Shriver

by Chris Belden

  At the airport the driver refused to accept any money for the ride, not even a tip. “All taken care for,” he said several times in his thick accent, bowing reverently, then he climbed back in behind the wheel and tore off, leaving Shriver amid a swirl of travelers with their huge piles of luggage and golf bags. Car horns blared; airplanes shrieked overhead. It was all a little overwhelming, but with the aid of a uniformed steward he managed to check his suitcase and receive his boarding passes. He then proceeded to the security checkpoint, where a guard asked him to remove his shoes before waving him through a metal detector. As Shriver walked through the machine a bell went off. He was ordered to go back, take off his belt, and place any keys or coins in a little plastic bowl.

  “What’s that?” The guard pointed at the bulge in his jacket.

  “That’s just some papers.” Shriver pulled out the story he had written. The guard ordered him to place the manuscript in a plastic tub for X-raying.

  “But it’s just paper.”

  “I don’t care if it’s the Bible,” the guard said, holding out the plastic bowl.

  Shriver set his story down and watched as the guard pushed it through the machine. He then stepped through the metal detector. This time no bell rang. He stood off to the side and watched as two security agents peered at the ghostly image of his story on the little monitor. One of them pointed at the screen, and the other one laughed.

  From there the first leg of his journey progressed fairly smoothly, except for some alarming turbulence during the ascent. Once the plane had reached its cruising altitude, Shriver downed two cocktails in quick succession and managed to relax and catch up on his sleep, resting so soundly that he did not wake up until the plane had landed and parked at the gate. Then, in order to make his connecting flight, he had to navigate the enormous Airport of America from Terminal B to Terminal F. En route, he passed fast-food restaurants, bars, clothing stores, bookshops, a pet store, ice cream stands, toy stores, and a massage parlor. He found it difficult moving among so many people. At one point he had to sit down and collect his breath. But he managed to find the correct gate on time and board the second, much smaller aircraft without incident.

  When the flight attendant finally brought his cocktail, Shriver shut his eyes and took a long, slow sip. A warm wave rolled down his throat and into his belly. He sighed, licked his lips, then glanced at the pages again. The words were a train wreck.

  He turned to the lady beside him, who was now awake and eating from a container of chocolate-covered nuts.

  “Excuse me,” he said, touching her pudgy elbow. “Ma’am?”

  She turned and took in the empty miniature bottle of whiskey on his tray table. “Do you need to use the lavatory?” she asked, and commenced the elaborate preparatory motions necessary to remove herself from her seat.

  “No, thank you,” Shriver said. “I was just wondering if you could do me a favor.”

  She stared at him.

  “I was wondering,” Shriver continued, “if you can read this.” He held out the pages.

  She looked at them suspiciously. “You want me to read that?”

  “No, I don’t want you to read it. I just want you to tell me if you are able to read it. Is it legible?”

  She tilted her head to see the top page more clearly.

  “Is it comprehensible?” Shriver asked.

  She squinted. “Well, the handwriting is pretty sloppy.”

  “But you can decipher it?”

  Caught up in the assignment now, she set the tip of a finger on the top of the page, leaving a tiny smear of chocolate on the paper.

  “ ‘The Water Mark.’ ”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Shriver said.

  “ ‘The water mark appeared on my ceiling . . . on the rainy day my wife walked out on me.’ Is that right?”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Can’t you read it?” she asked.

  “Oh, I’m just having some trouble with my eyesight. Getting old, I guess. Thank you again.”

  “Say,” the lady said, her eyes narrowing, “are you that writer? The one who’s speaking at the conference?”

  The day had gone so quickly that Shriver had not had time to worry about the moment he would have to take on the role he’d so impulsively decided to assume, but here it was.

  “Yes!” the lady exclaimed, all smiles now, her cheeks breaking into dimpled slabs of dough. “I recognize you from your picture!”

  “My picture?”

  “It’s in the brochure. Here.”

  She reached under the seat into a large, bulky shoulder bag of the kind woven by Guatemalan peasants and produced an envelope-sized brochure for the conference. On the cover were photos of the various featured authors.

  “That’s you!” the lady said, pointing to a murky black-and-white photograph. “Oh, this is very exciting!”

  “May I see that?” Shriver reached for the brochure. In the photo a man sat on an armchair in front of thick, pale curtains. The chair looked vaguely familiar, Shriver thought, but the man barely resembled him. He was much younger, with a full head of dark hair and a taut jawline.

  “Must be an old photograph,” the woman said. “But I can tell it’s you from the eyes.”

  Shriver peered closely at the subject’s face. The eyes, it was true, communicated a certain sadness.

  “It’s the only picture I’ve ever seen of”—and here the woman made dramatic air quotes—“the mysterious Shriver.

  “I come to the conference every year,” she went on. “I’m also a writer. Oh, not like you, of course, not nearly so talented and interesting. I write romance novels, mostly, but I have this one project, a memoir, that I’m trying to publish.”

  Shriver opened the brochure to the brief biographies of all the featured writers. Under Shriver’s name it said:

  One of America’s most controversial authors, Shriver burst onto the literary scene twenty years ago with his bestselling novel Goat Time. Though he has yet to publish a follow-up novel, he remains one of our most revered chroniclers of the American absurd.

  “I have a very interesting story to tell,” the lady continued as she searched through the many items in her bag. “I was once involved in a sort of harem with this biker from Utah. I spent a couple years there, doing drugs and participating in sex orgies.”

  “Yes,” Shriver said, still reading:

  His long list of honors includes the Federal Book Award, the Outer East Coast Inner Critics Circle Award, the Publishers Prize, and numerous others.

  “I have copies of the manuscript, if you’d like to take a look. Maybe you could help me find a publisher.”

  She thrust a two-inch-thick bound manuscript into Shriver’s hands. On the cover, in large letters, was the title, Harem Girl: My Life as a Sex Slave, A Memoir by Delta Malarkey-Jones.

  “Don’t worry,” Delta Malarkey-Jones said, “it’s a quick read. I would say I hope you’re not offended by graphic sex, but I figure you’re probably not, so . . .”

  She pulled from her bag a beat-up hardcover book. On the cover was a crude drawing of a satyr. “I think it’s refreshing to read your work,” she said. “Hardly anyone writes about real stuff like you do.”

  “Real stuff?”

  “You know—the raw stuff.”

  “May I see that?”

  “Maybe you could sign it!” she gushed as she handed the book over.

  Goat Time.

  This was his first glimpse of the book written by this apparently famous Shriver fellow. He had not patronized bookstores or libraries for many years because the smell of all that slowly rotting paper produced in him the urgent need to go to the bathroom. It was an instantaneous reaction, and very unpleasant.

  He opened the book to the inside back cover, handling the pages gingerly, in case the sudden urge to defecate came upon him. There was no author photograph. The brief biographical note stated, simply, that the author lived on the East Coast.

  Delta Malark
ey-Jones produced a fine-point pen. “I would really appreciate it.”

  Shriver turned to the title page. He thought it very odd that he’d never heard of this famous author with whom he shared a name.

  “You can just put ‘To Delta,’ plus whatever you feel like.”

  Shriver wiped his brow and wrote, To Delta, she of row 9, seat B, on this day in May, then he signed his name with a flourish.

  “Thank you so much!” She held the book aloft. “One of these days I’m going to finish it too. Hey—I can’t wait for your reading day after tomorrow!”

  “That’s very nice of you to say.” Shriver had hoped that no one would show up to his reading. Now it turned out this Shriver fellow was quite famous and sought-after. A tiny moth of anxiety fluttered inside his chest. He closed the book and handed it back.

  “You can hold on to my memoir,” she told him. “I have a bunch. My address is on the front.”

  “Oh, thank you.” Shriver squeezed the thick manuscript into the seat pocket in front of him. “I’ll read it later, if you don’t mind.”

  “Are you staying at the Hotel 19? Most of the writers stay there during the conference. I take the same room every year. I reserve it months ahead of time. Room twenty. In case you need to find me,” she added, winking.

  “Uh, I’m not sure where I’m staying.”

  She grinned. “I’d love to discuss those scenes with you.”

  “Which scenes?”

  “You know—the sex scenes in your novel. They were very . . . imaginative.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Thank you.”

  After a moment, during which his neighbor settled back into her seat with a series of contented sighs, Shriver turned his attention back to his story. He glanced quickly at the first page, then looked away. For that split second the words appeared to be arranged normally. He breathed a little easier. He had to get this situation under control. There might be a lot of people at the reading, if this lady was any indication. He looked back at the first page, this time for several seconds before turning away. Again, the lines of script were legible—poorly handwritten, perhaps, but legible. There was the title, “The Water Mark,” and, below that, the first line: “The water mark appeared on my ceiling on the rainy day my wife walked out on me.”

  Up to this point the flight had been quite smooth, but now, as the airplane skimmed just above the clouds, the fuselage began to shimmy and rattle like an old jalopy. To distract himself, Shriver turned once more to the pages in his hand. Immediately the words appeared to melt, as if the ink were wax over a flame, dripping down the page and onto his lap. He checked his watch. The numbers were as clear as the clouds outside his window. Less than forty-eight hours until his reading. As if it wasn’t going to be difficult enough to convince all those people he was a writer!

  While the plane bumped over air pockets, the flight attendant weaved down the aisle collecting empty bottles and cans.

  “May I have another?” Shriver asked, holding out the empty mini-bottle of whiskey.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the attendant said. “We’re going to be landing soon.”

  The airplane then descended right into the clouds, the window went white, and the cabin started to slide from side to side. Shriver gripped the armrests and concentrated on the VACANT sign outside the forward lavatory.

  Then, as it emerged beneath the clouds, the plane ceased its shuddering. The ground below lay as flat as a door on its side, from horizon to horizon, spotted with ponds that reflected clouds and patches of blue. Off in the distance Shriver could make out a small town, not much more than a cluster of low buildings and a water tower. The airplane tilted toward a large asphalt X in the middle of the prairie. Shriver’s ears ached from the pressure. He rubbed the tender spots where his jawbone attached to his skull and swallowed deeply. His throat burned as a whiskey belch made its way up his esophagus. Before he knew what was happening, a freshly plowed field and then a strip of tarmac rose up to meet the wheels of the plane, and with a bump and slide, they were on the ground. A pleased Delta Malarkey-Jones immediately began to collect her many articles from beneath the seat in front of her, including her bag, a jacket, a floppy hat, and a paper sack full of snacks.

  “Don’t forget my manuscript!” she reminded him, pointing to the seat pocket.

  “Oh, I won’t.” He placed the epic on his lap along with his own papers.

  The plane rolled toward the terminal and lurched to a stop.

  “I hope to see you around,” Ms. Malarkey-Jones said as she leaped to her feet and started to remove items from overhead. “Remember: Hotel 19, room twenty.”

  The exit door swung open and the passengers shuffled up the aisle. Shriver rose unsteadily to his feet and entered the line. All the whiskey had settled in his legs. Wobbling a little, he gingerly disembarked onto a metal stairway that led down to the tarmac.

  Looking up, he saw that the sky here was enormous, dwarfing everything beneath it. The clouds seemed thousands of miles wide, with vast swatches of blue in between. As for the land, it stretched flat and unbroken all the way to the horizon. Even the little airport was squat and low to the ground. He waved away a mosquito buzzing at his ears.

  Shriver wondered who would be at the gate to meet him. For all he knew, Chuck Johnson would spring out from behind a potted plant and shout, Surprise! But he had the feeling his old friend was nowhere near this place. The letters from Professor Cleverly, the free airline tickets, that woman on the plane—it was too elaborate even for Chuck. These people really thought he was Shriver the Writer! As he walked across the tarmac toward the doors, he concentrated on the task of becoming someone else, and wished for the first time that his gastrointestinal system were at least able to endure the library long enough for him to have read this Shriver fellow’s work.

  What had he been thinking?

  Passing through a glass door into the air-conditioned gate area, where a crowd awaited returning friends and loved ones, he cursed his decision to come here, to leave the safe confines of his apartment, to leave the unconditional love of Mr. Bojangles, the dedicated service of Vinnie the Doorman and Blotto, the delivery boy from the local grocery store. He could have been home right now watching the afternoon edition of the Channel 17 Action News and napping on the patch of sun that fell across his bed at this time every day. Instead, he was in this strange, aggressively horizontal land, pretending to be someone else entirely, someone who was a genius, apparently, and infinitely more intelligent than he, albeit it with a dirty mind.

  How can I worm my way out of this insane situation? he wondered. Perhaps he could avoid the person dispatched to retrieve him and exchange his return ticket for the next flight home. He decided right then and there that this was what he would do—he would go home to Mr. Bojangles—and so he started toward the main lobby and ticket counter.

  But his path was blocked by a petite young woman wearing a shiny yellow slicker.

  She offered her hand. “Mr. Shriver, I presume.”

  She had long blond hair, nearly the same color as her coat, and thin lips painted ruby red. He thought she was about eighteen years old until he looked closer and saw the crow’s-feet at the corners of her large brown eyes. She looked the way he imagined Tina LeGros would look in person, without the stiff hair and pancake makeup and power suit.

  “I’m Simone Cleverly,” she said.

  “Yes,” he replied, taking her hand in his own. “And I am Shriver.”

  Chapter Two

  When the luggage finally arrived, Professor Cleverly insisted on carrying Shriver’s suitcase, though it weighed nearly as much as she did.

  “Really, I can carry it,” Shriver told her, trying to grab the leather handle, but she pulled the bag away and started out of the terminal. For a small woman, Shriver thought, she was remarkably strong. While the other passengers at the luggage carousel stared at him with disapproving expressions, he followed her outside, where she lugged the suitcase across the small parking lot to a ma
ssive car, a three-ton contraption of black metal and man-made materials. She opened the rear door and, with a grunt, heaved the suitcase onto the seat.

  “Climb aboard,” she ordered.

  Shriver pulled himself up into the passenger seat as if into a tank.

  The professor turned the key and the engine growled to life. With some effort she shifted gears and aimed the monstrous vehicle toward the parking lot exit. She looked like a child in her yellow slicker, her tiny hands astride the colossal steering wheel. She had to scoot herself forward in order for her feet to reach the pedals. The car’s hood was so enormous that if a grown man walked directly in front of the vehicle, he would not be seen.

  “Normally we have graduate students pick up the featured authors at the airport, but your handler is teaching at this hour, so I took the job myself.” She watched the road as she spoke, not turning at all to address him.

  “I feel honored, Professor.”

  “It’s very inconvenient, actually. I have so much to do.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  After a pause, she said, “To be honest, I was curious.”

  “Curious?”

  “To meet the infamous Shriver.”

  “Oh? I didn’t realize I was infamous.”

  She let out a sharp laugh. “Have you read your book lately?”

  “I can’t say that I have.”

  “I read it in graduate school,” she told him, as if recounting the time she ate a spoiled piece of meat. “I almost got through the whole thing.”

  They passed a paddock populated by enormous, shaggy bison. A wooden sign, lettered in the style of an Old West ranch, proclaimed EAT BISON—LIVE WELL!

  “But everyone’s very excited that you’re able to attend the conference,” Professor Cleverly said, straining to sound positive. “This is quite a coup for us.”

  Shriver watched her profile as she drove: slightly crooked nose, strong jaw, skin tan and smooth but not pampered looking. Apparently, she spent a lot of time outdoors. The yellow slicker remained buttoned. She could have been naked underneath there for all Shriver knew. He blushed at the thought, and just then she turned to glance at him. He looked away toward a field of sunflowers stretching off into the distance.