Novelists

by C. P. Boyko

  Gercheszky told the girl a little about the marriage and the divorce.

  “Oh!” The girl clapped her hands. “You’re ‘Eva’!”

  Gercheszky’s ex-wife told the girl that certain facts had been distorted in the novel, and cited several instances. Gercheszky explained to the girl the concept of artistic license. His ex-wife explained to the girl the concept of eating shit and dying.

  They had a beautiful argument, which everyone gathered round to watch.

  Later, at another stupid party, Gercheszky read aloud passages from his fourth novel, breaking in periodically to explain how today he would write it differently. His haggard audience (the host and the hostess—everyone else had gone home hours ago) listened obediently, with the respect they believed due a great novelist, till long after the sun came up and Gercheszky’s voice grew hoarse. When he caught them nodding off, he tore the book in half and threw the halves at their heads. “Go!” he screamed. “Sleep! Who’s stopping you?” He stormed out of the apartment, then immediately returned, contrite. “I’ll stay on the couch. Not even a peep will I make. I’ll cook us all breakfast, the real traditional Jewish breakfast of Old Montreal.”

  Everybody knew by this time that Paddy Gercheszky was neither Jewish nor Québécois; that he had grown up in a suburb of Toronto; that he was not an orphan; that he was not even Paddy Gercheszky—his real name was Patrick Gurchase. But they all pretended not to know, because they liked Paddy, more or less, and anyway had known him longer than they had known his biographer (whom they no longer invited to their parties). Also, perhaps, they did not want to admit that they had been fooled. They chose to believe that they had always known there was something fishy about Paddy’s stories, and that it hadn’t mattered because he’d told them so well. As they say in Yiddish: You don’t ask questions of a story.

  But now his friends just wanted some sleep. “Aw, come on, Paddy. Don’t be like that. There’ll be other parties.”

  Long ago, at a better party, someone else had said words like these to him.

  He’d been the life of that party: telling jokes, singing and dancing, trading insults with his uncles, entertaining everyone—his parents, his eight older siblings, and all their friends. And then they’d sent him to bed.

  Alone in his room while the fun went on without him, he felt angry at first, then frightened, then strange. He felt tingly and insubstantial—like he didn’t have a body, like he didn’t exist.

  Later, his mother sat with him amidst the wreckage—apparently he’d thrown a tantrum—and ran her fingers through his hair to calm him. “Paddy, Paddy,” she said, “won’t you ever go to sleep? The world will still be here in the morning.”

  But that was what he was afraid of: that the world would always be there; there when he woke, there when he slept; that it would just go on being there, whether he was part of it or not.

  Riding down alone in the elevator, Gercheszky remembered none of this. He popped a sleeping pill so that he would pass out as soon as he got home. He had no more novels to dictate.

  Downstairs in the lobby, the night watchman recognized him. Snapping his fingers, he said, “Hey, aren’t you—”

  “No,” said Gercheszky, then added benevolently, “but I get that all the time.”

  The night watchman was offended. He had often seen Gercheszky on TV—the TV behind this very desk. Gercheszky should have been amazed by the coincidence and flattered by the recognition. After all, how many people sat up all night watching old reruns of Hal Patly? How many people had sat up night after night listening to Paddy Gercheszky whine about his childhood, kvetch about sex, and repent his marriage? The night watchman felt that he knew Gercheszky intimately, as few did. He and Gercheszky had shared a bond.

  Well, to hell with Gercheszky. The night watchman was glad he’d never bought any of his books. They probably stunk.

  Few do read Gercheszky’s books these days—unless it is to point out where they deviate from fact. The interest in Gercheszky has shifted since his death almost entirely from the work to the man himself. The biographies now outnumber the novels by a factor of four, with more on the way each year. A Hollywood film, starring funny man Kyle Lipton, is purportedly in the works.

  It is hard at first to imagine that Gercheszky would mind this trend. But then one realizes that if his life or his childhood had been more interesting, he would never have needed to become a novelist at all. If not the savvy investor, bold entrepreneur, politician, or movie star that he sometimes dreamed of being, he would surely have become in fact what he could only pretend in this life to be: a great memoirist masquerading as a novelist to avoid lawsuits.

  I think the trend towards biography is unfortunate, because Gercheszky was a great storyteller. He had an instinct for what to borrow and what to leave out. His books, I believe, represent the best of him. The novelist is a sort of sculptor who hews and polishes the rough block of his life down to something beautiful and elegant. The literary biographer by contrast scrutinizes the dust and rubble on the floor, and would happily obscure the sculpture in his effort to restore the rough block to its original state. But I suppose that in writing this character sketch I am guilty of the same desecration.

  The biographer of another novelist once said that poetry always triumphs over history—by which he meant that a lie well told always outlives the truth. Although parts of his legend survive—this story is called “Paddy Gercheszky” and not “Patrick Gurchase”—I am afraid that, for once, history will triumph over poetry.

  THE DOOR IN THE WALL

  “HERE, DUCK. Here, ducky duck.”

  Laurel Peggery sat on the edge of a park bench, scattering hunks of bread in an appetizing arrangement across the gravel bank. The duck, however, was grooming himself and took no notice.

  She was a tall, sturdy, stolid woman, dressed neatly in several layers of grey thrift-store sweaters, jackets, and scarves. Her posture was scrupulously correct. A permanently furrowed forehead and deep character lines, running from her nose to the corners of her wide mouth, made her look formidable; but her eyes were moist and beseeching.

  A man came ambling along the path towards her. She stuffed the loaf into her purse and kicked aside the crumbs on the ground. She crossed her knees and folded her hands and stared resolutely at the trees across the pond.

  The man took no more notice of her than the duck had, and so was startled when, at the last moment, she fixed her gaze on him and said firmly, as if reproaching herself for some weakness, “Good morning.” He was surprised to see that she was young and attractive. He was past her before he could return her greeting; and though he soon forgot all about the girl on the bench in the park, the rest of his day was haunted by a specter of disappointment and dissatisfaction with life.

  Laurel watched him till he was out of sight, then shook herself and returned to her task.

  “Here, ducky. Here, ducky duck duck duck.”

  A battered seagull flapped to earth twenty feet away and began strutting back and forth, watching her from alternate eyes. She hissed at it and threw a pebble in its direction, but her aim was poor and the gull, unruffled, continued its surveillance.

  Suddenly a squirrel dashed out from under her bench, seized a hunk of bread in its mouth, and bounded away in undulating leaps. She hissed and stamped her feet after it.

  “Filthy vermin.” She glared pointedly at the seagull, who had taken advantage of the distraction to come a few steps closer.

  The duck, meanwhile, had completed his washing-up and sat down at the edge of the pond with his back to her.

  “Duckeeee,” she whispered, holding out a golden, spongy crumb. The duck ruffled his feathers with luxurious contentment and settled more deeply into the bank.

  Laurel held the crumb between her thumb and index finger before her eye, like a jeweler appraising a diamond, and, rocking her forearm, carefully took aim.


  The first crumb landed in the pond, the second, somehow, in a shrub behind her, but the third landed an inch from the duck’s head.

  He looked at it. She held her breath.

  He prodded it with his beak.

  Then he picked it up, and with a toss of his head, flung it into the pond. Laurel, the duck, and the seagull watched as it grew sodden and sank below the surface.

  “Oh, to hell with you,” she said, and threw the rest of the loaf at the duck. Anger did not improve her aim. The bread rolled into a tuft of marsh grass, where it was promptly rescued by the seagull, who carried it across the pond and began tearing it apart and squawking. Soon the area was swarming with shrieking gulls.

  Laurel kicked gravel at the duck, then got to her feet and strode home.

  Lionel Pugg moved to the city to get away from a girl who did not love him and promptly fell in love with a girl who would never love him. He did not know that at first; at first—indeed for four years—he didn’t even know her name.

  Angel was his waitress at the first café he visited, his first day in the city. She dressed carelessly, like someone at the beach; she wore oversize flip-flops and shuffled penitentially from table to table, her head cocked to one side as if peering around some corner. She took orders standing heavily on one foot. She had a bluff, brash manner that terrified and beguiled him. She nearly gave him a heart attack when she called him “dear.”

  “All right, what’s it going to be, dear.”

  Though he was ravenous, he asked for a coffee, not wanting to put her to the trouble of fetching a menu.

  “Is that it?” she asked irritably.

  Lionel Pugg was a knobby, gangly, twitchy young man, with sunken eyes, a concave chest, and hunched shoulders. He had thin skin and more than the usual number of nerves, so he quivered like an overwhelmed antenna. Angel thought he looked like a creep.

  “You can take up the table because it’s slow today,” she said, “but don’t expect me to swoop down every five minutes to refill you, if that’s all you’re having. Somehow I don’t peg you for a big tipper.”

  Lionel agreed, by gesture, that he was an abominable tipper.

  He finished his coffee as quickly as its temperature allowed, left a five hundred percent tip, and fled without risking further talk or eye contact. From that day forward, he ate his meals at the café whenever Angel was not working, and sat there quaking with dread that she would appear before he could finish, and left shuddering with disappointment when she did not.

  He wrote her a novel. It took him three years to complete. It was about a waitress, brash and beautiful but otherwise rather without qualities, who fell in love with one of her customers who had also fallen in love with her. This mutual affection was happily discovered one day (on page ten) when the customer asked the waitress to marry him, and she agreed. Several chapters were dedicated to the technicalities of the wedding and the details of their blissful cohabitation, but this only brought the book to page fifty-­seven—a rather paltry offering, he felt. He had shown that these two would be happy together (which had been his secret didactic purpose), but perhaps their happiness had been too easily achieved? So he decided to have the waitress kidnapped; that got the ball rolling again. To make the kidnapping plausible, he had to supply the waitress with a garish back story, which reached as far back as her distant ancestors and as far forward as her decision to become a waitress. Then there was the question of the kidnappers’ motives, inevitably informed by their own characters and back stories. Finally, out of fairness, Lionel felt obliged to provide the customer-protagonist with a history and pedigree too. By this point, the hero bore little resemblance to the author, and the heroine probably had as little in common with her original; but he reassured himself that the portraits were metaphorical and still recognizable. If he was not a burly secret agent in fact, he was, anyway, rather taciturn; and if Angel was not a dispossessed Balkan monarch in fact, she was, anyway, rather imperious.

  Then came the action. His counterpart, the customer-protagonist, tracked the kidnappers first to their hideout in the Sierra Madre, then, from coded documents found there, to their headquarters in Washington, D.C., and from clues there, to their homes in Toronto, Phoenix, and Dublin, and from there to outposts in Brussels, Kuala Lumpur, and the moon. The waitress-heroine, meanwhile, was too beautiful and brash to remain idle. By the time her husband had hunted down and one by one killed off her kidnappers, she had successfully reverse-engineered their mind-control device and transmitted the blueprints to her Balkan accomplices. She had never been in any danger and was not grateful for the violent rescue. She divorced him, and on the last page threw her wedding ring at him and told him to get lost.

  This was not as Lionel had planned. But it seemed the more he subjected his characters to situation and event, the more vivid they became, and the more vivid they became, the less control he exerted over them. Consequently his novels never ended the way he thought they should—that is, happily—but always with some vivid, attractive character telling the protagonist what his flaws were, throwing something at him, and stalking off the page. In this case, the ending rather undermined his secret didactic purpose; so he reassured himself that the heroine and hero were total fictions and had no relation whatsoever to the real waitress or himself, and that, at 458 typewritten pages, Served Cold was a respectable gift, a genuine love-novel.

  He did not want to bother his beloved at work, so he carried the manuscript around with him for another year, hoping to run into her casually on the street. In fact, he saw Angel somewhere about town almost every other week, and on several occasions literally bumped into her. Finally, on one of these occasions she took him by the shoulders, held him upright to scrutinize his face, and demanded to know where she knew him from.

  The memory of the pressure of her hands on his arms rendered him aphasic.

  “I know I’ve seen you somewheres. Was it Lulu’s? Do you know the Donkey? It wasn’t the restaurant? Ah well: mysteries. What’s that you got there? It looks big enough to be a book.” She laughed at the outlandishness of her imagination. “Hey, I’ve got a date but come buy me a drink anyway in case I’m stood up. It’s just across the street.”

  The mention of the date restored him to speech. “I couldn’t possibly intrude,” he said, and ran away.

  At their next encounter, he did better: he thrust the manuscript into her hands, said, “I wrote this for you,” and then ran away.

  He stayed away from the café for six weeks. When at last he mustered the courage to return, Angel showed no sign of recognizing him. She did, however, come around with the coffee pot and refill his cup several times. Finally she asked him what he was doing that night. “I’m thinking of going to a party and I might need a date, in case it stinks.”

  Angel had not read the novel, but she had removed its elastic bands and identified it as a novel. She had no way of judging its worth—nor any inclination to, since it flattered her to suppose it a work of genius. Though she still thought Lionel was a creep, she began taking him around with her to parties and bars and introducing him to other more attractive men as her genius admirer. She found him useful, for she did not like to be alone.

  the mail had arrived. Laurel tore open the mailbox, clutched the three letters to her chest without looking at them, hurried upstairs to her apartment, locked and bolted the door behind her, then sat down at her desk to inspect her booty.

  All three envelopes were identical: the same size, the same color, with the same stamp in the same place, and all three addressed in the same meticulous handwriting—her handwriting. Three more of her self-addressed stamped envelopes had found their way back to her. One of them felt a little heavier than the others. She saved it till last.

  The first contained only a business card–sized piece of thin grey newsprint on which a single sentence had once, apparently long ago, been typed or photocopied. It read,

&
nbsp; We thank you for your interest but regret that your novel does not seem right for our list at this time.

  The Editors

  Neither the envelope nor the piece of paper gave any clue as to the identity or affiliation of these “Editors.” Nevertheless Laurel put the rejection card aside, to be filed later in the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet, which was euphemistically labeled “Correspondence.”

  The second envelope held a genuine slip, one full third of a regular sheet of paper. The paper too was heavier—possibly even twenty-four-pound—and hardly translucent at all. But the text on the slip, though longer, was no more encouraging.

  Dear Author,

  The editorial staff would like to thank you for the opportunity of reading your manuscript(s). Please excuse any delay(s) that may have occured in awaiting this response.

  The editors reviewed your work(s) with careful attention and real enjoyment. Unfortunately, however, given the quantity of submissions that they receive, sometimes even quality work must be declined. Ultimately, they did not feel passionately enough about your work(s) to be able to give it the support that it deserves.

  They regret that the large number of manuscript(s) that they receive makes it impossible for them to respond to you in a more personal manner or to comment in detail on your work(s). They wish you the best of luck in finding a home for it elsewhere.

  There followed an invitation to buy some of the publisher’s most popular novels at a discounted price.

  Her gaze lingered for a while over the words “real enjoyment,” but finally drifted contemptuously to the typo in the first paragraph (“occured”), the passive voice in the second, and the solecism in the last (“manuscript(s)”). These should perhaps have cheered her up, but did not: Although it is no dishonor to be criticized by the ignorant, it is depressing to be rejected by them.