by Tim O'Brien
"So you've published?" the young woman said.
"Certainly. That's what we're discussing here."
"But I've never even heard of you. Author-wise."
"No, dear, of course you haven't," he said. "Which is why I bring it up." Marv finished his drink, studied the glass. He was committed now. "You've heard of pseudonyms? Common practice, actually."
"Yes, I'm sure," Sandra said. "What is it?"
"What's what?"
"The pseudonym," she said.
Swifitly, Marv flipped through an internal card catalogue. Only the most ridiculous possibilities occurred to him, brand-name writers whose faces she would surely recognize from magazines or television. He began to shrug, to laugh it off as a bit of predinner fun, when he heard himself utter the name of an accomplished, highly regarded, largely unread, obsessively reclusive literary figure. Here, he knew, was the point of no return.
"Thomas Pierce?" Sandra said. "That's you?"
A muscle at Marv's eye twitched. "Impressive," he said. "I'll be honest, I'm surprised you're familiar with him. With me. Very pleasantly surprised."
"Well, why not?" she said. "I mean, God, he's one of... You're one of our great, great, great writers."
"You've read the books?"
Sandra wagged her head. "Of course not. Nobody does. That's not the point. You're famous. Everybody knows about you."
"Not everybody," Marv said modestly.
"Well, no, not compared to—you know—not like a movie star. Even so." She stopped and chewed on her lower lip. The skepticism began flooding back into her sharp brown eyes. "Okay, so you're Thomas Pierce, that's amazing. But I don't see how it's a confession."
Marv did not, either.
He took out a handkerchief, wiped his forehead, and called for another martini. His thoughts were divided. He wanted nothing more than to slither through some convenient loophole in the lie. Yet he also felt a savage need to press the issue. To make her believe. Even to make himself believe. The years of fat-boy mediocrity had somehow warped his common sense. Clearly, he told himself, there was no way he could get away with this, yet something pathological egged him on. Morbid curiosity. Certain secret longings. He could have been a writer. He should have been. He loved words, the sounds and syllables. Back in college, Marv had majored in journalism; he'd edited both the yearbook and the Darton Hall newspaper. Even after graduating, over the next several years, he'd often envisioned himself heading for New York, hanging out in coffee shops with a notebook and some pencils and a ravishing editor or two.
Mops and brooms had put an end to it. Inertia, too, plus a cumbrous marriage and the burdens of obesity.
Now, staring into his empty glass, Marv took a few moments to gather himself. "I'm sorry," he said, "you were asking—?"
"The confession thing," said Sandra.
"Right. Misleading, I'm afraid. What I meant was ... It's embarrassing, actually, but now that I'm unattached, nearly divorced ... Well, I needed to share the secret. A friendly ear. Someone to listen."
Sandra thought about it. "But why me? I'm an executive assistant."
Marv smiled, reached out, and took her hand.
"Very true," he said adroitly. "And therein lies my confession."
"You mean—?"
"For ten infatuated months."
Marv broke his own rule that evening. Not only did he make unambiguous advances toward the starstruck young lady, but he also went home with her, and to bed, under what even he recognized as false pretenses. Worse yet, Marv fell in love, or imagined he did. True, it was not the dry-mouthed, head-over-heels love of his youth. At best, he decided, it was the sort of love that visits a man who has recently shed a third of his body weight, whose divorce is six weeks from final, and whose self-esteem has long been crushed by mops and brooms.
He slept with Sandra again the following night, and then every night for the next two months. In most respects, the affair was thrilling: the way she looked at him with deference and delight, sometimes outright veneration. He liked the girl's intelligence, her bedroom professionalism, even her calculating, what's-in-it-for-me posture toward the world. She had the body of a fashion model, the central nervous system of a Pentagon mainframe. For Marv, all this was new and exhilarating, but at day's end his thoughts were drenched in the purest terror. He couldn't sleep, couldn't think. As a literary alter ego, Thomas Pierce had been an unfortunate choice. The man was a hermit, true—aversion to cameras, aversion to people—but he was also a master of the written word, a linguistic wonder boy destined for Stockholm, and the enormity and gross stupidity of the fabrication made Marv's spine go cold. At random moments, he was paralyzed by shame, by the pending horror of discovery. And there was no escape. All day, Sandra sat at an operations desk just outside his office. At night, she lay beside him in bed, scanning one of Pierce's most abstruse novels, now and then looking up to inquire about a metaphor or an obscure scrap of language. Marv did what he could to deflect such questions. He would sigh, or shake his head, and explain that literature was meant to be experienced, not explicated. Other times he would roll over and feign sleep. Eyes closed, frozen stiff by his own foolishness, he'd listen to the whispery sound of pages being turned, of Sandra's breathing, and in those miserable moments he would count himself lucky for even the smallest blessings. Thomas Pierce, praise God, did not permit photographs on his books. Nor had Sandra yet inquired about such sticky matters as royalty statements or work in progress.
The strain on Marv's constitution began to tell. By the end of December, he'd dropped another twelve pounds, tightened his belt a notch. In the office, behind a locked door, he spent his workdays trying to come up with some honorable solution. He considered firing the girl. He considered selling the factory, removing himself to another continent. But Marv's heart was now engaged. Despite Sandra's flaws—especially that hard-edged, profit-and-loss shrewdness in her eyes—she was a living emblem of all those lovely young women who eight or nine months ago would not have given him the time of day. He didn't want to lose her, or the idea of her.
In the end, therefore, Marv did nothing.
He waited.
He envisioned miracles. Nuclear holocaust. Epidemic amnesia.
At the turn of the year, on January i, 1989, Marv Bertel weighed in at a hundred and seventy-eight pounds, which for a man standing six-two, with a heart condition and chronic insomnia, bordered on the unwholesome. Eighteen days later he was down to a hundred and seventy even. The diet, he knew, had little to do with it; fear alone was sucking the muscle from his bones. He had no appetite, no energy.
There were times now, numerous times, when Marv found himself looking back on his obesity as if recollecting a dear departed friend, a steadfast comrade who was always on hand with good cheer and a quart or two of premium potato salad. Not that Marv had been a happy man back then. Far from it. All the same, for better or worse, he'd managed to waddle through the world with at least the appearance of contentment and portly self-respect. He had gotten by. For forty-one years he had slept the sleep of the nearly innocent. Now, odd as it seemed, he could not help mourning the jolly old Marv.
These changes were nerve-racking. And there was also the deceit: it was eating him up. With each miserable day, he turned a little jumpier, a little more irritable, his stomach fluttering whenever Sandra entered a room or started to speak. Exposure was a certainty. A matter of when and where, never if. And yet Marv was surprised, even shocked, when the inevitabilities tracked him down in early February. For several days, Sandra had become uncommonly quiet, stealing glances at him, and at dinner one evening she put down her fork, wiped her mouth, and said, "Something's bothering me."
Marv closed his eyes. He knew what was in store.
"I don't mean to pry," she said, "but I really, really have to ask this. You and me. We're a team. And we need to be open about everything."
"Open," Marv said.
"Right. And I feel ... I get suspicious sometimes. I can't help it."
/> Marv looked away, then looked back at her with hurt in his heart.
He was struck by the indignation of a man not trusted.
"Look, I know it's not healthy," Sandra said, "but I'm not used to putting faith in people. Especially men. Older men. And that's important, isn't it? That's what makes a relationship tick." She averted her eyes. "So I've been thinking—and I don't mean this in a bad way—but the thing is, you're a writer, a famous writer, except you don't ever write."
Marv stared at her. "Don't I?"
"Well, no. Do you?"
"Ceaselessly. Endless struggle."
"Yes, but when?"
He glared, folded his napkin, leaned back, and lied. He informed her with vehemence, voice quavering, that literature was not some seedy public sideshow, that it was pursued in absolute artistic solitude, paragraph by paragraph, syllable by syllable, and that in point of fact he slaved over his work every day, every hour, every minute, every instant of every minute. "What else," he said, "do you imagine I might be doing behind that locked office door? Computer games? Solitaire?"
"I didn't think—"
"Moreover," he said, "this isn't something a real writer talks about. We don't chat our books into oblivion, we don't broadcast creative news bulletins." His voice had sailed up an octave. Even as Marv spoke, elaborating on the theme of privacy, it struck him that he meant every ardent word. As if under hypnosis, transfixed by a besieged, self-righteous passion, he talked about the incessant turmoil of any worthy writer, the uncertainties, the subjectivity, the failures of nerve and language, the strain of wrestling with Satan for a line or two of decent prose. He cited Conrad on the subject. He cited Baudelaire. "You of all people," Marv said, "should understand that literature bubbles through my blood. It's my oxygen, my heartbeat."
Sandra surveyed his face. She backed off. "Fair enough," she said. "If you're actually writing ... Fine. I'm glad."
"Swell of you," Marv said, though his tone was begrudging and whiny. In part this was genuine. But in much larger part it was a mask for his amazement at how easy it had been, how swiftly she'd surrendered. Then again, he thought, who would not? The audacity of the lie, its scope and grandeur, its breath-taking magnitude, suddenly unnerved him. It was not, after all, as if he were claiming to be some backwater hack, some scribbling midlist nobody. He had appropriated genius. He had taken for his own an entire life's work, a couple of masterpieces, a way of thinking, a way of being, another man's energies and chemistry and fame and labor and God-given virtuosity.
The realization sickened him.
Something sour and deadly rose into his throat, like the taste of cancer, and at that instant Marv came within a breath of disclosing everything. But also at that instant, across the table, Sandra gave her hair a toss and said, "Problem is, I still don't get it."
"Get?" said Marv.
"I'm an executive assistant," she said. "I see your mail, I take your calls, and there's never anything literary. It's all mops and brooms."
"Oh, really?"
"Yes. Really."
"My God," said Marv. "What galling cynicism."
The impulse to confess evaporated. He launched into an angry soliloquy about the role of literary agents, about the importance of anonymity and creative deck-swabbing. There were people, he told her, to whom he paid a pretty penny to handle fan mail and contracts and all the other petty distractions. "I'm a language man," he said, too ferociously, "not a garbage man."
Sandra nodded, pushed to her feet, and without a word began clearing the table.
She was silent for the remainder of the evening. Several times he caught her looking at him, biting her lip, and at one point he had the sensation of being studied as if at a police lineup.
Marv mistook it for adulation. It was not.
In bed that night, lights out, Sandra said, "I went to a library today. Found a photograph."
"Did you?" said Marv.
"I did. An old one. It was pretty fuzzy, and I guess it was taken twenty-five, thirty years ago. But no resemblance. It wasn't you."
Marv heard himself chuckle. Not a single exculpatory thought came to him.
A trillion years ago, it seemed, all this had started as a way to get noticed, a way to be somebody, a sort of game, and now the convolutions had him tumbling in the dark.
"If you think this is funny," Sandra said quietly, "you're a pitiful human being."
"Right," he said. "It's not funny."
"So explain."
Marv sat up in bed. He was very, very hungry. "Yes, why on earth not?" he murmured, and pinched the bridge of his nose. He swallowed hard. He yearned for a T-bone. After a moment he took a breath and spoke slowly, painfully, but with immense valor. "The fact is," Marv said, "two of us write those books. I'm shy, he's not. What you saw was the other guy's picture."
"Other guy?"
"Precisely. My co-author."
Over the next twenty seconds, which had the half-life of plutonium, Marv unearthed several nuggets of wisdom. Most alarmingly this: There is no outer limit to mankind's credulity. Anything goes. The Easter bunny. The indelibility of love. A god with white whiskers and a hearty laugh. Almost always, the human creature prefers an elusive miracle to an everyday lie.
Moreover, at the last minute, Marv blurted out a piece of dialogue worthy of Thomas Pierce himself, a stroke of genius that instantaneously bought him both trust and time.
"Will you marry me?" he said.
The victory was short-lived. There was a three-day erotica-fest, with all its illusory distractions, after which Marv awoke to a headache and the knowledge that he'd managed little more than to deepen his grave and dump in the worms.
It was true that Sandra's will to believe had short-circuited her common sense. But it was also true that for Marv the consequences had multiplied beyond measure. There was nothing droll about it. Each tick of the clock pumped poison through his veins. At night, his dreams were blistered by cartoons of Judgment Day: truth cops with halos, heavenly polygraphs. His misery was absolute. By daylight, in the mop factory, Marv's heart would snap at the sound of Sandra's approaching footsteps. His breathing would go shallow, his future would go void. There were times, many times, when he had trouble accepting the reality of his own fraud. It didn't seem possible. Always the merry fat boy. A mop man. A pitiful, puffed-up yo-yo with a couple of secret chips on his shoulder. Nothing more.
In a sense, Marv thought, it was as if the diet had stripped away two hundred pounds of spiritual camouflage. What remained was a ghoulish, unrecognizable bag of bones, a stranger who terrified and disgusted him.
Over the next several days, he dropped another three pounds. Tufts of hair fell from his scalp. A pair of teeth loosened in his jaw. His appetite had returned—he was starving—but he couldn't make himself swallow. Each hour of his life, it now seemed, had the nap and weave of one of Thomas Pierce's most grotesque fictions, freakish and scary, ruled by entropy, a madhouse of make-believe looping back on itself in infinite ellipses.
In the first week of March, on the day Marv's divorce came through, Sandra mailed out a stack of engagement announcements. "I have friends, I have a family," she said. "Why keep it a secret? Unless there's something to hide."
She squinted up at him, holding his gaze until he looked away.
For Marv, it was a hard moment.
"Nothing hidden in the least," he said. "But I do hope you're not letting on about the Pierce business. That's sacred. That's holy."
"Understood," Sandra said. "Holy."
"A promise, then?"
"Not a peep."
Nonetheless, that evening, Marv overheard fragments of a whispered, disturbingly boastful phone conversation in which Sandra violated the spirit, if not the letter, of her pledge. Plain as day, he caught the phrase "literary bigwig"; also the words "stupid recluse."
When the girl hung up, Marv confronted her. "That," he said crossly, "was a peep. A complete squawk."
"Look, I'm proud of you," she said. "I want p
eople—"
Marv waved a hand. "What happened to holy? You flat-out lied to me. A blatant, point-blank lie, and don't you ever, ever forget it."
"All I said was 'bigwig.' I didn't name names, did I?"
"Hairsplitting rubbish," Marv said. "What about 'recluse'? 'Stupid recluse'? One thing I can't tolerate, not ever, is duplicity."
"And what does that mean?" said Sandra.
"It means," he said gamely, "squawk, squawk."
He said nothing else.
The end of the road, he realized. No more.
He grunted, spun on his heels, moved briskly to the refrigerator, and wolfed down his first full pint of ice cream in nearly a year. His appetite was huge. He could eat again. It was a kind of quittance, to be sure, but it was also a joy. Already, ounce by ounce, he could feel the ice cream converting itself into the old Marv, maybe bigger, maybe better. Before retiring that night, he consumed a can of unheated baked beans, a Key-lime pie, a lamb chop, a pear, a jar of chutney, and two or three fistfuls of chopped walnuts.
In bed, after he'd lost a portion of his snack to the toilet, Sandra said, "You're not Thomas Pierce, are you?"
"I am not."
"Not a writer at all?"
"No," he said. "But I'm skinny."
They married anyway. But there were terms: a cash stipend, separate bedrooms, a half-interest in the factory, an ironclad will. "If you ever cross me, ever so much as irritate me," Sandra announced on the eve of their wedding, "the whole world finds out what a creepy, contemptible liar you are."
"We could call it off," Marv suggested. "The wedding, the honeymoon."
"Now that," Sandra told him with a glare, "is what I mean by 'irritate.'"
Her MBA training had been brought to bear. She was already in possession of the family checkbooks and an altogether rigorous prenuptial agreement.
By and large, Marv had no quarrel with any of this. He deserved his punishment. He'd been expecting it, even craving it, although perhaps not the life sentence that had been handed down. Still, as in anything, the pluses and minuses balanced out. All said and done, he had secured the glossy veneer of the wife he'd always wanted. He had visiting privileges. He had off-and-on conjugal rights. There were times, in fact, as he lunched on brisket or supped on a soufflé, when Marv found himself swollen with admiration for his bride-to-be; more important, there was never a time when he did not unequivocally respect her. In the end, Marv noted, he'd had the amazing good fortune to bump into a woman who could appreciate a straightforward lie or two, who could give credit where credit was due, and who could without compunction return tit for tat. Under this woman's hardheaded leadership, the mop and broom enterprise would surely flourish.
