Vernon Downs (16 page)

He was startled to find Jessica in the loft.

“I didn't mean to frighten you,” she said calmly as she crouched, a green agate pendant swinging on the end of a necklace made of tiny purple beads, sorting through the selection of DVDs stored under the television. Dark circles ringed her eyes. Charlie hadn't noticed the storage space, and the discovery piqued his curiosity about what else might be hidden in the loft. “I see you've made yourself at home.” She nodded toward the assemblage of takeout containers and empty beer bottles forming a small cityscape on the kitchen counter. Mountains of paper littered the loft. Charlie hadn't even had the chance to utter “Hello,” and he guessed that Jessica was adept at controlling conversations. “I suddenly
had
to see this movie,” she said. She plunged her hands deep beneath the television, mining an assortment of foreign films and pornography that didn't seem to embarrass her. “You haven't seen it, right?”

“Which?”

“The one where the guy is trying to get back to his apartment and he's out of money and can't. His money floats out the cab window. He tries to take the subway, but they've raised the fare and he doesn't have enough.”

The movie sounded familiar, though he couldn't name it. “Something with mannequins,” he offered.

Jessica snapped her fingers. “Yes, exactly. You know it.”

“I don't
know
it,” he answered. “I may have seen it.”

“What's it called?” she asked hopefully.

The phone shrieked and they both froze, waiting for the answering machine. Vernon's voice floated through the loft, swarming around them in deep tones, and Jessica hugged herself absently. Charlie peered into middle space in an effort to coax the title of the film, counting the seconds left in the answering machine message he now knew by heart. The caller hung up without leaving a message and Charlie shrugged.

“I thought you were supposed to be useful,” Jessica teased as she returned the DVDs to their rightful place. Charlie admired the seam of Jessica's blouse, tracing it along the curves as it rose and dived this way and that. She stood and Charlie looked absently out the window, causing her to glance over her shoulder.

“I'm told I'm very useful,” he said. In his mind, the retort was flat and uninflected, a cold piece of steel brandished as a weapon against any misunderstanding that might arise between them, her being Vernon's girlfriend. Later, after Jessica had left empty-handed, he blamed the disconnect between his intention and his playful tone for the exchange that followed.

“I'll bet.” She smiled, closing the distance between them. He smelled a lemony soap, her freckled skin close enough to touch. “What did Vernon tell you about me?”

Her expectant gaze knifed him with guilt. Vernon hadn't so much as uttered a word about her. Charlie didn't even know her last name. He became flushed with the same rank embarrassment he'd felt earlier, at a Starbucks upon his return from the false lead on the Lower East Side. Two overweight girls, both with hair dyed unnatural colors, obviously in high school—and obviously in glee club by the way their conversation was punctuated with outbursts of song—earnestly promised to marry each other if they weren't married by their late twenties. “Do you promise you'll marry me?” the one asked. “Absolutely,” the other agreed, “except for the physical stuff, obviously.”

Jessica read his reaction accurately. “Not surprised,” she said. A shadow crossed her face as she bit her lip. “It's hard, Charlie. Very hard to be with someone who doesn't see you exclusively.”

Charlie inadvertently raised his eyebrows.

“He didn't even tell me where he was going,” she said, her voice infused with a soft whine.

“You mean where in Vermont?” he asked.

She looked at him askance. “He didn't even say he was going to Vermont,” she said bitterly. “Let me guess, Richard is with him, right?”

“Who is Richard?” Charlie was desperate to exit this line of inquiry and hoped to devise a change of topic while Jessica ranted about Richard.

“He's a protégé, like you,” she spit out. “A fucking waiter at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Classic. Just classic. The never-ending train of wannabes is tiring. ‘Do or don't' extends to his sex life, too, and it's mostly ‘Do.'”

The shocking reality of Vernon's bisexuality—Charlie was terrible at guessing people's ages, so naming their sexuality was outside his abilities if asked—was overshadowed by the realization that Vernon and Richard the waiter from the Gramercy Park Hotel had absconded to Vermont, leaving Charlie to dicker with dog sightings and jealous girlfriends. An aberrant hurt at Vernon's not coming on to him passed. Perhaps it meant Vernon took him seriously as a writer. Once the shock receded, he resisted the bitter feelingthat even though he was orbiting Vernon's world, he was a faraway, unnamed planet.

“I guess I need to find my own protégé, eh?” Jessica asked.

Possession overtook him as he regarded Jessica. Had she really come over to look for a DVD? The scheme seemed impossibly juvenile. If you encounter an embittered girlfriend crouched in your space, if only temporarily your space, what are the gears in the machinery that brought her to you? And if you're both feeling betrayed and looking for consolation, what is allowed and what is forbidden? He could reach out. He could touch her
on the arm, signaling his submission to whatever purpose she'd arrived at, riven with the idea that she could deliver him from his subordination. Every apprentice was one part assassin.

“I could ask around,” Charlie offered, floating it as a joke to gauge Jessica's reaction. The suggestion caught and she narrowed her eyes. She crossed her arms and her smooth biceps flexed involuntarily. He wanted to break the long gaze between them but knew that to do so would be to lose the powerful cord they were momentarily tethered to.

“I'd need someone discreet,” she continued. She moved toward the stereo. An old copy of
Details
magazine featuring a profile Vernon had written about the actor Val Kilmer caught her attention and she turned the pages absentmindedly.

“I thought you weren't exclusive,” Charlie said, leaning against the kitchen counter.

“I'd like to be,” she admitted, the confession squandering a measure of the playful tension that had been building. “I'm normally a one-man kind of girl.” She tossed the magazine back toward the pile of media he'd carefully gleaned from the rest of the archives, fluttering the mountains of correspondence, fan letters, and manuscript drafts.

The moment for conquest—if it really existed—slipped away with Jessica's acknowledgment of her true desires. The erotic haze that had briefly hung over them cleared, leaving him stifled and slightly sick to his stomach.

“But if, when you're out serving your master, calling ‘Here boy, here boy' around the neighborhood, you run into a suitable candidate, give me a shout,” she said, swinging her pocketbook over her silky shoulder. “Don't look too hard, though,” she added. “For the dog, I mean.” She glided for the door.

“Why not?” he asked, turning but not following.

“Sucks to have something you love withheld,” she said.

Charlie took a step toward her. “You took the dog?” he asked.

“He only cares about the dog because it's new,” she said. “I was new once too. So were you. Remember that.”

“Will you bring him back?” Charlie asked. “We'll say that he just came home on his own. Vernon will never have to know.”

Jessica opened the door and grimaced. “What makes you think I still have it?” she asked, and then was gone.

“Hurry the hell up,” Christianna called from the other side of the screen. She hunted through a Depeche Mode CD, sampling the first beats of each song before skipping ahead.

Charlie reread Shannon's e-mail:

Did you write a draft of the screenplay for
Minus Numbers
? Were you involved with that process? If you had to rank your books according to how successfully you completed what you started out to do, how would that list go?

The titillation of writing Shannon while Christianna waited in the loft was palpable.

S,

I was still in college when I found out they were going to turn it into a movie. I was sent a script by someone, I saw a couple of more scripts, but I was not involved in the process. I didn't want to be involved. When I was first asked if I wanted to be involved, I realistically didn't think I could do it because I was finishing up school, and then I did go back a week later to my agent and said, “Well, maybe I do want to do this.” She said, “It's too late, I already told them you don't, and you should finish school anyway.” But you know what? I would've done the first draft and it would've been very close to the book and there's no way they would've made it. This was a movie that should never have been made by a big studio, and it should never have been a big, glossy Hollywood movie filled with a lot of stars, directed by a very
slick video director. It just shouldn't have been done. It probably would have been much more successful if it had stayed true to the book and was made on a very low budget. There was no way that a big Hollywood studio run by the parents of the children in the book were going to make an honest movie out of that book. So it was hopeless anyway. I could've written a draft, but it wouldn't have mattered.

As for ranking, wow. You have an idea for a book and you're really lucky if you get fifty or sixty percent of that idea down. In your head, you have this grandiose idea of a great, awesome book where you're going to write about this, or this, or this, and when you start writing, reality sets in and you kind of get to the point where you think,
Okay, if I can just get through this, if I can just move it on to here, I'll have done some work and it will have worked out
. Sometimes writing a novel can be so overwhelming and so exhausting emotionally that you're really lucky if you can get fifty or sixty percent of what you really wanted to initially down on paper. I think, for example,
The Book of Hurts
is probably sentence for sentence the best writing I've done by far. I don't know if it's the best book, but I do think that the writing is, let's just say, very unembarrassing to me. I still think
Scavengers
is the one book that I really got down everything that I wanted to do. I wrote a book that really threatened to annoy a great many people. At the same time, I just really have a soft spot in my heart for
Scavengers
. That might be because
Minus Numbers
and
The Vegetable King
were these big bullies that could take care of themselves.
Scavengers
was so slammed because it was about these really annoying, atrocious kids nattering on and on about their lives at college and “Oh, he doesn't love me” or “She doesn't love me” or whatever. It got a tremendous amount of flak that I thought really wasn't due the book. So I sort of have a soft spot for it.

I really can't reread the books, it doesn't really interest me that much. They define a certain time of my life and what was going on during that time of my life, and I don't know, to me they're not that interesting to reread again. They were interesting to write, but to reread them … I don't know if I'd get that much pleasure out of that. Or if it would be particularly instructive.

Charlie proofed the e-mail against the typed interview and sent it. He checked Vernon's inbox for anything that seemed urgent. A request from his paperback publisher was difficult to decipher and he decided it could wait. Practically everything could wait, he guessed. At first, he expected daily phone calls demanding updates on Oscar; but the silence from Vermont portended that nothing that was going on in New York was of any importance to Vernon. He heard Christianna open the refrigerator and exhale a long “ew.”

“It's nine-
thirty
,” she whined. “I thought we were having drinks at Aviator.”

Didn't we do that already?
he thought. He moved to switch the computer off just as a reply from Shannon drifted into the inbox. His intuition that an unhappy Christianna was a dangerous Christianna warned him that he should save the e-mail for later, but Shannon on the other end of the connection, hoping to catch him in real time, was irresistible.

It seems like it would be easier to write “nice books.” It seems you risk so much with technique, with the things you do. At a certain point don't you think, is it worth it?

So much risk, so much risk. He flipped through the typed interview to find Vernon's answer to a similar question Charlie had asked previously, dispirited by the apparent unoriginality of his interview questions. How many times had Vernon had to answer the same question, or some version of it?

It's very strange to me that you say this because in the end it's really not a choice. It's really just a reflection of the writer, whether the subject is vampires, Japanese businessman taking over Los Angeles, evil corrupt law firms, or whatever. It's just a reflection of who you are. I don't think you can force yourself, at least not to the end of an honest book, to write in a way that you don't really want to write. You write how you write. Some people will like it,
some people will not like it. But it's not really about pleasing people or making people understand things. Writing is really a very selfish thing. You're writing a book because
you
want to write a book and
you're
interested in these characters and
you're
interested in this story and
you're
interested in this style and
you're
basically masturbating at your desk with all these papers and these pens, and if it goes out there, hits a nerve, fine; if it doesn't, well, fine too. It's really about expressing yourself in a lot of ways,
to
yourself and not to anyone else. You're pleasing yourself when you're writing, you're not pleasing a bunch of other people. You're not constructing a little candy house, or a little gingerbread house that everyone can take a piece of and feel sweet and nice and that makes themselves feel good about themselves or about reading a book. Writing a book is actually a very selfish and very aggressive thing. You're writing this book and putting it out there and it says,
Read me! Read me! Read me!