Shriver (15 page)

Nixon abruptly turned right, just past a frozen custard stand shaped like a giant ice cream cone. Two-story brick buildings lined the town's Main Street, clothing stores and Laundromats and insurance offices topped by apartments with large, old-fashioned windows.

“This is downtown,” Nixon said. “That's where we had dinner last night.” He pointed out Slander's Restaurant. “Oh my God.”

Emerging from the Church of Pornocology was T. Wätzczesnam, his enormous cowboy hat tilted downward to shield his eyes. The cowboy glanced up just as the jeep came up alongside him, as if he had recognized its distinctive rattle.

“What luck!” he hollered. “Where are you boys headed?”

Edsel Nixon braked at the curb. “I'm just showing Mr. Shriver around town.”

“Great!” The cowboy, with surprising dexterity, bounded into the backseat. “I suppose you're wondering what I was doing in that den of questionable repute.”

“It's none of my business,” Nixon said as he steered into the slow flow of traffic.

“ ‘I am sure no other civilization, not even the Romans,' ” the professor quoted in a stentorian manner, “ ‘has showed such a vast proportion of ignominious and degraded nudity, and ugly, squalid dirty sex. Because,' Nixon, ‘no other civilization has driven sex into the underworld, and nudity to the WC.' ”

“Is that a quote, sir, or is that your own opinion?”

“Both, my ignorant friend. Both.”

“Was it Hugh Hefner?”

“Mr. David Herbert Lawrence, you imbecile!”

“Sorry, sir. And how
was
your visit to the underworld?”

“Illuminating.”

“Pull over here, will you?” Shriver said.

“Ah, Shriver”—the cowboy smiled—“you are a mind reader.”

In Big Chief's Liquorarium, Shriver and Wätzczesnam picked out a pint of whiskey each. At the counter, Shriver realized he'd left his wallet in his damp suit coat
and
his per diem money at the hotel.

“Mr. Nixon, can I trouble you for a loan of a few dollars? I seem to have misplaced my wallet.”

“Of course.”

Edsel dug into his pocket and pulled out some crumpled bills. Big Chief grunted thanks and slid the bottle into a brown paper bag.

Half an hour later, the three men sat on the gently sloping banks of the aptly named Black River, watching the murky water rush by. Nearby stood a cluster of trees, their narrow trunks marked by past floods. Shriver and T. took occasional swigs from their bottles while Nixon drank from a can of warm root beer.

“I've always thought it was strange that the river flowed north,” Nixon said as a tree limb floated by.

“So, Shriver,” Wätzczesnam said, ignoring his student, “have you been interrogated by our diminutive friend in red?”

“I have.”

“Your observations?”

“He strikes me as determined.”

“Is he a midget or a dwarf?” Nixon asked.

“I believe he is merely stunted,” the cowboy answered. “And for your information, a midget
is
a dwarf, only with more proportional features. But then the term ‘midget' is out of favor in these dreary, overly sensitive times.”

“How do you know all that?”

“I know all, Mr. Nixon. And do not forget it.”

During this exchange, Shriver thought he saw something moving among the nearby trees, a blur of black caught out of the corner of his eye. But when he turned to look, nothing was there. Was he suffering a stroke? Hallucinating? Did he miss Mr. B. so much that he imagined him around every corner?

“Any idea about what happened to our friend Ms. Smithee?” Wätzczesnam asked.

“Maybe she just ran away from Ms. Labio,” Shriver said.

“Ah, yes. I wouldn't blame her.”

A long-legged mosquito landed on Shriver's hand. He smacked it hard and peeled the corpse from his skin.

“That was a male,” the cowboy said.

“A male?”

“Only the
female
mosquito bites.”

“How can you tell the difference?”

“The males have those long legs. They feed off plants. It's just the ladies you have to be careful of. Words to live by, eh, Shriver?”

“I suppose you're right, T.”

“ ‘Destructive, damnable, deceitful woman!' ”

“Was that Otway, Professor?” Edsel Nixon asked.

“Indeed it was.”

“I take it you're not a married man, T.?” Shriver asked, emboldened by the whiskey.

The cowboy pushed the lip of his hat back and sighed. Edsel Nixon picked up a stick and tossed it at the river.

“Don't get me wrong, Shriver, I'd love nothing more than to give it a shot, but I'm afraid it's not in the cards for this decrepit old cowhand.”

T. gazed at the black water gliding silently by. Shriver seemed to have strummed a deep chord in the man.

“No,” T. said, “I long ago came to the conclusion that to be a writer—a true writer—one must sacrifice such conventional comforts as marriage and family. How can you create whole worlds, living and breathing characters—how can you construct plots that pulse with universal truth—and at the same time maintain any kind of meaningful relationship with another person? Both paths demand everything from you. What self-respecting woman would tolerate a man who is chained to his desk for days on end, concocting an alternate reality in a fevered state that has no room for cuddling or cozy chats over dinner? And what novel or story or poem will forgive a man for setting it aside just to attend a dinner party or a piano recital? No! You'd get pulled apart like saltwater taffy, and then neither the art nor the marriage succeeds. You must pick one or the other, Shriver. But then I needn't tell you that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it's pretty well-known that your wife . . . Well, it didn't work out, did it?”

“That's well-known?”

“Come, come, old man. You may have crawled into a cave, but you don't write a novel like that without some attention being paid to your sex life.”

So the real Shriver was divorced too, Shriver thought. Not so surprising, really, especially given Wätzczesnam's description of a writer's marriage.

“Then again,” T. continued, “from that ring on your finger, I see you may have found someone else. Perhaps that's why you haven't written in so long. Tell us: have you been going to the ballet and Little League games?”

“Not at all,” Shriver said, covering his wedding band. “I just haven't—”

“You were the real McCoy, Shriver. Few men have written with such fury and precision. I imagine your pen on fire. What doused the flame, if not a woman?”

Shriver did not know what had doused the real Shriver's flame any more than he knew what had doused his own. He hadn't thought of those days in a long time, and when he did he saw only the water mark above his bed—all other images and memories dissolved.

Again, he noticed a blur of black over near the trees. Perhaps some kind of animal, a beaver or a river rat, had clambered up from the water. He got to his feet and stretched. This sudden alteration in perspective gave him a different angle on the trees, and he was able now to see a figure dressed in black running in the opposite direction.

“Did you see that, Edsel?”

“See what, sir?”

Another mosquito, this one more diminutive, landed on Shriver's hand. He slapped it away.

“Shriver!”

Jack Blunt ran up to him in the lobby outside the Union ballroom, his eyes bulging with excitement.

“I just spoke to your Mr. Cheadem!” He was so animated that his peltlike toupee had slipped a bit, exposing the pink skin above his left ear.

“Who?”

“Your agent!”

Shriver's stomach went icy cold.

“He says you two haven't communicated in years. He had no idea you were even here until he saw my article.”

“He saw the photograph?”

“All he does anymore is deposit your royalty payments, which I imagine are substantial.”

If anyone's breath at the conference reeked more of alcohol than Shriver's own, it was Jack Blunt's. Shriver could have done with a drink himself right about now.

“Anyway,” the reporter continued, “all is not lost. He'll be here tomorrow in time for your reading.”

“What?!”

“This is going to be one hell of a story!” Blunt said as he strutted off.

Shriver made his way to the restroom and into a stall, where he sat on the toilet and gulped down a mouthful of whiskey.
There was no hope now of getting through this thing intact. The genuine Shriver's agent would expose him as a fraud, and he would have to leave town with his head hanging low. There was nothing to do now but go straight to Simone and confess.

He took another deep gulp, went to the mirror, and stared at himself. “Imposter,” he said. Then he went out to the ballroom.

Simone stood alone at the front of the room. He had to tell her. Perhaps his honesty would provide him with a sliver of honor in her eyes. But just as Shriver neared her, a young woman—apparently a graduate student—mounted the steps to the dais. Simone saw Shriver coming and placed a finger to her lips, warning him to be silent. Meanwhile, T. Wätzczesnam and Edsel Nixon waved to him from the third row.

“ ‘Stately, kindly, lordly friend / Condescend / Here to sit by me.' ”

“Swinburne,” came Edsel Nixon's whispered response.

Shriver tiptoed up the aisle and squeezed in between T. and Nixon just as the young woman onstage ostentatiously coughed into the microphone. Simone moved to her usual seat in the front, off to the side. Rarely raising her head from the sheet of paper from which she read, the graduate student began her introduction with a history of her own love of literature—“of
words
,” as she put it—and then moved on to her studies here at the college. Prior to coming here, she said, she had never written anything remotely creative, but under the tutelage of various professors—all of whom she named, including Simone—she had blossomed into a person who could hardly stop herself from writing. She wrote from the moment she woke up to the moment she went to sleep. She wrote on notepads, on napkins, in the margins of newspapers and books; she wrote during classes when she was supposed
to be listening; she wrote during movies. One time, short of any paper at all, she wrote on the walls of her apartment. She was even writing right now, as she spoke, she said, though it was all in her head. (My goodness, Shriver thought—if that's the dedication required of an author, no wonder they're all so eccentric!) Finally, after ten minutes of talking about herself, the student found her way to the person she was introducing and briefly mentioned that the author was “probably” the same kind of writer as she—“someone who has never stopped, someone born to write, a bottomless well of creativity. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Zebra Amphetamine.”

The writer's long, metallic earrings swayed with each step up the stairs to the stage. She wore a straight knee-length dress that clung to her thin frame as she walked, as if it were pressed there by a strong wind. After the applause had died down she stood silently at the podium for a moment, her face composed into a serious expression.

Shriver glanced over at Simone, who watched Ms. Amphetamine intently, then something caught his eye: a flash of color over by the entrance. It was Krampus in his electric-red suit coat. The detective appeared to be waving at him, his short arm flapping up and down. Shriver pointed at his own chest and mouthed,
Me?
The detective nodded vigorously and motioned for him to come out to the lobby.

Meanwhile, Ms. Amphetamine shuffled some papers on the podium, preparing to launch into her reading. But when Shriver stood and started toward the door, the writer paused to watch him make his way across the ballroom. Everyone else seemed to be watching as well. The room went completely silent except for the sound of his footsteps and someone's nervous cough. Shriver stooped his shoulders, as if he could make himself less visible, but every eye was on him. He turned
back to see Zebra Amphetamine charting his progress. He shrugged and pointed to the doorway, trying to communicate to her that he had been summoned away. Unfortunately, Detective Krampus could not verify this fact, having retreated into the lobby. Shriver continued walking for what seemed like hours, the doorway always several steps away, the echoes of his footsteps growing louder and louder. He glanced over toward Simone, who observed him with an expression of disenchantment. But what could he do? He'd been beckoned by a police official! He felt sweat roll down his spine and pool at the top of his underwear. Then he remembered that his back pocket was bulging with the pint of whiskey, the bottle's neck exposed to all. He could almost feel Simone's eyes on his right buttock, her suspicion that he was a hedonistic drunkard, like all the others, confirmed by what she saw there. Near the ballroom door, along with several other people who had been unable to find a vacant seat, stood the pigtailed Cassandra, who also looked disappointed, her arms folded across her chest like a judge about to pronounce a sentence. It was as if masks had been handed out, there were so many long faces in the room. He was failing everyone today. But then, from her place in an aisle seat near the door, Delta Malarkey-Jones smiled and gave a little wave with the corn dog in her hand. Thank God she remained on his side. Not that it mattered. The real Shriver's agent would be here tomorrow to unmask him. Perhaps he should just keep walking, not even confess to Simone. He could step outside, hail a cab, ride straight to the airport, and take the next flight out of here. As he neared the doorway, he saw that damn photograph flashing across the large screen on the back wall. There sat the real Shriver, in front of those curtains, smiling contentedly. In a flash, he recalled a long-ago birthday. He had been drinking champagne with his wife and
some friends. She had drawn the curtains against the glare of the afternoon sun. He remembered how utterly satisfied he had felt that day. Recently married, he had friends, he felt weightless from the champagne, he smelled the aroma of curried vegetables coming from the kitchen, jazz played on the stereo. It was one of those extraordinary rare times when he felt happy without dilution, as if there were nothing wrong anywhere in the world and never would be. But that was so long ago, it might as well have been a dream.