Chapter 18 #3
“I’m sorry,” she said again, because he was right that she had been ignoring him.
Even if he hadn’t realized why, talking with the assistant jeweler had been Emily’s favorite part about shopping for the bracelet, not just because of the jeweler’s appeal but also why she had been appealing: the woman’s skill and confidence had reminded Emily of Gen.
Emily had liked learning from someone. She had liked seeing something in a new way.
But Jack was her husband. She loved him, and told him so.
Years later, after she left Jack the second time, the bracelet was one of the first things she sold.
That night, Connor, who was teething, woke up crying.
Emily went to his room and held him until he fell back asleep.
His hand clung to a lock of her hair, his small weight snug in her arms. She didn’t want to put him back in his crib.
She stayed in the rocking chair, thinking about how she used to write letters to Gen and then destroyed them.
That first year in college, before she and Gen had broken up, Emily had printed out Gen’s emails in the computer lab, but no one did that anymore—there were too many emails from too many people.
Emails lived forever in inboxes that nobody emptied.
Not many letters survived the ancient world.
Those that did had mostly been inscribed on clay tablets.
She wondered what kind of letters had been lost. She thought about the diamond dust, the extra matter of things, the side stories.
The dust was a kind of B plot to the A plot of the diamonds.
It occurred to her that even though The Odyssey was focused on Odysseus’s journey home, a shadow story ran beneath the narrative: the story of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and Odysseus’s patron.
Athena eventually begged the king of the gods to help Odysseus return home to Ithaca.
Why had Athena taken an interest in him?
Why did she wait so long to help him? Did she, in fact, want Odysseus to return home to his wife, or had she struggled with the idea of letting her favorite mortal go?
Emily supposed that Homer’s point was to make a human his main character and cast the gods as minor ones, but it also seemed that he hadn’t given the goddess his full attention. Athena’s story was at least as compelling as Odysseus’s, if not more so.
Emily put Connor back into his crib. She went into the living room. The sky brightened. The huge windows became planes of pink and yellow. She wrote a letter from Athena to Odysseus.
“You didn’t come back to bed last night,” Jack said in the morning.
“I was writing.”
He drank his coffee, still sleepy-eyed. “Writing what?”
“I don’t know.” The idea seemed silly by daylight. “Maybe the beginning of a book.”
“What kind of book?”
“A retelling of The Odyssey .”
“The book you were reading when we first met?”
“Yes.” She added, “It’s not such a new idea. Other people have retold The Odyssey .”
“But not like you.” He smiled at her over his coffee cup. “My brilliant wife.”
Emily saw little of her friends.
Elizabeth sent photos and brief, cryptic messages that read like reports sent back to a home planet from an alien scouting out Earth.
Swans are menacing. Bandit eyes. Like raccoons! But their FEET. Love their feet. Black and flexible.
Hello from Tanzania. The stars are so bright they ATTACK you.
Went hiking near Kashmir, totally off the grid. Fell but no broken bones. People who live in the mountains put BUTTER on my cuts. Nice!
OMG. In Majorca a local said worms grow in pine trees. Grow in balls (nests??). Hatch and WALK AROUND (these worms have legs??) and are POISON. Will sting, will SHOOT STINGERS AT YOU and BLIND YOU. WILL KILL DOGS. Leaving tomorrow.
The water in the Maldives is so clear I can see into my next life
Gonna buy a baby lemur, name him Marvin
Never coming home!
The surreal nature of the messages began to make Elizabeth seem like someone Emily had made up: an imaginary friend.
Emily hadn’t seen Rory since she canceled their drinks night.
Rory had expanded her client list to include rising-star actors and split her time between New York and L.A.
When they talked on the phone, Emily made her life with Jack seem ideal.
Sometimes her life actually looked that way, and she sensed that if she described how Jack could behave, Rory—mouthy, loyal Rory—might say or do something unpredictable that would make it impossible for Emily to continue the pretense, even for herself.
Once Emily had started lying to Rory, it was necessary to keep lying.
She tried to recapture the overwhelming gratitude she had felt two years ago on September 11, when Connor was four months old and Emily, panicked, couldn’t reach Jack—it was impossible for her calls to go through—and then he came through the front door covered in dust. He had walked the whole way home.
Emily relived that stroke of luck, the awe of momentous reprieve. How awful: the threat of losing him.
Florencia would visit in a few months, in summer.
She would stay with Emily and Jack for a week, a prospect that made Emily slide between an excitement that made her check her calendar every day and a nervousness that the visit would go wrong.
But Jack was looking forward to the visit, too.
He had told Emily that he would cook dinner for them every night.
Between classes and practice, Violet wasn’t often free, but came over occasionally to spend time with Emily and Connor, who was toddling more confidently and saying small words.
One day, Violet brought him a plastic plane that lit up and made take-off noises.
Connor grabbed it with both hands and plopped down onto his diapered bottom, mesmerized.
It was a weekend. Jack had gone to the gym.
Relaxed, Emily sipped sparkling cranberry juice while she watched Connor play and listened to Violet gossip about Juilliard.
All the drama students were hooking up with each other.
“It’s nonstop,” Violet said. “Their bodies are sources of infinitely renewable energy, like solar panels.”
“Sounds fun,” said Emily. Violet’s expression shifted slightly, just enough to make Emily realize that although Violet had been talking at length, it had never been about herself. “Are you having fun? Do you like your program?”
Violet grimaced.
“It must be a lot of pressure,” said Emily.
“It’s not that, not exactly. Being a professional musician is always intense.
I wasn’t sure I was up for that, but I regretted not going to conservatory for undergrad.
When I auditioned for the master’s program, I hoped I’d get into Ilse Visser’s studio.
Now her studio is everything I worried Juilliard would be. ”
“I’m not sure what you mean by studio. ”
“Each teacher chooses students to form a studio. Ilse Visser’s is legendary.
Any student she likes has big potential, because she’s close with music directors at every major symphony orchestra and her good word means a lot.
But she pits us against each other. We’re in constant competition.
We know our rank based on studio ‘assignments.’ The worst is scooping her cat’s litter.
My rank’s not so bad: I have to bring her a half-caf latte every day.
If you rank high, you’re constantly afraid you’ll fall.
Plus everyone resents you. If you’re on the bottom rung, you feel worthless. ”
“Can you report Visser to other professors?”
“She’s so respected that they say her methods build character.”
“Go to the president of Juilliard. Ask for a transfer out of her studio. Say that if you don’t get one, you’ll take the story to The New York Times .”
“They’d never publish it.”
“Abuse of power at an elite school? They would.”
“Maybe I should quit.”
“Don’t quit.”
“You make everything sound easy.”
Emily brushed away lint from her white pants. “It’s not,” she said slowly. “It wouldn’t be for me. I guess I’m giving advice I’d have a hard time following, but I believe that you can do it. If you’re ready to quit, you have nothing to lose.”
Violet watched Connor walk around the coffee table, gripping its edge for balance. “Can we talk about something else? Tell me about your book.”
It had become more than a retelling of The Odyssey .
Emily treated the original myths and Homer’s poetry as incomplete, supplying other sides to the stories as if those interpretations had been lost, and she was restoring them instead of creating them.
At that time, she was working on the myth of Arachne, whom Emily had cast as Athena’s lover in an early section of the narrative, as a flashback told before Odysseus is taken captive by Calypso.
“But she hated Arachne,” Violet said. “In the original myth. Right? Athena was jealous that a mortal could weave better than she could, so she hit Arachne on the head with a shuttle and turned her into a spider.”
“First, Athena loved her. At least, that’s how I’m writing it.”
“I didn’t know you wanted to be a writer.”
Emily hadn’t either, but the more she wrote, the more she liked writing.
She liked how each sentence was an artifact of time, an insect suspended in amber, one that she had placed there, in an exact shape and gesture.
She chose each word, the order, the inversion of expectation or its satisfaction.
Then her task was to dissolve that amber and make the insect whir to life.
“It makes me happy,” she said.
“Why?”
“In my book, I can make anything happen. I can do whatever I want.”
The front door opened. The sound was loud and startling. Emily spilled cranberry juice onto her pants.
“Hi, sweetheart!” Jack called. He came into the living room, sweaty. “Oh, hey, Violet. Good to see you! Em, do you want to go change? I’ll keep an eye on Connor.”