Christopher Hacker - The Morels

These sorts of things rarely come to that, the officer said, returning his notepad to his pocket.

They were silent for a while. Nice ride, the officer said.

It’s a rental.

That’s the way to do it. In style. The officer stirred up some small talk to pass the time. He spoke enthusiastically of the car: his uncle had an earlier model, same color; how the man had been bequeathed the car by a dead relative and spent his spare time modifying it. He’d gotten to comparing his uncle’s earlier model with this current one when the other officer emerged from the house.

He approached them, nodded to his partner, was abrupt with Arthur. No question which one was the bad cop here. He wondered what the Wrights had told him. Bad cop didn’t let on. He told Arthur that he’d have to move along, that loitering here was forbidden, anticipating an argument, but Arthur didn’t argue. He bid the officers a good night, opened the driver’s side door, and stuffed the gifts in back. He stalled twice on his way out of the subdivision. He watched the police cruiser in his rearview, colored lights flashing silently, all the way to the highway.

He got himself most of the way back to the airport before turning off 267 and into a motel. He sat on the bed and called his wife. This time, she answered.

Arthur, she said.

Penelope, thank God!

It’s over, she said. She told him to stop calling her parents, that they were all tired and needed to get some sleep. He begged her to stay on the line, to listen to what he had to say but was relieved, in spite of himself, when she said she couldn’t and hung up. Because, the truth was, he didn’t know what to say. He would apologize, he would say whatever she wanted him to say, but after his encounter with the police and the barrel of her father’s shotgun, he was feeling defensive.

To apologize for what he had written was tantamount to apologizing for what he was thinking, and could he, in all honesty, do that? He could be sorry for allowing it to be published, but Penelope admitted that she had encouraged him. He could be sorry for allowing himself to be encouraged, but that was just a passive-aggressive apology: Sorry you feel that way, sorry you’re displeased . These were no longer apologies.

If he couldn’t be sorry, what could he do? He couldn’t recall the book as though it were a faulty laptop battery; the publisher had made this clear. He couldn’t unwrite it. Penelope would have to set the terms of the amends, but she was refusing to speak to him.

Arthur called the airline and booked the first flight out the next morning. Afterward, he opened the door to his room and stood out on the balcony that overlooked the parking lot. Three shadows by a red pickup truck — two men and a woman — smoking cigarettes and drinking from a shared bottle. He watched them for a while — the woman sat cross-legged on the hood, the men leaning deeply onto the passenger side door, discussing something serious. Arthur watched them long enough to decide that getting drunk looked like a good idea.

He found his keys and got on his jacket and, asking directions from the trio by the pickup, drove to a nearby liquor store where he purchased a bottle of something called Duff Gordon, which turned out to be cooking sherry.

By the time he returned to the motel parking lot, the red pickup was gone. He uncapped the bottle and had a swig. This was what you were supposed to do when your wife and child left you; you got drunk in a motel parking lot. The circumstances required it. He adjusted his seat, turned off the engine, but kept the key in so that he could listen to the radio. He found a station playing “Waiting for the Man,” by the Velvet Underground. He thought of his mother.

He was woken by the sound of an electronic bleating that turned out to be his cell phone. It was his agent. He flipped open the phone. Hello? The morning’s glare from the windshield aggravated the cracked plates of a headache.

Arthur, it’s Doug. Are you sitting down? I hope you are, friend, because I have some news that’s going to knock you off your feet.

“HOLY SHIT,” I SAID. “CONGRATULATIONS!”

“You sound like my agent. Lord. I haven’t won anything. I’ve been short-listed. Besides, it’s not a real prize. It’s a vanity award, the kind they give out to small-press books in order to make us feel better for our dismal sales numbers.”

“Still, it sounds very prestigious.”

Arthur said, “I got off the phone. As I said, blinding headache. I turn the key, and chug-chug-chug , goes the engine. It won’t turn over. I’m late for my flight, my wife has left me, taken my son. I have a hangover, and I miss my plane waiting for a tow truck to jump-start my car.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s the bad news. The good new is your career’s taken off!” I meant it as a joke but felt genuinely jealous as I said it. “I’d trade places with you.”

“You would because you’re used to hangovers and because you have neither a wife nor a child, so you have no idea what it means to lose them.”

“Right, and I have no career to speak of. Thanks a lot. I feel much better now.”

“What I mean is be happy with what you haven’t got to lose. And I don’t have the career you think I do. Fiction writing is not a career. Adjuncting at a university, I don’t care what its pedigree, isn’t a career either, despite what my wife thinks. This isn’t my office. We adjuncts get to share the space left unoccupied by the full-timers on sabbatical.” He looked at the Tupperware by my elbow. “And I’m not liked. I haven’t made the effort. I’d be surprised if I were teaching here in the fall.”

Arthur walked me out, and I don’t know whether it was Arthur’s suggestion or if it really was in the air, but I felt us being stared at by those we passed, a curiosity that bordered on malice. Arthur stopped at his cubby and looked through the various notices and flyers. The woman at the reception desk offered a tight smile. She didn’t say hello to Arthur, and Arthur didn’t introduce me. At the door, we shook hands.

I said, “Have you explained to Penelope this notion of art you have?”

“An explanation won’t do what she wants it to. To give her comfort. No explanation will do that.”

“Maybe I don’t envy your misery,” I said. “But I do envy your spine. The way you follow through with your idea about art — strange though it is — is impressive.”

“Okay,” he said, “out with it. You didn’t come here to listen to me talk, and you didn’t come here because you were worried. You came to ask me something. So ask.”

“Fine. Here it goes — how would you like to be in a movie?”

Arthur snorted. Then he said, “You’re serious.”

“You could be yourself because it would be a documentary.”

“About?”

“About you.”

Arthur seemed ready to refuse — he tipped his head back and made a sour face — but he didn’t refuse. “Documentary,” he said, measuring the word. He said it a few times, sounding out its syllables. “Come back to the office for a minute,” he said.

We retraced our way upstairs, and I stood outside the door while he rummaged around the top of the desk. “She’s always sending me these things here at the school, but now for the life of me I can’t — aha!”

He held aloft a postcard, brought it over to me. On it was a photograph of a necklace made from what looked like human molars. On the other side: Cynthia Bonjorni, Artist @ Carriage House Crafts, Greene & Grand . Cutout letters, mixed fonts like the liner notes of a Sex Pistols album.

“Cynthia Bonjorni?”

“My mother. If you want to make a movie about me, she would be the best place to start.”