After the Workshop (12 page)

“Tubal ligation?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.

“Bingo!” I said. “We already have five kids, so . . . Five seemed like a good place to stop. Do you have kids?”

“One,” he said curtly. “Here’s your change. Good day.” He returned to his perch and began counting pills, peeking up at me over his half-glasses to see if I was still there, which I was.

I carried my book outside and into the snow-muffled morning, hoping to find Alice, but she was already gone. I looked for car exhaust rising into the air, like smoke signals from a teepee, thinking I might locate Alice that way, but the parking lot across from the hospital was as still as a graveyard.

“Dammit,” I said. I walked toward the nearest corner, thinking maybe she had parked on a side-street, but in a split-second decision I veered to my right, up the stairs to the Foxhead, and walked inside. The only other people there were Neal, the bartender, and former weight lifter, now Foxhead regular, Larry McFeeley.

Neal pulled me a draw of Miller Lite without asking what I wanted. Larry looked over at me and nodded.

“Put it on your tab?” Neal asked.

“Please,” I said.

Neal, aware of my precarious employment, let me run monthly tabs. What I loved about bars was the absence of self-righteousness. No one was going to ask me what the hell I was doing there on a weekday at noon. No one cared.

I carried my beer to the back booth, sat down, pulled Lucy Rogan’s novel out of my pocket, and started reading more of it. The best I could tell, it was the story of forbidden love, the love of two cousins (
second
cousins, the narrator made clear again and again), and how they were going to overcome the stigma attached to such a love, not so much by society but by their own families, especially since Claire was poised to collect somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred million dollars upon turning twenty-five. Would love conquer all? “Read on!” the book shouted to me at the end of each short chapter. And read on I did. I took
breaks only to piss and order more beer. By the middle of the novel, the pages were turning themselves—or so it seemed. There were no real surprises, and all the characters were ones I’d seen before, mostly on soap operas that I used to watch with my mother when I was too sick to go to school, and yet, on a day as cold as this one, while slumped inside a smoky, sun-filled bar cocooned by snow, I couldn’t have found a book more gripping than the one I was holding. I was so lost in the experience that I only dimly heard the door open and close, and I didn’t even notice the two men walking toward me until they had stopped at the edge of my table and one of them cleared his throat. I looked up. It was Vince Belecheck and Tate Rinehart.

Tate, shivering, was still wearing only an old service station jacket. Vince, on the other hand, was dressed like a lumberjack in an insulated, red-and-black-plaid flannel shirt, a puffy down-filled vest, and a black knit cap with the Steelers logo. A gray fuzzy ball hung from the top of his cap. They were each holding a mixed drink.

“Hair of the dog,” Vince said. “You mind?” he asked, but sat down across from me before I could answer, sliding over, and then patting the spot next to him, as one would for a dog. Tate obediently sat down. It was clear that Tate was suffering from a hangover of monumental proportions. His face was puffy, his stare like that of a dead fish packed in ice. Vince said, “Tied one on last night. Remember those two hotties?” He nudged Tate in the ribs, and Tate moaned. “You should have stuck around,” Vince said. “On second thought, there
were
only two of them. Probably better you left when you did. They were poets, weren’t they?” he asked Tate. Tate stared morosely into his drink, as if the cubes were slowly revealing the date of his death. “Anyway,” Vince said, “poets are fucking crazy, man. Sex freaks. All you have to do is tell them you’ve read Sylvia Plath and what’s-her-name. You know: the other one who killed herself. Oh, Christ, you know who I’m talking about. Oh, Jesus
Christ, what’s her name? Fuck me,” he said. “I think I wiped out almost all of my brain cells last night.”

“Anne Sexton,” I said.

Vince slapped the table with his palm. “Bingo!” he said. “How could I have forgotten that? Sex is in her name.
Sex
ton. Christ. Wasn’t she, like, doing her shrink? Anyway, I started talking about Plath and Sexton, and that was all it took. They were all over us. Like flies on shit.” He thought about that and then said, “Maybe that’s not the best simile. But you get the idea. So,” he said. “What’re you reading there?”

I shut the book. “Nothing,” I said. Before I could slide it off the table, Vince reached out and grabbed it with one of his big paws.

“What’s this?” he asked. “A
romance
novel? Jesus, Jack. Don’t tell me you actually read that horseshit. Do you actually read this horseshit?”

I shook my head. “I know the author.”

Vince let out a whoop. “You
know
someone who writes that shit? Tell us you’re kidding. Are you listening to this, Tate? Jack here
knows
a romance writer.”

Tate looked up and said, “I don’t feel too good.” He stood, lurched toward the bathroom directly behind us, and slammed the door shut.

For the next ten minutes, Vince and I sat in silence while we listened to Tate throw up in the toilet. At last, Vince said, “He and the chick he hooked up with were doing body shots. I didn’t go down that road. I know my limits.” He picked up Lucy’s book, opened it to her photo, and said, “So. You nailing this broad or what?”

“No,” I said. “I . . .”

Tate returned to our table.

“Feel better, sport?” Vince asked. “Sometimes getting it out of your system helps. Alcohol is poison, after all. Fucking arsenic.” He picked up his drink and tossed it back until the ice piled up against his nose and steam came rolling like fog from the glass. He slammed the glass
down and said, “What’re you drinking, Jack? Beer? You want something harder?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“I need some water,” Tate said.

“Yo, Neal!” Vince yelled, twisting around in the booth and motioning toward the bartender. “Can we get my boy here some water?”

The Foxhead didn’t offer table service, but Neal, probably because business was slow, brought over three large glasses of water for us anyway.

“Thanks, Neal,” I said, hoping a scrap of civility might differentiate me from the group.

Vince looked at me and said, “So, what’s the game plan?”

“Game plan?” I asked.

“Yeah, you’re Tate’s media escort, right? You’re the one who can charge all this shit back to the publisher, right? We didn’t even think about that until it was time to settle up last night, and Tate and I were like
holy shit
when we saw the bill. No way was the publisher going to pay for
that
much booze. I think it was Tate who said we should have kept you around.” Vince picked up his water, took a sip, and said, “Ugh. Christ. I thought this was beer. You ever do that, pick up something without looking at it and think it’s something else you’re about to drink? The worst is picking up a glass you think’s full of Coke when it’s really full of milk. That happened to me when I was a kid, and I almost blew chunks across the room. What about those people who are blindfolded and told they’re eating, I don’t know, a dog turd when they’re really eating filet mignon, but just the
idea
that they might be eating a dog turd is enough to make them throw up.”

“Guys, please,” Tate said.

“But now that I’m sitting here thinking about it,” Vince went on, “I’m wondering who the fuck would do that to someone—blindfold
some poor son of a bitch and wave a sizzling piece of filet in front of them and say it’s dog crap?”

“Please,” Tate whispered. “Can we change the subject?”

“Sure,” Vince said. “But I’m trying to remember now where I heard that damned story. Was it a scientific experiment, or was it torture? I can’t remember. You know what we should do tonight, Tate? We should blindfold some chicks and try this out. Those poet chicks would have gone for it.” He leaned forward and said, “Those chicks, Jack.” He wagged his big head and said, “When we got back to our place, they started making out. I never saw anything like that. I mean, I’ve seen it in pornos, but not in the flesh like that. They were out of control.”

“I’m glad you had a good time,” I said flatly.

Vince sat up, narrowing his eyes at me, and then he grinned and said, “Awwwwww. You’re jealous, aren’t you?”

“I’m not jealous,” I said. “Really, I’m glad you had a good time.”

“Shit, man. There’s no need to be jealous,” Vince said. “All you have to do is publish a book. That’s what gives you the mojo, pal. I mean, Tate here is a good-looking guy in that artsy-fartsy New York kind of way, but it’s not like either of us is a fucking Adonis. No, man, it’s the book that does it.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

“Oh ho! Now you’re
sulking
,” Vince said. “Look at you.”

“I’m not sulking,” I said. “All I said was, ‘I’ll keep it in mind.’”

“Yeah, but, you said it like I should be sorry I’m a published writer and you’re not. Listen, don’t bullshit me. I’m a student of human behavior. That’s what the best fiction writers are. Isn’t that right, Tate? Good writers are like psychologists. Or is it anthropologists? Anyway, everything I write is really about why people are the way they are. You can’t bullshit us, man.” Vince looked over at Tate and said, “I need out. I suddenly need to take a world-class dump. But you know what? I wonder if
the opposite is true. I wonder if you hold a piece of shit under someone’s nose and tell them it’s a filet, if they’ll eat it.”

Tate ran to the bathroom again and started to vomit. Vince used the women’s bathroom next door. I pocketed Lucy Rogan’s novel and, while the two men were indisposed, quickly stood up. On the floor, slumped against the booth, was Tate’s canvas messenger bag. I picked it up and slipped it over my shoulder.

“Don’t let them put anything on my tab,” I said to Neal on my way toward the exit.

“Not a chance,” Neal said.

Larry McFeeley said, “Leaving so soon?”

“Busy day,” I said and patted him on the back.

“You know what people don’t realize about weight lifting?” Larry said.

I stopped walking and looked at him. He was already half in the bag, the poor bastard. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Most of it’s mental,” he said, tapping the side of his head with his forefinger.

I nodded; I wasn’t sure what to say. I wasn’t sure what he
wanted
me to say.

“Have a good one now,” Larry said, returning to his drink.

“You, too, friend,” I said.

W
ITH TATE’S MESSENGER bag strapped over my shoulder, I tromped back to the hospital. I wasn’t entirely sure why I had taken it.

 

I’d never stolen anything before in my life, unless the ending of my optometrist short story counted, but every writer goes through an imitative phase, and there’s a world of difference between theft and mimicry. That, at least, is what I had been telling myself for the past fourteen years.

When I walked through the hospital’s automatic doors, I expected S. S. to be waiting for me with his hand bandaged, and I expected him to tip his head toward the messenger bag and say, “I see you have a new accoutrement!” But S. S. wasn’t anywhere in sight.

“Excuse me,” I said to the receptionist, the same woman who had informed S. S. that he wasn’t going to die. “I’m supposed to pick up S. S. Pitzer. He’s the one who needed his hand stitched up. Can you tell me how much longer he’ll be?”

The receptionist typed a few words, then looked up and asked, “And what’s your relation to Mr. Pitzer?”

“I . . .” I felt compelled to tell her the truth—that I didn’t really know him at all, that I had met him only one other time, that he had arrived in town under mysterious circumstances and I had given him
my sofa for the night. “We’re friends,” I finally said. “I brought him in. Remember?”

“Sorry,” she said. “I can give information to family members only.”

When I turned to leave, she said, “Pssssssst.”

“Yeah?” I whispered.

She wrote something on a Post-it note and then handed it to me. I read the note.

“He
left
?” I asked.

“Shhhhhhhhh,” she said. Whispering, she added, “I’m not supposed to say anything. It’s just that . . .”

“What?”

“You looked so sad.”

Why the hell did everyone think I looked sad?

“Did you see him leave?” I whispered.

The receptionist nodded.

“Did they stitch up his hand?”

“It was taped,” she said. “I really shouldn’t be telling you any of this.”

“Okay,” I said. “All right.” I forced a smile, trying not to look so sad, but feeling sadder than I had in a long, long time. In fact, I almost felt like crying. I pulled the messenger bag strap higher up onto my shoulder, turned, and walked over to a bank of connected chairs and plopped down. Bracing myself for the cold, I pulled on my ski mask and gloves, but instead of standing up and leaving, I remained glued to the chair, immobile, staring blankly ahead through the mask’s two holes.

It was likely—probable—that I would never get hired again as a media escort. New York publishing is like a small town where everyone knows everyone else, and I was certain that word of me losing an author, especially one as prominent as Vanessa Roberts, would travel
fast, whispered inside buildings all along Avenue of the Americas and then spreading like a virus to the boutique literary agencies on both the Upper East and Upper West Sides, and then down to the lofts of SoHo that housed the few remaining independent publishers whose publicists I charged only half of what I charged a Random House or a Simon & Schuster. The fact was I’d already burned some bridges. A few years ago, when an imprint of a publishing behemoth didn’t cut me a check within sixty days of my services, I sent them a subsequent bill with a $20 late fee. When I
still
wasn’t getting paid, I wrote to say that I was going to take them to small claims court. That’s when the head of publicity, Ross Traveaux, got involved. A check was promptly cut for the original fee, but then Ross himself sent me a personal check for the twenty dollars, along with a note: “We will no longer need your services.”