Sebastian Stuart - The Mentor

“Portia would have wanted me to work,” he says finally.

The first draft of the ending is nearly finished. Zack stays late at school, hangs out alone in the art room-the teacher lets him; she knows about his situation at home. He’s making a collage. And then his mother shows up, drunk, on a tear, and starts in on him, brutally, smacks him to the floor, kicks him in the head, she’s killing him-and the scissors gleam in the late afternoon sun. And the snow was so pretty out the window.

Charles is stretched out on her bed, reading what she wrote. Emma sits at her desk, waiting for his response. She’s so tired that she almost doesn’t care. She wants it to be nighttime, when they’ll be sharing the bed, climbing in together, and he’ll be warm beside her.

“It’s not up to your usual standard,” he says, putting down the pages.

“I’ll rewrite it,” she says quickly.

“You know what, it’s easier for me to fix it myself.”

“But, Charles-”

He sits up and leans forward on his elbows. “Listen to me, Emma. The ending needs some serious help. It’s erratic. There are flashes of brilliance and then whole passages that read like they were written by a profoundly disturbed teenager.”

The motherfucker.

“Hand me a pencil, would you?”

Emma brings him the pencil. He takes it without looking up at her and immediately begins to write over her words.

“Have you fed the fish?” he asks. • •

Emma takes a shower, a quick one. The water stings and she hates the way her skin feels when it’s wet, but she wants to be clean for him; she wants to smell nice. She dries herself too quickly; when she puts on her nightgown she feels damp on her thighs and inner arms. She runs a brush through her hair and takes a quick look in the mirror. She tries to smile, but it comes out all strained and weird. She has to stop looking in mirrors.

She steps out of the bathroom and sees that Charles is making up the sofa into a bed.

“It’s better this way. No distractions,” he says.

Emma nods.

Now he’s walking toward her with something in his hand.

“Here,” he says.

She looks down and sees two white pills in his palm.

“What are those?”

“Just a mild sedative. I know you haven’t been sleeping.”

“I don’t like to take pills.”

“Did you used to? Take pills?”

Emma shakes her head.

“You need rest. You’ll feel better. A good, deep sleep.” His voice is so soothing. The pills do look comforting, sweet little white pills, they’re her friends, yes, yes they are.

Emma takes the pills and Charles hands her a glass of water. He watches as she swallows them.

“Good girl,” he says.

The pills don’t work. Emma lies awake in the middle of the night, frightened. The Chinese restaurant has turned off its sign. It’s so quiet outside, as if the whole city has died. She looks up at the shadows on the ceiling. They’re wavy and remind her of water and water reminds her of the goldfish so she closes her eyes. She can hear Charles’s rhythmic breathing. She gets up, as quietly as she can, lifting the covers slowly, holding her breath. The floor is so cold and the corners of the room so dark. Gently lowering one foot in front of the other, she crosses to the sofa. She looks down at him, curled up on his side like a little boy. He has the blanket pulled up to his chin and the tiniest smile flickers at the corners of his mouth. What would happen if she held a pillow over his face and pressed as hard as she could? She wants to crawl in beside him, but she doesn’t. She just stands there in the dark looking at him, waiting for morning to come.

Where are her notes? She wrote a page of notes to herself last night, last thing, right before her shower, and left it next to the typewriter. Now she can’t find it. She looks through all the papers on the desk.

“Charles, have you seen my notes?”

He’s sitting on the sofa, working on the manuscript, and he doesn’t look up. “No,” he says. Like it’s no big deal.

Emma is sure she saw the page on the desk earlier this morning. Where is it?

“I just saw it here.”

He still doesn’t look up. “Then it must still be there.”

“But it isn’t.”

Finally he looks up.

“Well, maybe it folded itself into a paper airplane and flew out the window. Emma, what is wrong with you this morning?”

“Those pills didn’t work.”

He puts down the manuscript and looks at her.

“I’m sorry,” he says, looking concerned. “You should have told me earlier. You must be exhausted. Don’t worry about the notes; they’ll turn up.”

Of course they will. It’s only a page of notes. Anyway, Charles will fix the chapter. He’s been so helpful with the book. Emma feels silly. For getting so upset. And she’s so tired, almost too tired to care.

“Why don’t you knock off and take a nap?”

Emma does. She crawls back into bed with her clothes on and shuts her eyes. The bed is so soft and the sounds of the city so lulling. Charles is here and she can sleep.

Portia’s memorial service is at the Dartmouth Club. Charles has been asked to speak, of course. He leaves Emma early in the morning and takes a cab back to the apartment. He takes the book with him. It’s a cloudy morning with a chill in the air. As the cab crawls through traffic, he tries to compose a speech of some kind, but images of that day- walking down the rickety steps, the low gray sky — crowd his mind.

It’s strange to arrive at his own building as a visitor. The apartment feels eerily calm, as if everyone had left in a hurry, and his office is a mess, correspondence piling up, tangled bedding spilling off the couch. He carefully locks the manuscript in his desk.

In the kitchen he makes himself a cup of strong black coffee and then spikes it with Scotch. It was Portia who introduced him to the pleasures of an early morning spike- climbing into the battered rowboat, the cold water seeping into his socks, the cry of a distant bird.

The master bedroom looks perfect, like a page out of an Anne Turner catalog-except that the tulips on Anne’s night table are limp and have dropped most of their petals. In the bathroom, he looks for something to lessen the sense of dread-he can’t take the Xanax he’s giving Emma; it makes him too groggy. He opens the medicine chest. The sparkling shelves look like a magazine ad: shiny tweezers, opaque glass jars, Q-Tips, and cotton balls. It’s all so fucking artful and antiseptic. He sweeps his hand over a shelf, knocking everything down onto the counter in a spray of broken glass and spilled mouthwash and witch hazel.

After putting on a dark wool suit, Charles decides to walk down to the Dartmouth Club. The exercise will clear his head and calm him down. He goes only a few blocks before he starts to sweat. The sun has come out and burned away the morning chill, the day is turning out to be unseasonably warm and humid. Can it really be late November? “Winter feels like summer and summer feels like hell,” Portia had said. “The day is coming when the living will envy the dead.” He wishes he’d worn a lighter suit; the scarf around his neck is itchy; he’s dazed. The sun is blinding, glinting off metallic surfaces, and he didn’t bring sunglasses. Some-where below Columbus Circle he ducks into a discount pharmacy. The place is huge and assaultive. He grabs the first pair of sun-glasses off the rack, tosses the cashier a twenty-dollar bill and walks out.

The sunglasses help-soften the sharp edges, a barrier from the world. It’s getting late and he still has no idea what he’ll say. He needs to sit and organize his thoughts. There’s a small plaza in front of an office tower; he sits on a hard bench. There are so many people everywhere, they’re all around him, moving; he’s fidgety, can’t concentrate- the squeak of the oarlocks, the flat gray of the water, the pine trees rising from the shore.