The Accident (40 page)

Maybe everyone thinks the same thing: If it’s not me who makes this bargain, who betrays this trust, it’ll just be someone else who makes the sellout, someone else who benefits. There is always someone willing to take the bribe, the bait, the opportunity to run the division, the corporation, the world. There is always someone.

Should that person be me? That’s the question.

Jeff turns around, looks at the incendiary manuscript. He picks up the top inch. He turns back to the fireplace, and scatters the paper on the small smoldering fire. He blows softly at the gathering flames, and waits for them to catch, engulfing the pages from the bottom. By the light of its own flame, he rereads the top page before it curls and shrivels, then disappears.

He kneels there, feeding small stacks of paper into the growing conflagration, watching the manuscript burn, until every last page is up in smoke.

I
n the dim light by the front door, he kneels and opens her bag. At first glance he doesn’t see it. So he looks more carefully, and removes the large items, and still doesn’t see any thick stack of letter-size paper. It isn’t there.

Jeff rises, stands in the foyer, stares into the living room at the licking flickering flames, thinking back through the past hours, driving, shopping at the farmstand, arriving to the house, reading while Isabel prepared dinner in the kitchen, eating on the veranda. Then kissing, and walking upstairs, bed, sex, talking, that phone call.

Then he came back down here, and he burned his copy of the manuscript.

But he can’t remember the last time he saw her copy. Did she leave it in the car? Ditch it at the gas station? Did she hide it somewhere in this house? Where would she have had the opportunity …?

He turns on the kitchen light. He starts opening cupboards, and then drawers, one by one, as quietly as possible. There are a lot of places to hide something, in a kitchen. He looks on top of the glass-fronted hutch, and in the cabinet beneath the sink. In the oven. In the dishwasher. In the walk-in pantry and the tiny whitewashed washroom.

And when he eventually finds it, he grins.

T
he moon is casting dim shadows from the trees on the lawn that sweeps down to the rocky bluff, and the moonlight’s reflection is shimmering in the Sound, and he can barely see the lights of Connecticut twinkling in a low line across the water. Off to the east, away from the moonlight, the sky is filled with stars.

The slipcovered chair is deep and soft and enveloping, and Jeff sinks low, lower, his feet resting on the ticking-stripe cushion of the ottoman. He hears the creaking of the old wide-planked floorboards upstairs. The squeal of pipes and the distant vibration of running water, the click and hum of the pump in the cellar turning on, running, then a special type of
quiet when it stops. Two-foot waves thrum the beach softly, regularly, an acoustic guitar strumming rhythm. He can smell a whiff of salt, carried on a gust of cool breeze.

He’s falling asleep, aware of the dreaminess of his thoughts, the surreal images marching through his brain, like troops trudging through an occupied city. He recognizes these thoughts as dreams; he knows that he’s dreaming. But he’s also not asleep, not totally; he’s still aware of the real world, of real sounds, real sensations. Or at least he thinks he is.

And then he knows he is, because it’s a real sound that pulls him into full consciousness, out of the half-asleep dream state: it’s a creak from the front of the house, from downstairs not up-, made by something or someone who’s not Isabel. It’s the creak of the front door halfway through its arc.

Jeff’s eyes flash open, but otherwise he doesn’t move. This is real; there’s someone in the house.

He stays frozen, slouched low in the deep chair, his eyes darting. He’s not sure if he can be seen from behind; he may be sunk low enough in the chair to be invisible. Then again, he may not be low enough.

Jeff hears a creak on the floorboards behind him. Another.

He’s been holding his breath too long, so he exhales slowly, silently, then inhales just as slowly, straining to be still, to be quiet, to be invisible.

And then a small tinny clang, a little piece of metal landing on the wooden floor. His bathroom sink’s washer, falling out of his pocket.

Damn
.

It’s only a second later that he feels a thing touch his temple. For an instant he’s not completely positive, but then all doubt is erased that the thing is a gun when a man says, “Don’t move a muscle.”

This doesn’t make any sense, Jeff thinks. This isn’t part of the plan. There aren’t supposed to be any guns aimed in his direction. An idea scampers through his brain that he should try to explain to this man,
but worries that his explanation may not do anything other than get him shot.

While the man holds a gun to Jeff’s head, a second man appears in front of him. A familiar man. Someone Jeff saw once before, months earlier.

H
e has always frequented a bar around the corner. In the nineties it was Max Fish across from his apartment on the Lower East Side, as well as the Irish pub O’Flaherty’s around the block from his office in Times Square. When he briefly lived uptown, the challenge was to find a place on Amsterdam that wasn’t perpetually mobbed with drunk ex-frat boys and sorority girls. And when he started spending a lot of his life on Union Square, he struggled to choose a bar that didn’t explode with happy-hour revelry every evening.

Because what he’s always looking for is elusive: a comfortable place that’s neither prohibitively crowded nor depressingly empty. A clientele older than college kids and twenty-something binge drinkers, but younger than the hardcore geezers who hunch over their Manhattans and
Racing Form
s in old-man bars. He wants a ballgame playing on one television in the corner, but not twenty big screens broadcasting the entire league’s play. A decent selection of whiskey, without paying eighteen dollars per glass. A kitchen that can produce an acceptable burger, but not a fussy unaffordable patty made with braised short rib or stuffed with foie gras.

What Jeff wants is a place to work after work hours, to bridge the lonely distance between office and bed. In the twenty-plus years that he has lived in New York City, he has cohabitated with another human being for a total of only five; there was a one-year roommate at the get-go, and then a long-term girlfriend in his late twenties, and later a short-term wife. But for the other years he’s been solitary, like so many New Yorkers, eating dinner at bars, ordering in Chinese to consume on the couch,
turning on the bedside reading lamp at two a.m. without worrying about waking anyone.

This he thinks is the secret to New York City’s vast productivity: everyone works all the time to avoid facing their loneliness.

It was a normal lonely evening when Jeff headed to the old bar up on Eighteenth Street, leaving the office in the dark wet cold of early-winter seven p.m., red taillights faced off against white headlights on Park Avenue South, selfish suit-wearing jackasses whose golf umbrellas dominated the entire width of sidewalks, women in short skirts and tall heels trying to hail cabs on every corner, the welcoming glow from shops and restaurants and bars and lounges, customers rushing in and staggering out.

As he turned off the avenue a gust of crosstown wind ballooned his little five-dollar umbrella, snapping a few aluminum ribs. Although the wind was strong, the rain was light, which made his cheap umbrella more trouble than it was worth; he tossed it in the wire-mesh can on the corner, and hustled down the block protected by only his waxy raincoat.

Jeff hung the heavy damp jacket on a peg by the door of the pub. He loves this coat—it’s comfortable and warm, it’s waterproof and dries quickly, it has good pockets in the right places, it fits over a sport jacket—but at the same time he hates its ubiquity, its association with a uniform for a team he’s not on.

He took a seat on a wooden stool at the far end of the bar, with an empty spot between himself and a pair of unappealing thirty-something women. One gave him a quick once-over, batting over-mascara’d eyelashes over a pink drink in a V-shaped glass, which was not the thing to order in this bar. This was a beer place.

He turned away, unpacked a short stack of proposals from his satchel, his Sheaffer fountain pen from his flannel jacket. He ordered a first pint of ale; he’d order a second with food. He read the covering letters of a few proposals, pitches from agents about why this, that, and the other project should exist in the world, how respected So-and-So is, what a hot topic
such-and-such is. Guaranteed publicity. Can’t-miss special-sales opportunities. Superlatives and exaggerations and misrepresentations and at least one outright falsification.

A man took the stool next to Jeff, ordered a Belgian ale. Jeff looked up at the sound of the man’s voice, urbane and upper-class, out of place in this downtown pub. A voice that belonged in Bemelmans Bar, or maybe the Union Club, visiting from Boston, or from the 1920s.

The two sat in companionable silence for a few minutes while the Knicks quickly went down 12–3, and the bartender busied himself mixing new drinks for the women, then filling a tray of beer glasses for a large group at a table, before heading to the far end of the bar to chat with a better-looking, younger pair of women.

That’s when the man said, “You’re Jeffrey Fielder, aren’t you?”

Jeff turned to face this stranger. Somewhere between mid-fifties and late-sixties; tall and fit, schoolboy spectacles and neatly combed gray hair, well-dressed, maybe too, with a peacocky pocket square poking out of his tailored sport jacket. The type of man you see in expensive uptown restaurants, or boardrooms. Not that Jeff had ever been in a boardroom. Or even really knew what a boardroom was. But the guy didn’t look like the type of person who hung around a place like this.

“Do we know each other?” Jeff tried to muster a smile, pushing through the vague discomfort of a mid-forties man with a mediocre memory and a long history of inebriation, confronted with this type of situation. He’d met plenty of people who he later couldn’t remember. Especially men. He forgot dozens, maybe hundreds, of men per year. Forgetting men was practically his hobby.

“No.” The man shook his head. “You don’t know me.”

Jeff raised his eyebrows, asking for an explanation.

“I’m a sort of, I guess you’d call it an
enthusiast
about book publishing.”

Was this guy a stalker? A frustrated failed novelist, looking for a way to get published? “Uh-huh.” Or a rejected writer, looking for revenge?

“I’ve been studying the book business recently, learning about the
process. Agents, editors, writers. Contracts, royalties, legal issues. Libel and such.”

Jeff was now fully turned in his barstool, facing this guy. He certainly didn’t look threatening, nor was he behaving in a scary fashion; he looked like an art dealer, is what he looked like. But this was definitely a creepy conversation.

Jeff had been stalked once, by the writer of a book proposal who had come to the office with her ineffective agent for a meet-and-greet. Then Jeff had declined to make an offer on the project, as had apparently every other editor during multiple rounds of submissions, and the writer eventually resorted to alternative methods of trying to sell her project. Which included stalking and then propositioning Jeff—boldly and explicitly and not exactly quietly—and after he refused she called his home and nevertheless told his wife that he had not refused, unleashing a whole shitstorm from which his marriage never recovered.

Lesson being that you never know when crazy is going to show up, and there’s no real way to protect yourself. So it wasn’t really an actionable lesson, so much as simply the revelation of an unpleasant fact of life for anyone who’s in the business of making other people’s dreams come true, or dashing them.

“How can I help you, Mister … I didn’t catch your name?”

“You can call me Joseph Lyons. Joe.”

“What does that mean? Is that your name?”

“No, not really.” The guy smiled. “Mr. Fielder, someday soon—in the next few weeks, maybe, or within a few months—a manuscript will find its way to you. It may even arrive as an exclusive. This manuscript will be about Charlie Wolfe. It will—that is, the manuscript will—”

Jeff appreciated the clarification of the pronoun’s antecedent. But this whole thing was making him tingle with fear.

“—purport to be a revelatory, er,
bomb
shell. It may be a full biography of the man’s life, or it may have a more limited scope. That aspect of the project isn’t comp
lete
ly clear to us, at the moment.”

“Who’s
us
?”

The man ignored the question. “What
is
clear is that this manuscript will claim that Mr. Wolfe did something, or some things, horrible. Unseemly. Perhaps illegal.” He shrugged. “Who knows.”

The bartender stopped by, and this man ordered another beer, a pause in his story, looking around appreciatively. “This is a good place,” he said.