She walked out immediately after he finished. Her review: so-so. She kind of saw what Becky had meant about his being a little off. This too was not the point. She tried to remain focused on the point, but was basically excited. He was surely who she thought he had to be. She went outside and began trying to upload the photos to Becky. When the man from before came and stood next to her, she ignored him for as long as she could.
“What?”
“How’s your hip?”
“Oh,” she said, “OK, I guess. I’ll find out when I wake up at four a.m. in the throes of pain.”
“Put ice on it.”
“The country doctor speaks.”
“Scotch helps too. It’s long experience speaking. I have a bad back,” he said. He pursed his lips. “So, you’re writing about John Salteau?”
“What makes you think that?”
“I saw you taking notes. You don’t have a kid with you.”
“Not bad,” she said.
“What paper?”
“Who says it’s a newspaper? Maybe I’m a blogger.”
“Ah. A blogger.” He formed a cross with his index fingers and aimed it at her.
“Welcome to the digital frontier.”
“No. You forget, I’m the one trying to escape.”
“Then you’ll be relieved. I’m strictly old media. The Chicago Mirror. I feel like I have to identify myself because my boss would not be amused for one second by my impersonating a blogger.”
“Feels like his world is vanishing, huh?”
“It is vanishing. Blogs are like the good old days. It’s Twitter we have to worry about now.”
“What’s ‘Twitter’?”
“Never mind. Just aim that cross somewhere else.”
“Long as you’re not a blogger.”
“When in doubt, blame the bloggers.”
“It’s all their fault.”
“And so where’s your kids?” she asked.
“Brooklyn.”
“You mean like, Brooklyn Brooklyn.”
“Over the famous bridge.”
“I thought you seemed out of place.”
“Back. In place, I mean. I’m from the midwest originally.”
“Imagine that.” Kat checked to see if the pictures were uploading. The guy muttered something; can’t believe you found him or thought nobody would find him or something like that. She looked up sharply. “What?”
“I said, I guess Cherry City is about to lose John Salteau to the big time.”
“You’ve got a funny idea what the big time wants.”
“Oh, that’s not true. I watch a lot of television. There’s an endless supply of celebrity out there. A crisis of overproduction. Celebrity fry cooks, celebrity closet organizers, celebrity grocery store clerks. There’s a shoe salesman on the Foot Channel who was on the cover of US Weekly.”
“No,” she said, “there wasn’t.” She giggled, shaking her head. He was probably right. She glanced at her phone.
“You wouldn’t want to grab a bite, would you?”
“You’re kidding, right? You’re coming on to me at story hour?”
“It’s not like I’m asking you to huff Krylon behind the hardware store Dumpster or anything. Maybe I just want to compare notes.”
“Oh, you’re writing about Salteau, too.” She laughed again.
“I’m his number one fan. You could quote me.”
“Oh, you’re quotable all right. Local color.”
“I’ll buy.”
“I can expense my meals.”
“Come on. I’ll tell you everything I know about John. Deep background.”
“You know him.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.”
15
SHOULD I have heard of you?” she said.
“The dreaded question. Do I say, yes, you should have and you’re hopelessly ignorant if you haven’t, or do I say no, don’t worry, I’m completely insignificant.”
“How about this.” She folded her hands. “Have they made any movies out of your books?”
They were sitting in the back room of an Italian-style deli, eating sandwiches out of plastic baskets. A pair of high school kids hung out nearby, bored already by the abundance of time that was one gift of bad weather. The two adults were as insignificant to them as the mortar holding together the bricks of the walls, but the guy—Alexander Mulligan was his name—shot a glance at them and lowered his voice.
“Yes. Fallen Sparks.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Hollywood changed it,” he said, with irritation. He gave her the title of the movie.
“That’s the one with the great car in it.”
“’67 Chevelle. That was their idea. I very specifically gave my character a ’78 Civic.”
“Your first car.”
“I’m tempted to say my best car. What, tempted. Definitely my best car.” He’d begun warming to the subject. “Not cinematic enough, though. In one of the very rare instances when I had direct contact with anyone having to do with the movie, I asked the producer why they’d changed it. He looks at me like I’m mildly retarded and says, ‘It’s not a comedy.’ ”
She laughed. “Oh yeah it was. I saw it. I didn’t read the book, though.”
He shrugged. “I heard about this new trend in book clubs. You pick a book that they’re making into a movie. Then you don’t read the book, but go see the movie and then talk about that.”
“I believe it.”
“Why shouldn’t you? And you’re not even old enough to remember Classics Illustrated.”
“No, I’m not.”
“The Scarlet Letter with ads for X-Ray Specs and pimple cream every third page. People thought it was the end of Western civilization. If only they knew.”
“Personally, I thought The Scarlet Letter itself was the end of Western civilization.”
“Conversation terminated. You wonder why a writer retreats to the boondocks.”
“I didn’t wonder, actually.”
Alexander put his sandwich down and began talking to her for a while about what it was like being a writer. She nodded periodically. It was halfway interesting; a little pat. If anything, the overrehearsed aspect of the thing convinced her that he actually was who he claimed to be. She looked in her purse for her notebook but found her nicotine lozenges instead.
“See?” he said. “You should interview me sometime. You’re a natural. You bring out the talker in me.”
“A,” she said, “I don’t think you need any help from me, and B, I thought I already was interviewing you.”
“About me, I mean.” Then he blushed. He seemed starved for attention. A bad divorce, maybe, what with the kids back in Brooklyn and zero sign of that passing reference to my wife which she’d noticed married men often liked to make, if only to establish a thin veneer of honesty while they came on to her. No wedding ring, either. Puffy, like someone whose body had filled out with too much beer and too many bar burgers. Or from antidepressants.
“OK,” she said. She got out her notebook and pen. “You’re working on an important new book?”
Hopeless laugh, as if she’d asked how his terminal cancer was progressing. Try another tack (why was she bothering, she wondered).
“Why Michigan?”
“My father used to rent a cabin up here. We came up every summer.”
“Who?”
“The three of us. Me, my dad, my mom.”
“Do they still come up?”
“No. They cut it out. My mother started wanting to be close to home. Got funny about travel. She wasn’t old or anything, just stopped wanting to go out.”
“To go out or to travel?”
“Well. To go out. Which made traveling out of the question.”
“Sounds difficult.”
“It was difficult. They hardly knew my wife. They hardly knew their grandchildren.”
“Have they passed away?”
“My dad died. He got cancer and d
ied a few years ago. Very quick. Big surprise.”
“I’m sorry. And your mother?”
He made a sour face. “She’s alive,” he said. He drummed his hands on the tabletop for a second, looked around. The teenagers got up and left. He watched them as they went, then looked at her.
“So, the man of the hour. John Salteau.”
“That’s my quest.”
“Why is Chicago interested?”
“Local color. Fun-in-the-sun-type fluff. We’ll do a sidebar on Salteau, dust off our annual piece about the Cherry Festival, the lakeshore, the hang-gliding-and-ice-cream-sundae-making competition. We start the legwork now, and around May, when Chicagolanders come out of hibernation and begin thinking about escaping that oven of a city, the reps’ll start trying to sell ads to airlines and hotels and car rental agencies, we can start running our summer recreational coverage, and maybe we’ll all live to see another day.”
“Why you went to J-school, I’m guessing.”
She smiled. “How long have you known him?”
“Salteau? Since he started over at the library in the fall, I guess. A few months, now.”
“And why did you start going to see him there? What interested you?”
He leaned back and began talking again about being a writer, about the cutthroat environment in New York, about the innocent joy of Salteau’s kind of storytelling. He kept saying, “I’m serious,” and then continuing. She wrote down SERIOUS VERY SERIOUS SERIOUS ABOUT TALKING SERIOUS TALKER SERIOUSLY INTO THE SOUND OF HIS OWN VOICE SERIOUS? SERIOUSLY I MEAN IT SERIOUS.
He summed up: “That’s why I felt like I had to leave.”
“So you did leave. I’m way ahead of you.”
He blushed again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s embarrassing. I don’t mean to turn the conversation to myself, not every time.”
She smiled thinly. “No need to beat yourself up.”
“Anyway. I guess what I’m trying to say is that what I like about him has to do with the way he breaks the rules. He’s not worried about what’s possible, or plausible, not interested in lessons endorsed by the social sciences. Just in making order.”
“It’s primitive.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Authentic, then. Where did that face come from?” He’d assumed the same sour expression he had when she’d asked about his mother.
“What does ‘authentic’ have to do with telling stories? Who cares?”
“Well. I do, I guess.”
“If you’re bidding on a painting at Sotheby’s, OK. But fiction?”
“Don’t you think it matters that an authentic Indian should be telling authentic Indian legends?”
“Does it matter when some guy from Cambridge translates The Odyssey?”
“The culture wars, entering the top of the nine hundred fifty-sixth inning, still no score.”
He laughed. “These are the things that bring out the crackpot in all of us.”
“Some of us.”
“Granted, certain things make me a little crazy. But I can speak very poetically about other things.”
“Well, when are you going to start? I thought you weren’t going to be quotable at least in an interesting way.”
He looked down at the ruins of his lunch, bleeding out in the plastic lattice basket. He sighed. A crackpot, a charmer, a delusional con man, a victim of mood swings, a faker of hurt feelings: who knew? Actually, he was sort of interesting, but like most of the interesting things that confronted her in the course of an average plug-in-and-spectate day, he was turning out to be an irrelevant hindrance.
“OK. Here’s what I think,” he said. He held up his hands palms out, a hold-everything gesture. “For real. I think he’s got a real commitment to inventiveness. Believe it or not, I don’t see that a lot in my line of work. What I see a lot of is people trying to keep their names out there. It’s the opposite of invention. They take brave stands from somewhere midpoint in the herd. They might even win a medal from time to time.”
“What’s your brave stand?”
“Divorce, it turned out. I took a stand in favor of divorce.”
“Did you win any medals?”
“I didn’t want any medals.”
“You wanted a divorce.”
“Yeah, though apparently what I really wanted was to tear a huge gash in the moral fiber of my community.”
“So you retreat to the provincial values of the small-town midwest?”
He shrugged. “Anyway, I found Salteau here. And here we are.”
The refractive conversational habits of some people. Mulligan kept bending the conversation toward himself and then bending it away again. Kat felt her interest being piqued by the sad (though undoubtedly banal) story of his divorce (which evidently he’d initiated) and then her faint sense of disappointment when it was snatched away was instantly replaced by anticipation when he pushed Salteau back into view. She flipped the page in her notebook, a sort of official down-to-business gesture, and noticed that look cross his face, as if it wasn’t merely that the subject was being changed but that he himself was being left behind, detained within the unrelated drama of his past.
“Where’s he come from?”
“Who?”
“John Salteau.”
“Horton Bay, he told me.”
“What tribal band does he belong to?”
“He mentioned it, but I don’t hang on to those kinds of names. Whatever’s up there, I guess.”
“How long has he been performing?”
“That one I don’t really know for sure.”
“Do you know what he did before he started performing?”
“You know, I think he told me he worked at one of the casinos.”
Kat held her breath. Go slow, she thought. “A casino,” she said, writing it down. “You know which one?”
“That one up here, I think,” he said. “Manitou Sands?”
She exhaled. “Any other jobs?”
Mulligan leaned back, made a steeple with his fingers, looked up at the ceiling. “Construction worker, maybe he was in the army, you know.”
Kat thought for a moment. “No dark past or anything, though?” She giggled as if at the ridiculousness of the question. “You know, the more interesting I can make him, the more ink we get.”
“Right,” said Mulligan. “But I don’t know. I guess he’s as mysterious as anyone.”
He didn’t know: OK. “OK,” she said. “You ever see him with any friends, girlfriends?”
“Not that I remember, no.”
“OK,” she said. She capped her pen. “I can’t believe I let you sucker me into having lunch with you.” Mulligan looked stricken. “I’m just kidding,” she said. She patted his hand. “Mr. Sensitive.”
“I’m more of a literary consultant,” said Mulligan, recovering. “You could always ask him about these sorts of things yourself.”
“I’m going to. Now. I sure could use a coffee, how about you?”
He seemed pleased to oblige. She considered the pertinent information he’d given her. It was amazing that Saltino would mention that he’d worked at the casino, but it was also amazing that he was anywhere within a thousand miles of Manitou Sands. When Mulligan returned he was ready to change the subject, and he started asking her questions about herself, which flattered her and made her uncomfortable at the same time. It was a game she was familiar with. Let’s play I’m the interviewer and you’re the subject. Let’s play enough about me. Let’s play I’m a savvy person and I know how to manipulate the media to my advantage. Kat was no dummy, she went along with him as far as she was willing, but she was more willing than she might have expected. He asked her about her background and education, her hopes and dreams, and she was, like everyone else, a sucker for the hypnotic draw of her own hopes and dreams, and she was, like anyone who’s benefited from a certain amount of luck and apparent self-knowledge, a sucker for the opportunity to appear unregretful about the ones she�
��d given up on. And she was lucky, right? She might have ended up exactly where Becky had if she’d become some psycho tweaker’s old lady, parking her ever-wider duff on the back of a bike for ten straight years. And she was self-aware, right? Right? But also she was dissatisfied, with her marriage and with her job; and she was scared, of losing either or both of them; and while she was going to draw the line at discussing her marriage it was sensible to openly discuss her job because the death of print was always a lively topic and here was a fellow mourner, after all. What was up with the Mirror was pretty garden-variety, anyway. Circulation and display advertising way down, reliable revenue streams like the classifieds evaporated into nothing by Craigslist. The website apparently was too dense and too static to hold readers’ attention, and thus had the high bounce rate that scared off advertisers. Layoffs were scattered, disguised as attrition; as if two people in classifieds and three in books and arts had abruptly retired, or dropped dead, on the same Friday. Midwest Entertainment Holdings, the parent company, was liquidating properties, or just giving them away: Mirror Books, an imprint devoted to the glorification of all things Chicagoland, was quietly folded, its inventory remaindered or pulped. Six neighborhood weeklies that were published in various parts of Cook, DuPage, and Lake Counties were sold in a highly leveraged deal that allowed MEH to carry the receivable on its books as anticipated revenue, although it was almost certain that the undercapitalized group that had acquired the papers would default. Minority interests in regional broadcasters had been sold off, as well as a small stake in the Cleveland Indians. Although there was still nominally a Mirror Building on Michigan Avenue, the place had long ago been sold to developers and the paper had leased its offices elsewhere in the Loop for twenty years. All this was of little concern to Kat, who knew next to nothing about the paper’s heyday and whose instinctive resistance to joining anything kept her at a complete remove from something so trite as workplace spirit. She was scared of losing her job, not of Chicago’s losing a piece of its history it couldn’t have cared less about. Those kinds of abstractions generally didn’t bother her: cities, and times, were supposed to change. The Thunder of the Presses was the title of some black-and-white movie on TCM, that’s all. Still, as she unburdened herself to Alexander Mulligan, it surprised her that she had anything at all to unburden herself of. What were her hopes and dreams, anyway? She’d always wanted to “do something” that endowed her every aspect with a kind of prestige and self-assured presence, a juvenile aspiration to be sure but as real and resonant as the admiration she still felt for those confident people she encountered sometimes at parties or dinners who appeared so evidently at ease in the mess of living that you couldn’t help envying them, whatever it was they did and whoever it was they were. She’d been scrupulously studying these people since she was a little girl, cribbing from them whether she found them on TV or at the Speedway, filling up their cars as they passed through between one place and another.
The Fugitives Page 13