After the Workshop (16 page)

S. S. was on tour for
Winter’s Ghosts
. When I met him at the airport, he greeted me with a hug, as if we were old war buddies, and said, “So this is it! The fabled Iowa City I’ve heard so much about!”

“Actually,” I said, “we’re in Cedar Rapids.”

“Ah ha!” S. S. cried out. “And what’s Cedar Rapids’ claim to fame?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “but there’s a dog food factory on the north side of town. It smells pretty bad.”

“Oh, but the resident dogs must be in heaven!” he said. The look he gave me was mischievous, and I probably should have walked away from him right then and there, but he had already won me over. The only person I knew who was as charming as S. S. was Gordon Grimes.

“Luggage?” I asked.

“Good lord, no,” S. S. said. “I wouldn’t think of it. A man who can’t carry all his belongings in a carry-on is a man who has no business leaving his house.”

I didn’t think much of it at the time—S. S. staying in a bed-and-breakfast—but in all the years since, no other writer requested staying anywhere other than at the hotel that the publisher had booked for him. I didn’t recognize the name of the street on the itinerary, and I drove circles around town searching for it, but eventually I found it. “Splendid!” S. S. said upon arrival. “And I thank you for the tour. It’s
everything I imagined. The old Victorians. The tin roofs. The blonde-haired co-eds. Beautiful. All of it!” Everything else went according to plan—checking him in, picking him up for dinner, taking him to the reading—everything, that is, until he asked me after his reading to join him for a drink. I’d given up drinking because drinking was what had led me to gambling, and gambling was what had ultimately led me to question my talent.

“Sure,” I said, and we went to the Foxhead.

Gordon Grimes was already there, stuffed into one of the booths, surrounded by students I didn’t recognize. When he saw me, he blanched ever so slightly but then recovered.

“Sheahan!” he said. “Come over here, you rascal. Let me introduce you around.” He gave a few perfunctory introductions, but when he came to a student named Erskine Lee, he said, “Erskine just had a story in
The New Yorker
. Last week’s issue, was it? Hell of a writer.
Hell
of a writer.” He looked down at the unopened deck of Bicycle playing cards on the table and added, “Not a bad poker player, either, are you, you son of a bitch?” Erskine looked up at me sheepishly, and I turned away, toward S. S. I introduced S. S. to everyone. In typical workshop fashion, everyone pretended not to know who he was. I knew, however, that if I were to have left him alone for even a second, any one of them would have buttonholed him, working the poor man for a future connection, a blurb down the road, maybe even a letter of recommendation. Oh, I knew the game, and they weren’t fooling anybody.

Gordon looked up at S. S. and said, “That novel of yours.
Dreams of Lucifer
? Fine work. Really fine.”

S. S. reached up, touched the rim of his hat, and tipped his head. “An honor,” he said, “coming from you.” He then peeked up at Erskine and said, “I look forward to reading your story. The book tour has caused me to fall overwhelmingly behind in every regard, but I promise
you it’s next on my list. In fact, I’ll write your name down. Erskine Lee, correct?” To the other students, he said, “A pleasure.”

S. S. and I nabbed a booth opposite the pool table. I could feel all eyes on us, and, sure enough, a quick glance over at Gordon’s table, and the eyes, which had been trained on us, slid away.
We weren’t looking at you
, their posture said.
We don’t care what you’re talking about
. But they
had
been, and they
did.

S. S. ordered vodka martinis for us, giving the money to me while he headed for the bathroom to relieve himself.

“There’s a quote by Barry Hannah in there,” he said upon returning. And then, a moment later, “I wonder if he knows.” He looked down at his martini. “Did they not have slices of onion?” he asked, but his disappointment vanished as quickly as it came. “Ah, well. So be it.”

Long after Gordon’s crew had lit out for the territories, S. S. and I stumbled across the street to John’s Grocery for a bottle of whiskey and then waited on the corner for the cab we had called to arrive.

“What if I told you that I’m working on a formula for invisibility?” he asked.

“I’d congratulate you,” I said, laughing and clapping his back.

“No, no,” he said. “I’m serious. Invisible. Here but not here. What a beautiful concept.”

“Why invisible?” I asked, slurring.

He smiled, staring at the glowing beer sign in the Foxhead’s window. “You live as long as I have, you realize that enough people have seen you.”

I was about to ask him what the hell he was talking about, but our cab pulled up. By the time we settled into the backseat, I could no longer remember what it was he’d just said.

We stayed up that night playing old Tom Waits CDs while Alice slept, or tried to sleep, in our bedroom. That was when S. S. asked me to read him the first chapter of my novel. And that was when, after I had
finished reading, he had proclaimed the novel’s brilliance. Beaming, he said, “This is going to put you on the map in a big way.”

S. S. spent that night on my couch. The next morning, I found the bottle of whiskey, empty, sitting next to my copy of Gordon Grimes’s only book. S. S. must have been reading it before he passed out. We were both shaky, and more than once S. S. mentioned that he might be compelled to stick his head out a window and express himself, but I managed to get him back to the B&B to pick up his carry-on and then I drove him to the airport, where he signed my copy of
Winter’s Ghosts
: “For Jack, to Whom the Gods of Literature Have Whispered. Your faithful reader and loyal friend, S. S. Pitzer.”

For the next two months, all I could talk about was the novel—what I was going to do with it, the new directions the plot might take, which characters I could cut, which I should leave in . . . and then I began talking about agents and publishers, about advances, how the book should be promoted, what the print run should be. I wrote nothing, but I talked endlessly, as if talking were like stretching before a foot race. All I needed was the sound of the gunshot to prompt me to begin writing, and off I’d go! But the shot never came.

“Maybe I should change the title,” I was saying to Alice at least once a day. “What do you think? I mean,
After the Fall
is the name of an Arthur Miller play. I don’t know what to do.”

“Whatever you think best,” Alice would say. “I mean, it’s your novel.”

And then one day, Alice said, “Jack?”

I was sitting at my desk, staring down at where I had left off on the novel, thinking of the next possible word. The choices were daunting.

“Yes?” I asked, trying not to sound annoyed but unable to remove the edge from my voice. I smiled to mask my irritation, but the smile felt forced, unnatural.

“Something’s wrong,” she said.

“Wrong?” I asked.

“I’m bleeding,” she said, and that was all it took, the mention of blood, and I rushed her to the hospital. All the way I berated myself for not doing something sooner. She had complained earlier that week about a pinching pain on her right side, but she had insisted she was okay, that she was probably just cramping, that it was normal.
Fuck
, I thought as I drove us the five short blocks.
Why didn’t I insist that she go to the doctor?

“You’re crushing my hand,” Alice said gently.

“What? Oh. Sorry.” I didn’t want to let go of her hand, but I did.

In the emergency room, she was immediately taken into an examination room. A nurse got to work on her right away, taking her blood pressure. “82 over 37,” she whispered, writing it on the chart.

“82 over 37? That’s not good, is it?” I asked. The nurse cut her eyes toward me and then down at Alice and then back up to me, as if to say,
Don’t scare her, you frickin’ numbskull
.

In the short time between Alice telling me that she was bleeding and the nurse glaring at me, I made every imaginable deal possible. I wasn’t religious, so I wasn’t sure with whom I was making the deals, but I made them nonetheless, including giving up writing and getting a real job if it meant saving the baby.

A doctor came in, taking Alice’s hand and assuring her that she would be all right. She made no mention of the baby, however. That’s when I knew that the deals I was making were futile. The baby would be lost.

Alice moved out two weeks later, leaving behind everything we’d purchased together, along with any photographs taken between the time we had begun dating and the day she’d left me. I eventually gathered up the photos and put them inside a shoe box, and then a year later, when
it was clear that she wasn’t coming back, I took the rest of the stuff, our joint purchases, to Goodwill, dropping them off in the giant dumpster for donations that sat in the building’s parking lot. That night, before I went to bed, I put my long-dormant novel back inside the manuscript box and stowed it on a shelf, piling old phone books on top of it, and that’s where it had sat, tucked safely away and all but forgotten, until yesterday.

A
FTER MY NAP, I found S. S. wide awake and reading Lucy Rogan’s romance novel. S. S. said, “I hope you don’t mind, but I asked your neighbor if he had a spare key. The poor fellow. He can’t unzip his own pants. I had to undress him.”

“You undressed M. Cat?”

S. S. nodded. “He decided it was best if he stayed nude all day. No buttons, no zippers.”

“That’s his solution?” I asked. “To walk around naked?”

“Frankly, I couldn’t think of a better one,” S. S. said. “I actually thought it was kind of ingenious, to tell you the truth.” S. S. looked down at Lucy Rogan’s novel, folded the corner of one of the pages, and shut it. He said, “It isn’t bad. A few good passages scattered about. I especially like the way she uses the word
stiffly
. As in, ‘He shook her hand
stiffly
.’”

“Where did you go?” I asked.

“Go?”

“I went back to the hospital,” I said, “and you were gone.”

“Oh, that. Yes, well, they finished up with me in no time. I didn’t know what to do, so I wandered about. I figured we’d find each other again, sooner or later.”

“And we did,” I said.

“We did indeed,” S. S. said. His eyes, with their sagging pouches of fat beneath them, weren’t as bright as they’d been all those years ago, and lines extended downward from the corners of his mouth, making him look like he was perpetually frowning, even when he smiled. But he looked even worse for wear this afternoon, worse than he had this morning. I figured it was the pain in his hand, so I didn’t ask.

“I have to go to a reading tonight,” I said.

“I’ll go with you,” S. S. said. “If you don’t mind the company of an invalid.” He raised his hand, like a dog with an injured paw, to show me.

“Tate Rinehart’s reading,” I said.

S. S. grimaced. “Good God. What’s the name of that book of his?
The Prince of SoHo
?”

“
The Duke of Battery Park
,” I said.

“Oh, yes, that’s right. And what’s it about?”

“It’s
The Prince and the Pauper
. Only set in New York. In contemporary times. I hadn’t realized that, though, until today.”

“Clever boy,” S. S. said. “Why do people like us, you and I, bother making something up whole cloth? I mean, really, we’d save ourselves a good deal of time, don’t you think?”

“I’m not a writer,” I said. “Remember?”

“Nonsense. Someone with your talent? You’re in a slump, that’s all. I’m in a slump myself. I—”

“Enough,” I said, much too sharply. “Please.”

S. S. nodded. He picked up Lucy Rogan’s romance and studied the cover. “Why don’t I ever meet women who look like this?” he asked. When I didn’t say anything, he set the book down and said, “Well. Shall we go?”

T
HERE WAS A time, many years ago, when I enjoyed going to readings by fiction writers. I saw Kurt Vonnegut, with his incredibly long and expressive fingers, talk about how gloomy the world was and why he had decided to quit writing fiction. I saw Isaac Bashevis Singer near the end of his life, as thin as a stick, pausing for so long after each question put to him that one feared he might have dipped into a coma. When a student raised her hand and asked the great man to illuminate the purpose of literature, Singer stared out into the audience for an unbearably long time, as if he had not heard the question, but just as we were collectively about to give up hope on him, he raised a finger and said, “To educate and to entertain.” I listened to Susan Sontag discuss the arbitrariness of decades as lines of demarcation. I watched Norman Mailer berate a young man in the audience who would not give up the microphone to the next person wanting to ask a question. I even saw John Irving theatrically take off his leather jacket before a reading and toss it aside, as though he were a Chippendale dancer. I saw all of these writers, and more. I saw giants.

But in the past dozen years as a media escort, I was forced to watch one mid-list writer after another sail through town, desperately hawking their wares. Oh, some were celebrities, albeit minor ones, their fame
sometimes already on the wane by the time they landed in Cedar Rapids, but by and large, they lacked the panache of a Norman Mailer or Kurt Vonnegut, and they lacked the critical acumen of a Susan Sontag. They showed up in town wearing seersucker suits to promote books with titles like
Bob Walks to School
, or they introduced themselves as “miniaturists” and read from books that might as well have been titled
The Navel Gazer
. One poor author, in an attempt to bring something new to the table, played a flute at key intervals during his reading, only to be asked by a crazy man afterward if he knew how to play the theme to
Star Trek
. The crazy man’s name was Ted, and he used to come to every reading and ask crazy questions, until the owner finally banned him from public events. A store employee was now responsible for watching the front door before readings to make sure Ted didn’t come in.