Potboiler (5 page)

15.

That evening they dined at an Italian restaurant whose waitstaff knew Carlotta by name. The food was excellent, and Pfefferkorn, normally not a heavy drinker, consumed the other half of a bottle of Chianti.

“Tell me something,” he said. “Why did you change your name?”

“You mean when I got married?”

“I mean when Bill changed it.”

“I wasn’t about to have him be one thing and me another. And which would you rather be: de Vallée or Kowalczyk?”

“Fair enough.”

“Bill agonized over that, you know. It was his agent who made him do it.”

“Savory.”

“He said Kowalczyk was too hard to pronounce.”

“Too ethnic.”

“Mm. I don’t think Bill fully grasped the implications of consenting to be called something else. Remember, he never expected that book to become a series, and he certainly never expected that series to become a hit. When he agreed I think he still had the idea he could still go back to being Bill Kowalczyk afterward, but of course it was too late.”

“What I remember about the stories he used to show me,” Pfefferkorn said, “is that they weren’t any of this cat-and-mouse stuff. They were almost avant-garde.”

She nodded.

“I was surprised when the first book came out,” he said.

“As was I. Frankly, I didn’t care for it. Don’t look at me like that. I like them fine now. But at the time I’d never read a thriller in my life. I still don’t, except for Bill’s.”

“What do you read, then?”

“Oh, you know. Those paperbacks with the beefcake in the kilt, and the women are pale and faint three times an hour, and loins drip and members throb and all that.”

Pfefferkorn laughed.

“Anything that ends with them galloping across the misty moors is fine by me.”

“Now I know what to get you for your birthday.”

“A beefcake or a paperback?”

“I can’t afford a beefcake.”

“I hear they’re quite reasonable by the hour, actually.”

“I’ll look into it,” he said.

“Please do.” She took a sip of wine, ran her tongue over her teeth. “Bill was always very adamant that what he did shouldn’t be considered art.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“It’s true. He used to tell people he made chairs. He’d say, ‘Every day I get up, I go out to my shop, I sit at my workbench, and I glue and carve and sand. And when I’m done, I’ll give you a nice, solid, dependable chair, just right for sitting on. You’ll feel very comfortable, sitting on my chair. And by the time you’re through sitting on it, I’ll be ready with another one, just like the first, and that’ll be just right, too.’ I think it was important for him to differentiate.”

“Between.”

“Art and craft. What you did and what he did.”

“I don’t want to talk about that anymore.”

“I’m not saying he wasn’t capable of producing art. Just that he was conscious of his choices. He needed there to be a difference.” She took another sip of wine. “I don’t know if I should tell you this. I suppose it’s all past now, but . . .” She shrugged. “He was dabbling in a side project. A literary novel.”

“No kidding,” he said. “What about?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure he ever got anything on paper. He only mentioned it once or twice. I think he was afraid of how people would react.”

He understood she meant him. “Really, Carlotta. Enough.”

“Why do you think he still sent you first editions?” she said. “Your opinion meant the world to him.”

He said nothing.

“I’m sorry. I’m not trying to make you feel bad. And I don’t want to give you the impression that Bill was unhappy. At least I don’t think so. He loved building chairs. He might not have set out to become this . . .
godhead
, but it was a role he came to enjoy. His fans are positively rabid. Conspiracy theorists, paranoiacs who read the novels and get wrapped up in this silly world of double-crossing and dirty secrets. Bill played into it, of course, taking those jacket photos with the coat. I used to tell him it was a bad idea, encouraging these people, but he said it was part of the image.”

“Did you ever have folks bother you?”

“We’ve had occasion to hire a private investigator.”

“Sounds like a nightmare.”

She shrugged. “It’s all relative. Remember where we live. Around here nobody gives a damn about a writer. I’ll tell you another story. Don’t worry, this one’s not going to embarrass you. One time we went into a bookstore. I think I wanted a cookbook and we happened to be passing one of the chains, so we went in and got the book and stood in line for the register. Now, behind the counter is this big”—she spread her hands—“I mean absolutely huge display of his new book. There’s a photo of him on top, and it’s got his name on it. You’d think the clerk would put two and two together. Smile, at least. But—no reaction. We step up to pay for the book and she doesn’t bat an eye. Bill hands her a credit card with his name on it, and again—nothing. She swipes the card and puts the book in a bag and tells us to have a nice day.” Carlotta sat back. “It was five feet away.”

“I wish I could say I was surprised,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Well, look, better that than being mobbed every time you go outside. I don’t know how these movie stars deal with it.”

“They like it.”

“Yes, they must, mustn’t they? They’re exhibitionists.”

The waiter approached.
“I dolci, signora.”

“Cappuccino, please.”

“And for the
signore
?”

“Regular coffee, thanks.”

“Arthur. Aren’t we working-class.”

In the car, Carlotta loaned Pfefferkorn her cell phone.

“Daddy? What time is it?”

Pfefferkorn had forgotten about the time difference. “Sorry, sweetheart.”

“You sound funny. Is everything okay?”

“It’s just fine.”

“Are you drunk?”

“I wanted to let you know that I moved my flight. I’ll be home tomorrow afternoon.”

“Daddy? What’s going on?”

“Everything’s fine. I’m catching up with Carlotta.”

“All right. Have a good time.”

He closed the phone.

“She must be beautiful,” Carlotta said.

He nodded.

“The last time I saw her was—God, it must have been her bat mitzvah.” Carlotta looked over her shoulder to change lanes. “Every so often I wish we’d had children. Not that often. It was my decision. Bill wanted them. But I was afraid they would turn me into my mother. Which is funny because”—she changed lanes again—“I turned into her anyway.”

Back at the house, they made love twice. Then Carlotta showed Pfefferkorn to his own room, where he could rise for his morning flight without disturbing her.

16.

Pfefferkorn couldn’t sleep. He switched on the bedside light and reached for the remote control on the nightstand, turning to the news channel. A coiffed woman told him that the prime minister of West Zlabia had released a statement condemning capitalist exploitation and announcing the sale of exclusive rights to the gas field to the Chinese. The East Zlabians were up in arms. He watched for a few more minutes, then turned the television off and leaned back against the headboard, feeling completely awake. His insomnia had nothing to do with guilt, of which he felt none, or none that he was consciously aware of. He supposed he might have suppressed his guilt and that insomnia was the form it took in escaping. To his mind, however, a better explanation was that he was in the grip of newfound possibility. It was irrational, he knew. Nothing had changed. He was still Pfefferkorn, adjunct professor of creative writing. At the same time, making love to Carlotta—something he had fantasized about his entire adult life—had brought him into a state of mind dormant since his early twenties. It takes a woman to make a man feel this way, he thought. Then he corrected himself. It didn’t take just any woman. It took Carlotta.

Seized by a romantic impulse, he pulled back the comforter, put on his dressing gown, and padded downstairs to the terrace, along the way swiping a handful of pebbles from a potted bamboo. His plan was to throw them, one by one, at Carlotta’s window, waking her and perhaps arousing a third bout of lovemaking. Once outside in the cold, he felt ridiculous. Even if he successfully determined which of the many darkened windows was hers, he would probably end up breaking the glass.

He scattered the pebbles and sat down on the flagstone, gazing out at the silvery lawns. The night was splendid, the air sweet as nectar. The soothing gurgle of fountains came from points distant. Even a stray chew toy seemed artfully placed, a charming visual blip there to remind the viewer that this was a home, not a museum. Carlotta had called the house grotesque, and while that was partially true, there was also a kind of seemliness to it, a sense that if mansions had to exist, they ought to be just like this. It was probably for the best that Bill had been the one to get rich, as Pfefferkorn’s own relationship with money was characterized by that mixture of desire and contempt that comes from never having enough.

Growing up, he hadn’t felt jealous of Bill. For one thing, the gap between them hadn’t been so glaring. Bill’s parents never faced ruin, as Pfefferkorn’s often did, but neither were they the Rockefellers. Moreover, having Bill for a best friend enabled Pfefferkorn to thumb his nose at middle-class morality while still getting to ride around in a Camaro. He didn’t need money to feel on an equal footing with Bill, because he had his own form of power. Of the two of them, he was the intellectual. He was the Writer.

This paradigm held for so long that he continued to hide behind it long after it had proven false. It didn’t matter how many rejection notices he got or how many best-seller lists Bill made. There was one Writer, and it was him. It had to be thus, because otherwise he had no way to exist in their friendship. He quarantined those parts of his brain that whispered
No, he’s the writer, you’re a failure,
and as a result he had no concept of how much resentment he had stored up until one night, six years back, when Bill called to say he was coming into town and wanted to get dinner. Pfefferkorn hemmed and hawed. He claimed to have a mountain of papers to grade.

“You have to eat,” Bill said. “Come on, Yankel. We’ll get steaks. On me.”

Looking back, Pfefferkorn was hard-pressed to explain his reaction. Had he been struggling to figure out how he would pay his credit card bill? Had he just gotten off the phone with his agent? Whatever the reason, all the venom came spilling forth.

“I don’t want dinner,” he said.

“What?” Bill said. “Why not?”

“I don’t want dinner,” he said again. In a way, it was worse that he wasn’t yelling. “I don’t want anything, I don’t need anything, just enough already.”

“Yankel—”

“No,” Pfefferkorn said. “No. No.
Enough
.” He was up and moving now, pacing around his kitchen, squeezing the phone so tightly that he could feel the plastic housing starting to come apart. “Christ, you’re arrogant. You know that? Did you ever bother to ask yourself if I liked that name? No, you just assumed. Well, here’s news: I
don’t
like it. I can’t stand it. It drives me up the goddamned wall.
You
drive me up the goddamned wall. Just—leave it alone. Leave
me
alone.”

There was a silence. Hurt seeped over the line.

“All right,” Bill said. “If that’s what you want.”

“It is.”

There was another silence, longer and more ominous.

“Fine,” Bill said. “But listen, Art. Ask yourself this: you’re sure you can’t think of anything I have that you want? Anything at all?”

“Go straight to hell,” Pfefferkorn said and hung up.

Nine months passed before Bill called to apologize. Pfefferkorn made his own grudging apology as well. But the repercussions had been serious and long-lasting. Pfefferkorn had not been to California since. For his part, Bill still sent first editions, and he still inscribed them touchingly, but otherwise communication between them had all but atrophied. Pfefferkorn had concluded that it was sad but better this way. Few friendships were meant to last a lifetime. People changed. Bonds disintegrated. Part of life. So he had told himself.

Now, however, he saw the entire mess as a nauseating victory of pride over love. He began to shiver. He pulled the dressing gown around himself. It was Bill’s, far too big for him. Carlotta had loaned it to him. He wrapped himself tighter still and rocked in the moonlight, weeping without sound.

Some time later he stood up, intending to go back to bed. But again he changed his mind. He headed for the office path.

17.

Pfefferkorn stood in darkness, listening to the wind gust through the unused portion of the barn and stubbing his feet against the cold tile. He flicked on the light and sat at the desk, opening drawers. The first was empty. The second contained a box of pens of the same brand as those in the jar. The final drawer contained three reams of paper still in their wrappers.

The wind gusted again.

Pfefferkorn reached for the neatly piled manuscript. He leaned back in the chair. It let out a loud, rusty bark. He read.

If he had expected anything different from Bill’s previous work, he was to be disappointed: in both substance and style, the manuscript
differed so little from what he’d read on the plane that Pfefferkorn entertained himself with the idea that Carlotta had been mistaken, and that the pages in his hand were not a book-in-progress but the same one on display in airport terminals throughout the world. Three chapters in, he glanced over at the bookcase containing both his and Bill’s life’s work. The disparity amazed him. Even more amazing was that Bill still thought so highly of him. Surely one would expect that decades of uninterrupted commercial success would go to a person’s head. Surely Bill had the right to believe that he, not Pfefferkorn, was the superior writer. And who was to say he wasn’t? Pfefferkorn decided that he had been too harsh. Consistency, productivity, broad appeal—these, too, were writerly virtues, as was the ability to repeatedly vary a theme. By the end of its opening sentence, a William de Vallée novel made its reader feel at home. As a student, Pfefferkorn had railed against mass-market entertainment, decrying it as a weapon of the ruling powers aimed at maintenance of the status quo. He gravitated toward writers who employed alienating styles or unconventional themes, believing that these possessed the power to awaken the reading public to fundamental problems concerning the modern condition. He had striven to write in that mode as well. But these were a young man’s concerns. Pfefferkorn had long ago stopped believing that his stories (or any story, for that matter) would have a measurable effect on the world. Literature did not decrease injustice or increase fairness or cure any of the ills that had plagued mankind from time immemorial. It was sufficient, rather, to make one person, however bourgeois, feel slightly less unhappy for a short period of time. In Bill’s case, the cumulative effect of millions of people made slightly less unhappy for a short period of time had to be reckoned a significant accomplishment. There, at a bare desk in a frigid office in the middle of the night, Pfefferkorn softened his heart toward his dead friend, and to bad but successful writers everywhere.