Chapter 17 Mille-Feuille
Mille-Feuille
The next time I see Simone is at the White Lion Inn, in the Berkshires. She is not a guest of the inn; she is ensconced at
Woodstock Hill, a nearby writers’ retreat where our publisher is now putting her up so she can make progress on her novel.
God bless Simone’s editor. Although Simone is, thanks to me, now working on The Rumrunner instead of The Gold Digger’s Mistress, she’s so flighty and easily susceptible to distraction in the city where she lives, her teaching and her so-called codependents’
support group and what have you. Literary lockdown for her is imperative.
I know Woodstock Hill, a charming white farm of the colonial era, repurposed for the housing, feeding, and coddling of writers
trying to jump-start, revise, or complete projects. I myself once spent a very productive few weeks there—which is why I can’t
return now to rendezvous with Simone. The rules mandate monklike silence throughout the day, no socializing until evening,
and there are always a handful of writers tempted to violate the sanctuary with fraternization, a walk or conversation on
the grounds, or activities of a more boisterous and salacious kind behind closed doors. Again, I know. I have partaken. I
cannot repeat my past indiscretions, and my presence there, especially as I am between projects, would be disruptive.
Therefore I have rented us a prohibitively expensive room at this eighteenth-century inn, with its deep front porch and line of Adirondack rockers surveying the mountains, its historic staircase with alarmingly narrow risers and its creaking slanted floors.
The wallpaper is toile, the air museum-musty, the laboring AC unit—certainly not a fixture in George Washington’s time—failing to dispel humidity.
There is a replica antique bed whose four posts I intend to put to good use.
Ours is a top-floor suite for which I paid extra so my sweet can make all the noise I can make her make, and before the door even closes behind us I am upon her, lifting her shirt, stripping her pants, undoing her bra with one hand, an ambidextrous talent of mine, even as I’m biting her nipple through the lace.
It has been a week since we last saw each other.
Once our initial thirst has been slaked, we stroll around the grounds exchanging catch-up conversation: My tour travels—with
some salient details omitted; her room at the retreat—which has no bedposts, sadly, but does feature a gas fireplace—and the
other writers she knows there. One of them, Simone says, arrived with her own mattress, kombucha brewer, and meditation instructor,
and has mandated that a retreat employee visit a local farm every morning to fetch fresh goat milk. We both know who this
woman is. I laugh at Simone’s impression of her—“Are you sure this milk is fresh? Was it squeezed from the goat this morning?” Unlike some of the other women I’ve been involved with, Simone is really very funny. It’s not a requisite, but it is refreshing.
We eat dinner by candlelight in the inn’s restaurant, with its stone fireplace and original floorboards, pretending to be
like all the other genteel, genial couples dining there, although my hand is busy under the table the entire time. Simone
is as wet as a fountain, whether from earlier or now. This is another characteristic of hers I appreciate; it makes my situation
so much more pleasant. When we’re done with dinner, I suggest we sit on the rockers and watch the moon rise; I want her to
read whatever progress she’s made on The Rumrunner, but Simone is ready to go back upstairs. This is another thing about Simone that I have not found in another woman: Her sexual appetite matches mine. And she has no shame about it. It’s astonishing, really.
A man doesn’t want to be rude, so I follow her back to our chamber, contemplating the black lace thong she is wearing beneath
her demure sundress and feeling myself hardening again, which proves two things: (1) I continue to be a not-very-imaginative,
typical heterosexual adult male, easily titillated by straps and lace—a cheap sexual date, if you will; and (2) the pill I
took this afternoon is still in effect. God bless pharmaceuticals.
By the time we are done, the moon has risen above the mountains and is peering through the nearest window. We are parched
and both drink a bottle of the water the inn has provided. I check my watch; it has been eight hours since I last took my
medication, so I fetch the prescription bottle from my satchel and take a pill. Just to be on the safe side. Simone watches
from her pillow, naked now, as God intended.
“That’s for your heart, right?” she says.
“Yes.” I get back in bed, and she nestles next to me, her head on my chest.
“Do you mind if I ask . . . what the condition is, exactly?”
I put my other arm behind my head. I’m feeling expansive. I am genuinely fond of Simone, and there’s no harm in her knowing.
It’s a pretty moment, actually, our bodies sated and happy, the ceiling glowing blue.
“When I was a boy, I had a fever,” I say. “Rheumatic fever. It sounds like something from a children’s book, doesn’t it?”
I feel Simone nod. “Like Heidi,” she says, “or Little House on the Prairie. But that was scarlet fever. I don’t know rheumatic fever.”
“It’s a form of strep,” I say, “or rather it’s a reaction to the bacteria that causes strep. Other children get it and just
have sore throats. I contracted it, maybe on the playground, and . . .”
. . . and for a moment I am in my boyhood bedroom, which unlike this one was dark as a cave and to which the door was always locked.
I remember the pain in my throat, and trying and failing to call for help, so it was not until the following morning that my sister, Penelope, Pen, unlocked my door and found me unconscious on the floor with a 106-degree temperature.
I relay all this to Simone. “It took my father—he was a surgeon—a few tries to diagnose what it was,” I continue. “At first
he suspected tonsils, so they came out.” At home, I do not add. “When I didn’t improve, he treated me for strep. By that time
the bacterium had infected my heart, and I was in bed for a year.”
I feel Simone’s head shift on my chest as she looks at me. “I’m so sorry, William. That’s horrible.”
“It was,” I agree. “I was in bed like an old man. An invalid. I used to try to get out, but if I was caught, I was punished.
So I stayed in bed until my father pronounced me well, and my sister, Pen, brought me books from the library. She sat with
me and read to me, Tom Sawyer, Robinson Crusoe, all the Narnia and Oz books—have you read the whole series? They are hair-raising. And imaginative. And it was then that . . .”
I stop. Simone looks up at me again.
“Then that what?”
“I started to write,” I say. “I wrote my first story. It was about, predictably, a sick little boy whose imagination took
him everywhere, and it was published in the local paper. Pen submitted it to a contest for me. That’s how I got the writing
bug, via the bug that causes strep. So that little schoolyard bastard who gave it to me really did me a favor.”
Some of this may actually be true. How much, I don’t know. My life until I reached college is shrouded in a kind of mist,
from which only certain memories emerge like deadly promontories. I recall the pain of my throat, monstrous and searing. My
father did remove my tonsils. I was always locked in my room at night, purportedly to cure me of sleepwalking. The rest is
a fiction.
My heart is fine. There was no playground; Pen and I were homeschooled.
I was not the natural writer in the family; Pen was.
Nor did she bring me anything from the town’s public library, as my tale implies; we were not allowed off the mountain to visit it, although my father had a den from which Pen habitually and at her own peril snuck books.
And I did eventually and secretly mail a submission to the town newspaper, and then to a popular children’s magazine, and things grew from there.
It used to trouble me, my cloaked past and the necessity of invention, but now I think it’s like writing novels. Realities
get layered atop each other in a mille-feuille of experience, and often I find myself wondering: Did that really happen, or
did I write it? And: What does it matter?
Simone is quiet for a few seconds longer, then sits up. Her face is serious in the moonglow, her unplaited hair a curtain.
During the times I’m not with her, I have begun finding strands of it everywhere, on my clothes, in my car, like some magical
traveling cobweb.
“Thank you for telling me,” she says. “That’s horrendous. I’m so sorry that happened to you. Although I’m not sorry you became
a writer. The world has greatly benefited from that. But . . . your heart now? It’s still affected?”
“Negligibly,” I say. “The walls are thinner than they should be, that’s all. Sometimes I have some defibrillation. Don’t worry,
Simone,” I add, because her face is now a tragedy mask. “It’s not going to kill me. Unless you fuck me to death.”
She doesn’t laugh. Her mouth wrenches to one side, and she looks away. “It’s not funny.”
I reach up and thumb away a tear that is tracking alongside her nose. “A poor joke. Apologies, sweetheart. I didn’t mean to
upset you.”
“I just can’t lose any more people I love,” she says. “So keep taking your medicine, okay?”
“Yes’m,” I say. “I promise.” This statement is certainly true.
She slaps my chest lightly as if I’ve disagreed, then lies down again. I pull her in closer.
“How about you,” I say, “when did you become a writer?”
“I’ve always been a writer,” she says. “My dad was a writer. My very first memory is of sitting under his desk while he wrote.
I felt so safe.”
“And what is it he wrote? Anything I might have read?”