Demon

My cousin had, among his toys, a Sesame Street book about Grover, who was afraid of a monster at the end of the book. At each page Grover begged me not to go on, not to turn another page, and of course I couldn’t resist. I was so enamored with the book that I wanted to take it with me on the car ride home. My aunt gamely told me I could have it, and though my parents protested, and my cousin, two years younger than me, started to cry, I wanted that book so much that I made the situation worse by continuing to ask for it. I knew my mother would scold me later, but I didn’t care; I wanted to read it again and again with wild anticipation, Grover begging me at each turn not to go farther.

There’s a monster!

I didn’t care about the last page when Grover, alone at the end of the book, realized that he was the monster. It was the pages leading up to it that fueled my little heart, that kept me turning, fixated, despite repeated warnings.

And then I dreamed I was at my desk, thumbing through proposals stacked in towers nearly as tall as I, through manuscripts five thousand pages long. Peeking out from between two boxed manuscripts, I saw the thin book with its cartoon Muppet character. I picked it up and began to read.

There’s a monster.

21

Voices drifted from the Bristol Lounge, punctuated every few seconds by the trilling laugh of a woman. I ambled toward that sound, feeling like an outsider.

I had loved to come to the Four Seasons in my first years as an editor. I was writing the Coming Home books then and used to imagine the day when I would spend every Friday afternoon in the Bristol Lounge’s overstuffed chairs, perhaps in front of the fireplace if it were cold outside, expensive brandy rolling inside the snifter in my hand. There I would take drinks with fellow writers or my own editor—perhaps even an interviewer from the Paris Review.

It was four years now since I had last been here to take Aubrey’s mother to enjoy salmon sandwiches, miniature tarts, and scones with clotted cream, all part of a high tea that we could barely afford.

I half expected the hostess to give me a polite but distant look, to say that they were full, so sorry, that I might try the Irish pub down the street. But she smiled and led me to an out-of-the-way nook just off the bar lined by a long, red leather seat. Between the bronze upholstery tacks along the back of the seat and the book-lined shelves above it, the polished cherry wood of the table and the attendant cozy chairs pulled up on the other side, the little nook gave off the flavor of an elegant personal library.

In another life, one filled with editor and writer friends, I could have claimed this corner as my own, reserved it each week to hold court and take that brandy, to grant that rare interview.

Tonight there would be no editors, no interviews, no brandy.

But there would be, at least, dessert. I ordered coffee and then got up to drift between tables of tortes and pastries and cheesecake and ice creams at that famous dessert buffet, returning ultimately with a glorious bowl of hot pumpkin bread pudding that was even now melting a scoop of maple ice cream into a white moat in the dish.

From where I sat, I had a direct view of the grouping of cushy chairs in front of the piano, where five women exchanged Christmas gifts over likewise melting desserts. The gift bags and boxes were wrapped with tulle and sprigs of fresh evergreen and yielded items like silver bowls, a polished wooden jewelry box, a Hermes-style scarf. On the hand of every woman was a rock so large I could see it from my corner, shining like a beacon.

Beyond the group, a long expanse of windows looked out onto the street and into the Public Garden beyond. I used to love the order of those flower beds with their iron ropes, the manicured lawns and spiral-cut shrubs. But now they seemed as meticulous and indifferent as a cemetery, as unnatural as the perfectly embalmed visage of a corpse.

“I’m afraid I’m the late one this time.” A young man hurried into my morbid reverie and pulled out one of the cozy chairs. He was dapper in navy blue pants and a button-down shirt, his tie loosened so that it hung askew in a way that reminded me faintly of a noose. He might have been an intern fresh out of college; he had the mischievous, spring-faced look of an Ivy League a capella singer, a Harvard Din and Tonic or a Brown Derby. His hair, a light chestnut, curled around his face and over his ears in a way that might have looked like a dirty halo if the wind caught it just right. Like a doll-faced cherub. When he sat down, he crossed his ankle over his knee and fell back into the leather as though, at the ripe age of—what, twenty-one?—he had had a long day.

“Why are you so tired?” I said, a bit put out. I had come straight from eleven hours at the office on only five hours of sleep the night before.