By now you have heard of the scandal.
My first book, that one about Japan, had been a critical success. It allowed me to secure a staff writer’s position at a prestigious monthly American magazine and then to move on to an even more august periodical. My next book, nearly a decade later, the memoir about growing up in Nevada, about my high school drug addiction, subsequent stays in rehab, arrest for breaking and entering a physician’s office to steal narcotics, and my eventual incarceration in a state hospital, has become a bestseller. The scene in which I break the nose of one of my counselors at the rehab center and then piss on his desk has become almost as notorious as my boarding a plane with a broken jaw and Transportation Security agents following the trail of blood down the aisle to my seat. In the book, I fight off three of them before they finally subdue me with a Taser in full view of my fellow passengers.
I finally beat my nasty drug problem with a combination of martial arts discipline—picked up during my years in Japan—and a tough, go-it-alone ethos that I summarize in the book as Seven Times Down, Eight Times Up. It’s an old Yakuza saying indicating the relentlessness of the ronin (wandering warrior), who will always rise no matter how many times you knock him down. I abbreviate this in the book to the acronym 7TD8TU and repeat it as a mantra. Unbuttoning my shirt to reveal the 7TD8TU tattoo in Gothic lettering on my chest has become a regular feature at my readings and television appearances.
The book was becoming a phenomenon—a bestseller, of course, but somehow more than that, an inspiring tale that teenagers, young adults, and those down on their luck were reading over and over again and buying to give to their friends.
I had come a very long way since Tokyo.
I hadn’t heard from any of my old Tokyo colleagues in years. Trey, a fellow writer and editor at the Tokyo magazine where we had worked, had stayed behind, continuing on at the magazine for a year before moving back to America. We met in New York when he came through a couple of years later, quite a few pounds heavier and tired-looking. He had finally managed to place a story in a good magazine and secure a book deal of his own for a very modest advance. He wrote his book, it was published to general disinterest, and then he surprised me by moving back to Tokyo, where he began working at yet another new English-language magazine, this one a weekly spin-off of our old rag. He periodically sent me story ideas to show my boss at my magazine. I never passed them along.
Maxine had been the founder of the magazine and she had sold her share of the company and went on to edit another magazine, this one in Japanese, which eventually folded. I heard she had gotten a nose job, remarried a Japanese man, and was looking for work.
Yoshimi had married a salaryman and had settled in Saitama, a suburban prefecture, where she had two children of her own.
They all had their reasons for resenting me. I had left them all behind. We had been close, working together, until my resentment of Maxine—I felt I was doing all the work and she was getting all the credit—finally caused a series of arguments culminating in some very nasty exchanges. It had been Maxine, in fact, who had encouraged us to take liberties in the writing and editing of stories. We began making up some facts. The magazine needed the copy and she hadn’t cared how we produced it.
I didn’t think about any of them very much at all, busy as I was with my life and the impending paperback publication of my book. The publisher wanted me to visit twenty cities on my tour; my agent was trying to get them to agree to just a dozen. I had sold the dramatic rights, for a six-part mini-series, to HBO, and my co–executive producer was Sumner, a neighborhood guy who the development head at HBO had wanted detached from the project but who I insisted should stay on. They wanted a producer with a better track record as a show runner but I explained that Sumner had believed in the project from the beginning, from when he first read a galley of the book. I couldn’t dump him now.
They agreed and we made a deal that I would write the first two episodes myself.
THE DEAL FOR my next two books would be a blockbuster, a huge sum divided into four payments, the first of which would be nearly seven figures.
This, then, was the life I—we—had been dreaming of back in Tokyo. I was thirty-seven years old and married to a former editor I had met at the magazine. Marni was self-confident and pretty, sure enough of her looks to have actually written an article for New York magazine about what life was like for a pretty woman in New York City. She had been prominently social before we met, though never quite as wealthy as her society coverage would have suggested. This was a city on a bender similar to what Tokyo had experienced when I was living there: presumptuous, flush, drunk with certainty about its station and wealth. Real estate was a cloying and far-too-frequent topic of conversation—we had just purchased a spacious loft in Tribeca, and we were shopping for a house on the North Fork of Long Island—just as it had been back in Tokyo. Only now I was partaking in the prosperity, swimming in it, rather than feeling excluded.
I could never have imagined that I would appreciate literary and financial success primarily because they ensured better treatment for my autistic son, but that was turning out to be the great benefit.
Marni remained a powerful social force, though she no longer flew the flag of convenience of any of the glossy titles. She still inspired jealousy and a hint of fear in her peers, even among women you would assume were too pretty and too smart to give a shit. For the first months of our relationship I had wondered what she saw in me. Marni, who at one point could have married any of a dozen bankers or lawyers or trustafarians, had shacked up with a writer—and at that point, not even a successful one. Never mind that I had subsequently thrived so that my success now seemed commensurate with her status. She had chosen me when I was nobody. She must have loved me.
WHEN I STARTED at the magazine I was a contract writer in a borrowed cubicle—not as low-status a position as it sounds, but still, an enlisted man while Marni was clearly in the officer corps. I had always had a certain bluster about myself when it came to women; I wasn’t shy and being a writer had made rejection more familiar than feared. Yet my first glimpse of Marni, at the distant end of the table in a story meeting I made the mistake of attending because I happened to be in the office—writers never attended these meetings, I found out later—was electrifying. She exuded presumption. Her brown hair was curled down to her shoulders and her long head sat on a neck as graceful and flawless as a swan’s. Her eyeballs were heavy and protruding; she saw everything. Her cheeks were pink and shiny and her mouth thick-lipped and sensual. I remember she was wearing a white jacket, blue blouse, black pants. She seemed simultaneously bored and ahead of everyone else.
Stories were suggested, discussed, dismissed. It was only later that I found out that very few articles emerged from these meetings. Those came from smaller, more discreet conclaves. But Marni did suggest something fashion-related and it was immediately approved.
Later, when I was back at my cubicle, Marni came over and introduced herself. “Marni Saltzwell.”
I took her hand.
“You’ve been writing those Japan articles,” she said.
“That’s me.”
“They’re unbelievably good.”
She walked away, back to her distant office.
We went out for drinks a few days later, ostensibly between editor and writer though I would never write a story for her. We had martinis at the Oyster Bar and she said I should join her for a gallery opening. We went to the opening and ended up in a little galley kitchen at the back of the gallery, where we were crowded in with Damien Hirst, Anthony Haden-Guest, Patti Smith, and Arne Glimcher. Then we joined the artist in his limousine to go to a nightclub where the entire second floor was roped off in his honor and we sat at his booth. Nobody seemed surprised that I was there once I explained I was with Marni, but actually, what was I doing there?
That was the question I asked myself many times during the first few weeks of our romance, half-expecting strangers on the street to congratulate me because I was fucking Marni Saltzwell. My being with her was almost that ridiculous, as if I were suddenly dating Madonna. For the first time, my picture was showing up in Patrick McMullan layouts as “and friend” before he bothered to figure out who I was.
I didn’t dare mention my enthusiasm or excitement at being with Marni to Marni, but I looked forward to our assignations as if each was a long-sought-after first date. It never occurred to me that she might be feeling the same excitement. I assumed she would soon be moving on to her next guy.
She was still living up in SoHo then, in a corner loft on Grand Street with huge casement windows that faced south and east. I loved being in that apartment with her, reveling in the couples-y things we did, the Sunday Times reading (although she had already read most of the paper by Friday), the brunch-cooking, the dope-smoking. I was intoxicated by her glamour and pulchritude, of course, but there was also an easy connection, a steady and untroubled rapport. Marni was so fast and bright, possessed of vast computational power and analytical skills. She hadn’t become Marni Saltzwell only by birth and beauty; she had also been, I was now discovering, at the top of every class she’d been in, from Spence through Brown. She still remembered with mawkish regret that in third grade Willow Roebling had mastered long division before she had.
At the time, there was much discussion about the president launching air strikes against targets in the Sudan and if that was an appropriate use of U.S. power. How quaint it now seems that the loss of nineteen U.S. soldiers in a rescue operation in Somalia a few years earlier had generated the widespread belief that Americans would not tolerate any more combat casualties. It was Marni who first pointed out to me that as long as there was no conscription, then Americans would soon be willing to go to war again. She was always surprising me with that kind of analysis. I know it sounds awful and sexist, but I found it thrilling to hear such well-formulated ideas pouring out from such a pretty face.
We never spoke about what exactly this thing was but I knew it was serious when she called me up sobbing at four a.m., confessing that she had just slept with Mark McGrath, of all people, and felt horrible about it.
“Can I please come see you?” she said.
I said fine. I wasn’t sure who Mark McGrath was, but liked how this was playing out.
She came over and we sat on the sofa in my Eleventh Street apartment and she told me she had discovered something about herself, and about me.
“I need you,” she said. “I need you because you’re the one real thing in my life.”
IN THE MORNINGS, I would bring my son, Alexander, to his preschool over on the East Side. We had tried to mainstream him at the pre-K at the local public elementary school—it had embarrassed Marni to have a child in public school—but I liked the other dads, with whom I had coffee many mornings. Alex had been diagnosed as autistic—a wide-ranging disability, I was discovering—at around twenty months, but he was showing signs of perhaps being on the higher-functioning side of the spectrum. He walked at eighteen months and climbed steps soon after. Motor development, I read in the numerous books on autism that were now piled in our loft, was a key early indicator of IQ, which meant that Alex, beneath all the messed-up wiring and synaptic misdirection that experts now say is a cause, or perhaps effect, of autism, might have a relatively healthy mind. Marni and I, like all parents of the developmentally disabled, desperately hoped that was the case, and believed we saw in Alex small signs that he was improving. At age three, he was responding to his name, smiling more often, and when he sat with us at the table, he would allow his milk to be served in a receptacle other than his orange sippy cup. Because of the success of my book—and, of course, Marni’s money—we could afford the recommended phalanx of speech therapists and behavior-modification professionals, and these childhood-development experts were becoming a regular part of our lives, as constant a presence in our loft as Marni and I were. They seemed a little bit thrilled to be working with the son of a literary celebrity.
At first, it worried me when Alex seemed occasionally indifferent to my presence. That was, of course, a putative symptom of autism, and pediatric neurologists had warned us that it could make for a trying parenthood. I was reluctant to talk about it with the coffee guys. And even they were careful not to joke about Alex—virtually nothing else was off limits, so I was grateful for this forbearance. I thought of my tattoo, 7TD8TU, and was vaguely embarrassed as it now seemed that such warrior braggadocio was meaningless when I was confronted by the simple fact of Alex’s autism.
When we switched him to the special school on the East Side, I continued to have coffee with the guys as if my son was still among their children’s classmates. But while Alex didn’t show affection, he took great pleasure in my company as we took walks around the neighborhood, visiting the little park over by Greenwich Street or stopping in to the deli where I buy newspapers and a gluten-free peanut butter bar for Alex. (We hadn’t determined if Alex was gluten-intolerant, as are allegedly so many of the autistic, but thought it best to take as few chances as possible.) The Korean lady used to give Alex a straw, which he liked to chew on as she told him he was a handsome boy. Like so many autistic children, Alex possessed an otherworldly beauty. Or perhaps he had just inherited his mother’s good looks.
I DIDN’T GO into my office at the prestigious monthly very often, but I knew it was important that I maintain my position there. The magazine gave me the kind of credibility I could never have dreamed of back in Tokyo. But I believed the magazine now needed me almost as much as I needed it; the success of my memoir had made this a mutually beneficial relationship. I was also making friends with other writers in New York, the novelists from Brooklyn, the blue-blooded fellow writers at my magazine, the literary-lion types I met at Paris Review parties and PEN benefits.
On one of my infrequent sallies into the office, the editor in chief popped into my little windowless space and said, “You have a stalker.” He was a handsome man with wire-frame glasses and shiny black hair that he combed straight back. It was he who had first published my stories about Japan, a long time ago. Among our other topics of conversation were our autistic sons. His own boy, Roman, had Asperger’s syndrome and was already twelve years old. When Alex was first diagnosed, the editor in chief had been a great resource for advice, giving me the names of first-rate specialists and helping me to place Alex in the special day-care program on the East Side, for which I paid $36,000 a year.
“What?” I smiled, imagining that yet another deranged reader of my second book was trying to get in touch with me. Success has curious side effects.
He was holding in his hand a manuscript that he now passed to me. “Read this and let’s talk. Now don’t freak out about it.”
It was ostensibly an article submitted to my boss for the magazine’s consideration. In reality it was an unsigned, systematic, footnoted, fifty-nine-page takedown, beginning with my first book about Japan, which it went through almost page by page to demonstrate that I was not only mistaken in my reporting but that I was willfully misleading. It then went through my career at the old magazine back in Tokyo, citing articles there to prove I had always faked it. And then, most damaging, it went through my earlier stories for this magazine, those that had been about Japan and for which I had gained my first small measure of literary and journalistic success. It pulled those pieces apart and splayed them, as if dissecting cadavers, pointing out the myriad places, characters, and instances that could only be pure fabrication on the part of the writer.
I could only bear to read it in short bursts, pausing after every paragraph to consider the detail and precision of the attack. It was an etiological document, exhaustive, thorough, and linear. I didn’t even remember writing most of the passages quoted and then ripped apart. As I read, I felt my heart racing and very quickly realized this might be the second worst thing to ever happen to me; the gradual, creeping realization that something was wrong with Alex had been the worst.
The author had two lines of assault: there was the basic, simple idea that I made countless spelling and factual errors—the names of villages, the population of prisons, the view out a coffee-shop window. All wrong. But I knew that those were inconsequential errors of the type other journalists and writers had made and which I knew were excusable, particularly in work that was a decade old.
The other line of arguing was more sophisticated and ultimately more troubling: too many of the characters, in particular in those early stories for this magazine, simply did not exist. There was the Japanese motorcycle gang boss, the political fixer, the porno actress, all of whom had been the central figures in my early stories for this magazine—which back then had never run photographs—and who, the author of this document concluded (who was the author of this document?), could not have ever existed based on his extensive reporting. This person had gone back and spoken to experts quoted in my pieces, to other characters in my stories, and visited the addresses and buildings mentioned to prove that these characters and settings were fictitious yet had been presented in this magazine as fact.
Now, my magazine is famous for its fact-checking, though staff members know that the fact-checking is really only as good as the writers’ notes. And I had known going into my first assignment that they had no fact-checkers who could speak Japanese, and so were entirely dependent on my version of events.
The author of this document was making a reasoned argument that for a decade I had exhibited a pattern of fabrication and dissembling. What was making my back tingle was that this was a well-argued and systematic prosecution, persuasive in tone and well articulated; it was a condemnation of me as much as my work. After you read it, you were ready to convict me of almost any crime.
I IMMEDIATELY WONDERED who—besides my editor in chief—had seen this.
I asked him.
“I showed it to Tyler,” he said, referring to the editorial director of the company, nominally his boss. “Nobody else needs to see it.”
He said he didn’t care about the stuff in Tokyo and what was in my first book. What he felt we needed to do—just in case, he said—was prepare a defense about the stories of mine he had published in this magazine. It was heartening to hear that he was proceeding from the point of view that I was in the right; that my stories were solid, and all I had to do was rebut the allegations.
Then he said something chilling. “I’ve already gotten a call about this.” He mentioned a Web site that intensely covered New York media. “So it’s out there.”
I tried to laugh dismissively, but it came out so loud that I sounded a little bit like I was barking.
“Do you know who this is?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I have a few ideas but no, I’m not sure.”
I walked back to my office and sat for a while, staring at my terminal and trying to think of who this could be. Maxine? Trey? It could be any of a dozen hacks who had been in Tokyo while I was there and who were jealous that I had not only gotten out but had succeeded. But Maxine had been the angriest, the most resentful, and in many ways I had been most dismissive of her, reminding her in subtle ways—and sometimes not-so-subtle ways, for I was in my early twenties and possessed the arrogance of youth—that I was more talented than she, more brilliant, and was only passing through Tokyo. My future, I assured her, was in New York, in the media capital of the world, the seat of literary culture. She was, I implied, a bush leaguer, destined to remain in this provincial backwater—at least when it came to publishing in English.
I went back through the document, now looking closely at the allegations about stories I had written for this magazine. I felt like I could almost hear Maxine’s Texas drawl in them. Did my boss really expect me to produce notes and backup for articles written nearly ten years ago? And anyway, I felt it was a better strategy to ignore completely these accusations. To respond, I decided, would be to take them seriously, and how could we take seriously an anonymous accusation?
I e-mailed these thoughts to my editor and found it ominous that he didn’t immediately reply.
I had to go pick up Alex from day care and take him home for his speech therapy appointment. He was smiling when he saw me, but as I walked toward him I realized he had been fixated on something else, behind me, in the distance.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, I got an e-mail from my boss saying that he, Tyler, and one of the magazine’s attorneys wanted to meet with me the next morning. Nothing serious, my boss added, just an informational meeting.
When Marni got home, I showed the document to her and she withdrew into our bedroom to read it while I busied myself in the kitchen.
She was nodding when she came back out. “So?”
“What?”
“Is it true?”
I was shocked. Was the document so persuasive that my own wife would have her doubts about me?
Marni just that day had her brown hair blown out and had that fresh-from-the-salon glow. She was tall and had broad shoulders, which she insisted had resulted in great financial benefits for our family since she could seldom find expensive outfits that fit her frame, and so was now recycling outfits she had been given by designers. She had a small waist and when she wore jeans, as she did now, the narrowness of her legs made her upper body seem almost disproportionate; in build and carriage she seemed a little like a miniature wide-receiver in pads.
Still, she had known me for eight years, and we had been living together for the last six. She didn’t wait for me to answer.
“This is going to come out somewhere,” she said. “This will end up online.”
“But it’s unattributed,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter, you’re famous now. Sort of. You’re important. This will titillate people. But, but is it true?”
Ah, that was the question. What had so bothered me about the allegations, about the attack, was that it was an almost entirely truthful recitation of my inaccuracies and fabrications. Marni and I had never discussed what she knew or didn’t know about the veracity of my work. If she hadn’t known when we met, I believed, then she had to have been alerted when she read my second book, which plainly dissembled several stretches of my life that she knew—she must have known!—diverged widely from my actual history.
But success, I had discovered, can blind people to the facts. And I had even come to believe the “facts” of my books and to consider those versions as reliable and accurate as any other. Certainly the proceeds from those books had been real. Look at this condominium. This speech therapist working right now with my son in his room. That diamond on Marni’s finger.
I could see, however, that she did not like to admit that all this—or most of it anyway—was based on my prevarications. She was happier when it had all been unstated. And now I handed her this, a document stating that it was all built on lies, and she couldn’t help but be reminded of her own doubts.
“What is truth?” I said.
Those big brown eyes betrayed a sudden sadness. Those sensual lips pursed.
“You have to fight this,” she said. “You cannot give an inch.” She asked what my boss had said.
I told her about the impending meeting.
“Get your own lawyer,” she said.
Still, even as Marni gave me this sound advice, she seemed a little bit distant. She was too sophisticated to show any disappointment and too worldly to believe that I was the first journalist who may have fudged it. What she was silently reprimanding me for was putting all of this, our lifestyle, at risk, even if that risk had been laid in long ago.
I suggested to her that this wasn’t a big deal. That these stories, my first book, those old articles, it was all old news, literally. “Who cares about stories from the Nineties?”
She didn’t respond, but I knew what she was thinking. None of my work could stand up to this kind of scrutiny.
BUT WHO WAS making these accusations? Trey? Maxine? Ah, what about Yoshimi? She had once been a studious young journalist. Could this be her life’s work? I thought back to my departure from Japan. I had completed my first book and was moving to New York, where several magazine editors had implied I could expect enough work to make a living.
Yoshimi had been my interpreter for much of that first book, and she had also been a great source of information, of reporting, of wisdom about Japan. She had, in more ways than I care to admit, made the book possible. And I had been generous in my acknowledgments; hers had been the first name I mentioned.
And through the reporting and writing of that book, we had grown close, developing one of those rare relationships where the sexual intensity actually seemed to increase after the initial romance, in part because she had been physically nearby during the writing of the book. During any lulls in the work I would wander into the next room to where she was watching television, slip out of my tracksuit pants, and she would be waiting for me. (I have to admit, I never would feel the same level of easy sexuality with Marni.)
When it was time to leave Japan, it never occurred to me to ask Yoshimi to join me. I didn’t need her in New York. She would be a burden, I figured. Assimilating her into Manhattan would be an extra task I did not need at that propitious moment.
With Yoshimi, it was possible to achieve our parting by never talking about it. I knew she was unlikely to bring it up and when I began my preparations, she simply sat on the bar stool next to my kitchen, smoking her ultrathin cigarettes until the day the taxi came to take me to the train station.
I saw her a few times after that, on trips back to Japan, but we never resumed our relationship. Or talked about it.
Had she been quietly seething at having been abandoned by me? It was hard for me to even picture her face now; I could see her body, in the black stirrup pants she always wore back then, behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. She’d always been so loyal. I couldn’t imagine her turning on me now.
No, it had to be Maxine.
MY AGENT SUGGESTED a good libel attorney but before we could meet to discuss this issue, a Web site about Japan had picked up the document and was running excerpts from it. A link appeared on Gawker almost immediately, along with a terrible photograph of me in a kimono that had appeared on the contributors’ page of a travel magazine a few years earlier. This was a perfect schadenfreude item: successful author turns out to be a fraud, sort of, a long time ago, allegedly. They were having fun with it. But anyone who bothered to click on the link to the Web site about Japan would see the damning evidence for themselves.
I had badly underestimated my own fame. And Marni’s residual fame. Page Six picked up the item and in the wake of all the other journalism scandals at the New York Times and the New Republic, this seemed even more titillating, since I was, after all, a best-selling author, and august institutions like the Columbia Journalism Review were now on the case as well, calling my boss at the magazine to ask for a comment.
Sumner called me to say that HBO had called him to ask about the controversy. “They didn’t know the book was nonfiction,” Sumner said. “So I cleared that up. I told them this will all blow over. I reminded them of The Hitler Diaries.”
“But those were fake,” I said.
“Yeah, but didn’t the Germans make a movie out of them anyway?”
“Anyway, this is about my first book, not the book they bought.”
“Good point.”
I had already hung up before I realized how strange it was that HBO was now calling Sumner instead of me.
My attorney had asked the magazine to delay any meeting on the subject until he could go over all the material. He claimed that since I was being libeled by an anonymous source, in Japan no less, this was an exceedingly complicated case that required him to consult with attorneys in Japan before we could respond.
My boss, meanwhile, had asked his research department to dig up whatever documentation existed on those stories. These files, he had been told, were somewhere in Pennsylvania.
The worst thing that could happen to me, Marni and I concluded, was that I would have to resign from the magazine. I talked to my agent about this and he agreed that while it would damage my literary credibility, it would not affect the large advance for my next book. We had an agreement with the publisher, but had not yet gone to contract.
As long as this stayed in the distant past, and was about Japan, how many people would actually care?
A legitimate question could be raised about my work, and that was, did any of it actually seem like nonfiction? The tone, the scenes, the interior dialogue, the entire style of the writing was fictional. Fiction, nonfiction, I never worried about labels and I had learned early on in Tokyo that it didn’t seem to make much difference to readers. I had ended up writing nonfiction instead of fiction because of the realities of modern publishing. Magazines wanted journalism; book publishers wanted nonfiction. Who was I not to oblige?
Of course I couldn’t tell anyone this, or defend myself by claiming, as I knew very well, that tons of writers were fudging it, faking it, creating composite characters, making up scenes, taking broad license depending on what they felt they could get away with. Nobody ever talked about it, but I couldn’t be the only writer who had given in to this temptation. There simply were no rules. A book is published. If it is received as literature, then nobody wonders at the veracity of every detail, and reviewers use phrases like “richly imagined” instead of saying that it is “full of lies.” Readers knew, I was sure, that my first book had been “richly imagined,” and reviewers had both praised and condemned this attribute. Still, it had stayed steadily in print for more than a decade—twenty paperback printings—and the success of my second book had ensured that it would stay in print forever. (The publisher hadn’t yet responded to any of the allegations, but they were requesting a meeting with me to talk about the situation.) But where did a writer go to answer this question, of how much fakery was kosher? In a court of law, none. But in the real world of writers, where was the line?
Nobody knew. This was a game that changed as you played. And who gets caught? The unlucky. Seven times down.
I couldn’t tell my boss that. We were meeting in the magazine’s conference room, my lawyer seated beside me. My boss, Tyler, and the corporate attorneys—two of them!—across the table from us.
“Don’t say too much,” my lawyer had advised me.
It was obvious from the venue, the attendees, the body language, that my boss’s only concern here was covering his own ass. He did not want to get dragged down like the executive editor of the New York Times had because of the malfeasance of an underling. An investigation cost him nothing and provided maximum defense against accusations the magazine hadn’t acted quickly enough.
I was maintaining a pose of indignation, both at the accusations and at the fact that the magazine seemed to be taking them seriously. This was an anonymous document; why should that have catalyzed this convening of high-priced legal and editorial talent?
The magazine’s position was that it had to take seriously any complaints about the accuracy of its stories. In this climate of intense scrutiny of journalistic ethics, it had no other choice. Tyler tossed out bromides like “The reputation of our brands is built entirely on integrity.”
“Thank you for that,” I said.
In the past, as my boss and I had discussed one of my stories or our sons, I had seen in his expression, in the cast of his features, the eager widening of his eyes as we spoke, great energy and enthusiasm. Now there was a dullness behind his wire-frame glasses. He had in front of him my notes from those stories, years ago, or at least what could be found at the warehouse in Pennsylvania.
What was apparent was that the stories were entirely sourced to my notes, and, as far as the notes went, the stories were accurate. My attorney argued that was the end of it. His position, and it was a clever counteroffensive, was that all of us, the magazine and I, should be working to find out who was disseminating this material and sue them for libel.
But the notes, I well knew, had been as fabricated as the stories. I had written them after I had written the articles—faked interview transcripts, phony description—all of it submitted ex post facto to the research department that was incapable, because of language barriers, of checking for itself.
My boss was still suspicious.
“To completely exonerate you,” he said, “we are going to go back and check all of your stories again. To prove beyond a doubt that you are in the right.”
My attorney was a tall, skinny gentleman going a little bit bald on top. Still, when he sat back, as he did now, he almost appeared to have a full head of hair from the front. He was smart enough to see that too vigorous an argument against this tack would appear self-incriminating. Why would a reputable journalist argue against a thorough checking of his work? He should, in theory, welcome it.
How many pieces had I written for the magazine? At least twenty; only the first few had been about Japan. The rest had been wide-ranging, but mostly situated in countries where there was a serious language barrier to reporting. A few of them, mostly profiles of famous businessmen, politicians, or athletes, had been more or less accurate. The rest were as full of fancy as my books.
I shrugged. What else could I do?
WHEN I TOLD Marni about the magazine’s plan, she shook her head. “How long is this going to take?”
“I don’t know.”
“If they fire you, we lose our health insurance.”
With Alex’s disability, his frequent interactions with medical professionals, that would be a costly blow, but considering my vast income, the impending payment for my next books, the TV money—and wouldn’t I soon be in the Writers Guild and its excellent health insurance program anyway?—we would survive.
I was no criminal; nothing I had done could be considered a violation of any law. There was still, however, an anxiety I felt at not being able to speak with anyone about the reality of my situation. I had prevaricated, fabricated, whatever you wanted to call it; the document, in many ways, was accurate, and I would become strangely excited as I reread it, which I did frequently, almost gasping as the writer—Maxine?—concluded each carefully constructed argument with a veritable j’accuse. In tone and style, I realized, this was a kind of denouncement, similar to what might have been submitted by a neighborhood committee about a class enemy to the Communist Party in Mao’s China. But also, in its careful litany of evil deeds, journalistic heresies, it had a little bit of the measured hysteria that might convict a witch in seventeenth-century Germany. All that was left was throwing me into the well to see if I would float.
Why then did I feel a slow-burning desire to walk into my boss’s office and level with him, to bare my soul and admit that I had faked it, piped it, cooked it—that I was a fraud? This is why criminals confess: because they are too lazy to work hard on fabricating their innocence and they are too bored to wait out their eventual conviction. It is a little like quitting a game of chess that you know you are almost certainly going to lose anyway. Just get the embarrassment of defeat over.
But Marni, thankfully, was more clearheaded. She would ask what my lawyer said. She would weigh the pros and cons of various approaches. She would advise me on dealing with the media, hiring a publicist. But through all this, I could detect a certain distance, as if she were among those disappointed by me. She had told me she wanted me to be her one true thing.
My conversations with my attorney were clipped, concerned as I was about his fees. He had required a $5,000 retainer, and I was afraid to ask how much he charged per hour, per phone call. But he had come so highly recommended and was so frequently in the newspaper, associated with high-profile cases, that I knew this was going to cost me new-car kind of money, at least.
Still, my wife pointed out, repeatedly, that this would blow over. These were still, ultimately, old accusations. And so what if the magazine dug up some obscure factual discrepancies or incomplete verification of old stories? That was still trivia as far as the general public, the book-buying public, was concerned. This was still all in the realm of inside media, the kind of hair-splitting that New York journalists and editors did while the rest of the country happily went on reading books like my second one. They cared about the story, she reminded me, about my ability to put you right there, with me, as I struggled with my demons.
PERHAPS ONE OF the saddest aspects of fathering an autistic boy is that you wonder how much of his experience he is filing away. Is he building up a well of happy memories? We want our children to have these joyous recollections, a sense of well-being about their childhoods. Why? So that in life’s inevitable dark moments, they can call on this as evidence they were once happy and thus will be happy again. But with Alex, even as we took a walk on a beautiful spring morning to the playground, and then to the river where the light and the warming but still brisk air were so gorgeous you knew that through the course of your whole life you get maybe ten days like this, as I pushed him on the swing and he did his liturgy of mumbled consonants, “De-de-de-de-de-de-de,” and he twiddled his fingers together and rocked his head—I knew I was supposed to curtail his self-stimming whenever it happened, but he seemed so content at that instant that I was reluctant to intervene—I found myself lost in that question: if Alex is so existential that he can’t recall happiness, does that make him less cumulatively happy?
He was so pretty, sitting there in his swing, his blond hair bouncing in the breeze. He had my wife’s sharp nose and almost feline eyes—he was lucky in that—but he had my mouth.
It seemed so unfair that anything this bad should happen to me while I had just suffered the misfortune of having a developmentally disabled son. Where was the justice in that? I decided that was why this would blow over; I just had to hold steady. This was the bad part, and even if I had to resign from the magazine, I would still be fine. Eight times up, right?
WHEN ALEX WAS diagnosed, Marni had thrown herself into the autism world, joining the board of Autism Speaks, socializing with the celebrities who were now flocking to the cause. Having been born too late to witness the March of Dimes and the campaign to eradicate polio, I had never seen a disability marketed and packaged so successfully. When I began noticing the television commercials of lovely actresses sternly facing the camera and spouting statistics—1 in 250, then 1 in 170, then 1 in 70—I realized they had rebranded autism, a lifelong, chronic condition, as a childhood disability, as the March of Dimes had done with polio when they renamed it Infantile Paralysis. But as I considered Alex’s future prospects, I knew that all the autistic boys and girls will grow up, and while the funding and research were now being intensely focused on ever earlier intervention and treatment, the reality was that there would be millions of grown-up autistic men and women. What about them?
It had been Marni who came up with selling the kids. That is, she had chaired the Autism Speaks committee that had worked with the agency to conceive the strategy. The kids were adorable, after all, far more beautiful than the grotesque and often unkempt adult autistics. Who wants to give money to a self-destructive middle-aged man who can’t talk? But the children, like Alex, were cute. Millions were now pouring into the foundations funding research, all because, I wanted to tell Marni, of a little lie.
AT NIGHT, I would lie awake trying to figure out who hated me so. We flatter ourselves to think that all those we have known spend much of the rest of their lives thinking about us. But here, in this document, written with such barely restrained animus, was evidence that someone indeed had spent a great portion of his or her life thinking about me.
But who, and when would they stop? I had gone online and noticed that Trey’s new magazine was giving a great deal of space to the controversy on its Web site; a reporter from the magazine had e-mailed me asking for an interview and I had passed the query along to my attorney. The story was rousing interest over there because my first book had joined the canon of books by foreigners about Japan. Perhaps Trey had been jealous. I had detected a certain distance the last time we met, years ago, in New York. Did I too easily reveal my dismissiveness? Perhaps I had shown that I considered him beneath me, but should I have pretended otherwise? Yes, I now thought, perhaps it wasn’t Maxine. It must have been Trey.
In the U.S., however, the furor over my little scandal was showing signs of petering out. The magazine continued its investigation, and I took a leave of absence. According to my attorney, as long as I never pushed for reinstatement, it was very possible that the matter would just be dropped, as long as the media interest in the subject continued to wane. No one else, apparently, had the energy, ability, or inclination to investigate a bunch of decade-old stories. My attorney, when he had been reached for comment by one of the media Web sites, had been masterful at downplaying the significance of the accusations and overstating the Byzantine complexity—“We don’t think the correct transliteration of the name of a thirteenth-century Shinto priest should be a matter of much hand-wringing.” He assured me this would just become one of those curious little footnotes to an otherwise fine career.
I WOKE UP that morning with several concurrent thoughts. There was the practical matter: at some point I had to get over to our garage to pick up the Range Rover—and while I was thinking about the garage, had I mailed in their monthly payment? (Our choice of automobile had lately become a source of concern for Marni, now that she had become a resolute environmentalist.) Then there was the issue of children, as in should we have more of them? Since this small scandal had begun, Marni and I had postponed the conversation about whether Alex should have siblings. It was complicated by the fact that we both believed it would be too much of a burden for any child to only have Alex as a sibling. But if we had two—or twins, as Tribeca couples now seemed prone to spawning—then that would make it somehow easier for all of them. Marni had worried that two more children would mean at least five more years before she could seriously get back to work. She, too, had books she wanted to write, magazine articles she had turned down, board positions she could have accepted. The sacrifice, she correctly argued, was hers. There was no financial reason for her to go back to work, we both agreed, but the human ego is a fragile thing and Marni, as pretty as she was, had always been a little bit concerned about not being taken seriously because of her looks.
Marni had done the research, checked into our genealogy, and while there was a slight chance of a second autistic child, it seemed worth the risk and, I really believed this, it would be better for Alex in the long run. Marni and I were not going to live forever.
We couldn’t wait that long to make a decision, however. The many women’s magazines that came to the loft were constantly reminding us that every year past thirty-five a woman loses some alarming percentage likelihood of becoming pregnant. Perhaps we just had to charge ahead and see how far we got.
I was also, for the first time, feeling like this little brouhaha was finally blowing over. At coffee a few mornings ago, the guys never even mentioned my pseudo-scandal. I no longer went into the magazine and, to tell the truth, I didn’t miss it at all. I had my HBO script, which I needed to begin working on. Perhaps I would resettle out on the North Fork for a while, work on my script and my next book, and enjoy the leisure I had earned. But: Alex. We didn’t have a program for him out there and so I would have to head back into the city frequently anyway. Maybe we should just move one of the behavior-modification specialists out there with us, install her in a guest bedroom. Thank god for the money I was making. Right?
I WAS ALMOST out the door, hoping to get a quick cup of coffee with the drop-off guys, when I checked my e-mail and felt a sinking sensation in my shoulders. In my inbox were two dozen requests for interviews and comments from various news organizations and magazines. There were twenty-seven new messages in my voice mailbox.
It took one Web search under my name to turn up a new document, clearly prepared by the same person, posted on that same Web site in Japan, but now about my second book. Someone had searched through arrest records in Nevada and discovered the only court document that included my name related to an appearance in traffic court. No mention of an arrest for breaking and entering, no mention of a brawl with TSA officers. The article made very clear that the incidents described in my book, on pages 97–111 and 134–156, could not have happened. They were fabrications, which threw the rest of the narrative very much into doubt. In other words, this best-selling book, with 260,000 copies in print and a few hundred thousand more paperbacks now making their way to bookstores across the country, was a fraud. This new accusation, which built convincingly on the old document, was immediately reverberating in the media echo-chamber—CNN and Huffington Post already had it high up on their home pages.
I was momentarily dazed as I rode the elevator downstairs and walked to the garage to pick up my car. Marni had dropped Alex off at his day-care program and was presumably on her way home. I thought of calling her but instead called my attorney, whose assistant had been giving out no comments on my behalf all morning.
“What is this shit?” he asked me.
Another caller was trying to break into my line. I checked my phone and saw it was my agent.
“I don’t know. It’s bullshit. What do I do?”
“This isn’t a legal matter anymore,” he said. “No one is taking any action against you. The magazine is no longer the center of attention. This is for your publicist or your agent.”
I called my agent. “How bad is this for me?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Then her tone changed slightly, almost to pleading. “Are they wrong, are they completely wrong?”
I paused a moment too long. I had to say they were wrong, but when the truth leaked out, as it would, I might then lose her as an ally. Still, right now, what choice did I have? “Of course they’re wrong.”
She had noticed how long it took me to respond. “Don’t say anything to anyone. Not yet.”
I asked if I should talk to my book publicist.
My agent pointed out the publicist worked for my publisher, not for me. I was surprised to hear that our interests were not necessarily aligned anymore.
One of the guys I had coffee with, the playwright Levi-Levy, texted me, “Whos a full o’shit bastard?”
Then another: “Steak&martinis on me!”
Then Marni’s number showed up on my caller ID. “Everyone’s calling,” she said. “It’s disgusting. Their tone, they are almost gleeful that you’ve been taken down.”
I was in my car now driving down Greenwich. Where was I going?
Several times I turned toward the West Side Highway and the Battery Tunnel, planning to head out to Long Island, each time turning back around. Part of me felt I should just go ahead, look at a few houses, fuck it all, but then I would feel another wave of panic. It reminded me, actually, of swimming in the Caribbean off an otherwise pristine stretch of beach and then suddenly seeing a Portuguese man-o’-war hovering in the water just a few feet away, that sudden jab of panic, a primal waking up of my flight instinct. I could only imagine the fun all the media Web sites were having with this, perhaps the biggest takedown yet, a blockbuster writer exposed as a fraud.
I frequently had to pee.
I would pull the car over, on Chambers or Warren or West Broadway—I was spending my morning driving all through Tribeca—and just freeze for a while, mumbling, “Oh fuck.” My career might be over. I would leave my car with emergency lights on in a red zone and trot into Giorgio’s or Giancarlo’s Bakery or Bubby’s and use the toilet—the staff all knew me and didn’t think twice about seeing me running through the restaurant.
Again, I wondered, who did this? This document, this admirably thorough work, combing legal databases for court documents, that was in keeping with Maxine’s diligent character. She had always been relentless at pursuing her ideas: the founding of the magazine in Tokyo had been her pet project and she had stuck with it for years after I had left, despite having little aptitude for magazine editing. When I Googled her, I could see that her last job had been working in the English language division at a Japanese publisher, but the publisher shut down that vanity project a year ago. So she had time on her hands. And there was a relentlessness to this that also seemed in keeping with her character. She could work tirelessly.
My wife called to tell me the news was on CNN. “They have a dean from some journalism school talking about journalism as a public trust, and you, apparently, have violated that trust.”
“But this wasn’t, isn’t, journalism.”
“Nobody cares,” she said. She actually seemed to be enjoying this, a little, the publicity, the notoriety, the unfolding scandal.
I told her I was freaking out, that I couldn’t believe people were making such a big deal about this. And then I added, with hope, “As long as we’re together.”
“Of course,” she said, and then told me she was going to pick up Alex.
As I was driving back to the garage, I thought of all the ways a writer’s life could go wrong: never actually writing anything (somehow, that seemed the most pure failure), losing one’s nerve, never having enough time to write, never getting published, never achieving recognition, never making a living, never fulfilling early promise, spending one’s career doing the wrong sort of writing, having one’s work censored, being imprisoned, always feeling underappreciated, becoming jealous, bitter, angry, resentful, dying undiscovered.
I seemed to have come up with a whole new way to fuck up as a writer.
OR HAD I? In all the stories written about my career, nobody pointed out the obvious, that writers have always fabricated their stories. Instead of comparing me to Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, Janet Cooke, why not compare me to Daniel Defoe, Stephen Crane, or a host of other fine writers whose fiction was first published as nonfiction? Why not Bruce Chatwin or Ryszard Kapuscinski, whose fabrications were always celebrated as metaphorical masterpieces? Why wasn’t I considered one of those writers who used invention not to falsify truth but to sharpen it, enhance it, make it more vivid? Anyway, what was the damage, really? Shouldn’t the success of my book have at least elicited a comparison to a better writer than a daily newspaper hack who made up some quotes? They could at least have compared me to Clifford Irving or that lady who wrote as if she was a gay truck-stop hooker.
I did make the mistake of going on a television talk show, where I tried to explain that personal memoir had always been an impressionistic rather than factual genre. The white-haired newscaster—in person, he had a tiny head shaped like a pencil eraser—then brought up my work for the magazine, and I was reduced to pointing out that the allegations were all anonymous, and that no independent expert had proven that I’d made mistakes. Another major misstep. Nearly a half-dozen Web sites over the next three days came up with dozens of examples of errors and flaws in my work.
My editor at my publishing house was very disappointed by my performance and told me the publisher was considering suspending publication of the paperback, or at the very least putting in a disclaimer about the accuracy of the material.
The other parents at Alex’s program started to shun me. They brushed by me after drop-off without saying anything, avoiding my glance, not that I particularly wanted their company. But come on, soon the autistic themselves would shun me, though avoiding such interaction was a symptom of the condition anyway, so how would I know I was being shunned?
The TV deal was off, my agent told me. I could keep the money I had already been paid for the option—less than a year of special education for Alex—but the larger, deferred payments would not be forthcoming.
I called Sumner. If HBO was no longer interested, how about Showtime? Or FX? Or perhaps it could be a feature? Sumner was quiet and then told me that based on what he had been reading online, he didn’t feel he could in good conscience work with me anymore.
IT WAS AMAZING to me how quickly my circumstances had changed. Marni would look at me accusingly, and I could read in her expression an implied question: what are we going to do now? There was still her money—does it always come down to money?—and more coming in from the paperback publication. The disclaimer—practically a stamped FRAUD! on the cover—had been negotiated by my agent and publisher and didn’t initially put off readers; BookScan numbers over the first few weeks were good enough to keep my book on bestseller lists everywhere. But what was the trendy phrase everyone was using now? My book didn’t have a long tail. Those early sales, it seemed, were fueled by curiosity about this book being in the news.
Marni told me at one point: “I do not want to sell the loft.”
I actually thought it would be better to sell it and move someplace remote where nobody knew me. Ibiza. Bali. Philadelphia. But Marni wouldn’t have it. She had never been as wealthy or connected as the gossip columns suggested, but still, this was her world, and she had no intention of sacrificing it so that I could rehabilitate myself.
And what would we do with Alex? He had his programs, his professional support. We couldn’t just move him to a new country and restart his learning.
This wasn’t the time to mention that despite all the expensive programs, therapies, operant-conditioning sessions, Alex didn’t exactly seem on the road to wellness. He was still profoundly distant and, I had to admit, pretty damn weird. I doubted he would ever be a regular kid in a normal school; I didn’t think he would ever understand that it wasn’t acceptable to pick his nose and eat his snot in public. But oh how I loved him. Plus, in the midst of this whole scandal, Alex, of course, had been completely oblivious.
I was watching Marni with Alex one morning, spoon-feeding him gluten-free breakfast cereal, and I suddenly realized that the main reason Marni was staying with me was him. Our son, our autistic boy, was simply too much for her to handle on her own. Otherwise, I suspected, Marni would have a few months ago taken Alex and left me to my sad little fate.
I DIDN’T WANT to go out, to meet old friends, to join other writers and editors. Book parties would have been horrible, and distracting for the author whom we were ostensibly celebrating. The community that had once thrown its doors open to me, asking if I could host a table to raise money for this cause or appear on behalf of this literary journal, was now offering me only silence. Not surprisingly, nobody asked me to write for them. I was in a kind of internal exile.
Marni, on the other hand, was getting more assignments than she could handle, more board requests, more invitations. Her byline became, in a matter of months, the most sought-after in town, a symbol of a certain connectedness. The editors who gave her those assignments always asked after me, sent me their regards, but always stopped there. It was the kind of best wishes sent to the family of a convicted murderer: you pitied them for their hardship while knowing full well that the guy was a guilty bastard.
DEFEATED MEN, IN the best of times, are only interesting when they still have some power. Pompey, Marc Antony, Hannibal. True defeat leaves a man alone and therefore of much less interest to historians, I suppose, and to women. Compare Napoleon at Elba versus Napoleon at St. Helena. In the first instance, he still has his court and all the intrigue and possibility that entails; in the second, he is reduced to begging for a larger sugar ration from the English captain who commands the rock on which he is exiled.
In my defeat, I had become similarly uninteresting. Nobody called, nothing new happened in my life, and I soon found myself wondering if perhaps I should take up the study of a new language, learn Spanish and read Cervantes.
I had spent plenty of time mulling over who had taken me down and concluded that on my own, I might never discover who it was. It was better not to know, I decided. Revenge isn’t sweet unless you can show yourself to the victim. So for now, I took some small pleasure in not being sure who it had been. Trey? Maxine? I didn’t know and told myself I didn’t care.
I took long walks with Alex. I delivered him to school in the morning, and picked him up in the afternoon. Marni was busy with her writing and charity careers and I couldn’t think of anything else I would rather be doing. These were Alex’s first five words: Corn, Book, Dog, Ball, and Dad.
I knew that annoyed Marni.
It was only a coincidence that Alex said “Dad” the day she served me with divorce papers. That wasn’t a terrible surprise—is it ever, really? She had discussed it with me several times, but I had always assumed this was one possible scenario and that there were others that we hadn’t discussed.
She looked happy, like she was thriving. I was the one who wasn’t happy. We were sitting at our round table, in the portion of the loft that served as our dining area.
Are these conversations always so cliché-ridden? Working? Not working? I thought of one of those contraptions where you drop a marble into a tube and it rolls through all sorts of tunnels and turns and then bumps into a domino that sets a whole row of dominos falling until one drops onto a scale that tips so that water pours from a bowl into a pipe and so forth so that in the end, after a dozen other little connections are made, a lightbulb turns on. I guess a marriage is sort of like that—this ultimately trivial-seeming set of connections that has to be in place so that in the end, there is either light or darkness.
Marni looked at me and I recalled my first glimpse of her across that editorial meeting. Electrifying.
“I don’t believe you anymore,” she said.
I couldn’t really make any argument against our divorce. Marni had always been smarter than me and, truth be known, probably a better writer.
WHEN MARNI’S BOOK about our marriage and my scandal was published a year later, it was greeted warmly, sold respectably, and was optioned to become a film. She was attached as the screenwriter. Her income and her family’s money now kept her and Alex comfortable and the stream of specialists steadily paid.
When I read her book about our lives, I wasn’t surprised to discover she had made the whole thing up, cooked it as thoroughly as I had my own book. But then that made sense, didn’t it? It was published as a novel.
I told you she is smarter than me.
I MOVED FOR a time to Jersey City, working for a semester as a substitute teacher and tutor for children for whom English was a second language. If I had the money, I might have gone back to school to get a teaching certificate. As it was, I needed to pay for my car and the insurance so I could drive into the city every weekend and several times a week to see Alex. He lived with his mother, in our old loft, and it was agreed as part of the divorce that I would have unlimited visitation and the option of joint custody. Marni and I were forced by Alex’s condition to be far more amicable than most couples are in similar circumstances.
One Tuesday, we attended a conference with Alex’s teachers: he was now sorting shapes and patterns—and even holding a pencil and drawing shapes—but had no interest in people, even in other children. He had also developed a disconcerting habit of immediately dropping old words when he picked up new ones, so that his vocabulary seemed to have frozen at about two hundred words. He was getting dressed by himself, could brush his teeth, and—Marni was particularly jubilant about this latest achievement—was almost completely toilet-trained. Marni and I knew all this about Alex, of course; parent-teacher conferences about the autistic are usually a formality. But he was beautiful, his teachers said, such a lovely child.
After I returned home to my apartment in Jersey City, I found a letter from my old magazine. At first, the sight of the magazine’s venerable logo excited me. Even the coarse, heavy stock of the envelope quickened my blood for a moment. In an instant, however, I recalled my status, my permanent exile. I opened it to find a forwarded envelope on thinner stock, from Tokyo, Japan, sent months before.
I knew what this must be. Somehow, I’d been waiting for it.
I opened it to read the handwritten note from Yoshimi. She had researched and authored those attacks and now she wanted to be sure I knew it. I was surprised that she still seemed angry. It seemed that such effort should have at least freed her from hating me. Otherwise, what was the point? Near the conclusion, she gloated, “You could never cut it in MY game.” She added that she had found one additional mistake in my book, a very basic one. The old Yakuza saying, in actuality, was “Seven Times UP, Eight Times DOWN.”
She was wrong. That had not been a mistake.
In the end, I still believe, you don’t always lose.