Vernon Downs (2 page)

The plan to write Vernon Downs and arrange a private meeting while he was in Phoenix, lunch maybe, formed before the end of class. Charlie felt sure that Downs would agree to lunch, maybe dinner, with a couple
of fans. He dogged it to the library, rounding the deserted stacks of the fiction section. He browsed the multicolored spines—Danticat, Dickens, Didion—halting when he saw the prize in the hunt, and reached for those by Vernon Downs. He arranged the books in a neat row in one of the study carrels, studying the covers, taking them in all at once, then focusing on the name Vernon David Downs as if trying to decode its mystery. He flipped the books over to reveal the author photo on each and was taken aback at how young the Vernon Downs who wrote
Minus Numbers
was.
He looks like a kid
, Charlie thought as he studied the cool pout, the tousled hair, the black and white suit. He marked his own passing resemblance to Vernon Downs and wondered if Olivia had a type. The author photo on the back cover of
Scavengers
, Downs's second book, was hardly recognizable—the hair a little less abundant, the lines under the eyes, a cardiganed Downs hunched over on the steps of a nondescript brownstone. The studio shot on the back of
The Vegetable King
featured Downs in profile, his chin tipped up like an actor on a movie poster. “The powerful new novel by the controversial author of
Minus Numbers
and
Scavengers
” ran above the photo in bold lettering. He wondered if Downs's reticence to be otherwise photographed was simple vanity, and was surprised at how much pleasure the thought afforded. Was he jealous of Vernon Downs? The real question superseded this: What did Olivia see in Vernon Downs? He would've given anything to know how Olivia had first discovered Vernon Downs. What had drawn her in? The primary-color book jackets, the author photo, what? The novels were seemingly about the rich and affected, a class of people he'd never known Olivia to be particularly enticed by. Olivia's stories in workshop were mostly realist and were gently criticized for occasionally lapsing into sentimentality. Charlie read into Olivia's work and gleaned from her fiction that she was someone who prized kindness and life's small coincidences over the themes of apathy and perversion that Downs seemed obsessed with.

He toted the books to the bank of gray metal microfiche projectors and ordered a spate of reels from the portly, skeptical student working the front desk, a worn copy of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
splayed on the counter. Charlie wheeled through article after article about Vernon Downs, gathering and absorbing the biographical ephemera.

He began to unravel the mystery, the slow calculus computing. Vernon Downs wasn't a writer in the sense that other writers referenced in workshop were writers. Vernon Downs was as famous as the company he kept at nightclubs in New York, and restaurants in L.A. named Spago and Pastis and Bossa Nova. That he was a writer was incidental to his incredible celebrity.

Charlie couldn't calculate what excited him more: the prospect of arranging the lunch for Olivia, or announcing it in front of Shelleyan. In retrospect, he wished he hadn't been so confident in Vernon Downs's response, a confidence that tricked him into writing a short, breezy letter wherein he briefly described Olivia's admiration and their willingness to come to his hotel if that was more convenient. He cringed when he remembered his casual salutation—“Hey, Vernon”—that opened the letter, as if they were old friends. And he regretted not lying about his own admiration for Vernon Downs's books—he'd planned to catch the movie version of
Minus Numbers
so he could converse intelligently about the novel. Each minute after Charlie dropped the letter addressed to Vernon Downs in care of his publisher in the mailbox ticked by with a torpidity that bordered on cruelty.

He might've maintained his silence about the surprise, but circumstances conspired against him. First, the announced date for Downs's reading at Arizona State University was Valentine's Day, which lent his plan urgency. Then he opened the Sunday Arts section of the
Arizona Republic
to find the same studio shot of Vernon Downs from the back of
The Vegetable King
. The recognition felt personal, like seeing a picture of someone he knew. Just as startling as the photograph was the attendant article about the furor caused by the publication of
The Vegetable King
.
The elements of said furor seemed outrageous: sections of the book being leaked to
Time
magazine by staffers at Downs's publisher who were horrified by the content; a boycott instituted by the National Organization for Women because of the graphic torture and murder committed by the main character, Nick Banks; the pulping of the book by its original publisher, who allegedly bent to the will of its parent company, Gulf and Western, the book subsequently being snapped up, along with a short story collection called
The Book of Hurts
, by another publisher, which resulted in Downs being paid twice for the same book, Downs retaining the original six-figure advance. Charlie gulped back the information as quickly as he could, reading and rereading the article, converting the details into talking points whose vitality dimmed as the days expired without word from Vernon Downs. He knew the article would come up, and he even guessed correctly that Shelleyan would be the one to reference it. He had to wait only as long as Monday's lunch.

“That picture was hot,” Shelleyan said. “He could be a model if he wanted.”

“I can't wait to meet him.” Olivia sipped her 7UP. “I don't care how long the line is.” Abundant enthusiasm was just one of Olivia's attributes that enchanted him.

“Are you going to ask him to sign your book ‘love'?” Shelleyan joked.

Olivia smirked at Shelleyan. “Very funny.”

The words tumbled out before he could stop them. He hadn't heard so much as a word from Vernon Downs, but he felt his position in Olivia's life continually slipping as the date of her return home approached, and drastic action was the only recourse available to him.

“I was going to wait to tell you,” he said, his temples pulsing, “but we're going to have lunch with him when he's in town. It's all arranged. I wrote to him and told him what a huge fan you are, and he's staying at the Phoenician—you know, the hotel on Camelback Mountain, really fancy, Madonna stays there when she's in town, so it must be …”—his
breathing was so shallow he thought he might pass out, but he pressed on—“you know, pretty cool.”

The look of astonishment on Olivia's face was worth every ounce of the lie, which didn't feel so much like a fabrication when Olivia jumped up and wrapped her arms around him, kissing him lightly on the cheek, a promise, he hoped, of more gratitude later. Charlie glanced at Shelleyan, whose quiet smile he purposely interpreted as jealousy and not the pure, undistilled doubt that she made no effort to conceal.

“You can get him to sign your book at lunch and avoid the lines,” Shelleyan said drily.

As the weeks counted down to Vernon Downs's Phoenix appearance, Charlie nervously checked the mail with a frequency bordering on schizophrenic. He falsely accused his roommate, a stoner from Illinois who had dropped out of GCC the previous semester, of losing mail, making him promise not to visit the mailbox at all, for any reason. Worse, Shelleyan began alluding to the impending lunch with Vernon Downs with open hostility.

“What are you going to wear?” she asked Olivia at lunch one day in the cafeteria.

Another time: “Do you think he's a vegetarian? What if he orders, like, a salad?”

A week before the alleged lunch: “Ask him who designed the cover for the book. Tell him from me that it's pretty gross.”

Charlie decided to take action. He called information for the phone number for Downs's publisher. He carried the number in his pocket for a day or two, allowing the mail one last chance to deliver salvation. Finally he called. The line rang just once before a sweet-sounding operator answered. Charlie mistook the person as an ally and confided his eagerness to treat his girlfriend to lunch with Vernon Downs (her favorite writer!) when he visited Phoenix next week. He may even have offered to pay for the lunch, in case the financial end of the thing was what was holding up a decision.

“Hello?” Charlie said after a short silence.

“You need to contact the author's agent,” the operator said, all the succor drained from her voice. He timidly asked for that number, and after a lull where the real possibility that the operator had hung up loomed, she gave him the number for Downs's agent, Daar Baumann, and hung up. He held the phone long after the operator had clicked off, the name Daar Baumann resonating; it was listed in the acknowledgments of most of the important books published over the last decade or so.

“Can I say what this is regarding?” a mellifluous voice asked after he dialed the number he'd been given.

“Vernon Downs,” he answered, trying to imitate a reporter, or some other persona that Downs's agent was comfortable dealing with. He yearned to better understand the foreign land he was touristing.

“One moment.” The voice was suddenly replete with a dull apprehension.

Charlie self-consciously crossed his fingers during the silence, uncrossing them when the voice returned, flatter than before.

“She's in a meeting, can I take a message?”

He left a message, knowing it wouldn't be returned.

“Do you really think it would be okay to bring my book and get it signed?” Olivia asked as the phantom lunch date neared. “Or should I wait until the reading?” He nodded, searching for an equitable moment for confession. “Is it rude to bring more than one copy, do you think?” Her childlike worship might've infused a lesser man with jealousy, but Charlie only felt helplessness and defeat.

“I think it would be okay,” he said.

He skipped classes the day before Vernon Downs's reading, trolling hotel switchboards, hoping to reach out to Downs personally. An hour or so spent calling the Phoenician and other luxury hotels in the metro Phoenix area, asking to leave a message for Vernon Downs, proved a fantastic waste of time, as none had a reservation under that name. He devised and then scuttled an elaborate plan whereby he'd take Olivia to an expensive restaurant and then claim Vernon had stood them up.

He would have to confess, simple as that. There was every chance that Olivia might be so angry with him that she would refuse his company thereafter. A night of fitful sleep left him agitated and hostile. He transferred his irritation at not being able to track down Vernon Downs to Shelleyan, brushing by her when she said, “Bummer, eh?”

“Fuck off,” he grunted, prizing the shock on her face.

She called out after him, but a gaggle of administrators passed, drowning her out. He loitered in the parking lot to dodge the usual congregation in the cement amphitheater that functioned as the campus nerve center where he and Olivia and Shelleyan and others would meet before and after classes. He could successfully dodge Olivia until lunch, but lunch would bring its own set of problems, namely Shelleyan, and so he was skipping ahead after sociology when he spotted Olivia.

“Hey,” she said. Her smile undid him and he feared abrupt tears, not only hers, but his. She opened her backpack and he spied her copies of
Minus Numbers
and
The Vegetable King
. She threw herself at him, her face buried in his chest. “It's so disappointing,” she said, his secondhand Polo shirt muffling her cries.

The full import of what he'd done registered only then. “I know,” he said. “I'm sorry.” He'd hoped the simple confession would suffice, but he intuited that his future would be brimming with more contrition.

Olivia wiped a tear from her eye. “Stupid, right? I mean, think of Vernon. He's got it worse, right?”

The campus began to thin as he and Olivia moved dangerously toward tardiness. He tried not to betray that he didn't know how Vernon Downs had it worse. She passed him the carefully folded article from the
Phoenix Gazette
titled “Vernon Downs Cancels Tour.” Charlie read with wonder as the article recounted what he already knew—the grim circumstances surrounding the publication of
The Vegetable King
—and what he didn't: the death threats, the organized protests, the stalker that showed up in city after city until rented bodyguards became a daily reality for the author.
He held the article gently, as if it were an archive document, or a religious parchment that held the divination pilgrims had been seeking their whole life. He handed it back to Olivia and grabbed her up in his arms, both to comfort her and to cloak his elation at having been so gloriously bailed out.

They consoled each other with repeated viewings of
Minus Numbers
at his apartment, exploiting Charlie's roommate's absence owing to a funeral in Michigan. They collaborated on a rebuttal to a scathing review in
Entertainment Weekly
of Downs's story collection,
The Book of Hurts
, published quickly to capitalize on the notoriety of
The Vegetable King
, and were elated when the magazine printed it in a subsequent issue:

Once again a reviewer has overlooked the technical and literary genius of one of the brightest authors of our time, Vernon David Downs, whose work
does
represent the state of hip fiction today. We'll wager everyone who works at
EW
thinks Douglas Coupland is hip.

—Charlie Martens & Olivia Simmons, Phoenix

The dig at Coupland, a popular writer, was especially satisfying to Charlie. His early investigation of Downs and his work had prompted him to class Downs and Coupland as the same kind of writer, but Olivia had begun preaching the virtues of Downs's work, the clinical satire, the wicked humor, the moral empathy at the heart of his seemingly immoral characters, and Charlie had been persuaded of Downs's talents.