A Bigamist's Daughter Read Free Page B

acceptance letters. They, in turn, cry in her office, kiss her hand, send her gifts. They tell her: Now I know why these things happened, why I was lonely, hurt, why my child died, my husband left me, why I lost, missed out, messed up: So I could write about it.
    She looks down into the street, at the three little men who are now sitting, exhausted, on milk crates at the entrance to the garage. She imagines titles for the books they might write: Semi-Retirement on the Lower West Side; How I Backed a Tractor Trailer Out of a Garage, Once; My Life: In and Out of Mental Institutions. The last is a title Vista really has published. Kevin dug it out of the storeroom and left it on her desk one morning a couple of weeks ago with a note that read, “Perhaps this will provide some insight as to why we are here.” The jacket, in two colors on cheap paper, showed a long path leading to a wide door. The print, the path and the door were all dark green, but the rest of the jacket was light blue, as if the path led not to a mental institution but to the sky or a large lake.
    Kevin had taped a sketch of her on the back of the book, over the author’s picture. It was a very good sketch, even though he had made her cross-eyed. Kevin is a good artist. Under the sketch was a photo of a man with large watery eyes and big ears and a dent that looked like a huge thumbprint right in the middle of his forehead. His face was also light blue, and if it hadn’t been for that, and for the dent, he would have looked like Bing Crosby. It said in his biographical note that he’d once been hit on the head by a subway train and lived to tell about it. She pointed this out to Kevin and they laughed about it all that day.
    One of the little men gets up off his milk crate, stretches, and walks slowly down the street, west toward the river. She thinks of the Steinberg poster of the New Yorker’s view of the world: the Hudson, New Jersey, Chicago, California, Russia. She thinks again about Tupper Daniels’ novel, wondering how such a story can end. What happens to a man who comes and goes for nearly fifty years? Does he come home one day and simply never leave again, making his poor wife frantic, month after month, because she’d been sure he’d be gone by now, sure by now she’d have the house to herself again? Or does he, like her own father, go away one day and come back dead? Or does he simply turn a corner as the reader turns the last page (which, she supposes, is the same as going away and dying, coming home and never leaving)?
    She turns from the window and goes back to her desk. His manuscript is thick, on expensive paper, professionally typed. The author has already invested in his work, he believes in it. If Mr. Owens were here, he’d tell her to hit him for seven.
    One contract, fifteen minutes, and $200 is in her savings account. She passes Tupper Daniels and his mysterious man on to production (Won’t Ned love how neat it is, how much it looks like the real thing!) and goes home at five o’clock.
    Home to her studio apartment and her casual glances at the calendar, to her calculations that in about three more weeks it will be a year since Jill’s party, a year since she’s had anyone in her bed. Back to her studio apartment and her memories of that morning nearly a year ago, when she threw him out—Greg was his name, she thinks. Yes. Greg. Threw him out because he smelled of smoke and slept with his mouth open, because waking up with the feeling, Oh shit, who’s this? makes for wonderful jokes but lousy mornings and lousy days. Because right there and then on that Sunday morning, with her apartment a mess and her sheets looking gray and feeling greasyand a strange, bearded man sleeping next to her with his mouth open, she had vowed—shaking him, telling him to leave—that there’s be no more casual sex, that next time she had someone in her bed it would be for love.
    Now, nearly a year later, she’s willing to settle for a fine