Chapter 39 #2
He goes in their room to get ready. Since I am suited up already, I go back to organizing my school materials at my table.
Only one weekend left and I will officially be in the sixth grade.
I already asked Willy May to please find out what time Mr. Oney will pick me up Monday morning.
Only thing I am nervous about is seeing those cousins, now that Lucille has ruined my reputation as a respectable orphan.
But mostly I am itching to go sit in a schoolroom again.
Tom walks out telling Lucille he will need his book back tonight. He does not sound very happy about it either.
It is dusk by the time we get back from the lake. I am plumb worn out, in a good way. When I come down from changing, Tom is in the kitchen, wearing a funny pink apron over his clothes. It frills around the shoulders and has a flower pattern to it.
I see you looking at me, turkey, he says, opening the oven. It’s the only apron we had. He smiles and lifts a roast beef out and sets it on the stovetop to cool.
Lucille comes into the dining room wearing a white nightgown to her feet. She looks near like a ghost to me. There is some makeup on her face, but it looks strange and white. Her red lipstick is crooked along the top. She looks shocked, like she has seen something.
Tom meets her in the dining room. You not feeling well tonight, darling? he asks.
I’m—I don’t know what I am, Tom, she says.
He sets his palm on the side of her cheek and she looks up at him. It is about the sweetest thing I have seen her do.
But then Tom draws back, frowning. Lucille. We had an agreement. He follows her to the china cabinet which she is opening with the damn key. Look, I understand if you need a drink now and then—
Well, this is now, she says, with a rude little flip on the end.
And what about this afternoon?
That was then.
Well nobody thought to tell me she was taking damn liquor this afternoon. I am almost glad I didn’t know that.
Tom says he is going to fix her a plate of food, that she needs to eat.
Lucille mutters she’ll be making another martini.
She gets a new bottle out and picks at the red wax, picking and flicking it onto the wooden breakfront.
I scramble to clean it up, that is all we need, after everything, for Mrs. Heidelberg to find this out now.
Lucille uncorks the thing, and it makes a pop sound. Bring me a pitcher of ice and two glasses, Meg. She snaps her fingers at me like I am her servant.
I go fetch Her Highness what she wants. It’s bound to be too late for Mr. Oney to be driving at this hour anyway.
When Tom sees me on the stool hacking ice in the sink, he says, You don’t need to be doing that, Meg.
It is all right, Tom, believe me, I have dealt with worse. He still takes the ice pick away from me.
I take two glasses out to the table. Since Tom does not drink, I sure hope that second one isn’t for me. I set them both at Lucille’s place. I guess she plans to drink them damn two at a time.
Tom sets out three plates of roast beef with rice and gravy and some extra ambrosia salad for Lucille. Lucille moves one of those glasses in front of Tom’s place.
Stop it, Lucille, you know I don’t want that, Tom says and moves the glass back over.
She pours some in his glass anyway and pushes it back over to him. Like she is the devil temptress with the apple and he is the Eve. It smells like so much rat poison to me.
What’s gotten into you tonight? Tom murmurs and sets his napkin in his lap. Now I made you a plate, and you need to eat something. He said that sterner than I have heard him speak to her before.
Lucille waves at her plate, says, I can’t eat that, and lights a cigarette instead. Woman would rather eat a cigarette than food. Then she pulls out Tom’s favorite blue Fitzgerald book from who knows where and sets it on the table between them.
Thank you, I’ve been looking for that, Tom says. He moves it closer to him and pats it twice like Mrs. Heidelberg does my head. Lord, I don’t want to even think about her.
I read your book while y’all were at the lake.
We both look up. Tom’s fork is midair. What? he says.
She closes her eyes like she is concentrating very hard now. I went in your office. And I read your book, Tom.
Tom sets his fork down. That’s not fair, darling. You should’ve asked me—
I couldn’t help it. After everything, Tom. I am sort of mad she got to read it first.
Tom looks like he doesn’t know whether to smile or frown. He settles on both. Well? Are you going to tell me what you thought about it?
She takes a sip of her drink, and like she is so tired she can barely talk, she looks at him and says, Do you know what you’ve done, Tom? Her voice goes higher. You plagiarized it. Fitzgerald’s story. Even the names are almost the same.
I don’t move. I’m not sure what that word means, but her hand holding the glass is shaking.
But that’s—those are just placeholders. It’s not the same story at all, Tom says.
She reaches over and takes the book back that Tom patted and she slowly opens it to where there is a folded piece of paper inside.
She unfolds the paper and reads it out loud.
An educational exorbitance that in her youth was only for the daughters of the exceptionally wealthy—showed the delicacy of her features.
Then she sets the paper down which I guess is Tom’s writing, and she reads from the blue Fitzgerald book: An educational extravagance that in her youth was only for the daughters of the exceptionally wealthy—showed the exquisite delicacy of her features.
Tom looks puzzled but I see what she means. Alright, well, maybe that’s—I’ll cut that line, Tom says. My story’s very different than his.
How, Tom?
It—just is, it’s an entirely different tone of voice.
She takes another long sip of her drink.
When she claps it down hard on the table, it splashes.
Looking at her plate of food, she says, A young man goes to Princeton and his mother dies, so he moves to New York where he works in an advertising agency, he falls in love with a younger woman, but she breaks it off to marry a richer man, so he— She presses her red lips together.
What does he do next in your story, Tom?
He— Tom stops. Goes on a drinking binge, he says. By his wide-open face, that must be what happens next in the Fitzgerald book too.
It’s plagiarism, Tom! Lucille says, straining her face at him. Her muscles are so tense, I can see the bones in her neck. Except when it’s not. When the lines are good, they’re stolen, and when they’re not, it’s just—
I’ll go through and cut anything that’s too similar, it’s a process you don’t understand, darling. Novel writing is subjective and one opinion does not make a majority.
Lucille’s one eyebrow rises. Her noseholes go wider.
I was him, I would move back some inches.
Even though you viewed me as Bill Davenport’s air-headed pretty little secretary.
She smiles, imitating Bill Davenport’s airheaded pretty little secretary, I spent a good portion of my job reading manuscripts.
Hundreds of them, Tom, maybe thousands, to decide what was worth his time or not.
And believe me, many tried to sound like him.
She points to the blue book. Bill even had a name for those, the Phony Fitzgeralds he called them, but never did I see one that ripped him off so blatantly, but that’s not even the real problem here—
But—alright, I know it needs work. This is only an early draft.
Tom picks up the blue book and starts thumbing through it.
Look, here Rosalind throws the ring away.
My character— He stops and swallows. Rose—I’ll change that name—would never do that.
Did you read the whole thing, Lucille? If you did, you’d see it’s—
No. Because I couldn’t get through it. She widens her eyes, she cannot believe he would ask this.
Because it’s too … similar? he asks, then quieter, Or because you didn’t …
Because it’s amateurish, Tom! The writing is terrible! Nobody is going to publish this drivel!
Tom draws back like she slapped him. He hears her now. But I want her to shut up, and be nice to him and didn’t she hear him say, it is a process she doesn’t understand?
You wrote that Rose is—she picks up the piece of paper—pathetically and blondly gorgeous, with a mind like a precarious diamond? What’s that horseshit even supposed to mean, Tom?
Tom shakes his head. He does not know either what that is supposed to mean.
It’s unreadable, Tom. There’s no sense going any further.
Everything you’ve written reads like some tired cliché …
and even if it didn’t, why would anybody read it—she presses her hand on top of her hair like a crazy person would do—when a genius has already written it perfectly?
She squeezes her eyes shut. I cannot believe you—you did this to me again, Tom.
For a few seconds, nobody says nothing. I don’t even want to eat this roast beef anymore.
Tom just stares at her, like she is a stranger to him.
She sets both her elbows on the table, like she is tired.
Way she is holding that cigarette so near her head, she is apt to set that big red hair curl on fire.
Well I wish she would! Light herself up like a damn cigarette!
Meg, did Tom ever tell you what he used to do in New York City? she says. As an occupation, I mean.
God, Lucille, we don’t need to get into all—
I’m speaking to Meg. Meg, did Tom ever mention that to you?
I look at Tom. This feels like a trick. There is something awful coming off her, a sick green-yellow color.
The answer is nothing, Meg. He did nothing. Do you know why? Because Tom. Fails. Everything.
Lucille, what are you doing—
Real estate, automobile sales, stockbroker—
Stop it, Lucille.