Emma sits at her desk sorting through months of old mail. Many of Charles’s fans, particularly the female ones, seem to project their deepest longings-for a son, a husband, a lover-onto him. In her week and a half on the job, she’s dealt with a pound cake sent by a sixty-two-year-old widow in Missouri, a naked photo from a married woman in Marina Del Rey, and an impenetrable love poem from an overwrought Wellesley freshman. And then there are the manuscripts sent in by would-be writers, and galleys sent by publishers hoping to garner a book jacket blurb. When she started, there were dozens of these lying around the office. She suggested to Charles that she read the books and write synopses for him to review. He praised her initiative, and using this system they’re working their way through the backlog. Ditto for the forty-two unreturned phone calls that greeted her on her first day.
Emma has a goal: to make herself indispensable to Charles Davis.
The mail sorted into its usual three piles-Throw Out, Answer, and Pass On-Emma looks up and surveys the office. There’s no doubt that she’s succeeded in bringing some semblance of order to the chaos. There are neat piles of papers on chairs and tabletops, each pile labeled with a Post-it note as to its eventual destination. The room is off-limits to the housekeeper and Emma spent her first days cleaning, stirring up volumes of dust that sent her into sneezing fits. But what a difference-the place shines. There’s even a vase of fresh flowers on her desk. Emma loves order-it calms her, quells her terrors.
Emma imagines Charles, on the other side of the closed door between the two offices, sitting at his desk, writing. He has told her he’s starting a new book, that he writes his first drafts in longhand in spiral notebooks he orders from the Dartmouth bookstore. She’s read all of his novels. Her favorite is Irreparable Damage, the story of a New England family coming apart after the sudden death of the mother. The father, a college professor, mad with grief, immediately begins an affair with one of his students. Emma understood completely the professor’s need to lose himself in passion even though he knew that the affair was wrong and would damage his children, the young woman, and himself. Emma had been moved by the book and found solace in it too. There was something about that family, floundering in the aftershock of sudden tragedy, that made her feel less alone.
And of course she’s fascinated by the man himself. Beneath his imposing manner he seems kind, even wounded, lonely somehow, like a little boy who has won first prize at the fair but now stands all alone behind the bandstand. She wonders if he has any friends, any real friends. He needs one. She loves his hands, the long fingers with squared tips. When he gets close to her she can smell his pine soap.
As for Anne Turner, Emma hates her. She’d like to take a hammer to those perfect teeth. The bitch knows exactly what she wants, is so damned articulate that words roll off her tongue as if they were scripted. Turner lives in a parallel universe where everyone is fearless and graceful, where life is just a matter of waking up and making fabulous things happen. Emma keeps her mouth shut during their brief encounters. She listens attentively and tries to look intelligent, always remembering a secret maxim she honed in the mental hospital: What you don’t say can’t be used against you. During her week temping at Home, Emma had observed Anne carefully, hoping to learn some of her tricks. Even that rainy day in her office, when Anne got that phone call that seemed to disturb her so much, she never lost her composure. She was told something, some piece of news-what could it have been? — and her face went white. She even forgot Emma was in the room.
Turner had told Emma to help herself to anything in the kitchen, and two days ago, when Charles Davis was at the other end of the apartment taking a shower, she had walked down the long hallway and into the enormous room. She’d opened the refrigerator door and looked at all the cheeses and chutneys and tiny pickled vegetables. Each label was a miniature work of art; all the food seemed to come from organic farms in quaint-sounding corners of Connecticut or the Hudson River valley. Emma opened a small container of goat cheese-it smelled like goat hair. Stupid fucking rich people. She spit into it. Then, giggling to herself, she stirred the spit with her pinky until the saliva disappeared. She imagined Anne Turner spreading the cheese on a cracker and remarking on how divine it was. Then Emma took a carrot from the crisper. She’d taken only one bite when she heard Charles Davis approaching. She dashed back down to the office and stuffed the uneaten carrot into her purse. She smiled at him when he came in.
Charles’s office has antique filing cabinets, a Persian rug, and twelve-foot ceilings. Emma feels as if she’s stepped through the looking glass into a world she’s read about and seen on television. And now she’s part of it.
No you’re not. Stupid Emma, you’re a fly to these people, a convenience. You don’t belong here. Freak! Go back to where you came from, hide away in some rented room, be a small-town weirdo. Emma clenches her fists, digs her fingernails into her palms, harder harder…
There’s a tentative knock on the door at the end of the hallway. Emma licks a sliver-moon of blood from her palm. Be calm be cool. She goes and opens the door. Magdalena, the housekeeper, a quiet woman from the Canary Islands who pretends she doesn’t speak English-Emma sees through her little act-is standing there with a FedEx letter in her hand.
As Emma walks back down the hallway, she looks at the return address and sees that the letter is from London, from Charles Davis’s British publisher. She stands still and listens and then knocks lightly. Silence. Then the door flies open.
“What do you want?” Charles Davis demands. His face looks pained, almost contorted.
“This Federal Express letter just arrived from your British publisher. I thought it might be important.”
“You thought it might be important?”
“Yes.”
Charles grabs the letter, tears it in two, and flings it in the trash. “I’m trying to write! I don’t care if Jesus Christ himself wants to meet me for lunch, I’m not available to the world until further notice. Is that so goddamn hard to understand?” After shooting her a look of pure condescension, he slams the door in her face.
Emma stands there, a sickening deadweight suddenly lodged in her stomach. The sensation begins as a purely physical one, but quickly moves up her body, until her mind implodes with dismay, dismay and an approaching panic. She feels herself start to sweat on her upper lip, her forehead, under her arms. She feels the first tingle of prickly heat. She knows what comes next-banishment. Out to the back landing at the top of the stairs in her thin cotton dress and her bare feet, the door slamming and then locking behind her, the hours passing, she forbidden to move, staring at the railing, at the grooves in the wood, dreading that she’ll be noticed by the family that lives across the way. There are six kids in the family-six rowdy, unwashed, laughing, loved kids-and when they see Emma they stare, too kind to laugh. Then they whisper and run away, as if her sorrow might be catching. And evening turns to night and Emma grows colder and wants to cry, but what’s the use? And the hunger grows so intense it finally disappears and at least when it’s dark no one can see her up there on the back landing at the top of the stairs at the end of the alley in her bare feet and thin cotton dress with nothing on underneath.
Emma stands in front of the door to Charles’s office. What should she do? Don’t panic. She stands stock-still, her breathing shallow. She clenches her fists and wills herself not to cry. She hears what sounds like Charles Davis falling to the floor, followed by loud breathing, as if he’s doing a series of push-ups. This is followed by pacing. Then silence.
“Emma?”
“Yes, Mr. Davis?” she answers through the closed door.
“For Christ’s sake, stop calling me Mr. Davis. And will you please come in here?”
Emma opens the door and takes a step into the inner office.
He’s sitting at his desk. “It’s Charles.”
Emma hesitates a moment before saying a soft “Charles.”
“That’s better.” He smiles. “Sit down.” Emma sits across from him in a wooden armchair. “When I’m writing, or trying to write… well, it’s a difficult process, agonizing, fucking hellish is what it is. I don’t understand it. It’s physical, like football, or combat even, only the enemy is some amorphous gorilla of the soul. Or some bullshit like that. Is this making any sense?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose my point is, I become keyed up, revved, I go a little crazy. Or a lot crazy. So if I scream and yell and pound the walls… well, it’s not you.”
Emma feels a surge of gratitude and reaches past it to grasp courage. “I know that,” she says.
“You do?”
“… Charles… I’ve read all your novels. I’ve read Irreparable Damage twice. I can’t even imagine what it must take to create like that.”
Charles doesn’t answer, but a little smile plays at the corners of his mouth.
“I’m not afraid of a little screaming and yelling,” Emma says.
“No?”
“Not if that’s what it takes.”
He leans toward her, across his desk. “I’m very glad to hear that, Emma.”
“Scream away,” she says with a smile of her own.
He nods. Emma stands up to go.
“And, Emma?” She turns and looks at him, into his eyes. “You’re doing a very good job.”
She nods and closes the door quietly behind her. When she settles into her desk she tries to get back to work, but can’t. She’s overwhelmed by a physical sensation that moves over her body like liquid, a warm want that she has never felt before. There’s no way this job will be over in six weeks-she’ll make sure of that.