by Jaime Clarke
“So, that was something about what happened when The Vegetable King came out, eh?” Kline asked, slipping the question in at the end of a long dissertation about power hitters in the American League. “Seems like it came out of nowhere.”
Charlie nodded. “It was sudden,” he said. “But if I look back over it, there were a lot of warning signs. The publisher not publishing the book was the most sudden thing, though. All that stuff about the cover designer and the in-house personnel complaining about the content of The Vegetable King was really just background noise until the publisher dropped the book.”
Kline held his water glass in midair. “Who told you the book was cancelled?”
Charlie relished the attention and paused dramatically before answering. “My agent called and said, ‘Listen, we’re going to have to move this book because they’re not going to publish it,’” Charlie said. “I was floored. It really, really shocked me. And when the editor called to say that this was in fact the case, I was numb. I guess I thought they would publish it, and people would be upset by it, but I would’ve never guessed with a million guesses that they wouldn’t publish it. It was genuinely shocking.”
“Dessert, gentlemen?”
Kline waved off the waiter before Charlie could pad the bill with a custard he’d spied on the menu.
“Where did you get the idea for The Vegetable King?” Kline asked. “If that isn’t too banal a question.”
Charlie sighed. “If I had a dollar.”
Kline feigned an apologetic look but waited for the answer.
“Let’s see,” Charlie said, staring into the space of the near-empty restaurant. He tried to recall Vernon’s words, thrilled with Kline’s rapt attention. “I knew I wanted to write a book about New York—I find the city inspiring—and when I moved here after Camden, I found myself in the midst of all these guys who worked on Wall Street— brothers and friends of my friends from Camden—and I thought, Perfect, this is perfect. These guys were making a tremendous amount of money—hollow money, really—for doing next to nothing, which was a metaphor I liked.”
“So you were hanging out with them?” Kline asked.
Charlie shot him a look. “Yeah, that’s what I said.”
Kline waited for the rest and Charlie made him wait for it. He waved to the waiter. “I’ll have the custard,” he said. “You want anything?” he asked Kline.
“Coffee,” Kline said.
Charlie waited for the waiter to bring the custard and the coffee before restarting his story, as a penalty. He was having great fun and he appreciated why Christianna engaged in such role-playing.
“You were saying,” Kline said, stirring cream into his coffee.
“Yeah, so I was hanging out with these yuppies,” Charlie continued, “after they’d get off work. We’d meet at Harry’s, usually, and I’d just sit and listen while they raved about their summer place in the Hamptons, or their new model girlfriend, or some great car they were thinking about buying. It was wild. And so I knew that was the tipping point to start writing the novel. Also”—Charlie stopped for a bite of custard—“the book is informed by a severe black period I was experiencing then, which is why I often refer to it as the most autobiographical of my books.”
“It’s really an incredible book,” Kline said. “Do you ever wonder how it would’ve fared if it hadn’t had all the prepublication hoopla?”
Charlie shrugged. “Guess we’ll never know.” This wasn’t the answer Kline was looking for, which pleased Charlie. “Hey, this custard is first-rate. Think I’ll have another.” He registered his order with the waiter, who brought another bowl.
“It must’ve been pretty traumatic,” Kline sympathized.
“In some ways it damaged my reputation, probably,” Charlie said through a mouthful of custard, “but in other ways it completely enhanced it. See?” Kline nodded as if he understood. “I guess it made me wary of the publishing business—editors always covering their asses, et cetera, but I don’t really see the experience as anything but positive. In the end I got to publish the book I wanted to publish, and people got to read it, end of story. I doubt the experience left any sort of imprint on my life, though.”
“You’re a stronger man than I am,” Kline laughed. “I would’ve held a grudge against all those who tried to ruin the book. At the very least, I would’ve been angry at the boycott organized by NOW.”
“I was angry at the time,” Charlie said. “But their puppet show was revealed when they called for a boycott of not just the book, but the products and services mentioned in the book. American Express must’ve been laughing their ass off about that.”
Kline emptied his coffee cup. Two men wearing harried expressions entered, and one saluted Kline, who saluted back. “Colleagues,” he explained, though Charlie hadn’t asked.
“Last question,” Kline said. “What do you think people get wrong about you?”
Charlie laughed and reclined in his chair. “I think everything that’s been said about me is pretty much dead on. Or I should say, I don’t think there’s been anything said about me that I strenuously disagree with,” he said. “Sometimes I read profiles of myself written by newspapermen I don’t know”—Charlie paused for effect—“and I don’t recognize the person they’re describing. It’s usually just a convenient version of me, but it isn’t who I really am. What might not be true is that people assume I wrote The Vegetable King for reasons other than the simple fact that this was a book that I needed to write. That would be untrue. But other than that … people just write what they want to write.” An urgent need broke Charlie’s concentration. “Where’s the head in this joint?”
Kline indicated the men’s room and Charlie slid out of his chair. “If the waiter comes, order me a coffee.” He strolled down the hallway to the bathroom, passing a waiter whose face he could barely see in the darkness. He laughed at how Kline had fallen for the charade and slipped out the back, silently bidding Kline adieu.
The new doorman at Summit Terrace, whose name Charlie still hadn’t learned, regarded him as he blew through the lobby, hurrying to sign some of the copies of Vernon’s work in order to catch the book buyer at the Strand before he left for the day.
Unlike the calls from Staten Island, Harlem, and even Westchester County, the sighting of Oscar on the Lower East Side seemed plausible. But the twins in the Grand Street loft were another imposture. They beseeched Charlie to take their manuscript, a novel involving talking cats, and he grabbed the pages and deposited them into the first wire trash bin he encountered. Responding to phantom dog sightings was his most important responsibility, he knew, but he grew to dread them. Charlie no longer cared about the dog’s fate. Oscar likely had a new owner and was being fed and petted by the next set of hands, which was just the way it turned out sometimes.
He was startled to find Jessica in the loft.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” she said calmly as she crouched, a green agate pendant swinging on the end of a necklace made of tiny purple beads, sorting through the selection of DVDs stored under the television. Dark circles ringed her eyes. Charlie hadn’t noticed the storage space, and the discovery piqued his curiosity about what else might be hidden in the loft. “I see you’ve made yourself at home.” She nodded toward the assemblage of takeout containers and empty beer bottles forming a small cityscape on the kitchen counter. Mountains of paper littered the loft. Charlie hadn’t even had the chance to utter “Hello,” and he guessed that Jessica was adept at controlling conversations. “I suddenly had to see this movie,” she said. She plunged her hands deep beneath the television, mining an assortment of foreign films and pornography that didn’t seem to embarrass her. “You haven’t seen it, right?”
“Which?”
“The one where the guy is trying to get back to his apartment and he’s out of money and can’t. His money floats out the cab window. He tries to take the subway, but they’ve raised the fare and he doesn’t have enough.”
Th
e movie sounded familiar, though he couldn’t name it. “Something with mannequins,” he offered.
Jessica snapped her fingers. “Yes, exactly. You know it.”
“I don’t know it,” he answered. “I may have seen it.”
“What’s it called?” she asked hopefully.
The phone shrieked and they both froze, waiting for the answering machine. Vernon’s voice floated through the loft, swarming around them in deep tones, and Jessica hugged herself absently. Charlie peered into middle space in an effort to coax the title of the film, counting the seconds left in the answering machine message he now knew by heart. The caller hung up without leaving a message and Charlie shrugged.
“I thought you were supposed to be useful,” Jessica teased as she returned the DVDs to their rightful place. Charlie admired the seam of Jessica’s blouse, tracing it along the curves as it rose and dived this way and that. She stood and Charlie looked absently out the window, causing her to glance over her shoulder.
“I’m told I’m very useful,” he said. In his mind, the retort was flat and uninflected, a cold piece of steel brandished as a weapon against any misunderstanding that might arise between them, her being Vernon’s girlfriend. Later, after Jessica had left empty-handed, he blamed the disconnect between his intention and his playful tone for the exchange that followed.
“I’ll bet.” She smiled, closing the distance between them. He smelled a lemony soap, her freckled skin close enough to touch. “What did Vernon tell you about me?”
Her expectant gaze knifed him with guilt. Vernon hadn’t so much as uttered a word about her. Charlie didn’t even know her last name. He became flushed with the same rank embarrassment he’d felt earlier, at a Starbucks upon his return from the false lead on the Lower East Side. Two overweight girls, both with hair dyed unnatural colors, obviously in high school—and obviously in glee club by the way their conversation was punctuated with outbursts of song—earnestly promised to marry each other if they weren’t married by their late twenties. “Do you promise you’ll marry me?” the one asked. “Absolutely,” the other agreed, “except for the physical stuff, obviously.”
Jessica read his reaction accurately. “Not surprised,” she said. A shadow crossed her face as she bit her lip. “It’s hard, Charlie. Very hard to be with someone who doesn’t see you exclusively.”
Charlie inadvertently raised his eyebrows.
“He didn’t even tell me where he was going,” she said, her voice infused with a soft whine.
“You mean where in Vermont?” he asked.
She looked at him askance. “He didn’t even say he was going to Vermont,” she said bitterly. “Let me guess, Richard is with him, right?”
“Who is Richard?” Charlie was desperate to exit this line of inquiry and hoped to devise a change of topic while Jessica ranted about Richard.
“He’s a protégé, like you,” she spit out. “A fucking waiter at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Classic. Just classic. The never-ending train of wannabes is tiring. ‘Do or don’t’ extends to his sex life, too, and it’s mostly ‘Do.’”
The shocking reality of Vernon’s bisexuality—Charlie was terrible at guessing people’s ages, so naming their sexuality was outside his abilities if asked—was overshadowed by the realization that Vernon and Richard the waiter from the Gramercy Park Hotel had absconded to Vermont, leaving Charlie to dicker with dog sightings and jealous girlfriends. An aberrant hurt at Vernon’s not coming on to him passed. Perhaps it meant Vernon took him seriously as a writer. Once the shock receded, he resisted the bitter feelingthat even though he was orbiting Vernon’s world, he was a faraway, unnamed planet.
“I guess I need to find my own protégé, eh?” Jessica asked.
Possession overtook him as he regarded Jessica. Had she really come over to look for a DVD? The scheme seemed impossibly juvenile. If you encounter an embittered girlfriend crouched in your space, if only temporarily your space, what are the gears in the machinery that brought her to you? And if you’re both feeling betrayed and looking for consolation, what is allowed and what is forbidden? He could reach out. He could touch her on the arm, signaling his submission to whatever purpose she’d arrived at, riven with the idea that she could deliver him from his subordination. Every apprentice was one part assassin.
“I could ask around,” Charlie offered, floating it as a joke to gauge Jessica’s reaction. The suggestion caught and she narrowed her eyes. She crossed her arms and her smooth biceps flexed involuntarily. He wanted to break the long gaze between them but knew that to do so would be to lose the powerful cord they were momentarily tethered to.
“I’d need someone discreet,” she continued. She moved toward the stereo. An old copy of Details magazine featuring a profile Vernon had written about the actor Val Kilmer caught her attention and she turned the pages absentmindedly.
“I thought you weren’t exclusive,” Charlie said, leaning against the kitchen counter.
“I’d like to be,” she admitted, the confession squandering a measure of the playful tension that had been building. “I’m normally a one-man kind of girl.” She tossed the magazine back toward the pile of media he’d carefully gleaned from the rest of the archives, fluttering the mountains of correspondence, fan letters, and manuscript drafts.
The moment for conquest—if it really existed—slipped away with Jessica’s acknowledgment of her true desires. The erotic haze that had briefly hung over them cleared, leaving him stifled and slightly sick to his stomach.
“But if, when you’re out serving your master, calling ‘Here boy, here boy’ around the neighborhood, you run into a suitable candidate, give me a shout,” she said, swinging her pocketbook over her silky shoulder. “Don’t look too hard, though,” she added. “For the dog, I mean.” She glided for the door.
“Why not?” he asked, turning but not following.
“Sucks to have something you love withheld,” she said.
Charlie took a step toward her. “You took the dog?” he asked.
“He only cares about the dog because it’s new,” she said. “I was new once too. So were you. Remember that.”
“Will you bring him back?” Charlie asked. “We’ll say that he just came home on his own. Vernon will never have to know.”
Jessica opened the door and grimaced. “What makes you think I still have it?” she asked, and then was gone.
“Hurry the hell up,” Christianna called from the other side of the screen. She hunted through a Depeche Mode CD, sampling the first beats of each song before skipping ahead.
Charlie reread Shannon’s e-mail:
Did you write a draft of the screenplay for Minus Numbers? Were you involved with that process? If you had to rank your books according to how successfully you completed what you started out to do, how would that list go?
The titillation of writing Shannon while Christianna waited in the loft was palpable.
S,
I was still in college when I found out they were going to turn it into a movie. I was sent a script by someone, I saw a couple of more scripts, but I was not involved in the process. I didn’t want to be involved. When I was first asked if I wanted to be involved, I realistically didn’t think I could do it because I was finishing up school, and then I did go back a week later to my agent and said, “Well, maybe I do want to do this.” She said, “It’s too late, I already told them you don’t, and you should finish school anyway.” But you know what? I would’ve done the first draft and it would’ve been very close to the book and there’s no way they would’ve made it. This was a movie that should never have been made by a big studio, and it should never have been a big, glossy Hollywood movie filled with a lot of stars, directed by a very slick video director. It just shouldn’t have been done. It probably would have been much more successful if it had stayed true to the book and was made on a very low budget. There was no way that a big Hollywood studio run by the parents of the children in the book were going to make an honest movie out o
f that book. So it was hopeless anyway. I could’ve written a draft, but it wouldn’t have mattered.
As for ranking, wow. You have an idea for a book and you’re really lucky if you get fifty or sixty percent of that idea down. In your head, you have this grandiose idea of a great, awesome book where you’re going to write about this, or this, or this, and when you start writing, reality sets in and you kind of get to the point where you think, Okay, if I can just get through this, if I can just move it on to here, I’ll have done some work and it will have worked out. Sometimes writing a novel can be so overwhelming and so exhausting emotionally that you’re really lucky if you can get fifty or sixty percent of what you really wanted to initially down on paper. I think, for example, The Book of Hurts is probably sentence for sentence the best writing I’ve done by far. I don’t know if it’s the best book, but I do think that the writing is, let’s just say, very unembarrassing to me. I still think Scavengers is the one book that I really got down everything that I wanted to do. I wrote a book that really threatened to annoy a great many people. At the same time, I just really have a soft spot in my heart for Scavengers. That might be because Minus Numbers and The Vegetable King were these big bullies that could take care of themselves. Scavengers was so slammed because it was about these really annoying, atrocious kids nattering on and on about their lives at college and “Oh, he doesn’t love me” or “She doesn’t love me” or whatever. It got a tremendous amount of flak that I thought really wasn’t due the book. So I sort of have a soft spot for it.