Vernon Downs (20 page)

“‘Make it more Vernon Downs–y,'” Vernon repeated incredulously, his eyes bulging, his breath stale from cigarettes. “What does he know about it?” he asked angrily. “Take the George Washington Bridge.” Charlie followed Vernon's directions, Manhattan slowly receding, the skyline shrinking into miniature. “What does anyone know about it?” Vernon asked softly.

“What did the editor mean?” Charlie asked.

Vernon cracked the window and lit a cigarette. “It's a tired impression at this point, is all,” was the answer. “You take what they give you and you burnish it, indulging it even,” he said, “and then you realize you're in a prison of your own construction. I mean, I let it happen. This unrecognizable person in the papers was infinitely more interesting than I was. I'd read what they wrote about me and aspire to their interpretation. That was my mistake. I didn't understand how important it was to control your own narrative.

“I remember when I first learned
Minus Numbers
was going to be published, I was elated that something I'd dreamed up was going to find its way into print. That was it” —he exhaled through the open window— “but everything after that got … easier. I struggled and worried and fussed with
Minus Numbers
, and after it was published, I swear I could've published an annotated grocery list and it would've gotten the same reception as the books I did publish. You want to know why? Because the machinery was already in place to dictate the outcome. You're young, you write a book, you become famous, maybe make some money, which unleashes praise and jealousy in equal measure. So from then on out, a certain number of people worship you and a certain number of people loathe you. It's a mirror of everyone's life, just played out in the press.” Vernon stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray, where it smoldered among a salad of empty candy wrappers. “You once asked me what the most untrue thing anyone ever said about me was. ‘Controversial and reclusive East Coast literary novelist.' The person who first coined it should've trademarked it. If words were money, that person would be rich beyond rich. Ask anyone, there's nothing controversial about me personally. You see something, you translate it into words and create
fictional
characters to generate meaning, and then you're liable for these things that you simply witnessed and recorded. And they call you reclusive if you don't want to answer questions asked by someone who either hasn't read the work or wants to confuse your characters with you. And worse: You take the bait and start equivocating
on earlier denials that your work is any kind of reflection on your life. You have some fun blurring the edges, fanning the embers of the secret desires people who hardly know you harbor. Disappearance is the only remedy. What other answer is there? I'm forced to disappear if I want to wake up and live the way I was before
Minus Numbers
and everything else. I can't go back to New York. There's no peace in New York.”

Vernon had leaned against the window as he rambled on about the ways his self-impersonation had gone astray, how he had allowed what was said about him to inform his perception of himself, how he had acted his way through life accordingly. He fell silent and Charlie assumed he'd finally dozed off. “Against all my better instincts, I went to the tenth anniversary of Nell's,” Vernon said, barely audible, his voice shot through with sadness. “I went there very early with a friend of mine; we thought we'd have a glass of champagne and it would be like the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. I hadn't been there in five years, and we realized it would be really scary but we had to do it. We had spent so much time hanging out there with so many. It was really at one point the nexus of publishing. It was the hub of where everyone who was involved with publishing in New York would hang out. So we walk in and we sit in the same booth we always sat in whenever we were there, and then we noticed that a couple of us were drinking Diet Cokes, people were smoking light cigarettes, no one was doing blow on the table, everyone was checking their watch. Basically we all felt really old. Everyone was controlled by how manic the times were, which sort of demanded that you rush out to every restaurant you possibly could, party with every famous person you possibly could, buy everything you read about in magazines, act this way, look this way, do this.”

Vernon's monologue saturated Charlie's mind as he struggled against the monotony of the road. He resisted Vernon's interpretation, ascribing it to fatigue and a toxic moroseness induced by whatever had happened in Vermont. He guessed Jacqueline Turner and the other authors gathered
at Bemelmans on that not-so-long-ago afternoon would've traded some privacy for an ounce of Vernon's exposure. Everything had a price, he knew well, and it was either paid voluntarily or forcefully extracted. Still, Vernon's madness was real. They were on their way to California, to his mother's house in Los Angeles. That was real. He wondered at Vernon's game plan for a second act in L.A. Perhaps it was just to be closer to friends and family. But his money would run out eventually. Vernon's celebrity would hamper his ability to interview for the variety of jobs people held to pay their bills, much like Charlie's own resume, which was largely a chronology of absence.

“You never said where you were from,” Vernon said, yawning. “With most people … it comes up.” Vernon yawned again. “Just stay on the I-80 West.”

Charlie struggled with the question, rescued by a suite of sighs that preceded a light, melodious snoring. A calm settled over him as the extent of his liberation unfolded. Kline's demands, the drama with Christianna, the threat of reunion with Olivia with Shelleyan as witness—all erased. Like in Denver, when he'd forsaken Jesse Mason's friendship after the Batman and Robin skit to throw his lot in with a group of popular kids, a transition Jesse's mother and Mrs. Kephart ignored as Jesse's birthday party loomed, the awkwardness aborted when Charlie landed with the McCallahans, who were ignorant of the drama involving Michelle Benson. Not his pretend nuptials, but that after a brief acrimony toward the boyfriend she'd broken up with to be with him, he and the ex-boyfriend became friends, to Michelle's chagrin. Charlie eventually spent more time with the ex-boyfriend than he did with Michelle, and soon they were distributing He-Man Michelle Haters Club cards they'd printed on the ex-boyfriend's home computer. He recoiled when he thought about how easily he adopted the manners and interests of others as a coping mechanism for always being the new kid in the new school. He still didn't drink orange soda because Michelle hated it; he adopted Jesse Mason's opinion that the moon landing had been faked, something Jesse's parents had
told him. He became a Vernon Downs fan because of Olivia. He could think of endless examples. Vernon had liberated him from the mess back in New York like his move from San Diego to Phoenix had freed him from academic embarrassment, his short tenure as Miss Wade's student aide. His chemistry teacher's initial attentiveness was flattering, and he held the position with a pridefulness that other students must've found distasteful. But when he began to hear whispers that Miss Wade was a motorcycle-riding lesbian—rumors that were never confirmed—his attitude underwent a transformation, and it wasn't long before he was leaking the answers to Miss Wade's exams to anyone who asked, which was briefly a fountain of popularity. Miss Wade quickly discovered the hustle when the exact sequence of correct multiple choice answers were applied to an alternate test she'd utilized so that students couldn't pass answers from class to class. Charlie's demotion to study hall wasn't as perilous as the ire of the student body, and he was mulling begging the Wallaces to allow him to transfer high schools when he was shipped out again, to Phoenix, the immediate threat ameliorated just like that. Same for the trouble he'd gotten into with some classmates the summer of his junior year at Randolph Prep; the emancipation the Chandlers helped him engineer bailed him out of having to testify to the administration about how the fellowship at Garden Lakes, a sort of summer camp, had gone awry.

He slowed as the night sky colored red and orange, the taillights of the cars ahead of them flaring. The nose of the BMW almost kissed the bumper sticker on a yellow VW that read, IF YOU WERE AN AIRLINE PILOT, WE'D ALL BE DEAD. Charlie obsessed over all its meanings as the line of cars snaked forward in the dark. Vernon shifted in the passenger seat, his sleep cycle unbroken. The car at rest, and without the lullaby of the tires on the road, Charlie was wide awake. A police cruiser with its lights flashing passed silently on the shoulder, followed by an ambulance. He wondered idly if the driver of the yellow VW was embarrassed about the bumper sticker in this instance, when it could be that someone did
actually die, and possibly due to poor decision making. Or did the driver even remember that the bumper sticker was there? Charlie could envision a scenario where the driver slapped it on, as either a statement or a joke, and then quickly forgot about it, maybe only remembering it when he noticed it, or if someone asked him about it, where they could get one too. The bumper sticker morphed into a provocation as Charlie was compelled to stare at it when traffic came to a standstill. The deep woods on either side of the interstate bred a claustrophobia he attempted to abate by turning on the air conditioner. The slight breeze simulated enough movement to quell the aggravating implication that Charlie was as disconnected from his various experiences as the driver was from the bumper sticker on his car. It had meant something to him once, but he barely considered it now. To his relief, the yellow VW put on its flashers and pulled over to the side of the road. As he passed, Charlie smiled at the driver, a bearded man in his fifties who jumped out and popped his trunk.

By sunrise, they were well into Ohio. Charlie had stopped to relieve himself and fill the tank, waving the Speedpass on Vernon's key chain at the Exxon station off I-80 as Vernon slept in the passenger seat. When he finally awoke, just past Springfield, he said, “Take I-75 South,” and they veered off the exit, headed for Cincinnati. Without inquiry, Vernon gave a thumbnail account of the reason for their detour: that his ex-wife, Jayne, and nine-year-old son, Robby, lived in Blue Ash, a suburb just outside Cincinnati. Charlie absorbed the facts, that Vernon had met Jayne when she was a model in New York, right after he'd published
Scavengers
, that they had had a long, protracted battle involving private detectives over Vernon's paternity—“We kept calling each other John and Jane Doe after it was finally resolved,” Vernon said—followed by a quick marriage that lasted a mere three months. After a quiet divorce, Jayne had moved to Blue Ash and made Vernon swear not to utter a word about them as he
went on with his life. “Not for their own privacy,” he said, “but because I'm an embarrassment as a father and ex-husband.” The story staggered Charlie, as did Vernon's ability to keep it out of his official biography.

The modest white and blue ranch house on Laurel Avenue was shrouded behind clouds of hydrangeas. A red Jeep Cherokee sat in the driveway, the back passenger door inexplicably left open. Vernon stared uneasily at the open car door, perhaps sensing the visit was a mistake, the signs of apology troubling his brow. He fortified himself with the last of the cigarettes that had substituted for his breakfast. A golden retriever bounded across the lawn toward the Cherokee. “Victor,” Vernon said. “That dog hates me.” Charlie braced for Vernon to make the connection between the golden retriever and Oscar—Vernon had amnesia about the missing dog—but Oscar had apparently been consigned to the past, just as Jessica predicted.

A slender woman in blue jeans and a yellow sheer chiffon button-front blouse appeared in the driveway, shading her eyes. Her long black hair fluttered in the morning breeze. Vernon stepped out of the BMW and waved. The woman lowered her hands and retreated inside. Vernon leaned into the car. “Come back tomorrow,” he said, shutting the door and sauntering across the thick grass. The golden retriever ran aimlessly toward him and then pulled up, changing direction and jogging ahead of Vernon toward the front door.

The separation caused Charlie a moment of panic, which quickly converted to anger at being abandoned. Regardless of his intellectual preparedness, it was always a wonderment, that first prick of panic and then the wall of anger that rendered him powerless until he could hack through his emotions to take inventory of his new circumstances, which would reveal what would be required of him to survive. In the case of Vernon's precipitous exit, the primary concern was that he'd be obliged to sleep in the BMW, his funds mostly depleted from his summer in Manhattan. As he cruised the quiet suburban streets, idly guessing at what it would be like to grow up in the bucolic heaven that was Blue Ash, he scouted
for camouflage, which would only need to hold until tomorrow morning, when he could legitimately go for breakfast, or find a bookstore to satisfy his curiosity about whether the good citizens of Middle America read Vernon Downs. But after unsuccessfully trolling the local radio station for a soundtrack to his latest dilemma, Charlie fished for a CD in the leather armrest and discovered a stash of twenties he hoped Vernon wouldn't remember. A quick alibi—that he'd used the money to gas up in Pennsylvania—would be believable until Vernon received the bill for his Speedpass, at which point Charlie guessed it wouldn't be an issue. His cover story thus salted away, he rented an antiseptic room at a Motel 6 and fell on the blue and green checkered comforter in his clothes, staring at the television to dull his mind of all that had transpired.

He awoke after midnight, restless. The Motel 6 complex was a hulking ghost ship in a sea of suburban sprawl. The warm August night draped the landscape in a purple bloom, specks of headlights roving in the distance. The vending machine in the concrete courtyard swallowed Charlie's quarters without reciprocation. He pummeled the glass, but the Hostess cupcakes slumbered behind their wire guard. He unsuccessfully rummaged the BMW for more change, though his hunger ebbed when he discovered a cardboard box stashed under Vernon's luggage containing typewritten pages, the new novel. Charlie turned the pages carefully, sprawled out on the sheets back in his room. The novel was without a title page but involved several characters from Vernon's second novel,
Scavengers
, many of whom had gone on to become models. The narrator shared the same name as the golden retriever, and he chuckled at the connection. As he read, the narrative became a hybrid of satire and thriller, involving models as terrorists, the overt thesis intimating the tyranny of beauty.