Secrets of the Apple Read online

  Ryoki pushed back from his desk, rubbing his eyes. Maybe reading would be the thing. Kate always had something worthwhile and never hesitated to lend her books. He left his office and headed out to Kate’s cottage where he knocked as a precaution before disarming the alarm, unlocking the door and heading straight to the large bookcase that dominated one wall of the living room. Slowly he scanned the titles, happily savoring the delicious theft of time. He listened for Kate, hoping she’d come home and join him, his eyes lingering on the books they had read aloud together, the birthplaces of shared jokes and long debates. By the third shelf he’d already tentatively picked out two mysteries and a biography of George Washington. All three looked interesting in theory, but holding them in his hands reminded him of a sweater that seemed a perfect fit in the store but somehow developed itchies on the way home. He continued on to the bottom shelf where he encountered Kate’s battered leather binder, the one with the red paint stain that had traveled in her computer bag all the way from San Francisco. It was as familiar a sight as his own briefcase, though he had never looked inside. His eyes lit as he brushed his fingers down the spine, tracing the stain. There were stories inside, he was sure of it.

  He gripped the three books in his hands and looked around the room. All her desk drawers had locks, but the binder was right out in the open, and on the lowest shelf no less, where it would be most susceptible to water damage should there be an accident, a flood or a burst pipe. Certainly it could not be so secret and precious. She knew he had a key to her cottage. He drew his hands to his sides, ashamed to be rationalizing. The books were arranged on the shelves shortest down to tallest, so naturally a binder would be on the bottom shelf—aesthetics over security, typical Kate. As for the key, she trusted him to respect her privacy. He should wait for her permission.

  He lost interest in the first books, and returning them to their places started again at the top, willing himself to find something intriguing or mysterious that would distract him from the shabby binder, bottom shelf, third from the left.

  First shelf, nothing, second shelf, third shelf. At last be knelt for the bottom, slowing down, examining every title until he came again to the binder. He was beginning to feel sheepish and stupid. Probably making too much of it. Might not be stories, might be nothing but recipes. A woman who brought her own set of measuring spoons would certainly bring recipes, or his mother’s household notes or an address and appointment book. Why torture himself? Might as well just see what it is.

  He quickly pulled the binder from its place, noticing it left a gap, like a tooth knocked out. He flipped open the cover quickly, before he had any more time to think about right or wrong. Page one, “Hotel” by Kate Porter, covered in strikethroughs and Kate’s cramped handwritten notes, an early draft, actually several drafts.

  He rose from the floor, his right hand already pinching the full thickness of the manuscript, gauging the number of pages. A two-inch binder holds what, two hundred pages? Two-fifty? And this was almost full, more than three quarters. Okay to read the first story—my present, after all—but only the first.

  He did read his story, complete with scribbled insertions, saw the verbs gather muscle from one version to the next, reducing the prepositional phrases, the long-winded first attempt mercilessly cut and cut until only the essential words remained: Her gift to him.

  At the end he sat on the couch thinking. Unwilling to relinquish the binder quite yet, he began to slowly flip the pages, just to take inventory. Ten stories, all at different stages, almost all stacked with more than one version—first try on top, followed by the next revision or two, ending with the most recent version. Then a tabbed divider to preface a new story, first try first, followed by Revision A, Revision B, and so forth., leading him to guess she wrote a story the way she wrote a report at the office, writing all the way through, but refusing to show it to him until it had a chance to marinate—that was her word, marinate, so she could go back and refine it the next morning. She was always very particular like that. But in her stories she kicked it to a new level, placed each word like a jeweler.

  Having touched all the pages, it didn’t seem like such a stretch to read a few more, but only a few. He reached up to switch on the lamp, but the bulb was out and the overhead light was more for ambiance than reading. Now that he thought about it, she once said she never read in her living room, that the most comfortable spot in her cottage was the overstuffed armchair in the bedroom with its big ottoman and bright task lamp. He moved there, leaving the bedroom door open, not planning to stay long.

  He began to read, lightly skimming through the initial drafts, concentrating on the most recent attempt. So many details he recognized, ordinary acorns lifted out of their lives to grow and branch in a different reality, like the blue glass bowl he remembered from Saint Helena because of the way she’d stared at it, commenting that it looked like water, or the boy they’d seen in the market with the gimpy walk and the weeping sores on his filthy bare feet. He even spotted himself, reincarnated as a redheaded college student in Pittsburgh with more freckles than money and an embarrassing crush on Audrey Hepburn. Ryoki had never seen an Audrey Hepburn movie, but the boy was a cookie-eating Master of the Sandwich who flipped his pen when he was thinking. She laid him plain, stripped of all money and position. At least she cast him as the hero, albeit a complicated one.

  When he had reached the last divider, it was getting dark and he began to get a creepy-crawly that Kate would certainly be back soon, snatching her binder and whacking him over the head. But that last tab was marked with a tantalizing “NEVER To Be Published.”

  To his credit he did pause to ponder the real meaning, if it might be code for Don’t Read. An hour earlier he’d called the kitchen for another sandwich which he now wolfed distractedly, hardly caring that it needed a stronger mustard. By the time he’d wiped the crumbs from his mouth and pulled a mint from his pocket, he’d decided that Read and Publish were completely unrelated and he flipped the final divider with only the faintest twinge of guilt.

  He found the final section to be organized differently than the others, pages and pages of handwritten text on wide ruled paper, “The Puzzle,” scrawled across the top, underlined three times. He pinched the thickness with his fingers, too much for a short story, the rudiments of a novel maybe?

  He read the first page dated the previous September. Something familiar about that voice, an eerie echo of Kate herself, perhaps because she was trying out first person, different than the rest of the stories.

  I remember walking into the post office and catching sight of myself in the heavy glass door. I’d eaten off my lipstick and my dark hair fell limp on my shoulders, the roots damp with humidity. I looked dull, like a junker Mercedes. People notice when you look sick and green or chic and polished, but never when you look dull. Dull people are anonymous.

  I wondered how I looked to him. Dull, probably.

  Kate’s unnamed protagonist bought steaks at Dillman’s, dropped off two suits and a dress at DeAngelo Dry Cleaning, never letting on she knew the proprietor shouted gibberish that he pretended was Italian. She came home and turned up the music, dancing around her living room, posing and pouting like a rock star. She caught sight of herself in the mirror. “Crumpled blouse, limp hair.” Glancing at the clock, she quickly showered and put on a clingy red jersey dress, smudging on her eye shadow, soft, smoky, barely there. Her husband returned as she was applying her lipstick, but he left quickly, bouncing a tennis ball. He had a wicked backhand.

  I held the lipstick loosely in my fingers. Fire-Engine Red, “Guaranteed to start a fire,” the advertisement said. The door slammed and his car squealed out of the driveway. I automatically slid my feet into my best black heels and sat with my back against my dressing table, scraping it into the wall. I wanted to cry, scream, scratch my fingernails across the moldings, leaving ten perfect marks. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

  Ryoki stopped reading, shut the cover and sat nervously tappin
g the leather, finding a scuffed place and worrying it with his finger. First person, so like her, didn’t match the rest of the binder. Sounded more like…

  He needed to stop, none of his business, though his finger still held his place. Must stop. Really must.

  He flipped open the binder and read on, hustling to outpace his conscience. Might be a novel, could be, still that possibility. Dated entries, like a—

  Read faster, faster, just skim.

  He didn’t skim. He read every word. For months he’d been wondering how any man could leave a woman who conveyed love with a mere prick of her needle, and here Kate had been writing down the answer. It wasn’t a journal, not exactly, but her private attempt to make sense of the dreadful cataclysm, unsparing of herself, no heroes, no villains, continually penning a version of the same question, “What could I have done differently?—I wish I hadn’t taken offense; I could have climbed through that window even if my skirt was white; Why did I get upset over the muddy boots, who cares about muddy boots? Nothing else I could have done there.”

  The handwritten pages broke off before the end of the story, but tucked into the back pocket of the binder Ryoki found several pages, typewritten, single-spaced, dated much earlier than the rest, probably a few months before her divorce. The back page stuck to the leather as he tugged it out, leaving a pale brown stain on the paper.

  The Airport

  By Kathryn Porter

  “I want a divorce,” he said.

  In my peripheral vision I could see the line from the ticket counters snaking closer as the maze filled. A mother with three small children, four suitcases and two carry-ons struggled past me as fast as they could. I hoped they made their plane.

  “What?” I said.

  “I want a divorce,” he said, without rancor.

  I should not have been surprised, but I was. Seconds earlier I’d smiled to myself, thinking how romantic it was for him to leave his car illegally unattended at the curb, just to walk me through the doors. A sign of hope, I’d thought.

  I looked directly at him. He appeared to face me steadily, but kept his focus a fraction to the left, barely noticeable. I knew he’d chosen a public place so I wouldn’t cry or make a scene, a smart tactic, very sanitary, a move he’d probably brag about in later years, “Yeah, I dropped my ex at the airport and told her to just keep going,” brash and debonair in the locker room. Except here in the moment he felt bad, possibly even ashamed. I couldn’t gauge how long that feeling might last. Maybe forever, or maybe just until he got back to his car.

  Over the loudspeaker a polished voice requested the owner of a dark gray Mercedes to please return to the curb before the car was towed. Outside the sliding glass doors, we could see the car and the curb attendant glaring at us as he spoke into his radio. He looked mean, but he’d given us a chance, a warning. I suspected he had a kind heart. My husband whirled and sprinted to his car, yelling, “You could see me! You could see me! Don’t touch that car!” He’d only had it a month and didn’t care to lose it, not after all the sacrifices he’d made to get it.

  A blessed numbness carried me through the ticket line. I sleepwalked through security and almost to my gate before noticing my purse was flapping open. I put my hand in to feel for my wallet, just in case.

  On the plane I took out my compact and checked my makeup. No-shine perfect lipstick good hair day. I clicked the compact shut, pulled out a book and pretended to read for the rest of the flight, occasionally turning pages whenever I remembered.

  On the ground Grandma and Grandpa Porter greeted me. I smiled and hugged, made all the appropriate noises in the appropriate places. After dinner we talked about books and needlepoint, and watched a baseball game on TV. Grandma pulled out all her colorful threads and demonstrated a new stitch without pushing me to try it myself.

  At ten-thirty Grandpa started to nod off and I opened my mouth in a convincing yawn. I pled traveler’s fatigue and shuffled off to the corner bedroom where I always slept under a creamy embroidered coverlet that belonged in a museum. As was my habit, I turned out the lamp and knelt in bed to say my prayers before lying down and closing my eyes. I wanted desperately to cry, to heave and scream like a steam engine, but the house was so quiet.

  An hour later I sat up and knelt amidst the covers, thinking maybe I could talk to God a little longer. But my gift for language deserted me and all my intricate thoughts burst into the air, pared and infantile. “Please help please help please help.” The tears came after that, great wrenching sobs filtered to fragments by Grandma’s deep goose down pillows.

  I don’t remember falling asleep, but I awoke abruptly without a single groggy blink, my mind’s eye still full of three curly coal-black heads shining in the sun, small, squealing, running through the sprinklers in front of my grandparents’ house, a vivid dream of the children I would one day cuddle and scold, a stunning snippet from the future: God’s answer to my strangled prayer. Ridiculous, of course; a dream’s a dream, no proof of truth, except every cell in my body somehow knew. It was an awful knowing. Even with a “C” in Biology, I understood that brown and blond seldom pick a trifecta of inky black.

  I held up my hand and looked at the ring on my finger, thought of the naïve, romantic girl who accepted it, and the determined woman who had kept her promise. I rubbed the ring with my thumb, the way married women do—half carat brilliant cut, good color, with a defect that could be seen with the naked eye, but only in direct sunlight. A month into the marriage I’d been waiting in the car and noticed a circle of dead light among the tiny prisms sliding around the dashboard. Examining my ring, I found a small dark spot on the stone. I puffed on it, rubbed it on my pants, and finally took it to a jeweler for cleaning. He confirmed what I already suspected, that the flaw ran deep under the surface. “It’s a beautiful ring, though,” he added. Too tired to start over with a new dark spot.

  I hadn’t seen the children’s faces. Maybe there had been unnoticed shadows that darkened their hair, making it appear black? It could be brown, a really dark brown, perhaps, if I got a better look. Brown was a genetic possibility, a ray of hope that all my efforts hadn’t been wasted.

  I thought again about what had happened at the airport, imagining the whole scene as it would appear in a movie. The actress who played me would stand looking at my husband, shocked at first, then her eyes would narrow slightly and she would stand straighter. Pulling the ring from her finger, she’d throw it in his face, or maybe the producer would switch the modest round diamond for a big sharp marquis she could drop down his pants with a flick of her wrist before she turned, smiling to herself, and stalked off in triumph, her feet striking the floor to a steady rock beat.

  It wouldn’t be what really happened. There had been no soundtrack, no Friday night chick-flick audience to whoop and holler, no simple, satisfying wrap-up in the interest of time. I twisted the ring around my finger. I’d never loved the design, too fussy for my taste. Up close it was flawed, I was flawed, he was flawed. Mostly my husband didn’t like to share or forgive. I’d realized too late about the forgiving. He believed he was marrying a goddess and never really got over waking up with a human being.

  At the beginning it worried me all the time, knowing he’d seen through my fraud. All my life the grownups had been impressed, pulling my pigtails, fondly chucking my chin, singling me out as special, without ever defining what that meant. I had some aptitudes, all arts-related, but couldn’t cut it at math or science, the classes where good students would end up making real money. In high school my American classmates had been more savvy, smelling insecurity on the new kid like blood in the water.

  Occasionally strong attraction prompted me to fight through the fear and open my mouth in front of a boy. I could hear the oddities that came out, but could never quite stop them in time, sometimes wished I’d been born mute.

  In college I reinvented myself, learned to bat my eyelashes as a party trick and enter the room like I owned it. I had plenty of friends in col
lege, a large collection of boyfriends. I smiled to myself as I tried to remember some of their names and faces. It struck me as funny that I never thought about my successful college days, but sometimes still blushed recalling the crammed catalogue of embarrassing moments known as high school.

  I rolled over on my side and picked at the tiny French knots dotted around the intricate floral pattern. What was I now, success or failure? My husband had seen through me early in our marriage. The shy, awkward girl was still in there and sometimes put in an appearance at a work party when he needed me to sparkle, to make him look good. He’d seen me for what I feared myself to be, ordinary, or maybe a little less.

  If I wanted I could give him that divorce, take my opportunity to stand up in the court of public opinion and provide plenty of evidence of his abuse. “Every day he belittled me, Your Honor. Stripped me down and picked my bones. Always harped on my insignificance.” I could hand over all kinds of facts, tell a memorable story that would make some people shake their heads and others cry. I could easily produce all the trappings, except a real victim. Under oath, though, I would have to add, “Scraping me free of all the charms that used to prop me up, he somehow revealed a woman I never knew existed. But he hasn’t spotted me quite yet.” At that point the story would lose momentum and the audience would walk away, grumbling, “She nearly had us there. Fool didn’t know when to quit.”

  I sat up and turned on the bedside lamp, hugging my knees and wondering if he would ever really look at me.

  Five minutes later I got out of bed and pulled my drawing case from my luggage. I knew I wasn’t a natural artist, never had more than a germ of talent, but I’d taken enough drawing classes in connection with my Fashion major that I could at least sketch creditably. I’ll never forget the electrifying day in my Portraits class when the model’s actual likeness appeared under my pencil. Since then I’ve tried to draw a bit every day, just to keep my hand in.