The Fugitives (23 page)

I WAS FINISHING
a beer just before lunch when the phone rang. It was Dylan. I opened another. “Been a while since I read a good AIDS novel,” he was saying. “I mean straight-up AIDS, none of this Africa shit, just gay guys dropping like flies in the heart of the Castro.”

“AIDS Classic,” I said.

“Those were some days. I guess most of the people who were going to die died already.” He sounded glum about it, like a golden era had passed. “But this book is set in 1989. Very pleased. Good read. Just came in over the transom.”

“You read stuff that comes in over the transom?”

“By ‘read’ I mean Kirsten read it. Fucked up her plans the last couple of evenings, but she knows she can go back to the reception desk anytime she wants. By ‘transom’ I mean that it was sent to me by Edmund White.”

“Ed just took one look and said, Fecker’s got AIDS written all over him?”

“Oh, he’s funny. Funny guy. You sound very chipper today, Sandy. How are things in Ashtabula?”

“About the same. Highs in the mid-thirties. Sunny skies, slight chance of snow this evening. Orion, Gemini, and Arugula visible.”

“Very,
very
chipper. Hang on to that, will you? Because I’m calling to give you a heads-up.”

“Yes?”

“They’re starting to cancel contracts right and left. One day past deadline and they kill the book.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“You know who they are. The moguls. The diversifiers. The change agents.”

“Three catchy titles.”

“Sandy, they are looking for excuses. And thanks to all that fucking around you’ve been doing, you are very close to being in breach. He’s laughing. He’s laughing at this. How much does Monte owe you on your advance, Sandy?”

“You’d know better than me. You said you were going to frame a copy of the check when it arrived.”

“I did. Someone stole it right off the bathroom wall during a party.”

“Maybe you were out of toilet paper.”

“He owes you a bunch, is the answer. Payable on delivery. What do you have for them?”

“Not much.”

“They’re not going to cut you much slack, then. We’ll be lucky if they don’t sue to recover what they’ve already paid. Did I mention they’re suing people? They’re suing people.”

“Again with the ‘they.’ I thought you said Monte had an investment in my career.”

“He did. He does. Unsurprisingly, though, he has a bigger investment in
his
career. Besides, this is out of his hands at this point. If you’re not going to make deadline, we should dodge that bullet, get out in front of it.”

“Nicely mixed metaphor.”

“He’s killing me. Think about it, Sandy. We don’t have a hell of a lot of time.”

“There’s no book.”

“Send them what you have and let Monte and his elves hammer it into shape like the shoemaker in that fairy tale. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the kind of OK. Writers fall for that crap all the time; don’t fall for it. He’s falling for it. He’s got this labyrinth he forces himself to spend years working his way through, with this total enigma at the center, so of course he’s thinking of it as an enduringly profound artifact that he’s creating. It’s just a fucking story, Sandy. That’s what you writers always forget. Look: five million years ago some poor schmuck of a hominid was wending his way across the savanna when a lion jumps him and drags him off into the bushes. For millennia he’s just a skull and a pile of bones buried beneath the mud until an anthropologist digs him up, dusts him off, and ships him to the British Museum. The guy never did anything except scratch himself, throw rocks, and eat grubs, but now he entertains, informs, and enlightens millions. How are you going to top that? Maybe in a couple of hundred years there’ll be a few dozen doctoral dissertations on your work that no one’s looked at in decades. Movies, Sandy: the closest you’ll ever come to leaving your jawbone preserved in the mud somewhere in Africa will be the movies made from your books. They won’t even be remembering your work. They’ll be remembering fucking Ethan Hawke.”

IT WAS GRIM-ENOUGH
news, possibly unsurprising. The idea of being
in breach of contract
thrilled me a little, though. It even sounded vaguely prosperous, to have a contract it was possible to breach. Apart from ridiculing my seriousness, or what he misperceived as my seriousness, about my work, Dylan had actually sounded indignant on my behalf, as if he really believed that I needed only focus and a little more time. Well, he could fight it all the way to the gates of the old city of Stuttgart, but nothing could change the fact that I was not among the authors dawdling over their manuscripts, I was among the dreamers who wandered lost in a gauzy dream of famous achievement, puffed up by my own ego. I shook my head, knowing, finally, that there would be no book.

Drama of the book as the adversary. Drama of the book as the difficult offspring. All horseshit. The drama of the book was that it wasn’t an artifact of clarification, organization, selection; wasn’t an artifact of speech aimed toward an audience, even—it was an artifact speaking directly, as a medium of exchange, to other artifacts, the things that could be bought with it. A jet lumbered overhead, wheeling against the clear blue sky as it rose from Cherry City International, climbing to altitude with its cargo of the competent and well-adjusted. A shaman of marketing may have a certain aura, the prodigy of the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange works his voracious will in a neon glow, but these are the prophets and healers of unapologetic mercantile cults, bearing their private burdens but few public expectations. Whereas I was just another tawdry scofflaw with an inflated reputation, an oversized advance, and the ingrained habit of buying things. I wasn’t suffering from writer’s block, I was suffering from oversatiety and the eagerness to experience emptiness again, so that I could refill it.

MY FIRST BOOK,
although it earned disproportionately ecstatic reviews, awards, and a toehold on the zeitgeist despite basically lousy sales, let me believe that I’d remained pretty much unchanged. After the second, I wasn’t quite as sure.
A More Removed Ground
became a bestseller and a weird kind of cause célèbre. Reviewers delighted in placing it on a scale (their findings varied) and comparing it to objects weighing similar amounts (a wheel of brie, a meat loaf, a steam iron, various small car parts, stereo components) in comparison to each of which, it seemed, the book suffered. The consensus was that the book’s sheer ambition marked me as a genius, but I should have been more considerate and cut it by about two-thirds. It sold anyway. After that, the people I met at book parties and readings knew who I was. The photographers who asked to take my picture, and the journalists who scheduled interviews, and editors who solicited fiction, and festival impresarios wanting readers, and department chairs seeking writers-in-residence, and moderators impaneling panelists, and feature guys lowering the bucket for “voice-driven” features, they all knew. It was pretty easy to persuade myself that I was someone important. Beyond the Palace of Versailles, though, things were different. Out there the big question was ingenuously poignant, and cutting: “Have they ever made a movie out of one of your books?”

In my case, as we have seen, the answer was yes—that random Hollywood Santa had visited my home and scattered largesse; enough of it, really, to inflame me with an unfamiliar greed; not a greed that would remain unfamiliar for very long, although I managed to coil all its malign energies once again, store them against the day when I could no longer delay my own gratification; coils that would come undone all of a sudden, undoing with them all those pragmatic habits, that smooth routine;
habits
and
routine
being the very things I’d confused for me, for myself, for who I actually was, when in fact
who I was
was a slavering maniac waiting for an opportunity to spring myself from self-control; a hungry, envious, vengeful, weak, and treacherous maniac, as well as a consummate bullshit artist; the first whiff of that bullshit arriving the moment I got my hands on that first check from my Hollywood agent; an ordinary blue-gray check imprinted with a number not all that big in the overall scheme of things, but sufficient, more than sufficient, to reveal all the potential for vulgarity I possessed.

That time, we’d thought of greed as a lapse, Rae and I. Dazzled, we thought it was understandable to mistake money for freedom. Who wouldn’t? It is, in its way. It’s better to have it than not to have it. Who doesn’t believe that?
Pace
Count Tolstoy, but I can’t make a case for becoming a wandering mendicant. I am a product of my century, the twentieth, that is, which can be said to have consisted of a sustained effort to repudiate History’s Most Beloved Author. It is better to have it, as I prove each and every day here, in Michigan, free to drive my brand-new truck and wear my brand-new clothes, free to sit on my brand-new furniture and type on my brand-new computer, free to eat my brand-new food heated in brand-new pots and pans, all mounted in the midst of this brand-new life I rustled up for myself—Cherry City was a perfect setting for the expensive and flawless gem that reflected my unhappiness back at me from each of its hand-cut facets. If this was not a kind of freedom then freedom had no purpose. If freedom and happiness are synonymous then American life is only the sum of the dumbest aspirations it engenders. Now I found it satisfying that no one here seemed to know who I was. The problem (and even I was able to recognize the problem) was it wasn’t any longer a matter of concealing my public reputation but of concealing myself.

It was already wearing me out, in other words, to have this much contact with the world after months in retreat from it. The phone calls from Fecker, Arlecchino, and Harris were quite enough; the burlesque unreality that came out of the tiny, tinny telephone speaker was like a blast from a Kaufman and Hart play. (Anyway, they didn’t really require anything of me in telling their tales of woe; my response wasn’t the point. No story requires an audience, just the willing credulity of the teller. That’s what makes it glow. Possibly that’s the problem with politicians, or with their speeches, anyway: they feel that if they assemble an audience they have only to pour sentiment over it, like oil over a gigantic salad.) But Kat had brought with her the unmistakable feeling of dawning intrigue and strategy, and I had no appetite for it. I couldn’t figure out if that made me sick or well. There I was, supposedly writing a book. Just write it, and Kaufman, Hart, Groucho, Chico, Abbott, and Costello all shut up. It was a simple prescription: avoid intrigue, write. They shut up, I stop hanging around the children’s library, stop with the Omega Man fantasies, and go visit my mother like every other mope does when he journeys home to the midwest from one of the shining, night-bright coasts. They shut up, and Kat goes back to Chicago and solves her marital problems. They shut up, and I go back to New York and live like any other solid citizen, writing gently critical book reviews and chortling with forced laughter at crowded parties thrown in overheated brownstone apartments or galleries with high-res photos of vulvas on the walls. Like every incorrigible nutcase in this sloppy and fucked-up vale of tears and trans fats and thousand-dollar handbags, I wanted to make the voices stop.