Harry Dolan (2 page)

On an afternoon in May, he found a short-story magazine that someone had abandoned in a coffee shop. The title was
Gray Streets.
He ordered a cappuccino and found an overstuffed chair and read a story about an innocent man framed for murder by a beautiful and enigmatic woman.

The next day he set up camp in the professor’s home office, clearing books and papers from the desk. He turned on the computer and started to compose a story about a killer with a fear of parking lots. It took him three days to finish a draft, which he printed and read through once before tearing it in half and burying it in the wastebasket.

The second version took him four days, and he considered it barely passable. He let the pages sit on the desk for a week, until one evening he put them away in a drawer and began to click away at a third version. He kept at it for several more nights until he had worked out a plot that satisfied him. The killer turned out to be the hero of the piece, and there was a twisted villain, and a woman the killer saved from the villain. The climax took place on the top level of a parking garage. Loogan went back and forth on whether the woman would stay with the killer after he saved her, but he decided it would be better if she left.

When he had the ending the way he wanted it, he printed a clean copy with a title on the first page and no byline or contact information, and then consulted his copy of
Gray Streets
for the magazine’s editorial address. The address was a dozen blocks away, on the sixth floor of a building downtown. He walked there on a Saturday and the lobby doors were locked, but in the back he found a service entrance—a steel door propped open with a brick. A dingy stairway brought him to the sixth floor. He passed the offices of an accountant and a documentary production company, and there it was. Neat black letters on the pebbled glass of the door: GRAY STREETS.

He had the manuscript in an unmarked envelope. It was too thick to slide under the door but there was an open transom above, and he slipped the envelope over and heard it drop to the floor on the other side.

In the days that followed he returned to his routine, going to movies and lingering in coffee shops. Then, on a night when he couldn’t sleep, he went down to the professor’s office and sat before the computer screen, reading the story again line by line, tinkering with it as he went along. Trimming words and phrases and finding that the sentences were stronger without them. The next day he printed a new copy and after business hours he walked downtown and climbed the narrow stairs and slipped another envelope over the transom.

He was sure that would be the end of it. He made himself busy, branching out in his wanderings: to museums, to art galleries, to public parks. But it wasn’t the end. His memory was sharp; he could recall sentences and paragraphs; he could rewrite them as he walked along a path or stood before a painting. On another sleepless night he descended to the professor’s office, intending to delete the file from the computer; he stayed there for an hour, for three, mulling every word choice, fussing over every bit of punctuation.

He thought he would leave it there, a file on a hard drive. What would it matter if he printed it again? At twilight two days later he found himself in the hallway once more, holding the manuscript in an envelope under his arm. He stood before the door with the transom and tried to see beyond the pebbled glass. There might be nothing on the other side, he thought. Maybe just an empty room with two envelopes on the floor, gathering dust. And now a third to join them.

The door opened.

The man who opened it wore a dark blue suit with a powder blue shirt and a silk tie. He paused in the motion of putting on his hat—a black fedora with a band that matched the suit. He saw Loogan and his eyes went to the envelope and the hat came down, the door swung open wide.

“It’s you,” he said. “Come in.”

He retreated into the dimness of the room and after a few seconds a light came on in an inner office. From the lighted doorway he beckoned to Loogan with his hat.

Loogan took a few tentative steps. “I can’t stay,” he said.

“Why not?”

There was no answer for that. The answer that occurred to him—
Because it’s going to be dark soon
—would sound ridiculous.

“You’re not going to make me drag you in,” said the man in the blue suit.

His voice had an oddly formal quality, the voice of an actor running lines. He directed Loogan to a chair and went around behind the desk. Among the papers on the desktop, Loogan saw his own two envelopes, each one sliced open along the edge.

“I’ve been waiting for you to come by,” said the man in the blue suit. “That was clever, leaving your name off. It sparked my interest.”

He tossed his hat onto a filing cabinet. Loogan said nothing.

“Is this the same one again, or a new one?”

Looking down at the envelope in his lap, Loogan said, “It’s the same one. I’ve made some improvements.”

“You ought to be careful. If it gets much better, I won’t be able to publish it.” The man took a seat at the desk. “The reason I’ve been waiting for you—I wanted to make you an offer. I want you to work for me.”

This was unexpected. Loogan frowned.

“I’m not really a writer.”

“I don’t need another writer. I’ve got writers scrabbling between the walls here, gnawing on the wiring. What I need is an editor.”

Loogan shifted in his chair. “I don’t think I’m qualified. I don’t have the training.”

“Nobody does,” the man said. “It’s not like people go to school for it. No one sets out to be an editor. It’s something that happens to you, like jaundice or falling down a well.” He pointed at Loogan’s envelopes. “I like what you’ve done here,” he said. “There’s a clear improvement from one draft to the next. The question is, could you do the same thing with someone else’s story?”

Loogan looked to the window, where the twilight was deepening. This isn’t a problem, he thought. You can always refuse.

“I suppose I could,” he heard himself saying, “but I’m not looking for a job. I don’t know how I feel about coming into an office every morning.”

The man in the blue suit leaned back. “You won’t have to come in. You can work from home. You won’t have to follow a schedule. You’ll only have to do one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ll have to tell me what your name is.”

A moment’s hesitation. Then: “David Loogan.”

“Tom Kristoll.”

Chapter 2

TOM KRISTOLL OWNED A HOUSE ON A WOODED HILL OVERLOOKING THE Huron River. It was a sprawling affair of thick wooden beams and broad panes of glass. There was slate on the roof and a patio paved in stone, and wide stone steps that led down to a pool.

On weekends in the summer Kristoll hosted parties for the staff and writers of
Gray Streets.
The first time Loogan was invited he decided he wouldn’t go, but Kristoll phoned him in the early afternoon. They had everything they needed for a barbecue, Kristoll said, but no barbecue sauce. Could Loogan pick some up on his way? Loogan could and did. He arrived to find Kristoll, dressed in white from head to toe, overseeing the preparation of the grill. Kristoll’s wife scolded him for making their guest run errands. She took charge of Loogan, gave him a tour of the house, and was on hand to introduce him to a series of writers and interns.

“This is David Loogan,” she told them, “Tom’s new editor.”

Laura Kristoll wore a silk blouse and capri pants. She was sleek and blond and had a degree in English literature, which she taught at the university. Most of the interns were her students. She saw to it that Loogan always had a drink. She offered him towels and swim trunks in case he wanted to go in the pool. When he wandered off toward the edge of the woods to get away from the crowd, she let him alone.

Later, as he was leaving, she approached him and said quietly, “David, I’m afraid you haven’t had a good time.”

“Sure I have,” he told her.

“You’ll come again then.”

“Of course,” he said, though he hadn’t intended to.

Through the summer Loogan had a steady stream of editing assignments from Tom Kristoll. He worked on more than one story at a time and soon the manuscripts littered his rented house, the pages dotted with revisions in his fine, clean handwriting.

One evening in July, Kristoll called him and asked to meet him for a drink. Loogan drove to a restaurant downtown and a waitress led him to a booth paneled in dark wood and illuminated by a single bulb in a fixture of gray steel. Kristoll had ordered him a glass of Scotch.

“I didn’t think you’d agree to come,” Kristoll said. “I thought I’d have to drag you. I had it all planned, the dialogue written. ‘When I offer you a drink, you’ll have a drink and like it,’ I was going to say.”

Loogan made a show of relaxing. He sat sideways, his back to the wall, his left leg bent, the other stretched along the cushioned seat.

“You’re a closemouthed man,” Kristoll said, “but I like a closemouthed man about as much as any other kind. I’m not going to make you tell me your secrets.”

“I don’t have any secrets, Tom. Ask me anything.”

“All right. Where are you from?”

“Portland.”

“How long have you lived in Ann Arbor?”

“Four months.”

“And what were you doing, before I hired you?”

“For work?”

“For work.”

“I was with the circus.”

“Do I need to point out that Ann Arbor doesn’t have a circus?”

“This wasn’t in Ann Arbor,” Loogan said. “This was before I came here.”

“So you ran away from the circus and came to Ann Arbor?”

“More or less.”

“A lot of people go the other way. What did you do, in the circus?”

“I was a juggler.”

“Is there any point in continuing this conversation?” Kristoll asked.

“Call the waitress, Tom. Have her bring some dinner rolls. I’ll prove it to you.”

“And your hometown. Portland. Would that be in Oregon or Maine?”

“Which do you like better?”

Kristoll laughed quietly and tended to his drink. Loogan reached up and with his fingertips set the steel shade of the lamp swaying gently above the table. After a while the waitress brought them fresh glasses and they talked about other things: about the quality of the writers in
Gray Streets,
about writers generally, about the heat of the Michigan summer.

It was a pleasant conversation and it was followed by others on other evenings in the same booth, or in Kristoll’s office. Once, Kristoll came unannounced to Loogan’s rented house. “Tell me to go to hell, David, if you don’t want me to come in,” Kristoll said. “Come in, of course,” said Loogan. Kristoll inspected the furniture in the living room, the stonework of the fireplace. He admired some of the paintings and prints that hung on the walls. “None of them are mine,” said Loogan. “Naturally,” Kristoll said.

Unlike Loogan, Kristoll showed no reluctance to talk about himself. He had been raised in a middle-class suburb of Detroit, had moved to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan. He had met his wife there and with a small group of friends they had founded
Gray Streets
as a student publication. It was a modest success for four years, though it faded when Kristoll and his wife departed for graduate school out of state. When Laura Kristoll returned to Ann Arbor to teach at the university, Tom Kristoll set out to revive the magazine, gently prying it away from the students who had taken it over.

In the years since, the magazine’s circulation had grown to a respectable number, and the rise of the Internet had brought it a new audience. Kristoll had designed the original
Gray Streets
Web site himself, as a way of resurrecting stories from issues that had gone out of print. Bloggers had discovered the site and reviewed it. It had been mentioned in magazine articles about electronic publishing. More people read
Gray Streets
online than had ever read it in print.

“I’ll let you in on a secret,” Kristoll said to Loogan one evening. He had the window open in his office, his feet resting on the sill. A bottle stood on the desk. “In the early days, when Laura and I were in college, most of the stories we published were written by students. We wrote some of them ourselves, published them under pseudonyms. But when I started building the Web site, I left off most of those old stories. Only the best ones went onto the site. None of mine are on there. I have enough judgment to know they don’t belong there. Do you know what that makes me?”

Loogan hadn’t expected the question. “What?” he said.

“An editor. Nobody sets out to be an editor, but here we are, you and me.” Kristoll picked up his glass from the desk and held it in his lap. “Now I’ve turned maudlin,” he said. “You’ll forgive me. You can attribute it to the Scotch.”

“I think you drink less Scotch than you let on,” Loogan said.