About the Author (7 page)

“Yeah. He even exist?”

I cleared my throat (where my beating heart had lodged). “No,” I said. “No, he doesn’t.”

Yaeger cackled. “Good,” he said. Then he hung up.

I arrived at Michael’s, the next day, a few minutes early. But I used the time. At the bar near the front of the restaurant, I chugalugged a Heineken. With another eight minutes until Yaeger’s ETA, I ordered and quickly quaffed another beer. Then I ordered a third, which I sipped slowly. I was starting to feel calm enough to absorb a little of my surroundings.

Reached from a set of carpeted steps that led down from the street, the restaurant was actually below sidewalk level, so that through the large, curved bay windows that gave onto Fifty-fifth Street, you saw only the legs and swinging briefcases of the scurrying Midtown lunch crowds. Sunlight, reflected from the ornate facades of the buildings across the street, filtered through the windows, washing the restaurant’s expanse of white-clothed tables in a soft light. I’d walked past an awful lot of restaurants like this one since arriving in Manhattan more than two years before. This was the first time I’d been inside one. I felt like I could get used to it.

For this meeting, I had dipped into Stewart’s clothes closet, selecting a dark blazer, dark pants, and an almost new pair of buffed oxfords—an ensemble that I’d seen Stewart himself sporting a mere month ago when he had set off for an interview with a law firm that was recruiting on the Columbia campus. Studying myself now in the mirror behind the bar, I was struck, for the first time, by an odd resemblance between me and my deceased roommate. Of course, I was swarthy and dark-haired to his freckled fairness, and Stewart’s gaunt handsomeness had contained none of my overt sexual threat. But both of us were tall, striking ectomorphs, nice young men from well-to-do families and good schools. . . . And somehow this led me to think about how, if fate had not been diverted by that careless gypsy cab, it
would
be Stewart peering into this mirror, rather than me. It would be Stewart who was waiting for Blackie Yaeger to show up for this all-important lunch date. And what an injustice that would have been! For Stewart would have been here on utterly false pretenses, having stolen
my
life! Having purloined my past, my present and thus my future! What rich justice it seemed that I should be standing here instead—that I was, both literally and figuratively, in Stewart’s shoes, that I had taken back my life story from him and, as a kind of penalty or punishment, seized his bright destiny as my own. Or rather, reappropriated the destiny that was mine in the first place.

Deep in these rather tangled (and now slightly drunken) philosophical musings, I jumped slightly when I felt a hand grasp my elbow. I turned from Stewart’s reflection and found myself staring into the extraordinary face of Blackie Yaeger.

“Hope you haven’t been waiting long,” he said.

I felt like telling him I’d been waiting all my life.

The maître d’ led us to the smoking section (soon to be abolished in the antitobacco mania of the late nineties) and deposited us at a table that, I couldn’t help noticing with an obscure qualm of unease, was set for
three
, complete with three triangulated linen napkins, three inverted water glasses, three heavy sets of silverware—almost as if there were a third, phantom guest who silently took his seat with us.

“Can I get you anything from the bar?” our waiter asked, mercifully ridding the ghost of his eating utensils.

Yaeger rapped out an order for a gin-martini-straight-up-with-a-twist. He looked at me inquisitively, lifting a non-existent eyebrow. I said, “The same.”

The waiter vanished. Yaeger extracted a foreign-looking package from his inside breast pocket and fingered out a slim cigar, which he placed between his lips.

“So,” he said, striking one of the wooden matches from the small box he’d lifted from the ashtray, “I’ve written up a synopsis of
Almost Like Suicide
—hope you don’t mind that I took the liberty of doing that myself; didn’t want to waste time. Anyway, I faxed it straight to my Hollywood contacts.” He touched the flame to the end of his brown cigar, blew out the match with a stream of blue smoke, then dropped the spent match into the ashtray. A busboy immediately materialized, palmed the defiled ashtray, and replaced it with a pristine one.

I, meanwhile, was wondering if Yaeger was insane.
Hollywood
? Had he somehow mixed me up with someone else? A screenwriter?

“Um,” I said, carefully, “Hollywood? I wrote a
novel
—”

Yaeger’s attention was diverted by the arrival of the martinis. He immediately swept his off the table with two forked fingers and held it aloft in an invitation for me to clink glasses with him. We did. “To
Suicide
,” Yaeger growled. He gulped greedily at his drink.

“Okay,” he said, after rolling the liquid around for a while in his mouth and swallowing. “Let me explain. These days, we don’t—I enjoyed your book
immensely
, by the way.
Immensely
. Have I mentioned that? Thing knocked me on my ass.
But
as I was saying, the trick is to sell the sonofabitch to Hollywood
first
. Create an absolute frenzy among the publishers here in New York—especially if you can convince them that they’re going to get Spielberg to direct and Tom Cruise to star. Gotta think about your end-user.”

“End-user?”

“Sorry. Movie talk. You know, TV, cable, videocassettes. Whatever. Because I’m telling you, Cal, you’ve written a hell of a story. Very hot. Very today. And high concept? It’s a fin de siècle
Bright Lights, Big City
, with a Gen X twist and some post-po-mo juju thrown in for good measure. The shitty apartment, the minimum-wage McJob, the dysfunctional family. The
anger
. Frankly, your looks don’t hurt, either. Gotta think of that author shot. I’m not even going to listen to anything less than five.”

“Five?”

“Hundred thousand,” Yaeger said. “For the film rights. Fuck ’em. How much do you think they’re gonna pay Spielberg? I’m sick of watching the writer get screwed.” He stood up and patted his pockets. “Back in a sec.” He made a beeline for the john.

I sat there in complete confusion. Was I dreaming? Was I simply drunk? (I had certainly dispatched my martini in a hurry.) Imagining what this lunch might be like, I had pictured a sober discussion about my history as a writer; I’d spent half the night rehearsing plausible-sounding stories about my “artistic development.” Instead, all Yaeger had done was talk about Hollywood. And money. Mind you, big money. Was he bullshitting? Trying to get me to sign on the dotted line? I mean, I knew that young first novelists were hot, but five hundred G’s? . . .

He was back. In a different mood now. Much more tranquil. He virtually floated to the table, settling into his chair languidly.

“Ahhh, that’s better,” he said. “So, Cal, as I was saying, I’ve sent the synopsis to Hollywood, and let’s face it, that’s where the money is these days, the
real
money, and also the audience. Because, and I mean this with respect, who the hell reads anymore? Who has the time? I’m not saying that I won’t be able to sell the book to a publisher here in New York. Because I will. And I am going to get top dollar, because I’m telling you that this book you’ve written, with the right poster and a big star in the lead, well, it’s gonna be a monster. A monster. Forget the new Salinger; they’re gonna be calling you the new Hower J. Brent, the new ZeitGuy. I’m optimistic, Cal. Without wanting to raise your hopes too high, I would say simply, soberly, that I am
very optimistic
.”

At this point our waiter materialized, dispensing two menus. He introduced himself as Bree, then got to work reciting the day’s specials. When we were done ordering, Yaeger settled his elbows on the table and balanced his chin on his delicately interlaced fingertips.

“Now, here’s the deal,” he said, his voice gone all soft and sincere. “I’m not gonna ask you to sign anything or in any other way commit yourself. Lemme flog this thing around a little. I’ve given the flakes in la-la land a tight deadline to pass or play, so we shouldn’t have to wait long. But still. My point is, lemme show you what I can do for you. Lemme get you some quotes on this material, Cal. Lemme do you that justice. Then, if you’re satisfied with the figures, we can talk contract. Sound fair?”

Almost nothing Blackie Yaeger said sounded
fair
, by simple virtue of the fact that it was he who was saying it. You had to assume that his every utterance carried reams of fine print. But a lawyer and I could scrutinize that fine print later—if it really did come to that.

“Fine,” I said, at length. “But I’m just wondering. You mentioned a . . . a
sum
a few minutes ago. Were you serious? That much for the film rights alone?”

“Hooray for Hollywood, right?”

“I just never imagined that the figures could even be in that ballpark.”

Which was perfectly true. I had read about the money-geysers struck by other young writers in recent years, but that was the kind of thing that happened to other people. Not to me. Not in my wildest dreams.

“Cal,” Yaeger said, “I bet there’s a lot you haven’t imagined yet.”

He was absolutely right. For instance, I never imagined that Blackie would phone me, on the Tuesday following our lunch, to announce, breathlessly, that not one, not two, but
three
studios were interested,
very interested
, in the novel. In the days that followed, I would receive up to five phone calls a day from Yaeger, who would deliver panting updates on where “we” stood with the various “interested parties.” Studio A was willing to pay such-and-so, studio B saw its bid and raised it
this
much, while studio C trumped them both with an offer of yea-many dollars, which immediately provoked a still higher offer from studio A, and the whole process would start again, as the figures mounted into dizzying, implausible, impossible regions. . . . It all seemed entirely abstract, unreal, and while I can’t exactly say that I did not feel excited (I had, for instance, developed an uncontrollable flutter in my left eyelid, and I was no longer sleeping), I also experienced the strange sensation that all of this was happening to someone else. That I could be on the brink of unimaginable wealth—after all those years of scrambling to pay my phone bill, of scraping together the change to do my laundry—well, it was just too much for my mind and emotions to encompass. Yaeger himself sensed this. After naming some outlandish sum that one of the studios was willing to pay to acquire the novel, Yaeger would cry, “You’re not saying anything, Cal! ’S’matter? Aren’t you happy?” And I would say something limp about how it was all so hard to comprehend, so hard. . . .

It was a week later that Blackie called to tell me that he wanted to clinch the deal with studio B, which couldn’t wait to pay $950,000 for my little property. Within days, Blackie had, just as promised, initiated a fierce bidding war among five leading New York publishing houses for my suddenly “sizzling” novel, selling it at auction, four days later, to Phoenix Books. For $700,000. Throughout the tense negotiations, he would, as with the movie sale, keep me up to date, explaining complicated things about hard-and-soft deals, foreign rights and royalty rates, and on and on. I confess that I had stopped listening to him. None of it made any sense anymore. Everything was going so fast. Yaeger would ask my opinion on certain matters, and my response was always the same: “Whatever you think best, Blackie.”

It was on a Thursday in mid-August (exactly one and a half months since I had first seen Stewart’s transcription of
Almost Like Suicide
), that Blackie phoned to say that the book sale had been finalized; all it needed was my signature.

I was talking to him from the phone at the shipper/receiver’s desk at Stodard’s—for, you see, despite all the talk of astronomical money, I had continued to work at the bookstore, superstitiously believing that the moment I quit the job, all my deals would fall apart. I was, in fact, just scribbling down the details of where and when to meet Yaeger to autograph the publishing contract when Marshall Weibe burst through the stockroom door, his face scarlet, his plummy lips working inside his blond beard. From his perch at the cash register, he’d obviously been keeping his eye on the lit-up phone button. He now stood in the stockroom doorway, his chest heaving as his eyes darted back and forth from me to the stack of untouched book crates that had arrived just that morning and that Marshall had insisted that I unpack by noon.

“Okay, Blackie,” I said into the phone. “See you soon.” I hung up.

“For Chrissake,” Marshall erupted. “That was a
ten-minute call
! I warned you that
if
you persisted in making personal calls, I—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said.

I rose from my chair. And then I did something that you ordinarily get to do only in dreams. I looked at my fuming, sputtering boss, smiled wanly, and then strolled—mind you
strolled
—past him. I proceeded up the stairs, across the display room, and to the doors that led out to Fifth Avenue. Marshall followed me the whole way, like a baseball coach dogging the heels of an implacable umpire who simply trudges back to his base. Marshall was gesturing, almost shouting, startling customers. “What are you doing? Where are you going? You have to unpack those books. Those have to be unpacked by tonight. What are you doing?”

At the doors that led to the street, I grasped the handle, stopped, and, before walking out, turned to look into his twitching face. I’d been rehearsing a few exit lines on my march; these included “Ladies and gentleman, Elvis has left the building,” which I rejected as hackneyed. “You are starting to bore me,” had a clean, cutting quality, but I wasn’t sure I could deliver the line with the requisite bland insouciance; “Fuck you,” was too blunt and piggish. Blocked as usual, I ended up scrapping all these drafts, and leaving without a word.

A few hours later, I was in Blackie’s office high above Fifty-seventh Street, leaning over his desk with a Mont Blanc fountain pen (supplied by Blackie) in my hand. I lowered the pen tip toward the contract, and as I placed my signature on the dotted line, I was, for some reason, visited by a creepy recollection of scribbling my name on a grubby corner of the
Daily News
with a pencil stub, and for a moment the sound of Blackie’s excited voice faded away, replaced by a long, lingering memory-echo of Klein’s cracked voice bouncing down the facades of Waverly Place: “
You must do my bidding
. . . .” This aural hallucination then faded to a quite different voice, scratchy, raucous, drunken, squealing excitedly: “
You’re gonna be rich, dude! You’re gonna be rich
. . . .”