Very slowly, I put the notebook back into its hiding spot, and slid the floorboard back into place. Then I sat there for several minutes, frozen, just staring at the wooden floor, my brain unable to come up with a single thought. I looked at the clock, then I got up, changed my clothes, brushed my bangs, slicked on some lipstick, and lit the candles on the card table. I used the flame to light a cigarette, and then smoked a second one after that. My hand trembled as I smoked. It was abnormally silent in the apartment as I sat and waited for Cliff to come home.
CLIFF
70
Things were going along more swimmingly than ever until, all at once, there was a Great Unraveling. The Great Unraveling started one afternoon when Eden came home from work in the middle of a Tuesday. I knew something was wrong when I heard her key turn in the lock of the apartment door.
“Are you sick again?” I asked her as she came in, because to look at her you might think this was the case. She was so pale her skin bordered on blue, like watered-down milk. I couldn’t figure out why she would come home in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon—except, to tell the truth, I could figure out why, and there were only two options: either she was sick or else she had very bad news. She looked at me now with her big, dark eyes and shook her head at my question.
“No,” she said. “Not sick. Mr. Nelson—I mean, your father—he gave me the afternoon off. He . . .” She hesitated. “He asked me to have you telephone him as soon as possible.”
I must’ve shot her a hell of a surprised look, because we hadn’t told My Old Man yet about the precise details of our relationship together, much less that we’d eloped months ago. She rushed to put my mind at ease—at least, on this score.
“He figured, since I mentioned I knew you through some mutual acquaintances, I could find you to deliver the message.”
“Oh,” I said. “But where’s the fire? I’m supposed to meet with him down at ol’ Bonwright in two days. What does he want to talk about that’s so urgent?”
“He didn’t say,” Eden replied. She looked at me and I looked at her and all of a sudden my stomach gave a deep and terrible lurch. I was possessed with the thought that this wasn’t going to be good news. If it was bad news . . . I knew exactly what it was My Old Man must’ve found out and why he might want to talk to me. I wasn’t ready to face whatever was bound to come next and I certainly wasn’t ready to ask Eden about what she did or didn’t know. If I thought she knew more than she was letting on, well, then I wouldn’t be able to look at her face. It would kill me. Eden was a nice enough gal but she was a little like my goddamned conscience, too, and I couldn’t bear to think of the way she would look at me if she knew.
“All right,” I said, forcing a casual voice. I’d been sitting around the apartment in my boxer shorts and now I reached for a pair of pants. “I’ll just run around the corner to McSorley’s.”
Eden frowned. She did not like McSorley’s. There were two joints—both Irish bars—within walking distance that sometimes let us use the telephone and even occasionally took down messages for us, but of the two, Eden infinitely preferred the other one. This was because, strictly speaking, she had never been to McSorley’s; the bar still held a long-standing tradition of not allowing women on the premises.
I would be lying if I didn’t say that’s why I chose it now. My pulse was racing and I was feeling that god-awful sense of manic terror. I was in some kind of state, and I didn’t want Eden to be able to come with me to make the phone call or follow me and listen in or any of that nonsense, and by going to McSorley’s at least I could be sure she would have to stay away.
But despite her frown she didn’t protest my proposal and that got under my skin even more. She had no intention of following me, which meant she knew the news was bad. Her reaction only revealed the fact she’d been lying when I’d asked her what My Old Man wanted to talk about and she told me: He didn’t say. It was plain he did say and that she was goddamned lying about it and playing dumb.
In less than three minutes I had my shoes on and was stamping down the stairs of the tenement, shouting good-bye to Eden over my shoulder.
Maybe it’s nothing, I tried to tell myself as I pushed through the front door and stumbled out onto the sidewalk in the direction of McSorley’s. Maybe he wants to change the pub date, or the crummy typeface or the jacket or something. Lord knows the book has become awful important to him and maybe the Old Man just wants to go over this-or-that detail of the publishing process. There was no way in hell the Old Man was going to pull it, I told myself. That simply wouldn’t make any sense. We had all come too far and galleys had already been printed besides.
The thing about McSorley’s was that somewhere early on in its establishment someone had gotten the genius idea that the bar should never change. I walked past the sagging barrels that lined the sidewalk outside and through the saloon doors that had seen more coats of paint than a battle-weary navy ship, and asked for the telephone at the bar. The bartender, Woody, recognized me. He nodded, reached under the counter, and slid the telephone across the ancient bar.
“Better make that collect if it ain’t local,” he warned. “We ain’t in the business of making charitable donations to Ma Bell, you know . . .”
“It’s local.”
He let me alone and I dialed.
“Hello?” my father answered after the fourth ring.
“It’s Cliff,” I said. “Eden told me you wanted to talk to me.” I shifted nervously. It was perpetually dim and gritty in old McSorley’s. There were peanut shells on the floor and I could feel some of them pressing into the worn-out leather soles of my shoes. I heard My Old Man sigh on the other end of the line and thought I heard the clink of the crystal decanter from his bar set touch the rim of a glass.
“You should know, Clifford, we’re canceling the contract.”
A surge of acid filled my throat. I didn’t say anything and neither did My Old Man and for a moment I thought maybe he’d gone and hung up.
“Clifford?” his voice came through the wire finally. “Well? What do you have to say for yourself?”
“About what?” I blurted out. While I had been filled with dread on the walk over to the bar, nonetheless it had shocked me to hear it aloud. I could not have been more short of breath if someone had sucker-punched me in the gut and knocked all the wind out of me. As though from a far distance, I heard My Old Man let out another sigh over the tinny wire of the telephone.
“Fine,” he said. “You’re going to play dumb. And why should I expect anything else from you?”
“Play dumb about what, Pops?” I needed to hear him say it.
“We received a letter yesterday. An anonymous tip. It took me all afternoon yesterday and all evening to figure out what to do about this information. But when I woke up this morning, Clifford, I knew exactly what I needed to do. And before you blame me, it turns out I haven’t any choice, anyway: the tipper sent a copy of the letter to Harry, so even if I wanted to protect you—which, quite frankly, I don’t—it’s out of my hands.”
I knew “Harry” meant Harrison Tanley, the publisher who sat at the top of the pecking order at Bonwright, and My Old Man’s boss.
“You’re lucky, Clifford, that no one is bringing a lawsuit against you. At least, I haven’t heard of any yet.”
“But . . . but . . .” I started to say. All of my sentences were only half-formed and I couldn’t get my lousy brain to work.
“But what?”
“But . . . just like that? Some anonymous chump sends a letter and makes a claim against me, and you cancel the book? It’s crazy. I haven’t done anything wrong! What did this tipper say I did, and what proof did he have?”
“I think, Clifford, you already know what I’m going to tell you. He said the book isn’t yours, that you didn’t write it, and that he can produce a copy of the manuscript written out in longhand if he needs to! T
he fucking humiliation of it all . . .”
Miles, I thought, recalling the intense look of hatred on Miles’s face when he burst into my apartment and roughed me up. What a lousy, rotten, jealous bastard. I’d let him get his licks in, and hadn’t even struggled, but evidently that wasn’t enough to satisfy him. He was after blood. No, scratch that. He was after my family, my reputation. My brain raced to the thought of Miles’s journal, and where I had stashed it in my studio. If that was the longhand copy he meant to threaten me with, he certainly wasn’t getting his hands on it anytime soon. If he meant his father’s journal, well . . . it would be my word against a Negro’s.
“Say, that’s awfully flimsy stuff,” I countered. “Anyone could write out a copy of the manuscript in longhand and go around pretending it’s his!”
Again, that terrible sigh came over the line. “I don’t think so, Clifford,” My Old Man said, sounding tired. “I was quite guarded about that manuscript . . . Eden was guarded . . . Very few people have ever seen it . . . Galleys only went to print last week.”
“How do we even know this copy exists? You don’t sound as though you even want to look into it,” I said. There was no use beating around the bush and I figured I might as well make the accusation plain. My Old Man had always been lousy when it came to looking out for my best interests, and this instance was shaping up to be no exception.
“I don’t need to look into it, Clifford.” His voice was stern and solemn and maybe a little drunk, too; when you listened closely you could hear the vague undertow of gin.
I don’t need to look into it, Clifford. There, he had done it again: knocked the wind out of me, cold. It wasn’t as though I could honestly claim I was surprised to hear those words . . . it was only that he was so firm in delivering them. His lack of belief in me was a foregone conclusion and I’d been an idiot to think he could ever be proud of me and behave like the true father I’d always wanted.
I started to bring up Brooklyn. It was time to tell My Old Man I’d known all along what a lousy crook he’d been to me and to my mother. I’d suffered in silence all this time and said nothing. Now it was time to tell My Old Man and let it blow him over sideways, as it damn well should. But before I could figure out how to really stick it to him, he took the upper hand and ended the call.
“Our lawyers will mail you the paperwork, Clifford,” he said, just before hanging up. “I recommend we handle this as quietly as possible, for everyone’s sake.” And then I heard a click.
• • •
“Everything fine?” Woody asked, seeing me holding the phone in front of my face, staring at the mouthpiece like some kind of goddamned cryptic puzzle covered in hieroglyphics.
“Just dandy,” I answered, after I’d had a chance to shake myself and pull it together. I put the receiver back in its cradle and slid the phone back across the bar. “Say, though . . . I’ll take a whiskey—I don’t care; whatever you got in the well—neat.”
Woody tucked the telephone back under the counter and poured me the drink. “Looks like you need this pretty bad,” he said. “On the house. But don’t go using us as your regular phone-booth, hear?”
It was a hollow warning and I’d hardly heard what he said but I nodded anyway. I was hopped up on a rush of emotions and higher than if I’d swallowed a whole handful of bennies and chased them with a bucket of Swish’s cowboy coffee. My legs were quivering and my armpits were cold as hell with an icy, ticklish sweat. I couldn’t believe My Old Man had found me out and I couldn’t think of any way out of the whole mess. It would only be a matter of time before Eden knew, too, if she didn’t know already, and the thought of this made my stomach turn sour all over again.
I was finally able to calm myself down with one thought—one question, really: What had I done that was so terrible, after all?
It was true that the original inspiration for my novel came from Miles and his stories about his old man, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t really my manuscript, because after all I’d made some pretty significant changes and what is writing anyway but art imitating life and you have to start with some kind of original seed. It’s what you do with it after that that matters. That’s what Miles’s composition book was: a seedling that I had the good eye to know could be nursed into something greater.
I could only think Miles had written that letter, even after the threat I’d hinted at about phoning in a tip of my own to the State Department about his lover. I was good and steamed. At first I thought there was nothing I wanted to do more than charge over to his house as he had charged over to mine and rough him up something awful.
But then another thought occurred to me, and I decided to go looking for Rusty instead.
MILES
71
I successfully avoided Joey for the better part of three weeks. I had come to the conclusion that I’d been right to leave well enough alone in San Francisco, and that the biggest error of my life was taking that Greyhound down to Washington, only to reignite our folly of a tryst. Now the plan—if it can be called anything remotely resembling an organized set of strategic ideas, that is—was to pretend remote indifference and watch his interest die a slow but permanent death. But Joey’s phone calls to me had grown increasingly strange. He was jumpy and paranoid, but refused to tell me why this was so over the telephone. I had my suspicions what it could be, of course, but was not eager to have these suspicions confirmed.
Yet I found it difficult, one Friday in particular, to refuse his plea for me to see him. He had already come up to New York on the train, he said. He had checked into the hotel where we’d stayed on his last visit, and desperately needed to see me. Something in his voice unnerved me. There was a frayed quality to it, something I’d never heard in Joey’s voice before. I found myself rankled, worried.
“It’ll take me a little while,” I said. “But I’ll be there in a bit.”
“Hurry” was all he replied, and hung up.
I had been spending some time with Cob, reading to him from our father’s journal before putting him to bed. It was well after ten o’clock by the time I left my mother’s apartment and hurried to the subway.
• • •
“Where have you been?” Joey demanded as soon as I stepped into the hotel room. I was startled by the paleness of his face. Dressed in only his shorts and an undershirt, he rushed at me as if he were some kind of apparition from a nightmare. I caught his shoulders in my hands—he was moving about erratically and I looked at him. He was cold to the touch and shaking; his skin was coated in a slick sheen of sweat.
“What’s wrong?” Hoping it might help his trembling, I steered him over to the bed and sat him down. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Miles,” he said. “Miles, this is very important . . . Do you think you might’ve been followed here?”
“Followed?” I said, not comprehending. “Followed by who?”
“Does anyone know you’re here?” he continued, not answering my question. “Does anyone know you came here, or that you regularly meet . . . meet . . . a friend?” His eyes were wide and round. He leaned closer and I smelled the sweetish malt of cheap whiskey on his breath.
“Did you drink all that on the train on the way in?” I asked, looking at a half-empty bottle on the dresser.
“Of course not,” he said. “I only drank it here. I wouldn’t dare drink in public; at this point it would only give them another reason to give me trouble.”
“Give you trouble? Who, Joey? Who?” I repeated, my terrible suspicions growing. His eyes slid over my face as though searching for something just beyond my shoulder, not quite seeing me.
“They questioned me,” he said. “At work. I didn’t believe they were there for me at first. I went to work like normal, and there they were. They were rifling through my desk like they owned the place! Then they took me into a room I’d never seen before. They asked me all kinds of question
s, Miles.”
“Who did?”
“Two investigators,” Joey replied. “From the FBI.”
I blinked. A peal of laughter unexpectedly burst forth from me. It was so terrible as to be the stuff of comedies. The picture of FBI agents interrogating Joey was grotesque, absurd.
“FBI? They’ve got to be kidding,” I said, more to myself than to Joey.
“This is serious,” Joey said. “You remember the papers, don’t you? All those headlines when Joe McCarthy went after a bunch of boys in the Army and in the State Department?”
I remembered.
“All right. I’m listening,” I said, swallowing with sudden difficulty. “Tell me everything.”
It had started off an ordinary morning. Joey went into the office in Foggy Bottom and as he’d passed by his secretary’s desk he asked her to fetch him a cup of coffee. Before she could bring it to him, however, he had a surprise encounter with two men standing over his desk, opening drawers and going through the contents.
“Can I help you?” he asked. Yes, he could, they affirmed. He could help them, if he didn’t mind sparing a few moments of his time. One of the men showed Joey a badge and he nodded at it in a daze. They led him through the building to a room he had never seen before. It was not an office. It was not a conference room. It was an interview room of sorts, a small, windowless space with a wooden table and three chairs.
“Have a seat,” one of the men invited. Joey did as instructed.
“Gosh, fellas, I’m confused. Did I apply for a promotion I’ve gone and forgotten about?” Joey joked. The men did not laugh. They were there for security reasons, they said. They both took their hats off and put them on the table, but neither sat down right away. Instead, they hovered over Joey and appraised him, looming tall and broad-shouldered in their gray double-breasted suits. His appearance there today was voluntary, they reminded him, and they thanked him for it. If he didn’t mind answering a few questions, then they were certain they could get everything cleared up in no time. “Sure,” Joey said, eager to be helpful. “No problem.”
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