A Bigamist's Daughter by Alice McDermott Read Free Book Online Page A

move, she thinks, throw the unanswerable question back to the questioner, just like the teachers used to do in college. She wonders if she might have made a good real-life editor after all.
    He raises his hands and makes a tight-lipped grimace. “I don’t see it at all,” he says. “Bailey, the man who lived in Gallatin, where I grew up, the one the book is based on, is still alive. As far as I know. I left town when I went to Andover and the next year my family moved back to my grandmother’s house in Monteagle, so I never heard very much about him after that. Except that his second wife, Luanne, died—which is already in the book—and then that he was found to be a bigamist, which I don’t want to include in the book because I don’t know how to write good courtroom drama. I’ve tried.”
    She puts one of the black olives into her mouth and then wishes she hadn’t. It seems to make an awkward bulge in hercheek and the harshness makes her tongue wrap around itself. It tastes salty, foreign. She sucks the pit as he goes on.
    “I’ve even done some research. I called a few people I still know in Gallatin and asked about Bailey, but they couldn’t tell me anything new.” He pours her some more wine. “So I’m stuck. I guess the novel has no end because Bailey doesn’t seem to have one either.”
    The waiter brings them their soup and Tupper says, “That looks good.” She slips her pit onto the white plate under the bowl. It’s cold cucumber soup, laced with a flavor like walnuts.
    “Have you ever had this problem before?” he asks. “An author without an ending?”
    She shrugs a little. “I’ve had them with bad endings,” she says, rather world-weary. “But never without an ending at all.”
    He laughs. “I guess you do see a lot of bad stuff. There are so many people who think they can write.”
    “True.”
    He sips his soup and looks at her over his spoon. “Do you come here with all your authors?” he asks.
    She feels her stomach drop, as if the entire restaurant has just gone over a sharp hill.
    “It depends,” she says.
    He laughs a little, spooning his soup. She wonders if she’s blushing, squirming. “This is a loaded question,” he says, studying the soup, “but I’m curious. I’m curious about women in power, I guess. How they handle it. Maybe you should think of me as Henry James doing research when I ask you this.”
    “What is it?” she says, perhaps a little impatiently.
    He looks up at her. “Well, what if an author you’re working with comes on to you? Do you think”—he makes a stupid, almost cross-eyed face and she wonders if it’s supposed to be hers—“ ‘God, he just wants me to publish his book,’ or doyou give him the benefit of the doubt? I mean, you are a very attractive woman and you do have a certain amount of power. Do the two things sometimes give you problems?”
    The waiter clears their plates. “Not really,” she says over his arms. “It’s easy enough to separate the two.”
    “That’s good,” he says. “After all, men do it all the time, don’t they? Separate the two, I mean. Home and office, work and play.”
    “Yes,” she says, “that’s true.”
    They were in his office that was all oak and leather and rich browns. Even the light from the one lamp seemed beige, golden brown.
    The waiter brings them their lunches. Cold smoked chicken, asparagus salad, tomato aspic.
    “Sometimes,” Tupper Daniels says, “I think I may be missing something, never having had a nine-to-five job, an office, power, regular lunch hours.”
    Before the office, they’d had dinner here, at a table farther back, where he could still watch the door. A married man’s oldest habit, he’d said, watch out for it whenever you meet someone new. He was publishing a book of poetry, under the pen name Conrad Sikes. She’d only been working a few months and had not yet been trusted with an expense account, so when he asked to buy her dinner, she saw it as the