“I’m sorry, I haven’t read them. I can, though.”
“No need to apologize. I’ll give you a list of books that would be helpful for you to read. Let’s start with nonfiction, actually. Forget Ben Jelloun and Bowles—they may be more of a distraction than anything else.”
“What’s it about?”
“I’m still working out a lot of the details. But it follows an American woman who drops everything and moves to Morocco to work for an old childhood friend. From there, of course, disaster ensues.” Helen smiled.
Florence, more relaxed from the wine, saw her opening. “I wanted to tell you that I love the way you write about female relationships.” That had been the line she’d been rehearsing in the car from the train station. Immediately after she said it, she worried that it sounded just as trite as she’d feared it would then.
“Well, it’s only because men don’t interest me very much,” Helen laughed.
A weighted silence fell on them.
“I don’t mean that I’m a lesbian,” Helen clarified. “I sleep with men. Occasionally. But I don’t care to have relationships with them. I’ve never found one…fascinating in the way I find women fascinating. Men are blunt objects. There’s no nuance there.
“I was dating a man once,” she went on, “and we went away for the weekend. At the hotel, I realized he didn’t have a clue how to tip—not the bellman, not the housekeeper, not the concierge. He kept asking me how much to give, when should he give it, who should he give it to. I found it so off-putting. I realized then that I could never be with a man who didn’t know how to tip. But then, later, I realized I couldn’t be with a man who tipped easily and smoothly either. What smugness. What satisfaction. So who does that leave?”
“Maybe there’s some middle category of tipper,” offered Florence.
“No. There’s no middle category of anything.”
Florence could think of countless middle categories—the whole world felt like a middle category to her—but she left it.
“Middle categories are for middling people,” said Helen, as if she could read Florence’s mind.
Soon only the greasy bones and ligaments remained on their plates. But they stayed at the table drinking the last of the wine. Their conversation had lost some of its early stiltedness. Outside, crickets screeched in a pulsing drone.
“Doesn’t it bother you that no one knows it’s you?” Florence asked when she could no longer resist. “That you wrote Mississippi Foxtrot?”
“Bene vixit, bene qui latuit.”
Florence nodded then said, “Sorry, what?”
“It’s Latin, from Ovid. It means, ‘He lives well who is well hidden.’”
“Oh.”
Helen laughed at Florence’s confusion. “Don’t mind me; I’m being needlessly cryptic. The short answer is no, I don’t mind that nobody knows I wrote Mississippi Foxtrot.”
“Why did you do it, though? What’s the point of all the secrecy?”
Helen lit a cigarette and turned her gaze toward the window. “Does it sound stupid? Not to me. But I was young. I wrote Foxtrot when I was in my mid-twenties. Your age, I guess.”
Florence couldn’t help interrupting: “So, wait. You’re only…thirty-three? Thirty-four?”
Helen laughed. “So much for social niceties. I’m thirty-two.”
Florence was surprised; Helen seemed older to her. Though now that she thought about it, there was a lot in Mississippi Foxtrot that had reminded her of her own adolescence. Some of Maud and Ruby’s classmates had had cell phones; Bush had been president. This realization brought with it a sinking sense of her own inadequacy; she wasn’t even close to having a story to tell, much less a best-seller. Maybe that’s why Helen seemed older; she’d accomplished so much more.
“Anyway,” Helen went on, oblivious to Florence’s distress, “I was living in Jackson then, working as a proofreader for a textbook company. I wrote it almost entirely during my lunch breaks. The crazy thing is, all I wanted was to move to New York and become a famous writer…just not for that book. That book I had to write. I had to get it out of me so I could move on.” She turned back to Florence. “Do you know how you get rid of a tapeworm?”
Florence shook her head.
“You go into a dark room, pitch black, and you hold a cup of warm milk in front of your face. Then the worm pokes its head out of your nose, and you have to grab it quick as you can and just start pulling. That’s what the process of writing Mississippi Foxtrot was like for me: violent, painful, grotesque. But, ultimately, healing.
“I didn’t want to arrive in New York associated with that book. I wanted a clean slate. I wanted to go somewhere where no one knew anything about Hindsville, Mississippi.”
Florence noted the name of the town.
“I thought I could just write that one book under a pseudonym and then move to New York and make my brilliant debut as Helen Wilcox. I had grand plans to write this massive, multigenerational novel about a family crossing the American West in the early nineteenth century. But no matter how many ways I tried to start it, I always got stuck. I couldn’t escape my own story.”
Helen pushed out her chair roughly and went to a cabinet near the fridge. She pulled out a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. She poured them sloppily, splashing a bit on the counter, and handed one to Florence.
“Anyway,” she went on, “I never foresaw the success of Mississippi Foxtrot. I couldn’t imagine one person being interested in that dusty little corner of the country, much less millions. I sent it out to agents mainly to get it out of my sight, so I could finally be rid of it. When I got a call back from Greta Frost, you could have knocked me over with a feather.
“Later, after it really started to sell, Greta got me a ridiculous advance for a second book, on the basis of absolutely nothing: a one-page plot summary that I can barely remember. That was over a year ago now. And of course they’re paying for the Maud Dixon name. That’s who the audience belongs to. It would ruin everything if I came forward and admitted who I was. People think they want the truth but they’re always disappointed. It is invariably less interesting than the mystery. Believe me, I’ve tried to convince Greta to let me do it under my own name, but she’s right; it just doesn’t make sense. I’m stuck with Maud Dixon for the rest of my life.”
“Where did the name come from, anyway?” Florence asked.
Helen tapped the ash from her cigarette onto her plate. “The Tennyson poem, Maud. Have you read it?”
Florence shook her head.
“You should. It’s wonderful. It’s a love story with all these strange, dark undertones. He describes Maud as ‘faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null.’ I just love that.”
“And Dixon?”
“My college roommate. It was her middle name.” Helen shrugged. “Couldn’t stand her, actually.”
“And did you keep in touch with Ruby after you left home?”
Helen smiled a wide, closed-lip smile that Florence would come to recognize well. “Florence, it’s just a novel.”