Pocket Kings (42 page)

When I got home Cynthia—to my relief—was sitting on the couch with her legs crossed and the latest copy of
InStyle
on her lap.

“Where were you?” I asked her. “I've been really worried.”

“Where do you think?”

“I don't know. At a work off-site? Your mom's?”

“So? Did you get a lot of work done on the
Trilogy
? When do I get a chance to read it?”

“When I put it all together. I have to clean a few things up.”

She flipped
InStyle
onto the coffee table and it made a loud clang.

“So tell me . . .” she said. “How long have you and this Artsy Painter Gal been involved? And don't tell me you're not.”

“We're not.”

All the air around us abruptly vacated the premises.

“Oh, yes you are.”

I took my coat off and sat down on the couch, whereupon she stood up and went to the dinner table and sat down there.

“You snuck off to London with your
poker
mistress?!”

“How did you know about this? And it's ‘sneaked,' not snuck. And she is not my mistress.”

(I could have said “Poker is my mistress” but opted not to.)

“What I know or the fact that I know doesn't interest you . . . it's
how
I found out that fascinates you, isn't it?” I nodded and she went on. “When you asked me to send you whatever the hell that depressing, unreadable book is called, you gave me your password.”

I don't know what pissed me off more, my being foolish enough to trust her with my password or her calling my book unreadable. I think it was the former. (Quickly I wondered:
Would Cynthia like
Dead on Arrival
as penned by Boompha Felicity Jalalowitz with the pink cover, expensive accessories and new 9/11 theme?)

“I read some e-mails,” she said. “
Th
at's what I did.”

I resisted telling her how unethical that was because I knew there was no way I was going to win with that. She explained quickly to me that she had spent the previous night at a Tribeca hotel and was too angry to see me or talk to me.

“I can't believe you sometimes,” she said.

“Neither can I. Listen . . . I went to London.
Th
at's true. I really did plan to write, I swear. I don't know what you read but I promise you: nothing happened.”

“You're lying! You betrayed me.”

“I maybe was going to but she never showed up!”

“She didn't show up?”

“No! I swear to God . . . she stood me up! And probably nothing would have happened anyway.”

She smiled.
Th
e fact that I'd traveled all that distance and spent all that money to cheat but wasn't able to . . . she was loving it.

“Well, I still want you out of here.”

“No, you don't.”

“I do!”

I wasn't expecting this. I had been planning on a hot romantic two-week tryst that nobody would ever have found out about; now I was being thrown out of my own apartment for an affair that hadn't even happened.

“Please don't do this to me,” I said.

“I'm giving you ten minutes. Pack your stuff. Get out.”

She didn't smile or scowl, and in a weird way her face looked like the high school yearbook picture of some girl that nobody else in the book remembered at all.

I began packing, slowly at first, but then sped things up when she said, “Eight minutes.” Jamming underwear into a suitcase I told her, “Look, I'm a loser,” hoping that she'd say to me, “No, you're not!” Instead she said: “Yes, I know.” “No,” I said, still hoping again that she'd contradict me, “I really am.” She said, “Yes, you are. You have accomplished nothing in your entire life.” I put a few socks into the suitcase and said, “Hey, I did get those two books published,” and she said, “But they didn't sell. Six minutes.” “So you really think,” I asked, “that I'm a loser?” and she said, “You always tell me you are! And yes, I see now that you're right.” A few shirts fell out of the suitcase and I said, “Look at me, I can't even pack. I can't do anything,” and she said, “You're right. You're lousy at every single thing you do. And you have five minutes. And I can't stand your new hair, by the way.” Incensed, I said, “Hold on . . . you really think that I'm not good at
anything
?” It was hurtful to me that my wife was finally agreeing with me. “Yes, I do!” she insisted. “You're not good at anything.” “Oh yes I am!” I said. “Oh, and what's that?” she sniffed. “Poker!” I said.

Four minutes after the echoes of her little snort died down, I was gone.

I moved into a ten-room, $850-a-night
très charmant
hotel on the Upper East Side and stayed there four or five days. Without my laptop.
Th
e plan was to purge myself cold turkey of all the pills, booze, gambling, lousy food, and wicked fun. I wanted to see if I could go a few days without playing poker. And I could. But after I checked in I began vomiting and trembling wildly; I had chills and sweated nonstop and wept on and off, and my body was wrenched and twisted and a lifetime supply of mucus kept flowing out of me. I lost track of time and the world, and time and the world lost track of me. I refused housekeeping: every time there was a knock at the door, I called out, “Please just leave me alone!”
Th
ere were all sorts of fancy shampoos and conditioners that I repeatedly tried to shatter before realizing—it took two days—that the bottles were plastic. I barely made it to the bathroom when I had to go. Until then I didn't think it was physically possible to shit, pee, throw up, sweat, cough, be wide awake yet also be asleep and dreaming, to feel pain and relief all at the same time, but now I know it is.

I called Wifey but she wouldn't pick up. In my mind I wrote gorgeous
Faerie Queene
–length love poems for her but then tore them up and burned the scraps.

I wanted to murder someone but didn't know precisely whom to kill.

Stone cold sober, I urinated my initials on the wall. I also urinated a cross, a swastika, a star of David, and finally a smiley face on the floor near the window. I shouted curses and cruel insults at passersby outside the window and carved my misery into the faux–King Louis the Whicheverth armoire with my fingernails and teeth.

Curled up on the floor and shivering, I believe I may have called Deke Rivers to shoot the breeze. He had read the rest of
DOA,
he told me, and would publish it for a fee to be named later, but he still thought I should “nine-eleven it the hell up” and reverse the genders. I said something about all agents nowadays being interested only in money and not art and how the literary world has changed for the worse, and he said, “It's true, Chip, and it's just a goddamned shame, isn't it?” “Twenty out of twenty agents,” I lamented to him, “would rather handle
Th
e Da Vinci Code
than the
Blood Meridian
s of this world, wouldn't they, Deke?” “You're darn tootin' they would, buddy! Frank, they handle
Th
e
Da Vinci Code,
these agents'll tell you, so they can afford to handle the
Blood Meridian
s of the world, but uh-uh . . . they handle
Th
e Da Vinci Code
so they can afford their summer homes.” He cleared his throat and a quivering jellybean of phlegm oozed out of my phone. “
Th
e world, Deke,” I said, “has become a bad place.” “It's commerce taking over art, that's what it is,” he told me. “Just a sad commentary on our times.” I thanked Deke for hearing me out and he said, “Any time, Frankie, any time.”

I hung up—but maybe that phone call never really happened.

Sometimes that hotel room was spinning slowly one way and I was spinning a lot quicker the other way. At night I thought the patterns on the Egyptian cotton sheets and on the comforter were hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs. Cards were whispering into my ear unspeakably horrific things.
Th
e 3 of Diamonds, for example, cackled to me: “Tonight your asshole is going to suck you up and swallow you alive.”

My cell phone rang on day
th
ree or four and I was so sure it was Wifey calling that I picked up. But it turned out to be Susan Jessup and she sounded liked she was ten and was trying to sell me Girl Scout cookies. So, she said, didja really read my book? I told her I had and that I'd liked it a lot. While I clutched the night table, she asked me if I wanted to meet for a coffee and I said, Okay, sure. She told me she was in New York and it turned out she was only ten blocks away.

We met at a Starbucks and I hadn't done anything to fix my appearance. My stained, sweaty dress shirt was mostly dangling out of my pants, my breath reeked, my skin was a dull, undiscovered color, and if a tick or a louse or cockroach fell out of my hair nobody in Starbucks would have been shocked. Susan was twenty-three years old, the daughter of two teachers, had shoulder-length blonde hair; everything she wore was probably from Express or H&M, and I could tell that the very sight of me in this condition was causing her tremendous discomfort. She squinted and tried to get me in focus, but it didn't happen.

I sounded like I was drunk and hadn't slept in a week, but she never asked me if anything was wrong. Maybe she thought I always was in this shape. Was this for her like me thinking I was going to meet John Lennon but instead having Charles Manson show up?

“So,” she said when we sat down, “you really, really liked it?”

“You want to write books?
Th
is is what you want to do?”

When she nodded I thought: Wow, if this sweet young girl were my daughter I would be the luckiest, most delighted father alive.

“You're sure about this, Susan?
Th
is is the course you're setting for yourself?”

“Yes.
Th
is is what I want to do. So? My book? How can I make it—”

“I read some of it, yeah,” I mumbled. “But not the whole thing because I don't read books anymore.
Th
ere's better ways to waste my time. So I guess I lied. And I'm sorry. I liked what I read, but the thing is I'm not going to read it. It's not—it has nothing to do with you, I promise. I'm probably not going to read anything ever again. Now here's my advice.” I paused for a deep breath. “
Don't . . .
listen . . . to me. And this isn't against you personally because you seem very nice and very intelligent. For your own sake, just toss it out. Stop writing. Stop reading. Every word you read is a lie. Writers are liars. Pathetic, whiny, uninteresting, self-obsessed, lazy liars. Nobody means what they say anymore except for me right now.
Nobody!
Th
ey're worse than politicians. All just a bunch of whores! If you're an honest, sincere person, you won't do this. Please don't do this to yourself! Find something else . . . do charity work . . . build huts for lepers or plant trees or answer phones for PBS or Jerry Lewis! But really, you should just give it up.
Th
ere's no hope! And that is my advice.”

I tried to stand up but tumbled to the floor. I looked up and saw she was in tears. I was in tears, too.
Oh God,
I said looking up at her,
I'm so sorry!
I was trembling again, head to toe. I told her I'd been going through a rough time lately, that my wife had tossed me out of my home, and she grabbed my hand and helped me up and out onto the street.

If not for her I would have fainted, or something worse might have happened, and when we parted two minutes later we were both still sniffling. I promised her I'd be okay.

Th
e next day I checked out of the hotel and left $1,000 for the poor chambermaid, whose supercharged Dyson vac and bottle of Windex would be no match for the fetid havoc that awaited her. I got a
Times
for the taxi ride downtown and read that the movie rights to a book written by a pseudonymous British author had been optioned for $900,000 by Pacer Burton's production company.
Th
e book would soon be published in the U.S.A. and was called
Nuts.

Whether it was cold or mild that day or snowing or a hundred degrees out, I have no idea.

When I got home it was four in the afternoon. I showered and hoped to God Cynthia would take me back and for an hour and a half I rehearsed a summation that Émile Zola, Clarence Darrow, and Johnnie Cochran would be proud of. Yet some part of me wanted her to walk into the apartment with some hunky revenge-fuck lover so I could stand up, point an indignant finger at her and say, “Aha!
J'accuse!
”

When she walked in—alone—she wasn't happy to see me.