Who is Maud Dixon? Page 4

  When the group settled at a large table in the back, Amanda raised her glass and called out, “Chin-chin!” Florence and Lucy looked at each other unsurely, but mumbled “Chin-chin” back with the rest of them.

  Simon’s assistant, Emily, a friendly Midwesterner, had turned to the newcomers to try to draw them into the fold. “So where are you guys from?”

  “Amherst,” said Lucy in a barely audible voice.

  Amanda cut in: “Did you go to school there? That’s where my brother went. Stewart Lincoln?”

  Lucy nodded but it wasn’t clear which question she was answering, and she offered no further commentary.

  Emily asked Florence, “What about you?”

  “I went to the University of Florida. Gainesville.”

  “Oh cool,” Emily said. Everyone at the table nodded supportively. She might as well have just told them that she had cancer, so aggressively tactful was their response. Nearly all of them had gone to Ivy League colleges or their equivalents.

  “Have you been down to Hemingway’s house in Key West?” Fritz asked.

  Florence shook her head.

  “It’s awesome. They have these six-toed cats descended from his actual six-toed cat.”

  “God, don’t tell me we’re still pretending Hemingway is relevant,” Amanda said. “What is this, ninth-grade English class?”

  Fritz rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Amanda, all I said was that he had a six-toed cat.”

  A little while later, while they were on their second round, a middle-aged man in an orange kurta circulated the bar peddling roses. When she saw him, Amanda said, “There is literally nothing tackier than a single red rose. Someone should tell that poor man to start pushing peonies. Then he’d move some merch.”

  Everyone laughed except Florence, who stared quietly at Amanda, slightly awed. Who didn’t like red roses? For that matter, who didn’t like Hemingway? How could this girl, no older than Florence, hold such blasphemous opinions so cavalierly?

  On it went. Throughout the rest of the night, Amanda dropped cultural references that, until Florence Googled them later, seemed like little more than a series of disordered syllables: Adorno, Pina Bausch, Koyaanisqatsi.

  In Florida, Florence had grown used to being the most sophisticated person in the room. But in this grubby bar, she felt inadequate—stupid, really—for the first time in her life. She had been blithely walking around thinking she knew more than everyone and all of a sudden she realized she didn’t know a thing. If you’d asked her that morning, she would have said that red roses were just about the most elegant thing she could think of. And she hadn’t realized that maligning Hemingway was even on the table.

  The next day, she stared at the blank page and felt an unfamiliar emotion: fear. If red roses were tacky, what else was she wrong about? How many other embarrassing errors would crop up in whatever she wrote? And for that matter, could she even begin to contemplate writing a novel without reading Adorno first?

  She’d reread her old stories then and found them childish and clunky. She actually felt grateful to Amanda Lincoln, that smug bitch, for teaching her how little she knew before she humiliated herself.

  The attainment of greatness now felt like just one possibility among many rather than her God-given right. It was entirely plausible that she would end up an editor rather than a writer. Or back in Florida, selling houses or bank loans. Nothing was guaranteed. Nothing was owed.

  Her sense of self slipped from her as easily as a coat slips off the back of a chair. She’d outgrown the girl she’d been in Florida, but how did one go about building up someone new? She tried on moods and personalities like outfits. One day she was interested in ruthlessness. The next, she wanted to be an object of adoration. She put her faith in the transformative power of new boots, liquid eyeliner, and once—terrifyingly—a beret, as if an identity could seep in from the outside, like nicotine from a patch.

  By the time she encountered Simon Reed at the Forrester holiday party, she had been in New York for two years and still a true self had not begun to solidify. She was a ship without ballast, tilting wildly in the waves. This very quality of unfixedness had probably attracted him to her in the first place. He was one of those men helplessly drawn to these young, shifting forms—for she was hardly the only twenty-six-year-old woman to find herself grasping in the dark for an identity.

  He must have known that sleeping with a young assistant who worked for him had the potential to destroy both his career and his family. Why did he do it? Florence didn’t flatter herself with illusions of her own irresistibility. She suspected, instead, that he had a pathological addiction, not necessarily to sex, but to the sight of his own reflection—powerful, confident, desired—in an insecure young woman’s eyes. Plus, a nobody is less likely to kick up a fuss.

  And he was right. She hadn’t.

  7.

  The Forrester office reopened on January second. A few days after that Agatha sent Florence to deliver a bag of books she’d recently edited to an author she was trying to woo. The writer lived up on Eighty-Seventh Street, all the way east. It was an unseasonably warm day for January, and Florence was happy for an excuse to get out of the office.

  After she’d dropped off the books, she took her time heading back to work. She turned south and walked the perimeter of a pretty park running along the East River.

  She stopped at Eighty-Fourth Street, where a crowd of people were gathered outside a large mansion on the opposite side of the street. They were all women, most of them dark-skinned. One wore a gray maid’s uniform under her parka, like a character in a play. The handful of white women among them chatted with one another or checked their phones.

  The mansion’s double doors opened and a stream of girls in red plaid skirts poured out like a nosebleed. Florence read the gold plaque mounted above the door: The Harwick School. Simon’s daughters went here—she’d read it in a Vanity Fair profile of his wife. She looked back at the crowd of waiting mothers with more interest, but Ingrid wasn’t among them. Florence stayed to watch, perching on a bench across the street.

  Most of the children were herded into waiting buses; not the yellow school buses Florence had ridden in Florida, but the kind with velveteen upholstery and a bathroom in the back. According to a heavyset teacher with a whistle around her neck, they weren’t even buses; they were coaches. “Coach One leaves in five minutes, girls!” she bellowed. “Let’s go, let’s go!”

  Only after the coaches had pulled away, the nannies and mothers had walked off with their charges, and the teachers had been reabsorbed into the school did Florence stand up to begin her trek to the subway.

  * * *

  Back at the office, Florence was picking at her soggy, overdressed salad when Agatha called out, “Florence!”

  Florence scooted to the door of Agatha’s office. “Yes?”

  “Are you sure this is extra chickpeas?” Agatha gestured skeptically with her fork to the bowl Florence had just picked up from the Sweetgreen down the block.

  “Um, yep.” She had, in fact, forgotten to ask for extra chickpeas.

  “Clara is not happy about this,” Agatha said. “Clara needs her chickpeas. Clara’s going to force her mommy to mainline hummus when she gets home.”

  Florence nodded and smiled. Then, when Agatha seemed to be waiting for more, she asked, “Sorry, who’s Clara?”

  “Did I forget to tell you? Josh and I finally settled on a name.”

  “Clara? That’s pretty.”

  Agatha smiled.

  “I think that was Hitler’s mother’s name,” Florence added.

  Agatha froze, a piece of lettuce quivering on her plastic fork. “What?”

  Florence tried to backtrack. “Oh, well, actually I think she spelled it with a K. Being Austrian and all…”

  Agatha kept staring at her in silent perplexity.

  “Or are you spelling it with a K? Because I like that too.”

  Agatha shook her head slowly. “No…a C.”
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  Florence was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Yeah, pregnancy cravings are so weird. My mother said she couldn’t get enough Filet-O-Fish when she was pregnant with me.”

  Agatha started nodding slowly. “Yes.” This was a topic she could warm to. “Yes, well they say that eating fish makes your child smarter, especially salmon, as long as you watch your mercury levels. That’s obviously why she was craving it. Mother Nature knows what she’s doing.”

  “Or she’s shilling for McDonald’s,” said Florence with a laugh.

  “McDonald’s?”

  “Filet-O-Fish? From McDonald’s?”

  “Oh, I thought you were just talking about fillets of fish. I’ve never actually been to McDonald’s.”

  “Come on,” said Florence. “Yes you have.”

  Agatha shook her head guilelessly.

  “You have to have been to McDonald’s. Everyone’s been to McDonald’s.”

  “Not me. Do you know how many hormones are in that meat?”

  Florence would have bet that every single person in America had eaten at McDonald’s. How could Agatha so easily snub something millions of people did every day without ever having tried it, and at the same time refuse to get an epidural because a handful of African boys were flogging themselves with sticks?

  Before the holiday party, it hadn’t occurred to Florence that she might be in a position to judge Agatha. Florence was younger, less experienced, she made less money, she wasn’t married, she had no children. She lacked nearly everything Agatha valued. But the dismissive way Simon had said her name at the bar—Agatha Hale—had pulled back a curtain and revealed something ridiculous about her. This new perspective was disorienting. If Florence didn’t look up to Agatha, what was she doing? Why was she working here? Was this really helping her to become a writer?

  “Unhappy the land in need of heroes,” Amanda had said. But unhappy, too, was a land whose only hero was Agatha Hale.

  * * *

  Agatha left at five that afternoon, but Florence stayed on to finish a report on a manuscript she’d been given a few days earlier. At seven thirty, as she was emailing off her notes, her desk phone rang. It was Simon, and she could tell he’d been drinking from his ineffectively muffled ebullience.

  “Florence! You’re there! What are you doing working so late?”

  “Um, working?”

  “But that’s absurd. You shouldn’t be slogging away at this hour. Come meet me. Clearly I need to talk some sense into you.”

  “Meet you now?”

  “Meet me five minutes ago. Meet me yesterday. Come as fast as those gorgeous legs will carry you.”

  Florence pinched her lips to squelch a smile. “I thought you respected me too much to put me in this position.”

  “That doesn’t sound like me. No, in fact, I haven’t the least bit of respect for you. I hold you in utter, total contempt. You and Idi Amin—that’s my list. Let me show you just how little respect I have for you.”

  “Are you serious? Right now?”

  “I’m dead serious. I’ll meet you at the Bowery Hotel in thirty minutes. I’ll reserve the room under the name Maud Dixon, how about that? Easy to remember.”

  Florence hung up and brought her hand to her face. It felt hot. She gathered her coat and her bag and hurried out of the office, half hoping someone would ask her whether she had any plans tonight. If she’d told Lucy about her first encounter with Simon, she would have relished apprising her of the second, but she’d kept it to herself, knowing the judgment and dismay Lucy would have tried—and failed—to hide from her expression.

  Florence splurged for a taxi and beat Simon to the hotel. As promised, there was a reservation under the name Dixon. In the room, she sat on the chair by the window and tried to look casual. Should she undress? No, that was too ridiculous. She crossed and uncrossed her legs. She wished she’d worn nicer underwear.

  An hour later, he still hadn’t arrived.

  She pulled out the notebook she always carried in her bag and began writing a short story about a young woman waiting for her lover. She tore out the page and tossed it in the trash. At ten, she got into bed. She set the alarm on her phone for six. She’d have to take the train home to change before going back into the office.

  Several hours later the room phone woke her.

  “Florence, I’m so sorry,” Simon whispered on the other end.

  “What happened?” she asked, whispering back for no good reason.

  “My wife’s father had a heart attack. I didn’t have your cell number.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Who, Bill? No. He’s dead.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you come now?”

  “No, I have to stay here. Listen, this was madness. Total madness. I’m so sorry. I should never have pulled you into this.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not. But thank you for saying so.”

  They hung up, and Florence immediately felt like a fool. Why had she asked if he could come over now? She’d sounded so needy. Like her mother.

  She lay back and stared at the ceiling. She prodded herself to feel some pity for Ingrid, but it was hard to muster sympathy for someone who’d lost something that she herself had never had. There’s a crucial difference between a loss and a lack. Florence, after all, had never gotten any sympathy for growing up without a father. On the contrary, she thought she’d seemed tainted somehow, like she didn’t deserve one.

  All Florence knew about her father was his first name, which she’d pried out of her mother one Thanksgiving after she’d drunk three-quarters of a bottle of Shiraz. She had hoped it would be something stately, like Jonathan or Robert. But no. It was Derek, which was about as stately as a vinyl-sided condominium. What was that k even doing there, all garish and naked without a c in front of it? Bill was a much better name for a father.

  She sat up and fumbled for the remote. There was no way she was getting back to sleep now. Scrolling through movies, she came across Harbinger, a small indie film from a few years ago that Ingrid had starred in. She charged it to the room and pressed Play. When Ingrid appeared, Florence paused the screen on a close-up shot of her face, mouth spread wide in a beatific smile.

  Florence regarded the woman on the screen in front of her. No, what she felt for Ingrid was not pity. It was something very, very far from pity.

  * * *

  She didn’t bother to go home to change the next morning. She went to work in the same clothes she’d worn the day before. She doubted anyone would notice.

  On the subway, she checked Ingrid’s Instagram account. The most recent photo showed a sunlit vase of daffodils. The caption said, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Florence thought Bill probably hadn’t raged against death all that hard—a heart attack sounded sudden—but she appreciated the sentiment. The post already had over four hundred comments and two thousand likes. She tentatively liked it, then panicked and unliked it.

  An idea occurred to her. Perhaps Ingrid would pick up the children from school herself that day. Were they too emotionally fragile for the bus? For the coach?

  When Agatha got into work, Florence told her she had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon.

  Agatha nodded distractedly. “No problem.”

  Florence was up at the Harwick School by ten of three. She sat on the same bench across the street where she’d sat the day before and read The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark. When the school doors opened, she took out her phone and brought up an image of Simon’s daughters that she’d found online. It had been taken at a fundraiser for shelter dogs the previous summer on the North Fork. In it, the younger girl, Tabitha, cradled a scrawny and frightened looking Chihuahua, while Chloe, the older one, flashed a peace sign. Behind them, Simon and Ingrid smiled serenely with their arms around each other. Florence zoomed in on each face one at a time.

  Florence looked up to scan the crowd of students pooling outside. A youn
g teacher was trying to usher them into the waiting buses, but her soft-spoken exhortations had no effect on the wild mob. Florence spotted Chloe in a huddle of girls crowded around an iPhone. She guessed they were in seventh or eighth grade. Chloe gesticulated grandly, like a stage actress, but she was chubbier than you’d guess Ingrid’s daughter would be. Florence used the camera on her phone to zoom in for a closer look, and then, because she had it in her hand, she took a picture. She captured Chloe mid-laugh, her mouth thrown open grotesquely. Florence thought it slightly unseemly for her to be so giddy after her grandfather had just died. She wondered what Ingrid would say if she saw her.

  But Ingrid did not show up. The girls scrambled onto Coach One, and Florence waited to watch it drive away.

  8.

  The rest of January unfurled in a series of mild, sunny days, as if atoning for the bitterness of December’s chill. Florence was grateful for the reprieve—took it as an endorsement, for she was now spending one or two afternoons a week on the stone bench across from the Harwick School. If pressed, she wouldn’t have been able to articulate a reason for these trips uptown; all she knew was that something kept drawing her back. On Fridays, when dismissal was at one thirty, she went up during her lunch break, even though it took close to an hour to get there. Other days, she invented appointments to explain her absences from work.

  Sitting there, she almost felt like she was a part of that life. A life that was, simply put, better than hers in every possible way. She noted the two-hundred-dollar ballet flats on feet that hadn’t stopped growing. The way the teachers lingered in the crowd, joking with the students. Florence had never joked around with her teachers. She had never even seen her teachers joke around with one another. Her seventh-grade teacher had gotten spit on, right in her eye. She didn’t even yell at the kid. She just walked out of the room and didn’t come back for the rest of the period.