by Adam Langer
The book was one I needed to write, but in retrospect, not one that anyone needed to read. I didn’t think it would make much of an impression on my mother. She had often encouraged me to read, and kept numerous books on her shelves from her high school and college years—and like all Americans who came of age in the early 1960s, she kept some Salinger books in her collection. But I don’t recall her reading much of anything aside from nature magazines and puzzle books. Plus, in Nine Fathers, though I’d used my father’s real name in the hopes that he might happen upon it and find me, I’d described the character based on my mother as vaguely and sympathetically as possible. I’d changed all the biographical details, didn’t mention her temper or her mood swings. I’d left out just about anything that would have led readers to believe she neglected me. I didn’t mention her wealthy, cocktail-swilling boyfriends, most a minimum of ten years older than her. I didn’t write about the packs of Virginia Slims she asked me to buy for her, about the spending sprees, the occasional shoplifting charge, or the Rob Roys or Crème de Menthe. I didn’t even include the fact that her job at the Tribune consisted of writing the Anagrams and Jumble for the Trib’s puzzle page, which I thought would have struck readers as hackneyed symbolism even though it was actually true.
Shortly before it was published, I gave my mother a copy of Nine Fathers. By then, she had reached retirement age, but she was still working at the Tribune. When I would speak to her over the phone, I would wait for her to mention the book, but she never did, and I grew to suspect she hadn’t read it, and probably never would.
But an interview I did with Steve Edwards, the host of a Chicago NPR show, caught her attention. Having written hundreds of author profiles, I understood the sorts of stories that captivated an interviewer. You were supposed to be snappy and glib, and you had to talk about how your writing was autobiographical, even, maybe especially, when it wasn’t. And so I talked about my mother’s secrecy and the mystery that constituted my father’s life. I talked about the puzzles on the Tribune comics page and the Coq d’Or Lounge. I talked about the boyfriends Mom used to bring home—those silver-haired executives reeking of aftershave who ordered me to fetch ice for their cocktails and matches for their cigars, then offered me sips and puffs that I refused.
I didn’t think I had said anything particularly offensive or controversial. But the day after the talk show, my mom sent me a stern e-mail: “You have sullied your parentage,” she wrote. I tried to call her to get an explanation, but she never gave me one. For more than a year, she refused to take my calls. She didn’t answer the e-mails I sent either. Only after Ramona, her first grandchild, started to speak full sentences did my mom begin to speak to me again, but our relationship had been irrevocably damaged. There had been a time when the two of us could talk for hours about anything; now, our conversations rarely lasted more than five minutes. I had written something that had wounded her and she could no longer trust me, she said. Mere words I had spoken had changed the trajectory of lives—mine, my mother’s, and those of my wife and children. I began to sort of understand how it might have felt to be J. D. Salinger, how he might have been led to a life of seclusion. Once I’d had great plans for more novels, but after Nine Fathers, I weighed my words carefully and worried about the consequences of putting them into print. I had not completed another novel or story, and I was beginning to think I never would.
6
Room 110 at the West Lafayette Hilton was registered to a Mr. Jerome Salinger. It gave out onto Interstate 65, an unremarkable but functional highway that connected greater Chicagoland to Indianapolis. Conner had drawn the maroon curtains over his negligible view, their paisley pattern billowing stale gusts from the air conditioner, which was on full-blast even though, lately, Indiana mornings had been starting out cool.
Conner had moved the room’s faux-mahogany desk and chairs away from the window, as if he were a spy afraid someone might see him through the window and try to assassinate him. He slapped me hard on the shoulder, thanked me for coming, and apologized for the “mysterious invitation.” I noticed the beds were still made, and that Conner was wearing the same jacket, shirt, and jeans he’d worn at Borders.
“Yeah,” he said, noticing what I was looking at. “Couldn’t sleep, man. Didn’t even try. You hungry?”
I shook my head. “Already ate.”
“Coffee?”
“Water’s good.” I filled myself a glass from the bathroom sink.
“So,” I said as I took a sip, “what do you need?”
“You bring a swimsuit?” he asked.
“Yeah, but I’m not much of a swimmer.”
“Let’s head down to the pool anyway,” he said. “Might be safer.”
“Safer?”
Conner assured me he wasn’t worried for my safety, only his, and that the precautions were probably unnecessary anyway. He was just feeling paranoid that someone might have been listening to him or photographing him, and a swimming pool was more difficult to bug than a room. If he weren’t married and if he didn’t have a kid, he wouldn’t have given a damn. But now safety was constantly on his mind. So I followed along with Conner’s routine, which, if nothing else, was more interesting than my own. At this time of day, I would have been at home doing the diaper laundry, emptying the dishwasher, reading cookbooks, inspecting recipes on Epicurious, stalking old girlfriends on Facebook, and imagining other novels I could write that would probably get me into trouble—for example, Nine Exes.
Conner changed into a pair of black swim trunks; mine were orange and still a bit damp from the previous day at Bryan Park, where the kids and I had spent the day riding the water slides. We took the stairs down to the pool, which was empty save for a chain-smoking mom and her two boys who were eating Zagnut bars and littering the pool with their candy wrappers.
“You know, you’re the only person I can tell this story to; you’re the only person who’ll get it.” Conner took a sip of club soda and stepped into the pool.
I got in after him—the water was piss-warm and motionless. “All right, what’s the story?” I asked.
“First, let me ask you something. Do you remember that book I told you to read when we were hangin’ in the Pokes?”
I remembered. In fact, it surprised me that he remembered; I figured the time we spent together had made more of an impression on me than on him.
“Yeah,” I told him. “We were talking about John Le Carré. The Russia House.”
“That’s right. There was a line in it I told you about. One of my favorites. You remember what it was?”
I didn’t. In fact, I hadn’t managed to read the book all the way through. I had always found Le Carré’s books dense and slow-going, though I didn’t mind some of the movies and BBC TV series based on his novels.
“That’s all right,” he said. “It’s something the Russian agent says to Barley, the British publisher—‘Promise me that if ever I find the courage to think like a hero, you will act like a merely decent human being.’”
Conner repeated those last five words. He lingered over their syllables as if they were part of some prayer he had learned back in Catholic school—a merely decent human being.
“I have a feeling this story may turn out to be kind of like that,” he said.
“Why?” I asked. “Are you about to become a hero?”
“Not me,” he said. “Maybe the opposite.”
“You mean a villain?”
“Yeah,” Conner said. “Maybe something like that.”
7
The sun was beating down hard, and here we were—two forty-year-old guys in swimming trunks and baseball caps sipping club sodas in the shallow end of a pool at a roadside Hilton in West Lafayette with a view out onto the Interstate and the Flying J rest stop. I joked to Conner that we probably looked like a couple of kingpins planning a drug deal, but that was wishful thinking. I’m sure we looked
more like a couple of washed-up dads waiting for our kids to come down to the pool. My baseball cap shaded my face, but I could still feel the sunlight reflecting off the water, charring my cheeks. Conner’s skin was already bronzed, which pretty much summed up the differences between him and me—he tanned; I burned.
“How was Chicago?” I asked.
“Not all that great,” he said. He had taken the first flight out of Indy, and arrived at ten in the morning at the Drake Hotel, where he checked into the Author’s Suite, reputed to be the smallest suite in the hotel—even I had stayed in there when I was touring to support Nine Fathers, which should give you an idea of its modesty. He got a ride to Navy Pier, where he conducted an interview at WBEZ with the daytime host Rick Kogan, who had replaced Steve Edwards, the dude I held partially responsible for ruining my relationship with my mother.
Conner called Angie a couple of times to check in and see how she and Atticus were doing but, as always seemed to be the case these days, her temper was short and she seemed rushed; all she wanted to discuss was the work she needed to do around the house and what Conner would need to do when he got home—the toilet was backing up again; paint was chipping in the nursery and she sure hoped there wasn’t lead in it; the seventh year on their adjustable rate mortgage was rapidly approaching. So Conner spent most of the day wandering along Lake Michigan, checking out the boats, the swimmers, the sunbathers, and the chess players, seeking inspiration for his next novel. Then he started heading north to his bookstore event.
“That’s just about when things started getting weird,” he said.
Conner’s publisher had hired a driver to take him to his reading at the Borders on Clark Street and Diversey Avenue, about three miles from his hotel, but since he didn’t have any plans, he’d decided to walk. The Chicago weather was oppressive, steamy; the bricks of air-conditioned buildings sweated out heat as Conner strode north on Clark Street, making his way past the singles’ bars and restaurants of the near north side. He strolled by the tony homes of heirs and heiresses to industrial fortunes on the Gold Coast, then on through Lincoln Park, once home to David Mamet, Stuart Dybek, and a handful of other writers Conner admired. He took a shortcut through the Lincoln Park Zoo, where even the animals seemed to be having a hard time contending with the heat. Sad rhinos were gathered in small, muddy pools; the weary and somewhat mangy polar bear didn’t seem to want to get out of the water; the gorillas were in a better mood—they had air conditioning.
Near the gift shop on his way out, Conner caught sight of a lone coyote that seemed almost to blend in with the slab of slate upon which he was standing. Conner spent some time staring into that animal’s pale blue eyes. “You and me, man,” Conner told that coyote. “You and me. We’re just doing what we have to do to survive, and here we are, man, doin’ it on our own.”
When Conner got to Diversey Avenue, he started to feel more upbeat about his life. He was healthy, strong. He had a great wife, a beautiful son, both his parents were still alive. The streets and sidewalks were busy and the people on them seemed young, full of energy.
There was a line of people in front of the bookstore; the line was made up mostly of tweens with dyed hair accompanied by their parents and black-clad Goth kids on their own. Two news vans and a limo were parked in a loading zone, and a couple of bodyguards were standing by the front door, speaking furtively into their mouthpieces. Conner half convinced himself his interview on NPR had gone better than he had imagined and had generated this crowd. He also half convinced himself that Barack Obama was in town, perhaps visiting one of his major fund-raisers, Penny Pritzker, who lived in the area. Maybe the president and the Pritzkers were fans of his work and wanted their very own copies of Ice Locker. Only when he got to the front door did Conner realize he was at the wrong bookstore—this was not Borders; this was the Barnes & Noble across the street, a relic of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when people actually thought a neighborhood could support two big-box bookstores. The people outside the B&N were waiting to meet Margot Hetley, who would be reading from The Fearsome Shallow: Wizard Vampire Chronicles #8, or WVCVIII, as fanboys and fangirls referred to it. Everybody in line had a copy of WVCVIII; no one was holding Ice Locker. Across the street at Borders, a sign in the window read conner joyce reading tonight! but no one was waiting in line outside.
Inside Borders was a more depressingly familiar scene—rows of mostly unoccupied folding chairs upon a grim, gray carpet; stacks of hardcover Conner Joyce novels no one was waiting in line to buy; a disinterested store manager marking time before the store would close for good and she would get laid off. Yes, there was a better crowd than there had been at the Bloomington store—about fifteen or twenty, Conner estimated—but nothing that would make his next phone conversation with Angie go any better than the previous ones. Nevertheless, he tried to stay focused and positive. When he stood up in front of the audience and took his place at the podium, he performed his usual spiel. Afterward, he answered the usual questions—he said he did the same thing whether he was speaking before five people or five hundred, felt that each person deserved respect. Then he took out his Sharpie and sat down at the signing table.
The people who waited in a small line to talk to Conner after the reading were the typical amalgam of fans, writing students, and collectors, the latter of whom were hoping that someday Conner’s books would be worth more than they were right now. He took his time signing; he had plenty of it. The only items left on his schedule were a ride to his hotel, sleep, then a six a.m. trip to the airport. He would catch his flight to LaGuardia. He would pick up his car and drive it back to the Pokes, where he would have a serious conversation with Angie about selling the house.
Conner capped his Sharpie and was getting ready to leave when he saw another man waiting for him to sign his book. He hadn’t noticed the man during the reading, and felt fairly sure he must have shown up long after it had begun because, given his leathery face and imposing presence, he certainly would have remembered him.
“Was he anyone you recognized?” I asked.
“No,” said Conner.
“Who was he?”
“He said his name was Pavel.”
8
Pavel wore sunglasses. He was a bulky man in a mothballed tweed jacket, black shirt, and dark pants, all of which seemed a little tight for him, and he had a demeanor and sense of personal space that would have indicated he was Eastern European even before he opened his mouth and revealed his accent. Conner said he looked as if he might once have worked on a security detail for Vladimir Putin. He was hulking over the signing table, thumbing through a copy of Ice Locker when Conner caught his attention and asked if he wanted him to sign the book. The man nodded with a slightly sardonic smile that suggested a sly sense of humor at work beneath the thuggish presence, the bullish posture, and the shades. There was a bulge near one of his shoulders that made it look like he might have been carrying a weapon.
The man proffered his copy of Ice Locker. “If you plizz,” he said.
Conner took the book from the man, who told him how much he had enjoyed it. Odd—the man didn’t give off the impression of being much of a reader, and Conner was further surprised when he told him how accurate his novels always were, how much specific detail they provided about forensics and police procedures.
“You know my work,” said Conner.
“I do.”
“So,” Conner asked. “Who should I make it out to? The signature?”
“Make it ‘To Dex.’”
“Sure.” Conner signed and dated the book, at which point Pavel slid a stack of about a dozen books across the table and placed them in front of Conner.
“All these too,” Pavel said.
“Signatures on all of them?” Conner asked.
“Yes. And make them all ‘To Dex,’” said Pavel.
“You must be quite a fan,” said Conner.
&nbs
p; “Dex is, yes.”
Conner stopped in the act of signing. “You’re not Dex?”
“That I am not. But he would like to meet you.”
“Who? Dex? Is he here?” Conner continued to sign the books that Pavel was placing before him.
“No, but I can take you to him whenever you like.”
“I don’t think so, buddy; I don’t swing that way,” said Conner.
“Neither does Dex.” Pavel took off his sunglasses and looked directly into Conner’s eyes. The man reminded Conner of that coyote he had seen at the Lincoln Park Zoo—searching, scheming, alone.
“It would be worth your while. I guarantee this,” Pavel said, and after Conner asked him what he meant, Pavel told him Dex wanted to make Conner “a sort of proposal.”
The proposals Conner tended to get from strangers at readings were usually either bizarre or depressing, most often some combination of the two. Sometimes, a writer wanted Conner’s opinion on a manuscript or a recommendation for an agent or editor. Once in a while, there was a woman, usually unhappily married—she would want to know how long Conner was staying in town and if he had time for a drink. Conner always kept his responses polite yet guarded. He gave the writers his agent’s e-mail address and the name of his editor; he told the women he was busy and, if pressed further, married. The conversations usually ended there, but when Conner offered to give Pavel the name of his editor and publicist, Pavel said no, that wouldn’t do.
“This proposal Dex has to make to you, he will do it in person,” said Pavel.
Conner almost laughed out loud. He wondered whether Pavel’s use of commanding phrases—you will do this; he will do that—was intended to sound as threatening as it did or if Pavel’s English was just that lousy.