After the Workshop, page 16
Himself killing from him keeps what? I was already a good four blocks from Jerome Ruby’s house when I decided to turn around and head back.
When I arrived at the house, the lights, both inside and out, were all ablaze. I pictured the dial on their meter spinning like a circular buzz saw. I climbed the porch stairs and rang the bell.
Alice opened the door. A child ran laps behind her, a plastic hammer held with both hands over his head.
“Tommy!” Alice yelled at the child. “Honey,” she said, softer. “Please quit running. We have a guest.”
Tommy, who looked to be around three years old (but could have been anywhere between two and five, for all I knew about kids), lobbed the plastic hammer at nothing in particular. It spun through the air, end over end, like a tomahawk, then shattered a framed Norman Rockwell print of a pharmacist mixing up some medicine. In the painting, a child, covering his mouth, watches the pharmacist. Unlike Jerome, who wasn’t much older than me and had a full head of hair, Rockwell’s pharmacist was an old, bald man with a thick, old-timey mustache. It was exactly the sort of sentimental crap I expected from Jerome. The entire house was full of such nods to himself—antique apothecary jars, a battered leather doctor’s satchel, an aluminum sign that read, in flaking paint, JEROME’S DRUGSTORE.
“Tommy!” Alice said. “Look at what you did, Tommy!”
Tommy, unrepentant, had already begun running again.
“Watch out for the glass,” Alice said. “You’re going to cut yourself.”
“Maybe I came at a bad time,” I said. When Alice didn’t say anything, I called out, “Tommy!” I said it loud enough that he stopped running. “Hey, pal,” I said. “Do you like your Aunt Alice?”
Tommy nodded.
“Then give her a break, okay? You’re kind of pushing her buttons. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Tommy was about to start running again, but I crouched down to his level and said, “Hey! Did you hear what I said?”
Alice was watching me, but I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Was she grateful for my help, or did she think I had overstepped my bounds? For a second, I started to believe I’d had some sway with the kid, but then he yelled, “I’m gonna tell my daddy on you!” and began crying—a cry so deep and horrible, you’d think I’d backed over him with my car.
I stood up. “Maybe I’d better go.”
“Yes,” Alice said. “You should.” Her reply was more definitive than I anticipated.
I opened the door and stepped back into the cold.
“What were you doing here tonight?” Alice asked.
“Just now? I came back to see you.”
“No,” Alice said. “Why were you here in the first place?”
“Coincidence,” I said. She regarded me with suspicion, so I shrugged and added, “It’s a small town. What can I say?”
“It’s not that small,” she said. She sighed. “Good-bye, now.”
“Good-bye, Alice,” I said, and she shut the door.
I walked over to my car, got inside, and, miraculously, managed to pull out without a problem, as though there had never been anything keeping me there.
23
THERE HAD BEEN a time when I loved Iowa City—the patchouli-smelling girls, the carefree skateboarders, the night air filled with smoke from clove cigarettes—but my view of this city teeming with nothing but blithe spirits had recently mutated into a darker vision, that of a place populated with malingerers and hangers-on, where the only people who really made a killing were frat boy realtors who’d inherited swatches of land near I-80 on which they built repulsive shopping malls and fast-food chains to make even more money. Even though I knew that this change in my view was an extension of my own deep self-loathing, I suspected my analysis wasn’t entirely off the mark.
Tonight, on my drive home, I passed a giant snowman in front of a sorority house. It had a carrot nose, eyes and mouth made out of charcoal, and tree-limb arms. It also had an enormous cucumber penis. Using charcoal briquettes, someone had spelled EAT ME across its chest. The tradition of the profane snowman began only a few years ago, signaling—what? A shift in morality? A slippage of interest in anything academic? A hatred for snowmen? I honestly didn’t know, but I suspected it signaled something, and that whatever it portended couldn’t be good.
Safely home, without getting pulled over for drunk driving, I crawled into bed and covered myself with as many blankets as I could. I awoke several hours later to the whine of my front door opening, followed by creaking floorboards and the door snapping shut. It was three thirty in the morning; my bedroom was pitch-black, except for the digital numbers on my alarm clock. I had been dreaming about Vanessa Roberts and her baby, and in the dream, the baby was mine, and Vanessa and I were lovers who’d had a falling out. I tried to remember more of the dream, but large chunks of it evaporated even as I sifted through it. My eyes adjusted just enough for me to see the outline of my vacuum cleaner, which looked, in the grainy blur of half-sleep, like a very small person standing in the corner of my room, watching over me. As a child, I took pleasure in scaring myself, imagining that my coat draped over a chair was really a werewolf hunched near the bed and about to pounce. A shadow across my ceiling, probably from the headlights of a car driving by the house, might have been a bat.
I took a quick, unexpected gasp of air. I wondered, usually when I was too asleep to research it, if I had developed sleep apnea and what, if anything, could be done about it. There were nights when I woke up from dreams of drowning, unable to suck in enough air, but these were typically nights when I’d had too much to drink. Was this how I was going to die—alone, and of some disorder that I was too lazy to Google? Whenever I considered the many ways I might die, I always ended up thinking about Tennessee Williams, who died choking on an eyedrop bottle cap in a hotel room in New York. He had a habit (a deadly one, it turned out) of holding the cap in his mouth while leaning way back to place the drops in each eye.
The floorboards creaked again. Each time a switch was flipped on, light streamed in under my door, but when the switch was off, the illuminated swatch returned to black. I started falling asleep again, but the ancient fan in the bathroom began to moan, keeping me from slipping completely under. A toilet flushed. The water faucet was turned on and off. It was as though the apartment had come alive, each part commiserating with the other: a light switch talking to a floorboard, the fan to the faucet.
My doorknob jiggled, turned. The door opened, and I woke up.
“S. S.?” I said. “You need something?”
The light came on, as startling as a handful of lime thrown into my eyes. I squinted and blinked, and when I saw that it wasn’t S. S., I made a whimpering noise, sitting up quickly but scooting further away, pressing myself against the headboard.
“Jack Sheahan?”
“Lauren Castle?” I asked.
“Jesus Christ. I finally made it to this God-forsaken state,” she said. “You have no idea what my day has been like. No idea!”
“What are you doing here?” I asked. I had expected her to be older, more frightening looking, along the lines of Joan Collins or Leona Helmsley, and though she had to have been at least in her early forties to have worked in the warehouse where Jay McInerney’s third novel had been returned by the tens of thousands, she looked barely out of college. What made her seem older were her husky voice and her attitude. Otherwise, she could have been living down the street and posing with the X-rated snowman.
“What am I doing here? I’m here to find Vanessa,” she said, looking at me as though I were the unreasonable one.
“No, no,” I said. “Here. Inside my apartment. In my bedroom.”
“Sheraton’s sold out.” She looked around my room. “So this is Iowa,” she said. “Hunh.”
I wanted to tell her that my bedroom wasn’t really a fair representation of what the state had to offer, but Lauren had already walked away, back to my kitchen.
“Do you always leave your door unlocked?” she called out. “Is that how people out here live? Because, let me tell you something. If you left your door unlocked in Manhattan, you’d wake up the next morning missing a kidney. That’s right. A kidney, Jack.”
I pushed myself out of bed. I straightened up the covers. I cinched my sweatpants tighter.
I found Lauren in the kitchen, peering into my fridge.
“I’m starving,” she said, slamming the door shut. “But not for anything in there. What’s open all night around here?” she asked.
“The Quik Stop,” I said. “You can get a microwavable burrito and a gallon of milk.”
Lauren said, “Did you do something to her?”
“Who?”
“Vanessa.”
“Did I do something to her? Like what?”
“She tries my patience sometimes,” Lauren said. “I could certainly understand why someone might want to harm her.”
“You’re not serious,” I said.
Lauren shrugged. “My plane was rerouted because of the blizzard, and then I had to rent a car in—what’s it called? The Quad cities?” She shivered. “Terrible place,” she said. “Awful airport. They were out of rentals, so I had to wait for something like five hours to get one. The food there was poisonous. Shriveled hot dogs probably sitting there since the 1990s.” She sighed and shut her eyes, and for a couple of seconds, she seemed human, and I actually felt bad for her. But then she opened her eyes and said, “I’m not saying you killed her. Don’t be ridiculous. What I’m wondering, though, is if you somehow drove her away from here. Maybe you got into a fight over the money for the breast pump? I’m just spitballing here. Work with me.”
I’d almost forgotten about the breast pump. “Which reminds me,” I said. “I’m billing you for that.”
“Go ahead,” Lauren said. “But we’re not paying for it.”
I walked to the door, opened it up, and said, “Goodnight, then.”
Lauren stared out the door, incredulous. I expected her to cave in—it’s what I would have done—but she took a deep breath and walked past me, out into the hallway. She turned to say something, but I shut the door and returned to bed.
PART FIVE
Frank Conroy had said over and over that “the writing life is a hard life,”
and I’d resented him for it. Now, I owe him a debt of gratitude and think
I understand him. How difficult it must be to pass judgment on so much hope.
—FRITZ MCDONALD
24
IN THE MORNING, while scrambling eggs in a skillet and cooking up two strips of blurry-looking bacon, I heard what sounded like whimpering outside my door, followed by scrabbling. Had a stray dog smelled the food and wandered up the stairs? I opened the door slowly, keeping my right leg raised, in case an animal tried forcing itself inside, but there was neither a dog nor a band of angry rodents out there: It was S. S. sleeping soundly, curled up on the small patch of floor between my door and M. Cat’s.
I crouched down and nudged him.
“Hey, S. S.,” I said. When all he did was moan, I nudged him again, harder. “S. S. Wake up. You shouldn’t be out here.” It was freezing cold in the hall, and because the front door downstairs never shut properly, loose snow frequently blew up the stairs whenever the wind came gusting down the street.
“Huh?” S. S. said. “What?” He opened his eyes. “Who did you say?”
“What?” I asked.
S. S. blinked a few times, looked around, then sat up. “Oh, oh,” he said, “I was having a dream. A bad one.”
“What’re you doing out here?” I asked.
“The door was locked,” S. S. said.
“You should have knocked,” I said.
S. S., grunting as he stood, used my shoulder for support. “It was possible,” he said, “that you were indisposed. It was not my intention to disturb you. I was going to knock on my old friend M. Cat’s door, but I heard from inside what sounded like a bacchanal.”
“In what regard?” I asked.
“As in commemorating Saturnalia,” he said, stepping over the threshold into my apartment. When I looked blankly at him, he said, “The festival of Saturn? Celebrated in December in ancient Rome? Oh, you know—the time of unrestrained merrymaking?” I must have looked even more confused, because he leaned in close and whispered, “He was screwing somebody, son. And they were both—how shall I put this?—rather exuberant about it!”
“Oh,” I said. I stared toward M. Cat’s apartment. Screwing somebody? Who? With S. S. safely inside, I shut the door. “Did you have a good time last night?” I asked.
“Fleetingly,” he said.
Again, I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I let this one go. “Well, good,” I said. “They seemed like nice women.”
“Piranhas, the two of them,” he said. “Do I have any flesh left?” He smiled at me.
“You hungry?”
“Ravished,” he said. “Would that be bacon and eggs I smell?”
“Scrambled okay?”
“Perfect!”
“How’s your hand?”
He raised the wounded mitt and said, “A dull throb is all. Nothing a few aspirin won’t take care of.”
I scooped out two dried clumps of egg and plopped them onto a plate. “I suppose I need to track down Tate today,” I said, “and take him back to the airport.” I scooped out the rest of the eggs and dumped them onto another plate. I gave each of us a sad-looking slice of bacon.
“No need,” S. S. said. “He gave me a message for you last night. Apparently, the director of the Workshop wants to talk to him today about a visiting writer position.”
“You’re shitting me,” I said.
S. S. took the plate of food and said, “No, sir, I am not.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Gordon would have seen through that little bastard.”
“Ah, yes, Gordon Grimes,” S. S. said. “A few weeks ago, I was in a motel in Tucson and couldn’t sleep, so I turned on the TV, and guess what was on? The movie where aliens land in Gordon’s backyard. Not Gordon’s backyard, per se. Rather his character’s. Or, more precisely, his character’s mother’s backyard.”
“Gordon always saw through the fakers,” I said. “He wasn’t afraid to call a phony a phony when he saw one.”
“The strangest of careers, though,” S. S. said. “He wasn’t one of the Little Rascals, too, was he?”
“What?”
“The Little Rascals,” S. S. repeated. “You remember. Spanky? Darla? Alfalfa? Wheezer? Joe Cobb? He wasn’t one of them, was he? Was there a rascal named Grimes?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said.
S. S. saw Tate’s notebook and slid it toward him. I said nothing as he flipped through the empty pages, but when he reached the end, where Tate took notes backward, he looked up at me and said, “He’s not only a novelist, he’s a cryptographer, too! Do the man’s talents know no bounds?” He silently read the journal. Every few sentences, he glanced at me and narrowed his eyes, as if checking Tate’s observations against his own. When he finished, he pushed the notebook aside.
“What?” I asked.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You looked like you were going to say something,” I said.
S. S. finished the food on his plate. He dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin. He said, “You should write it.”
“What?”
“The story of your life.”
“Oh,” I said. “You mean how pathetic it is? What keeps me from killing myself?”
“Exactly,” S. S. said. “Only more honest. And funnier. You think I’m kidding, but I’m not. Oh, I’m not saying your life is pathetic. But you’ve hit a few bumps in the road, and you’re a decent fellow, and I bet you could pull off a pretty damned good memoir.” I carried the plates to the sink. I was about to spray the skillet off when S. S. said, “Use cold water. Hot water cooks the egg onto the surface.” S. S. reached up and scratched his earlobe with his forefinger. It was the most gentle yet idiosyncratic scratching that I had ever witnessed. He said, “I’m going to tell you something, but I don’t want you to be mad at me.”
I ignored S. S. and ran hot water over the pan anyway. When I finally turned back around, he said, “You’re already mad.”
“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m curious.”
“Okay. Fair enough. You know I’ve been in a slump,” he said. “I didn’t believe in writer’s block—that is, until I got it. I don’t want to be melodramatic about this . . . but it descended like the plague.” His voice took on the timbre of Laurence Olivier in Hamlet. “It laid waste to everything around me, especially the people I loved, so I quarantined myself by disappearing, hoping not to infect anyone else. If I were to die, I would die alone!” His eyes were about to boil over with tears. He blinked a few times and, with his shirtsleeve, wiped away the wetness. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s a silly thing, really. The inability to think of the next word. There are men who dig ditches or pick up trash, and women who sit behind a sewing machine for eight long hours each day, every day, for their entire lives—and here I am, unable to think of the next word, after a career of thinking up nothing but words. I’m a lucky man, I tell you. The luckiest!” He sniffled. He took a deep breath and stared up at my ceiling, as if the worst of what he’d had to tell me was over. But then he said, “I had come here to rob you, sir.”
“I’m sorry, but what did you say?”
“Your novel,” S. S. said. “I was in Pasadena a few weeks ago, sitting by a pool in a squalid little Motel Six, you see, and out of the blue, with my eyes closed, I remembered the first sentence of your novel. I wondered what had ever happened to it. I went back to my room, got dressed, and drove to Barnes & Noble. I remembered your name and asked an employee, a short fellow with a large head, if there were any books by you. When he told me no, I drove to the public library and researched you on the Internet. Nothing. That’s when I bought the bus ticket.”
