About the Author (16 page)

Whatever else happened, I had to get her out of the house
now
. The small pedestal clock on the end table beside Les said that it was almost three. Janet was not due back from school for another hour. But just last month the headmaster had canceled classes after two students died in a car crash, and Janet had come home early. If something like that was to happen today, how would I explain this girl’s presence to Janet?

“I’ll get you the money,” I said. “But the bank closes at three. The earliest I can get the cash is tomorrow morning, when the bank opens at ten. You’ll have it by noon.”

Affecting a great nonchalance, as if she did this kind of thing every day, she shrugged, pushed out her lower lip, and said, “Sounds okay.”

“I’ll bring the money to you. Where are you staying?”

“Nowhere. I just got off the bus and came straight here.”

“All the hotels will be booked,” I said, thinking aloud. “Except a place on the highway right outside New Halcyon—the Pleasant View. I think you’ll feel at home there.”

She shrugged. “Whatever.”

I said I would drive her over to the hotel, now.

“So soon? You haven’t even shown me the house.”

“Come on,” I snapped. “My wife is going to be home soon.”

I regretted it the moment I said it. I saw her small nostrils twitch, as if she had picked up a promising scent.

“I didn’t know you were married,” she said.

“We really have to go. Please.”

“Okay, okay,” she said.

With a great show of patience, she bent and scooped up the pages that I had placed on the coffee table in front of her. She put these in her knapsack, which she then shouldered. She signaled with her head that it was now okay for me to stand. We moved back through the house to the front door. This time she led the way, walking backward, knife blade raised.

The front door stood wide open. She checked that the coast was clear; then we proceeded out to my car, which was parked in front. I opened the back passenger door.

“You’ll have to get in here and stay low,” I said. “I don’t want anyone to see you.”

I expected her to balk at this request. To my amazement and relief, she climbed obediently into the back and hunkered down in the seat, her bare knees up high against the seat in front of her. I slammed the door and walked around to the driver’s side. The innocent afternoon was progressing as normal, unheeding of the strange drama playing itself out on the brow of the hill. I climbed in and started the motor.

“Fuck with me,” her voice issued from behind me, “and I’ll cut your throat.”

We got around the lake without incident. I steered up the golf-course road. Eventually the Pleasant View appeared. I stopped on the scrubby highway shoulder in front of the hotel. I told the girl to wait a moment. A pickup truck was coming from behind us. As it barreled past, I saw farmer Ned Bailey turn and look with fascination at this anomaly: Cal Cunningham’s car, with lights blinking, pulled up on the shoulder. His eyes, bright blue in a beef-red face, briefly met mine. I figured, or rather hoped, that the truck had been traveling too fast for him to notice the girl hiding in my backseat. The truck disappeared over a hump in the highway. I gave her the all-clear.

She got out, then sauntered around to my window. She had put her weapon away. “I’m gonna need some cash,” she said, flicking her hair off her face.

I fished in my pocket and found sixty dollars. I handed her the bills through the window. “That’s all I’ve got on me. But it should see you through until tomorrow.”

She stuffed the money into a pocket of her shorts without a word of thanks. “So you’ll come here with my money?” she asked, leaning in through the window.

“Around noon,” I said. “You’d better register under a different name. How about . . . Sally Monroe?” (I can’t honestly say
why
I suggested this, unless I was thinking, subconsciously, about that pseudonymous night I had spent at the Pleasant View so long before, in another life—a life that was now trying to reclaim me.)

“
Sally Monroe
,” she said slowly, rolling the name around in her mouth as if tasting a chocolate. She brightened. “I like it!”

“Noon,” I repeated, and stepped on the gas.

I simply drove for a while, blindly, the landscape pouring past me like the words of a novel that you automatically pass your eyes over but that your brain utterly fails to register. Easing up on the gas, I adjusted the rearview mirror so I could catch a glimpse of my face. I needed to see myself at this moment, as a substitute for pinching myself to check if I was dreaming. In the narrow mirror, I saw my bulging eyes, my clenched teeth, my mouth distended in a grimace, bubbles of saliva at the corners of my lips, as if I had just been gut-shot.

“Shit,” I hissed. “Shit. Shit. Shit.
Shit
!”

Then I began to calm down. I began to think dreamily, with a certain reassuring warmth, about how I could, with a single twist of the steering wheel, send my car crashing head-on into one of the trees that were flashing by on either side of the road, my head rocketing forward to burst, like a diver’s, through the windshield’s yielding surface, plunging me into eternal blackness, into that region where Stewart’s indefatigable spirit already swam.

But I am, among my other failings, a coward. I did not want to die. And here’s another thing about me: I’m not terribly realistic. In high school, when I used to play chess, I never resigned an obviously lost game, always believing that I could evade checkmate even from an opponent whose greater firepower and stronger position meant certain victory for him. I rarely had a long-term plan or strategy to avoid defeat. Instead I relied on sheer wiliness and reflex, responding to each one of my opponent’s moves with short, sharp, defensive little hops, makeshift blockades, wriggling evasions. Usually I succeeded only in dragging out my demise for another six or seven moves. But sometimes my opponent, growing bored, irritated, or complacent, would be induced to blunder, at which point my men, cowering around their wounded king, would buzz to life, reorganize themselves, gather their strength, and home in for the kill.

Janet got home from work that day at four-thirty. She sensed immediately that something was wrong. Sitting with me in the kitchen, sipping a glass of wine, she interrupted an account of an incident that had occurred at school. Something about a kid who had threatened to punch the assistant headmaster outside the teachers’ common room.

“Honey?” she said suddenly. “You’re a million miles away.”

Startled, I looked up from the table’s swarming surface. I had been thinking about Oscar Wilde and the blackmail he had been subjected to when certain incriminating letters he had written fell into the wrong hands. Like me, Oscar had at first agreed to pay for his blackmailers’ silence. Oscar had come to ruin.

“What is it, Cal?” Janet said. “Is something wrong?”

I apologized and said I was merely preoccupied with my new novel. Janet asked how it was going.

“You know, so far, so good.” In actuality, the novel was dead now, an alien batch of notes that might have been written by a complete stranger.

Later, in the bedroom, while we were getting dressed for the Halberts’ dinner party, Janet laughed and said, “So I understand you’ve started an affair with a young blonde.”

I stopped dead, my pants at half mast. “What do you mean?”

She was standing with her back to me, at the mirror, zipping her long white body into a black party dress. “I ran into Ned Bailey in Ernie’s, and he said he saw you this afternoon outside the Pleasant View. With a girl.”

“
Girl
?” I said, flushing. “Oh! Right. Around three o’clock. I went for a head-clearing drive, and on my way home—on the highway—I saw a hitchhiker. She looked harmless. So I drove her to the hotel.” It was my first lie to Janet (if you don’t count that my entire life was a lie).

Janet turned and walked over to me. “I bet she liked that.” She placed her hands on my shoulders and kissed me on my burning ear. “You know what would be fun?” she whispered. “Making love in our party clothes.”

I don’t think I could have managed it were it not for the fillip of perversity lent by the sight of Janet’s black dress hiked up around her white hips. Even at that, it was a less-than-spectacular performance.

“It’s that girl,” Janet said, smiling, as she worked her dress back down over her thighs. “She tired you out.”

We used my car to drive over to the party.

Jeremy Halbert, a history teacher at Janet’s school, had, in a previous incarnation, been an architect in Arizona. When settling in New Halcyon some years back, he had built his own house, a glass-fronted A-frame that jutted from the scrub and weeds along a secluded stretch of the Sylvan River some half a mile from the center of town. His wife, Laura, who wrote articles free-lance for a highbrow film magazine, had outfitted the interior with an array of midcentury furniture: plastic pedestal chairs and tables, womby recliners, and spidery floor lamps with conical metal shades, all straight out of
The Jetsons
. The Halberts themselves, pushing sixty, were aging modernist hipsters with an aura of big-city sophistication, he in his black turtlenecks and white goatee, she in her close-fitting, sleeveless cocktail dresses and heels.

Several cars were already parked in the driveway when we arrived. We joined the couples, all teachers at Janet’s school, who had assembled on the balcony on the front of the house. Ordinarily I enjoyed these get-togethers with Janet’s colleagues—mellowing scholars and artists who had opted out of fast-track academic and creative careers for the relative peace of private-school teaching in rural Vermont. But on that particular evening, I was in no mood for a party; I moved through the five or six couples on the Halberts’ balcony in grim silence, my brain seething with thoughts of Les. My preoccupation showed. Again and again, I was asked if
everything was okay with me
. I explained my distracted mood by blaming it on difficulties with my new novel.

At around eight, we shuffled through the sliding glass doors and settled down at the Halberts’ dinner table, a wood plank perched atop a complicated system of tubular struts. Through the glass front wall, the bendy river, mirror-still, reflected the neon blue of the fading evening sky.
She’s out there
, my brain told me in an urgent whisper.
She’s out there
!

Conversation turned to the subject of the Halberts’ upcoming trip to Rome. Jeremy planned to make sketches of the cathedrals and churches. I heard barely a word, as I had now begun to puzzle out
how
exactly to extract the blackmail money from the bank so that Janet would not find out about it, and also so as not to raise the suspicions of the people at the bank. Ideally, I would get the money from my savings account in New York City, where cash withdrawals of twenty-five thousand dollars might be supposed to be an everyday occurrence. But I didn’t have the time to fly to New York. I wanted the girl out of my life immediately. I would have to invent a plausible excuse for why I needed to withdraw twenty-five G’s from the bank in New Halcyon. But what excuse?

My mind, veering from this conundrum, settled for a moment on the voice to the left of me, that of Jim Thorne, a balding, hawk-nosed English teacher and jogging enthusiast who was entertaining the company with a story about an end-of-term essay he had just graded, in which the hapless tenth-grade student, a certain Naomi Chaucer, had plagiarized not only every word of a published article, but also the italicized reprint information at the bottom of the page of her sourcebook.

“At first I couldn’t figure out how she could be so dumb,” Thorne was saying in his plummy, condescending tones. “I mean, Naomi’s no genius, but she’s not stupid enough to type a bunch of publishing mumbo-jumbo into an essay about Hamlet. I asked her about it. She finally admitted that she used one of those hand scanners and just vacuumed up the article straight into her computer. Printed it out without giving it a once-over. Incredible, huh? I couldn’t resist: I gave her a B-plus.
And
a talking-to.”

When the general laughter had subsided, Jeremy Halbert dabbed at his goatee with a black napkin, then said that high school students were not the only scribblers who succumbed to the lure of plagiarism.

“Actually,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about writing a little paper on literary frauds and hoaxes. You’ve got Shakespeare himself fending off the shade of Francis Bacon. And then of course there’s Willy, who published his wife’s—Colette’s—early novels under his own name. There are also many fine contemporary examples. Like that case reported in the
Times
a while back—fellow wrote a thriller called
Just Killing Time
, a first novel. Sold it to Simon and Schuster for millions on the strength of some blurbs written by John le Carré and Joseph Wambaugh. Problem was, le Carré and Wambaugh didn’t write them. Then there’s Jacob Epstein.
His
first novel,
Wild Oats
, had long passages lifted whole from Martin Amis’s debut,
The Rachel Papers
. Caused a bit more than the usual fuss, given the pedigree of both novelists: Martin, son of Kingsley, and Jacob, son of a father who was a top executive at Random House and a mother who was an editor at the
New York Review of Books
.”

“You’d think with connections like
that
,” Thorne said, “he could have gotten published the old-fashioned way—by writing his own book.”

“We had a sad case up in Canada,” offered Lucy Garfield, a transplanted Torontonian who taught social studies. “This really well respected journalist—Ken Adachi?—got caught for copying an article, almost word-for-word, from
Time
magazine.”

“I hope he was fired,” sniffed Thorne.

“Worse,” Tracy said. “He killed himself.”

Thorne snorted.

“If I ever do write that essay,” Jeremy resumed, “I’ll definitely explore the saga of that young journalist who was caught making up several of his stories. Fellow named Steven Glass. Wrote for some of the biggest magazines in New York and Washington. Reportedly faked his research notes to keep the fact checkers happy. When his editors got suspicious, he allegedly had his own brother pose as one of his ‘sources’ and even went to the trouble of creating a Web page for a phony company he’d invented.”