Men in Black

by Scott Spencer

  We hurried past a Blarney Stone, with its special darkness inside—not the darkness of romance but the stale, beery darkness of “Give me a little fucking privacy, okay?”—and in a moment of fearful prescience I imagined myself in there, hour after hour, day after day, after my life fell apart, after I was exposed as the fraud who wrote Visitors from Above and after Olivia found out about Nadia and left me. I imagined myself in that bar, other bars, any bar, drinking to forget and remembering everything I lost.

  “Come on, Sam. It won’t do to be late for this.”

  My publishing company was called Wilkes and Green, after Stephen Wilkes and Aaron Green, two brainy, enterprising New Yorkers who began the firm in 1922. They held on to the company until the early 1960s, when it was sold to another, larger publishing company, who in turn sold it to a Seattle-based radio-and-television outfit, who in turn sold it to a group of Belgian investors, who diddled with it for less than a year before off-loading it onto the Japanese, who now, according to publishing rumors, were talking to a few select Americans about taking the venerable old company off their hands. That the company still bore the name of its founders was cold comfort to Ezra Poindexter, who, though nominally publisher of Wilkes and Green, routinely expected each day at the firm’s fussy offices to be his last.

  Graham and I were ferried up to the fifth floor by an elderly attendant in a loose-fitting uniform. The man held on to the control lever as if he had had recent experiences of passengers trying to wrest control of his car.

  My happiness about being in New York was beginning to fade, and without that giddy sense of being outrageously stimulated, my real feelings began to reassert themselves: I was, after all, a man with a missing son, a man whose marriage hung by a thread, and a man about to see his publisher about a book that he was too embarrassed by to put his real name on. I had never been in this building in a decent frame of mind; always something was wrong— working on a project that was abominable, coming to an appointment that had previously been canceled and rescheduled three or four times, feeling bad about money.

  I jiggled my leg, reached into my pocket and jiggled my change.

  “You know how I judge it?” Graham said. “It’s based on whether he sends his secretary out to reception or if he comes to fetch us himself.”

  “I’d prefer it if we were meeting him for lunch.”

  “God, writers and lunch! Everyone complains about editors and agents, but it’s the writers who insist on the lunches.”

  The elevator stopped with a lurch and then the operator goosed it up a few inches until we were parallel with the fifth floor. With a soft grunt, he opened the heavy door.

  Graham told the receptionist, a beautiful Caribbean woman who read the Iliad while seated at a polished Sheraton desk, that Mr. Davis and Mr. Holland were here to see Mr. Poindexter. She asked Graham to take a seat and he joined me on the green leather sofa, where I was paging through an issue of Publishers Weekly. A picture of a book called Loving an Addicted Gambler was on the cover. The author’s name was Ed Bathrick, and I wondered if this was a real name, a real author, or yet another fraud like me.

  “It’s better this way,” Graham said. “Meeting at the office instead of lunch.”

  “It is? I didn’t have breakfast—I don’t think I had dinner last night, either.”

  “Lunch is for relationships,” Graham said. “Well, we’ve all worked out our bloody relationships, so it’s utterly unnecessary. We’re meeting here because there’s business to be done, and that’s a much better sign.”

  “What kind of business? If the book is selling as well as you—”

  “Graham! Sam!”

  “Hello, Ezra,” said Graham, springing to his feet. He was accustomed to doing business primarily with women, and he brought a kind of italicized courtliness to the job. He took Ezra’s hand, and for a moment it looked as if he might even kiss him on the cheek.

  I got up. My agent’s quickness to rise slowed my own movements. I gripped Ezra’s hand in an excessively manly handshake and said, “Howdy.”

  It looked to me as if Ezra had arrived at work not from his home but from the overheated apartment of a model he picked up at a club the night before. His expensive clothes were rumpled, slightly dirty; his long blond hair could have used a wash. He was one of those men who at forty looks thirty but who will perhaps in a few days look fifty. His porcelain complexion held valiantly on to the blush of youth, and his vivid blue eyes showed the merriment and cunning of a man with a great many unpaid bills.

  We followed Ezra through the wide, wooden corridors of Wilkes and Green until we came to his large corner office, with its immense, dusty casement windows looking out over Madison Avenue. Ezra’s office had its own cozy little reception area, with a few comfortable chairs, floor lamps, and a table displaying a few choice Wilkes and Green books. On the way through this anteroom, I noticed that Visitors from Above had been placed on this display table, along with an anthology of Brazilian short fiction, the memoirs of an FBI agent drummed out of the service because his wife was bisexual, a book by a young German philosopher named J. Kufner called The History of Sadness, and a first novel by an author so young and attractive that his picture was on the front of the dust jacket.

  When I looked up again Graham and Ezra had already entered Ezra’s office. There were others waiting for me as well: a stocky, ruddy woman in a long skirt; a graying man in a rather inflexible-looking blue suit, who was stealthily slipping a Life Saver into his mouth; and a gaunt, edgy woman with pewter hair and purple lipstick, whose self- presentation was all determination—she seemed one of those women with a sexist father, living a life of furious, sorrowful determination to prove him wrong.

  The ruddy, matronly woman was named Marie something-or-other, and she was the head of publicity. The middle-aged man concerned with the freshness of his breath was Ken something-or-other, the director of sales. And the truculent woman was Heather Kay, a media consultant. During the meeting she spoke authoritatively, even curtly, her voice frosted with condescension; yet from time to time she blushed, deeply, from cheekbone to the tips of her ears, as if behind everything she said was only emptiness. She was full of conclusions but did not have a very orderly idea of how she had reached them. Nevertheless, the meeting primarily belonged to her; she worked for a public relations company that had contacts with radio and TV stations all over the country.

  After Ezra talked in general about how well Visitors from Above was doing, Marie said that though none of the more traditional reviewers had noticed the book, there were mentions in all four of the major weekly tabloids, and she was busy lining up reviews in a few magazines. Heather Kay stared at Marie, and Marie’s voice, which was cultured and vaguely southern, wobbled a bit beneath the scrutiny—her efforts suddenly seemed small-time and beside the point. Then Ken spoke, in a flat, genial midwestern accent, with those rubberized lower-middle-class vowels the Wexlers used to like to make fun of. Ken once worked as a salesman for a sunglasses company. When the company folded, Ken was without a job and a little too old to be considered by most companies. He was rescued by the book business, and now he was deeply grateful and fiercely loyal to Wilkes and Green.

  “We’re getting great sell-through,” he said. “No problem with stock remaining on the shelves. The only problem is getting the books out of the warehouse fast enough.” He smiled, satisfied: this was the kind of problem he could live with.

  “Have you gone into a third printing yet?” Graham asked Ezra.

  “We’re planning to,” Ezra said.

  “How many?” asked Graham.

  “Thirty thousand more.”

  “Well, that’s the whole problem right there. It’s too bloody conservative.”

  Ken nodded at Ezra, agreeing with Graham.

  An enormous grief opened within me like a black umbrella. Why couldn’t something like this happen to a book with my real name on it? My name, my name—I had had no idea it meant so much to me. Once, Olivia had specul
ated that I wrote under a pseudonym because my father’s surname hung on me like a millstone. Possibly, I’d thought, yet with faint conviction; psychological theorizing was strictly tennis without a net. But now I was certain that whatever I thought of my own father and the ancestral Hollands who comprised his genetic past, I nevertheless wished my own name were on a book that was going into its third printing, a book that could summon a director of promotion, a sales manager, and a media consultant into my publisher’s office—was it too late to put Sam Holland’s name on Visitors from Above? Or perhaps I could change my own name to John Retcliffe. Why not? Who in the world of arts and letters would wonder what had become of Sam Holland?

  “Sometimes that’s exactly what you want to do when some beautiful girl wants to go to bed with you,” Ezra was saying. He raked his long, graceful fingers through his fine hair, perhaps recalling a moment of tenderness from the night before. “She may want everything right now, but if you play it cool maybe you’ll have a more lasting relationship. Am I on to something here? Those returns can kill you. You know the old saying, ‘Gone today, here tomorrow.’”

  “Ezra,” said Heather Kay, holding up her hands as if he were an irrational man who needed to be calmed down. “Let me just say that if you let me do…what I do, with the media, then you’re—” She stopped suddenly, and the look of keenness left her wide hazel eyes, to be replaced by a startled, self-doubting expression. She seemed either to have forgotten what she had set out to say or to have taken a quick look ahead at it and found something wrong with it.

  “I’m?” prompted Ezra.

  Graham smiled at me, confident I had seen the same panicky expression in Heather’s eyes and not only evaluated but enjoyed it in the same way. Olivia used to tell me that Graham despised women, and though at the time I had found the judgment irritating and false, it seemed suddenly true.

  A blush darkened Heather’s face. She crossed her legs tightly, tucking the toe of her right foot behind the heel of her left. “I just don’t think you’ll have trouble selling copies of the book, that’s all I mean to say.” She shrugged and reached behind her for her briefcase. She took a sheet of computer paper from a long gray envelope, upon which was a list of cities and dates and the call letters of various radio and television stations. “This is what I was able to line up in just twenty-four hours,” she said. “There’s a lot of wanna-see-wanna-hear about John Retcliffe, and the whole extraterrestrial topic seems to have struck a chord. Besides, you know how the media obsesses about and competes with itself. Everyone wants to get in on what Jerry Hopper has done. They worship and despise him. You know how that is.”

  “Who the hell is Jerry Hopper?” I asked. All of my contacts with publishing people were dominated by chitchat about people I’d never heard of, and I was sick of it. I had always accepted this as part of the mean mercantile justice of being unsuccessful, but now I felt I had won the right to complain a bit—or John Retcliffe had.

  “Jerry Hopper?!” exclaimed Heather.

  I looked at her blankly, feeling a bit of prissy pride that I had no idea whom she was talking about—I still had a few remaining moments to feel above crass commercialism.

  “He’s a radio guy,” said Ken, rather gently.

  “He is radio, right now, in New York,” said Heather. “Drive time, morning and afternoon.”

  “Drive time?”

  “During the commutes, when most people are in their cars,” said Heather, with a certain warmness. Ah: so she liked it when she knew the answer. I felt my heart turning in my chest, to get a better look at her.

  “People in New York don’t have cars,” I said. “They’re in the subway, or on the bus, or maybe in a taxi, in which case they’re listening to something in Turkish.”

  “I keep getting Russians,” said Graham, very cheerfully, trying to counteract whatever unpleasantness I might be generating.

  “If you want to know why our…book is selling,” said Heather, “then the answer is Jerry Hopper. It was his mentioning it on his program that began the upsurge in sales. Maybe, living out on the farm, you don’t realize how influential the media has become.”

  “I don’t live in an Amish community,” I said. “Every other house has a goddamned satellite dish in front of it, the place is cabled up the kazoo.”

  “You two,” said Ezra, grinning, wagging a long finger at us. “Behave!”

  “Look, let’s stay on track here, okay?” Heather said. “There’s two areas of concern—radio, which Sam could possibly handle, and television, which is a problem, since we are dealing with an author who wishes to protect his anonymity.”

  Protect my anonymity? I never thought of it quite like that. My anonymity was always my extra helping of humble pie.

  “I’ve worked with an author who had to keep his identity secret, and when we had him on TV, local and national, they rigged up this kind of electronic blockage of his face and disguised his voice, too. But this guy was a government witness for those Mafia trials last year.”

  “Andy the Candyman,” said Ezra, nodding.

  “Yes.”

  “I Am a Killer,” remembered Graham.

  “Right,” said Heather.

  “How did that book end up doing?” asked Graham, idly.

  “Very nicely,” said Heather. “It was on the best-seller lists.”

  “People can’t get enough of that shit,” said Ezra.

  “I don’t suppose you know who represents him,” Graham asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘represents him’?” said Ezra, his voice a blend of amusement and annoyance. “Like he’s going to write Andy the Candyman, Part Two?”

  “You never know,” said Graham. “Remember that…” and he launched into an anecdote about a weightlifter who was held captive for three weeks by a movie star and her sisters and then wrote a book about it, which was a huge success.

  I sank into myself, wondering why, even in the midst of my first success, I could not inspire people to keep the subject on me. I fully realized how childish and petulant this was, but I couldn’t bear these digressions. I remembered Michael’s eighth birthday party, thrown at a lucky time in my boy’s usually solitary life, a time when he seemed to have enough friends to keep a small party going. In the middle of it, Michael had burst into a torrent of tears. “No one’s paying attention to me,” he said. “Everyone’s acting like this is just any other day.” I had stroked Michael’s soft sable cap of hair while he bawled against my belly. I had actually been frightened by the kid’s reaction, his lack of familiarity with how the world worked. Yet here I was in Ezra’s office, feeling neglected, slighted because mine was not the only book they were talking about. And the book was not even mine, not really. I reminded myself to keep repeating that essential fact of the matter: it was not really mine.

  “Something’s just struck me,” said Marie. “About Carol Mahoney, at the Times, I mean. One of her weirder quirks is she really believes in reincarnation.”

  “What does this have to do with anything?” I said.

  “I was just thinking how nice it would be to have the Times review your book, and maybe I could use the reincarnation angle to pique Carol’s interest.”

  “But there’s nothing about reincarnation in my book.”

  “Oh,” said Marie, not particularly distressed. “I thought there was.”

  “And God willing, the reincarnation angle won’t be in my next book, either.”

  “You know what, Sam?” said Ezra. “Let’s not talk about your next book right now.” He put his index fingers on either side of his skull. “Focus,” he said. “Now, Heather, when does Jerry Hopper want John Retcliffe on his program?”

  “He seems flexible, Ezra.”

  “How about this afternoon, then?”

  “This afternoon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ezra, these things are usually done quite a bit in advance.”

  “Who cares how things are usually done? Call him and tell him we’ve got John R
etcliffe here, that he’s passing through town and he can go on the show today.”

  “Are we talking about me here?” I managed to ask.

  “Don’t worry, Sam,” said Graham. “This will be fine.” He darted a look at Ezra.

  “I thought,” said Heather, “we were going to consider hiring someone else for the tour.”

  She reached into her briefcase and pulled out several black-and-white photographs. The top one showed a mild middle-aged man with his hair neatly combed, wearing a turtleneck sweater, his eyes friendly and eager behind horn-rimmed glasses. She handed the pictures to Ezra.

  To my great surprise, I found myself standing up. A consciousness of having made a great mistake descended upon me. How could I come here with everything in Leyden in such turmoil?

  “I need to call home,” I said. My ratio of head to body weight had changed. My body was lead and my skull was just frozen wind.

  Ezra gestured toward the phone on his desk. “Or would you like some privacy?”

  “Yes,” I said softly. My heart did not so much beat as bubble; a percolating column of blood raced up and down my chest cavity.

  “The office next door is empty,” Ezra said. “Feel free.”

  The office next to Ezra’s was small, with one window looking out onto Twenty-eighth Street. There was space only for a small bookshelf, a chair, and a desk, upon which were a bottle of Evian water and a paperback edition of Warrant for Genocide by Norman A. Cohn. I dialed my number and sat in the chair, turning it to face the window as I listened to the phone in my haunted house a hundred miles north ring once, twice, a third time. Usually I had to signal Olivia it was me, or she wouldn’t answer the phone. I had assumed it would be different today.

  “Hello?” Olivia’s voice was high and tight.

  “Thank God you’re there.”

  “Oh.”

  “Any word?”

  “Yes, he called.”

  “Thank God. Where is he?”

  “Don’t get too excited. He’s somewhere, he’s alive. But that’s all I know.”