Gun Church (19 page)

Nor did it escape me that the hostess wasn’t close to being the hottest woman in the place. At the bar alone there were five women, most of them in their early twenties, who, even on a no-makeup–bad-hair day, would have been Miss Brixton County. And no two of them were attractive in the same way. I’d forgotten that New York City was a city of St. Pauli Girls. That at any one time in any bar, on a subway car, or in a movie theater line, there were women, young and old, whose varied charms and looks were even more alluring than Renee’s. Renee had a kind of regional perfection, if that makes any sense. Yet, at that moment, I found myself missing her. Then Meg walked in.

When we first met, Meg’s look was sex neutral: not androgynous, neutral. She was plain faced, brown eyed, thin lipped, and built like a pencil, so she depended on her black-on-black wardrobe and take-no-prisoners attitude to lend her an air of authority. We hit it off almost immediately, though, to this day, I’m unsure why. I liked that she was immune to my charms and me to hers. It was just healthier that way. Funny thing is, our taste in women was very similar: we liked them, a lot of them, and often. It was one of the few things we shared, actually. Meg was unknowable. I knew about her. I knew she was loyal and dogged, but not why. True, I’d earned her a lot of money once, but that was yesterday’s news and in New York publishing, yesterday was ancient history. I never knew much about her upbringing, her family, or what was going on inside her head and she never volunteered information. Still, we’d somehow managed to love each other.

The Meg who strolled into the Liars was more severe looking than I remembered. Her thin brown hair had gone silver-gray and she wore it short, gelled, and spiky. She had on glasses with sharp rectangular lenses like microscope slides set in heavy black frames. In her black leather duster with upturned collar, she reminded me of Ming the Merciless from the old Flash Gordon serials, and her black bag was more Harley saddlebag than purse. She would have been as out of place in Brixton, I thought, as Truman Capote in Holcomb, Kansas. I watched Meg hungrily eye the hostess as she handed her the duster to be checked. That much hadn’t changed. Meg wore a black silk blouse over gray wool slacks and pointy-toed black pumps. Around her neck and wrists she sported thick, uncomfortable-looking silver jewelry twisted at irregular angles. Sort of Cartier meets Home Depot.

“What are you smiling at, Weiler?” she asked, when I slid into the booth next to her.

I leaned over, kissed her cheek. “It’s been a long time, Meg.”

“You’re not going to start sobbing, are you?” she said, even as she squeezed my hand.

“I promise. You?”

“Don’t be an ass. I’ve wasted too many tears on you over the years.”

“You look good, Donovan. And gray slacks, my god, it’s heresy.”

She laughed or what passed for her laughing. “You could always do that to me, you know, make me laugh. You look older, Kip, but fit.”

“I run.”

“Talk about heresy! The only running you used to do was from bed to bed.”

When the waitress came over and began reciting her prepared little speech, Meg cut her off and ordered a dry Ketel One martini with four olives. I held up my half-finished beer and said I was fine. Meg looked relieved.

“This was an interesting choice for lunch,” I said. “What happened, all the tables at Applebee’s and Ruby Tuesday’s were booked?” She knew I didn’t want an answer. “And the good old Algonquin, thanks for that. Maybe I’ll find an old pair of Dorothy Parker’s knickers to sniff. Her crypt’s in the basement, right?”

The martini arrived and Meg swirled the contents around with the olive-laden plastic sword. She sipped it, curled her lips, and slid an olive into her mouth.

“Look, Weiler, if I could have kept you in a straitjacket and leg irons until after dinner tomorrow night, I would have. But I figured the Algonquin and this dreadful joint were the most I could get away with without you acting out.”

“It’s fine.
I’m
fine. You don’t have to worry.”

“If you’re trying to make me laugh again or reassure me, it isn’t working.”

“I guess I’ve given you ample reason to be skeptical.”

“Ample? Since when is understatement part of your repertoire?”

That was my cue for a segue and I took it. “So, did you read the new pages I added to the original manuscript? What did you think of the plot synopsis?”

“I’ve read them both.” Meg did that curly lip thing again, took another sip, and a second olive. She actually turned to face me, a very un-Meg-like thing to do. “Kip,” she cleared her throat, “before we go to dinner tomorrow night, I have to … um … ask you a question.”

Meg hesitating!
Surely, this was the end of days.

“What’s the question?”

“Is it your book?”

Of all the things she could have asked, I didn’t see this coming. I was shocked and angry. “What the fuck kinda question is that to ask me?”

“Think about it, Weiler.” She held up her right index finger. “One: You haven’t sent me a manuscript in god knows how long and your last three books were, to put it mildly, disasters.” Her middle finger. “Two: I call you with a big rights deal and what, magically there’s new book?” Her ring finger. “Three: The voice in this new book doesn’t sound like your old voice at all.” Pinky. “Four: Your new characters aren’t anything close to what your old characters used to be like. These people have souls.” Thumb. “Five: The writing is done in pitch-perfect Irish dialects.” Left thumb. “Six: And all of a sudden you’re an expert on handguns?”

“Better stop now before you run out of fingers and have to remove your shoes,” I said. “You forgot to mention that
Gun
Queer
doesn’t contain a dream sequence.”

“That’s not an answer, Kip.”

“You want an answer?”

“Yes.”

I would have told most people to go fuck themselves, but Meg had earned the right to hear the truth about where the book had come from. “Okay,” I said. “Order another martini or two. I’ve got a story to tell you that you might not believe.”

She took my suggestion and about forty minutes later she knew more about my life in Brixton County than she ever wanted to know. Meg gulped down her third martini and didn’t bother fussing with the olives.

“Are these people dangerous?”

“Anyone with a weapon in his hand can be dangerous, but there’s only one asshole in the bunch,” I said. “Mostly they’re harmless and just plain bored. There’s a lot to be bored with in Brixton no matter what you do. This world they invited me into is the one place they can shine. It’s like a cross between Kabuki and Catholicism.”

“What is the significance of those rituals you were telling me about?” she asked, turning once again to face me.

“Some come from how the chapel was founded, like the ashes from the first tree they shot at. The number of steps you take to get to the chapel floor and to shooting position have their roots in how many people were originally a part of things. And the things we recite come from the Bible when Jesus is talking to Doubting Thomas, but there are other things we do that have to do with status.”

“Status?”

“Look, Meg, I don’t think you can appreciate what these people’s lives are like. The people at the chapel, they’ve got no futures. They either work in dead-end jobs in a dead-end town or go to community college in order to get dead-end jobs. There’s no way for them to derive any self-esteem or achieve anything worthwhile outside the chapel. The chapel is really their salvation. It’s a way for them to prove themselves as something other than a clerk or a short-order cook.”

“But how do they measure status?”

Now I hesitated. It was one thing for me to create a fictionalized version of the chapel, but I actually felt a pang of guilt. I was breaking the big rule. I was talking about the chapel openly, naming names, discussing it with an outsider. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to give all the details about the shooting, especially the part about shooting with only a vest for protection. I decided to fudge a little.

“We get red crosses on our shirts every time we shoot. It shows how brave we are and how we trust each other. The higher the number of crosses, the higher the status. Each time we shoot, the test is different. Sometimes it’s who’s fastest, other times it’s who’s most accurate. It’s even in how well we perform the rituals. For instance, when we walk four paces away from each other, stop and take one last step before turning to face one another, we strive to be as close to thirty feet apart as possible. When the real experienced people shoot together, they often are exactly thirty feet apart. I don’t know all the nuances or intricacies yet because I’m still new, but it’s all carefully thought out.”

Meg shook her head. “Still, why don’t you consider moving up here to finish the book? I would feel safer with you close by.”

“To make sure I don’t go off the rails, you mean.”

“That too,” she confessed.

“No need to worry, Mom. Staying down there is good for the book and good for me.”

“And this blond, the St. Pauli Girl—”

“Renee.”

“Renee. Do you love her?”

“I’ve been faithful to her probably longer than I was faithful to Amy.”

“I was waiting for that name to pop up. She’s miserable, you know.”

“So you’ve said.”

“You should call her,” Meg suggested.

I didn’t know what to say. Had I known, I don’t think I could have managed to say it. No matter what Renee was to me, she would never be able to touch the way I felt at just the thought of hearing Amy’s voice over the phone. Then it dawned on me—I guess it was a day for revelations, large and small—that I had nearly achieved the goal I set for myself the year before. With the book deal, the money from the rights deal, my keeping on the straight and narrow, and my newfound monogamy, I was nearly in a position to win back Amy’s respect and my own.

“And one more thing, Weiler,” Meg interrupted my reverie.

“What’s that?”

“I ran the title by Dudek and as I anticipated, he thinks
Gun
Queer
would be too controversial. It’s got to be
Gun Church
.”

“
Gun Church
it is
.”

The big powwow had been at a chichi steak restaurant in the Meatpacking District. There wasn’t a T-shirt or bottle of hot sauce anywhere in sight. There were four of us for dinner: Meg, Franz Dudek, his trophy wife Amelia, and me. Meg was in a black silk cocktail dress over black hose and a different pair of pointy-toed pumps. She left her industrial-strength jewelry home for the night, wearing instead a silver-clasped black leather bracelet, pearl stud earrings, and a simple string of pearls around her neck. This was about as girly as Meg Donovan got in public.

Amelia Dudek, all curves, legs, and lips, was about thirty, give or take. She’d probably done plenty of both: giving and taking, I mean. Her features were not so very different from Renee’s, though she wasn’t as naturally pretty. But Amelia knew the tricks: how to dress, how to makeup, how to accentuate and obscure. Franz Dudek wasn’t at all what I expected. I guess I thought he’d be slight and regal, the last viscount in a long line of vanquished Slavic nobility, shipped off to Eton and Oxford at an early age before surfacing in New York. Instead, he looked like a sixty-year-old potato farmer in a good suit. He was big-boned and broad-shouldered. His peasant hands were thick, his fingers gnarled, but he had a kind, handsome face. There were many such faces in Brixton and with a little coal dust on his cheeks and a hard hat on his gray head, he would have fit right in.

I don’t know what Dudek was expecting from me, but the look on his face when I met him and Amelia at the bar was fucking priceless. He seemed almost disappointed that I wasn’t some drunken monster with a drippy junkie nose and a blond on each arm. The late Haskell Brown had no doubt filled his boss’s head with endless tales of the Kipster’s debauchery and his exponentially diminished talent. It’s not like I hadn’t disappointed people before. I’d nearly turned it into a second career. It was that I hadn’t ever done it in quite this manner before.

Earlier, when the wine steward poured glasses of the old Cabernet Dudek had ordered to accompany our steaks, I’d noticed the sick look on Meg’s face. There’d been no need for her to say the words.
This is when he’s going to fuck it up
. I knew I’d been on probation from the moment I agreed to come up to New York. That’s why I had club soda and lime at the bar before we were seated and why, during dinner, I barely finished half a glass of wine. I was being watched, tested at every turn. The Kipster would have been glad to live down to their expectations by asking Amelia how much the prenup was worth or whether she’d had her boob job done before or after marrying old Franz. The impulse for self-sabotage was irresistible to the Kipster and he would have jumped at the chance. Why bother writing a crappy book that tanks, when you can just blow yourself up in front of your publisher? But
Gun Church
wasn’t a crappy book and I wasn’t the Kipster. His last vestige was parked in the Hippodrome Garage, directly across 44th Street from the Algonquin.

The hard part came later, after the contracts were signed and Dudek promised to have the checks cut to Meg Monday morning. Publishers don’t pay the author. They pay the agent and the agent pays the author after her percentage comes off the top. Nor do publishers fork over all the money at once. For the rights deals, it was half on signing and half on publication. For
Gun Church
, payment—like Caesar’s Gaul—was divided into three parts: one-third on signing, one-third on manuscript approval, one-third on publication. But any way you carved it up, I walked out of the restaurant well over a hundred grand ahead of when I walked in. It wasn’t about the money. I didn’t even mind that the advance for
Gun Church
was less than the advance the Kipster had received for
Beatnik Soufflé
a million years ago. That was the Kipster’s first book and
Gun
Church
was mine.