Who is Maud Dixon? Read online

  Helen said nothing.

  “She also voted for Trump,” Florence added with an uneasy laugh. “In case that wasn’t clear.”

  “And you didn’t, I take it?”

  “Me? God, no. Are you serious?”

  Helen shrugged. “How would I know?”

  “I’m not a sociopath.”

  “Not everyone who voted for Trump is a sociopath.”

  Florence had just spent two years surrounded by people who spent a lot of energy arguing precisely the opposite point.

  “What liberals don’t seem to understand,” Helen went on, “is that rational, intelligent people are capable of separating his personal shortcomings from his policies. I mean, nobody’s voting for him to be their best friend.”

  “So you…” Florence could hardly believe she was asking the question. Novelists don’t vote for Trump! “So you…you voted for him?” she asked as mildly as she could.

  “Lord, no. I never vote.”

  “Oh.”

  After a few more minutes Helen took a left onto a long driveway marked PRIVATE. It meandered through thick woods for nearly a quarter of a mile before depositing them outside a small stone house with green shutters. On its roof, a spindly copper weathervane jerked in the wind. It had nothing in common with the low, ugly houses they’d passed on the drive.

  “It was built in 1848,” Helen said, following Florence’s gaze. “I bought it two years ago, after the royalties from Mississippi Foxtrot started to come in.”

  The rain was in a frenzy now, battering the rosebushes lining the front porch. Helen told Florence to leave her bag in the trunk, and they both dashed for the door.

  On the covered porch, Florence dried her face on her sleeve while Helen jammed a key into the old lock. The door swung open with a creak and Florence found herself awash in brightness. The walls, the ceiling, the floors—the entire interior of the house as far as she could see—had been painted a rich, milky white.

  They were in a small foyer. An old wooden table was pushed up against one wall and scattered with keys and mail. Two pairs of muddy boots sat underneath. Through a door on the left, Florence spotted a dining room. Helen led her the other way, into the living room, where she threw her purse down on a large linen-covered sofa. A full ashtray balanced nervously on its arm. In front of it sat a square ottoman piled with books and a brick fireplace where embers smoked desultorily. Helen tossed another log in, and a cloud of ash and sparks shot up in protest.

  “Well, here it is,” she said.

  Florence’s mother liked to imagine a life of diamonds and gilt for her daughter. But this, this, was the life Florence wanted. A blue-and-white teacup stuffed with clementine peels. A tangle of white ranunculus in a ceramic pitcher on the windowsill. Amanda had once put a vase of those same flowers on her desk at work. The whole place looked like a painting by Vermeer. And it was cold. Chilly gusts rattled the windows in their frames. Someone had told Florence once that glass was actually a liquid that settled slowly, over eons; that was why in old houses the windows were always thicker at the bottom than at the top. Was that true? Florence didn’t care. In the same way she couldn’t understand why people were so determined to expose Maud Dixon’s identity, she couldn’t understand why they needed to pin things down, turn poetry into fact. Wasn’t poetry better? Why would you turn something beautiful into something quotidian?

  Helen led Florence on a tour around the rest of the main floor: a dining room with a long wooden table obscured by books and a laptop, a small guest room with two twin beds covered in faded quilts, and a kitchen with a massive old farmhouse sink. Helen picked up the pot from a battered Mr. Coffee on the counter and poured out two mugs.

  “Upstairs is just my bedroom and office and a couple of spare rooms,” she said, gesturing above her head. She set one of the cups of coffee down on the counter in front of Florence without offering milk or sugar. “You’ll be staying in the carriage house out back. It’s nothing fancy but I hope it will suit.”

  Florence said she was sure it would. She took a sip and watched the rain drip down the windows. All she could see beyond them was a gray-green field with some blurred brown smudges.

  When the rain subsided, Florence went to collect her bag from the trunk of the car and met Helen behind the main house. They followed a path of gray slate slabs embedded in moss.

  “The person who lived here before me was an arborist,” Helen said. “He crossbred a lot of these trees. So I have some odd specimens out here—half one thing, half another.”

  Florence looked at one of the trees that Helen was gesturing toward. It didn’t look like a mixed breed but rather like two trees grafted violently together.

  Helen continued the tour. “Over there is a pretty modest vegetable garden, which I do my best not to destroy, and behind those pines is my deep, dark secret”—she turned to Florence with a mock grimace—“the compost pile. And before you say anything, yes, I realize I’ve become the full-on cliché of the Hudson Valley hippie.”

  Florence smiled, as she knew she was supposed to.

  They reached the carriage house, which lay about a hundred yards from the main structure. Behind it, a dark line of trees marked the beginning of the woods. The front door stuck when Helen tried to open it but she popped it loose with a swift kick to the bottom corner. “I’ll do something about that,” she said. And then a moment later: “Actually, I probably won’t, but there are worse things in life than a sticky door, right?”

  Florence nodded and followed Helen inside to a bright, open space with a sitting area and a small kitchenette tucked away in one corner. A pink rotary phone was mounted on the wall next to the fridge. A peek into the bathroom revealed a deep, old-fashioned tub. Wooden steps, closer to ladder than stairway, led up to a lofted bedroom. She loved it. She’d never had her own space before—her own building—and this one felt right in a way no place she’d lived before ever had.

  Helen left her to get settled and told her to come over for a drink before dinner around seven. Florence immediately started unpacking. She had always been orderly. She couldn’t go to sleep unless her shoes were lined up properly in the closet.

  It took only twenty minutes to put away all of her belongings and stow the duffel bag under the bed. She sat on the couch and opened up the brand-new notebook she’d bought that morning at Grand Central. It was for the novel she planned to write while she lived up here. She needed a bigger canvas than short stories, she’d decided. She stared at the blank page for a few minutes. She wrote the date and “Cairo, NY” at the top. After a few more minutes, she shut the notebook with an exasperated sigh.

  Oh well, she’d have more to say soon. Having met Helen Wilcox, she doubted that life would be dull.

  She opened a book instead—she’d been slogging her way through Proust for a month, pretending to enjoy it more than she actually did—but soon she shut that too. She felt restless and at loose ends. She thought about calling Lucy, but she hadn’t returned any of Lucy’s messages since she’d been fired. Florence hadn’t wanted her sympathy; she preferred the balance of power to stay as it had been, firmly weighted in her own favor. Besides, she wouldn’t even have been able to brag about her new job.

  If she’d been back in the city, she might have gone for a walk or settled for chatting with Brianna and Sarah in the living room. Now she realized how truly isolated she was. She closed her eyes and listened. There was only silence. She was utterly alone.

  14.

  At five to seven, Florence knocked tentatively on the front door of the main house. Hearing no response, she opened it and went in. Music was playing from the kitchen, so she followed the sound.

  Helen was wearing an apron over her clothes, drinking a glass of wine, smoking a cigarette, chopping tomatoes, and stopping every now and then to conduct the orchestra with her knife.

  “Hi,” said Florence.

  Helen turned around and sang “La tua sorte è già compitaaaaaaa” in a husky alto, drawing out the
last syllable. She finished with a swig of wine. “Do you like opera?”

  “Um, I’m not sure.” Pretty much the only time Florence listened to classical music was during car commercials.

  “Oh, it’s divine. Divine! I saw Il Trovatore at the Met last year. I’ll take you the next time I go. Here, have some wine.”

  “Thank you.” Florence took the proffered glass and tried to hide her delight at the thought of attending an opera with Maud Dixon. “Can I help with dinner?”

  “No, I’m a total control freak in the kitchen.” She held up a small cherry tomato between her thumb and index finger. “Do you know what they call these in France? Pigeon hearts. Isn’t that fabulous? Isn’t that just what they are? You’ll never be able to look at a pigeon again without thinking of his little tomato-shaped heart beating away inside his puffed-up chest.”

  “My mother sometimes calls people pigeon-hearted,” said Florence. “People she thinks are weak.”

  “Pigeon-hearted,” Helen repeated, gesturing at her with the tip of the knife. “That’s good. I may have to steal that. Remind me, are you a Southerner? All the best sayings come from the South.”

  “Florida. We’re neither here nor there.”

  “That’s alright. Here and there are overrated.”

  “I suppose.”

  Helen stopped chopping to say, “It’s true. There’s real power in being an outsider. You see things more clearly.” Something in the oven snapped loudly enough to make Florence jump. “Chicken. You’re not a vegetarian, are you?” Florence shook her head. “Thank the lord,” Helen pronounced and resumed her quick thrusts of the knife.

  “So you’re settling in all right?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Good. We’ll get started on work tomorrow.”

  “How is the new book coming?”

  A shadow crossed Helen’s face. “It’s coming,” she said vaguely.

  “Is it a sequel to Mississippi Foxtrot?”

  “No. Maud and Ruby’s story is officially finis.” She made a slicing motion at her neck.

  “Oh.” Florence felt her excitement deflate a little. Like most fans of Mississippi Foxtrot, she wanted to know what happened next. “People are going to be disappointed.”

  “Yes, my agent reminds me of that daily. Apparently I owe my readers an ending.” Helen rolled her eyes.

  “You don’t agree?”

  Helen laughed. “Owe them! Of course not. I don’t owe anyone squat. She just wants me to write a sequel because it would make more money.”

  She pulled the chicken out of the oven and carved it expertly, placing a breast and a leg on each plate. These she set on the kitchen table with the bottle of wine and a bowl of salad. She gestured at Florence to sit.

  Florence asked when she’d get to read the new work.

  “Soon. Maybe tomorrow. If you can manage to decipher my godawful Mississippi-public-school chicken scratch.” She wrote her first drafts longhand on yellow legal pads, she said. It would be one of Florence’s jobs to type them up.

  “I’m about a quarter of the way into my first draft. As soon as I started writing I realized that it was going to require a lot more research than the first one. That’s where you’ll come in. It takes place in Morocco. Have you been?”

  Florence shook her head.

  “There are a few authors who’ve written about it very well. Tahar Ben Jelloun and Paul Bowles come to mind.”

  “I’m sorry, I haven’t read them. I can, though.”

  “No need to apologize. I’ll give you a list of books that would be helpful for you to read. Let’s start with nonfiction, actually. Forget Ben Jelloun and Bowles—they may be more of a distraction than anything else.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “I’m still working out a lot of the details. But it follows an American woman who drops everything and moves to Morocco to work for an old childhood friend. From there, of course, disaster ensues.” Helen smiled.

  Florence, more relaxed from the wine, saw her opening. “I wanted to tell you that I love the way you write about female relationships.” That had been the line she’d been rehearsing in the car from the train station. Immediately after she said it, she worried that it sounded just as trite as she’d feared it would then.

  “Well, it’s only because men don’t interest me very much,” Helen laughed.

  A weighted silence fell on them.

  “I don’t mean that I’m a lesbian,” Helen clarified. “I sleep with men. Occasionally. But I don’t care to have relationships with them. I’ve never found one…fascinating in the way I find women fascinating. Men are blunt objects. There’s no nuance there.

  “I was dating a man once,” she went on, “and we went away for the weekend. At the hotel, I realized he didn’t have a clue how to tip—not the bellman, not the housekeeper, not the concierge. He kept asking me how much to give, when should he give it, who should he give it to. I found it so off-putting. I realized then that I could never be with a man who didn’t know how to tip. But then, later, I realized I couldn’t be with a man who tipped easily and smoothly either. What smugness. What satisfaction. So who does that leave?”

  “Maybe there’s some middle category of tipper,” offered Florence.

  “No. There’s no middle category of anything.”

  Florence could think of countless middle categories—the whole world felt like a middle category to her—but she left it.

  “Middle categories are for middling people,” said Helen, as if she could read Florence’s mind.

  Soon only the greasy bones and ligaments remained on their plates. But they stayed at the table drinking the last of the wine. Their conversation had lost some of its early stiltedness. Outside, crickets screeched in a pulsing drone.

  “Doesn’t it bother you that no one knows it’s you?” Florence asked when she could no longer resist. “That you wrote Mississippi Foxtrot?”

  “Bene vixit, bene qui latuit.”

  Florence nodded then said, “Sorry, what?”

  “It’s Latin, from Ovid. It means, ‘He lives well who is well hidden.’”

  “Oh.”

  Helen laughed at Florence’s confusion. “Don’t mind me; I’m being needlessly cryptic. The short answer is no, I don’t mind that nobody knows I wrote Mississippi Foxtrot.”

  “Why did you do it, though? What’s the point of all the secrecy?”

  Helen lit a cigarette and turned her gaze toward the window. “Does it sound stupid? Not to me. But I was young. I wrote Foxtrot when I was in my mid-twenties. Your age, I guess.”

  Florence couldn’t help interrupting: “So, wait. You’re only…thirty-three? Thirty-four?”

  Helen laughed. “So much for social niceties. I’m thirty-two.”

  Florence was surprised; Helen seemed older to her. Though now that she thought about it, there was a lot in Mississippi Foxtrot that had reminded her of her own adolescence. Some of Maud and Ruby’s classmates had had cell phones; Bush had been president. This realization brought with it a sinking sense of her own inadequacy; she wasn’t even close to having a story to tell, much less a best-seller. Maybe that’s why Helen seemed older; she’d accomplished so much more.

  “Anyway,” Helen went on, oblivious to Florence’s distress, “I was living in Jackson then, working as a proofreader for a textbook company. I wrote it almost entirely during my lunch breaks. The crazy thing is, all I wanted was to move to New York and become a famous writer…just not for that book. That book I had to write. I had to get it out of me so I could move on.” She turned back to Florence. “Do you know how you get rid of a tapeworm?”

  Florence shook her head.

  “You go into a dark room, pitch black, and you hold a cup of warm milk in front of your face. Then the worm pokes its head out of your nose, and you have to grab it quick as you can and just start pulling. That’s what the process of writing Mississippi Foxtrot was like for me: violent, painful, grotesque. But, ultimately, healing.


  “I didn’t want to arrive in New York associated with that book. I wanted a clean slate. I wanted to go somewhere where no one knew anything about Hindsville, Mississippi.”

  Florence noted the name of the town.

  “I thought I could just write that one book under a pseudonym and then move to New York and make my brilliant debut as Helen Wilcox. I had grand plans to write this massive, multigenerational novel about a family crossing the American West in the early nineteenth century. But no matter how many ways I tried to start it, I always got stuck. I couldn’t escape my own story.”

  Helen pushed out her chair roughly and went to a cabinet near the fridge. She pulled out a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. She poured them sloppily, splashing a bit on the counter, and handed one to Florence.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “I never foresaw the success of Mississippi Foxtrot. I couldn’t imagine one person being interested in that dusty little corner of the country, much less millions. I sent it out to agents mainly to get it out of my sight, so I could finally be rid of it. When I got a call back from Greta Frost, you could have knocked me over with a feather.

  “Later, after it really started to sell, Greta got me a ridiculous advance for a second book, on the basis of absolutely nothing: a one-page plot summary that I can barely remember. That was over a year ago now. And of course they’re paying for the Maud Dixon name. That’s who the audience belongs to. It would ruin everything if I came forward and admitted who I was. People think they want the truth but they’re always disappointed. It is invariably less interesting than the mystery. Believe me, I’ve tried to convince Greta to let me do it under my own name, but she’s right; it just doesn’t make sense. I’m stuck with Maud Dixon for the rest of my life.”