John Irving - Last Night In Twisted River

She was a young-looking forty-three now, the cook reflected. It pained Dominic to see Charlotte ’s pictures, and to reflect on how fond he was of the young woman; the cook believed that Charlotte would have been the perfect wife for his lonely son.

But a deal is a deal. Charlotte had wanted children-“Just one child, if that’s all you can handle,” she’d told Danny-and Danny had promised her that he would get her pregnant and give her a child. There was only one condition. (Well, perhaps the condition word was wrong-maybe it was more of a request.) Would Charlotte wait to get pregnant until after Joe had graduated from college? At the time, Joe had three years to go at the University of Colorado, but Charlotte agreed to wait; she would only be thirty when Joe got his undergraduate degree. Besides, as the cook recalled, she and Daniel had loved each other very much. They’d been very happy together; those three years hadn’t seemed like such a long time.

At twenty-seven, Charlotte Turner was fond of saying, dramatically, that she had lived in Toronto her “whole life.” More to the point, she’d never lived with anyone-nor had she ever kept a boyfriend for longer than six months. When she met Danny, she was living in her late grandmother’s house in Forest Hill; her parents wanted to sell the house, but she’d persuaded them to allow her to rent it. The house had been a cluttered, messy place when her grandmother lived there, but Charlotte had auctioned off the old furniture, and she’d turned the downstairs into her office and a small screening room; upstairs, where there was only one bathroom, she’d made a big bedroom out of three smaller, practically useless rooms. Charlotte didn’t cook, and the house was unsuitable for entertaining; she’d left her grandmother’s antiquated kitchen as it was, because the kitchen was sufficient for her. None of Charlotte ’s short-term boyfriends had ever spent the night in that house-Danny would be the first-and Charlotte never exactly moved in with Danny in the house on Cluny Drive.

The cook had offered to move out. He saw himself as a potential invasion of his son’s privacy, and Dominic desperately wanted Daniel’s relationship with Charlotte to succeed. But Charlotte wouldn’t hear of “evicting” Danny’s dad, as she put it-not until after the wedding, which was planned (more than two years in advance) for June ’87, following Joe’s college graduation. Joe would be Danny’s best man.

At the time, it had seemed wise to wait on the wedding-and on Charlotte getting pregnant, and on having a new baby in the house. Danny had wanted to “shepherd” Joe through the boy’s college years-that was the writer’s word for it. But there were those in Toronto who knew Charlotte ’s history with men; they might have bet that a wedding as much as two years in the offing was unlikely, or that after leaving for one of her many trips to L.A., the young screenwriter simply wouldn’t come back. In the short three years they’d been together, Charlotte had kept scarcely any clothes in Danny’s bedroom closet, though she more often spent the night in that Cluny Drive house than Danny would at her place in Forest Hill. She did keep her share of toiletries in Danny’s bathroom, and her considerable cosmetics.

Both Charlotte and Danny were early risers, and while Charlotte was attending to her hair and her skin-she had the most beautiful skin, the cook suddenly remembered-Danny made them breakfast. Then Charlotte would take the Yonge Street subway to St. Clair, where she would walk to her place in Forest Hill; she did a long day’s work there.

Even after they were married, Charlotte always said, she planned to have an office outside the house on Cluny Drive. (“Besides, there isn’t room here for all my clothes,” she’d told Danny. “Even after your dad moves out, I’ll need at least an office-if not an entire house-for my clothes.”)

The clothes could mislead you about Charlotte, Dominic often recalled-especially when he saw pictures of her. However, like Danny with his novels, Charlotte was a workaholic with her scripts-no less so in the case of her proposed adaptation of East of Bangor , which was the reason she and Danny had met.

Charlotte knew all about Danny Angel’s nonnegotiable rules regarding the sale of film rights to his novels; she’d seen the interviews, where Danny had said that someone would have to write a “halfway decent” adaptation before he would part with the movie rights to this or that book.

The tall twenty-seven-year-old-she was a head taller than Daniel, the cook would remember, which made Charlotte closer in height and age to Joe than she was to Danny or his dad-had agreed to write the first draft of a screenplay of East of Bangor “on spec.” No money would change hands, no film rights would pass; if Danny didn’t like her script, Charlotte would simply be out of luck.

“You must already see a way to make a movie out of this novel,” Danny had said when they first met. (He didn’t do lunch, he’d told her. They met for dinner at Bastringue, where-in those days-Danny must have eaten three or four nights a week.)

“No, I just want to do this-I have no idea how,” Charlotte said. She wore dark-framed glasses, and was very studious-looking, but there was nothing bookish about her body; she was not only tall but had a voluptuous figure. (She must have outweighed Daniel by a few pounds, as the cook recalled.) She was a big girl to wear a pink dress, Danny had thought that first night, and her lipstick was a matching pink, but Charlotte did a lot of business in L.A.; even in ’84, she looked more like Los Angeles than Toronto.

Danny had really liked the first draft of her screenplay of East of Bangor- he’d liked it well enough to sell Charlotte Turner the movie rights to his novel for one dollar, Canadian, which at the time was worth about seventy-five cents, U.S. They’d worked together on subsequent drafts of the script, so Danny had seen for himself how hard Charlotte worked. In those days, Danny’s writing room was on the ground floor of the house on Cluny Drive -where his gym was now. He and Charlotte had worked there, and in her grandmother’s house in Forest Hill. It would take fifteen years to get the film made, but the screenplay of East of Bangor was pulled together in four months’ time; by then, Charlotte Turner and Danny Angel were already a couple.

In Danny’s bedroom, which was as much a memorial to Charlotte as the third-floor writing room was a shrine to Joe, the cook had often marveled at how well dusted and sparkling clean Lupita maintained all the framed photographs of the successful screenwriter. Most of the photos had been taken during the three years Daniel and Charlotte were together; many of these pictures were from their brief summer months on Lake Huron. Like some other Toronto families, Charlotte’s parents owned an island in Georgian Bay; Charlotte’s grandfather was alleged to have won the island in a poker game, but there were those who said he’d traded a car for it. Since Charlotte ’s father was terminally ill, and her mother (a doctor) would soon be retiring, Charlotte stood to inherit the island, which was in the area of Pointe au Baril Station. Daniel had loved that island, the cook would remember. (Dominic had visited Georgian Bay only once; he’d hated it.)

The only snapshots of Charlotte that the cook continued to recycle on the bulletin boards in his bedroom were those of her with Joe, because Daniel couldn’t sleep with pictures of the dead boy in his bedroom. The cook admired how Charlotte had been unjealously fond of Joe, and Joe could see for himself how happy his father was with her; Joe had liked Charlotte from the start.

Charlotte wasn’t a skier, yet she tolerated those winter weekends and the Christmas holiday in Winter Park, where the cook had made fabulous dinners in the ski house at the base of the mountain. The restaurants in Winter Park weren’t bad, or they were good enough for Joe and his college friends, but they were beneath the cook’s standards, and Dominic Baciagalupo relished the opportunity to cook for his grandson; the boy didn’t come to Canada often enough, not in Dominic’s opinion. (Not in the writer Danny Angel’s opinion, either.)