The Fugitives (20 page)

In the end all it added up to was around twelve hundred pages, over fifteen years. In the end it really wasn’t very impressive, as achievements went, when you thought about it. In the end she took all three of the books up to the counter and bought them, the clerk scanning and bagging them without comment, although Kat wasn’t quite sure what she’d expected, a chat or an opinion or what: she didn’t actually enter the dismal swamp of an independently owned bookstore often enough to be familiar with the fringe benefits currently on offer for patronizing such a place, unless it was just a general feeling of virtuousness, like you got for contributing to your local public radio station. The girl just shoved the books in a plastic bag as if they were socks or pork chops and sent her on her way, corroding a little more the romance that survived, God only knew why, in Kat’s heart.

She stepped out onto the street. The sun was beginning to break through the clouds, a little, and she tried to stay in it as she headed back to her car. As unexciting as she found the books, she was oddly excited to possess them. She felt that somehow she had illicitly found out something about Alexander Mulligan, although she knew this was absurd: writers deliberately published these things, didn’t they? Still and all, she would have been reluctant, even embarrassed, to admit to him that she’d gone to buy his books after having lunch with him.

PART 3

ATTACHMENT THEORY

16

I
SAT
on the sofa, a package of Wheat-Free Oatmeal Snackimals balanced in the palm of my hand. I’d unexpectedly encountered this latter-day hippie product at the vast, the cosmically sized, Meijer’s hypermarket where I go to hike the aisles in awe and, almost incidentally, to buy groceries. That had been the highlight of my day, apart from the moment that afternoon when I’d nearly run over some laptop-carrying kid racing out of Starbucks and into Front Street traffic.

The cookies were one of my children’s favorites, they reminded me of my children, I’d bought them as an aid to “thinking of” my children, but now I’d eaten every last one without sparing a single thought for them. Fuzzily, I gazed at the package (stoned-looking cartoon animals), then moved it to my mouth and emptied it of whatever was remaining at the bottom. Cookie fragments spilled out of the gas- and light-impermeable, shelf-stable, food-grade metalized plastic pouch and landed on my lap. Certified Organic crumbs and NASA-developed technology: the divergent dreams of the sixties, realized in unison. At last.

That was supper. It was Wednesday night, and I hadn’t felt like heating up, ordering in, or taking out. Animal crackers, scotch, and cigarettes that I’d bought with such hurried impulsiveness that I was lighting them with the only thing I could find, a gigantic butane fireplace lighter that spurted six-inch flames with an audible whoosh. Something had put me in one of those prolonged frail moods that call for voluptuous overindulgence. I listened to songs guaranteed to bring me to tears. Swayed to them, waiting for the tears: for false nostalgia, for absent friends, for lost youth, for my dead father, for my neglected children, for my demolished marriage, for my disastrous love affair. The tears came easily; I could cry to Miles Davis and the Beatles and the Clash with identical enthusiasm. I could cry to “Gymnopédie No. 1,” to the opening movement of Beethoven’s Fourteenth String Quartet, to Johnny Griffin playing “These Foolish Things,” to Elvis interrupting “Milkcow Blues Boogie” to entreat Scottie and Bill to get real, real gone for a change. Afloat on my couch in an ocean of tears, I wept equally for what had changed in the natural course of things and for what I’d intentionally exterminated. I wept until the scotch began to sour my stomach and the tears wouldn’t come anymore.

Later, after I’d stood in front of the refrigerator for several long, unsatisfying minutes (my pantomime there, framed in its light—bending at the waist, rising and placing my hands on my hips, tilting my head, sagging dejectedly at the shoulders—made me feel like one of those gigantic, forlorn, hyperexpressive marionettes), I turned on the TV. On one of the cable channels they were showing the movie made from my first novel. I knew the movie, but once again I was surprised by the casual, almost impertinent way that my characters had been translated so that they could be impersonated by movie stars, who never seemed more ornamentally otherworldly, more like they were merely walking through someone else’s dream, than when they uttered a line that had originated in my head.

But that happened only occasionally. There was a scrupulous thoroughness to the way that this complex collaborative effort worked to rebuke the book that had brought it into being. Space I’d filled with words was filled with pictures instead, and while I can’t say for certain whether my words were better than their pictures (I’d absorbed at least this much anxious relativism during my sojourn among the hipster elite), the film did exhibit a deliberate loss of density, as if a plate of spaghetti had been transformed into a mass of cotton candy. I felt my interest slipping away while watching (not for the first time), and as it did the book began to return to me, not as the familiar published object for whose permanent flaws I had long ago forgiven myself, but as the unsatisfyingly intimate companion that only a work-in-progress can be. Intractable, yet passive, permitting itself to be read and interpreted differently each time. Doesn’t pull its weight in the relationship. Doesn’t care how screwed up you think it is. Doesn’t care if you just quit, never add another word to it. Meanwhile, you fret over it constantly, hate leaving its side even when things aren’t going well; neglect other aspects of your life for it. In characterizing the relationship between writer and manuscript (here I lifted an index finger into the air from where I now lay on the floor beside the coffee table, wagging it dramatically), we see preoccupation on the writer’s part, involving low avoidance and high anxiety, and, on the manuscript’s part, dismissiveness, involving high avoidance and low anxiety. Very familiar. I raised myself on my elbows, gazed briefly at the TV screen (Ethan Hawke and Christina Ricci driving wordlessly along an empty road in a 1967 Chevelle—as usual I registered the car as a nice cinematic touch), took a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit it haphazardly somewhere along its length with the fireplace thing, and then recommenced my drunken lecture. Once the relationship ends, with either a finished or unfinished book, the writer regroups. Classic (finger shooting into the air once again, showering glowing coals and charred paper down on my face): ceases and desists with the book, suppresses anxiety, distances himself from the project.

Finally, I stood up. The room was in a state of dishevelment. Smoke drooped in the air. Cookie crumbs on the floor. The saucer I’d been using as an ashtray was overflowing with butts, and whiskey had slopped out of the bottle and each of the three glasses I’d apparently felt were necessary tonight. Half of my last-man-on-earth outfit was strewn about the room, and books and papers were scattered on the floor, signs of some urgent demi-ransacking I’d evidently done earlier. Sometimes I wish I bought into the mystique of disarray more readily. Though I felt neither jaunty nor cheerful, it seemed jauntily dissolute in here, in a cheerfully fuck-you kind of way; like Lester Bangs on the back cover of
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
. I stumbled over to the bookcase to take a look at the famous photo of Bangs in his wreck of an apartment, a photo that in its avowal of a way of living becomes an ironic portrait of the soon-to-be-dead critic.

Then the phone rang. I figured it was probably Rae, reporting her discovery of my deposit to her account. It would be like her to happily occupy herself sitting at the desk (at my desk), dealing online with money late at night. Every now and then something caught her eye and she would lift the phone to hassle some customer service rep, getting him to cut a few points off her APR, waive a fee, switch her to a more advantageous service plan. She routinely complained about defective or unsatisfactory products and services. She had become devoted to the vigilance she felt was required of those who found themselves at the base of the consumer pyramid, and she considered the efforts that large corporations made to accommodate her to be a form of bribery. The concessions she managed to wring from them made her feel like a kind of insider, a status she honored by being discreet, happy in her complicity in the effort to realize vast profits from customer inattention. Like the rest of us, it wasn’t justice she sought, but an edge.

The voice that echoed from the hallway once the answering machine had engaged, however, was not my ex-wife’s. It was faintly familiar, a high irritable twang, like H. Ross Perot coming down off helium. At first it sounded chummy and slightly apologetic, but the edge of touchy rancor that I remembered crept in right away.

“Boyd Harris here, calling for Alexander Mulligan. The third. Sorry to bother you so late in the evening but I take it upon myself to check in with each and every one of our Boyd Fellows each and every now and then and I like to do this sort of thing all at once. This here is your now and your then. How you get things done. Can’t aim a gun and then come back and fire it later. My nana taught me that. Target won’t wait. Sight won’t just stay lined up with the target. Got to aim the gun and then squeeze the trigger if you intend to hit anything. Otherwise it’s just a waste of time and ammunition. So while I reach you late, I been on the phone since six o’clock. Six Fellows per year each working through six-year terms means thirty-six Fellows total. Know something? Y’all usually pick up the phone. Can’t say I’m surprised. People always pick up and talk to the money. Love can roll over to voice mail, but you’re there for the money. Nana taught me that one, too. And y’all like to talk, I can say that. Chatty folks, you people. Like to chat my ear off, like as if I might take the money away from you if you don’t explain yourselves. I honestly have to say that I would prefer it if the calls were quicker. Seven hours on the phone with the Boyd Fellows. Twelve dollars of Boyd Fellowship money per call, I reckon. That’s two hours’ wages for a hand on my ranch. Three hours if he’s a Meskin. That’s the price of the blue plate special at the Avalon Diner. That’s the price of a à la carty car wash at the Fast Lube. Plus toll charges. Plus the not inconsiderable value of my own time. Seven hours chitchatting about physics and poetry and whatnot. I have to say, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be trying to prove to myself. We have a network of respected nominators, a esteemed committee of selection, and a distinguished advisory board to guarantee a top-quality pool of candidates. And the Fellowships are famously offered without strings, although I was not a party to that particular decision. I have to say I would prefer it if there was a string or two. Doesn’t matter how much someone likes rhubarb, they still got to pay for the pie and coffee. That’s also Nana. Not much got past Nana. There’s a whole bunch of reasons why I’m glad she’s dead, but the biggest is that she didn’t have to live to hear someone explain how they were writing a whole damn book talking about how whether Nathaniel Hawthorne was gay with Herman Melville. I just had that conversation. Shona Greenwald. Nice lady, but big as a cow. Got her fellowship couple years before you. Field of gender studies. Hawthorne and Melville sitting in a tree. New one on me but who am I to question the judgment of the respected, the esteemed, and the distinguished? It’s possible that I’m hopelessly out of step with currents of contemporary thought. That’s the contention of my dear cousin Mandy. You met her, I’m sure. Amanda Boyd Phimister. She never misses the investitures. Her chance to, ah,
hobnob
. Went to that Glassell art school down to Houston and got her head messed up forever. Sometimes the mosquitoes carry away the real people and leave behind fake impostors. Nana was big on that one. It explained a whole lot to her as she got older and more disappointed. Big swamp-bred mosquitoes, carrying people off and leaving death androids in their place. So, you gonna pick up or what? I sure hope I have the right number. Y’all are supposed to let us know when your personal information changes. It is written into the agreement you sign when accepting a Boyd Fellowship. You are bound by—”