by Jaime Clarke
The look of astonishment on Olivia’s face was worth every ounce of the lie, which didn’t feel so much like a fabrication when Olivia jumped up and wrapped her arms around him, kissing him lightly on the cheek, a promise, he hoped, of more gratitude later. Charlie glanced at Shelleyan, whose quiet smile he purposely interpreted as jealousy and not the pure, undistilled doubt that she made no effort to conceal.
“You can get him to sign your book at lunch and avoid the lines,” Shelleyan said drily.
As the weeks counted down to Vernon Downs’s Phoenix appearance, Charlie nervously checked the mail with a frequency bordering on schizophrenic. He falsely accused his roommate, a stoner from Illinois who had dropped out of GCC the previous semester, of losing mail, making him promise not to visit the mailbox at all, for any reason. Worse, Shelleyan began alluding to the impending lunch with Vernon Downs with open hostility.
“What are you going to wear?” she asked Olivia at lunch one day in the cafeteria.
Another time: “Do you think he’s a vegetarian? What if he orders, like, a salad?”
A week before the alleged lunch: “Ask him who designed the cover for the book. Tell him from me that it’s pretty gross.”
Charlie decided to take action. He called information for the phone number for Downs’s publisher. He carried the number in his pocket for a day or two, allowing the mail one last chance to deliver salvation. Finally he called. The line rang just once before a sweet-sounding operator answered. Charlie mistook the person as an ally and confided his eagerness to treat his girlfriend to lunch with Vernon Downs (her favorite writer!) when he visited Phoenix next week. He may even have offered to pay for the lunch, in case the financial end of the thing was what was holding up a decision.
“Hello?” Charlie said after a short silence.
“You need to contact the author’s agent,” the operator said, all the succor drained from her voice. He timidly asked for that number, and after a lull where the real possibility that the operator had hung up loomed, she gave him the number for Downs’s agent, Daar Baumann, and hung up. He held the phone long after the operator had clicked off, the name Daar Baumann resonating; it was listed in the acknowledgments of most of the important books published over the last decade or so.
“Can I say what this is regarding?” a mellifluous voice asked after he dialed the number he’d been given.
“Vernon Downs,” he answered, trying to imitate a reporter, or some other persona that Downs’s agent was comfortable dealing with. He yearned to better understand the foreign land he was touristing.
“One moment.” The voice was suddenly replete with a dull apprehension.
Charlie self-consciously crossed his fingers during the silence, uncrossing them when the voice returned, flatter than before.
“She’s in a meeting, can I take a message?”
He left a message, knowing it wouldn’t be returned.
“Do you really think it would be okay to bring my book and get it signed?” Olivia asked as the phantom lunch date neared. “Or should I wait until the reading?” He nodded, searching for an equitable moment for confession. “Is it rude to bring more than one copy, do you think?” Her childlike worship might’ve infused a lesser man with jealousy, but Charlie only felt helplessness and defeat.
“I think it would be okay,” he said.
He skipped classes the day before Vernon Downs’s reading, trolling hotel switchboards, hoping to reach out to Downs personally. An hour or so spent calling the Phoenician and other luxury hotels in the metro Phoenix area, asking to leave a message for Vernon Downs, proved a fantastic waste of time, as none had a reservation under that name. He devised and then scuttled an elaborate plan whereby he’d take Olivia to an expensive restaurant and then claim Vernon had stood them up.
He would have to confess, simple as that. There was every chance that Olivia might be so angry with him that she would refuse his company thereafter. A night of fitful sleep left him agitated and hostile. He transferred his irritation at not being able to track down Vernon Downs to Shelleyan, brushing by her when she said, “Bummer, eh?”
“Fuck off,” he grunted, prizing the shock on her face.
She called out after him, but a gaggle of administrators passed, drowning her out. He loitered in the parking lot to dodge the usual congregation in the cement amphitheater that functioned as the campus nerve center where he and Olivia and Shelleyan and others would meet before and after classes. He could successfully dodge Olivia until lunch, but lunch would bring its own set of problems, namely Shelleyan, and so he was skipping ahead after sociology when he spotted Olivia.
“Hey,” she said. Her smile undid him and he feared abrupt tears, not only hers, but his. She opened her backpack and he spied her copies of Minus Numbers and The Vegetable King. She threw herself at him, her face buried in his chest. “It’s so disappointing,” she said, his secondhand Polo shirt muffling her cries.
The full import of what he’d done registered only then. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He’d hoped the simple confession would suffice, but he intuited that his future would be brimming with more contrition.
Olivia wiped a tear from her eye. “Stupid, right? I mean, think of Vernon. He’s got it worse, right?”
The campus began to thin as he and Olivia moved dangerously toward tardiness. He tried not to betray that he didn’t know how Vernon Downs had it worse. She passed him the carefully folded article from the Phoenix Gazette titled “Vernon Downs Cancels Tour.” Charlie read with wonder as the article recounted what he already knew—the grim circumstances surrounding the publication of The Vegetable King—and what he didn’t: the death threats, the organized protests, the stalker that showed up in city after city until rented bodyguards became a daily reality for the author. He held the article gently, as if it were an archive document, or a religious parchment that held the divination pilgrims had been seeking their whole life. He handed it back to Olivia and grabbed her up in his arms, both to comfort her and to cloak his elation at having been so gloriously bailed out.
They consoled each other with repeated viewings of Minus Numbers at his apartment, exploiting Charlie’s roommate’s absence owing to a funeral in Michigan. They collaborated on a rebuttal to a scathing review in Entertainment Weekly of Downs’s story collection, The Book of Hurts, published quickly to capitalize on the notoriety of The Vegetable King, and were elated when the magazine printed it in a subsequent issue:
Once again a reviewer has overlooked the technical and literary genius of one of the brightest authors of our time, Vernon David Downs, whose work does represent the state of hip fiction today. We’ll wager everyone who works at EW thinks Douglas Coupland is hip.
—Charlie Martens & Olivia Simmons, Phoenix
The dig at Coupland, a popular writer, was especially satisfying to Charlie. His early investigation of Downs and his work had prompted him to class Downs and Coupland as the same kind of writer, but Olivia had begun preaching the virtues of Downs’s work, the clinical satire, the wicked humor, the moral empathy at the heart of his seemingly immoral characters, and Charlie had been persuaded of Downs’s talents.
A profile of Downs in Vanity Fair filled in the blanks about his canceled tour and gave an update about his whereabouts: He was ensconced in an unnamed town in Virginia with a friend, attempting to begin a new novel. The article described Downs as “bulky,” a detail in direct opposition to his author photo, but didn’t include any photographs, instead employing a full-page caricature emphasizing Downs’s cherubic features. The odd detail of Downs picking up a bath towel and sniffing it to see if it was clean stayed with Charlie longer than it should’ve.
“Let’s write him a letter,” Olivia said. “A real fan letter. I’ve never written a true fan letter.”
Charlie convinced her the better idea was to write a letter to the editor of Vanity Fair. “He might see it,” Charlie reasoned.
Olivia crafted a note she hoped Downs would read, rejo
iced when it appeared:
Finally a quasi-revealing profile (as much as we’ll ever know, I’ll bet) of one of the most talented writers of our time. As a creative-writing student at Glendale Community College, I can say that Mr. Downs is among the most revered authors of my generation, admired for the fluidity of his prose style and his eye for context and detail, which, on the surface, appear ordinary enough but are really, under Mr. Downs’s microscope, threatening and truly unnerving. I quiver with anticipation for the arrival of his latest masterpiece.
—Olivia Simmons, London
The sexual innuendo of the last sentence bothered Charlie like an itch he couldn’t reach, but he was more troubled by Olivia’s identifying herself as a Londoner, a reminder that she was but a provisional visitor who would return to her homeland in a matter of months. He suppressed those emotions and they spent the next few days driving around the metro Phoenix area, buying up copies of Vanity Fair.
The idling cab, pulled to the curb at Summit Terrace, was a cocoon: Once Charlie stepped from it, the final act of his plan to win back Olivia would begin. Camden had been a trial run—everyone in the summer writing program would forever associate him with Vernon Downs and vice versa. The stage was bigger now. How to replicate the effect, he wasn’t exactly sure. Olivia’s words—“We can’t see each other anymore”—still rattled him, though increasingly he thought of them as a challenge. He’d said he’d come the first chance he could, which meant financially, which was easily solved by an afternoon spent filling out preapproved credit card applications offered along with free T-shirts at various tables around campus. As the cards began to appear in the mail, he planned his trip to London and was devastated and confused when his weekly phone call didn’t find Olivia at home. When he finally reached her, he wouldn’t hang up without an explanation, and Olivia gave him an unbelievable one she had clearly contrived under duress. Perhaps her parents had learned about how she’d switched enrollment from Arizona State to Glendale Community College and were punishing her.
A desperate scenario in which he’d locate Vernon Downs in New York emerged. What would happen after that was anyone’s guess, but he let himself be guided by impulse. He charged a one-way trip to New York City and studiously pored over a map on the flight, wondering where along the colored grid he’d find Vernon Downs. He traced the route from LaGuardia into the city so he wouldn’t be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous taxi drivers of popular imagination. He laughed now as he remembered the look of surprise on the cabbie’s face when Charlie instructed him to take the Triborough Bridge. He hadn’t known that the Triborough was a toll bridge and that the Midtown Tunnel was the faster, free alternative. Other surprises lay in store, like the hotel in Times Square that was really a hostel, necessitating a pair of flip-flops from the corner CVS in order to use the communal shower; and how everything in New York cost at least two dollars more than it did in Phoenix. But the biggest surprise was the absolute lack of any trace of Vernon Downs anywhere in Manhattan. All the articles he’d read had Downs starring in nightly debaucheries, but as Charlie haunted the entrances of bars like Nell’s and Balthazar and clubs like Tunnel and Limelight, he understood that everyone who entered those venues did so seeking debauchery. He stood squinting up at the office of Downs’s literary agent, Daar Baumann, but knew nothing but disappointment awaited inside. Recognizing dead ends was a useful skill he’d developed early on.
The stench of defeat dogged him until a new plan spontaneously emerged, based on a flyer for a summer writing conference at Camden College, Downs’s alma mater, that was stuck on a bulletin board at the New School, where Charlie had taken refuge from an early blast of summer heat. Camden had figured prominently in a number of Downs’s books, and the conference featuring lectures and writing workshops would at the very least bring Charlie closer to the world of Vernon Downs. It seemed like the logical next step in his quest to win back Olivia.
Charlie cursed himself for scrimping, the late arrival time the result of a cheaper red-eye ticket that imprisoned him at the Albany bus station until six a.m., the first available pickup time that could be arranged by the car service, the only means of travel available to the remote college campus. This rookie mistake was obvious in retrospect as he trudged in circles through the tiny terminal, willing the sun to appear. He contemplated a hotel room, but the balance on one of his MasterCards had crept perilously toward the limit, and he vowed to eschew unnecessary purchases. He’d wait it out. He clutched the postcard of the Empire State Building he’d purchased at the Port Authority, debating about sending it. Olivia would see the beseeching lines he’d scrawled and know his longing for reconciliation. He slid the postcard into a mail slot and immediately began to worry that Olivia’s parents would find the missive in the mail and trash it instead of delivering it to its intended reader.
He curled up on an uncomfortable half bench, the strap of his duffel bag looped around his arm to prevent robbery; the suede pouch within, given to him by the Kepharts, secreted keepsakes from his travels and was the sole possession he valued. He longed for the comfort of his bed back in Phoenix, though he knew his ex-roommate had found someone to rent his room after Charlie announced his plans to go east. Sleep came fitfully and then was banished forever by the whir of an industrial vacuum cleaner as the terminal underwent an early-morning cleaning. Six o’clock was forever in arriving, and despite his excitement at escaping the bus terminal, he dozed off in the back of the hired Lincoln Town Car, waking to marvel at the Vermont countryside. The sun glinted off the green fields and he took in the rural landscape.
The car sailed through a red-planked covered bridge eroded by time, the verdant landscape filtering in through the latticework, the car’s interior spotted with sunlight. The Town Car shot out the yawning mouth of the bridge, delivering them into the town of Camden, a picturesque New England hamlet populated with wide lawns running back toward quiet houses nestled far from the road. The driver nosed the car through the gates of Camden College, itself set deep in the woods. An admixture of anxiety and excitement coursed through Charlie as the car crept along College Drive, finally slowing to a stop at the Barn, the two-story structure that functioned as the administration building. The driver let him off, and he signed for the service and the tip, which was more than he’d anticipated. He watched the black car drive away until it turned the corner, a curtain of morning sunlight falling over the still campus. The buildings appeared deserted: the Commons ahead and Crossett Library to his left, the manicured Commons lawn a quiet runway extending toward the End of the World, the abrupt terminus from which endless miles of Vermont woods and sky were visible.
He wondered what Olivia would say.
He wished he could know.
The single thought that he was finally within the inviting bosom of Vernon David Downs’s alma mater was surreal. His sole preoccupation on the bus ride from New York had been how to breach the campus successfully—he’d run several scenarios involving multiple deceptions to finesse any security—and once the awe at how easily he’d been able to infiltrate Camden had subsided, he realized he knew very little about Downs’s existence on campus. Which of the green and white clapboard dorms had he lived in? McCullough? Booth? He set his bag down on one of the picnic tables outside of the Commons, distressed by extreme weather and extreme temperaments, searching the campus for any sign of life. Vernon Downs probably sat at this picnic table, he thought. He tried the door to Stokes, surprised when the handle gave easily, and roamed through the vacant dorm, choosing an empty room down an empty hall farthest from the entrance as his own. He probably stared out this window, Charlie thought. The distant mountaintops retained their snowy caps, even in the summer. He may even have lived in this very room, he thought as he drifted off to sleep, exhaustion washing over him as he spread out fully clothed on the soft bed.
Faint laughter woke him some time later. He squinted at the bluing light as he tried to gauge where he was. The gauzy curtains blew in the evening breeze, t
he air suffused with a floral sweetness. Out his window, dark figures moved against the gray landscape, some struggling with overpacked bags, others darting furtively in and out of their dorm, unpacking idling cars double-parked on the single-lane road that wound past the student housing.
His fellow Camdenites had finally arrived.
Charlie hurriedly showered and dressed, then sauntered toward the Commons, which cast rectangles of light across the darkening lawn, the destination of the flow of people appearing in doorways or emerging in tributaries from points unseen. He kept his head low, hoping to blend with those who were actually enrolled in the summer program. Experience had taught him that he could persuade people he was invisible, which invariably emboldened him in any new social situation, so he was bewildered by how nervous he felt. He followed a woman in her eighties wrapped in an oversized yellow Windbreaker, as if expecting a storm, into a dimly lit room crowded with amiable and eager faces, all congregated at a long wooden bar stocked with self-serve beer and wine, which was being grabbed up by nervous hands. Charlie tried to mix into the crowd, cradling a sweaty bottle of Budweiser, listening in on conversations that cut violently from how hard it was to find time to write, to a short list of favorite books, to which of the teachers huddled near the dormant stone fireplace was the recent National Book Award winner.
Camden’s recent history was very much on everyone’s minds too. Charlie gathered the bits and pieces of conversation to sew the narrative together: Just a year before, the college had taken the extraordinary step of abolishing tenure, firing a third of the professors who taught at Camden, invoking the ire and censure of the academic community. The air was polluted with uncertainty about Camden’s future, which provided the perfect cover for Charlie’s impersonation of a Camden student. He quickly fell into the proscribed banter, asking people where they were from, if they wrote fiction or poetry or what. He readily provided answers when the same was asked of him, sometimes recycling answers he’d been given moments before during a similar inquiry. There was something intoxicating about rotating in a crowd of aspirants. Anything was possible. Even getting Olivia back.