Famous Writers I Have Known

by James Magnuson

It wasn’t until I threw caution to the winds and told Günter Grass’s secretary that I was Steven Spielberg, and that I wanted to make a movie out of Cat and Mouse, that I finally got through to a live author.

  Günter couldn’t have been nicer. The first thing out of his mouth was how E.T. had always been one of his favorite films.

  “But Cat and Mouse, it would be a hard movie to make.” The man’s accent made him sound like a bouncer in a really tough bar. “Who were you thinking of casting?”

  “The actors I’ve been talking to are Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire.”

  “Ja?”

  “Leo loves the book. And after Titanic, it will be a great change of pace. How would it be if I had Leo call you?”

  “I would be honored.”

  A sound like the pattering of rain made me turn. My glamorous landlady, thumb over the end of her hose, sent a soft spray over the flowers in her backyard. I felt bad about sticking her with a couple thousand dollars in international calls, but what can you do?

  “Good,” I said. “He’s a thoughtful young man. Oh, and Günter, while we’re on the phone here, can I ask you one other thing?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you know a man named Dudley Stainforth?” The silence was so long I though the line had gone dead. “Günter, are you still there?”

  “Ja, ja.”

  “I was asking you about Dudley Stainforth. I believe he gave you the Vita Nuova Prize.”

  “Ja, he did.”

  “V.S.!” My landlady’s voice cut through the morning air like a scythe. I looked back over my shoulder. She waved gaily, one arm stretched high, like the queen on a homecoming float. “How are you this morning?” she shouted.

  I gave her the A-okay sign. “You met him, then? Our friend Stainforth?” Günter said.

  “Yes, just recently,” I said. “I found him quite a charming guy.”

  “That’s one word for it,” Günter said. “And how did you meet?”

  “He’s offered me the prize, actually,” I said.

  “Really?” he said. “I thought he only gave it to writers.”

  My landlady tossed her hose aside and walked toward the gate between the two yards as if intending to come over and have a neighborly chat. I put a hand up to stop her and it did stop her, but it didn’t put her in a good mood. Think about the way Girl Scouts look when you tell them you’re not going to buy their cookies.

  “I guess he’s making an exception!” Silence on the other end of the line.

  “You don’t approve?” I said.

  My landlady, downcast, ran her fingers along the top of the picket fence. I held up the phone and pointed to it to let her see that I was on a call. We gestured back and forth like a couple of baggage handlers on the runway until she finally got the picture and retreated with a mock-curtsy.

  “May I speak frankly?” Günter said.

  “Of course.”

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t go near it with a ten-foot pole.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Has he asked you for money yet?”

  “Well, in a way . . .”

  “And he still has that little vixen working for him?”

  “Francesca? Oh, absolutely. But it’s a real prize, isn’t it? The list of people he’s given it to is remarkable.”

  “That’s true. I give him credit. His taste is impeccable. And in the beginning, it was a very reputable operation. The problem was, he liked to throw the money around. There was a big financial scandal. Most of his major donors left him. Steven, maybe you don’t want to hear all this.”

  “No, please, go on.”

  “It was hard to say what happened to him exactly, but he got desperate and everything took a turn. He started putting on more and more events, trying to raise money. At first many of the writers tried to help him, but after a while it felt as if he was parading us around like animals in a petting zoo. You see what I’m saying, Steven?”

  “Of course.”

  “One summer he asked me to come back to present the prize to a great Russian writer I’ve admired all my life. He was very old and very ill. He had spent years in a prison camp, wrote his most important books there, without pen or paper, been poisoned by the KGB.

  “I’d never met him, and so when I got there I asked Stainforth to introduce me. He takes me to the table. There he sits, this great Russian writer, his beard down to his waist, looking like the unhappiest man I’d ever seen.

  “In the chair next to him was the mistress of some hedge fund manager from Miami. She had amazing breasts. I could barely take my eyes off them. Later I heard that the hedge fund manager had paid twenty thousand euros to sit next to the great man for dinner.”

  “It sounds like a circus,” I said.

  “It was a circus,” Günter said. “Maybe these things are always circuses, but most people have the sense to disguise them as something else. Stainforth was too blatant about it. The final straw was when he was caught forging some of the writers’ signatures on his fund-raising letters. I suppose it’s a shame. He really had something and in the end managed to turn it into the laughingstock of the literary world.”

  “So people know about this?”

  “The people in the know, know about it. The last thing I heard, he’s been trying to peddle the prize to all these rich American novelists . . . Stephen King . . . Dean Koontz . . . All those guys turned him down, but some old English mystery writer would have lost all her money if her brother hadn’t stepped in. So did he show you the book?”

  “What book is that?”

  “The one with all the pictures. With the beautiful gardens and the fountains and the busts of the great writers lined up on the wall . . .”

  “He did.”

  Günter roared again, even louder than before. “He’s very good, isn’t he? You have to hand it to him. But, Mr. Spielberg, if I were you, I’d stick to my Oscars. This man is a jackal.”

  After Günter hung up, I went to the kitchen and set the phone on the receiver. I headed to the front door, hoping to intercept my landlady and soothe any ruffled feathers, but as I checked for my keys, the phone rang. Sure that it was Günter calling me back with one more juicy morsel, I leapt across the living room and picked up on the fourth ring.

  It was LaTasha, wanting to know what stories we were supposed to be discussing in class. For a second I was struck dumb. Class? What class? Then I remembered it was Wednesday. I told her not to worry. There weren’t any stories, but I was cooking up something good, I said.

  I went to the office and spent an hour flipping through The Wings of Prometheus looking for exercises, but it was hopeless. I was agitated. I suppose I should have been happy. I now had proof that Stainforth was as big a snake as I’d suspected he was. The Vita Nuova deal was a total fraud. A prize that even Dean Koontz had said no to? That tells you something.

  My next step was going to be the hard one. I knew I was already way out on thin ice. You make a hundred international phone calls, you’re bound to stir things up. God knows all I’d set in motion. One thing I knew for sure. In a couple of days, Günter was going to be calling Spielberg’s office about his movie deal. Would they be able to trace it back to me? And how long would that take?

  I lay down on the floor of my office, buried my head in my arms, and took a twenty-minute nap. When I woke up, I was better.

  I got out a yellow pad and tried to come up with an exercise on my own. My first half dozen ideas were terrible. Describe the worst picnic you’ve ever been on. Describe the death of your favorite pet. Describe how the parents of your favorite cartoon character met. Describe a thawing refrigerator from the point of view of a frozen chicken. But then I hit on something that seemed a perfect fit, given the morning I’d had. Write a single page that begins with these four words. I wish I’d never.

  When I gave the students their exercise that afternoon, they settled down to work without complaint. I went to the window and stared out at the shadows of clouds
moving across the burnt-up grass.

  After the morning I’d had, I was still steaming. What had me most upset was the idea of Rex being played for a fool. I know, I’d been playing him for a fool for months, but that was different. Rex and I had a relationship.

  I hate it when people think they can take advantage of us writers. They think we’re naïve, that we have our heads in the clouds, that we’re so hungry for any crumb of praise they can treat us like children.

  I’d thought some terrible things about Rex, I’ll admit it, but look at all the good he’d done for people. He’d given these kids the biggest shot they’d ever have, and they knew it. He read their stuff, spent his afternoons talking to them about it, treated them like his own sons and daughters. He was an old man, flickering in and out, and now Stainforth came waltzing in and was going to turn him into the laughingstock of the world. What was I going to do about it? It wasn’t clear.

  I had the kids go until half past two and then I had them read what they’d come up with. The first three or four were terrific. The one thing Chester would never do again was go hang-gliding on acid. The one thing LaTasha would never do again was call her junior high school principal a honky. Mel would never again scrawl deceased across his alumni bulletin before mailing it back, and Brett would never again try to tickle the football coach’s bare foot under the door of the bathroom stall.

  I felt like a genius. We were cruising. Everyone was having a great time, laughing, bursting into a round of applause when each reader finished. So why did I call on Dominique? Didn’t I know it could only mean trouble? There were a couple others who still hadn’t read. But Dominique had a way of letting you know when she was ready and she was definitely letting me know, leaning forward on her elbows, staring at me from under those lowered Cleopatra eyebrows of hers.

  “Dominique?” I said. “You got something for us?”

  She picked up her pad, bracelets jangling, and took a long look at it. “This is a little different,” she said.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”

  “It’s a poem.”

  “All the better,” I said.

  She pushed back a mass of black curls. She didn’t look at anyone while she read.

  I wish I’d given X a kiss on the cheek

  Rather than that flicker of tongue

  While Y waited outside in the car.

  I wish I’d never gone out for margaritas with X

  After Y had cried for two hours about his father’s death.

  I wish I’d never tried to sleep with two men at the same time

  And I really wish they hadn’t been writers.

  I wish I’d kept my diary under lock and key

  I wish I hadn’t tried to lie my way out of it

  Or that I’d been better at it.

  But if wishes were horses

  Even beggars would ride.

  She folded the paper in two and stared at Brett, who stared back, nostrils twitching. Nick slumped in his chair as if he wanted to slither under the table. Chester had his pen clenched in his teeth like a pirate, and LaTasha, for no reason I could understand, seemed to be grinning.

  “Can I see it?” I said.

  She handed me the piece of paper and I reread it silently. All I could think was, these were the characters Stainforth and Francesca wanted to send off to Italy to see what they could learn from opera singers. These were not people you wanted to put in a bunch of bungalows together.

  This crap that Dominique had written, what was the point of it? Was this all there was in the world to write about? How many versions of this story was I going to have to read? Why couldn’t these kids be more like Schoeninger and write about people founding leper colonies and inventing barbed wire? Schoeninger’s characters may have talked to one another like they were giving commencement addresses, but at least they were doing something with their lives besides screwing each other’s girlfriends.

  When I finished reading, I looked up at Dominique. She stared back at me, almost as if she was daring me to say something. If she’d meant to shock her classmates, she’d succeeded. Me, I wasn’t that impressed. I’d just spent the morning on the phone with Günter Grass. Compared to Stainforth, Dominique looked like Little Bo Peep.

  People lie. People cheat. People read one another’s diaries. Welcome to the Fun House. I handed the paper back to her and gave her a pat on the shoulder.

  “You guys knock me out, you really do,” I said. “How about for next time you all bring in a page from your favorite author? And be prepared to talk about what’s so all-fired great about it.”

  After the students left, I went to my office, turned off the computer, and headed downstairs. The place was quiet as a tomb. It was after five and Mildred was gone for the day. The lights were out and on the bulletin board the flyers advertising summer residencies fluttered like moths under a slow-moving fan.

  I peered through the slats in the blinds. Chester, LaTasha, and Mercedes argued madly with one another, strolling down the sidewalk.

  I went to the kitchen and checked the refrigerator. After the day I’d had, I was starving. Things did not look promising. There were a couple of cartons of yogurt, some celery sticks, and, way in the back, a Ziploc bag.

  I retrieved the bag and was delighted to see that it contained three chicken wings. God knows whose they were. One of the students’? Probably not Mildred’s. Maybe they were left over from the reception after my reading, but that had been a while ago. I didn’t want to get ptomaine poisoning, but those wings did look good.

  I opened the bag, lifted one of the wings out with thumb and forefinger, bent over the sink, and took a bite. What a happy moment! There was more meat there than I’d expected, and the cayenne pepper gave it some fire.

  I nibbled and gnawed, swaying back and forth like a harmonica player. To do justice to a chicken wing, you need to be a real artist with your tongue, but fried skin and spice and a touch of grease, you can’t do a whole lot better. The only thing you needed to make it perfect was a little blue cheese dipping sauce.

  I tossed the first wing in the garbage and was going to town on number two when I heard a sound. It was almost like a moan, but I wasn’t sure what it was. Was it near? Had it come from outside? Was someone having sex up in the conference room? I couldn’t tell.

  I stood very still for half a minute, just listening, a mangled chicken wing in my right hand. Then I heard the sound again. This time it sounded more like a grunt, like someone being hit in the belly. It was not coming from outside or from upstairs. It was down here on the first floor with me.

  I dropped the second wing in the trash, sealed the Ziploc bag, and put it back in the refrigerator, stealthy as a spy.

  I eased the refrigerator door shut and made my way silently to the front hall. Except for a few rays of late afternoon sun glaring through the blinds, the place had the gloomy feel of an abandoned subway station.

  I was freaking out. Could it be the cleaning crew? The campus police? Maybe one of those fund-raiser guys who’d had an appointment and somehow gotten locked in.

  There was a pair of offices on the east side of the building. One door was shut and the other, Wayne’s, was open, but there was no light on inside. I took another three or four quiet steps and tilted my head so I could peer inside from a safe distance.

  Wayne stood at the window in a shiny blazer, his back to me, bouncing from foot to foot. His fists were clenched. Every few seconds he would punch at the air, short jabs, and make these little sounds.

  “Wayne?” I said.

  I pretty much scared the wits out of him. He spun around so fast he nearly fell. “V.S.?”

  He was wearing an artistic tie. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him so dressed up, but he looked like a kid, a really embarrassed kid.

  “You okay?” I said.

  “I’m fine. Just fine. Please, come in. Let me turn on a light.”

  He snapped on the lamp next to his desk. I came in and warily took a sea
t on his couch. His face was pale and splotchy as an undercooked salmon.

  “So what’s going on?” I said.

  “A lot, I guess,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck.

  “Okay.”

  “I didn’t think anyone else was here,” he said.

  “I didn’t either,” I said. I licked my peppery lips.

  “But I’m glad you’re here. I guess it’s only right to tell you first.”

  “Tell you what?”

  He leaned against his desk. “I’m not quite sure how to say this . . . I don’t know if you’re aware of it or not . . . there’s no reason that you should be . . . but your presence here has probably had a bigger effect on me than on anyone else.”

  “Now, Wayne, you don’t have to flatter me,” I said.

  “I’m not flattering you. You know that poem by Rilke?”

  “Which one?”

  “The one where he’s looking at the statue of Apollo? And the trick of it is that the headless torso is somehow scrutinizing him . . . And the last line is, ‘You must change your life.’ ” I stared at him, speechless. That didn’t sound like much of a poem to me. “I didn’t become a writer so I could end up directing a writing program. I did it because I thought that one day I would create something great, something that would endure.” Brooding, he fingered the brass buttons on his sleeve. “But I had a family, kids to raise. I always thought this was going to be temporary, this teaching thing. I figured that sooner or later I would write a novel that would knock everyone’s socks off and I’d be able to go back to writing full-time, but that never happened.” He loosened his tie, grimacing. “So I suppose you could say that in the past few years I’ve settled in. I’ve resigned myself to being a good citizen, a good teacher, a passable father . . . writing when I can catch an hour here and there. But then you showed up.” Covering my mouth with my hand, I worked a bit of chicken loose from between my teeth with my tongue. “It’s funny, when you first got here, I was suspicious.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. You didn’t seem that interested in talking about books. You seemed a little too bewildered. I could tell that your head wasn’t in it. You were perfectly polite, but it was as if all you really wanted to do was hide. But then I figured it out. Of course you were bewildered. Of course you wanted to hide. You were a real writer and what we were doing had nothing to do with real writing, with all our exercises and workshops . . . It was as if you were from some other planet. You made me realize what a fraud I was . . .”