Sebastian Stuart - The Mentor

“Thirty thousand?!”

“It was the only bid. It’s a blow, yes, but fuck ’em, you’re still the best writer this country has produced in the last twenty-five years and no one’s going to doubt it once they read this new work.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s so right, going back to your small-town roots, writing from a young boy’s point of view. And the mother-she’s extraordinary! And terrifying.”

“Nina, just a minute-”

“Don’t be furious, but I’ve shown it to a few people, a few select people.” Through the open door, Charles sees Emma get a drink of water, take a few deep breaths. “I hope you’re writing. Don’t let me interrupt. You’re on to something, Charles. I have a very good feeling about this book. My love to Anne.”

Charles slowly hangs up the phone, feels his chest hollow out, the room reel. Nobody wants his book, nobody wants it. He lets out a sound that’s somewhere between a whimper and a moan. Emma appears in the doorway.

“Charles, are you all right?”

Staring down at nothing, Charles says, “I just got the lowest paperback sale of my career. One-tenth of what I got for my last book.”

“I’m so sorry,” Emma says. She takes a step toward him.

Charles stands up. He doesn’t want to look at her; he needs air, needs to move, needs to be alone. “Not as sorry as I am.” He walks past Emma, into the outer office. He hates her being there to witness his humiliation, hates the praise Nina gave her work. “By the way, Nina read your chapter,” he says over his shoulder.

“You showed it to her?”

As he heads into the hallway, away from his shame, away from her, he turns. She has an idiotic expression on her face-apologetic hope. He hates pity. “She thought it had promise. I think you should finish the book and we can go over the whole thing before I send her any more.”

“Whatever you say.”

Christ, he hopes she isn’t turning into just another suck-ass supplicant. Then she smooths her clothes in that awkward way of hers.

“You’re going to be very famous,” he says over his shoulder as he walks down the hall.

Manhattan can be the loneliest place in the world. Charles walks slowly, as he’s been walking for hours now, in counterpoint to the city’s rhythm, alone and out of step. He’s free-falling down a black hole. How humiliating it will be when he tells Nina that he didn’t write the chapter. How pathetic he’ll look. He hates Nina for loving Emma’s work, hates Emma for writing it, hates himself for hating them. As he walks the city’s grid, his spiral of recrimination makes him dizzy, nauseated.

Finally the day begins to wane, bringing with it the comfort of late afternoon light, a softening of hard edges. Charles finds himself in Midtown, on Fifth Avenue, nearing Rockefeller Center. In his early years in New York, as success piled on success, this Art Deco kingdom was his favorite place. The statues and murals and fountains, the human scale and the soaring spirit-Charles saw it all as a metaphor for his work, as if his vision had been captured in light and water and stone. He would spend hours sitting beside the fountain, watching the people, mesmerized by the passing parade and the play of sunlight on granite and glass, knowing, on some level, that, like Fitzgerald, he was savoring a fleeting moment of grace, of simultaneous celebration and mourning.

Charles looks down the walkway that leads from Fifth Avenue to the skating rink. It’s filled with laughing people, tourists in bright clothes, gawking at the fountains and the flowers, noisy, stuffing their faces with pretzels and ice cream. The world is so full of stupid people, bovine gimme-gimme people who don’t know literature from lunch meat. One chortling man in a canary-yellow sweater and a cowboy hat is passing out hand-held video games to his three TV-addled, toy-mad midgets, while his beaming wife can barely stand up under her load of FAO Schwarz bags.

Charles turns and walks away from the mindless, squawking masses and finds himself staring into a bookstore window-a window littered with new books by blacks and gays and rich girls and poor people and lesbians and the diseased and the disfigured, all of them wallowing, wailing in second-rate prose their memoirs or barely veiled autobiographical tales of abuse, addiction, incest, struggle, recovery, and of course, insight and reve-fucking-lation. Or if they don’t turn out sloppy sob fests, the women, quavering with pathos in their jacket photos, write from the womb in exquisitely measured sentences that read as if they’ve been strained through a sieve, so full of sensitivity and pain and crystallized moments that the goddamn books should be sold with a shrink-wrapped estrogen patch. The publishing industry isn’t about great writing anymore, it’s all about selling identity-race, gender, affliction, whatever pity party is drawing the biggest crowd this year. What a crock of self-indulgent shit it all is.

Next year Emma’s book will be in this window. And where will he be?

Anne is in the foyer about to leave for work. She stops and listens. The apartment is quiet. Charles is in his office. It’s a warm morning, too warm for October, with that awful New York humidity that makes your skin feel clammy. She ducks into the study, closes the door, and picks up the phone.

When the women’s health center answers, Anne lowers her voice. “Yes, this is Kathleen Brody. I’m calling to see if my test results are in.”

“Please hold.”

Anne stands absolutely still. A heavy bead of sweat rolls down from her left armpit.

“Mrs. Brody?” It’s Dr. Halpern.

“Yes.”

“I tried to call you last evening. The number you gave us is incorrect.”

“Were you calling with my results?”

“I was. The blood sample you gave us doesn’t match the DNA from your embryo’s chorion.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

Anne hangs up. She feels cold, as if her spine has turned to ice. And enraged. She dials again.

“Yeah?” The voice is groggy with sleep.

“Kayla, I’m sorry to wake you up, but…”

“Anne, what is it?”

“Charles isn’t the father.”

“Tell me this is a nightmare.”

“What am I going to do?”

“You know your choices.”

“It’s my child, Kayla.”

“Not yet, it isn’t.”

“Has Hollywood turned you into some kind of heartless monster? It’s my child!”

Anne hangs up on her best friend. She opens the study door just in time to see Emma hurrying away toward the kitchen. The little toad had been standing outside the door listening. Maybe she’s being paranoid-Emma might just have arrived for work. But she doesn’t have her bag.

Anne rushes into the kitchen. Emma is halfway down the hall that leads to Charles’s offices.

“Emma?” Anne calls.

Emma turns. She has an apple in her hand. “Yes?”

Anne waits as Emma walks back into the kitchen.

“Are you just arriving for work?”

“No. I was just getting a piece of fruit. I hope that’s all right.”

She can’t even look Anne in the eye.

“Help yourself.”

Emma holds the apple with both hands and looks down. “Thank you,” she says in that phony meek-little-girl voice of hers.

“You’re among friends,” Anne says.

“You’ve both been very nice to me.”

“Well, you do a very good job. You’re wonderfully efficient. And cooperative. That’s very important for people like Charles and me. I’m sure you understand that.”

Emma looks up and meets Anne’s gaze. “Of course,” she says.

“Good.”

Anne picks up a sponge and wipes away dirt that isn’t there. She rinses the sponge and replaces it by the sink. She dries her hands on a dish towel.