About the Author (2 page)

“Did you borrow my laptop?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “You know I have no idea how to use that thing.” (It was one of my writerly pretensions that I spurned word processors.)

“It’s gone,” Stewart said.

“Gone?” I echoed. “What do you mean, ‘
gone
’? I heard you using it last night. Where could it possibly have . . .”

And here my voice died away, the way a voice does when a dawning realization breaks the horizon line of the mind.

“You call the police,” Stewart said. “I’ll check to see if she took anything else.”

Thirty minutes later, we were in a dingy upstairs office marked “Robbery Identification Program” in the Thirty-fourth Precinct House at Broadway and 183rd Street. A wheezing cop lightly dusted with cigarette ash typed up the particulars about Stewart’s stolen laptop (serial number, model, etc.), while I was invited to peruse the mug-shot books.

For twenty minutes I flipped through those well-thumbed binders, which were marked along their spines with categories like “Break and Enter,” “Push-ins,” and “Armed Robbery.” The plasticized pages offered, to my gaze, a Boschian gallery of skanky street hustlers, drug addicts, and petty thieves. Turning the pages, I was terrified that at any moment, I was going to see Les’s moony face, with its curtains of pale hair, staring sullenly out at me in the glare of the photographer’s flash. I knew that I was supposed to be hoping to find her face amid those flint-eyed criminals, but I was relieved when I did not.

“Okay,” the emphysematous cop said. “We’ll check the pawnshops and have a look at this”—he peered at his notes—“this Holiday Cocktail Lounge. I doubt we’ll find anything, but if we apprehend a suspect, we’ll be calling you to come and look at a lineup.”

Then the cops drove us home.

Stewart sat silently in the backseat of the squad car, staring straight ahead. The tendons stood out under the thin, freckled flesh of his jaw. It was the angriest I’d ever seen him. The girl had made off with a signet ring that Stewart had inherited from his grandfather. The heirloom was irreplaceable, but I knew it was the loss of the laptop that was really killing him. He had saved assiduously for the thing—and I had heard him tell the cops that it was not insured.

Alone again in our violated apartment, I immediately started babbling to Stewart about how I would hit my dad up for a loan so that I could replace the stolen computer. Stewart, sitting on the sofa, methodically rubbing his temples, cut me off with a wave of his hand.

“Forget it,” he said. “These things happen.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Forget it. The damage is done.”

With that he stood and, without so much as a glance in my direction, stalked off to his room, shut his door, and resumed work as if nothing at all had occurred to disturb his routine—though now the muffled click of his computer keyboard was replaced by the clatter of a manual typewriter, an ancient flea-market Underwood with rattling keys and a piercing bell that rang resoundingly every time he reached the end of a line.

From that point on, there was a marked drop in the temperature of our relations. Stewart began to communicate with me solely by means of terse missives scribbled on Post-it notes tacked to the fridge. Passing me on his way out the door to class, he would accept my cautious greetings with only a stern nod. I tried to blame this on his heading into his final weeks of law school. He was clearly under tremendous scholastic pressure: not eating much, bathing infrequently, and thrashing away, endlessly, on his typewriter. But when, the following Sunday, he failed to stop by the kitchen even to say hello, I knew that he was harboring a pretty serious grudge.

Inevitably, the silent waves of disapproval radiating from Stewart’s room had their effect on me. Certain blurry guilts that had been collecting on the fringes of my consciousness for months, maybe years, came into focus. I called myself a writer, yet since my arrival in New York, I had not so much as uncapped a pen. It was time for me to turn over a New Leaf, to make good on my resolve, formed back on my twenty-fifth birthday, to knuckle down, finally, to work.

You’ve probably heard of authors who begin to feel their artistic faith deserting them if they miss a single day at the desk. Well, it had been considerably longer than a day since I had tried to write anything. More like two and a half years. Naturally, I was feeling some anxiety about ending my literary silence. As a warm-up, I had decided simply to write a straightforward account of a young man’s moving from his midwestern hometown to Manhattan, a fictionalized version of my own migration, nothing fancy. Yet for several days I found it impossible to disturb with a single word the surface tension of the page, which sat, quivering with bright expectancy, in the glare of my desk lamp. As the days passed, I realized that it wasn’t so much inspiration that I lacked; it was something still more basic to the writer’s mental and emotional makeup. I’m talking about the megalomaniacal confidence, the sheer cosmic audacity, that permits a mortal to attempt the sacrilege of setting in motion a world.

I did, eventually, find that boost of omnipotence, though in a most unexpected place. The catalytic moment came on June 30, about a month after our robbery—the day when Stodard and Son’s Bookstore, where I worked as a stockboy, held one of its special in-store events. The occasion was a personal appearance by Hower J. Brent, the twenty-one-year-old author of
ZeitGuy
, a first novel that had been sold to Hollywood for a reported $900,000 and entered the
New York Times
best-seller list at number five.

Ordinarily, contact with a writer of Hower J. Brent’s indecent youth and success would be precisely the kind of thing to plunge me into a weeklong depression. And I will further admit that for the better part of Hower’s in-store appearance (during which I was obliged to hand him fresh copies of
ZeitGuy
to sign—a kind of literary scrub nurse to his master surgeon), I roiled inwardly with envy. But these feelings did not last. The turning point came when the final one of Hower’s flushed and adoring fans had moved off to join the long line at the cash register, and he was, for a moment, all mine. I turned to the novelist (a precociously balding young man with baby-fat cheeks and nibbled lips), and said:

“I enjoyed your novel very much” (a lie, since I had been afraid even to crack the covers of
ZeitGuy
, in case it was good).

“Thanks,” he said, avoiding my eye. He automatically cocked his pen.

“Oh!” I said. “Right.” I removed a copy of his novel from the pile and handed it to him. As he leafed ahead to the title page, I, for no reason that I can exactly fathom, said, “Well, I hope to be signing a copy of
my
novel for
you
in the not-too-distant future.”

I saw something in Hower sag. He scarcely glanced up from the page as he muttered, “Ah, another writer.” I caught the fillip of sarcasm he gave to the word
another
.

“Oh, well,” I said, heat rising suddenly in my neck and face, talking fast, “I’d hardly be brash enough to call myself a
writer
. Since I haven’t published anything yet. It’s just that I recently submitted my first novel to some publishers in town, and they were kind enough to say some encouraging things and to start talk of some rather vigorous negotiations—
bidding
, I suppose they call it.”

His body language immediately changed its tone of voice. Straightening, he looked me in the eye for the first time and actually began to apologize, explaining that nearly everyone he met claimed to be working on a novel or a screenplay. Meanwhile, I had noticed, in my peripheral vision, that Marshall Weibe, my furious, blond-bearded boss, was over at the cash register glaring at me, as if to say,
How dare you talk to Hower J. Brent? Why the hell aren’t you over here helping me bag these books
? It was time to break away; I’d had my puny, meaningless moment of ego-rebuilding.

But Hower seemed in no hurry to let me go. Shaking my hand lingeringly, he asked my agent’s name. Now severely flustered, I said the first thing that came into my head—I said my roommate’s name: “Stewart Church.” Hower shook his head, then mentioned that he was with Blackie Yaeger. Which figured. Yaeger was, at the time, the most talked-about agent in Manhattan, a man notorious for obtaining astonishingly large advances for his stable of literary up-and-comers. I had promised myself that if I ever managed to write anything, the first person I would take it to would be Yaeger.

“Well, speak of the devil!” Hower suddenly exclaimed, looking past me over my shoulder. I turned, and bearing down on us was a tall, thin man, his arms spread.

I had seen photographs of him in magazines—a cadaverous dandy with a cap of bootblack hair scraped back from his bony brow. But photography could not do justice to his real-life visage. It was as if the skin on his face were being pulled taut by an invisible hand at the back of his head: his staring eyes seemed about to pop from their sockets; his teeth leered from a lipless mouth; and his flattened nose afforded a view clear up his two very black, slightly asymmetrical nostrils. Dressed in a high-buttoned black velvet suit, which looked to have been sewn directly onto his feline silhouette, he rushed up to Hower and executed a brief hug.

“Sorry I’m so fucking late!” Yaeger rasped. “Interviewer from
New York
magazine wouldn’t let me go. Blackie Yaeger.”

This last bit was directed at me. Yaeger had turned and extended his hand to shake. I clasped it, expecting it to feel as cold as a corpse’s. Instead it was hot, moist, and very much alive. Hower, meanwhile, was babbling to Yaeger about my recent literary good fortune. I saw Yaeger’s eyes ignite.

“Who’s your agent?” he rapped out.

“Uh, Stewart Church?” I quavered.

“Never heard of him,” Yaeger said. He conjured a business card from somewhere on his person, extending it between two fingers. “Here,” he said, glaring at me. “Call me. Look, Hower, we gotta get going. That MTV taping is at seven.” He hooked an arm around Hower’s shoulders, then started to guide him toward the front of the store. “Call me,” Yaeger repeated, over his shoulder.

I waited until both Blackie and Hower had pushed through the big double doors onto Fifth Avenue. Then I hied it over to the cash, where Marshall was ringing through the last few customers.

Even the sustained, sibilant tongue-lashing that I received from Marshall could not diminish the joy I felt after my colloquy with Blackie and Hower
. Cal Cunningham, no longer the cringing stockboy, but rather the brash young author enjoying a touch of shoptalk with his fellow literary luminaries
. So intoxicating was the moment, so thrilling, that I forgot for the moment that the whole thing was based on a lie. And yet, I told myself, it was not
really
a lie; that conversation simply belonged to an episode of my life to come—a scene that fate, in its scribbled first draft, had written out of sequence. It was
my
job to make sense of destiny’s chaotic jottings, my job to author the events that would make my meeting with Yaeger and Hower assume its proper position in the dramatic contour of my life. And it was then, as I rumbled home toward Washington Heights on the A train, that I felt the all-important authorial confidence flood my being. It was then that the barriers of fear, and self-doubt, and will-to-failure, fell away. I was ready to begin.

I got home from the bookstore that evening at around eight-thirty, so high on adrenaline, and so eager to get to my desk, that I skipped dinner and immediately seated myself at the rickety card table beneath the living-room windows. A layer of feathery dust covered the blank piece of paper on the tabletop. I whisked the page into the trash basket and selected a fresh sheet. A
new
New Leaf.

Stewart was, as usual, pounding away on his typewriter next door, so I screwed in a pair of foam earplugs. Then I cracked my knuckles, adjusted my chair, squared up the sheet of paper, cracked my knuckles again, readjusted my chair, recracked my knuckles, readjusted the sheet of paper. . .

Perhaps I
was
a little hungry after all. I’d been hauling crates of remainders all morning at the bookstore. I was fucking
famished
. No wonder I was having trouble getting to work. I got up, went into the kitchen, and slapped some ham between two slices of bread. I ate standing up by the sink, rinsing the sandwich down with a glass of milk.

I went back to my desk to write a novel.

I had always assumed that when the time came, it would be a simple matter to translate the swing, snap, and verve of my Sunday-morning monologues onto paper. It wasn’t. After two hours, I still had not written one word. The surging confidence that had filled me after my encounter with Blackie and Hower had now all but drained away. I became hyperaware of my body: the greasy slick of flop sweat on my brow and upper lip; the pressure of the back of the chair on my coccyx; the dull ache in my testicles where my jeans were binding them; the distant crepitation of Stewart’s typewriter as heard through my earplugs. Gradually, my overloaded senses irised in around this last phenomenon. I could actually
feel
, through the floorboards, the percussive vibration of Stewart’s typing—a particularly galling sensation to someone in the throes of writer’s block. The sound rose first to a distinct, and bothersome,
tick, tick, tick
, then to a more intrusive
clackety, clackety, clack
, and finally to an intolerable
ratt-a-tat-rattatat-TAT-A TAT-A-TATTAT
!

I yanked the plugs from my ears. Stewart was pummeling his typewriter with a force that suggested a man in the homestretch, a man close to climax. I was reaching a climax of my own. It suddenly seemed to me that Stewart was entirely to blame for my literary constipation. No wonder I hadn’t written anything in the past two years! Who could be expected to perform the delicate art of fiction with such a frenzy going on next door? If he didn’t shut up within the next ten seconds (I glanced at the clock—it was almost eleven), I would march into his room and
demand
that he do something to muffle the sound of his fucking machine, or else I would—