Lookaway, Lookaway (9 page)

Renewed incentive, Gaston thought. “Aren’t you ladies lovely to say so. I’ll be in momentarily.”

“You’re not nervous, are you? Why, Gertie, I think he’s got a little stage fright!”

“Maybe he does, aw, maybe he does. Just let me say that it’s so good of you to trouble with us out here in the wilds, Mr. Jarvis!”

They waved bye-bye and toddled inside.

And the phone vibrated again—Norma. “Yes, you old cow—I’m going in already!” he said aloud to the unanswered phone. Norma must have been called by the bookstore owner inside wondering if Mr. Jarvis was on track for the big event. He popped open the car door, still not really moving. All right, showtime. He tucked his flask in the breast pocket of his sports coat. Of course, he will do the reading. You see, that’s what no one understands, he thought, scrambling, launching his bulk to his feet from the too-low sports car. I’m a creature of the old niceties, the old Southern graciousness. I’ll be sweet to every one of those hyenas in there, because though raised amid violence and brutality, I have embraced the old manners, the old courtesies.

Too much a pussycat for my own good!

*   *   *

Norma must have an atomic clock instead of a heart; Gaston had never seen a rival to her punctuality. The doorbell rang at 10:30
A.M.
exactly. He was up but not dressed, having made his way, hungover, to the shower. It was a luxurious, multi-nozzle chamber with too many controls, where he could sit on a tiled bench within, being bombarded with mists and sprays of three different densities … and he had nodded off in there, while being wizened to a prune.

For decades people drove down Wendover Road and wondered about the vast overgrown vacant lot so near to downtown, so close to Myers Park, and wondered what indifferent owner had let this piece of prime real estate go fallow. Then suddenly a three-story mansion went up; a ten-foot wall accompanied it, cutting off the familiar view, frustrating the curious. There was relief when everyone learned that it was famed local author Gaston Jarvis who had commissioned the forbidding, Gothic-looking mansion with turrets and towers, dark brick and narrow thick-glassed windows one might have found in a Northern European church, some place of worship punitive and severe. The Jarvis place was a point of pride for a marginal neighborhood that now could say it was coming up, despite decaying evidence to the contrary. Gaston planted more trees, imported a giant boulder or two, then let the grass grow wild, all the better to insulate himself from the rest of Charlotte. Mustn’t have the fans getting at him. Though a fanatical fan would have been hard-pressed to find Gaston Jarvis at his house; he barely used it. There was a trail from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen, and the other twenty rooms were left to themselves, décor that had dated itself many eras over, furniture unsat upon, books never taken down from shelves, and a living room blank except for a chair, a table and a telephone on it.

Gaston answered the front door on the third go-round of Norma’s buzzing, in his bathrobe.

“It’s Tuesday,” she sang out.

“Norma,” he said, bowing his head, and then also addressing his amanuensis, the impossibly old Mrs. Meacham, prim, frowning at his bathrobe, whom he still did not call by her first name. “Ma’am,” he aimed in her direction. “Come inside, the coffeemaker has been on for some time.”

Gaston and his guests all settled in the kitchen. Mrs. Meacham had been a court reporter, a stenographer who typed up law offices’ notes after hours, a great adept. Nearly fifteen years ago Norma procured her services so Gaston did not have to hammer out his own first drafts but could dictate them. Mrs. Meacham would take everything down, no matter how scattered, then produce a word-processing document for Gaston to edit on his computer. For a few books, Gaston had dictated privately into a tape recorder, slurring, drunk, and Mrs. Meacham threatened to quit, saying the tapes were indecipherable and the sounds of drunkenness an immoral thing to countenance. Since then, Norma insisted that all dictation be done live. Furthermore, Norma would be in attendance and prompt Gaston until he was “up to speed,” though why she should care at all if another Cordelia book came out was a mystery.

“I thought I might kill off Cordelia in this book,” he announced, after a first sip of strong coffee. “A fatal slip into a pigpen, drowning in the slops.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” said Norma.

Norma was the keeper of the flame, the pre-editor, the proofreader … hell, she might even be co-writing these damn things, Gaston had occasion to think. He rambled and spoke of historical occurrences, made a mishmash of battles and what state’s regiment crossed what river, only to be vanquished or victorious under Colonel Whatsisname … somehow it all got straightened out, polished up, turned into another bestseller. Oh no one, not critics, not even the hardcore fans, thought these last books were as good as the earlier ones, but neither publisher nor reading public stopped demanding them. Gaston’s earlier Civil War productions dated from an era when Gaston thought he was working toward something serious, actually thought he was adding to an important body of work.

Gaston had made a study of Confederate heroines. He was aware of the mid-nineteenth-century popularity of doggerel like John Dagnall’s
Daisy Swain: The Flower of Shenandoah,
in which a purer-than-snow heroine searches through the mud and mire of prison camps for her truelove. There were plenty of real-life models. It’s not standard knowledge concerning the Civil War but the Union was harsh beyond belief when they found women ferrying goods and necessities to their imprisoned fiancés and husbands; they were tried as smugglers, the gifts were seen as contraband in the service of the Rebellion, and many a fine lady was tossed into the clink for long sentences, $1,000 fines (a sum far exceeding yearly incomes), and not all survived the disease and degradation of prison life. Gaston had been struck by Memphis’s L. G. Pickett, who wore several layers of clothes to reach her only brother and his Negro boy attendant, to provide them both clothing for the winter. She was convicted for smuggling, wrote an elegant and persuasive letter that survives, but was nonetheless sentenced to six months in prison. There was Emma Latimer, who as a teenage girl pulled down a Union flag in 1865, and was charged with treason, ninety days in jail and a $300 fine, which was two years’ soldiers’ pay. A higher-up Northern general overturned the sentence, chiding the prosecutors: “Their first battle for the flag was with a thoughtless schoolgirl.”

There was something literary in all this, Gaston thought, so he had his heroine, Cordelia Florabloom (he got that preposterous last name off a tombstone in Edenton, N.C., and had come to regret the choice mightily), take down a Union banner in Yankee-occupied Wilmington, then fall afoul of General Benjamin Butler, the scourge of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, who captured Fort Hatteras and Fort Clark before imperiously serving in New Orleans, where he earned worldwide opprobrium for his Order Number 28. That directive inflamed editorial pages around the nation and Europe, in that: any woman who did not return the normal courtesies of the Northern occupiers would be treated and dealt with as a common prostitute. “Spoons Butler” they called him for stealing the silver when he went to dine at Southern houses. Butler, while in North Carolina, had put a man to death in 1862 for taking down a Union flag—he was the perfect villain for Southerners, the perfect martinet to send young Cordelia to a dank Union prison.

March Into a Southern Dawn
was not a bad book. Cordelia has much time to think over the lost cause of the South—the “Old Fatuity,” Henry James called it—the doomed conscription of her father, brothers and truelove, her own lamb-innocent upbringing shielded from the sordor of war and slavery’s ugliness, sequestered from masculine mischief. It made money and even won some plaudits. Gaston wiped his brow … he should have stopped there, or maybe at three, a trilogy—who could blame him for a moneymaking trilogy?
This Chivalrous Hour
was the second in the series and even by then, the New York critical press was beginning to turn; the reviews were derisive. It sold fabulously and that should have been reward enough, but the slipping away of his literary reputation was a wound of pride that could only be assuaged with drink. And it was through a monsoon of drink that he indifferently churned out the third in the series,
To Bleed Upon This Sacred Earth
. Then the fourth. And the fifth.

His series was up to Book Number Eight, two decades from the first one, a span four times the length of the War Between the States itself. Indeed, even he could not stretch out the series much longer. Right now, he had lots to work with. The rapacities of the March to the Sea, the burning towns, the destroyed plantations, the avenging freed slaves telling the Union bummers where the silver was buried and the family heirlooms hidden, the last savageries inflicted on the Union troops and, especially, black troops by the ever-more-hopeless ragtag Southern forces. Sometimes the Northern boys would let the freed slaves beat their masters for a lark … all good stuff for a writer. But if the books were well into Sherman’s campaign in the Carolinas, then it meant that the war had a few weeks to go. Yes, he could have Cordelia face the horrors of the occupation and Reconstruction, but his heart wasn’t in that at all. Besides, he knew what he wanted to write next. And it wouldn’t be with these harridans in the room with him, either. He would write it by his own hand, go back to Paris, if he had to—

Norma’s cell phone burst into music. She took the call, so it had to be important, meaning some penny-ante appearance in some independent bookstore, moments before they declared bankruptcy, started firing the staff, boarding up the windows … “Oh I see,” she was saying. Then profuse apologies, a gentle parting of ways, then Norma turned to him: “Did you have words with the editor at the
Queen City Times
?”

Nothing enraged him more than those literary pieces in
Our State
magazine or the Sunday sections of the
Charlotte Observer,
“Ten Writers Who Matter” or “Twenty Voices of North Carolina,” in which they rounded up the usual publicity sponges and took late-light soft-focus photos of them in their oh-so-quaint studies, their “caves of making,” where they crafted their Suhthrin’ masterpieces. And was he ever among them? You see the limits of Norma’s meddling right here! Was she able to get these local rags to interview him, publicize his books, even mention him? The most recent insult was in the slick, mysteriously funded
Queen City Times,
the kind of area attractions / current happenings magazine known to a thousand executive hotel rooms, and their “Voices of Charlotte” ten-page spread. For God’s sake, there was not one living, breathing local writer who sold one hundredth of what he’d sold!

“Giordano is a good acquaintance of mine,” she explained, “and I thought it would do well to flatter him rather than annoy him. I’ve been cultivating him.”

“With your own special grade of manure,” he grumbled. Norma had called the magazine and proposed a time for the article’s author to talk to Gaston Jarvis, who surely would be included in “Voices of Charlotte.” She was told on her first attempt that there was no interest, plenty had been written through the years on Mr. Jarvis. Then Norma called her acquaintance Giordano, attempt number two, and tried to work around the first editor and received initial encouragement … only for the first editor to leave a message that Mr. Jarvis would not be included, but thank you very much for your “inexhaustible” interest in the
Queen City Times
.

Gaston had spent last week investigating the purchase price of the
Queen City Times
. He would buy it, sack everyone, and … no, that act would most certainly end up as a poisonous anecdote, told deliciously by his enemies, a snarky column in
Vanity Fair
. He should have left it alone, moved along—hell, his books were reviewed in
People,
in women’s magazines with millions of subscribers … but to be disrespected by the nothingness that was the
Queen City Times
! He couldn’t let it go. Drunk, home so late from the country club that it was morning and during business hours, Gaston last Friday called the
Queen City Times,
affecting a higher, younger voice.

He mentioned “his employer” Gaston Jarvis would be traveling on a European tour quite soon and if he was an intended profile subject, then they had better schedule a time for a photo and a sit-down, which Mr. Jarvis would be more than happy to do … hm, what’s that?

He wasn’t among the Voices of Charlotte?

They did understand, didn’t they, that Mr. Jarvis still lived in Charlotte and had eight bestsellers under his belt, translated indeed into sixteen languages and … oh, may I ask who is being profiled if not Mr. Jarvis?

Forrest Wrightway? Yes, he was born in Charlotte and proceeded not to spend one full year of his life in this town but … oh yes, of course, how could he not be included, someone of his stature and inestimable seminal importance. Oh I do hope there’s no scheduling conflict—that you fellows can schedule a time when he isn’t on WUNC, the PBS affiliate-monopoly, sitting by the fireplace being folksy and homespun, spinning off his bucolic spew in order to better market—what are we up to now?—three down-home folksy books set nowhere near Charlotte, set nowhere near Planet Earth for all the reality about life in the sticks that …

Oh and who else? Christine Flaherty Bain. Who the hell is … Oh, I see, a memoir out from the local press your rag has been pushing for the last two years, Kings Mountain Press, publisher of cookbooks and novelty books about How to Speak Suhthrin’ with the gummy granny chasing a bear (pardon me,
bar
) out of her vegetable patch, waving a skillet high about her head, requesting the varmint to git and skedaddle. Why, they’re doing fiction now! Oh Ms. Flaherty Bain’s work is a memoir about growing up and having had an actual mother, an old sweet kind knowing wise Southern mother and a fine old homeplace which is—you don’t say!—not around anymore. Well, we must have one more of those deathless books, yes indeed, Mason jars and puttin’ up peaches and front porches and butter churns and that certain special painful summer where young Christine went a few miles down the road and then how she came back a few miles down the road. Lordy yes, those Mama-books by women with three names just fly from the shelves, bought by other women with three sacrosanct names … If only we could find a lady writer of a certain age with
four
names—then we’d really have something, wouldn’t we? Maybe if Mr. Jarvis used his middle name, perhaps you could …