About the Author (8 page)

Until I sold a novel to a publisher, I had never imagined the long lag time that exists between the inking of a book contract and the moment when the product appears in stores. I was amazed when Blackie told me that Phoenix would need almost
nine months
to prepare my novel for publication, a span devoted to editing and copyediting the text, proofreading and typesetting it, creating cover art, writing jacket-flap and promotional copy, making up galleys (known as advance reader’s editions—paperback versions sent out to selected cultural buzzmeisters to generate a groundswell of favorable word of mouth), and then the printing of copies, followed by their distribution to the stores—where people like my former stockboy self would unpack them and put them on the shelves. Not until
next spring
could I expect to hold a copy of the actual book in my hand. It was now only August! “How am I going to kill the time until then?” I wailed to Blackie. “Enjoy yourself,” he said. “You’ve earned the break.”

Trying to believe this, I spent the next stunned and unreal weeks strolling around the summer city. I shopped for a whole new wardrobe. I roamed and browsed through bookstores. I attended smart parties with Blackie. I briefly dated an eighteen-year-old model. In late August, I even got a sample of what the marketing barrage for my novel was going to feel like.
People
, enticed by publishing gossip about my boffo book and movie sales, arranged to have me photographed for a short advance item in the front of the magazine. By then I had moved into a sun-pierced, fully furnished Village sublet that had (through Blackie’s ministrations) opened up for me. The photographer was a grinning, bearded man named Raoul, who thought it might be nice to snap me on the balcony overlooking Perry Street, with its glimpse of the Hudson at one end. As Raoul’s camera clicked and whirred, he kept chanting, “Beeg smile, beeg smile”—through sheer force of habit, I’m sure, since I was smiling all the time, those days.

There was only one small cloud on the horizon. I had yet to inspect the posthumous stories, notes, and diaries of Stewart’s that I had saved. I had long planned to sift through those materials for any potentially incriminating references to my novel. But I had been procrastinating, afraid that the task might disturb the delicate peace I had made in my mind about the tricky ethics surrounding the novel’s genesis.

Then something happened that allowed me to put off the job no longer. At the very beginning of September, Blackie called to say that
Esquire
was interested in running a short story of mine in its Christmas issue. “Have you got something I can toss to the editors?” Blackie asked.

I flashed on Stewart’s plump file folders.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think I can dig something up. Call you back.”

I hung up, then passed through the living room and into the office, a high-ceilinged chamber with a large leaded-glass window overlooking a garden court. Shielded from the street noise, it was a quiet sanctuary, ideal for writing (if ever I should feel so inclined). Beside the desk, which stood in front of the window, I had installed the one piece of furniture that had survived my Washington Heights days: Stewart’s gunmetal-gray filing cabinet.

I rolled the desk chair over to the cabinet, plucked the key from its hiding place in a crack along the baseboard, and unlocked the bottom drawer. I pulled it open. At random, I lifted out the file labeled “Odds and Ends” and opened it on my knees. On top were some notebook pages torn from a pocket-sized spiral pad and scribbled with words that I immediately recognized as the names of bodegas, hair salons, liquor stores, and bars lining upper Broadway in Washington Heights. Stewart must have jotted these down while on the M5 bus, judging from his shaky handwriting. Notes on local color that he had used in the novel. I separated these off to be destroyed.

I leafed through the notebook. On a page with the scribbled date and place “19 Mar. Chicago,” Stewart had written:

First loosening of winter. Gray mist. Melting. The sidewalks mirrors of white light. A tang of woodsmoke and a humid smell of earth breathing from thawing lawns. Even the sounds of traffic are idealized in this atmosphere: the car tires make a luscious sticky noise on the wet streets, like an endless Band-aid pulled off itchy skin. Can I express the richness of life I feel on such a day? How can I ever communicate the emotion of walking these streets in a March thaw? I must not let it go.

I looked up and thought about this.
Had
he “let it go”? He was dead, yet here before me was the evidence of the world’s impact on his senses, resurrected in me as I read. In college I had endured endless lectures about the power of literature to transcend mortality, but I don’t think I had ever understood as I understood that morning just how potent a force against loss, time, and death writing could be. Mere black marks on a page, which arouse in you a flow of memories, sensations, thoughts. It was as if Stewart, conjured by these scribbles, had become a living presence in the room.

I turned the page and was confronted by a piece of paper that did not look like the rest of the handwritten sheets. It was a carbon copy of a typewritten letter. I noticed, with a pang of deep unease, the date, in the upper right-hand corner: July 1 of that very year. The
day
Stewart had died. The rest I transcribe from memory. It is a faithful rendering, believe me; every word, every punctuation mark, of that letter is etched on my memory forever.

Dear Janet (it mysteriously began),

As you can see, I’ve typed this. Forgive the formality. But I’m not sure how things stand between us. Or rather, I’m not sure how things stand with
you
. I know how I feel, how I will always feel.

This is harder to write than I thought it would be. So I’ll get straight to the point.

I hope you will read the enclosed manuscript,
Almost Like Suicide
. It’s a novel. I told you it could be done (despite law school, New York, etc.). I hope this doesn’t sound too much like an I-told-you-so.

You are the first person I am showing it to. Yours is the only opinion (outside my own) that matters to me. But you know that.

I don’t trust myself to say more. At least for now.

Love,

Stewart

PS: I probably don’t need to tell you that my garrulous narrator is not me. I haven’t changed that much in three years. Have you?

I read the letter a second, a third, a fourth time. Yet on every reading, the words insisted on saying the same thing: Stewart had, at some point in the morning of the day he died, sent a copy of my novel to someone named Janet.

I experienced, first, a paroxysm of pure panic in which I was unable to do anything except gape, stupidly, at the letter. Then I snatched the page away from my eyes. Suddenly I recalled, with the vividness of a snapshot, Stewart’s desk as it had looked on the morning when I crept into his room to search for his novel. The old Underwood typewriter. The coffee cups. The scrunched typewriter pages. And the
heaps of crinkled carbon paper
!

That’s right, carbon paper.

That mess of thin, jet-black sheets, crumpled like black roses, around his typewriter. He had made a carbon copy of
Suicide
! I now saw it so clearly: the curled petals carrying a white mirror-writing, like pages that had been consumed by flame, a visual foreshadowing of Stewart’s burned manuscript in the bonfire I set in Fort Tryon Park, that effort of mine to destroy what I believed to be the only extant copy of Stewart’s version of the manuscript. An effort, I now realized, that had been quite, quite futile. . . .

I tried to piece together what must have been the sequence of events. I recalled the evening when Stewart had first revealed to me that he was a writer, the night he’d shown me his story “Harrington’s Farm.” I had gone to bed and, after an almost sleepless night, awakened to the sound of Stewart’s typewriter, an uncharacteristically slow hunt-and-peck typing. He must have been writing
this
letter—I looked at the page in my hand. “This is harder to write than I thought it would be. . . .” Yes, I had
heard
how hard it was for him in the painful
peck
. . . pause . . .
peck-peck
of his typing. Something about his history with this, this
Janet
, had corked up Stewart’s ordinarily unstoppered flow of words. But what? Who was she? How did they know each other? He had never mentioned her name, never hinted at her existence. But then, there was so much he had never told me. . . .

The initial shock was like an unseen ocean wave that boils up and smacks you face-first into the sand. Then, as the full implications of the letter struck me, I felt the undertow sucking me into the deep. I had sold the book for nearly two million dollars. In less than nine months I would be bursting upon the world in a welter of publicity. There was no turning back. Yet someone knew! This—this
Janet
. I pictured the shame, the humiliation, the disgrace of being discovered. The scandal gleefully documented in the
New York Observer
, in the
Post
, in the
Times
. And of course it would be on television
: Extra, Entertainment Tonight, 20/20
. Soon everyone would know that I was not, after all, the
sole
author of
Almost Like Suicide
. What would Blackie say? My father? Phoenix Books? Stewart’s parents?
Marshall Weibe
?

In the bathroom, I vomited—not the thick cascades that are such a cliché of emotional upset in Hollywood movies, but rather an abject and snivelly bit of bile-coughing that produced little more than a burning squirt of yellow-brown liquid. I flushed, shivered, wiped my eyes, then looked in the mirror.

I told myself that I could not break down. I had to get a grip on myself. I had to organize my thoughts, strategize. There was one thing on my side. The novel was still nine months from appearing in the stores. Still time to find Janet and undo, or remove, or disarm this booby trap that Stewart had set for me. I would fast-talk her somehow. I would figure out some way of explaining Stewart’s “appropriation” of my manuscript.

But first, I had to find her.

Where would I most likely find the name and number of someone Stewart knew? His address book. Had he even
owned
one? After his death, I had conducted a very thorough inspection of his property. I couldn’t recall seeing an address book. Then I thought of something. Wouldn’t Stewart, like
everyone else
, have carried his address book
on
him? If so, it would have been with him when he was killed. Ergo, the treasured book would, or
should
, be among the personal effects found on his corpse. I had those effects in my possession. Through some bureaucratic snafu at police headquarters, his stuff had been mailed not to his parents in Chicago but to our Washington Heights apartment. I had glanced at this material when it arrived, but the humble, human heap of crumpled bills, loose change, and dog-eared receipts had evoked a strange moral vertigo in me such that I had immediately resealed the envelope and tossed it into the cardboard box I was then packing up for my move from Washington Heights.

I had stowed the box on a shelf in the hallway closet. I now scurried into the hall, retrieved the box, and tore it open. Among the tattered paperbacks and dead photo albums was a manila envelope. I ripped it open. Stewart’s house keys and wallet spilled out, followed by a small imitation-leather address book. Eureka! I flipped frantically through the pages. No Janets, Jans, Janes, Janeys. No entries with the initial J.
Nada
. Nothing. I tossed the book aside with an imprecation (“Cock
sucker
!” if memory serves).

Now what?

A call to his parents to wheedle her identity out of them?
No
. Absently, I peered into the envelope. A tissue-thin scrap of pink paper was clinging to the inside. I pulled it out. Along the right edge were the words SHIPPER COPY. It was a Federal Express way bill. Under “Name of Recipient,” Stewart had printed, in block capitals, “JANET GREENE / 2 MEADOW HILL DRIVE / NEW HALCYON, VERMONT.”

I resolved to postpone panic until I had established whether the manuscript had successfully been delivered to this Janet Greene. You never knew. Maybe it had gone astray and was now languishing in some FedEx way station in Backwater, Georgia. In which case I could perhaps still manage to intercept it.

Using the phone on the smoked-glass living room table, I dialed the customer-service number at the top of the way bill. After some vexing byplay with a recorded message, I finally got through to the person I needed: an efficient-sounding woman named Ms. Brown. I said I was trying to trace a package. She asked for the eight-digit tracking number on the receipt. I read it out to her. She clicked at her computer keyboard.

“That shipment was a while ago,” she said, at length. “July first.”

“Yes, but did it ever get there?”

More clicking. A pause. More clicking. Then:

“According to our records, that package was hand-delivered on Wednesday, July second, at twelve noon Eastern Standard Time. Package was received and signed for, sir. Anything else I can do for you?”

“No, no,” I said. “That’s all.”

I put down the receiver. Again, I did not allow panic to overwhelm me. I did briefly pummel a sofa pillow with my fists and shout some profanities, but this tantrum did not last long. Soon I had not only regained my composure but had entered a new level of calm, a kind of icy precision of purpose. I knew, suddenly, what I had to do. There was no time to waste.

I grabbed the yellow pages and flapped them open to the Ts. I lifted the phone receiver, punched in the number for Awa-a-ay We Go Travel, then explained to the voice on the other end of the line that I wanted to make arrangements to fly, at the earliest opportunity, to New Halcyon, Vermont. That’s right. New Halcyon. N as in night; E as in evil; W as in woe, H as in hell. . . .