Corkscrew (27 page)

Joe thought about it, then slowly nodded. 'We'll ask him,' he said. 'If he agrees, we'll try it. If he doesn't agree—'

'He'll agree!'

'All right, let's phone.'

They got the answering machine. Bryce left a message.

When Wayne got back to the apartment after his after-lunch jog in Central Park, there was a message for him on the answering machine: 'Hi, Wayne, I'm at home in Connecticut, I'm here with Joe, we both want to talk to you as soon as possible, give us a call, okay, buddy?' Bryce sounded overly happy, manic, almost feverish. And he'd never called Wayne 'buddy' before.

Was this about the interview? Had it been a mistake after all to play the tape for Joe? It had seemed like the safest thing to do at the time.

The more Wayne had listened to that tape, trying to find something usable in it, the more he'd realized just how unstable Bryce had become. And could you count on an unstable person to do the best thing for himself? To take the best advice, even from a first wife? Bryce
knew
his Ellen was right, his public confession of Lucie's murder would be devastating for his children, but was he still sensible enough to act on that knowledge? Or would he suddenly go veering off, uncontrollable, destroying everything and everybody in spite of himself?

My only hope, Wayne had decided, is to establish ahead of time that Bryce is nuts, or going nuts, or simply no longer a reliable, stable person.
Then
, if he comes out with some wild story about paying another writer half a million dollars to kill his wife, it'll be easy to discredit him.

So Wayne had laid the groundwork, playing the tape for Joe, telling Joe he was worried about Bryce, which God knows was true enough. And Joe, in confidence, had said he was becoming worried, too, he wasn't sure Bryce was actually at work on the new novel, although he claimed to be. Joe had told Wayne that he shouldn't do anything else about the problem, he shouldn't play the tape for anybody else, but give Joe time to think it over, decide what was best to do.

So had Joe decided the best thing to do was confront Bryce? Tell him what Wayne had done? How would Bryce react to that? Trying to find some clue, some forewarning, he played the message twice more, and could hear desperation in there, beneath the false cheer, but it didn't seem to him there was anything accusatory or angry in that voice. Okay; he'd call.

Supposedly, he was working on the screenplay of
Double Impact
right now, but that was seeming more and more like a waste of time. He'd written the script very fast, pleased with it as he went along, not even worried that it was a hundred fifty pages long instead of the hundred twenty the screenwriting textbooks recommended, knowing what he was doing was fast and meaty and solid, but then he showed it to Susan, and she read it and said it was wordy. Too wordy. Too much dialogue. Not letting the camera tell the story, but making the characters tell the story by talking each other's ears off.

So it wasn't quite as easy as he'd thought. But now, going through it all Over again, trying to find great chunks of dialogue he could transmogrify into cunning paragraphs of instruction for the camera, he was learning to his distress that his imagination wasn't quite as visual as he'd always believed. But he refused to give up, at least not yet. I'll give it the month of April, he'd told himself, and if I can't do it by then, the hell with it.

So in a way it was an agreeable distraction to have this enigmatic message from Bryce. Telling himself he had more to worry about from the screenplay than from Bryce, he dialed the number in Connecticut, and a motherly-sounding woman answered, saying, 'Proctorr residence.'

A nurse? Had Bryce tried to kill himself? 'Oh, hi, uh… It's Wayne Prentice, Bryce called me.'

'One moment, please.'

He waited, not long, and then Bryce came on, still sounding manic and chipper, saying, 'Oh, damn, Wayne, Joe just left five minutes ago.'

'Who was that? The woman who answered.'

'Oh! You don't know, I took your advice. That's Mrs Hildebrand, the housekeeper.'

For some reason, that news was encouraging, as though hiring a housekeeper were such a palpably sane thing to do it suggested he needn't worry at all about Bryce any more. 'Well, I'm glad you did that,' he said.

'So am I,' Bryce assured him. 'And you'll be even more glad, the next time you come here. She knows lunch.'

'Good.'

'See, what it is,' Bryce said, his voice dropping, his manner suddenly hesitant, less sure, 'what it is, Wayne, Joe was here…'

'Yes, you said.'

'And he got sort of tough with me, I have to say, I didn't expect that, he was really very tough with me.'

'About what?'

'Well, he got it out of me that I haven't actually been working on the new book. I don't, uh, actually
have
a new book.'

Wayne was surprised, but then immediately he wasn't. 'What did he say?'

'Well, he wanted me to go into therapy,' Bryce said, 'but I can't do that, I mean, you know why I can't do that.'

'No, I don't,' Wayne said.

Bryce whispered, shrill and sibilant, '
You have to tell them the truth!'

Oh, for God's sake. 'All right,' Wayne said. 'That isn't the reason you gave him, I hope.'

'No! Of course not.'

'You just said no.'

'I just said no.'

'And what did he say?'

'He said, if I didn't do something to get help, get
started,
he was going to void my contract and demand the advance back. That's a quarter, I've already got a quarter. The last time, you know, my half was really one quarter on
Two Faces
and one quarter on this next book.'

Two hundred seventy-five thousand dollars. A lot of money to have to give back. Wayne said, 'He would do that? I thought he was your pal.'

'He is. He thinks he's being my pal when he's doing this. So I had to do
something.
So I told him, 'Wayne.
He'll
help me'. 'The voice dropping to a whisper again:
'Like last time.'

'Ah,' Wayne said. 'Who do I kill this time?'

'What?' The shock in Bryce's voice was so comical that Wayne could only laugh, and then Bryce, sounding deeply offended, said, 'That's not funny.'

'Sorry,' Wayne said, 'I thought it was. So what's the idea? I already gave you
Two Faces. The Domino Doublet.'

'I have some outlines, story treatments, Joe says they're no good, they're like the interview…'

'Oh, he told you about that.'

'Yes. But that's okay, I understand why you told him, it's okay. And you did a great job, fixing it up. You did a great interview, I'm only sorry I couldn't have been there.'

Again Wayne laughed, and this time he said, 'But you think there's something salvageable, right? In those outlines.'

'I
hope
there is. I haven't looked at them, I've been afraid to look at them, but you could. The deal is, if you say yes, you'll help me, Joe's gonna back off. Then you can look at these things of mine, see if we can do something with one of them, actually get
moving
at last.'

Possibilities shifted in Wayne's mind. 'I'll give it a shot, Bryce,' he said.

'Oh, Wayne, thanks, I knew I could count on you, I
knew
I could count on you.'

'You can.'

'Joe wants you to call him, tell him what you're gonna do,' Bryce said. 'Not in the office today, he's going home from here. Around five you could call him.'

'I will.'

'And you could come up, could you come up tomorrow?'

Thinking of the screenplay, not wanting to leave it because he
did
want to leave it, Wayne said, 'I've got my own stuff to do, Bryce. I could come up Saturday. Could I bring Susan?'

'Sure! Stay over, stay the weekend, I'm invited to a party Saturday night, some people up here, I'll tell them I'm bringing houseguests.'

'You don't have to do that.'

'No, that's normal up here,' Bryce explained. 'People always bring houseguests, I've always been the oddball, I never brought any extra people around, you'll be my first houseguests.'

'In that case, fine,' Wayne said. 'And Bryce, could you fax me directions? I'll rent a car and drive up.'

'Absolutely. And call Joe, okay? He's worried.'

'I'll tell him to stop worrying,' Wayne said. We'll all stop worrying, he thought, because all at once he knew what was going to happen. He was going to get to finish
The Shadowed Other.
He was going to get to see
The Shadowed Other
published. He was going to get to see
The Shadowed Other
on the best-seller list. Because he now had a secret pen name that was much better than Tim Fleet:

Bryce Proctorr.

'There it is!' Susan said. 'That's the house!' She was very excited.

'Yeah, that's it,' Wayne agreed, as they crunched slowly up the gravel drive toward the house in the rented Lexus. Eleven in the morning, sunny, cool, the columns on the front of the house gleaming white, like an old southern plantation.

'We were so close to it, weren't we?' Susan said. 'That day we looked for it.'

'You can't really see it from the road.'

'Maybe we drove past it. Did we?'

'I don't remember,' Wayne said, and parked by the garage, but just to the left, so the cars that used the garage could get in and out.

They each had packed a small overnight bag which they carried from the car, and as they neared the front door it opened and an older woman in a dark blue skirt and pink ruffled blouse smiled out at them, saying, 'Good morning. You must be the Prentices.' She looked more like a widow on a cruise ship than a housekeeper.

'And you must be Mrs Hildebrand,' Wayne said. 'We talked on the phone.'

'Yes, of course, come in.'

They entered the house, Susan looking around, her eyes sparkling, and Mrs Hildebrand said, 'Mr Proctorr is out walking, he likes to walk around the property. I'll show you to your room.'

'I know where it is,' Wayne said, 'I stayed here before.'

'Then I'll go back to doing lunch,' Mrs Hildebrand said. 'I hope you both like game hen.'

Wayne laughed, and said, 'You can count on us, Mrs Hildebrand.'

He led the way upstairs to the sunny large guest room he'd used before. When they were in the room, with the door closed, Susan said, 'It is like the apartment.'

'I told you, but he doesn't see it.'

'He's a strange man,' Susan said, and looked out the window. 'Here he comes.'

Wayne went over to stand beside her, and look out. Up-slope from here was the pool, almost at a level with this room, and beyond that a field, and beyond that thick woods leading uphill. Coming down across the field, skirting the pool, was Bryce, in a big bulky black car coat, with wood pegs instead of buttons. He wore it open and flapping, his hands in the pockets. He was bareheaded, and his expression was fixed, determined, like somebody trying to remember an important fact.

'I'll go down and talk to him,' Wayne said.

'I'll unpack,' Susan said, 'and see you at lunch.'

Wayne went downstairs and found Bryce walking toward him down the hall, still wearing the car coat, hands still in the pockets. His face brightened when he saw Wayne, and he pulled his right hand from the pocket to extend it for a shake as he came forward, saying, 'Wayne! It's great to see you.'

'And you,' Wayne said. He saw that Bryce was hyper, but controlling it.

Bryce pulled off the coat, as though not realizing till now he was wearing it, and stood there with the coat draped over his left forearm. He said, 'It's an hour till lunch, maybe more. You want to look at this stuff, or wait? I know it was a long drive.'

'No, it was easy, we rented a good car. Let's see these outlines.'

'Get the suspense over with, right?' Bryce said, and gave him a broad grin and an awkward pat on the arm.

'Right,' Wayne said.

They walked together back upstairs to Bryce's office, where he dropped the coat on the black leather sofa and said, 'You know how to operate all this stuff.'

'Sure.'

'They're in there, the outlines. Twenty-three of them. Twenty-four, but Joe took one.'

'Not the best one,' Wayne suggested.

Bryce's laugh was a little too explosive. 'He wasn't looking for the best one,' he said. 'Not by then. Listen, I'd be kind of uncomfortable in here, you reading those things. And better for you, too, if I'm not around.'

'Sure.'

'I'll see you at lunch,' Bryce said, and fled.

Wayne moved toward the desk, and Bryce appeared again, an embarrassed smile fluttering at his mouth. 'My coat,' he said, and pointed at it, and picked it up, and waved goodbye, and hurried away.

When he learns his wife had a sex-change operation years before they met, he leaves her. She pursues, and he flees into Canada, where he becomes a monk in a monastery that secretly smuggles political refugees into the United States. He falls in love with a Chinese girl who used to star in propaganda films and now wants to become a model in New York. His wife, pursuing, must disguise herself as a man.

That was the shortest of them. Some were more than three thousand words long, but most were only three or four pages. They were all hopeless.

This was not a surprise, not after he'd been told Joe's reaction to these things, but it was still depressing. What had gone wrong with Bryce? Was it really Lucie's death, guilt feelings, the lack of closure because he hadn't been the one to do it himself?

Or was it something from earlier, maybe not even connected to Lucie at all. Maybe Lucie left him because he was turning weird, and not the other way around.

Whatever it was, and whatever profit there might be for Wayne in it, he still found the situation sad and depressing. He liked Bryce, had liked him in a casual way in the old days, had admired and envied him from afar for a long time, and had felt many different things toward him in the last six months. But he still had to identify with Bryce as another writer, another storyteller, and how horrible it has to be when the stories won't come. When this static is all you can find.