After the Workshop (4 page)

“Well,” I said, “there’s a little problem.” I took a bite of my sandwich. “Ms. Roberts had me run an errand, and I had to write a check for two hundred and sixteen dollars, and now I’m broke. I was actually just about to call
you
.”

“Whoa!” Lauren said. “Back up. Call
me
? Explain.”

“She told me to bill you,” I said.

“Bill us? For what?”

“A breast pump.”

“Did I just hear what I think I heard? Did you just say a
breast
pump?”

“She lost hers,” I said.

“Well, then,” Lauren said. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s between you and her. We don’t reimburse for
breast
pumps. Sorry.”

“It’s for her baby,” I said.

“Hey. I don’t care if it’s for her pet monkey. We have a strict policy here for what we can and cannot reimburse for. Number one, top of the list—you want to guess what it is?”

“Hookers?”

“Nope. We’ll reimburse for hookers. Guess again.”

“Breast pumps?”

“Bingo,” Lauren said. “Get the money from her, and then get your car fixed. Are we on the same page?”

“The same paragraph,” I said.

“Good,” she said, and hung up.

I
FOUND MY SECOND author at baggage claim, waiting for me.

“Tate Rinehart? Oh, hey, sorry I’m late.”

 

Tate said nothing. Bored, maybe perturbed, he stood and cracked his knuckles, one hand and then the other. Then he grabbed hold of his head and twisted it one way, popping something in his neck, and then twisted it the other. His only luggage was a messenger bag strapped over his shoulder.

“This way,” I said, leading him out of the airport and into the parking lot.

I’d had my fill of Tate Rineharts: all of them guys from New York, early thirties, black plastic-framed glasses, black T-shirts, torn jeans. They were often finalists for, or winners of, National Book or National Book Critics Circle Awards, frequent contributors to
The New Yorker
and
Harper’s
, their bored expressions gracing the covers of
Poets & Writers
, their enthusiasm for camp culture well-documented, their own writing often experimental and gratuitously gloomy but penetrable.

I hated these fuckers. I’ll admit it. I hated all of them. But maybe I hated them because I’d had a shot at becoming one of them but had blown it. Or maybe I hated them because they were worthy of being hated. It was hard to say, really.

I relished the fact that Tate had underdressed for the Iowa weather, and when we stepped outside, he quickly zipped up his vintage service station jacket, the name Leroy stitched in red inside an oval over his heart. The jacket was too thin, and I swore I heard him whimper.

“Almost there,” I said, though I’d had to park, out of necessity, at the far end of an aisle.

Inside my car, Tate flipped open his cell phone and speed-dialed a number, but as soon as I started the engine and the car began to roar, Tate cut his eyes toward me and shut his phone.

“Muffler fell off this morning,” I said. “And then a semi ran over it.”

“Hm,” Tate said.

Halfway to Iowa City, Tate said, “Is there any way to quiet this car? I need to call a friend of mine who lives in town. Vince Belecheck?”

“I know Vince,” I said.

“Really?”

“Yeah, we were classmates together.”

“Undergrads?”

“No. The Workshop.”

Tate was sizing me up now. I could see, out the corner of my eye, the two skinny rectangles of his lenses facing me.

“You were in the Workshop,” he said matter-of-factly. “So you’re a writer?”

I nodded. I knew better than to go there, but the hook was waiting for me—or, more precisely, for my ego.

“I’ve been working on a novel,” I said, but before he could write me off as “one of them,” I quickly added, “I had a story in
The New Yorker
. Got picked up in
Best American
.” I shrugged. “But it’s the novel I’ve been focusing on.”

I looked over and saw that he was smiling. I was no longer simply his escort. I was a writer. The real deal. I had validated myself. And yet
I hated him even more now. The awful thing was, I
wanted
him to like me. I
wanted
his respect. That was the sick part of it all.

“So you’re friends with Vince!” he said.

I hadn’t said that we were friends—what I’d said was that I knew him and that we had been classmates—but I nodded anyway. Vince Belecheck was one of the trust-funders who pretended he’d come from a blue-collar background, going so far as to wear old plaid work shirts from Goodwill and a pair of well-worn brown leather Danner work boots, the kind no actual blue-collar worker I knew growing up could ever have afforded. This was all part of the Belecheck myth, you see, that he was the child of laborers and that he himself had kicked around in a series of day-labor jobs after college until he’d applied to the Workshop. His characters were foul-mouthed roofers and hard-drinking bricklayers, whereas Belecheck’s own parents were university professors and Belecheck himself drove a Jaguar with a vanity license plate advertising his best-known novel: STEELTOE.

“What did you say your name was?” Tate asked.

“Jack Sheahan,” I told him. “Jack Hercules Sheahan is what I publish under.”

Tate said, “And when were you in
The New Yorker?
”

“Oh, it’s been awhile,” I said. “Maybe I should have written a few more stories, made more of a name for myself, but the novel . . .” I looked longingly through the windshield, as though the pages of my novel were speared atop a hood ornament. “The novel kept calling to me.”

Tate said, “You gotta go where the muse calls you. I’m the same way.”

“Really,” I said.

“Absolutely,” Tate said. “What’s the name of your story? The one in
The New Yorker
?”

Each time he said “
The New Yorker
,” I felt compelled to reach over and slap him. I could tell he loved saying it. Tate Rinehart had published there at least a half-dozen times, but he’d also won
Paris Review
’s Aga Khan Prize and done a fashion shoot for
Esquire
’s literary issue, in which he wore a sand-colored tweed jacket with matching tweed pants while two scantily dressed “librarians” helped him locate a book.

“‘The Self-Adhesive Postage Stamp,’” I answered. “But it was years ago.”

“No, wait; wait,” he said. “I remember that story. I do.” And then he told me the plot, point by point, just to make sure that he was indeed remembering the correct story. “Is that the one?”

“The very one,” I said.

“Yes, I remember it,” he said.

And then he fell silent. He had remembered the story so vividly—in fact, he remembered the story better than I remembered it, recalling details that I had long forgotten—that I assumed he would follow up with a compliment. I didn’t expect him to
gush
; I wasn’t even expecting more than a kind word or two; but, no, the fact that he remembered it had been duly noted, so the discussion of my story was over.

The temperature had already dropped a good ten degrees since morning, and now the sky, never particularly colorful in Iowa in December, had turned to slate. Tate pulled out an advance review copy of Vince Belecheck’s forthcoming novel,
Where the Nail Goes
, and read it for the rest of the drive. Every few miles, Tate offered a grunt of satisfaction. I had read Belecheck’s early books and found them all to be not only patronizing but poorly written. In the one workshop we’d taken together, his similes were overworked (“like the stripe on a skunk after a car had run over it at sixty miles per hour”) and his language weirdly redundant, as if to convey some kind of gravity that the content lacked
(“Freddie Johnson rolled the round ball back and forth in the flat palm of his hand”). But what did I know? Belecheck had since been published in every major magazine and anthology, and he’d won nearly every major award, short of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, which I was sure he felt he deserved. Part of the Belecheck shtick was that the “establishment” overlooked poor schlubs like him, your “working stiffs,” your “everymans.”

“Here we are,” I said, pulling into the hotel’s semicircle for the second time that day. “Your reading’s tomorrow, right?”

“Right, but . . .”

“But?”

“But I may need you to drive me around tonight. You can do that, can’t you?”

I wanted to remind him that Iowa City, not unlike New York, had taxi service, but I needed the money.

“I have another author in town,” I said, “but as soon as I’m done with her, I’ll be available.”

“Who’s the author?”

“Vanessa Roberts?”

Tate’s face lit up. “
The Outhouse
! Oh my God, what a book. Have you read it?”

I shook my head. I didn’t tell him that I had skimmed it looking for the dirty parts.

“An
amazing
book,” Tate said. “Scary, honest, sad.” He wagged his head and said, “Human.”

“Human,” I repeated flatly. “I can’t wait.”

Tate said, “Tell you what. I’ll meet you at Vanessa’s reading tonight, and we can take it from there. Maybe she’ll even want to go out with us.”

“She brought her baby along,” I said.

“Of course she did,” Tate said, thinking about it. “Naturally she would be a protective mother, given all that she’s gone through.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” I said.

“I’ll see you tonight, then,” Tate said. “At the reading.”

“Tonight. Will do.”

I
T WASN’T UNTIL after I had gone back to my apartment for a nap that I remembered that I was supposed to ask Vanessa to write me a check for the breast pump. I should have taken care of it when I dropped Tate off at the hotel. I could have driven to my bank, cashed the check, and brought my car to House of Mufflers, but I was already beat.

The answering machine was blinking again when I got home, probably with another half-dozen messages from Lauren Castle, so I unplugged the phone. For reasons I couldn’t articulate, I kept every phone book I’d owned since living in this apartment, one for each year. I sometimes flipped through the oldest one, startled by restaurants, now long gone, that I had completely forgotten about, or the dog-eared pages with asterisks scribbled next to old friends who had either moved on or died. The oldest phone book was a document of a city that no longer existed, an ever-increasing graveyard of people and places. And yet here I was, still chugging along.

At the bottom of the pile of phone books was a manuscript box. Inside was my never-completed novel. I slipped it out. I hadn’t looked at it in seven years, hadn’t added a word to it in ten. I carried it over to my sofa, sat down, and blew dust off the lid. I had written the title
along the side of the box with a thick black Sharpie, the way they do at publishing houses and literary agencies: AFTER THE FALL. Granted, it wasn’t the most original title. Only later, after I was well into writing the novel, did a woman at a bar inform me that it was the title of an Arthur Miller play.

“It’s just a working title,” I told her. “Plus, titles aren’t copyright-able. I could name it
Moby Dick
, if I wanted. Or
The World According to Garp
.”

“You couldn’t name it
The World According to Garp
,” she told me. “You’d get sued.”

“No, I wouldn’t. John Irving can’t copyright that title.”

“Are you crazy?” she asked me. We were both drunk, and, until then, I had been hoping to go home with her, but a dark mood descended upon us, and I could tell, by her cross look, that she was more likely to slap me across the face than go to bed with me.

“Fuck it,” I said. “You know what? I’m going to call it
The World According to Garp
. Just to prove my point.”

“Good,” she said, gathering her stuff from the bar—cigarettes, lighter, change, lip gloss. “I hope John Irving comes over to your house and kicks your sorry ass.”

“I’d like to see him try,” I said.

She sneered at me and shook her head. “You wouldn’t have a chance,” she said. “He was a
wrestler
. A goddamned
wrestler
.”

“Oh,” I said, feigning fear. “A
wrestler
!” I laughed wildly and said, “I’m scared now. I’m quaking in my boots.”

She reached over and snatched the book I’d been reading before she came in—the Black Sparrow Press edition of Paul Bowles’s stories—and started tearing pages out of it.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I asked.

She ripped out several pages at a time and threw the book at my head. I ducked, and the book hit the man sitting next to me, an alcoholic carpet-installer named Bobby T.

“You son of a bitch,” Bobby T. said.

“It wasn’t me,” I said. “It was
her
.” I pointed at the woman I’d only a few minutes ago been trying to imagine naked.

Bobby T. narrowed his eyes at the woman standing behind me and then cut his eyes back at me. “Writers,” he said. “I wish you’d all just die.”

I tossed a few dollars from my pile of bills at the bartender and gestured with my head toward Bobby T. A free drink would smooth away any trouble between us. And it did. I finished the night sitting next to Bobby T., straightening out the torn pages from Paul Bowles’s stories, returning them to the place in the book where they belonged.

A few weeks later, I met Alice. Three years after that, I was alone again—and have remained alone ever since.

I lifted the lid to the box and pulled out my manuscript. The dot matrix print and the continuous-feed paper, with its fuzzy perforated edges where I had torn away sprocket-holed sides and then separated one page from the next, all made the novel itself seem dated, even before I read the first word. The pages themselves were actually starting to turn yellow.