Potboiler

by Jesse Kellerman

  28.

  “Jesús, I’d like you to meet my dear friend, Arthur Pfefferkorn. Arthur, this is my tango partner, Jesús María de Lunchbox.”

  The man’s silk shirt was unbuttoned to the navel, flashing open as he bowed to Pfefferkorn and revealing a tan, muscular torso.

  “Nice to meet you,” Pfefferkorn said.

  The man bowed again.

  “Let’s call it a day,” Carlotta said. “Monday, then? The usual time?”

  “Señora,” Jesús María said. He moved gracefully across the ballroom to collect his bag before bowing a third time and slipping away. Carlotta stood toweling off her neck and chugging from a bottle of vitamin-fortified water. She noticed Pfefferkorn frowning at the empty doorway. “What.”

  “Are you,” Pfefferkorn said. “Eh.”

  She giggled. “Oh, Arthur.”

  “It’s not my business,” he said.

  “Arthur, please. You really are too silly. He’s queer as a three-dollar bill.”

  Pfefferkorn was relieved.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I’m not sure what right you have to complain. It’s not like you’ve been around.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s as much my fault as yours.” She sighed. “We’re like a couple of children, aren’t we.”

  He smiled.

  “Let me get cleaned up,” she said. “Then you can tell me all about it.”

  29.

  They ate at the same Italian restaurant, ordered the same delicious wine, stuffed themselves with pasta. He thought he had never seen her so beautiful, her strong features mellowed by the liquid flicker of candlelight.

  “You must be very busy these days,” Carlotta said.

  “Off and on.”

  “You were in town,” she said. “I saw the poster at the bookstore.”

  His nerves had been deflating over the course of dinner, but under her unwavering stare, terror ballooned anew, larger than before, and he braced himself for the pinprick that would burst him in an instant.

  “You didn’t call,” she said.

  He said nothing.

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t want to upset you.”

  “Why in the world would that upset me?”

  “We didn’t exactly leave things on a major chord.”

  “All the more reason to call,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Silly man,” she said. “I forgive you.”

  The waiter arrived with dessert menus. When he had gone, Pfefferkorn girded himself to ask the question hanging around his neck like an anvil.

  “Did you read it?”

  She did not look up from the menu. “Of course.”

  There was a silence.

  “And?” he said.

  Now she looked up. She cleared her throat. “Well, like I said, I’m no thriller expert. Bill is my only point of comparison. But I thought it was very good.”

  He waited. “That’s it?”

  “Don’t be such a writer. I said it was very good.”

  He wasn’t looking for praise, though. He was looking for exoneration. He studied her closely as she debated out loud whether to order dessert. He sought a clue. Some preoccupation around the eyes. Some tightness in the lips. Some backward-canted posture of concealed revulsion. He waited and waited, yet all she seemed to care about was whether the strawberry zabaglione was worth the calories. At first he wouldn’t allow himself to accept what was happening. But it kept on happening, and by “it” he meant “nothing.” Nothing was happening, because she had no idea what he had done. It was the stuff of bad novels, but it was true. It struck him then that the stuff of bad novels was far more likely to occur in real life than the stuff of good novels, because good novels enlarged on reality while bad novels leaned on it. In a good novel, Carlotta’s motivations were far more complicated than they appeared. In a good novel, she was withholding her accusations so she could spring them on him later to achieve an unexpected end. In the bad novel of life, she simply didn’t know. His troubles ended here. That she did not seem to care for Blood Eyes was beside the point. It mostly wasn’t his book. He wanted to jump up and sing. He was safe. He was free.

  “Signora?”

  Carlotta relinquished the menu and ordered a cappuccino.

  “And the signore?”

  “Same,” Pfefferkorn said.

  The waiter departed.

  “If you knew I was in town, why didn’t you come to the reading?” Pfefferkorn asked.

  “I didn’t want to upset you.”

  “That’s the same excuse I used,” he said.

  “Well, I thought you were angry at me.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “It was a reasonable assumption based on our last conversation.”

  “Why is it,” he said, “that when I misjudge you I’m wrong, but when you make the same misjudgment of me it’s reasonable?”

  “Because,” she said.

  “Right,” he said.

  30.

  He extended his ticket and they spent a blissful ten days eating, laughing, and making love. There was a refreshing abruptness to their romance, a welcome dispensing of preliminaries, as they enjoyed each other for their own sakes. Bill’s name seldom came up, and when it did it was spoken with a kind of abstract fondness, as though he were a memorable character in a novel they had both enjoyed. The triangle had collapsed into a line, one that ran directly from Pfefferkorn’s heart to hers.

  She drove him to the airport herself.

  “Let’s not wait another year, please,” she said.

  “I don’t plan on it.”

  “I can come there.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” he said.

  It wasn’t necessary, because he could now afford to fly across the country every few weeks. He soon became a regular in coach—this a concession to a lifetime of frugality—growing friendly with the stewardesses who worked the route, enough so that they would slip him freebies or sneak him into business class if the flight was empty. Exiting the airport, he would find the Bentley idling curbside, Jameson at the wheel, a cold bottle of seltzer waiting in back.

  Los Angeles was growing on him. Like every city, it was a lot more enjoyable when you had money. Carlotta took him to quality restaurants. They browsed boutiques. They lounged at the beach club where the de Vallées were members. These were activities he could not have tolerated before, because he would have been too embarrassed to let Carlotta pay. In most instances, she still did pay—she had a way of effortlessly dispensing with the bill when he wasn’t looking—but it bothered him less, for he knew that, were she to forget her credit cards, he had the ability to step in and save the day. Pfefferkorn had heard it said that money was freedom, and this was true in the usual sense: having money enabled him to go places previously closed to him and acquire items previously out of reach. However, there was another, less obvious sense in which money was freedom. Money bred self-acceptance, liberating him from a sense of inadequacy. At times he felt ashamed that he had come to evaluate himself in such crude, stark terms. But the feeling swiftly passed, and he was once again able to enjoy himself.

  31.

  “You’re not offended, are you, Arthur?”

  “Not in the slightest.”

  It was a Saturday morning, three weeks before Pfefferkorn’s daughter’s wedding, which Carlotta had just said she would not be attending. The remains of breakfast in bed were on the nightstand. The smell of strong coffee lingered. Pfefferkorn shifted, rustling the sheets and slopping the disordered newspaper to the floor. He moved to retrieve it but she tugged him back.

  “Leave it,” she said.

  He relaxed again and she relaxed against him.

  “It was thou
ghtful of you to invite me,” Carlotta said.

  “Her suggestion.”

  “Now you really are making me feel guilty.”

  “I’m sure she won’t even notice. She’s trapped in a bubble of self-absorption.”

  “Well, she is the bride.”

  “I didn’t say I blame her,” he said, “only that she won’t care.”

  “I can go,” she said unconvincingly.

  “Not if you don’t want to.”

  There was a silence.

  “I do and I don’t,” she said.

  He said nothing.

  “It would be hard for me, I think, to see her all grown up.”

  “I understand.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not that it makes me feel old. I mean, yes, it makes me feel old. But that’s not what I’m afraid of.”

  There was a silence.

  “You make choices,” she said. “You can’t know how you’ll feel about them twenty years down the line.”

  He nodded.

  “It was my decision,” she said. “It always was. Bill tried to change my mind but I had it made up.”

  She fell silent. He felt a wet tickle on his bare shoulder.

  “Hey, now,” he said.

  She apologized. He brushed the hair from her forehead and kissed her cheeks.

  “You don’t suppose it’s not too late?” she said.

  “Anything’s possible.”

  She laughed and wiped her eyes. “Hooray for modern medical science.”

  “You’d really want to start with that, now?”

  “Probably not,” she said.

  “It’s very tiring,” he said.

  “So they say.”

  “Trust me.”

  “That’s another thing Bill always talked about. What a good father you were.”

  “How would he know?”

  “We admired how you managed it on your own.”

  “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Take some credit, Arthur.”

  He said nothing.

  “You must wonder, sometimes,” she said. “If things had turned out differently.”

  He did not answer her. He had spent thirty years fleeing that question, and only now, when it no longer mattered, had he come to some kind of peace.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It’s all right.”

  They lay together without speaking. He had never been anywhere as silent as the de Vallée mansion. There was no settling of wooden joints, no sigh of air-conditioning. According to Carlotta, that had been the goal. Peace and quiet, privacy and solitude. The whole house had been insulated to the utmost degree, and Carlotta and Bill’s master suite especially. Pfefferkorn told himself that he had a right to stop thinking of it as “Carlotta and Bill’s.” He had a right to think of it as Carlotta’s alone, or possibly Carlotta’s and his. Then he told himself not to be bothered by technicalities.

  She sat up. “Let’s do something fun today.”

  “Seconded.”

  She peeled back the duvet and headed to the bathroom. He heard the hiss of hot water. He bent over the side of the bed and picked up the paper. The headlines were uniformly depressing: terrorism, unemployment, global warming, performance-enhancing drugs, Zlabian unrest. He left the paper on the bed and went to join Carlotta in the shower.

  32.

  Every cost associated with the wedding ended up being triple what Pfefferkorn had been quoted. He didn’t care. He was set on giving his daughter everything she wanted. At her second fitting, she had spied, from across the store, a different gown, a thrilling one, the right one. Pfefferkorn did not blink. He wrote a check. The mother of the groom had insisted the caterer use premium organic ingredients. Pfefferkorn did not protest. He wrote a check. The bandleader had expressed the view that five pieces were insufficiently festive. Nine would be better, he said, and Pfefferkorn, taking out his checkbook, agreed. What began as a simple afternoon affair soon swelled into an entire hosted weekend, with meals and entertainment provided throughout. Pfefferkorn wrote one check after another, and when the appointed day arrived, and he saw his daughter’s joy, he knew he had chosen correctly.

  The party was over. Pfefferkorn, his tuxedo wrinkled and damp, sat alone in the reception hall, listening to the clatter of chairs being stacked. One by one, the guests had come up to him to pump his hand and offer congratulations before stumbling off toward the complimentary valet. Pfefferkorn’s literary agent had been among the last to leave, and it was his parting words that Pfefferkorn was mulling over.

  “Great party,” the agent had said. “Give me a call when your ears stop ringing.”

  Pfefferkorn knew what was coming. In the wake of Blood Eyes’s success, he had allowed himself to be coaxed into signing a lucrative three-book deal. The deadline for the first draft of the next Harry Shagreen novel was fast approaching and nobody had seen a sample chapter. The publisher was getting nervous. Pfefferkorn sympathized. They were right to be nervous: he had yet to write a word. At the time of the signing, he had turned in a plot summary, but it was sketchy and improvised, and in the ensuing months it had proven worthless. He had not begun to panic, although he could see panic around the corner. He did not have a plan. He never did. Bill would have had a plan. He was not Bill.

  “Don’t be sad.”

  His daughter and her new husband were walking toward him, hand in hand. She was barefoot, slender, her radiant face framed by tendrils of hair that had come loose at her temples. The sheer beauty of her caused Pfefferkorn’s chest to tighten.

  “I know,” she said. “Kind of an anticlimax.”

  “I’m just depressed thinking about the bill,” Pfefferkorn said.

  She stuck her tongue out at him.

  Pfefferkorn addressed his new son-in-law. “I take it your folks are all settled.”

  Paul’s parents were spending the night in the hotel before driving home in the morning. Pfefferkorn had quietly paid for them to be upgraded to a suite.

  “They’re super,” Paul said. His tie was gone and his jacket pockets bulged with the bride’s shoes. “You’re the man, Dad.”

  There was a silence.

  “Well,” Paul said, “the chamber of consummation awaits.”

  Embarrassed, Pfefferkorn looked away.

  “Go on,” Pfefferkorn’s daughter said. “I’ll meet you up there.”

  “But I want to carry you across the threshold.”

  “Then wait for me outside.”

  “A man can only wait so long.”

  “I’ll be there soon.”

  Paul smiled and strode off.

  “Sorry about that,” Pfefferkorn’s daughter said. “He’s hammered.”

  She pulled out a chair and sat, and together they watched as the hotel workers began to disassemble the dance floor.

  “I hope it’s okay he called you Dad.”

  “As long as I can call him Junior.”

  She smiled and took his hand. “Thank you for everything.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I know it turned out to be more than you expected.”

  “It was a bargain,” he said.

  A section of parquet was carted away.

  Pfefferkorn felt he should say more—offer a piece of advice, perhaps. But what could he say that would not ring hollow? She knew better than anyone what a disaster his own marriage had been. For many fathers, it would have been easy, and sufficient, to say I love you. To Pfefferkorn this was unthinkably trite. If one could not express something in an original way, one ought not to express it at all, and so he never did. There were other, older reasons for his silence. Forced to be both mother and father, he had done neither job well, and during his daughter’s adol
escence, when she started throwing his mistakes back at him, he had responded by lacquering his heart, one thin layer at a time, until it was impenetrable. He saw himself without any other option. If she had ever understood how frightened he was of losing her affection, he would have forfeited his already tenuous authority. Even now, he found himself skirting emotion by resorting to practicalities.

  “Always come to me if you need help.”

  “We’ll be fine, Daddy.”

  “I’m not saying you won’t. Life costs a lot more than it did when I was your age. You’re young but that doesn’t mean you should suffer.”

  “Daddy—”

  “Say you will, please. For me.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I will.”

  “Thank you.”

  More parquet was lifted.

  “I want you to know how proud I am of you,” she said.

  Pfefferkorn said nothing.

  “I’ve always believed in you. I knew you had it in you. I’ve always known it would happen for you, and now that it has, I’m just . . . so happy.”

  Pfefferkorn felt mildly sick.

  The final piece of the dance floor was removed.

  “It comes apart so fast,” his daughter said.

  There was a silence. Lights began to blink off.

  “I think that’s a sign,” she said.

  He let go of her hand.

  “Have a good night, Daddy.”

  “You too . . . Sweetheart?”

  “Yes?”

  He paused. He understood that she was leaving him, and that this was his last chance to tell her anything.

  “Careful he doesn’t drop you,” he said.

  33.

  Pfefferkorn met his agent for lunch.

  “Great party.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ve been to my fair share of Jewish weddings, but that was one of the best, if not the. Love that hora.”

  “It’s a fun time.”

  The agent’s salad arrived, layered in a tall vase. He worked his fork down inside and stabbed a quantity of lettuce. “So, then,” he said. “Back to the grind.”