Relentless (11 page)

As I was responding to an e-mail from my British editor, the phone rang. Line 3. Caller ID told me only UNKNOWN, but I took the call anyway: “This is Cubby.”

A man whose voice I did not recognize said, “Cullen Greenwich?”

“Yes, speaking.”

The caller sounded anxious, harried: “A lot of people think I’m dead, but I’m not.”

“Excuse me?”

“So many others are dead. Most days, I wish I were with them.”

“Who is this?”

“John Clitherow.”

I had never met the man or spoken with him on the phone, but I had corresponded with him, exchanging perhaps a dozen long letters. He had written novels that I much admired.

More than three years ago, he told his publisher he wished to cancel the remaining book on his contract. He intended never to write again. In publishing circles, the assumption was made that he had a terminal disease and wished to keep his struggle private. I wrote him again, but he did not reply. I’d heard that he and his family—his wife, Margaret, and two children—had moved somewhere in Europe.

“I shouldn’t be talking to you on your land line,” he said. “Too dangerous for me, maybe for you, too. Do you have a cell phone?”

I picked up my cell from the desk. “Yes.”

“If you’ll give me the number, I’ll ring you back. That’ll be safer for both of us. No matter who he is, what he is, he can’t listen in as easily to a cellular call.” When I hesitated, he said, “Your metaphors are damned well
not
ponderous.”

That reference surely had to be to the Waxx review of
One O’Clock Jump
.

I gave him the cell-phone number, and after he repeated it, he said,
“I’ll call you shortly. I just need to change locations. Give me ten minutes.”

He hung up, and so did I.

After staring at the computer for a moment, hardly recognizing the words that I had so recently written to my British editor, I got up and closed the shades at all three windows.

   As I finished lowering the last window shade, my third line rang. According to the caller ID, my agent, Hud Jacklight, wished to speak to me.

Because of the timing, I assumed this call and Clitherow’s were related, and I picked up.

“One word,” Hud said. “Short stories.”

“Those are two words.”

“Best American. You know it?”

Disoriented, I said, “Know what?”

“Short stories. Best American. Of the year.”

“Sure.
The Best American Short Stories
. It’s an annual anthology.”

“Every year. Different guest editor. Next year—you.”

“I don’t write short stories.”

“Don’t have to. You select. The contents.”

“Hud, I don’t have time to read a thousand short stories to find twenty good ones.”

“Hire someone. To read. Everyone does. Winnow it down for you.”

“That doesn’t sound ethical.”

“It’s ethical. If nobody knows.”

“Besides,” I argued, “the guest editor is always someone who writes short stories.”

“The publisher and me. We’re pals. Trust me. Very prestigious.”

“I don’t want to do it, Hud.”

“It’s a literary thing. You’re a Waxx author. Got to do literary things. Be part of the ‘in’ crowd.”

“No. That’s not me.”

“It’s you.”

“It’s
not
me.”

“It’s you. Trust me. I know you.”

“Don’t try to arrange it,” I warned him. “I won’t do it.”

“You’re up there now. One of the elite.”

“No.”

“You can be in the pantheon.”

“I’m going to hang up now, Hud.”

“The American literary pantheon.”

“Good-bye, Hud.”

“Wait, wait. So forget short stories. Think—the great one.”

No matter how much you want to terminate a Hud Jacklight call, astonishment and horror and curiosity often compel you to keep listening.

“What great one?” I asked.

“Think
The Great Gatsby.”

“What about it?”

“Who was the guy? The author?”

“F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

“Wasn’t it Hemingway?”

“No. Fitzgerald.”

“I guess you would know.”

“Since I’m one of the elite.”

“Exactly. I’ll talk to them.”

“Who?”

“His estate. You’ll write it. The sequel.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You can do it, Cubster. You’re pure talent.” I could not believe that I heard myself bothering to say, “
The Great Gatsby
doesn’t need a sequel.”

“Everybody wants to know.”

“Know what?”

“What happened next. To Gatsby.”

“He’s dead at the end of the book.”

“Bring him back. Think of a way.”

“I can’t bring him back if he’s dead.”

“They’re always bringing Dracula back.”

“Dracula’s a
vampire
.” “There’s your twist. Gatsby’s a vampire.”

“Don’t you dare call Fitzgerald’s estate.”

“You’re at a golden moment, Cubbo.”

“I hate
The Great Gatsby,”
I lied. “The pantheon. If you’ll just go for it.”

“I have to hang up now, Hud.”

“We gotta exploit the moment.”

“Maybe we don’t have to.”

“I’ll keep thinking. About opportunities.”

“I’m in pain here, Hud. I have to go.”

“Pain? What pain? What’s wrong?”

“I have to go. It’s a prostate thing.”

“Prostate? You’re only forty.”

“I’m thirty-four, Hud.”

“Even worse. Hey. Not cancer. Is it?”

“No. Just an urgent need to pee.”

“Thank God. I’ll keep thinking.”

“I know you will, Hud.”

I hung up.

Usually, after such a call from Hud Jacklight, I raced to Penny to share the details. Sometimes, that was the end of the workday for both of us, regardless of the hour. We could not get focused again.

Hud negotiated exceptionally good deals for his clients. I won’t say that was his saving grace, but it was my excuse.

With John Clitherow’s promised call due at any moment, I was finally convinced of something I had suspected for a long time: God has a sense of humor, and because the world is wondrous, He expects us to find reasons to smile even on the darkest days.

   When the cell phone rang, the voice of Hud Jacklight still ricocheted through my mind, no doubt destroying brain cells the way free-radical molecules damaged body tissue and accelerated the aging process if you didn’t have enough antioxidants in your diet.

John Clitherow said, “I’m calling you with a disposable phone. I don’t dare have anything in my name anymore. I’ll throw this away and use a different disposable as soon as I hang up. This will most likely be the only call I can make to you, so I’m pleading with you, Cullen, for God’s sake, don’t write me off as a crank.”

“You’re not a crank,” I said. “You’re a brilliant writer.”

“I haven’t written a word in over three years, and if five minutes from now I don’t
sound
like a crank, then I’m doing a piss-poor job of getting the gravity of the situation across to you, because the truth is crazier than a rabid monkey on methamphetamine.”

“I’ve had some experience of crazy truths,” I said. “Go on.”

“When Waxx’s review of your new book appeared on Tuesday, I
didn’t see it. I only read it a few hours ago. Been trying to get your number ever since. You didn’t take his criticism to heart, I hope. It’s the bile and vomit of an envious and ignorant man, the stench of which he thinks he has disguised with mordant wit, except that his mordancy is no sharper than a sledgehammer and his wit is not wit at all but the raillery of an intellectual fop, a popinjay who wheezes when he thinks he pops.”

Survival instinct told me to trust John Clitherow. But though I needed to know what he had to tell me—and perhaps already knew— I was loath to hear it.

Therefore, in light of recent events, I remained wary, hesitant to say anything against Waxx, lest he be orchestrating this moment, sitting beside Clitherow and listening to my every word. Paranoia had become my default position.

I said only, “Well, he’s entitled to his opinion.”

“He has no opinions, not of a considered and analytic nature. He has an
agenda,”
Clitherow said. “And the first thing you must
not
do is respond to him.”

“My wife told me to let it go.”

“A wise woman. But letting it go might not be enough.”

“The thing is, I didn’t exactly let it go.”

Clitherow barely breathed two words in such a way that they were less an expression of dismay than a prayer for a hopeless cause: “Oh, God.”

Obeying instinct, I told him about lunch at Roxie’s Bistro the previous day—and the moment in the men’s room.

When I informed him that the critic had spoken one word, he repeated it before I could. “Doom.”

“How did you know?”

He became agitated and spoke faster, words spilling from him in anxious torrents: “Cullen, for three years, I’ve continued to read the
bastard’s reviews, missed only a few. He’s as inelegant and as jejune when he praises books as he is when he drops his hammer on them. But what he says about your
One O’Clock Jump
is the first time he’s been that vicious since he assaulted my last book,
Mr. Bluebird
. He uses several identical phrases in both reviews. He says of you, as he said of me, that you are ‘an extremist of the naïve’ and that you’re incapable of understanding that humankind is ‘a disease of the dust.’ He said of us, separately, that we mistakenly believe ‘it is easy to be solemn but hard to be frolicsome,’ which indeed I do believe, and which I’m sure you believe, a belief supported by the fact that for every thousand solemn novels that thud into bookstores, there’s just one that is both meaningful and frolicsome, that has a sense of wonder, that is astonished by the universe and life, that knows regardless of the vicissitudes of existence, we were born for freedom and for joy and for laughter. Cullen, there are another half dozen things he said of me that he says of you in the identical language, in the same tone of scorn and near outrage. And this makes me afraid for you, very afraid for you and everyone you love.”

So rapidly and urgently had he spoken that while I followed all he said, I did not fully grasp the darker implications of his words or why, sentence by sentence, his anxiety curdled into anguish.

John Clitherow paused only to take a deep breath, and he resumed before I could ask a question: “I wrote Waxx’s newspaper, a response to the review of my book. Wasn’t an angry word in it. I kept it brief and humorous—and only noted a couple of the many errors of fact in his summary of the plot. Five days later, my wife and I came home from an evening at the theater. Laurel, the baby-sitter, was asleep on the sofa, and the kids were safe in bed. But after Laurel had gone home, I found my letter to Waxx’s newspaper in my study. It was the original that I had mailed, now pinned to my desk by a knife. The blade of the knife was wet with blood. In the low lamplight, I
had seen our cat sleeping on the office sofa, and now I saw the stain under her, and she was not sleeping. Right then the phone rang, and though the caller’s ID was blocked, I took the call. He said only, ‘Doom,’ and hung up. I’d never heard his voice, but I knew it had to be Waxx.”

Because I was on the cell, no phone cord tethered me to the desk, and I rose from the chair. Sitting, I could not draw a deep breath, for I felt as though a passive posture invited an attack. Movement was imperative, being ready to respond, being watchful.

“He’s been here,” I told Clitherow, “but I can’t prove it.”

I described Waxx’s bold intrusion the previous afternoon, when he had toured the house with such nonchalance that it seemed as if he operated under the misapprehension that our home was a public establishment.

The note of anguish in Clitherow’s voice phased into something colder, what seemed to me to be an icy despair. “Get out of there. Don’t spend another night.”

Pacing, I quickly told him about the critic’s second visit, the Tasering in the lightless bedroom.

“Go now,” he said. “Right now. Go somewhere you have no previous connection, somewhere he can’t find you.”

“That’s more or less the plan. My wife must be almost finished packing. We—”