Potboiler (3 page)

9.

Pfefferkorn pulled the pins from his shirt. It had been years since he had purchased new clothes, and he had been shocked by how expensive everything was. Once dressed, however, he decided the money had been well spent. The suit was dark gray rather than black, a more practical choice if he wanted to get further use out of it. He wore a silver tie. He grimaced to see that he had forgotten to shine his shoes. But it was too late for that. He had less than an hour and he didn’t know his way around town.

The desk clerk gave him directions. They were wrong, and Pfefferkorn got stuck in traffic. He arrived at the cemetery chapel as the ceremony was ending, slipping in to stand at the back. The room was packed, the air close with flowers and perfume. He picked Carlotta out with ease. She sat in the front row, her gigantic black hat bobbing and wagging as she wept. No clergy were present. On the dais was a lustrous black casket with brilliant silver fixtures. A life-size version of the pop-up of Bill in his captain’s hat stood off to the left. Rock and roll played over the stereo, a song that Pfefferkorn recognized as an old favorite of Bill’s. In college, Bill would play the same record over and over until Pfefferkorn couldn’t stand it any longer and threatened to break the hi-fi. Bill had always been a creature of habit. He’d kept an immaculate desk, bare save a typewriter, a jar of pens, and a neatly stacked manuscript. By contrast, Pfefferkorn’s desks tended to look like a child had been opening presents nearby. A similar distinction held in other parts of their lives. Pfefferkorn wrote irregularly, when the mood took him. Bill wrote the same number of words every day, rain or shine, in sickness and in health. Pfefferkorn had careered through a series of messy love affairs before ending up alone. Bill had been married to the same woman for three decades. Pfefferkorn had no nest egg, no vision for his retirement, no idea of what he ought to do except continue to live. Bill always had a plan.

But what, Pfefferkorn wondered, did those plans amount to in the end? Here, in lustrous black, lay the refutation.

The song concluded. The mourners rose. People were referring to an ivory-colored piece of paper. Picking up a spare, Pfefferkorn saw a map of the cemetery, with arrows indicating walking directions from the chapel to the grave site. On the back was the program for the just-concluded ceremony. Pfefferkorn read that he had been scheduled to speak third.

10.

Last in, first out, he stood at the base of the chapel steps, waiting for Carlotta so he could apologize for his tardiness. Two by two, the mourners poured out. Sunglasses were unfolded or brought down from foreheads. Handkerchiefs were returned to pockets. Frighteningly thin women clung to much older men. Pfefferkorn, who did not own a television and who rarely went to the movies, knew he ought to recognize some of these people. As a group they were exceedingly well dressed, and he felt his new suit put to shame. A woman encrusted in jewels approached him to ask where the bathroom was, reacting with perplexity when he said he did not know. As she tottered away, Pfefferkorn realized she had taken him for a cemetery employee.

“Thank God you’ve come.”

Carlotta de Vallée broke free of the man escorting her and gripped Pfefferkorn fiercely, her woolen jacket bunching itchily against his sweaty neck.

“Arthur,” she said. She held him back for inspection. “Dear Arthur.”

She was just as he remembered, exceptionally striking, if not quite conventionally beautiful, with a high, unlined forehead and a Roman nose. The latter had limited her acting career to a few pilots and the odd commercial. She hadn’t worked since her thirties. Then again, she hadn’t needed to. She was married to one of the world’s most popular novelists. Four-inch heels and the hat added to her already imposing stature: she stood five-foot-ten in bare feet, taller than Pfefferkorn but in proportion to her late husband. Pfefferkorn tried not to ogle the hat. It was an impressive thing, adorned with buttons, bows, and lace, its shape that of an inverted frustum, narrow around the head and widening as it went up, like Nefertiti’s headdress.

She frowned. “I’d hoped you would say a few words.”

“I had no idea,” Pfefferkorn said.

“You didn’t get my message? I left it this morning.”

“I was on the plane.”

“Yes but I thought you’d get it when you got off the plane.”

“That’s my answering machine you spoke to.”

“Arthur, my God. You mean to say you don’t have a cell phone?”

“No.”

Carlotta appeared genuinely awed. “Well. It’s all for the best. The ceremony went on much too long as it was.”

Her escort shifted noisily to signal that he was waiting to be introduced, a gesture Pfefferkorn found imperious given the context.

“Arthur, this is Lucian Savory, Bill’s agent. Arthur Pfefferkorn, our oldest and dearest friend.”

“Obliged,” Savory said. He was extremely old, with an extremely large head. It looked freakish atop his withered body. Thinning black hair was plastered back across his scalp.

“Arthur is a writer as well.”

“That so.”

Pfefferkorn waved noncommittally.

“Mrs. de Vallée,” a young man with a walkie-talkie said. “We’ll be ready shortly.”

“Yes, of course.” Carlotta offered Pfefferkorn her arm and they walked to the grave.

11.

Pfefferkorn stood at Carlotta’s side throughout the interment. He was aware of people staring at him, wondering who he was. To block them out, he cast his mind into the past. He and Bill had been in the same class from the seventh grade on, but it was while working on the high school newspaper that they had become friends, each discovering in the other a counterweight. Soon enough they were inseparable, the big, easygoing Polack and the lean, volatile Jew. Pfefferkorn nicknamed Bill “the Cossack.” Bill called Pfefferkorn by his Hebrew name, Yankel. Pfefferkorn recommended books for Bill to read. Bill endorsed Pfefferkorn’s grandiose dreams. Pfefferkorn edited Bill’s essays. Bill gave Pfefferkorn a lift home whenever they stayed late to finish the layout. Senior year, Pfefferkorn was appointed editor-in-chief. Bill became business manager.

Bill’s parents could have afforded to send him to a private college, but he and Pfefferkorn made a pact to go to the state university together. They ran in the same circles, the artistic ones that Pfefferkorn gravitated toward. Those were tumultuous times, and the campus literary magazine was an epicenter of the counterculture. Pfefferkorn rose to become editor-in-chief. Bill served as his ad manager.

At a be-in Pfefferkorn met a tall girl with a Roman nose. She was majoring in dance. She had read some of his stories and was impressed with his vocabulary. He lied and said that he was interested in dance. He fell in love with her instantly but had the good sense to keep his feelings to himself, a choice that revealed itself as farsighted when he introduced her to Bill and she proceeded to fall in love with him instead.

After graduation, the three of them got a basement apartment together. To make ends meet, Pfefferkorn worked at the post office. At night he and Bill played gin rummy or Scrabble while Carlotta cooked up crêpes or a stir-fry. They would listen to records and perhaps smoke a little dope. Then Pfefferkorn would sit at his desk, typing as loudly as he could to drown out the noise of Bill and Carlotta’s lovemaking.

He remembered the first time Bill revealed any literary aspirations of his own. Prior to then, Pfefferkorn had thought he understood the roles each of them played in their friendship, and it was with some unease that he sat down to read the story Bill had written “for the heck of it.” Pfefferkorn was worried it would be either superb and cause for envy or rubbish and cause for an argument. In fact, it fell somewhere in between, and Pfefferkorn felt relief at being able to express honest enthusiasm for the story’s strengths while yet retaining his position of dominance. He even offered to mark up the text, a suggestion Bill pounced on. Pfefferkorn interpreted his enthusiasm as an admission that Bill still held Pfefferkorn to be the superior writer and would gladly accept any pearls of wisdom Pfefferkorn cared to drop.

How naïve they had been. Pfefferkorn nearly laughed out loud. The sound of dirt being shoveled atop the grave helped him maintain his composure.

It took Carlotta more than an hour to shake the hands and kiss the cheeks of everyone who had come to pay respects. At her request, Pfefferkorn lingered nearby.

“Hell of a guy,” Lucian Savory said.

Pfefferkorn agreed.

“Hell of a writer. I knew from the first line of that first book that this fellow was something special. ‘Savory,’ said I, ‘Savory, behold something rare here. Behold
talent
.’” Savory nodded in confirmation of his own judgment. Then he glanced sidelong at Pfefferkorn. “You probably can’t guess how old I am.”

“Well—”

“Ninety-eight,” Savory said.

“Wow,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Ninety-nine in November.”

“You don’t look it.”

“Of course I fucking don’t. That’s not the point. The point, dingleballs, is I’ve been around the block. Updike, Mailer, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Twain, Joseph Smith, Zola, Fenimore Cooper. I knew em all. I fucked all three of them Brontës. And let me tell you, I never met a writer like Bill. And I never will again, even if I live to be a hundred.”

“I think that’s likely,” Pfefferkorn said.

“What is.”

“That you’ll live to be a hundred.”

Savory stared at him. “You’re a smart-ass.”

“I just meant—”

“I know what you meant,” Savory said. “Fucking smart-ass.”

“I’m sorry,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Pfft. Any rate, I’m telling you: Bill’s name belongs up there with the greats. We could chisel it into Mount Rushmore. Maybe I’ll do just that.”

“Mark Twain?” Pfefferkorn asked.

“Nicest guy you’ll ever meet,” Savory said. “Not like that Nathaniel Hawthorne, he was a cunt. You’re a writer?”

“Of sorts,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Publish anything?”

“A little.”

“How little.”

“One novel,” Pfefferkorn said. “In the eighties.”

“Name?”

“Shade of the Colossus,”
Pfefferkorn said.

“Shitty title,” Savory said.

Pfefferkorn bowed his head.

“Not a selling title,” Savory said.

“Well, it didn’t sell.”

“There you go.” Savory rolled his tongue around in his mouth. “You should have called it
Blood Night
.”

“What?”

“Or
Blood Eyes
. Now those are selling titles. See? I haven’t even read it and I came up with two better titles in thirty seconds.”

“They don’t really relate to the book.”

Savory looked at him. “You don’t understand this business, do you.”

12.

“Never mind him,” Carlotta said. “Lucian likes to make himself feel more important than he is. Bill keeps him on out of habit, or maybe compassion. God knows he doesn’t need an agent anymore.” She paused. “Listen to me. That’s what people do, isn’t it, use the present tense.”

Pfefferkorn squeezed her hand.

“Thank you for coming, Arthur.”

“Of course.”

“You’ve no idea how meaningful it is. These people . . .” She gestured to the vanished crowd. “They’re nice in a way but they’re not our friends. Or, they are in one sense, but you have to understand: this is Los Angeles.”

Pfefferkorn nodded.

“I know what they’re saying about me,” she said. “They think I’m not sad enough.”

“Oh, please.”

“What they don’t understand is that I’ve been mourning him for months. You can’t sustain a fever pitch that long. It’s unnatural. I’ve known more than a few widows like that, going around all day beating their breasts. There’s something terribly stagy about it. And wouldn’t you know, they always seem to recover as soon as the inheritance check clears.”

Pfefferkorn smiled.

“Let them think what they want,” she said. “This, here—it’s just a formality. It’s for everyone else. The real horror is all mine, and it only starts when I’m alone.”

Arm in arm, they crossed the burial grounds, parting eddying clouds of midges. The abundant lawns gave off a humidity that drove Pfefferkorn to loosen his tie.

“I expected them to hassle me about burying an empty casket,” she said. “But they were darling. They’re exceptionally good at dealing with people in a time of grief.”

“I bet.”

“It’s not out of charity,” Carlotta said. “It’s shameful what they charge. The flowers alone, you can’t imagine. And don’t get me started on the search company. But I didn’t bat an eye. I said find him, whatever it costs. Although in hindsight I have to wonder if they dragged things out on purpose, to soak me.”

“I hope they’d have more scruples than that.”

“You never know,” Carlotta said. “Money is money.”

They stood under the umbrella while the valets ran to fetch their cars.

“That’s yours,” Carlotta said.

Pfefferkorn looked at his tiny, bright blue rental car. “Point A to point B,” he said.

Carlotta’s car arrived, an oyster-colored Bentley with the gleam of the showroom floor. The perspiring valet got out to hold the door for her.

“It was good to see you,” Pfefferkorn said. “Circumstances notwithstanding.”

“Yes,” she said. She leaned in to kiss him goodbye but pulled back. “Arthur. Do you really have to go so soon? You can’t stay a little? I hate to see you off this way. Come by the house and have a drink first.” She clasped her hands to her face. “My God. You’ve never been.”

“Sure I have. I came for his fiftieth, remember?”

“Yes but that was forever ago. We’ve moved since then.”

Behind the invitation he sensed an accusation. He knew very well how long it had been. But whose fault was that? Then he remembered where he was and why he was there and he felt ashamed for clinging to grudges. Still, he hesitated, afraid to stir up more of his own ill will. He consulted his watch—unnecessarily, as he had already checked out of his motel, his flight didn’t leave for seven hours, and he had no pressing obligations other than to return the rental car. He told Carlotta he’d follow her, adding that she’d better not drive too fast.