Now, in a house whose silence he had grown accustomed to, DeMarco reread the paragraph in full. Then he laid the book against his chest as he leaned back in his recliner and stared at the ceiling and asked himself, And what do you fear, DeMarco? What is that which you must do?
He thought about it a very long time. Despite his efforts to do otherwise, he could come up with only one answer.
Seventy-Two
It was later than usual when Laraine finally pulled into her driveway. This time her car was followed by a black SUV. The man who climbed out of it appeared to be several years younger than her. He walked with a cockier step than most, swung a bottle of beer from his left hand, even paused outside his car to survey the neighborhood and take a long look at the pale gibbous moon. It seemed to DeMarco that the man actually wanted to be seen standing there on the edge of an older woman’s midnight lawn, that he conveyed none of the furtiveness of his paunchier predecessors, maybe even wanted Laraine to take note of his insouciance, consider herself that much more fortunate for his attention. Laraine was already inside her house, the front door standing open, before the man deigned to cross the yard.
This time, DeMarco did not wait for the usual signals that she and her new friend were on their way upstairs. He climbed out of his car and walked briskly to the front door and knocked. Soon she opened the door and stood there looking at him with the same practiced expression on her face, the same clouded eyes.
He told her, “You know the kind of man I am. When I make up my mind to do something, I do it.”
Her face remained a blank, a cold and beautiful stone.
“So I just want you to know. I’m done letting you do this to me. And I’m done watching you do it to yourself.”
For just a moment, her brow furrowed.
“I really don’t know if you think you’re punishing me or yourself or both of us. All I know is that I’m not going to participate in it anymore.”
She kept her mouth tight but he could hear her breathing now, the sibilance of controlled inhalations. He believed too that he could hear her heart beating, a soft thrumming in the night.
He touched her cheek. Its warmth startled him and drove a long splinter of heat through his chest. “Good-bye, sweetheart,” he told her. “I’m sorry for all the pain.”
He walked away then and struggled against the urge to look back. If he looked back and she was still standing there, he would return to her. But he did not look back after he had climbed into the car and he did not look back as he drove away.
A few minutes later, on the interstate and heading south, with no music playing and the only sounds the hum of metal speeding over concrete through the chill black air, he pulled to the side of the road and sat with his foot on the brake as he tried to catch his breath.
When his breath finally slowed, he reached for the pack of antiseptic baby wipes in the console, took one out, and cleaned his palms, then wiped each finger one by one. Then he crumpled up the little towel and tossed it to the floor. He stared into the darkness ahead.
Then, acting on impulse, he pulled his cell phone from his pocket. About that rain check… he typed, and hit Send, and sat waiting.
And just when he began to wish he could pull the text back, erase it, go home and be alone, and live alone with all his misery just as he deserved, his screen lit up with Jayme Matson’s text: Saturday night. Bring flowers. Wear a jacket and tie. You’re taking me to the most expensive restaurant in town. Try not to be an ass.
Twenty seconds later, he pulled back onto the highway and brought his vehicle up to speed. Only then did he give in to the need to take a long look in the rearview mirror. Behind him, the lights of Erie appeared to be underwater now, a twinkling city sinking into an indigo sea.
Reading Group Guide
1. The character of Thomas Huston, a writer, was named as an homage to Hemingway and his novel Islands in the Stream, whose main character is Thomas Hudson, a painter. Can you discern any other Hemingway influences in Two Days Gone?
2. The novel is divided into four sections, just as Thomas Huston’s novel-in-progress was intended to be. Why did Silvis structure Two Days Gone this way?
3. Are there any other ways in which Two Days Gone parallels Thomas Huston’s proposed novel D?
4. Many of the characters in Silvis’s novels are, as the Washington Times noted of his first mystery, “extraordinarily literate.” Is it necessary to be familiar with all the literary allusions in Two Days Gone to be engaged by the novel?
5. At what point did you become certain of Huston’s innocence or guilt?
6. Silvis has said that one of the themes of this novel is what happens to men when they lack, in Thomas Huston’s words, “the annealing effect of women.” Did the absence of a prominent female character detract from your enjoyment of this novel?
7. What other themes and motifs do you see at work in this novel?
8. Hemingway wrote that a story’s end must be inevitable but unpredictable. Does the ending of Two Days Gone achieve those qualities?
9. In a review of Silvis’s novel The Boy Who Shoots Crows, New York Times bestselling author John Lescroart wrote that “Randall Silvis gets to the hearts and souls of his characters like few other, if any, novelists.” Did the author succeed in getting to the hearts and souls of his major characters in Two Days Gone?
10. Randall Silvis tells his writing students that the two most important pages in a story are the first and the last. He says, “The first page brings the reader in, and the last page brings the reader back.” Does Two Days Gone succeed in doing that?
A Conversation with the Author
What are your influences as a writer?
There are many. More, probably, than I’m even aware of. I’ll start with my next-door neighbor when I was a boy, Sara McNaughton. I have no idea how old she was when I was little, but she looked ancient to me, a small, shriveled, hunched over, and hooked-nosed spinster—very Wicked Witch of the West–like, for those who chose to see her that way, as did most of the older boys in the village, especially when an errant softball flew into her yard, was grabbed by her, and was tossed under her porch. Summer or winter she wore long gingham dresses and a wide-brimmed sunbonnet. She lived in a tiny white cottage with an ivy-covered front porch, almost never had visitors, and seldom volunteered to talk to anybody. She had no television, maybe no radio, and, as far as I could tell, spent her days baking bread, making jams, gardening, and tossing errant balls under her porch.
For some reason I found myself knocking on her door nearly every day, especially before I was old enough for school. She would look out at me and scowl through her screen, and I would ask, “Got any jelly bread?” She always did. Thick, yeasty, crusty, homemade bread spread with homemade strawberry or plum preserves. And we would sit at her little kitchen table playing Old Maid until my mother started calling for me.
When I was seven or so, Sara gave me my first hardcover book. An illustrated copy of The Swiss Family Robinson. I can still see the bright greens and yellows of the cover art. I felt like a millionaire. And I was hooked. Sara and books and jelly bread. To a lonely little boy in a hardscrabble village, they were the closest thing to comfort and salvation I had back then.
Later there was Hemingway with his deceptive simplicity and masterful subtext. Faulkner with his lush prolixity and steamy, shadow-shrouded settings. Garcia Marquez with his ghosts and bedraggled angels and his startling, idiosyncratic way of seeing a world that seemed so like my own.
And I continue to be influenced and taught: by my sons’ openness and tolerance and big-hearted love; by the many brilliant women and men who write so beautifully and insightfully; by my eager and determined students; by my dreams, the music I love, the night sky at three a.m., a smile from a stranger. Everywhere I look there’s another inspiration.
If you hadn’t become a writer, what would you be doing now?
Before I decided to become a writer, around the age of twenty-one, what I really wanted was to be a songwriter. I wanted to be the next Paul Simon. When I wasn’t reading I was banging away on the family piano, writing song after song after song. I taught myself to play piano and guitar and to do musical notation, but I was too shy and insecure to ever share the songs with anyone.
During my first two years in college, where, for lack of any semblance of true ambition, I was studying to be an accountant, I spent all my spare time hanging out in the music rooms, sometimes tinkling away at a piano but mostly just sitting there with the door open so I could eavesdrop on all the real student musicians. I envied them and was intimidated by their talent and technical knowledge. I ached to be a music major. Music has the power, like no other force on earth, to fill us with emotion and to connect us with one another in some mysterious alchemical transcendence of even our basest human shortcomings.
Fortunately, in my junior year, two professors, during the same week, took me aside to comment positively on a couple of writing assignments. Both told me I had talent and asked if I had ever considered being a writer. I grabbed that suggestion like a drowning man grabbing a chunk of Styrofoam. And so began my self-education as a writer. And I learned, through Hemingway and others, that the written word can possess music too.
So, in answer to the question What would I be doing if I hadn’t become a writer? I honestly don’t know. I only know that everything I’ve done of any importance derives from two activities—trying to be the best father I can, and trying to be the best writer I can.
How would you define or characterize your writing?
I’ve written in several genres of fiction, and I also love creative nonfiction. But I suspect you’re asking a bigger question than that—one that asks me to account for what and how I write, especially in regards to fiction. In order to answer that, a couple points of reference are required. At one end of the contemporary fiction spectrum, let’s say we have commercial, mass market, plot-driven genre fiction. At the other end we have plotless literary fiction. I see my own work as being smack dab in the middle of that spectrum.
I’ll explain. I started out as a literary writer. My first book was awarded the Drue Heinz Literature Prize by Joyce Carol Oates. So what does it mean to be a literary writer? It means that theme and character development, the character’s inner journey, are the most important elements to the story. Prior to the arrival of minimalism, it also meant that distinctive language was important, as were setting and mood and tone. Minimalism, to my mind, came into vogue in the late seventies and sucked all the lifeblood out of American fiction by employing pedestrian prose, vague settings, and a universal theme that life is bleak and meaningless. Fortunately, true minimalism died an early death, and in general contemporary literary fiction has gravitated away from that stark end of the spectrum. But literary fiction has still not yet fully reembraced the importance of plot.
And that is the most apparent difference between a genre novel and a literary novel. In the genre novel, plot is king; the story is typically driven by the need to resolve an external problem, such as saving the world from an asteroid, banishing an evil wizard to another dimension, or identifying and capturing a serial killer. The protagonist is often one-dimensional and does not change from the beginning of the novel to the end. In a literary novel, there often is no external problem to resolve; the story is driven by the protagonist’s emotional or psychological need—for love, for acceptance, for understanding, and so forth.
I wrote my first mystery novel in the early nineties. My agent’s response was that the novel was too well written to market as a mystery, and the plot was too strong to market as a literary novel. I said, “It’s a literary mystery.” He said, “There’s no such thing.” I said, “That’s why I wrote one.”
I ended up marketing that novel on my own, and that’s the kind of crime novel I’ve been writing ever since: one that pays attention to theme, deep characterization and character growth, dialogue with subtext, imagistic description, some interesting twist on structure when possible, and prose that, when applicable, reaches for the musical and poetic. And a fully developed plot.
Earlier in my career I described myself as a literary writer who never abandoned plot, and I think that definition still holds. Even in my noncrime novels I aim for a beginning, a middle, and an end, though the plot in those stories focuses on the character’s inner journey and not on some external goal.
Readers who prefer commercial mass market mysteries, which emphasize plot over any other element, might find my descriptions of setting and my characters’ introspections and inner struggles distracting from the external goal. But for me, the resolution of the external problem is not of primary importance, but serves to reveal and test character and drive it toward a changed state of awareness. For me, character growth is the most important part of a novel. The addition of a compelling plot with an external goal helps to bring about that inner growth.
It’s probably fair to say that I’m a throwback to the generation of writers preceding my own generation. I continue to reread Hemingway (who was not a minimalist, by the way, no matter what the minimalists claim), Steinbeck, Eudora Welty, and other masters of the twentieth century. I also read a few of today’s younger literary writers, but generally only their short stories. Like most readers, I need something to happen in a novel, but I also need those events to have meaning and application to the soul of humanity.
Acknowledgments
All the solitary hours a writer pours into a novel would avail little if not for the solitary hours poured into it by many unseen others. Anyway I assume those others also do their work in solitude; maybe they work in pairs or crews or tag teams, but I’d rather imagine them slaving over my words in a poorly lit and otherwise unoccupied room, just as I do. Maybe they will have a little music for company, but nothing too upbeat, something along the lines of Mozart’s Requiem, for example, because as everybody who has ever worked on a book knows, this work can be as grueling in its way as crawling on your knees through ten acres of ground-hugging plants to pick potato beetles off one at a time and flick them into a galvanized bucket filled with soapy water. But it can also be as transcendent as the Requiem—or as picking potato beetles when you are in the right frame of mind for it.
Knowing other people are engaged in the same underappreciated labor and squeezing a perverse kind of joy out of it is what keeps me writing, especially if it’s my field of potatoes they are picking over. Sometimes I like to picture each of my collaborators working their way down a row, their backs aching, hands filthy with beetle juice, fingernails broken, eyes going cross-eyed in the faltering light. It’s inspirational.
Thirty years ago, I would have written (and did) a dull-as-dirt acknowledgment to thank each of my collaborators. It would have had all the excitement of a divorce decree. Back then I had no idea how difficult and precarious a job it is to turn out a novel every couple of years. It gets more difficult and precarious every year. So does living. To me, they’re pretty much the same thing.
So this time, I’m putting some honest-to-God gratitude into it. I want each of these thank-yous to be the equivalent of a bear hug and a big, sloppy kiss. I want to scoop each one of my collaborators up out of the dirt and clutch them to my bosom. (And yes, men do have bosoms. I Googled it just to be sure: the breast, conceived of as the center of feelings or emotions. If you can’t trust Google, who can you trust?)
And I am using the term collaborators because that’s exactly what these individuals do: to collude, join, assist, abet, usually willingly. I also enjoy the subversive connotations of the word collaborator. If you don’t think the making of a novel is a subversive act, you’ve never made one. The sole purpose of the work involved is to undermine society as we currently know it.
My most ardent big, sloppy kiss goes out to my first and probably most exhausted collaborator, my literary agent
, the wonderful Sandy Lu. This otherwise intelligent and perspicacious young woman is unfortunately saddled with a literary aesthetic nearly as ancient as my own, which is to say she does not love anemic prose any more than I do, despite a literary culture that cries out for it like an overweight infant bawling for another bowl of mashed peas. I cannot tell you how long and hard she searched for just the right editor for this novel—but not until she had run the manuscript under the microscope time after time, dye-staining every flawed cell and organelle. Without her collaboration, this novel would not be a novel; it would be a stack of slowly yellowing pages, if, indeed, it escaped the flames long enough to become one.
Also essential to the success of this collaboration was that just-right editor, my Goldilocks editor, the wonderful Anna Michels, another lover of the dark and brooding and irreverent and literary, of the academic and grisly and the grisliness of academe. Not only does she possess the consummate good taste to like this novel (insert smiley face emoticon), but also the consummate good sense to tell me all the ways the story could be improved. And then she championed the novel through a gauntlet of good reasons to simply let it fall from the vine and die, not least of which is that an editor’s own career, like an agent’s, lives or dies by the books she chooses to champion.
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