At the bottom of the escalator was the usual crowd of dumpy guys in shiny blazers, holding cardboard signs, scrutinizing us as we descended, looking for their fares.
There were only three or four people at the Avis desk. I took out my wallet and was flipping through my various credit cards when there was a tap on my shoulder.
I turned. A sultry twenty-something with masses of tangled black hair cocked her head and smiled as if I was supposed to know who she was.
“Mr. Mole?” she said.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“It’s okay,” she said, lowering her voice almost to a whisper. “It’s just us.”
I looked past her, trying to figure out who us was. Standing by the glass door were two other girls, looking just as breathless and excited as she was. One was this tall, gangly Shelley Duvall type in a miniskirt no bigger than a postage stamp. The other was a cute little African-American number, holding her hands to her cheeks like some awestruck Beatles fan.
“So do you have bags?” the one with the tangled hair asked.
“Bags?” I said. I’d seen a lot of scams in my life, but this was a new one. What were they going to do, take me out in woods, sexually assault me, and leave me for dead? “No, I’m fine, thanks. Now, if you’ll excuse me, sweetheart, I need to go pick up my car.”
“But we already have a car.” I gave her a second look. The other two were moving in, cutting off my escape routes. “We’re all part of the program,” she said. “I’m Dominique.” A stack of bracelets jangled on her arm as she reached out to shake my hand. “And this is Bryn.” The girl in the miniskirt gave me a little wave. “And LaTasha.” The black girl nodded, shy as a mouse.
I scratched the back of my neck. Program? What was this, some sort of cult? Some foxy spin-off of the Scientologists?
“And what do you do in the program?” I asked.
“Short stories, mostly,” Dominique said. “But I’d really like to try my hand at something longer.”
I stared at her, dumbfounded.
“She just had a piece in Tin House,” Bryn said.
“Really?” I said. “And how about you two?”
“Pretty much the same thing. Some creative nonfiction.”
“I’m working on a novel,” LaTasha said.
A older woman strode by, glaring at me, roller bags in tow. God knows what she thought we were up to.
The whole thing was clearly one of those crazy mix-ups. I should have just walked away, told them they had the wrong guy, but their eyes were shining with such excitement. I hated to disappoint them.
“So what’s the plan exactly?” I said.
“We thought we’d take you by the institute,” Dominique said. “Mildred’s got a couple of papers for you to sign and then I think she’s going to take you up to your house.”
“Oh, Mr. Mole,” LaTasha said, “the house is just wonderful.”
“And very private,” Bryn said. “It may not be as private as an island in Maine, but it’s pretty good.”
“And we’re not going to bother you, we promise,” Dominique said. “We’ve all been vowed to secrecy.”
The other two nodded their heads solemnly. Maine island? Ordinarily I’m pretty quick on the uptake, but this was taking a while to piece together.
It was getting annoying the way they kept referring to me as Mr. Mole, as if I was some friend of Mr. Toad’s, but then it occurred to me that I was spelling it wrong. Maybe it was M-O-H-L-E, not M-O-L-E. And the only M-O-H-L-E I’d ever heard of was V. S. Mohle, the guy who wrote Eat Your Wheaties, who’d been hiding away on some island somewhere, maybe it was Maine, I don’t remember exactly, and no one had even laid eyes on the guy for the past twenty-five years.
“So how did you all recognize me?” I asked.
They looked at one another and giggled. “From your jacket photo.”
“Really? You telling me I haven’t changed?”
“Not that much. You look a little older,” Bryn said, and then put her fingers to her lips, afraid she’d said something wrong.
“We were just afraid, when we didn’t see you at first, that maybe you’d changed your mind about coming,” Dominique said.
“I understand,” I said. It all came back to me, the ruckus at the gate in New York, the man who looked like me tearing up his boarding pass and fleeing.
“So should we go, then?” Dominique said. Her bracelets chimed as she adjusted the strap of her sundress. They were all waiting for me. We must have looked like something out of Charlie’s Angels.
I glanced through the glass doors at the people loading up their vans, hustling toward the taxi stand. How far did I really want to take this? These girls were total idiots. Did they really think I was a famous writer? Did nobody notice the bloodstains on my trousers?
But then I saw this old guy lurching across the crosswalk on a cane, trying to catch up with his wife. She was way out in front of him, hauling two suitcases, but she wasn’t waiting for him. Why he reminded me of Barry, I don’t know. He had white hair and honestly didn’t look like him at all. Maybe it was just the limp. Just twenty-four hours before, Barry and I had been walking in Riverside Park, trying to figure out how to get out of the jam he’d gotten us in. He’d been sore at me and I’d been sore at him, so I just walked him and walked him on his bad leg like it was some sort of payback. My eyes began to fill with tears.
“Are you okay?” LaTasha said.
“I’m fine. Or maybe I’m not so fine. I’m sort of at the end of my rope, to tell you the truth.”
Dominique put a hand on my arm and the other two moved in a little closer. The fucking shah going into exile couldn’t have gotten any better treatment than this. Maybe it was that they heard something like a note of true grief in my voice, but it was as if they were trying to hold me up, trying to protect me from the world.
The car must have been 140 degrees inside when we opened the door, but we piled in anyway, cranking down the windows and turning the AC all the way up. Dominique and I took the front and Bryn and LaTasha got in back. It was a ten-year-old Toyota with hail damage and no more leg room than a broom closet.
I can’t tell you how strange all this was. I felt like I’d been dropped down a rabbit hole. The three of them chattered away about their program while all I could think about was how I was now a marked man. If I knew the Cannettis, there would be guys looking for me in every city in America. They either knew who I was or they would find out soon enough. These guys were very good at finding people. I didn’t need a program; what I needed was to vanish off the face of the earth.
As we drove into town, I pumped the girls for information, trying to get the lay of the land. This institute they were talking about was called the Fiction Institute of Texas. It was made up of eight writers like themselves, all on these humongous fellowships (twenty-five Gs per year), and my job was to workshop them once a week for a couple of hours.
The only workshop I’d ever heard of was Santa’s, and from the girls’ tone it sounded like they were doing a lot more than carving pull-toys. They tried to explain to me how it worked, how they brought in their stories or sections of novels and I led the discussion, gave them a few pointers, and generally tried to keep a lid on things.
“So when we get to the institute, who’ll be there?” I asked.
“It should just be Mildred,” LaTasha said. The two girls in the back hovered over my shoulder, eager as puppies.
“Uh-huh. And who is she exactly?”
“She’s the program coordinator,” Dominique said.
“And anyone else?”
“Wayne may be there. But he’s usually in just in the mornings.”
“Wayne?”
“The director. The one you’ve been talking to.”
“Oh, Wayne. Of course. My old buddy.”
Off in the distance I could see the dome of the state capitol. In my whole life, I don’t think I’d ever seen so much sky. We passed a battered truck. A trio of Mexican workers
squatted among lawn mowers in the back, their mouths covered by bandannas.
“So from Austin, what’s the nearest city?” I asked.
“San Antonio,” Dominique said. “It’s an hour and a half away. Then there’s Dallas and Houston.”
“And how far are they?”
“Houston’s two and a half. Dallas a little more than three.”
“Uh-huh.”
I needed a plan. The girls had said there was a house waiting for me, but I was dubious. I’d pushed my luck about as far as I dared. But what choices did I have? I supposed I could rent a car and just start driving. There was a guy I knew once who ran a dog track outside of Denver, but I hadn’t talked to him for years. In the movies guys like me usually stop in some shitty little town and get a job working in a grain silo, but to tell you the truth, the whole world west of Trenton terrified me.
“So you were saying that you’ve all signed these vows of secrecy. Now, what is that about?”
Dominique shot me an odd look. “Well, I think you know what that’s about.”
“How do you mean?”
“It was your idea, right?”
“Right, but I was just wondering—”
LaTasha piped up from the back. “They gave us these confidentiality agreements we had to sign. It was like we were in the CIA or something.”
“No kidding?” I said. “And what did they say?”
“Basically that if any of us spill the beans about your being here, you’re gone on the next flight,” Dominique said.
“Plus Mildred said they might even yank our fellowships,” Bryn said.
As we got closer to town we began to pass taco stands and a series of small garages. “Wow,” I said. “That’s pretty hard, isn’t it?”
“Not to mention pretty insulting,” Dominique said. “We’re not children. We all know this is the opportunity of a lifetime. If the only way we can get you here is by promising to keep it all under wraps, we’re all on board.”
“As far as we’re concerned,” LaTasha said, “you’re the invisible man.”
“I appreciate it,” I said. “I can’t tell you how much that means to me right now.”
The Institute was a two-story white house on the north side of campus with a wide yard that led down to a creek. As we pulled around to the parking lot, an old woman in a faded print dress stooped over the flower bed, gingerly coaxing dog turds into a dustpan with a stick.
She looked up as the Toyota rumbled across the gravel, her glasses a wonderland of lenses. We all got out of the car and Dominique waved. “Hey, Mildred!” she shouted. “I’ve got somebody here I’d like you to meet!”
Mildred put down her dustpan and hobbled over, with the sweetest smile on her face I’d ever seen. “My goodness,” she said. “I never thought I’d see the day.”
I gave her a hug. “This is a great pleasure, Mildred.”
She squinted up at me through a cataract haze and patted me on the chest. “We better get you inside before you melt. Girls, thank you so much.”
The girls seemed reluctant to give me up, and who could blame them? This was probably the greatest day of their lives, meeting me.
“See you later, guys,” I said. “I appreciate the lift.”
Dominique tossed her keys in the air, caught them, and gave me a pouty look from behind her mane of tangled hair.
Mildred and I stood side by side, watching as the car pulled out of the lot. I was happy to see them go. It’s always great to be fawned over by a bevy of young women, but I wasn’t sure how easy it would have been to get out of their clutches. Mildred seemed like she would be easier to outmaneuver.
We went inside and she gave me a tour of the house. The place was like a museum, the walls plastered with framed posters of bearded men with their chins on their fists, and the air-conditioning was state-of-the-art.
She took me upstairs to see my office. I’d never had an office before and this was a nice homey one, with old-fashioned wallpaper and big windows that made you feel like you were sitting right up there with the squirrels and the robins. She showed me how my computer worked, how to retrieve the messages off the phone, and how to adjust the thermostat. I didn’t pay her much mind, but it was nice to be inside and out of the line of fire.
We went back downstairs and she took me through the kitchen and showed me where I could keep things. Dozens of little magnets dotted the refrigerator door. They all had words or parts of words on them and someone had been arranging them in short, wacko lines.
A thousand raw
summer sausages
fall together
and spring through winter
We proceeded at a snail’s pace—her hands were knotted up with arthritis and it was painful for her to reach under the lampshades to turn the switches. She reminded me a lot of a foster mom I’d had once, this sweet old lady from Brooklyn who had terrible tremors and yet somehow managed to take care of four birds, four cats, four dogs, and four of us foster kids, or at least she did until the day we tried to play baseball with one of her parakeets and she had Child Protective Services come get us out of there.
She got a map of the university out of her desk to give me. There was also a thick stack of papers for me to sign. She went into a long-winded explanation about withholding and pension and insurance, and I finally had to cut her off.
“Mildred,” I said. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but the girls were saying that you had a house for me?”
“That’s right,” she said, pushing up on the bridge of her trifocals. “It’s just ten blocks from here.”
“I was wondering if maybe I could take another look at all this stuff tomorrow. It’s been a long day . . .”
“Of course,” she said. “Just let me run in here for a second and we can go.”
She went into the bathroom and I heard the rattle of the lock. I took a deep breath and did a quick look around. A bronze bust of some surly character sat on a table in the hallway and there were several tall cabinets filled with cowboy gear—lariats and spurs, branding irons and old boots.
Squinting at the framed photographs on the wall, I saw that there were names under the pictures—J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Michael somebody, Peter Carey, Adrienne Rich. Maybe it was just my imagination, but it felt as if they were glaring down at me.
A three-by-five card was taped up above the door of the office next to Mildred’s desk. I stood on tiptoe to read it:
We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. Our doubt is our passion. Our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
Now, what that meant, I had no clue. The only people I knew who worked in the dark were cat burglars and heating duct repairmen, but what they had to do with the madness of art was beyond me.
I could have walked right out of there. I could have been rid of all this horseshit. God knows what kept me there. Maybe it was just the reassuring hum of the air-conditioning. If I took off on foot, I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in that killer heat.
They kept talking about this house and how private it was. If I could get a good night’s sleep, I could be gone before morning. It wasn’t as if I needed to keep up this charade forever.
When the phone rang in the office, I nearly jumped out of my skin. I let it ring a second time, a third, and then the answering machine picked up. A man’s voice came on, shaky and apologetic.
“Wayne, this is V.S. I’m sorry, but I can’t go through with this. I tried. I really did. I made it as far as the New York airport. I’d rather not go into it all now, but there was an unfortunate incident. I’m on my way back to Maine. I feel horrible about letting you down like this, letting Rex down. But I’m sure you’ll find someone who can step in and do a much better job than I ever could. I beg you, please, don’t try to call. This is all too humiliating. Maybe we could talk in a couple of months, but right now I’m just not capable of it. Forgive me . . .”
There was a soft click when the call ended. I heard a to
ilet flush. I glanced back quickly at the bathroom door.
I took a step inside the office. It was a hell of a mess—a desk piled high with manuscripts, cardboard boxes stacked in the corners, kids’ drawings on the wall. The answering machine blinked red. It was one of those big old clunkers with buttons marked play, repeat, skip, and delete. I leaned over and hit delete. There was a slither of tape and another click. I was safe, at least for the time being.
Chapter Three
This being mistaken for a famous writer had its upsides. Not only was the house great, but even greater was the hedge out front, so tall and thick and thorny you would have thought some horticulturist from Witness Protection had planted it.
It wasn’t much more than a cottage, really, but done up real classy, with white shutters and a Hansel-and-Gretel thatched roof. Ten blocks north of the Fiction Institute, it was just beyond the student slums in a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood. Inside, it looked like something you’d see written up in a fashion magazine, with gleaming oak floors, professionally scuffed chairs, frilly pillows tossed on leather couches, and, on the walls, oil paintings of cacti and sorrowful horses. A bowl of fresh fruit and a bottle of champagne, gussied up with a blue ribbon, sat in the breakfast nook; all my life I’d wanted a breakfast nook, and now I had one. I was smack-dab in the middle of I Love Lucy Land. The gardener came on Wednesday, the maid on Thursday, and if I wanted bottled water delivered, the truck came on Friday. The landlady lived next door and Mildred was sure I’d like her. A founder of the local book festival, she was apparently dying to meet me, and who could blame her?
Mildred showed me the little room I could use as my study, where the linens were kept, how to operate the washer and dryer. I suppose it was sweet, but the last thing I needed to know at the moment was how someone’s waffle iron worked. A nice set of silver looked as if it would bring five, six hundred dollars at any hockshop.
“So what time would you like us to pick you up in the morning?” she said.
“The morning?” I said.
“I know Wayne’s going to want to take you to breakfast and show you around a little.”
Famous Writers I Have Known Page 3
