After the Workshop (21 page)

Lauren stared out the door, incredulous. I expected her to cave in—it’s what I would have done—but she took a deep breath and walked past me, out into the hallway. She turned to say something, but I shut the door and returned to bed.

—FRITZ MCDONALD

I
N THE MORNING, while scrambling eggs in a skillet and cooking up two strips of blurry-looking bacon, I heard what sounded like whimpering outside my door, followed by scrabbling. Had a stray dog smelled the food and wandered up the stairs? I opened the door slowly, keeping my right leg raised, in case an animal tried forcing itself inside, but there was neither a dog nor a band of angry rodents out there: It was S. S. sleeping soundly, curled up on the small patch of floor between my door and M. Cat’s.

I crouched down and nudged him.

“Hey, S. S.,” I said. When all he did was moan, I nudged him again, harder. “S. S. Wake up. You shouldn’t be out here.” It was freezing cold in the hall, and because the front door downstairs never shut properly, loose snow frequently blew up the stairs whenever the wind came gusting down the street.

“Huh?” S. S. said. “What?” He opened his eyes. “Who did you say?”

“What?” I asked.

S. S. blinked a few times, looked around, then sat up. “Oh, oh,” he said, “I was having a dream. A bad one.”

“What’re you doing out here?” I asked.

“The door was locked,” S. S. said.

“You should have knocked,” I said.

S. S., grunting as he stood, used my shoulder for support. “It was possible,” he said, “that you were indisposed. It was not my intention to disturb you. I was going to knock on my old friend M. Cat’s door, but I heard from inside what sounded like a bacchanal.”

“In what regard?” I asked.

“As in commemorating Saturnalia,” he said, stepping over the threshold into my apartment. When I looked blankly at him, he said, “The festival of Saturn? Celebrated in December in ancient Rome? Oh,
you
know—the time of unrestrained merrymaking?” I must have looked even more confused, because he leaned in close and whispered, “He was screwing somebody, son. And they were both—how shall I put this?—rather exuberant about it!”

“Oh,” I said. I stared toward M. Cat’s apartment. Screwing somebody?
Who
? With S. S. safely inside, I shut the door. “Did you have a good time last night?” I asked.

“Fleetingly,” he said.

Again, I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I let this one go. “Well, good,” I said. “They seemed like nice women.”

“Piranhas, the two of them,” he said. “Do I have any flesh left?” He smiled at me.

“You hungry?”

“Ravished,” he said. “Would that be bacon and eggs I smell?”

“Scrambled okay?”

“Perfect!”

“How’s your hand?”

He raised the wounded mitt and said, “A dull throb is all. Nothing a few aspirin won’t take care of.”

I scooped out two dried clumps of egg and plopped them onto a plate. “I suppose I need to track down Tate today,” I said, “and take
him back to the airport.” I scooped out the rest of the eggs and dumped them onto another plate. I gave each of us a sad-looking slice of bacon.

“No need,” S. S. said. “He gave me a message for you last night. Apparently, the director of the Workshop wants to talk to him today about a visiting writer position.”

“You’re shitting me,” I said.

S. S. took the plate of food and said, “No, sir, I am not.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Gordon would have seen through that little bastard.”

“Ah, yes, Gordon Grimes,” S. S. said. “A few weeks ago, I was in a motel in Tucson and couldn’t sleep, so I turned on the TV, and guess what was on? The movie where aliens land in Gordon’s backyard. Not Gordon’s backyard, per se. Rather his
character’s
. Or, more precisely, his character’s
mother’s
backyard.”

“Gordon always saw through the fakers,” I said. “He wasn’t afraid to call a phony a phony when he saw one.”

“The strangest of careers, though,” S. S. said. “He wasn’t one of the Little Rascals, too, was he?”

“What?”

“
The Little Rascals
,” S. S. repeated. “You remember. Spanky? Darla? Alfalfa? Wheezer? Joe Cobb? He wasn’t one of them, was he? Was there a rascal named Grimes?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I said.

S. S. saw Tate’s notebook and slid it toward him. I said nothing as he flipped through the empty pages, but when he reached the end, where Tate took notes backward, he looked up at me and said, “He’s not only a novelist, he’s a cryptographer, too! Do the man’s talents know no bounds?” He silently read the journal. Every few sentences, he glanced at me and narrowed his eyes, as if checking Tate’s observations against his own. When he finished, he pushed the notebook aside.

“What?” I asked.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You
looked
like you were going to say something,” I said.

S. S. finished the food on his plate. He dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin. He said, “
You
should write it.”

“What?”

“The story of your life.”

“Oh,” I said. “You mean how pathetic it is? What keeps me from killing myself?”

“Exactly,” S. S. said. “Only more honest. And funnier. You think I’m kidding, but I’m not. Oh, I’m not saying your life is pathetic. But you’ve hit a few bumps in the road, and you’re a decent fellow, and I bet you could pull off a pretty damned good memoir.” I carried the plates to the sink. I was about to spray the skillet off when S. S. said, “Use cold water. Hot water cooks the egg onto the surface.” S. S. reached up and scratched his earlobe with his forefinger. It was the most gentle yet idiosyncratic scratching that I had ever witnessed. He said, “I’m going to tell you something, but I don’t want you to be mad at me.”

I ignored S. S. and ran hot water over the pan anyway. When I finally turned back around, he said, “You’re already mad.”

“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m curious.”

“Okay. Fair enough.
You
know I’ve been in a slump,” he said. “I didn’t believe in writer’s block—that is, until I got it. I don’t want to be melodramatic about this . . . but it descended like the plague.” His voice took on the timbre of Laurence Olivier in
Hamlet
. “It laid waste to everything around me, especially the people I loved, so I quarantined myself by disappearing, hoping not to infect anyone else. If I were to die, I would die alone!” His eyes were about to boil over with tears. He blinked a few times and, with his shirtsleeve, wiped away the wetness. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s a silly thing, really. The inability to
think of the next word. There are men who dig ditches or pick up trash, and women who sit behind a sewing machine for eight long hours each day, every day, for their entire lives—and here I am, unable to think of the next word, after a career of thinking up nothing but words. I’m a lucky man, I tell you. The luckiest!” He sniffled. He took a deep breath and stared up at my ceiling, as if the worst of what he’d had to tell me was over. But then he said, “I had come here to rob you, sir.”

“I’m sorry, but what did you say?”

“Your novel,” S. S. said. “I was in Pasadena a few weeks ago, sitting by a pool in a squalid little Motel Six, you see, and out of the blue, with my eyes closed, I remembered the first sentence of your novel. I wondered what had ever happened to it. I went back to my room, got dressed, and drove to Barnes & Noble. I remembered your name and asked an employee, a short fellow with a large head, if there were any books by you. When he told me no, I drove to the public library and researched you on the Internet. Nothing. That’s when I bought the bus ticket.”

“So you were going to, what? Come in here and club me over the head?”

“Good God, no,” S. S. said. “Do I look like a hooligan? No, no, I was simply going to take your novel back home with me and claim it was mine. And when I was sitting on your couch yesterday, reading it, I was already beginning to think of ways to finish it. In fact, I can tell you why you couldn’t continue on. You made a wrong turn about ten pages before you stopped writing. You were heading down a path that had no exit. A dead end, my friend.” It had been so long since I’d read the novel, I wasn’t sure I could recall what part S. S. was talking about. S. S. said, “Hamlin Grobes should never have taken the job as a court stenographer, and you should never have brought that
femme fatale
, Melissa Welcher, into the story. She upsets the plot’s balance, which, until then, was as seamless as
Gatsby
or
Bovary
.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I put Grobes in a job that forced him to sit down and keep his mouth shut. I can’t even remember now why I brought the girl into it.”

“She probably reminded you of somebody,” S. S. said. “In all likelihood, you didn’t even realize it.”

On the one hand, I wanted to ask him more of his thoughts on the novel; on the other hand, I wanted to kick him out of my apartment. Was the man standing before me insane, pathetic, or brilliant?

“In the end,” S. S. said. “I just couldn’t do it.”

“Do what?” I asked. “Finish it?”

“No, no,” he said. “I know exactly how to finish it. What I couldn’t do was
steal
it.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could say anything, there was a knock at my door.

“We’ll talk about this later,” I warned, and S. S. said, “I hope we will.”

The knocking came harder this time.

“I’m coming!” I yelled. “Just wait a goddamned second!”

I jerked open the door, and there stood Lauren Castle.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

“For what?” I wanted to know.

“We’re going to look for Vanessa Roberts. Chop-chop,” she said, motioning with her head toward my sweatpants.

“No, no,” I said, thinking about the breast pump. “That’s
your
problem. Not
mine
.”

S. S. appeared behind me. “Come now, Jack. I may be able to help. After all, I’ve had a little experience with missing persons.”

“And who are you?” Lauren asked.

I laughed. I shook my head. Why didn’t it surprise me that the head of publicity for a major New York publisher couldn’t recognize one of the great writers of her lifetime?

“What’s so funny?” Lauren said sharply.

“I’m a friend, is all,” S. S. said. “The name’s Samuel.”

“Well, Sammy,” Lauren said. “I’ll let you go along if you’re going to be of some help, but I don’t want you with us if the two of you are going to act like schoolgirls and giggle every time I say something.”

“We have ourselves a deal,” S. S. said.

“I need to take a shower,” I said to Lauren. “Why don’t you come inside and fix yourself a cup of coffee?”

Lauren entered the apartment cautiously, eyeing S. S. and then me.

“Here,” S. S. said. “Allow me to take your coat.”

She looked down at S. S.’s bandaged hand. She said, “What’s the deal with all the injured hands around here?” She slipped off her coat and handed it to S. S., who carried it to the living room and draped it over the back of a chair, careful not to let any of it touch the floor.

“What do you mean?” I asked, but before she could answer, I remembered what S. S. had told me about M. Cat’s bacchanal—the Saturnalia. “Wait a minute. Where did you spend the night?”

“You want to know something? No one locks their doors around here,” she said by way of a reply. “The first door I tried after yours was unlocked, too.”

“Was he still naked?” I asked.

“As naked as the day is long,” she said.

“Coffee’s over there,” I said, pointing.

I stepped into the bathroom. I shut the door and turned on the bathroom fan. I didn’t want to hear any more.

W
E DROVE TOGETHER in Lauren’s rental, S. S. riding shotgun at Lauren’s insistence, even though I was the only one who knew the city. Apparently, they had hit it off while I showered and dressed. I’d stayed in the shower so long to avoid Lauren, the water had turned ice cold. Even now, my fingers were still pruney.

“Jack,” S. S. said, twisting around to see me. “Tell us, would you, where you’ve looked for Vanessa?”

My heart clenched. Had I looked for her at all? I’d made a few sad stabs in that direction, but other than going to her hotel twice, I hadn’t actually checked anywhere.

“Oh, you know,” I said, “the main hotels in town and such.”

In the rearview mirror, I saw Lauren’s eyebrows rise above the top of her sunglasses. One look, and I knew what she was thinking:
Are you fucking kidding me?

“It’s been difficult,” I said, “taking care of Tate and, well,
he
came to town unexpectedly.” I pointed at S. S.

“Tate?” Lauren asked.

“Tate Rinehart,” I clarified.

“He’s in town?” Lauren asked.

“Indeed,” S. S. said.

Lauren smiled for the first time. “I love his work.”

S. S. nodded. “It’s as though he’s reinventing all the classics.”

Lauren thought about this. “Turn a moldy old work of fiction into something shiny and new. A great hook.”

“And that’s a good thing?” I asked.

“What’s wrong with that?” Lauren snapped back. I was the dog in the back seat that wouldn’t stop scratching and whining. A few moments later, Lauren said, “Sam here tells me you’re an amazing writer.”

“Whatever,” I said.

“He tells me you’re working on a memoir,” she said. “About your life as a media escort. About living on the margins. About writer’s block. About the artist’s life in the twenty-first century.” Lauren said, “You could sell that book for six figures. Easily.”