The Fictional Man

by Al Ewing

  When Dalton Doll’s ‘pleasure pad’ first appeared on the screen, with his mini-harem of Dolly Birds fussing about him in their oddly shapeless ’sixties dresses, Niles found himself smiling fondly, if a little ruefully. As a teenager, it had been his idea of a dream home – at the time he might as well have wanted a base on the moon, but now that he looked around his apartment, at the striking minimalist furniture and the Richard Hamilton prints on the wall, he had to admit he’d come fairly close. He might not have a hat stand he could summon from the floor or a zebra-skin love seat he could drop from the ceiling, but he had an espresso machine and a lava lamp, and if he didn’t have a harem yet it was hardly for want of trying.

  The thought jarred. Was he trying? Not to get a harem, for God’s sake, that was ridiculous, but just to – well, get involved with someone? Meet new people? To, to put it bluntly, get laid?

  It had been three years since the divorce – and the unpleasantness that had triggered it – and the realisation hit him that he hadn’t made a serious effort to meet anyone in all that time, which was... bizarre, considering how he’d behaved before then. He’d mostly been working on his novels, or spending time with Bob and – some of his other friends had stuck around, surely? – or he’d been having his therapy sessions with Ralph. What social life he had aside from that consisted mainly of launch parties and publicity junkets, and while he did plenty of looking – ogling, even, this was still LA – he always seemed to have an excuse not to ‘seal the deal.’

  “Good God,” he muttered to himself. “Seal the deal.” He sounded like one of those idiots who wrote seduction manuals. How To ‘Neg’ The ‘Hotties’: A Kurt Power Manual. That was a bad sign. Something was obviously starting to curdle.

  Now that he thought seriously about it, the woman he spoke to most regularly – and also the last woman he’d been in any way intimate with – was Iyla, which seemed... off, somehow, in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He’d have to speak to Ralph about it at their next session.

  He sighed, shaking the thought off and allowing his mind to return to the movie. It had reached one of his favourite parts – the casino scene, featuring the first appearance of Joi Lansing as the delectable Kitten Caboodle. Niles found himself perking up. As she leaned forward over the roulette table to serve Dalton Doll his Old Fashioned – “hold the cherry” was evidently thought by the screenwriters to be a serious rival for “shaken not stirred” – Niles reflexively did the same, as if he could somehow peer further down her top than the cameraman had managed to, and when Doll got her back to his pad and she revealed that dress, his hand began, almost unconsciously, to reach down and unbutton his fly –

  – at which point the phone rang.

  “Damn it,” muttered Niles, flushing slightly as he scrabbled around for the smartphone buzzing on the table in front of him. Surely the studio couldn’t need their pitch yet? Or was it Bob, ringing to apologise about his rudeness last night? They’d ended the evening amicably enough, but Niles had spent the taxi ride home fuming, recalling Bob’s tone when he’d referred to Kurt Power and the future Dalton Doll. How dare Bob imply that Niles wasn’t a good writer?

  Niles blinked at the display. It was Iyla.

  The synchronicity unnerved him. He considered ignoring it, but his thumb, seemingly on automatic pilot, slid across the display to answer the call.

  “Hello, Iyla?” He already regretted answering, but he was committed now. He put the film on mute – he could always come back to where he’d been later, and besides, his putative erection had gone back to sleep at the first sight of her name. He wondered exactly when it was that she’d begun having that effect on him.

  “Niles, hi. Listen, it’s not a biggie – were you working?” Her voice was brisk and rich, with a slight hint of the stronger accents of her parents. They’d hated him, of course, particularly at the end when she’d finish most nights by retreating to the spare room and calling them in floods of tears. Her father had once threatened to beat him to death with a tire iron, and it had taken a lot of restraint and understanding for him not to call the police.

  “Yes, I was working,” the author said, as if speaking to a child. “I’m always working. I can never turn it off, not for a second. To me, breathing and writing are the same. When you plunge me into the cold waters of our dead love, stop my work, stop my breath – I begin to die.” With that, he crushed the phone with a single clench of his powerful hand, and returned to making his copious notes.

  Perhaps he would thank her at the Oscar ceremony – for nothing.

  “No, no, nothing I can’t...” he tailed off. On the screen, Doll and Kitten – now naked but for a discreet op-art bed sheet – were locked in a passionate embrace. She was mouthing the words “real man” into his earlobe. That bit, he realised, might have to be updated for modern audiences. “Nothing important. How have you been?”

  “I’ve been fine. Things are great. Look, the reason I’m calling is that I was opening up one of the boxes...”

  Niles frowned. “Still? It’s been years.”

  Iyla sighed. “I’ve been busy, okay? And – look, I don’t know if you noticed, but that was kind of a painful time for me. I mean, I couldn’t even look at those damn boxes for a year – I bought a whole new wardrobe, new furniture...”

  “I thought you looked different that time...” They’d met for coffee on New Year’s Day of 2011, more than ten months after it had all fallen apart – that whole ugly business. Niles hadn’t wanted to, but Iyla had insisted they make some attempt to mend fences. Her therapist was telling her to forgive and forget – or try to, anyway.

  “Yeah, I had that pixie cut. Don’t know what the hell I was thinking, I walked out of that salon thinking I’d made the mistake of my life – well, present company excepted.” She laughed, letting him know it was a ‘joke.’ He frowned. “If you’d said anything about it then I might have killed you, but fortunately you just droned on and on about this terribly original idea you were working on about some terrorists who’d actually got hold of a nuclear bomb...”

  He could hear the sarcasm in her voice. “For your information, Edge Of Doomsday: A Kurt Power Novel reached number 19 on the US bestseller lists last September.”

  There was a pause. “You didn’t.” Niles heard her laughter on the other end of the line. Once upon a time, making her laugh like that would have been the highlight of his day. “You did! You put it out on 9/11!”

  “9/10,” Niles replied, stiffly. “The Monday. And it was an arbitrary date, nothing more.”

  “I cannot believe you sometimes,” He could hear her take a drink of something to calm the fit of giggles. “Ohh, boy. Every time I think I’ve hit the limit with you, you still manage to surprise me, you know that? It’s kind of adorable now I don’t have to live with it.”

  Niles pursed his lips. “Listen, Iyla, when I said I wasn’t working – well, technically speaking –”

  “Sure. Sorry. I’ll get back to why I called.” She was still smiling – he could hear it in her voice. He could remember the first time he’d seen that smile – a launch party for Linda’s book, the one about the wolf-girl, or possibly the one with the family of otters. Iyla had seemed so exotic to him – was that racist, he wondered? No, of course not, it was a compliment – exotic and alive, wearing a sharply-cut skirt-suit that showed off her legs, while Linda flounced around in a grim floral sundress that came down to her ankles and seemed designed for a commune in the ’seventies. He’d spent the whole evening finding little excuses to talk to the fascinating Indian girl – Indian-American, he corrected himself, as opposed to Native American, that’s Red Indian – and avoiding Linda, who’d eventually made a noisy demand to leave. She’d been in floods of tears as he’d driven her home – he didn’t remember formally ending it then, but then he hadn’t really needed to, given the circumstances. Realistically the whole thing had ended long before, anyway, before she’d even moved to San Francisco with him. It was when she’d sto
pped smoking and started putting on the weight.

  Of course, eventually Iyla ceased to be the exotic other and became the woman who caused fusses at perfectly innocent flirtations, but he wasn’t to know that then.

  On the screen, Joi Lansing and Anouska Hempel were about to do their big dungeon scene. Kitten was at that moment being chained to the wall by two well-built black women in red and yellow spandex, while the evil Ms Harridan, leader of F.L.O.O.Z.Y., waited in the wings. Niles lip-read the words “honey-chile” from one of the henchwomen and winced. Best to get rid of that, too. “Sorry, I was distracted for a minute. You were saying about the box?”

  Iyla sighed. “It’s not that big a deal. I can call back later.”

  “No, tell me now.” Niles said, pausing the film. “You were unpacking a box, and...”

  “And it’s one of yours. It’s got a whole bunch of your old CDs in it. And no offence, but I’m not having your shit taking up space in my life. I figured I’d give you a chance to take them off my hands – I’m home all Wednesday.”

  Niles thought. “I’ve got a therapy appointment on Wednesday.”

  “What, for the whole day? Look, I’m not paying postage. Either you come get them or they go to the Goodwill. Actually, it’s not like anyone uses CDs any more, I’ll probably just throw them away –”

  “Don’t be hasty,” Niles said hurriedly, “I could import them onto my laptop. It might save me some money on iTunes. Which albums are they? Are you sure they’re mine?”

  He heard the sound of cardboard being dragged across carpet, and then the click of plastic on plastic as she sorted through them. “Let’s see... Gustav Holst, that’s yours. Mike And The Mechanics, Dire Straits, U2... Josie And The Pussycats, that’s definitely yours... Terrordance...”

  Niles winced again. “That’s not mine –”

  “I’ve got Purple Rain here, and that’s absolutely one of yours. Your music taste was frozen in ice with the woolly mammoths.”

  “Not Terrordance, though.” Niles rubbed his temples. “I mean, God. Terrordance. Where did that come from?”

  There was a brief pause. “I have no idea,” Iyla said, although from the sound of it she probably did. Some impulse buy she now regretted. “That goes to the Goodwill, I guess.”

  “If they’ll take it.” Niles sighed. “All right, might as well go through the lot. I’ll stop you if there’s anything I don’t want.” He leaned back on the couch, staring at the frozen image of Joi Lansing, caught in mid-writhe, listening to Iyla reel off a short list of albums he remembered buying, most, if not all, from the time before he’d met her. He found himself wondering if this particular box had ever been unpacked during their time together. Maybe it was a metaphor for their relationship – although if it was, it was a metaphor that included him buying Terrordance on CD, and that wasn’t a metaphor he was quite prepared to accept. “Hold on,” he said suddenly. “What was that last one?”

  Iyla sighed. “The Donnie Darko soundtrack. That’s definitely yours, it’s all ’eighties music.”

  Niles shook his head, sitting up straight. “No, I remember you buying that. We’d just gone to see the film – you remember, it was 2001, we were still living in San Francisco –”

  Iyla scoffed. “I hated that film.”

  “You only hate it now because you saw the Director’s Cut. When you saw it in the cinema you thought it was great. And you loved the music, you thought that was the best part –”

  “Where are you getting this from?” Iyla sounded incredulous. Did she really not remember?

  “After the showing,” Niles said, surprised at the urgency that had crept into his voice, “we headed down to that restaurant you loved, the Italian one, and we walked because it was all downhill and on the way there was a Best Buy, and – and you’d been talking about the soundtrack, about how great those old Tears For Fears songs were and how they felt really fresh in a lot of ways and you wanted to hear more of them, and we passed a Best Buy and you just went right in and bought the album. I remember it. You actually jumped up and down when you found it, you had this big smile, your eyes were shining –”

  “Okay, okay,” Iyla said down the line, sounding a little disturbed. “It’s not yours. I’ll give it to the Goodwill.”

  “And afterwards, in the restaurant, you kept taking it out and looking at the track listing, and you were in such a good mood –” Niles couldn’t seem to stop himself talking. “You were in such a good mood because of the film, and, and because you’d just had a job offer in LA for twice the salary you were on, enough for us to get a really nice apartment, and... I remember the way you said us, like it was a given, not like... like you were asking if there was an us, if I was going to leave. Like it was... well. A given.” He paused, taking a breath, but Iyla didn’t interrupt. He knew he should just stop talking, but the words just kept coming out. All of a sudden they seemed very important to say. “And after dinner, we went back to your place and I, I stayed over, and...” He swallowed. “And the day after, I said I’d walk back to mine, not take a cab, since it was such a mild day. And on the way... on the way I saw the ring in the jeweller’s shop window. And I had to buy it.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  “Because... because you were the one.” He said it quietly, flatly. There was a lead weight in his gut.

  More silence. He could hear her breathing – steady, controlled.

  “Iyla?”

  “How many other women did you screw while you were married to me, Niles?” she said, quietly. “I counted at least three, but I’ll bet there were a lot more.”

  Niles groaned. “Iyla –”

  “I remember there was Bobbi,” she said, methodically, like she was making a list of the types of birds native to California. “Now her I wrote off as an early mid-life crisis, like getting a motorcycle or hair plugs. It was pretty obvious you weren’t serious about her, it was just... I don’t know, proving to yourself you could get a twenty-year-old into bed. Jacking off your ego. You were already bored of her by the time I found out.” Her voice was cold, the tone she’d had then. He felt sick.

  “Iyla, that didn’t mean –”

  “Save the clichés for your crappy books, Niles.” That one stung. He felt a flush of anger spreading over his face, mixing with the guilt. “So I just figured you were a little boy who needed a little toy, and maybe now you’d, whatever, sown your oats, maybe that was it. And maybe I decided to myself that the fact that you didn’t just scrape me off like shit on your shoe and run to the newer model, the way you did with Linda – and yes, I know I was an idiot to even start with you after that – meant that maybe, maybe I was somehow special to you.”

  “Iyla, you... you were, I mean you are –” he stammered, then cursed himself. More clichés. He slumped back on the couch, holding the phone out in front of him, staring at it, at her name, while her voice echoed hollowly from the plastic.

  “And then two years later along comes Justine. Justine the fucking Head of Marketing, so you don’t so much screw her behind my back as in front of my fucking face –”

  “You never said anything –” Niles muttered, rubbing his forehead. He’d honestly been surprised to find out that she’d known about that – he’d assumed he’d covered his tracks perfectly. That had been part of the thrill, the adrenaline rush from the sneaking around. He remembered it had already started seeming like hard work when she’d found him out, but Justine hadn’t wanted to end it. She’d been too old for him anyway. Once he realised how much effort she put into looking attractive for him – how saggy and lined she was under normal circumstances – most of his interest in her had died.

  “Maybe I am a cliché,” the author thought to himself. And then he ended the call, because there was no point continuing it. He simply switched his phone off and went back to work. The end.

  “No, I never said anything. For three months. I spent two and a half months telling myself it was nothing, that she was ten ye
ars older than you, not your fucking type – and then my folks were visiting and I couldn’t say anything in front of them and you were sneaking off to fuck her while they were sleeping in the fucking apartment – and then when I finally, finally get the courage together to tell you I know, after I’ve seen you fucking her with my own eyes, and thanks for that, you son of a bitch, you told me how hard for you it was!” She was screaming into the phone. He found himself wondering if the neighbours could hear it, if they thought it was part of the film.

  “It was hard,” Niles mumbled. The writer ended the call. He put the phone down and ended the call, and then he dropped his phone in the toilet. All it took was the smallest movement of his thumb and the whole ordeal was over.

  The thumb didn’t move.

  “‘Oh, she’s so clingy,’ you said. ‘It was supposed to be this casual thing and she wants more, I don’t know what to do...’ I had to leave my job, you fucking asshole! You were so fucking cowardly about it I had to end your affair for you!Your affair with my fucking boss! I couldn’t stay! I had to go back to children’s books!” Niles could tell Iyla was crying now, although she was almost managing to hide it. He moved the phone back to his ear, feeling numb. “I should have left you then. I should have just fucking kicked you out right then...”

  Niles remembered – the couples’ counselling they’d tried for half a year, until Niles had called it off, unable to deal with the implied judgement Dr Alder loaded every single sentence with. Then the sessions with Dr Loewes, on his own – what a waste of money that had been.