Chapter 10

Anthony

T. S. Eliot might have told us that April is the cruelest month, thought Anthony, but sometimes June is no great shakes either.

It was a surprising but welcome discovery for Anthony that Fitzy’s uncle had a meaty cable television subscription and a cable box attached to a small but impressively modern flat-screen television hidden inside a dusty armoire. He turned it on and flicked through the saved programs, out of curiosity. The uncle’s taste was eclectic and somewhat bewildering—he recorded NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt every evening, but also America’s Got Talent, Halt and Catch Fire, and reruns of Friends. Also: Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

It was early morning; the networks were still running their usual shows. Anthony stopped on one of them, thinking he should probably catch up on some current events. He’d been so wrapped up in the implosion of his own world he sometimes forgot there was a wider one out there. The climate was changing, nuclear dangers were proliferating, immigrant children were suffering. In comparison, his own troubles were minuscule.

“Up next!” said the announcer. “This month’s book club pick is one of the summer’s hottest thrillers, an instant number-one New York Times bestseller. Stay tuned—after this word from our sponsors, we’re going to tell you all about it.”

“Oh, no,” said Anthony. “No, no, no.” He wanted to push the off button on the remote but his fingers wouldn’t move. On one side of the split screen appeared the cover of The Thrill of the Chase. On the other, his father, freshly shaven, wearing a tweedish jacket, giving a coy little wave to the television viewers.

Anthony sat on the uncomfortable sofa for three minutes, while he learned about Ultra Soft Charmin and fresh-squeezed orange juice and gummy vitamins for those over fifty-five.

His phone buzzed: his mother. He ignored it. He knew she was calling to tell him to turn on the TV.

Turn it off, he told himself. Turn it off, walk away. Go to the beach, look at the waves.

But of course he couldn’t, he didn’t. He sat there, and he watched as the host—Travis Weaver—announced the presence of New York Times bestselling author Leonard Puckett, and the finale of the Gabriel Shelton series. When the camera panned back, all the world could see that next to Travis on the studio sofa was Anthony’s father, one foot casually resting on the opposite knee, a little smile playing at his lips, his fingers tented together.

They shot the shit for a while, Travis and Leonard, and caught up the three people in the world who had never read a Gabriel Shelton book on who the guy was and why he was so consistently out for blood. (Gabriel Shelton was a con artist who traveled the world, conning people, sleeping with supermodels, staying in one glossy, hard-edged penthouse apartment after another, engineering successful heists, and forever eluding his nemesis, CIA agent Rex Chapman.) When they were done with that, Travis said, “Leonard, I’m sure I speak for our live audience and the folks at home as well—what everybody really wants to know is, how do you do it? How do you keep going, year after year, book after book after book?”

“I can answer that,” Anthony told Travis. “I can tell you the whole history. There he was, a mid-level corporate accountant . . .”

“There I was,” began Leonard, “a mid-level corporate accountant . . . but what I really wanted to do was write. So I wrote in the mornings, and I wrote in the evenings.”

First came A Pirate’s Penance, which sold modestly, but well enough to secure a contract for a second book. Murder by Moonlight built respectably on the audience of the first book. Then A Sea Change, which catapulted Leonard Puckett from the fringes to the core: a household name.

After sales of A Sea Change reached a million, Leonard’s publisher set up a long-term contract, and Leonard agreed to write two books a year: like clockwork, like magic, or some unknowable combination of the two. Four months to write, six weeks to revise, two weeks off in between. A pattern was established from which Leonard never wavered. Work began at nine. Lunch with Dorothy at noon, four more hours of writing, and then scotch at five, while he fiddled around with what he’d written that day. Dinner at six-thirty sharp. He averaged twenty-five hundred words a day, which meant he could complete a draft of one of his one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word books in forty-eight working days, taking the weekends off. While his editor took a red pen to that draft, he began the next one. He chugged along and along, the Energizer Bunny of the publishing house, as reliable as the tides, a man whose work habits you could set your watch by.

They moved out of their condo and into the five-bedroom home on Marblehead Neck when Anthony was eleven. Anthony’s sense of his father became the sound of the heavy oak door to his office closing, the tinkle of ice in a rocks glass, the Puccini he played at full volume when he was stuck on a plot point.

But in truth Leonard Puckett was so rarely stuck on a plot point. He was rarely stuck on anything! The ideas kept coming, as if to a river fed by an endless supply of tributaries. The Gabriel Shelton series. The Delgado Marina series. The series that took place entirely on board a Navy submarine in the Indian Ocean. There were foreign editions by the bucketload, film rights and audio rights and large-print rights and mass-market editions. You couldn’t take a plane, a train, a goddamn Greyhound without being offered the chance to buy the latest Puckett.

Leonard Puckett, in the reviews he never read (“Those who can’t, review,” he said), had been called both formulaic and thrilling. He’d been called a genius and he’d been called a cad. Talentless and overhyped and underhyped and a faker and a realist. None of it mattered, none of it. The books kept selling.

“I’ve got one word for you, Travis,” Leonard said on the television screen.

Travis leaned forward, riveted, almost drooling. He looked like he might start making out with Leonard right then and there.

“Discipline.”

Travis sat back, disappointed. Discipline wasn’t magical; it wasn’t even interesting.

“You don’t write a book if you don’t log those hours in the chair,” Leonard added. “You certainly don’t write fifty-nine of them.”

“Fifty-nine,” breathed Travis, his disappointment tempered by grudging respect.

“A cup of strong black coffee in the morning,” Leonard went on, “a scotch at exactly five o’clock. Lunch with my wife every day. Those are the things that keep me going.”

“You heard it here!” cried Travis. “Right out of the horse’s mouth.”

They went to another commercial break; Anthony’s phone rang again. This time he answered. He owed his mother that.

“Your father is on the television, Anthony.”

“I know. I watched. Are you with him?”

“Oh, no. I stayed home. He did a nice job, didn’t he?”

Anthony sighed. “He always does.”

“Please call your father, Anthony. Tell him you saw him. Tell him he did a nice job.”

“He doesn’t want to hear from me.”

“Of course he does.”

“He doesn’t! Or he would have called. Emailed. Something.”

“He wasn’t sure how to handle it, that’s all.” There was a pause, and he pictured his mother’s pristine silver bob, her classy pants and blouses. She was a woman who dressed up to go shopping, who never left the house without lipstick and perfume. After a beat Dorothy said, “Can you blame him for that?”

Anthony didn’t answer. Yes, he thought.

“How long are you going to hide out there, Anthony?”

“Mom. I’m not hiding out.”

“Of course you are.”

“I had to leave! Cassie threw me out.” His voice cracked. “She doesn’t want me around right now, and I can’t say I blame her. I had to find somewhere to go.”

“You could have come here.”

He thought about the study door, always closed, the Puccini, the heavy silence of the great man at work. “You know that wasn’t an option.”

“It’s always an option. This is your home.” When Anthony didn’t answer, Dorothy said, “I have to tell you about what Max said the other day. Such a funny thing.”

Anthony’s pulse picked up. “You saw Max?”

Dorothy paused, then said, “Yes. I had him for two nights.”

“Two nights? Where was Cassie?” His mother had had Max for two nights and Anthony couldn’t even get five minutes on the phone with him? Every time he asked, Cassie said he wasn’t available. He was four years old! Of course he was available! No, said Cassie. He was at camp. He was at a playdate. A swimming lesson. A birthday party. Some of this was true, probably (Cassie kept him remarkably busy), but it couldn’t all be true. Cassie thought Anthony was a bad influence on Max; Cassie wanted to keep him to herself.

“She had to go away for work,” Dorothy said cagily.

Right, thought Anthony. Because art that sat in an expensive boutique in Boston’s South End (and really, if they were being honest, didn’t sell a hell of a lot) required so much business travel. Could his mother be so naïve? “Where’d she go?”

“I’m not sure,” said Dorothy.

“Interesting.”

“In the end, I didn’t care,” said Dorothy. “Because I was so happy to have Max.”

Again he thought of their wedding, on the grounds of an old horse farm in Shelburne, Vermont. Cassie’s blond hair was in those braids with the wildflowers woven in. Her dress was held up with the aid of two slender straps that looked like pieces of braided ribbon. She was paler than dawn, with minimal makeup. Her skin was luminous; everything about her was luminous. She walked down the cedar path that led to the wildflower arch completely barefoot, her toenails painted a pearly pink. The irony must have struck Dorothy immediately; after the ceremony she pulled Anthony aside and whispered, “Your new wife is already barefoot and pregnant!”

The reality was that though Anthony had flicked Dorothy’s comments away like they were a fly, she had seen Cassie’s true colors long before he had. Cassie was in it for the money and the prestige. They’d written their wedding vows themselves; Cassie had insisted they use none of the usual, hackneyed phrases, no ’til death do us part, no for richer or poorer. Anthony had thought that was further proof of Cassie’s stylishness and charm, but in retrospect it just seemed prescient.

“Well, what did Max say?” Anthony asked now. “That was so funny?”

“We were baking cookies, and while the cookies were in the oven he asked me if they were loading! Can you imagine? Loading! Cookies!”

Anthony smiled. That was a very Max-like question.

“It reminded me of when you were about his age and you asked what wist was,” Dorothy continued. She laughed. “Somebody had used the word wistful in front of you, and you, precocious boy that you were, assumed that if one could be wistful, there was something called wist one could be full of.”

(It made sense to Anthony, even now.)

“Anthony? Maybe I’ll come and visit you sometime soon.”

“Here?”

“Yes. There’s something I’d love to talk to you about.”

“Ah . . .” Anthony looked around the cottage. It was a two-bedroom, but, still, he couldn’t imagine his mother in the other bedroom. “Maybe not quite yet, Mom. I think I need to get my head on straight first. Alone.”

He was glad he couldn’t see his mother’s face; he didn’t want to know if he’d hurt her.

“Well, we’ll talk about it. It would be good for us to spend some time together. I’ll speak with you soon, okay? Hang in there.”

“Hanging in,” he said.

When they disconnected he texted Cassie. Can I talk to Max? If I call, will you answer?

Immediately the little bubbles popped up to tell him Cassie was writing back.

Not here. At camp.

But he’s alive though?

Of course he’s alive. Why wouldn’t he be alive?

On the screen, Travis was asking Leonard about the program he’d started to bring creative writing programs to state prisons across the country. Writers Unbarred, it was called. Give me a break, thought Anthony. He hadn’t known about the program.

“I just think everyone should have a voice,” said Leonard, shrugging. “Right? Maybe we’ve made mistakes, slipped off the path, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all have a voice.”

“There he is,” said Travis, as the transitional music began to play, indicating the end of the segment. No questions about him, then, about Anthony. That must have been part of the agreement beforehand. “Leonard Puckett,” said Travis. “A great man, and a good man.”

“Bullshit,” Anthony told the television. “Bullshit, Travis. You can’t be both of those. Good or great. You have to pick one.” Anthony threw the remote at the television, but gently, more softball pitch than major league curveball, because he knew he couldn’t afford to replace the television or the remote.

He looked at the decanter with the beautiful golden liquid. He wanted it so badly, so very, very badly—he wanted the scorch, the burn, the slow warm ease of forgetting. But he couldn’t; he wouldn’t. Drinking, after all, was one of the things that had gotten him into this mess in the first place.