THE FOLLOWING MORNING, AFTER I offered my resignation, Suriyaarachchi said, “But you’d be turning down a full-fledged producer credit, which would be a real shame.”
“On Dead Hank’s Boy?”
“That ship has sailed, my friend, no. I’m talking about our new project.”
“A documentary,” Dave said.
“About?”
“Your boyfriend down the hall. Dave, show the man.”
Dave held out a copy of yesterday’s New York Post. “Page nine.”
I looked from Dave to Suriyaarachchi to the Post in my hands. The headline: “Brick Suspect Rips Rudy’s Homeless Policy.” I thumbed past the movie listings. Page 9. There were three stories here. One involved a retired television weatherman convinced that a coming storm would wash away the sins of the city and was building an ark on the roof of his Cobble Hill brownstone. The neighbors had filed a court injunction against it. The man’s name was, improbably, Fludd. Another was an update on the kidnapping of a Queens woman’s two-year-old—it turned out the whole thing was a hoax. To what end was not made clear.
The third story was about Arthur: “Local Writer Sued—by His Own Family.” The article began, “Herald Square resident Arthur Morel, who has made waves in literary circles, now finds himself in deep water with his family upon the release of his latest effort, The Morels. Franklyn Wright, Mr. Morel’s father-in-law, has filed a defamation suit on behalf of his daughter and grandson. Mr. Morel’s openly autobiographical book makes explicit mention of an act of incest between himself and his then-eight-year-old son. Mr. Wright claims the portrayal of his daughter and grandson in such a manner constitutes unfair and damaging use of their names for the express purpose of furthering Mr. Morel’s own career. Mr. Morel could not be reached for comment.”
“And?” I said, handing the paper back to Dave.
“And!” Suriyaarachchi spread out his hands and jumped. Ta-da! “There is no and. This is it, baby! This is the movie that’s going to make us famous.”
“But we’re out of money. You said it yourself.”
“Let me worry about that. Tell me you’re not itching to get out there and shoot again. Look at me and tell me honestly.”
“But a documentary? They lack something. Michael Moore on the red carpet looks like a boom operator who wandered in by mistake. And you’re forgetting what production was like. We’re not equipped.”
“But we are equipped. A camera, a subject, a place to edit. That’s the beauty.”
“What about my script?” I said.
Suriyaarachchi gave me a look: What script?
“The one I’ve given you three times already but you keep losing!”
“That one. I don’t know. Dave, what did you think?”
“It was a little derivative.”
“Too many long speeches. And Mexican standoffs. Leave that stuff to Tarantino and John Woo. I keep telling you, you want to make your mark, you’ve got to do something different.”
“Anyway,” Dave said, “that’s a narrative feature. It would be months before we could begin shooting. Even if we did it on the cheap.”
“With this documentary we could be shooting tomorrow. Tomorrow! And be wrapped with a final edit in time for next year’s festivals. We wouldn’t have to reenter a movie that’s already been rejected”—the envelopes were already coming back to us—“we would have this new effort, a film that would be even stronger for us having been through Dead Hank’s Boy. And if we got the attention of a distributor? It could only be good news. It’s leverage.”
“A two-picture deal.”
“I was up all night thinking about it.”
“The only problem is your subject,” I said.
“Arthur?”
“He’s awkward.”
“He is awkward,” Dave said.
“And,” I said, “he’s a writer. This lawsuit aside, I don’t think you’re going to find he’s much of a subject. It’s not like he’s Salman Rushdie or anything.”
“Rushdie would be a subject,” Dave said.
“I think he’s still in hiding.”
“He came out for a cameo on Seinfeld.”
“That wasn’t Rushdie. I saw that episode. That was someone who Kramer thought was Rushdie.”
“It wasn’t Rushdie? Are you sure?”
“Look,” Suriyaarachchi said, “you don’t have to have a price on your head to be interesting.”
“It doesn’t hurt,” Dave said.
“What about the crazy weatherman,” I said. “I think he’d make a great subject.”
I was dissembling, of course. From the moment Dave handed me the paper, I knew where this was headed, and I didn’t want any part. Despite Suriyaarachchi’s claim, we couldn’t start shooting tomorrow because, for one, we didn’t have Arthur. And this was where I came in: the one who could bring him around. Luckily, I was still feeling hurt and angry at the both of them from the day before, or I wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to refuse. It struck me as unseemly, trying to capitalize on the very real turmoil the Morels were going through. And then there was the mess with Penelope; just thinking about it tightened a knot in my chest. But Suriyaarachchi worked on me all day long. He bought me lunch, kept calling me “the man,” laughing hysterically at any little thing I said.
“Just think,” he said, “this would be your project. No more running errands, no more ‘associate’ producer. You’d be a full partner in this. An equal voice in all creative decisions. And I’m planning on funding it without my parents’ help, which would make your license in these decisions that much more free.”
A few days later, against my better judgment, I went to knock on the Morels’ door. To say that I had refused Suriyaarachchi may be an overstatement. In fact, I told him that I would have to think about it and, having thought about it some, came around to the idea of a documentary about Arthur. Although they lacked the glamour of narrative features, there was something pure about documentaries; they were more serious, higher-brow. And despite what I had said to Suriyaarachchi, Arthur did seem to be a good subject—the perfect subject, in fact. He said and did things that got him into trouble. What could be more entertaining than that? And to the question of using the misfortunes in his life for our gain, I thought: this is what artists do. No need to make it sound so sinister. It offered a way for me to face Arthur again, a way for me to make it up to him. In my fantasy—a fantasy that Suriyaarachchi encouraged—this movie would make Arthur famous. I would be doing him a service, I reasoned, while atoning for my sins.
The door was open. A red suitcase blocked my way in. I stepped over it and called out, “Hello?” There was someone here. I could hear sounds coming from elsewhere in the apartment. I called out again and walked down the short corridor toward the bedroom. The light was on in the bathroom, door partway open, and when I peeked in I saw Penelope crouched at the cabinet under the sink. Stuffing things at random, it seemed, into her purse. I tapped my knuckle on the door.
She screamed, wheeled around. “What are you doing?” She stood up, then elbowed past me out of the bathroom.
I followed.
She said, “I thought I told you to stay away.”
I told her I had been, but something had come up, an opportunity—she could be a part of it. That I’d like to make her a part of it, if she was willing.
She didn’t appear to be listening. “Look,” she said. “Something’s happened, and I’m just, I’m on my own. I have to deal with it on my own.” She was in the bedroom now, pulling open dresser drawers and tossing clothes by the handful into an open suitcase on the bed. I want to say she had been crying, but her eyes weren’t red or puffy. I might say they were a little shiny, and in her high sweet voice there was a new throatiness, a new depth.
I said, “I read about the lawsuit in the paper. How are you holding up?”
“The lawsuit,” she repeated. “Oh, the lawsuit. That’s just my father being crazy.” She zipped the suitcase and jerked it up off the bed onto the floor. “Will!” The place was ransacked. The dresser’s drawers remained yanked open, a pair of stockings spilling out. The closet was empty but for a few full-length dresses.
“I hope this isn’t because of us,” I said. “Please don’t leave because of us. You two can still work it out.”
Penelope glanced past me to make sure nobody was there and then narrowed her eyes at me. “I told you never to mention that,” she hissed. “There is no us. I told you that, too.”
“Then where are you going?”
“I tried,” she said. “I tried with him, but there’s only so much I can do. At a certain point, I’ve got to start being a mother. God, why did it take me so long to figure that out?” She clicked the suitcase handle into place and rolled it out of the room. “Will,” she shouted down the hall, “are you ready?”
I tried with him. Was she talking about Will or Arthur? I followed after her into the living room.
Will was kneeling at the television. “Hey,” he said to me.
Penelope said, “Where is your sleepover stuff?”
“I want to make sure it tapes. It’s the second episode in a two-part—”
“I told you, Will. We’re not coming back for a while.”
“But when we do come back—”
“Your sleepover stuff. Now.” Will got up and marched into his room.
“I know you have your hands full here,” I said, “and I don’t want to make things more complicated for you right now. But I have a thought—not a thought, more of a proposal—for you to think about on your way to wherever you’re going. Where are you going, by the way?”
“Jesus, just ask what you’re going to ask already.”
“I want an interview with you.”
“An interview.”
“We’re going to make a film. About Arthur, about your lives. You can be famous.”
“What is this? You want to film me? What for?”
“And Arthur. It would be a documentary.”
“Fucking unbelievable. You people are fucking unbelievable. It’s like a steamroller, a runaway steamroller. Will!”
Will stomped out of his room. “I’m packing,” he yelled. His voice was angry, but his eyes were afraid.
“Forget it. We’re leaving. Now. Out the door.” She ushered Will into the hallway. “Hit the button,” she called, following him, leaving me standing in the center of the room. She didn’t bother to close the door on her way out.
I related this run-in to Suriyaarachchi, who said, “Don’t worry about her, she’ll come around.” He rubbed his hands together. “So the plot thickens!”
The next day, I tried knocking on their door again, half expecting it to be open, but it wasn’t, and nobody answered. I had Arthur’s cell number and tried that a few times, but it was going straight to voice mail. The campus directory at Columbia put me in touch with the Writing Division, and the woman who answered the phone said he had office hours on Thursdays. It was Friday.
“Isn’t he around any other day?”
“He’s here now, but I couldn’t say how much longer he’ll stay. Most people leave early on Fridays.” I thanked her and told Suriyaarachchi that I would be back later.
I arrived at the doorway to Arthur’s office, flushed and out of breath. “I’ve been looking for you.”
He was seated at his desk, stack of papers in front of him. He looked up. “What do you want?”
Despite Penelope’s claim, it seemed clear to me that the frantic business of her packing was the direct result of our affair. I was certain it had caused this final tumult in their lives—a shouting match that ended with her throwing the fact of her infidelity in his face. Arthur’s abruptness appeared to confirm it.
“Nothing urgent,” I said. “Mostly just concerned.”
He gave me a frown. The office was dim and windowless, barely big enough for one of the two enormous desks here. Whoever occupied the one opposite Arthur was not here now, though there were signs of a recent vacancy: unfinished e-mail on the monitor, a Tupperware container open next to the keyboard: pasta, fork with a bite twirled neatly around resting on the lid.
“That’s Don,” Arthur said, seeing where I was looking.
“I tried calling. And knocking and ringing your doorbell. Where have you been?”
He was unshaved, hair uncombed, shirt untucked. He watched me for a moment and then, as if to wish me gone, returned his attention to his papers. I sat down at the unoccupied desk, waiting for him to tell me what he knew, readying my apology.
“Don’s coming back,” he said without looking up. And then, putting down his pen, “Penelope left me. She took Will.”
“Oh no,” I said. Then, testing the waters, “What happened?”
“I came home last night,” Arthur said. “There was a reading up here, over at eight. I thought she might be picking Will up from the neighbors’. Then I saw the bedroom.”
Closet empty. Dresser empty.
He called her cell—straight to voice mail. He sat down on the bed, pulled a coat hanger out from under his seat. He tossed it on the floor with the others. He had always thought that he would one day end up alone—that his luck would one day run out. So in this way, the discovery was not an unexpected one. After all, who could love someone like him? What was there to love? He was too literal, too humorless and detached, with a self-destructive streak a mile long. Arthur would say to Penelope during their first year of marriage, You’re going to leave me. At first she would protest, reassure him that she wouldn’t, then later it would provoke an argument. Do you want me to leave? Is that it? You can’t handle being married? Is it too hard for you? Somewhere along the way he’d stopped saying it, though he hadn’t stopped thinking it, which was maybe why this scene he’d walked in on was not shocking, why it felt like some piece of bad news he’d known for some time though hadn’t been officially told to him.
What did surprise him was the panic. He’d recently gone after a student for describing a character as being in the grip of panic. Why does panic always have to grip? Can’t panic do other things? Can’t it flog or pinch or startle or finger? Why always grip? But sitting there on the bed, he felt very much in its grip. His ribs pressed in on him, he had trouble catching his breath, he felt squeezed, felt his pulse ticking loudly in his head, his thoughts trapped in his skull. He got up, paced the apartment.
Will’s room was similarly ransacked of things.
He called Penelope again, and again got her voice mail, again stopped short of leaving a message.
Where had she gone? Where had she taken Will?
He dialed the Wrights. Constance answered. She doesn’t want to speak with you, she said. That was it. She hung up. Arthur called back, but this time got the recorded voice of Frank declaring that nobody was home.
Arthur was not a man of action and would not have imagined he’d be one to hail a taxi to the airport, no plan other than to see his wife and son, to wait standby for a flight to Dulles, yet there he was, no overcoat, no change of clothes, still gripped—yes, gripped—by a feeling that some terrible change was taking place, had already taken place, while he wasn’t paying attention, and that he was entirely at fault. It was up to him to make it right. But what could he do, what could he say to make things right? He had tried. For the past two weeks, he had tried—but had obviously failed miserably.
“Why didn’t you just take the train,” I asked.
“Haven’t you been listening? I was in a panic. And we usually fly when we see Penelope’s parents—Will’s not good with sitting for long periods.”
His name was the last to be called, his seat between a pair of squabbling young boys. Their mother came over to apologize several times and to scold each into sitting quietly in his seat, but Arthur couldn’t help noticing that she didn’t offer to switch places with him. He felt a sudden pang of sadness for Penelope, who didn’t have the luxury of this mother—her ignorance of him or her freedom from him. Penelope was stuck, forced to carry with her the burden of knowing him and sharing a child. She wanted out—her parents had finally convinced her—and here he was, following her. She wanted to be left alone. To be free of him. Why couldn’t he leave her be?
But this empathy for his wife passed, and in its place came a wave of self-pity. His students loved him; he was their hero. He stood cornered after the reading the night before by a gaggle of them, eager for his esteem, eager to prove that they too understood literature’s power and importance. The fluorescent overheads were too bright for a cocktail party, but under their glare he had a cup of white wine, and then another. He enjoyed their belief in him, in what he’d written; it must be how a revolutionary feels after leaving home—family furious at being abandoned and put at risk—to arrive in the basement of his comrades, welcomed warmly as a fellow soldier, admired for the sacrifice he’s made of his family for the greater good of the cause. These were his true believers, fellow revolutionaries. They regarded him with awe, with respect. He stayed as long as he dared in that corner with a second, then a third, cup of wine, just to hear them talk, to have them ask him questions.
Overheard at the start of the semester, while passing a fellow faculty member’s office: One book does not a writer make. Had they been talking about him? Probably. He had not made friends among his cohorts. It was more important to have the alliance of faculty than his students. Full-time positions were not determined by student evaluations. Penelope urged him to invite his colleagues to dinner, to get to know the dean. Penelope was smart in these matters. It was all Penelope’s dream—the novelist husband, the distinguished professor—not his. One book. Whoever said it was right. He should have quit while he was ahead.
But he didn’t quit. Something compelled him to keep going, to seek publication. What was it he was doing? What was he trying to say? It was something Penelope had asked relentlessly, day after day, these two long weeks, and when he answered her, she assumed he was hiding his true intentions. But he wasn’t. If there were other motives, motives behind the reasons he gave her, then these motives were hidden, even from himself. Yet he could say this for certain: whatever he was trying for in that book, whatever possessed him to write what he wrote, these ambitions were not the same as, or even related to, the ambitions Penelope wanted for him—the academic ladder, lucrative book contracts—they were not the ambitions of even his most idealistic students either: he wasn’t aiming for great literature, to add to or dismantle the canon or reveal some hidden aspect of human nature or prove some political or philosophical point or make innovative use of language or form or style. They weren’t necessarily the ambitions of a writer at all. They were, if anything, related to his notions of art from many years ago, when he was studying music.
His old composition teacher worshipped at the feet of the “great” composers. He played Arthur recordings of the established living masters, “bearers of the torch,” he used to say, as though each of these men from different parts of the world, from different generations, shared the same aim, an aim that his teacher could never articulate clearly to Arthur. As if Bartók’s curatorial notions of his countrymen’s folk music were in any way related to the playful, kaleidoscopic symmetries that flowed from Mozart’s brain. For a while, Arthur would allow himself to become enamored of a composer or a certain contemporary school of thought—new serialism, indeterminacy, minimalism—feeling each time that yes, this was the answer. But then he would decide that the theory fell short in some way, didn’t account for some music, unwritten, that was inside of him, needing only to be unlocked.
However these composers and schools of thought failed individually, they failed collectively in the same way: the music was all dead on arrival. For every piece of music, once written down, was merely a description of itself, its true purpose a set of instructions. And to perform that set of instructions was merely to describe the description. It was to confuse the act of cooking with the act of reading a recipe out loud. True music was not created by instruments squawking out noises specified on a page. It was not to be written down. It was not to be thought about, codified into some school of thought—somewhere along the line, music found itself divorced from one of its more powerful, primal purposes.
Catharsis.
“It’s an antiquated notion,” Arthur said. “The lost art of ancient bards with their lyres. It’s been replaced by a more general suggestion that music should quote-unquote ‘move people,’ that it should activate the emotions in some way, but on the whole, people who make music—composers, performers—disown themselves from this responsibility: it’s up to the audience to feel what it will and is generally out of the hands of the person onstage. And many contemporary composers have taken it a step further—they reject the notion that music should do anything at all, that, in fact, to actively try to provoke a feeling in a listener is a futile effort at best and, at worst, a manipulative act better left to the hacks who score movies and, as such, something any serious-minded composer ought to avoid. So freed from any and all obligations to a listener, the contemporary composer is free to annoy—or more likely bore—that listener to death.”
Catharsis: to cleanse, to purge. According to my dogeared college dictionary, “an emotional purification through art, intended to renew the spirit.” Or “to rid oneself of a fixation by allowing it direct expression.” An appealing idea for Arthur, one that came to him not through his time at music school but at home, in the process of teaching himself French.
His parents’ bookcase at home was a special kind of library. Guests were free to take any book they wanted as long as, in its place, they donated one of their own. It was a tradition his parents began before he was born and continued to this day. It was better than any public library, they claimed, bringing them into contact with titles they would never have chosen on their own. (The spring of 1976 saw the sole, important amendment to the rules: the book donated must not already exist in the bookcase—after they noticed their shelves overrun by dozens of copies of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, threatening to overtake their entire library like a virus.) They received books of all kinds, many in languages other than English, and during Arthur’s foray into the French language, he scoured the bookshelves for titles a little more challenging than Le Petit Prince. Arthur found a book by one Louis Moulinier entitled Le Pur et l’Impur dans la Pensée des Grecs, which seemed to describe, if he was reading correctly, cathartic traditions and rituals in ancient Greece.
In it, he learned that Greeks practiced music as a kind of medicine, as a way of keeping the “humors” in balance. In order to purge evil humors, the musicians would invoke them through their music—similia similibus curantur, “like curing like”—in the way that Achilles cleansed himself of the murder of Thersites by washing his hands in the ritual blood of a sacrificed piglet: blood purified through blood. In this way, Arthur learned, the Greek purged himself, through music, of all sorts of bad stuff. And it wasn’t only the audience that was the beneficiary of this treatment: the musicians themselves and the composers were cleansed as well.
As Arthur read this (as it happened, at the same time struggling with a cadenza for the concerto he was to perform), it seemed he had unearthed an essential truth about art, long forgotten—a truth he himself knew but had never been able to articulate before.
It was a notion that came to inform his writing once he found himself engaged in the activity. When he’d finally gotten around to Aristotle’s Poetics, he was struck by this sentence: “Tragedy is an imitation of an event that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude, being found in action, not of narrative.”
So, then. The main thing was action, not narrative.
Then what was one to do with a novel, which was narrative in nature? Even scenes that “showed” rather than “told” in a novel were, at core, narrated. How could you overcome what was in essence, your very definition? Was there such a book that could achieve this ideal and still be a book? Actions, however well described are still descriptions of actions—narratives—and not the same as the actions that unfold on a stage, witnessed by a live audience. Books amounted to nothing but fancy stage directions, all potential, no action.
If a book were to overcome such a shortcoming, it would have to be less about what it contained—its story—and more to do with the action on the part of its author—what the author himself was doing or appeared to be doing.
“Like Hemingway,” I suggested. “The hunter who writes about hunting.”
“No,” Arthur says. “Not like Hemingway.” He makes a face. I can see I’ve gotten it totally wrong. He’s disappointed.
Arthur had written several shorter pieces of fiction and with each one felt his craft improving, and although he enjoyed a certain satisfaction in writing them, he was unable to get any closer to this notion of what he felt literary art should be. It was only after he had completed his first novel—in the doldrums between books, ready to give up—that it came to him. In fact, it had been there all along, on his bookshelf—seen so often that it had become invisible.
He had discovered it as a college student, shelving books at the Queens College Library, a job he was terrible at. He’d wheel a full cart into the small rickety service elevator with every intention of doing his job, and yet there he’d be, three hours later, kneeling in the PQs, paging through the unexpurgated 120 Days of Sodom, shelving cart parked in a corner, still full. Yet when, at the end of a shift, he slipped out having only put away half-a-dozen books, nobody seemed to notice. It was a place to daydream literature. It was during one of these daydreams that Arthur discovered PR6068.U757 S27. He was about to shelve it when he noticed the title: The Satanic Verses. Rushdie back then was a prominent news story—the ayatollah only a year prior had levied the holy bounty on the author’s head. Arthur imagined the book—from the furor it had caused and his misunderstanding of the facts—to be some slim document written in Arabic, an unrelenting tirade against Iranians and all that they stood for, whatever that was. His half-brother Benji, whom he was living with at the time and who was outspoken about all matters of cultural debate, declared it only fitting that the book should have sent him into hiding, for it was so poorly written—and when the issue came up in a class Arthur had been auditing the semester prior, he parroted Benji’s condemnation of the book. Yet to Arthur’s surprise there in the library, the book was nothing like what he had expected. First of all, it was in English. The “About the Author” on the last page revealed that Rushdie wasn’t even Iranian—he was from India. The book was big, bursting at the seams. It was at turns lyrical and funny and crass and intellectually challenging.
The burgundy clothbound tome, its library call letters on a strip of white adhesive at the bottom of its spine. Arthur was still on record for owing the eighty-dollar replacement fee. He had kept renewing it, intending on finishing it, but never did. In fact, he hadn’t gotten any farther than he had in that initial enthusiastic burst at the library so many years ago.
He took it off the shelf and reread the opening passage. It begins with a startling image—two men falling out of the sky—suicide bombers who have leaped from a rigged jetliner just before an explosion. Do they get their wish? He couldn’t recall and did not read on to find out now, for it wasn’t the words or their meaning that interested Arthur—it was the action behind them. Here was a book that managed to achieve a certain cathartic ideal. It wasn’t the plot that was the power of this book. Or rather the plot managed to generate the actions that made this book into a powerful creative act. It had caused a series of events that flowed reflexively back to the author. The book, in a sense, was generating story. This he liked; this was interesting literary art.
“So write a book that will get banned. Is that the idea?”
“Not exactly.” Arthur described a man in Florida, a serial murderer, who wrote “stories” in which the protagonist rapes and strangles his victims, the protagonist matching an idealized version of the author and murders tactically similar to the murders he himself would commit, the victims of a similar type he himself might choose. When he was eventually caught, these stories, found on a shelf in his closet, were used as evidence against him in the trial. This, too, Arthur thought, was ideal fiction, powerful fiction, authentic documents of authorial action. It didn’t matter if these stories were poorly crafted—Arthur managed to obtain a copy of them, published by a fringe press under the title Killer Fiction—odd point-of-view shifts, basic grammar and style errors. The craft didn’t matter—the abrupt nonendings, the woodenness of dialogue, the flatness of character. They were essentially snuff fantasies, a kind of morbid pornography. Yet there was an Aristotelian perfection about them. It was an example of narrative catharsis—similia similibus curantur. Blood washing blood. It was why de Sade remained such a potent figure: it wasn’t the writing—for, really, the work, shocking though it is, in the end is just downright tedious—but rather the image of the author imprisoned for engaging in such acts, dreaming up these pages on his only available writing implements: toilet paper and his own blood. The writing becomes synonymous with the author. It’s not what’s written that matters; it’s that the author has written such a thing—the writing of the book as a performative act, a purgative, purifying act. Catharsis.
If Arthur had to define his modus operandi, it would be this: writing as performance.
Arthur disembarked from the plane at Dulles and found the rental counter. His only option that evening was a bright yellow Camaro, a stick shift. He’d never driven a stick before. The attendant made Arthur sign some kind of waiver before giving him a lesson around the parking lot.
Arthur lurched out. The seats were very low. It felt like he was driving lying down. Several cars on the highway honked and flashed their lights at him. He waved tentatively as they passed, thinking that perhaps he looked as ridiculous as he felt and these people were laughing at him, but after a while he realized he hadn’t turned on his lights. He groped around the dashboard, swerving, until he located them and flipped them on. When he arrived at the Wrights’, the window lights—dark upon his approach—went on one by one as he idled, trying to remember how to turn the lights off.
He had brought the gifts for Will—on his way out the door he pulled them down from the closet shelf before putting on his coat. As he hoisted himself out of the car, he dragged the enormous bag from the backseat, loaded down with two video-game consoles, three board games, and a poltergeist forensic kit. He limped with it up the front walk.
What had changed? Why had Penelope chosen this day to leave him? He could only think that her father was at the bottom of all this. His lawsuit, his corrosive anger. Since he’d filed the suit, he called the house daily. If Arthur answered, Frank would hang up. When Penelope answered, she would take the cordless into the bathroom and have long conversations from which she would emerge cantankerous, spoiling for a fight. Had her father finally gotten to her? But why wouldn’t she speak to him about it? It was unlike her. She was usually so vocal about things.
Arthur swayed there for a moment after pressing the bell. He pressed it again. He hadn’t imagined this scenario. Somehow, he thought that Constance would open the door to let him in, that he would be able to ascend the stairs to Penelope, to Will. He didn’t know what he would do when he saw them—his imagination didn’t go that far—but the important bit would be to have them there in front of him. Something would come. Their very presence would see to that. She would say something, and then Will would say something, and then Arthur would say something—at which point they would be talking and, from there, all roads led home. He would do whatever he had to, say whatever he had to, to have them back. But none of this could happen out here.
He stabbed at the doorbell, banged at the door with his fist. He yelled, Penelope! Will! He paced, banged some more. It was no good, no good! Even if Penelope did come to the door, it would be no good. To speak to her out here would be to lose them both. All roads, from out here, led to rift, to divorce. She would say something, he would say something, it didn’t matter, it would end, whatever was said, with her walking back inside and closing the door on him. These were the essential truths of body and action: to cross the threshold, to breach her father’s castle, was to win; to stand out here in the cold was to lose. He had to get in.
The lights came on downstairs by the entrance, but he remained staring at the closed door. He pressed the bell again, followed by a few raps with the door’s knocker. This produced some whispering on the other side of the door. Arthur tried peering through the lace gauze in the narrow side window. Constance, he said. It’s Art. Please. Let me in.
The curtain was yanked back by a hand, and Frank’s face appeared suddenly, sternly, nose to nose with Arthur. He shook his head slowly—so that it could have stood both for refusal as well as disappointment—and then disappeared again.
Arthur banged on the door, so hard it rattled the frame, rattled his teeth. He bellowed, Penelope! Will! Let me in!
He marched around to the rear, trudging the gift bag at his side, to the enclosed porch. The screen door was locked, but the door was outfitted at its base with a swinging panel for Curtis the Cat.
Arthur crawled down and managed, by turning himself sideways, to wedge himself in. Strands of spiderweb tickled his lips and clung to his face.
Hands planted, legs still outside, he heard the swoosh of the sliding back door and a sound that, never having heard it before in person nor ever having felt the cold steel of it on the back of his head, he knew nevertheless to be the cocking of a shotgun.
Back, Frank said.
Arthur moved to stand up.
No. The way you came. He nudged Arthur back with the tip of the gun.
Come on, Frank! I need to see my wife.
Not tonight, you don’t. Now go.
Arthur was forced to shimmy back out through the unyielding pressure of the gun barrel on his head. He stood up, facing his father-in-law through the screen door. He said, I can’t leave until I see them.
They don’t want to see you.
Why?
If you have to ask, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Just open the door, Frank. They stood staring at each other. It was clear Frank had no intention of letting Arthur pass. Arthur grabbed the handle of the screen door and rattled it.
Frank shouldered the shotgun and firmed his stance. I will blow your head off.
Arthur was suddenly furious. Do it! Do it! Shoot me, Frank. Go ahead—Penelope!
The whoosh of the sliding door again, and Constance, in pajamas, came out. Okay, okay, she said, her voice low, calm. Frank’s not going to shoot you. Frank, put down that thing. But you can’t come in, Arthur.
Constance, Arthur said.
The police are on their way, she said. A cordless phone was in her hand—she held it out, as if this were proof of what she said, and then brought it to her chest. Now go, she said. Penelope will talk to you when she’s ready.
I need to see her. I need to see my son.
Will, Constance said, her voice suddenly different—still calm but no longer soft. As long as I can help it, you will never lay another hand on that boy.
Up until this point, Arthur had been in the dark about Penelope’s sudden retreat with Will, her refusal to see him. He had been raging out here under the impression that he was raging at—raging against—his in-laws, that he had come out here to win her, and Will, back from them. But this wasn’t it—he was still in the dark, but he saw now that he was not in the position he thought he was in—they were not barring his entry as much as they were protecting their daughter and grandchild. Penelope had not been lured to this place—she had fled here for protection. From him.
He was not the hero; he was the intruder.
Tears pricked his eyes. What is this? he said. He looked at the old couple before him as if for the first time—frail, frightened of the man standing before them.
Arthur walked back around to the front just as the flashing squad car pulled into the driveway. An officer who could have been one of Arthur’s students took down his name on a pad and asked him some questions, each one a spoonful of grief: what was his relationship to the Wrights, what had transpired between them, what was he doing out here. The questions framed this situation as a domestic dispute. They treated Arthur generously, compassionately, even—though he was made to stand by his Camaro with one of the officers while the other was admitted into the house by Constance.
Neighbors emerged from their houses and stood on their lawns. Ones who were too far away came up the road and stood watching with their arms folded.
A man approached the officer by Arthur and said, Everything okay here? He gave Arthur a penetrating glare.
Thanks for your concern, sir. Everything is under control—just go back inside. The man walked back, keeping his eye on Arthur, to his position on his lawn, arms folded. The officer rolled his eyes. Everybody wants to do something when there’s nothing to be done. Makes me laugh. Same guy passes a dark alley during a mugging, and he just keeps walking.
I just want to talk to my wife, Arthur said.
I understand, man. I really do. Believe me, I’ve been there. But if she don’t want to come out of there and talk? There’s nothing you can do. The officer had seemed merely a kid at first, but getting a longer look, he estimated that the man was older than he was by several years.
He pulled a gun on me, Arthur said. And threatened to blow my brains out! Isn’t that against the law? He didn’t like how he sounded—he was tattling on the old man. His body had begun to tremble, and a twitch in his stomach was threatening to force up the egg salad he’d had on the plane.
The officer pulled out his pad and made a note. Depends on the circumstances, he said. He who? The owner of the property? Mr. Wright. Your father-in-law, correct? And what were you doing at the time?
Never mind, Arthur said.
The officer cleared his throat and repeated his question, more forcefully this time, and Arthur reluctantly described the scene at the back porch. I don’t want to press charges, if that’s an option even.
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.