About the Author (14 page)

Hardly had the hoopla begun to ebb in the American media when it began to crank up again in the foreign countries where the book rights had been sold—places as far-flung as Denmark, Sweden, Japan, China, Italy,
Turkey
, and of course dear old Britain, where, I learned with a spasm of amazed horror, the copyright-page information was worded thus: “The moral right of Cal Cunningham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act . . .” After reading that, I almost backed out of an agreement to be the subject of a BBC documentary about my “life and times,” but Blackie wouldn’t hear of it, and so I found myself, for three weeks, being shadowed around New York by a crew of blokes bearing boom mikes and movie cameras, as I went about my business of buying the paper at the corner newsstand, taking money out of my local ATM, and giving tight-throated readings of my novel in the few remaining independent bookstores in the city.

Given the worldwide public celebration of me as the author of
Almost Like Suicide
, it seemed increasingly less feasible that I would ever make a private admission to Janet that I was, strictly speaking, not. Yet as time passed, it also seemed equally impossible that I could ever break up with her (no matter what my conscience told me). So I settled on a typical rationalization. I told myself that being with Janet would turn me into the writer she, and the rest of the world, believed me to be. Her love would act as an antidote to the poison of self-doubt that rendered me artistically impotent. In my more fancifully psychological moments, I actually believed that my loving Janet would, as it were,
turn me into Stewart
, that through a transmigratory transfer of identity, I would take on his virtues of literary discipline and skill. In short, I believed that Janet’s love could, retroactively, make me
good
.

Which explains why, some four weeks after the book’s publication, I went AWOL from the reporters and publicity people and raced up to New Halcyon for a day. There I pulled Janet into my arms and said that I thought it was time she took her house off the market. At first she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Then the penny dropped, and she threw her arms around my neck. We decided to keep the plans simple. The ceremony itself was held just two weeks later, in New Halcyon, in the brown-shingled Anglican church just off Cliffwood Road. I recall, first, my bride’s face as she beamed up at me at the altar, her hair interwoven with sprays of baby’s breath and lilies of the valley; I remember Janet’s father, looking startlingly like an aging Donovan Leitch, and her mother, a smaller, older, but by no means less beautiful version of Janet; I remember my own boutonniered father, his smile carrying an unmistakable cast of suspicion about how I, his prodigal heir, had managed to manipulate the levers of life so much to my advantage. I remember, too, the wickedly grinning teeth and staring nostrils of Blackie Yaeger, who snaked up to me and my bride through the crush of wine-sipping well-wishers to hiss at us that we were
a fucking gorgeous fucking couple
—a moment that might have belonged to the book-launch party that Phoenix threw for me at the Limelight that spring, but never mind, it all runs together, it all merges in one strange and implausible dream of happiness realized.

Of course, there were those readers who, knowing my romantic history as spelled out in
Almost Like Suicide
, questioned whether I could break my old habits of womanizing. Little did they understand that until I met Janet, I had been a virgin. Obviously, I’m not talking about the nuts-and-bolts act of intercourse. I am talking, here, of physical
love
, about which I, until I met Janet, knew nothing. Sex, for me, had always been a short, sharp flash of pleasure, followed almost immediately by a rumble of ominous, approaching regret. The brighter the flash, the drearier the aftermath, since there was nothing to link my partner and me except the shared challenge of negotiating a quick, unembarrassing parting. With Janet, however, I learned that the joy of sexual passion comes in the slow expansion
after
the crescendo, as you lie together in the enveloping pink-misted cloud of happiness, of soul fusion. It changed me. Leaving behind the jaded Lothario immortalized in
Almost Like Suicide
, I entered a state uncommonly like innocence. Janet and I had regained Paradise on our hillside in New Halcyon, a modern Adam and Eve.

And what of Stewart in all this? Did he continue to lurk on the periphery of my dreams? Less and less so. Yes, there were times when he would edge into my consciousness, usually during some moment of particularly supersaturated happiness with Janet—when we were picnicking together, say, in the pasture’s tall grass, or curled up in front of the fire while an ice storm raged against the picture window. I might at such times be stricken by the thought that I was living a destiny meant for Stewart. But for the most part, I managed to relegate my old roommate and collaborator to a back hallway of my mind, much as I had relegated Janet’s portrait of him to the back hallway of the house (Janet had not minded my moving the painting from its prime spot in the living room; she’d even smiled indulgently about my peccadillo of “jealousy over the past”). Like the portrait, Stewart was out of sight, out of mind. And indeed, once the publicity maelstrom around
Almost Like Suicide
began to subside and Janet and I were finally afforded some peace and quiet together, I began to think that my pale ex-roommate might recede to a point where he would fade altogether, like a character you know from some half-forgotten novel.

If there were any true discomforts associated with my new life, they had to do less with the hauntings of guilt and more with how, precisely, I was to occupy my time. New to the existence of an independently wealthy country squire, I took a while to establish a routine for killing the hours between Janet’s departure for work each morning and her arrival home in the evening.

For the first few months, I filled the time by kibitzing with the parade of contractors whom I hired to renovate Janet’s sagging home. But once the plumbers, electricians, painters, and carpenters had finished their respective jobs, I was once again thrown back on my own devices. I tried gardening, but all that bending and digging hurt my knees, and as a person who lacked the patience for literary work, I certainly didn’t have much for watching plants and flowers grow. I tried tinkering with my car, but the oiled intricacies of the internal combustion engine just didn’t seem to hold the fascination for me that they do for so many of my fellow males. I then got into the habit of tooling down to the little country library to forage among the shelves for old leatherbound volumes of Dickens and George Eliot. But after a couple of months, even Great Literature began to pall, and the potential for boredom, not to mention outright brain death, presented itself. Gradually I came to recognize that if life as a writer in a rural hamlet was going to work for me, I was simply going to have to try to start writing.

Over that first winter, while immersing myself in all those classics, I had allowed myself to begin woolgathering about writing a pastoral novel set in a New England town—a fat, slow-moving, old-fashioned novel rich in atmosphere and articulated by a cast of colorful local characters. I told Blackie of my plans and even began to scribble some cautious notes: descriptions of the local flowers and weeds, snippets of conversation overheard at the supermarket or the hardware store, observations about the weather and the change of seasons. It was not, however, until a bright May morning, on the very brink of Janet’s and my first anniversary, that I felt ready actually to begin writing—or, I should say, felt I could no longer stall the act.

After Janet’s departure for school that morning (an especially pretty spring morning of flickering birdsong and twittering leaf-shadow), I did not (as was my custom) linger on the lawn to take in the lake and hills, but instead went immediately to the office I had set up in a back room of the house. There I wasted no time seating myself at the desk, a titanic object with multiple stout-handled drawers. I pulled out the stack of handwritten notes I had been accumulating over the winter—notes about a young Manhattan sharpie’s spiritual rebirth in a Vermont town. For the next four hours I read, and carefully indexed and cross-referenced these jottings. After a short lunch, I returned to my office, and prepared to begin writing. With my notes set to one side of the desktop, I removed the cover from my manual typewriter, then screwed a sheet of paper into the platen.

This was my first attempt at fiction writing since that distant day, in Washington Heights, when Stewart had interrupted my literary labors to show me his story “Harrington’s Farm.” Curiously, I felt none of the familiar panic at the sight of the waiting page. Instead, a relaxed yet somehow alert mood settled over me—
filled
me, like an invading spirit. I seemed to enter a trance in which the book’s contours took shape before my eyes. For the first time that I could ever recall, I experienced what I imagined real writers must experience when they settle down to write: a certain satisfying plumpness of the imagination, a sense of words and sentences crowding to the front of the brain, seeking escape onto the page. Maybe, I thought, those fantasies of Stewart’s benign “possession” of me were not so fanciful after all; perhaps living with Janet for the past twelve months had had precisely the healing effect on me that I had hoped it would. After a moment’s pause (like the silent beat before the conductor raises his baton), I lowered my fingers toward the keyboard.

The doorbell rang. I waited, hoping the person would assume no one was home. The bell sounded again. Twice.

Cursing, I got up and headed down the hallway.

In the vestibule, I sneaked a glance out the window onto the porch. In profile stood a short blond girl in a shrunken cotton T-shirt and cutoff jean shorts. Her naked legs disappeared into white socks rolled over the tops of black army boots. She carried, in the crook of one arm, a copy of my novel,
Almost Like Suicide
.

I was annoyed, but not particularly surprised, to see her. Every few weeks I could count on at least one devoted fan of my novel’s making a pilgrimage to New Halcyon to meet me in person. They often looked much like this girl: early-twenty-somethings who had taken too much to heart Holden Caulfield’s assertion that there could be no greater pleasure in life than to meet, in the flesh, one’s favorite writer. To date I had had to fend off only one bona fide crackpot, a gaunt boy with matted hair and flaring, “enlightened”-looking eyes. He had hitchhiked all the way from California to tell me that he’d “cracked the code” of my book, which involved taking the first letters of each word in selected sections of the novel to spell out hidden messages concerning the imminent arrival of certain “dark riders.” He had agreed to leave only when I admitted to him that I
had
concealed such messages in my text, but cautioned that he mustn’t speak of this to anyone; he nodded, a finger to his lips, and backed away down the driveway, as if to say that my secret would rest safe with him. Except for this crazed young man, my visitors were, by and large, harmless, well-meaning folk who simply wanted to tell me how much they had enjoyed my novel. It was no skin off my nose to sign an autograph or take five minutes to listen to how my work had changed someone’s life.

This girl, however, had come at a bad time. I resolved not to answer the door. I figured she’d give up after a couple of rings. I was wrong. Over and over, for perhaps three minutes, she resolutely worked that bell
. Bing-bong. Bing-bong
. When it was clear that she just was not going to give up, I stalked over to the door and opened it up a crack. Through the gap I took in her plump, pretty face with its blunt nose and rather fat, pouty lips.

“Can I help you?” I said.

“So, it really
is
you,” she said, apparently oblivious to the irritation in my tone.

“Yes, it is. How can I help you?”

Her quick blue eyes flickered up and down my body, then resettled on my face with a kind of expectancy or (perhaps) challenge—almost as if she thought I should recognize her. When I did not, she burst into rapid speech:

“Please don’t shut the door! I came all the way up from New York on the bus, and I got stiffed by the cab guy in Newport, and then I had to
bribe
this hick in town to tell me where you lived! I—I just wanted to tell you that
Almost Like Suicide
is my favorite book of all time.”

In the patient but not too friendly voice that I had developed for these encounters, I thanked her and said I was happy to hear that she’d liked my book.

“Wow, cool,” she said, shaking her pale hair back from her face with a twitch of her head. “Would you mind signing my copy?”

That, I said, would be fine.

She rummaged in her knapsack for a pen. “I know I got one in here somewhere.” She frowned into the recesses of her sack. “Ahh, got it.” She pulled out a gnawed Bic and passed both it and the book to me. Her bitten fingernails carried traces of purple polish.

“Just put ‘To Lesley, love Cal,’ ” she said.

I thumbed through the book to the title page, then scrawled the words she’d requested, with the slight editorial alteration of changing “love” to “Best wishes.” Meanwhile, she talked on excitedly of her own life as a struggling artist and dancer in New York. “I live with my boyfriend on the Lower East Side,” she prattled. “If you’re ever back in town, you should drop by.” I handed the book and pen back to her and explained that I made it to New York very rarely these days. “Too bad, man,” she said. “It’s still the greatest city on earth. We could show you an awesome time.” She glanced at the words I had written, looked a little crestfallen at my editing change, then placed the book back in her bag. She thanked me. I said that she was very welcome. But she didn’t budge. She just stood there on the doorstep, perhaps hoping to be asked inside. As tactfully as possible, without wanting to seem like I was hustling her out, I explained that I really should get back to my writing.