The Man Who Cancelled Himself (53 page)

Not that I had walked away from my first career. Not me. Not Stewart Stafford Hoag, that tall, dashing author of that smashingly successful first novel
Our Family Enterprise,
the one that led
The New York Times
to label me “the first major new literary voice of the Eighties.” I’m referring to my second career. I’m a pen for hire, a ghostwriter of celebrity memoirs. Not just any ghost, mind you. I am
the
ghost—the best money can’t buy—with five, count ’em, five no. 1 bestselling memoirs to my non-credit, as well as somebody else’s bestselling novel. I am not one of the lunchpail ghosts. I cost a helluva lot more, for one thing—generally a third of the action, including royalties. The usual As Told To kids don’t command nearly so much. But they also don’t know how to treat celebrities. They handle them with kid gloves. I wear steel mesh ones. I also carry a whip and a stool. And when I’m in the cage with them I never, ever let them know I’m afraid. If I did they’d eat me alive. There’s something else that sets me apart from the others—and I’m not referring here to my wardrobe or to my uncommonly short, four-footed partner with the doofus ears and the unwholesome eating habits. It’s simply that, well, some rather ugly things have this way of happening when I’m around. That’s because memoirs, good ones at least, are about dirty secrets past and present. Generally, there’s someone around who wants those secrets to stay safely buried. And will go to any length to make sure that they do. Just one of the many reasons why my days and nights doing the Claude Rains thing were behind me. Or so I had hoped and prayed.

I had given that all up so as to concentrate on novel number three. Yes, there was a novel number two,
Such Sweet Sorrow,
about the stormy marriage between a famous novelist and famous actress. Doesn’t ring a bell? I’m not surprised. It hardly even got reviewed, unless you count that snotty capsule in
The New Yorker,
which called it “an appalling waste of trees.” That one really hurt, because only God can make a tree. I don’t know who or what makes critics. Possibly some form of virulent fungus. As for novel number three … it had been in progress for nearly four years now. Frankly, it was going a little slowly. Frankly, all I had to show for it was one paragraph. More of an image, really. A creak on the stairs. Not that this was all that I’d written. Hell, no. I’d written hundreds and hundreds of pages more. Whole plots, subplots, characters … You name it, I’d written it. And scrapped it. When you’re young, writing is about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. You plunge recklessly ahead, utterly fearless, utterly convinced that no one has ever before done what you’re doing. That gets harder as you get older. Because you realize that everything’s already been said before—by better writers than you, by lesser writers than you and by you. Not that I was giving in to it. I rose early every morning and retreated to the chapel. It was a small chapel, one narrow room with no electricity and not much in it—one Franklin stove, one harvest table, one chair, one oil lamp, one typewriter, one former genius. There I sat, day after day, waiting for the damned thing to bubble to the surface. And waiting. But it wouldn’t come. I was even beginning to wonder if it was there at all. This was me facing a cold, hard reality—that I simply didn’t have anything more to say. Possibly I was even through.

Fortunately, there was plenty to keep me occupied outside. Autumn’s your busy season in the country. Apples and pears to pick, firewood to lay in for winter, gardens to turn under, storm windows to repair, downed leaves to be gathered and shredded into mulch. The garden shed needed re-roofing. The battered old Land Rover needed its winter oil and its plow blade. There were rotten foundation sills to be replaced in the old carriage barn, one corner of which I was in the process of jacking up with the aid of a young local named Dwayne Gobble, who had come into our lives a few weeks back.

Know how every once in a while you’ll be inching your way along a narrow, treacherous country road in the middle of a violent storm—trying desperately not to wrap your car and yourself around a tree—and some heavy metal testosterone case in a mondo pickup truck comes roaring up on your tail with all sixteen of his brights on, honking at you to speed up or move over or simply die? Meet Dwayne Gobble. That’s how I did. I hit the brakes right there in the middle of the road, got out of the car and suggested the pinhead might want to step out of his truck so he wouldn’t bleed all over his nice dashboard when I hit him. I’ve been known to get a little butch after I’ve been in the country for a while. Dwayne ended up coming to work for us. Autumn’s a busy time, like I said. Plus our usual caretaker, Vic Early, Hollywood bodyguard extraordinaire, was on location in Maui guarding the body of Cindy Crawford. Poor Vic never could catch a break.

Yeah, I was living the sweet life, all right. But then again, I wasn’t. I almost always awoke in the night, bathed in sweat, Merilee sprawled there next to me in deep, exhausted slumber. If Tracy needed changing, and she always did, I’d change her. Afterward, I’d sit up with her in the front parlor, staring gloomily at the glowing embers of the fire and sipping eighteen-year-old Macallan while she gurgled in my lap, studying me intently, waiting for me to explain myself. I’d study her right back. She was a calm baby, sunny and hopeful and not at all inclined to be irritable, which meant she took after Merilee more than she did me. Her head seemed abnormally large to me but I was assured that this was normal for a midget human life-form her age. I’d think about what lay ahead for her. In two years she’d be singing along with Barney. In three she’d be parked in front of her own Mac playing
Putt-Putt Joins the Parade.
In four she’d be calling me a butthead. I didn’t know what I’d be calling her. I still hadn’t made up my mind about her. I didn’t love her. I didn’t dislike her. I didn’t feel anything toward her. I wondered if I ever would. Maybe when she got older and starting asking me questions, like where do duckies go when they die, Daddy, and why is there greed and is it okay to give a boy a hand job on the first date? Maybe then.

I’d sit there sipping single malt and staring at the fire and brooding a lot about life, death and fatherhood—three things I knew nothing about. I knew I’d never had it so good. Christ, I knew that. But I also knew I’d never felt so frustrated and unfulfilled and lost. Part of it was the novel, no question. But not all of it. I didn’t know what it was, the rest. I only knew there seemed to be an absence of joy in my life.

That’s what I was thinking about the night Thor Gibbs showed up, begging me to help Clethra pen her Tale of Whoa. Like I said, I didn’t want to. And not just because I’d had it with ghosting. As far as I was concerned, Thor had behaved like a swine. A seventy-one-year-old man doesn’t run off with his eighteen-year-old stepdaughter. Not if he’s thinking straight. But therein lay my dilemma—the man
wasn’t
thinking straight. Couldn’t be. Something had to be wrong. Terribly wrong. And part of me felt that Thor knew it. That’s why he’d shown up. Not because
she
needed a ghost but because
he
needed
me.
My old friend was crying out for help. So was poor Arvin, an innocent boy who was being ripped apart by his parents’ battle—not to mention his half-sister’s rather queer taste in boyfriends.

Face it, this was a family in desperate need of a healer. John Lee Hooker calls the blues our great healer. I don’t disagree with the old master. It’s just that most of the people who come to me for help are tone-deaf. And they don’t see things too clearly either. They need someone to set them straight. Someone who’ll tell them what they don’t want to hear. Someone who’ll whomp them upside the head if need be.

They need me.

And sometimes, if I get real lucky, I need them, too.

I
PICKED SOME WHITE MUMS
from the garden to put on Merilee’s breakfast tray. Breakfast in bed may be Merilee’s favorite thing in life, other than watching
Regis & Kathie Lee,
and she won’t watch them anymore. Doesn’t want to expose Tracy to crap. She’d heard that just as you are what you eat you are what you absorb—in other words, if you watch crap, if you listen to crap, if you read crap, you
become
crap. I don’t know who told her that. It may have been me.

I’d been up for hours. Never went back to bed, actually. After I’d gotten Thor and Clethra settled in I’d stropped Grandfather’s straight-edge razor and shaved. I dressed in an old, soft Italian wool shirt, thorn-proof moleskin trousers, ankle boots of kid leather and the eight-ply oyster gray cashmere cardigan I got at the Burlington Arcade in London. At dawn I’d grabbed my old hickory walking stick and went hiking off through the woods with Lulu to Reynolds’ general store for the
Times,
the maple leaves turning a million different glorious shades of orange and red, the geese flying over in formation, heading south. It was a bright, clear morning, the air crisp and cold. Lulu had on her hand-knitted Fair Isle vest to ward off the chill. She picks up sinus infections easily, and she snores when she has them. I know this because she likes to sleep on my head. After her most recent bout, her vet had raised the idea of having her deviated septum repaired. I’d never heard of a basset hound getting a nose job. The vet assured me it was quite common and would not alter her appearance in the least. Right away this cooled me on the whole idea.

She came scrambling up the stairs with me when I took Merilee’s tray up, nails clacketing on the wood floor, desperate to jump up on her mommy’s bed for a snuggle. But this was a no-no. Not with Tracy there. She was on her belly next to Merilee in her Babar the Elephant footed rompers, arms waving, legs kicking. Looked like she was break-dancing, actually. Merilee cooing at her with delight. Lulu had to settle for the rocker in front of the fireplace, grunting peevishly while I threw open the curtains and let in the morning sun.

One entire wall of the master bedroom was a row of tall mahogany casement windows that afforded a not terrible view of the cove. The bedroom was not large. We kept it rather sparely furnished. The rocker, washstand and lamp tables were Shaker. The bed, of gently battered brass, was not. Shaker beds, as you may know, tend to be, well, really narrow.

“They’re still here, aren’t they?” Merilee demanded when I presented her with her tray.

I stood there gazing at her. She looked weary. She always did now. But she also looked extremely delectable. It was hard to believe she was past forty. Even harder to believe she was mine. Not that Merilee Nash is a conventional beauty. Her nose and chin are too patrician, her forehead too high. Plus she is no delicate flower. She is just a hair under six feet tall, with broad sloping shoulders and huge hands and feet. What used to be called a big-boned gal, and is now called a Merilee Nash type.

“Can’t I do something nice without you immediately being suspicious?” I said lightly.

“Hmphht.” She reached for the paper and glanced at the headlines. Or I should say squinted. She won’t read with her glasses on in front of the baby for fear Tracy will grow up wanting to wear glasses whether she needs them or not. This particular belief she cooked up all on her own. She took a sip of her hot milk. The milk was from a dairy in nearby Salem and came in glass bottles with the cream floating on top. She took another sip. She said it again. “They’re still here, aren’t they?”

“As a matter of fact, they’re asleep in the chapel.”

Without warning, Tracy tried sitting up. I gave her an 8.5 on form and a 9 on degree of difficulty—before she abruptly plopped over onto her side with a quizzical yelp.

Delighted, Merilee reached over and tickled her foot, producing a gale of giggles. I watched the two of them, wondering just how much longer Merilee would be content here on the farm with her, especially now that the summer gardening season was ending and the fall theater season beginning. How much longer before she’d need to hear that applause again?

She furrowed her brow at me. “Darling?”

“Yes, Merilee?”

“There’s no bed in the chapel.”

“He prefers the floor. Some back injury from his rodeo days.”

“And she?”

“Not to worry. She’s generously padded on both sides.”

“Why, Mr. Hoagy, are you being meowish?”

“Who, me? Never.”

“So what’s she like?” Merilee inquired, trying to sound casual about it. And failing.

“I gave them the down comforter from the guest room.”

“Is she awful?”

“And Sadie to fend off the mice.”

“You don’t like her, do you?” She seemed mildly amused by this.

“Thor asked me to give her a chance.”

“You
detest
her.” She seemed greatly amused by this.

“Possibly,” I offered, “she’s just in need of a positive female role model. After all, she and Ruth aren’t exactly on good terms anymore.”

“And I wonder why.” Merilee took a bite of her toast, which was topped with her very own apple butter. She shook her head. “He’s a dirty old man, Hoagy. And she’s cruel and stupid.”

“I guess that means you don’t want them staying here for the winter.”

Her eyes widened. “Staying here? Explain yourself this instant, sir.”

I did. And to her credit, Merilee listened patiently and calmly before she responded, “I want peace and quiet right now, not
Hard Copy
camped out at the foot of our drive. That’s exactly what I don’t want.”

“I don’t want that either, Merilee. Nor do they.”

She studied me over her mug. “You want to do this book with her, Hoagy? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Not even maybe.” I sat down at the foot of the bed. “But I do owe the man. And he is in trouble.”

She sipped her milk, considering it long and hard. “Okay,” she concluded, much to my surprise. “But only because of a certain person who I happen to care deeply for.”

“Ruth?”

She shook her head.

“Arvin?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“You haven’t been very good company lately, darling. You’ve been pointy and distant and about as much fun as a dose of poison ivy in one’s pink places.”