Famous Writers I Have Known

by James Magnuson

  Chapter Five

  My first class met the last Wednesday in August, and when I came in I was pleased to see that the security guard was in place. He was sitting by the front door doing a book of crossword puzzles, and on the table next to him was a typed list of everyone who was allowed access to the building. He was up in years, with a bit of a belly—he looked almost old enough to have served in World War Two with Schoeninger. His name was Anton Woolley and he seemed genial enough, though I don’t think he would have fit anyone’s definition of muscle.

  When I walked into the conference room, everybody was so quiet you would have thought Elvis Presley had just risen from the dead. I could feel them following my every move. I slid into my chair at the head of the table and counted to ten to calm myself, eyeing all the young geniuses. They were a handsome group and they seemed good-natured, which they should have been, given the cushy fellowships they were pulling down.

  I introduced myself and passed out copies of what we were going to do for the semester (syllabus, I think Wayne had called it). I said a few words, pretty much just parroting back all the junk Wayne had told me about how the workshop was a place of perfect freedom, where writers could experiment and fail far from the prying eyes of editors and agents, a place where honesty was the rule, where the gloves were off, yet at the same time a place where they would feel nurtured and supported. It was a real “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” kind of speech and I could see from the glow in their little genius eyes when I finished that they were fairly inspired.

  Down at the far end of the table, Dominique was giving me significant looks. She was magnificent in a shimmering rust-colored blouse with a couple of the top buttons undone, exposing her long, lovely neck and a bit of breastbone. I wouldn’t call it slutty exactly, but it suggested a certain feast-your-eyes-all-you-want-you-lousy-schmuck kind of attitude.

  I asked each of them to tell me a few things about what they were reading and writing. One by one they had their say: Mercedes, a former grade school teacher from El Paso who loved some writer named Sandy Cisneros and had spent the summer tending her parents’ dog kennel; Nick, an intense young guy who was the spitting image of this racetrack tout I once knew called Louie the Lip and was working on a series of postmodern fables—whatever the hell they were—based on the Book of Revelation; and LaTasha, who’d been transcribing interviews she’d done with her uncle, a tractor driver in Mississippi.

  None of this exactly floated my boat, but after each of them finished, I tried to say something encouraging. “Sounds interesting,” I would say, or, “It’ll be fascinating to see where you’re going to go with that.” When Nick tried to lay all that bullshit about the Book of Revelation on us, all I could do was point a finger at the boy and go, “Now, that’s an idea!”

  I’m sure someone else could have come up with better ways to handle it, but you’ve got to remember that I’d never been in a college classroom before. All I knew about universities I’d learned from watching Fred MacMurray in Son of Flubber, so it was kind of a kick to have everything I said scribbled down in notebooks. It was a little like those stories you read about nutballs who show up in small towns, announce that they’re doctors, and start taking out appendixes without having had day one of medical training. One of the nice things about what I was doing, I could be pretty sure no one would die from it.

  Whatever I was doing, it seemed to be working. They were loosening up and I was too.

  I hadn’t thought that much about it, but they were probably a little intimidated by me, so it was a big relief for them to see what a regular guy I was. Before you knew it, I was telling them how much reading Cervantes when I was twelve had changed my life and how the little Indian boy in Eat Your Wheaties was based on a real Indian boy I’d met while he was selling baskets alongside the highway with his grandmother, and how I still had the piñon nut he’d given me.

  They were eating this stuff up. But just as I was starting to think I had a real talent for this, things got complicated.

  Thirty minutes into class, this kid named Mel slunk in, sweating like a hog, bicycle helmet under his arm, red bandanna tied around his forehead. He clomped to the far end of the library and found a place, not at the table with the rest of us, but in front of the window, in a green recliner.

  As we continued around, letting everyone have a turn, Mel took out a sketch pad and began to doodle, unimpressed with anything anybody had to say. He was unimpressed with the laid-back Chester, unimpressed with rosy-cheeked Brett, who had gone to Williams and worshipped some Cheever guy, unimpressed with Bryn and her description of her collection of linked stories set in the Upper Peninsula.

  Frankly, I sort of agreed with him on that last one. I would have given a stuffed bear to the first person who could tell me what a linked story was.

  But what really got my goat was just how unimpressed the little putz was with me. I could feel him sizing me up, raising an eyebrow over the top of his sketch pad at some of the more blandly reassuring things I had to say. When I asked for comments, he chose to pass. He had a foot up on a chair in front of him, one hairy knee raised so he could use it as an easel.

  The last person in the room to speak was Dominique, and I could tell from the way the others came to attention that she already had a certain standing among her classmates. She was reading Susan Minot, she said, and finishing a novel based on the story she’d published in Tin House. It was about a teenage girl who goes on a cruise with her pill-popping mother and her new stepfather and ends up having a hot affair with a Jamaican cabin boy. She described it in serious detail, pushing back her mass of black hair, running her fingers along the open collar of that eye-catching rust blouse, her silver bracelets jangling.

  By the time she finished, Brett’s cheeks were glowing like Christmas ornaments. Everybody, in fact, was pretty knocked out by her performance, with the exception of Douche Bag, who was still absorbed in his sketch pad. I was not sure how I was supposed to handle a situation like this, but my instincts told me I couldn’t just let it ride.

  “So, Mel, what do you think?”

  He glanced up from his doodling and rubbed his nose with a knuckle. “That kind of work doesn’t interest me.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He took his foot down from the chair in front of him and lurched forward. Dominique reached for her water bottle. “You know. A divorce. A lousy stepfather. An affair. No offense, but how many stories like that are there?”

  “And you don’t think they can be well done?” Brett said, a little too loudly.

  “Maybe they can be,” Mel said. “But it’s still just realism.”

  “And you have a problem with realism?” Brett said.

  “My only problem with it is that it bores me.”

  I stared down at my hand. I had no idea what they were talking about. “So is it realism that bores you, or is it a particular subject matter?” Bryn said.

  “Such as?”

  “Such as stories about women.”

  He screwed up his face as if he’d just caught a whiff of gym socks. “I like women’s stories. I love Angela Carter. I’m just more interested in stories that take chances. Stories about rich people getting their feelings hurt doesn’t exactly do it for me.”

  It was as if he’d just dropped a lit match on a gasoline slick. In an instant the rest of the class was talking over one another.

  “How can you possibly dismiss someone’s work before you’ve even read it? It’s idiotic to say you can’t write about rich people. What about The Great Gatsby? What about Updike? Edith Wharton? Henry James? Tolstoy, for God’s sakes,” Bryn said.

  “When you say you’re interested in stories that take chances, what does that mean?” Chester said.

  “And how can you just write off realism like that?” Mercedes said.

  “The real,” Brett shouted, “is the atlas of fiction!”

  I tried to keep everything under con
trol. “Guys, guys, one at a time,” I would say, or, “I think LaTasha had her hand up here!” But every time I thought I had them calmed down, old Douche Bag would say something else outrageous and off they’d go to the races.

  The names of writers I’d never heard of flew like daggers in a martial arts movie—Joyce, Zola, Flaubert, Beckett, Coover. LaTasha kept shooting dismayed glances in my direction as if I was expected to do something.

  You can’t imagine how pissed I was. We’d been doing great and then this little dickhead shows up and wants to have a literary debate. I knew I had to stop it or I was dead meat.

  I slammed my hand on the table. All their heads came up, like a herd of frightened deer. “Okay, guys, enough!” I gave them my Mohleian molar-suck. “This is making me crazy. What do you say we stop blowing smoke? We’re here to talk about your stuff, not to bullshit about all this other junk. Everybody talks about what a great writer this Gatsby is. What makes him so great, huh? And why should we care? What does it have to do with this discussion?”

  Everything became very quiet, the only sound the whirring of the overhead fan. Bryn looked down at her lap. Mel curled his lip. The others had the stunned look the passengers on the Titanic must have had when they heard the first soft thud of the iceberg.

  A hand went up. It was Mercedes. “Mr. Mohle?”

  “Yes?”

  “The Great Gatsby isn’t really a writer. He’s a character in a novel.”

  They were all waiting. It felt like a bad day in front of the parole board. “Good Lord, doesn’t anybody recognize a joke when they hear one?” I pushed up from the table. “You all want to go on arguing about all this, go ahead, suit yourself, but I’m out of here. I’ll see you all next week.”

  They were agog. I’ll grant you, it was a bit of a grandstand move, stomping off like that, but it was effective. It would have been more effective if I hadn’t snagged my toe on Mercedes’s backpack and stumbled on my way out, but I still made my point.

  When I got downstairs, there was a note in my box from Wayne. He said he’d called Schoeninger, who’d said he would like to have me over for dinner on Saturday. His assistant would come by to pick me up at my house at six.

  I can’t tell you how the idea of Rex’s twenty million dollars had burned itself on my brain. It was like waking up one morning, looking out your window, and seeing the Taj Mahal over the back fence.

  Even more unbelievable, there were reasons to believe I might even have a shot at it. First of all, he had to give it away before he croaked, which, from the look of it, probably wasn’t going to be long. But Number Two, he thought I was V. S. Mohle, his lifelong enemy, the one he’d just about destroyed way back when. What was obvious was that he must have been feeling bad about the whole business for years, and if he wanted to die with a clear conscience, I was more than happy to oblige.

  But was I up for the task? Twenty million dollars. I just couldn’t get my head around it. It must have been the size of the annual budget of Greenland. When it came to lifting fifty or a hundred clams off a guy, I was your man, but this was something else. This was not going to be like a stroll up the hill with Jack and Jill, this was going to be a climb up Mount Everest. This was going to take preparation.

  Night after night I was up late, racking my brain, trying to come up with a scheme to bilk Schoeninger out of his millions. It was tough. I’m at my best with the greed and avarice crowd. What was going to work for an eighty-five-year-old Boy Scout, I wasn’t quite sure.

  Using the Web, I checked out what he’d already coughed up major cheese for besides the Fiction Institute—a western art exhibition, an annual folklore conference, a fund to help Russian émigré authors.

  It was all pretty uplifting stuff, not exactly my specialty, but I did my best, balling up one sheet of yellow paper after the other and tossing them in the general direction of the wastebasket. Was he really going to go for a center for Polynesian dance? A Nobel Prize Winners Wax Museum? An up-from-your-bootstraps choral group? A condensed version of Moby-Dick to be distributed free to all the Motel 6’s throughout the country?

  Schoeninger was no fool. He was going to see through this junk in a second. I needed to come up with something I could pull off fast. The last thing I needed was a proposal he would want to mull over, call in his lawyers to discuss. I was looking for the ultimate wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am kind of scheme.

  I missed Barry so much. Even though I was the brains of the outfit, I needed him to bounce things off of. Without him, I was struggling. But it is always amazing and humbling how often, when you’re in a real corner, God provides. At one in the morning on Friday, the answer came to me in a blinding flash: a Wampanoag Indian Museum.

  At first glance it might seem as crazed as all the other ideas I’d come up with, but the more I thought about it, the more it had going for it. There were the connections to the Pilgrims and early American history, which was right up Schoeninger’s alley, and there was the plight of an oppressed and once-noble race, always a crowd-pleaser. The fact that Mohle had been living on an island in Maine for twenty years made it plausible that he might have developed a certain interest in the local lore. The other thing I really liked about it was that this was an area where I had some background. For one of our more elaborate, though ultimately doomed, scams, Barry had me pose as a Mohegan chief so we could apply for a casino license.

  I woke up Chester at nine the next morning to tell him I had a little more library work for him.

  Saturday night I stood on Schoeninger’s doorstep, leaning forward to give the bell a long second ring. At seven in the evening it was still fiercely hot—the thermometer on the bank said 103—and I felt like I was about to expire. Under my arm I had a forty-dollar bottle of Beaujolais that I’d swiped from my landlady’s wine rack.

  Rubbing the back of my neck, I listened for some sign of life inside, and when I didn’t hear anything, I took a couple of steps back to check the windows. The house, if it was Schoeninger’s, was a disappointment. It was the kind of place where you might expect a disgraced accountant to live—a flat-roofed number with green shutters in need of paint, a shiny-leaved magnolia tree and a lawn turning to straw in the August heat.

  The knot in my stomach was tight enough to double over a weaker man. How was he not going to spot me as a fraud? The only time he and Mohle had ever met face-to-face was that night on the Cavett show, and that had been twenty-five years ago. That was an awfully long while, but was it long enough to save me?

  I was about ready to turn and walk back to my car when the door opened. A tall, hippy woman with a Wilma Flintstone beehive hairdo fixed me with an icy stare.

  “Yes?” she said, sounding as if she had law enforcement somewhere in her background.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Is this Rex Schoeninger’s?”

  “It is,” she said.

  “Oh, good,” I said. “I’m V. S. Mohle.”

  “I’m Ramona,” she said. “Please, come in. We were expecting you a little earlier.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Finding my way across town was more of a trick than I thought it would be.”

  “Mmm,” she said. I could see she was not the sort of person apologies really worked on. “Follow me.”

  We made our way down a narrow hall lined with dozens of framed awards that Schoeninger had collected over the years, plus a lot of old best-seller lists, laminated and preserved in redwood frames. Schoeninger sat on the edge of a couch in the living room, leaning on a silver-headed cane. Over the mantel was a huge poster for his newest book, Dakota.

  I’d expected Schoeninger to be old, but not this old. He was skin and bones, with sunken cheeks and glittery eyes. It was hard to believe this was the same beefy guy I’d seen on the Cavett show tape. His outfit was pretty bozo: a freshly pressed short-sleeved shirt, bolo tie, red running shoes with Velcro straps. His plaid trousers, cinched tight, were a couple inches short, riding up on shiny shins.

  “Evening,” I said. He stare
d at me for several seconds without saying anything. He cocked his head to one side, like a robin listening for a worm. I could see he was confused.

  “So it’s really you?” he said.

  “Oh, it’s me, all right,” I said. “For better or worse.” In the kitchen, the hawk-faced cook dropped English muffins into a pop-up toaster. “I apologize for keeping you waiting, but I kind of got turned around out there. But I brought you something.” I handed Schoeninger the bottle of Beaujolais.

  “I don’t drink,” he said, “but I’m sure Ramona would be happy to join you. Ramona, why don’t you open this for the man?”

  Ramona took the bottle without a word and headed for the kitchen. I sat down in an overstuffed blue chair opposite him. A mingy bowl of peanuts was on the table between us. Twenty million dollars, you would have thought the man could have afforded a few cashews.

  “So I understand you had a pretty lively first class.”

  “They kept me on my toes.”

  “You need to be careful not to let them run over you. They’re not quite the geniuses they think they are. But at least they’ve all read your work.”

  “I’m sure they’ve all read your work too.”

  “Oh, no. Let’s not kid ourselves. I write the kind of books their parents read.” He took a sip of his iced tea. “I can’t tell you how much this means to me. I’ve dreamt of this day for years. I know it took a lot of guts for you to do it. Most people wouldn’t have had the nerve.”

  “I didn’t feel as if I had a choice,” I said.

  “Neither of us did, did we?” He glanced toward the kitchen. “So are we about ready to eat?”

  The food was a disaster. I suppose for Ramona and Schoeninger it might have been passable—some dried-out chicken, burned English muffins, mashed potatoes and gravy—but since Mohle had the reputation of being a big-time vegetarian, the cook had specially prepared for me watery yellow squash, some dented peas, and a pile of Brussels sprouts.