The Agency (24 page)

“Not as good as I’d like. Anyway, it’s old news. My relationships are a thing of the past. I’m unattached and planning to stay that way.”

“You?”

“Really. I’m considering celibacy.”

“Don’t take your vows just yet.”

I smiled, then screwed my courage up again. “Tell me something honestly, Dad. No kidding around. Do you think I’m up to this whole thing? Do you think I can make it work on my own? With everything going on, I’m wondering if God is sending me a message: Stay where you are. Don’t rock the boat.”

Dad steepled his hands and leaned forward with his long chin balanced on his fingertips. “You, Tessie? Please. You were born to rock the boat.”

Leave it to your father to come through for you when you least expect it. Sure, he worked in his share of zingers, but I left the restaurant actually feeling better than when I went in. Like maybe my life was not the complete and utter disappointment to him that I generally believed.

I hailed a cab and literally fell into the backseat. It was Friday night, and I could sleep as late as I wanted on Saturday, and I was hoping the world would look better after an extended communion with my pillow. I still wasn’t sure if I had the balls to hand in my
resignation on Monday with Dorothy’s future up in the air, but like Scarlett O’Hara, I figured I could think about that tomorrow.

I thought about closing my eyes in the cab, but I am a slave to my BlackBerry. We lost out on two more queries on
Duopoly,
which pissed me off. I got a picture message from Emma that showed her and her actress chicky, Jane Parmenter, mugging for the camera on the London Eye. The message reminded me that I still hadn’t called my friend at Godfrey Kahn’s production company about pushing Jane for the role in Kahn’s next flick. Thanks to Emma, I knew more about Jane’s gifts in bed than her gifts as an actress, but the acting business isn’t really about talent anyway. It’s about who you know. I called Kahn’s offices. Got voice mail. Left a message.

When I was done with e-mail, I checked my own voice mail. Sally called, wondering about my plans, asking what was up with Dorothy. Marty Goodacre called, looking to schedule a meeting for me with Cosima for eleven o’clock on Monday morning. No doubt she wanted to talk about Dorothy’s contract again. Maybe I’d have a surprise for her. Guy called, asking if I was heading to the premiere of the newest Boublil and Schönberg musical on Saturday night. I wondered if Dorothy had told Guy about David Milton. That would be stupid, but it would be just like Dorothy to confide in Guy. Anyway, yes, I was going to the premiere, so I’d see him there.

The last message was from Oliver, time-stamped two hours ago. Hearing his voice, I realized that I should tell him about Cruise, even if it came to nothing. Oliver needed a pick-me-up. Something to lift the cloud.

And then I realized, as I listened, that he needed much more.

“Tessie, it’s Oliver, I’m sorry I missed you,” he said. He sounded drunk but not an ordinary kind of drunk. He sounded depressed, but not an ordinary kind of depressed. “Look, thanks for everything, okay? I just wanted to make sure you knew it’s not your fault.”

That was all.

I hung up and sat there, wondering why my dinner was doing cartwheels in my stomach and why my heart was pounding in my
ears. I used my phone and called my voice mail and listened to the message again. And again. Until there was no mistaking what he meant.

“Oh, shit,” I said aloud.

I gave the driver a new address and told him to hurry.

OLIVER LIVES
, if you can call it that, in a basement studio flat not far from King’s Cross, in a part of the neighborhood that has stubbornly resisted redevelopment. Drug dealers and whores have to live somewhere, and this is where they call home. No yuppie condos. No quaint boutiques and bistros. I would sooner walk alone after midnight in most areas of London than in New York, but not here. My taxi driver looked at me as if I were crazy when I changed my destination from Putney and he let me off on this garbage-infested street.

It was raining hard. Good thing. Rain keeps the night people inside. I saw silhouettes in doorways and twentysomethings crowded near the lit window of an Indian restaurant. Smelled cigarettes and hash. Heard loud voices and, somewhere, glass breaking. I tugged my trench coat around my shoulders and hurried down the slippery wrought-iron steps to the underground level of Oliver’s building. I kept an eye out to make sure no one followed me,
and I listened for footsteps in the rain. God knows how I hoped to get a taxi back. This wasn’t the area to cruise for fares.

Something brown and quick moved in the shadows under the steps. A rat, nibbling on thrown-away food. Someone told me once that wherever you are in London, there’s a rat no more than ten yards away. He wasn’t even talking about Parliament or Fleet Street, where it’s probably five yards.

I was pissed off, being here. Not at Oliver, but at the world I inhabited, which treated genius so cavalierly. I don’t throw that word around lightly, but with Oliver, I do. He has seen and survived things that would have killed me and most of you. He stares at the devil in the open door of his closet every night. He creates worlds of squalor and beauty in his books, worlds that worm their way around your brain, worlds you cannot escape or forget. And no one cares. No one even looks down. We let our geniuses die in the gutter.

I wondered if I was too late. This is the “if only” time when you have a friend in despair. If only I had called him earlier. If only I had answered my damn phone. It was so like Oliver to make sure I didn’t blame myself when he committed suicide.

I pounded on his door, making the broken windows rattle. “Oliver!”

I stared through the dirty panes, trying to see inside, but he had a black bedsheet taped on the glass. Around here, you don’t want the neighbors having a looky-loo at your TV or your stereo or your food. Assuming you have any of those things to begin with.

“Oliver!”

I pounded again. Rain poured on my head and ran down my face. The rat scampered away in annoyance. I was disturbing his dinner. Somewhere close by, I caught the sweet-sick smell of feces, like perfume from the sewers. I hoped it wasn’t coming from inside.

As I waited, and no one answered, I had visions of where I would find him. On the floor. In his bed. On the bathroom tiles. It’s selfish, but I was obsessed with my own failure. I had let this happen. Me, the superagent, who couldn’t sell the best book I’d ever read. Who couldn’t deliver on my promises. Who let this extraordinarily
decent and talented man get sucked into a whirlpool rather than lift him up.

I twisted the rattling doorknob, but it was locked. I beat on the door again with my fist. A lake of water slurped around my feet, soaking into my stockings.

“Oliver, damn you, open the door!”

Be alive, damn you. Don’t be dead. Don’t make me find you.

Finally, I heard something. The jangle of a chain. The door swung open like a creaky closet in a haunted house, and there he was, dark and alive. Eyes like a cave. Skin the color of wallpaper paste. A cigarette between his lips, pointing at the floor, and his fingers twitching as he propped it up.

“You bastard!” I screamed at him.

I shoved him backward into the flat, stormed inside, and slammed the door behind muself. He wore a black T-shirt. Boxers. Bare feet. There was sweat on his forehead.

“Where are they?” I demanded.

Oliver stared at me and didn’t say anything. He blew smoke, adding to the pungent cloud in the flat.

“Where are the drugs?” I repeated.

He gave the barest of shrugs. “Bathroom.”

I stalked into the loo, which was the size of a phone booth. If you sat down on the toilet, your feet were in the shower. The sink was dirty with hair and dried toothpaste. The mirror showed me my face, my makeup streaked, my hair flat and soaked. Some superagent. I yanked open the medicine cabinet and found two pill bottles inside. One was aspirin. The other was unmarked, with capsules stacked to the lid.

I took them both, opened them, and poured the contents into the toilet bowl. I flushed and watched the water get sucked down, taking the pills with them. I felt as if I had saved him, but I hadn’t. He could have taken them anytime before I got here. And he could replace them anytime he felt the need.

When I went back into the other room, Oliver was sitting on a chair, bent over, his elbows on his knees. The cigarette smoldered between his fingers.

“Is there more?” I asked.

He shook his head. I believed him. I took off my wet raincoat and flopped down on the flea market sofa.

“Why?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” he said.

That was true. I probably wouldn’t.

“I want you to see someone, Oliver. A counselor. I’ll pay.”

“Fuck that, Tessie.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. No shrinks. And not on your dime, either.”

I saw an empty bottle of wine on the card table where he ate his meals. “Is there more to drink around here, or did you finish it all yourself?”

“There’s more.”

I got up and opened the refrigerator in his kitchenette. He didn’t have much inside. A brown banana. A box of takeout curry. A pork pie. On the door, I spotted a half-empty bottle of cheap Riesling. I grabbed the bottle, yanked out the cork, and didn’t bother looking for a glass. There probably wasn’t a clean one anywhere in the flat. I drank from the bottle, kept it in my hand, and went back to the sofa.

“Did you call me so I could stop you?” I asked.

“No.”

No, he called to spare my guilt, and I felt guilty anyway.

“So why didn’t you go through with it?” I asked. “Or are you going to do it when I leave?”

“You make it sound like a big deal.”

“Isn’t it?”

Oliver shook his head. “No, it’s not a big deal. None of us leaves a ripple, Tessie. Not me. Not you. Not Lowell Bardwright.”

“Yeah? How about those guys who did the sculptures in the cathedral?”

“Like I told you, no one will be reading
Singularity
in a thousand years.”

“You don’t know that. And even if they’re not, the point is that people are reading it right now.”

“Really? How many? Eleven people isn’t a legacy, Tessie.”

“How about that note you showed me last year? From the woman who was reading
Singularity
while her father was dying in hospital? Your book comforted her. Your words helped her deal with her pain.”

Oliver sighed. “One person.”

“Yes, damn it, one person. And you didn’t answer my question. Are you going to do it when I leave?”

“No.”

“What about tomorrow? Or next week?”

“I’m not going to make promises, Tessie. They’re not worth anything.”

“Promise me anyway.”

“I can’t do that. I wish I could, but I can’t do it.”

“So what do you want? Something to live for?” I swigged more wine. “I met Tom Cruise. I put
Singularity
in his hands.”

Oliver’s eyebrows arched. “Are you lying to me?”

“No, it’s true. I saw him at a restaurant in New York. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it will change anything. He may love the book, but the odds are that he won’t do a damn thing about it. And I’ll tell you something—it doesn’t matter, because that one person who wrote to you is already more important than Cruise. She’ll remember your book for the rest of her life.”

“You’re good at this,” Oliver said. “But it doesn’t change anything.”

“How can you say that?”

“Look, Tessie, you’re not the kind of person who gets depressed, so you don’t know what it’s like. I’m not talking sad or blue, I’m talking about fucking empty, paint it black, not caring about a single damn thing. What happens is that you’re holding a machine gun and you blow away everything around you, until the barrel suddenly turns around and you see it’s pointing at you. And you realize how easy it is to wipe out yourself like everything else.”

“You’re scaring me,” I admitted.

“I’m scared, too. It’s not like I want to feel this way. I just do.”

I finished the bottle of wine. I was almost as drunk now as he
was. I sank down on my knees in front of Oliver and put my warm hands on his face. His cheeks were rough.

“You know that I’m a self-obsessed, neurotic egomaniac,” I told him.

“Of course.”

“You’re also my only real friend.”

“Not true.”

“Yes, true. I’m telling you this because you seem to think I’m taking pity on you, and the reality is, you should be pitying me. The last few days have been like seeing my reflection in a mirror, and I have to tell you, I haven’t liked the view. People hate me. I used to wear that like a badge of honor, and suddenly I realize it’s not a good thing at all. I’m afraid of losing everything, and if I have to start over, I’m not sure I can do it on my own. I need someone to believe in me. For whatever reason, no matter how much I fail you, you still believe in me, Oliver. If I lost you now, I can’t tell you how grotesquely alone I would be.”

I wasn’t lying. And, yes, pity me that I have to make a friend’s attempted suicide all about me. Oliver smiled, because he is smart enough to recognize the irony.