Shriver (9 page)

Meanwhile, Simone had run to the podium, where she tapped tentatively at the microphone.

Thump thump thump.

A few people applauded, Shriver among them.

“I am
so
sorry about that,” Simone announced. She then made room for Basil Rather at the podium. The playwright approached the microphone as if it might bite him. Ms. Brazir stood nearby, ready to administer first aid.

“Well, that was
interesting
,” Rather said.

He then apologized, not for the technical difficulties, but for the blunt language of his play, which, he said, was necessary to bring home the point of the piece. He did not elaborate on that point. Instead, he wondered if there were any questions.

Again, the audience was reluctant to pose queries. Wishing to avoid any temptation to leap into the fray, Shriver stood up and sidled past the young students toward the aisle. He would go out to the hall and relax, sit on a couch, have a drink. As he crossed the back of the ballroom, he glanced at Simone beside the stage. She was scanning the audience, clearly hoping to see some upraised hands. There were none. For a second their eyes met, and Shriver stopped in his tracks. He did not want her to see him leave.

“Come, now,” Basil Rather said. “Someone must have a question.”

Simone looked at Shriver with imploring eyes.
Please don't go,
she seemed to be thinking. For some reason, perhaps to
convince her that he was not actually going anywhere, he waved.

“Mr. Shriver!” Basil Rather shouted.

Heads turned. Shriver froze, hand still in midwave.

“First into the breach again?” the playwright asked.

Shriver looked back toward Simone, herself equally stationary, the two of them statues on either side of the curious throng.

Basil Rather leaned forward, awaiting Shriver's inquiry. The playwright's steady breathing could be heard over the sound system. In the sea of heads between them, Shriver made out the artificial coloring of Jack Blunt's hairpiece. The reporter smiled mischievously. Shriver scratched at his itching hand.

The noise seemed to come from underneath them at first, like the shifting of tectonic plates miles below the surface of the earth, but then it rapidly grew in intensity until, after welling up deep inside the bowels of the sound system, a volcanic blast of feedback erupted, making the previous disaster seem like a minor annoyance. Shriver watched as seven hundred people pressed their hands to their ears and shut their eyes—all except Simone, who ran onto the stage, straight to the podium, grabbed the microphone, and switched it off.

The noise ceased immediately, trailed by an echo that ricocheted around the room like an errant bullet. People seemed reluctant to uncover their ears, understandably worried that there might be another brain-frying aftershock. Basil Rather stood crimson-faced on the stage with Simone, speaking quietly but with many gesticulations.

Shriver took the opportunity to exit the ballroom. He could always claim ear damage as an excuse. Out in the hall, side by side on a couch, sat Gonquin Smithee and Ms. Labio.

“I don't know which was worse,” the poet said. “The feedback or the play.”

“Such claptrap,” her companion added.

“I mean, I don't mind confrontational—
I'm
confrontational;
you're
confrontational, Shriver—but at least he should have the talent to back it up.”

Shriver wondered if this meant Gonquin Smithee thought he had talent. Or that the
real
Shriver had talent. An olive branch, or at least a leaf, seemed to be in the offing. He sat down a little too hard on a couch opposite the two women.

“Would either of you like a snort?” he asked, removing the pint of whiskey from his pocket while, with his other hand, he rubbed his sore bottom.

“What the hell,” Ms. Smithee said, reaching for the near-empty bottle.

Ms. Labio watched with a disapproving expression as her friend downed a considerable amount.

“Gonky,” she said in a tone of warning.

The poet swallowed, shook her reddening head from side to side, and flapped her arms. “I can handle it,” she squawked, handing the bottle back. Her eyes were pink-edged and a little crossed. “So where do you teach, Shriver?” she asked.

“Teach?”

“Harvard? Princeton? Must be an Ivy.”

“I don't teach.”

Her eyes bulged. “You don't teach?”

Shriver shook his head.

“You mean you just write?”

“Is that good or bad?”

Ms. Smithee sat back in her chair and snorted. “Oh, it's good, it's very good. You're the genuine article. I wish I had the guts to do that.”

“How would you make money?” her friend asked.

“I could wait tables. Work in a bookstore. Whatever.”

Ms. Labio rolled her eyes at this. Shriver got the impression she rolled her eyes quite a lot.

Ms. Smithee gestured for the whiskey and took another long pull.

“You know, Shriver, I've been thinking about what you said earlier.”

Shriver took a serious drink himself.

“What
I
said?”

“You know—about writing from the point of view of my father. I may have been hasty in my assessment of that suggestion.”

“It wasn't so much a suggestion as a question,” Shriver said, anticipating another assault.

“But the question suggests that there is this other approach, and I've never really considered it.”

Relieved, Shriver said, “I bet it might be interesting.”

“What do you think, Majora?” Gonquin asked her friend.

“I think you've had enough to drink.”

“Aw, bullshit! I'm tired of being the frickin' victim. I wanna be the bad guy for once. See what it feels like. What does it feel like, Shriver?”

“How should I know?”

“Oh, c'mon. All those pervs and nasty-ass characters in your book. That guy cut off his wife's head, for Christ's sake.”

“Oh,” Shriver said, detecting a far-off rumble inside his bowels. “Him.”

Gonquin Smithee laughed. “You know, Shriver, you're not at all what I expected.”

“Is that so?”

“I thought you'd be this stooped-over goat man or
something, leering and slobbering at all the girls, all full of yourself with your awards and shit.”

“Is that my reputation?”

“You don't
have
a reputation. That's the amazing thing. I asked around about you but got nowhere: not a word for twenty years. You're a mystery, Shriver.”

“More than you know.”

“You're actually much more complicated, I can see that now.”

“Thank you. I think.”

“I'm fascinated by your divided nature.”

“Oh?” Shriver felt uncomfortable under the poet's piercing gaze.

“It's like there's two different people inside you, wrestling. There's the
real
you, gentle, sensitive, genuine. Then there's the liar, the imposter, the villain—the
writer
.”

Shriver tried not to gulp, but his Adam's apple moved of its own accord. “Must one be an . . . imposter to be a writer?” he asked, trying desperately to engage rather than turn and run away.

“Depends what he writes about.” Gonquin leaned forward. “Tell me—what's it like to inhabit those people? To crawl inside their skin and walk around doing such bad things?”

“I never thought about it,” he told her. “I suppose it must be sort of liberating.”

“Exactly! I need to be
liberated
!”

“You need some coffee,” Ms. Labio commented dryly.

“I need to be a liar! An
imposter
!”

“We shouldn't have come. This happens every time.”

“That's right,” Gonquin said. “Every time we come to one of these conferences, I meet real writers and have a
great time
!
That's
what you can't stand, Majora.”

Shriver stood up. “Excuse me, ladies.”

“Aw, look what you did,” Ms. Smithee said. “You drove him away.”

Feeling woozy from the whiskey and all this literary talk, Shriver walked in a jagged line across the lobby and into the men's room. As he relieved himself, he became aware of a presence in the nearby stall. He heard a groaning sound, followed by impressive flatulence. He washed his hands at the sink and, staring at himself in the mirror, saw that he'd never looked so old. Bags hung under his bloodshot eyes; gray whiskers dotted his sagging chin. He dabbed some water on his scalp and tried to comb his wiry, thinning hair into submission. Then he pulled down his trousers and examined the rather alarming purple bruise that had formed on his left buttock. It was shaped like something, but he wasn't quite sure what.

“Good God Almighty, Shriver!” T. Wätzczesnam cried out as he emerged from the stall. “Looks like you got kicked by a mule!”

Shriver quickly pulled his trousers up and buckled his belt. “It's nothing.”

The cowboy vigorously washed his hands. “A vinegar compress'll help that, ya know. I used to get whacked all the time back when I was in the rodeo.” He dried his hands with a paper towel and tossed it away.

“I didn't see you leave the ballroom,” Shriver said, changing the subject.

“ ‘By stealth she passed, and fled as fast / As doth the hunted fawn . . .' ”

With that, the cowboy made his exit. Shriver lowered his trousers and took another glance in the mirror. The bruise was shaped like an animal—an opossum, say—or maybe a small
Eastern European country on a map. Moldova? Slovenia? He would have to consult an atlas later.

Out in the lobby people were now emerging from the reading. Shriver swam against the tide and squeezed through the doorway. He scanned the room for Simone. Up near the front, Basil Rather was holding forth for several audience members. Nearby, Edsel Nixon spoke to some of the undergraduates, and Blunt, still sitting in his seat, scribbled in a little notebook. Over in a corner, Professor Wätzczesnam had been trapped by Delta Malarkey-Jones, who pressed a copy of her manuscript into the cowboy's hands.

Simone stood at the back of the room, Shriver now saw, conferring with the sound technician, who appeared to be explaining something to her. She seemed on the verge of tears. Shriver loitered nearby, hoping to speak to her. He felt awful about deserting her earlier. He should at least have been able to come up with a question for Basil Rather.

Nearby, in a shadowy corner of the ballroom, stood a tall young man dressed in black, fidgeting as if trying to decide on an action to take. He kept looking at Shriver, then looking away. Finally, he appeared to make up his mind and headed toward Shriver just as Simone broke away from the sound technician.

“What a disaster,” she said to Shriver. She looked much older now, aged by stress and the unforgiving glow of the fluorescent ceiling lights.

“I'm sorry.”

“I don't know what happened. Some sort of technical snafu that I don't understand.”

“Can I help?”

“Most definitely not.”

She moved off, the little wiggle in her step canceled out by the speed with which she walked.

“Going to the reception, sir?”

He turned to see Edsel Nixon. Had his designated handler noticed him staring at Simone's shapely derriere?

“The reception? Of course. Can you lead me there, Mr. Nixon?”

As he followed the graduate student Shriver turned to look for the tall man in black, but he was gone.

“This is going to be interesting,” Nixon said as they crossed the street. He did not appear to be bothered by the mosquitoes that were busy dive-bombing Shriver.

“How so?” Shriver asked, waving his arms to ward off the insects.

“Well, Mr. Rather is really upset about the sound. He thinks someone sabotaged his reading.”

“Sabotaged?”

“He said he might not come to the reception, even though it's for him.”

The St. George Café was a roomy coffeehouse with high, arched ceilings and a huge cross hanging on the wall. Several of the graduate students stood around drinking coffee and snacking on small pastries that the conference had supplied. A man with a shaved head tuned up an acoustic guitar on a small stage at the far end of the room.

“I'm going to get a latte,” Edsel Nixon said. “Do you want something?”

“Just get me an empty coffee cup, if you can.” Shriver opened his jacket to show the whiskey bottle. Nixon nodded and went to the counter.

On the café stage the folksinger, flanked by two public address speakers, stepped up to a foam-covered microphone. “This is a song by Jackson Browne,” he said, and started strumming.

“I'm going to rent myself a house,” he sang, “in the shade of the freeway . . .”

Meanwhile, Edsel Nixon returned with an empty coffee cup, into which Shriver poured himself a finger.

“Shriver!” came the now-familiar rumble. “Got any of that hooch left?”

Shriver offered a slug to the cowboy.

“What did you think of the reading, Professor?” the graduate student asked.

“Not my cup of whiskey, to be perfectly frank about it,” Wätzczesnam said before downing a significant portion of Shriver's booze. “I'm more of an
Our Town
kind of guy.”

“Too bad about the sound,” Edsel said.

T. grunted. “We'll see if that haughty old queen Rather shows up.”

Right on cue, Basil Rather, closely followed by Ms. Brazir, entered the café. Wätzczesnam started clapping and ran up to them, showering the playwright with praise. Rather thanked him, but his face remained stern.

“And don't fret about the sound,” the cowboy told him. “It didn't make any difference. Everyone was very happy with the performance.”

“Where did you go, Shriver?” the playwright asked. “Didn't you have a question?”