How I Became a Famous Novelist (18 page)

“I tell you,” he said, now leaning in on me, his breath leathery and thick, “that’s all I’m doing with my books. Moving around men and machinery.

“All right,” said Nick Boyle finally, looking at his watch, “I gotta go give a talk at some high school. Tim was it?”

“Pete.”

“Stay the course.”

He waddled out, and I sat there beaming. I’d done it. From the scratchy couch to bending elbows alongside him, Nick Boyle himself. The bartender presented me with a lengthy bill for both of us, which I paid without complaint.

The Second Terrific Thing

I’ll understand if the reader finds it a little coincidental that I met two famous authors on the same day. But remember that
this was, after all, the BooXpo, and famous authors were swarming around all over the place. I’m pretty sure I saw Alexander Solzhenitsyn, too, although it may have just been a homeless person. I saw Tom Wolfe, or at least a Tom Wolfe impersonator. Stephen King was walking around, and I would’ve tried to talk Red Sox with him except he was eating a pretzel.

By midafternoon, something about the air of the place was getting noxious—all those packing crates of unread pages, and the smell of coffee encrusted in the mouths of manic readers, cycled through their breath. I walked outside to catch a Pacific breeze, turned to do a walking loop of the Convention Center, and saw Pamela McLaughlin.

She wearing a thick leather jacket the color of an old record, with her mussed-up half-blonde hair flopping around on her shoulders. At the second I saw her she was simultaneously lighting a cigarette and blowing her nose. My first thought was
That’s very efficient!
and then I thought,
It’s also very dangerous,
and then I realized,
Hey! That’s famous paperback mystery writer Pamela McLaughlin!
and then I thought,
Pamela McLaughlin lights her cigarettes and blows her nose at the same time? That’s very odd,
and by then I was almost on her and I had to say something.

“I’m a real fan!” is what I ended up saying.

“Huh?”

“Of your books.” This wasn’t true. As of yet I hadn’t done more than flipped through them derisively in the grocery store. “You’re Pamela McLaughlin, right?”

She issued a dismissive, let’s-hurry-things-along nod.

“Yeah, yeah.”

It was going very badly, this, and I needed to say something coolly casual to recover.

“You just in town to see the pandas?” I said this with a smile twisting into place, because I was proud of how clever it was, but then the smile untwisted as I was finishing, becoming almost a frown as I remembered I was stealing that line from an old
Simon & Simon.

But I guess she hadn’t seen that episode, and the twisting of my face maybe just came off as lascivious, because she shot a line of smoke above my left ear and said:

“I’ve been meaning to go to Sea World. Feed the penguins,” and it was clear then that she was game to play along.

“I’m Pete Tarslaw. I wrote
The Tornado Ashes Club
.”

“Pammy McLaughlin. I didn’t read it.”

Awesome. Kudos for her for saying it; that was my attitude. I pointed at her cigarettes and said—because this is what a cool guy would say, right?—“Those things’ll kill ya.”

“They’re not the only ones trying.”

Up close it was clear how much airbrushing had been done by the
New York Times Magazine.
Her face looked like a baseball mitt. A new baseball mitt, mind you, not some old worn-in glove on display at Cooperstown in an exhibit about “Hope and Sorrow: Baseball in the Depression.” Her cheeks looked like the palm of a new Wilson before you’ve had a chance to break it in. There was a dense thicket of wrinkles, some of them so deep I’d wager you could stick a penny at least a third of the way in. Her hair was blonde, but not Viking-wife blonde, more the color of a pale wood cutting board. She was muscular, too. Shoulderwise she could pass for a field hockey coach.

But she also possessed a brazen adult confidence I wasn’t used to, and it made me kind of giddy and afraid, like a high
school sophomore getting hit on by one of those creepy divorced teachers you hear about in Florida.

Pamela had said in interviews that she always carried a gun, and I wondered where it was right now.

In retrospect this moment was also the height of my own confidence. I mean lifetime—that exact minute, too. So maybe I was projecting some alpha-male pheromones, and she was projecting queen-bee chemicals, or whatever, and they were mingling in the air. That would explain the next thing that happened, which is she stubbed out her cigarette with the bottom of her black boot and looked me square in the eye.

I realize, by the way, that this is all beginning to sound a bit campy. But that was the exact appeal. It was that thing of
How long can this possibly be sustained?

“I’m going to Mr. Fung’s,” she said. “Bar near my hotel. Are you coming?”

Yes, of course I’m coming, you fantastic nose-blowing smoking boot-wearing mitt-faced vixen!
is what I thought.

“I’m always in for a dumpling,” is what I said. I’m not sure that’s any better of a thing to say.

A STORY PAMELA MCLAUGHLIN TOLD ME AT MR. FUNG’S

“All this was brain splatter.” She indicated a section of cocktail napkin meant to stand for a murder scene she’d been to, near the Liberty Bridge on the south side of Pittsburgh.

“By the time I got there, a rookie had picked up most of the skull chunks. Probably thought he’d impress the bosses by doing the dirty work. So when I rolled up, the detective was
screaming at him. ’Cause all that’s crucial; you want to map the blast backward, locate the shooter.

“Not that it really mattered. Shooter was in a car, fired out his window. The real question is how they got the victim, Evan, how they got him out of
his
car.

“In a murder case, you always start with the husband or the wife. This guy’s wife was a wispy toothpick. Very mannered— she’d been born in France. Right there everybody’s suspicious. Her family had a wine importing business. So that didn’t play well either, in a city of beer drinkers. But she had tiny little spider arms—no way she could have fired a shotgun. And why would she do it out here? So then you start looking for affairs— his or hers. When you shake that tree, you always get some apples.”

Pamela really said that.

“Every murder, every one, is a soap opera. You’re just watching it backward.

“That’s where the toxicology matters. They ran this Evan’s blood work downtown. Turns out he’d taken some amyl nitrates. They relax the anus. He was down here for sex.” She laughed. “When that report came back, the detective had to pay me twenty bucks. He couldn’t believe he was gay.

“The wife, she had a close friend, Kent. Very handsome guy. Gym muscle. One of these upscale gay hustlers you hear about. Anyway, they got the computer whizzes on it. In a few hours they figured out this guy Kent roped in Evan on the Internet. Two hours more and they found the receipt for the shotgun. Here’s the best part: this guy Kent, he bought the shotgun over the counter at Bear Mountain Hunting Supply! If I put that in a book, readers wouldn’t believe anybody could
be so stupid. I mean, if you’d seen this guy—he probably walked in wearing a Charvet shirt or something. Whoever sold it to him must have known he wasn’t going duck shooting.

“Anyway, just seeing the cops he was a blubbery mess, gave the whole thing up in about a minute and half, said the wife paid him. She’s got a smart lawyer, still awaiting trial. But when they showed her the shotgun receipt, she muttered under her breath about ‘that stupid little shit.’ Like I said: you start with the wife.”

Then Pamela finished her drink.

“So, are we doing this?” she said.

That’s how I ended up fornicating in the W Hotel and then feeling my wang bump against my jeans in the elevator.

On the W elevator I did wonder if maybe, if I’d played it right, Pamela would’ve invited me to Bellissima Haven. But other than that I was pretty pleased with myself.

The Next Morning

On Sunday the Convention Center had a picked-over look. Copies of the
New York Times Book Review,
fliers about new titles, and catalogs were scattered around on the floor, like popcorn boxes and peanut shells on the ground at a closing carnival.

Outside I found a cart selling coffee and breakfast burritos, and I headed up the escalator to find a place to sit and eat. In the smaller conference rooms, they were still holding panels. Through an open door I saw one that was nearly deserted, so I settled down to breakfast in the back.

Onstage a man who looked like seventy-year-old retired Charlie Brown was softly answering the questions of a few gathered readers.

“Literature is important. It matters. It sounds a bit corny, perhaps, but I
believe
that.”

Jesus, this guy sounds like a Nick Boyle character, I thought, as I unwrapped damp tinfoil.

“You have to get it right, or you shouldn’t do it at all. When I was younger, of course, I wanted to be a novelist, you know, Hemingway, all that. So I decided: I’ll write one million words. That seemed like the number I should write before I tried publishing any. It took me thirty years.”

A jet of grease shot me on the thigh as I took a bite of my burrito. These were my only nice pants for the whole trip, so I left the burrito on my seat, slunk out, got some paper towels from the bathroom, and did a quick mop-up.

When I slid back in again Old Man Charlie Brown was still talking.

“. . . so I was in China, in the Foreign Service—this was 1980 or so—and I think I started making my notes then,” he was saying.

“And I started thinking, and working them through, more as a hobby than anything else. It’s slow. You have to be very careful, and very slow. I find, anyway. But slowly, it started to take a bit of shape. Then I retired, and my wife, God bless her, she said ‘you waited thirty years to be a writer. Give it a good try.’ She made me sit down and write every morning.”

I’d sort of gotten a sense of the burrito’s landscape now, so I could eat while watching Old Man Charlie Brown talk.

“It’s funny,” he continued. “I was writing, here, about paleontology, excavations, digs. And that’s what writing a novel is. People think of it as slapping words down on paper, the stack of sheets and a pile of cigarettes and so forth. Or conjuring
things up, closing your eyes and seeing it in a flash, or something.”

There was too much egg in this burrito.

“. . . but,
excavating
. That’s a much better metaphor, I think. You peel back layers, slowly, and brush off the dirt, and gradually, very gradually, it becomes clear to you. You see more and more of it.”

Abandoning half the burrito I sipped my coffee as he kept going.

“And it is careful work. Tedious work. And, just like with a dig, if you try and go too fast you’ll ruin the thing. You can’t rush it. You might dig for a day, and just find a tiny piece of pottery, or what have you. Just learn one small thing about one of your characters. But that’s the only way to do it, slowly. So it’s slow work, down in the dirt there, but if you do it well, then hopefully you’ll uncover something—that’s really the word, you
uncover
a novel I suppose—you’ll uncover something that’s worthwhile.”

Yikes
, I thought,
this guy is working too hard.

“So, I suppose I’ll go at it again, get in the dirt again, because I do enjoy it. That gradual—gradual discovery. And if you do it well, I think, then you almost don’t feel you have any part in it. Any more part in making it than a paleontologist has in making a fossil.”

I could see why they saved this guy for Sunday. Old Man Charlie Brown shuffled offstage as the audience clapped politely.

As we were leaving I asked a besweatered spectator who that had been, talking.

“Bill Lattimore,” he said.

“Bill Lattimore . . . what did he write?”

“He wrote a novel called
Peking.”

“Oh right, right. Thanks.”
Peking,
Lucy’s favorite book, which at that moment was doubtless being used as a trivet for Hobart’s lunchtime mashed potatoes.

I made a note to tell Lucy to tell Bill Lattimore to stop knocking himself out “excavating” and just crank out a book with a murder and some Christmas stuff.

With a few hours to kill before my flight, I wandered around downstairs. A few booths were still up, and a few stragglers poked about. At the Ortolan table, I picked up a copy of
The Tornado Ashes Club
and flipped through it. I read sentences at random.
The gold light seeped between the cracks in the peaks, pouring through in heavy streams, the heat of it popping and melting the snow along the rims of rock.
Or,
Silas, the taste of old beer still plastering his mouth, looked down into the white checkermallow and the greasewood, and saw how the earth rebuilds itself.

I could still hear Nick Boyle thundering about “men and arms,” and Pamela pointing out on a cocktail napkin where the Pittsburgh cops had found brain splatter. At the very least, those two seemed like they meant what they wrote. I was having trouble finding a single sentence in my book that I’d truly believed. But hey—I’d pulled it off, right?

There was a woman near me, thirty-five maybe, looking at another copy of my book.

“That’s a pretty good book,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I had to read it in my book club. I didn’t finish it. Couldn’t really get into it, you know?”

“Oh. Well I thought it was pretty good.”

“Yeah, it just seemed like one of those books that’s trying to pack too much in. I got about halfway and decided, meh.”

“What about the language?” I asked. “Didn’t you think the language was lyrical?”

“I guess, but, you know, at a certain point, it’s just—you know—words.”

“Huh. I’m sure people said that to Faulkner.” This came out pissier than I’d intended.

“I love Faulkner, actually. I wrote my master’s thesis on the theme of race in
The Sound and the Fury
.”