Shriver (8 page)

Everyone raised their glasses and drank. Then, amid more talk of the mosquito problem, dinner was served. Throughout the meal, the waiter hovered nearby, his focus primarily upon Shriver, it seemed. Conversely, Shriver couldn't help but notice that Gonquin Smithee and her sidekick would not look at him at all. Unnerved, he poked at his salad in silence, barely listening to the talk of literature and academics. Occasionally, inspired by a word or phrase, the cowboy would utter some snippet of poetry, then quiz poor Edsel Nixon as to its author.

“You have an impressive familiarity with poetry, Mr. Nixon,” Shriver said.

“I have to. Professor Wätzczesnam is my faculty adviser. He says if I get any wrong he's going to torpedo my thesis.”

“All the more impressive.”

“Not really.” Mr. Nixon leaned in and spoke quietly. “He
quotes from the same poems all the time. Usually he's too inebriated to realize it.”

Professor Wätzczesnam did seem a bit sauced, Shriver thought. At the moment he was tilting toward Simone, talking animatedly, though she looked eager to get away.

Meanwhile, Basil Rather, in between chewing bovinely at a hunk of veal, asked Shriver if he was planning to attend that evening's reading. “It should be quite interesting,” he said, “if I do say so myself.”

“I'm sure I'll be there,” Shriver said.

“You know, Shriver, your novel was quite important to me as a young man.”

“Is that so?” Shriver felt himself blushing slightly.

“I can't remember much of it now—I'm not even sure I finished it—but I recall it made an impression on my soft, unformed intellect. Of course, I imagine it would not cast the same spell now that I am older and wiser.”

“I can see the influence in your work, actually,” Edsel Nixon told the playwright.

Through clenched teeth: “Really? How so?”

“In the transgressive nature of the characters. How they yearn for meaning so much, they destroy meaning in the process.”

“Nonsense,” Basil Rather said to the young man. “Did you hear that, Lena? My characters are transgressive! Wätzczesnam, what kind of claptrap are you teaching these students of yours?”

“Probably the deconstructionist element,” the cowboy explained in a tone of grave seriousness. He cast poor Nixon a withering glance. “They're running rampant in the English department.”

“God help us!” the playwright cried.

“And what's wrong with deconstructionism?” Gonquin Smithee asked.

“Ah-ah-ah!” The cowboy wagged a crooked finger. “Save it for the panel discussion tomorrow. Looks like there could be fireworks, eh, Shriver?”

Shriver signaled the hovering waiter for another whiskey. He dreaded the panel discussion. He knew nothing of deconstructionism or transgressive characters. He was just a man who liked to lie in his bed and watch the Channel 17 Action News. He missed Mr. Bojangles. He loved to rub the white cummerbund of fur on the cat's belly. Mr. B. never spoke to him about poetry or the meaning of literature. He never made any demands beyond regular feedings and the stroke of a hand.

When dinner was over, the waiter presented each guest with a separate check. Great piles of quarters and dimes appeared upon the white tablecloth. As Shriver added up his tip, the waiter knelt at his side.

“Mr. Shriver, it's a real pleasure to meet you. I've read your book three times.”

“Three times?”

“And I'm reading it again for my writing class.”

“You seem to be the only one to have finished it.”

“I think it's fascinating.”

The young man remained on one knee for a moment, his eyes watching Shriver from their deep sockets. For a moment, Shriver was convinced that he knew the boy somehow.

“I was wondering,” the waiter said, looking away now, shyly. “I'm a writer too, and I was hoping maybe you could take a look at—”

“Be gone, young interloper!” Professor Wätzczesnam shouted. “Mr. Shriver has better things to do with his time than to read your juvenilia.”

“Oh,” Shriver said. “But I suppose I could—”

“Nonsense, Shriver. You're beyond that sort of thing.”

The young waiter stood and gathered up Shriver's money. “Of course,” he said. “So sorry.” He walked off, dejected.

“Honestly,” T. said. “The nerve.”

/

Edsel Nixon ferried Shriver and T. Wätzczesnam back to the Union in a decrepit old army-issue jeep.

“Where's your horse, Professor?” Shriver asked.

“Walter? He's home resting, poor fellow. His battered hooves are destined for gelatin and postage stamps, I'm afraid.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

Shriver had hoped to catch a ride with Simone, but she'd promised a lift to Gonquin Smithee and Ms. Labio, so he thought it best to accept his handler's kind offer. He sat in the cramped backseat, among books and ice scrapers and teeth-marked pens, and rolled from side to side with every sharp turn. There was no roof, and the engine sputtered like a dying lawn mower.

“I like to ride with the top off,” the graduate student hollered over the noise. “The wind keeps the mosquitoes away!”

“ ‘Insects do not sting out of malice,' ” the cowboy quoted, one hand clasped to his fluttering ten-gallon hat, “ ‘but because they also want to live: likewise our critics—they want our blood, not our pain.' ”

Poor Edsel Nixon was drawing a blank.

“Okay, I'll give you a pass on that one,” his adviser said.

“Who is it?”

“Nietzsche, my boy! Don't you ever read anything but bullshit poetry?!”

They drove down a tree-lined street beneath dense,
overhanging limbs. Gazing up through a blur of leaves, Shriver caught a glimpse of the nearly full moon.

“So, Shriver.” Professor Wätzczesnam's rugged, sunburned face appeared between the front seats. “Any thoughts on the panel tomorrow? Or should I surprise you?”

“I'm not sure I have much to contribute, T.,” Shriver said, hoping to lower expectations.

“Balderdash! You're one of this country's most revered novelists. A mystery man for twenty years! You must have a lot to say about reality-slash-illusion.”

Shriver's hand began to itch. The bite had grown to the size of a quarter.

“People are coming from hundreds of miles away to hear your thoughts,” T. continued. “I know this for a fact!”

Shriver removed the bottle of whiskey and, with some effort, unscrewed the cap. He offered it to the cowboy.

“Don't mind if I do.” Wätzczesnam grabbed the bottle and indulged in a rather prodigious swallow. “Nixon?”

“No, thanks.”

“Oh, right,” T. said, handing the bottle back to Shriver. “Our man Nixon here is a teetotaler. Did you know that, Shriver?”

Shriver took a long slug and screwed the cap back on.

“I'm afraid I may disappoint Shriver fans tomorrow,” he said.

Wätzczesnam laughed. “I know you're up to something, Shriver. I've never met a writer who didn't have something to say. I don't know what it is, but I'm
sure
you're up to no good!” He laughed some more.

“ ‘If I had to give young writers advice,' ” Edsel Nixon said in a dramatic voice, “ ‘I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.' ”

The two older men looked at the graduate student.

“Lillian Hellman,” he said.

/

The ballroom was once again filled to capacity, with many of the same faces as at the afternoon reading, including that of Delta Malarkey-Jones, who waved a candy bar at Shriver from her seat near the door. Simone stood up front, chatting with a group of graduate students, while Basil Rather waited off to the side, tall and imperious. Ms. Brazir skulked beside him, looking as anxious as her mentor looked calm. Perhaps Rather kept her at hand to absorb all the trepidation that came with being an award-winning playwright. Shriver wished he had such a sponge for his own unease, and then realized that, in fact, he did: Mr. Bojangles. Oh, if only the cat were here with him tonight.

Edsel Nixon invited Shriver to sit up front with him, but he declined, preferring a row toward the back, where he could imbibe more easily. He found a seat in the far corner, next to some undergraduates abuzz about the upcoming performance.

He settled in and surreptitiously sipped from the bottle. Even from far across the ballroom, he saw, Simone stood out in the crowd. Her face glowed pink from the wine; her blond hair cascaded down her back. She was not only lovely, but apparently also a revered teacher, for her students listened closely to her words, in thrall, before peeling away, one by one, to perform their duties. The last of them, a bearded young man wearing a gold hoop earring, stepped up to the podium. The crowd dutifully quieted down as he cleared his throat.

There followed an adulatory introduction of Basil Rather.
The graduate student spoke of a trip he once made to New York, where he took in one of Mr. Rather's many critically lauded plays. Watching the performance, he said, he was sucked into a vortex of language he had never experienced before. Or something like that. Shriver was much too busy watching Simone, who had returned to her usual seat in the front row corner, to pay much attention.

Despite her obvious popularity with the students and her colleagues, Shriver thought Simone seemed lonely and isolated. He'd been touched by her talk of divorce and how difficult it had been to remove her wedding ring. She seemed to be someone who, when she loved, loved deeply.

After the introduction, an attractive man and woman walked onto the platform and stood a few feet apart. Using voices trained in the college theater department, they proceeded to enact a scene from the playwright's canon.

“Cunt,” the man casually began.

The undergraduate students near Shriver snickered.

“Coward,” the woman responded.

“Twat.”

“Weakling.”

“Bitch.”

“Mama's boy.”

Shriver heard a groan behind him and turned to see T. Wätzczesnam, who rolled his eyes toward the sky.

As the play continued, Shriver resorted repeatedly to his bottle. Eventually, both of the characters turned to the audience and recited monologues about the pointlessness of relationships and the impossibility of connecting.

“Can you ever know someone,” the young man wondered, “when you don't even know yourself?”

“We are just bundles of neuroses,” the woman said. “Each
of us a jigsaw piece with its own distinct bulges and crevices. What are the chances of finding the perfect match?”

Shriver heard T. grunt and say, “Mixed metaphors.”

Up front, Simone sat leaning forward, as if hanging on every word. But as Shriver watched her, he hoped she was thinking of other things—the progress of the conference so far, the meaning of life, or (dare he think it?) the genius of the author Shriver—anything, he hoped, but the play being enacted onstage.

After about thirty very long minutes, the actors abruptly stopped speaking and, amid smatterings of applause, took their bows. Shriver felt a tapping on his shoulder and turned to see T.'s sweaty visage.

“I could sure use another slug of that there hooch, Shriver, old buddy, after that sorry display.”

Shriver handed the bottle over, and the cowboy took a long pull.

Meanwhile, Basil Rather bounded onto the stage and leaned against the side of the podium, twisting the neck of the microphone to point it closer to his face. His mouth moved but no sounds emerged. He continued with this pantomime until several audience members began shouting, “The sound is off!” and “Turn the mic on!”

“Oh, what a blessing,” T. said.

Rather's face reddened. He turned to look at Ms. Brazir, who was standing off to the side of the stage. Ms. Brazir, in turn, looked toward Simone, who was already rushing to the podium. She examined the microphone, pushed a button, but still there was no amplification. The playwright's face grew more and more crimson as poor Simone scurried up a side aisle to the back of the room.

Shriver watched as she conferred with the obviously
confused young technician behind a large soundboard. Knobs were turned, cables extracted and replaced. Still no sound. The audience became restless, their whispers like rustling paper.

“Shriver,” Wätzczesnam said, “what say we adjourn to the Prairie Dog Saloon to discuss the profound piece of
thee-a-tah
we were just subjected to?”

But Shriver was distracted. Directly above the area where the soundboard was located, he saw for the first time a large screen hanging against the room's back wall. Projected onto this screen was the photograph of the author Shriver from the conference brochure. One of the students sitting next to him, a young girl in dark pigtails and a halter top with a sunflower design, looked from the projected photo to him and back.

“Hey, that's you,” she said.

“No, no,” Shriver said, but the girl had already turned to her friends and shared the news. They all smiled and said hello. “We're reading your book in our class,” one of them said.

Meanwhile, the image had faded and the face of Gonquin Smithee had appeared on the screen. After a moment this photo dissolved into a professionally lit publicity shot of Basil Rather.

“Can you hear me?” Basil Rather called out from the lip of the stage.

“No!” someone barked back.

At this point, an earsplitting shriek of feedback rocked the ballroom. It went on so long and so shrilly that Shriver had to cover his ears.

When the noise finally faded, Shriver looked around with one open eye, half expecting to see the room in tatters. On the stage, Basil Rather stood bowed with his hands still over his ears, his face twisted into a grimace.

The gaping silence was broken by T.'s rumbling voice: “ ‘All the heavens / Opened and blazed with thunder such as seemed / Shoutings of all the sons of God,' ” followed by a more timid utterance from the front of the room: “That would be Tennyson, sir.”