Mentor: A Memoir (23 page)
Authors: Tom Grimes
That evening at a party, a classmate who knew none of this said (I don’t remember the context), “You’re Tom Grimes. They’ll publish every word you write.”
I laughed. But, in retrospect, I see my narrative’s perfect symmetry. I arrived as a potential success. I departed a proven failure. Only, that isn’t the meaningful story. The meaningful story is: I arrived fatherless; I departed a son.
At 9:00 AM, on June 1, Jody and I walked out of our home, leaving everything in its place. At 5:00 PM, when the movers finished packing our belongings, we returned to an empty house. We wandered through it as if to confirm our absence and affirm that the past was now truly the past.
Maggie and Tim flew to Boston where, after driving cross-country, bearing their summer clothes, Frank would meet them. The evening before he left he appeared in the TV room, where Jody and I were watching a basketball game. “I’m going to Cedar Rapids to pick up some hookers,” he said. I laughed. Then he waved good-night.
The next morning, I walked along the neighborhood’s immaculate streets. Birds chirped. The leaves were green. And when I reached the bridge, the river flowed.
Inside EPB, Connie handed me Frank’s office key. I opened the door, aware of the room’s stillness. The Oxford dictionary lay open, perched on its stand, but the heaps of manuscripts had vanished. I brushed my fingertips along the edge of his desk. Then I sat in Frank ’s chair, swiveled toward the one I used to sit in, and saw nothing, not even a ghost.
PART THREE
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
O
nce Jody and I had moved to Texas, I returned to writing the novel no one wanted to publish. On weekdays at 10:00 AM, I’d carry a cup of coffee and a slice of low-calorie toast topped with jam into the small room I used as an office. I’d work until 1:15. Then I’d close my notebook, undress, step into the molded plastic shower, bump my head on its five-foot-high nozzle, curse, dress, grab my freshman composition textbook, and walk out the door. Rated the Best Party School in the Country by
Playboy
magazine, the university was a one-mile hike across town past abandoned houses, a strand of ramshackle apartment buildings, and several dingy mansions occupied by fraternities that decorated their lawns with stained couches, beer cans, crumpled pizza boxes, and the occasional Frisbee. Whenever I was late, I ran. When I saw the twin pit bulls, I stopped, turned, and sprinted a block out of my way in the ninety-degree heat. T-shirt drenched, I arrived in class, breathless. I taught, and held office hours, Monday through Thursday from 2:00 to 5:00 PM, and every other week, I graded fifty-four freshman composition papers. Twice a month, I spent Friday afternoons in meetings. Weekends, I wrote until midday. Returning to the novel’s beginning, revising its seventy pages, and then continuing provided the personal affirmation I required. Every writer is alone, and every good book is difficult to write. I had forgotten this. I wouldn’t forget it a second time.
nce Jody and I had moved to Texas, I returned to writing the novel no one wanted to publish. On weekdays at 10:00 AM, I’d carry a cup of coffee and a slice of low-calorie toast topped with jam into the small room I used as an office. I’d work until 1:15. Then I’d close my notebook, undress, step into the molded plastic shower, bump my head on its five-foot-high nozzle, curse, dress, grab my freshman composition textbook, and walk out the door. Rated the Best Party School in the Country by
Playboy
magazine, the university was a one-mile hike across town past abandoned houses, a strand of ramshackle apartment buildings, and several dingy mansions occupied by fraternities that decorated their lawns with stained couches, beer cans, crumpled pizza boxes, and the occasional Frisbee. Whenever I was late, I ran. When I saw the twin pit bulls, I stopped, turned, and sprinted a block out of my way in the ninety-degree heat. T-shirt drenched, I arrived in class, breathless. I taught, and held office hours, Monday through Thursday from 2:00 to 5:00 PM, and every other week, I graded fifty-four freshman composition papers. Twice a month, I spent Friday afternoons in meetings. Weekends, I wrote until midday. Returning to the novel’s beginning, revising its seventy pages, and then continuing provided the personal affirmation I required. Every writer is alone, and every good book is difficult to write. I had forgotten this. I wouldn’t forget it a second time.
On the drive from Iowa City to Texas, I daydreamed as we sped through the flat midwestern landscape. Then, without expecting to, I imagined a boy leaping off a rooftop, at night, high above a city’s lights. I didn’t make a note of it. If the image needed to be in the novel, I’d remember it. If it didn’t need to be, I’d forget it. This image resonated. If it continued to resonate, it would end my novel.
“Don’t lose it,” Eric told me during a telephone call, two months before he retired at age thirty-seven. After he was diagnosed as being HIV positive, all that mattered to him were his lover and his yellow Labrador retriever, who, by the end, would drag Eric along Manhattan’s streets by the leash connecting them. “And don’t quit,” he added. “Write the novel.”
I continued to write, but by late autumn my ability to construct sentences, and shape scenes, began to deteriorate. My muscles ached. My head felt like a metal claw had buried itself at the base of my skull. Often, an hour ticked by before I could summon the word I needed. As winter began, my fatigue intensified. I thought the cause might be allergies. By four every afternoon, pressure from clogged sinuses made me feel like my eyeballs would pop out of their sockets. I’d return from school, take two Tylenol, lie on the floor, stare at the stucco ceiling, and listen to the water heater’s lime-choked pipes whistle as steam blew through them. Taking antihistamine tablets didn’t help. Every morning, my brain felt as dense as a cinder block. Working twenty hours a week, I wrote thirty pages in three months. Maybe Gerry Howard had been right: I wouldn’t be able to finish the novel. I lacked the necessary talent and energy.
A year after
Season’s End
’s publication, its paperback edition was nonexistent. Twenty-two hundred hardcover copies had sold. Thirteen thousand were remaindered. And Little, Brown had recouped only forty-four hundred dollars of my forty-two-thousand dollar advance. But the image of a boy leaping off a rooftop persisted, and I understood, irrationally perhaps, that if I abandoned this new novel my life as a writer would end. If I quit once, I could quit again. “Go on failing,” as Beckett said. “Only next time, try to fail better.”
Season’s End
’s publication, its paperback edition was nonexistent. Twenty-two hundred hardcover copies had sold. Thirteen thousand were remaindered. And Little, Brown had recouped only forty-four hundred dollars of my forty-two-thousand dollar advance. But the image of a boy leaping off a rooftop persisted, and I understood, irrationally perhaps, that if I abandoned this new novel my life as a writer would end. If I quit once, I could quit again. “Go on failing,” as Beckett said. “Only next time, try to fail better.”
In May, Connie called. “How would you like to teach here this summer? ” Denis Johnson had taught the spring semester, but didn’t want to stay. (Years later, he said to me, “They expect you to work up there.”)
Once again, we would rent Frank and Maggie’s house. Frank told me my salary would increase. “But your rent stays the same,” he said, before he added, “Although, I have thought about charging your cats room and board.” Then he laughed. Why wouldn’t he?
Body & Soul
would be released in four months. The novel, it seemed, would make him more famous than
Stop-Time
had. The only unanswered questions were how long it would remain on the
New York Times
best-seller list and what prizes it would win. Frank had been a finalist for the National Book Award once. This time, maybe they’d give it to him.
Body & Soul
would be released in four months. The novel, it seemed, would make him more famous than
Stop-Time
had. The only unanswered questions were how long it would remain on the
New York Times
best-seller list and what prizes it would win. Frank had been a finalist for the National Book Award once. This time, maybe they’d give it to him.
Two years earlier, one evening after workshop, I’d given Frank a bottle of wine. We had left EPB after dark and walked across the parking lot. Sitting in Frank ’s car, we shivered as its engine warmed. Our breath fogged the windshield, masking the thin, filigreed sheet of ice that would soon melt and be swept aside by the wipers. Once heat streamed out the air vents, our muscles unclenched, and Frank turned on the headlights. With a gloved hand I removed from the crook of my arm the wine bottle I’d wrapped in a brown paper bag. As I passed it to him I said, “Just a little something to say thanks.” I’d ordered a bottle of 1934 Château Lafite Rothschild Bordeaux from Morrell and Company in Manhattan when my advance for
Season’s End
arrived. Hoping I was a local socialite who regularly dropped $150 for a liter of Bordeaux, the telephone salesman said, “Should I send over a case? ” Just a bottle, I told him. While I recited my Iowa City address, I thought he might decide not to sell a legendary vintage to a midwestern rube. But he shipped it, I toted it to class, and then, beneath the parking lot’s lamplight, Frank checked the bottle’s label. About to utter a polite thank you, he said, “Hey!” Immediately slipping it back into the bag he added, “I’ll drink it when I finish
Body & Soul
.”
Season’s End
arrived. Hoping I was a local socialite who regularly dropped $150 for a liter of Bordeaux, the telephone salesman said, “Should I send over a case? ” Just a bottle, I told him. While I recited my Iowa City address, I thought he might decide not to sell a legendary vintage to a midwestern rube. But he shipped it, I toted it to class, and then, beneath the parking lot’s lamplight, Frank checked the bottle’s label. About to utter a polite thank you, he said, “Hey!” Immediately slipping it back into the bag he added, “I’ll drink it when I finish
Body & Soul
.”
Those two years passed and, one Sunday in late November, shortly after dusk, our telephone rang. Frank’s voice, soft and conspiratorial, said, “I’m opening a bottle of wine.”
“You finished
Body & Soul
.”
Body & Soul
.”
“Two hours ago.”
“You’re happy with it?”
“Very.”
Then Frank tasted the wine and said, “It’s terrific.”
Had Jody and I been in Iowa, we would have been standing in the kitchen with him and Maggie, clinking glasses. Maggie would have said, “All right!” Frank would have said something innocuous, like, “Cheers!” He wouldn’t play the piano. “Let’s go sit by the fire,” he would have said, and, in my imagination, he does say it—to phantoms. Jody and I were seventeen hundred miles away. The scene isn’t a memory, it’s a fantasy. And, over time, its continual recurrence with subtle variations—who stood where, how hot the fire was—hasn’t diminished my sense of absence but enlarged it, and reinforced the loss’s permanence.
Moments later, Frank said, “Wish you were here. Love to you both.” Then he hung up.
The conversation lasted two minutes. Seventeen years later, I still hear it.
Publishers Weekly
reviewed
Body & Soul
in June, while Frank was on Nantucket. The review wasn’t “boxed,” to distinguish it from other reviews, nor was it “starred,” or signed. Its anonymous, but far from objective, reviewer had decided that
reviewed
Body & Soul
in June, while Frank was on Nantucket. The review wasn’t “boxed,” to distinguish it from other reviews, nor was it “starred,” or signed. Its anonymous, but far from objective, reviewer had decided that
When the author of
Stop-Time
and
Midair
produces a new work, it is an event to celebrate. And although Conroy’s bildungsroman of a boy finding his identity in his musical genius has some flaws, it is by and large an engrossing novel, written in a supple and elegant prose and displaying remarkable insight into the mind of a prodigy. Conroy’s protagonist is Claude Rawlings, who grows up in the 1940s in the shadow of New York’s Third Avenue El . . . neglected by his emotionally unstable, alcoholic, cab-driver mother, he shines shoes, lifts coins from sewers and learns to steal. He is introduced to another world when Aaron Weisfeld, a music store owner and WWII refugee, recognizes his musical gifts and transports him to the Park Avenue apartment of a maestro whose Bechstein piano Claude uses and eventually inherits. Even more in the Dickensian mode, Claude falls in love with a cold, arrogant young woman from a patrician New York family, a character who is eerily similar to Estella in
Great Expectations
. Conroy’s depiction of a young boy’s discovery of music, the awakening of his sensibility and the flowering of his genius are brilliant. Lucid explanations of musical theory ranging from basic harmonics to the 12-tone scale, from Bach to Charlie Parker to Schoenberg, provide a continuum of insights and discoveries for Claude and for the reader. The first half of the book sweeps Claude along a path strewn with almost miraculous lucky breaks: he has inspired teachers and generous and appreciative patrons; his concerts are unalloyed triumphs— and only the cynical will wish for a disaster to increase the tension. (Readers of
Stop-Time
will also recognize in Claude’s childhood an alternative version of Conroy’s miserable youth.) The second half is less successful. Claude’s immersion in music, an obsession that makes him fascinating as a youth, renders him hollow as a man, and while Conroy obviously intends to demonstrate that Claude’s emotional life is sterile in several ways, as a protagonist for a time he becomes a muted and shadowy figure. Claude’s unquestioning relationship with the kindly Weisfeld, his first and abiding teacher, is less credible once he matures. The revelation of Claude’s patrimony is poignantly rendered, however, and provides another look at the nature of creativity. And the book as a whole is harmoniously orchestrated and beautifully observed. 125,000 first printing; film rights to Spring Creek Productions; major ad/promo; author tour.
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