Thirty-Nine
Tom Wolfe
A snail’s pace would have been an improvement. With a pair of snowshoes, I think I could have made it back to the Avenue H station a lot quicker than the Q train. We were doing okay in the tunnels, but once we hit the above-ground portion of the trip, forget it. The big drifts and deep snow had been cleared away, but the wind was still howling, creating new drifts, blowing downed tree branches across the already slick tracks. All I wanted to do was to get back to my apartment and retreat into the pages of GunChurch. I understood the motives of my characters far better than the reasons for the knot in my gut.
In some sense, of course, I was quite relieved that the subways were running and to have escaped the increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere in Amy’s loft. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed that the fantasy of Kip and Amy, part two, had sprung a leak. Even when I quietly crawled back into bed at around four thirty, I knew Amy was in that same bad place I was in. She was as awake as I was, but feigning sleep. That was okay by me. It saved me from having to be the one to pretend. I passed out eventually and woke up as Amy was closing the door behind her. She hadn’t bothered to leave a note. I was glad of that. What could it have said? I showered and got out of there in less than fifteen minutes. As I walked out the front of Amy’s building, I looked across the street to where I thought I’d seen Renee. She wasn’t there. She had never been there. I wasn’t hallucinating, just projecting: seeing who I wanted to see, hearing what I wanted to hear.
I was losing it. I knew what that felt like. You do as many drugs and consume as much alcohol as I had on a regular basis, you’re going to have episodes when you lose it. Sometimes it blindsides you and you wake up in the psych ward crawling out of your own skin, but then it’s over, like a twenty-four-hour virus, and you move on. It’s far worse when you can feel it coming on, when you’re an impotent witness to your own deconstruction. When you feel the stitches holding the illusion of yourself together begin to stretch and pop, and you can’t sew fast enough to keep the stuffing in. In the end, you just stop trying and let the seams rip. That’s what this was like.
For fuck’s sake, I knew the transition from Brixton back to New York was going to be a difficult proposition under the best of circumstances and these were far from the best of circumstances. I don’t recommend killing a man, even a world-class asshole like Stan Petrovic, the evening before you begin life anew. But that wasn’t all of it, not nearly. Beyond conjuring up the sound of Jim’s truck and hallucinating Renee, there was Amy, and there was me.
Then, as if to put an exclamation point on my tenuous grip on things, a plug-ugly, thick-necked guy got on the train at DeKalb Avenue: Stan Petrovic. Maybe it was the way he hobbled to his seat on bad knees or maybe he really looked like Stan. He sat directly across from me on the near-empty subway car. On closer inspection, as ugly as he was, he didn’t look like Stan all that much. Though his attitude wasn’t far different.
“What the fuck you staring at?” he said to me, menace in his voice.
“Sorry. I was just lost in thought there for a minute.” I walked to the opposite end of the car to wait for my stop.
The entrance to my apartment was around the rear of the house and my landlord was out clearing a path with his snow blower, the whine of its gas motor an unpleasant reminder of the generator we used at the chapel. The blower was shooting out a cloud of already graying snow onto Avenue H. When he saw me coming, he powered down the blower and walked towards me.
“Good morning to you, Mr. Weiler. You don’t look so good. Long night?”
“Too long, yeah. Got trapped in the City. Train ride home took forever.”
“I got a package for you inside.”
“Package?”
“Yeah, my daughter found it on the front porch yesterday afternoon. She brought it up, but you weren’t in. Come, I have it in my apartment.”
I followed him through the door and up the backstairs. He lived on the second floor, his divorced daughter and her five-year-old daughter on the first. As we went, Isaac made small talk about the weather and his wife’s bad back. Apparently, any kind of precipitation made her pain that much worse.
“Wait here,” he said, disappearing into his apartment.
I stood on the landing, the floorboards creaking under my feet. The old place had charm, but it needed a lot of work. The appliances and fixtures in my flat were museum pieces and the paint on the walls so thick, it was thicker than the walls themselves. My house in Brixton was much the same. I wondered how Renee was doing there, alone, and if she was old enough to appreciate charm. Renee, it seemed, was much on my mind lately.
“Here we go,” Isaac said, handing me a yellow nine-by-twelve envelope. It was less than an inch thick and not very heavy. “I got to get back down there and finish clearing the path. I don’t want no one slipping and breaking their tuchus on my sidewalk. Lawsuits, I don’t need.”
As I trudged upstairs, I noticed that although it was a mailing envelope, it hadn’t, in fact, been mailed. My name was scrawled across the front of the envelope in black marker. I didn’t recognize the handwriting. Handwriting! Who handwrote anything anymore? It was no doubt several copies of some document-a foreign rights contract, I hoped-from Meg or Dudek that required my signature. I squeezed together the metal prongs of the clasp that held the flap closed, pulled the flap back, and slid the contents out.
My heart missed a beat for the second time that morning. Bound with a flimsy rubber band, it wasn’t a contract at all, but a photocopied copy of a chapter from a typewritten manuscript. Not only did I recognize the pages as having been typewritten, I knew the exact machine-a portable Smith Corona-on which they had been typed. I immediately recognized the editorial notes as Moira Blanco’s. Although the writer’s name appeared nowhere on the pages, I was intimately familiar with his work. His name was Kenneth James “Kip” Weiler and the chapter was from the original manuscript of Flashing Pandora. There was just one problem, a daunting one at that: the copy of the chapter I was holding couldn’t possibly exist.
I needed to sit down.
All previous indications I was losing it-the sound of Jim’s truck, the faint glow of a taillight, my building a vision of Renee out of a fleeting glimpse of a profile from three stories up through a driving snowstorm, seeing Stan Petrovic’s look-alike on the subway-had been ethereal at best, products of my wishes and worries. These pages were something else again. They were tangible proof I was skating along the razor’s edge, about to fall off. And this wasn’t just any chapter from any book. This was the chapter from Flashing Pandora that Moira had had me completely rewrite, the chapter in which Harper Marx had pulled a Colt Python on Kant Huxley and Pandora outside CBGB. I was freaked and ready to throw my recent Boy Scout behavior right the fuck out the window. Brooklyn didn’t lack for bars. I called Meg Donovan instead.
“Kip Weiler, how are you?”
“A long way away from good, Meg.”
“What’s wrong with your voice? You’re not high, are you?”
“Not yet.”
“Not yet! What do you mean, not yet? You promised me you-”
“Did you have a package messengered over to me?”
“Package? What package? No, I didn’t have-”
“How about your assistant? Did she-”
“No, Weiler, there was no package, at least not from us. What are you talking about?”
“Maybe from Dudek?”
“I can check, but he wouldn’t have anything to send you at this stage of things. You know the drill, you won’t get anything from him until you hand in the manuscript and they generate galley proofs. In any case, no one’s messengering anything to anyone in this weather. What’s this about?”
“I think I’m going nuts, Meg.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“This isn’t funny. I’m imagining things.”
“What kind of things?”
“It’s not important. This p
ackage is what’s important.”
“We’re back to that again. You want to play Twenty Questions or tell me what’s in the damned thing?”
“Something that can’t be in it.”
“Look, Kip, I’m a fucking agent, not a mind reader.”
“Did you keep a copy of my manuscript for Flashing Pandora?”
“Of course not. You remember how crazy Moira was about loose copies of manuscripts. These days, it’s all done electronically. In those days, Jesus, Moira was always so paranoid about anyone seeing a book before it was ready. But you know all of this, Kip. What’s this got to do with anything?”
“Inside this package there’s a copy of a chapter from Flashing Pandora that Moira cut out of the book.”
“The chapter with the gun, when Harper Marx kills Pandora?”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Because it pissed you off to no end. You said you knew Moira was right, but you were a kid genius then and didn’t like being overruled, not even by Moira. It took me two weeks to talk you down from the ledge and to get you to rewrite it.”
“That’s right. I forgot that part. Some kid genius, huh?”
“So what’s the big deal?” she asked.
“Because there’s only one copy of it and it was mine.”
“I still don’t see why the fuss. Someone must’ve gotten a hold of your papers and made a copy of that chapter.”
“They couldn’t have.”
“Why not?”
“Because when Ferris, Ledoux remaindered Flashing Pandora, I did a Tom Wolfe. I got totally fucked up and made a bonfire of my vanities. I burned the original manuscripts for all my old books and cooked hot dogs over the fire. I particularly enjoyed feeding this chapter to the fire one page at a time.”
For once, Meg didn’t have a snarky, sharp-tongued answer. “I don’t know, Kip,” was the best she could do. “Did anyone see who delivered it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, maybe you better make sure before you get fitted for a straitjacket and reserve a padded room at Kings County.”
“Okay, Meg.”
“This probably isn’t a good time to ask, but how did things go with-”
“Not now, Donovan. I can’t talk about Amy now.”
I hung up before she could ignore me. I put the pages back into the envelope and walked down the backstairs to the first floor. Isaac’s daughter, Rachel, was in her mid-thirties and like her dad, she had a friendly demeanor. She was cute in a chubby, earth mama kind of way, but raising her kid on her own was taking its toll on her and she was fraying around the edges.
“Mr. Weiler,” Rachel said, pulling back the door, her daughter clutched tightly to her leg. Her daughter stared up at me with skepticism and disdain. Sharp kid. Rachel immediately started finger combing her dyed blond hair. “My goodness, I’m a mess. Sara, say hello to Mr. Weiler.” Sara shook her head no. “Sorry, she gets shy with people.”
“That’s okay.”
“What can I do for-” she cut herself off, noticing the yellow envelope in my hand. “I found it on the porch yesterday, but you were out.”
“Your dad told me. I wanted to thank you.”
“Not a problem. All I did was take it in off the porch.”
“I wanted to ask you, did you happen to see who delivered it?”
“I’m sorry, no. I was in the kitchen and heard something on the front steps, but by the time I got outside … ”
Sara started tugging furiously at her mother’s faded Brooklyn College sweatshirt.
“What is it, honey?”
Sara waved to her mother that she had a secret to tell and Rachel leaned over. When she did, Sara cupped her hands around her mouth and whispered into her mother’s ear.
“Thank you, honey. Is it okay if I tell Mr. Weiler? It might be important to him.”
Sara thought about it for a second and then nodded a reluctant yes.
“Sara says the girl who put the package on the porch had hair like Mommy’s. So I guess that means she was blond.”
“A girl. Was she a little girl like you?” I asked in a quiet but serious voice. I was often terrible with adults, but I was good with kids. Amy used to say that was because I’d never actually grown up. I repeated the question. “Was she a little girl like you?”
Sara clamped her mouth shut and shook her head no. The girl who had delivered the package was not a kid. This was progress of a sort.
“Was she a grownup lady like your mom?”
Same response.
“Was she pretty like your mom?”
Rachel blushed and even Sara’s disdain abated a bit, but she didn’t answer. Instead, she ran into the apartment and came back holding a magazine. She held it out to me. It was a woman’s magazine like Elle or Vogue, and the cover girl was a neutral-faced blond, her skin masked in elaborate makeup. She had soft blue eyes and the cheekbones of a goddess. I got lightheaded, but tried to hold it together.
I asked, “The girl who put the package on the porch looked like this?”
Sara nodded yes, finally smiling with pride.
“Sara, if I showed you a picture of someone I think might be the girl, would you recognize her?”
“Uh huh.” She spoke directly to me for the first time.
It took me about fifteen minutes to dig through the boxes and find what I was looking for. It was a copy of the Brixton Banner from the day after Frank Vuchovich had held my class hostage. A reporter had taken a shot of my students as they emerged from Halifax Hall. It wasn’t the greatest photo, but you could make out their faces well enough. By the time I got back downstairs, Rachel had managed to brush her hair and put on some makeup.
“Listen, Sara, I really appreciate this. You’re a smart girl. I’m going to show you a picture from a newspaper. If you see the girl in the picture, point to her. But if you don’t see her, that’s okay too. I mean it. You’ve done a great job whether you see her or not.”
I folded the front page in half to hide the headline and held it out to Sara. Without any hesitation, she pointed at the picture.
“That girl,” she said, tapping her finger on the paper.
Indeed, it was the girl, the St. Pauli Girl.
“Thank you, Sara. Thanks, Rachel. I really appreciate the help.”
“Is anything wrong?” Rachel asked.
“Not at all,” I lied. “Just an old friend playing a practical joke on me.”
“Okay, then, is there anything else we can do for you?” There was both hope and disappointment in Rachel’s question.
“Not right now, no. Thanks again.”
My walk back upstairs was a long and shaky one. So I hadn’t been imagining things. Well, at least not everything, though I wasn’t sure that was necessarily a good thing. Renee was here. Maybe Jim, too, and I was being followed. Their presence suggested all kinds of questions that were making my head pound, but the questions worried me a lot less than their potential answers.
Forty
Pascal
A week had come and gone since the chapter arrived and only I seemed to have taken notice. The world kept spinning and no one, as far as I could discern, was losing sleep over the yellow envelope on my kitchen table. After three days of frying my brain with wild scenarios and conspiracy theories, I too moved on. What choice did I have, really? I’d finally unpacked all my boxes and set up shop like a man who meant to stay put for a little while. I had cable TV and Internet installed. The snowstorm that had paralyzed the area for days was no longer a subject on everyone’s lips. All that remained of the two feet of snow were soot-blackened lumps where great mounds of it had been piled up and compacted by the plows. The rest of the snow had melted away, Jim and Renee receding along with it.
It’s not like I hadn’t searched for them at every turn and around every corner. God, my neck was sore from snapping my head about to look behind me. Sometimes, usually after a few hours of writing, I’d purposely go for long, leisurely
runs to make myself an easy target for prying eyes, but it was a wasted effort. I didn’t hear the scrape and rattle of Jim’s truck or catch sight of a mysterious blond lurking in the shadows. No one on the street or in Prospect Park particularly reminded me of anyone else.
I’d nearly convinced myself that Sara had gotten it wrong and that she’d picked Renee in the newspaper photo because she looked like the model on the magazine cover. I knew enough about little kids to realize that they have trouble separating fact from fantasy-me too, apparently-that kids can be suggestible, and that they sometimes do what they think grown-ups want them to do. Still, there was no explaining away the chapter. And though I’d done my level best to ignore the damned envelope, it, unlike Renee and Jim, hadn’t melted away with the snow.
Meg called several times to check in with me to see if I was still at loose ends or if I’d broken my promises to her. One of the ways I knew I’d killed off the Kipster was that it hurt me now to hear the expectation of disappointment in Meg’s voice. It had once been a point of pride with me, my ability to disappoint those closest to me beyond their wildest dreams. I’d disappointed so many people in my lifetime, but only a few of them mattered. I wondered if there were some debts so large they could never be paid off, if I would ever again be able to prove myself worthy of trust. It was easy to understand why some people in my position would just give up and slide back into their weaknesses.
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