“Sandy. I want to let you know up front that there’s no truth to the rumor that I’ve been sleeping on the couch in my office.”
“I hadn’t heard that.”
“It’s been all over the place.”
“It hasn’t been here.”
“Ogler has been doing an item per day on it. At twelve thirteen p.m. someone calling herself Thalia Halstead posted the alleged dimensions of the couch.”
“How big is it?”
“Seven feet long by three feet wide, allegedly. I will point out that even if that were the case it wouldn’t represent the actual usable area of the couch.”
“Still, a generous couch.”
“There are cushions, armrests, and so on, that aren’t taken into account.”
“The armrests are for the flying monkeys to perch on.”
“Bitch. As if this weren’t a difficult enough time right now. The novel is dead, books are dying, publishing is thrashing on the deck.”
“There’s always e-books.”
“E-books? We can’t sell audio books. That’s where we find ourselves today: we can’t even sell books that read themselves. I feel like I’m presiding over the beginning of the next ice age. All I have to do is fire the starter’s pistol—sign another dumb memoir, capitulate to the insane demands of another prima donna—and the glaciers begin to move on Manhattan. Everything crushed beneath millions of tons of frozen zilch—every book, every painting, every symphony, every decent restaurant. But what can we do, really? Forty million people watch an Internet video of Darius the Chimp peeling an orange. It’s quick, it’s cute, it’s free. I’m supposed to like it, on some reluctant level I do like it, but when I lie awake at night, which I’ll reemphasize I’m doing in my own apartment, I try to figure out: is this some kind of vandalizing, Dada riposte to art? These people are jungle insurgents and we’re fighting in columns, with muskets.”
“What it is is a vandalizing, Dada riposte to commerce. You have to go to the Times Book Review if you want serious vandalism directed against art.”
“Why aren’t you more worried about this?”
“When they start speculating aloud whether if you chain forty million Shakespeares to forty million oranges will they eventually come up with the collected works of Darius the Chimp, I’ll start worrying.”
“Oh, so you’ll let me worry about it. Terrific. Take a number. Monte will figure it out. Monte’s job is to figure it out. Like this is what I signed on for, saving an industry. Listen, when I started, I just wanted to publish a few good books, have a few laughs. Nobody’s laughing now. Not since the Germans bought us out. People are cringing in the hallways. They’re puking in the toilet stalls before each meeting with sales. Editors who haven’t worn a tie to work in twenty years are showing up in suits, as if that alone will placate our Teutonic overlords. The big decisions have already been made, though, I suspect. There are telling indications. But who can really say for sure? At three a.m. the e-mails start rolling in from Stuttgart. Strictly Kremlinology time. What does this mean? What does that mean? Shepard and I have these fierce, whispered conversations when sane people are supposed to be dancing their cares away at after-hours clubs. But I don’t want to worry you. You have an entirely different job. How’s my new book?”
“Hopelessly stalled.”
“I just wanted to let you know that I have two pages reserved for you in the Fall catalog. They’ve dummied it up, and we didn’t even lorem ipsum it. The pages just have ‘AM3’ across them. The long-awaited follow-up by AM3.”
“It won’t be ready for Fall.”
“Untitled Novel.”
“Great.”
“Hey, I’m counting on something from you, buddy. I believe that was our understanding. You were going to go out to Michigan and get to work. I was going to sit in New York and patiently wait. You were going to deliver the work. I was going to perceptively edit it. Then we’d publish it to great fanfare. That was the understanding. You would go on a grueling book tour, Shepard and I would arrange to have gourmet fruit baskets waiting for you in your hotel rooms. That was my understanding. This change of plans won’t go unnoticed in Stuttgart.”
“You’ve never worried about a deadline before, Monte.”
“What can I say? It’s almost as if, no offense, they’re eager to begin officially losing money as soon as possible. Bean counters, right? It doesn’t have to be a problem if it’s lousy. Nobody has to know it’s lousy. We publish a lot of lousy books to fulsome praise. It’s part of the cultural give-and-take. We actually count on it.”
“The lousy books or the good reviews?”
“Both, really. A list full of masterpieces would be a complete disaster.”
“I’m trying, Monte.”
“Maybe you miss the city. The hustle and the bustle. The hurly and the burly.”
“I don’t think that’s it.”
“Fascinating. I think it’s ironic. When I was coming up, willed artistic isolation was simply a question of not opening your mail. Nobody dreamed of actually leaving. Some writer who’d never set foot off the island of Manhattan—you’d encounter him on lower Fifth Avenue, or around Sheridan Square, and you’d wonder, didn’t he die? Is that a ghost I just saw schlepping a D’Ag Bag home from the supermarket? Turned out he’d just left his phone off the hook. Sure, writers have always been strange. But they stayed put, is the thing. A true weirdo might decamp to Massachusetts, or take a crack at writing screenplays out on the West Coast, and people would marvel at their tenuous link to the real world by long-distance telephone. I’m serious, you’d call authors living out of town and it would be like listening to the voices of the dead, all echoes and whistling static. A chill would come over you. The distance seemed insuperable. But nowadays, you people can’t wait to leave. New York is like this necessary obstacle to be overcome. I don’t understand it. There’s an entire body of treasured literature from when I was a young man that speaks of the America lying on the wrong side of the Hudson with toxic disdain, and now people your age act as if there couldn’t be anything finer than a tenure-track appointment at the University of Kansas. Whatever happened to Henry James, and the idea that ‘the best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding to the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation’?”
“He dropped dead after renouncing his American citizenship. And didn’t he live way out in East Sussex?”
“Well, we can’t compare ourselves to Henry James.”
“I’ll try to break the habit.”
“But I’m not putting down your little sabbatical. I know you were having a rough time of it here. The sheer athleticism of bigamy! You have my boundless sympathy, especially given my own current personal situation, which has been exaggerated beyond belief in the media. I know it was rough for you here.”
“Here it’s going fine. I’ve been happy to discover that my dream of being completely forgotten is being realized faster than I ever feared it would.”
“Nobody’s forgetting anybody, Sandy. Two pages in the catalog: you’re practically the centerfold. Needless to say, Untitled Novel is our lead title.”
“But who knows what three a.m. will bring from Stuttgart?”
“God forbid. Don’t they ever take time off? Hitler’s birthday, or something?”
“April.”
“Doesn’t matter. If my worst professional fears come to pass, I’m capable of seeing beyond who and what I am today. If and when my worst professional fears come to pass, this is not the end. I can see beyond what’s defined me for the last thirty years. I refuse to be taken by surprise. I hate surprises, and things surprise me all the time. I enjoy bleu cheese: that was a surprise. Dogs don’t like me. That was a big surprise. Young people like to spit on your penis. Who knew? Among many other surprises. When my worst professional fears come to pass, there will be another act.”
“Impression
s, or juggling, maybe?”
“Prophecy, I’m thinking. I’ve always felt there was a more-direct-than-usual connection between me and God. I just haven’t had the time to commit. I’ll button my shirts up to the neck and deliver my esoteric wisdom to captive audiences of rush-hour commuters riding the IRT. My eventual biographer is likely to say that that’s when I hit my stride.”
“Why wait? I can log on to Wikipedia and say it right now.”
“Save your imagination for my new book you’re not writing. By the way, what’s this shit I hear about you hanging around with some Indian? What is it, some kind of George Harrison thing?”
I SPENT THE rest of the afternoon reviewing my finances: checking, savings, CDs, IRAs, equity accounts, mutual funds, life insurance policies. Revolving charge accounts and lines of credit. If there’s any single legitimate way of ordering reality, this may be it. A few months before my father died I went to visit my parents for a couple of weeks, the last opportunity I had to spend time with someone resembling the entire man before the cancer devoured him completely. One evening I found, on the coffee table next to the sofa where he sat propped up with pillows for much of each day, a slip of paper on which he’d written a list of five- and six-digit numbers. My mother saw me studying the list and laughed.
“Your father was figuring out how much money we have,” she said.
Well, my parents had evidently done all right, and my father had “terrific” health insurance coverage—perversely, he enjoyed pointing out how little the expensive process of dying was costing him out of pocket—and there was no reason why he needed to copy out, in his increasingly shaky hand, figures that mostly appeared on the consolidated statements the guy who handled their investments sent them on a quarterly basis. Still, I was able to recognize the rational compulsion behind it; saw the satisfaction he must have taken in seeing the numbers forming under the pressure of his pen, the column growing longer; extrapolating dividends and compound interest; seeing in the robust well-being of those expanding amounts all the health and vigor that had departed his failing body.
It was in a contortedly similar spirit that, when I was finished with my own review, I signed on to my local bank and, in accordance with no schedule or agreement, arranged to have ten thousand dollars deposited to Rae’s checking account, not out of concern for Rae or the kids but as a starkly manipulative gesture, a desire to loudly declare the measure of my importance to her. If I’d sent her a bouquet of flowers she might credibly have been able to accuse me of harassing her, but an arbitrary ten grand she could neither ignore nor reject. Here I am. Don’t forget me. Is there a more muscular use to which money can be put than such nakedly controlling acts? I made the wild decision then to do the same for Susannah. As I was hunting around for her account number, though, I began to feel strange, and when I realized that what I was feeling was nausea, I stopped.
12
EVEN failed romances generate the endless pillow talk, that low autobiographical hum. In my bottomless fascination, I listened. Did I get it all? I got what Susannah intended for me to get. As usual, I made up the difference on my own, filling the trenches separating the discrepant histories she offered me with all the resourcefulness of a working novelist. Susannah was, in fact, my only project for months. Not one day passed when I wasn’t confronted with something different and unexpected; not one night when I didn’t fall asleep trying to anticipate what the next day would bring. For the first time, the chess strategies of writing fiction, the ability to see ahead, holding the whole shape of an unfinished thing in mind despite changes of direction, a dozen daily alterations in tone, became something I was able to project into the three dimensions of real life, although writing, even when it was difficult and frustrating, generally brought me a sense of competency and satisfaction, while real life now only left me feeling confused, and was so complex that it required a kind of edgy wariness at all times. It was when it turned out that Susannah and I were not the known quantity I’d thought we were, that the “whole shape” I’d imagined translating into the real world had existed only in my imagination to begin with, that I began to understand desperation.
Susannah and I began our affair shortly after her husband, a director, started running the undergraduate theater arts program at a small college in Vermont. One day I was receiving a mass e-mail from these two acquaintances, this solid couple, announcing the move as the newest phase of their lives together and seeking to sublet their Union Street apartment; the next, it seemed, I was fucking Susannah on their lumpy futon. She complained about the boring town adjacent to the rural campus, about the unfulfilling role of faculty wife, about how the move would thwart her own ambitions, about how it was time for her husband to carry the load for a while. Susannah was one of those intelligent and well-educated people who establish themselves at the place where art, fashion, and “lifestyle” have their vague intersection, and she had spent her career bouncing from one loosely (or closely, depending on your perspective) related field to another: from fashion merchandising, to sales, to editorial work at one of Condé Nast’s consumption-stimulus rags. The giant publisher had deposited her on the sidewalk that spring like last year’s swag, and Susannah had then met an agent who’d persuaded her—they’d persuaded each other, really—that if she could put together a good proposal for a memoir dealing with her time there they could earn a six-figure advance. This became her cover; the story was that Susannah had decided to remain in New York to “craft” this proposal; one of those forty-page fever dreams in which writers write about what they’ll be writing once someone pays them to write it. Each word must hang heavy from the lowest branches, ripe with the promise of money. But that wasn’t really the reason she’d stayed behind, she said.
“When did you decide you didn’t want to go?” I asked one afternoon in bed.
“It was after I went out there. Out there. I sound like it’s in Montana. It’s three hours’ drive. Super beautiful. But like a totally different planet. The students are all business majors who subscribe to The Wall Street Journal. They wear suits to class, for God’s sake. He’s expected to head the department and I was expected to be the department head’s wife. I just couldn’t.”
“But you were going to. You were going to sublet this place.”
“I just couldn’t.”
“Didn’t he get mad?”
“No. He was disappointed in me.”
“But you didn’t fight?”
“We didn’t fight.”
I didn’t bother to consider the possibility that I’d wandered onto a battlefield; that these two were interested primarily in damaging each other. It didn’t seem relevant that even a generous interpretation of the arrangement between them signified an approach to marriage to which I couldn’t have imagined reconciling my own sensibilities. I did conclude that the marriage was faltering because of some inherent flaw in Susannah’s husband’s makeup. He’d seemed like a stiff to me, frankly; always standing soberly to the side at parties with one eye on his watch, looking forward to leaving at a reasonable hour. Besides, even if he’d been the most wonderful and thoughtful husband, the most attentive and passionate of lovers, he would have been no match for me. Or so I convinced myself.
Reader, I was hooked. In retrospect, I can see all the understandable reasons why my marriage to Rae imperceptibly had grown fragile, why I would have been interested in pursuing an affair with Susannah, and why she would have returned my interest. We deserved each other. Certainly Rae didn’t deserve me. Even Susannah’s husband didn’t deserve me, though I think the affair struck him as immoderate more than anything else. What I can’t understand, even now, is the brutal and irreversible course things took. It would have been within my means to have left Rae; found my own apartment and begun my affair as a single man. Alternatively, I could have concealed my rapturous afternoons from her, taking care to isolate them from my emotional life. Instead, Susannah and I quickly fucked each other into that ecstatic, hallucinatory state in w
hich we equated separation from each other with illness and being together with health. After making the diagnosis, I delivered the bad news to Rae, and then abruptly effected the cure. I ran to my lover.
HOW WELL CAN we know someone? is the question of the day. A worthy preoccupation. Each of my books considered questions of identity—its formation, its instability, its highly contingent state—but they were the happy abstractions of someone who took tremendous satisfaction in knowing what he could expect from his life and from the people sharing it. Live like a bourgeois so that you can be violent and original in your work: how many writers who find themselves choosing among brands of organic milk at the supermarket or mopping the hardwood floors grab ahold of that remark with all the figurative violence Flaubert intended? And I’d liked living like one. Stacking cans in the cupboard, watching manuscript pages accumulate. Clean towels for the kids to dry themselves, clean sheets for them to slip between, a story or two, and then lights out and back to reading and taking notes on a canary pad while Rae finished up the work she’d brought home or watched a movie on TV. Who needed the mannered chaos of “bohemia” when I had the output of my mind at its most focused and creative to show me again and again each day exactly who I uniquely was? Nothing like those twenty or forty or sixty lines each day, there to be refined, scraped out, rearranged, admired, tossed: no stamp in a passport, no photo in an album, no souvenir on a shelf, no notch on a bedpost that resonated with the same satisfying sense of having done, that preserved and carried forward the strain of life that went into having done it. The rest of existence was satisfying because it permitted me to do this in peace, without ambiguity or uncertainty: that was all on the page, where it belonged.
About Susannah, my beliefs were exactly the same as those magical ones I’d first formed about another human being when I was seventeen and the sun shone right out of the eyes of my beloved. But we are no longer high schoolers, casually blowing other people’s egos to pieces. As damaging or cruel as teenagers can be, the extent of the destruction is sharply limited by context. When we wake up each morning snug in a room in our parents’ house, we don’t hold one another’s lives in our hands. By the time we’re ready to take a crack at really fucking things up, we hope to have handy some experience—experience and judgment. I had them, I just chose not to draw on them. With everything at stake, I drew instead on a revival of the same magic faith I’d placed in Loralynn Bonacum during the summer between eleventh and twelfth grade.
The Fugitives Page 10