Now You See Him
WITH BONUS MATERIAL
Eli Gottlieb
For my mother and father
Where does one look for a source? According to the law of contrast (the law of pain) it must be located not in the metropolis, but well away from it, on the periphery—whether of a literature, a city, society or civilization as a whole.
—Andrei Sinyavsky
Hello Readers— I am happy to introduce you to the digital versions of my books. The first one,
Now You See Him
, is about two childhood friends and a murder set against the backdrop of a literary community. It is also about festering family secrets and the true bonds of loyalty and trust; it is also about envy and manipulation, marriage and its delicate intricacies, and sets out to ask the question: what if our parents weren’t whom we thought they were? What if our friends weren’t either? The book peels back the surface of our typical life-assumptions and shines a hard (and I hope suspenseful) light on what lies beneath.
The back of the book features an excerpt of my new novel,
The Face Thief
, which uses the ancient art of Chinese Face reading as a theme. We all read faces, of course. The minute we see someone, we form an instant impression about their character, even if we’re not entirely aware of it. But I was fascinated by the thought: what if someone used Chinese face reading, which is a real science of interpretation, based on traditional Chinese medicine, to evil ends, to gain an advantage in life? In this novel, a damaged yet brilliant and unscrupulous woman employs the art to defraud men in business dealings.
A novelist loves all his novel-children equally, but I wouldn’t be offended if you skipped to the very end of
Now You See Him
and took a peek at my latest offspring, about which I’m very excited.
A
T THIS LATE DATE, WOULD IT BE FAIR TO
say that people, after a fashion, have come to doubt the building blocks of life itself? That we suspect our food? That we fear our children? And that as a result we live individually today atop pyramids of defensive irony, squinched into the tiny pointed place on the top and looking balefully out at the landscape below? In such a time of dark views and darker diagnoses, I’ll forestall all second-guessing and declare it up front: I loved him. I’d grown up across the street from him. In my own way, I worshipped him. With the slavish adoration of a child, I’d tried briefly to be him. Although we were both boys the same age and although we chaffed and teased each other constantly, below it all ran an awareness on my part that there was always something quicksilvery, musical, more sharply drawn about him that set him apart from the rest of us.
His name was Rob Castor. Quite possibly, you’ve heard
of him. He became a minor cult celebrity in his midtwenties for writing a book of darkly pitch-perfect stories set in a stupid sleepy upstate New York town. Several years later, he murdered Kate Pierce, his writer girlfriend, and then committed suicide, causing the hot lights of the media to come on with an audible whoosh, and stay there, focused on his life, the town of his birth and, by default, we his friends and neighbors. In truth, it was fascinating, in a somewhat repulsive way, to watch how a lone wire ser vice story spilled outward, and the newsweeklies picked it up, and then, when it hit television, everything exploded in a bright and twinkling cloud of coverage. In the control rooms of America, apparently, they’d made the collective decision:
this is the one
. So within six days of the event, TV people were driving up from Manhattan and bivouacking in the Dorset Hotel, along with the big trucks with their sleek antennas and dishes, the over-made-up on-camera host women and anchormen looking all of them like something struck from the Stone Phillips mold and oozing a special kind of major-market insincerity.
For those of us who were his friends, even if we hadn’t been in touch with him much these last years, there was the inevitable shock, followed by the inevitable (in my case) sorrow. For the rest of us in town, it was more about the transforming wave that ran through us on the heels of the media attention: that hot bolt of change that left us keenly aware of the way our bodies and faces might look in the rare air of television. By default, it seemed, we’d all become actors on a reality show dedicated to showing the rotten underbelly of innocent American small-town life. Except there was no rotten underbelly. This wasn’t
Columbine High School. This wasn’t that sandy sad place where poor David Koresh preached and died. This was Monarch, New York, a trim, proud little town on a hill far enough away from the major urban centers that people still pause a second to consider before they speak.
But no matter. The weather was turning crisp, the apples had already swelled, reddened, and fallen from the trees, and suddenly too many of us were outside braving the cold while wandering the streets of the town in pretend idleness, hoping to be on the nightly news. It was undignified to see Major Wilkinson, our World War II vet and a man rumored to have squirreled away millions in silver coins, buying a whole new wardrobe (at eighty-five years of age!) and posing in a photo op each morning at the entrance to the Krispy Kreme like a Wal-Mart greeter gone mad. Old diaries and dusty storage boxes were ransacked for sellable artifacts, and there was a kind of unspoken lottery that was won by Hilary Margold, who unearthed a tattered browning piece of paper with Rob’s unmistakable high school penmanship forming the words “question authority.” It was authenticated, publicized in the local press, and in tribute to the perennial American hunger for morbid memorabilia, ended up on eBay, where it went for a pretty sum. All of us, whether we’d known Rob personally or not, walked around with a strange lifted feeling, like a freshening wind was blowing, and maybe that wind would bring something live and new into our lives.
For my part I participated in almost none of it. I was stunned by his death, and then doubly shocked by the ex tent of the pain it brought with it—a sharp piercing ache in a private place, way up inside, that hadn’t been touched in years.
U
NSURPRISINGLY
, I
SUPPOSE, MY WIFE
,
Lucy, has been less than interested in sharing my bereavement. In truth, she’s never quite trusted the wildness of my old friend, or liked hearing the wiggy picaresque stories that, especially after a glass or two of wine, I love to recount about our childhood together:
Here’s Rob and me at age ten writing and distributing a newspaper filled entirely with dirty words. Here’s Rob showing me a new way to masturbate, which is “how they do it in China.”
Not Norman Rockwell perhaps, but I confess I’m still a bit mystified by the vehemence of my wife’s disgust. He was a deep friend, I’ve told her, part of the landscape of ancient memory, and I loved him the way you love an old land formation like a pier or jetty off which you remember jumping repeatedly into the cool, blue, forgiving water. “It’s so simple, darling,” I’d say, looking at the woman whose marriage to me has been a steady falling away from a dream of undivided light: “I felt really
enriched by our friendship as a kid, and why shouldn’t I honor those feelings as an adult?”
I’ve told Dwight and Will, our eight-and ten-year-old sons, stories about Rob, describing him as someone who was dedicated to telling us affectionately how lame we were, how silly, dumb, humanly wasteful to go through our days in a fog of nodding complacency and not scratch an inch below the brilliant surface of life. But being children, they’re more interested—of course—in some of the spectacular scrapes we got into together over the years. And over the years, we got into a lot.
When I ask myself why the life and death of my old friend and his lover blew up into a rolling national media storm that is still, weeks after the event, engulfing us with battering headlines and high editorial winds, the only conclusion I can come to is that it must have been the universal appeal of the whole thing that turned people’s heads. It had good looks, talent, the New York skyline and a bad end. It had boy-girl emotions, and even, depending on your point of view, a villainous asshole, in the person of a man named David Framkin. Some of us have advanced the idea that it was his girlfriend Kate’s mysterious aloofness, her untouchable composure, that seemed to entrance the many men who wooed her, and that from within the illimitable detachment of her own death she was able—briefly—to entrance an entire nation. But I think at bottom the truth is much more mundane, and can be boiled down to one word: video.
Right at the height of the first wave of national interest, a cache of tapes of Rob and Kate was discovered from an unfinished documentary about the mystique of
the writer’s life, filmed at the art colony where they met. Nearly instantly they entered the special sad pantheon where that poor little starlet JonBenét Ramsey lives, along with Dylan Klebold, and even Patty Hearst posing with her machine gun like a porn star of mayhem and murder. The video contained several wrenching scenes of them individually talking to the camera about what they wanted to do as writers and with their lives. But I think the shot that captured the heart of America was the sentimental one of the two of them sitting in a place called Race Point Beach, on Cape Cod, and singing songs together, with Rob doing some fast-fingered chords on a guitar. It was old Beatles stuff, some Hendrix, a little Nirvana, but a big flaming brazier of a sunset was falling into the water, the waves were crashing off to one side, and as their piping little voices rose, twined and fell together in complete ignorance of what would befall them, it was impossible, watching, not to be a little sick with foreknowledge about it all, and to feel that maybe the best, most passionate love always breeds its own extinction.
For about two weeks straight, the tabloid TV shows were jammed solid with these
Unplugged
excerpts. Repeatedly we watched that fatally demure girl with her face canted a little bit off axis, as if looking, steadily, into a better world, and that guy with the striking good looks of a Kurt Cobain, but beefier, singing and pausing every few seconds to announce his thoughts on life with the impudent self-confidence of a born shit kicker.
Meanwhile, the literary community, roiled by the murder, mobilized to mourn Rob, while some of them, his supposed friends, did their best to distance themselves
from the act. Benefits in his girlfriend’s name were held to provide funding for victims of domestic violence. Others, predictably, mounted the soapbox of the tragedy to opine on the obscene competitive pressures brought to bear on young artists today. Semifamous people wrote strong columns for and against Rob in the
New York Times,
and former mentors of his lived the mayfly cycle of quotation for several consecutive news rotations. All the while, watching and listening, I took a bitter satisfaction in the thought that, if nothing else, and at least for a few weeks, the entire country seemed to concur with me that my dear old friend was unforgettable.