Charles wakes up on the couch in his office, fully clothed. Anne spent the weekend at her friend Kayla’s hotel suite-passive aggression disguised as female bonding. Fine-she’s out of his hair. Charles calls for his car. He makes it up the Thruway in record time, fighting a headachy hangover all the way. The day is gray and humid, the landscape bare and uninspiring; with the leaves gone, all the dreary malls and self-storage barns leap out at him. He gets off the Thruway and heads deep into the forest. There’s no sign of human life for many miles, as if the world has ended and he’s the last man left. Just endless woods, woods that could swallow you up without anyone knowing it.
Charles finally reaches Portia’s cabin. Smoke is coming from its chimney; a lamp glows inside; hardy mums bloom in haphazard clumps around the yard. He finds Portia slumped in her favorite chair-a cigarette in her mouth, a mug of coffee beside her, half-glasses perched on the end of her nose-reading his manuscript.
“You’re early,” she says, without looking up.
“I suppose that means lunch isn’t ready yet.”
“Lunch is somewhere out there in the lake.” She puts down the manuscript and picks up her cane. “Let’s go.”
In California they call it earthquake weather, these gray, still, unseasonably humid days. Good weather for going insane. Carrying the fishing rods, Charles follows Portia down the wooden steps that wind down the cliff to the lake. They walk out onto the old dock-it wobbles and creaks beneath them-and climb into Portia’s battered rowboat. A sad little puddle sits in the bottom of the boat and Charles can feel the water seep into his socks. Portia takes the oars and slowly begins to row them out onto the deserted lake. The suffocating silence is broken only by the rhythmic squeak of the oarlocks. From somewhere deep in the forest comes the plaintive cry of a distant bird-or is it a coyote? The moist air and low clouds make it hard to breathe, as if the sky were a damp blanket slowly descending over the earth.
When they reach the middle of the lake, Portia ships the oars and expertly casts her fishing line.
“Ten years ago the lake would have been frozen over by this time. Winter feels like summer and summer feels like hell. The day is coming when the living will envy the dead, mark my words. In the meantime, I wish I could stop caring so much.”
She reels in her line and casts off again.
“I’ve reread it three times. I didn’t know I could still be so moved by the written word. That boy, that poor lost child… and his mother-what a harrowing creation. Haunting, simply haunting. I haven’t felt this way since I first read your work.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you didn’t write it.”
Charles laughs uneasily. “Of course I wrote it. Who else could have written it?”
“Don’t play games with me, Charles. Did you really think you could deceive me?”
“I didn’t come all the way up here to listen to this.”
“What did you come up here for? To be reassured that you could pass off this work as your own? To the one person who knows your writing best? To be told that you’re a genius, that you’re finally, gloriously, out of the slump you’ve been in for the past ten years?”
“Stop it.”
“That you’ve found your voice again, that you’re writing something with heart and soul and real life again, something that matters, something-”
“I said stop it!”
“I’ll stop when you start telling me the truth.”
There’s a long silence, and then that distant cry echoes across the lake. Charles can’t bring himself to look at Portia and so he looks down at his hands. They look veined and blotchy and old.
“I fell in love with her. She made me feel alive again… I wanted to help her.”
“Help her?”
Charles thinks of Emma sitting at his library table, writing, her face lit from within. He sees a stray lock of hair tumble across her face, remembers that mischievous glint in her eye when she tasted one of his french fries, feels a momentary ache for her body. He does love her. And he’s gone terribly wrong.
“I gave Nina the manuscript, took Emma’s name off it so it would get a fair reading. She thought it was mine. She said it was the great book everyone’s been waiting for me to write.”
“But it isn’t.”
Charles finally looks up at Portia.
“And you can’t pretend it is,” she says.
He looks out over the lake and wonders what has brought him to this place.
“No, I can’t,” he says simply. He reaches over the side and trails his hand in the cold, numbing water. Then he looks at Portia. There’s a challenge in her eyes, but also something else. Is it forgiveness? Or at least understanding? Her expression softens. She does understand. And she still loves him. He can redeem himself. Charles knows what he has to do: he has to go back to New York and make things right.
Suddenly there’s a sharp pull on Portia’s line. She stands up to reel in the fish and loses her balance. The boat starts to rock and she struggles to regain her footing, shoots Charles a beseeching look. He stands up to help-and the boat rocks more violently. Portia panics, drops the fishing rod, bangs her knee against the gunwale, and begins to tumble forward, toward the frigid water. For one split second Charles is elated: No one can survive in that water; she’ll go into shock, die quickly, cleanly. He’ll be home free; the book will be his.
And then he lunges forward, grabs her, and pulls her to safety.
Charles holds her fast. They’re both breathing heavily, afraid to move, waiting for the boat to stop pitching. Slowly it steadies itself. Charles takes a deep breath and gingerly moves back to his seat.
Portia tries to disguise how shook up she is. She pulls out a Pall Mall and sticks it between her lips. She lights a match and just before she holds the flame to the cigarette, she looks over at Charles. “I’ve never once been wrong about you.”
Charles helps Portia out of the rowboat and secures it to the dock. She follows him across the patch of rocky shoreline. As they climb the steps, the only sound is their footfalls on the old wood. Charles feels emptied out, emotionless; speech seems an impossible effort-and what is there to say? Behind him he hears Portia’s labored breathing as she climbs, and her labored steps, her old feet carrying her old body. They near the halfway point, where the stairs turn and there’s a small landing.
“I’ve got one of my chicken pot pies in the freezer, I’ll stick it in the oven,” she says.
Charles reaches the landing and starts up the final stretch. Portia stops a moment, leaning against the rail, sucking air.
“God bless R. J. Reynolds,” she says.
Charles turns and looks at her.
“You really should think about quitting,” he says.
And then he pushes her.