Vernon Downs (4 page)

“Hello,” the director boomed.

Charlie gave a short wave, an understatement he hoped the director would let stand.

“Good man,” the director said, slapping him heartily on the back, which propelled him in an unplanned direction, around the nearest corner and away from the director, who bounded out the door and into the brightening sky. Charlie strolled down the hall strewn with cluttered corkboards and stacks of unstained wooden chairs, hunting for an exit that would circumvent the director and thus avert an embarrassing conversation he was sure neither of them wanted to have.

A murmuring wafted through the breezy hallway, and Charlie slowed at the open door bearing an engraved plastic plaque advertising the summer writing program office. He feigned interest in the flyers pushpinned to the bulletin board outside the door while straining to hear.

“We should make them pay when we accept them,” a voice tinged with anger said. “That would keep them from dropping out without notice.”

“They'd just want a refund,” a smaller voice said. “There's no way to guarantee they'll show up.”

“But canceling at the last minute,” the first voice countered. “If he would've had to pay in full, that would've forced him to attend.”

Charlie lifted an outdated flyer about summer studies abroad and focused on an announcement about a film series at the local cinema featuring movies inspired by books. Some days the fantasy that Olivia could see him was all he had to motivate him, and her phantom presence had become so ingrained that he often acted as if he were on a stage, with the audience just off in the wings.

“The workshops are all screwed up now,” the first voice said, exasperation replacing anger.

“Can't we draft the closest wait lister?” the small voice said.

“Not at this late date,” was the reply.

Charlie stared dumbly at the bulletin board. He had what he'd come for, and extending his stay on campus could only increase the chance of exposure. But there was an allure about all he didn't know about Vernon Downs and his time at Camden. He reasoned that an education in All Things Vernon could only aid in his overall goal to ingratiate himself with the author. Plus, it was more economically feasible to spend ten days in Vermont than ten days in New York City. He crept away from the open door, the floor creaking underfoot, threatening to expose him as he formulated what exactly he'd say. He didn't consider it lying, exactly, but an expedience that benefited all parties involved—a cousin to a white lie, or at best, an act of charity whose currency was simple, harmless untruths.

He circled the Barn, gathering courage before striding into the writing program office. The air-conditioning had been turned low and Charlie shivered as he approached the counter.

“Can I help you?” The small voice he'd heard earlier belonged to a round, dour woman behind a wooden desk weighted down with stacks of shuffled papers and a computer monitor three technologies old.

“I need to pay my tuition,” he said confidently, smiling sheepishly, as if the joke was on him in some way.

“What's the name?” the woman asked as she pulled a pair of reading glasses from her worn sweater.

He gave her his name and she typed it slowly into the computer. A dark figure moved behind a pane of frosted glass in the door guarding an inner office. The dour woman frowned. “I don't have you in my computer,” she said.

Charlie smiled casually, knowing this was the critical performance. “Maybe I'm still on the wait list,” he suggested. “I was wait-listed at first.” He rubbed his hands together and then dropped them to his sides, shrugging in a mimic of a small child waiting instruction from a parent.

The woman clacked the keys of her computer again, a look of consternation on her face. “Hmm,” she said, and Charlie could see the conceit
he'd planted in her mind take bloom. “Wait one moment, please.” She swept out of the room, easing behind the door to the inner office, which was consumed with urgent whispering. The door opened and closed again, and the woman rounded her desk, a curiously thin file folder in her hand. “Found it,” she said, sighing dramatically. “Computers can't beat a good old-fashioned filing system.”

Charlie chortled dutifully. “They never will,” he agreed, nodding at the prop file. He was amazed but not surprised that the trick had worked.

“How would you like to pay?” the woman asked.

Charlie placed his MasterCard on the counter, and the woman fished a carbon from the top drawer. He smiled as she copied down his credit card number, confident that the summer writing conference would be over before the transaction was processed, at which point he would call MasterCard and refute the charges, feigning ignorance about what or where Camden was.

Charlie moved into the cramped room assigned him in Booth, no longer having to squat in Stokes on the fringe of the summer program, though his official admittance left him feeling exposed. He nodded politely to the girl who lived at the end of the hall, alarmed that she'd try to trap him in a conversation about books or writing. A low-level fear accompanied him as he rotated on the outside of groups of students that formed and broke apart with the speed of supernovas. His artistic resume—two semesters of creative writing at Glendale Community College—represented the least distinguished credentials among those in attendance, who all seemed either to be enrolled at Iowa or Columbia or Williams, or to have decades of life experience, which lent an air of authority to their theories about writing and what constituted art.

Workshop was another matter entirely. He spent evenings in his room conscientiously reading the stories passed out that afternoon. The quality of the stories was markedly better than those he'd seen at GCC—several read as smoothly as published stories—and he couldn't find anything
substantive to say, so that by the third meeting, he was the lone participant who hadn't spoken, forcing Jane Martin, the workshop leader and author of a famous book set in an eponymous small town, to call on him. He fumbled through a string of exhortations about the quality of the writing and plotting, aping speech he'd heard in the hallways and dining room, finally making an original point about the likability of the narrator, a widowed herpetologist who falls in love with a woman half his age. The con held, though he wasn't sure that all his workshop mates were convinced he belonged there, a suspicion he feared would be confirmed as the deadline for him to hand in his story approached. His small cache of original work was archived on a blue diskette he kept in the suede pouch, and he reread everything he'd written on a computer in Crossett Library, but none of it exhibited the quality of the work they'd been considering at Camden. One of the first stories he'd written, “My Last Jenny,” was too upsetting to finish reading. Another, about people all over the country mistakenly spotting Lee Harvey Oswald in the moments after the Kennedy assassination, rose in his estimation, but the story was too personal, written during a sensitive time—he hadn't even shared it with Olivia—and he wasn't eager to hear it dissected in workshop.

The situation plagued him all through the field trip arranged by Jane Martin for the purpose of an elaborate writing exercise designed around the tragic disappearance of Paula Jean Welden, the Camden sophomore who walked out into the campus woods in the mid-1940s and vanished.

Charlie tramped along the worn trail, the campus receding behind the group of students lacquered with astringent bug spray. They listened as Jane Martin described Paula Jean's disappearance, how she'd marched out the front gates in the December cold without a jacket or scarf, how a garage owner closing for the night was the last to see her alive, if you discounted the bus driver who claimed Paula Jean had grabbed the last bus to New York City, or the waitress at the Modern Café who swore she'd served Paula Jean a plate of scrambled eggs and sausage with a side of pancakes.

“The rumor that she was underdressed led searchers to believe that Paula Jean was rendezvousing with someone who had a car or a cabin,” Jane Martin said. She gathered the group under a stand of birch trees, the sunlight spotting the faces of the would-be scribes, anxious to please. “So take out your notebooks,” Jane Martin said, “and sketch out a few paragraphs about what you think happened to Paula Jean.”

Notebooks and pens were wrestled free of bags and backpacks. Charlie took out a pocket-size Camden notebook he'd shoplifted in the campus bookstore. He held his pen to paper like a reporter but drew a blank. The other workshoppers scribbled furiously, constructing whole lies out of the scraps of a girl's unsolved disappearance. Charlie found it exhausting to speculate about Paula Jean, a little disconcerted that the others found it so easy. Weren't they worried that adopting a tendency to fabricate would leak over into their real lives? The girl standing opposite him swatted at a red spot on her tanned leg with her notebook.

Jane Martin called time and all but a few pens stopped scratching out make-believe. “Who wants to go first?” she asked.

Predictably, the eager, bird-faced brunette from Wisconsin, whose workshop story was roundly criticized for flowery language and corny sentiment, shot her hand in the air.

“Go ahead, Charisse,” Jane Martin said without a hint of reluctance. Charlie wondered how a professional and published writer like Jane Martin could summon the patience for wannabes like Charisse and the others in the group. The only legitimate answer was the amount of the paycheck, he surmised.

Charisse proceeded with a spiel about Paula Jean and a mystery lover, taking the obvious cue and running. In Charisse's version, the mystery lover was a disfigured local boy whom Paula Jean had befriended. Longing to shrug off their shackles—in Charisse's take, Paula Jean was sick of being rich and bored—they plunged deep into the woods to live simply and shirk the value system imposed on them by a superficial society.
“I didn't get to finish,” Charisse lamented. “I think they had children, too, who they raised accordingly.”

Charlie suffered through an outpouring of implausible plotlines involving UFOs, Bigfoot, kidnappers, and sinkholes. Jane Martin tried to convey that the
how
was less interesting than the
why
, compelled to hold up Charisse's ridiculous response as an example of interior versus exterior. He understood perfectly what she was trying to impart. He thought about Paula Jean leaving all that she was behind, trusting in the unknown. How fearful she must've been that she'd be caught, dragged back to the present she was trying to outrun, consigned to the life she wanted to give back.

Paula Jean's struggle was mighty compared with his own life, Charlie realized. How easily had he slipped from place to place, a new set of friends, a new school, everything new, new, new? Pride surged within him as he realized how much Paula Jean would've envied his life. The fresh slant on his own history enthralled him until the gross similarities between Paula Jean's disappearance into the Vermont woods and his exodus from Denver, and Santa Fe, and Rapid City, and San Diego, struck him. The bothersome thought that he could simply walk away from Phoenix, and from Olivia and the memories they shared, couldn't be dislodged from his mind, no matter how distasteful the idea. He refused to surrender to the hypothesis, afraid of the power of admission. It was like using a relative's death as a fake excuse for missing school—once proffered, the evitable would follow. To forget Olivia would be to forsake the one person who could provide his one real chance to quit the dizzying carousel of towns and fleeting friendships that had accrued over the years. He lamented surrendering his apartment, his only real tether to Phoenix, even though he'd had to financially. He'd never doubled back before and had discounted its comfort as a fallback. An afternoon wind rustled the leaves, and he clung to his memories of Olivia, battered by the awareness foisted upon him by the stupid writing exercise. An outer dark loomed beyond
the group of workshoppers, the bleak future that awaited Charlie if he succumbed to cataloging Olivia as just another person in another town that he'd known.

He heard his name called, Jane Martin bringing him back from the precipice. The group eyed him, waiting, but he shrugged. “I couldn't think of anything,” he said, closing his notebook.

Charlie strode across the short, thick grass of the Commons lawn, glancing up in time to avert being hit by a stray shuttlecock from a scratch badminton game being played by other Camdenites, all of whom were swatting at the birdie with their free hand, the other hand minding their full plastic cup of wine or beer. The campus was in its postdinner lull, the sun still high in the sky, the faculty readings still hours away. An esprit de corps had enveloped the campus, and those with cars motored into Camden to haunt the shops for trinkets for their children or significant others, or to stock up on the basic necessities at the newly constructed Wal-Mart. Charlie had skipped dinner to stroll around the fetid pond and through the tall, ragged grass of Jennings Meadow, which led to Jennings Hall, the granite mansion that housed the music facilities. The summer writing program was mostly contained at the other end of campus, and the foot traffic on the trail to Jennings thinned noticeably as he broached the imposing house. He'd overheard vague tales about how Jennings was haunted, how music students practicing in the converted studios would hear strange, unmusical noises that would chase them back to their dorms and trouble their dreams, but he didn't believe in the supernatural and dismissed the rumors as campus mythology.

A rush of wind blew across the naked meadow and he turned his back to it, his T-shirt and shorts billowing in the gale. The warm air cooled as it subsided, swaying the maple saplings that ringed the mansion. He listened for music—a prim group who ate at a table in the windowless corner of the dining hall were rumored to be music students stranded at Camden
for the summer—but Jennings was quiet. The front door caught when he tried it. He read about the Jennings family on the historical marker bolted to the stone facade, about how Mr. Jennings had been a powerful lawyer in New York City who died in his midsixties, widowing his wife, who ultimately donated the house for the creation of Camden College, a Depression-era college for women. The engraved words EST. 1880 appeared in smaller type at the bottom of the plaque, and Charlie ran his hand over them, his fingers lingering over the numbers, the one and the eights and the zero.
More than a hundred years old
, he mused.
Older than the state of Arizona
. He thought of the hastily abandoned Mrs. Jennings and shuddered. Without warning, the parade of friends he'd left behind filed through his mind. He'd made widows of them all as he bounced here and there. He was curious to know if he'd left a trail of heartbreak. He'd never before considered that his previous experiences and relationships were anything more than finite—their separateness had given him pleasure, the compilation of memories a zoetrope always spinning in his mind. That he'd been a bit player in an array of people's lives, against a myriad of backgrounds, seemed impossible. Yet he acknowledged the probability that he hadn't widowed anyone, but simply passed through their lives with an inconsequential nod and a polite smile.