Wild Orchids Read online

  I had to remind myself of those words several times during the next months. I even typed them on a piece of paper and hung them on the wall above the typewriter. At some point, Pat wrote “Amen!” at the bottom.

  I never went back to my classroom full of non-English-speaking students. At first Pat called in sick for me, and for a week she took over the class, but after the third student asked her to marry him so he could stay in the U.S., she quit. And she told them that I quit, too.

  The book took me six months to write, and during that time I didn’t come up for air. I saw Pat but I didn’t see her. As far as I remember, we had no conversations. I didn’t think about how she was managing to pay the bills without my income, but I imagine her father helped. I really don’t know. My book was all the life I had.

  When it was done, I turned to Pat where she was curled up on the end of the couch reading, and said, “I finished it.” While I was writing, she’d never asked to read a word of the book and I’d never offered to show it to her. Now, shyly, feeling sheepish, I said, “Would you like to read it?”

  Instantly, she said, “No,” and I nearly collapsed on the floor. What had I done? Did she hate me? In the seconds before she spoke again, I imagined at least a dozen reasons why she didn’t want to read my book—all of them bad.

  “Early tomorrow we’re driving to Dad’s house and you’re going to read the whole book aloud to both of us,” she said.

  I stared at her for a few silent moments. It was one thing to bare my soul to her but to her father?! I searched for some excuse that would get me out of it. “But what about your job? You can’t miss school. Those kids need you.”

  “It’s summer. School’s out,” she said, without a trace of humor in her voice.

  It was a six-hour drive to her father’s house, and I was so nervous that after I ran into the left lane the second time, Pat took over driving. By the time we got there, all the blood had left my face, my hands and my feet.

  Pat’s father was waiting for us with fat turkey sandwiches, but I knew that if I took a bite, I’d choke. Pat seemed to understand. She put her father on the sofa, and me in a chair, then she dropped the first half of my manuscript on my lap. Without a word, she settled herself on the sofa beside her father, full plates on their laps.

  “Read,” she said as she took a bite.

  That manuscript needed a lot of work. It was full of dangling participles, and contained thousands of ambiguous antecedents. I’d been writing so fast that I forgot to put in “he said” and “she said,” so sometimes it was difficult to figure out who was talking. And my dates were all mixed up. I had people being born after they were married. I would have a character named John and twenty pages later I’d call him George. And I don’t even want to think about the misspellings and typos.

  But for all the errors, the book had something that all my previous work hadn’t. At the sixth chapter I looked up and saw that Pat’s father had tears running down his cheeks. The book had heart. My heart. And in writing about what was inside me, I had at last broken up that huge, hard structure that had been living inside my chest. I had put the ugly thing, molecule by molecule, onto paper.

  Night came, Pat put a glass of iced tea by my hand and I kept on reading, and when my voice gave out, she took the pages from me and began to read out loud herself. When the sun came up, I took over again while Pat scrambled eggs and toasted half a loaf of bread. When anyone went to the bathroom, we all went down the hall together and stood outside the door, never breaking in the rhythm of reading.

  The housekeeper came at nine A.M., but Pat’s father told her to go home and we kept on reading. When Pat finished the book at a little after four that afternoon, she leaned back in the chair and waited for our verdicts as though she were the writer and we the jury.

  “Brilliant,” Pat’s father whispered. “Martha has been avenged.”

  His opinion was important to me, but it was the opinion of the love of my life, Pat, that I wanted to hear. But she didn’t say a word. Instead, she set the pages on the floor, got up and walked out the front door, taking the car keys and her handbag off the foyer table as she left.

  Her behavior was so odd that I wasn’t even hurt by it. The book had been about her mother so maybe Pat was upset, I thought. Or maybe—

  “Women!” Pat’s father said, and that seemed to sum it up.

  “Yeah. Women,” I said.

  “What’d’ya say we get drunk?” my father-in-law asked and I’d never heard a more pleasing suggestion in my life.

  By the time Pat returned an hour and a half later, he and I were downing shots of bourbon at an alarming pace, and he was telling me that he thought my book was the best one ever written. “Second only to the Bible,” he said.

  “You mean it?” I asked, my arm around him. “You really, really mean it?”

  When Pat walked into the kitchen carrying two big bags with Office Max printed on them, she took one look at us and told us we were disgusting.

  “But you didn’t like my book,” I wailed, the booze having dissolved my manly charade.

  “Nonsense!” Pat said, taking the bottle and glasses off the table and placing a huge pizza box before us. She opened it to reveal a giant pizza covered with hot sausage and three colors of peppers—my favorite.

  It wasn’t until later, after I’d thrown up and shared the pizza with Pat’s father, who then went straight to bed to sleep it off, that I realized Pat had taken her other bags and disappeared. I found her in the dining room, the table covered with pens, papers, and my manuscript.

  My head ached and my stomach was queasy, and I was beginning to worry because she still hadn’t made even one comment about my book. “What are you doing?” I asked, trying to sound everyday and as though I didn’t want to jump up and down and scream, “Tell me! Tell me! Tell me!”

  “I’m editing,” she said, looking up at me. “Ford, it’s the best book I’ve ever read, but even I could hear the errors in it. You and I are going over it sentence by sentence and correct it, and when it’s done we’re sending it to a publishing house.”

  “To my agent,” I murmured. Best book, she’d said. Best book.

  “That pompous little windbag?”

  I had no idea she didn’t like the man.

  “No,” Pat said. “I am going to be your agent.”

  “You?” I said, and, unfortunately, it came out sounding like I didn’t believe that she, a high school chemistry teacher, could, overnight, become a literary agent.

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “If you can become a writer, I can become an agent.”

  “Sure, honey,” I said, reaching out to take her hand. I’d call my agent first thing in the morning.

  Removing her hand from my grasp, she looked back at the manuscript. “Patronize me all you want, but while you’ve been writing I’ve been thinking and I know I can do it. All I ask is that you give me the chance.” When she turned to me, her eyes were fierce, determined, almost scary. “I have no talent,” she said in a hard tone I’d never heard her use before. “And I’ll never have children. I have nothing but you and your talent to thank God for four times a day.” She put her hand on the tall two-box stack of typed pages. “You don’t know it yet but this is brilliant. And I know that right now, this minute, is my one chance in life. I can step back and become the writer’s wife and be stuck at the end of the table with all the other stars’ spouses—or I can become your partner. Maybe I can’t write, but I’m better with numbers and money than you are, and I can organize anything. You write and I’ll take care of the rest of it. I’ll take care of contracts and promotion and defined benefit plans and royalties and—”

  She stopped talking and looked at me. “Do we have a deal?” she asked softly, but her voice was full of steel. She wanted this as much as I wanted to write.

  “Yes,” I said, but when she put out her hand to shake mine, I kissed her palm, then her wrist, then I ran my lips all the way up her arm. We ended up making love on her