“Then guess again, just for fun. Which one will it be?” she says.
“Which house will publish the book that you haven’t yet written?” I ask, feeling once again as though Mr. Kafka is writing my life as I live it. “I don’t know.”
“Doesn’t it give you a rush to think that one of your former students might be published by a real New York City house someday? That your teaching might have a great ripple effect? That you may have encouraged a future New York Times best seller just when she needed it most? Haven’t you ever dreamed of that?” she says, looking up at me from under this very cute pink hat, and I suddenly realize that she is wearing matching lipstick, eyeliner, and some sort of blush. She’s done herself up to walk around NYC with me. Me. To Portia Kane, this day is worth makeup.
“So that’s your dream now—to be a fiction writer?”
“It’s always been, since I was in your class. We used to talk about it, remember?”
“No,” I say, even though I have a vague recollection.
“Haven’t you ever dreamed of becoming a published novelist? I mean you practically worshipped—”
“Never wanted to be a writer,” I say, too quickly, I admit.
“Well, I’m going to be published someday, and I’m going to dedicate the book to you. That’s a promise. You’ll want to stick around to see your name in print, right? Right at the beginning. ‘To Mr. Vernon, the good man who first helped me believe.’”
I stare at her and try to decide if she can possibly believe what she’s saying—promising to dedicate a book to me, a book she hasn’t even written, and guaranteeing that it will be published by one of the major houses in New York City. Aside from the dedication she has presumptuously penned before her dreamed-up novel, she probably hasn’t even written a paragraph since her brief college stint, almost twenty years ago. It’s a delusional promise at best, and probably psychotic otherwise. And yet she’s looking up at me with these wonderful, childlike believing eyes, bathing me in that rare gaze I used to receive from my most promising students, who were not necessarily the most intelligent or the best read or the ones who had previously studied under the cleverest teachers, but the ones whom Kerouac called the mad ones, the people who were crazy enough to do something outside of the norm, just because it was in them to do.
Before I can stop myself, I say, “Ms. Kane, I don’t want to speak about things I know little about anymore, and this doesn’t change a thing regarding my ability to answer the first question—but that just might be a spark in your eye I see now.”
When she smiles, a happy tear leaks out, and I instantly regret giving her hope. She doesn’t deserve it—she has done nothing but dream and look up at buildings with her suicidal former English teacher—and I know that hers will most likely be what Mr. Langston Hughes called a dream deferred.
“Maybe there’s one hiding in your eye now too—a spark,” Portia says.
I shake my head. “It’s a good dream for you, Ms. Kane. I hope you accomplish your goal. But this is your course, your dharma, if you will, not mine.”
“You started it. You turned me on to this—literature, writing,” she says.
I’m tempted to ask how many books she has read in the past year, how many words she has written, but I hold my tongue. This will all be over soon.
She takes me to Central Park, and we buy warm cashews and hot dogs from a vendor and eat on a park bench, neither of us saying much, and then we stroll, people-watching and feeling a bit awkward about everything—both of us, I can tell, because Portia seems to be running out of steam herself.
We watch the sun set through the barren trees, the dying light illuminating the melting piles of snow, and then we walk through darkness back to the hotel, order room service, and eat a light dinner in our suite before we resume drinking heavily from the mini fridge.
Three or four airplane bottles in, Portia says, “You don’t believe I’ll publish a novel, do you?”
“Plenty of people publish books every year,” I say, trying to skirt the question.
“But never the daughters of hoarders—fatherless girls who grow up across the street from the Acme. No, they marry abusive men who discard them when they grow to be middle-aged and wrinkled.”
“Perhaps you’ve had too many little bottles, Ms. Kane?”
“Do you know people used to say we slept together when you were my teacher?”
I don’t know what to say to that.
“That, apparently, was the rumor. I just found out. Why do you think people would say that?”
“Funny. I thought the rumor was that I was gay,” I say.
“Are you?”
“Would it matter to you?”
“No. I just—I mean, I wish you had someone in your life, like a lover. It would make all of this easier.”
“Saving my life?”
“Yes.”
“I was in love with Mrs. Harper, but she’s going to marry the butcher—and he doesn’t even know who Albert Camus is,” I say, and suddenly realize I am a bit drunk too. “I found out he popped the question right before you showed up. That and Albert Camus the dog’s suicide sort of triggered my . . . well, whatever we are in now.”
“What did you love about Mrs. Harper?”
“Her nose, mostly, I guess.”
“What?” Portia laughs.
I smile in spite of myself. “Mrs. Harper had a—well, a Jewish nose. And I have always been turned on by Jewish women, especially their noses, with the little bump. I don’t know why.”