About the Author (6 page)

“I see,” Mrs. Church said. “There was some kind of robbery.”

“That’s right.”

A bitter little smile seemed to be tugging at her mouth. “Funny that Stewart never mentioned this . . . robbery. Did the thief, or thieves, make off with anything else, or did they come solely to remove my son’s ring?”

“I’m afraid Stewart’s computer was also stolen, as a matter of fact.”

Mrs. Church nodded slowly. Then her eyes grew quite hard and penetrating. She explained that it was a
very expensive
ring, a family
heirloom
, and that it was
irreplaceable
.

It took me a while, but I finally twigged that the woman was trying to suggest that
I
had pocketed it. I informed her, in as steady a voice as I could muster, that Stewart had reported the ring stolen at the Thirty-fourth Precinct at 183rd Street and Broadway, and that she might like to check there to see if the ring had been found.

She held my eye. “Yes, we might just do that.” She snatched her gaze away and continued to dig around in Stewart’s drawers. I remembered hearing, somewhere, that anger was one of the early stages of grief. But I thought I detected, in Mrs. Church, a hostility quite divorced from her current tragic circumstances. I excused myself and went to pace in the living room.

They emerged soon after. Stewart’s father was carrying his dead child’s framed family photographs—the ones Stewart had stuffed away, out of sight, in his filing cabinet. They had left everything else.

I ushered them out to the filthy old lobby.

“If that ring turns up,” his mother said pointedly, glancing up and down my body in a manner that suggested she disapproved of my shoes, “
let us know
.” And with that the bereaved couple marched off to the curb, where they had kept their cab waiting.

No wonder Stewart had loathed them, I thought as I watched his parents climb into the taxi. No wonder he had turned down their financial assistance when it was offered. No wonder he had kept on writing long after he told them he had given it up. He must have been motivated, at least in part, by pure spite. Strange. With Stewart dead, I felt I had never understood him so well.

I cannot pinpoint the precise day and hour when I decided that I would attempt to publish
Almost Like Suicide
under my own name. Clearly, some such thought had been in my mind when I filched the writings from Stewart’s filing-cabinet drawer. The important thing to note is that at the time I thought it a morally defensible decision.

The material belonged to me. Stewart, as far as I was concerned, had acted simply as a glorified secretary, a dictation taker—a ghostwriter. And really, now that Stewart was a
literal
ghost, who could have resisted the temptation to appropriate his work? By Stewart’s own admission, no one knew he was a writer. I, meanwhile, had spoken of my literary aspirations to anyone and everyone who would listen! My voice rang in every line; I was the novel’s “I.” Who would ever suspect that
Almost Like Suicide
was not mine? Who can even say with assurance that it was not?

I also want to register something else. In assuming authorship of
Almost Like Suicide
, I had no financial motive in mind. My desire to be a writer went deeper than that. Simply for the book to find a publisher was enough; it would be enough for my words to wriggle free from the stranglehold of my clenched imagination to take up residence between permanent hard covers. Even if the novel were to plummet straight into the remainder bins—unread, unheralded, unreviewed—its existence would be memorial enough to my dead mother, and vindication enough against my naysaying father.

To be on the safe side, I decided to sit for a while on my treasure
—just in case
someone was to come out of the woodwork bleating, “Stewart Church was a writer! Where are his manuscripts?” In the meantime, I got to work readying the ms., by which I mean that I retyped the thing on my own typewriter. I thought it unwise to circulate a manuscript typed on a machine that could be identified as Stewart’s old Underwood. Have I mentioned that I have an innate instinct for criminality?

My re-typing of the seventy-thousand-word manuscript took on a strangely spiritual aspect: I truly felt as if the work were reverting back to me, “its onlie begetter and true author,” to quote the Bard. At a dismal twenty-five words a minute, I would type for two hours every morning before going to work at the bookstore, then I would continue when I got home in the evening, often clacking away at the keys until three or four A.M. I developed cramps in my hands, ghostly aches in my elbows. But as I watched the pages pile up, I felt a mounting excitement, a thrill of accomplishment, that spurred me on, even when exhaustion bowed my back and gripped my neck in nerve-pinching pains. I did not, by the way, change a word. On those few occasions when I thought I might be able to improve on Stewart’s (really
my
) phrasing, I would pause over the keys, mentally trying out variants; but these meditations would always lead me into a dead end. I would realize that the original wording was right after all, was the only possible word choice that blended literary grace with the illusion of colloquial speech. I would admonish myself for wasting time and immediately resume my halting typing.

On the third Sunday in July, at ten A.M., after an all-night typing session, with the early-morning sunlight just beginning to ignite the delicate twigs of the little trees that grew in the alley outside my window, I punched home the last period on the last page.

Maybe it was a result of the fleeting delusions that can gather after too many sleepless nights; or maybe it was the heightened emotional pitch to which I had been brought by sifting, day after day, through my painful past. Whatever the reason, in that instant when I arose from the desk, knees cracking, I felt convinced that I truly
was
the author of the freshly minted typescript that lay on my desk. Stewart’s specter, which had seemed to hover in the shadows above my pecking keys, was finally gone. Gone!

Or just about. He wouldn’t really be gone until I had disposed of his version of the manuscript. I had marked for destruction not only the fair copy from which I had typed my version, but also his notes for the novel, which included near-indecipherable scribblings on yellow legal pads, jottings on the backs of old law school essays, and densely written spiral-notebook pages, plus an accordion-folded printout of a first draft in stunted, squared-off sans serif characters with ugly, irregular gaps between the words. (His other stories and sketches I had decided to save for future perusal.)

It wasn’t as difficult as disposing of a body, but it proved harder than you might think. I rejected immediately the option of simply stuffing the papers into a garbage bag and throwing them out. The tabloids abounded in tales of squalling babies being plucked from the garbage. I had to know that Stewart’s evidence had disappeared from the face of the earth, without a trace. Fire seemed the only way. Where do you burn five hundred pages? I don’t suppose anyone in Washington Heights would have taken much notice had I simply built a bonfire in front of my building and immolated the stuff right there on the sidewalk, but why tempt fate?

I ended up walking twenty blocks north, to Fort Tryon Park, the tract of manicured public gardens and untouched forest on the northern tip of Manhattan. Well, not completely untouched. According to the
Times
, the area was a favorite among drug dealers and other miscreants, as a disposal site for potentially incriminating evidence. Just a few weeks earlier, a human torso had been found by some picnickers amid the abundant underbrush. Maybe it was some subconscious association that made me decide on this as the place to dispose of
my
evidence. Who knows?

On the day in late July when I hiked up to Fort Tryon, the weather was cold and overcast—a strange flash-forward to fall. A good thing. It meant fewer sightseers and strollers. Passing under the Cloisters, I ducked into the woods, then made my way into the densest part of the forest. The West Side Highway, down a steep drop-off, whooshed with ceaseless traffic. The sun found a chink in the clouds, and the leaf shadows rose up on the forest floor like stains seeping into a paper towel. I crouched in the weeds and removed the pages from my knapsack. Summoning the skills I had learned as a child at summer camp, I used a stick to dig a shallow, bowl-shaped declivity in the ground, in which I placed Stewart’s crumpled title page. I built a tepee of twigs over the balled paper, then struck a match. Soon I had a handy little bonfire and was feeding in three or four pages at a time. I warmed my chilled hands over the inferno. Thirty minutes later, Stewart’s version was little more than a gray wasp’s nest through which a few orange sparks wriggled and winked. I scooped soil over the top, stepped on the mounded earth, flattening it, then sprinkled on some old pine needles and leaves.

It was only later, when I got back to the apartment and saw a notation I had made on my desk calendar, that I realized I had performed the sacrificial act on the precise day and at the very hour of Stewart’s cremation in Chicago.

“Blackie Yaeger, please.”

“Who should I say is calling?” the woman’s brisk voice demanded.

“Cal Cunningham.”

“And is Mr. Yaeger expecting your call?”

“He is.”

Muzak flowed through the earpiece, a strings and Pan flute version of Captain & Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together.” I was on hold. It was now July 26. Hower’s book signing had been almost a month ago. Would Yaeger remember me? Probably not. Which meant I would have to explain it all to his assistant: “You see, Mr. Yaeger gave me his card and said that I should call. . . .” I didn’t want to go through that rigmarole, especially if it meant being told to “leave my name and number” so that Mr. Yaeger could “get back to me.” I’d never hear from him. With the phone still pressed to my ear, I leaned forward on the sofa and poured another neat vodka. The Muzak switched to a strings and Pan flute version of the Beatles “Help!”

There was a click on the line, the music stopped, and for a moment I was sure that I had been hung up on. Then a voice rasped:

“Cunningham. Yaeger. How are you?”

I swallowed the firewater and gasped that I was fine.

“Been looking forward to your call,” he continued, on a cheerful note. “I checked around town. None of my editor friends seems to have heard of you.”

I did not faint. But my vision did tunnel considerably. I groped for something to say. I came up with:

“I—you—what do you—?”

“You told Hower that your book was out there circulating. What’s the deal, Cunningham?”

I wanted to say something. But there didn’t seem to be anything to say.

“So,” Yaeger said. “Is there a manuscript or isn’t there?”

“There is.”

“No kidding?” He laughed—a remarkable sound, like sheet metal being torn by a machine. “Gotta hand it to you, Cunningham. I don’t give my card to just anybody. I figure anyone who can lie like that, I want to read what he writes. I’ll get Sue to send up a messenger for the book. What’s the address?”

I recited the street and apartment numbers. He repeated these back to me, then said, “Okay, talk to you.” And he hung up. Twenty minutes later, a helmeted bike messenger appeared at my door and spirited away the manuscript bearing my name.

My desk calendar from that remarkable year indicates that it was less than a week later when Yaeger called me back. This suggests that time really is the relative phenomenon that Einstein said it was, because that span of numbed time seemed an eternity. After just one day, I was so anxious that I found myself cursing Yaeger’s insensitivity in taking so long to get back to me. By the second day, a depression had settled over me, triggered by my sudden conviction that Yaeger was going to reject the novel outright. By the third day, I was soaring on wild hopes that Yaeger would pronounce the thing a masterpiece, and by the fourth I began to picture my novel languishing unread at the bottom of some slush pile of thousand-page manuscripts on Yaeger’s desk. This horrific possibility occurred to me while I was squatting amid a drift of foam peanuts, desultorily unpacking a new shipment of remainders in Stodard’s low-ceilinged stockroom. I suddenly realized that it might be
months
before Yaeger got back to me. Could I live in this state of wrenching suspense for that long? In a word, no. I felt a compulsion to phone his office, to double-check with his receptionist that he had received my submission, and to ask, en passant, how long I might have to wait before I heard something. . . . I was, in fact, moving toward the phone, which sat amid the crumpled purchase orders and invoices on the shipper/receiver’s desk, when the phone emitted the dull buzz that indicated an intercom message. I picked up the receiver. It was Marshall, calling from his cushy post at the front cash register.

“
Call
for you on line three,” he said, indignantly. Marshall hated it when we took personal calls at work. “Keep it short.”

“Will do,” I said, and punched the blinking light. “Cunningham here.”

“Where you been all my life?”

“Mr.
Yaeger
?” (Purely rhetorical—there was only one person in the world with a voice like that.)

“Wondering if you’d like to go to lunch tomorrow. One o’clock. Michael’s. Fifty-fifth Street near Sixth Avenue.”

“Michael’s,” I echoed, stunned. Did this mean he
liked
the book? It
must
mean he liked the book! You don’t invite someone to lunch if you
don’t
like his book. Do you?

“Love to chat,” Yaeger said, “but I can’t. You’ll be there?”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.” Meanwhile, in another layer of my brain, I was working out how I would phone in sick to work tomorrow. Marshall would never approve an extended lunch hour for a groveling stockboy like myself.

“One more thing,” Yaeger said. “This agent you mentioned? What was his name again?”

“Oh—uh—Stewart? Stewart Church.”