About the Author (13 page)

“No, no. My pleasure,” I said.

She had been right earlier today when she tried to avoid this dinner date, I now saw. The evening had done nothing more than tantalize and torture me with a vision of a future that could never be. I was now convinced that my inability to take the plunge with Janet had to do less with Stewart than with certain deep and fundamental flaws in my character. It seemed that my romantic impotence with Janet was somehow bound up with my inability to commit words to a page; some crucial element of self-confidence, of self-esteem, was lacking in me. It was this lack that would deny me forever the possession of any true happiness, any true fulfillment.

To avoid having to look at her beautiful face, I studied the pattern of condensation that had started to form on the inside of her windshield, an encroaching cloud of mist that crept inward from the corners of the window toward the center, leaving a butterfly shape of clear glass in the middle.

“You know,” she said, “I almost phoned you this afternoon to cancel dinner.”

“Second thoughts,” I said miserably. “Well, I understand. Maybe—”

“Oh, no,” she said. “It wasn’t that at all. No, I just wasn’t sure I was up to it emotionally. Something kind of upsetting happened after you left this morning.” I turned to look at her. Her eyes met mine across the gulf that separated us. “Do you remember that portrait you liked?” she asked. “The head of the young man?”

Stewart’s portrait. I stiffened and said, as naturally as possible, “I do.”

“Well, after you left this morning, I opened the mail that had accumulated over the summer.”

I froze. Stewart had sent her
two
versions of
Almost Like Suicide
: one by Federal Express, the other by ordinary mail. For safety. In case one got lost. My interception of the novel the day before had been for nothing. I was found out.

But no. That wasn’t it.

“There was a letter from a girl I used to know in college,” she said. “I haven’t spoken to her for years. Anyway, she was writing to tell me that he’d
died
. He was killed in a bicycle accident. In New York. A few months ago.”

Still not convinced that I was out of danger, I said warily, “That’s awful.”

She looked down at her hands in her lap. “Yes, it is.”

“Were you,” I said, “very close?”

They’d been close in college, she said. Marriage had seemed to be in the offing. There had been obstacles. Although he had wanted to be a writer, he’d been pressured by his parents into pursuing a solid, practical legal career. He didn’t have the strength to defy them. He had done as he was told. “He said that he’d write a novel while he was in law school,” she said, “and dedicate it to me, and that we’d be together. I never heard from him again.”

So there it was. The mysteries of both Janet Greene and my mysterious roommate, solved. Love was what had kept this beautiful woman single; she had been keeping herself for Stewart. And love was what had driven
him
to the superhuman feat of churning out a novel while simultaneously drilling his way through one of the most demanding law programs in the country. Love was what had given him his single-minded focus—love for the person who sat across from me now, this woman whose every gesture sent my heart fluttering. A sickening jealousy attacked me. Jealousy over the past that she and Stewart had shared, and jealousy over their future. For though he was dead, I knew they had a future. Stewart had become, in death, that most seductive of figures: the brilliant young artist whose life is snuffed out before his creative promise can be fulfilled, a romantic martyr whose shadow will haunt his lover’s heart forever. I thought of Joyce’s short story “The Dead” and the deceased boy who stands between Gabriel and his wife.

“I’m sorry for talking about this,” Janet went on. “I hadn’t planned to. It’s just that Stewart’s death seems like a sign.”

It was the first time she had used his name. It gave me a queer sensation, like a knife blade shoved into my heart and twisted. “ ‘A sign’?” I said.

She made a helpless gesture with her hands.

“That we can’t post
pone
things. I mean, I’m sure that Stewart
planned
to write his novel—maybe when he finished law school. But sometimes the future never comes; it never came for Stewart.” She looked at me. Her gaze had a bright intensity. “His death, I don’t know, it made me realize that we have to go with our instincts. We can’t allow once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to slip by.” She lowered her eyes and began to play with her hands in her lap. “And
that’s
why I didn’t cancel dinner with you tonight.”

I told her that I was not sure I understood.

She blushed. “I know it’s crazy to tell you this, because—because I’ll probably never see you again, but . . .” All in a rush, as if it were one word, she said, “I was attracted to you from the moment I first saw you.”

“On your driveway,” I managed to say.

“Even before that,” she said with an embarrassed smile. “That’s the really dumb thing. It was when I saw the picture of you in the magazine. I was on the plane, looking at your picture and having these fantasies about this cute guy whom I’d never lay eyes on in real life—which is typical of my love life for the past three years, because I’ve had all these ridiculous crushes on talk-show hosts and movie stars and famous writers—and then, there you
were
, on my
drive
way. It’s just . . . And like I said, I know I’ll probably never see you again, but Stewart’s death made me realize that I can’t let a chance go by.”

Slowly—as slowly as if I were extending my hand to pluck a butterfly from a branch—I reached over and touched her hair, brushing it away from her cheek. She considered me tentatively, as if this might be a cruel joke. Whatever she saw in my face convinced her otherwise. And her face moved toward mine.

I closed my eyes, and my senses were saturated with the milk-and-cinnamon scent of her skin, of her hair, the push and wetness of her lips and tongue, the minty sweetness of her saliva—all of this swimming against an aural background of crickets, whose mating crepitations whirred all around us. And even through my amazement and happiness, I felt some part of my consciousness split off, detach itself, to consider how Stewart’s ghost had turned out to be a benevolent specter after all, his spirit helping to shape my destiny, to guide both Janet and me to this moment. For hadn’t Janet herself said that it was Stewart’s death that had convinced her she must seize the moment, seize happiness before it slipped away? The thought helped assuage the slight residual guilt that nibbled at some far edge of my joy; it also quashed the jealousy that had afflicted me moments before, when I had imagined Janet pining away, forever, over her ex-lover. It was almost as if Stewart had, while displaying the solemnity of the dead in dreams, presided over this first kiss and then, the nuptials concluded, wordlessly climbed into the awaiting coffin and obligingly borne himself away into Eternity. Or until his inevitable resurrection.

I would not, in these hastily written pages, presume to unlock the mystery of love. Who can say what makes two strangers look into each other’s eyes and recognize there the person for whom they have been subconsciously searching all their lives? I could list any number of things about Janet that I loved at first sight and that I came to adore over the following months, when I would drive up every Friday from New York to spend the weekend with her. I could say that she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I could say that I was amazed by her independence, her energy, her talent. I could say that she was graced with a guilelessness and openness of heart that verged on naïveté. I could come clean and simply say that she was, on some deep level, the incarnation of the tender and attentive mother I never had. But let’s leave off the psychologizing. Suffice it to say that after that Labor Day kiss, I knew we must be together forever.

And Janet’s love for me? On what was
it
founded? That was a question I asked myself incessantly that fall. Because it goes without saying that I possessed none of her strength of character, none of her artistic or moral courage, none of her goodness. She loved me for the virtues I
seemed
to possess—all of which derived from my supposed authorship of
Almost Like Suicide
.

She even said as much.

It was a morning in mid-October when the town slept under the season’s first snowfall. Lying beside me in her bed, propped on one elbow, Janet traced the outline of my profile with her fingertip and said, “I wonder if I would have fallen in love with you if you weren’t a writer—if you were, say, a lawyer or a clerk or a carpenter. But no, because then you wouldn’t be
you
.” I smiled, but inwardly I died, thinking that Janet had fallen in love not with me but with a phantom projection of an ideal lover who I was only pretending to be. At such times I actually imagined that I would come clean to her about the unusual provenance of
Almost Like Suicide
. If she truly loved me (I reasoned) she would understand my appropriation of Stewart’s manuscript, forgive it, and even join me in helping to keep my secret. Then I would come to my senses. Not only would it be wrong to make of her an accessory after the fact, but the disclosure would, almost certainly, kill her love for me, since it would mean revealing so much other sliminess besides: that I had been Stewart’s roommate and never told her; that my reason for coming to New Halcyon had been to steal her ex-lover’s manuscript; that everything about me was a lie, a deceit, a deception. In my worst moments, I used to imagine that our love, like my authorhood, was simply a fraud I had perpetrated upon her, and that the only decent thing would be for me to break up with her before she fell too deeply in love.

Any such noble dreams were crushed for good that spring, when my novel finally hit the stores. Like iced bottles of Coca-Cola in mid-July, copies of
Almost Like Suicide
vanished off the shelves faster than the clerks could replace them. Great waist-high pyramids of the book, with its starkly elegant cover of blood-red letters on black, would be erected in the center of the superstores’ aisles, and by closing time they would be eroded to ankle-high plinths. Whole wall displays at Barnes & Noble would be empty by midday. Phoenix Books was in ecstasy. “We just can’t
ship
enough copies,” a salesperson told me when I took a victory lap in the offices that spring. “I can’t remember anything like it—except maybe for our book on the Broccoli Diet, and of course
Having a Chat with the Lord
.” He shook his head in disbelief, then added in an amazed whisper, “And it’s not even on
her
club!”

The reviews helped. The tone was set by
Kirkus
, which proclaimed me a “dazzling new talent in American fiction” and called the book a “daring, funny, moving, riveting debut.” Critics from the
Times, Time
magazine
, Newsweek, New York
magazine,
The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, People
, and
Us
greeted
Suicide
with the appellation applied to every novel published by any male author under the age of thirty since, say, 1984, branding it a “
Catcher in the Rye
for the [in this case] New Millennium.” Other once-young novelists of relatively recent fame (McInerney, Ellis, Coupland, et al.) were evoked only to be dismissed as passé, authors whose very obsolescence was announced by my brash arrival. The famous “zeitguy,” Hower J. Brent (whose ascent had so stung me during my days as a stockboy), had shrewdly sought to immunize himself against such rough critical treatment by supplying a blurb for the hardcover in which he subtly suggested that he and I belonged to a fraternity of new young novelists who had come to kick the butt of all the old, and aging, farts. “Forget Generations X, Y, and even Z,” Brent trumpeted from my back cover. “A whole new era in fiction has dawned, and Cal Cunningham is its latest, and possibly its finest, representative” (I was, on both Stewart’s and my own behalf, a little annoyed by that slippery
possibly
, but let it pass).

Then came the book tour.

I had always imagined that there could be no more gratifying ego-rush than spending a few weeks crisscrossing the country to promote a book; indeed, most of my adolescent fantasies of a literary career had centered not on the writing of the novels but on the charming interviews I would grant about them. I actually used to play out long scenarios of sparkling repartee between me and my questioner from the
Paris Review
. Under the circumstances, however, I found the reality of shilling
Suicide
considerably less gratifying than those old fantasies. It wasn’t that I didn’t still consider myself the rightful author of the book: again, they were
my
words,
my
experiences, simply filtered through Stewart’s imagination. Still, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I felt strangely like an impersonator of an impersonator as I squared off with my interviewers, be they the harried newspaper hacks; the earnest, whispery-voiced females from NPR; or the jacked-up, capering goofballs on the “morning zoo drivetime” shows. Although a born ham and ranconteur, I nevertheless found myself curiously tongue-tied and diffident when trying to answer their nosy questions about “how autobiographical” the book was, what my “working methods” were, where I “got my ideas,” and what I “hoped to say to readers with this book.”

Particularly excruciating was the half hour I spent sitting across the round table from a certain droopy-lidded TV talk-show host, who insisted on halting the encounter to read out passages from the novel. Those words seemed suddenly so alien to me—words that I could never have written myself, words, in fact, so different in tone from my spoken replies that it seemed transparently obvious (at least to me) that I was not, and never could have been, their actual author.

My print performances went better. The journalist from
Vanity Fair
described me, in the opening paragraphs of his piece, as the “hunky author whose life of high-six-figure advances, fabulous Hollywood movie deals and stunning critical raves has done nothing to change his natural reserve and engaging, almost self-denying modesty . . . ,” while the writer from
Rolling Stone
(dispatched by his editors to trail around after me in New York nighttown as I demonstrated some of the “gonzo” behavior detailed in my novel) was amazed to find that I refused to be interviewed anywhere but in an elegant restaurant of my choosing, where I sipped only mineral water with lime so as to keep my wits about me—an act that the journalist luckily chose to interpret as evidence of my authenticity as a
real literary artist
, “unlike certain formerly superhot, now supercold, novelists whose prime occupation seems to be posing for the paparazzi at fashion shows and movie premieres.” In the
New York Times’
s breezy “At Home with Cal Cunningham” piece, the writer described me (irony of ironies) as “resembling more a straitlaced and abstemious law student” than the “booze-soaked, motor-mouthed sexual adventurer of his now-famous novel—a testament to Cunningham’s extraordinary powers of invention.”