Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

“How about this.” She folded her hands. “Have they made any movies out of your books?”

They were sitting in the back room of an Italian-style deli, eating sandwiches out of plastic baskets. A pair of high school kids hung out nearby, bored already by the abundance of time that was one gift of bad weather. The two adults were as insignificant to them as the mortar holding together the bricks of the walls, but the guy — Alexander Mulligan was his name — shot a glance at them and lowered his voice.

“Yes. Fallen Sparks .”

“Never heard of it.”

“Hollywood changed it,” he said, with irritation. He gave her the title of the movie.

“That’s the one with the great car in it.”

“’67 Chevelle. That was their idea. I very specifically gave my character a ’78 Civic.”

“Your first car.”

“I’m tempted to say my best car. What, tempted. Definitely my best car.” He’d begun warming to the subject. “Not cinematic enough, though. In one of the very rare instances when I had direct contact with anyone having to do with the movie, I asked the producer why they’d changed it. He looks at me like I’m mildly retarded and says, ‘It’s not a comedy.’ ”

She laughed. “Oh yeah it was. I saw it. I didn’t read the book, though.”

He shrugged. “I heard about this new trend in book clubs. You pick a book that they’re making into a movie. Then you don’t read the book, but go see the movie and then talk about that.”

“I believe it.”

“Why shouldn’t you? And you’re not even old enough to remember Classics Illustrated .”

“No, I’m not.”

“ The Scarlet Letter with ads for X-Ray Specs and pimple cream every third page. People thought it was the end of Western civilization. If only they knew.”

“Personally, I thought The Scarlet Letter itself was the end of Western civilization.”

“Conversation terminated. You wonder why a writer retreats to the boondocks.”

“I didn’t wonder, actually.”

Alexander put his sandwich down and began talking to her for a while about what it was like being a writer. She nodded periodically. It was halfway interesting; a little pat. If anything, the overrehearsed aspect of the thing convinced her that he actually was who he claimed to be. She looked in her purse for her notebook but found her nicotine lozenges instead.

“See?” he said. “You should interview me sometime. You’re a natural. You bring out the talker in me.”

“A,” she said, “I don’t think you need any help from me, and B, I thought I already was interviewing you.”

“ About me, I mean.” Then he blushed. He seemed starved for attention. A bad divorce, maybe, what with the kids back in Brooklyn and zero sign of that passing reference to my wife which she’d noticed married men often liked to make, if only to establish a thin veneer of honesty while they came on to her. No wedding ring, either. Puffy, like someone whose body had filled out with too much beer and too many bar burgers. Or from antidepressants.

“OK,” she said. She got out her notebook and pen. “You’re working on an important new book?”

Hopeless laugh, as if she’d asked how his terminal cancer was progressing. Try another tack (why was she bothering, she wondered).

“Why Michigan?”

“My father used to rent a cabin up here. We came up every summer.”

“Who?”

“The three of us. Me, my dad, my mom.”

“Do they still come up?”

“No. They cut it out. My mother started wanting to be close to home. Got funny about travel. She wasn’t old or anything, just stopped wanting to go out.”

“To go out or to travel?”

“Well. To go out. Which made traveling out of the question.”

“Sounds difficult.”

“It was difficult. They hardly knew my wife. They hardly knew their grandchildren .”

“Have they passed away?”

“My dad died. He got cancer and died a few years ago. Very quick. Big surprise.”

“I’m sorry. And your mother?”

He made a sour face. “She’s alive,” he said. He drummed his hands on the tabletop for a second, looked around. The teenagers got up and left. He watched them as they went, then looked at her.

“So, the man of the hour. John Salteau.”

“That’s my quest.”

“Why is Chicago interested?”

“Local color. Fun-in-the-sun-type fluff. We’ll do a sidebar on Salteau, dust off our annual piece about the Cherry Festival, the lakeshore, the hang-gliding-and-ice-cream-sundae-making competition. We start the legwork now, and around May, when Chicagolanders come out of hibernation and begin thinking about escaping that oven of a city, the reps’ll start trying to sell ads to airlines and hotels and car rental agencies, we can start running our summer recreational coverage, and maybe we’ll all live to see another day.”

“Why you went to J-school, I’m guessing.”

She smiled. “How long have you known him?”

“Salteau? Since he started over at the library in the fall, I guess. A few months, now.”

“And why did you start going to see him there? What interested you?”

He leaned back and began talking again about being a writer, about the cutthroat environment in New York, about the innocent joy of Salteau’s kind of storytelling. He kept saying, “I’m serious, ” and then continuing. She wrote down SERIOUS VERY SERIOUS SERIOUS ABOUT TALKING SERIOUS TALKER SERIOUSLY INTO THE SOUND OF HIS OWN VOICE SERIOUS? SERIOUSLY I MEAN IT SERIOUS.

He summed up: “That’s why I felt like I had to leave.”

“So you did leave. I’m way ahead of you.”

He blushed again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s embarrassing. I don’t mean to turn the conversation to myself, not every time.”

She smiled thinly. “No need to beat yourself up.”

“Anyway. I guess what I’m trying to say is that what I like about him has to do with the way he breaks the rules. He’s not worried about what’s possible, or plausible, not interested in lessons endorsed by the social sciences. Just in making order.”

“It’s primitive.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Authentic, then. Where did that face come from?” He’d assumed the same sour expression he had when she’d asked about his mother.

“What does ‘authentic’ have to do with telling stories? Who cares?”

“Well. I do, I guess.”

“If you’re bidding on a painting at Sotheby’s, OK. But fiction?”

“Don’t you think it matters that an authentic Indian should be telling authentic Indian legends?”

“Does it matter when some guy from Cambridge translates The Odyssey ?”

“The culture wars, entering the top of the nine hundred fifty-sixth inning, still no score.”

He laughed. “These are the things that bring out the crackpot in all of us.”

“Some of us.”

“Granted, certain things make me a little crazy. But I can speak very poetically about other things.”

“Well, when are you going to start? I thought you weren’t going to be quotable at least in an interesting way.”

He looked down at the ruins of his lunch, bleeding out in the plastic lattice basket. He sighed. A crackpot, a charmer, a delusional con man, a victim of mood swings, a faker of hurt feelings: who knew? Actually, he was sort of interesting, but like most of the interesting things that confronted her in the course of an average plug-in-and-spectate day, he was turning out to be an irrelevant hindrance.

“OK. Here’s what I think,” he said. He held up his hands palms out, a hold-everything gesture. “For real. I think he’s got a real commitment to inventiveness. Believe it or not, I don’t see that a lot in my line of work. What I see a lot of is people trying to keep their names out there. It’s the opposite of invention. They take brave stands from somewhere midpoint in the herd. They might even win a medal from time to time.”