tightly to the stem of her wine glass, Seana leaned across the table. “So tell me something, Charlie,” she said. “Do you enjoy seeing beautiful landscapes despoiled and ravaged? Do you take pleasure in seeing men, women, and children exploited and driven to early graves in order to provide lubricants for our machines, and poisons for our food and arteries? Do you take pride in your portion of responsibility for the deadly conditions that prevail in the enchanted world you’ve been inhabiting?”
“Of course not,” I said, and resisted the urge to start talking about just what I did feel about Borneo and palm oil. “It’s complicated,” I said. “If you’d been there you’d understand that it’s very complicated…”
“What isn’t?” Seana said. “Nevertheless, our conversation has served to put me in mind once again of George Sand, a woman rarely far from my thoughts, and in particular—the obvious inspiration for the accusatory grilling I’ve just subjected you to—of her dying words: Ne détruisez pas la verdure.”
“Do not destroy the greenery,” my father said.
“I don’t need a translator,” Seana snapped. “And ‘greenery’ stinks—doesn’t begin to capture what she meant.”
“When Seana was considering continuing on for a doctorate,” my father explained, “she talked of writing her dissertation on George Sand.”
“On Sand and Eliot,” Seana said, correcting him. “The two great Georges. Gorgeous Georges? Curious Georges? Our own Ms. Oates notwithstanding, George Sand, you will recall—Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, and for greater part of her adult life, the Baroness Dudevant—was the most prolific female author in history. Nobody reads her anymore, though I would point out that Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, a man of exceptional erudition and discernment—like you, Professor Max—admired her enormously.”
“As did many men,” my father said.
“Truly and duly noted,” Seana said, her voice slurred. “Pagello above all.” Seana turned to me. “Pagello was an Italian doctor—a country doctor, but not out of Kafka, and he fell in love with Sand, and she transported him with her across Italy and lived with him in Paris, and then she ditched him, and he returned to Venice, where he married and fathered children. He died at the age of ninety-one, nearly sixty years later. Your father once considered writing a novel about him.”
“That’s true,” Max said.
“Actually, I know who you’re talking about,” I said. “I saw a movie about him where he gets to shag Juliet Binoche. A piss-poor movie, if you ask me.”
“A novel manqué? my father asked.
“Mutilé would be more like it,” Seana said. “And as for you, Max—didn’t I hear you say it was past your bedtime?”
Seana stood, steadied herself by leaning on the table, said that it was true that she and I had things to talk about, and that, to prepare herself, she would now proceed to brew a cup of coal-black coffee.
She swayed a bit as she made her way to the kitchen, stopping at my chair, where she touched my shoulder briefly, even as my father said again what a joy it was to have me home. He wished us both pleasant dreams, and headed upstairs.
The list Seana gave me—titles with brief one-sentence explanatory tags attached to them, like log-lines you see in television listings for movies—was in her handwriting, which was exquisitely graceful, a skill of small value, she asserted, and one shared by most girls who’d survived a childhood of Catholic schools. My father’s full list—titles with and without the tags—was extensive, she said. Amazing, actually—page after page of titles and snippets in search of authors and stories—so that what she’d done was to choose a baker’s dozen that on a first reading seemed the most obviously promising, and, more to the point, ones that she liked to imagine Max had had in mind for her—for novels he imagined she might imagine into being were she to come across them one day.
What she wanted from me was not my opinion—how could one have an opinion of an unwritten novel that might be based on a title and a squiggle of words?—but my immediate and, more important, my unreflective reactions.
Because what made me an ideal collaborator, she added pointedly, was that she believed me capable of a truly thoughtless response.
“Thanks,” I said.
She stared past me with glazed eyes, then blinked. “Okay,” she said, as if she were waking up. “You’re right. Okay then. I’ve thought about this and here’s what I’ve come to—that I’ve never collaborated with anyone before, so I’m doubtless wary of doing so, and covering my wariness—my sadness? my fear?—with aggression. A familiar pattern because—and I’m on a slight roll now, Charlie, so don’t interrupt, please—unlike Mister James, a writer more generously sociable than most, who wrote that the port from which he set out was the essential loneliness of life—hardly an unusual journey for an Irishman—I’ve always believed my compass was set in an opposite direction: that the port to which I’ve been heading was the essential loneliness of my life. Can you understand that?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes,” she repeated, and she pushed several pieces of paper across the table. “So here’s the list—what I wanted to ask you about. And now that I’ve given it to you, do you know what that makes me?”
“List-less?”
“It is apparent that you are more your father’s son than either of you understand.”
“Maybe. But consider this too—that because you made your deal with him, he’s become listless too.”
She tapped on the list with the eraser end of a pencil. “To the task at hand, young man,” she said. “Read them and then tell me, please: Which ones appeal most? Which ones seem of no interest? Which ones inspire your curiosity, and—question numéro uno—which one do you think I should use as the basis for my next novel—or, to make it easier on you, why don’t you choose three, say—but in ranked order of preference.”
I picked up the pages.
“Is that too much to ask?” she said. “Too much responsibility for an innocent young guy like you?”
“Innocent and thoughtless,” I said, correcting her.
“Oh Charlie,” she said. “You shouldn’t take my words as seriously as I sometimes do. I was just trying to get a rise out of you. My apologies—okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
This is the list she gave me:
Pagello’s Surgery. Memoirs of an aging Italian country doctor who had once been George Sand’s lover.
A Missing Year. A veteran of the Korean War, suffering intermittently from suicidal impulses, returns home to Kansas in order to marry a fellow soldier’s widowed wife even while he struggles to come to terms with the death of that soldier, an act of murder he may or may not have imagined.
Hector on 9/11. Story of a Puerto Rican teenager who, on the day the World Trade Center towers come down, has an exceptionally successful 24 hours of romance with his social studies teacher
