About the Author (4 page)

In any case, I never did get the chance to win from my mother a revised opinion of my “talents.” Shortly after my fifteenth birthday, she died of the pancreatic cancer that had been resolutely devouring her for the previous two years. I know that my father (a saturine, grim-browed surgeon who had long dreamed of my following in his footsteps into cardiology) hoped that with my mother’s passing, my artistic ambitions would pass, too. If anything, though, the loss steeled my resolve to become a great writer (the dead, I can safely say, are at least as potent a force to us as the living). And so, against my father’s protests, I majored in (
what else
?) English lit at the University of Minneapolis and, shortly after graduating, announced to him my intention of moving to New York City to realize my literary destiny. He was not pleased and in fact informed me that should I make good on my threat to go to Manhattan, he would not contribute one penny toward the experiment. Which explains why I, the son of a well-off surgeon, was living on the poverty line in drug-infested Washington Heights.

I’m no psychiatrist, but it seems pretty clear to me how my background of emotional deprivation, material comfort, early tragedy, paternal tyranny, and precocious reading came together to form the structure of my complicated personality: the preening, puffed-up, faux-literary arrogance that masks a gnawing, all-consuming insecurity. Back then, I didn’t understand it. I mistook the tensions within me for the torments of nascent genius. At least, until that moment when I read Stewart’s short story and saw what true talent really was. It was as if some internal balloon that I had been keeping inflated through sheer force of will had suddenly been drained of its air. A strange, terrible emptiness filled me. I was forced to face the truth that I had, for years, been denying: I was a poseur, a fraud, an artist manqué, and always would be. It was
Stewart
who was the writer;
Stewart
who would realize all my fantasies of literary success and acclaim;
Stewart
whose stories and novels would keep my mother’s spirit happy in Heaven.

It was too dreadful a thing to contemplate; by four A.M., I had forced myself to consider a less dire view. Perhaps (and everything seemed to depend on this), perhaps the novel Stewart had just completed was
not
good, not publishable. And soon my mind, like a defense attorney who has hit his stride, began to present arguments for why the novel was, in all likelihood, a failure. “Harrington’s Farm” was a poetic fragment of autobiography, but could he sustain such subtle flickerings over the course of a
book
? It just didn’t seem likely. Hadn’t my mother herself once told me that first novels often suffered from an excess of personal detail, bogging down in childhood obsessions that the writer had not yet fully thrown off? Certainly she had. And when I recalled this, I was buoyed by the thought that tomorrow was another day. I was only twenty-five; there was still time: still time for me to write my own masterpiece; still time for me to prove my father wrong. Still time for me to win, from my mother’s shade, the benediction—the
love
that is, when you get right down to it, all I, or any writer, seeks.

I was awakened at seven-thirty the next morning by the sound of Stewart’s typewriter. Not his usual gunning attack, this time, but instead a halting, tentative, hunt-and-peck rhythm. Is he starting
another
novel? I thought, with panic. After a few minutes, however, his machine dribbled into silence. Then he tiptoed (as he did every morning) out of his room.

I cracked open an eyelid and watched him creep past the foot of my Hide-a-Bed and into the kitchen: a shadow figure stooped under the weight of a packed knapsack. I listened as he poured and drank a glass of milk—his usual breakfast—then I secretly watched as he slinked out to the entrance nook. He unlocked the apartment door, eased it open, and wheeled his bicycle out into the hall. I listened as he locked the door behind him; then came the
tickety-tickety-tick
of his bike gears as he walked his ten-speed down the hallway. I heard the scrape, swoosh,
and ka-LANGGGG
of the big outer door of the building, and he was gone.

The night before, Stewart had said he was starting a summer course today, a Tuesday. I figured the class would last at least an hour, probably more. The place was all mine. Tuesday, you see, was my day off from the bookstore.

I think you can guess what I did next.

Without even pausing to pull on a pair of jeans, I got out of bed and crept in my underwear over to Stewart’s room. Funny that I should have tiptoed, considering that I knew I was alone. Perhaps it was some kind of atavistic instinct that always accompanies acts of sneakiness. The dirty old floorboards felt cold against my bare toes.

His door, a stout thing bearing moldings so often repainted that their beveled edges were almost rounded, was half closed. I pushed it open and went in. I had been in his room on only one or two other occasions, always with him present. I felt a deep, shaming sense of transgression, of trespass, but this was overridden by a need that could not be denied.

The room, a mirror image of mine, was dominated by a futon, a bookshelf, a desk, and a filing cabinet. From somewhere deep within the building, a radio poured out a skein of static-laden merengue music. Otherwise the morning was unusually quiet and still.

I crept over to his desk, where his boxy, black-metal Underwood sat amid crumpled typewriter papers and crinkled carbons. Two or three mugs of unfinished coffee, each in a varying state of mossy decomposition, sprouted among the trash. His tear-off desk calendar announced today’s date: July 1. I pulled open the long, shallow drawer that ran the length of the desktop. Pencils, paper clips, white-out, thumbtacks, checkbook. No manuscript. I tried the three stubby, stacked drawers attached to the right of the desk. Nothing, save a bunch of law school stuff: lecture notes, photocopied briefs. . . . Giving up on the desk, I moved across the room to the filing cabinet. I tried the top drawer. Inside, heaped any which way, was a dusty pile of framed studio photographs of Stewart, documenting his progress from swaddled toddler to begowned scholar. In the second drawer was more law stuff:
Black’s Law Dictionary;
tomes entitled
Torts, Civil Procedure, Tax Law
.

The bottom drawer was locked.

I straightened up, hands on hips, and surveyed the room, scanning the thousand and one places where he might have hidden the key. Then, on a hunch, I crouched and lifted the corner of the rug near my feet. A key glinted on the floorboards. I unlocked the drawer and opened it.

A treasure trove. Lying atop a row of fat file folders was the story he’d shown me the previous night, “Harrington’s Farm.” I removed this and placed it on the floor nearby. Some thirty or so folders were wedged in the drawer. He
had
been a busy boy. Rapidly finger-walking across the identification tabs, I saw labels that read “Deletes,” “Odds and Ends,” “Notes,” “Stories,” “Outline,” more “Notes,” and then “First Draft: Novel” and, finally, “Novel: Fair Copy.” I pulled this folder out, taking care to remember its placement between “First Draft” and a tab marked “Ideas.” I seated myself cross-legged among the dust bunnies on the carpet, composed myself, then opened the folder in my lap. In the pale light that filtered in through his grimy windows, I began to read.

For the first, oh, two minutes, I read consecutively, starting at page 1. Then I began to rampage around in the thing—flipping ahead five, six, fifteen pages, going back to the beginning, fingering ahead to blaze through the ending, circling back to the middle.

What I saw amazed and horrified me beyond any of my worst imaginings of the night before. Not because the novel teemed with life, incident, color, humor, and character (though it did), and not because it was written in a voice so different from the poetic murmur of the short story he had shown me (though it was). No. What astounded me, what broke upon me in a wave of incredulity, was this: the novel was a retelling of
my
life, a virtual transcription of the monologues with which I had entertained Stewart during the two and a half years of our roommatehood. It was all there. All of it. Not just the “Dispatches from Downtown,” with their ribald tales of romantic conquest and alcohol abuse, but the truly precious stuff, the irreplaceable personal lode of my childhood memories, with all their pain and yearning and loss. And all of it told just as I had told it to Stewart. Whole phrases leapt out at me that I recalled inventing, on the fly, during my monologues, those oral flights that I had imagined one day converting into my
own
novel! Only later would I see how artfully he had woven the story of a young slacker’s New York barcrawling into the tale of his troubled upbringing—the hero’s skirt chasing and boozing and thwarted artistic urges traced back to a heartbreaking abandonment by his mother. Only much later could I credit Stewart with having spied, in the tangle of my life, connections and motivations that had always eluded me. At the time, through my rage, I saw his novel as nothing but a direct steal not only of my material but of my voice, of my very
self
. He had even nabbed what I had once told him was my novel’s “working title.” There, on the first page, were the words
Almost Like Suicide
(a fragment from Elvis Costello’s song “New Amsterdam”—a bitter, swirling, eerily ambivalent paean to New York)!

Why? I asked myself as I paced Stewart’s small room.
Why
had he done this to me? Because surely this thievery could be construed only as an act of malice, of hatred.

Or had he snitched my life without even thinking about it? Had he committed the crime the way I had heard artists did? That is, with no regard for the consequences of real people’s feelings, but with only a passionate loyalty and sense of duty to the work of art? Or then again, did the key to his motives somehow reside in that short story he’d shown me the night before, where his fictional counterpart, Robert, took such relish in fooling the unsuspecting Mrs. Florio? After all, hadn’t Stewart done something similar to me? Misrepresented his true identity, tricked me into believing he was one thing when he was really another? Or was it something still more twisted? Did Stewart perceive the novel as some kind of compliment to me? Did he somehow imagine that I would be
pleased
or
flattered
by this creepily accurate projection into my mind and emotions?

If so, he had a surprise coming. I planned to confront him immediately. This would mean confessing to him that I had skulked into his room and snooped in his private papers. Fine. I was no more afraid to admit this than I would have been had I found a corpse secreted in his closet. He had committed the greater crime; mine would pale to insignificance next to it.

I stomped into the living room, dressed, then folded up the bed. I kept glancing at the clock radio on the bookshelf. I tried to decide whether I should be standing right in the entrance nook shaking
Almost Like Suicide
over my head when he came in the door, or sitting on the sofa, the manuscript lying on the beat-up coffee table in front of me. In any event, I knew my opening line. It would be: “Of course, it’s out of the question that you will
ever
publish this thing.” I would go on to explain (calmly, rationally) how I planned to sue him for the theft of intellectual property. True, he was a law student and would probably be able to tell me that there were no legal grounds for my blocking publication of the novel. Fine. That would be when things would get ugly. That would be when I would bunch my fists and say something like, “Well, there may not be any
legal
grounds, pal. But there are
other
grounds.”

Just thinking about this quickened my breath and heartbeat. Where
was
he? It was past noon. He’d been gone for four hours. Currents of electricity leapt and twinged in my muscles. For something to do, I scuttled out into the hall to collect the mail from the battered tin box in the lobby. Nothing but the Con Ed bill and—
voilà
!—a postcard from Stewart’s parents, who were traipsing all over Europe on one of their many vacations.
Hope you’ve been working hard
, they wrote.

“Don’t worry,” I muttered. “He has.”

Back in the apartment, I tossed the bill and postcard onto the table in the entrance nook. I began to feel my initial surge of adrenaline wearing off; the emotion of the discovery was starting to exhaust me. I dropped onto the sofa. Where the hell was he? I wanted a confrontation, and I wanted it
now
, while my indignation was at its peak. I scrabbled the manuscript off the coffee table for another stunned look, to refuel my rage, but just then the phone rang on the end table next to me. I was convinced it was Stewart.

“Yeah?” I barked into the receiver.

“Is this the home,” said an unfamiliar male voice, “of Stewart L. Church?”

“Not home,” I said, and hung up.

Fuck it. Why should I be polite to Stewart’s callers? I owed him nothing. The phone rang again. I snatched it up on the second ring. “Uh-huh?” I said.

“I don’t want to
speak
to Mr. Church,” the gruff voice continued, as if the connection had not been severed. “This is the New York City Police Department, Officer Hancy speaking. I’m tryna find out if this is his place of residence.”

I sat up. “Yes,” I said. “He lives here—what’s going on?”

“Are you related to Mr. Church?”

“No. I’m his roommate.” Had they found Stewart’s stolen computer—perhaps at a pawnshop? Or maybe they had actually apprehended the girl. What was her name again? Les.

“And you live at Seven-ten West a Hundred and Seventy-third Street, apartment Six, in Manhattan?”

“That’s right.”

“Okay.” I heard a rustle of papers. Then he said in a flat, uninflected tone, “Some ID in Mr. Church’s wallet said to contact the occupant of that address in case of emergency.”

“Em
er
gency? What’re you—?”

“Mr. Church was involved in an accident.”