Wake Up, Wanda Wiley Read online

  All my heroines, she thought, trod a well-known path that was preordained by the rules of the genre. The path of a single destiny, of one right fate, and the challenge was simply to secure it. Or let it secure them.

  But the future now is as open-ended as these plains. A person could go for a thousand miles in any direction, and still the horizon would be impossibly far off. Still there would be no end to reach. A journey rather than an arrival.

  She looked at Austin as he drove, and she thought, He asks so little of the world. Nothing, almost. He finds contentment in what’s before him.

  He doesn’t poke at my emotions the way Dirk did. He doesn’t need the constant reassurance that he still has a hold on me. He simply lets me be.

  In the past, she would have interpreted that as indifference or neglect. When Dirk ignored her, she picked at him, just to make sure she still mattered. The ebb and flow of Dirk and Wanda were tides on a sea of insecurity. There had been no nurturing or growth, only the avoidance of what they feared would be the deeper loss of not having each other to abuse.

  On the third night of the trip, on the plains of eastern Colorado, when she and Austin were still sleeping in separate beds, she dreamed of Hannah.

  Hannah approached her on a flat country road between rippling fields of wheat. She wore the white muslin dress of an 1890’s farm maiden. Wanda worried Hannah would be angry. Before Hannah could speak, she said, “I know I’ve neglected you. I know I’ve let you down.”

  “You didn’t let me down. You just didn’t listen. Take me out of this dress, will you?”

  “What do you want to wear?” Wanda asked.

  “What do you want to wear?”

  Faded jeans and an oversized t-shirt. Soft cotton all around.

  “That’s better,” Hannah said, spreading her arms and looking at the baggy shirt sleeves. “I never wanted to be your heroine.”

  “I know.”

  They walked side by side toward the mountains in the west.

  “I’m more outward looking. I want to make a difference in the world.”

  “I know,” said Wanda.

  “I need a bigger stage.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why did you write me like that? Like my destiny was to be someone’s girlfriend?”

  “Because that’s how all the stories are. That’s what people know and respond to.”

  “You could write a different story.”

  “Maybe,” said Wanda. “But I don’t know if people would buy it.”

  “Try,” said Hannah.

  They had come to a stop at the foot of the mountains, the mountains that had been a hundred miles off just a minute earlier.

  “How did we get here?” Wanda asked.

  Hannah pointed to the towering summits and said, “Try.”

  38

  Eighteen Months Later

  Dirk Jaworski sat at his desk facing the monitor with the same open document he’d been staring at for years. The lonely letter X stared back at him. He hadn’t touched the half-empty tequila bottle beside the keyboard since last night. Or was it the night before?

  The empty beer bottles on the bookshelves told visitors what had caused him to lose his shape and make his fat bottom meld into his chair the way Wanda’s had once melded into hers.

  What comes after X, Dirk wondered. Goddamnit, something has to!

  Xylophone!

  Yes, he thought. Exclamation point and all!

  This was a breakthrough.

  He had added eight letters to his masterwork. The first letter had taken four years. And now, in a blinding flash of inspiration, eight more had come all at once. If one letter was four years of work, then eight was…

  Dirk opened the calculator application and typed in the numbers.

  8 x 4 = 32

  Thirty-two years of work in a single morning!

  You see, he told himself. You see now what a drag she was on your creativity, with her neediness and her complaints. She was an anchor around your neck. Now she’s someone else’s problem. Now she’s with Austin. Or who knows, maybe she ran out on him too.

  Thirty-two years of work in a single day deserved a reward. He poured a shot of tequila and swished it in the glass and thought about the interview he’d seen an hour earlier. Wanda on that morning TV show, all healthy and aglow, all smiles and clear skin and eager answers.

  For Christ’s sake, Dirk thought, she’s pushing books on television.

  He drank the shot.

  Television! That bastion of illiteracy! So what if she sold half a million copies in the first two months? There are over three hundred million fools in this country—football fans and wrestling fans and people who think Katy Perry can sing—and so what if she sold half a million books? She captures a fraction of a percent of that sea of idiots, and for that they celebrate her and put her on TV?

  He poured another shot.

  “Now you admit you failed on the Trevor Dunwoody book,” said the interviewer, a middle-aged woman in a knee-length skirt.

  Wanda smiled and gave a big thumbs down. “Oh, I bombed it. I totally bombed it.”

  “Not your kind of story?”

  Wanda shook her head. “Not my kind of story. Not my kind of character.”

  “And that hurt your career,” said the interviewer.

  “Well, the editor was angry. No, the editor was irate. Because I had Trevor solving problems through diplomacy.”

  “It was the only novel where he didn’t have a love interest,” the interviewer noted.

  “Or use his gun.”

  “What were you thinking?” the interviewer asked with a laugh.

  Wanda laughed too. “I was thinking the genre needed a reboot.”

  “So Ed Parsippany’s editor fired you.”

  “Yup.”

  “And then you had a falling out with your own editor.”

  “And my agent,” said Wanda. “She wanted another romance. She wanted the tried and true formula with guaranteed sales.”

  “But you tried to pitch her something different?”

  “Nomance.” Wanda made air quotes around the word.

  “What is nomance?”

  “Fulfillment not in the shape of a penis. Wait, can I say that on TV?”

  “You just did. But Hannah Sharpe,” said the interviewer, “Senator Sharpe, she does have a man in her life.”

  “She does. But he’s not the story. They are not the story. It’s the story of a woman with moral vision and courage and the ability to rally people. It’s the story of a woman who has tremendous common sense, who helps others to see clearly and move forward toward a better world. She inspires people to act.”

  “And where did you come up with the character of her husband? He’s an unusually supportive, enlightened character.”

  “Willy? He came of my experience writing the Dunwoody book. Willy is basically the anti-Trevor.”

  “And, I’m sorry, I just have to ask.” The interviewer leaned forward with a smile and tapped her knee. “The name? Willy Keeper. Where did that come from?”

  “Oh…” Wanda waved off the question, laughing inwardly at her memory of the prayer Trevor uttered that night in Lafayette Park. “Long story.”

  “Now your agent didn’t want this book, is that right?”

  “Oh, no,” said Wanda. “Romance sells. Nomance is… an unknown quantity.”

  “So you self-published.”

  “I did.” Wanda nodded. She was smiling.

  “Why do you think the book took off the way it did?”

  She threw her arms up as if to say she had no idea. “Timing, I suppose. I guess it just hit a nerve.”

  She hadn’t been stoned in eighteen months. She no longer needed to medicate herself to tolerate her day-to-day life, and when she stopped smoking, she stopped craving sweets. She went back to eating the healthy foods she had once naturally preferred. Her energy returned and she became ac
tive again.

  Dirk couldn’t conceive of the change that had come over her, much less give her credit for it. He had decided her healthy appearance was due to good makeup and lighting. Her confidence and energy, he was sure, came from being the center of attention. He knew what it was like to have all eyes on him. It puffed him up like a big colorful balloon.

  What he missed most since the loss of his professorship was the auditorium, being at the front of the lecture hall filled with young women. There were young men there too, to fill out the crowd, but in Dirk’s mind, only the women mattered.

  Shana, the dark-haired one who had waited outside the house that evening when Wanda was cooking lobster, Shana was his downfall. If it weren’t for her stupidity and carelessness, he’d still have his job. He had convinced her that a condom would deprive her of the full Dirk Jaworski experience, that skin on skin would be immeasurably better than that sensation-deadening bag.

  And then she had gotten pregnant. Of all the stupid things to do!

  When she complained to the university, two more women came forward.

  At the hearing, Dirk was confident he’d be put on leave and brought back in a year, after the controversy had blown over. But that wasn’t how it went.

  “Three women have come forward,” said the dean, who was herself a woman. “That means there might be ten.”

  Dirk was secretly pleased that she gave him credit for seducing ten women. The number was actually higher, but this wasn’t the time to correct her.

  “The university has a duty not only to educate but to protect. There is no place for you here.”

  Dirk was sure he could get a job at another university, but the blot on his record made him untouchable.

  His new position, bagging groceries at the supermarket, didn’t bestow the same aura of power as his professorship. He had no stage to strut on, no ready-made crowd to hang on his words. The women in the checkout line passed too quickly for him to impress with one of his carefully crafted performances. Some of them were old and not worth talking to. The young ones told him what to do, where not to put the eggs and how not to crush the bread.

  Finding new partners was now infinitely harder than it used to be. They weren’t his students so he didn’t know their names. He only knew them by their attributes. The blue-eyed blonde at the coffee shop with the perky tits. She had laughed at two of his jokes. One laugh could have been written off as luck, but two? Two meant the door was open.

  And then there was the brunette in the dentist’s office who was so plainly insecure, so pathetically eager to please. Sure, she was fat, but her weakness cried out for a savior, for a dashing, glorious Prince Charming to lift her up… And to remind her every now and then how lucky she was to have him, what a nothing she had been before he discovered her.

  As he poured another shot and admired his budding masterpiece on the computer monitor, Wanda sat in the back of a cab in New York City, heading to a second interview.

  What a difference, she thought, to have someone who gets you. Who appreciates you, who lets you be you. Kindness and decency are worth more than passion in the long run. What an utterly different world I live in today.

  Her notion of love now was thoroughly unromantic. It was like food or water or shelter—things which, when they are consistently and reliably present, provide the foundation of a healthy life. To obsess over them was unhealthy. To pursue them single-mindedly was to live an unbalanced existence.

  There were still moments when she missed the intensity of the destructive passion she had shared with Jerk, as she now called him. But when she missed the intense highs and lows, she reminded herself how predictable those days had been. How all the same, how like the hamster’s wheel, running and running to feel you were alive but never getting anywhere. Exhausted all the time.

  In six and a half years with Dirk, all the yesterdays had been the same. Today, in this cab in New York, her life was a million miles from where it had been the day she walked out on him. In a few minutes, she would be talking to an editor from a literary journal, the kind of journal whose editors looked down on genre fiction the way Dirk had once looked down on her. They had finally picked up one of her books. They had gotten a peek into her mind, and now they wanted a feature interview.

  At his desk, Dirk considered another shot of liquor.

  Too early, he thought. Better switch to beer.

  He looked at the gift that had sat unopened for eighteen months. The little rectangle in green wrapping. To Dirk, from Wanda.

  All right, Wanda, since today seems to be your day…

  He picked it up and tore recklessly at the taped seam. A frame, he thought. A photo of Wanda and me? Do I really want to see it?

  He turned it over and read the sonnet.

  My love is as a fever, longing still

  For that which longer nurseth the disease,

  Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,

  Th’ uncertain sickly appetite to please.

  My reason, the physician to my love,

  Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,

  Hath left me, and I desperate now approve

  Desire is death, which physic did except.

  Past cure I am, now reason is past care,

  And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;

  My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,

  At random from the truth, vainly expressed:

  For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,

  Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

  “You dumb bitch,” he muttered. “You got the commas wrong.”

  He reached for his red professor’s pen and began marking up the text, happy to have been given the opportunity, one last time, to show her who was right.

  About the Author

  Andrew Diamond writes mystery, crime, noir, and comedy. His books feature cinematic prose, strong characterization, twisting plots, and dark humor.

  You can find Andrew on Amazon, Goodreads, and Facebook, and at https://adiamond.me.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you, Lindsay Heider Diamond, for another excellent cover. And thanks to Meredith Tennant for proofreading.

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