Mentor: A Memoir

by Grimes, Tom

  Eric said, “Frank told me they want New World.”

  Idiotically, I’d listed the play’s title on Season’s End’s flap copy. “But it’s a draft,” I said. “It hasn’t been through rehearsals. I haven’t even heard it read yet.”

  I asked if we could exchange scripts. Eric said it would be too embarrassing. When I returned to Iowa and was seated in his office, Frank said, “It’s good if they ask for more stuff. It means they’re interested.”

  But the judges read an unfinished play. I didn’t receive a Whiting. And you can be nominated only once.

  Yet, what would have been worse: to know Frank had nominated me and I’d been turned down, due, in part, to my stupidity? Or to wonder, for the rest of my life, why he’d never nominated me at all?

  “We’ll go for a Guggenheim in a few years,” he said, tossing the foundation’s letter onto his desk. “Just write the new book.”

  By late April, I had seventy pages to show Eric. Before leaving the house to mail them, out of habit I clicked the television’s remote and tuned to CNN. On screen, fires blazed inside roofless buildings. Smoke drifted over East Los Angeles. People smashed storefront windows using rocks and bottles. They carted away half gallons of milk, cigarette cartons, loaves of bread, shoe boxes, bed pillows encased in plastic bags. A bludgeoned truck driver lay on the street. A single police car sped away, backward, from a charging mob.

  The riot had been triggered by the acquittal of four white police officers who had beaten a black man named Rodney King. They caught him after a car chase, and once he stepped onto a patch of nighttime roadway illuminated by a squad car’s headlights, two cops shot him using taser guns. The electrical shocks forced King to his knees. As eight or ten cops watched, four drew their nightsticks and clubbed King’s head, ribs, thighs, and back. They aimed for his throat. When he rolled onto one side, they lifted their nightsticks, then hit him as if they were chopping a log with axes. Someone filmed the incident using a home movie camera. They beat him for one minute and sixteen seconds.

  I dialed Eric’s office and said, “My book ’s on television.” He asked what I meant and I explained that I’d written about a cop killing and riots.

  He said, “You’d better FedEx the pages to me, overnight.”

  By the next afternoon he’d read them. He said they’d astounded him and he planned to submit them, at once, to every editor who had bid on Season’s End. Responses were swift and identical: no. Bill Phillips from Little, Brown wrote, “We believe Tom’s an enormously talented writer but, based on these pages, we feel he has started down the wrong path.” John Glusman (rather than Roger Straus) replied, “We’d love to publish Tom’s books, but I’m afraid this isn’t the one to start with, if for no other reason than I’ve just spent a year working on an ‘apocalyptic’ novel [Going Native by Stephen Wright] and don’t have the strength to take on another.” Gerry Howard said, “This is the kind of book that makes me very nervous,” meaning the novel could be a masterpiece or a total disaster. “But I don’t think Tom can sustain the energy to write the entire book.” He passed.

  That evening at a party, a classmate who knew none of this said (I don’t remember the context), “You’re Tom Grimes. They’ll publish every word you write.”

  I laughed. But, in retrospect, I see my narrative’s perfect symmetry. I arrived as a potential success. I departed a proven failure. Only, that isn’t the meaningful story. The meaningful story is: I arrived fatherless; I departed a son.

  At 9:00 AM, on June 1, Jody and I walked out of our home, leaving everything in its place. At 5:00 PM, when the movers finished packing our belongings, we returned to an empty house. We wandered through it as if to confirm our absence and affirm that the past was now truly the past.

  Maggie and Tim flew to Boston where, after driving cross-country, bearing their summer clothes, Frank would meet them. The evening before he left he appeared in the TV room, where Jody and I were watching a basketball game. “I’m going to Cedar Rapids to pick up some hookers,” he said. I laughed. Then he waved good-night.

  The next morning, I walked along the neighborhood’s immaculate streets. Birds chirped. The leaves were green. And when I reached the bridge, the river flowed.

  Inside EPB, Connie handed me Frank’s office key. I opened the door, aware of the room’s stillness. The Oxford dictionary lay open, perched on its stand, but the heaps of manuscripts had vanished. I brushed my fingertips along the edge of his desk. Then I sat in Frank ’s chair, swiveled toward the one I used to sit in, and saw nothing, not even a ghost.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Once Jody and I had moved to Texas, I returned to writing the novel no one wanted to publish. On weekdays at 10:00 AM, I’d carry a cup of coffee and a slice of low-calorie toast topped with jam into the small room I used as an office. I’d work until 1:15. Then I’d close my notebook, undress, step into the molded plastic shower, bump my head on its five-foot-high nozzle, curse, dress, grab my freshman composition textbook, and walk out the door. Rated the Best Party School in the Country by Playboy magazine, the university was a one-mile hike across town past abandoned houses, a strand of ramshackle apartment buildings, and several dingy mansions occupied by fraternities that decorated their lawns with stained couches, beer cans, crumpled pizza boxes, and the occasional Frisbee. Whenever I was late, I ran. When I saw the twin pit bulls, I stopped, turned, and sprinted a block out of my way in the ninety-degree heat. T-shirt drenched, I arrived in class, breathless. I taught, and held office hours, Monday through Thursday from 2:00 to 5:00 PM, and every other week, I graded fifty-four freshman composition papers. Twice a month, I spent Friday afternoons in meetings. Weekends, I wrote until midday. Returning to the novel’s beginning, revising its seventy pages, and then continuing provided the personal affirmation I required. Every writer is alone, and every good book is difficult to write. I had forgotten this. I wouldn’t forget it a second time.

  On the drive from Iowa City to Texas, I daydreamed as we sped through the flat midwestern landscape. Then, without expecting to, I imagined a boy leaping off a rooftop, at night, high above a city’s lights. I didn’t make a note of it. If the image needed to be in the novel, I’d remember it. If it didn’t need to be, I’d forget it. This image resonated. If it continued to resonate, it would end my novel.

  “Don’t lose it,” Eric told me during a telephone call, two months before he retired at age thirty-seven. After he was diagnosed as being HIV positive, all that mattered to him were his lover and his yellow Labrador retriever, who, by the end, would drag Eric along Manhattan’s streets by the leash connecting them. “And don’t quit,” he added. “Write the novel.”

  I continued to write, but by late autumn my ability to construct sentences, and shape scenes, began to deteriorate. My muscles ached. My head felt like a metal claw had buried itself at the base of my skull. Often, an hour ticked by before I could summon the word I needed. As winter began, my fatigue intensified. I thought the cause might be allergies. By four every afternoon, pressure from clogged sinuses made me feel like my eyeballs would pop out of their sockets. I’d return from school, take two Tylenol, lie on the floor, stare at the stucco ceiling, and listen to the water heater’s lime-choked pipes whistle as steam blew through them. Taking antihistamine tablets didn’t help. Every morning, my brain felt as dense as a cinder block. Working twenty hours a week, I wrote thirty pages in three months. Maybe Gerry Howard had been right: I wouldn’t be able to finish the novel. I lacked the necessary talent and energy.

  A year after Season’s End ’s publication, its paperback edition was nonexistent. Twenty-two hundred hardcover copies had sold. Thirteen thousand were remaindered. And Little, Brown had recouped only forty-four hundred dollars of my forty-two-thousand dollar advance. But the image of a boy leaping off a rooftop persisted, and I understood, irrationally perhaps, that if I abandoned this new novel my life as a writer would end. If I quit once, I could quit again. “Go on failing,�
� as Beckett said. “Only next time, try to fail better.”

  In May, Connie called. “How would you like to teach here this summer? ” Denis Johnson had taught the spring semester, but didn’t want to stay. (Years later, he said to me, “They expect you to work up there.”)

  Once again, we would rent Frank and Maggie’s house. Frank told me my salary would increase. “But your rent stays the same,” he said, before he added, “Although, I have thought about charging your cats room and board.” Then he laughed. Why wouldn’t he? Body & Soul would be released in four months. The novel, it seemed, would make him more famous than Stop-Time had. The only unanswered questions were how long it would remain on the New York Times best-seller list and what prizes it would win. Frank had been a finalist for the National Book Award once. This time, maybe they’d give it to him.

  Two years earlier, one evening after workshop, I’d given Frank a bottle of wine. We had left EPB after dark and walked across the parking lot. Sitting in Frank ’s car, we shivered as its engine warmed. Our breath fogged the windshield, masking the thin, filigreed sheet of ice that would soon melt and be swept aside by the wipers. Once heat streamed out the air vents, our muscles unclenched, and Frank turned on the headlights. With a gloved hand I removed from the crook of my arm the wine bottle I’d wrapped in a brown paper bag. As I passed it to him I said, “Just a little something to say thanks.” I’d ordered a bottle of 1934 Château Lafite Rothschild Bordeaux from Morrell and Company in Manhattan when my advance for Season’s End arrived. Hoping I was a local socialite who regularly dropped $150 for a liter of Bordeaux, the telephone salesman said, “Should I send over a case? ” Just a bottle, I told him. While I recited my Iowa City address, I thought he might decide not to sell a legendary vintage to a midwestern rube. But he shipped it, I toted it to class, and then, beneath the parking lot’s lamplight, Frank checked the bottle’s label. About to utter a polite thank you, he said, “Hey!” Immediately slipping it back into the bag he added, “I’ll drink it when I finish Body & Soul.”

  Those two years passed and, one Sunday in late November, shortly after dusk, our telephone rang. Frank’s voice, soft and conspiratorial, said, “I’m opening a bottle of wine.”

  “You finished Body & Soul.”

  “Two hours ago.”

  “You’re happy with it?”

  “Very.”

  Then Frank tasted the wine and said, “It’s terrific.”

  Had Jody and I been in Iowa, we would have been standing in the kitchen with him and Maggie, clinking glasses. Maggie would have said, “All right!” Frank would have said something innocuous, like, “Cheers!” He wouldn’t play the piano. “Let’s go sit by the fire,” he would have said, and, in my imagination, he does say it—to phantoms. Jody and I were seventeen hundred miles away. The scene isn’t a memory, it’s a fantasy. And, over time, its continual recurrence with subtle variations—who stood where, how hot the fire was—hasn’t diminished my sense of absence but enlarged it, and reinforced the loss’s permanence.

  Moments later, Frank said, “Wish you were here. Love to you both.” Then he hung up.

  The conversation lasted two minutes. Seventeen years later, I still hear it.

  Publishers Weekly reviewed Body & Soul in June, while Frank was on Nantucket. The review wasn’t “boxed,” to distinguish it from other reviews, nor was it “starred,” or signed. Its anonymous, but far from objective, reviewer had decided thatWhen the author of Stop-Time and Midair produces a new work, it is an event to celebrate. And although Conroy’s bildungsroman of a boy finding his identity in his musical genius has some flaws, it is by and large an engrossing novel, written in a supple and elegant prose and displaying remarkable insight into the mind of a prodigy. Conroy’s protagonist is Claude Rawlings, who grows up in the 1940s in the shadow of New York’s Third Avenue El . . . neglected by his emotionally unstable, alcoholic, cab-driver mother, he shines shoes, lifts coins from sewers and learns to steal. He is introduced to another world when Aaron Weisfeld, a music store owner and WWII refugee, recognizes his musical gifts and transports him to the Park Avenue apartment of a maestro whose Bechstein piano Claude uses and eventually inherits. Even more in the Dickensian mode, Claude falls in love with a cold, arrogant young woman from a patrician New York family, a character who is eerily similar to Estella in Great Expectations. Conroy’s depiction of a young boy’s discovery of music, the awakening of his sensibility and the flowering of his genius are brilliant. Lucid explanations of musical theory ranging from basic harmonics to the 12-tone scale, from Bach to Charlie Parker to Schoenberg, provide a continuum of insights and discoveries for Claude and for the reader. The first half of the book sweeps Claude along a path strewn with almost miraculous lucky breaks: he has inspired teachers and generous and appreciative patrons; his concerts are unalloyed triumphs— and only the cynical will wish for a disaster to increase the tension. (Readers of Stop-Time will also recognize in Claude’s childhood an alternative version of Conroy’s miserable youth.) The second half is less successful. Claude’s immersion in music, an obsession that makes him fascinating as a youth, renders him hollow as a man, and while Conroy obviously intends to demonstrate that Claude’s emotional life is sterile in several ways, as a protagonist for a time he becomes a muted and shadowy figure. Claude’s unquestioning relationship with the kindly Weisfeld, his first and abiding teacher, is less credible once he matures. The revelation of Claude’s patrimony is poignantly rendered, however, and provides another look at the nature of creativity. And the book as a whole is harmoniously orchestrated and beautifully observed. 125,000 first printing; film rights to Spring Creek Productions; major ad/promo; author tour.

  A mixed review that, nonetheless, provided advertising quotes: “[A]n engrossing novel, written in a supple and elegant prose. . . . Conroy’s depiction of a young boy’s discovery of music, the awakening of his sensibility and the flowering of his genius are brilliant.”

  Kirkus Reviews’ assessment was similar: “From rags to riches—by way of musical genius—in this alluringly atmospheric first novel by Conroy of Stop-Time (1967) fame. . . . Claude’s awakening to music is splendidly, rivetingly, described, and the Horatio Alger-esque clichés and coincidences are readily forgiven. . . . [But] once Claude is grown and launched, Conroy fills out his novel with more and more soap-opera turns. . . . Still, especially for the first two-thirds: a masterful coming-of-ager set in a now-vanished New York. 75,000 first printing (not 125,000); film rights to Spring Creek Productions.”

  Again mixed, but quotable: “[A] masterful coming-of-ager set in a now-vanished New York.”

  Not great reviews, but not damaging, although, unintentionally, the reviews exposed every publisher’s exaggeration regarding the size of a book’s first printing—more copies, more faith in the book; the totals differed by fifty thousand copies. In either case, Sam Lawrence anticipated a major success.

  Before he left for Nantucket, Frank gave me an advance reader’s copy. On its front cover, the novel’s title and Frank’s name appear in one-inch-high dusky gold letters. An elegant red cleft note separates the words Body and Soul. A slim line of type reads: A Novel by the Author of Stop-Time. On the back, above his bio, Frank is seated on a black bench, one arm resting against a black grand piano. He wears charcoal gray slacks and a black pullover turtleneck sweater, which fuse with the photograph’s grayish-black background. His hair is silvery white, his skin flawless and light gray. He looks neither happy nor dour, but elegant, and eerily handsome. Without glasses, his eyes are impenetrably black. And he stares at me—I know this is impossible—as if he’s certain I will study this photograph many years later. And, he’s right, I do. But while I imagine our perpetual, metaphysical bond, his expression seems to say, “Your memoir, Tom, is about me. Don’t fuck it up.” Then he laughs. I know he isn’t serious. But here I am having a conversation with a seventeen-year-old photograph taken prior to Frank’s need for insulin injections to control his diabetes and, later, his use
of a cane. Yet the photograph perfectly encapsulates my relationship to Frank. For years, he has existed more as a psychological rather than as a physical presence for me. And this memoir, I now see, binds and separates us for a simple reason: it’s told in my voice, not his.

  Still, I often embodied Frank’s absence. I worked in his office. I taught in his classroom. I lived in his house. I slept in his bed. I played his piano. And I wrote in his study, although I deliberately avoided sitting on the mattress where he’d written Body & Soul. Instead, I used the small desk near the window that overlooked the driveway. As summer blossomed, the speed and clarity of my writing not only returned, it also increased. I produced a page to a page and a half a day, the prose (to me) virtually flawless. At times, it seemed words appeared on the page before I’d even thought of them. However, a muse didn’t enthrall me; neurons zipping from projectors to receptors did. Images flashed across the hemispheres of my brain, and Jody began to ask why I was talking so fast. Every evening, after two tumblers of bourbon, my speech slowed. But every afternoon my thoughts accelerated, racing from swift to scattered, and my actions became impulsive. Once I’d finished reading a galley copy of Body & Soul, I knew the novel’s latter half could be improved, and, as someone who idolized Frank, I felt compelled to tell him. He would expect no less of me. So I composed a letter, and quoted passages to support my argument.