit it up, it tasted stale, more like lipstick than marijuana. And then to her dismay, the youthful cop with the oil-slicked complexion had materialized out of the ether.
“Warm night.” A voice radiated from the depths of the elevator.
Zoë was torn from her thoughts. She had not perceived him standing behind her. He was tall, dark, and masculine in a way she had, heretofore, never experienced.
“Yes,” she managed. His eyes scanned her body and she could not prevent herself from gazing at him. Her eyes fell on his chest. His shirt was open at the neck and revealed a smattering of dark hair. She had a sudden instinct to rip it open. She heard the sound of the tiny buttons popping, felt the wispy Egyptian cotton of his silk shirt shred beneath her fingers.
“Do you live here? I don’t recognize you.”
“Yes,” she gazed into his dark blue eyes and found that, similar to a hefty girl in the supermarket dessert aisle, she could not look away. She had died and gone to confectionary Xanadu.
“Yes, you do?”
“Sorry.” She plummeted to earth. “I live and work with Edward Banks.”
“Oh, yes. Edward.”
“His last book was incredibly successful.”
“Yes. He certainly has a way with words. I would know. I’m an author, too.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” he sighed self-importantly. “I am James Wringer.”
“Oh yes, of course. I read one of your books in high school, I think. Nice to meet you.” He could tell by her reaction that she was not particularly literary. He had written a handful of commercially successful books; although, his latest had not been well-received by critics, signalling a hardening of his literary arteries, the dreaded confirmation of his mediocrity. Unlike his more inspired contemporary, Edward, he was a falling star. On a downward spiral, the miasma of his own noxious gases disillusioned him.
“Care to join me for a drink?” James asked.
Zoë opened her mouth to pronounce the appropriate “no.” She was a good girl, after all. But when she parted her lips, all she emitted was air, soundless air.
“Jesus!” I exclaim. It was too close for comfort. The park, the police officer, meeting in an elevator. It had happened. Of course, there was a lot of creative license thrown in. It was obvious that Michael was James. But how had Archibald stolen these details? I had been alone that night in the elevator with Michael. Was I going crazy? I look up for Sam and hear him in the kitchen. Was this heading where I thought it was heading? I desperately flip ahead.
She lay naked beneath the silken sheet, staring up at his ceiling. The room itself mirrored the rest of the house in its spartan, controlled neatness, as different as night from day from the ostentatious elegance of Edward’s rooms below. The silhouette of the baby grand piano was the only other fixture in the room. It had a presence, like a person. Was it trying to communicate with her? She strained her ears, but heard only James in the shower through the door. She let her eyelids slip together and recalled the pronounced thrill of her first orgasm. It hinted of greater forces in the world at large and far beyond the vista of this room. She imagined that the ceiling had opened up and that the room was illuminated with stars, millions of twinkling, newfangled stars. She pictured poor Bud lying alone in his apartment, with his flaccid member and a long-distance girlfriend, an unrequited, perhaps, even, unconsummated love. When she opened her eyes, it was just a ceiling, a plain, white, demi-glazed surface quite devoid of stars.
As the days passed, she continued her liaison with James. It was, after all, new and exciting. It gave her an illicit pleasure to think of Edward below, blissfully ignorant. She would steal out at night as he slept or during one of his many evenings out. Edward was widely adored and socially in-demand. In fact, so overwhelmed was he with requests for his company that a significant part of her job of late fell to refusing party invitations and public appearances.
It is so wrong and right at the same time! I continue to read.
Why was James so attracted to Zoë? Perhaps because she was unlike all of his former lovers. She was neither a great beauty, nor elegant and accomplished. Perpetually casual, in denim and bulky sweaters, her appearance left a great deal to be desired. However, she was not especially stupid and did possess raw qualities that had been neglected as a result of public education and a misanthropic mother.
As it was, she could claim a rudimentary wit and a touch of artistic temperament. She drew adequately enough, producing the odd trifle she kept hidden in her room like a frightened budgie. Her constitution was apathetic unless provoked into action, when she could construct an argument, if she thought it worth her effort. On rare occasions, she achieved a degree of spontaneity. And, yes, she had the attractiveness of youth in her favour. She was well-proportioned, with rather dull grey eyes and a head of hair which could have been lustrous if it had been a bit redder or blonder. As it was, it resided between the colour of driftwood and hay. From the back, she was rather boyish, with squared shoulders and no hips to speak of. But this may have been an enticement, for reasons that will soon become clear.
Perhaps her greatest quality was her ignorance. For not a single great expectation cluttered the banal wasteland of her mind. She was in the dark as to why she attracted a man as outstandingly handsome and urbane as James, and this was precisely why he liked her. One cannot disappoint a person who is incapable of disappointment. As a child, she had never been cherished, never received the stroking indulgence that masks itself as parental affection, but had always been an afterthought, an obligation. And as a young woman, she had never so much as gotten a toe wet in the wading pool, let alone found herself caught in the torrential deluge, we call love. And this was something James found irresistible. For James, Zoë was like a great, glistening, golden vagina; the ignorance of her potential value transformed her into a treasure he could plunder again and again.
“Oh my God!” I throw the book on the floor. Was he describing me? Me? A golden vagina! “How did this happen?!”
Sam sits in the nearby armchair. He has made coffee but isn’t drinking it. I spit, “How did he know about Michael? How did he find out?”
“Did he ever see you together?”
“No, I really don’t think so. You were the only one who knew. Sam?!” I pull at my hair violently. “Hair the colour of wood … no, hay! He had me in bed with Michael and he knew about his piano!” How long had he been conspiring against me?
“I would never have told him.” He is hurt.
“I’m sorry. I am sorry. I know that.” I get up and start pacing. “But. He stole me. He stole my life and turned it into … He’s made me into a simple-minded idiot!” I howl suddenly and collapse in a ball, face mashed into the carpet.
“It’s not you. He used you. All of us.” He crouches down beside me.
“At least you aren’t in it.” I look up at him from my place on the floor.
“Aren’t I?”
“You’re not … Bud?” I say with horror. “The sexually dysfunctional aspiring poet? No!”
“Who also happens to be a janitor.”
“But you are not sexually … dysfun—”
“Of course not. Maggie, that is the material point. He kept enough of it to sting and twisted the rest.”
“My paintings,” I moan. “I can’t let him have my art. I will be forever tied to him. Oh God!” Was that why Eddie had been so persistent in trying to get me to read the book? Did he have a guilty conscience? Or worse, had he been wanting to buy me — buy my silence? Give me a show to lessen the damage? “I have to get them back!”
“The show is in three days—”
“I will snatch them off the walls if I have to.”
“Did you sign anything, Maggie — a contract giving the gallery your pictures to sell?”
