We’re headed to the cemetery behind St. Peter’s, to the gravesite of the Author. Even now, hordes of his devoted readers still pilgrimage to this little town in Mississippi and pay their respects at his grave. Many of them carry some form of dark liquor along with them, carefully placing the half-empty bottles of Wild Turkey and Maker’s Mark around the enormous tombstone, the gesture a kind of offering to him, the Author, who had become, toward the end of his life, notorious for his drunken antics. Since we decided on making the trip at the last minute, however, we come empty-handed. No one remembers who suggested we come, but here we are, the four of us, off to see the Author, long dead these many years.
St. Peter’s is a short walk from the bookstore; that is if you know the way to go. And we do. We’ve all lived here for some time. We cut diagonally across the town square, the dimly lit fronts of local department stores and cafés and pharmacies all hushed and empty at this hour, then we make our way down Old Timothy Street’s cobbled pavement, passing the narrow Victorian houses with their large old-timey windows and low-ceilinged porches, and on up, farther still, we climb the little hill toward the First National Bank. Here, we take a left on Church Street where we can, at last, see St. Peter’s steeple, a sharp, burnished needle pressing above the trees. On the tip of the steeple: a gold cross. From this distance, the cross appears delicate, vulnerable to the elements—almost as if a strong gust could come barreling through from the north at any moment and send the gleaming fixture cartwheeling across the heavens. I mention something like this to the others, but they ignore me. It’s that kind of night.
We walk in pairs, two men following two women. The men are writers. One’s successful, and one isn’t. (I’m the unsuccessful one.) Ahead of us, the women stride arm in arm headlong into the dark, their slim bodies illumined by a fat moon. Grasshoppers sing softly beside us, invisible in the tall grass. The women speak in hushed voices like old friends, sisters even, and kick away pinecones that clutter about their ankles on the sidewalk. They are working things out between themselves, I know. One of them—the brunette—is married to the successful writer, and the other one (incidentally, I’m in love with this one) is sleeping with him. Everyone knows, of course: Tonight, there are hardly any secrets left among us worth telling one another.
THE AUTHOR WAS BORN a bastard in this town at the dawn of the last century, a time when Mississippi had started to regain some of the vitality it lost during the Civil War. The Author’s town bustled with new life and optimism back then: The university had doubled in size since its founding fifty years before, and established families from Jackson and Natchez and as far away as Nashville settled around this growing seat of education, building grand houses in the style of Queen Anne Victorian, and none of them were grander than the Cartwright house. It was built a block and a half away from the town square, near Mr. Cartwright’s pharmacy, and became somewhat famous for having the largest bay windows in the state.
A year before the Author’s birth, the Episcopalians finished the construction of St. Peter’s. The man who would become the Author’s father, a rowdy steeplejack from Cincinnati, fastened the cross to the church’s steeple sometime in the summer of 1898. That fall, a slight romance developed between Mr. Cartwright’s daughter, a naïve debutante, and this selfsame steeplejack. Mr. Cartwright didn’t think much of the match. He envisioned, like many fathers of that time and place and station in life, his daughter marrying a banker or a doctor or—at the very least—a pharmacist like him. Despite Mr. Cartwright’s objections, the relationship continued, often in secret, and soon the girl found herself “with child,” as they used to say back then.
Overwhelmed at the prospect of becoming a father, the steeplejack caught the first train to Texas. Some scholars conjecture that he worked the rest of his days in an oil field near Dallas, but that’s pure speculation. In any event, no one heard from him again, and the Cartwright girl gave birth to the child out of wedlock, a great shame to her family. She didn’t live long after, a rare case of toxicity setting in soon after the baby’s first cries; the local newspaper called her death “merciful” and “proper” considering the circumstances. According to most of the Author’s biographies, his grandparents, the austere Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright, treated him kindly, and he enjoyed a reasonably pleasant childhood with them, learning to read at an early age and spending most of his days, quiet and alone, prone in the expansive bay window of the Cartwright house, watching passersby and reading the likes of Hawthorne and Melville and—his favorite—Mr. Henry James.
By the time he was twenty, both of his grandparents had been entombed in the cemetery behind St. Peter’s—where he himself would one day rest—and most of his other relations had scattered. Wayward and untethered to anyone or anything, he traipsed up and down the Eastern Seaboard before finally sneaking into Canada and joining the Canadian Expeditionary Force for the last year of the Great War. (The United States Army having soundly rejected him because of his flat feet.) After bravely fighting the kaiser, he spent the remaining years of his twenties in France.
During this time, his artistic inclinations seriously took root; here, in the City of Light, he transitioned from private journaling to penning brief vignettes about life in Mississippi. These were hard little gems of truth, his early work. He showed his writing to other American artists living there at the time, but they, as a whole, were not a very encouraging bunch and never accepted him into their ranks. Gertrude Stein, for example, found his accent too thick and cumbersome and his manners too boorish and his taste altogether questionable. “The man writes what he thinks he should write,” she wrote in a letter, the one and only time she mentioned the Author by name, “instead of what he wants to write. He is, in a word, befuddled.” His closest ally in France, a writer from the Middle West, advised him after a long night of drinking to return home and allow that setting—those people, their dark and funny ways—to nourish his creativity. The Author listened, and once back in Mississippi, he cloistered himself in the Cartwright house like a monk and wrote. Eventually, he published. His novels sold poorly and made little racket in the world, bewildering the finicky New York critics who deemed his style “experimental” and “cerebral” and his complex story lines completely “incomprehensible.” Then, a year after his marriage to a woman who worked in the town’s public library, the Swedes bestowed upon him an auspicious literary award, which garnered him almost instant international acclaim. The award surprised no one more than the Author himself. Now critics took a second, more thoughtful, look at his work, declaring him a “genius,” and his reputation began to grow, as did his misanthropic tendencies.
BRADLEY HOLCOMB—he’s the successful writer on our walk tonight.
Late thirties. A professor at the university in town. Popular among his students—especially the girls. Always dresses in some kind of flannel even in the summertime when the heat is so thick it has texture and personality. Because of his voluptuous eyebrows and protruding jaw, he appears, most of the time, to be brooding or deep in thought. He’s from Virginia, and his accent, slight and noticeable only when he reads aloud, invites easy friendship and is not—as in my case, with my own muddy Delta twang—a joke. Earlier, before our walk to the cemetery, Holcomb read from his latest novel at a party in town celebrating its publication. The woman who’s currently sleeping with him owns the bookstore that hosted the party.
Her name is Maggie.
Today, before Holcomb’s reading at her bookstore, she confessed to loving him. I was there helping her and her small staff arrange things for the upcoming event; mostly, I was an extra hand to set up folding chairs and move tables and string up clear Christmas lights in the trees in the backyard. “It’s sickening, the way I want him,” she said, when we had finished the preparations and were having lunch alone in her office. I told her I understood, that I felt the same way about her. At this, she laughed, tilting her head back, exposing a white cream of skin under her chin. Physically, Maggie’s remarkable: wild sprays of coppery hair, boyish hips, a face speckled with freckles, like a robin’s egg. I’ve studied this face; I know it intimately. I know, for instance, that she rarely smiles because her teeth crowd and jut over one another in her small mouth, each tooth a slightly different shade of white. By all accounts, Maggie should be homely, but she’s not. And on those rare moments when she does smile (or, as was the case at lunch, laugh), the effect on me is profound. Her provocative and unusual features—all co-opting together—turn her exotic, electric. How could you not love a woman like this?
After laughing at me for admitting my love, something she’d known about for some time and chosen to ignore, she said flatly, “You’re hopeless.”
I said, “We both are.”
She squinted. “Touché.”
During the reading, I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. She sat in the first row, her profile barely visible, and wept—a wet, gentle sort of weeping. Her tears glittered on her cheeks like liquid crystal, and I wanted to lick them from her face and then take her away from this place, from her bookstore and all these people who had gathered here tonight to honor the libertine writer Bradley Holcomb. Bradley Holcomb! He didn’t deserve her. I sat behind the crowd of admirers, in the back with Holcomb’s wife at my side. I met her for the first time that night. She clutched my arm the whole time her husband read. After he finished, Maggie, dabbing her eyes with a paper napkin, stood and led the crowd in an enthusiastic round of applause.
As the others around me clapped, I remained stock-still, and Holcomb’s wife leaned over, and whispered, “That girl—she’s really quite beautiful when in pain, no?”
AT THE URGING OF HIS EDITORS, the Author went to Europe to accept his big award from the Swedes, which came—he was delighted to learn—with a substantial cash prize. On returning to town, he sold his childhood home and bought thirty acres of land, mostly undeveloped, just south of the square. The spacious two-story house on the property was one of the few Greek Revivals not burned when General Andrew Jackson Smith went rampaging through the state, and came complete with servants’ quarters and a horse stable and an outside kitchen. It’s said that his wife, who came from humble means, had taken a shine to the place during her girlhood, and he bought the house for her as a belated wedding gift.
Not much is known about his marriage, but some biographers indicate that the relationship was somewhat tumultuous, even violent. He kept odd hours—a night owl who slept well into the afternoon—and he was known for talking to himself and making detailed outlines of his novels’ plots on his bedroom walls with heavy charcoal sticks (he and his wife slept in separate bedrooms, another indication of their troubled life together).
Universities and libraries around the country called on him to speak, to give readings, but the Author rarely went. He preferred his privacy, working on his house and grounds instead. He lined his driveway with an alley of tall cedars and planted a large vegetable garden in the back and took a special pride, it was said, in tending to his only horse, an old Appaloosa named Bathsheba. His wife rarely ventured into town, and most of the townsfolk who interacted with her found her disagreeable, altogether too snobbish for the mechanic’s daughter they knew her to be. Meanwhile, outside of town, around the country, a generation of emerging writers read his work, were inspired by it, and attempted to imitate the leafy Southern voice he had perfected in his prose.
However famous he became, the town always regarded the man as something of an oddity. Few in town read his stories and novels, and those who did were baffled or bored. They referred to him as, quite simply, the Author, and usually the utterance of this nickname was accompanied by an exaggerated eye roll or a huffy sigh. (Later, of course, his fans took to calling him the Author as a term of endearment.) Something happened between him and his wife a few years after he won the award, and the couple separated—although they never officially divorced. After his wife packed up and moved to New Orleans, he became a public nuisance. His relationship with the bottle became legend during this time in his life. Riding Bathsheba, he stalked the township at night and either yelled bleak obscenities or recited the poems of Keats and Wordsworth and Coleridge for all to hear. Years passed, and his behavior only worsened. The police arrested him on numerous occasions for public drunkenness and disturbing the peace. Some members of city hall talked about committing him to Whitfield, the sanitarium near Jackson, but before anything official could be done, the Author was caught in a flash flood one night and drowned. It was 1964.
After his death, the town and the university suffered through a hard time with integration and the civil rights movement and looked for ways to remedy its troubled public image. As they saw it, the Author, who had been buried there, represented an opportunity. They pooled their money, wrote grants, asked for donations, and bought his home from his wife and transformed the great house into a museum. The university, at the behest of the mayor, began holding weeklong conferences on the Author and his work every year in August, attracting scholars from around the world to their hamlet. And, in 1975, the board of trustees at the university commissioned an iron statue of him and erected it near the humanities department on the drill field. Often the recipient of bird scat, the statue, I’m assured by scholars, looks nothing like the real man: It’s a thinner version with an amused face and a cocky stance, a pipe perched snugly between his smiling lips. The Author himself rarely smiled.
MAGGIE AND HOLCOMB knew each other for slightly more than a year before they started the affair. The way Maggie tells it, the wife—Gilly—knew about it almost from the start. “They are very open with their desires,” Maggie told me. Adding, “Very French, if you ask me.” Holcomb’s attractive, in a rugged, sordid kind of way, so I understand the physical draw, but what moved Maggie to love him, or at least tell me she did, I can scarcely say. Her heart seemed so unyielding to me in this regard that I assumed all men were unlikely to snare her affections.
However irrational it may sound, I cared for Maggie almost immediately. Couldn’t help myself. We met my second week in town. I had quit my job teaching high school after my first year proved disastrous and drove two hours east to settle here because I believed the atmosphere of the place, its “rich literary tradition,” as the brochures called it, would be conducive to my desire to become, once and for all, a writer. Maggie was throwing a party at her bookstore—she’s always throwing parties, it seems—this one was to commemorate the five-year anniversary of the bookstore’s grand opening—and I was working part-time at the public library and had somehow been included in the invite with the rest of the employees.
I biked to her bookstore after work. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the bookstore was in the old Cartwright house, the Author’s childhood home. It was a prime location for such a store too, nestled between a popular bed-and-breakfast and a café renowned for its molasses pies. Two gauzy willows drooped on either side of the entrance, obscuring most of the house’s beautiful frontage—including those lovely bay windows—from the street view. The heavy tangles of the willows pulled at my dress shirt as I stooped to pass under them and open the double front door to the glory inside.
Maggie often claimed she had refused countless requests from national magazines to do photo spreads of the interior of her bookstore when it first opened. When she bought it (at auction and presumably for a song), the house was all but condemned, the splintery walls and floors crumbling into themselves like stale bread. She completely gutted the inside and restored the rooms on the first floor to the appearances of an upper-class home of the late 1940s, furnishing them with stained-glass lamps, dark oak coffee tables, hard-cushioned couches with claw feet, and—in what must have once been the dining room—a baby grand piano, shining like a new car, side by side with an ancient and clattery cash register that Maggie insisted on using to do business. Each wall had a built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcase crowded with books—new and old, best seller and classic alike—shelved in no particular order. “Alphabetizing,” she was wont to say to her customers, “kills the mystery. Let the book find you, darling.” The second floor housed all the first editions and rare finds; she was more particular about these, keeping them behind glass cases under lock and key. The attic was Maggie’s living area. “Not nearly as swank,” she had assured me, though I had never been invited up there to see for myself.
The night of the anniversary party, I expected to be ignored by most of the people attending: boozy intellectuals who care more about what witty joke they can come up with than they do about meeting new people—least of all someone like me, a burned-out high school teacher/clumsy librarian/wannabe writer. Perhaps the crowd was more diverse than all that, and I simply wasn’t in the mood to give them much of a chance to prove me wrong. The point is, there was free booze, so I helped myself to that and ignored the hell out of everybody else. By the time Maggie found me, I was squatting on the floor in a room that looked like it had once been a study or an office and was now the closest thing the bookstore had to a children’s section. At some point in the night, though I can’t recall when, I retrieved a glossy copy of Goodnight Moon and began to read it aloud to myself.
“You, sir,” Maggie said, pointing her finger and drawing closer. “A birdy tells me you think you’re a writer.” Her words oozed out of her mouth in a slow assembly line of exaggerated syllables, and I was immediately glad to realize she was drunker than I was. Otherwise, I’d have been intimidated by her and the way she stood over me, swaying, her gray dress drifting up her long body like smoke. “It’s in my blood,” she told me, plucking the book from my hands and carefully sliding it back into the shelf above my head, “to foster and care for the likes of you.” And she was dead serious. Before the night was over, she had introduced me to the current director of the board of trustees at the university, an easily romanced tree stump of a man. He was quick to inform me, after Maggie had left us to chat, that the curator of the Author’s house had just retired and suggested I put in my application for the position, claiming if I was good enough for Maggie, then I was good enough for him.
A week later, they hired me—her word carried that much weight.
Like many small towns, this one had its bevy of local luminaries, and Maggie, only thirty, had established herself as one of the most notable. She claimed, I would later learn, to be a distant relation to the Author, purporting to be a member of his east Tennessee line—“a distant branch.” Eager for anything concerning the Author, the town took her at her word (though some persnickety genealogists did express doubt) and began touting her as something of a living landmark. After its opening, her bookstore was added to the list of other official stops on the Great Author Tour, which was held every third Saturday and Sunday of the month. Her connection to her “Old Uncle,” as she called him, bestowed upon her bookstore more panache than it would have otherwise garnered by itself even though it was already strategically located in the Author’s childhood home, which helped to ensure—many believed, including me—its overwhelming success.
Her bloodline must give writers like Holcomb ideas about legacy and whatnot. I know because, well, it gives me the same ideas too.
AT SOME POINT DURING THE WALK, Holcomb laces his meaty arm into mine and begins to pontificate. Before tonight, we had never been in the same room; nevertheless, he seems intent on telling me the most private aspects about himself, like he’s trying to stranglehold me into an intimacy he knows I want no part of. For some time, he goes on and on about the feeling that passes over him when he first wakes up in the morning. “Those bright few seconds,” he is saying, “I lie there in my bed and am not myself. I am not Bradley Holcomb, but just—I don’t know, you know?—pure animal, pure need. Need to piss. Need to fuck. Need to—to . . . be. Really incredible, and disheartening, when my ego clicks back into place and I remember who I am.” Here, he pauses, gives me time to reflect, squeezes my arm. “You know what I mean?”
No, I tell him, I don’t.
His face is splotchy. Which doesn’t surprise me since he drank three glasses of scotch before we left the bookstore.
He asks me what I’m currently working on, and I tell him that it’s a story about my gay uncle. Eyes wide, he says, “My god, aren’t we all!” Then, perhaps now bored with me, he glances at the pair of women in front of us, their heads tilted together. “They’re discussing us, you know,” he says to me, winking.
His arm finds its way around my neck. “Can you feel them ahead of us?” he asks quietly. “Their warm bodies moving, the pumping of blood?”
My silence makes him laugh and prompts him to put me in an awkward headlock. “Les belles dames sans merci!” he says, and Maggie and Gilly stop and turn around.
In trying to remove his arm from around my neck, I unintentionally engage him in an impromptu wrestling match. We roughhouse in the street, both of us gasping and coughing like much older men.
“You’ll hurt him,” Maggie says, and I’m not sure if she’s talking to me or Holcomb. Gilly, meanwhile, clicks her tongue disapprovingly, and says, “Gentlemen.”
As if directed, he releases me, and somehow both of us lose our footing at the same time and tumble down the shallow ditch beside the road. The women laugh at us, the beautiful noise filling up the darkness. It’s almost midnight, and the houses on this street are quiet and seem closed off to us, their occupants fast asleep by now, and the sound of Maggie’s and Gilly’s laughter must be apparent only to the lightest of sleepers, resonating on the outermost boundaries of their consciousness. On the wet ground, flat on my back, I imagine how both wonderful and sad it must be to have such a dream, a part of it true and never knowing about it.
Holcomb’s the first to rise. Looking up at the women, he places his hand over his heart and closes his eyes. “I met a lady in the meads,” he shouts. “Full beautiful—a faery’s child, her hair was long, her foot was light, and her eyes were wild!”
Gilly steps to the edge of the ditch. “You shut that up—you’ll wake the world.”
“Aw, baby doll.” Holcomb clambers up to the road and reaches for her, but she slaps him away. He shrugs and goes for Maggie, hoisting her over his shoulder and spinning her around and around. I scurry up the ditch and reach them about the time Holcomb and Maggie have stopped spinning and are, instead, kissing. On the mouth. Right in front of us.
I look at Gilly. “This is bullshit,” I tell her. She smiles and shrugs, as if to say, What can you do?
Ignoring us, Maggie and Holcomb don mock-serious expressions and, gazing intently into each other’s faces, appear to speak in a new way that doesn’t require words. Then, coming to some agreement between themselves, they straighten their backs, clasp hands, and begin to dance. In fact, they tango—gleefully moving in the direction of the cemetery, Holcomb humming a Spanish lullaby along the way to keep them in step.
ON THE GREAT AUTHOR TOUR, the guides save the Death Trace for last. Here, visitors are treated to a small footpath that curves through the woods beside the Author’s house to a low-level scrub of land near the river. In the dry summers, the ground is not much more than a circle of dust and red clay, but when the heavy rains come in spring and fall, the river spills into the woods and floods the Death Trace, turning the trail into a swampy pond.
Reports of what happened to the Author on the trace vary. Here’s the one I believe: One stormy night in March, a loud clap of thunder spooked Bathsheba from her stable. Hearing her desperate whinnies as she trundled into the woods, the Author took off after her. The water had already reached his knees by the time he made it to the brush, but he kept on, sloshing down the path, calling out Bathsheba’s name. He found the old girl tangled in the briar patch at the end of the trace. Her left hoof was broken clean off, and the river water was rising up around them at an alarming rate. He anchored down beside the beast in the muck, and together they faced the storm. The next day, after the waters had receded, his maid found them tangled around each other. No one knows exactly why he stayed with the horse. Scholars blame depression. Romantics, heartache and loneliness. Many in town say it’s foolish to dwell on the motives of a drunk.
WHEN GILLY AND I catch up to them in the cemetery, they have transitioned from the tango to a spunky fox-trot around the Author’s tombstone. The night’s warm air feels denser among the graves, almost as if the mix of concrete and tombs and old bodies has congealed it. A few live oaks, with their swaying feathery tops, form a canopy and blot out the stars, leaving us, if it were not for a few nearby streetlamps, in complete darkness. Gilly and I sit cross-legged on the ground at the foot of the Author’s grave. We have been defeated, the two of us, but Gilly seems more at ease with the loss than I do. She begins to sing, rocking her head back and forth, and the song is something French and sad. Maggie and Holcomb’s dance slows, turns into something intimate and unbearable to watch.
“Why are we still here?”
Gilly stops midsong and taps me on the wrist. “She said I could have you if she could keep him for a little while longer.”
I meet her eyes, and we laugh, her face mostly obscured in shadow.
“Don’t I get a say?”
She kisses me. “Do you want one?”
I don’t answer. Instead, we return to watching the couple as if they were characters in a play. Holcomb whispers something into Maggie’s ear, and as she lifts her head to listen, the light from a streetlamp catches her face, and I see how, at that moment, she appears so achingly happy, the sheer brilliance of it nearly knocks me out. I know she’s forever lost to me.
Bottles of whiskey and bourbon circle the base of the tombstone. Gilly gestures to them, and says, “My mother would find this behavior offensive.” At first, I misunderstand and think she’s referring to Holcomb and Maggie. “My mother wrote a book about the Author. She’s the one who discovered his liquor of choice was Four Roses Bourbon.” She waves her arms at the booze. “Not this down-market swill.”
This talk frustrates me. She frustrates me, I realize, in a way I can’t quite understand. So I nod to her husband, intent on picking a fight. “He seems pretty pleased with himself.”
“Pleased?” She considers the word. She blinks and finally shakes her head. She snatches a clod of dirt and throws it at the tombstone, knocking over a bottle of Jim Beam. “Yes, he’s pleased. Pleased to be here. Pleased with his book, yes. Pleased to have a wife who’ll allow him to fuck just about anything he wants. But with himself? No—and there’s the sadness of it all. With himself, he’s never pleased.”
She undoes her wasp’s-nest tangle of hair, and blue-black curls suddenly fall about her shoulders, framing her face. “That urge,” she says, “to create, to make something out of nothing—it’s liable to trample over everything else. Best not to make a fuss. To let it pass on through.”
I don’t know what she’s talking about. I tell her so.
“You write. You must know the feeling, the selfishness.”
I shake my head.
“Ah, well, maybe you are not a real writer then. Maybe you are like me, one of those who likes the idea of being a writer but not the actual work of it.”
“Oh, brother.” I look above me to see if I can make out the steeple amid the network of branches and leaves, but it’s not there. Like the stars, it’s blocked. A few steps away, Maggie shifts herself in Holcomb’s arms and bends over the tombstone. He’s careful and almost tender as he pushes up her skirt with one hand and braces her slight body with the other.
I move to kiss Gilly, but she stops me. “The girl,” she says hoarsely. “She doesn’t see that Holcomb can’t control himself. That he’ll fly away. I’m worried for her.”
“The fuck you say.”
“No, really. He won’t be good for her.”
In front of us, Maggie holds on to the sides of the tombstone; Holcomb’s fingers grip her shoulders, and his hips rise to meet hers. Then he settles himself deep inside her. Their moans start softly at first. Gilly moves closer to me but mumbles something to herself—a poem or perhaps a prayer. I’m not sure. She allows me to kiss her this time, and I push her flat to the ground and cover her body with my own.
AFTER THE AUTHOR’S DEATH, scholarship on him grew to an unprecedented, fevered pitch. He had many biographers, but none of them were as persistent as Dr. Lane Douglas. She grew up in a city on the West Coast, reading the Author’s gothic tales of the Deep South. They consumed her. When finished with his novels and his collected and uncollected stories and the few vagrant poems here and there, she moved to the books about him and his work. Here, she hit a snag. The books, to her estimation, were unsatisfactory in scope and analysis—especially the material about his personal life. She had troubled over every word he’d ever written and felt these “scholars” had only glimpsed the artist—unlike them, she saw the man in full and was desperate to know even more: his favorite color, the way he made his bed. Everything.
She studied at good universities, earning a doctorate in literature by the time she was twenty-five. Her dissertation on the Author’s treatment of female characters in his early novels won her the respect of her committee and was published by a large university press. After an ill-fated dalliance with a fellow graduate student, which left her bloated with pregnancy, she took a tenure-track position at a small liberal arts college in New Orleans—not the best of options, to be sure, for someone with her qualifications, but she had her reasons for honing in on this place to live. Her next project would focus on the wife of the Author. This woman had lived the rest of her life in the Garden District after leaving him, and Dr. Douglas was determined to unearth the mysteries surrounding her, this strange librarian the Author had chosen to love. That would be her life’s work—to understand the workings of the heart of one of the greatest artists of our time. Perhaps she believed her discoveries would alter the very bedrock of criticism surrounding the Author. Perhaps she thought that if she understood the type of person the Author had loved then she might know if he could have ever convinced himself to love someone like her. Eventually, Dr. Douglas gave birth to a screaming baby girl, a lump of warm skin that never inspired the maternal instinct, if such a thing exists, which Dr. Douglas strongly doubted.
As it turned out, the wife of the Author kept few records, rarely wrote letters, and made very little impression on the people in her neighborhood. Somehow, she had managed to fade out of existence without disturbing too much of the world around her, which must be recognized as a feat in itself. In the end, Dr. Douglas’s dogged persistence turned up very little. A safe-deposit box was discovered, but it contained only some unimportant knickknacks: a silver dollar, some tattered gloves, and—perhaps most perplexing—a postcard from Sweden with the word soon written on the back of it in what was undoubtedly the Author’s hand. After years of fruitless research, Dr. Douglas began, in her hopelessness, to hate New Orleans and the quaint college full of addle-brained students who braved to enroll in her classes, and—to some degree—she even began to hate her daughter, who was always there in the background of her mother’s life needing something from her, something she couldn’t wholly give without resentment.
Gilly says her mother went for many years like this, full of spite. Until, that is, a writer showed up one day at their door. Gilly was sixteen, and he was burly but articulate: a Virginian. He claimed that he’d read her mother’s “insightful” book on the Author and realized that she, Gilly’s mother, knew more about writing than any other person alive. He charmed them both, and her mother, it was no surprise, superimposed her obsessions with the Author onto him, this little upstart. She nurtured the young writer in every way: She gave him long, detailed notes on his writings and invited him to move into their small flat and, eventually, share her bed. “And we were a family,” Gilly says. “For a while.” But the problem with the happy years in a life is that they move by too quickly and rarely make it into the story proper.
When it became clear to the college that Dr. Douglas would not produce another book, they quietly asked her to leave, denying her tenure. About this time, one of Holcomb’s stories was accepted for publication by a well-respected magazine. Within months, he was offered a job teaching creative writing at a university.
“Not just any university either,” Gilly tells me. “But his university—the Author’s. And Holcomb didn’t ask us to tag along.” Gilly and I are now alone, in my bedroom, the night after our trip to the cemetery. We stink of each other’s bodies and need a hot bath. But she’s telling me so much, opening up so freely, that I can’t bring myself to move. She tells me about her mother as if she’s been waiting her whole life to talk about her, as if I’m the one person in the world she has chosen to listen. “My mother became desperate again when he left,” she says, and I rest my head in her lap.
Dr. Lane Douglas, failed scholar, jilted lover, had a new plan. She would write the book about the Author’s wife anyway. What she didn’t know, she would improvise, using her imagination, fabricating the sources here and there when called for. It took her a couple of months to finish it, and a small university press, lax in fact-checking, published it. At first, academia flocked to her book, dazzled by the wonderfully tragic story Dr. Douglas had crafted about the woman. The librarian and the Author were childhood sweethearts—in secret, of course, since the Cartwrights would never approve of his dating a mechanic’s daughter. After his return from France, they married and tried to start a family. Several miscarriages later, the childless couple began, heartbreakingly, to turn on each other until the Author turned away and took to the bottle. Yes, it was high drama—and most of it completely untrue. A couple of weeks after the book’s release, the first article was written to decry the falsehoods. In it, her book was spliced apart page by page for its “numerous and deliberate fallacies.” A firestorm erupted, and the university press felt compelled to pulp the book. Academics denounced her; professors around the country took to calling her Dr. Lie. In an interview with Charlie Rose, she appeared intoxicated—which she was—and admitted to everything. Back in Mississippi, the town, wanting some of the publicity for themselves, called a press conference and banned her from ever stepping foot inside their city limits.
“Wait a minute,” I ask, raising my head. “Is that even possible?”
“No matter—they put on a good show regardless, the damage was done.”
Gilly’s mother never recovered emotionally from the vicious haranguing. Her drinking—Four Roses bourbon only, large bottles of it—increased. One night in December, she blacked out in a school playground, and by morning, she had caught a severe case of pneumonia, which eventually spread to both of her lungs. She died a few weeks later.
“Histories sound so much more depressing when you lay them out like this, end to end.” Gilly nudges me from falling asleep, and I lift my head to kiss one of her hairy nipples. It’s lighter outside my bedroom window, almost morning. Very soon, she will start putting on her clothes: first her underwear and her bra, then her pants and her dingy top. She will brush her hair, tie it into a loose knot. Finally, she’ll tell me something that means, no matter what she says otherwise, goodbye. Goodbye and no more. But for now, she finishes her story. “Bradley came to her funeral. You should have seen him! All tears and blubber. You know how dramatic some Southerners can be. He practically proposed to me right there at her grave.”
AFTER GILLY LEAVES ME that morning, there’s silence in my life. Silence filled with repetition.
I go to work at the Author’s house. Give guided tours of his beautiful home. I bike to my apartment in the evenings. I eat frozen Hot Pockets. I watch reality TV. I read. I write. Maybe a sentence or two—nothing more. A month passes. Then two. Maggie finally calls me one morning.
“I need you,” she says, “to come to the bookstore.”
“What’s the matter?”
“What do you think?”
DO YOU WONDER WHY we ever took to calling it making love?
I do. The term implies that with repeated and rhythmic penetrations we can somehow bring forth from ourselves the abstraction of what we mean to one another—call it infatuation or lust or, if you must, even love—and make this abstraction, transform it, into something tangible and concrete, some knot of magic that we can hold in our hands and show to one another, and say, “Look! This is it. We caught it.” I guess some want, in the end, what we do to be special and different from what the malodorous hippos do, rutting themselves silly in a jungle river. Maybe for a few of us it is different. Maybe the lucky and the beautiful experience this love-made-solid thing I’m talking about every goddamn day of their lives. In my experience, however, people always leave the love that cannot hold them; they just slip right on through the abstractness of it all. The steeplejack left the debutante. The librarian left the Author. The writer left the scholar. And now the married couple leaves the single misfits to fend for themselves.
Critics called Holcomb’s new novel a masterwork. It was short-listed for every major literary award soon after the night of the reading. Then a private college in New England contacted him, offered Holcomb a lighter teaching load with a substantial salary increase. Gilly and he went to visit the campus and never came back.
Maggie says, “For days I thought about flying up there and finding them.”
“And doing what?”
But she doesn’t say, so we sit quietly on the back steps of the bookstore and drink Diet Coke and vodka, and listen to an old Nina Simone record. We are tired. We’ve spent all morning outside, stacking Holcomb’s books into a great pile. Then we dosed them in kerosene. Maggie lit a match and tossed it on top of the books. Presently, we are watching them burn. Holcomb’s books pop and sizzle, their gluey insides unfolding before us like bloated marshmallows. Smoke pillows around us, and Maggie raises her glass to the rising flames. “One day,” she says, “you’ll write about this summer.” She’s drunk—has been drunk ever since I came over. I gulp down my drink and tell her I may never write again. “Oh, you will,” she says bitterly. “You’re like him that way.”
When the fire burns out, she leads me upstairs to her room above the bookstore. It’s the afternoon, and light pools in from the windows, making strange patterns on the hardwood floor. We decide to close the blinds and shut the curtains. Still, the light ekes through and troubles us. We strip the comforter from her bed and duct-tape it over the windows. Now I can’t see a thing. “Much better,” I hear her say, and somehow in the darkness, she finds me, and we help each other undress. Then, all of a sudden, I hear sobbing. When she places a hand on my naked chest, I tremble and realize that it’s me: I’m the one who’s crying.
“This is what you want?” she says. “Isn’t it?”
“Of course, of course.”
In the long, bright afternoon, we cleave to each other, our sad, wet bodies, and I blurt out everything I can think to tell her—all my feelings, all my regrets. “Yes,” she says, over and over. “Tell me, tell me.” And once I start, I can’t stop. I tell her how talented of a writer I am. I tell her how I want to be just like Holcomb only better, more successful. I tell her, my breath quickening, how I want to fuck his smell off of her. And Maggie—her thin body—can take it, every last bit, because she’s not there, not really. She’s eight hundred miles away, imagining the person in New England her body’s pretending I am in the dark.
WHEN I GIVE TOURS of the Author’s house, I always explain to the guests that many theories abound for why his wife left him, but this is what I believe to be true: She was second to his work. The whole trouble between them stemmed from that simple fact. After he won the big prize in Europe, she thought their relationship would change, deepen, mature; he would, at the very least, throw some attention her way. He didn’t. Instead, he became more feverish in his desire to write—we know that he was working on three different projects at the time of his death. Like any talent, his was his greatest strength and his greatest weakness.
But what do I know? I’m just the curator.
I now stay late at his house, hours after the last guest signs the register and leaves. Maggie drives over in the evening. Our late nights have become ritual. We traipse over the velvet rope cording off the entrance to his bedroom. The twin mattress can barely hold the two of us. Around us, on the walls, his indelible charcoal etchings plot out the various lives of his characters, the words gleaming fiercely in the buttery light of the old-fashioned bulbs.
“It’s all a lie,” Maggie says once, running a finger along the dark marks. “I’m not really related to him.”
“You’re not?”
“Does it matter so much to you if I am?”
I pull her close, and the bed squeaks. “No, no—of course not.”
She always leaves first after we finish—she never stays—and later, I kill the lights to the old house and bike back to my apartment alone. On the way, I sometimes ride down the Death Trace. The trail’s well-worn and easy to negotiate even at night. I pause at the bottom, where the Death Trace ends, and bellow out an old verse or two, something ornate, something I’m sure the Author would like to hear if he could. And the night swallows up my voice and spits back another, one that’s all haggard from years of pipe smoke and hard living, so like how I imagine the Author’s sounded. But, of course, this isn’t really him. It’s nothing more than a distorted echo, a trick of sound bouncing back to me through the trees—my desperate voice pleading to be heard by someone other than my own fool self.