And One to Die On(19)

“This is Gregor Demarkian,” Bennis said, in a weak voice.

Natalia was perfectly happy to shake Gregor’s hand.

After that there was a lengthy silence, during which Darcy and Natalia gazed adoringly at Bennis, and Bennis cast around desperately for something to say. Gregor was just beginning to get desperate himself, when the door opened and three more women came in. Like Natalia, they were in costume, two in peaked hats and robes and one in embroidered satin trousers and an embroidered satin tunic. In Zedalia, Gregor surmised, the women of the nobility must go around exclusively in embroidered satin. Gregor had read one or two of Bennis’s books, but he could never remember what was in them. With the knights and the ladies and the unicorns and the magic, they never made any sense to him. Like Natalia, the three new women dropped to the floor and kissed the hem of Bennis’s skirt. Bennis leaned over until her lips were touching Gregor’s ear and hissed, “I need a very large glass of Scotch and a cigarette.”

Gregor needed the Scotch himself. He had never smoked. The three women stood up and smiled shyly at Bennis. Darcy Bentley introduced them as Katania, Melinda, and Allamanda. Obviously their names, like their costumes, had been taken from one novel or the other of Zedalian life. From what Gregor remembered, there was a companion world to Zedalia in Bennis’s novels, called Zed. Zed was populated entirely by men. He wondered if there were little groups of men somewhere who dressed up in the costumes of Zed and practiced on each other the secret handshakes and underground codes of Zed’s nobility. It was depressing to think about it, but there probably were.

“Oh, Miss Hannaford,” Katania said. “I’m so glad to meet you. There are so many questions I want to ask you.”

“We all want to ask you,” Melinda said.

“I want you to answer one question right away,” Allamanda said. “I just can’t wait for the answer.”

“Sure,” Bennis said recklessly. “Ask away.”

“Well,” Allamanda said, quite seriously. “Do you write your books yourself, or are they channeled?”

It went downhill from there, way downhill, and rapidly, like a boulder falling off the side of Mount Everest. More women came in, and as they did Gregor began to realize that no one was going to show up at this reading who was not in costume. What was more, both the costumes and the behavior grew increasingly odd. At some point, the crowd reached critical mass, and they began to talk funny. Gregor caught perfectly sensible syllables, but they didn’t seem to translate into words.

“Zia dum gorno rok,” Darcy Bentley seemed to be saying to Natalia.

“Gorno tok dem barnia beldap,” Natalia answered.

“What’s going on here?” Gregor asked Bennis. “Do you know what they’re talking about?”

“No,” Bennis said.

“Do you know what’s going on here?”

Bennis sighed. “They’re speaking Zedalian,” she explained. “There’s a chapter in Zedalia in Winter that supposedly outlines how to translate Zedalian into English and vice versa.”

“Supposedly?”

“Well, you couldn’t prove it by me, Gregor. I’ve never tried to make it work.”

Bennis didn’t try to make it work now, either. When people spoke to her in Zedalian, she ignored them, and when Darcy asked her if she could read in Zedalian—“We thought it might be a relief for you to hear your work in its original language; and we all understand it here.”—Bennis adamantly refused. For a moment, Gregor thought she was going to refuse to do the reading at all, but she was much too much of a professional for that. She got out the manuscript she had been working on back in Philadelphia—at readings, Bennis had explained to Gregor on the drive to Boston, the audience always prefers works in progress—and recited three pages of it with suitable vocal flourish. When people cried out “Great Goddess, hosanna,” in the middle of everything, for no reason at all, she acted as if she hadn’t heard them. When the reading was over and Natalia leapt to her feet to do a bell dance around a paperback copy of Zedalia in Love and War she had thrown to the floor, Bennis simply got up, went over to the desk, and took her pen out in preparation for signing books. Nobody seemed to notice that she was not participating in the festivities. Nobody seemed to notice much of anything. A lot of people had joined Natalia in her bell dance.

“What it is, I think,” Bennis told Gregor back at the hotel, while she dragged on a Benson & Hedges menthol as if it were an oxygen mask, “is that people need to identify with something, and they don’t want to identify with their families anymore. Families are supposed to be a drag. So instead, they identify with a fictional landscape, like Zedalia.”