The End of the Book (19 page)

“These days the only readers of so-called literary fiction are other writers: faculty and students, the wandering herd of MFA graduates,” I said. “A ‘writer's writer' used to be the name of a critical darling the masses ignored. Now the critics have disappeared along with the book reviews, the masses don't read, and a ‘writer's writer' is anyone fool enough to spend three, five, forty years type-type-typing into the void.”

“So you're a fool?” Lucy asked.

“The title of my thesis was
A Brief History of the Fool
. Now I prefer the term
grotesque
.”

“I've seen more grotesque than you,” she said.

“Like Edgar Allan Poe over there. I hope the food isn't as bad as that mural.”

She relented a little at that. “I wouldn't count on it.”

“And why did we come here again?” I asked.

“I'll do anything to support books.”

My salad was mostly candied walnuts, my iced tea undrinkably sweet. When Lucy asked how lunch was, I said I'd met my monthly sugar quota.

“Complaining about sugar is anti-American. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

I was grateful that Lucy had lightened the mood, glad to move beyond our little back and forth over Imego. But I felt I owed it to her, or perhaps to myself, to say how I really felt about my job. “I know I sounded like I was defending the Library Project,” I began. “I've been working there for five years, so I guess I'm programmed to take the company line. You know Imego's motto:
Remember what your mother told you
. Well, I don't know many mothers who would tell their children to take over the world. And though I'm pretty sure the founders and current leadership are not capitalist wolves but true believers in making information universally available, I do worry what would happen if their stocks crashed and survival depended on the bottom line.”

I acknowledged other concerns people had about my employer: privacy, censorship, control of information. These were legitimate fears, which I shared. But mostly I wanted to say that I wasn't happy there, and would leave if I could. “Though not in this economy,” I told her. “I owe quite a bit of money for my MFA.” I moved swiftly past the subject, since I wasn't about to revisit the debt I owed Lucy. I didn't so much as look up for her reaction. “Like everyone else these days, I'm kind of stuck,” I said. “But I'm still working on that novel.” I don't know why I kept telling her that I had a book under way.

“When do you write?” Lucy asked.

“Nights,” I lied. “My wife is rarely home.”

This hung in the air while the waiter returned to see if we were interested in dessert. Lucy suppressed a smile, and we both declined.

“I've been married little over a year,” I continued. “Though we work at the same place we hardly see each other. And now Dhara decided to apply for a position at Imegoland. I guess she wants to Rollerblade to work.”

“In California?” Lucy asked.

“I don't want to move there.” I told her about my father, the heart-failure brochure, how I worried that he'd not survive another uprooting. I said Chicago was home; nowhere else felt as real to me. “Dhara can't see where I'm coming from. I know it's terrible, but I hope she doesn't get the job.”

Lucy wasn't saying much, nor was she prompting me, so I filled the space with far-too-candid talk. I knew it was a betrayal, and I had to worry I was becoming like my father or one of those grotesques he talked about, cut off from the world. It shouldn't have been that way. I'd had my circle of friends in college, but the ones who'd come to Chicago had moved to the suburbs and nearly all had kids by now. I had a job, but worked on the margins and spent so much of my time on the road. I had a family, sickly, scattered, or gone. I had a wife. Yet in some fundamental way I was alone, and here was Lucy, across the table, hearing me out.

We paid the check, and when we stepped onto the sidewalk, I asked, “Where do you live?”

She pointed down the block in the direction of the El, then we walked along talking about the neighborhood. Lucy said she'd thought about living in Wicker Park, Bucktown, Ukrainian Village. “But those places have become as bougie as Lincoln Park. I don't care if you've got tattoos covering 80 percent of your body and the Sex Pistols blasting on the stereo, you're still charging five dollars for a cupcake,” she said. “I'm running out of years to be cool, so I might as well live here.”

When we got to her street, a couple blocks past Armitage Station, she put out her arms and I leaned in for a quick embrace. “I'd show you my apartment, but it looks like something out of Doctorow's new novel.”

I was relieved she hadn't invited me to her place. I was married. I loved my wife. What did I have to complain about? The thought that Lucy and I could just be old friends seemed much more appealing at that moment than embarking on a misadventure that couldn't possibly end well. “I like Doctorow. What's the book?” I asked.

“It's not out yet, but I scored a galley in a trade. It's called
Homer & Langley
, about famous hoarders in New York.”

“The Collyer brothers,” I said. “I know that story all too well.”

“Your father?”

“The very one.” As we stood there on the corner of Armitage and Dayton I told her about the storage locker in Little Italy and how over the course of three months it had gone from full to nearly empty. I wanted to say I'd staked my father out, followed him across town, but I worried she would think I'd gone off the deep end.

“How sick is he?” she asked.

I told her about stages A through D, but said I didn't know. And, like Dhara, she urged me to confront him, once and for all.

“I don't mean to sound alarms,” she said, “but I had a friend in college whose father killed himself—left the car running in the garage—and during the year or so beforehand he'd been casting off everything he owned, taking out insurance, getting his house in order. You used to complain all the time about your dad, but you also worried about him. Do you think—?”

“No,” I said. Then, “I don't know.” Whenever the thought had crossed my mind that he might be suicidal I had pushed it away. He didn't seem to have given up. He still had plenty of wit and spleen. He'd always been more angry than depressed. “He's pushing eighty. Isn't he too old?”

“I thought rates were higher at that age,” Lucy said. “People take their own lives to escape the pain.”

I recalled that December morning, pounding on my father's door, climbing the ladder to the second-story window, the sense of panic over what I might find.

I thanked Lucy for listening and for the good advice. She apologized on behalf of Ravenous Books & Café, and we laughed, making a vague plan to see each other again.

That night, I brought my father a grilled chicken salad from the ground-floor restaurant, and we ate dinner in front of his small TV while watching the Cubs play their third game of the season. “Is it my imagination, or have you tidied up?” I asked. His papers were in a small stack on his desk, the settees and chairs free of books.

“Are you going to watch the game or chitchat?” He turned up the volume.

“It's the top of the third, and we're up eight runs. This hardly qualifies as crunch time,” I said. “I was merely admiring the apartment.”

He labored to his feet and fixed himself another drink, and we spoke only of baseball until the end of the game, which the Cubs won, 11–6. “Could be our year,” I said. The team had won the NL Central two years in a row, and some were predicting World Series.

“Ha!” he laughed, and continued laughing until he fell into a fit of coughs.

The next morning, at the usual hour, I pulled the Prius around and waited for my father to exit the garage. He was twenty minutes late, and instead of going into the Loop on State, he headed north, up the Magnificent Mile. He turned left on Walton and parked at the curb just beyond the Newberry Library. He got out, paid at the meter, slid the ticket onto the dashboard, then went inside. A minute later a security guard came out front with him and helped bring a small box back up the steps and into the building. I wondered what was in that box. Manuscripts? Letters? Books? My father's novel? Perhaps he was delivering it to the curator of the Sherwood Anderson Collection for a read-through.

This time I waited for nearly two hours, so long that at one point I got out of my car and sat on a bench across the street in Washington Square Park. I called into the office to let my team know I'd be working from home that morning, and I made a round of calls to university librarians.

When my father finally returned, he was trailing the same security guard, who once again helped with the box. Then he took off, up LaSalle, along the margins of the Gold Coast, to North Avenue, where he swung a left at a McDonald's. From across the street I watched him grab a book from the passenger seat and go inside. He put in his order, then shuffled with a tray to a window booth. He ate an oozing cheeseburger, just what his heart needed, while flipping the pages of the book. When he had dumped his tray he returned to the car, sipping at a drink through a straw, and continued along North to Wells Street and the stretch of shops and restaurants in Old Town. He pulled over and parked under an awning marked “CRBC.” A lean, eager man with bifocals that hung on a chain from his neck rushed out to help him with the box, and they went inside.

CRBC. I'd seen the letters before, etched on the boxes in the storage cage. I did another search on my iPhone. Citizens Republic Bankcorp? Cross Roads Baptist Church? Cannery Row Brewing Company? I added the word “Chicago” to the search, and the first page to come up was Chicago Rare Book Company. An hour passed, and then another, until I couldn't avoid turning around and heading back to work. I wished I had looked in those CRBC boxes to see what was there when I'd had a chance.

A big shipment—sixty thousand books—arrived, with little notice, from the University of Michigan, so I spent the rest of the week and well into the following one working Dhara-like hours at the West Town warehouse. I had meant to talk to my father, but it wasn't until the end of April that work slowed again and I got back into the routine of delivering his lunch.

To my surprise he was there that first afternoon, then the second and the third, until, finally, I asked, “What happened to your walks?”

“Oh, I gave those up months ago. I found that driving is less stressful on the skeleton.”

“I'm sure your doctor would prefer it if you got your legs moving,” I ventured.

“What do doctors know?”

We sat down to eat at his dinette table, and he even managed not to complain about the food. He was good for a
thank you
maybe once a month, and this was one of those days. We were dispatching the flavorless turkey wraps I'd picked up in a rush from a coffee chain when my father asked, out of the blue, “Are you still writing?”

I could remember only a few times this subject had come up. It was my second year of graduate school before I summoned the nerve to tell him I was in a writing program, and just as I'd expected he called it a waste of time.
These salons are a racket. They're creating a generation of dilettantes. Did Shakespeare get an MFA? Cervantes? George Eliot? Hemingway and Faulkner got their MFAs by reading Sherwood Anderson. That's all the degree is, a jargoned-up book club. If you want to be a writer, yes, you have to read your eyes bloodshot. But you also need a rare talent and a host of demons driving you
.

“I'm too busy at work,” I said now. “When I get home I don't have the energy.”

“It's not easy, is it?” And then, as if to distance himself, he added, “I can only imagine—sitting at a desk day after day with nothing to draw on but dreams.” After a few bites, he put his wrap down and dropped his napkin onto his plate. “Tell me about what you've written?” he asked.

I was hesitant to get into it, but I couldn't remember ever seeing him quite this benign. I wondered if something was going on with his heart, a new medication, a change in dosage, lack of oxygen to the brain. He wasn't so much out of it, though, as uncharacteristically placid. So I told him about
A Brief History of the Fool
, first in the most abbreviated, dismissive way, but he kept prompting me, asking more questions, until I found myself describing the stories at length, talking about the characters—a bartender, an amateur astronomer, a diver after shipwrecks around the Great Lakes—and the curious features of the town, which as I talked about it sounded too much like Bloomington. I admitted this to my father, but he said, “Sounds more like
Winesburg
to me. But don't worry; you're in good company. In all of American literature of the past hundred years, no book has had a greater influence. Not
Gatsby, Catcher
, or
Invisible Man
. The more you read the more you'll see it's true.”

I cleared the table and was getting ready to go back to work when my father said, “I'd be happy to read your book.” He got up and stood by the sliding doors to the balcony, and with his back turned added, “I wouldn't be surprised if it was good.”

Shaken perhaps by the unheard-of event of a compliment from my father, I declined right away. “Thanks for the offer, but I haven't looked at that book in years. If
I
have to avert my eyes, I couldn't possibly inflict it on you.”

“As you wish.” He shrugged.

I felt like I'd let him down, and I wanted to give him something—if not the abandoned book, at least a thought or two I'd been keeping to myself. So I told him for the first time that I didn't like my job, that I had problems with Imego, that I wished I could get a stretch of unfettered time to finish a book. “But I'm in no position to quit, and even if I were, I probably don't have the guts.”