abortion, takes a job teaching art to teenagers at an international school in southern France, and becomes romantically involved with the headmaster. It was based, in part, on Jane Eyre—the headmaster is married, and his wife, a gifted painter who suffers from bouts of depression and mania, lives in seclusion in a cottage near the school—but, as Seana made clear in the question-and-answer period after the reading, when she reminded the audience that instead of marrying the headmaster, her heroine murders him and gets away with it—‘Reader, I buried him,’ was the book’s opening line—her novel was intended not as homage to Charlotte Brontë, but as Seana’s way of using a situation she found intrinsically intriguing—another one of O’Sullivan’s triangles, she allowed—to get at the dark side of matters that, in her opinion, Brontë had turned into sentimental nonsense. ‘Mawkish’ was the word she used to describe Brontë’s book, and afterwards—we had drinks together in her hotel’s bar—she confided that although what gave her the most pleasure in life was the act of writing itself, she did love getting a rise out of audiences by being mildly outré.
“Outré?” I asked.
“Outrageous, eccentric,” she said. She was aware that people thought her books weird, which didn’t hurt sales, and the good sales gave her the freedom to write what she wanted to write, and to live the way she wanted to live. The truth, though, was that she never thought of her books as being weird.
“I’m essentially a realist,” she said, after which, watching for my response—which was no response at all, since even if I’d been sober at the time, I don’t think I would have understood what she meant about Triangle or Plain Jane being realistic novels—she began giggling. Then she leaned toward me and kissed me on the mouth, very gently, and I was so stunned that all I could do was sit there and grin. “You can kiss me back if you’d like,” she said, and I did, and we kissed for a long time until, a finger to my forehead, she pushed me away from her. “That was very good, Charlie,” she said, and she wished me sweet dreams, and left.
Now, when I looked up at her from my bed, I saw that her reddish-brown hair was still cut page-boy style, that her eyebrows, which she never plucked or trimmed, were as dark and thick as ever, and that she had not had a chipped front tooth repaired. I’d always admired her for leaving the tooth the way it was because its imperfection had the effect of making me aware of how weirdly beautiful the rest of her was.
“It’s my apostrophe,” she had explained once when I asked about it. While playing stickball with some guy-friends in Holy Cross schoolyard in Brooklyn, near where she grew up—which wasn’t far from where Max had grown up—she’d broken off a corner of the tooth, and the resulting shape—“Why it’s a giant white apostrophe!” her high school English teacher at the time, a nun named Sister Maureen, had said—seemed a good thing for a writer to hang on to, Seana had theorized, since in addition to representing something that had been omitted—and wasn’t what a writer chose to leave out more important than what he or she chose to leave in?—the word derived from the Greek, and signified a turning away from a large audience in order to direct your words to one person in particular.
“Hey Charlie,” she said a moment after I opened my eyes.
“Hey Seana,” I said.
She caressed my forehead and said she hoped we were still friends.
“Why wouldn’t we still be friends?” I asked.
“Well, for starters, I took over your room for a while, though I’ve since relocated to the third floor guest room.”
“Then you’re not…” I began, and stopped. “I mean, you and my father have separate rooms.”
“Sure.”
“I just…”
“You really are an innocent, aren’t you?”
“That’s what Max always says.”
She leaned down, brushing my forehead with a kiss, and said that I’d had a long trip and probably wanted to wash up and get myself settled before dinner. She’d brought my bags up to the room, and there was a glass of ice water and a snack—cheese and crackers and assorted goodies she’d left on my desk—and later, after I got my bearings, she had something she wanted to show me.
I looked at the clock on my bureau, saw that it was nearly seven, but the shades were drawn, and I wasn’t sure if it was seven in the morning or the evening.
She saw the puzzled look on my face. “It’s evening,” she said.
“How long was I asleep?”
“Three hours, maybe four. I’m not sure exactly when you arrived, but you were buzzing away—beautiful Z’s—when I returned from the library. You’re good at it.”
“Good at it?”
“At sleeping. It’s a talent I wish I had.”
I sat up. “What’s the surprise?”
“No surprise. Just something I’d like your opinion on.”
“That’s all you want?”
“Don’t get fresh with me, young man,” she said. “But yes, that’s all I want—your opinion on something I’d prefer not to ask your father about, all right?”
“Sure.”
“And there is one other thing.” She opened the door to leave. “Some time—whenever, as they say these days—I want your story. I want you to tell me your story.”
“Sure,” I said. And then: “Is this the way you usually get material for your books—do you go around collecting stories from everyone you meet?”
“Not at all.”
“Then why…?”
“Why?” She shrugged, and when she spoke again she did so without looking at me. “Why? Because I guess I figure it’s the quickest, best way for you and me to get to know each other now that we’ve both grown up.”
For dinner, my father made one of our favorites—blanquette de veau, with a spinach and wild mushroom salad on the side—and he served it with a smooth, light-bodied Italian wine. I was still in the grogs from the long flight home, and the wine kept me there, but my father and Seana were in high spirits, especially when they went on riffs where they imagined the way various of his colleagues (some of whom had been Seana’s teachers) might have reacted to the tag sale, and to the deal he and Seana had reached on the morning of the tag sale.
In general, they agreed, most English department faculty members had little use for living writers, though they didn’t mind the cachet that came their way from knowing a writer who’d become a celebrity like Seana, or—what they got off on even more—being able to tell people they were friends with a colleague whose novel had been turned into a movie. In this, Seana said, they were like most people, thinking the highest compliment they could pay you was to say your book would make a great movie—as if novels were merely movies manqués.
“Is that why you made sure your first novel would be one that could not be made into a movie?” I asked.
“Not at all,” Seana said. “It certainly could
