Page 27 of The Last Book Party

“Have you stopped taking your medication?” my mother asked.

“I was feeling good. I didn’t need it,” he said.

My mother sighed. For the past two years, Danny had been taking an antidepressant that worked reasonably well but that would make him dangerously ill if he ate certain foods, including aged cheeses, smoked fish, or cured meats like bacon and hot dogs. My mother was vigilant about reminding Danny of the importance of avoiding those foods and even tried to keep them out of his sight. At our potluck Fourth of July picnic at Corn Hill the previous summer, she not only had refused to serve hot dogs, but had asked all our friends to forgo hot dogs too, so that Danny wouldn’t be reminded of his eating restrictions and his condition. Danny had known she had done this and had joked with me about how un-American it was for her to ban hot dogs on the Fourth of July. We’d laughed at the idea that he could forget that he suffered from depression or that the sight of a single hot dog could send him spiraling.

Our mother had been just as overprotective when Danny was seventeen and it had become clear that he had not inherited my mother’s height. “Don’t say anything about his being short,” she told me once, as if my mathematically brilliant brother didn’t know that at barely five-six he was considerably shorter than the average American man. Danny and I had laughed about that too. “I hate to break it to you,” I’d said, “but you’re short.” He’d run to the mirror and pretended to collapse in horror.

My mother convinced Danny to get dressed and go with her to see his doctor. I stayed behind and stripped his bed, gathered up his dirty sheets and clothes and took them down the block to the laundromat. I threw out the remaining hot dogs along with a container of moldy yogurt and three slices of rock-hard pizza. I didn’t know what to do with the pages and pages of notes andequations on the desk, the couch, and living room floor, so I put them into two neat piles on the coffee table. Their numbers were meaningless to me, but they meant something profound to Danny. I prayed his depression would lift so he could resume the task of making sense of the numbers in a way that gave him peace.

When they returned, Danny crawled back into bed. My mother thanked me for cleaning the apartment. “You’re a godsend, Eve. It’s nice to have you home for a while.”

She told me that Danny’s psychiatrist had convinced him to go back on his medication.

“Will it work?” I asked.

My mother glanced toward Danny’s bedroom, her face pinched with worry.

“We can only hope.”

24

I returned to Truro with a heaviness and the feeling that I had been away a long time, that my giddy conversations with Henry about books had taken place weeks ago rather than only a day before. Henry didn’t ask the reason for my absence, and I didn’t share what was going on in my family. It was soothing to get back to Henry’s world, and his joy at my return—he seemed to light up when I walked into his office—took me by surprise. His eagerness gave me the sense that I was not alone in really liking our time together.

“You have no idea the battle that has been raging between me and these pages,” he said, tapping his fingers on the manuscript on his desk.

“What’s the problem?” I asked, perching on the edge of my school desk.

“Unsolvable problem: too long, yet impossible to cut.”

“Perhaps a fresh pair of eyes…?”

He frowned, and for a moment I thought I’d overstepped and that he was offended at the suggestion that I would be able to help him. But then he stood, gathered up the pages, and presentedthem to me with a little bow like a waiter offering a platter of food.

I took the papers to my table and settled in to read. Humming, Henry picked up the day’s crossword puzzle and went downstairs. I was happy to be alone. I became absorbed in the chapters, which chronicled a period of particular social prominence for Henry in the late 1970s.

Many of the anecdotes were funny, but more than a few seemed included only to puff up the persona of Henry Grey. The worst were the stories in which Henry quoted himself delivering what he obviously considered to be extremely clever quips. A case in point was his account of his response when Gay Talese canceled a lunch date because he had to do some additional reporting for his upcoming book on American sexuality,Thy Neighbor’s Wife. Without skipping a beat, Henry had retorted, “Too fucking busy and vice versa?” Which would have been very witty if Dorothy Parker hadn’t said it first.

After about an hour, Henry came back upstairs and asked me to show him what I had marked. I went over it slowly, easing into my criticisms, careful to tell him what I liked about the parts I was suggesting he shorten. He argued a bit, and then nodded and listened, at times looking a little pained. Gently, I tried to make him understand that by calling less obvious attention to his every witticism, his genuinely funny anecdotes would shine.

I watched, silently, as he paced the room with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the floor. I thought he might be angry, that I’d knocked him off his pedestal a bit too presumptuously. But then he stopped and, with a tired but open and accepting look on his face, said, “Thank you, Eve. As suspected, it was helpful to have another reader.”

As he picked up his manuscript, I asked, “Hasn’t anyone else read these chapters?” I instinctively didn’t mention Tillie by name.

“No,” he said, meeting my eyes. “It’s often not productive.”

25

Biking home, I was thrilled that I’d been able to help Henry. It was exciting to feel that I was on an equal intellectual footing with him, that he had valued my insights into his writing as he once had Tillie’s. Now that I knew that Henry’s shelf of favorite books did not include any poetry, I wondered what had changed since the years, described so lovingly in the beginning of Henry’s memoir, when they had helped each other with rough drafts. They may both still be writers, but the combination of serious, obscure poet and fact-heavy journalist with a taste for light satire was something of a literary mixed marriage.

It wasn’t until I saw the Volvo in our driveway that I remembered my father had returned, with houseguests, and that I’d promised to join them all for dinner in Provincetown. Still giddy from helping Henry, I didn’t even mind my mother’s up-and-down glance at my outfit, cutoff jean shorts and an old Grateful Dead T-shirt of Danny’s, and her barely whispered “Something nicer for tonight, please.” After a quick shower, I put on a gauzy halter dress and sandals with heels. I left my hair down and put on mascara and lip gloss. I glanced in the bathroom mirror. I liked the way I looked. I liked working for Henry. I had nothingto apologize for, and no need to offer an explanation for leaving my job at Hodder, Strike. If asked about it, I could honestly say it was a refreshing break from the city and that I valued the opportunity to work for Henry Grey.

No doubt pleased with my appearance and buoyant mood, my mother didn’t make any pointed comments about my current job or future prospects on the drive into Provincetown, although I saw her lips tighten when Barbara Rankin mentioned that her daughter Lisa had just been promoted at Young & Rubicam. The conversation stopped as we approached the stretch of Route 6 that opens up to an expansive view of the Provincetown shore and the tip of the Cape.

“Now that’s what we call Cape light,” my mother said.

The sun, glowing a brilliant orange, was sinking behind the Pilgrim Monument, flushing the underbelly of the vast clouds stretching across the sky with deep purples and pinks that looked almost too extreme to be real. The wind was brisk, and a light chop on the bay was flicking the water a dark silvery blue. It was true what Tillie had written: to see light, sea, and sky come together like this and bathe the whole landscape in warmth and color was both a comfort and an inspiration.

At Pucci’s, my mother had reserved a table by the window, and she ushered my father and me to the chairs facing the inside of the restaurant so that our guests could have a view of the harbor. I sipped a glass of white wine, only half-listening to the conversation about Ed Rankin’s recent trip bareboating in the British Virgin Islands.

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