Famous Writers I Have Known

by James Magnuson

  Ramona launched into a history of the place and was doing a good job, but after a couple of minutes Rex lost interest and plopped down at a picnic table. Francesca was quick to join him.

  “So Rex,” she said, “I hear one of your students sold her novel for a lot of money.”

  Rex gave a tired smile. “Isn’t that something?”

  “Oh, it is,” she said. “It’s very exciting.”

  Pigeons strutted across the gravel, looking for food. Nasty, pigeons. Barry always used to tell me that the most vicious animals in the world were the rabbit and the pigeon, and I believe him. I rubbed at my eyes. Tequila, I tell you, it’s the devil’s drink.

  “It looks as if she’s on her way,” Rex said. “Now all we need to do is figure out what to do with the rest of them.”

  “It’s a problem, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Oh, it is,” Rex said.

  “Dudley and I were just talking about this.”

  “Really?” Rex said.

  “Please, Francesca,” Stainforth said. He helped Ramona pull her shawl over her shoulders. “This is not the time.”

  “No, go ahead,” Rex said. “I want to hear.”

  Francesca looked up at Stainforth with those big almond eyes of hers. “Is it all right?”

  “Whatever Rex wants, that’s fine,” Stainforth said, his fingers still resting lightly on Ramona’s back. I could tell from the glow on her face that she liked it.

  “Well, anyway,” Francesca said, “for some time now we’ve been talking about how to make ourselves more relevant, how to open ourselves up to the modern world a bit.” She tossed back her wonderful mane of hair. “And one of the ideas we’ve been playing with is offering talented young writers like your students six-month residencies.”

  My ears perked up, and not in a good way. “Residencies?” I said.

  “You have some opinion about residencies?” Rex said.

  “Not really,” I said. I should have stopped right there, but I’d had a couple of margaritas. “I’m no expert, of course, but I’ve gotten to know Rex’s students fairly well. I’m not sure another residency is what they need. You don’t want them to get too pampered.”

  Rex’s face clouded over. “Pampered?” he said.

  “You know what I mean? You don’t want to hand them everything on a silver platter. Isn’t it about time for them to go out and get a dose of the real world?”

  “Oh, they’ll be getting a dose of that soon enough.” He chewed on his upper lip for a couple of seconds. The thing about Rex was, when he got his dander up you could usually see it coming. “The point is that we need to help them however we can. Those young people over there are going to be the great writers of the next generation.” I was sure he had to be kidding, but it didn’t look as if he was. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. He caught me at it. “You don’t agree?”

  “Rex, there’s no way you can know that. They’re just kids.”

  His jaw tightened, set like an old sturgeon. “I’ve read their work. Have you?”

  “Some of it, yeah.”

  “I promise you, they’re going to leave us in the dust. Not to mention, they’re not going to be wasting half their lives in petty feuds.”

  I would have laughed out loud if I’d dared. What did Rex know? Maybe they wouldn’t get involved in feuds, but they certainly weren’t above running off to Las Vegas with their buddy’s girlfriend. I looked over my shoulder. A bunch of parents and toddlers loaded onto a kiddie train.

  “I’m sorry, Francesca,” Rex said. “You were saying . . .”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Anyway, we’ve just started a building campaign to put up these nice little bungalows.”

  “Good for you,” Rex said.

  “We see it as a kind of refuge,” she said. “Sort of a modern-day version of the monastic retreat.”

  “A little like Yaddo then?” Rex said.

  “But different. Think Yaddo with Etruscan tombs,” Stainforth said.

  “And a Roman aqueduct just up the road.”

  They were good, these two. Real pros. And where was Ramona, now that she was needed? Totally smitten. The defenses had been breached.

  From far off I heard the rattle of a diving board, a whoop, a splash. I spied a greasy packet of abandoned french fries on the far bench of the picnic table. I retrieved it and began to toss bits of the soggy fries to the pigeons and squirrels.

  “We know there are a lot of residencies,” Francesca said. “But we think this could be something special.” She recrossed those long beautiful legs of hers and put her hand on Rex’s sleeve, talking only to him.

  “The location alone . . . just to be surrounded by the examples of the great classical authors . . . to walk the same hills that Dante walked, to breathe the same air that Petrarch breathed. I think it could force these young writers to set their sights a little higher.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Rex said. Pigeons soared in from everywhere, nearly taking Ramona’s head off.

  “And I’ve also had this idea,” Francesca said.

  “Please, tell me,” Rex said.

  “Now I know this will sound really crazy, but I’ve even thought of inviting opera singers.”

  My head came up. Could she be serious? I’ve never been to an opera, but I’ve seen a little of it on TV when nothing else was on, barrel-chested characters wandering around the stage in wigs and buckle shoes.

  “Rex loves the opera,” Ramona said.

  “Ramona, how perfect!” Francesca slapped her hands and turned back to Rex. “Don’t you think your students could get a lot out of that? It would be wonderful for them to attend a master class and see how hard these singers work.”

  “Christ A-mighty!”

  Everyone turned to stare as if that had come from me. And I guess it must have.

  “You have a problem with that?” Rex said.

  I tossed the last couple of limp fries into the mob of thrashing birds. “I don’t know if it’s a problem, but I just don’t think your students would be all that excited by the idea of hanging out with a bunch of opera singers.”

  “So who would they be excited by?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Barry White, maybe.”

  Not a flicker of recognition from any of them. “Barry White?” Rex said.

  “You know. The Walrus of Love. ‘Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe.’ ”

  The way they gaped at me, you would have thought I was speaking Chinese. “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Rex said.

  “It’s not going to work, Rex! You can’t make somebody a great writer, no matter how much you give them. They’re going to do it or they’re not. You had to make sacrifices to be a writer. Why shouldn’t they?”

  His eyes narrowed, as if he suspected that I knew more than I was supposed to have known. “Maybe because I wouldn’t want anybody to have to go through what I went through,” he said. He kicked at one of the pigeons, sent it fluttering away, and looked up at Stainforth. “So I take it you’re looking for partners?”

  “We are,” Stainforth said. “But please, let’s be clear about this. We’re not asking you for money.”

  “Absolutely not,” Francesca said.

  “And why not?” Rex leaned forward, the cuffs of his plaid trousers riding up on his gleaming shins.

  “It wouldn’t be right,” Stainforth said. “Here we are, giving you this big prize. It would look terrible.”

  “I don’t care how it would look,” Rex said. A lifeguard’s whistle sounded in the distance. “If it would make you more comfortable, I could give it anonymously. No one needs to know.” Francesca and Stainforth glanced at each other. Nothing was supposed to come this easy. “So how much is it going to cost you?”

  “What did we say, Francesca?” Stainforth said. “We were looking at those figures the other day.”

  “Let’s see now. We were thinking fifteen to twenty bungalows.” She brushed a leaf from Rex’s lapel. “And then there’s th
is extraordinary sixteenth-century church we were hoping to restore for readings and concerts . . . I’d say five million.”

  Black disks spun before my eyes like the wheels of Roman chariots. I was about to pass out. Ramona raised a finger to lodge an objection, but Rex put a hand up to stop her.

  “Consider it done,” he said. He rocked forward several times, trying to get up. Stainforth took his elbow and eased him to his feet. “And now, if you don’t mind, I need to go home and take a nap.”

  Walking back to the van, I limped along behind the others. I felt as if I’d been pole-axed. Five million dollars? Rex was giving them my five million dollars? Whatever our differences, I’d always considered Rex to be a man of his word. But just the week before he’d told me he was tapped out. Now apparently he wasn’t. What was I supposed to do? Put on a spectacular red dress and start batting my big almond eyes?

  Maybe it was my own fault. I was the one who’d given my blessing to this unholy alliance, and now I was paying the price. But it was a killer.

  Waiting as everybody wrestled Rex into the van, I glanced up at the hill above the parking lot. A boy stood in the trees, staring down at us. He was ten or eleven, shivering in his bathing suit. He had something pressed to his chest, a towel, probably, but given the state I was in, it was hard not to imagine that it was a teddy bear, held close, and that it was snow, not light, flickering through the branches, a snow that was only going to keep falling harder and harder.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When I got back to my house, I kicked into high gear. I phoned Chester and told him I had a task for him. I asked him to go to the library, collect anything he could find by Dudley Stainforth, and bring it to me, the earlier the better. As soon as I hung up, I sat down at the computer and began to do some serious checking on my own.

  On the surface, everything looked legit. The man had credentials up the wazoo. Princeton undergraduate, All-Ivy squash player, Rhodes Scholar, Harvard Ph.D., winner of the Prix de Rome and a Guggenheim, some big-deal translation of The Divine Comedy, seven years on the Yale faculty, before putting together the Vita Nuova Prize.

  I found a list of all the previous winners, which wasn’t that useful, since I didn’t recognize any of them—Günter Grass, Nadine Gordimer, Milan Kundera, Kenzaburō Ōe, Maguib Mahfouz, Wisława Szymborska.

  The pictures were more helpful, a lot of them of Stainforth placing a chunky gold medal around the neck of some white-haired old geezer or strolling with a group of tuxedoed donors through a courtyard where water rushed from the eroded mouths of lions. Maybe I was just making it up, but it seemed to me that in nearly every photograph, Stainforth had just a trace of a smirk, the look of a man who was used to being the cock of the walk.

  Around six, I went for a walk to clear my head, and when I got home there was a stack of books on my front stoop, three volumes of Stainforth’s translation of The Divine Comedy and a skinny collection of essays on the Borgias.

  I spent all of Monday morning stewing over what my next move was going to be. I thumbed through Stainforth’s version of The Divine Comedy (what a nasty piece of work that is!) and then got back on the computer to see what else I could dig up. There had to be a pissed-off ex-girlfriend out there somewhere, a whiff of a scandal, some old enemy willing to talk, but I’ll be damned if I could find anything.

  I did come up with a few articles about the Vita Nuova Prize. Most of them were in Italian and the half dozen I found in English were at least ten years old. I read statements from the judges and excerpts from the writers’ acceptance speeches, which were mostly about agony and sweat, sorrow and beauty, whether or not we could survive as a species. Your basic climb-every-mountain stuff.

  You ever see a dog when he knows there’s a rat under the porch and he can’t get at it? It drives him out of his mind. That’s how I was. Stainforth was a phony. It oozed out of him like oil out of a smoked chub. The problem was I couldn’t prove it.

  Early that afternoon I called Rex’s, hoping to have a candid conversation with him, but Ramona was there to intercept. She said he was having a nap, but she let me know that they’d had the most wonderful lunch with Stainforth and Francesca. They’d ended up at the office of the president of the university and he’d gotten so excited about their idea he’d called in the provost and the director of development to join them.

  “He went for the bit about the opera singers?” I asked.

  “He thought it was fantastic. I think that’s probably what sold him on the whole idea.”

  “Isn’t that something?” I said. “Listen, Ramona, I was wondering if Rex would have any time in the next few days. I’d love to sit down, catch up a bit.”

  Her voice went cool as a doorman’s. “Of course. One of the things Rex mentioned to me this morning . . . we’re flying to Big Bend on Thursday. He’s got some research to finish up. He wanted to know if you’d like to go with us.”

  “I’d love to,” I said. “And what about Stainforth and Francesca?”

  “They’re leaving tomorrow,” she said. “But they’ll be back soon enough. It’s amazing how this has all taken on a life of its own.”

  There was no more time for shilly-shallying. Tuesday morning, after a cup of coffee and some toast, I sat down at the phone with a list of every name I’d been able to find that had anything to do with the Vita Nuova Prize—donors, judges, staff, interns, the works.

  You ever try to make an international phone call? Do you have any idea how many numbers you have to punch in? You get one wrong, you have to start all over again, and even if you get it right, you’re probably going to get somebody who doesn’t speak English.

  I must have been on the phone for eight hours straight. It was mind-numbing work. For most of the names on the list, I was never able to track down a number. A lot of the time, even if I had a number, nobody would answer or I’d get a machine, in which case I’d just hang up. When I got somebody who only spoke Italian, I’d get off as quick as I could.

  I was able to reach maybe twenty people who spoke passable English. Most of those were pretty much what you’d expect. They went on and on about how wonderful it was, and a couple of the ex-interns remembered working for Stainforth as being the most glorious summer of their lives.

  But then there was this other handful. The line I was using was that I was writing an article for Harper’s on the Vita Nuova Prize, and as soon as I said that, several of them hung up on me. One woman burst into tears. A former donor who built heavy machinery in St. Louis kept repeating, “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  A professor from Manchester, England, who’d served as a judge during the early days of the prize, lit into me. He wanted to know who I was and why I would be writing such a thing. He bombarded me with questions. Did Stainforth know I was doing this? And what was the name of my editor at Harper’s?

  “I want you to know that I haven’t spoken to any of these people for years,” he said. “I’ve washed my hands of the whole affair.”

  “But why would you need to wash your hands?” I said.

  “It’s none of your damn business,” he said. “It was a grand idea. And in some ways he did a grand job.”

  “And in other ways he didn’t?”

  “Young man, I do not need you putting words in my mouth! I wasn’t born yesterday. I know perfectly well what you’re after, but you’re not going to get it from me. Good day!”

  When he slammed down the phone, it sounded as if it echoed halfway across the Atlantic.

  It was getting discouraging. I pressed my fingers to my eyes and then glanced at the clock. It was four and I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast.

  I walked over to Guadalupe and had myself some soggy sweet-and-sour pork, which helped settle my nerves. Eight hours on the phone, and what did I have to show for it besides a crick in the neck? Oh, I suppose you could say that I’d made progress. I now knew that somebody was hiding something, but as Barry used to say, that and a token will get you a ride on the IRT.
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  My next move came to me in a dream, or something close to it. I woke up before dawn on Wednesday, listening to the thud of newspapers in driveways, the cooing of doves. I must have been lying there for an hour, letting little wisps of things float in and out of my brain like leaves on a slow-moving stream.

  It was so obvious. The only people I hadn’t contacted were the actual winners of the Vita Nuova Prize. I suppose there were good reasons why I hadn’t. Not only were world-famous writers going to be a bitch to track down, but they were going to be surrounded by a wall of people like Ramona whose job it was to keep people like me as far away as possible.

  But on the other hand, I knew about famous writers, being one myself. There wasn’t anything special about them. It wasn’t as if they were rock stars or Wall Street bankers or Jerry Seinfeld. They were just ordinary Joes who’d been sitting at their desks for years moving little men around their little toy towns. And if anybody was going to be able to tell me about Stainforth, they could.

  But what could I offer them that would coax them out of their holes? Another prize? These guys had enough prizes to choke a horse. A teaching gig? Pathetic. A cover story with a big-time magazine? Fat chance. No, I was going to have to offer them something they were all hungry for, no matter how much they denied it: a major movie deal.

  After a quick breakfast, I went out to the screen porch in back with my phone and started punching in numbers for Paris, London, Tokyo, Warsaw.

  I was too careful at first. Afraid of setting off a firestorm of calls to Hollywood, all I said to the various lackeys was that a very prominent director was interested in adapting their boss’s work to the screen. When they asked for the name, I said I could not divulge that at this time. That didn’t cut much ice with anyone, though Kenzaburō Ōe’s assistant promised to pass on the information.