by Adam Langer
Occasionally, I groused to Sabine about our life in Bloomington, and how much it paled in comparison to the life we had led in Manhattan. To keep ourselves amused, we kept a private blog under the pen name Buck Floomington. We wrote awful, nasty stuff about Sabine’s colleagues that we never shared with anyone: who was sleeping with whom, who liked to go shooting at the target range behind Brad’s Guns outside Indianapolis, who had threatened his family with a chainsaw, who hired only Asian women to serve as his work studies, who kept a shrine to basketball coach Bobby Knight in his rec room, who had gotten banned from the strip mall massage studio for demanding a hand job … It was cathartic. Sometimes, in the desolate, insular heartland, you do whatever you can to keep your mind alive.
Still, what from the outside may have looked like complacency actually felt a lot like security. Bloomington was a quiet college town that may have offered little, but it also expected little in return. And though most of the faculty spouses I knew had either settled or given up, there was a certain comfort in surrender. Sure, I could have finished a second book or freelanced this or that article. I could have competed for a lecturing gig at Butler University or Ivy Tech or for an editorial job at some magazine, such as Indianapolis Monthly or Bloom. But if I wanted to spend my days literally bleaching the shit out of diapers and mastering the art of vegetarian cooking with the aid of cookbooks by the only authors I read anymore, Mark Bittman and Deborah Madison, then that was fine too.
The Bloomington Borders, located next to a FedEx Kinko’s and across from a Panera Bread in the College Mall, was going out of business, and all kids’ books were 50 percent off. Beatrice and I were stocking up on Mo Willems and Dr. Seuss books when I saw the color Xerox of Conner, smack dab in the center aisle. The shot looked just like the ones we had used in Lit—Conner with a full head of black curls and five o’clock shadow, his serious, pale-blue eyes staring straight at you as if he had something important to say and was hoping you’d give him the time to listen. He was wearing a sport coat, a pressed light-blue shirt, and boots. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his jeans, one thumb tucked in a belt loop. On one of his wrists was an expensive-looking watch. He looked tough and earnest, the publishing world’s answer to Josh Brolin—what John Irving should have looked like but didn’t. I was studying Conner’s photo when I noticed Beatrice tugging on my sleeve.
“Who’s that person you keep staring at?” she asked.
“Guy I used to know,” I said. “His name is Conner.”
“Is he your friend?”
I said I wasn’t sure, but I would probably go to his reading, and maybe I would ask him to come by our house for dinner or dessert. “Maybe you’ll get to meet him too,” I said. “Wouldn’t you like that?”
“No.” Beatrice began to toddle off in the direction of the children’s section. She seemed a bit scared of the guy in the picture, or perhaps scared of what she thought my friendship with him might bring. But I couldn’t begin to imagine what could possibly frighten her about a good-looking, all-American guy like Conner, or about the fact that I still wanted to be his friend.
2
As it turned out, Conner didn’t come to our house for dinner or dessert; it was a school night and the kids needed to be in bed by nine. But I did go to the reading. I had figured I would sit in the back and mill about until he was done greeting his fans. But the turnout was poor. Really poor. Authors tend to exaggerate the number of people who come to readings, or at least I do. Usually, if you divide by three, you get the true figure. When you say only seven or eight people showed up, everyone gets depressed, uncomfortable, and judgmental, particularly in a college town where no one regards writing books as an actual career.
“Right, but what do you do for money?” my wife’s colleagues continually asked me when I trailed along to departmental parties or when I ran into them at Lowes or Home Depot or Best Buy. In their line of work, or whatever they did that passed for work, writing was just one of the many things you did to keep your job—you didn’t expect anybody to read what you wrote, let alone pay you for it. After all, you’d gotten your job by convincing your employers you’d read hundreds of books they probably hadn’t read themselves. When you told these folks honestly that you had a lousy turnout, they tended to guess twenty-five or thirty people came. But when I showed up at the Bloomington Borders for the Conner Joyce reading, only eight people were there, including the events coordinator.
On the metal folding chairs positioned in rows in front of a podium and a signing table were a pair of trampy white women in their late thirties or early forties; they were wearing tight, sequined blue jeans and were holding copies of People magazine’s bachelors issue, circa 2005, for Conner to sign. There was the de rigueur weedy, sunlight-averse guy with copies of each of Conner’s books stacked in a wheeled pushcart, undoubtedly hoping to move autographed first editions on eBay (“Just your signature. No inscription,” he said). There was a doughy lady in her early fifties with a library copy of Ice Locker and a digital camera so she could take a photo of Conner for her blog, Authors Are My Weakness. Conner gamely agreed, but after she snapped the pic and he mentioned his wife, she didn’t stick around.
A homeless dude was sprawled across three chairs in the front row; there was a white boy with baggy jeans, a turned-around vintage Montreal Expos baseball cap, dragon tattoos on his shoulders, and an iPod, reading a copy of XXL; an Asian girl with a mug of coffee was studying for the SATs and leaving coffee rings on her test-prep book. None of them seemed to know who Conner was. Maybe some had seen the straight-to-DVD movie of Devil Shotgun (pretty good performance by Mark Ruffalo in the lead role of Detective Cole Padgett if you feel like streaming it on Netflix), but they didn’t seem aware the author was in the store. The other customers in Borders were either purchasing coffee, reading books and magazines they hadn’t paid for and weren’t intending to pay for, or buying discounted books by James Patterson, Stephenie Meyer, or Margot Hetley.
Conner, wearing his traditional getup of a good heavy sport coat, jeans, and a light-blue button-down shirt, was adjusting the microphone at his podium and studying a sheet of prepared remarks through a set of half glasses. Those glasses were the only sign he had aged at all since I had last seen him. Otherwise, he looked eager and energetic, smiling all dimples at the women in the front row seated next to the homeless guy. Conner smiled as if he didn’t notice how small the crowd was, or as if he felt flattered that anyone would go out of his or her way to hear him speak. The humility I have always worked so hard to affect seemed to come naturally to Conner.
I didn’t know whether I would be doing Conner more of a service by sitting up front and making the crowd look bigger or by sneaking out and pretending I hadn’t noticed how few people were there. But before I had decided, Conner caught sight of me by the bestsellers shelf, where I was flipping through The Fearsome Shallow—the eighth book in Margot Hetley’s Wizard Vampire Chronicles series. I was wondering how Ms. Hetley, who seemed to occupy just about every slot on the New York Times hardback, paperback, and e-book bestseller lists, had managed to wring eight five-hundred-page installments out of the concept of wars between rival gangs of vampires and wizards when it seemed obvious to me that all a wizard would have to do to kick a vampire’s ass was pounce on it during the day while it was sleeping. How could anyone take this stuff seriously, I wondered. Hetley’s graphic depictions of wizard-on-vampire sex, which was creating a bloodthirsty, mutant race of evil, soulless “vampards,” seemed absurd. I was still scanning Hetley’s book when Conner’s voice boomed out, as loud as if he had been speaking over the public address system.
“I was wondering if you’d come out of hiding, buddy; I was thinking maybe I was gonna hafta track you down,” he said with a laugh. I put down the Hetley book as Conner bounded over and pulled me into a hug. He smelled like dry-cleaned sport coat and he-man cologne, the musky sort that an old-time ballplayer might have worn for a n
ight on the town. He kissed my cheek and I could feel his stubble. “What’re you doin’ afterwards, bud?” he asked. “You got some time to hang out?”
I told him I didn’t have plans, but since I hadn’t called to tell him I would be there, I would understand if he were too busy to have more than one drink.
“Do I look too busy?” he asked. “I’ve been in this town all day and just about all I’ve seen is the inside of my hotel room, the quad, and the frickin’ food court. It ain’t like the old days, my friend; writing books is a tough way to make a buck.”
“When were the old days?” I asked.
“’Bout six years ago,” he said. “Maybe a little more.”
I nodded. “Yeah. That’s probably about when my magazine folded and Sabine and I moved here. But haven’t you at least done a couple of interviews? Maybe a photo shoot?”
“Not even one, dude.”
“Well, it’s a sleepy little college town,” I said. “Only reason anyone moves here is because of the university or because they like basketball or the movie Breaking Away.”
Conner smiled. “Yeah, I liked that movie too,” he said, then shook his head. “No, the whole book tour’s been like this.” He said he had traveled to ten cities and the only one left on his itinerary was my hometown—Chicago. Everywhere he had gone, the situation had been pretty much the same. Half a dozen people had attended in Cincinnati, ten each in Milwaukee and Louisville. In Madison, only one guy had come to hear him read at a shopping mall Barnes & Noble and Conner wound up taking that guy, his driver, and his media escort out to dinner. So far, the biggest crowd had been in Manhattan, where thirty people had shown up at the Union Square Barnes & Noble, but Conner’s editor Shajilah “Shascha” Schapiro had brought half her office with her and she had been expecting to see a whole lot more people she didn’t know.
“Frankly,” Conner said, “I was kinda hoping to make a better impression on Shascha. We’re buds and all, but that doesn’t mean she’ll keep laying out cash to publish my books.” He said he didn’t understand why Shascha and her publicity and marketing department were spending all this dough on his hotels, meals, and business-class plane tickets when it looked as if they weren’t spending any on promoting the actual book. As far as he was concerned, he’d rather sleep in a YMCA, ride Greyhound, and eat at Mickey D’s if they would advertise. He didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but he had better things to do than sign half a dozen books in a chain bookstore in a middle-American burg; he had left Angie at home with their son, Atticus, and if he wasn’t doing anything useful, he’d rather be home. He hated the idea of becoming the sort of father who was too busy to spend time with his son.
“Kinda like your dad,” he said. “Sorry, man. I know you don’t like talking about that shit. No offense.”
“None taken; you’re right,” I said, remembering I had told him all about my lonesome boyhood. “Anyway,” I added, “you’ve got a son now. Congratulations.”
“Yeah, a son.” He looked at me with what seemed to be genuine regret. “Man,” he said, “it has been a while, hasn’t it? How long?”
“About seven years, something like that,” I said. “I’ve got two kids now.”
“Shit, two? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I just figured you’d be busy.” I wondered why he seemed to think we were better friends than I imagined we were.
“Yeah.” Conner looked around at the sparse crowd with a smirk. “Real busy.”
The events coordinator approached us. She was a dowdy woman of an indeterminate age. Her badge said Cathy-Anne, and she looked as though she would have preferred to be managing a Best Buy or a Target, which was most probably what she would wind up doing when this store went out of business at the end of the month.
“Do you want to do the reading now, Mr. Joyce? Or do you want to wait a few more minutes to see if anybody else comes?” she asked.
Conner sighed. “What do you wanna do?” he asked.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Conner told me to make sure I stuck around afterward, then slapped me on the shoulder as if he had just bested me in a game of hoops. He approached the podium, put his half glasses back on, cracked open a copy of his book, and leaned into the microphone. I took my seat in an empty row near the back, and listened to the first lines of Ice Locker:
“Cole Padgett stepped into the darkened confessional booth. ‘Forgive me, Father, for I know exactly what I’ve done. Forgive me, Father, for all that I still must do.’”
3
I wish I could tell you that a whole lot more people showed up after Conner started reading, but only one other person did. I wish I could report that Conner sold or signed more than four books aside from the one I bought. I wish I could say that Cathy-Anne didn’t box up the rest of the books to send back to Conner’s publisher. I wish Cathy-Anne had been thoughtful enough to turn off or at least turn down “Tubular Bells,” which was tinkle-tinking ominously throughout the store, and I wish half of Conner’s sentences weren’t drowned out by espresso and Frappuccino machines.
I wish, too, that everyone who didn’t come to Conner’s reading were missing something special, that Conner’s reading of Ice Locker, the latest in his Cole Padgett series, was a mind-blowing experience. But Conner had never been much of a reader. He had a rich basso-profundo but used it uncertainly, like a timid father called upon to speak at his son’s confirmation, trying to get through the damn thing without embarrassing his family. At one point in his career, someone had apparently coached Conner in how to read in front of an audience. But whenever he made a supposedly dramatic gesture—say, twirling his right hand to represent smoke rising from the barrel of a .45 caliber gun, or holstering that weapon, which he made out of a thumb and two fingers—it seemed phony and labored, as if practiced in front of a mirror. His vocal cadence shifted between embarrassingly emotive and painfully monotonous. The real trouble, however, wasn’t how Conner was reading, but what he was reading. Sure, the writing itself was lucid, crisp, and terse as always, but there was something rote about it, as if he had written this sort of material many times before, which, of course, he had.
This Cole Padgett novel was another of Conner’s honest-cop-stuck-in-a-corrupt-system tales. He had written a serial-killer novel in this vein, and an espionage plot; this one happened to be a heist story like his first, Devil Shotgun. But the characters, themes, struggles, and Catholic guilt were the same as always. Conner’s criminals were rarely habitual offenders; they were basically honest people pushed to their limits, forced to make choices they wouldn’t have made under ordinary circumstances. The villain in Ice Locker was Cole Padgett’s immediate superior, who had been a heroic figure in a few of Conner’s previous thrillers. The titular location was where he had been storing evidence of the unsolved crimes he had actually been committing. As was always the case, the villain wasn’t some evil outside force; the enemy was within.
Familiar stuff, to be sure, even when Conner had begun his career. But what had initially differentiated Conner’s work within his genre was his copious attention to detail. He had become known for his dogged, painstakingly accurate research and his ruthlessly honest portrayal of the gray areas in the traditionally black-and-white world of cops versus robbers. He was well-versed in this topic, knew about it through his work as a beat reporter for the New York Daily News and through fictionalizing the stories his wife, Angie, had told him about life as a crime-scene investigator for the NYPD.
“I always wanted to get every detail right,” he had told me when I interviewed him. “When I worked for the Daily News, I talked to people who had never been in the newspaper before and might never be in the newspaper again. And, man, I wanted to make sure the one time I quoted them, I got everything they said right. I wanted every last spelling, every last detail, to be on target.”
But the world had changed since Conner had started writing. Now every
one who had watched CSI had become an expert in forensics, and people expected this sort of detailed approach from all authors, not just him. Careful readers began finding minor errors in Conner’s work—plot discrepancies, misspelled street names, outdated cop slang—and posted them on fan sites and in online reviews, which were usually less forgiving than print reviews were. Plus, the knowledge on which Conner had based his first books was stale. He hadn’t worked at the Daily News in nearly a decade, and Angie had quit working for the NYPD after she and Conner had gotten married. Devil Shotgun had been a post-9/11 book, the story of a man who committed thefts while adopting the identities of people who had disappeared during the collapse of the Twin Towers. The book had captured a certain moment in American history; but Osama bin Laden was dead, the Bush era was over, and the anxieties of that particular time seemed to belong to the past every bit as much as Conner Joyce’s fiction.
These days, Americans were facing different anxieties. The economy was in the tank—the Clearance and Everything Must Go! signs in Borders attested to that fact. The culture had grown increasingly cynical and self-referential, and whether or not Conner Joyce’s conflicted hero might have to rob a bank in order to save a hostage’s life and find evidence that would prove the case against his boss seemed like a petty concern. These days, you did what you had to do to feed yourself and protect your family.
Conner performed better in the sadly brief Q&A period. Here, his humility, honesty, and enthusiasm came to the fore as he effused about nearly every author who had influenced him. Salinger? “So goddamn honest, man. Like he’s talking right to you.” Tolstoy? “He makes you think it’s all happening right now, even though he wrote more than a hundred years ago, man.” Dudek? “How could anyone who survived such dark times find so much humor in them?” Cephus? “It’s a crime that his works are out of print now.” Conner even gave me a shout-out—“That’s a real talent you got living here, a real big name; check him out. C’mon, let’s hear it.” He asked me to stand up (I did) and take a bow (I didn’t). As for his own writing, though, he didn’t want to talk about it—not at Borders, and not when I was hanging out with him afterward.
