The Secret Society of Demolition Writers (17 page)

The drive to the castle was not a long one, but the hill was steep, the road difficult to navigate.

Marc parked in the courtyard, signed in with the security guard at the main entrance, and waited while the man phoned upstairs to make certain that Cassandra Benjamin was expecting company.

The building was drafty, the stairs damp and poorly lighted. When he reached the apartment, he knocked timidly and then stood aside.

The woman who opened the door was dressed in a blue track suit with white stripes and wore a red watch cap over her naked skull. Instead of booted heels, she had on a pair of white Nikes with a blue swoosh, and looked terribly young. Marc thought she looked fragile. A child, really.

Cassandra smiled warmly. “You’ve come behind the curtain in Oz?” she said.

Marc nodded.

“I hope you don’t feel that I’m imposing.”

“No, no,” said Marc. “I’m honored.”

“But it’s not about your work,” she said. “It’s about mine.”

“Oh,” he said quickly, and hoped she hadn’t picked up on the disappointment in his voice. “That’s fine,” he said. “Just fine. I’m still honored.”

“I have something I want you to read,” Cassandra said and led him over to the glass table. She pointed to the desk chair. He sat. There was an opened FedEx package on the table, a manuscript on top of the FedEx package, and a letter paper-clipped to the first page of the manuscript.

“Do you want a drink?” she asked. “Tea? Coffee? Water?”

“Nothing,” he said, “I’m fine.”

“I’m going to go out for some air,” she said. “I want you to read the letter and the synopsis. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“Okay.”

“Are you a fast reader?”

“No.”

“Fifteen minutes then,” she said, pulled the famous leather coat over the track suit, and was gone.

THE STATIONERY WAS thick and creamy with the Lion of Lion’s Leap Publishing, Inc., embossed at the top. The letter was from the executive editor, Michael O’Donnell. “Dearest Faust,” it began.

Don’t talk to me about muses. I
am
your muse. We’ve given you
the bones of a novel that need only run 60,000 words. You’re a
storyteller. Remember that. A communicator. Like Ronald Reagan. You story-told your way out of jail. With my help. With my
help you’ve story-told your way onto the bestseller list.

Do it again. We’ve done the marketing. The report is attached,
if you want to read it. Done right on campus. Her name’s on the
report. Do you know her?

Love Mephistopheles.

Under the letter was a second page, also of high-grade paper and with a thick stripe of maroon that ran right down the text on the right side. Marc remembered something about film companies doing this with scripts they were afraid might be stolen.

SYNOPSIS

Helen Yerning is a high school graduate in her late thirties. She
lives in a development called Troy Place. She’s stopped reading,
but hasn’t entirely forgotten what it felt like. Married eight years,
she’s stopped having sex, but hasn’t entirely forgotten what that
felt like either. Helen lives in a High Ranch or Center-Hall Colonial. (Your choice.) Two children and a cockatiel.

Her hates in order of intensity:

Herself

Her husband

Her children

The bird.

We’ve named the husband Gary after your ex. This way your
fans can confuse the fictionalized version of your real life with
your fiction. Most readers don’t believe in a higher truth anymore.
They want their hairy facts.

You open with the Yerning family at the breakfast table. It’s autumn. TV’s on, of course. (The Department of Homeland Security
has moved the alert level to crimson and severe.)

The husband is reading a story about an eight-million-dollar,
two-year contract just signed between the Baltimore Orioles and a
pitcher with a titanium pin in his right shin. Eldest son, Gary Jr.,
11, has taken the day off because his shin aches. Daughter, Aimee,
argued that if her brother can stay home from real school, then she
has the right to stay home from “fake school.”

“It’s not fake, dearie. It’s nursery school,” Helen said, but lost
the argument.

Now she looks out of the Home Depot bay window. (Gary Sr.
installed it, and it leaks.) Helen notes idly that the Troy Fuel Oil
truck parked in the drive next door has two wheels on the Goldmark lawn. Ari Goldmark is lawn-proud. So lawn-proud in fact
that his nickname in the neighborhood is Scotts Goldmark.

“Come look,” Helen says to her husband, “Ari’s going to blow a
cork.” Gary grunts, but does not rise from the table.

(Note: Render the husband as unsympathetic as you please. If
the performance of your earlier books is any indication, the female
readers will outnumber male readers by a ratio of more than ten to
one. Gary’s going to die immediately. Death makes even a heel
sympathetic. Repeated studies have shown that while “dead” is not
an adjective we covet for ourselves, we’re often pleased to apply it to
others. Who was it said death may be the ultimate accoutrement?)

Helen clears everybody’s dishes—and play that up. The cruel
injustice of housework has proven a solid theme in your books.
Beds made, Helen takes the Buick Skylark out to Pathmark.

While in produce, she hears a distant roar and feels the earth
move beneath the linoleum.

Did you see it coming? Goldmark was an outspoken member of
the Jewish Defense League. The faux oil truck was full of high explosives. The Israeli activist is dead.

Collateral damage: Helen’s husband, children, and the bird.

You’ve got the rest of the book for her to lose about sixty pounds
in. Jenny Craig is interested in the tie-in, but I know that you’ve
favored Weight Watchers in the past.

You pick. Not Atkins. They don’t need us, and so won’t help
with distribution. Helen of Troy Place finds herself again in a rebirth of wonder. (You do this so well.) Also Mr. Right. Again you
have a free hand. In our version he’s a dot-com billionaire made
wiser and kinder but not significantly poorer by the recession of
2001–3.

MARC FINISHED READING. He got up from the table and paced back and forth once.

He heard the door click closed. Then Cassandra was back in the room, taking off her coat, hanging it up. Marc was still standing, so she sat down at the desk.

“What do you think?” she said, pushing the chair away from the table and to the side so that she could see her student’s face.

Marc shrugged. “I don’t know yet,” he said. “It’s too soon. I need to metabolize this.”

Cassandra nodded.

“There is one thing of which I’m certain,” he said.

“And what’s that?”

“You’re forgiven.”

Cassandra Benjamin smiled faintly.

“No more,” she said, rising suddenly and holding an arm out, so that he moved toward her instinctively and they walked together to the door of the suite. “This time I write from dreams. I’m writing about the tyranny of time and of machines. But I’m not writing it out of my cranium. Or out of any shameful marketing test. A Ouija board,” she said and paused.

“A length of copper wire,” he said. “Grounded.”

“Right,” said Cassandra.

“Good,” said Marc and nodded.

Cassandra inhaled deeply. “Gives me a reason to live,” she said.

“A good thing to have,” he said.

Cassandra nodded, then put a finger to her lips. “Nothing of this to a soul.”

“Of course,” he said.

“Now,” she said, “ you get on out of here.”

Once in the courtyard, Marc asked the security guard if he could look at the Land Rover. “I’m a buff.” The man yawned, and shrugged. “It’s parked over by the dumpster,” he said. “Help yourself.”

A WEEK HAD passed and Marc sat squeezed beside Alice in the third pew of the McCracken Union Church. The memorial had been scheduled for eleven but the famous editor, Something O’Donnell, was driving out from Manhattan, and he was late. The building was packed to the rafters, and there
were
rafters, great wooden beams stained and exposed.

The aisles were kept clear by staff proctors, but spectators filled the open area behind the pews and poured out into the light and down the flagstone steps to the road. The PA system had been activated so that those outside could hear the speeches.

The dean of students, a mousy lapsed nun named—can you believe it?—Miss Dirge and dressed in a shapeless gray suit and flats, was the first to step up to the podium. Reading from note cards, she remarked on the beauty of the day. She said that there would be coffee and cookies afterwards in the dining hall. “Free for guests, but the members of the student body should act as if this were a regular tea and put their payments in the jars placed for this purpose on each table. As always, the honor system applies.” Then Dirge fluttered and introduced the Walrus.

The president stumped forward resolutely. Clearly an effort had been made to project the confidence he did not possess. His suit was freshly pressed, his bow tie yellow, and the mustache appeared to have been shampooed and blow-dried. He cleared his throat and then beamed out at the crowd. He said it was an honor to introduce Michael O’Donnell, then he introduced Michael O’Donnell and stepped away from the microphone.

The editor was a much younger man than Marc had anticipated. He was tall and quite strikingly handsome with blue eyes and sandy hair. He was almost good-looking enough to have stepped out of a Polo ad. The kerchief in his breast pocket matched his patterned Hermès necktie.

His talk was short and salted with quotations, including whole passages from Auden on the death of William Butler Yeats. “For those of us who loved Cassandra for herself, there are no consolations or extensions,” he said. “For those of us who know her only through her books, there will be another chapter. Cassandra Benjamin possessed many sterling qualities. Not the least of these was an ability to get it done. Always. And so we already have in hand the completed manuscript of her next novel.”

O’Donnell paused here, drew the silence out almost to the breaking point. “
Helen of Troy Place
will be published by Lion’s Leap a year from now, in the fall. We’d be delighted to have a ceremony here,” he said, looking at Franklin Wallace, who— standing off in the shadows—nodded violently in assent. “Readings. A cocktail party. Something small. Something to acknowledge both the book and the campus that was her home.”

There was a smattering of applause: O’Donnell bowed, and Franklin Wallace stepped out of partial shadow to take his second turn at the microphone.

Marc thought he could hear a sigh of disappointment escape involuntarily from the crowd. Franklin Wallace was not—had never been—an inspired speaker. A tall man, the college president had a face that went on and on and revealed nothing. The cavalry mustache seemed to indicate courage, or at least forthrightness, but the eyes above it were as dead as knotholes.

“The road down from the castle is a nightmare,” he said. “Always has been a nightmare. I suppose the road down from Assisi is also problematic. You all know the story by now in one version or another. There is one point I should like to clear up. The state police informed me yesterday afternoon that there was no brake fluid in the car. None. There probably wasn’t any brake fluid when she started out for campus. Cassandra cherished that car. She maintained it beautifully. And yet it failed her. Apparently the tubing just gave out. It was an old car. A classic. This was not—as some have cruelly speculated—a suicide. The woman was betrayed by the machine she loved.” Here he paused, as if waiting to be contradicted. Then the president cleared his throat and went on.

“F. Scott Fitzgerald believed that life is a tragedy, and I suppose for artists this is often true. I only wish that this tragedy could have gone on for another act. And another. And another. Cassandra Benjamin was not just a teacher,” said Wallace, “not just a genius, or an activist, not just a friend. She was all of those things, but she was a writer first, an artist, a medium. She was the very instrument of beauty.”

MARC WENT TO the tea hoping to meet O’Donnell, but the editor was surrounded by faculty members and other students. He fetched Alice a cookie and a cup of hot water with a bag of Lip-ton in it, put three dollars in a jar, and they stood on the edge of the crowd and whispered to each other. When Alice had finished her snack, they went to his dorm room. Once inside the door, she threw her arms around him and kissed him violently on the lips.

Alice woke first, her slumbers broken by that most ubiquitous of rhythms, the cycling of an electric motor. She peered around the room, looking for one of the small refrigerators common in the dorm rooms of upperclassmen and graduate students. She didn’t see it. Then, on a whim, Alice slid down under the covers and put an ear to her lover’s narrow, hairless chest.

Good Sport

MY FIRST YEAR OUT OF COLLEGE I got a job working as a coffee promoter for a famous chain of coffee-houses. I don’t drink much coffee, but I’m an excellent promoter and did well in the two marketing classes I took at school, and I think I got the job based on my description of the blend. I’m decent with adjectives, and I used words like
rich
and
impoverished
together, and my soon-to-be boss jumped up and clapped a hand on my shoulder and said: “Allan you are the
one
,” and things were so down that summer that I swelled under that, my mood rose like a helium balloon, and it only crashed again when I realized that the one job I could get with my new hundred-thousand-dollar degree was promoting bottom-of-the-grinder Joe for a ubiquitous chain that I’d boycotted for months.

I started the next morning, determined to make the best of it. Most CEOs with any integrity started small. This store was the only shop open early on the street that led directly to the beach, and it was crowded, fast, with people who worked in the few businesses lucky enough to have an ocean view. And who knows, maybe they’d see me and eventually offer me a job. The morning manager was a very alert woman named Tina, and Tina was a coffee hound. She must have drunk at least five cups just while she was setting me up with my freebie promotional tray.

“Make sure,” she told me, marking half the cups with a giant D, “that everyone knows which ones are
not
decaf because decaf people WILL sue if they get the wrong kind, I swear, even when it’s free, and also, it’s hot, make sure they know it’s hot because you know all about that problem. Be careful here, Allan.”

I nodded a lot and watched as her hands moved swiftly from coffee thermos to minicup, filling them up to the brim. She put the cups into groups: Colombian blend. Irish mocha. One big corner of decaf. Three frothy mini cappuccinos. It was all very gourmet. She handed the tray over, and with a sudden sweet smile that made me forgive her completely, sent me out into the street.

Commerce and beach intersected here in Newport Beach, the West Coast end of Orange County, the Republican core of California, where all the hyperclean people work. Everyone smells hygienic in Orange County and even if you look hard you can’t find any homeless. Not that that’s a good thing. They used to be here. Before I started college there were at least a few, so I think they must’ve rustled them all up one day and had a mass something. I don’t like to think about it. Once, I had half a sandwich that I just couldn’t finish and for some reason, I forget why exactly, I couldn’t stand the thought of putting it in my refrigerator at home. It seemed too depressing, this sandwich, this half ranch-dressing-chicken, so I drove around for an hour looking for a hungry homeless person to feed and I couldn’t find a single one. Not even a hungry dog. All the dogs here are fat.

Another thing about these hyperclean Newport Beach people is that they drink a lot of coffee. In five minutes, half my tray was gone. I had two decafs, one Irish mocha, and seven various blends left when a girl about my age approached the tray.

She peered down into each cup. “I don’t drink coffee,” she said. She was wearing white pants, a difficult choice for a girl, but she looked smart in them, and also a white shirt and white tennis shoes and her hair was blond and in a braid. She looked all set to bleach the world.

“But,” she continued, looking over my shoulder, “I do want to wake up.”

I snapped the fingers of my free hand in front of her face. “Wake up!” I said. The tray wobbled. She didn’t even blink. “Coffee wakes you up,” I told her, holding the tray more firmly now. “Have an Irish mocha, on the house.”

“I’ve tried coffee,” she said, smoothing her braid over one shoulder, “but it doesn’t work.”

“Oh, well,” I said.

“Can I ask you something?”

She fixed her eyes on me. Girl eyes. Two months earlier, as we were measuring ourselves for caps and gowns, the love of my life, who I’d been with for over three years, dumped me for a more manly man. It had happened in a flash, overnight: suddenly she was horribly dissatisfied and had to leave me. I had, to her, become a half chicken sandwich.

“How do you wake up?” the girl asked, moving fingers over each bump in her braid as if she were a blind person reading her hair. “I just wonder how you get up in the morning.” She looked at me directly now. I tried to keep looking back. “When you’re in bed and the alarm sounds and there’s that minute where you want to fall back asleep but you know you’ve had enough sleep and then it’s time to heave ho, how do you do that?”

“Well, you got up, or you wouldn’t be here,” I said, trying to be encouraging. “Colombian?” The woman passing in the blue-striped suit grabbed a cup without breaking stride.

“I was taken to the hospital,” the girl said. “I didn’t really get up on my own will at all, but my mother was worried, it was the fifth day, and so she took me to the hospital and they tested me for things.”

“Fifth day of what?”

“Fifth day of not getting up,” she said, impatient with me now.

I kept the tray balanced. Now that she’d said hospital, the white clothes had twisted in my mind and she looked like a nurse to me, a tennis nurse or something. I had visions of falling in love with her and sitting by the edge of the bed, pulling on her wrists and saying: “Darling, I made a coffee bath for you, I have a cold shower running, we can make love on the white kitchen tile and you can pick whatever position takes the least energy.” It was moderately sexy to think about.

“So what did the tests say?” I asked.

She leaned against a No Parking pole. Two young jerks in ties passed by, nodded at her, ignored me, and grabbed the last two decafs. It’s funny, who picks the decafs. It’s not who you’d expect.

“I didn’t check,” she said. “I know what’s wrong with me.”

Then there was the kind of annoying pause that indicated it was my turn to ask her what was wrong with her. I waited it out for maybe a minute while she rolled her head against the pole. Then I got bored. It was nine-thirty a.m. on a Tuesday morning for a new college graduate with no plans, no girl, and massive encroaching debt. What else was I supposed to do?

“So what’s wrong with you?” I asked.

She tilted her head to one side. “I have a stone heart,” she said. “Literally.”

I fiddled with the cups on the tray, and a wave of impatience flowed through me. Because really what was the point? I don’t date crazy women.

“I’m not crazy,” she said, looking past me again, through the window into the coffee store. I offered an Irish mocha to the red-head in the blue dress who passed me and she grabbed the little paper cup and said thank you so sweetly I almost threw the tray at this white girl’s head, taking up my time like she was.

She stepped closer. “Just feel,” she said. “I know I’m bugging you, I’m sorry, I’ll even drink a cup.” She slung one back. Then she took my right hand and held it up to her neck. Her skin was very pale there and she stretched out two of my fingers and placed them where her pulse would be. “Just listen,” she said. “Listen to the difference.”

I kept my fingers there because her skin was soft. I hadn’t touched a girl in two months. The beats came slowly and they were hard and heavy, hammer beats: plung, stung, so slow and dark and deep they gave me goose bumps. I gave her my tray to hold and, keeping one hand on her, placed my free hand on my own pulse. In contrast, my heartbeat was a ripping wave of rapids. It made me a little concerned about myself, why was I so light and fast? Maybe it was coffee fumes.

“But why would the hospital dismiss you if your heart’s so messed up?” I said, after we were done.

“They didn’t dismiss me at all,” she said. “I left.”

She handed me back the tray. I looked into the coffee-store window and Tina was on the telephone, gesturing with her right hand, rings glinting. “They can fix this,” I said. “Doctors.”

“All they did,” she said, “was listen to it and the doctor shook his head over and over and did just what you did, listened to his own heart, everyone gets worried about their
own
heart, and then he left the room and I split out the window.”

“Where’d you get dressed, though?” I asked, irritated now at both of us.

“At home,” she said. “My mother was at work.”

“So what do you think is really wrong?” I asked. “Is it a disease?”

“I think it’s stone,” she said. “This is all new to me too, but I really think it’s stone. I think if you cut me open right now, in my chest beating you’d find a smooth-shaped rock and that would be my heart now and that’s why I can’t get out of bed and that’s why everything is so SLOW around here and that’s why coffee doesn’t work.” She went back to the pole and I could see she was very upset and she molded her spine into it, and her eyes were sludgy bright, and two more people cleared two more Kenyan roasted blends off my tray; one of them even came back for a second, apologizing too much. “It’s fine,” I told her, “have two more,” and she did.

The girl clasped her arms around the pole, a backwards hug.

“And what do you want
me
to do about it?” I asked her.

She laughed a little. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I just want you to believe me.”

The street thinned. More storefronts opened. Summer-school bells rang. I could smell the ocean, way way off, pounding away.

“Jog up and down,” I told her. “Let me feel it when you’re out of breath.”

She obliged. After three minutes of rapid jogging, she came up to me again and I put my finger back on her throat. The same heavy thud was happening, now more urgently, but with a power and weight that made me nauseated somehow; it really made me want to throw up. I’d never felt anything like it. My old love, my old girl, she’d exercised a lot, too much, I think, all that step aerobics all the time, and when I’d hold her close and hear her heart I used to think it was bright and lively. I used to think: this is the heart that loves me and listen to it go. It’ll never stop! Ha. Compared to this one, it was just an eager little mouse.

She returned to her pole. “Hang on, I need new cups,” I said. I went inside, where it was dark and cavelike, and Tina, the mind reader, had already filled a new set of paper cups, this time with a fake-rum blend (“be sure to explain it’s nonalcoholic,” she said) and a vanilla mocha. The tray smelled excellent, even to a non-coffee-drinker like me. I walked outside again, wondering if she’d be gone, and for a moment I thought she was and felt a wave of relief and rejection, but then I looked to the left and she was by the shoe store next door, leaning against their window, sort of rolling against it in a way that normally would be sexy, but knowing that heartbeat, it seemed so full of effort it nearly killed me just to look at her.

“Vanilla mocha?” I offered, and it was snatched up, whoosh, down the throats of busy people whose pace increased slightly once they passed me.

The girl kept rolling against the window. “I sink, too,” she said. “If you still don’t believe me.”

“You what?”

“I mean when I’m in water. I sink. I don’t float.”

I sniffed a little. “Yeah, but can you swim?” I asked. “I mean people do sink, normal people.”

“I can sort of swim,” she said, “I used to be able to swim thirty laps every morning. Now I can’t go in the deep end safely, I swear it. How long is your shift?”

“Four more hours,” I said, after a minute.

“We’ll go to the pool,” she said. “As long as you’re there to save me, we’ll go to the pool and I’ll show you,” she said. “You’ll see.” She faced me and her eyes were very big and darkening and the smell of coffee was, already, starting to make me tired.

“Sure,” I said, “I could meet you there in a little over four hours? Gives me time to go home and get my trunks.”

She gave me a huge smile, full of pathetic dredged-up energy, and I sort of smiled back. She turned to go away. “Hey wait,” I asked her. “Why me? Why are you asking me to help you with all this?”

She turned around. “Because you look sad,” she told me, half over her shoulder, “over there with your big coffee tray. You looked really sad.”

She walked off. I watched her go, and then I stood there with my coffee tray for a while longer, but everyone was pretty much settled at work by now and all the coffee just got cold.

I DID FIVE more trays anyway, and there was a real surge at lunchtime and then the four hours were up and Tina gave me a portion of the tips: $6.70.

“You did good,” she told me. “People seemed to like you.”

I said I’d see her tomorrow and headed home. I lived twenty or so blocks away, and the streets were crowded now with summer people heading to the beach, and they were all together with other summer people and I was not. Times like this, I feel the outline of things far too clearly. I wanted to be less outlined so I could bleed into their groupness; I wanted to start walking with a family and have them not notice their new son. I went home, and there was my apartment, just exactly as I’d left it. Went to the mirror and there was my face, just exactly the same. No messages. Tessa, the old girl, kept saying she’d call so we could have the final talk, but she hadn’t called and I sure as hell wasn’t going to call her after I’d pretty much begged at her feet to be kept. Fuck no. She’d told me I was a good sport about it all, when I hadn’t blown up at her when she finally told me we were over. It’s not something I’m proud of. I think I even hugged her at the end, told her I understood even though I never will. And I hadn’t been sure until that moment about the pool, but I knew I absolutely couldn’t stay home and sit around; I had to get out, and if there was a girl with a heart of stone waiting for me, so be it.

I hadn’t been to a pool in over a year, I just hadn’t felt the need to be in water at all, but I found my swimming trunks at the bottom of the sock drawer, where I’d last left them, and I put them on and headed over. I was pleasantly surprised to see her waiting for me at the front gate with a towel around her waist like a sarong, a blue towel, a blue suit, white sandals.

“You ready?” she said. “Hi, how’s it going? You ready?”

I fell into step beside her. “I’m ready, but the lifeguard is on duty, right? Just in case?”