Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

She smiled at me, popping open a dark blue canister and shaking a nicotine lozenge into her palm. “But you can control your image.”

“Only if you’re preoccupied with having an image to begin with. You just want to hand an interviewer a copy of your book, and they want to know what you’ve got in the medicine cabinet.”

“Is that what happened to you?”

“Literally. And mindful as I was about wanting to stick to the subject of my work, I was totally caught off guard by the question.”

“You showed him?”

“Her. Yes. Dream of fame. And journalists really don’t like reticence, do they?”

“Most famous medicine cabinet in New York.” She shook her head; pushed the hair out of her face.

“For about two days, yep. Lexapro and Advil and fifty-five yards of minty-flavored floss. Big whoop — but what kind of write-up about a mere book can compete with copy dealing in lurid personal facts? A friend of mine made a casual remark to some guy who was profiling her about how her older daughter was having trouble in the third grade. Perfectly normal kid, some brat in class was making her life miserable — you know how school can be. So the piece comes out and it says that she and her husband are deeply concerned about their daughter’s struggles with a learning disability. They tried to keep it from her, but of course some of her classmates’ parents saw it, and grilled their kids, and the upshot is that the poor kid gets pegged for the rest of the year as ‘the Retard.’ That’s literary fame. I get the attitude of a Pynchon, after that. Just give them the book: anything beyond that gets slippery.”

“Yeah, well, you practically demanded that I have lunch with you.”

“But you’re not interviewing me, are you?”

“How can you be so sure?” She smiled.

“No cross-marketing purpose. If I had a new book out, maybe.”

“Are you working on a new book?” Kat picked up a pen and struck a pose as if she were about to write down whatever I said next. She looked eagerly silly, like a kid pulling a face. It made me laugh. She asked, “Why Michigan?”

“My father used to love to come up here. We rented the same cabin on Little Bonny Lake for like eight straight summers. It’s torn down now. First thing I checked when I got back.”

“What’s there now?”

“Nothing at all. A big empty lot. They even cut down the trees. I asked around and found out that someone had bought out the Houkemas, who owned it, when the price of acreage spiked a few years ago. I guess they were going to build condos, but then real estate started taking a dive.”

“The Houkemas.”

“Yeah, big local family. One branch still raises corn out in Noonanville Township. This, the cabins, was Randy and Marge. He was a real estate agent up in Bonny Arbor. The cabins were just something he did on the side. Randy’s Roost. Two little bedrooms, a parlor, a kitchen, and a screened-in porch. That great summertime smell of mothballs and vanquished mildew. I don’t know what my parents paid to rent for the season, but it couldn’t’ve been much back then. My father loved it. He said there was no bullshit here, none of that sense you get in some summer places that business as usual has just been transferred wholesale to a different venue. I understood exactly what he was talking about the few times my ex and I found ourselves in the Hamptons or on Fire Island. A hundred guys on the beach, all with that unmistakable look of the prosperous know-nothing, shouting into a cell phone at someone back in Manhattan.”

“Yet here in paradise they tore down the Houkemas’ guest cabins.”

“Touché. Even all the way up here things are different in the exact same way.”

“Your father doesn’t come up anymore?”

“My father died of cancer about two years ago.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

I shrugged. “He went fast.”

“Is your mother living?”

“Yeah. So.” I looked around, as if a different and more comfortable subject might materialize. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Safe in the past, my father in his robust middle age, things were fine, but I thought about his death every day: he did die quickly, and bravely, but he also died confused and disappointed by what was happening to my life, and I was too engrossed in ruthlessly reordering everything in it to bother to notice that he would have taken solace in a settled and stable son, nor would it have made any difference if I had. When I’m being generous with myself, I reckon that I’d simply assumed that he couldn’t die until things had worked themselves out, that he’d have the opportunity to see for himself that I was right to have done what I did, that it was good for him to know how dissatisfied I was with the things he assumed had satisfied me. As it happened he had only the opportunity to blame himself for dying on me when he felt — and this he was right about — that I needed him most. He managed to miss the worst of the chaos, but it didn’t matter: I was ashamed of myself. My mother and I drifted out of contact.

The boy and girl gathered together their things, the sprawl of media on their tabletop, stuffing them into zippered and Velcroed pockets in their jackets and bags and getting up to leave.

“So,” I said. “John Salteau.”

“Man of the hour. My quest.”

“All the way from Chicago. I’m thinking, don’t they have Indians there?”

“It’s the lake-and-mountain beat. Part of an unending cycle of insistent articles on fun in the summer sun, under the turning leaves, on the winter slopes. Precisely why I went into journalism, as you can imagine. How long have you known him?”

“Few months. Around since he started at the library.”

“This was when?”

“Mid-fall, I guess? I’d been here a couple of months. I wandered in one day and there he was.”

“You’ll excuse me, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would captivate someone like you.”

“It isn’t, ordinarily. But I was primed to be captivated by someone not suffering from a terminal case of Cleveritis Famosus. I got to the point where I’d walk into a bookstore in Manhattan and see all the dust jackets and have to turn around and walk out, where I’d pick up a copy of New York magazine and have to put it down, where seeing the same five or ten names recycled again and again would make me want those people to vanish from the face of the earth, and then I realized that my name was probably on someone else’s list of people who should vanish.”

“So you vanished. We covered that.”

I was embarrassed. “I’m sorry. Of course we did. I’m sorry.”

“Geezum,” she said, “don’t commit suicide or anything.”

Not necessarily the thing to bring up, for many reasons. I’d considered it myself, from time to time, window-shopping, as it were; to a tourist like me it seemed like a pastoral part of life here in the higher latitudes, especially in winter, the sun spinning out of sight around four o’clock each afternoon. I was almost able to imagine it as an event that possessed a kind of rustic charm, a frozen body leaning against a trunk amid a stand of pine, half-empty pint of rye in the pocket of its buffalo-checked jacket. Another good reason to live in town. Or maybe not, I don’t know: there was something unforgivably hesitant about my lingering at the civilized edge of country I knew so well; I was hedging and I knew it; town was a planned reality so concrete and measured and consistent that it became less dangerously real than the accidental humps and bends of the true land up in Manitou, glacially formed and wind-planed; I hadn’t wanted to learn whatever Manitou might have to teach me, its icy quiet under its trillions of stars; “the eternal silence of infinite spaces terrifies me,” Pascal had said; what I wanted was the slow-motion fellowship of a town, a beach, a good burger and a pint of beer served by a twenty-two-year-old with a pierced nose and a genial disdain for the banal middle-aged man ogling her; the incomplete solitude of half measures.