Vernon Downs

by Jaime Clarke

  Vernon Downs

  Jaime Clarke

  For my mother and father

  and in memory of Liam Rector

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  Praise for Vernon Downs

  It was only now clear to me how very much I had made that image, and yet I could not feel that it was anything like a fiction. It was more like a special sort of truth, almost a touchstone; as if a thought of mine could become a thing, and at the same time be truth.

  —Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea

  Chapter I

  Charlie had traveled a long, indirect route to Summit Terrace. He could hardly recall a time he hadn’t known the name Vernon Downs, though in truth the discovery was in the not-too-distant past.

  “He’s Olivia’s favorite writer, dummy,” Shelleyan had said that day in the Milky Way Café at Glendale Community College, where Charlie and Olivia were creative writing majors. It was his second stint at GCC; he knew from his first stab, after graduating from high school, that even though he was pushing thirty, he wasn’t the oldest student on campus. That Olivia was twenty-two separated her—and him—from the student body full of teenagers who mostly behaved like they were still in high school, and the retirees taking classes as a hobby. Only Shelleyan could make him self-conscious of his advanced age. He ignored her, long used to Olivia’s roommate as the price of Olivia’s companionship. He’d met Olivia, an international student from London, the previous semester in Intro to Creative Writing. Over the prior summer, Charlie had read an interview with a writer who had a background similar to his—the writer was an army brat and had lived all over the world—and how that sense of impermanence informed his writing. Whether or not the writer was being self-deprecating, Charlie couldn’t tell, but the piece spooked him a little, as the writer seemed to intimate that there was no place in the workaday world for those with such an upbringing. And so he enrolled in the creative writing class with more hope than ambition.

  Discovering Olivia across the conference table seemed to confirm the impression Charlie had taken away from the interview. Olivia’s nationality gave her an air of otherness, and Charlie perceived a kinship in the way she was both present but from somewhere else entirely. Olivia hadn’t told her parents that she’d dropped out of Arizona State University the first week of the fall semester so she could pocket the difference in tuition between ASU and GCC. If anyone could fully comprehend the narrative of his past and, more importantly, overlook its irregularities, it was Olivia, who confessed that she liked the attention, which was all the encouragement Charlie needed. What began as a crush on a pretty girl with a sexy accent quickly evolved.

  “What did he write?” Charlie asked Shelleyan, the name Vernon Downs vaguely familiar. He glanced at Olivia as she combed through that day’s goulash with her fork.

  “Minus Numbers,” Shelleyan answered automatically, scooping a forkful into her mouth.

  He looked at Olivia for help, but she was apparently absorbed in thoughts of Vernon Downs and Minus Numbers. More troubling than the notion of Olivia’s secret admiration was the apparent truth that Shelleyan had been privy to the information but not him.

  “You should really read it,” Olivia said.

  “You never finished it, liar,” Shelleyan accused.

  Olivia shrugged her off. “Of course I did.”

  “You just think he’s cute,” Shelleyan said. She turned to Charlie and he flinched. “He’s in the movie for a second. He only has, like, one line.”

  Olivia giggled, embarrassed. “So what?” she asked. “He wrote the book it’s based on, didn’t he?”

  “The book is nothing like the movie,” Shelleyan snorted. “But I guess you wouldn’t know that, huh?”

  “So what?” Olivia said again. She had never found Shelleyan as intimidating as Charlie did.

  He wondered how long it would be until she missed him. Really missed him, the way he knew he’d miss her once she was gone, a visa issue stripping her of her international student status after the spring semester. He dreaded the first time he would miss the candy aroma of her perfume, her smiling, freckled face drawing near, the harrowing moment when he would understand her loss in terms of his happy future thieved, stolen away back into the wilds of England.

  Olivia had never mentioned Vernon Downs or Minus Numbers as far as he could recall, and he thought for a minute that they were putting him on. He awaited the punch line, the gentle ribbing that signified that he was still an intimate and not an ignorant outsider. He wasn’t sure which he preferred: Olivia’s having a simple infatuation with Downs or her actually admiring his writing, which, though he hadn’t read anything by Downs, he was satisfied was facile and gimmicky. Hadn’t he seen Downs in GQ? Serious writers didn’t appear in the pages of GQ.

  He was overcome with sadness at Olivia’s leaving. Charlie knew intimately what it was to have something ripped out of your life, enervating your will, and senselessly: his parents, sure; but also the Kepharts, his maternal grandparents, in Denver, who helped him secure his Batman costume so he could burst into his third-grade homeroom, his new best friend, Jesse Mason, trailing in the Robin outfit, Mrs. Holstein looking on calmly as they scrambled after George McLean, the only Asian at Elrod Elementary, whom Charlie had talked into dressing as the Joker. The Kepharts had helped him crumple tiny pieces of aluminum foil, filling the bag of fake diamonds George clutched in his hand. Charlie’s classmates squealed as the pursuit led them across the room, the chase continuing into the adjoining homeroom, as per his design. He explained to the principal that the drama would be more believable if the entire school was captivated by the play, a syllogism the principal accepted, much to Charlie’s amazement. What Charlie didn’t confess to the principal was that the production was simply a stunt to impress Suzy Young, whom he’d been caught kissing after the bell.

  And the McCallahans, his aunt and uncle in Santa Fe, where he’d gone to live after the Kepharts admitted they were too old to raise a child. The McCallahans couldn’t look at him with the same eyes they laid on their son, Ian, with whom Charlie had built a fort in the backyard out of empty boxes from Mr. McCallahan’s job at Southwest Peterbilt. Only afterwards did he realize that Ian was technically his cousin, a fact that never arose while he was staying with the McCallahans.

  And the Alexander-Degners of Rapid City, a cousin of his father’s who was married to his high school sweetheart. Their childless neighbors had a dog that often found its way into the Alexander-Degners’ yard. Charlie would play with the dog, chasing it up the grassy berm in their backyard that led to the freeway. The new neighbors were rarely seen, so that when a short, bearded man knocked on the Alexander-Degners’ door to discuss erecting a fence between their yards to keep the dog from roaming free, Mr. Alexander assumed the man was the husband of the woman next door. Charlie learned only by eavesdropping that the man was a boyfriend, and that the couple had rented the house to get away from the woman’s husband, a fact that the neighborhood discovered the morning after the boyfriend loaded his shotgun into his station wagon and drove to the local bar to call the husband outside and fire a slug into his chest, ending the alleged harassment the boyfriend and the woman next door had suffered at the husband’s hands. The murder shocked their street, more so as no one knew the boyfriend or the woman, who had endeavored to live anonymously among their neighbors. Charlie retraced the neighbor’s short drive to the bar in his mind, hearing him call the husband out onto the street, away from the innocent patrons, raising the shotgun to chest level. He imagined the husband, drunk, not begging for his life but daring the boyfriend to pull the trigger. C
harlie heard the pop, smelled the smoke, saw the bewildered look on the husband’s face. What were his taunts? How had he harassed them? Charlie tried to imagine the satisfaction the boyfriend must’ve felt when the threats evaporated. He wondered what it felt like to erase the past just like that.

  He missed the Wallaces of San Diego too, another aunt and uncle, with whom he’d lived on base. Mr. Wallace treated him to trips to the flight simulator on Saturdays, until the Wallaces were dispatched to an air force base in Florida, a place Charlie, for some reason, couldn’t go.

  And of course he’d miss the Chandlers, his Arizona family, who’d enrolled him with every good intention at Randolph College Preparatory, an all-boys Jesuit high school of which Mr. Chandler was an alum. The Chandlers lived next door to his first cousin, twice removed, who agreed to take him in when the Wallaces left for Florida. The first cousin was a salesman for something called Simco and went missing for long stretches of time, leaving Charlie in the care of a succession of older women the first cousin called “friends.” Charlie noticed the surfeit of kids living in the brown and white ranch next door and quickly found himself welcomed by the Chandlers, who were foster parents to six kids, including Talie, whom Charlie followed around like a puppy dog. With the first cousin’s permission, the Chandlers helped Charlie file the paperwork to emancipate at seventeen, the family court judge scowling at him as if he were making the mistake of a lifetime, the glare lasting an uncomfortably long time, ruining the pizza party at Pistol Pete’s that the Chandlers had thrown to help him celebrate his entree into adulthood.

  Charlie had admitted his fractured past to Olivia and was relieved when she didn’t consider him the alien in landscape he mostly felt in his day-to-day life. He anticipated the moment in any social scenario— especially potentially romantic ones—when his past would arise, which always required endless qualifications. He’d omitted the gaping hole in his life that was Jenny, the Mormon girl he’d met in high school. Jenny’s sudden marriage just after she graduated was a wound that wouldn’t heal, and Charlie was too embarrassed to admit to Olivia the hold his memories of Jenny held over him. Or his secret hope that Olivia would be the one that would make him forget about Jenny forever.

  “Did you see he’s coming to Phoenix?” Shelleyan asked. She pulled her reddish brown hair back and adjusted her scrunchie, revealing the dabs of sparkle she’d applied high on her cheeks. She didn’t know it, but the joke among those students who knew her was whether or not they could get sparkled by Shelleyan. A few had, and still others dreamed of it.

  Olivia’s eyes grew wide. “You’re lying.”

  “It was in the paper, dummy. He’s got a new book coming out,” Shelleyan said, gathering up her napkin and utensils. “No picture, though. He hates having his picture taken. Don’t you read the paper?” Charlie hated the way all of Shelleyan’s questions intimated that everyone else was in the know, and he suspected her questions were really aimed at him specifically, to dunce him in front of Olivia. “I gotta jet,” she said, keeping one eye on Miles Buchanan, a hotel restaurant management major—and current focus of Shelleyan’s affections—as he sauntered past the table and gave her a not-too-subtle wink, then drifted toward the door. Charlie guessed they were headed out to the parking lot, to make out in the backseat of Miles’s silver Ford Bronco; Miles had told Shelleyan he’d tinted the windows with just those aspirations.

  Lunch ended with Olivia promising to meet Charlie after classes, as usual, but he couldn’t concentrate in his British literature class, distracted by the revelation about Vernon Downs. His need to be the center of Olivia’s life flushed him with jealousy as he stared at the copy of Pride and Prejudice open on his desk, Professor Rudrud’s words droning on. He hadn’t been able to read the novel beyond the first few chapters, as the phrase “It is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life” upset him so much that he couldn’t continue, and he knew he would recall Austen’s words verbatim every time he heard the book’s title.

  The plan to write Vernon Downs and arrange a private meeting while he was in Phoenix, lunch maybe, formed before the end of class. Charlie felt sure that Downs would agree to lunch, maybe dinner, with a couple of fans. He dogged it to the library, rounding the deserted stacks of the fiction section. He browsed the multicolored spines—Danticat, Dickens, Didion—halting when he saw the prize in the hunt, and reached for those by Vernon Downs. He arranged the books in a neat row in one of the study carrels, studying the covers, taking them in all at once, then focusing on the name Vernon David Downs as if trying to decode its mystery. He flipped the books over to reveal the author photo on each and was taken aback at how young the Vernon Downs who wrote Minus Numbers was. He looks like a kid, Charlie thought as he studied the cool pout, the tousled hair, the black and white suit. He marked his own passing resemblance to Vernon Downs and wondered if Olivia had a type. The author photo on the back cover of Scavengers, Downs’s second book, was hardly recognizable—the hair a little less abundant, the lines under the eyes, a cardiganed Downs hunched over on the steps of a nondescript brownstone. The studio shot on the back of The Vegetable King featured Downs in profile, his chin tipped up like an actor on a movie poster. “The powerful new novel by the controversial author of Minus Numbers and Scavengers” ran above the photo in bold lettering. He wondered if Downs’s reticence to be otherwise photographed was simple vanity, and was surprised at how much pleasure the thought afforded. Was he jealous of Vernon Downs? The real question superseded this: What did Olivia see in Vernon Downs? He would’ve given anything to know how Olivia had first discovered Vernon Downs. What had drawn her in? The primary-color book jackets, the author photo, what? The novels were seemingly about the rich and affected, a class of people he’d never known Olivia to be particularly enticed by. Olivia’s stories in workshop were mostly realist and were gently criticized for occasionally lapsing into sentimentality. Charlie read into Olivia’s work and gleaned from her fiction that she was someone who prized kindness and life’s small coincidences over the themes of apathy and perversion that Downs seemed obsessed with.

  He toted the books to the bank of gray metal microfiche projectors and ordered a spate of reels from the portly, skeptical student working the front desk, a worn copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance splayed on the counter. Charlie wheeled through article after article about Vernon Downs, gathering and absorbing the biographical ephemera.

  He began to unravel the mystery, the slow calculus computing. Vernon Downs wasn’t a writer in the sense that other writers referenced in workshop were writers. Vernon Downs was as famous as the company he kept at nightclubs in New York, and restaurants in L.A. named Spago and Pastis and Bossa Nova. That he was a writer was incidental to his incredible celebrity.

  Charlie couldn’t calculate what excited him more: the prospect of arranging the lunch for Olivia, or announcing it in front of Shelleyan. In retrospect, he wished he hadn’t been so confident in Vernon Downs’s response, a confidence that tricked him into writing a short, breezy letter wherein he briefly described Olivia’s admiration and their willingness to come to his hotel if that was more convenient. He cringed when he remembered his casual salutation—“Hey, Vernon”—that opened the letter, as if they were old friends. And he regretted not lying about his own admiration for Vernon Downs’s books—he’d planned to catch the movie version of Minus Numbers so he could converse intelligently about the novel. Each minute after Charlie dropped the letter addressed to Vernon Downs in care of his publisher in the mailbox ticked by with a torpidity that bordered on cruelty.

  He might’ve maintained his silence about the surprise, but circumstances conspired against him. First, the announced date for Downs’s reading at Arizona State University was Valentine’s Day, which lent his plan urgency. Then he opened the Sunday Arts section of the Arizona Republic to find the same studio shot of Vernon Downs from the back of The Vegetable King. The recognition felt personal, li
ke seeing a picture of someone he knew. Just as startling as the photograph was the attendant article about the furor caused by the publication of The Vegetable King. The elements of said furor seemed outrageous: sections of the book being leaked to Time magazine by staffers at Downs’s publisher who were horrified by the content; a boycott instituted by the National Organization for Women because of the graphic torture and murder committed by the main character, Nick Banks; the pulping of the book by its original publisher, who allegedly bent to the will of its parent company, Gulf and Western, the book subsequently being snapped up, along with a short story collection called The Book of Hurts, by another publisher, which resulted in Downs being paid twice for the same book, Downs retaining the original six-figure advance. Charlie gulped back the information as quickly as he could, reading and rereading the article, converting the details into talking points whose vitality dimmed as the days expired without word from Vernon Downs. He knew the article would come up, and he even guessed correctly that Shelleyan would be the one to reference it. He had to wait only as long as Monday’s lunch.

  “That picture was hot,” Shelleyan said. “He could be a model if he wanted.”

  “I can’t wait to meet him.” Olivia sipped her 7UP. “I don’t care how long the line is.” Abundant enthusiasm was just one of Olivia’s attributes that enchanted him.

  “Are you going to ask him to sign your book ‘love’?” Shelleyan joked.

  Olivia smirked at Shelleyan. “Very funny.”

  The words tumbled out before he could stop them. He hadn’t heard so much as a word from Vernon Downs, but he felt his position in Olivia’s life continually slipping as the date of her return home approached, and drastic action was the only recourse available to him.

  “I was going to wait to tell you,” he said, his temples pulsing, “but we’re going to have lunch with him when he’s in town. It’s all arranged. I wrote to him and told him what a huge fan you are, and he’s staying at the Phoenician—you know, the hotel on Camelback Mountain, really fancy, Madonna stays there when she’s in town, so it must be …”—his breathing was so shallow he thought he might pass out, but he pressed on—“you know, pretty cool.”