McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

by Michael Chabon

  In descending order of age, the four men enjoying the amenities of the Salon were Max Baccarat, the much-respected former president of Gladstone Books, the acquisition of which by a German conglomerate had lately precipitated his retirement; Anthony Flax, a self-described “critic” who had spent the past twenty years as a full-time book reviewer for a variety of periodicals and journals, a leisurely occupation he could afford due to his having been the husband, now for three years the widower, of a sugar-substitute heiress; William Messinger, a writer whose lengthy backlist of horror/mystery/suspense novels had been kept continuously in print for twenty-five years by the biannual appearance of yet another new astonishment; and Charles Chipp Traynor, child of a wealthy New England family, Harvard graduate, self-declared veteran of the Vietnam conflict, and author of four nonfiction books, also (alas) a notorious plagiarist.

  The connections between these four men, no less complex and multilayered than one would gather from their professional circumstances, had inspired some initial awkwardness on their first few encounters in the Salon, but a shared desire for the treats on offer had encouraged these gentlemen to reach the accommodation displayed on the afternoon in question. By silent agreement, Max Baccarat arrived first, a few minutes after opening, to avail himself of the greatest possible range of selection and the most comfortable seating position, which was on that end side of the sofa nearest the pebble-glass doors, where the cushion was a touch more yielding than its mate. Once the great publisher had installed himself to his satisfaction, Bill Messinger and Tony Flax happened in to browse over the day’s bounty before seating themselves at a comfortable distance from each other. Invariably the last to arrive, Traynor edged around the door sometime around 4:15, his manner suggesting that he had wandered in by accident, probably in search of another room altogether. The loose, patterned hospital gown he wore fastened at neck and backside added to his air of inoffensiveness, and his round glasses and stooped shoulders gave him a generic resemblance to a creature from The Wind in the Willows.

  Of the four, the plagiarist alone had surrendered to the hospital’s tacit wishes concerning patients’ in-house mode of dress. Over silk pajamas of a glaring, Greek-village white, Max Baccarat wore a dark, dashing navy-blue dressing gown, reputedly a Christmas present from Graham Greene, which fell nearly to the tops of his velvet fox-head slippers. Over his own pajamas, of fine-combed baby-blue cotton instead of white silk, Tony Flax had buttoned a lightweight tan trench coat, complete with epaulettes and grenade rings. Wth his extra chins and florid complexion, it made him look like a correspondent from a war conducted well within striking distance of hotel bars. Bill Messinger had taken one look at the flimsy shift offered him by the hospital staff and decided to stick, for as long as he could get away with it, to the pin-striped Armani suit and black loafers he had worn into the ER. His favorite men’s stores delivered fresh shirts, socks, and underwear.

  When Messinger’s early, less successful books had been published by Max’s firm, Tony Flax had given him consistently positive reviews; after Bill’s defection to a better house and larger advances for more ambitious books, Tony’s increasingly bored and dismissive reviews accused him of hubris, then ceased altogether. Messinger’s last three novels had not been reviewed anywhere in the Times, an insult he attributed to Tony’s malign influence over its current editors. Likewise, Max had published Chippie Traynor’s first two anecdotal histories of World War I, the second of which had been considered for a Pulitzer prize, then lost him to a more prominent publisher whose shrewd publicists had placed him on NPR, the Today show, and—after the film deal for his third book— Charlie Rose. Bill had given blurbs to Traynor’s first two books, and Tony Flax had hailed him as a great vernacular historian. Then, two decades later, a stunned graduate student in Texas discovered lengthy, painstakingly altered parallels between Traynor’s books and the contents of several Ph.D. dissertations containing oral histories taken in the 1930s. Beyond that, the student found that perhaps a third of the personal histories had been invented, simply made up, like fiction.

  Within days, the graduate student had detonated Chippie’s reputation. One week after the detonation, his university placed him “on leave,” a status assumed to be permanent. He had vanished into his family’s Lincoln Log compound in Maine, not to be seen or heard from until the moment when Bill Messinger and Tony Flax, who had left open the Salon’s doors the better to avoid conversation, had witnessed his sorry, supine figure being wheeled past. Max Baccarat was immediately informed of the scoundrel’s arrival, and before the end of the day the legendary dressing gown, the trench coat, and the pin-striped suit had overcome their mutual resentments to form an alliance against the disgraced newcomer. There was nothing, they found, like a common enemy to smooth over complicated, even difficult relationships.

  Chippie Traynor had not found his way to the lounge until the following day, and he had been accompanied by a tremulous elderly woman who with equal plausibility could have passed for either his mother or his wife. Sidling around the door at 4:15, he had taken in the trio watching him from the green sofa and chairs, blinked in disbelief and recognition, ducked his head even closer to his chest, and permitted his companion to lead him to a chair located a few feet from the television set. It was clear that he was struggling with the impulse to scuttle out of the room, never to reappear. Once deposited in the chair, he tilted his head upward and whispered a few words into the woman’s ear. She moved toward the pastries, and at last he eyed his former compatriots.

  “Well, well,” he said. “Max, Tony, and Bill. What are you in for, anyway? Me, I passed out on the street in Boothbay Harbor and had to be airlifted in. Medevaced, like back in the day.”

  “These days, a lot of things must remind you of Vietnam, Chippie,” Max said. “We’re heart failure. You?”

  “Atrial fib. Shortness of breath. Weaker than a baby. Fell down right in the street, boom. As soon as I get regulated, I’m supposed to have some sort of echo scan.”

  “Heart failure, all right,” Max said. “Go ahead, have a cream cake. You’re among friends.”

  “Somehow, I doubt that,” Traynor said. He was breathing hard, and he gulped air as he waved the old woman farther down the table, toward the chocolate slabs and puffs. He watched carefully as she selected a number of the little cakes. “Don’t forget the decaf, will you, sweetie?”

  The others waited for him to introduce his companion, but he sat in silence as she placed a plate of cakes and a cup of coffee on a stand next to the television set, then faded backward into a chair that seemed to have materialized, just for her, from the ether. Traynor lifted a forkful of shiny brown goo to his mouth, sucked it off the fork, and gulped coffee. Because of his long, thick nose and recessed chin, first the fork, then the cup seemed to disappear into the lower half of his face. He twisted his head in the general direction of his companion and said, “Health food, yum, yum.”

  She smiled vaguely at the ceiling. Traynor turned back to face the other three men, who were staring open-eyed, as if at a performance of some kind.

  “Thanks for all the cards and letters, guys. I loved getting your phone calls, too. Really meant a lot to me. Oh, sorry, I’m not being very polite, am I?”

  “There’s no need to be sarcastic,” Max said.

  “I suppose not. We were never friends, were we?”

  “You were looking for a publisher, not a friend,” Max said. “And we did quite well together, or so I thought, before you decided you needed greener pastures. Bill did the same thing to me, come to think of it. Of course, Bill actually wrote the books that came out under his name. For a publisher, that’s quite a significant difference.” (Several descendants of the Ph.D.s from whom Traynor had stolen material had initiated suits against his publishing houses, Gladstone Books among them.)

  “Do we have to talk about this?” asked Tony Flax. He rammed his hands into the pockets of his trench coat and glanced from side to side. “Ancient history, hmmm?”
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  “You’re just embarrassed by the reviews you gave him,” Bill said. “But everybody did the same thing, including me. What did I say about The Middle of the Trenches? ‘The . . .’ The what? ‘The most truthful, in a way the most visionary book ever written about trench warfare.’ ”

  “Jesus, you remember your blurbs?” Tony asked. He laughed and tried to draw the others in.

  “I remember everything,” said Bill Messinger. “Curse of being a novelist—great memory, lousy sense of direction.”

  “You always remembered how to get to the bank,” Tony said.

  “Lucky me, I didn’t have to marry it,” Bill said.

  “Are you accusing me of marrying for money?” Tony said, defending himself by the usual tactic of pretending that what was commonly accepted was altogether unthinkable. “Not that I have any reason to defend myself against you, Messinger. As that famous memory of yours should recall, I was one of the first people to support your work.”

  From nowhere, a reedy English female voice said, “I did enjoy reading your reviews of Mr. Messinger’s early novels, Mr. Flax. I’m sure that’s why I went round to our little bookshop and purchased them. They weren’t at all my usual sort of thing, you know, but you made them sound . . . I think the word would be imperative.”

  Max, Tony, and Bill peered past Charles Chipp Traynor to get a good look at his companion. For the first time, they took in that she was wearing a long, loose collection of elements that suggested feminine literary garb of the nineteen twenties: a hazy, rather shimmery woolen cardigan over a white, high-buttoned blouse, pearls, an ankle-length heather skirt, and low-heeled black shoes with laces. Her long, sensitive nose pointed up, exposing the clean line of her jaw; her lips twitched in what might have been amusement. Two things struck the men staring at her: that this woman looked a bit familiar, and that in spite of her age and general oddness, she would have to be described as beautiful.

  “Well, yes,” Tony said. “Thank you. I believe I was trying to express something of the sort. They were books . . . well. Bill, you never understood this, I think, but I felt they were books that deserved to be read. For their workmanship, their modesty, what I thought was their actual decency.”

  “You mean they did what you expected them to do,” Bill said.

  “Decency is an uncommon literary virtue,” said Traynor’s companion.

  “Thank you, yes,” Tony said.

  “But not a very interesting one, really,” Bill said. “Which probably explains why it isn’t all that common.”

  “I think you are correct, Mr. Messinger, to imply that decency is more valuable in the realm of personal relations. And for the record, I do feel your work since then has undergone a general improvement. Perhaps Mr. Flax’s limitations do not permit him to appreciate your progress.” She paused. There was a dangerous smile on her face. “Of course, you can hardly be said to have improved to the extent claimed in your latest round of interviews.”

  In the moment of silence that followed, Max Baccarat looked from one of his new allies to the other and found them in a state too reflective for commentary. He cleared his throat. “Might we have the honor of an introduction, madam? Chippie seems to have forgotten his manners.”

  “My name is of no importance,” she said, only barely favoring him with the flicker of a glance. “And Mr. Traynor has a thorough knowledge of my feelings on the matter.”

  “There’s two sides to every story,” Chippie said. “It may not be grammar, but it’s the truth.”

  “Oh, there are many more than that,” said his companion, smiling again.

  “Darling, would you help me return to my room?”

  Chippie extended an arm, and the Englishwoman floated to her feet, cradled his rootlike fist against the side of her chest, nodded to the gaping men, and gracefully conducted her charge from the room.

  “So who the fuck was that?” said Max Baccarat.

  II

  Certain rituals structured the nighttime hours on Floor 21. At 8:30 p.m., blood pressure was taken and evening medications administered by Tess Corrigan, an Irish softie with a saggy gut, an alcoholic, angina-ridden husband, and an understandable tolerance for misbehavior. Tess herself sometimes appeared to be mildly intoxicated. Class resentment caused her to treat Max a touch brusquely, but Tony’s trench coat amused her to wheezy laughter. After Bill Messinger had signed two books for her niece, a devoted fan, Tess had allowed him to do anything he cared to, including taking illicit journeys downstairs to the gift shop. “Oh, Mr. Messinger,” she had said, “a fella with your gifts, the books you could write about this place.” Three hours after Tess’s departure, a big, heavily dreadlocked nurse with an island accent surged into the patients’ rooms to awaken them for the purpose of distributing tranquilizers and knockout pills. Because she resembled a greatly inflated, ever-simmering Whoopi Goldberg, Max, Tony, and Bill referred to this terrifying and implacable figure as “Molly.” (Molly’s real name, printed on the ID card attached to a sash used as a waistband, was permanently concealed behind beaded swags and little hanging pouches.) At six in the morning, Molly swept in again, wielding the blood-pressure mechanism like an angry deity maintaining a good grip on a sinner. At the end of her shift, she came wrapped in a strong, dark scent, suggestive of forest fires in underground crypts. The three literary gentlemen found this aroma disturbingly erotic.

  On the morning after the appearance within the Salon of Charles Chipp Traynor and his disconcerting muse, Molly raked Bill with a look of pity and scorn as she trussed his upper arm and strangled it by pumping a rubber bulb. Her crypt-fire odor seemed particularly smoky.

  “What?” he asked.

  Molly shook her massive head. “Toddle, toddle, toddle, you must believe you’re the new postman in this beautiful neighborhood of ours.”

  Terror seized his gut. “I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.”

  Molly chuckled and gave the bulb a final squeeze, causing his arm to go numb from bicep to his fingertips. “Of course not. But you do know that we have no limitations on visiting hours up here in our paradise, don’t you?”

  “Um,” he said.

  “Then let me tell you something you do not know, Mr. Postman. Miz LaValley in 21R-12 passed away last night. I do not imagine you ever took it upon yourself to pay the poor woman a social call. And that, Mr. Postman, means that you, Mr. Baccarat, Mr. Flax, and our new addition, Mr. Traynor, are now the only patients on Floor 21.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  As soon as she left his room, he showered and dressed in the previous day’s clothing, eager to get out into the corridor and check on the conditions in 21R-14, Chippie Traynor’s room, for it was what he had seen there in the hours between Tess Corrigan’s florid departure and Molly Goldberg’s first drive-by shooting that had led to his becoming the floor’s postman.

  It had been just before nine in the evening, and something had urged him to take a final turn around the floor before surrendering himself to the hateful “gown” and turning off his lights. His route took him past the command center, where the Night Visitor, scowling over a desk too small for her, made grim notations on a chart, and down the corridor toward the window looking out toward the Hudson River and the great harbor. Along the way he passed 21R-14, where muffled noises had caused him to look in. From the corridor, he could see the bottom third of the plagiarist’s bed, on which the sheets and blanket appeared to be writhing, or at least shifting about in a conspicuous manner. Messinger noticed a pair of black, lace-up women’s shoes on the floor near the bottom of the bed. An untidy heap of clothing lay beside the in-turned shoes. For a few seconds, ripe with shock and envy, he had listened to the soft noises coming from the room. Then he whirled around and rushed toward his allies’ chambers.

  “Who is that dame?” Max Baccarat had asked, essentially repeating the question he had asked earlier that day. “What is she? That miserable Traynor, God damn him to hell, may he have a heart attack and die. A woman like
that, who cares how old she is?”

  Tony Flax had groaned in disbelief and said, “I swear, that woman is either the ghost of Virginia Woolf or her direct descendant. All my life, I had the hots for Virginia Woolf, and now she turns up with that ugly crook, Chippie Traynor? Get out of here, Bill; I have to strategize.”

  III

  At 4:15, the three conspirators pretended not to notice the plagiarist’s furtive, animal-like entrance to the Salon. Max Baccarat’s silvery hair, cleansed, stroked, clipped, buffed, and shaped during an emergency session with a hair therapist named Mr. Keith, seemed to glow with a virile inner light as he settled into the comfortable part of the sofa and organized his decaf cup and plate of chocolates and little cakes as if preparing soldiers for battle. Tony Flax’s rubber chins shone a twice-shaved red, and his glasses sparkled. Beneath the hem of the trench coat, which appeared to have been ironed, colorful argyle socks descended from just below his lumpy knees to what seemed to be a pair of nifty two-tone shoes. Beneath the jacket of his pin-striped suit, Bill Messinger sported a brand-new, high-collared black silk T-shirt delivered by courier that morning from Sixty-fifth and Madison. Thus attired, the longer-term residents of Floor 21 seemed lost as much in self-admiration as in the political discussion under way when at last they allowed themselves to acknowledge Chippie’s presence. Max’s eye skipped over Traynor and wandered toward the door.

  “Will your lady friend be joining us?” he asked. “I thought she made some really very valid points yesterday, and I’d enjoy hearing what she has to say about our situation in Iraq. My two friends here are simpleminded liberals; you can never get anything sensible out of them.”

  “You wouldn’t like what she’d have to say about Iraq,” Traynor said. “And neither would they.”

  “Know her well, do you?” Tony asked.

  “You could say that.” Traynor’s gown slipped as he bent over the table to pump coffee into his cup from the dispenser, and the three other men hastily turned their glances elsewhere.