The Salinger Contract (2 page)

A
s it turned out, Conner didn't come to our house for dinner or dessert; it was a school night and the kids needed to be in bed by nine. But I did go to the reading. I had figured I would sit in the back and mill about until he was done greeting his fans. But the turnout was poor. Really poor. Authors tend to exaggerate the number of people who come to readings, or at least I do. Usually, if you divide by three, you get the true figure. When you say only seven or eight people showed up, everyone gets depressed, uncomfortable, and judgmental, particularly in a college town where no one regards writing books as an actual career.

“Right, but what do you do for money?” my wife's colleagues continually asked me when I trailed along to departmental parties or when I ran into them at Lowes or Home Depot or Best Buy. In their line of work, or whatever they did that passed for work, writing was just one of the many things you did to keep your job—you didn't expect anybody to read what you wrote, let alone pay you for it. After all, you'd gotten your job by convincing your employers you'd read hundreds of books they probably hadn't read themselves. When you told these folks honestly that you had a lousy turnout, they tended to guess twenty-five or thirty people came. But when I showed up at the Bloomington Borders for the Conner Joyce reading, only eight people were there, including the events coordinator.

On the metal folding chairs positioned in rows in front of a podium and a signing table were a pair of trampy white women in their late thirties or early forties; they were wearing tight, sequined blue jeans and were holding copies of
People
magazine's
bachelors issue, circa 2005, for Conner to sign. There was the de rigueur weedy, sunlight-averse guy with copies of each of Conner's books stacked in a wheeled pushcart, undoubtedly hoping to move autographed first editions on eBay (“Just your signature. No inscription,” he said). There was a doughy lady in her early fifties with a library copy of
Ice Locker
and a digital camera so she could take a photo of Conner for her blog,
Authors Are My Weakness
. Conner gamely agreed, but after she snapped the pic and he mentioned his wife, she didn't stick around.

A homeless dude was sprawled across three chairs in the front row; there was a white boy with baggy jeans, a turned-around vintage Montreal Expos baseball cap, dragon tattoos on his shoulders, and an iPod, reading a copy of
XXL
; an Asian girl with a mug of coffee was studying for the SATs and leaving coffee rings on her test-prep book. None of them seemed to know who Conner was. Maybe some had seen the straight-to-DVD movie of
Devil Shotgun
(pretty good performance by Mark Ruffalo in the lead role of Detective Cole Padgett if you feel like streaming it on Netflix), but they didn't seem aware the author was in the store. The other customers in Borders were either purchasing coffee, reading books and magazines they hadn't paid for and weren't intending to pay for, or buying discounted books by James Patterson, Stephenie Meyer, or Margot Hetley.

Conner, wearing his traditional getup of a good heavy sport coat, jeans, and a light-blue button-down shirt, was adjusting the microphone at his podium and studying a sheet of prepared remarks through a set of half glasses. Those glasses were the only sign he had aged at all since I had last seen him. Otherwise, he looked eager and energetic, smiling all dimples at the women in the front row seated next to the homeless guy. Conner smiled as if he didn't notice how small the crowd was, or as if he felt flattered that anyone would go out of his or her way to hear him speak. The humility I have always worked so hard to affect seemed to come naturally to Conner.

I didn't know whether I would be doing Conner more of a service by sitting up front and making the crowd look bigger or by sneaking out and pretending I hadn't noticed how few people were there. But before I had decided, Conner caught sight of me by the best­sellers shelf, where I was flipping through
The Fearsome Shallow
—the eighth book in Margot Hetley's Wizard Vampire Chronicles series. I was wondering how Ms. Hetley, who seemed to occupy just about every slot on the
New York Times
hardback, paperback, and e-book bestseller lists, had managed to wring eight five-hundred-page installments out of the concept of wars between rival gangs of vampires­ and wizards when it seemed obvious to me that all a wizard would have to do to kick a vampire's ass was pounce on it during the day while it was sleeping. How could anyone take this stuff seriously, I wondered. Hetley's graphic depictions of wizard-­on-vampire sex, which was creating a bloodthirsty, mutant race of evil, soulless “vampards,” seemed absurd. I was still scanning Hetley's book when Conner's voice boomed out, as loud as if he had been speaking over the public address system.

“I was wondering if you'd come out of hiding, buddy; I was thinking maybe I was gonna hafta track you down,” he said with a laugh. I put down the Hetley book as Conner bounded over and pulled me into a hug. He smelled like dry-cleaned sport coat and he-man cologne, the musky sort that an old-time ballplayer might have worn for a night on the town. He kissed my cheek and I could feel his stubble. “What're you doin' afterwards, bud?” he asked. “You got some time to hang out?”

I told him I didn't have plans, but since I hadn't called to tell him I would be there, I would understand if he were too busy to have more than one drink.

“Do I look too busy?” he asked. “I've been in this town all day and just about all I've seen is the inside of my hotel room, the quad, and the frickin' food court. It ain't like the old days, my friend; writing books is a tough way to make a buck.”

“When were the old days?” I asked.

“'Bout six years ago,” he said. “Maybe a little more.”

I nodded. “Yeah. That's probably about when my magazine folded and Sabine and I moved here. But haven't you at least done a couple of interviews? Maybe a photo shoot?”

“Not even one, dude.”

“Well, it's a sleepy little college town,” I said. “Only reason anyone moves here is because of the university or because they like basketball or the movie
Breaking Away
.”

Conner smiled. “Yeah, I liked that movie too,” he said, then shook his head. “No, the whole book tour's been like this.” He said he had traveled to ten cities and the only one left on his itinerary was my hometown—Chicago. Everywhere he had gone, the situation had been pretty much the same. Half a dozen people had attended in Cincinnati, ten each in Milwaukee and Louisville. In Madison, only one guy had come to hear him read at a shopping mall Barnes & Noble and Conner wound up taking that guy, his driver, and his media escort out to dinner. So far, the biggest crowd had been in Manhattan, where thirty people had shown up at the Union Square Barnes & Noble, but Conner's editor Shajilah “Shascha” Schapiro had brought half her office with her and she had been expecting to see a whole lot more people she
didn't
know.

“Frankly,” Conner said, “I was kinda hoping to make a better impression on Shascha. We're buds and all, but that doesn't mean she'll keep laying out cash to publish my books.” He said he didn't understand why Shascha and her publicity and marketing department were spending all this dough on his hotels, meals, and business-class plane tickets when it looked as if they weren't spending any on promoting the actual book. As far as he was concerned, he'd rather sleep in a YMCA, ride Greyhound, and eat at Mickey D's if they would advertise. He didn't want to seem ungrateful, but he had better things to do than sign half a dozen books in a chain bookstore in a middle-American burg; he had left Angie at home with their son, Atticus, and if he wasn't doing anything useful, he'd rather be home. He hated the idea of becoming the sort of father who was too busy to spend time with his son.

“Kinda like your dad,” he said. “Sorry, man. I know you don't like talking about that shit. No offense.”

“None taken; you're right,” I said, remembering I had told him all about my lonesome boyhood. “Anyway,” I added, “you've got a son now. Congratulations.”

“Yeah, a son.” He looked at me with what seemed to be genuine regret. “Man,” he said, “it has been a while, hasn't it? How long?”

“About seven years, something like that,” I said. “I've got two kids now.”

“Shit, two? Why didn't you tell me?”

“I just figured you'd be busy.” I wondered why he seemed to think we were better friends than I imagined we were.

“Yeah.” Conner looked around at the sparse crowd with a smirk. “Real busy.”

The events coordinator approached us. She was a dowdy woman of an indeterminate age. Her badge said Cathy-Anne, and she looked as though she would have preferred to be managing a Best Buy or a Target, which was most probably what she would wind up doing when this store went out of business at the end of the month.

“Do you want to do the reading now, Mr. Joyce? Or do you want to wait a few more minutes to see if anybody else comes?” she asked.

Conner sighed. “What do you wanna do?” he asked.

“Let's go,” she said.

Conner told me to make sure I stuck around afterward, then slapped me on the shoulder as if he had just bested me in a game of hoops. He approached the podium, put his half glasses back on, cracked open a copy of his book, and leaned into the microphone. I took my seat in an empty row near the back, and listened to the first lines of
Ice Locker
:

“Cole Padgett stepped into the darkened confessional booth. ‘Forgive me, Father, for I know exactly what I've done. Forgive me, Father, for all that I still must do.'”

I
wish I could tell you that a whole lot more people showed up after Conner started reading, but only one other person did. I wish I could report that Conner sold or signed more than four books aside from the one I bought. I wish I could say that Cathy-Anne didn't box up the rest of the books to send back to Conner's publisher. I wish Cathy-Anne had been thoughtful enough to turn off or at least turn down “Tubular Bells,” which was tinkle-tinking ominously throughout the store, and I wish half of Conner's sentences weren't drowned out by espresso and Frappuccino machines.

I wish, too, that everyone who didn't come to Conner's reading were missing something special, that Conner's reading of
Ice Locker
, the latest in his Cole Padgett series, was a mind-blowing experience. But Conner had never been much of a reader. He had a rich basso-profundo but used it uncertainly, like a timid father called upon to speak at his son's confirmation, trying to get through the damn thing without embarrassing his family. At one point in his career, someone had apparently coached Conner in how to read in front of an audience. But whenever he made a supposedly dramatic gesture—say, twirling his right hand to represent smoke rising from the barrel of a .45 caliber gun, or holstering that weapon, which he made out of a thumb and two fingers—it seemed phony and labored, as if practiced in front of a mirror. His vocal cadence shifted between embarrassingly emotive and painfully monotonous. The real trouble, however, wasn't how Conner was reading, but what he was reading. Sure, the writing itself was lucid, crisp, and terse as always, but there was something rote about it, as if he had written this sort of material many times before, which, of course, he had.

This Cole Padgett novel was another of Conner's honest-cop-stuck-in-a-corrupt-system tales. He had written a serial-killer novel in this vein, and an espionage plot; this one happened to be a heist story like his first,
Devil Shotgun
. But the characters, themes, struggles, and Catholic guilt were the same as always. Conner's criminals were rarely habitual offenders; they were basically honest people pushed to their limits, forced to make choices they wouldn't have made under ordinary circumstances. The villain in
Ice Locker
was Cole Padgett's immediate superior, who had been a heroic figure in a few of Conner's previous thrillers. The titular location was where he had been storing evidence of the unsolved crimes he had actually been committing. As was always the case, the villain wasn't some evil outside force; the enemy was within.

Familiar stuff, to be sure, even when Conner had begun his career. But what had initially differentiated Conner's work within his genre was his copious attention to detail. He had become known for his dogged, painstakingly accurate research and his ruthlessly honest portrayal of the gray areas in the traditionally black-and-white world of cops versus robbers. He was well-versed in this topic, knew about it through his work as a beat reporter for the
New York Daily News
and through fictionalizing the stories his wife, Angie, had told him about life as a crime-scene investigator for the NYPD.

“I always wanted to get every detail right,” he had told me when I interviewed him. “When I worked for the
Daily News
, I talked to people who had never been in the newspaper before and might never be in the newspaper again. And, man, I wanted to make sure the one time I quoted them, I got everything they said right. I wanted every last spelling, every last detail, to be on target.”

But the world had changed since Conner had started writing. Now everyone who had watched
CSI
had become an expert in forensics, and people expected this sort of detailed approach from all authors, not just him. Careful readers began finding minor errors in Conner's work—plot discrepancies, misspelled street names, outdated cop slang—and posted them on fan sites and in online reviews, which were usually less forgiving than print reviews were. Plus, the knowledge on which Conner had based his first books was stale. He hadn't worked at the
Daily News
in nearly a decade, and Angie had quit working for the NYPD after she and Conner had gotten married.
Devil Shotgun
had been a post-9/11 book, the story of a man who committed thefts while adopting the identities of people who had disappeared during the collapse of the Twin Towers. The book had captured a certain moment in American history; but Osama bin Laden was dead, the Bush era was over, and the anxieties of that particular time seemed to belong to the past every bit as much as Conner Joyce's fiction.

These days, Americans were facing different anxieties. The economy was in the tank—the Clearance and Everything Must Go! signs in Borders attested to that fact. The culture had grown increasingly cynical and self-referential, and whether or not Conner Joyce's conflicted hero might have to rob a bank in order to save a hostage's life and find evidence that would prove the case against his boss seemed like a petty concern. These days, you did what you had to do to feed yourself and protect your family.

Conner performed better in the sadly brief Q&A period. Here, his humility, honesty, and enthusiasm came to the fore as he effused about nearly every author who had influenced him. Salinger? “So goddamn honest, man. Like he's talking right
to
you.” Tolstoy? “He makes you think it's all happening
right now
, even though he wrote more than a
hundred years ago, man
.” Dudek? “How could anyone who survived such dark times find so much humor in them?” Cephus? “It's a crime that his works are out of print now.” Conner even gave me a shout-out—“That's a real talent you got living here, a real big name; check him out. C'mon, let's hear it.” He asked me to stand up (I did) and take a bow (I didn't). As for his own writing, though, he didn't want to talk about it—not at Borders, and not when I was hanging out with him afterward.

Conner had a driver for the evening—a chauffeur in a shabby black uniform driving an even shabbier black stretch limo, another needless expense. But when I told Conner I would happily drive him back to his hotel when we were done for the night, he slipped the chauffeur a twenty and told him to head home and pick him up at the Indiana Memorial Union at six a.m. so he could catch his flight for Chicago, the last stop on his tour.

“Shit, I know I've lost something,” he told me. “There's a reason my books aren't selling anymore. And yeah, I could rationalize the whole thing and say it's because people don't read as much as they used to, or because they're too distracted by their iPods, iPhones, and iPads, or whatever the hell people have now, or because the economy's gone to hell and people don't have money to spend on books, or because people who still like to read just want to read about wizards, vampires, and shit like that. But that's not the whole story. I gotta be honest with you, man, and with myself, too. There's a hell of a lot more to it than that.”

We were sitting at an outdoor table at the Upland Brewing Company. Most of the tables were empty even though it was a lovely night. The inside tables were jammed.
Monday Night Football
fans were watching the Colts take on New England. This was one of the things I griped about consistently on the Buck Floomington blog. People don't go outside in this town. Porches were littered with unused lawn furniture. After dinner, my kids were the only ones on the playground. Some of my wife's colleagues even bought houses on large properties surrounded by tall trees to keep passersby from knowing there were children inside.

Conner and I were splitting a plate of pita and hummus. He was drinking a dark beer while I drank club soda—since Ramona was born, I had probably consumed three beers total. The idea of alcohol had nearly always depressed me anyway, and reminded me of my mother in her cocktail waitress days before she started working for the
Tribune
: the bottles of Crème de Menthe I used to find on the butcher's block when I came home from class; her boyfriends with their lame jokes and lamer attempts to ingratiate themselves—“Fetch me a Rob Roy, young man”; finding her passed out on the couch in the front room with the TV blaring; pouring all her liquor down the sink; feeling guilty for making her spend even more money on booze.

“Yeah,” Conner said as we sat outside the brewery, listening to the muffled hollers of the football fans inside. “I don't have what I used to. I don't know how I lost it or where, and I'm not sure if I can ever get it back. Maybe authors shouldn't write more than one or two books. Maybe you just keep writing the same book over and over anyway. I've already written more than Salinger, Dudek, or Harper Lee ever did.”

As the night wore on, people inside the brewery were still watching the game, but the Colts had fallen three touchdowns behind. Someone had turned down the volume and had turned up Dierks Bentley's “Lot of Leavin' Left to Do.” The temperature on the patio was dropping fast, and Conner and I were the only ones outside. We asked our waitress, Abby, if she wanted to close out our tab.

“You can stay out here till my shift's over far as I'm concerned,” she said, then added to Conner, “I'm a fan, hon. I loved that
Devil Shotgun
. Have you ever written anything else?”

Conner gave a somber half smile. “Yes and no,” he said.

I left the table, ostensibly to use the john, but really so that Conner and Abby could continue their conversation. I didn't peg Conner for a guy who would pick up women on the road, but then again, I wasn't sure I would have resisted the temptation. Unfortunately, as far as I was concerned, the average age of my audience when
Nine Fathers
came out was about seventy-five, so I was never particularly well tested in this area. But when I came back from the Upland bathroom, Abby was gone and Conner was on the phone with Angie. Apparently, Angie had asked how many people had shown up to his reading.

“Not too many,” he said, then quoted me: “It's kind of a sleepy little college town.”

“Yeah,” he added, he was off to Chicago in the morning and he expected a better turnout there. He told her he had run into “an old friend” but didn't mention my name. The time I met Angie while interviewing Conner in the Poconos, she seemed suspicious—answered questions tersely; kept eyeing my minidisc recorder, legal pad, and pen with a dour, judgmental expression. “She's just protecting me; she used to be a cop,” Conner had said. “She knows that talking too much can get you in trouble.”

I wondered if Conner remembered Angie hadn't liked me. Or maybe he just figured she wouldn't remember who I was and didn't want to bother explaining.

“Kiss Atticus for me. I love you guys,” he told her before he hung up, but from his expression, it seemed clear she hadn't said “I love you too.”

“Marriage,” he said with a wry, weary laugh. “It's a long, hard road, man.”

With just about any other writer, I probably wouldn't have had the patience to listen to another tale of writer's block, of the difficulties of raising a family on mere advances, royalties, and film deals. “Get a real job,” people in this town would have said, and though I would have taken umbrage if that statement had been directed toward me specifically, I would have probably agreed with the sentiment. When nearly 10 percent of the country was unemployed and foreclosures were at a record high, the fact that here in South Central Indiana, at the end of an all-expenses-paid book tour, a particular genre novelist was having trouble finding a topic to write about would have seemed low on the list of national tragedies. But Conner's chagrin seemed genuine, as did his concern for his family's future.

“I honestly don't know what I'm gonna do next, buddy,” he said. “I started three books; I ditched all of 'em. I wrote a screenplay, a coupla pilots; no one bought 'em. My agent's frickin' eighty years old and she rarely takes my calls anymore—she's got her own personal shit to deal with, no point in me bugging her. Besides, I don't have a new book idea anyway. You know, me and Angie, we banked our futures on this career. It seemed like an easy bet to make, but man, it's just not payin' off.”

Conner didn't mind the idea of going back to work at some newspaper job. If he and Angie economized, they could hire some help around the house. She could complete a master's in education at East Stroudsburg University, then get a job teaching kids, which was what she'd said she wanted to do when she quit the police force. Selling the Delaware Water Gap house and moving someplace smaller sounded fine to him. They didn't need a Porsche, either; it was a crappy car if you had a kid.

But Angie had gotten used to their lifestyle and was exhausted by the idea of starting over. They had felt elated when they learned she was going to have a child, but the pregnancy had been hard, and lately neither of them had been getting any sleep. They argued all the time, something they had never done before.

“I was hoping this book might change all that.” Conner let his voice drift off; he didn't need to finish the sentence.

“I don't mean to lay all this on you, buddy,” he said. “You're a good guy for listening and you've had more than enough of your own bullshit to deal with in your life. I'm amazed you can still hold it all together so well.”

I told Conner all the stuff you're supposed to say, all those darkest-­before-the-dawn clichés. I said he was a talented writer and that he would pull through and that all couples argued during that first year of parenthood, me and Sabine included. I told him just about every writer I had ever known wrote his best work when he had his back up against the wall and thought he would never write another word. And no matter how hackneyed and useless my advice seemed to me, Conner nodded and smiled ruefully, as if no one had ever given him such intelligent, sober counsel.