The Books of Fell (15 page)

The Deems lived on Jericho Road in a red brick house that Nina Deem told me she wouldn’t mind dying and coming back as.

“Nothing around here gets so much attention,” she said, “except Meatloaf.”

Maybe she told me this by way of apology for making me take off my boots before I followed her down the hall. Meatloaf, a fat red dachshund, licked my face and hands as I began praying my socks weren’t going to smell.

I didn’t get a really good look at her until I straightened up and let her lead me along polished wooden floors into the living room.

She was blond, like me, her hair falling to her shoulders, straight and shiny-soft. Green eyes to match the scoop-necked heavy green sweatshirt she wore. She had on jeans and some yellow Nike aqua socks, those shoe-sock things you can even wear into the water. Keats would wear them when we’d go clamming at the bay back on Long Island.

Meatloaf was waddling along behind us and Nina was saying, “Christmas? Dad didn’t even let the tree in the house this year. It was out there on the sunporch” — waving her hand toward the long doors — ”so we could see it, but the needles wouldn’t drop to the floor. I mean, is that obsessive-compulsive or is that obsessive-compulsive? Really.”

“We didn’t have one,” I said.

“One what?” She turned around and looked at me, waiting.

“A Christmas tree.”

“Oh,” she said, as though she’d forgotten she’d brought up the subject.

“We just had a lot of wreaths,” I finished, feeling foolish for going on about it.

“We can sit here on the couch,” she said, and Meatloaf took her up on the invitation, so I sat down beside him. We were a dachshund sandwich.

It was a large, comfortable room, lots of armchairs, and tables with flowers in vases, built-in bookcases all around, the same floors you could see your face in, but covered with old Oriental rugs. Big, orange-and-brown pillows to go against all the beige-and-white slipcovers. In front of us a long, low table with a marble top, filled with the latest magazines. A single framed photograph of a blond woman in shorts, carrying a tennis racket. Nina, fifteen years from then.

There was a notebook there, too, with a Flair pen stuck in its center.

“Do I call you John?” she asked.

“Everyone calls me Fell.”

“As in fell down, fell apart, fell to pieces?”

“Or fell back on or fell on one’s feet — it doesn’t all have to be negative.”

“Fell in love,” she said. “Yeah, I guess there are good ways to fall, too … or you wouldn’t be here.”

“I don’t follow you.” I looked into her eyes for the first time. She wasn’t shy about meeting someone’s glance. Just the opposite. She was one of those we’ll see-who’s-going-to-look-away-first types. So I looked away and added, “I don’t get the part about I wouldn’t be here if …” and I let my voice trail off. I was beginning badly, mainly because I didn’t know what we were really talking about.

She let me know. She said, “If I hadn’t fallen in love with Eddie, Dad wouldn’t have called you to the rescue.”

What was I supposed to say? Eddie? Who’s Eddie? I don’t know any Eddie?

I didn’t say anything.

She said, “It’s all right. I need tutoring, too, but Dad’s an earhole sometimes. Really.”

I had to laugh at the earhole bit. You couldn’t say Nina Deem wasn’t a lady.

“Everything you heard about Eddie Dragon is a lie!” she said.

“Fine. Let’s get to work.”

“We will, but remember that. He would never sell cocaine! He wouldn’t even smoke pot with me when I asked him to!”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m not arguing the point.”

“Don’t! He was the best thing that ever happened to me. He could no more sell dope than I could. He said it was a sure way to wreck your head.”

“He was right about that.”

She didn’t press the point, I’ll give her that. She leaned forward and got the notebook, opened it, and took out the Flair. “What I’m trying to do,” she said, “what I want your help with, is this biographical essay I’m writing on Browning. I don’t understand him.”

“Robert
Browning?”

“Is there a Walter Browning, a William Browning? Really. I thought you were supposed to be this dynamite writer.”

“I’m not a dynamite writer,” I said, while my greedy and materialistic mind raced ahead of me whispering gold 7, word processor, six dollars an hour, don’t mess it up, don’t be an earhole. “I mean, I’m a good enough writer, and I certainly know Robert Browning. I just thought I’d never have to read ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ again, ever!”

She laughed. “You won’t have to. I’m more interested in his life, and his romance with Elizabeth Barrett.”

We were off and running. The air was clear, despite the odor that was now compelling Meatloaf to get all the way down on the floor and investigate my argyles.

• • •

When she finished reading aloud what she’d written, she said, “Rate it on a scale of one to ten.”

“Eight.”

“Why only eight?”

“It’s very good, but you can’t have sentences like ‘Against all odds, these young lovers eloped in 1846’.”

“Why can’t I?” Nina said, waving her arms in the air, and it was then that I saw it.

A tiny insect, a few inches above her left breast, coming out of her bra.

“You can’t,” I said, “because they weren’t young. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was thirty-nine. He was thirty-four.”

It wasn’t alive.

“They couldn’t have been that old, Fell!”

“They were,” I said.

It was a tattoo of a pole-thin black what? With a long tail and deep-blue wings. A beetle.

“I don’t believe you!” Nina said. Then she saw where my eyes were rooted.

“All right,” she said, “we’re not going to get anywhere until you take a good look!”

She grabbed the collar of her sweatshirt and yanked it down. “There! See it?”

“A dragonfly?”

“Good, Fell! A lot of slow wits think it’s a mosquito or a beetle.”

“Is it a permanent tattoo?”

“Yes. I found out where Eddie got his and I got one just like it. A fellow down in Lambertville does them. Like it?”

“It’s an attention-getter, all right.”

“Only if you’re with guys who look down your blouse,” she said. “Let’s get back to the Brownings.”

She wasn’t one to waste her father’s money.

• • •

At five thirty, the grandfather clock in the hall gave a bong.

“Dad said to ask you to stay for dinner,” Nina told me. “We eat at six, so we’ll have another half hour if you can do it.”

I said I could before I realized it was Wednesday, steak night at Sevens. She tossed back her hair and straightened her posture so the dragonfly disappeared. There was a phone in the hall by the clock, she said, if I wanted to call The Tower. “You won’t miss out on the steak, either,” she said, “because I had our butcher cut us a thick sirloin … The only thing is, I haven’t cooked a steak for ages! Dad’s cut way back on red meat and I hardly ever eat it.”

I jumped in. “I’ll cook it!”

“Can you?”

I smiled. “How did you know we have steak on Wednesdays?”

“Dad. He was one of you, remember? … He wouldn’t ask just anyone from The Hill to rescue me from Eddie. It’d have to be one of the holy Sevens, of course. Really.”

“We’re not that bad,” I said.

“I know. You’re a good tutor, Fell. Do me a favor?”

“I charge extra for favors.”

“Let Dad think I don’t know what you’re really doing here — he hates it when I outsmart him.”

“We’re doing the Brownings so far as I’m concerned,” I said. “Time out while I marinate the meat?”

My first date with Delia, I’d made her French toast. I was thinking about that while I reached up in the cupboard for seasonings to go in the marinade.

I was also thinking about the tattoo, and the look in Nina’s eyes when she said Eddie’s name.

I was beginning to be sorry for myself because I wasn’t connected to anyone. It made me feel like a kid again, this half-assed (half-eared?) preppy who’d have to put his name on the blind-date list for The Charles Dance and hope the girl who got off the bus from Miss Tyler’s school didn’t have bad breath and think we ought to nuke Nicaragua.

Then I saw something that started me going the other way, and I began to grin while I grabbed it.

“Hey, Nina, where’d this come from?”

It was a bottle of Fox’s U-Bet chocolate-flavored syrup. Made in Brooklyn!

“That was my mom’s. It’s about three years old. She used to order it by the case to make egg creams.”

“Which I’d kill for! Do you happen to have any seltzer?”

“There’s a cylinder in on the bar. Can you make an egg cream, Fell?”

“Can Michael Jackson dance?”

“I’ve tried to make them like she used to, but they don’t come out right.

“Just leave everything to me. All I need now is that seltzer and some milk.”

I finished marinating the steak while Nina got the cylinder, a carton of milk, and two glasses.

“Was that your mom’s picture in on the coffee table?”

“Yes, but it’s not good of her. She was beautiful. She was like some exotic hothouse flower daddy’d never let breathe fresh air. He’s very overprotective, Fell.”

“Sometimes you need protecting, Nina.”

“I
need it?”

“Not you in particular. We all need it sometimes.”

“I get too much of it.”

“I thought you said you’d like to come back as this house so you’d get some attention.”

“That’s right. This house gets loving care. I get locked inside with a bodyguard.”

“How’s this for loving care? Watch me,” I said.

She stood there while I spooned an inch of Fox’s U-Bet into each glass, adding another inch of milk.

“Is that all the milk you use? I use half a glass.”

“That’s too much. Now, the trick is to tilt the glass like so, and spray the seltzer off the spoon.”

Soon there was a big chocolaty head.

“See?” I said.

We were right on the verge of clicking our glasses together in a toast I proposed to H. Fox & Company, Brooklyn, New York, when Meatloaf began crooning while he ran from the room as fast as his fat little legs could carry him.

“Dad’s home,” said Nina.

• • •

Dad was your average nice-man type, getting gray at the temples, but keeping himself lean, dressed in a brown suit, a guy who probably wore his necktie from the time he got up until he went to bed. He looked like he’d be at home in an office, a bank, a church, at Rotary, on the golf course, or on his way in first class to some Hilton hotel for a meeting.

If he’d started his business from scratch, as Schwartz had said, he was way past scratch now, and his voice let you know it.

“Nina, before we go in to dinner, I want you to change your top.”

I automatically looked down at my own seedy sweater, scruffy jeans, and stockinged feet. Nina said, “Don’t worry, Fell. Dad just doesn’t like scoop necks.”

“I don’t have to look at it while I’m eating,” Mr. Deem said.

“You don’t ever have to look at it,” said Nina. She finished the rest of her egg cream and left me in the kitchen with David Deem.

I told him I’d cook the steak, and he mouthed a few sentences about his cholesterol level finally getting down, and his triglyceride staying at about 150.

“You don’t have to worry about all that yet, John.”

I asked him to call me Fell, and if I should get the steak in right away.

He said Nina usually had the salad washed and waiting in the refrigerator, peeked in there, and nodded. “Yes, go ahead. Mrs. Whipple left us lima beans from last night we’ll just heat up.”

He got busy behind me, after he dropped the beans into a pan he put on low, but he didn’t take his coat off or loosen his tie.

Meatloaf sat up and begged, and Mr. Deem tossed him something and told him to go into his bed.

Then Mr. Deem said, “I’m glad we have a few minutes alone, Fell…. If you ever hear anything or see anything that tells you Eddie Dragon is in touch with my daughter, I want you to tell me immediately. You know that, I hope.”

Already I knew how hard this situation might become. I liked Nina. I couldn’t see myself ratting on her. But I couldn’t see myself letting her hang out with a pusher, either.

He went right on without waiting for any comment from me. “He’s very clever, don’t forget that. He can charm the birds down from the trees, too, so you have to be on your guard…. Did you see it?” he asked me.

“See what, sir?”

“The tattoo. You couldn’t have missed it.”

“I saw it.” I liked it. I’d never tell him that, but I wouldn’t have minded if Delia’d had something like it to remember me.

“He did that to her,” said Deem.

“She said she did it on her own initiative.”

He laughed unhappily. “Don’t believe it! … Now she thinks it’s zany and original. But imagine, Fell, years from now when Nina will want to attend a dance, or a dress-up dinner party, or go to the club for a swim: There it will be. He’s marked her for life.”

“Well, I’m sorry about that,” I said.

“Then she talked about him, hmmm, Fell?”

“Not much. Just a little when I noticed the tattoo.”

“What did she say?”

I sighed. I wasn’t going to be good at this at all. “She just said anything I might hear about him is a lie.”

“Ha!
He’s
the liar! He’s a pro, Fell! He had me believing him, and I’ve met my share of liars!”

The thought of it made him work the wooden fork and spoon so vigorously, a piece of lettuce flew at my sweater.

I picked it off and popped it into my mouth. “Good dressing,” I said. It needed salt and a touch more garlic, but it was surprisingly tasty. A great mustardy tang.

“My wife’s recipe…. Did I see you two drinking egg creams?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s good. Nina says she can’t make one right. They remind her of her mother too much, I think.”

“She told me something about that.” “She did? She talked with you about her mother?”

“Not a lot, but a little.”

“I’m surprised … and delighted. Nina has a lot of trouble talking about her. She took her death very hard. We both did, of course. Nina’s so much like Barbara in every way, sometimes I walk into a room, see her, and have to stop and catch my breath. She’s Barbara to her bones: the daredevil, the romantic — all the qualities I lack. But Nina could use some of my dull, old common sense, too. She needs to come down to earth.”

I was timing the steak. “Mr. Deem? Do you two like your steak rare?”

“Yes, rare…. I’m glad you came on the scene, Fell. I know Nina will win you over, and you may feel disloyal if you have to report anything to me, but just remember this.”

He stopped and came around so he could face me.

“If you care anything at all about my daughter, you’ll be doing her a very great service keeping Dragon out of her life.”

Then his eyes got very wide and he said, “Oh, no!”

“What’s wrong, sir?” I thought of cholesterol and triglyceride, of high blood pressure and heart attacks.

He went over to the sink and ran the cold water.

“Are you all right, Mr. Deem?” My own father had died very suddenly of a heart attack.

He grabbed a towel and put a corner of it under the water, turned, and handed it to me. “Your sweater,” he said. “There’s oil or something on it.”

Where the lettuce had hit me.

I grinned with relief and dabbed at the stain.

“We should both have on aprons,” he said.

• • •

Nina was definitely out to get him at dinner. She was pretending to be reviewing for him what we’d gone over during the tutoring, but she talked far more about Elizabeth Barrett than she did about Browning, harping on her controlling father.

“Ummm hmmmm,” Mr. Deem would respond. “Well, Nina, they were very strict with young ladies in those days.”

Nina gave me a triumphant look. Then she said, “Dad, when she met Robert Browning she was practically forty! Her father was
still
telling her what to do!”

“She was ill, wasn’t she? Didn’t you just say she was ill?”

“He made her think she was! He wanted to keep her home with him!”

“It all turned out all right, didn’t it?”

“Yes, because she defied him! She eloped!”

“That’s a word we don’t use much anymore. Elope.”

“Oh, we still use it, Dad. Those who have a reason to use it still use it.”

She could have been talking about basket weaving in Madagascar for all the reaction she got out of him. He gave the same bland responses no matter how impassioned Nina became. He sneaked bits of steak to Meatloaf, who was stationed at his feet, under the table.

“The steak is done just right, Fell!” Mr. Deem decided to change the subject.

“Thanks, sir.”

“Nina, did you show Fell any of your old stories?”

“I’m throwing them all out,” she said. “They were from another time.”

“You’ll regret it if you do. You might want to remember that time someday, how you felt when you were younger.”

“I don’t want to remember feeling like this little Goody Two Shoes who raised her umbrella and heard the wind
sough
in the trees. I actually wrote that line, Fell. ‘She raised her umbrella and heard the wind sough in the trees.’“

“Sough is a perfectly legitimate word,” said her father.

“My future characters aren’t going to own umbrellas,” Nina said, “or slipcovers or coasters. I’m never going to write about careful people again!”

One thing I’d learned about her: If she
was
a jet crash, she had a certain brave facade about her. I couldn’t imagine her letting anyone feel sorry for her. I liked that about her, maybe because I was a little that way myself. We jet crashes had our pride.

• • •

I had to be back at The Hill by ten. At eight Mr. Deem walked out on the front porch with me, and we stood a moment in the cold night.

Then he grabbed my hand, and I felt his thumb push against my fingers. I had almost forgotten the Sevens handshake. I let my thumb touch his. It was an awkward gesture that made me feel silly, but he seemed satisfied.

“This is going to work out fine,” he told me. “I can tell.”

He went back inside and left the light on for me as I headed down the walk.

His Lincoln was there in the driveway.

The license plate read DDD-7.

The wind was soughing in the trees.