Shriver (12 page)

“Shriver!”

T. Wätzczesnam sat on his usual stool in the saloon, his hat beside him on the bar, drinking what appeared to be a tall glass of milk. The cowboy waved him over.

“I believe I may have discovered the fountain of youth last night!”

“Please, T.,” Shriver said, mentally blotting out visions he did not want to have.

“Ever hear of the ‘low-hitch stunt,' Shriver?”

“Can't say that I have.”

“How about the ‘Swedish fall'?”

“Nope.”

Shriver noticed a young woman waiting near the door. Tall, curvy, with straight reddish hair, she seemed tense as she glanced at her wristwatch.

“Excuse me, T.,” he said.

The cowboy lifted the glass of milk in a toast, his hand visibly trembling.

“ ‘Youth, large, lusty, loving—' ” he chanted. “ ‘Youth, full of grace, force, fascination.' ”

Shriver started toward the door.

“There's a whole uncharted world out there, Shriver,” the cowboy called after him. “These gals today are capable of almost anything!”

As Shriver made his way toward the door, Ms. Labio waved him over to the front desk.

“Is something wrong?” Shriver asked, noticing the sculptress's pink eyes and puffy face.

“Fucking A, something's wrong. Gonquin is missing.”

“Missing?”

“Mr. Shriver!”

The redhead rushed to meet him with an outstretched hand. She wore tight, faded jeans and a clingy red blouse that showed off her pert bosom. Though perched upon preposterously high heels, she seemed perfectly balanced as she jogged across the lobby.

“Teresa Apple,” she said.

“Hello,” Shriver said, shaking her hand. Her face was lightly freckled, her eyes a piercing blue.

“What am I going to do?” Ms. Labio cried. “I don't know where she is!”

“What's the matter?” Teresa Apple asked.

“Ms. Smithee is missing,” Shriver said.

“
Missing?
”

“That's what
I
said.”

“Maybe we should call the police,” the clerk suggested.

“The police?” Ms. Labio screeched.

“What's the ruckus?”

T. Wätzczesnam approached the desk, the tall glass of milk sloshing in his shaky hand.

“Gonquin Smithee is missing,” Ms. Apple told him.

“
Missing?
”

“She never came back to our room!” Ms. Labio bellowed.

“How strange,” Wätzczesnam said. “Well, let's see. Wasn't she in your room last night, Shriver?”

“
Shriver's
room?” Ms. Labio said.

“Yes,” Shriver said, then quickly added, “Along with everybody else.”

He tried to recall the poet leaving his room but remembered only his dream about her passing out in his bed.

“I didn't notice when she left,” he told them. “But I'm sure there's some explanation.”

“What do you mean,” the sculptress asked, “you didn't notice when she left?”

“There was a lot of chaos last night,” Shriver explained. “People in and out.”

“You were all
drunk
!”

“Ms. Labio,” the cowboy said, “I resent the implication.”

“I'm sorry,” Ms. Apple interrupted. “But we have a class to get to.” She turned to Ms. Labio and added, “I'm sure Gonquin will turn up.”

“Where could she be?”

“Maybe she went for a walk,” Wätzczesnam offered.

“A walk? Where to? There's nothing here!”

“I think we should call the police,” the clerk again recommended.

“Mr. Shriver,” Ms. Apple said, taking him rather firmly by the elbow, “we're going to be late.”

Shriver looked back as they made their way through the lobby. Ms. Labio and the cowboy continued conferring with the clerk, the sculptress's arms wheeling about in distress.

“I wonder what happened to her,” Shriver said as he followed Teresa Apple into the parking lot.

“She probably met someone nicer than her current companion. Here's my truck.”

She led him to a worn-out pickup, faded red in the spots not covered by rust.

“I apologize for my tardiness,” Shriver said as he climbed up into the cabin. “I overslept.”

“You had a long day yesterday,” Ms. Apple courteously replied. She proceeded to stomp on the gas pedal, and the truck shot out of the hotel parking lot.

The vast sky shone bright and cloudless, and as Teresa Apple steered the rumbling pickup toward campus, there
came a refreshing breeze through Shriver's open window. The throbbing blood vessels in his head had quieted down.

“Did you sleep well?” Ms. Apple asked.

“Like a baby.”

“The helicopter didn't wake you up?”

“Helicopter?”

“They sprayed early this morning. Some sort of synthetic pyrethroids.”

“Pyre-what?”

“Insecticide. It works pretty well, but the mosquitoes will be back at dusk. Trust me.”

“Oh dear.”

“
Aedes vexans.
The bane of our existence. They migrate up to twenty miles for a blood meal.”

Shriver scratched at the raw lump on his hand. “Sounds gruesome.”

“I hate the little fuckers,” Ms. Apple said as she accelerated to beat a yellow traffic light. “You're younger than I expected,” she said after a moment.

“Really?” It hadn't occurred to Shriver that the real Shriver might be older.

“Your novel strikes me as having been written by a cranky old man.”

“I hope you're not too let down.”

“On the contrary,” she said with an enigmatic smile. She made a sharp right turn into a parking lot behind one of the university buildings and screeched to a halt. “Here we are.”

Feeling dizzy from the ride, Shriver gingerly set foot on the ground.

“This is Custer Hall,” Teresa Apple said, swiftly leading him to a back entrance. He followed her up a flight of stairs and down a long hallway. Students scurried past on their way
to class, their faces screwed up into serious academic expressions. Oh dear, Shriver thought. This class would be the biggest test yet of his ability to fool people into thinking he was the real Shriver—but it was just a warm-up for the panel discussion to come.

As Teresa was about to enter the classroom, Shriver grabbed her elbow and pulled her aside.

“I want to ask you,” he said, feeling the now-familiar flutter of the black crow in his rib cage, “in all seriousness: what do these students expect of me?”

She patted him on the arm. “You're nervous, aren't you? That's sweet. But they've all read your book. Some of it, anyway. They think you're a genius. You could fart in there and they'd worship you. Okay?”

“Okay,” Shriver said. “I guess.”

As she turned on her considerable heel and sashayed into the classroom, Shriver again scolded himself for accepting the conference invitation. He wished he'd been discovered right away as an imposter and sent back to his comfortable home. But then he remembered Simone. He recalled shards of another dream he'd had last night, in which she had figured prominently. She'd been wearing a cheerleading outfit and was bouncing on an unseen trampoline outside his sixth-floor apartment window. Each time she arced up into view she performed a different acrobatic maneuver, bright red pom-poms in her hands, and asked, “Are you a writer?”

Shriver took a deep breath, swallowed yet another upsurge of bile, and entered the classroom.

Inside, a dozen or so students sat at their desks and gazed up at him as though he were about to hand out one-hundred-dollar bills. The windows had been thrown open, letting in fresh air and the musical chirping of birds. Shriver stood
abashedly to the side while Ms. Apple introduced him. She utilized a range of superlatives to describe Shriver's talent, creating a weird, almost disembodied experience for him, since after all she was not actually speaking of
him
, even as she and the students thought she was.

“I encourage you to ask Mr. Shriver anything at all,” she continued, “but since this is a creative writing class, you may want to know about how he works—his process, his writing habits. Anyone want to dive in? Or,” she said, turning to the guest of honor, “do you have anything you'd like to say first?”

Shriver's mouth, already parched, became a veritable desert.

“Well,” he squawked, his dry lips clicking, “as you probably know, I haven't been writing so much lately.”

“Twenty years,” Teresa Apple helpfully reminded him.

“Yes. So, I'm a little bit out of the loop when it comes to technique and that sort of thing.” He was hoping this would excuse him from having to answer any technical questions about writing.

“You haven't written anything
at all
?” a young man asked from the front row. “Not a word?”

“No, I have written a little,” Shriver said, thinking of his story.

“When are we going to see it published?” someone asked.

“I have no idea.”

“What's it about?”

“It's hard to describe.”

“Are you going to read it tomorrow?”

Shriver leaned back against the front edge of the teacher's desk. “I hope to.”

The students murmured excitedly.

A hand shot up. “Why is your book so misogynistic?” a pigtailed young lady asked. The rest of the class sniggered.

As Shriver tried to come up with an adequate response, another student—a young man sitting far in the back—said, “I don't think it
is
misogynistic. I think he's just telling it like it is, ya know?”

“But it
is
misogynistic,” the young lady said. She opened a copy of
Goat Time
and, in a clear voice, read aloud: “ ‘He stroked his cock furiously, remembering the night he'd spent with the dark-haired waitress from the saloon—the way she had writhed atop him, her knees up, both feet flat on the motel room floor, her green eyes rolling backward, her breath catching in her throat, her small breasts flopping in counterpoint to the rest of her body . . .' ”

Shriver's face turned red. “I wrote that?”

“I think it's kind of erotic,” another girl said.

“It's just
dirty
,” the pigtailed girl countered.

Shriver found himself agreeing with her.

“What's wrong with ‘dirty'?” Ms. Apple asked. “Is there room for dirtiness in literature? Are our lives so clean? Do we have to limit ourselves as artists to those clean moments, those corners of our lives that are not shadowed, or
dirty
?”

Shriver thought she might have a point.

“Not if we're going to be honest,” the boy in the back offered.

“I don't know,” the young lady said, feeling outnumbered. “It just seems excessive to me.”

True, Shriver thought. That bit about the flopping breasts was over the top.

“
Life
is excessive!” a chubby young man in a tight T-shirt shouted. “We have a responsibility to show that.”

“You
would
say that, Cornelius,” the pigtailed girl shot back. “All you write about is fellatio.”

The other students chuckled in recognition.

“Yeah, well, fellatio can be important.”

Cheers from the others.

“Okay, you guys,” Ms. Apple interrupted. “Let's get serious.”

“I
am
serious,” Cornelius said.

Another hand went up. A pale young man with a wispy mustache asked Shriver where he'd gotten the idea for his novel.

He had rehearsed this one. “I don't remember.”

“Why is the novel partly written in the second person?” someone asked.

“Second person?”

“Are you indicting the reader?”

“Uh, I'm not sure.”

“What about your new story?” the pale student asked. “How'd you come up with
that
?”

“Well,” Shriver began, thinking back to last week, “I was lying on my bed, and there was a water mark on the ceiling, so I thought I'd write about that.”

The students hummed.

“Fascinating,” Teresa Apple said. She turned to the class. “You see how art can be inspired by the mundane, the little details that are right under our noses?”

“And we all know what's under
Cornelius's
nose,” the pigtailed girl said.

An alarmingly thin girl raised her hand. “Why did you name your protagonist after yourself?”

“I did?”

A few students laughed.

“Was it because the story is so autobiographical?”

“I suppose I couldn't think of any other name,” Shriver said.

“And why'd you give the other characters such funny names?”

“What happened to his wife?” the thin girl asked. “How can someone just up and disappear like that?”

“Did she really disappear?” Shriver asked, curious now.

“Hm,” Ms. Apple said. “Interesting question.”

“He killed her, didn't he?” someone asked.

“More misogyny,” the pigtailed girl said.

Shriver, feeling a blood vessel vibrating in his head, was relieved when the boy in the back row responded. “Why do you have to have all the answers? Why can't a novel be ambiguous?”

“Yeah,” Cornelius said. “Sometimes you're not
supposed
to know.”

“But what's the point of that?”

“
Life
is ambiguous!”

The discussion continued in this vein, with Shriver happily unable to get a word in edgewise. He leaned against the desk with a tightly constructed smile on his face, and as the students debated the merits of ambiguity, metaphor, and poststructuralism, he thought: I have no idea what these young people are talking about. When he'd written his story about the water mark he had simply come up with the words that described what had happened to him. His wife had left him. It was raining outside. He lay on the bed. The water mark grew and grew. Then he had gone a little further because what had really happened beyond that point was not so interesting to him anymore, and probably not interesting to anyone else either. He had to make things up. Then he had to come up with a proper ending. He needed to feel like this had all led to something. He did not once think about deconstructionism, or whatever it was called. He didn't even know what it meant.
He had never heard of those French people who apparently invented it.