The Words I Never Wrote Read online

  Sometimes she didn’t recognize herself.

  Juno thought of her friends, her contacts, her beloved apartment two floors above a bakery, whose aroma was the first thing to greet you as you walked out the door. Then she imagined a new life in L.A. as one of Dan’s entourage. The hangers-on and admirers, the late nights, the times when the only chance of seeing him would be pitching up to his trailer, or in a stupor of sleep before a predawn call.

  They argued until they were barely speaking. The apartment was so small it was hard to avoid each other, but Dan managed it, flinching infinitesimally if her hand brushed his, waiting until she had finished in the bathroom rather than barging in as he used to and jokily sharing the basin. Tension hummed like tinnitus in the air. A wall of silence descended between them, cutting off further discussion. Until, eventually, the start of filming arrived. At JFK Dan’s parting words lingered as if written in neon on the air.

  You can come with me or you can stay here without me. Up to you.

  Up to you.

  Three little words, but not the three she really wanted to hear.

  * * *

  —

  JUNO WAS JERKED FROM her thoughts by the approach of a man from behind the partition. He was a bulky figure in thick spectacles and suspenders with a sunburned face, a shock of white hair, and fingers stained with ink the way a smoker’s are yellowed by nicotine. He glanced down at the lime green typewriter.

  “The Hermes 3000. You have good taste. Thing about this one, it lasts. It’ll serve you a hundred years. What computer lasts a hundred years?”

  Could he tell that her laptop had just been hacked? Or was the question merely rhetorical? He bent closer and started to fiddle with the machinery, as delicately as if it had been a Swiss clock.

  “Here. To unlock the carriage simply move it to the right. You know how to move the marginal stops, right? Adjust the centering scales? Change a ribbon? Takes an Ellwood ribbon.”

  Surely it was obvious that she couldn’t change a ribbon or operate the paper-centering scales or a marginal stop release button to save her life.What was more, she didn’t have the faintest intention of learning. Writing had never been her way into the world. Pictures were.

  Juno drifted over to another machine and ran her fingers across it. This one was smaller than the Hermes and in every way more perfect. Its sleek black enamel was as shiny as a fountain pen, the casing buffed to a Mercedes gleam.

  “That’s the Underwood Portable. It’s Jazz Age, the 1931.”

  “How much is it?”

  The old man blew out his cheeks and glanced up through his thick lenses. He took a while to consider this proposition, crossing his arms and slapping them against his torso, as if he were cold. Juno sighed. This was supposed to be a store, wasn’t it, that sold things? Yet this guy was acting as though she had requested something outlandish. She might as well have asked him to part with a piece of his soul.

  “This machine belonged to a special lady. She was quite well known.”

  No doubt he was planning to charge a fortune and was stalling to calculate how much.

  “Would I have heard of her?”

  “Cordelia Capel, her name was.”

  The name did ring a distant bell. It came with a wash of sepia, and a musty sense of something Juno might have seen in her grandmother’s home. A stash of Life magazines. A whisper of lavender and sandalwood.

  “She was a newswoman. Old-school. Covered the war in Europe before she moved here.”

  Instantly, Juno’s interest was piqued. She had already decided that she would buy the typewriter as a piece of décor. It would look intriguing and classy in the apartment, and she was going to put it on the table where Dan, until recently, had kept all the statuettes and blocks of glass and abstract bronze shapes that testified to his theatrical success. The awards were always the first things guests saw when they walked into the apartment, so they always became the talking point, but now their guests—her guests—were going to see a piece of history instead. The fact that this machine belonged to a semifamous journalist made it all the more a conversation starter. Might a typewriter retain the imprint of the creative process—some phantom trace of the person who once had used it?

  “This lady, when she arrived here in the States, swore she never wanted to set foot in Europe again after what she’d seen. Which was sad, because all her folks came from there.”

  “That’s awful. My brother lives in England and I can’t imagine not seeing him again. But I suppose it was different then. Harder to travel…” Juno paused expectantly, wondering how much more small talk was needed. “So is the typewriter for sale?”

  Still the old guy hesitated.

  “You know, you could get a better-looking machine than this. I would have said an Olivetti might suit a lady like yourself. I have a very nice one over here….”

  “It’s this one I like,” Juno said politely.

  “This particular model is not the most sophisticated. If you took the Hermes 3000, a lot of people would say that is the greatest typewriter of all time.”

  Juno sensed her stubborn streak harden. The one her mother always said was her “problem.” The one that had stopped her flying to L.A. with Dan and kept her marinating in misery in the New York apartment.

  “I don’t want a Hermes. I like this one. I can feel something about it…” She faltered.

  The old man squinted at her. He had an uncomfortably penetrating gaze, yet he seemed to have reached a decision because he nodded and said, “You’re right, there is something special about this one. Come back here and I’ll show you.”

  He picked up the typewriter, carried it through the glass door at the back of the shop, and set it down on a workbench buried under a jungle of keys, cogs, ribbons, and levers. A younger man was perched there, eviscerating a Corona that rested with its keys elevated, guts spilling out, alongside discarded spigots and sprockets.

  “My name is Joe Ellis, by the way. That’s my son Paul.”

  The old man took her hand and she shook it. The son nodded.

  “Juno Lambert.”

  “Well, Miss Lambert, this model comes with a carrying case. Here.”

  From beneath the bench he brought up a square, heavy case, its dark leather faded and stained. From the inside came a close smell of must and the faintest trace of perfume.

  “When we looked, we found this.”

  It was a manila envelope, from which he withdrew a wad of paper, three inches thick and slightly yellowing.

  “What is it?”

  “Looks a lot like a novel to me.”

  Juno peered closer. It appeared to be about a hundred and fifty pages of single-sided, typewritten script. No title, but typed on the top page was a dedication.

  For Hans. Forgive me.

  “Do you think she meant to leave it there?”

  Joe Ellis shrugged. “Miss Capel was almost a hundred when she died. Who knows what people intend at that age? My guess is, she forgot about it.”

  Juno picked up the manuscript and riffled the pages. They were scuffed and battered at the edges, the corners starting to curl like dead leaves.

  “I’ve taken a look at it,” Joe Ellis added. “I’d say she never finished it. But then not all stories are straightforward, are they? They don’t always have a neat ending. Perhaps it’s one of those stories that finishes off the page, rather than on it.”

  “This lady was a journalist, you say. Wonder what prompted a novel?”

  “Perhaps she finally got the time. From what I see, journalism’s always in a rush—always having to respond to events, or wars or politics. Reckon fiction is a slower business. Guess it’s like a rock, gathers layers, can’t be hurried.”

  “What about her family? Shouldn’t they have this?”

  “No family around, as far as Paul and I ca
n tell. We’ve had this machine a coupla years now. It came from a house clearance. I’m afraid I wasn’t in town at the time—I was in Washington looking at a 1913 Sphinx, mint condition—so my son here bought the machine and it wasn’t until that evening that I took a look. Right away I said to Paul, ‘Hey, these pages could be valuable to someone,’ so Paul called the clearance company, but they weren’t interested. Suggested we toss them in the trash.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “My thought exactly. We held on to it ever since.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s valuable, if someone put work into it, it deserves…” Juno paused, looking down at the stack of paper. “I don’t know what it deserves, but whether it’s a memoir or a novel, if it’s taken all that time to write, it deserves at least to be read.”

  A small, satisfied smile cracked the walnut face. “Glad you see it that way.”

  He reached for an envelope on the desk.

  “There were a couple of old clippings in the case too. Pieces she wrote. Might as well have a look at them too. We don’t take credit cards, I’m afraid. Just cash or check.”

  Chapter Two

  Juno battled her way through a river of people along the cross street toward the subway and down the steps. The midday sun was bouncing off the steel and granite, and already her arm was aching from carrying the typewriter case. How ever did old-style journalists manage to lug these objects around with them? She thought wistfully of her laptop, light as a feather. Then she reminded herself it was about as useful as a feather quill for the moment, where writing was concerned.

  * * *

  —

  HER APARTMENT WAS IN a great location—Upper East Side, two blocks from the park—but the address was the only great thing about it. Its three narrow rooms were entirely inadequate for the accumulated possessions of several years, and it was only the exercise of strict minimalism that kept it habitable. Luckily, Juno had worked out a kind of stark classicism—white walls, wooden floors softened with rugs—to showcase her few precious items: a full-length Florentine mirror, a leather wing chair, her mother’s Regency desk.

  And the double bed, draped in white linen, as smooth and glacial as an uncut wedding cake.

  Every time Juno opened the door she expected to find Dan there. He was not, of course; he was in L.A., where judging by pictures in Variety.com he was enjoying the company of a hard-faced blonde with a brow full of Botox. Yet even though Dan’s physical presence was gone, he was still everywhere around her. The pictures she had taken of him hung on the walls, his chiseled, regular, slightly ordinary features transformed by extreme photogenic power to almost godlike perfection. There were a few photos starring Juno, too, her round face and dark brows in marked contrast to Dan’s glowing blond hair and ice blue eyes, gifted to his family by some long-buried Scandinavian gene, her five-foot-two figure barely brushing his shoulder.

  Some of Dan’s stuff remained where it had fallen, his bedside book opened at the page where he abandoned it, a sweater, arms outstretched in supplication over the white French armchair. Even his toothbrush was in the bathroom still, its tiny accretion of toothpaste hardening over like stone. Everything in the apartment felt provisional, like a waiting room, which in a way it was.

  Up to you.

  How had her life reached this stage, in which pictures of Dan Ryan occupied all the surfaces where photos of their children should have been?

  She blinked, but too late to prevent the image of a baby, pearl white flesh unblemished and plump as freshly baked bread, its sweet musky smell just as enticing.

  At first it had been Juno who delayed, insisting that she needed to get her career established before they began a family. Then it was Dan. There was never a right time.

  Until the mistake happened.

  Dan couldn’t have known, because she hadn’t told him. She had hugged the precious, splendid mistake to herself, as if even acknowledging it might place it in peril. In her darker moments she had wondered if it would ever happen; at thirty-six she was already a year past the age doctors called “elderly primigravida,” meaning women who were pregnant for the first time after age thirty-five. Gleefully she thought of the child taking shape inside her—their child—the cells folding and dividing in their silent, synchronized dance, a miraculous future coming into being that stretched far beyond her own and Dan’s.

  The delay couldn’t last, of course. She had been on the point of telling Dan on the very evening that his own announcement trumped hers. There was no more point in arguing. He would go without her. Yet even after he had left, the badly timed mistake was a consolation. Juno had cherished it, nurtured it, made endless plans for it, rearranged her future for it, until the future rearranged itself.

  The accident happened the very morning she had stopped feeling nauseous. Until then, a mere waft of coffee had been enough to make her retch, but that sunny morning heralding the next trimester she awoke with a feeling of benign bloom, like the cherry trees in Central Park, which had just budded into flower.

  Was it the blossom that caused her to look the wrong way when crossing toward the park? The car was barely moving, but the wall of shining steel rammed into her flank with a sickening thud. She staggered, then rallied and batted off the offers of medical help: I’m okay, honestly, it was nothing! But by the time she had reached home and her bathroom, she was miscarrying. She curled on the floor, blood spreading across the tiles, grief leaking out of her, sobbing as she waited for the ambulance to arrive. The mistake, the baby that might have been, was gone.

  Leaving Juno with a different decision to make.

  * * *

  —

  AS SOMEONE WHO HATED decisions, she spent yet another day not deciding about Dan.

  The afternoon she wasted on the usual procrastinations, hauling her washing down to the basement, making calls to the editors of magazines she relied on for regular commissions. The first, American Traveler, was a monthly for whom Juno had photographed everything from the Grand Canyon to the Everglades and whose editor, Jake Barton, had a world-weary air entirely unsuited to his job description.

  “We’re planning an issue on European capitals in the light of international terrorism. Do our readers still want to visit? Is it safe for them? Rome, Paris, Berlin, Prague, Venice; do they still appeal? How about it, Juno? Any of them take your fancy?”

  No reader of American Traveler wanted to sip a cappuccino in the shade of a refugee camp, or face an armed terrorist in the Louvre, or step over migrants on his way to a peach Bellini in Harry’s Bar. Sure, they wanted to seek out new worlds, but only worlds that contained Louis Vuitton bags and friendly doormen and taxi drivers who spoke English and knew the best bar in town. People who wanted to extend their cultural horizons generally found those horizons stopped far shorter than they imagined. Intrepid was not a popular adjective in the pages of American Traveler. As soon as he mentioned it, Jake’s proposal raised a glimmer of excitement that Juno forced herself to quell.

  “Can I think about it, Jake, and get back to you?”

  She put the phone down with a sigh. Things were far too complicated to be jetting off just then. Distance is no escape, as her mother would have said.

  And her mother should know. She had crossed the Atlantic from England to escape an angry, depressive father, only to run into another man just like him, who closed his arms tight around her and never let go.

  Standing in front of the cheval mirror, Juno tilted a photograph toward her. Mom in a black swimsuit on a pebbly beach, holding hands with a small, potbellied Juno. She had bangs and hoop earrings and was laughing down at her tiny, dark-haired daughter. Although the beach was on the Cornish coast and bitingly chill, Mom might have been Audrey Hepburn and the stretch of shingle the French Riviera, such was her chic and model-thin elegance. Long after she had moved to New York she retained her precise, British Home Counties accent, and Juno gue
ssed a large part of Mom had never left the England of her childhood. Perhaps it was homesickness that accounted for her critical attitude toward her only daughter, the ruthless discipline and emotional chill, the clashes over Juno’s clothes and social life, her academic career—or lack of it—and, of course, her boyfriends, none of whom met Mom’s exacting standards. Yet Juno ached to fold that bony body in her arms once more, and hold the knotty hand with its basket weave of veins in her own. She missed her mother desperately.

  Maybe Mom had been right about Dan. Even now she could hear her mother’s voice in her ear: Just stop thinking about him! While Dan dominated her own thoughts, Juno doubted it was the same for him. Often she wondered what Dan even saw when he looked at her—was he looking at the woman she was? Or simply his own reflection in her eyes?

  The evening stretched ahead and television failed to hold her attention. Her eye was caught by the typewriter, still resting where she had abandoned it by the door. She took it out of its case and set it proudly down. Though it was sleek and gleaming, she could not resist giving it an unnecessary extra polish.

  She reached again for the manuscript in its manila envelope, and the accompanying clippings. Fanning them out on the sofa beside her, she took a proper look at Cordelia Capel. In a pair of cream high-waisted slacks, dark blond hair tucked behind her ears, looking fiercely intelligent and powerful, like Katharine Hepburn. Standing in front of a tank against a background of rubble in a tailored safari suit. At a fashion show introducing Dior’s New Look. Interviewing President Eisenhower. At the Woodstock festival.

  Some of the articles carried the tagline:

  Cordelia Capel. The Foremost Chronicler of Our American Life.

  Yet of Cordelia’s own life there was no mention.

  Unlike the journalists Juno read in The New York Times and Vanity Fair, whose biographical details seemed at least as important as the issues they tackled, who produced regular memoirs of their childhoods, divorces, and diseases, Cordelia Capel’s generation kept their private lives private. Hers was an era when reporters were trained to cut themselves out of their stories, to act as disinterested observers who watched and recorded what they saw with no mention of how it affected them. Whether at a war or a rally, journalists were there to bear witness and keep their opinions and emotions to themselves. No family anecdote, no husband or children, sneaked their way into Cordelia’s reports. Nor was there any mention of Hans, the recipient of the tantalizing apology that now lay beside Juno on the sofa. Who was Hans? And what had Cordelia Capel done to require forgiveness?