After the Workshop (27 page)

“I’m sorry,” I said, walking to the kitchen and delivering Lucy’s glass to the sink. “This has all been one big mistake.” I spoke loudly so that she could hear me, explaining that S. S. didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, that if anyone needed a writing coach, it was S. S. Did she even know who S. S. Pitzer was? Hadn’t she heard of
Winter’s Ghosts
and the story of its author who had disappeared after the book had become a wild success?

When I walked back into the living room and saw that Lucy was crying, I felt about as low as I’d ever felt. What had gotten into me? Why was I taking this out on her, of all people?

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Hey, look, I’m sorry.”

“I can’t do this anymore,” she said.

“Hold on,” I said, and I grabbed a few napkins off the kitchen table and brought them to her. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “Do what?” I asked.

“
This
,” she said, motioning to me, her suitcase, the window. “I’ve been living here for three years, trying to find my place, and I foolishly thought helping people with their own writing would give my life some meaning out here.”

Listening to Lucy reminded me of the time she had spent in my car, telling me all about her failing marriage. She had wept openly then as she did now, and I had admired her willingness to be vulnerable around a perfect stranger. Because that stranger happened to be me, I had felt special.
Chosen
.

“Your books are best sellers,” I said. “You don’t need the money. Why would you do this?”

“It’s not about the money,” she said. “It’s about belonging. I’m all alone here,” she said, her eyes starting to water again. “I don’t know anyone. No one.”

I pulled up my chair and touched her shoulder. “It’s okay,” I said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

Lucy breathed congestedly through her nose, snorted a mildly derisive laugh, and said, “That’s what I keep telling myself.”

“Let’s think about this for a second,” I said. “What was so special about your first trip here?”

“I don’t know anymore,” she said. “If I knew, maybe things would be different.”

“Look,” I said. “I
do
need help. I
want
your help.”

Lucy stared at me through blurred eyes.

I said, “I’ve got writer’s block like you wouldn’t believe.” I sounded like a man with a bad bout of constipation.

She dabbed her nose with the tissue. She said, “When I spoke to S. S., he told me that you had thrown your novel away. You shouldn’t have done that. I mean, you
should
probably start something new. This old book is probably the reason you can’t move on. But you never know when you’ll go back to it.”

“I didn’t throw it away. It was stolen,” I said.

“I don’t understand.”

“S. S. stole it,” I said. “He took it.”

“Why would he do that?” Lucy asked.

“It’s hard to explain,” I said. And I was about to attempt an explanation, but my door swung open and Lauren Castle burst in as though she and I were old roommates.

“I did it,” Lauren said. “I fucking did it.”

I motioned to Lucy. “Lauren; Lucy. Lucy; Lauren.”

“What did you do?” Lucy asked, interested.

“I talked our publisher into giving M. Cat a five-figure deal for his book.”

“What book?” I asked.

“
The Naked Man
.”

“What’s it about?” Lucy asked.

“It’s about Jack’s neighbor,” Lauren said, “spending an entire month completely naked, and how society can’t deal with it.”

“He hasn’t left the house yet,” I said. “How do you know society can’t deal with it?”

“Jack,” Lauren said. “Don’t you know
anything
? We sold it on the basis of a proposal. Well, in this case, a pitch; we didn’t even have time
to actually type something up. You think what’s-her-name, that
Eat Love Fuck
chick, actually wrote her book first and
then
sold it? Think again, my friend. Think again.”

“
Eat Pray Love?
” I said.

“Whatever,” Lauren said. “The point is, I talked my own publisher into giving M. Cat a massive amount of money—what Publisher’s Marketplace would call a ‘significant deal’—which proves what I’ve suspected all along.”

“And what’s that?” I asked.

“That I’m wasting my talents being a publicist. I should be an agent. I should be out there landing six- and seven-figure deals instead of busting my ass promoting whatever crap the publisher hands to me.” She looked over at Lucy, as if seeing her for the first time, and said, “What do you do, Lisa?”

“Lucy,” Lucy corrected gently. “I’m a writer.”

“Really?” Lauren said. “Do you need an agent?”

“Her books are on
The New York Times
best-seller list,” I said. “I think she’s doing fine.”

“Let her speak for herself, Jack.” To Lucy, she said, “
Are
you doing fine? Are you in need of new representation?”

Before Lucy could answer, M. Cat walked into my apartment. He was still naked, so I looked away.

“Oh, sorry,” M. Cat said. “I didn’t realize you had company. Yo, Jack, when you get a chance, could you stop by my apartment? I need some writing advice.”

“Don’t leave,” Lauren said. “Stay. This is the whole point of your book, isn’t it? To see how people will react? So. What do you think, Lucy? Is this shocking? Are you offended?”

“Would both of you get the hell out of my apartment?” I said. “Please?”

On her way out, Lauren said, “Have you found Vanessa yet?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Well, keep looking. My publisher’s going to be very unhappy if I don’t find her, and I don’t want to burn that bridge.”

Once they were gone, I shut the door and locked it.

Lucy said, “Were those oven mitts on his hands?”

“Bandages,” I said.

Lucy took a deep breath, held it, then let it go.

“Do you ever get writer’s block?” I asked.

Lucy shook her head, the way a child might: tight-lipped, holding back a smile, eager to answer the question. It was one of the reasons I had become so infatuated with her the first time I met her—her innocence. “I published three books last year,” she said. “I’m working on my thirty-sixth right now.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” I said. “That’s amazing!”

“I’ve got an outline for my thirty-seventh, and some preliminary notes for numbers thirty-eight, thirty-nine, and forty.”

“I’m jealous,” I said.

“I should probably go back to Cedar Rapids now,” she said.

I nodded toward the suitcase. “What’s in there?”

“A change of clothes,” she said. “My toothbrush. The usual.”

“You were going to stay?”

“In the Sheraton, yes,” she said. “I took the bus down. I don’t drive.”

“You don’t drive? How did that happen?”

“I really should go,” she said. “I don’t want to miss the next bus.”

“I thought you were going to help me,” I said.

Lucy stood and picked up her suitcase. “You’re just being polite.”

“No, no,” I said. “I’m serious. I need your help.”

“Really?”

“I do,” I said. “You have no idea.”

“Okay,” she said. “Then I’ve got an assignment for you. S. S. tells me you’re writing a memoir?”

I nodded.

“I want you to tell me who you are. Can you do that?”

“Who I am? Isn’t that a little too . . .
existential
?”

“No, no,” she said. “I don’t mean like that. I mean, who
are
you? What do you
do
?”

“Oh,” I said. “You mean like, ‘I’m a—’”

“Shhhhh!” Lucy said. “Don’t say it. Write it.”

I nodded. I waited for more. When Lucy offered nothing, I said, “That’s it?”

“You’ll see.” She carried her suitcase to the door.

“Here, let me drive you to the hotel,” I said.

Lucy shook her head. “You’ve got an assignment,” she said. “I want you to get to work on it right away.”

Lucy Rogan stepped out into the hall and said, “We should get together tomorrow morning. First thing.”

“I’ll call you,” I said.

As though we were concluding our first awkward date, Lucy nodded and said, “I’d like that.”

I
CARRIED MY LAPTOP to the kitchen table, opened it up, blew dust off the keyboard, and typed

I stared at that sentence for a good long while, head in my hands, wondering where to go from there. It was a familiar feeling, this creeping dread, as the light from outside abruptly shifted, turning my apartment dark. I reached over and flipped on the kitchen light.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” I said, standing up so fast my chair fell backward. What the hell was I doing following the feel-good writing therapy that Lucy Rogan was selling? And what the hell did she know about writer’s block, anyway? She’d already knocked out thirty-five novels, with another four in the pipeline. What she was offering me was pop psychology à la
Writer’s Digest
: How to Write a Best-Selling Memoir in Thirty Days! Eager to please, I had taken the bait.

I shut my computer. I took a quick shower to rinse off my liquor-laced sweat and then I slipped on my old Iowa sweatshirt, one that Alice had bought for me and I still clung to, even though the fabric had begun to disintegrate and I could poke a finger through any number of holes. As I pulled on my socks, I started whistling. I never whistled—and yet
here I was, whistling a tune I didn’t even know, a mysterious, light-footed melody taking root inside my brain and blooming. Where did such things come from? How, for that matter, did I used to write short stories, or even as much of the novel as I had written—words building toward sentences, sentences shaping paragraphs? On days when things were going really well, the pages wrote themselves. I know it’s a cliché, but there was no other way to explain it. You couldn’t type fast enough to keep up with the images flashing in your head. You didn’t even have to
think
. It was as though your hands were merely a conduit through which the story expressed itself. Before you came along, the story had been floating through the air, waiting for someone to catch it and transcribe it. I wondered if musicians felt similarly, that they themselves were merely the mediums for something that already existed.

It was possible that this phenomenon was the reason I had been drawn to writing in the first place. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Varner, wanted each of us to write a short story, and while the rest of my classmates fumbled, unable to color in more than a sentence or two of their imaginary world, I wrote a full-fledged story called “The Crawl Fish.” The catalyst for the story was based on my mishearing of the word
crawfish
, and it featured a fish that, too tired to walk upright, crawled everywhere. People would stop and say, “Look at that crawl fish,” and the fish, for which I felt great sympathy, would say, “I’m just so tired. So tired!” I wrote four pages of the story without pausing, stopping only because Mrs. Varner wanted us to put down our pencils and, one at a time, read our stories aloud. Until that day I had been a mediocre student, struggling with multiplication and division, but as I read my story out loud and, looking up, saw Mrs. Varner smiling or, at the best parts, silently clapping the way she did whenever she was delighted by something we said or did, I sensed something in my life shift, though I wouldn’t have been able to pinpoint it for years. More than anything
else, what changed my life was the experience itself of stringing together words without consciously laboring over each one, as if I were a haunted little boy transcribing words of the dead. I wanted to experience it again, and again, and again. Sometimes it worked; other times, it didn’t. My mother would say, “What in the world are you working on, Jack?” and I would shush her, afraid I might lose the next word, afraid that whatever it was that had taken hold of me would leave me for good if I didn’t remain dedicated to it and it alone. Even as a child, I knew that this thing that other people saw as a talent might not stay with me forever.

I opened my door, but something stopped me. A sentence. I walked back to my kitchen table, popped open the laptop. I typed

I continued typing, one sentence building upon the other, a miniature story about my job and one of the authors I had escorted, about the things that people do to each other, and about the inexplicable ways we feel afterward. An hour had passed, and I’d typed six double-spaced pages. I printed those pages, tucked them into my back pocket, and put on my coat. It was time to start looking for S. S.

L
ESLIE BUTTONS HAD been the Workshop’s coordinator for as long as anyone could remember. She’d lived through the reigns of four Workshop directors and had actually outlived Gordon Grimes, who had arrived deep into her watch. Though her position was technically an administrative one (some might even have said it was a glorified secretarial appointment), Leslie actually wielded more power than most agents in New York. She had worked with writers at all stages of their careers: Nobel Prize winners passing through Iowa City to give readings, Pulitzer Prize winners on the permanent faculty, novices who would go on to become literary celebrities beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. She invited high-powered agents to scout talent; she received calls from publishers looking for her most gifted. Even under Gordon Grimes’s directorship, it was well-believed that Leslie Buttons was actually the one behind the curtain, pulling the strings by way of appointing TAs, choosing visiting writers, and pushing certain manuscripts into the hands of those who could change a budding writer’s fortunes. Rumor had it that she was even responsible for covering up lurid affairs between a certain award-winning poet and her students.