Wake Up, Wanda Wiley Read online

  “How do you know that?”

  “Go outside and smell the fog. It reeks of marijuana.” Hannah paused for a moment, deep in thought, then added, “She’s stuck. Poor Wanda is stuck.”

  “But you said she just finished the ninth book in the Regency series.”

  “It’s horrible,” Hannah said. “The first three were great, then they dried up. She’s still sticking with the formula, but all the life has gone out of them. Only her diehard fans read her now.”

  Watching her there beneath the lamplight, detached as she was, unselfconscious and lost in thought, Trevor began to reappraise her, not as an agent or a spy, but as a woman. She has some depth to her, he thought, though God only knows what madness lurks down there. She’s pretty enough to manipulate any man, and I can’t figure out what cards she’s holding. She’s like a poker player who might have a royal flush or might just have a handful of nothing. Or maybe she’s just jokers all the way down, the kind who draws you so far into their insanity that you begin to feel insane.

  Will she try to play the seduction angle, he wondered. That’s the most obvious option, given her delusions of romance. A gentle probe might shed some light on that question. Make a suggestion and watch her face. Watch her body. Don’t listen to the words. Just look at the physical reaction.

  “Maybe,” Trevor offered in a gentle tone. “Maybe Wanda sent me here to be your lover. Your…” he fumbled through the words. “Your soulmate.”

  “No,” Hannah said, shaking her head numbly. If there was any tell in her body language or facial expression, the weight of her sadness and resignation covered it up. He couldn’t read her.

  “You’re in a different book,” she said. “Remember? You don’t belong here.”

  Here we go with the books again, Trevor thought. It’s like we’re running in circles. How do psychologists have the patience to deal with crazy people?

  “And besides,” Hannah added glumly, “you don’t even have a penis.”

  Why did those words strike such terror into his heart? What power did she have over him that she could say something so patently ridiculous and yet make him feel compelled to check? To make sure?

  The fog outside was thickening. The wisp that drifted in through the window sash smelled of marijuana, just as Hannah had said it would.

  If she’s right about that… Trevor thought nervously. He put his right hand on his thigh as nonchalantly as he could, and watched her to see if she noticed.

  I don’t care if she’s in a book, he thought. And I don’t care if I’m in a book, or if there is no time or if the whole world is just fog, but I’m not going to check my pecker just because some crazy woman whose dress changes color for no reason at all says I don’t have one.

  She watched his hand slide toward his crotch, and he watched her, pretending not to move it and seeing whether she was buying his ruse.

  So what if one minute it’s midnight and the next minute it’s daylight, he thought. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a penis. People in Sweden have penises and it’s light at twelve-ten a.m. on the summer solstice.

  Hannah now seemed to have caught the contagion of his suspense. She watched his hand slide closer.

  “I’m only doing this,” said Trevor, who had broken into a sweat, “to prove that you’re insane.”

  Hannah nodded kindly, wide-eyed with anticipation.

  Finally, Trevor’s hand hit the spot. He closed his eyes and let out a huge sigh of relief. “You’re wrong!” he exclaimed with a delighted smile.

  “Then you haven’t gotten to chapter sixteen yet.”

  Trevor’s eyes shot open. “What?”

  “Chapter sixteen of The President Has Been Stolen.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Trevor said nervously. “What happens in chapter sixteen?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  2

  Wanda Wiley sat on the edge of the bed beside a hamper of dirty laundry from which she had extracted four pairs of her almost-husband’s underwear. She counted seven days back to the last wash.

  He’s getting better, she thought. Four pairs in seven days. When we first started dating, he’d only change them once or twice a week.

  For six and a half years, her almost-husband had disappointed her by not proposing. In six months, they would have been together seven years, she thought, and their relationship would be a common-law marriage.

  She wondered how many of her friends had started washing their partner’s laundry three weeks into the relationship. Then she wondered if there was a socially acceptable way of asking that. It was a simple enough question with a straightforward answer. Why shouldn’t she be able to ask it directly?

  She pictured herself asking friends over drinks. How long into the relationship before you started washing his underwear? The scene played out like a movie in her mind. She saw her friends read too much into the question, and she became embarrassed. Wanda shook off the daydream with some difficulty. The pot always made her imagination vivid.

  As she smoothed a pair of red plaid boxers on the bedspread, the voice of her friend Louise returned from the recently dissolved scene and said, “I will never wash any man’s underwear.”

  Fucking Louise, Wanda thought. She’s so full of shit.

  Wanda went to the door and turned off the overhead light. She opened the nightstand drawer and removed a little wand that her almost-husband had quietly assumed was a glow-in-the-dark vibrator. It was in fact an ultraviolet light used by campers and hunters to make stream water potable by killing all the bacteria in it.

  Wanda passed the wand slowly over the red plaid boxers and counted four glowing stains. She picked up the pencil and tiny spiral notebook from the nightstand and read over her notes.

  Sunday: Red plaid boxers. Sex - twice.

  She put a check mark at the beginning of the line and tossed the boxers back into the hamper.

  The black boxers came next. He had worn those on Monday. The ultraviolet light showed no stains. Her notebook said Dirk had gotten drunk on Monday night at a faculty event while Wanda got high and binge-watched Orange is the New Black. She didn’t have to add “no sex.” That was implied.

  As she tossed the black boxers into the hamper, she wondered why the university served alcohol at Monday night faculty events, and what went on there that would encourage a man to get drunk.

  Dirk was an erratic drinker. He’d go weeks without a taste of alcohol, and then for no reason at all, he’d get plowed.

  “Why do you do that?” she asked. “What sets you off?”

  “Nothing sets me off. When the Dirkster wants to get tanked, the Dirkster gets tanked.”

  “I hate it when you call yourself the Dirkster.”

  The next item to be examined was the pearl-white G-string, a garment that made her shudder. She called it his gay stripper underwear and asked him never to wear it in her presence. He said it was the most comfortable option in hot humid weather: “like a bra for my man parts” (his words) “to hold them up and keep them fresh.”

  The wand revealed several glowing stains on the G-string. Her notebook showed no entry that week for the stripper panties, and to her recollection, it had not been hot or humid. She checked the weather on her phone to be sure. The hottest day of the week had been Wednesday. Seventy-five degrees with twenty-nine percent humidity. Neither hot nor humid.

  She wondered who he was keeping his man parts fresh for, and how fresh they needed to be. Was it the dark-haired Claudia with the coal-black eyes and extra-tight shirts? Or Jeanette, the sporty blonde? Or some other student she hadn’t met yet? She was sure it was a student. They were easier to impress than women Dirk’s own age, and Dirk needed to be admired.

  Wanda pictured the blonde-haired Jeanette peeling the pearl-white G-string off Dirk’s man parts, taking a long sniff and then smiling like a woman in a laundry detergent commercial. “Mmmm. How do you keep it smelling so fresh?”

 
She shook off the image with some difficulty and jotted a few words in the notebook. G-string = cheat pants. The image of the sniffing woman she had just dismissed came back and made her brow furrow. She jotted another note. 60/40 indica/sativa blend makes images TOO VIVID!! Do not want to see woman sniffing man parts.

  There was one pair of underwear left. The cobalt-blue briefs from last Friday showed unexplained stains. She tried to remember where Dirk had been that day.

  Running errands, he had said. For six hours. But he didn’t come home with any groceries or new clothes or anything else a person might pick up during six hours of errands.

  After she threw the laundry in, she went into the office she had converted from the spare bedroom on the first floor. The room contained a small desk with a laptop and chair, a keyboard, monitor, lamp, a side table, and bookshelves.

  The top shelf held the complete plays of Shakespeare. Thirty-seven cheap paperbacks, each marked up with highlights and underlines. They were the only books she read more than once. She also had a book of his longer poems, but she had lost the sonnets when she moved into the house and had never gotten around to buying a new copy.

  The lower shelves held three or four copies of each of her eighteen titles, all mass-market paperbacks printed on pulp. She had written and published them in the six and a half years since she’d been with Dirk.

  “I don’t understand how you can crank them out so fast,” he said at breakfast one recent morning through a mouthful of cold leftover steak.

  “I put in six hours every day,” Wanda said. “It’s just a question of getting your ass in the chair.”

  Dirk glanced down at her ass when she said that. It was a subtle gesture that was meant to be noticed, characteristic of Dirk’s manipulative tactics, reminding Wanda that her ass wasn’t what it had been six and a half years ago, when she was a twenty-one-year-old student in Dirk’s senior seminar and he had seduced her.

  He was ten years older than her, and he was no stuffy professor. He dressed well and kept in shape. He had the broad shoulders and muscled chest of the shirtless models who would later grace the covers of her Taken series. And he seemed to always have a glow about him, as if health and vitality radiated from his perfect skin and golden hair.

  And he’s still like that, she thought. Because he works so damn hard at it. Ninety minutes of every day devoted exclusively to hygiene, and two hours to exercise. He looks just like he did when we met. But me…

  The years of increasingly heavy pot smoking had made her lazy and chronically inactive. It had changed her diet from fresh greens to packaged cupcakes, cookies, ice cream, and chips. Her friends told her she was depressed, but the pot kept her mind entertained with visions that sometimes turned into books and mostly kept her amused throughout the day.

  “Maybe I am depressed,” she told her friends, “but I have a hundred and fifty channels in my brain that run twenty-four-seven. Sometimes all of them at once.”

  Dirk chewed through his mouthful of cold rubbery steak that morning and gave her a jab she should have seen coming. “It’s not that you have your ass in your seat six hours a day. It’s that you’re writing to a formula. You don’t have to put any thought into it. That’s why you can whip them out one after the other, like pulling toilet paper off a roll.”

  “Why do you have to be such a jerk?”

  Dirk shrugged and said with a disarming smile, “I don’t know. Just born that way, I guess.” One of the many maddening things about him was that when he insulted himself like this, it made her feel like he was bringing her into his confidence, and that made her smile. He had the charm of a snake, an arrogant self-confidence that would retreat at the most unexpected moments into self-deprecating humor, making people smile when they wanted to hate him.

  Elements of his personality appeared in the scoundrel-heros of all the happily-ever-after pulp novels that lined the shelves of Wanda’s office. She thought of him as a muse, a man as fascinating as he was infuriating. The sunshine of his love lit her world, while the icy indifference of his anger made her want to crawl into a hole and die.

  The therapist she had seen in the third year of their relationship said, “From what you’ve described, it sounds like he has elements of borderline personality disorder. You know: I hate you, don’t leave me. But he’s too controlling to be borderline. He’s a narcissist.”

  “I know,” said Wanda.

  “Why do you stay with him?”

  “Ha! Have you ever slept with him?”

  “But you don’t want to be with him.”

  “Who says?”

  “You. You’re here.”

  “So?”

  “So, why’d you come?”

  She didn’t like that question. It cut too close to the heart of the matter. She decided, with no basis in reality, that the therapist was in love with her and wanted to take her away from Dirk. So she stopped seeing him.

  The therapist, with his textbook understanding of human relationships and his dry clinical vocabulary, could never understand the reality of being in love with a man like Dirk, who was at once infinitely needy and infinitely confident, a black hole that drained her emotional energy and then a supernova that could give it all back in one blinding burst.

  “He’s like a drug,” she told Louise over coffee one morning.

  “We can see that,” Louise replied. “We can all see that. And what happens to drug users in the long run?”

  Fucking Louise, with her fucking Volvo station wagon and her boring-ass milquetoast husband who sells insurance, and their twice-a-year flyaway vacations. Louise who eats oatmeal without sugar and drinks unflavored soy milk and gets socks for her birthday and LIKES it! Stupid bitch.

  Yes, I crank out three books a year, and yes, it’s easy because I love what I do. I have a vivid, relentless imagination. And yes, there’s a formula. I admit that. So what?

  So what, Dirk Jaworski, Distinguished Professor of Flawless Grammar and Pedantic Punctuation at Third Rate University? I’ve published eighteen books and you’ve published one—which nobody even read! Wanda sat angrily at her desk and rubbed her temples. Just admit that I’m good at this, will you?

  “It’s Byrd State,” said the voice of Dirk that had lodged its corrective presence inside her brain. “Call it by its proper name.”

  Oh, get out of my head, Wanda thought. Do you have to nag me when you’re not even here?

  Eighteen books, but she’d never gotten a starred review from Kirkus or Publisher’s Weekly. Eighteen books, and she brought in more money than him, though he pretended not to know this, and she didn’t bring it up for fear of wounding the narcissist’s pride.

  The bookshelf in Dirk’s office held fifty copies of his one and only published volume, OMG, I’m Like, Totally Illiterate: How Instant Messaging is Destroying the English Language. That work, which consisted of more footnotes than text, had earned him a professorship at Byrd State, and had then gone on to be cited in a handful of other academic monographs.

  Funny, Wanda thought, how in academia becoming a footnote is a measure of success.

  For the past few years Dirk had been working on the book he hoped would seal his bid for tenure, an encyclopedic eight-volume history of the Oxford comma. His writing process was different from hers. For Wanda, the character was the unit of composition. What kind of character did you start with in chapter one? What kind of adversity did the character face? And how did the character change by the end? The act of writing was simply tracing the arc of change from A to B over two or three hundred pages of richly detailed human interaction.

  Dirk was more particular. The fundamental unit of writing for him was the letter, and he spent months agonizing over what the first letter of his masterpiece should be.

  Should it be A? Absolutely not. That was too common and too obvious. The alphabet itself began with A.

  T and E were also out, as they were the most common letters in the English language, and no
work of Dirk Jaworski’s would ever be common.

  Z was too obvious. To begin a book with the last letter of the alphabet—that was just being contrary.

  He had settled on X, in part because no book he knew of began with the letter X, and in part because it represented a monumental challenge. How do you follow up such a bold opening as X? If he pulled it off, he’d be famous.

  But this was where things got difficult. What should the next letter be? If he chose E, he’d be stuck with an opening sentence about Xerox or Xenophon. The letter A would saddle him with Xanax or Xanthan gum. If he chose Y, he’d have to go with Xylophone, which smacked of childishness because every alphabet poster in every kindergarten classroom in the country showed a xylophone for the letter X.

  Few people appreciated the enormity of the challenge he had set for himself in beginning his book with such a difficult letter.

  He had been puzzling over the second letter of his masterpiece for four years now. Wanda brought snacks to his desk as he stared at the big black X on the top line of the otherwise blank page. She did all she could to encourage him.

  “Maybe start with an outline,” she suggested helpfully, but that just made him explode.

  “Do you understand what it’s like to have writer’s block?”

  “I’m just saying, back up for a minute and look at the big picture.”

  “You don’t get it, do you? Because you can pump those books out like diarrhea. I’m trying to give birth here! Do you have any idea how fucking hard that is?”

  “Don’t shout at me, Dirk.”

  He slammed his hands down on the desk and made the keyboard jump. Then he grabbed his bag and stormed out of the house.

  To the gym, Wanda thought.

  He’d go pump iron for two or three hours and flirt with the girls in their leggings. Nothing made him happier than admiring his chiseled chest and shoulders in the weight-room mirror while he pumped and pumped and pumped himself up.

  Then he’d come home and they’d have sex. She wondered if, during the act, he was thinking about her or one of the girls he saw in the gym. She knew he was most energetic on the days he was most frustrated with work. When his writing wasn’t going well, she could channel his anger into sex. If she got him while his temper was good and hot, she could extract from him one of those nights that would turn stupid Louise Pennypacker green with envy and scare the hell out of her pudgy missionary-position husband.