Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence (12 page)

She parked her car and was soon cruising up and down the aisles of the IGA, the town's one supermarket. Twenty minutes later, she loaded the groceries into the trunk, picturing the evening ahead and how once upon a time she might have invited her father to join them. She'd only told Henry bits and pieces about him, though nothing of what she'd done or who he really was, or that part of her willingness to leave New York City had to do with hiding out from him. Still, her father had located her, though she wasn't exactly sure how, and Henry now realized her fear.

How dare he make such a scene, she thought with indignation. She knew if he found her he'd come to the town to try to talk her into changing her mind. He'd accuse her again of dishonesty and disloyalty, would try to persuade her to return the money. You had no right to this story, he'd say. There are other stories to tell. To Antonia, who'd always known a good story when she heard one, there were no other stories so worth the telling, none quite like this one. Besides, it felt more like the story had chosen her. No, she thought, imagining her angry, dejected father, stalking the streets of the town, relentless in his pursuit of her. He'd already found her once. She knew it was just a matter of time before he found her again.

At home, Antonia washed and prepped the vegetables, located the necessary spices, and went to work on the meal, all the while thinking about this new novel of hers, mapping it out in her head. She knew she had to write another page-turner, better than the first, because, as Henry liked to remind her, you're only as good as your last book. With Henry's support, though, she realized she couldn't fail. He'd already made sure she'd been well received at Chimera Books, an imprint of Beadle & Blau, one of the most reputable publishing houses in New York. He'd called his friends at the
New York Times,
peddling the novel as if he were its biggest and best fan. She thanked him repeatedly, yet she had no idea how to repay his generosity, except by loving him as best she could. And she did love Henry, as much as she'd loved anyone. One day she wanted to be his wife. Once, not that long ago, she and Henry had talked of marriage, but the subject hadn't come up again since her move to Winslow.

The turkey was in the oven, the pots simmering on the stove, and the atoms in the air were bumping furiously against one another, producing an incredible heat and aroma. The aroma of the holidays, she thought, looking past the hours of preparation to the evening's beautiful culmination—the five (or six, if Catherine showed up) of them seated around the table, drinking wine and laughing, while Henry carved the turkey. She was throwing this dinner in honor of him; a meal she trusted would launch the three-day rapprochement between him and his estranged son, Ezra. Just another thank-you among many: Thank you for your belief in me. Thank you for your support. Thank you for your love. She need not have thanked Henry, she knew, because her move to the town, he said, was thanks enough. Besides, how could she ever truly thank Henry, except by fulfilling her own promise to write another well-received book?

After she left the kitchen, Antonia unlocked the door to her study, heading immediately for the typewriter. She sat down, lit a cigarette, and stared at the few sentences she'd written this morning. Usually, she was able to sit for hours and work, as everything else fell away, and she filled one page after another. Five, ten pages later, she'd glance up to find the sun gone and the sky dark, realizing she'd been at the typewriter half the day. This novel—it balked and cried against her gentlest urgings. She was missing significant, indispensable details that would help shape the choppy, incongruous narrative and awaken her half-sleeping characters. She couldn't get at the heart of the story because she didn't have the body. She needed the body to get at the heart, plain and simple. Whereas the writing of her debut novel had been relatively easy—her uncle had supplied her with the blueprint, the body—the writing of this second novel was proving very difficult.

Not that fiction depends at all on truth, she thought, tapping a key, tapping another, trying to make connections where it seemed none existed. She knew they existed, because she still sensed them, had sensed them the minute she'd walked into the blue house, the minute she'd mentioned Henry, and Catherine went pale. There was more, so much more—Henry's refusal to talk about the accident; the girl's name, Wren, which he sometimes shouted out in sleep; the essay he'd written about Wyatt Strayed. Here were connections, however loose, and Antonia the writer was determined to get at them, while Antonia the friend and lover knew she should walk away from the entire endeavor. An hour later, after smoking several cigarettes and writing just one sentence, she pushed away from the desk, feeling defeated. In the small bedroom, she stretched out on the bed. With hours to go before anyone arrived, she shut her eyes. Sometimes all it took was a nap and she'd be able to find her way back into the narrative. She hoped when she opened her eyes that everything murky and unresolved would reveal itself to her. Yet when she awoke an hour later, the only thing that revealed itself to her was the darkening sky viewed through the window. Groggy and disoriented, she sat up, convinced that she was back in her old bedroom in Damascus, Vermont. For a moment, as she gazed out at the fleeting twilight, she had never left the safety of her father's house. Then, that familiar landscape blurred and dimmed into this one, and she rubbed her eyes, returning reluctantly to Winslow.

The air held a heavy, alarming suggestion of smoke, which filtered under the door. Sliding out of bed, she threw open the door and froze. Someone was in the kitchen rattling around. Henry, she thought, rushing out of the bedroom, the smell of smoke more pronounced the closer she came to the kitchen. Here, she paused in the threshold, startled to find Catherine and not Henry at the sink, scrubbing a pot. Antonia knew then that her oversleeping had cost her the meal, and she gazed at the stove, where the charred, awful remains of the bird still sat, belching up whispers of black smoke. Nearly hysterical, she asked Catherine if she were able to salvage any of the food.

“No,” she said, drying the pot. “Nothing at all.”

“Oh,” Antonia said, wilting. “Now what am I going to do?”

“Don't worry,” Catherine said, already picking up her pocketbook from the table and heading for the door. “I'll be back in a while. Set the table in the meantime.”

Antonia glanced around the spotless kitchen, where Catherine had returned everything to its rightful place, from the knives, the cutting board, and the mixing bowl to the blender and grater. Everything shone, the counters and the porcelain sink, which the woman had scrubbed clean as well. Antonia leaned against the sink, glaring at the turkey's smoldering carcass, tears spilling down her cheeks. I'm an idiot, she thought, hating herself for the nap, the time when she should have been more vigilant. She approached the stove and gave it a good kick, hard enough to put a tiny dent in the door.

When Henry showed up a few minutes later, Antonia was on the sofa in the dark, sobbing for all that she'd ruined—the perfect dinner that was to christen the perfect weekend. Henry sat down next to her, saying nothing, and she sank into him, sobbing even harder. “I love you, Henry. I really, really love you,” she said as he held her close, kissing the crown of her head. She shifted her body, and her lips found his, and then they were making their way into the bedroom and shutting the door, undressing in the low lamp light, his body still magnificent to her, all of him, his silver-haired chest, the constellation of minor scars that mapped the mishaps of his boyhood, the major scar on his thigh from the car accident. She traced a finger over this scar now, knowing enough not to mention it again, remembering how quickly and irrevocably he closed up when she did. “I don't want to talk about it,” he'd say, and he wouldn't. Won't, she thought, as the slow rhythms of his hips met the rhythms of her own, and then he was inside her and this time it was he who was crying and she wondered why as she kissed the tears from his face. As she did, she thought she heard a car pull up to the house and footfalls on the porch and shuddered against this intrusion—was it her father?—but she didn't care at this moment who it was, because Henry was beneath her and she was above him, and they were one, an unlikely pairing that had always made sense to her. He knew her, the depths of her ambition, and she knew him, the depths of his own. We are royalty, she thought. The king and queen of letters.

After, Henry got up to take a shower, while Antonia smoked a cigarette, loving the sweat that glistened on her young body, her breasts achy from Henry's lips. She joined him in the shower, soaping his back, the wiry, taut muscles beneath the aging skin. How little she cared that he was fifty-nine and that she was twenty-three, that they were born of different times and generations, because they fit so well together. It still took her breath away, and when he said her name, his voice broke the surface of her daydream and awoke in her thoughts of the future, of marriage, of children, and of money. Privilege, she thought. We will get married, and I will have his children, and we will live in glamour high above the city. We will be the envy of our friends and enemies alike. We will grow old together, and I will dedicate all of my books to him, my husband. He will understand why I have done what I've done, and he will forgive me. Wren, she thought, but it wasn't a thought, because, without realizing it, she'd said the name aloud; and then Henry was shrinking away from her, already climbing out of the shower, cinching a towel around his waist and hurrying out of the bathroom.

A
FTER SLIPPING INTO
her favorite vintage baby-doll dress and sandals, Antonia wandered out of the bedroom to find the table set and the front door ajar. She heard the low murmur of voices on the veranda and paused. Henry was talking to Catherine about his son, Ezra, the weekend plans he'd arranged—the kayaking on the Mohawk River, the hikes in the mountains, the movies at the Mayfair. “I hope it all goes well,” Catherine said, then she was saying good-bye, as Antonia headed into the kitchen. The bird was gone, a different, tin-foil-covered pan in its place. Through the open windows, a light breeze stirred the curtains, dispelling the last of the heavy stink of smoke. Now the room smelled as it had hours before, full of rich, savory odors emanating from the stove and the several brown paper bags lined up on the counter. Antonia peered into one of the bags, then another—mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, candied yams, pumpkin pie, stuffing—everything necessary for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.

Catherine, she thought, gratefully. She turned to the stove, lifting away the layers of foil that eventually revealed a modest-sized game hen, the drumsticks tied up and booted. It wasn't as large as the turkey, but it'd do. It has to, she figured, replacing the foil, just as Henry appeared in the doorway. “That was Catherine,” he said coldly, not meeting her eyes. She suspected he'd remain like this all evening, punishing her in big ways and small for mentioning Wren. “She can't make it tonight, which is just as well,” he said, turning his eyes to the clock on the wall. It was seven thirty; the guests would be arriving at eight. “You should have had the decency to tell me she was invited, Antonia.” She went rigid, wanting to remind him that this was her house and her dinner party, which she was throwing for him. She didn't say any of this, because she finally understood his gruffness had nothing to do with her, that he was reacting (overreacting, overanalyzing, she thought) to the evening's indeterminate variations.

“Henry, everything's going to be fine,” she said, moving toward him and kissing his cheek. “You look very handsome.” More handsome than she had ever known him to be. In the three years since they'd met, she'd never seen him as vulnerable or exposed as he was at this very moment. Yes, three years of knowing him, during which there were the slow, sometimes painful baby steps of her seduction, coaxing him through the doors of his doubt and fear into the romantic rooms she'd decorated—all for him. This seduction took a far greater effort on her part, though she'd never thought about it as effort. Rather, she'd thought about it as nothing more than her right to him, to love a man like Henry Swallow. The love she had for him back then, which had been based partly on his illustrious reputation, bore little if no resemblance to the complex love she had for him now, which was based on moments like these. This was the Henry she idolized and cared about, not that other Henry, who clung to his ruthless prowess and even more ruthless, rigid ideals about literature. Look at what he did to Wyatt Strayed, she thought, and how he did it, which aren't half as terrible as his reasons for going through with the review at all. There was a story here as well, as old and bruised and buried as his dislike of Catherine and her dislike of him. Yes, Antonia saw the way Henry glowered through his smiles and Catherine scowled through hers every time they were in the same room together. They never seemed to notice that she noticed them, yet she did. What aren't you telling me, Henry?

Twenty minutes before the guests were due to arrive, she retired to the kitchen, organizing the food, tossing Henry's salad, which he'd brought with him: a bag of prewashed mixed greens and a bottle of salad dressing. When he came into the room, she poked fun at him for his domestic failing.

“I'm a critic, not a househusband,” he said sulkily.

She laughed but resented the comment. Over the last few months, she'd done quite well at deflecting such offhand remarks, the insinuation that he'd never make a decent husband. He had been a decent husband at one time, but the accident had taken care of that. My wife left me, he'd told her, and that was all. That wasn't all, though, and she knew it. She yearned to get him talking about these past six years, why he no longer drove, why he called out the girl's name in his sleep. “Just tell me. Unburden yourself. There are ways out of this, Henry,” she would say, wanting to add, “Write it down.” Even as she thought it, she understood her own selfish impulses, her own greed, and she tamped them down; clearly, the story was too painful for him to relive. Yet she needed him to share this pain with her. It was the only way.