Oracle Night (3 page)

‘You ask, I find. Whatever it is, I find for you. M. R. Chang deliver the goods.’

He pumped my arm two or three more times after that, and then he opened the door for me, nodding and smiling as I slid past him into the raw September day.
1

I had been planning to stop in for breakfast at one of the local diners, but the twenty-dollar bill I had put in my wallet before starting out had been reduced to three singles and a smattering of coins – not even enough for the $2.99 special when you figured in the tax and tip. If not for the shopping bag, I might have gone on with my walk anyway, but there seemed to be no point in lugging that thing around the neighborhood with me, and since the weather was in a fairly nasty state by then (the once-fine drizzle had turned into a steady downpour), I opened my umbrella and decided to go home.

It was a Saturday, and my wife had still been in bed when I’d left the apartment. Grace had a regular nine-to-five job, and the weekends were her only chance to sleep in, to indulge in the luxury of waking up without an alarm clock. Not wanting to disturb her, I had crept out as quietly as I could, leaving a note for her on the kitchen table. Now I saw that a few sentences had been added to the note.
Sidney:
Hope you had fun on your walk. I’m going out to do some errands.
Shouldn’t be long. See you back at the ranch. Love, G
.

I went into my workroom at the end of the hall and unpacked my new supplies. It was hardly bigger than a closet in there – just enough space for a desk, a chair, and a miniature bookcase with four narrow shelves – but I found it sufficient for my needs, which had never been more elaborate than to sit in the chair and put words on pieces of paper. I had gone into the room several times since my discharge from the hospital, but until that Saturday morning in September – what I prefer to call
the morning in question
– I don’t think I had sat down once in the chair. Now, as I lowered my sorry, debilitated ass onto the hard wooden seat, I felt like someone who had come home from a long and difficult journey, an unfortunate traveler who had returned to claim his rightful place in the world. It felt good to be there again, good to want to be there again, and in the wake of the happiness that washed over me as I settled in at my old desk, I decided to mark the occasion by writing something in the blue notebook.

I put a fresh ink cartridge in my fountain pen, opened the notebook to the first page, and looked at the top line. I had no idea how to begin. The purpose of the exercise was not to write anything specific so much as to prove to myself that I still had it in me to write – which meant that it didn’t matter what I wrote, just so long as I wrote something. Anything would have served, any sentence would have been as valid as any other, but still, I didn’t want to break in that notebook with something stupid, so I bided my time by looking at the little squares on the page, the rows of faint blue lines that crisscrossed the whiteness and turned it into a field of tiny identical boxes, and as I let my thoughts wander in and out of those lightly traced enclosures, I found myself remembering a conversation I’d had with my friend John Trause a couple of weeks earlier. The two of us rarely talked about books when we were together, but that day John had mentioned that he was rereading some of the novelists he had admired when he was young – curious to know if their work held up or not, curious to know if the judgments he’d made at twenty were the same ones he would make today, more than thirty years down the road. He ran through ten writers, through twenty writers, touching on everyone from Faulkner and Fitzgerald to Dostoyevsky and Flaubert, but the comment that stuck most vividly in my mind – and which came back to me now as I sat at my desk with the blue notebook open in front of me – was a small digression he’d made concerning an anecdote in one of Dashiell Hammett’s books. ‘There’s a novel in this somewhere,’ John had said. ‘I’m too old to want to think about it myself, but a young punk like you could really fly with it, turn it into something good. It’s a terrific premise. All you need is a story to go with it.’
2

He was referring to the Flitcraft episode in the seventh chapter of
The Maltese Falcon
, the curious parable that Sam Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy about the man who walks away from his life and disappears. Flitcraft is a thoroughly conventional fellow – a husband, a father, a successful businessman, a person without a thing to complain about. One afternoon as he’s walking to lunch, a beam falls from a construction site on the tenth floor of a building and nearly lands on his head. Another inch or two, and Flitcraft would have been crushed, but the beam misses him, and except for a little chip of sidewalk that flies up and hits him in the face, he walks away unhurt. Still, the close call rattles him, and he can’t push the incident from his mind. As Hammett puts it: ‘He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.’ Flitcraft realizes that the world isn’t the sane and orderly place he thought it was, that he’s had it all wrong from the beginning and never understood the first thing about it. The world is governed by chance. Randomness stalks us every day of our lives, and those lives can be taken from us at any moment – for no reason at all. By the time Flitcraft finishes his lunch, he concludes that he has no choice but to submit to this destructive power, to smash his life through some meaningless, wholly arbitrary act of self-negation. He will fight fire with fire, as it were, and without bothering to return home or say good-bye to his family, without even bothering to withdraw any money from the bank, he stands up from the table, goes to another city, and starts his life all over again.

In the two weeks since John and I had discussed that passage, it hadn’t once crossed my mind that I might want to take up the challenge of fleshing out the story. I agreed that it was a good premise – good because we have all imagined letting go of our lives, good because at one moment or another we have all wanted to be someone else – but that didn’t mean I had any interest in pursuing it. That morning, however, as I sat at my desk for the first time in almost nine months, staring at my newly acquired notebook and struggling to come up with an opening sentence that wouldn’t embarrass me or rob me of my courage, I decided to give the old Flitcraft episode a shot. It was no more than an excuse, a search for a possible way in. If I could jot down a couple of reasonably interesting ideas, then at least I could call it a beginning, even if I broke off after twenty minutes and never did another thing with it. So I removed the cap from my pen, pressed the point against the top line of the first page in the blue notebook, and started to write.

The words came quickly, smoothly, without seeming to demand much effort. I found that surprising, but as long as I kept my hand moving from left to right, the next word always seemed to be there, waiting to come out of the pen. I saw my Flitcraft as a man named Nick Bowen. He’s in his mid-thirties, works as an editor at a large New York publishing house, and is married to a woman named Eva. Following the example of Hammett’s prototype, he is necessarily good at his job, admired by his colleagues, financially secure, happy in his marriage, and so on. Or so it would appear to a casual observer, but as my version of the story begins, trouble has been stirring in Bowen for some time. He had grown bored with his work (although he is unwilling to admit it), and after five years of relative stability and contentment with Eva, his marriage has come to a standstill (another fact he hasn’t had the courage to face). Rather than dwell on his burgeoning dissatisfaction, Nick spends his spare time at a garage on Desbrosses Street in Tribeca, engaged in the long-term project of rebuilding the engine of a broken-down Jaguar he bought in the third year of his marriage. He is a top young editor at a prestigious New York company, but the truth is that he prefers working with his hands.

As the story opens, the manuscript of a novel has arrived on Bowen’s desk. A short work bearing the suggestive title of
Oracle Night
, it was supposedly written by Sylvia Maxwell, a popular novelist from the twenties and thirties who died nearly two decades ago. According to the agent who sent it in, this lost book was composed in 1927, the year Maxwell ran off to France with an Englishman named Jeremy Scott, a minor artist of the period who later worked as a set designer for British and American films. The affair lasted eighteen months, and when it was over Sylvia Maxwell returned to New York, leaving the novel behind with Scott. He held on to it for the rest of his life, and when he died at the age of eighty-seven, a few months before my story begins, a clause was found in his will that bequeathed the manuscript to Maxwell’s granddaughter, a young American woman named Rosa Leightman. It was through her that the book was given to the agent – with explicit instructions that it be sent to Nick Bowen first, before anyone else had a chance to read it.

The package arrives at Nick’s office on a Friday afternoon, just minutes after he has left for the weekend. When he returns on Monday morning, the book is sitting on his desk. Nick is an admirer of Sylvia Maxwell’s other novels, and therefore he is eager to get started on this one. A moment after he turns to the first page, however, the telephone rings. His assistant informs him that Rosa Leightman is in the reception area, asking if she can see him for a few minutes. Send her in, Nick says, and before he is able to finish reading the opening sentences of the book (
The war was nearly over,
but we didn’t know that. We were too small to know anything, and
because the war was everywhere, we didn’t
…), Sylvia Maxwell’s granddaughter enters his office. She is dressed in the simplest clothes, has almost no makeup on, wears her hair in a short, unfashionable cut, and yet her face is so lovely, Nick finds, so achingly young and unguarded, so much (he suddenly thinks) an emblem of hope and uncoiled human energy, that he momentarily stops breathing. That is precisely what happened to me the first time I saw Grace – the blow to the brain that left me paralyzed, unable to draw my next breath – so it wasn’t difficult for me to transpose those feelings onto Nick Bowen and imagine them in the context of that other story. To make matters even simpler, I decided to give Grace’s body to Rosa Leightman – even down to her smallest, most idiosyncratic features, including the childhood scar on her kneecap, her slightly crooked left incisor, and the beauty mark on the right side of her jaw.
3

As for Bowen, however, I expressly made him someone I was not, an inversion of myself. I am tall, and so I made him short. I have reddish hair, and so I gave him dark brown hair. I wear size eleven shoes, and so I put him in size eight and a half. I didn’t model him on anyone I knew (not consciously, at any rate), but once I had finished putting him together in my mind, he became astonishingly vivid to me – almost as if I could see him, almost as if he had entered the room and were standing next to me, looking down at the desk with his hand on my shoulder and reading the words I was writing … watching me bring him to life with my pen.

At last, Nick gestures for Rosa to sit down, and she settles into a chair on the opposite side of the desk. A long hesitation follows. Nick has begun breathing again, but he can’t think of anything to say. Rosa breaks the ice by asking if he found time to finish the book over the weekend. No, he answers, it came in too late. I didn’t get it until this morning.

Rosa looks relieved. That’s good, she says. There’s been talk that the novel is a hoax, that it wasn’t written by my grandmother. I couldn’t be sure myself, so I hired a handwriting expert to examine the original manuscript. His report came in on Saturday, and he says it’s genuine. Just so you know.
Oracle Night
was written by Sylvia Maxwell.

It sounds as if you liked the book, Nick says, and Rosa says yes, she was very moved by it. If it was written in 1927, he continues, then it came after
The Burning House
and
Redemption
but before
Landscape with Trees
– which would have made it her third novel. She was still under thirty then, wasn’t she?

Twenty-eight, Rosa says. The same age I am now.

The conversation goes on for another fifteen or twenty minutes. Nick has a hundred things to do that morning, but he can’t bring himself to ask her to leave. There is something so forthright about this girl, so lucid, so lacking in self-deception, that he wants to go on looking at her for a little while and absorb the full impact of her presence – which is beautiful, he decides, precisely because she is unaware of it, because of her absolute disregard of the effect she has on others. Nothing of consequence is said. He learns that Rosa is the daughter of Sylvia Maxwell’s oldest son (who was a product of Maxwell’s second marriage, to theater director Stuart Leightman) and that she was born and raised in Chicago. When Nick asks her why she was so keen on having the book sent to him first, she says she knows nothing about the publishing business, but Alice Lazarre is her favorite living novelist, and when she found out that Nick was her editor, she decided he was the man for her grandmother’s book. Nick smiles. Alice will be pleased, he says, and a few minutes later, when Rosa finally stands up to make her exit, he pulls some books off a shelf in his office and gives her a stack of Alice Lazarre first editions. I hope you’re not disappointed in
Oracle Night
, Rosa says. Why should I be disappointed? Nick asks. Sylvia Maxwell was a first-rate novelist. Well, Rosa says, this book is different from the others. In what way? Nick asks. I don’t know, Rosa says, in every way. You’ll find out for yourself when you read it.

There were other decisions to be made, of course, a host of significant details that still had to be conjured up and worked into the scene – for purposes of fullness and authenticity, for narrative ballast. How long has Rosa been living in New York? for example. What does she do there? Does she have a job and, if so, is the job important to her or simply a means of generating enough money to cover the rent? What about the status of her love life? Is she single or married, attached or unattached, on the prowl or patiently waiting for the right person to come along? My first impulse was to make her a photographer, or perhaps an assistant film editor – work that was connected to images, not words, just as Grace’s job was. Definitely unmarried, definitely never married, but perhaps involved with someone, or, even better, perhaps recently broken up after a long, tortured affair. I didn’t want to dwell on any of those questions for the time being, nor on similar questions relating to Nick’s wife – profession, family background, taste in music, books, and so on. I wasn’t writing the story yet, I was merely sketching out the action in rough strokes, and I couldn’t afford to bog myself down in the minutiae of secondary concerns. That would have forced me to stop and think, and for the moment I was only interested in forging ahead, in seeing where the pictures in my mind were going to take me. It wasn’t about control; it wasn’t even about making choices. My job that morning was simply to follow what was happening inside me, and in order to do that I had to keep the pen moving as fast as I could.