The Fugitives

by Christopher Sorrentino

  Now, having kissed Kat and inserted my hand under her blouse, I felt the first familiar not-at-all-faint stirrings of swollen emotion. She was beautiful, difficult to decipher, and she was attracted to me: all pluses. She also was married, albeit unsatisfactorily, which I could go either way on. What else? She lived in Chicago, a town I liked. I pictured us in one of those big elegant apartments overlooking the lake. I pictured us sharing drafts, ideas, passages from books we were reading over drinks before dinner. The kids would love her. Rae would cede physical custody. The Yacht Reporter would vanish obligingly. I would even become a father again. (Is it clear yet that this is exactly the fantasy I had of my life with Susannah?) Our love would be wondrous, a balm to the witnessing world. In forty years’ time we’d be entwining our fingers as we always had, gazing into each other’s eyes; silver-haired, handsome elders, hale and pigeon-chested.

  Another thing my mother used to like to say is “There’s no fool like an old fool.” She’d often say this, half-jokingly, in reference to my father, but I think she’d say it to me now, if she were to have seen me staring into the hallway mirror after I entered my house, studying myself, in self-appraising wonder.

  I had intended to treat myself right that night, to do some work, even, but I hadn’t anticipated the sense of exquisite dissatisfaction that my afternoon with Kat had left me with, and there was the whiskey, and there were still some cigarettes, and so within a couple of hours I was sprawled drunkenly on the couch, occasionally, and self-consciously, sniffing the sweater I’d worn that afternoon, which smelled of Kat’s perfume, and which I kept handy on the cushion next to me. I exhorted myself to get to work, finally forcing myself up off the couch. I made for the stairs, reaching out for the newel and missing it entirely. My momentum sent me crashing into the front door, and I stood there rubbing my upper arm, puzzled about my intentions. Then I remembered: rear bedroom. Where the computer and all that shit was. I noted dimly that the answering machine was still flashing with Boyd Harris’s message. Time for him later. Still rubbing my arm, I started up the stairs.

  18

  I FELL asleep at my desk, of course. I woke up stiff and gritty-eyed; my contact lenses seemed to have been applied to my corneas with a thin and stubborn coat of glue. My neck throbbed. So much for the nine-hundred-dollar chair. The sense of determination that had carried me upstairs to the study the night before had abandoned me. I went downstairs to put coffee on, then climbed back up to get undressed and take a shower. Then I would get started. Why wouldn’t I get started? What would keep me from getting started? I thought about the block of day ahead, as uniformly smooth in consistency and tone as a hunk of Gouda. A writer’s dream, through and through. But, though I’d barely paid any attention to Salteau the morning before, I wished that it were Tuesday again already, so I could run from my work. I got dressed, poured the coffee, decided I was hungry. I fried some eggs, then decided to clean up the kitchen. The house needed airing. I wanted to do the laundry, haul the empty bottles out to the recycling bin in the garage. Hang the coats in the closet. Empty the ashtrays and pick up the living room. Run the vacuum. Was I going to polish the silver next? It was eleven o’clock now. I poured the remaining coffee into my cup and lit a cigarette—gratifyingly, the last in the pack. Gratifying because I knew that now I would have an excuse to run to the mini-mart at the gas station on Division. Then I could take repeated breaks to smoke, enjoying the tiny pernicious twinge just to one side of my right shoulder blade that I had become convinced was an admonitory communication from the malignancy taking form in my lung. Great: talking tumors, now. I forced myself to go back upstairs.

  Coetzee writes of telling a story selectively, omitting all of the complicated and unsettling truths; “the story unrolls without shadows,” as he puts it. On reflection, it occurs to me that the story without shadows is a cartoon, no more or less. Whether aimed blatantly at an audience (around the table, at the bar, on the jury, in the cineplex, under a reading lamp) or draped in the most elaborate trappings of High Art, it comforts its audience and, occasionally, its author. For a while I’d recognized that what I was working on was nearly shadowless. I’d read it, and read it again: it was a voice I’d never use unless I was trying, not even to comfort, but to con. Irremediable. The idea of admitting to myself, let alone to someone else, that the book I’d sold was likely never going to exist made me anxious—I knew I was courting another series of calls from Fecker, Arlecchino, and Harris, the three evil fairies—but what really terrified me, made me want to crawl on my hands and knees behind a barrier of sandbags, was my continued inability to write. I was like some aged invalid, overcome by dementia. All I wanted to do now was sit around and smell my clothes. I went downstairs to confront the empty cigarette pack, picked up the sweater off the couch and gave it a whiff, posing as the detached technician: gardenia, perhaps? What a joke. The musk took hold of me again—maybe I was feebleminded—and I stood holding the sweater pressed against my face, inhaling deeply. Loralynn Bonacum wore Giorgio—that great, fruity madeleine of the ’80s. Like big hair and shoulder pads, brilliantine and wingtips, yellow neckties and unvented double-breasted suits, an aroma as caricatured as those anxiously modish times. Yet how many young guys pickled their brain cells in that scent? Every now and then I’ll pick it up in a crowd, at a mall, say—a dedicated line to my juvenile passion (which makes it no less piquant)—and it stops me, anyway it cuts off volition, I continue to move ahead but I’m really thinking, feeling, remembering. If I had the presence of mind I might search the faces of the other middle-aged men around me, try to identify the ones suddenly stopped dead in the midst of their lives, the bones of the ardent past unexpectedly disinterred between the pretzel stand and the sneaker store.

  I WAS FINISHING a beer just before lunch when the phone rang. It was Dylan. I opened another. “Been a while since I read a good AIDS novel,” he was saying. “I mean straight-up AIDS, none of this Africa shit, just gay guys dropping like flies in the heart of the Castro.”

  “AIDS Classic,” I said.

  “Those were some days. I guess most of the people who were going to die died already.” He sounded glum about it, like a golden era had passed. “But this book is set in 1989. Very pleased. Good read. Just came in over the transom.”

  “You read stuff that comes in over the transom?”

  “By ‘read’ I mean Kirsten read it. Fucked up her plans the last couple of evenings, but she knows she can go back to the reception desk anytime she wants. By ‘transom’ I mean that it was sent to me by Edmund White.”

  “Ed just took one look and said, Fecker’s got AIDS written all over him?”

  “Oh, he’s funny. Funny guy. You sound very chipper today, Sandy. How are things in Ashtabula?”

  “About the same. Highs in the mid-thirties. Sunny skies, slight chance of snow this evening. Orion, Gemini, and Arugula visible.”

  “Very, very chipper. Hang on to that, will you? Because I’m calling to give you a heads-up.”

  “Yes?”

  “They’re starting to cancel contracts right and left. One day past deadline and they kill the book.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “You know who they are. The moguls. The diversifiers. The change agents.”

  “Three catchy titles.”

  “Sandy, they are looking for excuses. And thanks to all that fucking around you’ve been doing, you are very close to being in breach. He’s laughing. He’s laughing at this. How much does Monte owe you on your advance, Sandy?”

  “You’d know better than me. You said you were going to frame a copy of the check when it arrived.”

  “I did. Someone stole it right off the bathroom wall during a party.”

  “Maybe you were out of toilet paper.”

  “He owes you a bunch, is the answer. Payable on delivery. What do you have for them?”

  “Not much.”

  “They’re not going to cut you much slack, then. We’ll be lucky if they don’t sue
to recover what they’ve already paid. Did I mention they’re suing people? They’re suing people.”

  “Again with the ‘they.’ I thought you said Monte had an investment in my career.”

  “He did. He does. Unsurprisingly, though, he has a bigger investment in his career. Besides, this is out of his hands at this point. If you’re not going to make deadline, we should dodge that bullet, get out in front of it.”

  “Nicely mixed metaphor.”

  “He’s killing me. Think about it, Sandy. We don’t have a hell of a lot of time.”

  “There’s no book.”

  “Send them what you have and let Monte and his elves hammer it into shape like the shoemaker in that fairy tale. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the kind of OK. Writers fall for that crap all the time; don’t fall for it. He’s falling for it. He’s got this labyrinth he forces himself to spend years working his way through, with this total enigma at the center, so of course he’s thinking of it as an enduringly profound artifact that he’s creating. It’s just a fucking story, Sandy. That’s what you writers always forget. Look: five million years ago some poor schmuck of a hominid was wending his way across the savanna when a lion jumps him and drags him off into the bushes. For millennia he’s just a skull and a pile of bones buried beneath the mud until an anthropologist digs him up, dusts him off, and ships him to the British Museum. The guy never did anything except scratch himself, throw rocks, and eat grubs, but now he entertains, informs, and enlightens millions. How are you going to top that? Maybe in a couple of hundred years there’ll be a few dozen doctoral dissertations on your work that no one’s looked at in decades. Movies, Sandy: the closest you’ll ever come to leaving your jawbone preserved in the mud somewhere in Africa will be the movies made from your books. They won’t even be remembering your work. They’ll be remembering fucking Ethan Hawke.”

  IT WAS GRIM-ENOUGH news, possibly unsurprising. The idea of being in breach of contract thrilled me a little, though. It even sounded vaguely prosperous, to have a contract it was possible to breach. Apart from ridiculing my seriousness, or what he misperceived as my seriousness, about my work, Dylan had actually sounded indignant on my behalf, as if he really believed that I needed only focus and a little more time. Well, he could fight it all the way to the gates of the old city of Stuttgart, but nothing could change the fact that I was not among the authors dawdling over their manuscripts, I was among the dreamers who wandered lost in a gauzy dream of famous achievement, puffed up by my own ego. I shook my head, knowing, finally, that there would be no book.

  Drama of the book as the adversary. Drama of the book as the difficult offspring. All horseshit. The drama of the book was that it wasn’t an artifact of clarification, organization, selection; wasn’t an artifact of speech aimed toward an audience, even—it was an artifact speaking directly, as a medium of exchange, to other artifacts, the things that could be bought with it. A jet lumbered overhead, wheeling against the clear blue sky as it rose from Cherry City International, climbing to altitude with its cargo of the competent and well-adjusted. A shaman of marketing may have a certain aura, the prodigy of the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange works his voracious will in a neon glow, but these are the prophets and healers of unapologetic mercantile cults, bearing their private burdens but few public expectations. Whereas I was just another tawdry scofflaw with an inflated reputation, an oversized advance, and the ingrained habit of buying things. I wasn’t suffering from writer’s block, I was suffering from oversatiety and the eagerness to experience emptiness again, so that I could refill it.

  MY FIRST BOOK, although it earned disproportionately ecstatic reviews, awards, and a toehold on the zeitgeist despite basically lousy sales, let me believe that I’d remained pretty much unchanged. After the second, I wasn’t quite as sure. A More Removed Ground became a bestseller and a weird kind of cause célèbre. Reviewers delighted in placing it on a scale (their findings varied) and comparing it to objects weighing similar amounts (a wheel of brie, a meat loaf, a steam iron, various small car parts, stereo components) in comparison to each of which, it seemed, the book suffered. The consensus was that the book’s sheer ambition marked me as a genius, but I should have been more considerate and cut it by about two-thirds. It sold anyway. After that, the people I met at book parties and readings knew who I was. The photographers who asked to take my picture, and the journalists who scheduled interviews, and editors who solicited fiction, and festival impresarios wanting readers, and department chairs seeking writers-in-residence, and moderators impaneling panelists, and feature guys lowering the bucket for “voice-driven” features, they all knew. It was pretty easy to persuade myself that I was someone important. Beyond the Palace of Versailles, though, things were different. Out there the big question was ingenuously poignant, and cutting: “Have they ever made a movie out of one of your books?”

  In my case, as we have seen, the answer was yes—that random Hollywood Santa had visited my home and scattered largesse; enough of it, really, to inflame me with an unfamiliar greed; not a greed that would remain unfamiliar for very long, although I managed to coil all its malign energies once again, store them against the day when I could no longer delay my own gratification; coils that would come undone all of a sudden, undoing with them all those pragmatic habits, that smooth routine; habits and routine being the very things I’d confused for me, for myself, for who I actually was, when in fact who I was was a slavering maniac waiting for an opportunity to spring myself from self-control; a hungry, envious, vengeful, weak, and treacherous maniac, as well as a consummate bullshit artist; the first whiff of that bullshit arriving the moment I got my hands on that first check from my Hollywood agent; an ordinary blue-gray check imprinted with a number not all that big in the overall scheme of things, but sufficient, more than sufficient, to reveal all the potential for vulgarity I possessed.

  That time, we’d thought of greed as a lapse, Rae and I. Dazzled, we thought it was understandable to mistake money for freedom. Who wouldn’t? It is, in its way. It’s better to have it than not to have it. Who doesn’t believe that? Pace Count Tolstoy, but I can’t make a case for becoming a wandering mendicant. I am a product of my century, the twentieth, that is, which can be said to have consisted of a sustained effort to repudiate History’s Most Beloved Author. It is better to have it, as I prove each and every day here, in Michigan, free to drive my brand-new truck and wear my brand-new clothes, free to sit on my brand-new furniture and type on my brand-new computer, free to eat my brand-new food heated in brand-new pots and pans, all mounted in the midst of this brand-new life I rustled up for myself—Cherry City was a perfect setting for the expensive and flawless gem that reflected my unhappiness back at me from each of its hand-cut facets. If this was not a kind of freedom then freedom had no purpose. If freedom and happiness are synonymous then American life is only the sum of the dumbest aspirations it engenders. Now I found it satisfying that no one here seemed to know who I was. The problem (and even I was able to recognize the problem) was it wasn’t any longer a matter of concealing my public reputation but of concealing myself.

  It was already wearing me out, in other words, to have this much contact with the world after months in retreat from it. The phone calls from Fecker, Arlecchino, and Harris were quite enough; the burlesque unreality that came out of the tiny, tinny telephone speaker was like a blast from a Kaufman and Hart play. (Anyway, they didn’t really require anything of me in telling their tales of woe; my response wasn’t the point. No story requires an audience, just the willing credulity of the teller. That’s what makes it glow. Possibly that’s the problem with politicians, or with their speeches, anyway: they feel that if they assemble an audience they have only to pour sentiment over it, like oil over a gigantic salad.) But Kat had brought with her the unmistakable feeling of dawning intrigue and strategy, and I had no appetite for it. I couldn’t figure out if that made me sick or well. There I was, supposedly writing a book. Just write it, an
d Kaufman, Hart, Groucho, Chico, Abbott, and Costello all shut up. It was a simple prescription: avoid intrigue, write. They shut up, I stop hanging around the children’s library, stop with the Omega Man fantasies, and go visit my mother like every other mope does when he journeys home to the midwest from one of the shining, night-bright coasts. They shut up, and Kat goes back to Chicago and solves her marital problems. They shut up, and I go back to New York and live like any other solid citizen, writing gently critical book reviews and chortling with forced laughter at crowded parties thrown in overheated brownstone apartments or galleries with high-res photos of vulvas on the walls. Like every incorrigible nutcase in this sloppy and fucked-up vale of tears and trans fats and thousand-dollar handbags, I wanted to make the voices stop.

  I put on my boots and my parka and went for a walk, crossing Division and taking a long, slow swing through the grounds of the lunatic asylum. The broad lawn the facility presented to the street receded toward a planted cedar grove, with paved footpaths leading to the various buildings, actually various complexly arranged wings extending from each other and anchored by the grandest of them, Building 50 so-called, a looming structure topped by multiple red spires. The setting was reminiscent of a small and grimly unphotogenic agricultural college, except that most of the buildings were unoccupied or undergoing major renovation. Signs nailed to the doors announced some of the future uses to which these buildings would be put: a nature center, a children’s museum, headquarters of the local historical society. The smaller buildings were severely functional, with long, narrow windows whose multiple muntins, where they were intact, resembled bars from a distance. Building 50 itself was surrounded by chain-link fencing, behind which various pieces of mid-sized construction equipment were parked, some still covered with snow. A placard had been affixed to the fence that read: