The Edith Wharton Murders Read online

  It seemed obvious to me that Priscilla’s books must threaten Chloe in some way, but I couldn’t imagine how, and I didn’t bother saying it. It would be like telling your child after she’d been viciously mocked at school that her tormentors were not very mature, and obviously unhappy people inside. True, perhaps, but not very satisfying.

  Suddenly, Priscilla’s face changed and she looked pensive. “What do you think of Chloe’s work?”

  I wasn’t a writer, just lived with one, but Stefan had warned me against dishing other writers because what I said could reflect on him; people might assume he shared my opinions.

  “Well”—I hesitated—”it’s…pleasant.”

  Now Priscilla grinned. “Beautiful,” she said. “That is beautiful. You don’t have to say anything more.” But then she sighed, and I felt we had made no progress at all.

  “The French are wild about Chloe,” she said. “Don’t ask me why.”

  “Hey, the French worship Jerry Lewis. The French test nuclear weapons in the Pacific.”

  Priscilla couldn’t be deflected. “Chloe’s even having an affair with Vivianne Fresnel! You know, the ‘French Susan Sontag.’”

  I shrugged. The name meant nothing to me, so Fresnel had obviously never written anything in my specialty, Edith Wharton.

  “Nick, Chloe’s work is available in French and Hungarian. Russian, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Hebrew, Portuguese, Swedish.”

  “How do you know that?”

  She held her head up. “I checked,” she brought out simply.

  I nodded. That wasn’t hard to imagine. Priscilla probably had a file at home, maybe more than one. Her Chloe files: interviews, reviews, advertisements, conference brochures, whatever she came across, all of it slow poison, weakening her confidence. I bet she had helplessly followed Chloe’s career as if she were a losing general planting dispirited little flags on a map. I’d seen it with lots of writers; they can’t stay away from the information—the magazines or book reviews, the phone calls or letters—that sickens them, that makes them despair of ever achieving success because so many unworthy writers do, thanks in part to the right connections, but equally to the unpredictability of literary life.

  “My books aren’t even available in England,” Priscilla said, eyes closed, clearly dragged down by this old grievance.

  “I’m sure your publisher didn’t try hard. And Stefan says the publishing business is terrible over there anyway.”

  She shrugged. It might have been true, but that didn’t make it hurt less. Eyes down, she went on: “My last book didn’t go into paperback.”

  We’d been in the same department at SUM for over two years, but this was the first time I felt really close to Priscilla, felt confided in, respected. It was very easy to sympathize with her because I was immune to the terrible disappointments and equally stunning excitement in a writer’s life. Academics rarely make money on their books, which are most often stepping stones to tenure and promotion. We write and publish pretty much in obscurity, and the university press catalogues hawking our works are as meaningful as a glossy chain letter. But fiction writers always dream of a breakthrough, of a Big Book that will make the rest of their lives a little easier. I knew that for Priscilla, who wrote somewhat drab and rhetorical mysteries, the chances of making it big were nonexistent.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Priscilla asked, hands tightly clasped in her lap.

  I shrugged.

  “You have no idea what it’s like, Nick. People always ask me about her—at readings, or conferences. I’ll be minding my own business, someone comes up and tells me that they love my work—and they love Chloe’s too. It makes me sick. They ask if I’ve met her, and what is she like! She’s this albatross—I can’t ever get rid of her.”

  Suddenly Priscilla clapped her hands together. “Oh, Nick, I’m sorry I haven’t even asked you about the Wharton conference. How are things going?”

  It was my turn to feel plagued. “Fine, so far. No hitches yet.” That wasn’t really true, but I was desperate to change the subject.

  “Isn’t it pretty soon? Like next month?”

  “No! Not until April—the first week of April.” I said it slowly, as if casting a spell to protect myself. “I really don’t want to talk about it right now.”

  Priscilla nodded sympathetically.

  AT HOME THAT evening, I didn’t mention Priscilla’s confession about Chloe DeVore to Stefan because he’d been in a lousy mood for weeks. His latest book was not going into paperback because his publisher had been unable to sell it to any major trade houses, and even the smaller presses had said no. Stefan’s agent told him it was the state of the market, and the influence of big book chains, and I don’t know what else, but the plain fact was that for the first time, one of Stefan’s books had failed. Stefan was humiliated, as if the New York Post had run a cover story: “PUBLISHERS TO STEFAN: DROP DEAD!” It was worse because the news was coming during the long Michigan winter, the time Stefan called “the envy months,” when other people’s good fortune could feel like a torment. Stefan was still smarting from one of the worst reviews he’d ever gotten for one of his books. We’d never heard of the newspaper, the Bethesda Bulletin, or the reviewer, Kevin Sapristi, but none of that mitigated the review’s viciousness. Sapristi had willfully misquoted from Stefan’s book, calling it “vomit.” Was the reviewer anti-Semitic, antigay, or just plain stupid and mean?

  It was the kind of deadly review an author might expect from a rival or an ex-lover.

  The evening last month when Stefan got a copy of that review from his publisher’s publicity department, I found him at his computer working on a letter.

  “I’m writing to that reviewer,” he announced, as if daring me to stop him.

  I sat down at his desk, nodding. This was one of those moments Stefan had warned me about years ago, telling me to slap him if he ever embarrassed himself by responding to a nasty review. I bided my time, trying to keep my face blank. He typed, I sat.

  “What I really want to do,” he said as his fingers slammed at the keys, “is send him a bomb.”

  “Great. I married the Unabomber. Stefan, don’t you know how hard it would be getting your work published from prison?”

  He turned, frowning, on the edge of a smile—or outrage. I went for broke.

  “Wait—maybe I’m wrong,” I said. “It might be the best thing you could do for your career! Why don’t we both kill this moron and do a dual memoir? I’m sure we could get on Barbara Walters from death row. I mean, memoirs are the hottest thing going—even your agent said so.”

  Stefan smiled wanly, looked back at the screen, shook his head, and switched off the computer.

  That had been a few weeks earlier, and I think he had pretty much recovered from the review, but I didn’t want to bring up Chloe DeVore and get him started on any train of thought that would lead back into his own little heart of darkness.

  We did talk about Bob Gillian.

  “He seems nice enough,” I said.

  Stefan shook his head. “He can’t be nice if he married that she-wolf Joanne. They’ve probably got one of those relationships where she has all the permission to be vicious, and he’s her foil.”

  I thought that over; it was an interesting theory. “Well, I’m gonna try to like Bob, because anything else will be too exhausting. I have to share an office with him.”

  Grading papers in front of the fire later that night, after Stefan had gone to bed, I kept thinking about Chloe DeVore, who I’d never met but now felt strangely inimical to because of Priscilla’s revelations.

  I had haphazardly followed her career. Chloe DeVore was in many ways a manufactured writer. She’d gone to Smith, and by the time she was nineteen had published several stories in the New Yorker because her father knew one of the editors. The stories were nothing special, but enough to get her a book contract, and she had a collection of stories out before her graduation. Reviews called Angels of Light “dazzli
ng,” “luminescent,” “quiveringly intense,” “radiant,” “heavenly,” playing inane variations on the title. Everyone noted her extreme youth and astounding maturity of vision. The book appeared briefly on the New York Times best-seller list and she won a Pulitzer.

  Chloe DeVore was the first lesbian/bisexual author to be cosseted, even championed by the New York Times. When later books were occasionally hit hard by other newspapers, the Times always found some one to write a gentle review. Most reviewers mentioned her bisexuality in muted terms, which was appropriate, I think. In her writing, DeVore was bi in the most harmless and inoffensive of ways; her sexuality could have been a mildly eccentric hobby like bottle cap collecting. I knew from Stefan that gay male writers muttered about her success, but said little in public so as not to be branded sexist. From Priscilla, I had found out that lesbian writers thought even less of Chloe’s work.

  “Shallow,” Priscilla told me was the consensus. “And nonthreatening—to straights. But you can’t say that because it would mean you’re undermining a sister, that you’re male-identified, that you’re a bitch.”

  With the success of her first book, Chloe DeVore also appeared in Esquire, Vanity Fair, Interview, even People. Slim, slight, completely unprepossessing, she was an oddly photogenic nullity in designer outfits. There was something almost freakish, exhibitionistic in the publicity that increased with her first novel, Brevity, and continued through an other collection and a book of two novellas, Drifting. As she neared thirty, however, it apparently became harder for reviewers to find something remarkable about her—like those child prodigies who play the Beethoven violin concerto at ten years old and soon fade from the concert scene. Reviews were still full of praise, but it was softer, almost reminiscent. There were other stars to be dazzled by, and I noted that her reviews appeared further back in various book reviews, further from the front page, that imprimatur of significance. Had Chloe ever been remarkable—or was it just the American hunger for sensation, for youth?

  I didn’t think much of her writing, and I thought even less of her after Priscilla gave me copies of some of Chloe’s interviews. She sounded as compassionate and thoughtful as Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers film. Asked about AIDS, she might ramble on about her “suffering brothers” and how her heart was “utterly, yes, utterly” with them—a statement that rang somewhat hollow when she delivered it lounging on a silk-covered Empire fauteuil in her apartment near the Élysée Palace. And when you considered that her greatest suffering seemed to have been a visceral dislike of the jacket art on her second book, a subject that drifted into every other interview like an ill-behaved little dog that won’t stop pissing on the rug. “You want your readers to love your books, inside and out,” she once explained, adding, “Inside and out,” in case the interviewer had missed her subtlety of feeling. Equally as weird was Chloe’s claim that she led “a hermit’s life” in New York and Paris.

  Which made me wonder how she had managed to wind up in so many gossip columns describing fabulous parties, and how she had snagged all the fabulous blurbs from well-known authors that glittered on each and every one of her books. They had to be her personal friends.

  I was musing about all this when the doorbell rang and startled me out of my chair. I checked the mantel clock—it was after eleven p.m. A little nervously, I went to the front door, and saw Priscilla through the glass panel.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, as I opened the door. “I’m just so miserable about Chloe.” Scraping her boots on the doormat, she looked pale, despondent. I reached for her parka, but she kept it on and followed me into the living room, headed straight for the chair by the fire. Priscilla had never dropped by before, never even called and said she would be in the neighborhood, and yet I felt no discomfort.

  “Stefan’s asleep,” I said, pulling over a chair to sit opposite Priscilla. “He was pretty tired.”

  “He wouldn’t understand,” she brought out. “He’d think I’m petty and vindictive.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

  But Priscilla was shaking her head. “A friend in New York just faxed me, actually a couple of friends. Chloe’s new book is getting rave pre-publication reviews. There’s a film deal.” She gulped. “With Sharon Stone!”

  I whistled my amazement. “What’s the book about?”

  She sighed. “You know how some people think her work isn’t sexy enough, and that she needs more range? Too much gentle Connecticut angst? The new books called—get this—Empire of Sin. It’s huge, seven hundred pages, in diary form. It’s about Justinian and Theodora.”

  “The Byzantine Empire? Those guys? It sounds like a dud. What the hell would Chloe DeVore know about the Byzantine Empire?”

  Priscilla shrugged. “I guess she spent a weekend in Istanbul once. But all the reviewers are saying it’s brilliant, a rich tapestry of sex and fear and history.”

  That sounded like a quote. Priscilla was already memorizing Chloe’s reviews!

  “Do you want a drink?”

  She nodded and I brought her some Cointreau. She peeled back her parka and sipped from the glass, looking as defeated as if the whole first printing of Chloe’s book had landed on her house.

  Priscilla breathed in and out heavily a few times. “Well, at least her girlfriend dumped her.”

  “That Vivianne Fresnel? How do you know?”

  Priscilla grinned. “I don’t think Chloe can buy a baguette in Paris without someone sending somebody a letter, a card, a fax, E-mail.”

  “Twenty-four-hour surveillance?” I asked. “Satellite photos?”

  She laughed, and it made me feel good.

  “So what’s this about Chloe’s girlfriend?” I asked.

  Priscilla looked happier by the minute. “They had a big fight in the Tuileries Gardens—”

  I cut her off. “Wait a minute—next to which tree?”

  With mock dignity, Priscilla said, “I don’t know that. Yet.”

  And we grinned like conspirators.

  “She’s also gained weight. They say she’s looking puffy,” Priscilla brought out with satisfaction. “And no, I can’t tell you how much weight! But I heard she’s wearing baggy sweaters.” She nodded grimly, as if vengeance had been served.

  I couldn’t tell this to Priscilla, because it was too intimate, but Stefan and I had sat in front of the fire before, or in my study, or in restaurants, having similar conversations about writers he disliked and scholars I had no respect for. I was more intemperate than Stefan, who was usually fairly calm about other writers (not living in New York helped). But if he saw what he thought was unwarranted success or a review that was clearly rigged in the author’s favor, that could start him spinning. And me, I always had outrage to spare. We could range freely from people’s shoddy work to their shoddy personalities, implacable. It was like two nasty little kids mocking and mimicking their elder brothers and sisters who seem all but omnipotent.

  “She really yanks my chains,” Priscilla said, sounding apologetic. “It’s not like I have a bad life, or that my books don’t get published. It’s just that—” She shrugged.

  “It’s just that Chloe made it so big, so fast, and doesn’t deserve it.”

  Priscilla nodded, looking mournful, and then she made another quick switch, peering into the fire: “Do you think Chloe’s written herself out?”

  There was only one good answer to that question. “Written herself out? Honey, I don’t think there was ever that much inside to begin with!”

  Priscilla beamed. “I could grow very fond of you,” she said. Smiling wickedly, she added, “I heard a wonderful story about her. A friend of a friend was in Paris and the subject of Chloe came up at a literary dinner. Someone had just had drinks with her, and was asked if Chloe spoke French well. The woman paused, and said ‘Yes, but then she’s boring in any language.’”

  I laughed. It was the kind of casual put-down I could imagine my parents making. “Hey, why don’t you put Chloe in your next mystery?
”

  “I’ve tried! But I can’t calm down enough to do it right. Don’t you think I’m dying to kill her off so I can get it out of my system? Give her some slow poison, or have her mangled in an accident and just hanging on before she croaks. Or a lingering disgusting disease….”

  “Maybe you could commission someone to write a mystery for you,” I suggested. “A freelancer. A literary hit man.” After a second, I amended it: “Hit person.”

  “Wouldn’t that be expensive? It’s probably cheaper to have someone knock her off for real. Faster, too.”

  “Forget it. Think of the publicity. Her books would sell even better.”

  “You’re right,” Priscilla said, regretfully. She didn’t sound like she had been joking.

  “What’s your new one called?” I asked.

  Priscilla hesitated. “Sleeping with the Enemy.”

  “Like the Julia Roberts movie? Great title! It’s due this summer, right? Or next fall?”

  Priscilla didn’t answer. She seemed distracted, but then I knew writers often didn’t feel comfortable discussing books in progress.

  “Nick, I know you said you didn’t want to talk about the Edith Wharton conference, but you’ve been so wonderful to listen to me about Chloe, I wanted to ask if I can help somehow.”

  I breathed in deeply, trying to picture the kind of calm and peaceful scene they ask you to think of on an imagery trip, but all I could come up with was an image of myself fleeing down the slopes of a volcano, the red-hot lava coming after me with supernatural malevolence.

  “Really,” she said. “I’d be happy to help out.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it!”

  Priscilla gulped, surprised by my vehemence, and I hurried to assure her: “I just can’t talk about it now, please.”

  “Fine.”

  Priscilla left soon after, and getting ready for bed, I thought about what she hadn’t said. I knew that Priscilla was coming up for promotion to full professor next year, and that she was also turning forty. Both milestones would be enough to make anyone feel vulnerable, crazed, and diminished by a rival’s undeserved success.