Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

“You’ve never worried about a deadline before, Monte.”

“What can I say? It’s almost as if, no offense, they’re eager to begin officially losing money as soon as possible. Bean counters, right? It doesn’t have to be a problem if it’s lousy. Nobody has to know it’s lousy. We publish a lot of lousy books to fulsome praise. It’s part of the cultural give-and-take. We actually count on it.”

“The lousy books or the good reviews?”

“Both, really. A list full of masterpieces would be a complete disaster.”

“I’m trying, Monte.”

“Maybe you miss the city. The hustle and the bustle. The hurly and the burly.”

“I don’t think that’s it.”

“Fascinating. I think it’s ironic. When I was coming up, willed artistic isolation was simply a question of not opening your mail. Nobody dreamed of actually leaving . Some writer who’d never set foot off the island of Manhattan — you’d encounter him on lower Fifth Avenue, or around Sheridan Square, and you’d wonder, didn’t he die? Is that a ghost I just saw schlepping a D’Ag Bag home from the supermarket? Turned out he’d just left his phone off the hook. Sure, writers have always been strange . But they stayed put, is the thing. A true weirdo might decamp to Massachusetts, or take a crack at writing screenplays out on the West Coast, and people would marvel at their tenuous link to the real world by long-distance telephone. I’m serious, you’d call authors living out of town and it would be like listening to the voices of the dead, all echoes and whistling static. A chill would come over you. The distance seemed insuperable. But nowadays, you people can’t wait to leave. New York is like this necessary obstacle to be overcome. I don’t understand it. There’s an entire body of treasured literature from when I was a young man that speaks of the America lying on the wrong side of the Hudson with toxic disdain, and now people your age act as if there couldn’t be anything finer than a tenure-track appointment at the University of Kansas. Whatever happened to Henry James, and the idea that ‘the best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding to the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation’?”

“He dropped dead after renouncing his American citizenship. And didn’t he live way out in East Sussex?”

“Well, we can’t compare ourselves to Henry James.”

“I’ll try to break the habit.”

“But I’m not putting down your little sabbatical. I know you were having a rough time of it here. The sheer athleticism of bigamy! You have my boundless sympathy, especially given my own current personal situation, which has been exaggerated beyond belief in the media. I know it was rough for you here.”

“Here it’s going fine. I’ve been happy to discover that my dream of being completely forgotten is being realized faster than I ever feared it would.”

“Nobody’s forgetting anybody, Sandy. Two pages in the catalog: you’re practically the centerfold. Needless to say, Untitled Novel is our lead title.”

“But who knows what three a.m. will bring from Stuttgart?”

“God forbid. Don’t they ever take time off? Hitler’s birthday, or something?”

“April.”

“Doesn’t matter. If my worst professional fears come to pass, I’m capable of seeing beyond who and what I am today. If and when my worst professional fears come to pass, this is not the end. I can see beyond what’s defined me for the last thirty years. I refuse to be taken by surprise. I hate surprises, and things surprise me all the time. I enjoy bleu cheese: that was a surprise. Dogs don’t like me. That was a big surprise. Young people like to spit on your penis. Who knew? Among many other surprises. When my worst professional fears come to pass, there will be another act.”

“Impressions, or juggling, maybe?”

“Prophecy, I’m thinking. I’ve always felt there was a more-direct-than-usual connection between me and God. I just haven’t had the time to commit. I’ll button my shirts up to the neck and deliver my esoteric wisdom to captive audiences of rush-hour commuters riding the IRT. My eventual biographer is likely to say that that’s when I hit my stride.”

“Why wait? I can log on to Wikipedia and say it right now.”

“Save your imagination for my new book you’re not writing. By the way, what’s this shit I hear about you hanging around with some Indian? What is it, some kind of George Harrison thing?”

I SPENT THErest of the afternoon reviewing my finances: checking, savings, CDs, IRAs, equity accounts, mutual funds, life insurance policies. Revolving charge accounts and lines of credit. If there’s any single legitimate way of ordering reality, this may be it. A few months before my father died I went to visit my parents for a couple of weeks, the last opportunity I had to spend time with someone resembling the entire man before the cancer devoured him completely. One evening I found, on the coffee table next to the sofa where he sat propped up with pillows for much of each day, a slip of paper on which he’d written a list of five- and six-digit numbers. My mother saw me studying the list and laughed.

“Your father was figuring out how much money we have,” she said.

Well, my parents had evidently done all right, and my father had “terrific” health insurance coverage — perversely, he enjoyed pointing out how little the expensive process of dying was costing him out of pocket — and there was no reason why he needed to copy out, in his increasingly shaky hand, figures that mostly appeared on the consolidated statements the guy who handled their investments sent them on a quarterly basis. Still, I was able to recognize the rational compulsion behind it; saw the satisfaction he must have taken in seeing the numbers forming under the pressure of his pen, the column growing longer; extrapolating dividends and compound interest; seeing in the robust well-being of those expanding amounts all the health and vigor that had departed his failing body.

It was in a contortedly similar spirit that, when I was finished with my own review, I signed on to my local bank and, in accordance with no schedule or agreement, arranged to have ten thousand dollars deposited to Rae’s checking account, not out of concern for Rae or the kids but as a starkly manipulative gesture, a desire to loudly declare the measure of my importance to her. If I’d sent her a bouquet of flowers she might credibly have been able to accuse me of harassing her, but an arbitrary ten grand she could neither ignore nor reject. Here I am. Don’t forget me. Is there a more muscular use to which money can be put than such nakedly controlling acts? I made the wild decision then to do the same for Susannah. As I was hunting around for her account number, though, I began to feel strange, and when I realized that what I was feeling was nausea, I stopped.

E VENfailed romances generate the endless pillow talk, that low autobiographical hum. In my bottomless fascination, I listened. Did I get it all? I got what Susannah intended for me to get. As usual, I made up the difference on my own, filling the trenches separating the discrepant histories she offered me with all the resourcefulness of a working novelist. Susannah was, in fact, my only project for months. Not one day passed when I wasn’t confronted with something different and unexpected; not one night when I didn’t fall asleep trying to anticipate what the next day would bring. For the first time, the chess strategies of writing fiction, the ability to see ahead, holding the whole shape of an unfinished thing in mind despite changes of direction, a dozen daily alterations in tone, became something I was able to project into the three dimensions of real life, although writing, even when it was difficult and frustrating, generally brought me a sense of competency and satisfaction, while real life now only left me feeling confused, and was so complex that it required a kind of edgy wariness at all times. It was when it turned out that Susannah and I were not the known quantity I’d thought we were, that the “whole shape” I’d imagined translating into the real world had existed only in my imagination to begin with, that I began to understand desperation.