About the Author (9 page)

The plane, a packed Northeast Airlines 747 with blue-and-orange upholstery, climbed into the sky over New Jersey. Fuel tanks, tiny houses, and toy-sized cars fell away below me. Awa-a-ay We Go had managed to get me onto a seven o’clock flight landing in Burlington at eight. From there I would drive in a rental car the remaining hundred-odd miles to New Halcyon. The town lay in the northernmost part of the state, a microscopic pinprick nestled five miles or so from the Quebec border. I figured to be there around nine, nine-thirty. Lodgings had been the tricky part. It happened to be Labor Day Weekend; the place was overrun with vacationers. Awa-a-ay We Go had booked me two nights at a place called the Pleasant View Hotel, on route 3, just outside town. “It’s not fancy,” the agent had warned, “but it’s a roof over your head.”

With an unsipped Bloody Mary and an unopened pack of pretzels propped before me on the tiny fold-out table (my appetite had evaporated since finding the letter), I tried to lose myself in the magazine I had blindly pulled from the airport newsstand just before boarding. As soon as I opened it, my eye immediately fell on a small photograph of a tousled-haired young author standing on a balcony with a beeg, beeg smile on his face. Me. “He’s in the money,” began the caption. I slapped the magazine shut
. Just who the hell is this Janet Greene
? I inwardly wailed.
Who? How did they meet? Was she Stewart’s girlfriend? Why didn’t they speak for three years? And what the hell am I going to say—or do—when I meet her
?

Throughout our descent into Burlington International Airport, Rain fell hard. But it had turned to drizzle by the time I nosed my rented Celica out from the tangle of airport ramps and onto the highway. Although vaguely aware of the shapely green hills and mountains on either side of me, I was in no mood for sightseeing. The drenched landscape swept by unseen as a new conundrum hammered away in my head
: Why hadn’t Janet Greene written or phoned Stewart with her opinion of the manuscript
? She’d had the thing since the beginning of July. It was now early September. Two months. I had changed addresses, but phone calls and letters were being rerouted to my new apartment. Strange that she hadn’t tried to get in touch with Stewart. Maybe she knew he was dead. But how? From Stewart’s friends?
What
friends? Stewart’s dreadful parents? Unlikely, given that she had been incommunicado with Stewart
himself
for the past three years.

The rain picked up again as I penetrated ever deeper into what my
Frommer’s Guide to Vermont
called the Northeast Kingdom—a cute, even Tolkeinesque name, but in my current mood one that carried an oddly foreboding tinge suggestive of the edge of the world, the end of civilization. After a number of jogs and turnings, I arrived at the top of a steep incline where I was rewarded with a small sign reading NEW HALCYON 1 mile.
Turn back
, a voice in my brain implored me.
You can turn back now
. Instead, I pressed the accelerator and rolled down the hill, into the center of town.

If town you could call it. New Halcyon’s main strip proved to be no more than a handful of weathered buildings fitted around the V-shaped tip of the lake. I stopped beneath a streetlight across from Ernie’s General Store. They were sorry, they were closed. So was everything else at this hour. To the left of Ernie’s was a bakery with a red awning, Lady Jane’s; to the right, a hardware store with two 1950s gas pumps out front. On my other side was the silky black vastness of the lake. A light burning on the opposite shore was reflected into a quivering stiletto blade on the water, pointing straight at me. I pressed the gas and rolled on, searching for my hotel.

I passed a hamburger stand called the Snak Shak, a post office, and a bank. Beyond the forlorn-looking laundromat, I came to a steep road branching to my left: route 3. I followed it for about two miles until, on my left, there appeared an ill-kept clapboard building with peeling white paint, loose black shutters, and a neon sign over the doorway: PLEAS NT VIEW HOTEL. I parked my Celica at the far end of the lot, got out, and stretched. Above, the sky presented a heart-quailingly vast field of stars
. How far are you willing to go to save yourself
? asked a voice in my brain. Finding no answer in twinkling infinity, I lowered my eyes and trudged inside.

The matronly, bifocaled desk clerk barely glanced up as she pushed the guest book toward me across the countertop. I bent over the page, and then I did something that I hadn’t exactly been planning to do but that, when I did it, left me feeling not at all surprised. Instead of writing my actual name, I wrote “Colin Coleman”—the name Stewart had given to the hero of
Almost Like Suicide
. The woman took no notice that I had signed a name different from the one under which the reservation had been made. Even if she had noticed, I don’t think she would have minded. It wasn’t that kind of establishment.

She plucked a key from the pegboard behind her. “Number Twenty-eight,” she said, over the noise of the bass and drums that pulsed from the bar just down the hall. “Second floor.”

On my way to the stairs, I stuck my head through the beaded curtain that led to the barroom. Under the confetti light of a sparkle ball, men and women in John Deere caps and cowboy boots stood talking by a long wooden bar, or boogied on a small dance floor. I was turning to go up the stairs when a thought struck me. I had, for some hours, been preoccupied with the question of how I would find Janet Greene’s house once I got to the town. To maintain my anonymity, I didn’t want to ask, say, the clerk at Ernie’s. As I gazed at the bar patrons, it occurred to me that they would be unlikely to recall giving directions to a tall stranger whose features would be hard to discern in the dark bar.

And so, with my overnight bag slung across one shoulder, I bellied up to the counter, ordered a Miller, and then stood admiring the “band”: two bald men in leisure wear plunking guitars and singing “Proud Mary” to the accompaniment of a rhythm box. They segued into the Police’s “Every Breath You Take.” Amazing musicians, in their way. I turned to the guy standing next to me, a skinny, scraggly-haired mountain man with a droopy mustache. He was staring, slack-mouthed and apparently very drunk, at the dance floor.

“ ’Scuse me,” I said (for some reason slipping into what I thought sounded like a down-home accent). “You from around these parts?”

His watery blue eyes seemed to hold a glimmer of assent.

“Could you tell me,” I ventured, “how to get to Meadow Hill?”

“Greene place,” he said in tones untinged by alcohol—a rural voice squeaky as a barn-door hinge. “Right round the other side of the lake. Take the ballpark road, just keep goin’ up. Can’t miss it.”

I leaned back, trying to move my face into shadow, thanked him, then slipped out.

Upstairs I found room 28, a turquoise-green cell. I shut and locked the door behind me, flicked off the light, then fell face-first onto the unyielding mattress, too tired even to remove my clothes. So tired, in fact, that I slipped into dreamland despite the thudding of the Buddha Brothers below, their voices joined in a polka version of “Did You Happen to See the Most Beautiful Girl in the World?”

I was asleep by the time they hit the second chorus.

In the Holiday Cocktail Lounge on St. Mark’s Place, I was peering past the dusty bowling trophies and the antlered deer head, into the tinted mirror behind the bar. It was dark as hell in there, but for some reason I was wearing sunglasses. As I raised a Rolling Rock to my lips, a scratchy female voice spoke my name. I lowered the bottle, turned to my left to see who it was—and woke up.

After a moment of serious disorientation, I sat up and squinted at my watch. Eight-thirty in the morning.

I bounded out of bed, peeled off my clothes, then scuttled into the bathroom for a shower. I moved with haste, spending as little time as possible thinking about what I was about to do. Especially since I didn’t
know
what I was about to do, beyond my vague assignment of canceling the threat posed to my career, my reputation—my
life
—by Janet Greene.

Then I was in the Celica again, rolling down route 3, back into New Halcyon. Breakfast was out of the question. The sidewalks were thronged with pedestrians: city-slicker yuppies in tennis whites, lounging teenagers in plaid shirts and ripped jeans. New Halcyon was hopping on this sunny Labor Day Weekend. Good. Less chance that anyone would remember me. I followed the road around the lake, past the ballpark, then up an incline to a secluded, tree-shaded dirt road, at the end of which was an entrance to a steeply ascending driveway. A professionally lettered sign sprouted from the ditch:

I put the car in gear and began to climb. Meanwhile, I rehearsed, one last time, the lie that I had prepared for Janet Greene.

The lie was designed to explain what was, on the face of it, unexplainable: why Stewart would have FedExed to Janet Greene a copy of
my
novel and pretended that it was
his
. The underlying premise was that Stewart had, quite simply, gone nuts. Not so hard to believe when you considered Stewart’s tightly coiled personality and the state of nervous exhaustion he had reached shortly before his death (always a good idea to base a lie on some particle of truth). I would explain to Janet Greene how, as Stewart’s roommate, I had tried to jolly him out of his depression; how I had tried to coax him from the apartment and his law tomes. But to no avail. Stew’s social agoraphobia had made him a prisoner of our apartment, and he had grown steadily more depressed. He envied me my life as a writer and bon vivant. He spoke bitterly about his own decision to go into the law. Gradually, the differences between us had festered in his mind, intensified, until they became outright rivalry. One day, shortly after I had completed my first novel,
Almost Like Suicide
, Stewart had stolen a copy meant for my agent. I had immediately discovered the theft and asked Stewart if he knew anything about it. He had owned up in a tearful confession. He explained that in a moment of consuming envy, he had burned the manuscript. An act of spite. Seeing that he was on the brink of mental collapse, I forgave him and told him that I still had a copy of the original—no harm done. He seemed to accept this, but then he said he needed a “head-clearing” bike ride. Foolishly, I let him go. Less than an hour later, I learned that Stewart had died under the wheels of a Gypsy cab. The NYPD called it an accident. I had my doubts. I would
always
have my doubts. But I had struggled to put the whole tragic incident behind me. Then, the other day, while readying a few of Stewart’s papers to send off to his grieving parents, I’d found a copy of a letter to
you
, Janet Greene. In the letter, Stewart claimed authorship of an enclosed manuscript,
Almost Like Suicide
. So he had not, in fact, burned the stolen copy of my soon-to-be-published novel, but had sent it off to you! Of course, I thought of explaining all of this over the phone, but then I decided it would be best to do it in person, since it was all so complicated and difficult to talk about over long distance, especially to a stranger.

So, that was the lie. I had begun concocting it the day before, and had spent the intervening hours
internalizing
it, repeating it to myself so often that I had almost come to see it as the truth. And
wasn’t
it a form of the truth? Stewart had, after all, stolen my material from me—a crime that might be explained as the action of a diseased mind. And what
about
that bike accident? The ultimate Freudian slip? Almost like suicide, indeed. But the truth or nontruth of the tale was not the important thing at the moment. The real question was, would Janet Greene buy it? She would
have
to. It was all I had.

The house came into view some fifty yards ahead: a ranch-style dwelling of weathered white clapboard built into the side of a hill. A family 4-by-4 was parked out front, its tailgate open.

I parked behind the truck and got out of the car. For this meeting, I wore a jacket and tie and was carrying, draped over one forearm, a khaki raincoat. I had hoped the effect might be one of a certain bookish elegance. But my reflection in the car’s side window was distorted by the slanted pane: my body was compressed into that of a squat, square-headed hit man. I turned away and hastened over to the house.

I passed through an unlocked screened porch to the front door: a solid white rectangle that bore neither knocker nor window. I licked my lips and squared my shoulders. Since the few curt words I’d uttered in the Pleasant View, I had not spoken in twenty-four hours. “Testing,” I quavered. “Testing-one-two three.” Then I pushed the doorbell button. Immediately the door flew open.

A tall, pear-shaped man in T-shirt, shorts, and topsiders was in the process of herding several pieces of blond luggage, as well as two small children, a boy and a girl, also blond, out the door. “C’mon, honey!” he shouted over his shoulder. “We are outa here!” Behind him, in the vestibule, was a heap of tennis rackets, inner tubes, golf bags, baseball mitts, and bats. One of the kids, the boy, tugged at his father’s shirt and whined, “Can we stop at the McDonald’s in Newport, Dad? Can we?
Can we
?” The little girl scanned the floor around their feet and cried, “Where’s Gertie?” Meanwhile, a woman’s harried voice called out from some recess in the house, “
Was that the doorbell
?”

At which point six eyes, all of them blue, all three pairs at different levels, trained themselves on me.

“Hello,” I said, producing a generalized smile meant to encompass them all. “I see that this is a bad time to call. Um. But I was wondering, is Janet Greene in?”

The man’s big, smooth, sunburned face frowned.

“She won’t be back till tonight,” he said.

“
Who is it
?” the woman’s voice echoed from inside the house.