Who is Maud Dixon?
Alexandra Andrews
For Chris
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.
—W. B. Yeats
“The Stare’s Nest by My Window”
PREFACE
Semat, Morocco
Madame Weel-cock?”
Her left eyelid wrenched open, and warm yellow light flooded into the crack. Her vision was crossed by a blurred figure in white. She shut her eye.
“Madame Weel-cock?”
A shrill beeping sounded from somewhere. She forced both eyes open this time. She was lying in an uncomfortable bed flanked by two dirty curtains.
“Madame Weel-cock?”
She turned her head stiffly. A man in what looked like a military uniform sat in a chair pulled up to the bed, leaning forward onto his thighs and watching her intently. His face had the puffed, plastic curves of a baby doll. He was not smiling.
“Madame Weel-cock,” he said for the fourth time.
“Helen?” she asked in a patchy voice.
“Helen.” He nodded. “Do you know where you are?”
She looked around. “Hospital?”
“That’s right. You had the big night.”
“The big night?”
“The very big night.”
She let out a small, involuntary laugh. The man frowned, visibly annoyed. Then the curtain on her left swished open. They both turned their heads. A woman in a white headscarf and white jacket stepped through. A nurse? She leaned over the bed and smiled warmly. She said something in a foreign language and smoothed out the thin blanket.
Then she turned to the man at the bedside and said something to him in a sharper tone. He stood up, holding out his palms in appeasement. He smiled coldly and pushed the curtain aside. He was gone.
The young woman in the bed turned to the nurse, but she too was leaving.
“Wait,” she called hoarsely. The nurse either didn’t hear her or didn’t heed her.
She was alone.
Her gaze settled on the ceiling. It was mottled with brown water spots. She tried to push herself up to a sitting position but found herself hindered by a cast on her left wrist. That’s when she noticed that she was in pain. Everywhere.
She looked back at the empty chair the man had sat in. He had called her Madame Weel-cock. The information seemed significant, but she couldn’t place it within any meaningful context. She shut her eyes again.
A few moments later—or perhaps it had been hours—the curtain opened again. The nurse had returned with a different man.
“Madame Wilcox,” he said. “I am glad you are awake.” He spoke English with more precision than most native speakers, each syllable demarcated crisply from the next. “I am Dr. Tazi. I was on call when you arrived last night with two fractured ribs, a broken wrist, and hematomas across your face and torso. I was told you had been in a car accident. We often see injuries like these caused by airbags. You are lucky they are not worse.”
The nurse, as if waiting for her cue, presented a Dixie cup of water and a white pill the size of a molar.
“Hydrocodone. For the pain,” the doctor said. “I will return this afternoon to assess your condition, but I do not foresee any reason to keep you past tomorrow. Until then you should rest, Madame Wilcox.” He left, trailing the white-robed nurse behind him like a veil.
Madame Wilcox. She mouthed the name silently. Helen.
Then the light withdrew and sleep descended.
PART I
1.
Two young women climbed a narrow set of stairs toward the sound of laughter and music. Florence Darrow, in front, dragged her hand along the blood-red wall.
“There’s something perverse about throwing publishing parties here,” she said.
Both women worked as editorial assistants at Forrester Books, and tonight was the office holiday party, held every year on the second floor of a dark bar called The Library, where the theme was literary kitsch.
“It’s like having a United Nations summit at EPCOT.”
“Totally,” agreed Lucy Gund in a small voice. Her dress had hitched up on her tights during the climb, and now it was bunched around her thighs.
They reached the top of the stairs and stepped in to survey the scene. The party had started only half an hour earlier, but already a noisy din rose from the crowd and hung above it like smog. Nearly a hundred people—some who worked with them, many who didn’t—clustered in tightly packed groups. Florence hadn’t wanted to get there too early, but she wished they had arrived in time to stake out a corner for themselves. The girls scanned the room, looking for familiar and approachable faces. They found none.
“Drink first?” Florence suggested. Lucy nodded.
The two women had started at Forrester at the same time, nearly two years ago, and Lucy had immediately granted Florence her unconditional loyalty.
On paper, Lucy was just the type of friend Florence had hoped to make in New York. Lucy had grown up in Amherst, where both her parents taught in the college’s English department. Her father had written the definitive biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Florence had spent her first Thanksgiving with them after moving to the city; she’d been delighted to find that their old, book-filled house lay just down the road from Emily Dickinson’s. It was the type of intellectual idyll Florence had always wished she’d grown up in herself. It was everything her mother’s cramped apartment in Port Orange was not.
In practice, however, Lucy lacked the confident sophistication that Florence assumed would be the natural inheritance of a childhood like that. She was painstakingly shy, and Florence sometimes suspected that Lucy’s mother had told her to find just one friend in New York and she’d be fine. Florence had been the first person Lucy met at Forrester.
They had never really been incorporated into the company’s larger social scene, mainly because Lucy hadn’t tried and Florence hadn’t succeeded. Since Florence had also cut off contact with her old friends from Florida—she thought of her past as a gangrenous limb that needed to be severed for the greater good—Lucy was, for all intents and purposes, her only friend.
They wormed their way through the crowd, past a long table piled with grapes and cheeses, toward an imposing mahogany bar in the back. A bartender in a black satin vest smiled at some point just above their heads. They did not, apparently, meet the qualifications for his undivided attention. Lucy was used to being overlooked—in fact seemed to prefer it—but Florence had had just enough success with men to be disappointed when her charms went unnoticed.
Florence was not unattractive, but without exception the first thing anyone noticed about her was her pallor. She looked like someone who had grown up in a bunker rather than the Florida sunshine. Evidence that she had been born in the wrong place, she often thought with satisfaction. Her fair skin flushed easily, whether with shyness or fervor was never quite clear, as if her creator had been torn between the competing impulses of purity and perversion. Some men found this effect entrancing, but many were put off. She also had dark, nearly black eyes and dirty blond curls that sprang from her head like Medusa’s. Despite the hundreds of dollars her mother had spent over the years on gels, sprays, and holding creams, Florence still had not learned how to tame them.
“What’ll it be, ladies?” the bartender asked in a practiced tone. The light glinted off the stiffened spikes of his hair. Florence imagined crunching them under her fingers like frost-covered grass.