Private Novelist

by Nell Zink

  Taylor, who like all sensitive guys was made terribly uncomfortable by pathos, put his hand in his pocket and fiddled with his organizer.

  “How would I look with lighter hair?” she asked suddenly. “I mean, like ash blond?” Raising her eyes from the milk, she had noticed a salon on the other side of the street.

  He was taken by surprise. “Terrific,” he said. “I mean it.” He was relieved to be able to give her something she wanted, even if it was a trivial compliment about a hair color she didn’t have. When he got into his cab, they both were smiling. He really felt much better, and took a card from his inside pocket. “Listen, if you do your hair, call me, I’d like to see it. I’ll buy you lunch.”

  CHAPTER 14

  SHATS APPEARED SHAKEN BY RECENT events. He wrote:

  While reading chapter ten, specifically the parts describing our visit and aftermath, I decided it would be safer to regard everything in Sailing Toward the Sunset by Nell Zink as pure fiction, a novel with stories about fictional people, who may or may not resemble real people I know. However, your assertion in chapter eleven, “I assume the reader has no difficulty detecting shifts from fiction to nonfiction, but in case there is some confusion, an explanatory note: everything I write about Avner Shats and Sailing Toward the Sunset is 100 percent true,” undermined my comfortable position. I will maintain this pretense, however, for the time being at least.

  He then refers to a list of literary figures provided in the original Sailing Toward the Sunset. Half are fictional, and one is the poet Zohar Eitan. But, he adds, Zohar might as well be fictional, since no one has heard of him. With this insight, I think Shats hits the nail on the head.

  In a sense, I am a fictional literary figure already—the novelist Nell Zink. This novelist will come into real existence for most people the day Sailing Toward the Sunset appears in a shop with cardboard around it, and will cease to exist the day it is remaindered.

  The fictional Avner Shats is not a character in either version of Sailing Toward the Sunset. A former scuba commando, Shats published his first story, “Gill-Slit Neoteny: Challenge for Genetic Engineers or Invitation to Hubris?” in the Congressional Register, July 14, 1981. Following a prison term for piracy, he spent six years in Liberia assisting General Butt Naked (now the evangelist Milton Blahyi) in his effort to satisfy Satan’s appetite for human blood. After Naked’s conversion to Christianity, Shats returned to Israel, attaining a master’s degree in literature from the Hebrew University in 1996. He now lives with his wife, Ronit, and eleven children on Moshav Modi’in. He has published four novels, Race for the Bottom, The Manganese-Nodule Murders, Belly-Up!, and The Shark Inside Me, and the 1997 collection Tentacles, whose title story won the PT-109 Award of the Naval Institute for best nautical adventure under one hundred tons.

  Furthermore, to my dismay, the lucid, readable Hebrew I mined so proudly from the interior of Sailing Toward the Sunset was not in fact the work of Shats, but of David Pupco, his collaborator in drafting a political thriller.

  Bemused by my mistake, Shats writes, [Taylor’s] wife left him . . . for consuming South African pineapples, thus breaching political correctness codes (it was in the eighties). That was my addition. She also refused to blow him (Pupco’s). He really is sensitive, I guess. I think in the original plot he was killed, but I didn’t include it: I just used him for the obligatory porno part every thriller must have.

  The next day at noon Mary, with noticeably lighter hair, in a ponytail to keep it from being too distracting, sat opposite Taylor in a dark niche in Little Italy. She looked dandy, and they were both glad that Taylor had been right.

  “So you think you look too good for him now?” Taylor asked, twirling a carnation from the vase on the table and leaning on his elbow.

  “He’s had better-looking girls than me before. You should see this girl who’s in love with him now, Osnat—she’s like Cindy Crawford.”

  “What’s his secret? You said he’s nothing special—I want to know how he attracts these girls.”

  “His job, I think. Or the self-confidence it gives him. Also, he doesn’t have regular hours, or any hours at all really, and girls like that. Actually, except for a couple minutes last week, I don’t think he’s worked since I met him.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s a hit man. Why do you look angry? Isn’t that a funny job for a nice guy like Yigal?”

  Taylor leaned across the table and took her hands in his. He had drunk two glasses of Chianti. “Mary, please don’t go back to him. I mean, don’t fly to Israel tomorrow. I think maybe this is the luckiest thing that’s happened to you since you met him. I don’t think you, and your baby, should be following this criminal who’s abandoned you. I think you’re terrific. Way too good for him.”

  “You think so?” Mary asked.

  “You say he kills people for a living.”

  “Well, he tries to avoid it. Nobody really knows who he’s supposed to kill anyway, or if the guy even exists. It’s a weird political thing. Maybe he never killed anybody in his life.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “About a month.”

  Taylor appeared to be doing math in his head. “And you’re sure this is his baby? Is there someone else? You can tell me.”

  “There’s nobody else. I love Yigal.”

  “Why don’t you stay in New York, just for a while, and keep checking for messages at the hotel, and let me help you?” He took her hand again.

  “Because Tel Aviv is so nice and warm. Hotel rooms have those little forced-air heaters that don’t really work unless you turn them up so loud you can’t think, and the bathtubs are gross.”

  Taylor turned his head away and looked at a picture of gondolas, then turned back and said, “You could stay with me for a little while. You can sleep in my office and turn up the heat as high as you want. I know this sounds dumb, but there’s something so unique, so special and sort of childlike about you, and I hate to think of you running back to someone, just because you think you have nowhere to—”

  “I know, I know,” Mary said. “Don’t get upset.”

  While Taylor was amazing himself by inviting a pregnant stranger, whose husband was a professional killer, to stay in his apartment—it made him feel almost as glamorous, he thought, as professional killers must feel—Yigal was sitting in a rented car in a state park in northern New Jersey taking hits off a bottle of Bacardi 151, and I was on my way to the port to watch the sunset. There was a lot of commotion down by the water, and I couldn’t get close enough to see anything. I was pushing forward through the crowd when everyone suddenly turned and began running toward the road, crushing me against a wall so that my head got slammed twice and I scraped up my shoulder. I was bleeding from three places by the time the stampede thinned out enough to let me near the seawall. When I got there, whatever had happened was over.

  I asked a religious guy what it was.

  “Nobody knows,” he said. “All I saw was something going up, like a rocket. It was black and white.”

  “Damn it,” I said, but when I got home, nothing was out of place. I turned on the radio—nothing. I tried a religious station, and again there was nothing, no news. Then I went up to the roof to take down my laundry, and there I found the Trident warhead. It had bounced off the mattress Yigal and Zohar dragged up there in April, and landed in a barrel of rainwater.

  I e-mailed Yigal right away.

  Yigal—

  Another attack, lucky this time, it’s in a barrel on the roof. Please tell me what to do with it. Maybe you can keep it from happening again or you’re going to be looking at a lawsuit from me and the condo association. Take good care of Mary.

  Readers of political thrillers enjoy technical details, so I should point out that the submarine, Mr. Pickwick, was a unique futuristic prototype with no moving parts. It was made almost entirely of a gelatinous substance from which the missiles slipped like spoons from a bowl of cold consommé. The exterior
was sheathed in a continuous ribbon of osmium sealed with caoutchouc and wooden dowels. Like the golem of Prague, it took its motive power from a name. However, in this case the name was not that of God, but of Moshe Dayan.

  Yigal woke up before it was light and slipped out of the car to retch. Frightened, a doe and two bunnies crept back into the underbrush. They had wanted to give Yigal a message of universal love and hope, but in the end they were too timid.

  He drove slowly out of the park to a Wawa store and drank a great big coffee. During the night, he had decided to volunteer for more hazardous duty, something with plague germs or Kurdish guerrillas, but after the coffee he sat in the car and looked at the rental company’s map of New Jersey. Three hours later he was in Atlantic City, up $15 on blackjack. By nightfall he had won $80 and was buying drinks for a secretary from Red Bank. He spiked them with B vitamins, but she didn’t notice. They talked about the weather and gambling until she asked if he was Italian.

  “No, I’m Israeli.”

  “I’m Jewish too! Come over and meet my friends.”

  “I don’t think being Jewish is the most important thing to have in common.” Yigal finished his drink and signaled the bartender for another. “I think it’s more important to be human.”

  “We’re all human under the skin. What really matters is communication, and it’s so easy to communicate with someone who shares your way of life and your traditions.”

  Yigal realized he was sliding off the barstool, so he stood on the floor.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Maybe I should go to bed,” Yigal said. “I feel dizzy.”

  “How many drinks have you had?”

  “None at all, compared to yesterday. It’s my wife. She—forget it.”

  The secretary backed away one step and said, “Where is she now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You poor man!” She threw her arms around him. “You need some cheering up!”

  “No,” Yigal said firmly. “I need to be depressed. I need to find a deep hole, fill it with mud, and climb in headfirst.”

  “What a wet blanket.”

  “I need to lie under a fallen redwood in the Olympic rain forest, while banana slugs crawl all over me.” Yigal was struggling with his wallet, trying to pay and leave.

  She must have misunderstood, because she slapped him and said, “You son of a bitch.” After a brief walk under escort, he found himself in front of the casino with the secretary and all her friends. His pistol had fallen out of his jacket and was lying there on the sidewalk. He picked it up and ran toward the parking garage.

  Meanwhile, as Mary walked from the bathroom to Taylor’s office past his open bedroom door, she glanced inside to say good night, and saw that he was lying on top of the bedspread, wearing striped pajamas. His fly snaps were open and he was gently petting himself. “Sorry,” she said, closing the door.

  “No, it’s okay,” Taylor called out. “Come in, I want to talk to you.”

  “What about?” She sat down on the bed.

  “Oh, Mary,” he said. “If you would just touch it.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Or put your mouth on it.” He reached out for the back of her neck, trying to incline her head in a certain general direction.

  She stood up quickly. “What gave you that idea? If you try anything like that again, I’ll leave and I won’t come back. I ought to kick your ass.”

  He snapped up his pajamas and sat upright. “I’m sorry. I thought it would be fun. You know, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I apologize.”

  “It was incredibly rude.”

  “I said I’m sorry.”

  She left him alone and closed the door. He lay there masturbating for a while, thinking about his wife. For eight years he had loved her, supported her, helped her get work (she illustrated gardening books and seed catalogs) and worked very hard to be as romantic as possible and to please her in bed. In his whole life, he had loved only her. She had left him very suddenly. She said it had something to do with South African produce, but he knew it was the fatigue, escalated by repetition into a sort of agony, of the scene with which he unfailingly managed to destroy their most intimate times together and both their egos: When they felt closest, when he really felt that they belonged to each other completely, he would always feel compelled to take advantage of the situation by asking her, very hesitantly, if by any chance she hadn’t overcome her revulsion, which was so instantaneous and physical that Taylor couldn’t help perceiving it as a sort of mortal insult to him, though he knew it wasn’t intended as one, to oral sex. Every time he posed the question, it drove a wedge between them, which seemed all the greater because of the perfect closeness that had to arise before he would even dare to ask it. In the end she left him and moved in with her sister, saying she couldn’t stand his hypocrisy.

  Mary lay in the dark and thought about her husband. She wondered where he was.

  Yigal happened to be lying on the floor of the rental car while police shone flashlights all around him. He was lucky to be drunk. It’s more comfortable to be drunk if you have to lie across the hump in the floor of a Lumina and crush your ear against a bristly plastic carpet while noticing bits of dry mud in your mouth, especially when Atlantic City police with lead-weighted flashlights two feet long are after the illegal weapon that is still in your pocket. Yigal felt he had gotten his wish. At least, he hoped there was nowhere to go but up.

  When he heard other cars starting and moving around, he slid to the front seat and looked in the mirror. There was some orange juice left in a bottle under the passenger seat, so he poured it over his hair and slicked it flat. He took off his jacket and his glasses. He pried open the inside cover of the car door, dropped in the gun, and snapped the cover shut. Then he drove slowly down the ramp and out of the garage, past the secretary from Red Bank, who was sitting in the front seat of a police car, talking to the policeman. He put on his glasses and was happy to be seeing details again, but instead of relief he felt only bitter scorn for the whole world. Idiots, he thought.

  He stopped at a wayside in the Pine Barrens and pulled the car several hundred feet into the woods. The crackly pinecones and the hard, sandy forest floor, the sort you can sweep clean with your hand until it feels smooth as fur, reminded him of the artificial forests in the Negev, except that in New Jersey the pines had grown all by themselves. He had read that by 1820, there wasn’t a tree standing in America between the Appalachians and the sea. The soil was exhausted and everyone had to move west. If there were any justice, they would have returned to find a rocky desert ready to wear them out with backbreaking work, but instead they were awarded vast forests of loblolly pines. He was very quiet, imagining he could hear jackals. He lay down in the car, and while he slept he had a vivid dream.

  He dreamed that Mary was begging outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal. She looked at least six months pregnant and she pleaded with Yigal to return to her. As she spoke she curled up smaller and smaller, until she looked like an old woman or a crippled child. Yigal woke up grimacing and remarked cynically to himself that the dream was an obvious wish fulfillment and that he wished to punish her, but in the dream he had picked her up on his outstretched hands like a pillow, and taken her to a small, round swimming pool. There, in the water, she relaxed and grew back to normal size. The swimming pool looked familiar, and he realized it was the one in the middle of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, ringed with tall grass and filled with naked women.

  Mary was in the cafeteria of the Whitney Museum, telling Taylor her theory about Runts of 61 Cygni C.

  “I see what you mean,” Taylor said. “I guess I always secretly wanted someone to be my runt.”

  “You mean your wife. You wanted your wife to be your runt.”

  Taylor looked ashamed, which was not surprising, considering the effort Mary was putting into making him feel bad. Had he been less sensitive, he would have been delighted that she was talking about sex at all,
but he was sensitive enough to know by now that he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. Two well-dressed, good-looking, bored, lonely, young, idle, single curators were sitting at the next table, saying things like “Neither of them has a wedding ring,” and theorizing about Taylor’s name; background; income; abdominal, lateral, and gluteal muscles; “package”; and apartment, so it may have been unlucky for him that the first thing they overheard clearly was Mary’s saying, “You wanted your wife to be your runt.” Then they listened extra hard and heard Taylor say:

  “I still love her. I’d do anything to get her back.” I think he was just trying out new ways to look better than Yigal, but the curators stubbed out their cigarettes and went back upstairs.

  Mary said, “Then call her. You were unfaithful to her. It was indirect, because it was the make-believe runts, but you made her feel it, by bringing it up all the time—”

  “You’re right. I was horrible.” He covered his face with his hands.

  “Maybe she forgives you, now that she’s seen what life is like without you.”

  “You’re so sweet,” Taylor said. “You seemed so vulnerable at first, but you’re so strong.”

  This went on at length, but Taylor didn’t seem to be making any progress, and after lunch they split up. Mary went back to his place to get warm. When he paused to remove a personal-ads tabloid from a box on the corner of Madison and Eightieth, thinking that he might want to experience oral sex at least once before he died, a taxi changing lanes while running a yellow light was nudged by a bus running the same yellow light while dodging a bicycle, and jumped the curb. He died instantly. Mary imagined that he had spent the night with his wife, and that she was responsible for their happiness, which was no less realistic than his imagining that she secretly longed to give him head. In the morning, she left him a congratulatory note and checked into a better hotel.

  CHAPTER 15

  I REALIZE I HAVE BEEN NEGLECTING the great works of Western literature, so in the spirit of Yigal’s remark, “Idiots,” I will discourse on the subject of Remembrance of Things Past. Two facts about the work are well known: (1) the mature Marcel is thrown back into the past by the taste of muffins, and (2) the book contains secret references to Proust’s homosexuality. For example, Albertine is really Albert.