by Adam Langer
“So, do you really give a shit about the books, or is that just an act?” Conner asked Dex.
“You’re demeaning your own talent,” said Dex. “Great literature inspires me, motivates me. I told you that. I love these books, every one of them. I love each sentence in them.”
“That’s why you keep them?” asked Conner. “For ‘love’?”
“In part, yes,” said Dex. “I keep them because of the love they inspire in me and because of the fond memories they provoke, and …”
“And?”
“And even if I didn’t, I would also need to keep them as security and as evidence.”
“Evidence? Meaning what?”
“Meaning that if you, or for that matter any other author who works for me, violates the agreement we have made, then I know certain individuals who would be very interested in the books you have written, and I would not hesitate to bring your book to their attention. One day, Margot Hetley will learn that. And if you violate our contract, so will you.”
“Go to hell,” said Conner.
“Look, Conner,” said Dex, “you’ve been very well paid, better than you ever have been in your life. You delivered your side of the bargain; I’ve delivered mine. May I give you some advice?”
“I’ll pass.”
“Well, here it is, nonetheless. Go back to Pennsylvania. Go home to your wife and son. Deposit your check. Forget this ever happened. Forget you ever met me or Pavel. Nothing connects you to the robbery—only one manuscript that no one, save myself and Pavel, will ever read.”
“And a flash drive,” Conner said.
Dex looked to Pavel.
“Thees was my idea,” said Pavel. “A keepsake. A memento.”
“I trust you’ve disposed of it by now,” Dex told Conner. “Will you be staying at the Drake tonight?”
“I want to go home,” said Conner.
“Understandable,” said Dex. “But if you change your mind, there’s a room reserved there. Feel free to use it. The accommodations are much nicer than the ones your publisher pays for, or should I say the ones your publisher used to pay for. I’ve made the reservation under a name that I think you like to use as well.”
“Which is what?” Conner asked.
“You don’t need me to tell you that,” said Dex.
31
The last flight to LaGuardia had already left. So Conner did wind up taking the room Dex had reserved. From the window, he could see nearly half of Chicago. He could see the red and white lights of cars zipping up and down Lake Shore Drive against the black backdrop of Lake Michigan. He could see the expanse of darkness that was Lincoln Park Zoo, where, somewhere inside, a lone coyote on a slab of gray rock was probably howling. Conner felt like howling too—he wished he had someone to share this room with; it was wasted on him. But Dex was right; it was certainly comfortable. And yes, it did seem as if Dex had been right about most things. As far as the advice Dex had given to Conner—go home, pretend nothing had happened, deposit his check, move on with his life—Conner couldn’t say for sure whether Dex was right or wrong, but he figured he had no other choice.
“I was going to pretend none of it ever happened,” Conner told me. “I wrote a book. Someone committed a crime. There was no connection. That’s the choice I made. But I didn’t realize a choice had already been made for me.”
Conner went to bed past midnight. He had been planning to wake up early to catch the 6:15 a.m. flight, but he still wanted to talk to Angie. He called her on her cell phone; he figured she was probably asleep, but he would leave her a message, apologizing for having lost his temper. He would tell her that he loved her and would see her soon.
Voice mail usually picked up after three or four rings, but this time, Conner heard a click after Angie’s phone had rung only once. She picked up.
“I read the Times, Conner. You’re a fucking liar,” she said, then hung up.
Conner tried to call back, but she wouldn’t pick up however many times he called, however many messages he left.
“Holy fuck,” I said.
“Yep, that’s about the size of it, dude,” said Conner.
“So, what did you do?”
“The only thing that made sense.”
“What was that?”
“I went looking for you.”
The rent-a-cop in the drive-in was now laying on his horn and flashing his lights, which was all right because I had to get home, and Conner had told the whole story—at least, all that he knew up to this point. He was on his way back to Pennsylvania, where he would have to talk to Angie. Somehow, she had discovered what he had done, and now he could either gamble his marriage by continuing to try to lie to her, or he could risk everything by telling her the truth.
“You know I trust you, man. You know that by now, don’t you?” Conner said to me.
“Yeah. You’ve told me.”
“So, what would you do in my position?”
“You mean tell Angie or not?”
I considered. What would I do? Actually, I had a pretty good idea of just what I would do. But I didn’t think Conner meant to ask me what I personally would do; I thought he meant to ask what I would do if I were him. For myself, I would have done whatever led to my desired outcome, regardless of whether it was the right thing or not. As long as it kept my family together, I probably wouldn’t have given a damn about right or wrong. Sign this contract, agree to this or that, who gave a damn as long as it paid our expenses and kept us out of trouble. I hadn’t even told Sabine about my conversations with Conner because she probably would have told me I was wasting my time when I should have been working on my own writing. But I figured Conner didn’t see me as that sort of person; he saw himself reflected in me, and so I told him what I figured he wanted to hear, what I thought Conner Joyce would do.
“I’d tell her the truth,” I said.
“That’s what you would do?” he asked.
“It’s what Cole Padgett would do,” I said.
“What about Conner Joyce?”
“Him too. Even more so.”
“Even if it meant I might lose everything?”
“If you don’t, what do you have left?” I asked.
It was a bullshit line, corny as hell, but Conner smiled thoughtfully, then cupped my shoulder with one hand. “I knew you were a decent human being,” he told me.
“Maybe, maybe not.”
He laughed; he must have figured I was joking or being modest, and I didn’t see the purpose of telling him I wasn’t.
We shook hands and said good-bye. I wished him safe travels back to Pennsylvania and good luck. The high beams of the rent-a-cop’s truck were still shining as I watched Conner get back into his rental car, then drive out of the parking lot of the Starlite Drive-In heading north toward Indianapolis. I hooked a left and headed south. As I sped along the dark highway, I had the sensation I was being followed. But by the time I got back home, I couldn’t see any cars behind me.
32
I knew I would hear from Conner again soon—far sooner, in fact, than I wanted. But when I did, he was far away from my mind. My own future was my concern, not his, and I didn’t have any sense that the two were linked. Part of my mind was in Indiana, part of it was in Chicago, part of it was floating just about everywhere in the United States; if any of my mind happened to be thinking about the Pocono Mountains, I certainly wasn’t aware of it. Because now it really looked as though Sabine, the kids, and I would have to leave Indiana.
Although one could not say Sabine’s tenure appeal had gone well, it certainly did not go poorly in the way we might have expected. There was more to the story than the vague sensations of disgruntlement we felt as we packed up boxes with the intention of moving to my mother’s apartment in Chicago or Sabine’s parents’ house outside Rastatt, Germany, where we would hunker down and figure
out what to do next. The university had denied Sabine’s appeal, citing some crappy student evaluations and “unsatisfactory service to the department,” the latter of which meant that she was axed in part for wanting to spend time with her kids as opposed to hot-tubbing with “Spag” Getty and the members of his reggae band, or attending the semiannual, adults-only departmental outings to one of the local crap-ass wineries. No mention at all was made in the university’s report of our Buck Floomington blog.
Sabine was fatalistic about the whole matter; she was German and fatalism was in her DNA. She had no interest in a protracted debate, and certainly didn’t want to blow what little savings we had on a doomed legal battle. But I was unwilling to accept the university’s decision. So I spent hours, when I wasn’t cooking, vacuuming, doing laundry, driving my kids back and forth to Wonderlab, the Indianapolis Zoo, and the Children’s Museum, researching successful tenure lawsuits and e-mailing pro-bono attorneys from the university’s law school. I was dismayed by my apparent impotence, and began to feel like that line Conner quoted from the John Le Carré novel, but twisted all around:
If you had the opportunity to act like an entitled asshole in order to get what you want, would you take it?
Absofuckinglutely.
That’s not the answer I would have given Conner Joyce, but it worked well enough for me.
The outdoor farmers’ market was one of my favorite aspects of Bloomington, one of the only reasons to get out of the house before noon on a Saturday—Amish families selling cheese and strawberries; little kids shaking noisemakers to Hoagy Carmichael tunes sung by a husband-and-wife duo who called themselves the Hoosier Hotcakes; barrels of paw-paws for sale. I knew all the salespeople by the products they sold—there was Earnest Swiss Chard Guy, Jolly Hydroponic Basil Dude, Homemade Barbecue Man, Italian Pastry Mom, Earthy Mushroom Lady, and, of course, Dreadlocked Hottie at the Tamale Cart.
Ramona was with Sabine at the library and I was pushing Beatrice’s stroller by the acoustic music stage, where a bluegrass step dancing group called Fiddlin’ Feet was playing. I was helping Beatrice out of the stroller so that she could get a better view of the stage when I noticed Dr. Lloyd Agger approaching. My wife’s current department chair was a bald, muscular man, who, with every confident step, seemed bent on proving that adage about hair loss being evidence of virility. He was known for having five daughters and beating the shit out of all their husbands in one-on-one hoops and squash. Strutting in his khaki shorts, his white T-shirt with bloomington united in diversity printed in rainbow letters, and his flip-flops, he grinned at me, extended a hand, and asked how Sabine’s and my job searches were going.
I smiled back, shook his hand, tried not to wince at his anaconda grip, and told him they were going as well as they could. Fiddlin’ Feet was playing the Bob Wills tune “Take Me Back to Tulsa (I’m Too Young to Marry)” and Beatrice was slapping a pair of sticks to keep time with the music.
“I’m sorry this story didn’t have a better ending,” Agger told me, and in response, I offered some bullcrap about how the end of one story could be seen as the beginning of another, and there was always another chapter to be written.
“That’s the writer in you.” He laughed and slapped me on the back. “I like that attitude. It should get you far.”
I thanked him for complimenting my attitude, but told him my statement was true. Now that the tenure appeal process had been exhausted, I could focus on some opportunities I hadn’t been able to take advantage of before. For example, I said, though I had felt angry when I learned that Duncan Gerlach had discovered our Buck Floomington blog entries, then leaked them to members of my wife’s department, I was ultimately thankful because I had never realized how strong they were as pieces of writing. “It’s amazing how sometimes you can do your best work when you’re not even trying,” I said.
Dr. Agger was still smiling, although now it appeared as if it was taking him some effort to keep doing so. Perhaps he was reminded of that Buck Floomington line I had written, describing him as a “penis in flip-flops.” Either way, I had his attention and so I kept going.
“In fact,” I added, “I think you’ll find this interesting, Lloyd: I took the liberty of showing the blog to a friend who works in development at HBO. She practically flipped over it; she couldn’t stop laughing.”
“Flipped?” Dr. Agger asked.
“Yeah, that’s the word she used—‘I’m “flippin’” over these.’ She told me she thought they could go viral.”
“Viral?”
“Yeah, viral.” I said I was already developing a pilot for a Buck Floomington TV series and the characters would be based on individuals from the university, something I could have never done if Sabine and I had been planning to stick around.
“Of course, there’ll be that usual disclaimer about, ‘any resemblance is purely coincidental,’ but nobody ever believes that anyway.” I forced out a chuckle.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t true in the slightest. But Lloyd Agger, perhaps because he was solipsistic enough to believe HBO would actually be interested in developing a TV series about the inner workings of a graduate school of foreign policy, seemed to have no idea I was putting him on.
“You know that anything written on a university computer becomes property of the university,” he said.
“So I guess you may just have to sue me,” I said. Agger stalked off to patronize Jolly Hydroponic Basil Guy while I took a seat on the ground beside Beatrice and watched Fiddlin’ Feet.
Within weeks, Sabine was offered the opportunity to teach at the university for an additional year, during which she could search for another job, while I was offered an adjunct gig teaching creative writing at $8,000 per semester in exchange for signing a document asserting I would not write anything impugning the reputation of any employees of the university—a document I might be flagrantly violating this very moment. Oh, well.
The extra time, however, proved a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it alleviated some of the existential panic Sabine and I had been experiencing, but our lives didn’t become any more pleasant. There were the dirty looks we received in the produce section of the Bloomingfoods natural grocery store, the whispered conversations about us at the arts events we attended, the murmurs of “tenure denied” and “HBO series” we heard in the children’s section of the Monroe County Public Library. Even my barber, Kemp, at the Boomerang Hair Salon seemed to have figured out I was a dick. Our daughters stopped getting invitations to playdates from all but a couple of friends, and those were from families that weren’t associated with the university. We spent less time together than ever. Sabine was jetting around the country, conducting informational interviews with the Rand Corporation and with think tanks and universities, while I sold as many of our belongings as I could on eBay and Craigslist, procrastinated grading my students’ stories, and putzed around with a TV pilot called Buck Floomington, which I actually did draft and send to my old Chicago pal Gina, who was developing a show for FX, not HBO, and who told me what I expected—no one gave a damn about the struggles of professors and house husbands in south central Indiana.
Frequently, on weekends, I would take Ramona and Beatrice to Chicago, where we were helping my mom box up her belongings in preparation for her move to a retirement facility in the North Park Village Nature Center. Her memory was fading, emptying out, and walking the stairs to her second-floor apartment was becoming harder. On one of those Chicago trips, Conner reappeared.
33
It was early March. Sabine was in Washington, DC, sleeping on the couch of her grad-school housemate Rhiannon Nakashima, who now worked for the Center for Public Integrity, and was giving her the lowdown about the grim jobs scene in the nation’s capital. In my mom’s apartment in Chicago, Beatrice and Ramona were on the living-room couch with my mother, who was trying to interest them in Last Year at Marienbad—a film she likes because it’s a puzzle w
ithout a solution. Meanwhile, I was, yet again, snooping for information about my father, but Mom had either already thrown it all out or boxed it away. Or she simply didn’t have anything to hide anymore. I learned from her that secrets were phenomenally easy to keep if you actually wanted to do so. So I simply filled boxes with books and clothes for her move. I could say more about my mother here, describe our conversations in more detail or something like that, but given what happened after I published Nine Fathers, you know I won’t do that.
I was leashing Hal, preparing to take him for a walk around the neighborhood, when I heard my telephone’s “Fables of Faubus” ring. I looked at the display: conner joyce.
“Where’re you going, Dad?” Ramona asked.
“Just walking the dog,” I said.
I closed the door behind me and walked out with Hal.
“Hey, dude,” I said into the phone.
“Hey, pal.” Conner’s voice sounded weak and scratchy.
“You OK?” I asked.
“Been better, been worse. At least I’m alive,” he said.
“You sound like that was in doubt,” I said.
“It was,” he said. “Maybe it still is, who knows? Where’re you at?”
He coughed, wheezed, then cleared his throat. In the background, I heard chatter and the whirrs and beeps of machines.
“Where’re you at?” I asked.
“Just getting out of the hospital,” he said.
“Which?” I asked.
“Northwestern.”
“In Chicago?”
“Yeah. What about you? Where are you?”
“Chicago too.”
“Cool. You got some time?”
“A little. Not too much. I’m here with my kids. You OK, man?”
“For now. I think so. But I gotta head out soon.”
“Where to?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you,” said Conner. “And when I do, you might just get that opportunity we’ve been talking about, pal.”