About the Author (17 page)

“Wouldn’t it have taken
less
energy simply to research and write
actual
articles?” Thorne asked.

“You’d think so,” Jeremy said. “But the mind of the literary fraud is a mysterious thing. Consider Penelope Gilliat of
The New Yorker
. Wonderful writer, but somehow she found herself regurgitating huge tracts of someone
else’s
profile on Graham Greene. She said the plagiarism was ‘subconscious,’ but she lost her job as a
New Yorker
feature writer. Although I believe they continued to allow her to write movie reviews.”

“They were far too kind,” said Thorne.

“What do you think, Cal?” asked Lucy, training her pointed, mouselike face at me. “You’re the only one here who makes his living by his pen. Have you ever felt tempted?”

I had, by this point, enjoyed more than my fair share of the Halberts’ free-flowing chardonnay. The faces that turned to confront me seemed a little indistinct in my vision.

“Well,” I began, smoothly enough, “I can’t speak for journalists. But I sympathize with unpublished
fiction
writers who yearn to get into print any way they can.”

I looked across the table at Janet, who smiled at me in the flickering light of the candles that decorated the Halberts’ table. I swept my unsteady gaze around the circle of faces. My listeners nodded, interested.

“See, what you all are either forgetting or don’t know is that unpublished writers are
des
perate. Until you publish, you don’t exist. Your soul is . . . not
dead
, exactly, but, but”—I groped for eloquence with my thickened tongue—“but in the same region as death, the region we inhabit before we’re born. Limbo; purgatory. All you want is to be born—into print.

“And
you
,” I said, suddenly piercing Thorne with a glance, my tone abruptly shifting into acid accusation, “get on your high horse about these poor bastards when they take desperate measures to—I was going to say
succeed
, but that’s not the right word at all. That sounds mercenary and self-serving; it smacks too much of self-advancement. I am talking about the yearning to give birth to the self. I’m talking about the difference between life and death. Literally—and no pun intended.”

I wasn’t sure that I had even made a pun, but no matter. The words were bursting from me now, under great pressure, and could not be dammed up—despite the quick glances and murmurs that had started to animate my listeners.

“It’s easy for someone drawing a
pay
check and with
health
insurance to criticize penniless, unpublished writers,” I went on, my voice suddenly adopting a wheedling, pleading edge, as if I were asking this table of wined-up scholars for their forgiveness. “I mean, if I hadn’t published
Almost Like Suicide
, my life would never have started; I’d still be living in a ghetto in New York City, slaving at a bookstore for minimum wage. Worst of all, I never would have met my”—and here an obstruction came into my throat, a sob that I stifled to a gulp—“I never would have met my beautiful
wife
.”

Janet was staring hard now at her plate, a deep blush suffusing her face. My startled fellow diners stared at me silently. Then Jim Thorne, with his pedant’s prissy, competitive need to have the last word, muttered, “Granted. But you presumably didn’t plagiarize your novel. You actually did the
work
.”

I snapped my head around. “You mish my point,” I slurred. “I am saying that even if I
had
plagiarized it, I wouldn’t give a damn about your dishapproval.”

“Yes, well!” our host suddenly cried from the head of the table, rubbing his hands together and lasering his gaze down the table at his wife. “And what rare marvel of culinary artistry have you come up with for our dessert, my love?”

The conversation never really found its groove again after my outburst, and the Thornes left shortly after dessert, at around ten, saying something about “a busy day tomorrow.” The party labored on, trying to reach the finish line of midnight, but at around eleven-thirty, the soiree wobbled to a halt.

Standing in the Halberts’ foyer, saying good-bye to our hosts, I addressed Jeremy.

“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “I guess I was feeling kind of protective of my fellow writers” (by which I suppose I meant “fellow literary thieves”).

“Not at all,” he said, scowling a little. “Don’t give it a second thought. Water under the bridge. Water under the bridge.”

I hate it when someone says something like “water under the bridge,”
twice
. It means it isn’t. I still retained enough grip on sobriety to realize that further apology would only dig me in deeper. Bracing myself, I then faced our hostess, Laura. Eyes averted, she gave me a brisk, brittle air kiss, then finished whatever she had been saying to Janet, which seemed to involve assuring her that there would be no hard feelings.

Once we were finally out the door, Janet snapped at me, “We’re walking.”

“Walking?” I dumbly answered, teetering a little on the narrow flight of wooden stairs that led down to the Halberts’ driveway.

“Yes,” Janet said. “You’re in no shape to drive, you could use some fresh air, and I told Jeremy that we were going to leave our car here for the night.” I began weakly to protest, but she simply shot me a glance under those dark, straight brows, and I knew enough to leave it alone.

We set out, wordlessly, along River Road. Ordinarily we would have held hands or put our arms around each other’s waist. Now, however, we did not touch.

We rounded the curve onto the town’s main street. The elastic abyss of the lake was on our left. Suddenly Janet’s voice hissed at me:

“I
can’t
understand why you spoke like that to Jim.”

I stopped and grasped her arm. I looked down into her face. Grief, like a muscle spasm, did something complicated to my heart, compressing and then rapidly releasing it. I knew right then, for certain, that I could never tell her the truth, never explain that in attacking Thorne, I had been defending not all literary crooks, but only myself.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I drank too much, and I just lost it. I’ll call Jim tomorrow and apologize.”

“You’d better,” she said.

She permitted me a kiss, and with my face buried in her dark hair, I inwardly begged her to forgive me.

We continued walking and had just started out across the bridge when I noticed, to our right, the shadowy figures loitering in the glow of the Cold Beer sign in Ernie’s front window. A few beefy boys, shirtless and wearing leather biker vests, stood proudly beside their hogs while three or four girls, in jeans and untucked flannel shirts, milled around them, swigging from cans of Bud. There was nothing especially unusual about the scene: Ernie’s stoop, I knew, was a popular hangout for the bored local youths. But then I noticed her, like a familiar, recurring nightmare, standing in the midst of the action in her cutoffs and T-shirt, her hair hanging limp on either side of her pale face. Les. Her eyes glinted in the moonlight, picking me out of the darkness. I started, flinched, and tightened my grip on Janet’s waist.

“What’s wrong?” Janet said.

“Nothing. Just want to get home.”

“Evening, Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham!” a female voice cried from the group.

“Oh, hello, Chopper,” my wife called. “I didn’t recognize you in the dark.”

Chopper Pollard—real name Melissa—was a sixteen-year-old town girl, one of several daughters of Jake Pollard, a chronically unemployed road worker, and his wife, Tammy, who waitressed at the Snak Shak. A sweet kid, Chopper did odd jobs around town to help her mom out: mowing lawns, delivering groceries, tending plants and pets for the local yuppies when they went on vacation. We’d had Chopper up to rake leaves and shovel snow several times.

“You’re gonna be needing a mowin’ pretty soon,” Chopper called out across the street.

“I know,” Janet said, her voice echoing off the shop fronts. “Cal will give you a ring about it this week. Right, Cal?”

I forced a smile onto my face, then risked a glance toward the store. “Right,” I choked out.

Chopper, short and stocky, with a cropped bob that hung to the edge of her blunt jawline, was standing out front of the group now. I could see Les over her shoulder. She was hanging back in the shadows, her feral eyes darting between me and my wife. I looked away and tugged gently on Janet.

“ ’Night, Chopper,” Janet sang. “Don’t be up too late, now.”

“No, ma’am!”

We walked on through the darkness. I was amazed that Janet could not feel my heartbeat. It rocked my whole frame.

When we were about a hundred yards from the group, at the edge of the park, Janet whispered, “I’m sorry to see Chopper hanging with that crowd.”

“Likewise,” I said, meaning it.

“I recognized the Trench brothers, and the Morrissey sisters. But who was that pretty blond girl?”

I said I was sure I had no idea. “But did you really find her pretty?” I couldn’t help asking.

“Didn’t you?” Janet asked. “Actually,” she said, laughing, “I was convinced she must be the girl Ned saw you with today. Your mistress.”

I got to the bank the next morning at a few minutes past ten. Eschewing the lines that had already formed at the tellers’ windows—mostly stooped farmers in overalls, clutching precious government checks—I headed straight for the front office and rapped lightly on the frosted-glass door. On it were stenciled the words
Brenda Rasmussen, Manager
. A female voice called, “Come on in.”

Brenda was standing behind her desk, arranging a pile of ledger books and loose papers. She looked up and smiled at me. “Howdy, Cal,” she said. “Take a seat. You here to count your money? If so, it’ll take a while.”

We knew Brenda a little, socially. Having grown up in New Halcyon, she had earned a B.Comm. at the University of Vermont and an M.B.A. at Duke, then worked in Burlington before returning to New Halcyon some six years ago to take up the manager’s position at the bank. Now in her late thirties, she had acquired a veneer of big-city professionalism—the no-nonsense suit jacket, knee-length gray flannel skirt, and floppy businesswoman’s tie—but retained all of her small-town informality. In this she was like the bank itself: though part of one of Wall Street’s biggest banking concerns, this branch was, with its faded linoleum floor, brass tellers’ wickets, and long wooden counters, as comfortable and cozy as an old apothecary shoppe.

I sat in one of the two green-leather office chairs that faced Brenda’s desk. I had spent a good part of the night before concocting, then rehearsing, the story I was about to unfold. Consequently, it emerged quite smoothly (I had also thought to grease the wheels of speech a little with a few shots of bourbon, administered after Janet had gone off to work).

I explained to Brenda that I hoped to make a rather substantial cash withdrawal. My reason was simple. As she might or might not be aware, my first wedding anniversary was coming up, and I had decided to play a kind of practical joke on Janet. It was my intention, I said, to inform my wife of an upcoming windfall (an advance on my new novel) by presenting her with a gift-wrapped package that would contain an absolute avalanche of greenbacks. Janet’s
real
anniversary gift would be presented later; but I just wanted to see the look on her face when she opened the gag present.

Brenda nodded for a while, then said, “Cal, it’s your money. You can do what you like with it. But I wouldn’t be doing my duty as a bank manager—or as a friend—if I didn’t tell you it sounds like a damn fool idea.”

“Why’s that?” I asked, all innocence.

“Well, for one thing, if the house happens to burn down that night, and you lose it all . . .”

“Listen, if that house burns down, the money will be the least of my worries. You can’t bring back Janet’s childhood memories.”

“No.” Brenda smiled and said, “You also can’t bring back the money.”

“Aaah, Brenda,” I said. “What’s life without a little risk?”

This was a veiled little dig. The implication was that Brenda had taken the safe route in life, which was why she had ended up the manager of a poky little bank in her native backwater; whereas I had ventured forth in the perilous life of an artist, which was why I was an internationally known novelist and millionaire. “Well,” Brenda said with a down-turning little smile, “how much money were you thinking?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, as if I hadn’t even considered the question until now. “Twenty-five?”

“Hundred,” she said.

“No, no,” I said. “Thousand. That’s why I brought this.” I lifted the attaché case I had brought with me. Brenda raised her eyebrows. I laughed—the kooky, impractical artiste. “You’re not going to tell me that I don’t have that much in the bank?”

“No, you’ve got that and then some,” Brenda said. “It’s just a lot of money. And by the way, for cash withdrawals in amounts over ten thousand dollars, I’ve got to file a form with the government.”

“You mean I can’t get the money today?” My heart quickened.

“No, you can get it today,” she said. “I’ve just got to put it on record with the feds. But I think your idea is the dumbest damn thing I’ve ever heard of.”

I told Brenda that I hoped she would nevertheless indulge me.

When she saw that I could not be dissuaded, she rose from her desk, extracted from a nearby filing cabinet a few forms for me to fill out, and then disappeared, with my attaché case and one of her tellers, into a back room, presumably containing the vault.

I was alone now in the office. I had managed to unspool the story without so much as a pause or hitch in my voice, but I
had
perspired with some freedom, so that my back, in its lightweight cotton shirt, had adhered nastily to the chair’s leather backrest. I filled out the forms, then cast nervous glances out Brenda’s window (the ancient, rippled pane made the street beyond look like a scene glimpsed through water). Brenda came back in, placed the attaché case on the desk between us, and opened it.

“Take your time and count that, Cal,” she said.