The Mentor (8 page)

Emma stands in the bathroom doorway taking deep breaths. She makes herself look at the rest of the room. The floor is black-and-white linoleum tile. There’s a pedestal sink with a medicine chest above it. Emma resolutely pushes down her pants and sits on the toilet, leaving the door open. As she pees, she slowly forces her eyes over to the tub. It’s just a bathtub. Her bathtub. But she doesn’t deserve a bathtub—she’s a dirty girl. Emma feels the dread spreading like a stain, the familiar tightening in her throat, the queasiness in her stomach; her jaw goes slack and her eyes half close. Moving slowly, she stands up from the toilet, slips off her pants, takes the little tin box from her bag, and climbs into the tub. She crouches down with her legs spread. She runs her fingers over the tiny raised scars that line her inner thigh. The scars are her friends. But no more scars. She’s learned that. Don’t press too hard and you won’t leave a scar. So she opens the box, lifts the velvet, takes the razor and presses gently against her skin—just hard enough for the sweet obliterating pain to bring up a perfect line of blood.

Enthralled, Anne drags he sumptuous virtual sofa down from the corner of the computer screen and moves it around the tiny virtual room until she finds just the spot for it. She resumes browsing through
Home On-line
, dragging down one item after another until the room is, well, perfect. Then she orders the items she wants by moving around the room and clicking on them. That’s all it takes. The warehouse outside Poughkeepsie ships the products; credit card billing is instantaneous.

“Absolutely fabulous,” Anne says, turning to a beaming Nikki Spinoza, the genius behind InterMagic, a woman in her early forties who wears her extra poundage sans apology, dresses in thrift-store rejects, lets her flyaway hair fly away, makes no secret of her lesbianism, and runs a very loose ship. InterMagic is housed in a converted stable in Tribeca. The staff, none of whom looks over twenty-five, are encouraged to bring in their latest toys, and the yeasty chaos—strewn with everything from a beach ball to a four-foot robot—resembles a kindergarten classroom.

“I’m glad you like it,” Nikki says.

“Nobody else in the industry has anything approaching this. It’s more like playing a game than shopping. How soon can we have the site up and running?” Anne asks.

“A week.”

Anne feels that exquisite surge of elation called success.

“You’ve done an amazing job.” Anne turns to the entire room and applauds. “You’ve all done a fantastic job. I can’t thank you enough. Call Dean and Deluca. Lunch is on me.”

Now it’s the turn of the dozen motley designers and computer nerds to applaud. Just at that moment the front door opens and a three-year-old boy wearing denim overalls rushes up to Nikki.

“Mommy! Mommy!”

Nikki sweeps him up and tosses him in the air. “Hey there, Tiger Balm. Justin, this is Anne.”

Justin says “Hi” and sticks out his arm. Anne shakes his tiny hand.

“We went on the Staten Island Ferry,” Justin says.

“No kidding, sailor.” Nikki looks about to burst with maternal pride.

“It was rough out there,” Justin announces.

“Well, it’s a windy day.”

“Choppy,” Justin corrects.

A woman in her mid-thirties, athletic, wearing black jeans and a T-shirt, walks into the office and gives Nikki a spousal kiss.

“Lisa, this is Anne Turner. Lisa Lewis.”

Lisa and Anne share a firm handshake.

“If
Home
gave frequent buyer miles, we could trek to Timbuktu. And that was
before
you hired Nikki. What a pleasure,” Lisa says.

“Well, Nikki has done a fantastic job with the website,” Anne says, feeling an immediate rapport with this loving and enthusiastic family. With it comes a twinge of longing.

“Let’s go to lunch. I want focaccia!” Justin says.

“Only a downtown kid, huh?” Nikki says.

“Hey Justin, get a load of this!” a voice calls from the other end of the office. Anne turns to see a giant plastic firefly sailing through the air.

“Wow!” Justin screams, charging off.

“I didn’t know,” Anne says, nodding in Justin’s direction.

“The crazy part is we didn’t want a kid, a couple of hip downtown career dykes like us. But Lisa had this cousin in Oregon she’d never met,” Nikki explains.

“Heroin addict, prostitute. Who’da thunk it? Oregon. She was Justin’s mom,” Lisa says.

“She died of an overdose. Justin was in the bed with her.”

Anne tries to imagine the horrific scene. “How old was he?”

“Eight months. We got him three months later.”

“Nobody knows who his father is,” Lisa adds.

“Has he asked?”

Lisa nods. “And we told him the truth.”

Anne turns and looks at the boy, who is gleefully launching another firefly. “He’s a very lucky child,” she says.

“No. We’re the lucky ones,” Lisa says.

Their marriage seems so guileless, so free of hidden agendas. Suddenly Anne feels dizzy and slightly faint. This is followed by a wave of nausea—they’ve been coming with some regularity for the past week.

“May I use your office for a moment?” she asks.

“Of course.”

Anne retreats to the sanctuary of Nikki’s large cluttered office. She sits down and stretches her legs out and waits for the nausea to pass. How would a child affect her marriage? Would the rivalries and resentments fade in the face of a new life? Or would the kid just become one more thing to struggle over?

And what would the baby look like, with its chubby little limbs? Would it have Charles’s smile? His eyes? Her coloring? If so, they’d have to buy sunblock by the gallon. Then it floods back—that afternoon on John Farnsworth’s leather couch, his flabby white body, his fat stubby penis poking into her, his tongue on her neck
and cheek. She presses her fingertips into the knot of self-hatred at the back of her neck. She takes out her cell phone and gets Directory Assistance, then punches another number.

“Planned Parenthood.” The voice sounds so reassuring.

“Yes, I wonder if you could answer a question for me.”

“I’d be more than happy to try.”

“Is it possible to determine a fetus’s father?”

“It is.”

“How is it done?” she asks, reaching for pen and paper.

“Through DNA testing of either the amniotic fluid or the chorion, which is the outer lining of the sac surrounding the embryo.”

“And then that DNA is compared to the DNA of the possible father?” Anne asks.

“Exactly. How far along is the pregnancy?”

“About ten weeks.”

“In that case, the chorionic villus sampling would be indicated. It’s too early for amniocentesis. Of course, you’ll need a blood sample from the possible father.”

How is she going to get a blood sample from Charles?

“How long does it take to get the results?”

“About two weeks. The cost is around a thousand dollars. The company that performs the testing will coordinate the arrangements with your doctor.”

She can’t possibly go to her own gynecologist. Judith Arnold’s husband is a publishing executive; they travel in overlapping social circles with Anne and Charles.

“Oh, one last question.”

“Shoot.”

“How much of the father’s blood is needed?”

“Usually they take a syringe full, but all the lab really needs is a few drops.”

After she hangs up, Anne realizes her nausea is gone. There’s a knock on the door.

“Anne, lunch is here.”

Anne joins the crew as they eagerly unload the shopping bags
full of scrumptious goodies from Dean and Deluca. Suddenly she’s famished. She finds a smoked turkey and roasted red pepper hero. There’s a tug on her pant leg.

“Where’s my focaccia?” Justin asks.

Anne digs into one of the bags and finds a thick slice of focaccia baked with mozzarella and sun-dried tomatoes.

Anne kneels down beside the boy. “Here you go, buckeroo.”

“That’s a silly name. Are you a silly lady?”

Anne looks up at Nikki.

“I guess I am a silly lady sometimes.” Anne laughs.

“Silly like a fox,” Nikki says.

After waking from a deep nap, Emma walks to the corner bodega. She loves the smells in the cramped store: something fried and spicy, the dirt on root vegetables she never seen before, city cats. She gathers up two apples, two oranges, a can of spaghetti, tea bags, milk, a box of Fig Newtons.

On her way home she passes a botanica. She stops and looks at the plaster figures in the window: Jesus, the Virgin Mary, an array of heroic saints in heroic poses. Gaudily painted, they remind her of what you can win at the county fair ball-toss on a dusty August night if you have a boyfriend. At the fair, the plaster figures aren’t religious; they’re dogs and cats and Elvis Presley and all around the lights of love swirl and there are pink puffs of cotton candy and whirligig music and farm folks strolling and show animals lazy in the night air. Emma hates the county fair.

As she walks into the botanica the fat proprietress—in a thin red dress stretched so tight across her front that her bosom is
mashed down and indistinguishable from the other rolls of flesh narrows her eyes.

“You have trouble,” the woman states, certain as a judge. She lights an unfiltered cigarette.

“What kind of trouble?” Emma asks.

“Bad trouble,” the woman says. She taps her temple and exhales by opening her mouth and letting the smoke billow out.

The store is heavy with smells, a thousand perfumes and incense sticks, the fresh layered over the stale in a dense mix that suddenly makes Emma dizzy. More plaster figures, their deadpan faces betraying no religious ecstasy, fill the shelves. And candles, hundreds of candles in glasses covered with saints and Jesus again. Jesus is everywhere in the botanica.

“I have magic for trouble,” the woman says, holding out a small glass vial.

Emma takes the vial and stares at the light brown liquid it holds. “What will it do?”

“Make you safe.”

“How much?”

“Twenty dollars.”

Emma starts to unscrew the cap.

“No!” the woman warns. “On your door make a cross with it and sprinkle it all around your bed.”

Emma hands the woman twenty dollars. Suddenly she wants to get out of the suffocating store. The plaster figures look evil—passive spectators to the world’s unspeakable acts. What do they care? They’re saints; they’ve cashed in their chips. As she closes the door on her way out of the store, Emma hears the woman mutter something unintelligible, in Spanish, something that sounds to her like a curse.

Before she unlocks her door Emma opens the vial—the liquid has a sharp fusty odor—wets her fingertip and makes a cross on the door. Inside, she unloads the food. She loves the bare cabinets, their corners home to crumbly spots of rust, and the noisy refrigerator
with the cracked handle. She wants her apartment to be a refuge replete with books and teas and at least two different kinds of cookies. A safe place.

She moves the chair close to the window and eats the apple and then four Fig Newtons, savoring every grainy bite, as she watches the street life below. Across the street an old man sits in a lawn chair in front of his building; couples out for dinner stroll by; clutches of hip young people in black, long-limbed and laughing, ramble down the block. Emma finds the passing parade hypnotic, and a sweet fatigue comes over her. She sprinkles the rest of the magic water around her bed, crawls in, and reads
Heart of Darkness
until her eyes begin to hurt. She turns off the bedside lamp. Red light filters in from the neon sign and plays against the far wall. She can hear the distant muttering of a thousand voices, a thousand beautiful anonymous voices. Emma lies still for a long time, looking at the light and listening to the voices. She has always imagined her father living in a room like this.

It was a winter-weary day in March, filled with dirty snow and bare trees, and nine-year-old Emma was in no hurry to get home from school. Home to the creaky apartment over the hardware store. She was chilly in her too big parka and slightly soggy boots, but that didn’t keep her from walking slowly, kicking her way down the small-town streets. The first thing she noticed as she climbed the stairs was that it was quiet; there was no music—no Janis, no Billie, no Piaf. Her mother always played music in the afternoon, singing along as she drifted from room to room getting higher and higher, changing her outfits, touching up her makeup, staring at the long-untouched painting on her easel.

The front door to the apartment was ajar. Emma pushed it open. Her mother was on the living-room floor wearing a hot pink top and her souvenir-of-Hawaii skirt, a panorama of paradise, her eye shadow smeared. She was staring into space—her skinny gaudy glamorous mother, her going-mad mother, sitting there splaylegged
on some crazy mixture of Seconol and Vivarin and Valium, some crazy chemical cocktail concocted to dull her dreams. Emma knew immediately that he was gone, her sad-eyed father with his longing for golden California. Strangely enough, she was relieved. At least it was over. The screaming, the hitting, that awful dead feeling that permeated an apartment shared by two people who blamed each other for everything, whose every waking moment was an unspoken shout of “If only I hadn’t met you.”

Emma said nothing to her mother, but walked slowly into her bedroom and crawled under her bed. She pulled a towel over her and imagined her father making his way west, her pot-smoking, underground-comics-reading, incense-burning, bitterly unhappy father who loved Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and the Grateful Dead, off to seek his long-haired dream far from the dreary dying towns of western Pennsylvania. She imagined him in motels and rented rooms as he made his way across the country, she imagined him forgetting about his mistake, about his wife, his life, about Emma. She understood. And yet secretly, every time the phone rang, every time the mail came, she felt it—that strange sad tingle of hope.

Emma curls up into the fetal position on her bed. Fuck her father. He better not come around after she’s famous, like one of those movie-star stories you read in the tabloids. His sorry ass won’t get a dime out of her. Emma blows off that loser’s memory and turns her thoughts to Charles Davis and his piney smell. She’s seen men looking at her on the subway; she knows she’s no dog. Her breasts are as pretty as Winona Ryder’s. She lets her hands go up and explore them, running her fingertips in gentle circles. She a goddamn survivor.