How I Became a Famous Novelist (21 page)

“Fix a drink. I gotta send this shit.”

There was a tidy bar under a giant framed poster for
Nosferatu
. Original, it looked like. A German Expressionist
vampire loomed over me as I tried to decide what kind of vodka to have.

I realized the back of my shirt was soaked with terror sweat from the drive with a THC-fueled mad genius. Worried I might stain the white couch, I just stood there and looked at the pools. Miller was on the phone in the other room.

“Boom! I just sent you gold. Go in the Elite Class Lounge or whatever and print that . . . Have the pretty stewardess get you a nice Johnnie Walker, double, rocks, read that, and by the time you’re over Newfoundland you’re gonna be wondering what picture you want them to use on the cover of
Variety
. . . nice safe flight.”

Miller came back into the room, stared me in the eye, and pointed behind me.

“Thomas Mann used to live right down there.” Then he turned and said, “How many novelists you know have two fucking pools?”

Liquefied THC must have a sedative stage, which kicked in by the time we drove back to the Standard. There was less swearing at traffic lights, and I had to exert less energy exerting the muscles in my sphincter to keep from soiling myself.

“I’ll tell you a story about novels,” he says. “I went to lunch at Campanile with Sam Mendes. And we got to talking, and he says [here Miller did a very good British accent] ‘Miller, there’s something I’ve been just
itching
to take on, and I want you to adapt it.’ It’s
Madame Bovary
. So he makes me an offer, I take it, I go up to Vancouver for a couple weeks and take a look at it. Mark up the thing, pull out scenes, sketch out
dialogue, he doesn’t say anything but I know he wants to put Kate in it—Winslet. So I think I’ve got a take. There’s affairs, there’s botched surgery, Paris, death, stuff to work with. I start writing.

“Here’s the thing. I get through ‘Interior—Rouault’s farmhouse, north of France, 1850s, et cetera, he’s working on the broken leg, Emma enters. But then I realize I’ve got nothing. Because here’s the problem: it has to be internal. You can’t dramatize it all. And there’s no actress, not even Kate Winslet, who’s that good. There never will be. There’s always going to be that distance. You can watch a movie. But you can’t live it. And
Madame Bovary,
you need to live it.

“So I call up Sam, tell him I took a swing and couldn’t connect, he says we’ll find something else, et cetera.

“Just to clear my head I wrote a movie about a biracial car thief who gets caught up in a gang war in prison. It’s in turnaround at Paramount.”

We drive on through the green that hides the houses in Bel-Air.

“You know, I probably could’ve done it,
Madame Bovary
. Could’ve pulled something off, Sam and Kate would’ve made it look good. But you know what? It wouldn’t have been
true
. I couldn’t have made it
true
.

“And let me tell you—I’ll lie about just about anything. But I couldn’t make myself turn
Madame Bovary
into a lie.

“Flaubert,” Miller said. “That guy deserved two pools.”

After I left LA I never heard from Miller Westly again. I traded a few calls with Aaron, who acted mock resentful that we had
failed to Scotch it up, and through odd evasions over several months I eventually understood that Miller had lost interest or gotten too busy or somehow given up on
TAC.

Which was too bad. Some of the things that happened to me later I would’ve liked to discuss with him.

15

The hot-tub jets still whirred, blowing indifferent fountains of water against the slumped face, bobbing it about like some awful buoy, or a horrible children’s pool toy. The face of Heavenli D’Jones, who’d danced on her last bachelor’s lap—in this life anyway. A single gunshot, like a red wax seal on an antique document, was centered in her forehead.

Officer Ted Kobler was watching the scene, while a few higherups conferred on the patio. Kobler had never been in a house this nice, not in eight years of traffic stops and beat walking, not in his entire life. It had never occurred to him someone might have a Jacuzzi right in their backyard—not in Pittsburgh anyway. Beyond it, the grass, trimmed as tightly as a marine’s haircut, sloped down before revealing an incredible view, a Christmas tree of city lights, dots spaced out to the horizon, broken only by the dark waters of the Allegheny.

But with all that to look at, Kobler couldn’t take his eyes off that gunshot.

Then he felt someone slide past him. It took him a second to notice. A hell of a lot longer than it should take a cop.

A woman—straight black hair, tight khakis, leather jacket—bent over on the Spanish tile by the Jacuzzi and took out a notebook.

“Hey! Hey! You can’t be here! Lady!”

Then he felt a firm hand on his shoulder.

“Relax, Kobler.”

Detective Mitch Frilock stepped up next to him, drinking coffee out of a Styrofoam cup.

“Hey, Trang,” Frilock said. “You think those tits are real?”

Trang Martinez looked up from her notebook.

“I dunno Mitch. Maybe you should come over here and feel ’em. Probably be the first action you’ve had in a while.”

—excerpt from
Strip Tease
(a Trang Martinez Mystery) by Pamela McLaughlin copyright © 1997 Pocket Books, reprinted with permission)

The next stop on this Western junket was Montana. I picked up
Strip Tease,
one of Pamela McLaughlin’s books, at the LA airport and read it on the flight to Billings. By the time we were over Denver I’d finished.

The basic plot: Trang unravels these murders that are designed to disgrace various city councilmen. She realizes they’re being committed by this eccentric old guy who wants to keep his rotting rodent-infested house from being condemned. Once she’s cracked it, everybody thinks the matter’s settled. But Trang discovers the real reason the old guy doesn’t want his house condemned is that if they tear it down they’ll find the body of his wife, whom he murdered in a case that’s long since gone cold. So Trang solves that one, too. Also Trang is sleeping with a veterinarian who works with tigers at the zoo. That part’s just filler.

But the point, for me, wasn’t reading the book. It was that I, Pete Tarslaw, Famous Novelist, had slept with Pamela McLaughlin. That was how things went in the world of letters. Now I would do what Famous Novelists do: read with derision the works of former lovers.

This was all prep work for my appearance at the Great Plains Writing Program at the University of Billings.

I’d found the time in LA to Google myself and seen some new reviews. The
Brooklyn Eagle
said I had “a rare ear for the rural voice.” If there’s anybody who knows the rural voice, it’s a book reviewer in Brooklyn. The
Miami Herald
said my book was
“flawed in conception and overwrought in execution.” The same thing is true of the city of Miami, but people seem to like
that
.

There was some intellectual backlash, too. Some blogger who called himself “The Pathetic Fallacy” wrote this long essay pointing out that my book was “everything that was wrong with contemporary fiction.” Which, given my method, was kind of a compliment. I mean, I’d hit all the bases.

But I was hoping to go over huge at the Great Plains Writing Program. This was one of the nation’s premiere graduate schools in writing, apparently. I’d never heard of it, but I gather it’s a big deal among your tea-drinking academic literati. Tom Buckley, who runs it, is a legend. He’d written a book of well-received short stories called
Bird King,
then settled down to teach the craft for fifteen years. He taught other people who wrote other well-received short stories.

The point being that winning him over could be the first step toward landing a sweet teaching job and beginning a long career of pipe smoking and sexual hijinks.

Along with his invitation to be a Guest Writer, Tom Buckley had sent some copies of the literary journal,
Prairiegrass Review
. After I finished with
Strip Tease,
I flipped through a few of those.

The contrast could not have been sharper. Consider this simple chart:

They each have their flaws, I guess is my point. But you can’t get
Prairiegrass Review
at the airport.

Those folks in Billings were trying to write earnest honest fiction about crows and almonds. If they were willing to try, I was willing to cash their modest honorarium.

The University of Billings had promised to send a student to pick me up. At the airport I had some exciting moments following the vectors of passing young women until they veered off toward baggage claim or to hug some mulleted slackjaw.

My student ride finally found me and introduced herself as Marianne. They’d at least had the common courtesy to send a girl, but she was hardly the specimen of coed loveliness I’d hoped for. Thankfully she didn’t want to talk about writing. In fact, as she led me to her pickup truck, she mentioned she
hadn’t read my book. Not pointed or anything, she just put it out there. I respected her for it.

I’d written about Billings in
The Tornado Ashes Club,
despite never having been there. I’d had Silas, Grandma, and Esmeralda (née Genevieve) drive through, and I’d written that
in Billings he could hear rattling metal and the rumble of truck engines, the chords of unashamed American work
. True enough, although I’d made the place sound a lot more romantic than it actually was. Billings appeared in fact to be pristinely worthless, nothing but Pizza Huts and oil refineries. The passenger-side window of Marianne’s truck was made of cardboard and packing tape, and the March wind seeped in around the edges. Not in any kind of interesting way, just enough to make my ride unpleasant.

THE READING

We were late getting to the lecture hall. About forty people were shifting around in their seats, above average attendance for one of my readings. A third of the people were seniors who probably come to every event they see a flier for, just to keep their juices going.

Tom Buckley shook my hand. He was handsome in a pared-down way, as though years of prairie winds had blown off any excess from his face.

“Pete, welcome. Thanks for coming to Billings.”

“Thanks. Good to be here.”

“We’re so glad to have you as one of our guest writers. We’re all eager to hear you share some work with us. I’ve got some beginning writers here who I think could really benefit from engaging with it. We’ll open up some discussion.”

Part of me wanted to lean in and say, C’mon, guest writer? You’re a smart guy, you’ve obviously got a sweet gig for yourself here. But we both know I’m just a punk kid who cranked out a cheesy book instead of getting a job.
Share
?
Engage
? I’m gonna read a couple paragraphs, and your students are gonna sit glasseyed and think they’re getting their tuition’s worth. Then we’re gonna get some beers.”

Tom Buckley jogged to the podium and introduced me. This was always an uncomfortable minute. Nobody ever had much to say about me, except that I was young. But Tom Buckley’s presence alone enlivened the crowd; I could see them shift forward as he delivered some impromptu remarks about how I’d come all the way from Boston to give a reading. Tom said that he always liked to use the word
give,
because that’s what writers do. The students and the old women nodded at this beautiful notion as I gulped some water.

My set piece for readings was a flashback scene in France during World War II. Luke and some Resistance types are going through a forest, and they come across a pregnant woman, a collaborator who’s been kicked out of her town and is about to give birth. Some of the Resistance guys want to shoot her, but Luke decides to stay behind and help her.

This bit works well for readings. There are some funny parts where the woman swears in French as Luke ineptly tries to help and gets freaked out by all the mess. I do the French voice in an accent—an impression of my high school French teacher, Madame Bouchand. This always gets laughs. But the scene wraps up with emotional punch, as Luke holds the baby in his hands. Everyone loves babies. Sometimes mothers in the audience are almost crying at the end.

Except at U. Billings, I was distracted. Tom Buckley was sitting right in the front row, halfway out of his chair, smiling a smile a kindly priest might give to an atheist.

I kept losing my place. For a patch I forgot the French accent, and started doing something like Scrooge McDuck.

Finally I stumbled through to the end. Luke wipes the baby’s forehead with a rag still stained by gun oil. The audience applauded for the exact amount of time basic etiquette required.

Tom Buckley pounced up and grabbed me on the shoulder.

“Any questions for the author?”

There was a pause, four coughs long. Then an old woman stood up.

“Do you ever write mysteries?”

“Uh . . . no, I never have.”