The Best of Youth
Page 21
“Yeah,” Sasha said. “It’s really gross. But Henry, man, I really like you, so I’m willing to endure.” And with this, she held Henry even tighter, and Henry hugged her back with equal happiness, although now, at last, in the midst of what was, unequivocally, a very happy moment, he realized how truly exhausted he was, and how he had spent the past day and night doing a thing that would surely change his life.
23
AND AS FAR AS life-changing events go, Henry was not wrong to anticipate the magnitude of what came next. (Astonishingly, Kipling had found the article in the online version of Whitney’s paper a day before the print version was released—clearly he had some system of monitoring his Web presence.) It was now several days after Henry and Whitney had drafted the article, and Henry was at work at the warehouse when the action began.
Kipling, Merrill, and Kipling’s lawyers called his mobile phone every three minutes or so all through work, and for many hours after he’d gotten home. With some legal astuteness, however, Henry did not answer. The lawyers’ messages were as expected. They said things like, “You’re in violation of your contract and we’re now working to bring about restitution for our client.” Kipling’s messages were so hostile that Henry actually found some pleasure in them: “This book was my fucking idea! It was my fucking idea! Anyway, no one’s going to believe you, you little fucking cunt. Who are you? I mean, who the fuck are you? How about I come by and teach you another lesson with some more statuary from my fucking hotel?”
For his part, Henry also left a message with Lawrence saying that Lawrence’s legal services would probably be needed soon, although Henry didn’t go into too much detail. He’d already resigned himself to losing whatever official case was brought against him, so he was not really yet inclined to call in the lawyers, as they say.
The message from Merrill, though, which came late in the day, was a bit tougher to hear. It was delivered with compassion but it felt very serious. “I’m just not sure why you did this,” Merrill said on the phone. “We had an agreement, Henry, and I’ve got to say that you’re one of the most honest and aboveboard people I’ve ever met. I guess I’d like to know why you did this and, Henry, and I know you know this, this is going to end so badly for you.”
Henry did feel as though he owed Merrill an answer, and he arranged to meet him for a drink via messages to his secretary, although by the time they were sitting down in the front room of the Gramercy Tavern the die was cast and the news was spreading and any kind of mediation was now an impossibility. Still, Henry felt calm as they talked, because what was controversial about his decision? Kipling had beaten up one of Henry’s closest friends—a woman pregnant with Kipling’s child.
“What would you have done for Abby?” Henry asked after laying out the entire story for Merrill. (He’d asked for Merrill’s discretion, and Henry knew he’d get it because he was sure Merrill would not want to hurt Abby.)
And to Henry’s question, Merrill said, “I would have done the same. Or I hope I’d have had the courage that you did. But Henry, you’re really fucked with this. You’re really, really fucked. Really, really fucked. You’re totally right to have done what you’ve done, but you’re really, really fucked with this.”
Merrill was about to continue along these lines when Henry finally interrupted: “Why are you even friends with that guy?”
Here Merrill paused, and it struck Henry that he looked as though he were feeling something close to shame. Certainly he looked very uncertain about how to respond. Still, he managed to produce something of an answer: “Well, at this point, I’d say he and I have an association rather than a real friendship, but we were young together and he was a great friend to me in the past, and I don’t know if I know a more talented actor, although how that is, is lost to me now. We have a meaningful past together. How’s that for an answer? At this stage in everything, however, I don’t know if we really are friends anymore. Let’s face it, I think it’s evident the guy’s got a pretty serious drug problem. And obviously the things you’ve told me make it seem that the problems are even deeper than that.”
Merrill looked truly distressed as he finished this statement, and Henry felt bad as well. But it was the truth that Merrill and Kipling had no business being friends, no matter what kind of history they shared. Merrill was such a better man. And Henry felt confident about his own recent decisions. And he was sure (and happy) that Kipling was now probably in a state of desperation trying to figure out how to manage the problems that Henry had unleashed upon him.
24
IN THIS REGARD, shortly after lunch, Henry received a call from the New York Times—from someone named Lisa Bremmer—who said she wanted to talk to him about his role in the creation of The Best of Youth. Henry agreed, and when she asked if they could meet, he suggested she come to his apartment so they could look through the hard-copy pages (they’d been described in Whitney’s article) that he’d so carefully worked and reworked as he wrote the novel. At this point Lisa also made a specific request. “Can I ask you not to talk to anyone else?” she said. “I mean other media. It’s good for me, but it’s good for you too. Your story will have a bigger impact if you consolidate it with me at first, and once it’s out in the Times everyone will want to talk to you, so you can give as many interviews as you can handle.”
Henry thought this over for a moment, and then said that he could do this.
“How about five o’clock today?” Lisa said.
“Okay,” Henry replied. “Five o’clock is good.”
Lisa came over that evening as promised and Henry could hardly help but notice that she was extremely attractive, and (most bizarre) somehow fascinated with him. Of course, Lisa made no sexual advances—Henry was afraid of this, given that he was now involved, as they say. But as Lisa looked over Henry’s printed manuscripts and looked through his emails from Merrill and Kipling, she did seem to grow even more excited by her surroundings and, again, by Henry.
“You know,” Lisa said at last, standing up from Henry’s computer, “I read the book last night. I can’t say I know much about kids’ books, but I cried when I read it. A couple of times. It was very moving. I’m really impressed. And from my perspective, at this point, I’m believing all of your claims. So congratulations on such a great book.”
Here she paused.
“But here’s a question, Henry,” she said. “What’s he going to do to you now that you’ve let go with this information? You signed a confidentiality agreement—one that’s pretty hard-core, from what you say.”
“Kipling will sue me,” Henry replied.
“Okay,” Lisa said, “so why did you come clean? I’m sorry, but as you might have imagined, I did some research, and you’re pretty rich. This is really going to screw you. Pretty hard.”
Henry paused and then said, “Can I answer off the record?”
“No,” she said. “You can’t answer off the record. Sorry.”
Henry paused again. “Generally, then, I’d say I did it for the sake of fame and glory. Even if I do lose all my money.”
Lisa nodded, said, “All right,” and walked back across the room to the stack of manuscript pages. “Fifteen million bucks, you’re not getting that back. Not as a fiction writer. I know some big-time successes in your end of things—literary dudes, I mean—and they’re not getting 15 million dollars for their work, even across their whole careers.” She turned as she said this, hoping that Henry might have something to say, but Henry said nothing.
Lisa spent another hour looking over the manuscripts and rereading and copying emails, and then finally left saying that she’d probably be in touch soon with follow-up questions. And she was in touch again, although far sooner than Henry expected.
“Okay,” she said, right after Henry answered his phone, now just an hour after her departure. “Off the record, then.”
“What?” Henry said.
“Why did you fuck yourself like this?” Lisa said. “Off the record.”
“I won’t tell anyone. You seemed like you wanted to talk, back at your place, so why would I say off the record right away? But I want to know. So, off the record.”
“Look, this is pretty important,” Henry said. “Someone else is involved. And you can’t use the information to investigate on your own.”
“I’d get fired if I did that, if I screwed you over like that. And journalistic ethics shit, Henry, is really important to me. Almost the most important thing in my life. So all I can say is that I’d rather be sent to Guantánamo than report something you told me in confidence. And, from your end, what you need to think about with this is that it will help the story if I know what’s really going on. You’ve convinced me that you’re telling the truth, but it will help the story if you can tell me more.”
It took Henry a moment to think about this before he finally repeated, “So, off the record? Definitely?”
“Off the record,” Lisa replied. “No joke.”
Henry paused, then said, “Well, he got one of my closest friends, my fourth cousin, his girlfriend, pregnant. And when he found out—I think he was pretty high—he beat her up. Beat her up unlike anything I’ve ever seen. She didn’t want to go to the police because then her life really would be destroyed—gossip columnists and tabloid reporters—and so I ratted him out because I fucking hate him and I wanted to hurt him. And I suppose that’s it.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone. It hadn’t been a long and vivid description, but Henry was sure he’d conveyed everything an ordinary person would need to know, and at last Lisa spoke. “Okay, Henry,” she said. “No one will know about what you’ve just told me from my end, but your cousin, it’s Abby Cahill, I’m guessing. Obviously I did some research and know she’s his girlfriend—hard to miss it, given celebrity coverage these days. Anyway, I promise I’ll never tell what you’ve just told me.”
Then she added, after an even longer pause, “And fuck him. I’m going to fuck that guy.”
25
A BIT OF IRONY marked the day the article about Kipling’s fraud came out in the New York Times. The story was, surprisingly, on the cover of the Sunday Styles section (surely more damning for Kipling than if it had been on the paper’s front page), but in the Book Review, The Best of Youth had made it further up the children’s best-seller list. It had, in fact, climbed to number one. The sales numbers that put it there clearly came from the week before the story broke, so it wasn’t the scandal that led to this. It was Kipling’s fame and a quality product, apparently, although Henry couldn’t help but wonder how much longer that would last, given the breaking story. He hoped the book would drop from the list altogether, but the reading public, of course, was impossible to predict, and scandal clearly has value when pushing product.
And these brief reflections led to another set of thoughts. They made Henry wonder, as he looked over the best-seller list and then began reading the article, what was, in the end, the damage of all this for a guy like Kipling. The question made Henry feel a little sick, since the answer might be very little. So Kipling hired a ghostwriter. Who would care? The movie world hired writers of all sorts, and usually without giving them any credit at all for the work they did. And (as Kipling made clear in one of his almost twenty enraged and hostile phone messages to Henry) the book might not have gotten any attention at all “if it wasn’t for me, you little fucking, fucking cum-drinking pussy cunt bitch!” Henry was sure, though, that the quality of the book had something to do with its success. Had the book been badly written, Kipling never would have been on the ride he was now taking. But Kipling did have a point. Had it been a wonderful book by an irrelevant author, who knew where it would have gone?
The thing was that Kipling was furious—with an anger that Henry had never seen before in anyone—and that, at least, was one indication of the damage Henry had done to him. There might be any number of ways to rationalize the exposure in light of its long-term effects on Kipling’s career, but given the wild and uncontrollable nature of Kipling’s tirades, it was clear that his being outed upset him far more than even Henry had expected. Kipling had presented himself to the world as a great writer and Henry had taken that away, had recast him with devastating effect as a kind of cultural swindler.
Perhaps equally satisfying was that the article Lisa wrote was maybe one of the most aggressive Times pieces he’d ever read. There was nothing about Abby—Lisa had kept her promise—but the essay turned into something of a meditation on contemporary fraudulence (referencing everything from Enron to The Music Man) and how Kipling was the latest example of what Lisa was describing as a new and ghastly lineup of villains and liars. In reference to Kipling, Lisa’s case fit easily with her larger arguments, simply because Kipling had offered so many outrageous interviews about the “trials and triumphs” of being a “true writer” that his quotes spoke for themselves. And Lisa quoted extensively. And what the quotes all added up to was completely damning, Lisa’s point being that Kipling was not just leveraging his name to launch a project or make money, but, rather, had assumed an entirely false persona and then embarked (with great vanity) on a grand tour during which he, again and again, spoke at length of things he knew nothing about and had never really experienced. He’d even recently accepted (Lisa pointed out) an invitation to testify before the UN’s General Assembly on the importance of encouraging young people to write more, a testimony that was to follow a dinner he’d agreed to attend in New York to benefit and promote a national literacy campaign that the president was launching. Lisa used the invitations to point out that Kipling’s fabrications amounted to the worst kinds of lies, lies far beyond and very different from run-of-the-mill Hollywood magic, and she suggested that if these invitations in New York were honored by Kipling, she at least would be reporting on it and Kipling wasn’t going to show up for the events without serious consequences.
It was all quite astonishing to Henry, and he took so much pleasure in reading the article he almost felt guilty that someone else’s disgrace should bring him so much delight. But then he thought about Abby again and read the article one more time, just to encourage and prolong his pleasure.
And Henry was sure the story (and the gratification) would continue—there would be plenty of other people reporting on it all. Henry had done as he was asked, though, and hadn’t granted any other interviews yet. He’d certainly fended them off, following the initial publication in Whitney’s paper, and as Henry thought about the fact that he’d now need to start making the rounds with other news sources, he decided that he might start with the more colorful, celebrity-oriented magazines, although he’d also already been contacted by the Boston Globe and the L.A. Times and he planned to tell them quite a bit as well. Henry did intend to add one last poetic flourish to the story at this point, though, now that he had a little more control of it all and had learned something from his experiences with Lisa. He planned to explain his motives for his confession as completely accidental—the result of drunkenness and the inability to plug the leak once it got started. (It didn’t, after all, seem very prudent to go off the record with lots of other reporters, and certainly they’d want to know why he came forward in the first place.) In this vein, though, Henry would also say that the drunken mistake came in the midst of a discussion about Kipling and what a terrible person he was—in general, not in reference to Abby—and Henry concluded that it might be very illuminating if he described things like watching Kipling cut lines of coke in random bathrooms or listening to him talk about his passion for pierced bohemian women with blond hair.
And so, despite the fact that his entire fortune was now in jeopardy, Henry felt surprisingly happy. But the truth was that thoughts of Kipling’s suffering and Henry’s avenging Abby were not the only source of these feelings. Other than the scandal that Henry was causing, it was, that morning, a generally peaceful and happy Sunday,
and to his left, in his bed, was Sasha, fast asleep and entirely naked. Henry had planned an elaborate breakfast for her, including asparagus and eggs from the Williamsburg Greenmarket, and then, if he could find the courage, he might even suggest that they return to bed to continue once again with the various projects they’d embarked on the previous night. And this was what they did, although Henry also took some time later that day to call Abby to check up on her and see how she was doing. Of course (being a graduate of Oberlin), she’d read the Times that morning as well, and all she could say was, “I can’t fucking believe this.”
“Yeah, I really messed up,” Henry replied. “Definitely going to get sued. I got drunk. I never meant for it to get out.”
Abby paused, and, it seemed to Henry, halted for an uncharacteristic period of time. And he couldn’t help but think that she was linking everything together in a way he hoped she wouldn’t. At last, though, apparently with some mercy, she said, “You know what a fan of the book I am. I mean, Henry, it’s a really, really fucking great book. You should be so proud. This will lead to something good for you—I promise—but from the article, it looks like you’re going to get killed in court. Henry, though, holy fuck, your book, it was great! You’ve come a long way since you killed all my aunt’s goats! I’m sure you’re going to get something good out of this.”
“I hope something good happens,” Henry replied, feeling surprisingly happy, despite his bad feelings at the mention of the goats. “And killed is right,” he added. “I am about to get killed.”
Henry had, in fact, spoken to Lawrence just before talking to Abby. “The book is terrific!” Lawrence said. “I read it last night. You should be really happy with yourself! But from now on, you should think of me as the guy keeping you out of bankruptcy. It will be an honor to represent you. You’ll have your own book before long. And if I rescue some of your money, you can dedicate the book to me. But fuck, it’s going to be rough for you. Lot of fucking money gone, even if I do a good job. But here’s the deal: I promise Kipling will want this to be over as soon as possible, and we can use our ability to draw it out forever to get him to settle. The settlement will cost you, though. But you’re not going to walk away totally poor. And if that’s what Kipling wants—for you to lose everything—I’ve got a PR firm that I use and I can make sure the suit will be in the news every day for the rest of his life. And how will that look? The great phony suing the real artist for telling the truth? Still, it won’t be cheap. Kipling does hate you. And he’s lost a lot and if he’s feeling like he’s going to be fucked for a while, he’s going to want you to be fucked too. So, you might have to lose as much as nine or ten. Nine or ten million. But you’ll have some left, if that’s the case, and, as far as I can tell, you bohemian types in Williamsburg don’t need very much cash. I had a way-too-young girlfriend last year who lived there, and staying over was like sleeping in some kind of carny’s trailer.”