Scott Spencer Read online

  “Ho there,” Kate says, completing what has become her signature greeting. Kate thinks, It’s bad enough to copy someone else. What I’m doing is worse—I’m copying myself.

  The book she has been promoting all over the country—Prays Well with Others—began as a series of essays for Wish, the magazine with which she had forged a relationship during the O. J. Simpson trial. When the trial was over, her self-preservation instinct helped her stop drinking, and it also gave her a new subject—her pilgrim’s progress toward a sober, God-loving life. Eventually there were enough essays to be gathered into a volume, and Prays Well with Others was published. Its success was not a total surprise—Kate had developed a following while writing the pieces for Wish. But the size and duration of the success were beyond anyone’s expectations, and now Kate is no longer worried about money. She is sober. She is a good mother. She has learned how to pray without feeling like a faker or a mental case. There is a man in her life who adores her and whom she can love with a wholeheartedness she once thought impossible, a love that she once thought was as mythical as a unicorn. All this happiness! She sometimes feels unstable and afraid, as if standing in front of the chute to a slot machine that sends out a nonstop torrent of gold.

  A microphone has been clipped to the nubby knit of Kate’s sweater; the electronic transmitter nestles in the deep front pocket on her floor-length skirt. The toes of her boots flick in and out from beneath her hem like lizard tongues as she paces the pulpit between lectern and altar. Kate dresses for public appearances with considerable modesty, despite her handsomeness, as if it were her wish to have her slender build, dancer’s grace, and the plain pioneer beauty of her face go somehow unnoticed. But she is unmistakably beautiful, and at no time more than now, radiantly in love.

  It is chilly in the church; hot water hammers hollowly in the radiators, but there hasn’t been enough time to warm the place for this impromptu gathering. Kate, still unnerved by the enthusiasm of her crowds, takes a deep, steadying breath. There are mainly women here, dressed for the November cold in knit caps, gloves, and overcoats. The scent of all that wet wool gives the place the smell of a stable full of sheep in for the night. Thunder groans from behind the dark blue stained glass, and a flash of lightning illuminates its cobalt universe. To her left is a statue of Saint George armed with an ax and a sword, his face as petulant and superior as an old baby doll’s.

  “Well thank you all for coming out on such a cruddy night,” Kate says. “I’m…well, to be honest with you, I’m overwhelmed.” This admission of vulnerability elicits applause from the crowd, and Kate colors, hoping that no one will think she is somehow fishing for an extra round of applause, and wondering, because that is her nature, if she might have in fact been doing just that.

  A woman’s voice, vigorous and clear, calls up from a side pew. “How’s Ruby doing?”

  Kate brings her hands prayerfully together, in a burlesque of piety that manages to be slightly pious nevertheless. “She’s happy, she’s beautiful, and guess what—she’s reading!” This piece of good news brings forth cheers and applause. “Yes, God bless J. K. Rowling, the only author I’m not jealous of. We were going to bring Ruby down with us tonight, but she has her babysitter bewitched and she has just started in on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. She can read to herself but she likes to have someone in a chair nearby watching her as she reads.” Kate shakes her head. “I’ve tried to talk her out of this but she insists on it. I tell her, Honey I can’t just sit there while you read. And then she tells me, Mom, you used to sit in that chair for a real long time, not doing anything but sitting. Yes, my darling, I tell her, but it was easy then because Mommy was dead drunk.”

  There is a strained, uneasy quality to the laughter, which is oddly comforting to Kate. She has learned that people like to hear about her kind of Christianity, one that includes a fair amount of swearing and swagger, left-of-center politics, and all the sex your average heathen would enjoy. They like to hear you can be devout and still be angry, irreverent, a little selfish, even jealous and competitive. Her envy of a few other writers working the spiritual circuit creates surefire laugh lines. But what audiences don’t always like to hear about is lax, careless mothering, and they certainly don’t like to hear about drunken mothering, even if it is safely sequestered in the past and is part of a recovery narrative. It’s just as well to Kate; universal acceptance seems like a sign of mediocrity; causing a little trouble and offending a few people here and there makes her feel more like herself.

  “Ah, those were the days,” she says. “I think Ruby misses some things about my drinking days. For instance, I used to have no idea they gave homework in her school, even in first grade.” Kate scratches her head, looks confused, out of it. “So let me get this clear,” she says in a tipsy slur, “they keep you in school all day and then send you home with more work to do at night? Oh honey-bunny, thass terrible, lemme make you a cocktail.”

  “Oh Kate? Kate darling?” A woman rises from the aisle seat of the front pew. She is not much taller than five feet and comfortably round. Her short brown hair is graying but her face is youthful, unlined, and cheerful; she looks like someone who has devoted her life to poetry or music or to the welfare of others, and faces age now with a deep serenity. She wears dark glasses and holds a cane, but despite her blindness there is an aura of authority about her. “I want to welcome you here, Kate, and just to let you know how happy all of us are to have you with us tonight.” As she speaks, the woman gestures with her white aluminum cane, waving it in an arc above her to indicate the entire audience. “And to commemorate this wonderful occasion,” the blind woman says, in her resonant alto, “I want to tell you my poem.”

  Kate makes a bow in the woman’s direction, and then, realizing her error, says, “How nice,” but her own voice is a bit faltering because she has been taken by surprise.

  The woman taps out a steady beat with her cane against the church’s wooden floor, and sways dreamily from side to side as she recites:

  Sing through me of the woman, Muse, the woman of wisdom and wit

  Who comes home to us as from a great journey

  Wherein she slew these many monsters

  The beast of doubt and the fiend of disbelief

  The sirens of wine and wantonness

  The vampires of loneliness and the werewolves of fear

  Her triumphal return is our triumph, too

  The cheers for her are hosannas for us

  Sing through me, sacred Muse, the story of Kate Ellis

  We are but vines needing strong support, and she is our trellis

  The woman ends with a salute in Kate’s direction, and as the audience cheers lustily for her she soaks it up with unabashed delight, waving her cane and her free hand over her head. She blows a huge kiss in Kate’s direction and it is not until the applause begins to die down that she takes her seat again.

  “Wow,” Kate says. “I am completely overwhelmed. Thank you. Thank you so much. May I ask you—what’s your name?”

  The woman doesn’t seem to have heard the question. The fourteen-year-old boy sitting next to her—her son?—nudges her, whispers something to her. She makes a deep nod of understanding and calls out: “Julie, Julie Blackburn McCall.”

  “Thank you, Julie Blackburn McCall,” Kate says, “and let me tell you that Ellis-trellis rhyme is going to stay with me a long while.” Kate picks up Prays Well with Others, opens it to the bookmarked page. “Okay, people, I’m going to read about six pages, which will take somewhere between fourteen and fifteen minutes. I don’t know about you, but I can’t stand readings that go on for more than fifteen minutes. Then I can take questions, or comments, and I can ask you guys questions, and we’ll just hang out, but when the clock strikes nine we have to wrap it up. Is that all right?” She smoothes the page down and takes a nervous drink from the bottle of water someone has left for her on the lectern.

  The past few months of speaking to audiences have given Kate a
confidence in her instincts that allows her to suddenly veer from prepared text into improvisation. “I’m obviously here to read from my book, and sign copies, and sell books. That goes without saying. But I just want to tell you…” She stops, breathes deeply; she has surprised herself with how emotional it makes her feel to say what she is about to say. “What I am, or what I want to be, is a messenger of hope. Hope, hope,” and she says the words as if she were letting balloons slip from her hands and float up into the air. “Hope, what Emily Dickinson called the thing with feathers. I am here with a message of hope because I am here to tell you the most unexpected, astonishing things can happen in a life. I am here because whoever tells you that we are stuck in the mud of ourselves is a liar.” She lays her hand over her breasts. “Forty years old, one novel that two people read, and a mini-career calling for O. J. Simpson’s head on a pike—and now this.” She holds up her book. “Forty years old and drunk on my ass, and now sober, one beautiful, way cool day at a time. Forty years old and then one day against all odds and expectations so into Jesus that most of my old friends think I’m ready for the funny farm, especially my liberal-progressive friends who fear that I’ve gone all pious and Pat Robertson on them. Or is it Pat Boone? Forty years, all of them spent as an emotional moderate—even at my own marriage ceremony, I insisted on saying I’ll try rather than I do—and after I got sober, after I realized I was no longer in charge, after I finished my book, the next miracle arrived, which I do believe the love of Jesus prepared me for, which is the love of—and for!—a wonderful man. So that’s my message of hope. If I can have these things, everyone else can, too. Remember this. Our lives make sense. There is a story, a story of creation and sacrifice and love—and we are all a part of that story.” She pauses, clears her throat, tears up. This embarrasses her, but what can she do? She waves her hand in front of her eyes, drying them and mocking herself. “Anyhow, I better get to it, because truth be told my boyfriend doesn’t like to stay up late.” She looks as if she is about to begin reading, but she stops herself. “Here’s another thing about my boyfriend,” she says. “He’s like the most old-fashioned man in the world—and when I say old-fashioned I don’t mean Bob Dole or, I don’t know, Bobby Short. I mean Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett. He shaves with a straight razor. He doesn’t wait for the hot water to come on before he steps into the shower. He makes things with his hands. His beautiful hands. He can cook, he can sew. He can fix anything, and if he needs a tool he doesn’t have he actually makes the tool. One other thing. He pays cash and he carries it in his front pocket. Now I see a guy taking his little credit card out of his wallet I find it…I don’t know. It seems very girly. And writing a check? Forget it. You may as well be twirling a parasol.”

  In the tenth row, Paul Phillips, the man who came in with Kate, lowers his head and jams his hands into the pockets of his brown leather jacket. The few times Paul has observed Kate in her public life and witnessed the effect she has on people have been entertaining experiences. He is not unfamiliar with successful people, but he has never had a relationship with a woman of large and worldly achievement, and the pleasure it brings him to bask in the reflected glow of her success has been a surprise to Paul, with an unexpectedly erotic component. There is something grand about going home with a woman everybody loves. Heretofore his romantic life has mainly involved women who worked with their hands—potters, gardeners, weavers, carpenters like himself, and one chiropractor—or else winsome idlers living on the dregs of family fortunes. Despite the pleasure Kate’s fame brings him, he is not prepared to become a part of her public life, and as those seated near him turn to look at him he feels not only embarrassment but a degree of irritation. The woman next to him, who, judging by her notebook and her tote bag, works for CBS, looks at him with professional curiosity. She is half-Asian and reminds Paul strongly of a woman he once worked for. A woman wearing a serape in a pew across the aisle gives Paul the thumbs-up sign and an elderly couple with cottony hair and merry blue eyes looks at him fondly.

  There’s nothing to be done about it, but a couple of hours later, in the hotel room Kate’s publisher has secured for them, saving them the two-hour drive back upstate, Paul says to Kate, “When you talked about your boyfriend all those people were staring at me.”

  “No way,” she says. She is in bed, trying to corral her ego and, for the most part, succeeding after the evening of adoration. “I was careful not to look in your direction.”

  “They knew it was me anyhow,” Paul says. “There weren’t that many men there.”

  He doesn’t want to sound annoyed, especially not after a big night for her, and surely not in bed. A room service cart presents its own reasons for him to be of good cheer: a spray of orchids, a shrimp cocktail, a bowl of cut fruit. Even though this particular place is not really to Paul’s taste, he has spent enough nights sleeping in unheated cabins, in tents, or on bed frames without mattresses to be forever mindful of creature comforts others might take for granted. But if you are in bed and you lean your head back, you ought to feel either the wall or wood, but Paul’s head rests against the bed’s upholstered headboard and though the softness is vaguely pleasant, upholstered headboards are suburban elegance, a cut or two above the padded toilet seat. Simplicity, durability, and reality are what please Paul, and all of these can be expressed by not hiding the materials out of which objects are made.

  Most places in the city are ten degrees too warm for him, including this room, the closeness of which brings up bad memories. Now, while Kate is under the covers in her pale orange silk pajamas, and wearing socks to keep her feet warm, Paul is on top of the comforter, in nothing but his boxers.

  “Look at you,” Kate says, “stretched out like that.” She runs her hand over his chest, down to his belly. “I hit the trifecta. Sobriety, faith, and now you.” Her finger hooks under the elastic waist. “Off?”

  Paul lifts his hips, takes off his shorts. His penis flops over to the left, his pubic hair glistens darkly. His chest is as smooth as a boy’s, except for the kinky fringes around his nipples. Kate has a passing fancy to lick him. Instead, she reaches for a piece of mango and eats it. She often has quick, errant bursts of desire, some of them a bit outré, but marvelously so. Sometimes she feels a kind of erotic Tourette’s and wants to say things she has never said to a lover, like It’s okay to be rough, if you want to, why don’t you slap me on the ass and pull my hair. She has yet to surrender to the temptation. What generally restrains her is not the imagination of the act itself but the shadow it would surely cast over everything that followed. How do you talk to someone after you have asked them if they would like to do some of the things that occur to her? The conversational pall would be crushing. Who could she be after, if she were to act out these impulses? It would be too much for daily life to bear, it could be neither absorbed nor forgotten.

  “I’m feeling all seven of the deadly sins,” Kate says, patting her cheeks, in an imitation of a Victorian lady overcome with the vapors. She is calming herself the only way she knows how—by talking. “Lust, naturally,” she says, “the first sin you led me to. Wrath at the thought of anyone else ever getting to look at that beautiful penis, including urologists. Sloth—isn’t that one?—because I would gladly spend the rest of my life in bed, if it was with you. Greed, because I want to hoard you like gold. Gluttony, because I want you to fill me up in every imaginable and, frankly, unmentionable way.”

  Paul rolls closer to her, begins to gather her in his arms, but she places her hand on his chest so she can continue speaking. “Pride, because you are so beautiful and I love to watch when people see us together. And—what is that?” She counts silently to herself. “That’s only six. What’s the seventh?”

  “I don’t know,” Paul says.

  “Come on,” Kate urges, “you didn’t even try. There’s seven of them, try to think of the last one.”

  “Sneezy,” Paul says.

  “Oh, I know,” she says. “Envy’s the seventh. I’ve g
ot that, too. And it’s you that I envy. I wish I were half as beautiful as you. So that’s the seven, and mama’s got them all.”

  “I love the way you look,” Paul says.

  “I need to drink more water,” says Kate. “I’m really not aging well.”

  Kate is the oldest woman with whom Paul has ever been intimate. He has never known a woman who paints her toenails, just one of Kate’s manifestations of grown-up femininity. She diets, she regularly visits a hairdresser. She chooses her clothes with great care, trying things on and discarding them, especially if she is to make a public appearance. She will pay a hundred dollars for a jar of silky cream to rub into the lilac indentations beneath her eyes, and somehow believe the magic of the stuff will make her appear younger. And it does! It actually works. The previous women in Paul’s life have not worried about their age, and they have been casual, confident of their beauty, finding their power at the edge of gender rather than at its center. They were Levi’s and T-shirt types, outdoorsy women more at home at a campground than in a manicurist’s chair. Being with Kate makes Paul feel pleasantly and proudly older, as though he has at last taken his place in the world of men. It once seemed as if he was going to have one of those lives that have no particular rhyme or reason, the kind in which people appear and disappear and you never know with whom you’re going to have Christmas dinner but you don’t worry about it because you rarely end up alone. But now there is order to his life and no longer any mystery as to where he will be next week, or next month. At long last, adulthood has begun.