Pocket Kings (36 page)

I wrote Bev back and told her to give the girl my e-mail address and phone number. I'd love to help, I told her. I promised myself that if and when this Susan contacted me, I would be polite and helpful to her. What the hell? I had the time and money to be nice now.

Deke Rivers. Last Resort Press. Paying someone to publish
Dead on Arrival.
Th
en I could hire, I thought, an aggressive and insincere publicist to spread the word around, to bookstores and book clubs and the press. Maybe the worst idea of them all wasn't so bad.

Th
ere must have been hundreds of manuscripts going unread in December and January—editors were too busy e-mailing me. Perhaps I had gotten them in such lousy moods that they wound up rejecting books which they, had they not been bubbling over with bile and nitric acid, would have gladly published otherwise. So be it.

One evening, two weeks before Christmas, I attended a reading at a Barnes & Noble on Lexington Avenue uptown.
Th
e author had penned a variation of
Jane Eyre . . .
the narrator was the character Bertha Mason, Rochester's insane wife, and it was written in some incomprehensible patois that was occasionally interrupted with outbursts of schizoid insanity. Having never been able to sit through the movie, having never been able to muster up the interest to read the book, and not paying any attention to the author reading, I had no idea what was going on.
Th
e author wasn't merely doing a reading; it was an attempt at performance art, and at one point she was yelling and hacking apart Jane Eyre's body with an invisible machete. Saliva flew from her mouth, her eyes surged out of their sockets, and I couldn't tell if the twenty people attending the reading were riveted to their seats or were too scared to leave.

Halfway through I stood up and interrupted.

“I represent,” I told her, “the Brontë estate and we intend to sue!” I brandished my cell phone and said, “I've been recording this. How dare you appropriate this magnificent novel for your own personal gain. We just won four hundred thousand dollars from someone who put the umlaut in the Brontë name over the O and not the E.
Th
at's
who you're dealing with here!”

She froze. Did she really believe I was serious and that the thirty or so grand she had received for penning her high-strung, forgettable work was going to be snatched from her savings account by Charlotte Brontë's great-great-great-great-grandchildren?

Someone tapped my shoulder.

“Mr. Dixon?” I heard a woman whisper behind me.

I turned around and saw a vaguely familiar face. She examined, for a second or two, at close range the new hair, new pounds, and new tinted shades.

“Yes?” I whispered back.

“I'm going to have to ask you to leave please,” the store manager said.

“All right, but how do you know who I am?”

She told me that she used to work at the Union Square Barnes & Noble and that I'd once asked why that store had no copies of
Plague Boy.

“I was the one,” she reminded me, “who told you the book was out of print.”

“Okay, I'm going now,” I told her.

“And
please,
” the woman hissed, “stop what you're doing!”

Th
ey were on to me.

It was Glenn Tyler of Lakeland & Barker who had called me a Master of the Suburban Mimetic and said that I possessed some sort of secret sharer status. I had, he'd said, given him a kind of spiritual rash. I still have no idea what any of that means, but I do know that he was the Abraham and Sarah of all my rejection; on the genealogical chart of everything negative that had recently befallen me, it all stemmed from him.
Th
erefore he had to pay, too.

I sent him an e-mail asking if he wanted to read a new book of mine. (
Th
is was the first direct contact he and I had ever had.) I didn't tell him what it was about or the title. A week went by and he told me to send it to him; he was, he told me, familiar with
Plague.
I sent him
DOA
and waited. It probably took only one paragraph for him to realize he'd already read it. Graciously never letting on, he e-mailed me: “I am afraid that I'm going to have to pass.” Now, he didn't know that I had read the rejection he'd sent Clint—I'd been counting on that—so I wrote him back: “
Th
at's really all you have to say about it?
Th
ree years, 750 pages, and all you can say is you're passing? Nothing about me being a master of the suburban mimetic? Nothing about a kind of spiritual rash? Aw, c'mon, throw me some props here, G-Man!” When, as expected, I received no reply, I e-mailed him: “Pussycat got your tongue, does it?”

Th
at was the end of him and of me and him together, and to my dying day I will picture Glenn Tyler covered head to toe with the scaly, flaming purple rash that I gave him, scratching himself so hard that every ounce of his sick spirit oozes out of the wounds.

Cynthia noticed that lately I was in an unusually cheerful mood. “You must be having an affair, Chip!” she even once jokingly said. “You're just so
sprightly!
” (Even Wifey was now calling me Chip to my face every once in a while, as I was calling her Wifey to hers.) She would come home from work and, after eight hours of battling editors and publishers, I was walking on air to open the door for her.

“We should take another vacation soon,” she said to me one night in bed.

“Yeah, that's a good idea.” And, man, did I have the money for it.

We discussed where we might go and, after considering Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Barcelona, Napa and all the other usual places, we settled on London. In February. “It will be freezing and wonderful and we'll drink tea and keep warm,” she said, sounding like three Hemingway heroines all at once. “And if you want,” she suggested, “you can write during the daytime there while I walk around and shop and keep our hotel room warm and pretty.”

Th
e next day the two-week vacation my wife and I had begun to plan took a new twist. Or to be more accurate, it got fatally mangled. I was at a private table with APG and told her about it and she said, “So, uh, why does she get to go with you and I don't?”

“Because,” I reminded her, “she's my wife and you're not?”

“Not good enough. How about I just happen to be there at the same time as you?”

Right away I had a much better idea: I would go to London alone.
Th
e cover story would be I was refining and finishing the
Trilogy.
No, I'd tell Wifey, this isn't really a vacation for me.
Th
is is work.
I'd tell her that after London—after three weeks in London—she and I would go someplace else, anywhere she wanted. Someplace exotic.
Th
e thought of Tahiti, for some reason, drives most women wild. But I didn't mention Tahiti just yet.

And in London I really
would
work on the
Trilogy.
It was already written; all it needed was a little nip here and a massive tuck there. So yes, I would stay in London for a week and work on it, Artsy would then join me for two; I'd work on the book during the daytime and she and I would dine like royalty at night. We'd shop till we dropped. We'd stay at Claridge's or the Connaught or some unknown boutique hotel where the room was tiny and the bed was uncomfortable and the cost was five hundred pounds a night.

I resolved that when I hit $400K I'd stop playing poker. Forever!

Th
e plan was idiot-proof. I knew that Wifey would allow it: she wanted me to write and to get published again.
Th
e week I'd be in London alone, I resolved, I would starve myself into quasi-perfection, so that when Victoria showed up I wouldn't be such a chubby hulk. I'd eat a half a scone in the morning and walk twenty miles a day, then eat rice for dinner. And APG, I was sure, would fancy the New Much Fiercer Me.

Th
e next day I woke up realizing that this was all an insane pipe dream and that APG didn't really mean it, but the first words out of her mouth—or her keyboard—to me that day were: “So have you been thinking of our fantastic London getaway?”

I confessed I had, then asked her how could she, a mother of two and a wife of one, manage to sneak away for two weeks?

She told me to hold on. She logged off and I stayed put and sat alone at our private table. Five minutes went by and she didn't return. Ten minutes.
Th
e Big Man sat back in his chair and stared into space. Were 2,000 people out there watching me wilt? Fifteen minutes. And then with a merry tinkle she sat right next to me as the Busty Blonde.

“Just called Mr. APG,” she said. “I told him I wanted to get away & start painting again & really immerse myself in it for a few weeks. He bought it.”

We played a hand and I quickly dumped $700 to her. “Hey!” I said. “
Th
at was my round trip airfare!”

“Just e-mail me,” she said, “when you're going and I'll make it work out.”

We played one more hand. I don't know if she lost on purpose but I won the airfare back with the next hand.

Th
at moment when I opened the door and saw the back of Diane Warren's head between my younger brother's legs . . . that was without question the
Hindenburg
“Oh, the humanity” low point of my life. Nothing will ever top that. Were I ever to walk in on Wifey naked in bed with the starting front seven of the Dallas Cowboys, that wouldn't do it. Because I've already had the shock of a lifetime. Dostoyevsky was once taken outside to be shot by a firing squad but lo and behold, he wasn't executed—it was just your typical cute Russian prank
(Gotcha, tovarich!).
As a result of this extreme close-up of the existential abyss, hundreds of thousands of people were later forced to read
Th
e Brothers Karamazov
against their will.

Maybe we all get the personal lowlights we deserve.

So as a cheating victim I wanted to know just what I was getting into. I knew everything there was to know about Victoria G. Landreth, but how much of the everything that she told me was true . . . and what else was there? But what I really wanted to know was: was I the only player on the site she was flirting with?

Th
ere was only one way to find out.

One day I told APG I had to bring both of my computers in to be fixed. She told me she would miss me and I told her I'd miss her too.

It was all a ruse.

I opened up a new account on the Galaxy and chose a name for my new persona.
Th
e handle I had in mind would certainly be available: the Suburban Mimetic.

For three days I spied on Artsy Painter Gal. Since the Suburban Mimetic wasn't on her Galaxy “buddy list,” she would have no idea I was logged on. I watched her sashay from table to table, I watched her play dozens of hands, I felt it in the pit of my stomach when other male players attempted to flirt with her. She talked to them but never flirted and it warmed my heart. My e-honey was being true to me! Over those three days I even sat in and played a few hands with her—I purposely lost half the London airfare she'd lost to me—and struck up a potentially dangerous conversation. “So, Artsy Painter Gal, what do you look like?” the Suburban Mimetic brazenly asked her. “Eh, I'm all right,” was all she said. She refused to play the coquette and I gulped—it was like the mushy point in the movie when the loser guy realizes that the pretty girl really likes him best after all.