After the Workshop (6 page)

But then there were those writers whose personal lives I knew too intimately. A best-selling novelist who wrote books that tapped into the mass consciousness of whatever year the book was being published needed me to run out and get him some Imodium AD as quickly as possible for what he described as “the worst fucking diarrhea I’ve ever experienced.” Throughout his entire reading, to an audience of over five hundred, I was the only one in the room, other than the author himself, who knew that the man’s stomach was a bubbling volcano waiting to blow.

Lucy Rogan, a romance writer doing a book signing in Cedar Rapids (my one and only romance writer during all my years as a media escort, and the only writer I ever took to a bookstore that wasn’t located in
Iowa City), asked me on our way to the event if I had any children—a segue, it soon became clear, for her to tell me about her recent miscarriage. The miscarriage then became a segue to talk about problems in her marriage: She’d married too soon; he wasn’t a writer and didn’t
really
understand her or—worse—didn’t really care about what it was she did, as when she tried talking to him about a problem she was having with one of her plots, or how characters sometimes took on lives of their own, or how people looked down on romance writers when what she was doing, though not Shakespeare, was still a craft that took time to develop. I kept looking over at Lucy to assure her that I was listening. According to her bio, she had won several local beauty contests when she was a child, but I could see now why she didn’t continue to compete or, if she did, why she didn’t win—and yet it was
these
, her losing attributes, that I found the most compelling: the small puggish nose, the too-thick eyebrows, the hair that couldn’t be tamed. I doubted she was even five feet tall.

She wept openly twice while talking to me during the fifteen-minute drive from the airport to the bookstore, and I was genuinely moved by her tears, so much so that I told myself that I was even going to read her novel, which featured on its cover an illustration of a brawny man with thick windswept hair and a pair of firm, muscular tits. He was clutching (rather violently, I thought) a much younger woman whose own breasts were popping out of a sheer, low-slung nightgown.

At literary events, an author who isn’t a best seller would be lucky to scare up twenty-five people; in front of the bookstore in Cedar Rapids, however, a line of women trailed out the front door and all the way down the street. When I took Lucy inside, there were mountains of her books, maybe six hundred copies of a single title. Lucy’s spirits were lifted at the sight of her fans—“Oh, look!” she said, brushing away tears—and once we were inside and she had settled behind her desk,
pen poised to begin a day of marathon signing, she looked up at me and said, “You’re a sweetheart,” and squeezed my arm, even though I had said practically nothing the entire drive. I’d merely listened while guiltily fantasizing about a life in which I swept her away from her uncaring husband, carved out a life for us together in Iowa, and made fervent love to her every night: in cornfields, in haylofts, in cars parked on dusty rural highways. She was, in a word, bewitching. It was as though I had finally found someone who might understand
me
, who might even be able to offer some insight into why my own dreams to become a writer had short-circuited.

But no sooner had I gotten home and begun reading her book than I wondered what the hell I had been thinking. Her novel was full of clichés and plot contrivances, and the characters were all paper-thin. I read two chapters before tossing it aside. It wasn’t so much that I was an elitist (though I probably was); it was just that my expectations had been higher, and though I knew that the romance genre was formulaic and that its main point was to fulfill its readers’ expectations and not subvert them, I had hoped, after all the talk about her own struggles, to find something,
anything
, in her writing that would suggest a deeper connection between us. All I could imagine, after reading what I did, was a life in which I grew to resent her each time I drove her to a bookstore and saw all those eager fans, the same readers who would find my own work “too dark” or “too depressing” or “filthy” because I’d used the word
fuck
one too many times, even as they read books that glorified rape and treated women like inflatable dolls.

This was what I’d told myself—that is, until the next day when I picked Lucy up from her hotel to take her back to the airport, and I fell under her spell all over again. Inside the airport, she hugged me goodbye—a long, deep hug. Afterward, I stood there watching as she passed through security and disappeared amid the other midday travelers.

Her books were best sellers now, and there was never any mention of her husband in her bio. Each time she published a new book, I picked it up and stared longingly at the author photo, wondering if, like one of her bronzed and well-endowed heroes, I should have grabbed her before she passed through Cedar Rapids Airport security, spun her around, and carried her back to my Corolla.

Having returned to the Sheraton, I asked the woman now working the front desk to please connect me to Vanessa Roberts’s room. She typed something on her keyboard, examined her screen, then typed something else.

“Vanessa Roberts?” she asked.

“Yes. She checked in this morning. An early check-in.”

The woman typed away. The more the keys clattered, the hollower my stomach felt. She finally looked up and said, “I’m sorry, but she checked out an hour ago.”

“That can’t be right,” I said.

The woman nodded sympathetically and said, “No, I’m sorry, unfortunately it is right. She checked out.”

“Do you know
who
checked her out?”

“It wasn’t me.” She studied the computer screen, then said, “Charlie, come here.”

Charlie, with his shaggy hair and sad little goatee, looked like a beatnik, as did a lot of guys in Iowa City who were Charlie’s age—twenty-two, twenty-three, done with college but not sure what to do or where to go.

“Did you check out a Vanessa Roberts?” the woman asked Charlie.

Charlie said, “She have a baby?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yeah, I checked her out then.” Charlie studied me a moment then asked, “Is there a problem?”

“Yeah, there is,” I said. “I’m her escort.” When Charlie’s eyebrows raised, I said, “
Media
escort.”

Charlie smiled and said, “I was gonna say, dude, you don’t want to go announcing that in here.” When I didn’t return his smile, he said, “Yeah, she and the kid checked out. There was a bag back here waiting for her. For confidentiality reasons, I can’t tell you what was inside, but she took it out of the bag and tucked it under her arm.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

“Uh, no. Why would she do that?”

“Did she take a cab?”

“I didn’t look. Typically, we don’t follow our customers out the door.”

“I’m sorry, but are you getting smart with me?” I asked.

“I’m just saying . . .” Charlie said. He drummed his fingers. That’s when I saw the prison tats across his knuckles and realized I had seriously miscalculated who I was dealing with. One set of knuckles spelled LIFE, the other, DETH. I wanted to ask him how he had managed to get a job with tattooed knuckles, not to mention the rather egregious misspelling, but he was already making his way around the front desk to confront me face to face. “These questions,” he said. “I’m not sure you have a right to ask me. Do you have a badge or something? Oh, no, wait. You’re an
escort
.”

There are times when you know intuitively that it’s in everyone’s best interest to back off, and this exchange was almost certainly one of them. I’d seen it too often in bars, two men talking shit, the ante upped too quickly, everyone puffing up, and then a moment of eerie calm before someone throws a punch. These were explosive fights in which anything at hand became a weapon (beer bottles, pool cues, a dartboard), people ended up in the hospital or behind bars, half the furniture became next day’s kindling. Usually, innocent patrons ended up injured, sometimes
from a thrown shot glass, though more likely from the losing pugilist tumbling into them, knocking them off a high stool. And so I saw this moment in the Sheraton for what it was: a fight, barely dormant, waiting for the first jab. And I wasn’t going to throw it.

“Thank you!” I said. I backed up, grinning. My teeth were pressed so hard together they squeaked. I was probably pumping my fists, too, but no matter: I was leaving. Everything would be fine.

I needed to make a few calls, but, as Lauren Castle had pointed out on numerous occasions, I didn’t own a cell phone. And as I had discovered recently while trying to call Lauren collect from the airport to inform her of a canceled flight, most pay phones didn’t work anymore.

“Shit,” I said, standing outside, cinching my coat tighter. The wind had picked up; clouds churned overhead. For lack of a better plan, I walked over to the bookstore to give them a heads-up that tonight’s literary luminary might not be showing up for her book signing after all, but once I arrived at the store and stared in at the elaborate window display of Vanessa’s book, I changed my mind. What if she had merely checked into a different hotel? What if I inadvertently set off a manhunt for a woman who wanted only better room service?

I slipped next door to Mickey’s, one of Iowa City’s many overpriced restaurants, and slid into a booth near the back. After ordering my food, I slumped down and spaced out. Back when I still believed that I was a writer, I spent all my time watching people. I used to bring a notepad with me, jotting down random details, like “crushed fedora,” “gimpy leg,” or “the forgotten dab of mustard on her chin.” These days, I merely stared ahead, into space, until my focus blurred.

“Jack?”

I looked up. It was Alice, my ex-fiancée, and she was covered in large snowflakes. Before today, I hadn’t seen her in years, and now I was seeing her everywhere I went.

“Alice!” I said. “It’s snowing?”

“You’d be surprised,” she said. She started taking off her coat but paused to ask if I was expecting anyone. When I told her that I wasn’t, she continued slipping out of it. And then she joined me. “Jack, I’m sorry about this morning. I kind of freaked out. When I saw what you were buying, I thought . . .”

“That it was for
me
?”

“Not
you
, per se. Your
wife
. Thinking that you were married and I didn’t know about it just . . . well, it kind of freaked me out a little.”

My
wife
. I smiled.

Alice said, “But then I remembered your job. The whole escort thing. And then I realized what you were trying to tell me. And then I Googled what’s-her-name.”

“Vanessa Roberts?”

Alice nodded. “I saw that she was married and had a baby. And that she was on a book tour.” She looked like she wanted to say something else.

“What?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing. I guess I just started feeling guilty. I mean, here I am feeling shitty that you might be married, and yet—”

“What?”

Alice shook her head. Whatever she was about to tell me, she had decided not to. I didn’t press. She said, “That book. It looks
terrible
.” She made a face and shivered.

“It is,” I said. “I mean, I haven’t actually
read
it yet, but I can just imagine.”

Alice said, “The publisher says it’s a memoir in the same league as Richard Wright’s
Black Boy
or Elie Wiesel’s
Night
. Who writes this garbage?”

“The author, usually,” I said. “Or the author’s editor.”

“
The Outhouse!
” Alice said and harrumphed. “What a load of crap.”

I smiled. This was the Alice I had fallen in love with, a woman who cut quickly through bone and gristle, pulled out the still-pumping heart, and held it up for everyone to see.

“
The Outhouse
indeed,” I said. I was cheered that Alice had sought me out, so I asked, “How did you find me?”

“I didn’t,” she said. “I came in to grab a bite to eat and saw you sitting here. You looked so sad.”

“Really? I did?” I smiled to prove her otherwise. “I’m fine,” I said. “No worries. Just a long day.”

When the waitress took Alice’s order, I asked for another draw of Bud.

“I’ll take one, too,” Alice said. And it was like old times again, the two of us meeting at Mickey’s for dinner, settling in for the day’s gossip over ice-cold beer. I ordered four more Buds over the course of the afternoon. To my surprise, Alice matched me mug for mug. When we paid up and stepped outside, I helped her on with her jacket. The flakes of falling snow were preposterously large and sticking to every surface, including my face.

“Oh, damn it,” she said. “I’m parked all the way across the river.”

“My car’s just over here,” I said, pointing to the hotel. “In the parking garage. Want a lift?”

It was less than an hour now before Vanessa’s event. I peeked into the bookstore’s window, but I had a good buzz going, and my eye was easily distracted. Instead of Vanessa Roberts, I saw Tate Rinehart standing near the front table of new releases, reading a copy of his own book. When he looked up, I smiled at him and he smiled back, but then his brow furrowed and he cocked his head. He’d recognized me, or, more likely,
thought
he’d recognized me but couldn’t quite remember who I
was, despite the two of us having spent thirty minutes together only a few hours earlier.

In the parking garage, Alice and I were forced to walk up one ramp and then another instead of taking the stairs, like civilized humans, since I had foolishly forgotten where I’d parked.

“Click the button to unlock your doors,” she said. “Maybe you’ll hear it beep.”

“The locks are manual.”

In a voice that was more playful than critical, she asked, “Are you still driving that old Toyota?”