The Fugitives Read online

  Unfortunately, for all the sense made by his plan to teach us to talk reasonably to each other, the only person I thought about making it work with was Susannah, with whom I’d been disastrously unable to discuss anything of significance and with whom I could now discuss nothing at all. I kept it to myself: Heinz had taken each of us aside during our first session to ask if either of us had any secrets from the other and I knew instantly that I would have to exempt thought-crimes from disclosure. My rehabilitation depended on the complete repudiation of Susannah. I knew, anyway, that Heinz didn’t want any complexifying confidences to deal with. “I don’t do breakup counseling,” he’d advised from the outset, like a lawyer who takes on only the cases that he can win. Rae had chosen him carefully. Everyone was pulling for us; now even our doctor was insisting that we had no choice but to be cured. And so I claimed to have left Susannah behind, reciting to myself, and to anyone who’d listen, all the good reasons why I couldn’t possibly love her. It’s a familiar ruse, a good idea, never entirely convincing. But it tortured me to erase e-mails and photos from my hard drive. I never got around to deleting her number from my cell phone. Plus the sheer physical difficulty of making people’s traces vanish as completely as they themselves have. Here’s this blue T-shirt that Susannah gave me. A stupid keychain that I’d bought in a stall on the Ponte Vecchio with her. A car rental receipt falling from between the pages of a Graham Greene novel. Make, Pontiac. Model, Grand Prix. Odometer out, 13,556 miles. Destination, some motel in Santa Barbara where I fucked Susannah day and night, getting her smell into my pores, her taste into my mouth. The book was The Power and the Glory. I actually finished it on that trip, though I have no idea when I made the time. I fucked her like I wanted to climb inside her. I fucked her like I wanted to smash through the atomic structures dividing us into two separate beings. I fucked her like tomorrow they were coming to flay me, eviscerate me, castrate me, and nail my genitals to a board in the town square. The power and the glory indeed. What was this response? Biochemistry? Obsession? I played along with Dr. Heinz when he suggested, with smug self-assurance, that strong bonds grew from mutual respect, mutual communication, mutual goals, mutual commitment to compromise. There he was, delivering the mission statement of the Working Families Party, and all I could think about was Susannah’s pussy: her pussy cradled in lace; her pussy framed inside the rectangle formed by garter belt, stocking tops, and garter belt fasteners; her pussy gaping and wet; her pussy when my face was pushed into it. I thought about the way her pussy felt when it was tightly gripping my cock and the way her pussy felt when I reached over the hump of her perfect ass to stick my fingers in it while she went down on me. I knew I couldn’t speak rationally about any of it. One reason for bodily taboos is simply to restrain people from trying to express themselves on subjects such as these. It would have been possible to form a cult of one around Susannah’s pussy, with all of a fringe theology’s gorgeous blind-alley symmetries. There will never be a utopia on earth as long as each of us may be transported to the heaven of our hidden manias. Susannah could have humiliated me in any way she wished, as long as she allowed me to venerate and adore her awesome erotic supremacy. Her mistake—or, rather, her strategy—was in withholding her dominance over me; allowing me to come to myself long enough to panic, and flee to Rae.

  Heinz said that however it had ended, Susannah and I had been doomed to fail from the outset of the affair. I was happy to go along and agree that in the limited sense that he intended—the sense of two of us, Susannah and I, working shoulder to shoulder in furtherance of a common purpose, like partners in a well-run small business—he was certainly right. In the sense that he refused to acknowledge, the unassimilable combination of unending desire and perfect gratification that defined the whole thing, we had failed only in that the balanced suspension of the two was impossible to maintain, and its disintegration left me, unhappily, with only the desire.

  I STAYED AT the Holiday Inn while I looked for a place to live. I had a room with a view of the bay. The calm surface and moderate breeze attracted windsurfers and Sunfish in the shallows just off the narrow strand of beach, and, farther out, larger boats moved slowly through the blue water, or rocked gently at anchor. A postcard view, though this is the grittiest and least attractive part of the region. Grandview, the street fronting the bay, is lined with motels, gas stations, and drive-thru restaurants, and the area is, if not exactly seedy, a little shopworn. A half hour’s drive up into Manitou County will get you to places that are frequently described as unspoiled; while they’re hardly that (the lakeshore and adjacent towns are tourist destinations, after all), they are beautiful, quiet, clean. I didn’t want the isolation of Manitou, though, or acres of wooded land looming at my back requiring me to be mindful of bears, hunters, and snowmobilers, and apart from the motel strip the town itself is very appealing.

  The bungalow turned out to be easy to find. The owner lived in Grand Rapids, and the place had sat vacant for months, its rent slipping to a level at which I was able to believe that this was a larky and temporary adventure, rather than one of those anxiously groping relocations, a wandering through a maze of alternatives toward an imagined absence of pain.

  I moved in and slept on the floor in a sleeping bag while I waited for things to be delivered. Still life of pizza boxes and empty beer bottles accumulating in the kitchen. For a few days I’d entertained the idea of furnishing the place entirely from the Salvation Army store just down the road, but after spending twenty minutes there sitting on an old Naugahyde sofa it occurred to me that both self-deprecation and masquerade have their sensible limits. If indeed another person was inside me writhing to emerge from the wreckage, that person did not want to live like a downmarket midwesterner. True to my class, I turned loneliness into a consumer spree. Money was available, and I didn’t see any reason not to indulge the materialism that lurks at the heart of every fantasy of personal renovation (if materialism were not the issue, it wouldn’t so often remain a fantasy, would it?). So I waited for stuff to arrive to fill the house.

  Work was supposed to come next. At the beginning I had the same faith Dylan had in the industriousness of the exile, the reduction of things to a kind of primary essence. Me and a book. Me and a notepad. A pen. I also had an Aeron chair, a laptop with separate cordless keyboard and mouse, an external hard drive, a printer, a scanner/fax/copier, a smartphone, an iPod and a stereo dock, a modem, a high-speed Internet connection, and a wireless router to connect it all; everything the reclusive author needed except a briar pipe and a walking stick.

  “Simple and good,” approved Dylan. “So not what people expect of the writer-entrepreneur of today. This restores things. It connects him with the process.”

  “Writer-entrepreneur?”

  “At a suitable time I’ll explain about the writer-entrepreneur. Is a reminder of the realities of the marketplace what he needs right now? No. For now let’s just say: sounds like you’re in business.”

  “Let’s just say that.”

  “Go to work. Take it easy. Take care of yourself. Spoil yourself a little. Take your mind off things. Take the opportunity to think things through. Forget about the grind. Reconsider your career goals. Put the top down. Wear sunscreen. Buy fresh produce from roadside stands. Eat crappy takeout. Visit historic sites. Download the dirtiest Internet porn you can find. And if you get lonely, just think of me stuck here with the Eurotrash on the roof of Soho House waiting as we speak to have lunch with an editor who’s got no money and a fuckload of attitude. That’s lonely. That’s dread. Make me proud I’m in this shitass business. Did you hear about Kendra Wallenstein over at Synes and Martell? She won’t acquire a fucking book if it doesn’t have a happy ending. Official new official policy. Even the backlist’s under review. Tremors throughout the industry. But don’t you worry about that. It’s not your worry. Go ahead and write a book that leaves us weeping. I’ll stock up on Kleenex now. Monte’s totally behind us on this. Monte has an investment in your
career. I can have him call you right now and tell you the exact same thing.”

  “Why do I want to have the same conversation twice?”

  “Why does he want to have the same conversation twice. See how I protect him from reality? Agenting is more than single-handedly supporting Kinko’s and screaming at interns. What to you is an inconvenience, a freakish oddity, is to me an everyday phenomenon. You know form letters? I have form conversations.”

  “Is this one of them?”

  “Ha ha ha. The wit that’s been translated into more than twenty languages is regaining its edge. Honing his craft and his wit in the American Heartland. Go walk in the footsteps of Hemingway, catch a trout or something. We can pitch it to Men’s Journal, keep your name out there.”

  I WORKED IN fits and starts, not inconsistent with my personal tradition of restricting the writing to short interludes while frittering away most of the workday. It wasn’t just success that had afforded me the opportunity to waste time so lavishly. My career as a writer had begun that way, when in my mid-twenties I’d saved up to rescue myself from a ridiculously inappropriate job and city (insurance underwriter, Miami) that seemed at the time to be a pair of life sentences running concurrently, and moved to Williamsburg. Once there, I’d honored the long, unadorned days by frequently rising from the sublet kitchen table where I worked to pace, fling myself on the couch to read, stand moodily smoking by the window overlooking the backyard, gazing at the amazing amounts of laundry the family next door generated, which hung from the clothesline, snapping and waving in the breeze. I also masturbated, operatically, arias of autoeroticism. I read, I wrote, I dicked around, I expended semen by the quart. Me, the Western Canon, a blank sheet of crisp paper rolled expectantly, with professional neatness, into the platen of my typewriter, and a wad of Kleenex always at the ready. My first novel assembled itself under these conditions, fell apart on rereading, disappeared into a drawer. More pertinently, I was dazedly pleased to have discovered a life that suited me as perfectly as this one did. The rhythm of reading, writing, wasting time; a pace and a pattern that easily assimilated any stupid interruption: the need to work at shit jobs, travel, friends, women, marriage, children. All such things merely filled the interstices between those big three, Reading, Writing, Wasting Time. Not that people understood. Bosses fired me. Friends complained about unreturned calls. Women, forget about it. The children would learn that I was the figure over whose shoulder they peered, hunting for clues in the object of my total absorption. So, fits and starts, yes—but I could tell the difference between productive and unproductive. The machinery had been on the blink for a while. I wasn’t writing, I couldn’t read, and even the bright joy of throttling abundant time evaded me. It didn’t strike me as inapt that the ability to create had burned out in me, although the novel I’d insisted for three years that I was working on (at one point Amazon listed it, then delisted it, which caused the servers hosting three blogs devoted to my works and—increasingly—my life, to shut down) had been bought and paid for—twice, in effect: first by Monte Arlecchino, for an unjustifiably ridiculous amount of money, and again by the Boyd Family Foundation, through whose embarrassing largesse I was receiving $75,000 annually for a renewable six-year term as a Boyd Fiction Fellow.

  I worried less about Arlecchino than I did about the Boyds. Monte was easy; he had a roster of dilatory authors whose years-overdue manuscripts he spun as instances of genius perfectionism. But the Boyds scared me a little. They were vastly wealthy Texans who had procured their august dignity in painstaking stages, by trial and error: first, through the enormous success of the Boyd Repeating Arms Company, next with the founding of Boyd Baptist Teachers College (now Boyd University), then with the establishment of the foundation and its short-lived Boyd War Prize (awarded irregularly but frequently enough really between 1912–1939 for “The most ingenious strategic use of munitions, ordnance, or weaponry against enemies in time of war or insurrectionists in time of rebellion or unrest”), and finally with the foundation’s creation of the Boyd Fellows Program in the 1970s. The investiture ceremony for Fellows took place at Henry Silas Boyd’s mansion, Estancia, a strange and bloated folly with sandstone exterior, Doric columns, red tile roof, oaken drawbridge, marble floors, and stained-glass windows removed from a thirteenth-century French cathedral. A three-hundred-foot artificial hill had been erected, lavishly landscaped and sculpted with tall phallic hoodoos, on the high plains behind the house; deer and antelope played there, buffalo roamed. We received gold medals (the first of our twenty-four quarterly checks was in the mail), wore colored robes signifying the fields in which our fellowships had been granted, were greeted cordially not only by the descendants of the founding tycoon who sat on the foundation’s board but by the distinctly pacifist and left-leaning notables who served as chairman and executive director, and there wasn’t a single six-gun or fragmentation grenade in sight, but it was impossible not to be aware of the mountain of corpses on which the whole thing had been built. Public relations, press, and legal structures to the contrary, these were not people who gave anything away. “Make us proud,” one of the descendants, Boyd Harris, had said to me, “make us proud.” He uttered it in a slightly menacing singsong, as if I were the Fellow he wasn’t sure about (I suppose there’s always one). And now here I was in Michigan, doing little but going to hear a man tell ancient stories that belonged to no one. And an Indian, yet.

  3

  IN the city, I’d found myself distracted by unwieldy and complicated arguments I got into with complete strangers on the Internet, people whose militant opinions, buttressed by a facile authoritativeness carved on the surface of the Web, seemed to cry out for an aggressive response. It would consume hours of time, when I let it, and often once the day was over I would feel a vague shame, as if I’d spent my time having anonymous encounters of an intimate nature. Which, in a sense, I had. Of course I did all this under a number of different pseudonyms, frequently engaging people using pseudonyms of their own. It was absolute candor, with no revelation, as if to their very depth our personalities were made up of no more than the glassy surfaces of our opinions, folded back on themselves to reflect their own light. The rule was to say anything, to mine the untellable hostility from where it was deposited in our real lives and fire it at an echoing voice. A peculiarly empty intimacy; the gratification of hearing myself, loud and confident and bloated with the gaseous feeling of well-being that accompanied unbridled and risk-free self-expression. Now and then I’d tip my hand regarding my imposture, reassuring myself that, whatever else I may have been, I surely was not like them, pathetically defining myself within the limits of the comment box. And yet the authority that box bestowed. I pretended to be gay. I pretended to be a woman. I pretended to be black. I pretended to be a senior citizen living on a fixed income. I pretended to be a disabled war veteran. I pretended to be a Republican. I tested the limits, in a way I hadn’t in my “real” fiction, of what I could persuade myself it would be worth saying for no reason other than to feel what it was like to have said it.

  In Cherry City, I could see that this wouldn’t do. Now the virtual terrain I escaped to from my life became the accustomed thing; reality no longer provided a familiar frame of reference. It was too scary: the love of an invented voice became the coddling of a fragmented self; to play the self-righteous crank in the night—Cade the long-haul trucker or Bruce the midnight movie enthusiast or Hector the community activist—was to actually experience his piercing evangelical desire to persuade others. That was when I began taking my walks, when work no longer interested me or began driving me nuts with frustration. I needed to show myself that I was someplace real.

  And it was hard not to believe that I was, strolling down these streets in those mellow late-summer days; hard not to believe that the greatest minds in all of the United States lived here, it was so neat, so logical, so convenient, so beautiful as a perfectly realized ideal; hard not to believe that this was the genius of American life right
here in its jejune excellence: surely the flag that people had died for had, in their minds, snapped in the wind over a place like this—not some medieval capital like New York, not some vast and agitated conurbation like Los Angeles, and certainly not over the kingdom of placeless enfranchisement, the Internet. Just walking, no one around. Occasionally a car door would shut and I’d turn my head to meet another’s gaze, visible over the roof of the car, and thrill to the familiarity of the feeling as I reflexively raised my hand, saluting a stranger. Rae and I had sometimes passed through places like this, fantasizing, deciding which house looked like it could be ours. The nice thing about a house was the way it let you project an entire imaginary existence onto its visible architectural features, as if the house had thought about your life for you. You sat out here at twilight with a cold bottle of beer, you held the birthday parties back here, this was where you read in the evenings, this snug room with the dormer window and the sloped ceiling was just right for working in all day. I’ve never met a person living in a house who’s confused in the slightest about what purpose, ceremonial or otherwise, each room should serve, whereas in New York everybody shares the same neurotic habit of pushing the furniture against the walls, muscling past each other in the cleared space.

  You want to find a peg to hang the damage from—could it have been the city, remaining enmeshed in all the staticky hassle, the maneuvering? In New York we’d all been swindled by the promise of something better, or at least realer, that justified the expense and the crush, only to be told a hundred times what it was that we’d arrived too late for. I didn’t even have any genuinely hair-raising stories from my years in Brooklyn, only anecdotes of improperly paced gentrification. Would Rae and I have been happy or miserable in a place like this? Felt marooned or settled? Would fame have had more value, or less? Susannah wouldn’t have happened, of course, but would there have been something sadder and more tawdry, noontide adventures in one of the Grandview motel rooms?