After the Workshop (20 page)

So why did I stay? I honestly didn’t know. Familiarity, perhaps. Maybe nostalgia. Most likely, though, the reason was inertia. The very thought of packing up, moving, and starting all over again didn’t so much fill me with dread as exhaustion. My sense of adventure was limited to ordering Thai food “spicy hot” rather than merely “hot,” and even then, I would weigh the short-term benefits against the long-term pain I might experience. All too often, at the very last second, I asked for “medium hot,” moving down a notch instead of up, opting for what I knew to be safe.

My few good friends from the Workshop had all left town years ago. One published a well-reviewed novel that sold only five hundred copies in hardback and never made it to paper. Another went back to school to get a degree in psychology and now worked for the state of Arizona; I still didn’t know exactly what it was he did. My closest friend from back then earned a PhD in English, took a job at a good university in the Southeast, and now drank himself to sleep each night. When I talked to him over the phone, which was no more than twice a year, he ranted the entire time about how lazy his students were and how much he wanted to beat up certain colleagues. “This asshole who teaches Faulkner?” he said. “One of these days, when he least expects it, I’m going to reach over and gouge his eyes out. I’m just going to reach out and sink my fingers into that bastard’s eye sockets. Tell me
that
wouldn’t send a message that he shouldn’t have been such a pain in my balls!” The last time we spoke, he’d said, “You’re lucky, and you don’t even realize it. You’re your own boss. How many people can say that? Huh?” And then, after an uncomfortably long silence, I heard him snoring.

The people I knew these days were barely more than acquaintances, like the bartenders at George’s and the Foxhead, or those bars’ regulars, men like former weight lifter Larry McFeeley, or Sand Man, who, thirty years after his pool-playing heyday, could still beat any punk at the table. I knew Jerry the book buyer, of course, but I had no idea what part of town he lived in or what he did in his spare time. I knew he was married, but I wasn’t even sure if he had any kids. I occasionally spoke to the mailman, who parked his truck down at the end of my block to smoke and read other people’s magazines. As for women, the one who probably knew me the most intimately at this point was Lupe, the waitress at El Ranchero, who remembered, among other things, to bring me a cup of shredded cheese with my fajitas. I saw her every Tuesday and Thursday during the tail end of her lunch rush, and I always left a 25 percent tip. On the rare day she wasn’t there and I was placed in the hands of someone who didn’t know the idiosyncrasies of my order, I felt temporarily adrift. Sometimes I would ask, “Where’s Lupe?” but often the waiter or waitress didn’t understand English, so the question would go unanswered.

Recently, in an attempt to meet new people over the Internet, I opened a MySpace account and sent “friend requests” to anyone still living in town who had attended the Workshop. The first message I received in return was from a twenty-eight-year-old poet named Gretchen, who wrote, “Thanks for requesting my friendship. Please state your name, country of origin, and the reason for your request. I have no idea who you are.” At first, I interpreted the reply as simply a hostile “Who the fuck are
you
?” and I was tempted to write back, “Who the hell do you think
you
are?” But after reading it over again, I surmised it had more to do with the fact that I was a writer she hadn’t heard of and, because I wasn’t on her radar, wasn’t worthy of her time: “Prove yourself, if you want to be my friend.” Finally, I dismissed these theories and saw
behind the words a soulless bureaucratic: “State your name, country of origin, and the reason for your request.” She was living and breathing, presumably a human being, but she was as heartless as the computer on which she typed. Before anyone else could send a message to me, I canceled my account.

Himself killing from him keeps what?
I was already a good four blocks from Jerome Ruby’s house when I decided to turn around and head back.

When I arrived at the house, the lights, both inside and out, were all ablaze. I pictured the dial on their meter spinning like a circular buzz saw. I climbed the porch stairs and rang the bell.

Alice opened the door. A child ran laps behind her, a plastic hammer held with both hands over his head.

“Tommy!” Alice yelled at the child. “Honey,” she said, softer. “Please quit running. We have a guest.”

Tommy, who looked to be around three years old (but could have been anywhere between two and five, for all I knew about kids), lobbed the plastic hammer at nothing in particular. It spun through the air, end over end, like a tomahawk, then shattered a framed Norman Rockwell print of a pharmacist mixing up some medicine. In the painting, a child, covering his mouth, watches the pharmacist. Unlike Jerome, who wasn’t much older than me and had a full head of hair, Rockwell’s pharmacist was an old, bald man with a thick, old-timey mustache. It was exactly the sort of sentimental crap I expected from Jerome. The entire house was full of such nods to himself—antique apothecary jars, a battered leather doctor’s satchel, an aluminum sign that read, in flaking paint, JEROME’S DRUGSTORE.

“Tommy!” Alice said. “Look at what you did, Tommy!”

Tommy, unrepentant, had already begun running again.

“Watch out for the glass,” Alice said. “You’re going to cut yourself.”

“Maybe I came at a bad time,” I said. When Alice didn’t say anything, I called out, “Tommy!” I said it loud enough that he stopped running. “Hey, pal,” I said. “Do you like your Aunt Alice?”

Tommy nodded.

“Then give her a break, okay? You’re kind of pushing her buttons. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Tommy was about to start running again, but I crouched down to his level and said, “
Hey!
Did you hear what I said?”

Alice was watching me, but I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Was she grateful for my help, or did she think I had overstepped my bounds? For a second, I started to believe I’d had some sway with the kid, but then he yelled, “I’m gonna tell my daddy on you!” and began crying—a cry so deep and horrible, you’d think I’d backed over him with my car.

I stood up. “Maybe I’d better go.”

“Yes,” Alice said. “You should.” Her reply was more definitive than I anticipated.

I opened the door and stepped back into the cold.

“What were you doing here tonight?” Alice asked.

“Just now? I came back to see you.”

“No,” Alice said. “Why were you here in the first place?”

“Coincidence,” I said. She regarded me with suspicion, so I shrugged and added, “It’s a small town. What can I say?”

“It’s not that small,” she said. She sighed. “Good-bye, now.”

“Good-bye, Alice,” I said, and she shut the door.

I walked over to my car, got inside, and, miraculously, managed to pull out without a problem, as though there had never been anything keeping me there.

T
HERE HAD BEEN a time when I loved Iowa City—the patchouli-smelling girls, the carefree skateboarders, the night air filled with smoke from clove cigarettes—but my view of this city teeming with nothing but blithe spirits had recently mutated into a darker vision, that of a place populated with malingerers and hangers-on, where the only people who really made a killing were frat boy realtors who’d inherited swatches of land near I-80 on which they built repulsive shopping malls and fast-food chains to make even more money. Even though I knew that this change in my view was an extension of my own deep self-loathing, I suspected my analysis wasn’t entirely off the mark.

Tonight, on my drive home, I passed a giant snowman in front of a sorority house. It had a carrot nose, eyes and mouth made out of charcoal, and tree-limb arms. It also had an enormous cucumber penis. Using charcoal briquettes, someone had spelled EAT ME across its chest. The tradition of the profane snowman began only a few years ago, signaling—what? A shift in morality? A slippage of interest in anything academic? A hatred for snowmen? I honestly didn’t know, but I suspected it signaled
something
, and that whatever it portended couldn’t be good.

Safely home, without getting pulled over for drunk driving, I crawled into bed and covered myself with as many blankets as I could. I awoke several hours later to the whine of my front door opening, followed by creaking floorboards and the door snapping shut. It was three thirty in the morning; my bedroom was pitch-black, except for the digital numbers on my alarm clock. I had been dreaming about Vanessa Roberts and her baby, and in the dream, the baby was mine, and Vanessa and I were lovers who’d had a falling out. I tried to remember more of the dream, but large chunks of it evaporated even as I sifted through it. My eyes adjusted just enough for me to see the outline of my vacuum cleaner, which looked, in the grainy blur of half-sleep, like a very small person standing in the corner of my room, watching over me. As a child, I took pleasure in scaring myself, imagining that my coat draped over a chair was really a werewolf hunched near the bed and about to pounce. A shadow across my ceiling, probably from the headlights of a car driving by the house, might have been a bat.

I took a quick, unexpected gasp of air. I wondered, usually when I was too asleep to research it, if I had developed sleep apnea and what, if anything, could be done about it. There were nights when I woke up from dreams of drowning, unable to suck in enough air, but these were typically nights when I’d had too much to drink. Was this how I was going to die—alone, and of some disorder that I was too lazy to Google? Whenever I considered the many ways I might die, I always ended up thinking about Tennessee Williams, who died choking on an eyedrop bottle cap in a hotel room in New York. He had a habit (a deadly one, it turned out) of holding the cap in his mouth while leaning way back to place the drops in each eye.

The floorboards creaked again. Each time a switch was flipped on, light streamed in under my door, but when the switch was off, the illuminated swatch returned to black. I started falling asleep again, but the ancient
fan in the bathroom began to moan, keeping me from slipping completely under. A toilet flushed. The water faucet was turned on and off. It was as though the apartment had come alive, each part commiserating with the other: a light switch talking to a floorboard, the fan to the faucet.

My doorknob jiggled, turned. The door opened, and I woke up.

“S. S.?” I said. “You need something?”

The light came on, as startling as a handful of lime thrown into my eyes. I squinted and blinked, and when I saw that it wasn’t S. S., I made a whimpering noise, sitting up quickly but scooting further away, pressing myself against the headboard.

“Jack Sheahan?”

“Lauren Castle?” I asked.

“Jesus Christ. I finally made it to this God-forsaken state,” she said. “You have no idea what my day has been like.
No
idea!”

“What are you doing here?” I asked. I had expected her to be older, more frightening looking, along the lines of Joan Collins or Leona Helmsley, and though she had to have been at least in her early forties to have worked in the warehouse where Jay McInerney’s third novel had been returned by the tens of thousands, she looked barely out of college. What made her seem older were her husky voice and her attitude. Otherwise, she could have been living down the street and posing with the X-rated snowman.

“What am I
doing
here? I’m here to find
Vanessa
,” she said, looking at me as though I were the unreasonable one.

“No, no,” I said. “
Here
. Inside my
apartment
. In my
bedroom
.”

“Sheraton’s sold out.” She looked around my room. “So
this
is Iowa,” she said. “Hunh.”

I wanted to tell her that my bedroom wasn’t really a fair representation of what the state had to offer, but Lauren had already walked away, back to my kitchen.

“Do you always leave your door unlocked?” she called out. “Is that how people out here live? Because, let me tell you something. If you left your door unlocked in Manhattan, you’d wake up the next morning missing a kidney. That’s right. A
kidney
, Jack.”

I pushed myself out of bed. I straightened up the covers. I cinched my sweatpants tighter.

I found Lauren in the kitchen, peering into my fridge.

“I’m starving,” she said, slamming the door shut. “But not for anything in there. What’s open all night around here?” she asked.

“The Quik Stop,” I said. “You can get a microwavable burrito and a gallon of milk.”

Lauren said, “Did you do something to her?”

“Who?”

“Vanessa.”

“Did I
do
something to her? Like what?”

“She tries my patience sometimes,” Lauren said. “I could certainly understand why someone might want to harm her.”

“You’re not serious,” I said.

Lauren shrugged. “My plane was rerouted because of the blizzard, and then I had to rent a car in—what’s it called? The Quad cities?” She shivered. “Terrible place,” she said. “Awful airport. They were out of rentals, so I had to wait for something like five hours to get one. The food there was poisonous. Shriveled hot dogs probably sitting there since the 1990s.” She sighed and shut her eyes, and for a couple of seconds, she seemed human, and I actually felt bad for her. But then she opened her eyes and said, “I’m not saying you killed her. Don’t be ridiculous. What I’m wondering, though, is if you somehow drove her away from here. Maybe you got into a fight over the money for the breast pump? I’m just spitballing here. Work with me.”

I’d almost forgotten about the breast pump. “Which reminds me,” I said. “I’m billing you for that.”

“Go ahead,” Lauren said. “But we’re not paying for it.”

I walked to the door, opened it up, and said, “Goodnight, then.”