Shriver (3 page)

Delta Malarkey-Jones produced a fine-point pen. “I would really appreciate it.”

Shriver turned to the title page. He thought it very odd that he'd never heard of this famous author with whom he shared a name.

“You can just put ‘To Delta,' plus whatever you feel like.”

Shriver wiped his brow and wrote,
To Delta, she of row 9, seat B, on this day in May
, then he signed his name with a flourish.

“Thank you so much!” She held the book aloft. “One of these days I'm going to finish it too. Hey—I can't wait for your reading day after tomorrow!”

“That's very nice of you to say.” Shriver had hoped that no one would show up to his reading. Now it turned out this Shriver fellow was quite famous and sought-after. A tiny moth of anxiety fluttered inside his chest. He closed the book and handed it back.

“You can hold on to my memoir,” she told him. “I have a bunch. My address is on the front.”

“Oh, thank you.” Shriver squeezed the thick manuscript into the seat pocket in front of him. “I'll read it later, if you don't mind.”

“Are you staying at the Hotel 19? Most of the writers stay there during the conference. I take the same room every year. I reserve it months ahead of time. Room twenty. In case you need to find me,” she added, winking.

“Uh, I'm not sure where I'm staying.”

She grinned. “I'd love to discuss those scenes with you.”

“Which scenes?”

“You know—the sex scenes in your novel. They were very . . . imaginative.”

“Oh,” he said. “Thank you.”

After a moment, during which his neighbor settled back
into her seat with a series of contented sighs, Shriver turned his attention back to his story. He glanced quickly at the first page, then looked away. For that split second the words appeared to be arranged normally. He breathed a little easier. He had to get this situation under control. There might be a lot of people at the reading, if this lady was any indication. He looked back at the first page, this time for several seconds before turning away. Again, the lines of script were legible—poorly handwritten, perhaps, but legible. There was the title, “The Water Mark,” and, below that, the first line: “The water mark appeared on my ceiling on the rainy day my wife walked out on me.”

Up to this point the flight had been quite smooth, but now, as the airplane skimmed just above the clouds, the fuselage began to shimmy and rattle like an old jalopy. To distract himself, Shriver turned once more to the pages in his hand. Immediately the words appeared to melt, as if the ink were wax over a flame, dripping down the page and onto his lap. He checked his watch. The numbers were as clear as the clouds outside his window. Less than forty-eight hours until his reading. As if it wasn't going to be difficult enough to convince all those people he was a writer!

While the plane bumped over air pockets, the flight attendant weaved down the aisle collecting empty bottles and cans.

“May I have another?” Shriver asked, holding out the empty mini-bottle of whiskey.

“I'm sorry, sir,” the attendant said. “We're going to be landing soon.”

The airplane then descended right into the clouds, the window went white, and the cabin started to slide from side to side. Shriver gripped the armrests and concentrated on the
VACANT
sign outside the forward lavatory.

Then, as it emerged beneath the clouds, the plane ceased its shuddering. The ground below lay as flat as a door on its side, from horizon to horizon, spotted with ponds that reflected clouds and patches of blue. Off in the distance Shriver could make out a small town, not much more than a cluster of low buildings and a water tower. The airplane tilted toward a large asphalt X in the middle of the prairie. Shriver's ears ached from the pressure. He rubbed the tender spots where his jawbone attached to his skull and swallowed deeply. His throat burned as a whiskey belch made its way up his esophagus. Before he knew what was happening, a freshly plowed field and then a strip of tarmac rose up to meet the wheels of the plane, and with a bump and slide, they were on the ground. A pleased Delta Malarkey-Jones immediately began to collect her many articles from beneath the seat in front of her, including her bag, a jacket, a floppy hat, and a paper sack full of snacks.

“Don't forget my manuscript!” she reminded him, pointing to the seat pocket.

“Oh, I won't.” He placed the epic on his lap along with his own papers.

The plane rolled toward the terminal and lurched to a stop.

“I hope to see you around,” Ms. Malarkey-Jones said as she leaped to her feet and started to remove items from overhead. “Remember: Hotel 19, room twenty.”

The exit door swung open and the passengers shuffled up the aisle. Shriver rose unsteadily to his feet and entered the line. All the whiskey had settled in his legs. Wobbling a little, he gingerly disembarked onto a metal stairway that led down to the tarmac.

Looking up, he saw that the sky here was enormous, dwarfing everything beneath it. The clouds seemed thousands of
miles wide, with vast swatches of blue in between. As for the land, it stretched flat and unbroken all the way to the horizon. Even the little airport was squat and low to the ground. He waved away a mosquito buzzing at his ears.

Shriver wondered who would be at the gate to meet him. For all he knew, Chuck Johnson would spring out from behind a potted plant and shout,
Surprise!
But he had the feeling his old friend was nowhere near this place. The letters from Professor Cleverly, the free airline tickets, that woman on the plane—it was too elaborate even for Chuck. These people really thought he was Shriver the Writer! As he walked across the tarmac toward the doors, he concentrated on the task of becoming someone else, and wished for the first time that his gastrointestinal system were at least able to endure the library long enough for him to have read this Shriver fellow's work.

What had he been thinking?

Passing through a glass door into the air-conditioned gate area, where a crowd awaited returning friends and loved ones, he cursed his decision to come here, to leave the safe confines of his apartment, to leave the unconditional love of Mr. Bojangles, the dedicated service of Vinnie the Doorman and Blotto, the delivery boy from the local grocery store. He could have been home right now watching the afternoon edition of the Channel 17 Action News and napping on the patch of sun that fell across his bed at this time every day. Instead, he was in this strange, aggressively horizontal land, pretending to be someone else entirely, someone who was a genius, apparently, and infinitely more intelligent than he, albeit it with a dirty mind.

How can I worm my way out of this insane situation? he wondered. Perhaps he could avoid the person dispatched to retrieve him and exchange his return ticket for the next flight
home. He decided right then and there that this was what he would do—he would go home to Mr. Bojangles—and so he started toward the main lobby and ticket counter.

But his path was blocked by a petite young woman wearing a shiny yellow slicker.

She offered her hand. “Mr. Shriver, I presume.”

She had long blond hair, nearly the same color as her coat, and thin lips painted ruby red. He thought she was about eighteen years old until he looked closer and saw the crow's-feet at the corners of her large brown eyes. She looked the way he imagined Tina LeGros would look in person, without the stiff hair and pancake makeup and power suit.

“I'm Simone Cleverly,” she said.

“Yes,” he replied, taking her hand in his own. “And I am Shriver.”

When the luggage finally arrived, Professor Cleverly insisted on carrying Shriver's suitcase, though it weighed nearly as much as she did.

“Really, I can carry it,” Shriver told her, trying to grab the leather handle, but she pulled the bag away and started out of the terminal. For a small woman, Shriver thought, she was remarkably strong. While the other passengers at the luggage carousel stared at him with disapproving expressions, he followed her outside, where she lugged the suitcase across the small parking lot to a massive car, a three-ton contraption of black metal and man-made materials. She opened the rear door and, with a grunt, heaved the suitcase onto the seat.

“Climb aboard,” she ordered.

Shriver pulled himself up into the passenger seat as if into a tank.

The professor turned the key and the engine growled to life. With some effort she shifted gears and aimed the monstrous vehicle toward the parking lot exit. She looked like a child in her yellow slicker, her tiny hands astride the colossal steering wheel. She had to scoot herself forward in order for her feet to reach the pedals. The car's hood was so enormous that if a grown man walked directly in front of the vehicle, he would not be seen.

“Normally we have graduate students pick up the featured
authors at the airport, but your handler is teaching at this hour, so I took the job myself.” She watched the road as she spoke, not turning at all to address him.

“I feel honored, Professor.”

“It's very inconvenient, actually. I have so much to do.”

“I'm so sorry.”

After a pause, she said, “To be honest, I was curious.”

“Curious?”

“To meet the infamous Shriver.”

“Oh? I didn't realize I was infamous.”

She let out a sharp laugh. “Have you read your book lately?”

“I can't say that I have.”

“I read it in graduate school,” she told him, as if recounting the time she ate a spoiled piece of meat. “I
almost
got through the whole thing.”

They passed a paddock populated by enormous, shaggy bison. A wooden sign, lettered in the style of an Old West ranch, proclaimed
EAT BISON—LIVE WELL!

“But everyone's very excited that you're able to attend the conference,” Professor Cleverly said, straining to sound positive. “This is quite a coup for us.”

Shriver watched her profile as she drove: slightly crooked nose, strong jaw, skin tan and smooth but not pampered looking. Apparently, she spent a lot of time outdoors. The yellow slicker remained buttoned. She could have been naked underneath there for all Shriver knew. He blushed at the thought, and just then she turned to glance at him. He looked away toward a field of sunflowers stretching off into the distance.

“Ever been out this way?” she asked.

“Only to pass through. On a military train. All I can remember are the sunflowers.”

Shriver was surprised that he remembered this. He hadn't thought about it in years. The train had been headed west, farther and farther away from home. He smiled, recalling the image, exactly like this one. “Millions of yellow-bonneted faces all turned to worship the sun,” he said.

Professor Cleverly nodded, as if she'd expected him to say exactly that.

“The college is famous for its botany department,” she said. “Did you know Native Americans used the oil for snake bites and wart removal?”

“I did not.”

“Between the flowers, the seeds, and the oil, there are lots of uses for
Helianthus annuus
.”

Her voice sounded a little tight, he thought—the voice of someone trying to impress. He wondered what the real Shriver would say right now. Probably something erudite about agriculture, but he felt it was better at this point to keep his mouth shut. So far she had not suspected him of any fraudulence, and he didn't want to push his luck.

“We'll swing by the hotel first,” she said, “so you can drop off your bag and freshen up a little. Then I'll take you over to the College Union, where you can see what we have planned for you.”

She drove with great concentration, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. Perhaps she was simply nervous around such an “infamous” author. In any case, she did not seem to like him very much—or, actually, she did not seem to like the
real
Shriver. At the very least she disliked
Goat Time
.

He noticed that she didn't wear a wedding band. Instinctively, he covered his own with his right hand. For the first time he felt ashamed that he still wore the ring after all these years. He hadn't removed it partly because he simply couldn't
pull the thing off his pudgy finger, and partly because he had never had any reason to. In fact, he'd forgotten he wore it at all; it had become invisible—until now. He vowed to take it off as soon as he was alone.

“There's quite a lot of interest in your reading,” Professor Cleverly told him, working hard to keep the conversation afloat. “Everyone is wondering if you'll be sharing something new.”

Shriver reached into his jacket pocket to pat the pages there. “Actually, I
am
hoping to read something new.”

“That
is
exciting.” Her words, on paper, would imply excitement, but her face appeared locked in what Shriver interpreted as a struggle between pleasure and distaste. “This could turn out to be a huge literary event.”

Again, the moth of anxiety—or was it now a butterfly?—beat its wings against the fragile casing of his heart.

Fortunately, they were now pulling into the parking lot of the Hotel 19, a dull, square, three-story building teetering on the very edge of the town. Looking out a window from the front side, one would see a small college campus with tree-lined streets and old stone buildings; from the back one would see only prairie and sky.

“This place used to have just nineteen rooms,” Simone explained. “Hence the name. Then, a few years ago, they added on.”

She parked at the front entrance, then jumped down and ran around the car. By the time Shriver set his feet on the ground, she had hoisted his suitcase from the backseat.

“Why don't I come back in about an hour,” she said as she carted the bag toward the building. “That will give you time to catch your breath.”