Vernon Downs (6 page)

The miracle that stabilized his living situation first appeared to him a mirage. A heat-induced chimera in Shelleyan's likeness sauntered down Minetta Lane one particularly airless afternoon, checking her hair in the reflection of the Black Rabbit, a wood-paneled bar on the corner.

Charlie peered at her, overtaken by serendipity. Surely her presence was an omen that he was treading the right path, that the hazy journey from Arizona to Vermont to New York would bring him back to Olivia. He straightened his back, shifting his dirty duffel bag to obscure his meager possessions. Perhaps Shelleyan would even act as the conduit.

“It is you!” Shelleyan cried. “I thought it was. How are you?” She looked exactly the same, as if the Arizona Shelleyan had a twin living in New York City, save for the stylish haircut that gave her the air of working in an office.

“Fine,” he answered, “I'm fine.” She lunged at him for a quick hug. “I've been in Vermont.”

“What have you been doing in Vermont?” she asked.

“Studying writing at Camden,” he said, baiting her. Would she remember Camden as the school Downs had made famous? He regretted it instantly, the scene where Shelleyan taunted him about his ignorance of Olivia's penchant for the works of Vernon Downs was still fresh. If she asked him what he was working on, or what he'd written, he knew he'd blank, incapable of even devising a fake title to offer as proof of his new phantom identity.

Shelleyan nodded. The clue eluded her, which convinced him that what she had professed to know about Vernon Downs she'd aped from
Olivia's interest only to harangue him, and he hated her for it anew.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I live here,” she answered.

“Where?” he asked. Had she seen him living on the streets, working up the courage to approach him, maybe at Olivia's insistence, from whatever safe roof housed her?

“Williamsburg,” she told him. “Or East Manhattan, as we say in Billyburg.”

Charlie was baffled by what she was talking about, but nodded nonetheless.

“I transferred to Parsons,” she continued. “Where are you staying?”

“East Village,” he lied. It was the only neighborhood he could convincingly speak of.

“Very cool,” Shelleyan said.

A cab lurched down the lane and they both watched as it rolled to a stop at the entrance to the shuttered Minetta Lane Theatre. An athletic cabbie with shoulder-length hair braided against the heat shook the locked theater doors and then drove off.

“Have you heard from Olivia?” she asked, as if intuiting the thought that had dried on his lips.

His nerves jangled at the sound of her name. He felt the sudden need to confide his ploy to impress Olivia with his connection to Vernon Downs, but all there was to disclose was his objective and its unsuccessful execution. “You guys stay in touch?” He winced as the question landed. The answer would tell him how much she knew about what had been said between them during that last phone call.

“She doesn't have my new address,” Shelleyan admitted. “I need to write her.”

Charlie clenched his bag. “Sounds like a plan,” he said, baffled at why Shelleyan had engaged him in such friendly conversation, if not at Olivia's bidding. The concept that he and Shelleyan would be friends
so far from home seemed improbable. Their roles had been cast back in Phoenix, their relationship previously defined. “Hey, I've got to run. I'm meeting someone… .” He motioned in the direction of the Black Rabbit.

“Is this your regular?” she asked, appraising the bar.

“It's just a bar,” he said. “Great to see you.”

“Okay,” Shelleyan said, and he rushed past her, touching her on the shoulder to evade the good-bye hug he sensed was imminent. “Wait!”

He turned around, his dirty duffel swinging violently.

“Let me get your number.” She rummaged in her bag. “Be fun to have old home week, huh?”

The open door to the Black Rabbit was less than fifty feet away. “You can always reach me here,” he said, jamming his thumb at the gold-stenciled window. He laughed to indicate it might be a joke and it might not, waving and disappearing into the dark, cool bar. He spied Shelleyan copying the phone number into her address book. The sight of her provoked a set of fragile emotions: On the one hand, a sense of welcome familiarity gripped him, as if he and Shelleyan and Olivia had lunched together in the Milky Way yesterday rather than forever ago; but all that had happened to him since reminded him that Olivia, too, was off somewhere living her life while he was absent from her life. He longed to staunch the accumulation of time spent apart, and Shelleyan's presence was a further insult to his situation.

Charlie watched from the safety of a dim corner until Shelleyan was lost in a sea of NYU kids migrating toward Sixth Avenue. The empty bar had the clean smell of freshly polished wood. The elderly bartender nattily attired in a pressed white cotton shirt and vintage gold vest busied himself with aligning the bottles of liquor behind the bar, rotating the labels face out, putting his eyes in the mirror only when Charlie turned to leave.

“Drink?” the bartender asked. A streak of late-afternoon light lit a dust mote that floated aflame across the vacant bar.

Charlie hesitated. He knew that wood-paneled bars like the Black
Rabbit were generally more expensive than the sinkholes on the Lower East Side—he'd wandered into the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel after an afternoon idle in Central Park and was dismayed at the fifty-dollar check for two vodka tonics and a watercress sandwich. He hadn't even known what watercress was, and while he enjoyed the sandwich, he would forever associate it with that afternoon's extortion.

“Maybe a glass of water,” Charlie answered, “if you can spare it.”

The bartender smiled. “You look like you need something a little stronger than water.”

Charlie pulled out a barstool, convinced that this old man was going to sucker him by selling him a drink he needed but couldn't afford. His insides were still electrified from Shelleyan's unforeseen appearance, and the fortitude he needed to endure the harsh conditions on the streets of New York had momentarily been flushed from his system.

The bartender poured a tall, frosty glass of amber ale and set it in front of him. “On the house,” he said without fanfare.

A store of self-pity welled up and it was all he could do to refrain from leaping over the bar to hug the bartender, or to curb the tears tickling the corners of his eyes. He lifted the glass in the bartender's direction. “Cheers,” he said, the first taste of the cold beer going down a little too easily.

The bartender gave his name, and Charlie listened as Frank related how he'd once been a Broadway producer, “back when New York was New York,” telling about the theater he had called home and all the wonderful friends who were long gone. “Some of them are on the wall,” he said, indicating the framed pen and pencil caricatures that lined the establishment. Frank poured Charlie another beer, then one for himself. “What do you do?” he asked.

“I'm a writer,” Charlie said, sipping the fresh beer.

“What have you written?” Frank asked.

Charlie babbled an unintelligible monologue about a novel that too closely resembled the mashed-up plots of two of Vernon Downs's novels,
and he hoped that Frank wasn't a rabid Downs fan. “So far unpublished,” he added quickly.

“Just takes luck,” Frank said. “So many people in the theater had the most amazing stories about finding fortune. Some owed their whole career to standing in the right spot at the right time.” He raised his glass. “To luck.”

Charlie lifted his half-full glass. “To luck,” he repeated.

Frank drained his glass and quickly washed it in the bar sink, replacing the sparkling pint on the pyramid of glasses behind the bar. “My friend owns a small publishing house in Brooklyn,” Frank said. “You should send him your book.”

Frank's mounting kindness toward him washed away all of Charlie's anxieties, and he deeply wished the imaginary manuscript existed, if only to repay the charity that Charlie knew he didn't deserve. He pocketed the address Frank scrawled on a cocktail napkin bearing a foil silhouette of a small black rabbit.

It was a number of days before Charlie learned that Obelisk Press was in the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn, the same neighborhood where Shelleyan lived, and the notion of paying a visit—he was slowly learning that every connection in New York deserved tribute—gave him the heebie-jeebies. Accident brought him to the crumbling concrete steps of the gray building in the Puerto Rican section of Williamsburg one Wednesday afternoon: He was enjoying an afternoon getaway from the city courtesy of a flyer he'd found in the subway advertising a kickball tournament in McCarren Park, in Greenpoint, the neighborhood abutting Williamsburg. As the sun set on the kickballers, Charlie trudged back toward the subway, his stomach full from the free hot dogs and watery beer served to spectators and players alike by the Turkey's Nest, a dive bar that was also the tournament's sole sponsor. An adventurous jaunt down a quiet side street designed to prolong the redemptive afternoon led him instead to the discreet plaque advertising the publishing company Frank had steered him and his imaginary manuscript toward.

He knocked on the door, unsure what he'd say. No one answered. He knocked again, spying the buzzer at knee height. He bent down, his back aching from leaning or lying on the grass all day, and pressed the buzzer. The front door was jimmied open by an enormous man in his sixties dressed in an impeccable three-piece suit, a neatly trimmed white beard the only hair on his pink head. Charlie introduced himself as a friend of Frank's. He didn't know Frank's last name, and Frank had only suggested mailing his imaginary manuscript, not showing up at the address in Brooklyn, but Charlie's instinct was stronger than reason and always prevailed. The man was searching Charlie's face, trying to fathom what it was he was saying, when Charlie remembered the folded napkin in his wallet. He offered the napkin with Frank's scrawl and the man's eyes lit up. He hoped Frank wouldn't learn of this misapplication of his kindness, though he was fairly sure he would never see Frank again, or could avoid him if it became an issue, so he dispatched the worry as quickly as it arose.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “Come in.”

The man introduced himself as Derwin MacDonald, though his affiliation with Frank from the Black Rabbit was to be forever unknown. Obelisk Press occupied the entire first floor of the building, the second being Derwin's living quarters. Charlie accepted Derwin's offer of a strong cup of coffee and, grateful for a comfortable chair, settled into the low-lit living room as Derwin recounted his days as a hanger-on in London, on the fringes of the third incarnation of the Bloomsbury Group, which Derwin explained was a group of intellectuals, writers, and painters. He glossed over the group's demise owing to vanity and fervent self-publication, Obelisk rising from the ashes of the immolation to publish the writers and thinkers he admired most.

“Do you write?” Derwin asked.

“I'd like to be a writer,” Charlie admitted.

“Ah,” Derwin said. “That's not the same thing.”

Charlie shrugged and peppered him with questions about London, what
it was like to live there, how expensive it was compared with New York, what single people did for fun, etc., keeping silent on the nature of his inquiry. He was dismayed at the glorious portrait Derwin painted, worried that Olivia might realize that she was already living in one of the most desirable world capitals and lose any interest in returning to America, for any reason.

By the end of the evening, he felt as integrated as he had since he'd left Phoenix, and by the end of the week he was squatting in the tiny studio apartment on the third floor, above Obelisk Press, with Derwin's permission. A foldout couch sat unevenly on the hardwood floor next to a table with spindly legs piled high with copies of Obelisk titles. A small counter installed under the far eave supported a toaster and a defunct coffeemaker. What he mistook for a closet was actually a half bathroom. The room suited him fine. He'd long ago given up trying to personalize any of the spaces he inhabited.

His apprehension at bumping into Shelleyan on the streets of Williamsburg faded as he acclimated to his new lodgings, and when Derwin offered him a part-time job as his right-hand man, he felt landed enough to call Vernon Downs, whose number he still knew by heart.

As he knocked on Downs's door, Charlie was revisited by an old humiliation from his first week in New York. Fearing that he'd be chased from the city and never have the chance, he had managed a call to Downs. Their staccato conversation—mostly Charlie giving a nervous recitation about what had transpired after his public reading of Downs's work—was cut short with a proffered invitation, a book party at the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park. Charlie thanked him profusely, and Vernon said he was looking forward to meeting then, which provoked a crippling anxiety that lasted until the party. It was some small relief, then, when the doorman at the National Arts Club forbade him entrance for lack of a jacket.

“Gentlemen wear jackets,” the doorman snobbishly suggested. The snub ignited Charlie's inclination toward flight, which he'd felt when he first arrived at the Kepharts', and the McCallahans', and the Alexander-Degners'—on down the line. Over the years, he'd noticed a tickle when inaugurated into a new situation, one that implored him to turn back, or to press on quickly. He fought against the feeling but bailed from the foyer as the doorman hunted up a club jacket for him to wear. An aggregate of humiliation could only lead to certain ruin. But would Vernon remember Charlie standing him up? Or worse, had he somehow witnessed his humiliation as the doorman shook his head sternly, like the nannies did their charges in Gramercy Park on the sunny days since that Charlie had spent canvassing the scene of the crime, the interior of the National Arts Club a mystery still? He had considered calling Vernon the next day and leaving a cheery message saying he'd see him later that night, pretending to be mistaken about the date, ultimately glad that he hadn't. One of the dilemmas about an uncertain present was an indecipherable future.