Page 8 of Kill Your Darlings

“Your friend Judy, from work. Didn’t she move to D. C.?”

“God, I haven’t thought about her in years. No, I hadn’t planned on it. I don’t even know if she’s still there.”

“Sorry for asking,” Thom said.

“Oh no, did I sound... You just took me by surprise.”

They were quiet for a moment. Thom’s drink was gone and he was starting to get cold. “Well,” he said, and put his hands on his knees.

“About Emily, that woman you work with,” his wife said.

“Uh-huh.”

“You don’t have something going on with her, do you?”

“With Emily? No, she’s, like, half my age. I mean, not that if she was older... You know what I mean.”

“You promise me?”

“Promise you what?”

Wendy was looking at Thom, but her face was in shadow, her body rigid. “Promise me you’re not lying about this. You haven’t done anything stupid, have you?”

“Plenty of stupidity, but nothing stupid with Emily. She’s a sweet kid. I haven’t even thought of her that way.”

“Okay,” Wendy said, turning her head to look toward the kitchen. Her shoulders had relaxed.

Thom decided to try a joke, and said, “Want her all to herself, do you?”

“Something like that,” Wendy said. “It’s not every day I meet a fan.”

Later, in bed, Thom thought about the conversation with Wendy, how strongly she’d reacted. She had genuine cause to be concerned. He’d given her reasons throughout the years to not trust him. Maybe there really was some jealousy involved, that Emily/Annabel had shown interest in Wendy and she didn’t want him to screw it up. Fair enough, he thought, and began to doze off, but kept thinking about Emily’s real name, and about that poem by Poe. How’d that go again? Wendy had it memorized, he knew that much. He’d tried, as well, but it somehow hadn’t stuck. All he could remember now was the first two lines, and he whispered them to himself now: “It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea.”

v

The Airbnb was smaller than it had looked in the pictures, but it was very clean, and the owners had left a gift basket with a bottle ofred wine and a small box of chocolate truffles from some local candy shop.

Wendy opened the front-facing window of their apartment to let the air in. They’d gotten onto their Amtrak train that morning at South Station in Boston, each wrapped in scarves and fleece coats, and they’d disembarked at Union Station into an altogether different climate. Balmy air, even a hint of humidity. She was determined to enjoy herself a little, and to see that Thom enjoyed himself as well. She knew that other people would see that as horrific, but she didn’t, exactly. If Thom were dying of cancer and had only months to live, then bringing him down here for one last hurrah would be seen as something kind, as life-affirming. And Thom did have a cancer rotting him. A lifetime of guilt and shame had metastasized into something uncontrollable. Before leaving on this trip, Wendy had steeled herself and read the first forty pages of his “mystery” novel. It was worse than she’d thought it would be. It was a confession badly disguised as fiction.

“Open this wine now, or go out and find a place to have a drink?” It was Thom, standing behind her. He’d spent the train ride studying what pubs and restaurants they should eat at during their trip. He hadn’t mentioned once, not since she’d first told him about the trip, how Georgetown was a return to the place where it all began. And he hadn’t mentioned the Exorcist Steps.

“I need to take a shower after that train ride. Why don’t you go find a place for a drink and text me where you are and I’ll meet you?”

“Mission accepted,” he said, and saluted her.

She made a face, and he added, “Sorry, Jesus. Something about this trip has me on edge.”

In her shower she thought about what he’d said, hoping that what was making him nervous was the fact that he hadn’t yet had a drink by midafternoon, and not that he’d cottoned on to her reason for taking him on this trip. For some reason she thought about Samsa,their old cat, and how when they’d made the decision to have the vet put him down they’d both been relieved to find out that vets made house visits these days to perform that particular service. As it was, Samsa’s last moments had been stretching in a bar of sunlight on the second-floor deck and not shaking uncontrollably at the animal hospital. If Thom turned out to be miserable on this trip, she didn’t know if she could go through with it.

By the time she got to the Tombs, the bar he’d picked for an afternoon drink, she’d walked in out of the sunshine, her eyes taking a long time to adjust, and watched Thom come into focus. He was in his element, one elbow on the bar, a pint glass in his hand, talking to a much younger woman, who was looking at him with some interest. Not a lot of interest, but not revulsion either. Thom, naturally, had no idea that Wendy had entered the bar; he was far too focused on the pretty girl and whatever story he was spinning. Wendy stood for a moment and watched. Over the past few years, she’d felt herself becoming invisible to the world around her—it was a cliché, she knew, but one she happened to be living. Thom, on the other hand, had attained some second age of attractiveness, or maybe it was just a fairly interesting style, in his fifties. He’d let his thinning hair grow out just a bit over the ears, brushing it back, and he’d started wearing black-rimmed eyeglasses. Wendy didn’t imagine he was in any way sexually appealing to the young woman he was talking to, but he hadsomethinggoing on. Maybe he’d mentioned his recently published piece on John Cheever called “Lear in Suburbia,” and how it had been nominated for an obscure academic prize, and he was definitely footing the young woman’s bill. Wendy made her way slowly to the bar.

“Ah, my wife,” Thom said theatrically, and Wendy wondered how many drinks he’d managed to consume already. She hadn’t taken that long in the shower.

The woman’s name was Alice Something and she was a grad student in Georgetown’s Department of English, out celebrating thecompletion of a final draft of her thesis. She was interesting, actually, and just when Wendy was beginning to wonder if they’d be stuck with her for the evening, two of her friends showed up and whisked her to a table.

“Having fun?” Wendy said.

“I am,” he said, “but we don’t have to stay. I do realize I found the darkest bar to come to on this beautiful afternoon.”

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