The Best of Youth

by Michael Dahlie

  “Okay,” Henry said. He wasn’t that hungry—he’d been starving at the airport and had bought a large but old-looking ham sandwich and eaten it in the car. Still, Henry was always happy to eat.

  Breakfast was good, but straightforward. Scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee. No bacon, which disappointed Henry somewhat. He’d imagined that Kipling might have some kind of standing order at a local farm that cured its own meats and that he might have some kind of British artisanal pork belly to start the day. But a newly arrived guest can hardly start demanding that he be fed artisanal bacon, or so Henry determined, and he contented himself with the eggs. They did not talk about the book.

  “We’ll talk about work on our walk around the grounds,” Kipling said before he asked how the flight and the airports had been.

  When breakfast was eaten and the tour commenced (beginning outside), the conversation about the book began. As they walked from the house toward a stone folly at the end of a long, almost perfectly flat lawn, Kipling began to praise Henry’s work, and to tell Henry how perfect he was for this project. “You know, it’s a hard thing, to find someone for a project like this. We’re very lucky. I’m very lucky. We wanted a real writer. An artist. Not just some hired person. And Merrill raves about you. I think Merrill was dead right when he said that you’ve got ample talent and maybe not enough behind you yet to turn us down.” Kipling flashed Henry a very warm and, Henry felt, sincere smile at this point. “Of course,” he continued, “you’ve seen the contract, so we’ll see how things go. I’ve worked on enough collaborative projects to know that they don’t always work out, even when you’ve got the very best people. But I feel very hopeful.”

  “I do too,” Henry said, a bit apprehensive now that he had been reminded that his work was to be periodically evaluated. He even wondered if he’d blow the whole thing. But then Kipling began to describe in detail how much he liked one of Henry’s stories, and the flattery dampened the anxiety.

  Aside from the praise, though, they talked more generally about storytelling and what Kipling was calling “the narrative arts.”

  “Writing and acting are a lot alike,” he said, “and that’s why I’m so interested in writing. It’s storytelling, like what I do, but from such a different perspective. Sometimes I think fiction writing is similar to an improvisational acting experiment, just inhabiting a character and going where it takes you.”

  “I’ve actually thought that as well,” Henry said, although he stammered as he got to the end of this statement because he’d never thought anything like this, although it did sound like a good comparison.

  “I’d write this myself,” Kipling went on, “but I’ve got so much going on right now. Of course, if this were real, not a book for kids, I’d never let anyone write it for me. I mean, I want this book to be great. Really. I don’t see why kids’ novels need to be any less artistic than anything else. It’s not the real thing, however, is it? And it’s just, well, I thought if I had someone to work with . . . I mean, you’re the writer. But I have a vision for all this. I’ll be working very closely with you.”

  Again, Henry slipped back into wondering if this was all a terrible idea, but he simply said, “Yes, Merrill said you had some kind of outline. I’d love to look it over.”

  Kipling shook his head and said, “No, no, I don’t have an outline. I don’t even know who the characters are, or what happens, or where it’s set, for that matter. But those things will come if we think about the thing that’s been on my mind for a while, something that’s been on my mind for most of my career.” He paused for just a moment, then continued, “You see, in this day and age, young people and old people spend so little time together. In our era. Now. In ancient China, it was perfectly normal for eight-year-olds to be cared for by eighty-year-olds, but these days we just pack old people up, and what I’d like to write is a book about a young person, a twelve-year-old, say, who’s friends with an old person.”

  Henry hesitated, not sure Kipling was done, but when nothing more came, he asked, “Who would the old person and the young person be?”

  “Well, see, that’s why you’re such a perfect partner in all this. You’ve written so beautifully about old people. We thought about trying to get a young adult writer, someone who has experience writing about young people, but I felt that getting a proper artist, someone who can take your perspective, can see things through the eyes of an older person, well, that seemed better. I want this to be the real thing.”

  Kipling said this last part with deep conviction and Henry nodded with what he hoped was conviction as well, but he was still fairly baffled by the limited nature of the proposal.

  “So there’s no plotline or anything laid out?” Henry asked again. “It’s no problem, it’s just that Merrill seemed to think there was some kind of story idea.”

  “Well, there is,” Kipling said, again with sincerity. (They were now walking along a small creek and Kipling was trying to keep track of where he was stepping while at the same time looking Henry in the eye.) “The story is the story of friendship—a friendship between an old man and a young man. That’s the heart of it all. It’s almost all anyone needs to know.”

  “Ah,” Henry said, after stumbling on a large stone. “I guess that’s something to think about,” he added, although it struck Henry that if this was what Kipling thought an idea looked like, it would all be hard going. While trying to avoid being too judgmental, it seemed to Henry that Kipling somehow imagined that a story about friendship represented some kind of artistic inspiration (and a well-researched one too, given his thoughts on ancient Chinese culture).

  At any rate, the conversation went on like this for the rest of the walk, although Henry also brought up several of Kipling’s movies to get him to talk about himself and what kinds of roles he liked most. And the conversation never flagged. At points Henry even found it interesting. (It lasted throughout the walk back to the house, through its multiple reception rooms and bedrooms—including what would be Henry’s—and along various hidden servants’ sections.) At last, though, Kipling suggested that they take a break from the conversation—the tour was now mostly done—so Henry could do some thinking. “And I’ve got some scripts I need to get to this afternoon. We’ll have drinks at five and an early dinner and we can continue talking then. How does that sound?”

  “Good, that sounds good,” Henry said.

  “And make yourself at home,” Kipling added. “You know where your room is. And I have someone in after one today—she’ll be cooking for us tonight—but if you get hungry, you can find your way to the kitchen and she’ll make you something, and she can get you anything else you might need. I’ll be in my study, the room I showed you with all the bookcases, if you need me.”

  Henry again thanked Kipling, and soon he was (a little confused) standing again near the front door, beneath the large curved staircase, wondering what he’d gotten himself into. It did occur to him, though, as he mounted the stairs toward his room and thought about the conversation he’d just had, that the lack of detail (the lack of any sort of story at all on Kipling’s part) wasn’t such a bad thing in the end. Henry had been dreading taking orders from someone else in terms of what to write. He’d worried that he might be handed a long and preposterous outline that he’d find impossible to stick to. At least with this situation he wouldn’t be burdened with a confusing and ill-conceived plot that he’d be forced to follow. The thing was that friendship between an old person and a young person wasn’t much of a start.

  However, Henry did spend the rest of the afternoon thinking about it all, and even came up with some interesting ideas, although many of them seemed a bit dark for a children’s book—assisted suicide, crippling dementia, obsession-induced murder, etc. The problem with these ideas (aside from simply being too gruesome to give to a twelve-year-old) was that they were so focused on the experiences of the elderly. It did strike Henry that it might be interesting to explore a twelve-year-old’s romantic obsession and
then the subsequent murder of his love interest, but for obvious reasons he had a hard time thinking that this would fly, especially if the book was mainly supposed to be about friendship.

  At any rate, Henry spent the rest of the day wandering the grounds and napping, and by cocktail hour he found himself in the largest of the reception rooms, standing in front of the fire and drinking a glass of whiskey poured over a single large ice cube, once again talking to Kipling.

  The matter of the book remained the topic. Henry shared some of his ideas, with the caveat that they were all a bit heavy for a book for children, and Kipling actually seemed surprisingly receptive. “I see what you mean about the ideas being heavy,” Kipling said. “But children, Henry, they have an enormous capacity for absorbing and understanding difficult themes, maybe better than any of us.” Kipling spoke this last sentence with a somewhat exaggerated spirit of drama and circumspection and Henry once again tried to make an assessment of what might be called his host’s turn of mind. Henry loved what he saw of Kipling in the movies, and so did a lot of people. He was definitely a success with the more highbrow critics. And certainly a man who could capture the spirit of a nineteenth century British con man and then, the very next year, have a significant role in a romantic comedy set in Brazil, well, he must have known what he was doing. But Henry still couldn’t quite come to any final conclusions about his employer’s literary insight, although this would change later that night.

  Henry usually dealt with sleep deprivation fairly well, but by eight o’clock, just after a dinner of lamb chops and roasted potatoes, he confessed that the jet lag was catching up with him and that he ought to get some sleep so their discussions the next day would be profitable. As he was standing up, though, Kipling said he had something else for Henry to look at. “I’m a little sheepish about this,” Kipling said. “But I’ve written a few things over the past couple years, and I think you’ll enjoy reading them. I think it’s important too, so you understand my sensibility.”

  Henry never had any idea what people meant by the word “sensibility,” but he was happy enough to take the stories. And soon he was in his bedroom with a sheaf of Kipling’s writings, wondering if he’d be able to get through it all before they reconvened the next morning. Still, the surroundings made him feel relaxed. The room reminded him of his parents’ bedroom in Massachusetts—the large bed and the attached boudoir and bathroom—and as he got in bed beneath what must have been $2,000 worth of Italian linens, he felt very comfortable and eager to start reading. He didn’t make it through the first paragraph of one of Kipling’s stories, though, before he realized once again how tired he was. Soon the lights were out and Henry was fast asleep.

  And the sleep was deep and very restful, and at four in the morning, when he awoke, he found that he felt very refreshed. It was early, of course, but Henry had the stories to read, and, after going to the kitchen to make himself a cup of instant coffee—there didn’t seem to be an accessible coffeemaker—he returned to his room, lay down on the boudoir’s purple velvet sofa, and began to work through the stories.

  It took about three hours to read Kipling’s four stories, although Henry’s assessment didn’t change much from the start, even if it was the kind of assessment he was never comfortable making and certainly wouldn’t share with anyone. The stories were all about gas station attendants and welders and assorted other “real people.” They weren’t entirely bad. There were some things in the stories Henry found to like. But what struck him (and maybe this was the thing that Henry had been trying to articulate to himself from the first of Kipling’s stories) was that they were marred by what Henry could only determine was a stunning lack of labor. It was a common problem, as far as Henry could tell, although he often felt so wretched about people judging his own work that he was very careful not to arrive at this conclusion (even to himself, in his bedroom, with his instant coffee) with too much conviction. The fact was, though, that the stories felt a bit as if they were written during some kind of overnight illegal stimulant bender when the writer believed that the deepest thoughts were the ones written fastest and without afterthought. Of course, Henry had to admit that some people did, indeed, write this way, and although it was not his kind of pleasure, other people often thought a great deal of this sort of thing. Henry had been given these stories in a straightforward exchange, though—Kipling had wanted him to understand his “sensibility”—so it was hard to think of a way to politely say something like, I hear that other people like this kind of thing a lot.

  At any rate, when Henry finally emerged from his bedroom to greet Kipling that morning—they had agreed to meet for another late breakfast—he felt a deep kind of dread because he wasn’t sure how he was going to discuss the stories he had just worked through. He considered telling Kipling that because of the jet lag and the time difference, he’d not had a chance to get to the stories, that he had slept for sixteen straight hours. But he wasn’t sure he could pull this off. Henry was simply not a good liar. As he walked down the curved staircase and toward the kitchen, he at last decided that he would use words like “interesting” and “captivating” and even “alarming,” all of which were true. And it really was a fact that he found a few things that did appeal to him, including a sort of dishwasher character who evoked a certain amount of empathy (despite his somewhat forced everyman’s love of Kerouac and “other writers like him”). But Henry found that any such discussion would, at the very least, be delayed because there was no sign of Kipling, and for the next two hours (Henry left his bedroom at eleven) there was no one anywhere in the house or on the so-called grounds. At last, the person who fed Kipling and took care of his house arrived and told Henry that his host had left for Paris early that morning—on a last-minute trip that couldn’t be avoided.

  “He emailed me from the airport,” she said. “He wanted me to tell you it was a pleasure to meet you and that he’s thrilled by the project and that he feels that you’re off to a wonderful start. You’re also welcome to stay for the rest of the weekend, although Mr. Kipling won’t be back for another week.”

  “Ah,” Henry said, not sure how to react to such news. “Well, let me think about what to do. But I don’t think I’ll be staying, although please thank him for the offer.”

  8

  HENRY SPENT THE next hour or so on the Internet figuring out how to get home, and after an uncomfortable night at a hotel next to Heathrow, he was soon on his way back to the U.S. Clearly it was an odd trip, and Henry wasn’t quite sure what to make of it all, but he did find himself upon his return feeling fairly tired and antisocial. Henry found himself, over the next few weeks, refusing several invitations to events and festivities, invitations from Abby, from Whitney, and from various online venues that seemed to invite everyone to everything. (He even got an invitation to a party from the tattooed girlfriend of Suckerhead’s fiction editor, although there were also three hundred other recipients.) But instead, Henry was in bed early every night, up early in the morning, and spending his free time reading an enormous amount. He also found himself eating light—not out of discipline but out of lack of dietary interest. Henry had always had a reasonably healthy diet, but he found that he was having lunches and dinners consisting only of leafy vegetables and, perhaps, an avocado or a slice of tofu to spice things up. He drank almost nothing, alcoholic that is, and he lost track of what was going on with the news—he seemed to be accumulating stacks of unread New York Times. The reasons for this were puzzling, and Henry was only intermittently aware of this change in mood, but there was one significant thing in his life that was at least in part the cause. Henry had become entirely absorbed in his work, or his job, as it might be more properly put, specifically with a story line he’d started to flesh out and then, because it seemed to be working so well, which he entirely devoted himself to. It was true that he owed an outline to Merrill and Kipling before he started writing, but seeing that Henry never worked from an outline, it seemed that the best way to pursue t
he story was just to write it rather than perform some kind of duty that wouldn’t lead to his best work. Anyway, he always worked swiftly, and he had plenty of time, so if Kipling hated the project, he could simply start over. And he really was in what might be called a trance over this book, and he seemed to do nothing besides write it and think about it.

  The one exception to all this, or the one moment when Henry paused to consider his work and explain it to someone, was at a lunch with Merrill, now three weeks after he arrived home from London. Merrill had scheduled the lunch to “keep up with progress,” and as they sat down at a fairly austere but expensive Japanese restaurant on Fifty-sixth, Merrill smiled and said, “I can’t wait to hear what you’ve come up with.”

  And Henry told him, as best he could, although he realized what he was saying seemed slightly disjointed and unformed as he pressed forward. And Merrill slowly began to look more and more quizzical until he finally said, now looking extremely confused, “So, this book, for Kipling, for children, it’s a children’s book about a catastrophic brain hemorrhage?”

  “Well, yes, a stroke,” Henry quickly replied. “By its proper definition. But from a different angle. And, actually, two strokes.”

  “And this was Kipling’s idea?”

  “No, it’s mine. Kipling really didn’t have an idea. He wanted a story about a young person and an old person, but nothing more specific than that. This is what I’ve come up with.”

  “And the kid, he’s the sick one.”

  “The boy, he’s twelve, is injured when he falls from his bike. He has internal bleeding that isn’t diagnosed. A clot breaks off and moves to his brain. And then he has a stroke.”

  “And his eighty-year-old grandfather, who’s also had a stroke, but a minor one, has to take care of him.”