“Get out of it? I don’t want to get out of it.”
“I don’t want to pry, but you must have already sunk a fortune into this.”
“I don’t know if I’d say that, but I’ve spent a few bucks.”
“It’s a shame we weren’t in touch earlier. We might have been able to do something. Right now, I’m pretty tapped out.” Rex dug into the rind of the orange with his fingernails, making a real mess. “You still got that teddy bear?”
“I keep it in my window.”
“Listen, V.S., you did the best you could. You’ve got to stop beating yourself up over this. We’ve all done things we’re not so proud of, but we can’t always fix them. And at our age, we’re getting a little old to play hero.” He opened his window a crack and let the bits of orange peel sail on down the road behind us.
“Would you mind if I ask you a question?” he said.
“Of course not.”
“So is this why you came down here? To ask me for money?”
“Ask you? Are you kidding me? No way.”
“I didn’t think so. I was just curious,” Rex said. Birds rose and fell over a field of stubble. In the distance I could see the gray water tower of some two-bit town. When Rex leaned in to give me a punch on the shoulder, his eyes seemed almost merry. “So what do you say we go check on your woolly mammoths?”
When we got to the museum there was a four-man delegation there to greet us. Rex was in the grandest mood, shaking hands with everybody, asking about their families. Walter Cronkite couldn’t have done it better.
They took us on a VIP tour of something called the dig shelter. We made our way along a catwalk above the remains of a dozen or so of these monsters. There were huge curved tusks, shattered skulls, vertebrae, toe bones the size of salt shakers. According to our guide, these mammoths had been bigger than elephants, fourteen feet high. Enormous herds of them had roamed the plains of Texas some fifty thousand years ago, along with camels and saber-toothed tigers and giant sloths.
Rex ate this stuff up with a spoon. In a way he looked like a fossil himself, with his bony old head. He scribbled notes and asked a million questions. Me, I shuffled along behind like a doomed man. What had I thought would happen? I’m ashamed to admit it, but I honestly thought Rex and I were going to end up on our knees, two old foes praying for the forgiveness of our sins together. It would have been a beautiful thing. If everything had gone the way I’d planned, the man would have been begging to give me his money.
But Rex was no sap. I’d offered him a chance to redeem himself and he’d slapped it away like a hockey puck. The story I’d cooked up for him had been perfect. All these years later, I’m still moved when I think about it. And wasn’t it always the surefire way to get close to somebody, confessing to something you know the other guy is guilty of?
But when you’ve got somebody like Rex reeling, you’ve got to close, and I hadn’t closed. He’d held, he’d covered up, he’d danced out of range like the pro he was. And if he’d sussed me out, if he sensed I knew his secret and was using it, he had to have total contempt for me, even if he hadn’t let on. I wasn’t a fool. I knew there could be hell to pay for this.
For the next few days I was in bad shape. The state I was in, I couldn’t have beaten a chicken at tic-tac-toe. I had that horrible four-in-the-morning-in-Atlantic-City feeling you get when you’ve put every cent you’ve got on the roulette table and lost and you’re going to have to borrow twenty bucks from the hat check girl to take the Chinese bus back to Manhattan.
I couldn’t believe that Rex had turned me down. Part of me still was hoping that he would change his mind, that I would get a phone call saying he’d had a chance to think things over and he’d realized that if he didn’t go in with me on this damn deal he’d never be able to live with himself. The call never came.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been feeling so sorry for myself. Wayne had just cashed my November check, which meant I had another eighteen grand tucked under my bed. I had enough stashed away now to give me a good start anywhere.
So why was I taking it all so personal? I was really starting to dislike Rex. There was something crass and cold about him. Mohle had been the first to spot it and Rex had tried to break him for it, just like he was trying to break me. This was just round two.
When I walked into the conference room on Wednesday, I found half the class seriously sunburned. Dominique, Nick, Bryn, and Chester were lined up in a row on the left side of the table, faces red as lobsters. All four of them wore dark glasses, as if they were backup singers for the Blues Brothers. Across the table, the pasty-faced Brett pretended to ignore them, making last-minute notes on the back of a manuscript.
The first story up for discussion was Mercedes’s. It was about an old Mexican woman living on the border who late one afternoon walks down to a family cemetery. When she falls, she can’t get up, and ends up spending the night on the ground. The moon rises. She hears owls calling in the cottonwoods, varmints rustling in the brush. She is visited by the ghosts of her husband, the daughter who was killed in an auto accident after her senior prom, her sister who was shot to death by a jealous lover.
It was depressing as hell, but at least it wasn’t boring, and it seemed to me that there should have been a lot to talk about, so I was surprised when the discussion fell flat. Mel, who had somehow turned himself into Mr. Goody-Goody Two-Shoes, was the only one who kept it from being a total disaster. He must have had three pages of notes, plus a lot of encouraging things to say. Brett, on the other hand, was too morose to do much more than point out a couple of grammatical slips.
But the real problem was that the four Blues Brothers obviously hadn’t read the story. Bryn and Dominique at least had the courtesy to try and fake it, parroting Mel’s comments, but every time I looked Chester’s way, I caught him nodding off. It made me pissed, but I held my tongue until the break, when I pulled him into my office and demanded to know what was going on.
He scratched at one of his crusty ears. “We drove to Las Vegas for the weekend.”
“Las Vegas? Nevada? Are you kidding me?” I was still so pissed off about Rex stiffing me, I was in no mood to cut anybody any slack. He hung his head like an eight-year-old. “How far is that?”
“Eleven hundred miles.”
“You mean each way.”
“Each way.”
“So you weren’t able to get to the stories.”
“We meant to, and we would have, but the car broke down in the desert on the way back.” All that ultraviolet damage seemed to have knocked off a few of the boy’s brain cells.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
It was clear enough how miserable he felt about letting me down, but what wasn’t clear was exactly what they’d been up to. Two boys, two girls—who was sleeping with who? That was the million-dollar question. I could hear the voices of the other students drifting past the door. “We better get in there,” I said.
The other manuscript we were scheduled to talk about was Brett’s, but Brett had a surprise in store for us. We settled down around the table and everyone was pulling out their copies of the stories when Brett raised his hand.
“Mr. Mohle?”
“Yes?”
“I hope this isn’t too irregular . . . but that story I handed out last week . . . I had a chance to look at it . . . and it’s a piece of crap, honestly . . . I’d really rather we didn’t discuss it.”
I leaned forward, resting my chin in the palm of my hand, trying to control my irritation. Brett was right about one thing. It had been a piece of crap, and I’d spent two hours reading it. “So what do you suggest we do?”
“I wrote another one. Over the weekend. And I’ve brought copies for everyone. I was thinking I could read it aloud and everyone could just follow along.” He took a quick glance at the clock. “We’ve got time, right?”
I scanned the faces around the room. What a bunch of louts. I remember Wayne telling me that the first rule of teaching is to
maintain control of one’s classroom, but what was I going to do? Half of them hadn’t read Brett’s other manuscript anyway. “That would be fine,” I said.
Whatever else you want to say about it, Brett’s story woke everybody up. It was about three young artists living in New York—Desiree, a tall, beautiful painter with wild hair and silver bracelets, her lover Bronson, a WASPy and athletic muralist (I hadn’t even known there was such a word as muralist, but you learn something every day) from a wealthy Connecticut family, and Nils, Bronson’s best friend—a brainy nutball, a bit of a fanook—who created wacko sculptures out of vacuum-cleaner hoses and bicycle frames, fingernail clippings and artificial limbs.
The three of them are together pretty much 24/7. Bronson and Desiree have these knock-down, drag-out fights. A lot of them are about her early success, which, according to Bronson, is due more to her being a hot number than to the quality of her work. Jealous as a tick, Bronson is convinced she’s been having an affair with a big-shot gallery owner, but he’s never been able to prove it.
They both tell their troubles to Nils, who has plenty of troubles of his own. On the way home after a night at a SoHo bar, Nils makes a drunken pass at Bronson. Bronson gets weirded out, says something nasty, and Nils slinks off like a whipped dog. When Bronson calls the next day, hoping to soothe any hard feelings, all he gets is a machine and Nils never calls him back.
That weekend, while Desiree is in Boston for the opening of a new show, Bronson digs through her things and finds a diary tucked away in the back of a drawer. Reading it, he discovers that Desiree’s been sleeping with Nils off and on for the past month.
On Sunday night, rather than wait for her at his apartment, Bronson takes the subway to Grand Central to meet her. I’m no literary guy, but the last paragraph was a doozy.
“They got off the train together, Nils swinging his backpack onto his shoulder, Desiree maneuvering her rolling suitcase around a pair of conductors. There was such a crush of people that they passed within four or five feet of Bronson without seeing him. She put a hand on Nils’s arm to steady herself as they got on the escalator, and as they ascended, Nils looked back and said something that made her laugh, the sound musical and faithless and free, echoing in the cavernous space.”
I was amazed Brett could even read it! His voice did waver a couple of times, but he made it all the way through, the red faces on the left side of the table growing redder by the minute. Dominique rested her hands on her books in front of her, chin up, Miss Stoneface, while Nick twitched and took guilty peeks at the others, like an accused man checking out the jury. Mel seemed mildly amused; but Mercedes looked pretty glum. She knew she’d been trumped. Let’s face it, ghosts in graveyards may have their charms, but they can’t hold a candle to a rich boy losing his girlfriend.
I suppose you had to admire Brett’s nerve, but, honestly, what had he been thinking? If he thought this was going to get him another date, I’m afraid he was sadly mistaken. It wasn’t as if he’d tried to disguise anything. Not only did the names of the characters start with the same letters as the names of the people they were based on, but the details were lifted directly from life—Dominique/Desiree’s habit of running a finger down a man’s sleeve when she was being ingratiating, the way she fiddled with her bracelets; Nick/Nils’s knock-kneed run, the way he splattered food on himself when he was trying to eat and talk about big ideas at the same time.
When Brett finished reading, you could have heard a pin drop. Bryn rubbed a knuckle across blistered lips. Chester pressed both hands to the sides of his Harpo Marx hairdo. For a moment I considered letting them all go early, but I’d pulled that one too many times already.
“Comments?” I asked. My question just hung there.
“It seems like a real departure from your other work,” Chester said.
“Good,” I said. “Anyone else?”
“I thought it was pretty sniggery,” Mercedes said.
“I did too,” LaTasha said. “I thought it was awfully self-pitying.”
“I thought it was a mess,” Bryn said.
“I didn’t,” Mel said. “I liked it. I thought it had a lot of edge. But I’ve got some notes.”
Good old Mel. He must have taken five minutes, going through what he thought worked and what he thought didn’t, pointing out where a scene might be expanded, a sentence tightened, a chunk of exposition tossed. Now that I’d called him a genius, he’d turned into my right-hand man.
Dominique finally took off her dark glasses and fixed Brett with a lidded stare. Nick, elbows on the table, jiggled his knee a mile a minute. Neither of them had said a word, and who could blame them? She’d been accused of being a slut and he’d been accused of being a pansy. Pale as a ghost, Brett tried manfully to write down everything Mel had to say.
“Other thoughts?” I said when Mel finished his spiel.
“And what do you think of it?” Dominique said. It was me she was talking to.
“What do I think of it?” I said.
“Yes.”
I took a quick glance at Brett. He was looking at me with the soft, pleading eyes of a lamb being led to slaughter. The boy was dying to be rescued, but as far as I was concerned, it was every man for himself.
“As a story? As a piece of writing?” I said.
“As anything.”
I scowled. These sunburned jerks needed aloe vera more than they needed my comments, but I wasn’t going to say that. I rolled a pen between my palms. I racked my brain, trying to remember if there had been any advice in The Wings of Prometheus about how to handle situations like this.
“I thought it was promising,” I said. “There were some vivid details. I particularly like the way you describe escalators in the story. My big question is, who are we supposed to like? Isn’t that always the question? Or maybe we’re not supposed to like anyone. Which would be fine too, but we would just need to know that. I think you could do more with the rich family in Connecticut. How rich are they? Where does the money come from? What part of Connecticut are you talking about? That stuff is always interesting. Now, the bit about finding the diary . . . how many times have we seen that? I hate to say it, Brett, but that’s kind of taking the easy way out.”
I took a quick survey of the table. Did they know that I was blowing smoke? I suspect they did, but I didn’t care. I was just trying to get us all out of there alive.
“I think it would be a big help if you went back to read some early de Maupassant.” I was sort of proud of that, the de Maupassant remark. Wayne had just been telling me about him, and I think I may have even pronounced it right. “And that scene in Grand Central . . . how late is it? Maybe our hero gets pickpocketed. Every other goddamned thing happens to him, why not? He’s emotionally upset, he’s probably not paying attention. I’m not trying to rewrite your story for you, but late at night at Grand Central, there are some real sleazeballs out there . . .”
Mel hung around after class to ask me if I’d had a chance to look at his journal. I told him to close the door. Bewildered, he did as I said.
“Well, well, well,” I said.
“Yeah?” he said.
I shoved him hard in the chest. He staggered back, looking alarmed. “You are really something.”
“So you read it?”
“Yes, I read it. I don’t know how to say this exactly, but every once in a very great while you read something that you feel could really change your life.” I wasn’t going to tell him that I’d been hoping it was going to change mine, until Rex shot that puppy down in about ten seconds.
“You liked it?”
“I was knocked out by it. Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s rough. But if you put a couple of years into polishing this thing, you could have yourself a gem. But you have to promise me something.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t want you to whisper a word about this to anyone. And I don’t want you showing it to anybody. This is just between you and me. All right?”
His eyes went wide. “Right.”
“This is the problem with young writers, I’ve seen it a million times, they end up talking their books to death. There’s no quicker way I know to lose the magic. Silence and cunning, my friend, silence and cunning.” A couple of acorns rattled down the roof. “Could I ask a question?” I said.
“Sure.”
“Those kids that you met last summer, under the bridge . . . You keep in touch with them at all?”
“No. I don’t know how I would.”
“They didn’t disgust you at all?”
“What do you mean?”
“It must have been a little foul.”
“You get used to it.”
“Mmm. And you probably never told them you were taking notes on them.”
“No.”
“Well, good. I guess it’s better not to let people know you’re a writer.”
Chapter Fifteen
Friday night I had an awful time sleeping. Maybe it was something I ate, but every time I managed to doze off for a few minutes, I found myself in a terrifying dream about my son. In it I was supposed to pick him up after school, but traffic was insane. When I finally got there, he was gone. I ran around the parking lot, asking people if they’d seen him, but they just stared at me as if I was an idiot. Everything was jumbled up, but in one of those bits I saw him in the back of a station wagon that was driving away. He had his face to the rear window and when he saw me he was crying and I was running and running and there was no way I would ever catch up.
As upsetting as the dream was, when I woke up Saturday morning, what I needed to do next was crystal clear. There was no more time for moping or feeling sorry for myself. So Rex had turned me down. Did that mean the game was over? No way.
What I needed to do was give it another shot. I needed a fresh approach. Maybe I could tell him I’d just had some wonderful news. I could tell him some old friend had called out of the blue to say they were donating three million to the cause, which meant that if I came up with just a couple of million more, a drop in the bucket for a high-roller like him, I was home free. With a little thought I was sure I could come up with an even better story than that. Hell, wasn’t I a professional at this?
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