About the Author (3 page)

His typing stopped. His chair scraped, and his footsteps approached the door. I snatched up a pen and assumed the attitude of someone in the grip of a divine afflatus. In reality, I was simply scribbling my own name over and over:
Cal Cunningham Cal Cunningham Cal Cunningham
.

Stewart halted in the living-room doorway. He produced a dry, stagey cough. I looked up at him.

He was dressed in an unbuttoned shirt and stained sweatpants. He looked awful: eye sockets hollow; skinny chest deeply grooved down the middle; hair ruffled and askew. Working his lips for a while, as if rolling something sour around in his mouth, he finally said:

“If you’ve got a minute, Cal, I’d like to have a word with you.”

There was a sober gravitas to the utterance that reminded me of the tone used by an old high school vice principal of mine when he regularly called me into his office for mournful discussions of my shortcomings as a student and a person. Stewart apparently hoped to do something similar—perhaps to address, belatedly, the matter of the stolen laptop, which we’d never really resolved, of course. Part of me recoiled at the prospect; another part of me welcomed an airing of grievances. Maybe once we’d buried the hatchet on that issue, I might be able to write something.

I turned in my chair to face him. “Sure,” I said. “I’ve got a minute.”

“Good,” Stewart said, failing to stray from his post in the doorway. “I was wondering if you could read something I’ve written.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard him properly. Something he’d
written
? It took me a moment to shift mental gears from the expected confrontation to this new, unexpected, phenomenon, but when I did, I naturally assumed that he was talking about one of his legal papers. I put down my pen. “Gee, I don’t know, Stew,” I said. “I don’t know much about the law.”

“Actually,” he said, glancing down at the floorboards, then returning his gaze to me, “this isn’t a law paper. It’s a short story.”

I blinked. I opened my mouth, then immediately shut it again.

A short story? Was he kidding? No, he looked deadly serious as he hovered there in the doorway, an apprehensive frown on his face. I felt a kind of animal alertness come over me, a houndlike lifting and flaring of my nostrils, as if I had sniffed some dangerous intruder in my territory.

As I think I’ve made clear, I did not belong to that fraternity of writers who relish the company of their fellow authors. It might have been different had I not been both a virgin to publication and a virtual impotent as regarded actual writing. But as things stood, even so unlikely an artistic rival as my earthbound, uninspired roommate posed a nasty threat.

“Stew,” I said, trying to smile, and failing, “I never knew you were moonlighting as a writer.”

“Yes, well . . . ,” he said, his face flushing pink. “I hoped you might have a look at something. I mean, I value your opinion. As a writer yourself.”

This tweaked my authorial vanity, and I felt something in me relax a little. Of course, it was ridiculous for me to imagine that Stewart could string together two sentences of fiction. Common sense said that anything he produced would be fatally afflicted with the law’s dry cadences and obscure vocabulary. Old Stew was simply asking for a few literary pointers. How could I be anything but
flattered
?

“Of
course
I’ll look at it,” I said, all smiles now. “By all means, bring it on. But I can promise nothing but my honest opinion, and perhaps a few stylistic suggestions.”

“Great,” Stewart said. “I’ll just . . .” He made a gesture, then turned and disappeared into his room to collect his “short story.”

I stood up from my fruitless desk and walked over to the sofa. I even recall that I ambled with a kind of loose-jointed carelessness, almost whistling. But as I lowered myself onto the sofa’s tired cushions, I offered up a silent prayer that Stewart’s writing would be awful.

“It’s pretty short,” he said, coming back into the room with a sheaf of typewritten pages clutched to his chest.

“Fine,” I said, with brisk condescension. For I really did not believe that it
could
be good. Stewart’s writing’s being good would require me to revise my opinion not only of Stewart, and of myself, but also, in a sense, of the entire universe.

He handed me the pages, saying, “I’ll just wait in the kitchen.” I told him that that would be fine. He went.

I settled back on the sofa, shook the pages, then began to read.

The story was titled “Harrington’s Farm.” It concerned a quiet schoolboy of seventeen, named Robert, whom I immediately recognized, through certain physical clues (deep voice, gangly frame), as Stewart. So the thing was probably autobiographical. Fine. Robert is asked by a classmate, Jeff Florio, to do him a favor. Florio, hoping to spend the weekend with his girlfriend, offers Robert ten bucks to pose, telephonically, as a certain “Mr. Harrington,” the father of one of their classmates. “All you do is phone my mom,” Florio tells Robert, “tell her you’re Harrington, and say that I’ve been invited to your farm for the weekend with your kid.” Robert, enticed by the money, and perhaps a little by the danger, agrees to the plan. He calls Mrs. Florio and pulls off the trick with aplomb, inventing an entire history for the charming widower, Albert Harrington. “It is a strange thing,” Stewart wrote, “to discover that you are a born liar.” Soon Robert is practicing the deception regularly. He starts to develop a bantering, flirtatious relationship with the divorced Mrs. Florio, whom he pictures, on the strength of her whiskey-roughened voice and throaty laugh, as a beautiful and adventurous woman in her early forties. She starts to angle for a meeting. At first Robert sidesteps this. But then he thinks
, Why not
? Is he not, at least in one dimension, Albert Harrington? He offers to drop by her apartment one afternoon on his way home from “the office” to return a sweater that her son has supposedly left at “the farm.” Riding up in her elevator, Robert imagines how she may react to his deception. Anger. Outrage. Horror. Instead, the comely Mrs. Florio displays a kind of rueful amusement. She asks where her son has really been spending his weekends. He tells her. She mutters, “Like father, like son.” Robert asks if he might be able to see her again. “No,” she says. “No, I don’t think that would be such a good idea.” But she does kiss his cheek, just before he leaves, and tells him that he is “an extraordinary boy.”

“And for the first time in my life,” Stewart wrote, “I felt that way.”

This bald plot summary cannot convey even a fraction of the story’s magic. The tone (it was told retrospectively, in a minor key of remembrance) was exquisitely suited to the material. It had suspense, strong characters, wit, atmosphere. The story, in other words, was beyond considerations of “good” or “bad.” If there could be any debate on its merits, it would be a debate that would resolve the relative degree of the story’s perfection. To this day I can recall vividly, sickeningly, the effect it had on me: a sensation felt primarily in the gut, as when the roller coaster passes the top of the hill and begins its stomach-lurching plunge down, down. . . .

Because it was all coming together now: the quiet, watchful,
writerly
aura that had always hung around Stewart; his evasiveness when I had asked him, once, if he harbored any ambitions outside of a legal career; and, of course, the marathons of typing, typing, typing.

I stood, on shaking legs, and walked into the kitchen.

He was sitting at the table, fingering the cap to the salt shaker. He started a little when I came in, and then looked at me, his eyebrows raised in a kind of hopeful anticipation—as if I, or anyone else in the world, could have judged the story anything less than miraculous.

“You should send this somewhere,” I managed to say.

A look of relief briefly lit his sallow features, like the flickering of a faulty fluorescent bulb, then immediately went out. He quickly stood and took the pages from my hand. “Er, not yet,” he mumbled.

“ ‘Not yet’?” I said.

“It’s not quite . . .” He paused. “Not quite right, yet.”

“I can’t see how you could possibly improve—”

“No, no,” he said abruptly. “This story”—he shook the priceless pages as if they were nothing—“was just a sort of . . . exercise. I’ve done something longer.”

“ ‘Longer’?” My heart bounded against my ribs. “You mean, a . . . are you talking about a . . .”

“A novel,” he said. “I’ve been working on it for over a year. Between studying. It nearly killed me, but it’s done now. I just burned through the last chapter.”

He was referring, I realized, to that fusillade of typing a half hour ago, the racket that had so distracted me from my own pitiful efforts at authorship. “How . . .” I faltered. “That is, you never . . . you never mentioned that you—”

“No,” he interrupted, knitting his tufty red eyebrows. He glanced away with a strange furtiveness. “I’ve never told anyone. Except my parents. But they think I’ve given it up. They made me promise.”

It was not the first time Stewart had said something mysterious about his parents. From the few references he had ever made to them, I had gathered that he hated them: he had once intimated that they had pushed him into studying law, and then there was the time he let it slip that he had refused to accept his father’s offer of financial help. I had never asked any questions about these matters; of what interest, after all, could beige, boring Stewart be to me? But now, of course, he was of great interest.

“Your parents made you promise to stop
writing
?”

“Yes,” he said, with finality. I could tell he wasn’t going to say anything more on that subject. That was okay. I had something more pressing to ask.

“Do you think,” I said, “that I could have a look at your, at your, at your . . .”

“My novel?” he said. “To be honest with you, I—”

“No, of course,” I said.

“—want to wait and see what an agent—”

“Certainly.”

“Though I really am
heartened
that you liked my story. I wanted to hear your opinion because I—I suddenly wondered if I could write, at all. You know what it’s like.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

“It’s just so
hard
to work in a vacuum,” he went on, with feeling. “So, to hear you say that this”—again he shook the pages—“isn’t too bad, well, it gives me more confidence to show my novel.” Then he glanced at his watch. He smiled. “Midnight. I’d better get to bed. I’m starting a summer course in contracts tomorrow.”

Still dazed, still feeling like all of this might simply be a bad dream, I followed his stooped, shambling figure out of the kitchen into the living room. I dropped heavily onto the sofa. Stewart shuffled on into the bathroom. I heard him rattling the toothbrush cup, splashing around in the sink, pissing, flushing the toilet. Then, on his way to his bedroom, he stopped and stuck his head into the living room. I had heard him coming and had grabbed a magazine.

“Well,” he said, “good night.”

I looked up from the page. His pale, freckled face protruded from beyond the door frame. I studied his expression for a moment; his bland smile seemed innocent of any of the emotions I expected to read there: victory, triumph, exultation. Was it really possible that he did not know what his short story had done to me? What implications it had for
my
life? It seemed he did not.

“ ’Night,” I said. “Great story!”

“Thanks. And thanks for reading it.”

“My
pleasure
.”

He retracted his head and carried on into his bedroom. I tossed the magazine aside.

Some time later, I heaved up off the sofa and prepared for sleep myself. I folded out the bed, retrieved my pillow from the cupboard, and stripped down to my underwear. But before getting under the covers, I went to the filing cabinet in the corner and extracted from one of the drawers a thin pile of papers—perhaps fifty pages in all. My “writings.” The accumulated fruits of my literary labors since the age of fifteen.
The Collected Works of Cal Cunningham. The Cunningham Reader. The Portable Cunningham
. Very portable. I took the papers into the kitchen. I pressed them deep down into the garbage, burrowing them beneath the slimy lettuce and cold coffee grounds. I tied the bag shut. Then I went to bed.

Lying there, sweating into the bed sheets, I now saw that my entire life was merely a pitiable attempt to support the lie of myself as a writer. But
how
? How had I managed to hoodwink myself for so long into believing that I was destined to be a writer of greatness?

I was fifteen when I first openly declared my authorial ambitions. I’m sure a shrink would tell you that it went a lot further back than that—back, possibly, to the dawn of my consciousness, to my first preverbal memories of my mother, and specifically of her tragic gray-green eyes, which, confusingly, do not meet my goggling upturned baby gaze but instead are directed toward the alien object held in the opposite hand from the one that curls around my diapered bottom. Sometimes what she sees in the depths of that mysterious rectangular object provokes her beaming smile or chuckling laughter; other times she weeps, the tears coursing silently over her tipped-down face, a grief that I, even in my infant’s brain, know to be connected to her deepest source of pleasure and of love. A love I play no part in.

Obviously, I’m interpolating here from slightly later memories, but I feel confident in saying that it was in those earliest moments of my life when the wound was inflicted; the rest of my childhood was merely a worrying away at the original sore. I guess that if I had been differently constituted, I might have grown up to despise literature, to hate the books that deflected my mother’s attention from me. Instead, in my yearning for her, I resolved to seek connection with her the only way I thought possible: by writing, by publishing a block of exquisitely turned words that would hook her oblique gaze and hold it in my thrall.

First I had to know my rival. Eschewing the TV sitcoms that today form the foundation for the collective unconscious of my generation, I devoted myself, beginning at age eleven, to ploughing through my mother’s bookcases. Stealing up to my bedroom with a handful of her broken-spined paperbacks, I would puzzle for hours over the exploits of Yossarian, Caulfield, Angstrom, and Portnoy, understanding little but pressing doggedly on, working my way through the shelves that lined every wall in our suburban Minneapolis home. With puberty, understanding and appreciation began to dawn (though with certain distortions owing to my age: at thirteen, for instance, I developed an anguished crush on Dolores Haze, who was, after all, only one year younger than me when her stepdad first fondled her). At fourteen, I essayed my own first efforts at fiction. These early products were nothing but turbid imitations of my then-hero, J. D. Salinger (
who else
?), and my mother did not hesitate to tell me so. Incidentally, did my chronic writer’s block date from that moment when she so casually dismissed my fledgling efforts? Was it
her
voice that I heard whenever I faced the blank page?