by Harper Logan
“So what’s the secret?” asked the girl sitting closest in the circle to Sergio. She was wearing her hair up in pigtails streaked with magenta and teal, and her lips were a matte cyan that suggested she had been fished from the lake during winter, but the eager energy in her eyes was all fire and warmth. “How do you make a reader’s heart beat faster, how do you intrigue them like you did with Pistols in Pisa?”
Serge smiled that confident, knowing smile that had landed him this residency. He looked from her, to the small circle of other writing students who had been hanging on his every word. He leaned back in the plastic chair and put his hands behind his head. He gave his arms a slight flex, so the definition of his triceps would be more visible in his short-short sleeve shirt; a flick of his eyes told him the flex had made the right impression on pigtail girl.
“It’s all about life,” he said finally. “Gorging yourself on it like a fruit, until your face is wet and sticky with it.” The group laughed. “If you haven’t lived, if you haven’t clutched life between your two hands, then what are you offering your reader?”
“But your book was so intellectual,” said a thin, nervous man further around the circle. He pushed his glasses up his nose. “How do you balance the philosophy and…and the lust, as it were?”
Serge’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it, carefully controlling his face so the flicker of concern he felt wouldn’t show. It was his agent again. He knew that.
He unlaced his fingers, bringing his thick hands forward, reaching out into the center of the circle, leaning forward as though about to impart wisdom so secret it could only be whispered. “The mind itself is life,” he said. “Your thoughts, your philosophy, they must be grasped with the same gusto. Your hold on your ideas must be as passionate as when you are holding on to a beautiful woman.”
Nervous laughter from the group, and the thin man sat back, a surprised and embarrassed look on his face.
Serge’s phone buzzed again. He ignored it.
“It’s not easy,” he continued. “Many writers never accomplish what I have. They’re spending years, book after book, looking for their masterpiece. And they do grow in skill, don’t get me wrong. But they’re always going to be craftsmen. It’s nice, I suppose, to turn out a nice chair, a table of some sort; but shouldn’t we reach higher? Would you rather build a barn or the Sistine Chapel?”
A girl wearing denim overalls raised her hand.
“It’s not a class, Gina. We’re just here to talk.”
The girl blushed. “I was just wondering. I saw on the schedule that you’re going to be on the local author’s panel with Madeleine Stevens.”
“That’s true.”
“I was wondering…”
“Don’t keep us in suspense.”
“Do you think of Stevens as a craftsperson, or an artist?”
His laugh was sharp enough to startle them. “Look, I hate to say anything here. Lots of people love Maddy Stevens, okay? I don’t want to break anybody’s heart. Fans of her, anyone? Anybody here like her?”
Shrugs, nods, a few enthusiastic looks, including from the girl in overalls.
“Okay, this goes no further than this room. I don’t want anyone saying I’m badmouthing local authors, right? That would be bad for me, it’d be bad for her. But Madeleine Stevens is the opposite of a craftsman. It’s like she’s getting worse and worse as time goes on, whittling down the chair until it’s nothing but sawdust and sticks. A big, big damn pile of sawdust, too. You know she’s got a new book out?”
“I’ve got it on order,” said overalls girl.
“I’d call it the most vacuous thing I’ve ever read, but I think it’s more sinister than that,” he said. “It’s all about a girl who lies to herself about love, for the course of over a thousand pages. A thousand!”
His phone buzzed again. The girl with the hair said, “Do you need to get that?”
“Get what?”
“Your phone. It keeps ringing.”
“Nah. Probably the girl I dumped last night,” he lied. “Anyway, the thing about this new book is, not only is she lying to herself, trying to talk herself into loving someone who is deeply wrong for her, you can tell Stevens wants you to root for that love. She never gives her character a minute where she can just be honest with herself. And worse, the lies are so hokey. She’s got this dead grandmother who is telling her what to do—”
Suddenly, all at once, the alarms on the kids’ phones and watches began to go off. “Is it time to go to classes already?” he said. He watched them grudgingly pick up their books and bags. It was weird, they seemed so human when listening to him, but he supposed this must be what university did to kids, turned them into schedule-obeying automatons. They thanked him and left the room.
The problem was, this left him alone with his phone. And the voicemails.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket. All the calls from his agent were neatly lined up on the screen. He sighed, and tapped the screen.
“Serge, you delicious slice of man, where have you been the past few days? Hiding?” His agent’s oily laughter seeped into his ear.
“Hey Sam. Settling in to this residency. You know how it is. New town, new people.”
“Yeah, I know how it is. I’m trying to get you a fat check from Hollywood, and you’re giving yourself away to some fancy-pants university for room and board?”
“Let’s not go into that again, okay? I think this will be good for my reputation.”
“You know what else would be good for your reputation? A new book. Oh, I got a better idea: Not just any new book, but the one you signed the contract for, the one you cashed an advance check for, the one I’ve got a publisher breathing down my neck for. You ought to write that book.”
“It’s coming, Sam, it’s coming.”
“You know me. I trust you implicitly. Explicitly too. If my wife were in a burning building, you’re just the young stud I’d send in to save her. But a publisher, Serge? They’ve been hurt. They’re broken-hearted, and they gotta learn to trust the slow way, don’t they? And the way they learn to trust is, you send them some pages.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m polishing up this chapter—”
“Would this be the same chapter you were polishing up last month?”
“I realized I needed to take it in a whole different direction, and—”
“Bub. Buddy. Serge. You’re like a brother to me. And so I say this like we’re brothers, right? As though you and I have the same mother. Not like we’re two businessmen. Brothers. Think of me like that, when I tell you, don’t tell me ‘different direction.’ I lined up this contract based on the new book going in the same direction. Pistols in Pisa Part II.”
“No, but Sam, hear me out. I think readers want to stretch beyond the whole sequel thing. Nobody likes a sequel. They know it’s crap. There has never been a sequel as good as the original. What they want—”
“As your pretend brother, as your brother for the purpose of this figure of speech, let me tell you I’ve got a pain in my chest right now, right under my sternum, and it’s getting worse every word you say, Serge. You know the word franchise? You want to take a minute to go to that big library on campus and look it up, get back to me when you know what it means? No?”
“That’s what I hate about this business, Sam. I’m an artist. A respected master in my field. You know what a franchise is, it’s a fast-food place, it’s a—”
“It’s a steady fucking paycheck for you and a steady fucking ten percent for me.” A cough from the other side of the line. “Excuse me. Language. But brothers, right? Brothers can say stuff like this to one another. I am sweating big bloody drops from my forehead right now. What the publisher wants, what I want, what the readers want, is a nice fat franchise. A book a year. Christmas-time comes, box ‘em up, shrink-wrap ‘em, nice gift for dads and uncles. Movie deal, big money. Get you set for life. Franchise, Serge. Get your detective in some graphic novels, get him on the sides
of lunchboxes, get him his own phone app. Do you hear the money falling from heaven? Ching-ching-ching, Serge, that’s coins hitting the sidewalk, and it’s all for you baby boy, to buy all those protein shakes you drink for the big muscles all the girls like, and the only obstacle, and it’s not even really an obstacle, the only speedbump, the only slight elevation in the road, is you have got to get some fucking pages to the fucking publisher right fucking now.”
All the air went out of Serge in that moment. How could he fight? He’d signed the contract. It had seemed so simple at the time. Put his name on the paper here, here and here. Then the checks started arriving, and the interviews, and the celebrity. Not movie-star celebrity, nothing that big, but people who read books knew who he was, and they were the only people who counted, in his opinion.
“I’ll do it, don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll have some pages for you by the end of the week. I have to prepare a little something for the panel—”
“Do I need to say fuck the panel, Serge?”
“I’ll have a chapter ready by then. I can’t drop the panel. I’ve got people counting on me.”
“Oh, for that, you worry about people counting on you. Forget the poor publisher who has you all lined up on the schedule, the editors who are twiddling their thumbs, the printer who is out of a job because you can’t get your shit together, his children starving on the streets, little waifs wearing rags. Let me tell you something, Serge. We all know about that panel. We know who’s on it, and you better stay home that day.”
“What?”
“You think I didn’t see that review you did of Maddy Stevens’ book? Serge, you go out there on the street, you’re a dead man. What did you think you were doing, going right into her backyard and taking a big shit? Now you want to sit on a panel with her?”
“Come on, Sam, it’s not going to hurt anything. Her book sucks. Someone had to say it. Besides, I think it’ll help me in this residency. Stir up a little tension, get people talking, you know? If people see a big rivalry, they’ll be more likely to buy my next book.”
“You ever think of talking over these career moves to somebody who knows the business? Somebody who has your interest at heart? Hell, somebody who only makes money if you do? Like your agent? Serge, baby, you’ve got a career to think about, and you can’t go making enemies. Especially not a psycho like Maddy Stevens. She still got that assistant?”
“I don’t know what she’s got.”
“Used to be, everybody knew you don’t cross Maddy Stevens, that assistant would come to your house, you’d find your tires flat, sugar in the gas tank, spraypaint on your windshield. Psycho. This review? You’ll be lucky if she doesn’t burn down your house.”
Serge chuckled. “I’ll be fine, Sam. It’s just a review. Madeleine Stevens is all washed up. Trust me on that. She’s toothless.”
“You better hope she is. But I tell you this: Dead or alive, you’re getting those pages done. If I gotta fly up there and poke your cold dead fingers on the keyboard, words are gonna come out of you.”
“I know, man. I’ll get you the words.”
When his agent hung up, Serge looked around the empty classroom. It felt weird to be alone here, and reminded him of how new this place was to him.
The university had provided him a little office with a view of the courtyard, pretty trees, a fountain. Very safe view from a small window. He would go up there, and he would write. Then everybody would be happy. Everybody else.
3
Cam
It wasn’t that Cam had anything against universities particularly. Of course, he never could’ve afforded Beasley. Between his parents, his part-time job, scholarships, and loans, he’d only just been able to make it through State. But there was something about knowing that Sergio Faletti had his office here in the pretentiously grand literature building that sent a shiver up his spine. He pictured Faletti like a loathsome troll, festering in a dank stone-walled cell, grimly laughing while writing another cutting review. And here Cam was, coming to slay the troll.
School had been rough on Cam. He knew what he wanted to do: Study Madeleine and the writers like her (what few there were). But for some reason English majors were also required to take math, and science, and history, and all these other classes that were considered so much more important than what he wanted. And even when he’d broached the subject of using her books for his senior thesis, his professors had balked. Why didn’t he stick with a more established, canonized writer? If he must work on a woman author, why not Virginia Woolf, or Gertrude Stein? The disdain that academic people had for Madeleine’s work had surprised and disheartened him. And he was sure that nobody in this great building—a hall of learning that seemed like a castle compared to the cramped fluorescent-lit English classrooms at State—nobody here would care about Madeleine, her work or her reputation, the damage she had suffered at Faletti’s hands. Hands? Claws. Stubby claws.
It wasn’t fair that someone like Faletti could have a bestseller. Cam had been trying to put words on paper all his life. Somewhere, deep down, he dreamed about being able to write stories that people would love. There wasn’t time for that with Madeleine, but some nights he would come home, exhausted, and sit up late with his paper and pen, writing down characters and situations, wishing he had the time for more. Meanwhile, people like Sergio Faletti would have all the time in the world for their loathsome screeds.
He climbed the old marble stairway up four stories. Each stair had been slowly worn away over time, so that there was a depression in each one, dug by thousands of feet over the decades. He emerged in a silent hall filled with doors of dark wood, doors surprisingly close together, suggestive more of a cloister than the rich, expansive offices he’d assumed professors here would have. He crept down the hall, instinctively keeping his step light and quiet as possible, reading the names on the doors, until he came to one with a piece of paper pinned to the door. “Sergio Faletti,” it said, “Writer in Residence.” A list of office hours indicated he’d come at the right time.
As he raised his hand to knock on the door, he paused. Was he really going to do this? Was he going to confront a bestselling writer in order to defend his employer? Suddenly the foolishness of it struck him. It was like there was a little bubble around Madeleine, where irrational things made sense, but the further you got from her, the more logic began to take hold.
He was about to do something really stupid.
No. No, that was wrong. This wasn’t stupid. The outside world might have thought so. People might say, why are you going to tell a guy off for writing one single review? Why can’t you let Madeleine’s book stand on its own?
They didn’t understand. Madeleine needed help. Needed protection. Her words had meant so much to him during that dark time of his life that he couldn’t bear hearing her put down. His knuckles rapped against the door. Sergio Faletti was about to get an earful.
But the man who opened the door wasn’t Sergio Faletti. He couldn’t have been. Where was the scowling troll? The guy at the door was tall, maybe half a head taller than Cam, and he wasn’t old and ugly. Not Cam’s type. One of those guys at the gym who spends a little too much time looking in the mirror while he lifts, making sure he’s getting just the right definition on his arms. The tight shirt he was wearing was so obviously a ploy to get people to notice his muscles. And worse, it was so clear he knew that people thought he was attractive. His face was stuck in what could only be described as a polite but cocky sneer.
“Hey, I’m writing,” he said, “but my office hours start at 3.” He started to close the door.
“I’m not a student,” said Cam.
The guy stopped closing the door. Cam was glad of that, because in a sudden moment of panic he thought, what if the door had really closed? Would he knock again? Or worse, was he supposed to shove his foot in the door? Did people actually do that? It seemed like it would hurt.
Now the guy had a raised eyebrow. Could this actually be Sergio Faletti? It d
idn’t seem possible. “Are you here for an interview?” the guy asked.
So this was the moment of truth. The time when Cam would declare his purpose, and begin the attack. And his mouth was completely dry. When he tried to say something, his voice croaked.
“I’m sorry?” said the guy.
Cam cleared his throat. “You’re Sergio Faletti?”
“Yeah, I—” Then there was a buzzing sound from the pocket of the guy’s pants. Cam hadn’t yet looked down that far. He began to blush. Sergio pulled his phone out from where it had been clearly outlined in denim. The jeans weren’t skinny fit, but Sergio’s thighs were so thick and muscular that the fabric was pulled tight over them…and his package was pretty obvious. There was just no room in those pants to conceal it; it was pressed against the denim like it was struggling to get out. Cam looked back up, praying his gaze hadn’t lingered too long, that it hadn’t been noticed.
Too late. Sergio was scowling at him while answering the phone. Cam’s cheeks were so hot with embarrassment. The lightness of his voice speaking into the phone was in conflict with the anger on his face. “Hey, yeah, I just talked to Sam. No, no, it’s no problem.” He made a brushing motion with his hand: Go away. Then he turned and began to close the door again.
There are times in life, when you’ve just been caught staring at the crotch of your boss’s greatest rival, that you have to look inward for guidance. Cam considered: Should he follow Sergio into the office and continue the confrontation, risking even greater humiliation? Or should he do the sensible thing, go home, lock the door and never show his face in public again?
But Madeleine. How could he ever look himself in the mirror again, if he didn’t go through with this? She needed him. And he needed this job. It was his passion, his life. And if it took a little humiliation to get the job done, then hell, he’d face that embarrassment with pride. Or at least that was the speech he gave himself. As the door closed, he put his foot between it and the jamb, and then pushed his way in.