Faking Life (15 page)

Frank showed up at the office at quarter past noon. He strode in wearing a custom gray pinstripe suit with white athletic socks under spiffy Bruno Maglis. He didn't say a word to Esther, just went his desk, sat down, then got back up and poured a cup of water from the cooler. He gargled, then returned and put his feet up on the desk. After twiddling his thumbs for five minutes, he stood up and went back to the cooler.

As he passed her desk, Esther muttered just loud enough, “Yankees, Frank?”

He stopped next to her, a little too close for comfort. He put the cup down and placed his hands on his hips. “What's wrong with the Yankees?”

“You're from Boston, Frank.”

“Yeah, and as a Bostonian I'm smart enough to know that if I walk into a New York bar wearing a Red Sox hat I'll leave with a fractured skull and an empty wallet.”

“That's not the point.”

“So what is the point?”

“Why were you at the bar last night?” Frank shrugged and sipped his water.

“Felt like a drink. Is that wrong?”

“You could have hurt him. And you saw the owner, he was really pissed.”

“Maybe so. Whatever. I didn't tell him to call me an asshole. And let me ask you this,
Esther
,” he said condescendingly. “Why were
you
there?”

“That's none of your business.”

“Come on.
I
was there doing research. But why were you there? Curiosity? Please.” He sipped the water and gargled.

“I had my reasons,” she said, now sorry she'd gotten called attention to herself. She didn't want to see Frank today, last night, or as a matter of fact, ever again.

“What reasons are those?” Frank seemed to realize he'd touched a nerve. Though Esther didn't care one bit what he thought—Frank could assume she was stalking John and it wouldn't bother her—she began to wonder why exactly she
was
there Saturday night.

“I have my reasons,” she said, avoiding eye contact in the hope that he'd realize how terribly unwanted he was at that moment. Of course, he didn't.

“Well, should we chalk it up to, ahem, professional curiosity then?”

“Chalk it up to whatever you want, I don't care,” she said, glaring at him. She tapped her fingernails against the desk. “Don't you have work to do?”

“Yes, I do. Just got a proposal from a
Times
columnist who's writing a book about how the U.S. can lower unemployment by banning self-help books. I think it could work.”

“Yeah, well good luck with that.”

When Frank left, Esther plowed through the queries with reckless abandon. Two dozen went right to Nico, who signed rejection slips that Esther sealed and sent out immediately.

When she left at six-fifteen, the sun was still peeking through the evening shade, the golden hues keeping watch behind the emerging dullness. She crossed Broadway and took the E train to West 4th. When she emerged from the dank tunnels the sky had filled with gray mist. The moon was hidden behind angry clouds. She buttoned up her coat and trudged on.

Esther walked west until she arrived at Slappy's Slop House, the blue awning flapping gently in the faint breeze. She needed to know why John left so abruptly the other night. And she needed to know why she was risking her conscience to help him.

She pushed the door inward and glanced around. There was no sign of John. The only person behind the bar was a pudgy albino with straggly blond hair, a t-shirt barely concealing a stomach that spilled over his jeans like pancake batter. She set her coat on a hanger and took a stool, hoping John might be on a break or in the bathroom. The bartender didn't pay her any mind, just kept patting his belly as though the contact alone might melt off the flab.

“Ex
cuse
me,” Esther said, after rapping on the bar and playing with her hair had garnered no attention. He came over, seemingly irked that she'd interrupted his daydream of one day appearing in an ad for Gold's Gym.

“Brian,” came his surly response. Esther leaned forward.

“Huh?”

“My name's Brian. You don't have to say 'excuse me'. You know how many drinks you'll get yelling 'excuse me' at a bartender in a packed house?” Making sure her eyes weren't deceiving her, Esther surveyed the bar. She counted a total of six people, only four of them at the counter.

“Sorry, excuse me
Brian
,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Can I have a whiskey sour, or is that too much trouble?” He disdainfully made the drink and clapped it down in front of her, then went back to feeling his stomach. She took a sip and glanced toward the bathrooms. She noticed Brian tapping the wood in front of her.

“Yes?”

“What, you think you drink for free around here?” She shook her head in disbelief, wondering how an owner could hire a bartender as likable as John and another who treated customers with disgust usually reserved for telemarketers. “That'll be five.” She put the bills on the table, then dug a quarter from her purse and left it on top. A suitable tip.

“Excuse me,
Brian.
Can I ask you a question?” He looked up, continued the manual ironing job, and raised his eyebrows. “Is John Gillis on tonight?”

“Nope, he's off this week.”

“Off? The whole week?”

“Yeah, the whole week. Artie, he's the owner, he asked me to fill in since John jetted last night without telling him. He told John to stay home, sleep it off and come back in a week if he still wanted to work here.”

“So he's suspended from bartending?”

“I suppose that's one way of looking at it.”

“I thought that kind of stuff only happened to athletes and cops.” Brian looked up at her and smiled.

“Lady, you can get suspended from anything if you fuck up bad enough.”

P
aul felt like sprinting down Seventh Avenue, but decided to give his aching legs a rest. Still sweating from the jog and carrying a light load in his briefcase, for the first time in ages Paul Shrader felt on top of the world. He had no papers to grade, no tests to score, plus he'd sparked an idea for a short story he could, if finished on time, submit to his agent.

His agent.

A word that had once seemed so implausible that it had lost all meaning, yet now rang in his ears like sonorous church bells.

I have an agent
.

When he first started writing nine years ago, Paul Shrader had no idea that writers even
had
agents. Agents represented movie stars. They helped Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts sort through thousands of scripts to decide which would be their next blockbuster. They didn't work for the people who wrote about worlds that movie stars might inhabit. The ones whose images existed on paper, hoping the telepathy they'd developed with the reader was strong enough to create a universe more intoxicating than anything they could see on the silver screen.

He hadn't been expecting it, especially after years of sending queries that were rejected with scrawny notes, sometimes handwritten though usually not, explaining that his material just wasn't right. He knew he wrote good stuff—his publication credits told him that—but selling short stories wasn't something you could make a living on in the crowded market of testosterone-drenched blockbusters.

The agent who had contacted him was from the recently established Slocumb Smith Literary Management. She sounded young on the phone, a hint of uncertainty in her tinny voice. Her name was Carol Joyce and she wasn't even listed in his copy of
Writers Market
. Researching further, Paul learned she was married to the editor of a literary magazine that had published one of his stories. Apparently they kept his contact info on file. She had good credentials—B.A. from Princeton, MFA from Syracuse—and impressed Paul with her eagerness.

Trade magazines were fantastic, but merely a steppingstone to fame. They were the minor leagues, a medium to polish your skills until you were ready for a call-up to the big leagues. But how much seasoning did he need? In the beginning Paul figured he'd publish a few shorts to gain credibility, then when he was ready to put something substantial together he'd be established to the point where his name might mean something. But if he
really
wanted to attract attention, not to mention raise the odds of a big payday, he needed one of two things: a novel, or enough good short stories to warrant publishing a collection.

The day after her initial call, he Fed-Exed Carol ten stories and his curriculum vitae. He received a call back a week later saying, and a contract was in the mail the next day. Due to the tremendous success of another compilation by a writer named Preston Keith—one of the stories had recently been optioned by Brad Pitt—new collections were highly sought after. Every house, Carol said, was looking for the next Preston Keith.

He took his time reading the contract, sipping a glass of scotch while he scrutinized the details. Standard agreements; 15% of earnings, termination clause, 20% of foreign sales. It sounded great. He had no problem giving up 15% of his earnings on a book contract. Hell, he'd be making 85% more than what he was earning now. And royalties! To think he could be earning royalties, like he was Quincy Jones or something. He'd already begun coordinating a wardrobe for his tour.

He trudged up the steps, his muscles aching, and lurched inside the apartment. Silence met his ears. John's door was closed. An empty beer bottle sat on the coffee table but the house was otherwise spotless. Since the suspension, Paul had expected John to either go insane with boredom and spend hundreds of dollars on movie rentals and junk food, or simply morph into a couch potato (although this probably incorporated much of the first scenario as well). Instead, Paul came home every night to a closed door and the faint sound of typing emanating through the walls like Morse code in a P.O.W. camp.

Since their schedules hadn't overlapped in years, it was entirely possible John's writing had gone unnoticed for a spell. Despite his curiosity, Paul hadn't asked about it. He knew firsthand that a writer needed privacy to thrive. If John wanted his opinion, he'd ask for it. But shit, how could he
not
be curious?

As far as Paul knew, John had never written anything not assigned by a professor, and his taste in literature was an enigma. Paul would spend
hours
browsing the racks for books by unknown (and in his opinion, unappreciated) authors who might profit from the sale of one more copy, knowing it could be him one day needing that extra dollar.

Still, he had to give John credit. It took a lot to sit down and really
write
. Paul wasn't an author who, due to some prenatal cognition, knew he was born to write. To him, it was all hard work and practice. He didn't even
read
much until college, when he would plop down on his bed with a novel every now and then just to escape the drudgery of 1,000 page textbooks about sea snails and tectonic plate shifts.

Yet as he read more, an amazing thing happened. Not only did Paul find himself enraptured by the fabulous tales, he began to realize that he, Paul Shrader, was actually capable of
writing
stories as well.

The more he wrote, the more Paul's grades dropped. He neglected his schoolbooks for novels, ditching his assigned readings and buying paperbacks by the truckload at the campus bookstore. As far as he was concerned, they were a better investment. A six-dollar five hundred page novel would last a whole week, whereas the thinnest textbooks would set him back thirty or forty and rarely be opened.

He remembered when his first story was accepted by the college literary zine, sitting in the student lounge with a fifth of vodka tucked under his fleece, the after party where he met—and left with—a grad student named Michelle who stole the ounce of weed he kept in the closet. As he slept that night, Paul dreamed of people waiting in long lines, just for a glimpse of him, their idol. Nubile young women waiting in hot anticipation, passing him lipstick-smeared phone numbers and coded hotel room keys. But when it came time to write a follow-up story, his mind was blank.

He stayed up all hours of the night wracking his brain without a single word emerging. Finally, two months after the story's publication, Paul was in the shower singing “Stand by Your Man” (the girl he was dating had butchered it the previous night at a karaoke bar), when a series of visions swam by. He stepped out of the shower, still sopping wet, and proceeded to churn out 15 pages. Three months later the story was on page 47 of the zine and Paul was twelve dollars richer. It was in that moment, sitting naked at his desk, when Paul Shrader knew he could write. His first story wasn't an aberration or merely the product of underutilized imagination. Finally he'd learned to corral his muse.

Maybe that's what happened to John, Paul thought as he removed his sweat-soaked shirt. Maybe his mind was finally freeing itself. Seeing so many joys and sorrows night after night must have made him think about his life, the experiences he was or wasn't having.
Bars must be great places for material
, he thought.
So many stories every night. So many lives wandering in and out.

Paul flexed his aching muscles and ran a hot shower. He let the steam rise, the sweat melting off his body, a thousand worries dripping down the drain. When he got out, John was sitting on the couch reading
Time Out New York
.

“Hey,” he said, marking his place with his finger. “How was school?”

“Got yelled at by a nine-year old. Would've yelled back but his father's a cop. Not much homework tonight so maybe I'll treat myself to Leno. What are your plans?”

John held up the magazine. “I'm thinking about taking in some culture, you know, actually take advantage of this city. You have no
idea
how much shit I haven't seen. Pretty embarrassing considering I've lived here for twenty-eight years. But under every museum they list the good bars in the neighborhood. I think it's an omen.”

“Yeah, sure. An omen.” Paul took a seat on the couch. “So, you getting bored?”

“Sort of, not really I guess. I just spend so much time doing…other things that I just need to get out of the house before I get bed sores.”