And on the trip north for his court date, in his silver Volvo, Henry found himself thinking more about the story than about his date with the judge, and he determined that he was very pleased with how the story was going. He did wonder if he ought to rewrite the ending, though. Maybe the woman died in prison, just before the jailer brought her her final divorce papers. And walking through the courthouse, and greeting the Massachusetts colleague Lawrence had been working with (he was going to be the one to sit with Henry as he pled), Henry couldn’t help but think very deeply about the strangeness of dealing with the American legal system and that he had several other ideas for stories about elderly criminals. And even as he pled guilty, to a judge who struck him as fairly friendly (he smiled and nodded when Henry stood up, at least), Henry thought that the judge might make for a good character in something because he had such a comically bald head. It was of the old sort, waxed to a shine and ringed with a fluffy band of graying auburn hair. Henry didn’t imagine that people cut their hair this way anymore and he was thinking with quite a bit of amusement about this matter as he heard the judge’s opinions and decisions concerning the legal issue at hand.
“I accept your plea,” the judge said, “and I understand the circumstances of this case, and I know that you and the prosecutors have been in touch to bring us to this point. However, I deal with violence and handguns on an almost daily basis, and while the extenuating circumstances of this case are clear, the obligation was yours to take care of these weapons. If more people lived up to their responsibilities, then maybe, even in a small way, we could alleviate some of the problems that face many, many parts of our country. Someone very easily could have stolen those handguns from your family’s home and they would have been very valuable for a certain kind of criminal. The crux of all this is the following: I will suspend sentence on illegal possession of handguns, which is the most serious, but I am not going to suspend the sentence on the charge for failing to register firearms, which, while not as dire, will, in this case, mean that you’ll serve fourteen days in Essex County Jail. I know this will come as a surprise, but I hope it’s the kind of thing that will teach you—and everyone who is a gun owner—that these are not minor issues.”
Henry was still absorbed in thinking about this man’s strange hair as he began to grasp what was being said. He couldn’t help but remember Lawrence’s declarations that the matter was a done deal, and that there was no jail time, and this gave him just a bit of irrational security. There must be some kind of mistake about this, Henry thought. But as he looked over to the surrogate lawyer Lawrence had hired, the lawyer looked back with what was obviously distress, quickly saying, “It’s a safe place. I promise you. Minimum security. It will pass quickly. Quicker than you think. This happens from time to time.”
And at this point Henry understood that he would, in fact, be going to jail. It was only two weeks, but two weeks were plenty of time to suffer the worst kinds of prison torments. Henry even began to say something, clearly out of turn, although he only got through “But I . . .” before the judge said, “I know this isn’t what you expected, but I don’t see any alternative. I will give you five days, however, before you have to report for your sentence. That should give you a little time to arrange your affairs at home, although next Monday, at eight a.m., you need to appear at the Essex County Jail.”
And now Henry finally felt the sort of dread a person would anticipate. Physically, that is, in the back of his neck, and he did all he could not to stumble and fall as he walked back through the courtroom and into the large marble hallway beyond.
16
RAPE, OF COURSE, was the only thing on Henry’s mind as he drove back to Brooklyn, although Lawrence’s colleague assured him that this was a complete impossibility. “It’s not that type of place,” he said. “You’ll watch TV all day. That will be it. The food will be bad. At the very worst you might get shoved around a little by an inmate. But it’s all very well run, this jail, and there won’t be anyone in there who’s particularly violent.”
Not particularly violent was not at all reassuring to Henry, nor was the prospect of only being shoved around “a little.” And there was no guarantee who would be in there. Perhaps some deranged recidivist criminal waiting around for his next trial would be his roommate, and Henry was quite thin, and mostly without body hair, and, since he took care of himself, he had what could only be considered very nice skin. Womanish, was now suddenly how he felt, and he couldn’t shake the thoughts of violent sexual attacks for the four hours it took him to get back to Brooklyn.
It was all very distressing, although a good thing did happen to him just fifteen minutes after he arrived home, even if it was not really good enough to distract him entirely from his impending torture. Merrill called, just after Henry turned his electric kettle on, to say that he’d heard from the editor who had signed up Kipling and that she “absolutely adored!” The Best of Youth.
“She thinks it’s one of the best things that’s ever come across her desk,” he said. “She kept saying that she had no idea Kipling had this kind of thing in him. I’m not making this up, Henry. And, believe me, this is sincere, because I’ve heard a lot of editors trash bigger than Kipling. This woman loved the book. And she’s going to speed things forward, which shouldn’t be too hard, since the sales team has been planning for a book from Kipling for awhile. She said she wants galleys finished in four months, which is something, and then for the pub date to be nine months from now. It shows that she thinks the thing is done and polished, at least. Anyway, we’re very, very happy, Henry, and you should be happy too, because this really is quite an accomplishment. I mean, how it plays out for you will be a little stilted because of the ghostwriting thing, but I don’t think you should worry about that. You’ve got true, true talent, and soon enough I’ll be selling a book for you with your name on it.”
And for just a little while after that, as Henry poured himself a large bourbon and sat down on his couch to look out at McCarren Park, he thought about what this particular success meant (in its deepest and absurdly romantic sense) and wondered if going to prison might not benefit him somehow in an artistic sort of way. It would teach him a great deal about a world that he really knew little about. And, after all (Henry had this particular idea well into his second very large drink—and bourbon always made him quite drunk), not many young Harvard men had been raped and beaten in prison, although he did then manage to grasp that being raped in prison was hardly a thing to find meaning in, no matter how much you might learn from it.
All these thoughts, though, soon slipped away to something far less speculative and far less philosophical—something very concrete and in the world, in fact. After pouring a third drink (a small one this time), Henry checked his email and discovered a very long note from Kipling. In it he said that he’d finally read the manuscript (“or a good two-thirds of it”) and that, while he “liked some of it!” they still had a very long way to go.
The opening of the email was, of course, friendly, and filled with reflective ideas about the nature of art and the difficulties “people like us face when creation is unfolding.
“But I see this manuscript as deeply flawed,” he continued, “on a number of levels. I had to skip a section or two because I’ve got a lot of obligations right now with scripts, but from what I’ve read, I feel like we’re pretty far away from where we want this to be. I’m not saying you can’t do it, and I want to keep working with you. I admire you. This manuscript, however, isn’t working.”
Kipling went on to describe again his feelings about parentheses, which Henry had actually used sparingly, and also offered some ideas about books he ought to read—books by “true writers.”
At any rate, it all had a sickening and false angle to it (combined with the unreasonable expansiveness of a man likely using illegal stimulants) and, in the end, it was all simply too much for any thinking person to bear. Henry wondered what his obligations were at this point and planned on
calling Merrill for help, but he also wondered whether Kipling’s editor—the one who’d been such a fan of Henry’s work—might be able to win the debate. Kipling, after all, was so poorly prepared on the manuscript—it was amazing that he had any opinion at all—that Henry thought he might be talked into accepting the book as it was, rather than insisting on things that made absolutely no sense, particularly coming from a person who admitted to having skipped sections of the book.
All this being said, there were other bad things Henry was facing that were probably more significant than being bullied by celebrity actors. Now that the tedious aspects of his newly-embarked-on professional life had once again interrupted the small bit of peace he’d found in his bourbon, Henry realized once more, very plainly and with all its expected horror, that he would soon be in jail, and that life was short, and that he really needed to avoid worrying about people like Kipling.
17
AND SO THE TIME finally (nearly) came for Henry to head north to face his problems. On the night before, however, Henry planned for himself something of a “last day of freedom” event, although it was only he, Whitney, and Abby who went out. They met in Manhattan at a newly opened restaurant with a famous chef and prices that were far heavier than what the three were used to in Williamsburg. Henry insisted that he pay when he first made the invitation, and he did, in fact, pick up the check, which was surprisingly large after cocktails and wine were figured in (even for this kind of place). By the time Henry was signing the receipt, however, his mind was very far from the expense of the evening or the profound pleasure of the food. He’d imagined this moment before it arrived—when his happy wine-induced mood, accompanied by things like roasted poussin and blood sausage, would begin to give way to feelings of being overfull and far too drunk. He knew that this would be the time when he’d start feeling dread once again, and that, at that point, no subsequent heavy dinner or liquor were going to pull him out of it. Quite surprisingly, though (and it really was shocking), the very intense despair that Henry was now feeling was coming from a brand-new and entirely unexpected source and it took quite a bit of strength not to break into tears through the entire meal.
Abby had been especially happy that night, had chosen her food with some aggression—squab and (without irony) curried goat vol au vents—and after they ordered and as they were sipping their cocktails, she grinned and said, “Something really, really good has happened to me.”
It had been quite a bit of time at this point since Henry had made any advances toward Abby, and it was even a substantial amount of time since he’d allowed himself to believe that he still had any feelings for her at all, but he could tell that the next words out of her mouth were going to be about a boy. That said, and as horrible as this prospect was, what followed was much, much worse than anything he could have imagined.
“I’ve got to tell you guys this, mostly because it’d be weird not to,” she said, “but also because it’s really on my mind. I know you know him, because you brought him to see me play, but Jonathan Kipling called me the day after the show and asked me out. He got my number from Merrill. Anyway, it’s a strange thing to say so soon, just three weeks, but I have to say that I’m in love. I’m really, really, truly in love. And so is he, or that’s what he tells me, but we’ve spent every single night together since he first called, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. I’m going to meet up with him after dinner tonight, in fact.”
Abby said other things following this, although by now Henry was lost to a kind of internal dream, half an act of denial and half an act of mental transcendence, trying to avoid what could only be described as crushing sorrow. And he managed to stay focused on this interior moment, this personal mental exercise, for the entire dinner, knowing that if he just let a bit out, if he just made one mild comment along the lines of, Are you sure he’s the right guy for you? he’d surely follow with declarations like, I’m the one you should be in love with! Me! That guy is the worst fucking person I’ve ever known. Apart from the ironclad legal and contractual obligations that prevented Henry from telling Abby the ways in which Kipling was an idiot, there was the even more important matter of personal shame that prevented him from speaking in this way. Weeping at a dinner table was never a good tactic when trying to prove one’s virtue, and at last Henry took refuge in the idea that surely Abby would soon see through this freak. The sad fact was, though, that it did seem that she was now clinging to (enchanted by) whatever illusions Kipling had spun, and that if they had spent every night together for the past three weeks, perhaps he too was enchanted, and that this mutual enchantment might last for some time. It was very, very distressing.
Henry managed to survive the dinner (and further discussions about true love) without any kind of outward fit of despair or anger. As they finally left the restaurant, however, with Abby off to meet Kipling, Henry finally began to struggle under the intensity of the pain he felt. He abruptly said he had errands to run and that he needed to hop in his own cab and that they’d all be best off finding their own ways home. “Errands” was a foolish word of prevarication—it was eleven p.m. at this point, and what errands could he be running? But he didn’t care. And when he got into the cab, he shut off his phone and before long he was riding the elevator to his apartment, feeling, he realized, with some amount of dismal humor (humor entirely shot through with horrible despair) that he’d found something far worse to keep his mind off what he was facing for the next two weeks. And as he got into bed—his own bed, with his own sheets, with a comforter that his mother had made him in a period of quilt-making enthusiasm when Henry was eleven—he decided that two weeks in a Massachusetts prison really might be just what he needed to think about how bad things had been over the past month or so. It was hard to tell. Prison was sure to be terrible. But not even the prospect of rape at this point could distract Henry from the pain he was now feeling over Abby. Thinking about Abby and Kipling being together really was the worst thing Henry could imagine, and that night he got no sleep at all.
PART
III
1
ALL THINGS TAKEN together, Henry found McCarren Park to be one of the most calming places in New York City, despite its endless hostile bustle and the tracts of dead grass. Some might argue in favor of Prospect Park or Central Park in the debate over New York’s most serene places, but despite their obvious and undeniable beauty, those parks were clearly well-planned artifices, magnificently chiseled pieces of fabricated nature that could not possibly exist in what a person might call the wilderness. McCarren Park, however, actually did encapsulate the chaos of wild frontiers—albeit the chaos of crowded human frontiers—and in that sense it really did represent something close to the natural world. And (and this fact could hardly be argued against) it was absolutely captivating to look at. All that disorder could amuse a man for days, although it should be pointed out that “amusement” and “captivation” are not the same thing, and, in Henry’s case, captivation (or mesmerization) was really closer to what he experienced as he frequently looked out from his balcony that fall. It was mysterious, why this was, although the origins of Henry’s confused thinking were clear. The mystery was why his view over McCarren Park now provided such an enchanting spectacle at this moment, although by this point in Henry’s life there wasn’t really much of anything that Henry could rely on to explain his feelings.
That Jonathan Kipling was now a fixture in his life was a fact that Henry simply had to face, and he had done so with more courage than he’d thought himself capable of. And it was also a thing he couldn’t permit himself to get angry about, because that kind of anger only led to more distress and the possible (further?) alienation of Abby. And in the past eleven months or so, Henry had only had to face a few interactions with Kipling, mostly at Abby’s concerts (which Henry now only attended sporadically), so having to watch Abby with the egomaniac brute was not something he had to put up with very often.
But a new development was unfoldi
ng that was leading Henry to the sort of despair that rivaled even a broken heart. It was a thing that certainly made him even more angry—anger he couldn’t tamp down—and which seemed even more unfair (if a person believes the words “fair” and “unfair” have any place in describing the course of things like love). Advanced reviews had been coming in for The Best of Youth (which Kipling’s editor had managed to keep almost exactly as Henry had written it—word for word, really, despite Kipling’s earlier criticism), and in just the previous few weeks Kipling was being heralded by the experts in children’s literature as something of a modern master. The reviews were in the trade publications—the book was still over a month from official release—so they were mostly the opinions of the librarians and booksellers who spent their days in the pursuit of reading and bookselling and interesting others in books. (English departments in the great universities were still a bit away from assigning Kipling in their graduate seminars.) But trade publications were certainly more important than literature professors in determining the success of a forthcoming novel, especially for the young adult market, and there, in that venue, Kipling was being celebrated with what can only be seen as something close to abandon. As one reviewer wrote, “Truly exceptional writing is not a thing that comes around often, and reviewers have to be circumspect when heaping praise on the latest novels to come along, but here, I believe, we are looking at perhaps one of the best portrayals of a young person’s vision of the world since Catcher in the Rye, and surely the book rivals the very best coming out now for the adult literary market.”
Other reviews were a bit less dramatic, but what was clear from all of them was that the verdict concerning the novel was that it was “a real winner!” and that Kipling (“A man for all seasons!”), already having proven his deep understanding of story via motion pictures, was unquestionably a “magician of the written word” as well.
The Best of Youth Page 14