After the Workshop (22 page)

“Right,” I said, staring blankly out the window. We passed the snowman in front of the sorority house. I was going to point it out, but when I saw that someone had cut the cucumber penis in half, a pain shot up from my groin into my bowels, and I remained silent.

“This is one of those books that’ll get a front-page review in
The New York Times Book Review
.” She seemed to think about this a moment before revising it. “Okay, maybe not a front-page review. Maybe one of those round-up reviews they do. Hey, you know what?
The Times
can kiss my lily-white ass. We’re not even convinced they sell books, anyway. But you know who
does
sell books?
All Things Considered
sells books.
Talk of the Nation
sells books.” She lifted her arm up, as though flashing me a gang symbol, and, nodding slowly and with deep purpose, said, “NPR, motherfucker.”

“Very good shows,” S. S. added.

“You should let us do it, too,” she said.

“What?” I asked.

“The book, the book. I know the perfect editor for it.”

“What if I haven’t written it yet?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” Lauren said. “It’s the
idea
that matters. Hey, look, we all know that New York is in love with itself. So, what better than a book about the book business, but not by an editor or a publisher. No, this one would be told from the lowest rung of the business. The lowest of the low. The media escort!”

S. S. said, “It’s like a book about the film business written by the boy who works in the mailroom at Paramount Pictures.”

“Or the janitor who cleans the shitters,” Lauren added. At the next stop sign, she said, “Where the hell are we going, anyway?”

“Jack,” S. S. said. “Have you tried that old B&B I stayed in all those years ago?”

“No,” I said. “I haven’t.”

“Shall we start there then?” S. S. asked. “It was such a wonderful place. French toast in the morning, sprinkled with powdered sugar, and maple syrup that could have come straight from a tree in their backyard.”

Lauren reached over and slapped S. S.’s leg. “Quiet. You’re making my stomach growl. I’m so hungry, I could eat a goddamned horse.”

“They may well have it on the menu, my dear,” said S. S. “They may well indeed.”

T
HE LAST TIME I saw Gordon Grimes was in the Foxhead. I’d had a particularly brutal morning, picking up a writer named Mwangaza Jones, who had brought her two children along with her, a five- year-old girl and a three-year-old boy. Mwangaza, an Oprah pick for her memoir
Every Drop of Blood Was Mine
, was on her cell phone from the moment I spotted her walking toward me until I dumped her off at the Sheraton. I’d had to carry the three-year-old, who had planted himself on the floor and wouldn’t stand up. On the way to my car, I felt what at first I thought was a rush of warm air hitting my thigh, but when my jeans began sticking to my leg, I realized that the child had pissed himself and, ipso facto, pissed on me. I looked pleadingly over at Mwangaza, hoping to get her attention, but she was busy telling someone about the man who had been assigned to direct the adaptation of her memoir and how his requests for changes to her script were unacceptable. She paused from the conversation to ask where we were.

“Iowa?” I said, unsure how specific she’d wanted me to be.

“Hold on,” she said into the phone. “I have a smart one on my hands today.” To me, she said, “What
city
?”

“Cedar Rapids,” I said, her child still clinging to me. I was about to mention the urine incident, but Mwangaza had returned to her phone call.

“I’m in Cedar Rapids, Iowa,” she said. “I know, I know.” She laughed at something her friend said. “You’re telling me!” she replied.

I went back to my apartment and changed my pants, but I couldn’t sit still. I paced. I yelled. I kicked one of my shoes across the room.

What I had wanted to do—what I should have done—was knock Mwangaza’s cell phone away from her head and yell,
You’re just a writer! That’s all. A fucking writer!
But, of course, I didn’t do anything. Like so many other moments of humiliation, I swallowed it.

Around one that afternoon, still fuming, I headed to the Foxhead. Alcohol being a salve for the deluded, the dreamers, and the demented, I decided to join my brethren, but when I opened up the door and said hello to Neal, there was, I discovered, only one other person in the entire bar. He was sitting in a booth with his back to me.

“It’s Gordon,” Neal whispered. He poured me a tall one and a short one, and I carried my drinks over to Gordon’s table and stood beside him until he looked up and smiled. When I actually saw the shape Gordon was in, I may have winced or, at the very least, tightened my brow, but I told myself to act as though nothing was out of the ordinary.

“Jack!” he said. “Sit your ass down! Sit, sit!”

Always the student, I obeyed. Gordon’s arms were covered in bruises, each one a different shade of purple or yellow. The palms of his hands were blotchy and red. His eyes were yellow where they should have been white. In front of him sat a glass of whiskey.

“Just came from Mercy,” he said. At first, I had thought he was speaking metaphorically, but then I realized he meant Mercy Hospital next door. “I guess I’m dying,” he said, smiling. He picked up his whiskey and took a drink. By the time he’d placed the glass back on the
table, he was grimacing, as though someone were stabbing him with a screwdriver while whispering into his ear, “Act normal!”

“Cirrhosis,” Gordon said. “You know, Billie Holiday died of cirrhosis. She was only forty-four. O. Henry died of cirrhosis, too.” He looked wistfully around him. “A hack, though,” he added. “O. Henry, that is. Not Ms. Holiday.” He raised his glass and said, “To Lady Day,” and took another painful swig.

“Surely there’s something they can do,” I said. “Treatments? We’re not far from the Mayo Clinic.”

He pulled a five dollar bill from the inside of his suit jacket. “Here,” he said. “Put some music on. A bar’s not a bar without music.” He turned around. “Is it, Neal?” he called out.

“Is it
what
?”

“Just agree with me.”

“You’re absolutely right, Gordon,” Neal said. “You’re
always
right.” To me, Neal said, “He tips better when I agree with him.”

When I first started going to the Foxhead, they still had an old jukebox that played 45s, but, like every other bar in America, they eventually caved in and brought in a jukebox that played CDs. I knew that Gordon liked blues and jazz, but seeing him in the state he was in, covered in repulsive bruises and looking distinctly inhuman with his yellow eyes, I didn’t concentrate a whole hell of a lot on the music that I was choosing. I merely punched in songs familiar to me at a glance, an amalgam from various periods of my life, including grade school and high school, without regard to the moment at hand. When a Whitesnake song came on, Gordon cocked his head at me and said, “What in fuck’s sake is this?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Did you play this crap or didn’t you?” Gordon asked.

I finished my drink, then reached over and put my hand on Gordon’s shoulder. “I have to go. I’m escorting this real piece of work. Her son
pissed on me,” I said. “But you take care of yourself, you hear? I mean that. Don’t let this being-sick-shit get the better of you.” I tapped the rim of his glass with my finger and said, “And easy on
this
stuff.”

The look Gordon gave me said,
Are you serious?
But then he smiled and said, “Pissed on you, eh?”

“Soaked my pants,” I said.

“Well, don’t let the little bastard get away with it.”

“I won’t.”

“Next time you see the boy,” Gordon said, “piss on
him
.”

“I will.”

He winked at me with a yellow eye.

I walked out of the Foxhead, leaving Gordon alone to continue his journey to death’s door, accompanied by my poor selections of hair metal power ballads and techno mash-ups.

Three months later, Gordon’s wife called me to ask if I would speak at his funeral, and, fool that I was, I ended up getting drunk at the Foxhead instead and, later, arrested for public intoxication. Vince Belecheck was tapped as Gordon’s replacement to head the Writers’ Workshop until a national search could be conducted. During his three-month stint, he was rumored to have slept with a half-dozen students and sired a child. The mother, a young Mormon poet whose first and only venture beyond the confines of Utah was her journey to Iowa, fled the Workshop and, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, hadn’t published so much as a single bad poem in an obscure magazine since her ill-fated tryst with Vince Belecheck. In all likelihood, she returned to the bosom of the Latter-Day Saints and now passed her days reading the prophet’s book of scripture when she wasn’t home-schooling little Zennith.

I never visited Gordon’s grave. I didn’t go to the Workshop’s memorial for him a year later, either. To me, he was still sitting at the Foxhead, nursing his whiskey and listening to the crappy music I’d put on.

“Pull over here,” I said now, pointing to the B&B.

Lauren parked without backing into the space. She pulled in nose-first, killing the engine with the car still angled out into the street.

“Ah, yes,” S. S. said, staring out at the B&B. “I remember it as though it were yesterday.”

“She’d better be here,” Lauren said, opening her door. “I’ve already canceled readings in St. Louis and Memphis. I can’t keep telling people she has the flu.”

Together, we crossed the street, walked up the front steps, and entered the B&B with the gusto of a theater troupe. As S. S. and I stomped our feet, Lauren stepped toward the antique desk, behind which sat an ancient woman wearing a sweater and a stylish knit cap pulled to the tops of her earlobes. I could only imagine, from her perspective, that we looked like we were putting on a performance, what with the two men clomping behind the feisty yet vulnerable woman who, having stepped forward, opened her mouth as if to burst into song.

Lauren turned around quickly and yelled, “Quiet, boys!” as if this were all still part of an elaborate script. S. S., playing his role to perfection, turned to me and smiled, a smile that said,
Oh, but isn’t she charming!
For my part, I rolled my eyes, as if to say,
Oh, S. S., you’re such a pushover for that dame!

We quit stomping—and as soon as Lauren began interrogating the old woman, who, until now, had been cheered to see us, the illusion that we were a band of traveling actors turned to dust. Lauren fired one question after another at the poor woman, sometimes following the woman’s answer with, “Oh,
really
.” I let it go on much too long. One of my fatal flaws was allowing people to do and say the most outrageous things without calling them to task, if only because I couldn’t actually believe that they were really doing and saying the things they were. Later, of course, I would obsessively run through all the things I
should
have said,
and I would keep revising those things until my retort became razorsharp—the best possible response for that particular moment. Sadly, it would all remain inside my head.

But right here, right now, the words finally came to me, the best possible words, and I was about to speak them, but S. S. stepped forward and said, “Please forgive the tone, ma’am. We’re all so worried, that’s all. She has a child with her. A newborn. And we don’t want to see any harm come to either mother
or
daughter. I’m sure you can understand.” S. S. reached out and touched the old woman’s hand. “It’s easy to become just a little—you know—hysterical.” He said the word
hysterical
under his breath, even though Lauren, about whom he was speaking, stood next to him, thumping her fingers along the edge of the antique desk.

“I understand,” the woman said.

“It was my pleasure to have stayed here many years ago,” S. S. said, smiling now and looking nostalgically about him. “In fact, I was just telling Ms. Lauren Castle and Mr. Jack Sheahan about the delectable French toast I was served!”

The old woman, clearly pleased, blushed. “We don’t have any guests today,” she said. “But if you’re hungry, I guess I could . . .”

“We would pay handsomely,” S. S. interrupted.

She led us into the dining room before leaving us alone. Lauren stood with her hands behind her back, examining the room’s various paintings (most of them featured cows) as though she were at a Monet exhibit. S. S. rubbed his fingers over the dining room table’s wooden surface then examined the tips of his fingers, like a homicide detective searching for the smallest of clues. For want of something to do, I opened the drawer of a bureau and looked around inside.

“What the hell are you doing?” Lauren asked.

S. S. wagged his head. “You really shouldn’t, old boy,” he said.

I shut the drawer. When they continued staring at me, I said, “What?”

S. S. pulled a flask from his coat pocket. “Care for a snort? Anyone?”

Lauren said, “What
time
is it?”

“I’m not driving,” I said. “I’ll take a snort.” I took the flask and tipped it up quickly while keeping an eye on the kitchen door.

“Give that to me,” Lauren said.

“But you
are
driving,” I said.

S. S. nodded toward her. “Go on, Jack. Give it to her.”

I handed it over. Lauren took a long, deep snort. Before giving it back to S. S., she turned it up one more time.

“You have no idea how much I needed that,” she said.

“Did Tate say what time his meeting was with what’s-her-name? The Workshop’s director?”

“What’s this?” Lauren asked, moving closer to us. The three of us now stood in a tight circle and, like a band of co-conspirators, stared at the floor between our feet while we plotted.

“Apparently,” I said, “Tate Rinehart is being invited to teach in the Workshop. He’s being wooed.”