Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

Now, having kissed Kat and inserted my hand under her blouse, I felt the first familiar not-at-all-faint stirrings of swollen emotion. She was beautiful, difficult to decipher, and she was attracted to me: all pluses. She also was married, albeit unsatisfactorily, which I could go either way on. What else? She lived in Chicago, a town I liked. I pictured us in one of those big elegant apartments overlooking the lake. I pictured us sharing drafts, ideas, passages from books we were reading over drinks before dinner. The kids would love her. Rae would cede physical custody. The Yacht Reporter would vanish obligingly. I would even become a father again. (Is it clear yet that this is exactly the fantasy I had of my life with Susannah?) Our love would be wondrous, a balm to the witnessing world. In forty years’ time we’d be entwining our fingers as we always had, gazing into each other’s eyes; silver-haired, handsome elders, hale and pigeon-chested.

Another thing my mother used to like to say is “There’s no fool like an old fool.” She’d often say this, half-jokingly, in reference to my father, but I think she’d say it to me now, if she were to have seen me staring into the hallway mirror after I entered my house, studying myself, in self-appraising wonder.

I had intended to treat myself right that night, to do some work, even, but I hadn’t anticipated the sense of exquisite dissatisfaction that my afternoon with Kat had left me with, and there was the whiskey, and there were still some cigarettes, and so within a couple of hours I was sprawled drunkenly on the couch, occasionally, and self-consciously, sniffing the sweater I’d worn that afternoon, which smelled of Kat’s perfume, and which I kept handy on the cushion next to me. I exhorted myself to get to work, finally forcing myself up off the couch. I made for the stairs, reaching out for the newel and missing it entirely. My momentum sent me crashing into the front door, and I stood there rubbing my upper arm, puzzled about my intentions. Then I remembered: rear bedroom. Where the computer and all that shit was. I noted dimly that the answering machine was still flashing with Boyd Harris’s message. Time for him later. Still rubbing my arm, I started up the stairs.

I FELLasleep at my desk, of course. I woke up stiff and gritty-eyed; my contact lenses seemed to have been applied to my corneas with a thin and stubborn coat of glue. My neck throbbed. So much for the nine-hundred-dollar chair. The sense of determination that had carried me upstairs to the study the night before had abandoned me. I went downstairs to put coffee on, then climbed back up to get undressed and take a shower. Then I would get started. Why wouldn’t I get started? What would keep me from getting started? I thought about the block of day ahead, as uniformly smooth in consistency and tone as a hunk of Gouda. A writer’s dream, through and through. But, though I’d barely paid any attention to Salteau the morning before, I wished that it were Tuesday again already, so I could run from my work. I got dressed, poured the coffee, decided I was hungry. I fried some eggs, then decided to clean up the kitchen. The house needed airing. I wanted to do the laundry, haul the empty bottles out to the recycling bin in the garage. Hang the coats in the closet. Empty the ashtrays and pick up the living room. Run the vacuum. Was I going to polish the silver next? It was eleven o’clock now. I poured the remaining coffee into my cup and lit a cigarette — gratifyingly, the last in the pack. Gratifying because I knew that now I would have an excuse to run to the mini-mart at the gas station on Division. Then I could take repeated breaks to smoke, enjoying the tiny pernicious twinge just to one side of my right shoulder blade that I had become convinced was an admonitory communication from the malignancy taking form in my lung. Great: talking tumors, now. I forced myself to go back upstairs.

Coetzee writes of telling a story selectively, omitting all of the complicated and unsettling truths; “the story unrolls without shadows,” as he puts it. On reflection, it occurs to me that the story without shadows is a cartoon, no more or less. Whether aimed blatantly at an audience (around the table, at the bar, on the jury, in the cineplex, under a reading lamp) or draped in the most elaborate trappings of High Art, it comforts its audience and, occasionally, its author. For a while I’d recognized that what I was working on was nearly shadowless. I’d read it, and read it again: it was a voice I’d never use unless I was trying, not even to comfort, but to con. Irremediable. The idea of admitting to myself, let alone to someone else, that the book I’d sold was likely never going to exist made me anxious — I knew I was courting another series of calls from Fecker, Arlecchino, and Harris, the three evil fairies — but what really terrified me, made me want to crawl on my hands and knees behind a barrier of sandbags, was my continued inability to write. I was like some aged invalid, overcome by dementia. All I wanted to do now was sit around and smell my clothes. I went downstairs to confront the empty cigarette pack, picked up the sweater off the couch and gave it a whiff, posing as the detached technician: gardenia, perhaps? What a joke. The musk took hold of me again — maybe I was feebleminded — and I stood holding the sweater pressed against my face, inhaling deeply. Loralynn Bonacum wore Giorgio — that great, fruity madeleine of the ’80s. Like big hair and shoulder pads, brilliantine and wingtips, yellow neckties and unvented double-breasted suits, an aroma as caricatured as those anxiously modish times. Yet how many young guys pickled their brain cells in that scent? Every now and then I’ll pick it up in a crowd, at a mall, say — a dedicated line to my juvenile passion (which makes it no less piquant) — and it stops me, anyway it cuts off volition, I continue to move ahead but I’m really thinking, feeling, remembering. If I had the presence of mind I might search the faces of the other middle-aged men around me, try to identify the ones suddenly stopped dead in the midst of their lives, the bones of the ardent past unexpectedly disinterred between the pretzel stand and the sneaker store.

I WAS FINISHINGa beer just before lunch when the phone rang. It was Dylan. I opened another. “Been a while since I read a good AIDS novel,” he was saying. “I mean straight-up AIDS, none of this Africa shit, just gay guys dropping like flies in the heart of the Castro.”

“AIDS Classic,” I said.

“Those were some days. I guess most of the people who were going to die died already.” He sounded glum about it, like a golden era had passed. “But this book is set in 1989. Very pleased. Good read. Just came in over the transom.”

“You read stuff that comes in over the transom?”

“By ‘read’ I mean Kirsten read it. Fucked up her plans the last couple of evenings, but she knows she can go back to the reception desk anytime she wants. By ‘transom’ I mean that it was sent to me by Edmund White.”

“Ed just took one look and said, Fecker’s got AIDS written all over him?”

“Oh, he’s funny. Funny guy. You sound very chipper today, Sandy. How are things in Ashtabula?”

“About the same. Highs in the mid-thirties. Sunny skies, slight chance of snow this evening. Orion, Gemini, and Arugula visible.”

“Very, very chipper. Hang on to that, will you? Because I’m calling to give you a heads-up.”

“Yes?”

“They’re starting to cancel contracts right and left. One day past deadline and they kill the book.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”