The Fugitives (3 page)

Heinz said that however it had ended, Susannah and I had been doomed to fail from the outset of the affair. I was happy to go along and agree that in the limited sense that he intended—the sense of two of us, Susannah and I, working shoulder to shoulder in furtherance of a common purpose, like partners in a well-run small business—he was certainly right. In the sense that he refused to acknowledge, the unassimilable combination of unending desire and perfect gratification that defined the whole thing, we had failed only in that the balanced suspension of the two was impossible to maintain, and its disintegration left me, unhappily, with only the desire.

I STAYED AT
the Holiday Inn while I looked for a place to live. I had a room with a view of the bay. The calm surface and moderate breeze attracted windsurfers and Sunfish in the shallows just off the narrow strand of beach, and, farther out, larger boats moved slowly through the blue water, or rocked gently at anchor. A postcard view, though this is the grittiest and least attractive part of the region. Grandview, the street fronting the bay, is lined with motels, gas stations, and drive-thru restaurants, and the area is, if not exactly seedy, a little shopworn. A half hour’s drive up into Manitou County will get you to places that are frequently described as
unspoiled
; while they’re hardly that (the lakeshore and adjacent towns are tourist destinations, after all), they are beautiful, quiet, clean. I didn’t want the isolation of Manitou, though, or acres of wooded land looming at my back requiring me to be mindful of bears, hunters, and snowmobilers, and apart from the motel strip the town itself is very appealing.

The bungalow turned out to be easy to find. The owner lived in Grand Rapids, and the place had sat vacant for months, its rent slipping to a level at which I was able to believe that this was a larky and temporary adventure, rather than one of those anxiously groping relocations, a wandering through a maze of alternatives toward an imagined absence of pain.

I moved in and slept on the floor in a sleeping bag while I waited for things to be delivered. Still life of pizza boxes and empty beer bottles accumulating in the kitchen. For a few days I’d entertained the idea of furnishing the place entirely from the Salvation Army store just down the road, but after spending twenty minutes there sitting on an old Naugahyde sofa it occurred to me that both self-deprecation and masquerade have their sensible limits. If indeed another person was inside me writhing to emerge from the wreckage, that person did not want to live like a downmarket midwesterner. True to my class, I turned loneliness into a consumer spree. Money was available, and I didn’t see any reason not to indulge the materialism that lurks at the heart of every fantasy of personal renovation (if materialism were not
the
issue, it wouldn’t so often remain a fantasy, would it?). So I waited for stuff to arrive to fill the house.

Work was supposed to come next. At the beginning I had the same faith Dylan had in the industriousness of the exile, the reduction of things to a kind of primary essence. Me and a book. Me and a notepad. A pen. I also had an Aeron chair, a laptop with separate cordless keyboard and mouse, an external hard drive, a printer, a scanner/fax/copier, a smartphone, an iPod and a stereo dock, a modem, a high-speed Internet connection, and a wireless router to connect it all; everything the reclusive author needed except a briar pipe and a walking stick.

“Simple and good,” approved Dylan. “So not what people expect of the writer-entrepreneur of today. This restores things. It connects him with the process.”

“Writer-entrepreneur?”

“At a suitable time I’ll explain about the writer-entrepreneur. Is a reminder of the realities of the marketplace what he needs right now? No. For now let’s just say: sounds like you’re in business.”

“Let’s just say that.”

“Go to work. Take it easy. Take care of yourself. Spoil yourself a little. Take your mind off things. Take the opportunity to think things through. Forget about the grind. Reconsider your career goals. Put the top down. Wear sunscreen. Buy fresh produce from roadside stands. Eat crappy takeout. Visit historic sites. Download the dirtiest Internet porn you can find. And if you get lonely, just think of me stuck here with the Eurotrash on the roof of Soho House waiting as we speak to have lunch with an editor who’s got no money and a fuckload of attitude.
That’s
lonely.
That’s
dread. Make me proud I’m in this shitass business. Did you hear about Kendra Wallenstein over at Synes and Martell? She won’t acquire a fucking book if it doesn’t have a happy ending. Official new official policy. Even the backlist’s under review. Tremors throughout the industry. But don’t you worry about that. It’s not your worry. Go ahead and write a book that leaves us weeping. I’ll stock up on Kleenex now. Monte’s totally behind us on this. Monte has an investment in your career. I can have him call you right now and tell you the exact same thing.”

“Why do I want to have the same conversation twice?”

“Why does he want to have the same conversation twice. See how I protect him from reality? Agenting is more than single-handedly supporting Kinko’s and screaming at interns. What to you is an inconvenience, a freakish oddity, is to me an everyday phenomenon. You know form letters? I have form conversations.”

“Is this one of them?”

“Ha ha ha. The wit that’s been translated into more than twenty languages is regaining its edge. Honing his craft and his wit in the American Heartland. Go walk in the footsteps of Hemingway, catch a trout or something. We can pitch it to
Men’s Journal,
keep your name out there.”

I WORKED IN
fits and starts, not inconsistent with my personal tradition of restricting the writing to short interludes while frittering away most of the workday. It wasn’t just success that had afforded me the opportunity to waste time so lavishly. My career as a writer had begun that way, when in my mid-twenties I’d saved up to rescue myself from a ridiculously inappropriate job and city (insurance underwriter, Miami) that seemed at the time to be a pair of life sentences running concurrently, and moved to Williamsburg. Once there, I’d honored the long, unadorned days by frequently rising from the sublet kitchen table where I worked to pace, fling myself on the couch to read, stand moodily smoking by the window overlooking the backyard, gazing at the amazing amounts of laundry the family next door generated, which hung from the clothesline, snapping and waving in the breeze. I also masturbated, operatically, arias of autoeroticism. I read, I wrote, I dicked around, I expended semen by the quart. Me, the Western Canon, a blank sheet of crisp paper rolled expectantly, with professional neatness, into the platen of my typewriter, and a wad of Kleenex always at the ready. My first novel assembled itself under these conditions, fell apart on rereading, disappeared into a drawer. More pertinently, I was dazedly pleased to have discovered a life that suited me as perfectly as this one did. The rhythm of reading, writing, wasting time; a pace and a pattern that easily assimilated any stupid interruption: the need to work at shit jobs, travel, friends, women, marriage, children. All such things merely filled the interstices between those big three, Reading, Writing, Wasting Time. Not that people understood. Bosses fired me. Friends complained about unreturned calls. Women, forget about it. The children would learn that I was the figure over whose shoulder they peered, hunting for clues in the object of my total absorption. So, fits and starts, yes—but I could tell the difference between productive and unproductive. The machinery had been on the blink for a while. I wasn’t writing, I couldn’t read, and even the bright joy of throttling abundant time evaded me. It didn’t strike me as inapt that the ability to create had burned out in me, although the novel I’d insisted for three years that I was working on (at one point Amazon listed it, then delisted it, which caused the servers hosting three blogs devoted to my works and—increasingly—my life, to shut down) had been bought and paid for—twice, in effect: first by Monte Arlecchino, for an unjustifiably ridiculous amount of money, and again by the Boyd Family Foundation, through whose embarrassing largesse I was receiving $75,000 annually for a renewable six-year term as a Boyd Fiction Fellow.

I worried less about Arlecchino than I did about the Boyds. Monte was easy; he had a roster of dilatory authors whose years-overdue manuscripts he spun as instances of genius perfectionism. But the Boyds scared me a little. They were vastly wealthy Texans who had procured their august dignity in painstaking stages, by trial and error: first, through the enormous success of the Boyd Repeating Arms Company, next with the founding of Boyd Baptist Teachers College (now Boyd University), then with the establishment of the foundation and its short-lived Boyd War Prize (awarded irregularly but frequently enough really between 1912–1939 for “The most ingenious strategic use of munitions, ordnance, or weaponry against enemies in time of war or insurrectionists in time of rebellion or unrest”), and finally with the foundation’s creation of the Boyd Fellows Program in the 1970s. The investiture ceremony for Fellows took place at Henry Silas Boyd’s mansion, Estancia, a strange and bloated folly with sandstone exterior, Doric columns, red tile roof, oaken drawbridge, marble floors, and stained-glass windows removed from a thirteenth-century French cathedral. A three-hundred-foot artificial hill had been erected, lavishly landscaped and sculpted with tall phallic hoodoos, on the high plains behind the house; deer and antelope played there, buffalo roamed. We received gold medals (the first of our twenty-four quarterly checks was in the mail), wore colored robes signifying the fields in which our fellowships had been granted, were greeted cordially not only by the descendants of the founding tycoon who sat on the foundation’s board but by the distinctly pacifist and left-leaning notables who served as chairman and executive director, and there wasn’t a single six-gun or fragmentation grenade in sight, but it was impossible not to be aware of the mountain of corpses on which the whole thing had been built. Public relations, press, and legal structures to the contrary, these were not people who gave anything away. “Make us proud,” one of the descendants, Boyd Harris, had said to me, “make us proud.” He uttered it in a slightly menacing singsong, as if I were the Fellow he wasn’t sure about (I suppose there’s always one). And now here I was in Michigan, doing little but going to hear a man tell ancient stories that belonged to no one. And an Indian, yet.

3

I
N
the city, I’d found myself distracted by unwieldy and complicated arguments I got into with complete strangers on the Internet, people whose militant opinions, buttressed by a facile authoritativeness carved on the surface of the Web, seemed to cry out for an aggressive response. It would consume hours of time, when I let it, and often once the day was over I would feel a vague shame, as if I’d spent my time having anonymous encounters of an intimate nature. Which, in a sense, I had. Of course I did all this under a number of different pseudonyms, frequently engaging people using pseudonyms of their own. It was absolute candor, with no revelation, as if to their very depth our personalities were made up of no more than the glassy surfaces of our opinions, folded back on themselves to reflect their own light. The rule was to say anything, to mine the untellable hostility from where it was deposited in our real lives and fire it at an echoing voice. A peculiarly empty intimacy; the gratification of hearing myself, loud and confident and bloated with the gaseous feeling of well-being that accompanied unbridled and risk-free self-expression. Now and then I’d tip my hand regarding my imposture, reassuring myself that, whatever else I may have been, I surely was not
like them,
pathetically defining myself within the limits of the comment box. And yet the authority that box bestowed. I pretended to be gay. I pretended to be a woman. I pretended to be black. I pretended to be a senior citizen living on a fixed income. I pretended to be a disabled war veteran. I pretended to be a Republican. I tested the limits, in a way I hadn’t in my “real” fiction, of what I could persuade myself it would be worth saying for no reason other than to feel what it was like to have said it.