The Fugitives (14 page)

“You do that,” the other boy said, bending low with the turkey baster. I moved on, toward home.

11

T
HAT
afternoon I spoke on the phone with Monte Arlecchino. Monte had his assistant, a boy named Shepard, place his calls for him. Their special, ritualized protocol always made me feel, once Shepard had gotten hold of me and then called Monte to the line, as if I were being presented to the Queen.

“Monte, I have Alexander Mulligan the Third in Cherry City on the line. Sandy, Monte is waiting.”

My name’s suffix tends to make me cringe when I hear it spoken aloud. For twenty-seven years, I used it only on official forms. When, after graduation, I saw the Roman numerals trailing behind my name on my college diploma, I contemplated it miserably, as if some blighting error had been lettered onto the document. It was Monte who’d seized on what I’d always viewed as an affectation, as a way to distinguish me when my first book was due to come out. He came on the line.

“Sandy. I want to let you know up front that there’s no truth to the rumor that I’ve been sleeping on the couch in my office.”

“I hadn’t heard that.”

“It’s been all over the place.”

“It hasn’t been here.”

“
Ogler
has been doing an item per day on it. At twelve thirteen p.m. someone calling herself Thalia Halstead posted the alleged dimensions of the couch.”

“How big is it?”

“Seven feet long by three feet wide, allegedly. I will point out that even if that were the case it wouldn’t represent the actual usable area of the couch.”

“Still, a generous couch.”

“There are cushions, armrests, and so on, that aren’t taken into account.”

“The armrests are for the flying monkeys to perch on.”

“Bitch. As if this weren’t a difficult enough time right now. The novel is dead, books are dying, publishing is thrashing on the deck.”

“There’s always e-books.”

“
E
-books? We can’t sell
audio
books. That’s where we find ourselves today: we can’t even sell books that read themselves. I feel like I’m presiding over the beginning of the next ice age. All I have to do is fire the starter’s pistol—sign another dumb memoir, capitulate to the insane demands of another prima donna—and the glaciers begin to move on Manhattan. Everything crushed beneath millions of tons of frozen zilch—every book, every painting, every symphony, every decent restaurant. But what can we do, really? Forty million people watch an Internet video of Darius the Chimp peeling an orange. It’s quick, it’s cute, it’s free. I’m supposed to like it, on some reluctant level I
do
like it, but when I lie awake at night, which I’ll reemphasize I’m doing in my own apartment, I try to figure out: is this some kind of vandalizing, Dada riposte to art? These people are jungle insurgents and we’re fighting in columns, with muskets.”

“What it is is a vandalizing, Dada riposte to commerce. You have to go to the
Times Book Review
if you want serious vandalism directed against art.”

“Why aren’t you more worried about this?”

“When they start speculating aloud whether if you chain forty million Shakespeares to forty million oranges will they eventually come up with the collected works of Darius the Chimp, I’ll start worrying.”

“Oh, so you’ll let me worry about it. Terrific. Take a number. Monte will figure it out. Monte’s job is to figure it out. Like this is what I signed on for, saving an industry. Listen, when I started, I just wanted to publish a few good books, have a few laughs. Nobody’s laughing now. Not since the Germans bought us out. People are cringing in the hallways. They’re puking in the toilet stalls before each meeting with sales. Editors who haven’t worn a tie to work in twenty years are showing up in suits, as if that alone will placate our Teutonic overlords. The big decisions have already been made, though, I suspect. There are telling indications. But who can really say for sure? At three a.m. the e-mails start rolling in from Stuttgart. Strictly Kremlinology time. What does this mean? What does that mean? Shepard and I have these fierce, whispered conversations when sane people are supposed to be dancing their cares away at after-hours clubs. But I don’t want to worry you. You have an entirely different job. How’s my new book?”

“Hopelessly stalled.”

“I just wanted to let you know that I have two pages reserved for you in the Fall catalog. They’ve dummied it up, and we didn’t even
lorem ipsum
it. The pages just have ‘AM3’ across them. The long-awaited follow-up by AM3.”

“It won’t be ready for Fall.”

“
Untitled Novel
.”

“Great.”

“Hey, I’m counting on something from you, buddy. I believe that was our understanding. You were going to go out to Michigan and get to work. I was going to sit in New York and patiently wait. You were going to deliver the work. I was going to perceptively edit it. Then we’d publish it to great fanfare. That was the understanding. You would go on a grueling book tour, Shepard and I would arrange to have gourmet fruit baskets waiting for you in your hotel rooms. That was my understanding. This change of plans won’t go unnoticed in Stuttgart.”

“You’ve never worried about a deadline before, Monte.”

“What can I say? It’s almost as if, no offense, they’re eager to begin officially losing money as soon as possible. Bean counters, right? It doesn’t have to be a problem if it’s lousy. Nobody has to know it’s lousy. We publish a lot of lousy books to fulsome praise. It’s part of the cultural give-and-take. We actually count on it.”

“The lousy books or the good reviews?”

“Both, really. A list full of masterpieces would be a complete disaster.”

“I’m trying, Monte.”

“Maybe you miss the city. The hustle and the bustle. The hurly and the burly.”

“I don’t think that’s it.”

“Fascinating. I think it’s ironic. When I was coming up, willed artistic isolation was simply a question of not opening your mail. Nobody dreamed of actually
leaving
. Some writer who’d never set foot off the island of Manhattan—you’d encounter him on lower Fifth Avenue, or around Sheridan Square, and you’d wonder, didn’t he die? Is that a
ghost
I just saw schlepping a D’Ag Bag home from the supermarket? Turned out he’d just left his phone off the hook. Sure, writers have always been
strange
. But they stayed put, is the thing. A true weirdo might decamp to Massachusetts, or take a crack at writing screenplays out on the West Coast, and people would marvel at their tenuous link to the real world by long-distance telephone. I’m serious, you’d call authors living out of town and it would be like listening to the voices of the dead, all echoes and whistling static. A chill would come over you. The distance seemed insuperable. But nowadays, you people can’t wait to leave. New York is like this necessary obstacle to be overcome. I don’t understand it. There’s an entire body of treasured literature from when I was a young man that speaks of the America lying on the wrong side of the Hudson with toxic disdain, and now people your age act as if there couldn’t be anything finer than a tenure-track appointment at the University of Kansas. Whatever happened to Henry James, and the idea that ‘the best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding to the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation’?”

“He dropped dead after renouncing his American citizenship. And didn’t he live way out in East Sussex?”

“Well, we can’t compare ourselves to Henry James.”

“I’ll try to break the habit.”

“But I’m not putting down your little sabbatical. I know you were having a rough time of it here. The sheer athleticism of bigamy! You have my boundless sympathy, especially given my own current personal situation, which has been exaggerated beyond belief in the media. I know it was rough for you here.”

“Here it’s going fine. I’ve been happy to discover that my dream of being completely forgotten is being realized faster than I ever feared it would.”

“Nobody’s forgetting anybody, Sandy. Two pages in the catalog: you’re practically the centerfold. Needless to say,
Untitled Novel
is our lead title.”

“But who knows what three a.m. will bring from Stuttgart?”

“God forbid. Don’t they ever take time off? Hitler’s birthday, or something?”

“April.”

“Doesn’t matter. If my worst professional fears come to pass, I’m capable of seeing beyond who and what I am today. If and when my worst professional fears come to pass, this is not the end. I can see beyond what’s defined me for the last thirty years. I refuse to be taken by surprise. I hate surprises, and things surprise me all the time. I enjoy bleu cheese: that was a surprise. Dogs don’t like me. That was a big surprise. Young people like to spit on your penis. Who knew? Among many other surprises. When my worst professional fears come to pass, there will be another act.”

“Impressions, or juggling, maybe?”

“Prophecy, I’m thinking. I’ve always felt there was a more-direct-than-usual connection between me and God. I just haven’t had the time to commit. I’ll button my shirts up to the neck and deliver my esoteric wisdom to captive audiences of rush-hour commuters riding the IRT. My eventual biographer is likely to say that that’s when I hit my stride.”

“Why wait? I can log on to Wikipedia and say it right now.”

“Save your imagination for my new book you’re not writing. By the way, what’s this shit I hear about you hanging around with some Indian? What is it, some kind of George Harrison thing?”

I SPENT THE
rest of the afternoon reviewing my finances: checking, savings, CDs, IRAs, equity accounts, mutual funds, life insurance policies. Revolving charge accounts and lines of credit. If there’s any single legitimate way of ordering reality, this may be it. A few months before my father died I went to visit my parents for a couple of weeks, the last opportunity I had to spend time with someone resembling the entire man before the cancer devoured him completely. One evening I found, on the coffee table next to the sofa where he sat propped up with pillows for much of each day, a slip of paper on which he’d written a list of five- and six-digit numbers. My mother saw me studying the list and laughed.

“Your father was figuring out how much money we have,” she said.

Well, my parents had evidently done all right, and my father had “terrific” health insurance coverage—perversely, he enjoyed pointing out how little the expensive process of dying was costing him out of pocket—and there was no reason why he needed to copy out, in his increasingly shaky hand, figures that mostly appeared on the consolidated statements the guy who handled their investments sent them on a quarterly basis. Still, I was able to recognize the rational compulsion behind it; saw the satisfaction he must have taken in seeing the numbers forming under the pressure of his pen, the column growing longer; extrapolating dividends and compound interest; seeing in the robust well-being of those expanding amounts all the health and vigor that had departed his failing body.

It was in a contortedly similar spirit that, when I was finished with my own review, I signed on to my local bank and, in accordance with no schedule or agreement, arranged to have ten thousand dollars deposited to Rae’s checking account, not out of concern for Rae or the kids but as a starkly manipulative gesture, a desire to loudly declare the measure of my importance to her. If I’d sent her a bouquet of flowers she might credibly have been able to accuse me of harassing her, but an arbitrary ten grand she could neither ignore nor reject. Here I am. Don’t forget me. Is there a more muscular use to which money can be put than such nakedly controlling acts? I made the wild decision then to do the same for Susannah. As I was hunting around for her account number, though, I began to feel strange, and when I realized that what I was feeling was nausea, I stopped.