The Mentor Read Free

Seasons? To complete the humiliation, why don’t I walk in naked?”
    Anne curses herself. There is simply no way to minimize the blow—the
Times Book Review
is Big Daddy.
    “I love you,” she says. “I can’t wait to get home.”
    Anne goes to the window. Down below, the city is a wet gray blur.
    The intercom sounds. “Ms. Turner, may I speak to you a moment, please?”
    The mouse squeaks, Anne thinks.
    “What is it?”
    The temp enters. She’s small and young and quite pretty, actually, when she lets her face peek out from the unruly brown hair that keeps falling down from behind her ears. Large green eyes, lovely skin, a mouth that could be sensual if she’d let it.
    “In these catalog pages that you okayed?”
    “Yes?”
    “I found two errors.”
    “You’re kidding me.” Anne takes fierce pride in her attention to detail.
    “See the extra space between the period and the start of the next sentence here? And ‘pâté’ needs an acute accent over the
e
.”
    The last thing most temps will do is take it upon themselves to review the boss’s work.
    “You’ve got a good eye, Edna.”
    The phone rings.
    “I’ll get it myself.… Anne Turner.”
    “Anne, it’s Judith Arnold.”
    Her gynecologist. Anne stiffens.
    “The test is in. Hope you and Charles have some champagne on ice.”
    “You’re positive?”
    “No doubt. You’re going to have a baby.”
    Anne can feel the blood rush from her head and then, just as quickly, her face flushes hot red. She sits in a gray chair she’s never sat in before. Christ, she wishes the rain would let up; she can’t think through its splattery tattoo. And she needs to think.
    “It’s Emma.”
    She’s forgotten that the young woman is still in the room. “What?”
    “My name. It’s not Edna, it’s Emma.”
    “Thank you, Emma. Hold all calls.”
    When the girl is gone, Anne looks out the window again. But now all she can see is her own reflection, staring back at her with fear and contempt.

3
    Anne strides down the cavernous hallway of the Central Park West apartment in her bra, panties, and the new Manolo Blahnik heels she paid six hundred dollars for at Bergdorf’s. She hates heels, they’re uncomfortable and send the wrong message. But today is a heels day—some days just are. Anne has spent the last week in a state of low-level panic. She called Judith Arnold back and swore her to secrecy about the pregnancy. She also asked for some pills to quell her anxiety, but was told they all carried too many risks. Anne reminds herself constantly how important it is to keep going. The next couple of weeks are going to be about Charles and the book. After that, she’ll have time to think. To decide.
    She and Charles have been moving through the house as if in parallel universes. He began to slip down that black hole of his, but then, to his credit, he started work on a short story to take his mind off things. He’s also running compulsively, for hours at a time, and then polishing off two bottles of wine during their tense,desultory dinners. Anne knows that the less she says the better—they just have to wait and see how the release of
Capitol Offense
plays out. She yearns for the connection and release of lovemaking, but Charles loses all interest in sex when he’s depressed or resentful and right now he’s both.
    In the kitchen—the kitchen that recently graced the pages of
Metropolitan Home
—Anne digs into the perfectly ripe papaya half Magdalena has left, as per instructions, on the bare white vastness of the room’s center island. Anne adores papaya—fat free, good for the digestion, and when perfectly ripe it literally melts on the tongue. Fifty percent of eating is texture, the other fifty percent is guilt. She looks around the gleaming room with its glass-front cabinets. None of that au courant clutter for her, thank you very much. The mania for baskets—woven grease-magnets she calls them—sets her teeth on edge. Anne is glad they bought the