Famous Writers I Have Known

by James Magnuson

  I decided to try another approach. I began to chuckle, putting my fist to my nose, shaking my head as if the joke was too rich to share.

  “Oh, God, look at you all! If you could only see your faces! I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . . I really should stop playing with you all like this, but sometimes I just can’t help it.”

  Dominique stood frozen, a quiche just inches from her parted lips, unable to take a bite. What was so unfair about the whole deal was that I’d actually read Eat Your Wheaties, just a month before, but what was I supposed to do, memorize every line? I put my arm around Rex’s shoulders.

  “Did I write that line?” I said. “Of course I wrote it, if you can call that writing.” Rex slipped out from under my arm. “I worked on that first paragraph for a month. Everything I’d come up with was garbage. And then one day it was as if the heavens opened and there it was. ‘If you’re wondering how crappy a best friend can be . . .’ Man, it was like it was just burned on my brain.”

  I’m telling you, there’s an art to blowing smoke. Were they buying it? Most of them had these sheepish smiles on their faces as if they were coming around. Mercedes still looked as if she was in a coma, but Mel let go with a big guffaw as if I was the funniest guy who ever lived. Rex, working over his teeth with his tongue, did not seem happy. He was not a man who enjoyed having his leg pulled, one way or the other.

  “Forgive me, please,” I said. “Maybe I’ve been living up in the woods too long. People up there develop strange senses of humor. What do you say we go finish off those lemon squares?”

  Chapter Eight

  My check arrived on the last day in September. After withholding and insurance, it came to nearly twenty grand. When I pulled it out of the envelope, all I could do was stare at it, all printed out, my name in capital letters—v. s. mohle. It was a real check from a real place. And this wasn’t like my usual ill-gotten gains. I’d earned this money.

  Great as that felt, I now was faced with the problem of what to do with it. Ordinarily I would have found myself one of those shady limo-service/tattoo-parlor kinds of places and had them fix me up with a phony duplicate of Mohle’s Social Security card and driver’s license, but this wasn’t an ordinary situation. I’m no expert—Barry was always a lot more up on this stuff than I was—but my impression was that there were armies of high-tech geniuses coming up with new ways to nab malefactors like me every month.

  But my ace in the hole was Wayne. The night after I got my check, I had dinner over at his place. It was a modest house, the walls decorated with the quilts of oppressed groups from around the world. I liked his wife, a gentle librarian from Manitoba by the name of Faith. Their two daughters had been shipped off to the neighbors for the evening, which I appreciated. How could you expect an eleven-year-old to keep her mouth shut if she met someone as famous as me?

  We stood around in the kitchen, drinking red wine and noshing on baba ghanoush, while I entertained them with tales of New York. After a second glass of wine, Wayne and I excused ourselves and went out back to check on the barbeque. When I saw the smoke rising above the grill, my heart leapt, but as I got closer, I saw there was nothing but portobello mushrooms, limp red peppers, and onions. This vegetarian thing was getting old, but at least I wouldn’t be dying of scurvy.

  Wincing from the heat, Wayne flipped the slices of peppers with a pair of tongs. “So Wayne, could I ask you something?”

  “Of course.”

  “Ramona and Rex. What’s the deal there?”

  “The deal?”

  “Yeah, you know. I’m still trying to figure it out.”

  “Rex, you know how generous he can be. Sometimes he gets these crazy ideas. Ramona’s the one whose job it is to say no. And God forbid if you try to go around her.”

  “Where’s she from?”

  “Oh, she grew up in England. Spent some time bumming around. He met her when he was doing research for New Spain. She was working on some cruise ship in the Caribbean, and he hired her on the spot to be his typist. They’ve been together ever since.” Wayne was wearing the same Hawaiian shirt he’d had on the first time we met. I guess it must have been his party shirt. “It sounds as if you and Rex have been getting along.”

  “I’ve got no cause to complain.”

  “Good,” he said.

  “You haven’t heard anything different, have you?”

  “No.” The way he said it, I wasn’t sure I could believe him. “It’s just that Rex has his moods.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Wayne picked up a spatula and began to rake the sooty bubbles on the grill. “He has the deans and vice presidents constantly jumping through hoops. He likes to stir things up. I just didn’t want you to think it was you.”

  “No, I understand.” I swatted a mosquito that had settled in on my arm. “So Wayne, I wonder if you could do something for me.”

  “Anything. You name it.”

  “You know I got paid the other day.”

  “Right.”

  “You know what a hopeless flake I am,” I said. “The problem is I have this weird thing about banks. I wonder if you could cash it for me.”

  “You have it with you?”

  “I do,” I said. I scanned the surrounding yards, just to be sure no one was peeping out their windows, then pulled my warm, bent check out of my back pocket and offered it to him.

  He tried not to show it, but I swear he gulped when he saw the amount. “Wow,” he said.

  “I hope it’s not too much,” I said.

  “No, no,” he said, his voice quavering. “I can do this.” He turned the check over. “You haven’t endorsed it.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said.

  He handed the check to me, patted his trousers, and fished out a blue ballpoint. I took it from him and used the wall of the garage for a hard writing surface. I scrawled V. S. Mohle on the back of it, careless and easy as Nolan Ryan signing a baseball.

  “Here you go,” I said.

  He cupped the check in his hand and stared down at the signature for way too long. I could tell there were a lot of things whirring around in his brain. I wiped sweat from around my neck.

  “Any problem?” I said.

  “No problem,” he said. “But I was just thinking. The signature’s probably worth more than the check is.”

  That night I ended up calling my ex-wife in New Jersey, and why I did, I have no fucking idea, unless it was that getting that check had stirred me up in some idiotic way. It was nearly one in the morning and I woke her.

  “Hello?” Her voice had not lost its usual note of suspicion.

  “Dora?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Frankie.” There was such a long pause I thought maybe we’d been disconnected. “You still there?”

  “Where are you?” she said.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “You can’t tell me? You wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me you can’t tell me where you are? I thought you were dead!” For a second it sounded as if she was going to cry.

  “So you heard.”

  “Of course I heard!” Over the years, Dora had turned into something of a hysteric, most of that directly attributable to me. “It was in all the papers, about Barry being shot. And then the police came by . . .”

  “Huh.” I belched softly. I’m telling you, all those seared vegetables can wreck havoc on a person’s digestive system. I was sitting on the couch in the living room, the phone on my belly, my feet resting on a stack of Mohle biographies. “So they know I was with Barry?”

  “Well, weren’t you?”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “What could I tell them? That I hadn’t seen you for how many years? That you haven’t sent your son so much as a birthday card?”

  I rubbed my hand across my forehead. “Dora, please.”

  “The police weren’t the only ones.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “There were two other
friends of yours that dropped by.”

  “Who was that?”

  “One of them was Claude something. I don’t remember the name of the other one, but he had a scar over one eye and he must have weighed four hundred pounds. He could barely make it through the front door . . .”

  “Dora, those guys were not friends of mine.”

  “They said they were. They said they wanted to talk to you about some business matters. They said if you got in touch with me, I should call them first thing. They said they would make it worth my while.”

  “So are you going to call them?”

  “What sort of person do you think I am? You think I want to see you dead? All I want is for you to stop dragging me back into all your horseshit . . .”

  I hate it when she uses foul language; it’s something she picked up from her father. “Dora, I didn’t have anything to do with Barry being killed. I’m as in the dark about all this as you are, I swear.”

  “How am I supposed to believe that? Tell me how.”

  My head throbbed. The cactus painting on the wall had begun to undulate. What could I have been thinking? These old marriages, you think there’s going to be solace there, when, really, all there is is grief.

  “Oh, and you know what else?” she said.

  “What else?”

  “They came back. Just last night.”

  “Jesus Christ. And what did they want?”

  “They didn’t want anything. They were just checking. I’m going to hang up now.”

  “Did they leave you a phone number? These guys?”

  “I think I threw it out.”

  “Are you sure? You couldn’t go look?”

  “It’s the middle of the night, Frankie. I’ve got to get up and go to work in the morning.”

  “It’s important, Dora. I’m trying to get to the bottom of things.”

  “Are you? We were married for ten years. I don’t remember your ever getting to the bottom of anything.”

  There was a click and then, after several seconds, a dial tone. I sat for a long time, rubbing my chin with a thumbnail. It had been a big mistake, calling. I swung my feet off the pile of biographies. On the cover at the top of the stack was the famous photo of Mohle, but the edges were whited out so he looked like God peering out of the clouds. Mohle had the right idea. Go live on an island, keep to yourself, don’t bother people, and don’t let them bother you. Everything else was too fucking sad.

  When I met Dora she wanted to be a singer. She was good too. She could have been the next Barbra Streisand if it hadn’t been for those faltering high notes. She was just twenty-five, the miniskirted daughter of a body-shop owner in East Orange. She looked a little like Annette Funicello on The Mickey Mouse Club, only sexier.

  We got together at a good time. I was in my mid-thirties and it was the one moment in my life when I was within a hair of legitimacy. Barry and I were selling lots for a development in Arizona Barry had dubbed the Lake Havasu Estates and the money was rolling in.

  Dora and I had a classic whirlwind romance. I took her to the best restaurants, bought her candy and flowers, took her out to Belmont for the races, but the real reason she fell for me was my mouth.

  She loved to hear me talk. It almost makes me wince, remembering the pictures I painted for her about the life we were going to lead. The apartment on Fifth Avenue, the summers in the south of France. We would hire her the best voice coach in the city and through my exclusive contacts in the music business (a pal of mine had once been Perry Como’s wardrobe guy), we would get her launched. It was as if I was blowing glistening soap bubbles and she was a little girl with her hand outstretched.

  We made love for the first time in her bedroom on her parents’ bowling night. She turned out to be more expert than I imagined. We did things that night that no one in The Mickey Mouse Club could have imagined in their wildest dreams. Her orgasms were operatic; I had to put a finger to her lips to keep her from alerting the whole neighborhood. Afterward we lay side by side in what was no more than a child’s bed. I had never been surrounded by so much pink.

  We were married after six weeks, and six weeks after that I got a letter from the Arizona attorney general, requesting that Barry and I appear for a hearing. There had been a number of complaints that the lots we were selling at the Lake Havasu Estates were nowhere near Lake Havasu, but sixty miles out in the desert.

  I tried to keep the bad news from Dora as long as I could. Barry and I lost everything. It was a shock for Dora, but she was more noble about it than I deserved. Though, frankly, one bump on the head, who can’t be noble about that? It’s when you realize that someone’s dragging you by the ankles down a long stairway that it starts to get hard.

  Both Dora and I tried our best to make it work, but I think it was too much of a shock for her, once it dawned on her that she was stuck with a run-of-the-mill con artist. The kid coming along didn’t make it any easier. From time to time I would try to straighten up and fly right—selling bank vaults, running a driving school. I even worked at Dora’s father’s body shop for six months, hammering the dents out of bent fenders until I just couldn’t take it anymore. These regular jobs, I felt like I was holding my breath underwater. There was no hope in them, no upside, and I’ve always been a sucker for the upside. When Barry showed up with his scheme for getting a casino license, I was easy pickings. All I would have to do was pass myself off as a Mohegan chief, drive up to Oswego, and alter a few tribal ledgers.

  I’m not proud of what I did. I turned Dora into a harridan. I humiliated her in front of her friends and family, in front of the world, and left her with a boy to raise. But how could I stay? She didn’t believe in me anymore.

  The next day when I poked my head into Wayne’s office, he had his feet propped up on his desk as he read over some application. I rapped on the wall. I hadn’t meant to startle him, but I did. He lurched forward, feet slapping the floor.

  “Hey,” he said. “Just the guy I was looking for. I’ve got something for you.”

  He reached into his desk drawer, pulled out five thick envelopes, and handed them to me. They were filled with fifties.

  “Wow,” I said. I thumbed through the bills in one of the envelopes. There is nothing more comforting in the world than the flutter of greenbacks. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Forget about it,” he said. “It was nothing.” Just above his head was the row of remaindered copies of his first novel, Winnowing.

  “They didn’t give you any trouble at the bank?”

  “Why would they give me trouble? It’s a university check and I’ve known these people forever.”

  I took a moment to try to suss out his mood. “So how they hanging these days, Wayne? Everybody treating you all right?”

  “Everybody’s treating me fine,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

  I stashed the envelopes in my inside jacket pockets, three in one, two in the other. I felt a little bad for the guy. Here he was, thinking he was helping out a famous writer, and all he was really doing was setting himself up for ten to fifteen for bank fraud. “No reason. You just seem a little quieter than usual.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I just wonder why I even bother.”

  “Bother? Bother with what?” I asked. He flicked at the application on the desk with the back of his hand. “You’re not thinking of giving up, are you?” He shrugged. “You mean giving it all up?”

  “The writing hasn’t been going very well. It’s just so hard to get anything done, between the students and my family. I feel like I’m being eaten alive.”

  “This is crazy,” I said. “Maybe it’s a little tough, but, Jesus . . . You’ve got the goods, Wayne. You know you do. And that’s all that matters. I’ve read Winnowing.” I pulled one of the copies of his novel off the shelf and flipped to the last page.

  “Listen to this. ‘But then there was no need to do anything else than wait for the combine to complete its slow circling of the f
ield, to feel the rush of grain beating through my hands, feel the first stirrings of the afternoon wind against my face, the only sound the rattle of the auger when we lagged behind and the hushing of wheat flowing into filling barns during the long, bright day.’ You think any of the kids I’m teaching upstairs could come up with something like that? In a million years?”

  He leaned back in his chair, eyeing me, fist to his lips. “Who’s to say?”

  “Christ A-Mighty!” I said. “The book did well, right?”

  “Not so well, actually.”

  I scanned the inside of the back flap. “But it was critically acclaimed.”

  “Well . . . in a way. It was a finalist for the Abigail Schermerhorn Prize.”

  “There. You see?” I wriggled the novel back into its place on the bookshelf. Through the slats of the blinds, I could see Anton out on the driveway, eating a doughnut, trying not to get the powdered sugar on his uniform. “Pardon my French here, Wayne, but you’ve got to stop worrying about all these little shits! Seriously. You’ve got to learn how to be selfish. Take it from me. If I hadn’t been selfish, I would be nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

  “I appreciate your saying all this,” he said. He was still pretty much down in the dumps, but the clouds were beginning to part. I have to admit, I do have a gift.

  I slapped him on the arm. “So what you working on there?”

  “Just my application to Bellagio.”

  “Bellagio? You going to Vegas?”

  He looked at me blankly for a second, and then laughed as if he’d just gotten the joke. “Oh, no, this is in Italy. Lake Como.”

  “Oh, that’s more like it,” I said. “Anyway, if you want to put my name down as somebody who thinks you’re a hell of a writer, feel free.”

  Chapter Nine

  Rex and I had been dodging it for weeks, the Big Conversation. It had gotten to the point where I thought it might not even happen, that he’d just decided to let sleeping dogs lie, so when it did happen, he caught me totally off guard.