The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “So take yourself, you know, or somebody else who spent all his life studyin’ Hemingway. He puts all he’s got into writin’ these stories—he knows the people who are gonna be readin’ ’em; knows what they’re gonna look for. And he hires like an expert forger to make the pages look like they came out of Hemingway’s machine. So could it work?”

  Baird pursed his lips and for a moment looked professorial. Then he sort of laughed, one syllable through his nose. “Maybe it could. A man did a similar thing when I was a boy, counterfeiting the memoirs of Howard Hughes. He made millions.”

  “Millions?”

  “Back when that was real money. Went to jail when they found out, of course.”

  “And the money was still there when he got out.”

  “Never read anything about it. I guess so.”

  “So the next question is, how much stuff are we talkin’ about? How much was in that old overnight bag?”

  “That depends on who you believe. There was half a novel and some poetry. The short stories, there might have been as few as eleven or as many as thirty.”

  “That’d take a long time to write.”

  “It would take forever. You couldn’t just ‘do’ Hemingway; you’d have to figure out what the stories were about, then reconstruct his early style—do you know how many Hemingway scholars there are in the world?”

  “Huh uh. Quite a few.”

  “Thousands. Maybe ten thousand academics who know enough to spot a careless fake.”

  Castle nodded, cogitating. “You’d have to be real careful. But then you wouldn’t have to do all the short stories and poems, would you? You could say all you found was the part of the novel. Hell, you could sell that as a book.”

  The odd laugh again. “Sure you could. Be a fortune in it.”

  “How much? A million bucks?”

  “A million … maybe. Well, sure. The last new Hemingway made at least that much, allowing for inflation. And he’s more popular now.”

  Castle took a big gulp of beer and set his glass down decisively. “So what the hell are we waiting for?”

  Baird’s bland smile faded. “You’re serious?”

  2. in our time

  Got a ripple in the Hemingway channel.

  Twenties again?

  No, funny, this one’s in the 1990s. See if you can track it down?

  Sure. Go down to the armory first and—

  Look—no bloodbaths this time. You solve one problem and start ten more.

  Couldn’t be helped. It’s no tea party, twentieth century America.

  Just use good judgment. That Ransom guy.…

  Manson. Right. That was a mistake.

  3. A Way You’ll Never Be

  You can’t cheat an honest man, as Sylvester Castlemaine well knew, but then again, it never hurts to find out just how honest a man is. John Baird refused his scheme, with good humor at first, but when Castle persisted, his refusal took on a sarcastic edge; maybe a tinge of outrage. He backed off and changed the subject, talking for a half-hour about commercial fishing around Key West, and then said he had to run. He slipped his business card into John’s shirt pocket on the way out. (Sylvester Castlemaine, Consultant, it claimed.)

  John left the place soon, walking slowly through the afternoon heat. He was glad he hadn’t brought the bicycle; it was pleasant to walk in the shade of the big aromatic trees, a slight breeze on his face from the Gulf side.

  One could do it. One could. The problem divided itself into three parts; writing the novel fragment, forging the manuscript, and devising a suitable story about how one had uncovered the manuscript.

  The writing part would be the hardest. Hemingway is easy enough to parody—one fourth of the take-home final he gave in English 733 was to write a page of Hemingway pastiche, and some of his graduate students did a credible job—but parody was exactly what one would not want to do.

  It had been a crucial period in Hemingway’s development, those three years of apprenticeship the lost manuscripts represented. Two stories survived, and they were maddeningly dissimilar. “My Old Man,” which had slipped down behind a drawer, was itself a pastiche, reading like pretty good Sherwood Anderson, but with an O. Henry twist at the end—very unlike the bleak understated quality that would distinguish the stories that were to make Hemingway’s reputation. The other, “Up in Michigan,” had been out in the mail at the time of the loss. It was a lot closer to Hemingway’s ultimate style, a spare and, by the standards of the time, pornographic description of a woman’s first sexual experience.

  John riffled through the notes on the yellow pad, a talismanic gesture, since he could have remembered any page with little effort. But the sight of the words and the feel of the paper sometimes helped him think.

  One would not do it, of course. Except perhaps as a mental exercise. Not to show to anybody. Certainly not to profit from.

  You wouldn’t want to use “My Old Man” as the model, certainly; no one would care to publish a pastiche of a pastiche of Anderson, now undeservedly obscure. So “Up in Michigan.” And the first story he wrote after the loss, “Out of Season,” would also be handy. That had a lot of the true Hemingway strength.

  You wouldn’t want to tackle the novel fragment, of course, not just as an exercise, over a hundred pages.…

  Without thinking about it, John dropped into a familiar fugue state as he walked through the rundown neighborhood, his freak memory taking over while his body ambled along on autopilot. This is the way he usually remembered pages. He transported himself back to the Hemingway collection at the JFK Library in Boston, last November, snow swirling outside the big picture windows overlooking the harbor, the room so cold he was wearing coat and gloves and could see his breath. They didn’t normally let you wear a coat up there, afraid you might squirrel away a page out of the manuscript collection, but they had to make an exception because the heat pump was down.

  He was flipping through the much-thumbed Xerox of Carlos Baker’s interview with Hadley, page 52: “Stolen suitcase,” Baker asked; “lost novel?”

  The typescript of her reply appeared in front of him, more clear than the cracked sidewalk his feet negotiated: “This novel was a knock-out, about Nick, up north in Michigan—hunting, fishing, all sorts of experiences—stuff on the order of “Big Two-Hearted River,” with more action. Girl experiences well done, too.” With an enigmatic addition, evidently in Hadley’s handwriting, “Girl experiences too well done.”

  That was interesting. John hadn’t thought about that, since he’d been concentrating on the short stories. Too well done? There had been a lot of talk in the eighties about Hemingway’s sexual ambiguity—gender ambiguity, actually—could Hadley have been upset, sixty years after the fact, remembering some confidence that Hemingway had revealed to the world in that novel; something girls knew that boys were not supposed to know? Playful pillow talk that was filed away for eventual literary exploitation?

  He used his life that way. A good writer remembered everything and then forgot it when he sat down to write, and reinvented it so the writing would be more real than the memory. Experience was important, but imagination was more important.

  Maybe I would be a better writer, John thought, if I could learn how to forget. For about the tenth time today, like any day, he regretted not having tried to succeed as a writer, while he still had the independent income. Teaching and research had fascinated him when he was younger, a rich boy’s all-consuming hobbies, but the end of this fiscal year would be the end of the monthly checks from the trust fund. So the salary from Boston University wouldn’t be mad money any more, but rent and groceries in a city suddenly expensive.

  Yes, the writing would be the hard part. Then forging the manuscript, that wouldn’t be easy. Any scholar would have access to copies of thousands of pages that Hemingway typed before and after the loss. Could one find the typewriter Hemingway had used? Then duplicate his idiosyncratic typing style—a moment’s reflection put a sample in front of him, space
s before and after periods and commas.…

  He snapped out of the reverie as his right foot hit the first step on the back staircase up to their rented flat. He automatically stepped over the fifth step, the rotted one, and was thinking about a nice tall glass of iced tea as he opened the screen door.

  “Scorpions!” his wife screamed, two feet from his face.

  “What?”

  “We have scorpions!” Lena grabbed his arm and hauled him to the kitchen.

  “Look!” She pointed at the opaque plastic skylight. Three scorpions, each about six inches long, cast sharp silhouettes on the milky plastic. One was moving.

  “My word.”

  “Your word!” She struck a familiar pose, hands on hips, and glared up at the creatures. “What are we going to do about it?”

  “We could name them.”

  “John.”

  “I don’t know.” He opened the refrigerator. “Call the bug man.”

  “The bug man was just here yesterday. He probably flushed them out.”

  He poured a glass of cold tea and dumped two envelopes of artificial sweetener into it. “I’ll talk to Julio about it. But you know they’ve been there all along. They’re not bothering anybody.”

  “They’re bothering the hell out of me!”

  He smiled. “Okay. I’ll talk to Julio.” He looked into the oven. “Thought about dinner?”

  “Anything you want to cook, sweetheart. I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand there with three … poisonous … arthropods staring down at me.”

  “Poised to jump,” John said, and looked up again. There were only two visible now, which made his skin crawl.

  “Julio wasn’t home when I first saw them. About an hour ago.”

  “I’ll go check.” John went downstairs and Julio, the landlord, was indeed home, but was not impressed by the problem. He agreed that it was probably the bug man, and they would probably go back to where they came from in a while, and gave John a flyswatter.

  John left the flyswatter with Lena, admonishing her to take no prisoners, and walked a couple of blocks to a Chinese restaurant. He brought back a few boxes of take-out, and they sat in the living room and wielded chopsticks in silence, listening for the pitter-patter of tiny feet.

  “Met a real live con man today.” He put the business card on the coffee table between them.

  “Consultant?” she read.

  “He had a loony scheme about counterfeiting the missing stories.” Lena knew more about the missing stories than 98 percent of the people who Hemingway’ed for a living. John liked to think out loud.

  “Ah, the stories,” she said, preparing herself.

  “Not a bad idea, actually, if one had a larcenous nature.” He concentrated for a moment on the slippery Moo Goo Gai Pan. “Be millions of bucks in it.”

  He was bent over the box. She stared hard at his bald spot. “What exactly did he have in mind?”

  “We didn’t bother to think it through in any detail, actually. You go and find.…” He got the slightly wall-eyed look that she knew meant he was reading a page of a book a thousand miles away. “Yes. A 1921 Corona portable, like the one Hadley gave him before they were married. Find some old paper. Type up the stories. Take them to Sotheby’s. Spend money for the rest of your life. That’s all there is to it.”

  “You left out jail.”

  “A mere detail. Also the writing of the stories. That could take weeks. Maybe you could get arrested first, write the stories in jail, and then sell them when you got out.”

  “You’re weird, John.”

  “Well. I didn’t give him any encouragement.”

  “Maybe you should’ve. A few million would come in handy next year.”

  “We’ll get by.”

  “‘We’ll get by.’ You keep saying that. How do you know? You’ve never had to ‘get by.’”

  “Okay, then. We won’t get by.” He scraped up the last of the fried rice. “We won’t be able to make the rent and they’ll throw us out on the street. We’ll live in a cardboard box over a heating grate. You’ll have to sell your body to keep me in cheap wine. But we’ll be happy, dear.” He looked up at her, mooning. “Poor but happy.”

  “Slap-happy.” She looked at the card again. “How do you know he’s a con man?”

  “I don’t know. Salesman type. Says he’s in commercial fishing now, but he doesn’t seem to like it much.”

  “He didn’t say anything about any, you know, criminal stuff he’d done in the past?”

  “Huh uh. I just got the impression that he didn’t waste a lot of time mulling over ethics and morals.” John held up the Mont Blanc pen. “He was staring at this, before he came over and introduced himself. I think he smelled money.”

  Lena stuck both chopsticks into the half-finished carton of boiled rice and set it down decisively. “Let’s ask him over.”

  “He’s a sleaze, Lena. You wouldn’t like him.”

  “I’ve never met a real con man. It would be fun.”

  He looked into the darkened kitchen. “Will you cook something?”

  She followed his gaze, expecting monsters. “If you stand guard.”

  4. Romance is Dead subtitle The Hell it is

  “Be a job an’ a half,” Castle said, mopping up residual spaghetti sauce with a piece of garlic bread. “It’s not like your Howard Hughes guy, or Hitler’s notebooks.”

  “You’ve been doing some research,” John’s voice was a little slurred. He’d bought a half-gallon of Portuguese wine, the bottle wrapped in straw like cheap Chianti, the wine not quite that good. If you could get past the first couple of glasses, it was okay. It had been okay to John for some time now.

  “Yeah, down to the library. The guys who did the Hitler notebooks, hell, nobody’d ever seen a real Hitler notebook; they just studied his handwriting in letters and such, then read up on what he did day after day. Same with the Howard Hughes, but that was even easier, because most of the time nobody knew what the hell Howard Hughes was doing anyhow. Just stayed locked up in that room.”

  “The Hughes forgery nearly worked, as I recall,” John said. “If Hughes himself hadn’t broken silence.…”

  “Ya gotta know that took balls. ’Scuse me, Lena.” She waved a hand and laughed. “Try to get away with that while Hughes was still alive.”

  “How did the Hitler people screw up?” she asked.

  “Funny thing about that one was how many people they fooled. Afterwards everybody said it was a really lousy fake. But you can bet that before the newspapers bid millions of dollars on it, they showed it to the best Hitlerologists they could find, and they all said it was real.”

  “Because they wanted it to be real,” Lena said.

  “Yeah. But one of the pages had some chemical in it that wouldn’t be in paper before 1945. That was kinda dumb.”

  “People would want the Hemingway stories to be real,” Lena said quietly, to John.

  John’s gaze stayed fixed on the center of the table, where a few strands of spaghetti lay cold and drying in a plastic bowl. “Wouldn’t be honest.”

  “That’s for sure,” Castle said cheerily. “But it ain’t exactly armed robbery, either.”

  “A gross misuse of intellectual … intellectual.…”

  “It’s past your bedtime, John,” Lena said. “We’ll clean up.” John nodded and pushed himself away from the table and walked heavily into the bedroom.

  Lena didn’t say anything until she heard the bedsprings creak. “He isn’t always like this,” she said quietly.

  “Yeah. He don’t act like no alky.”

  “It’s been a hard year for him.” She refilled her glass. “Me, too. Money.”

  “That’s bad.”

  “Well, we knew it was coming. He tell you about the inheritance?” Castle leaned forward. “Huh uh.”

  “He was born pretty well off. Family had textile mills up in New Hampshire. John’s grandparents died in an auto accident in the forties and the family sold off the m
ills—good timing, too. They wouldn’t be worth much today.

  “Then John’s father and mother died in the sixties, while he was in college. The executors set up a trust fund that looked like it would keep him in pretty good shape forever. But he wasn’t interested in money. He even joined the army, to see what it was like.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Afterwards, he carried a picket sign and marched against the war—you know, Vietnam.

  “Then he finished his Ph.D. and started teaching. The trust fund must have been fifty times as much as his salary, when he started out. It was still ten times as much, a couple of years ago.”

  “Boy … howdy.” Castle was doing mental arithmetic and algebra with variables like Porsches and fast boats.

  “But he let his sisters take care of it. He let them re-invest the capital.”

  “They weren’t too swift?”

  “They were idiots! They took good solid blue-chip stocks and tax-free municipals, too ‘boring’ for them, and threw it all away gambling on commodities.” She grimaced. “Pork bellies? I finally had John go to Chicago and come back with what was left of his money. There wasn’t much.”

  “You ain’t broke, though.”

  “Damned near. There’s enough income to pay for insurance and eventually we’ll be able to draw on an IRA. But the cash payments stop in two months. We’ll have to live on John’s salary. I suppose I’ll get a job, too.”

  “What you ought to get is a typewriter.”

  Lena laughed and slouched back in her chair. “That would be something.”

  “You think he could do it? I mean if he would, do you think he could?”

  “He’s a good writer.” She looked thoughtful. “He’s had some stories published, you know, in the literary magazines. The ones that pay four or five free copies.”

  “Big deal.”

  She shrugged. “Pays off in the long run. Tenure. But I don’t know whether being able to write a good literary story means that John could write a good Hemingway imitation.”