brow. “Well, then, I intend to be the Bill Faulkner.”
He smiled. “You have a lot farther to go than I do,” he said.
“Fuck you,” I said, taking a cigarette from the pocket of his shirt.
As we drank our espressos I told him about myself and my wanderings over the past few years, embellishing my account with shameless references to wild if vague sexual encounters. I sensed a certain awkwardness on his part around the subject of girls and I asked if he was seeing anyone, but he grew monosyllabic and I quickly backed off. Instead I told him the story of Albert Vetch, and I could see, when I had finished, that it moved him.
“So,” he said, looking solemn. He reached into the pocket of his overcoat and pulled out a slim hardback book in a buff-colored dust jacket. He passed it to me across the table, two-handed, as though it were an overflowing cup. “You must have seen this.”
It was a collection, published by Arkham House, of twenty short stories by August Van Zorn.
“The Abominations of Plunkettsburg and Other Tales,” I said. “When did this come out?”
“A couple of years ago. They’re a specialty house. You have to go looking for it.”
I turned the deckled pages of the book Albert Vetch hadn’t lived to hold. There was a laudatory text printed on the jacket flaps, and a startling photograph of the plain, high-browed, bespectacled man who had struggled for years, in his room in the turret of the McClelland Hotel, with unnameable regret, with the emptiness of his external life, with the ravages of the midnight disease. You certainly couldn’t see any of that in the picture. He looked relaxed, even handsome, and his hair was just a bit unkempt, as befitting a scholar of Blake.
“Keep it,” said Crabtree. “Seeing as how you knew him.”
“Thanks, Crabtree,” I said, flush once more with a sudden unreasonable affection for this small, skinny person with his scarf and his awkwardness and his studied displays of arrogance and scorn. Later they lost that quality of studiedness, of course, and hardened into automatic mannerisms not universally admired. “Maybe someday you’ll be my editor, huh?”
“Maybe,” he said. “You need one, that’s for sure.”
We smiled at each other and shook hands on it, and then the young woman I’d been avoiding came up from behind and poured a pitcher of ice water onto my head, drenching not only me but the book by August Van Zorn, ruining it beyond repair; or at least that’s the way I remember it happening.
THE windshield wipers played their endless game of tag as we sat parked on Smithfield Street, smoking a little piece of Humboldt County and waiting for my third wife, Emily, to emerge from the lobby of the Baxter Building, where she worked as a copywriter for an advertising agency. Richards, Reed & Associates’s major client was a locally popular brand of Polish sausage famous for its generous dimensions, which made writing ad copy a simple but delicate matter. I saw Emily’s secretary come through the revolving door and shake open her umbrella, and then her friends Susan and Ben, and then a man whose name I had forgotten but whom I recognized as the Engorged Kielbasa from an office skit a couple of Christmases earlier. There were all kinds of other people spinning out into the soft gray evening, dentists and podiatrists, certified public accountants, the sad-looking Ethiopian man who sold half-dead flowers from a small kiosk in the lobby; looking skyward, covering their heads with outspread newspapers, laughing at the glittering, rain-slick prospect of a Friday night downtown; but after fifteen minutes Emily had still not appeared, even though she was always downstairs waiting for me on Fridays when I came to pick her up, and eventually I was forced to admit to myself what I had been fervently denying all day: that sometime early this morning, before I awoke, Emily had walked out on our marriage. There’d been a note taped to the coffee machine on the kitchen counter, and a modest void in all the drawers and closets that had been hers.
“Crabtree,” I said. “She left me, man.”
“She what?”
“She left me. This morning. There was a note. I don’t know if she even went to work. I think she might have gone out to her parents’ place. It’s Passover. Tomorrow’s the first night.” I turned around and looked at Miss Sloviak. She was sitting in the backseat, with Crabtree, on the theory that Emily would have been getting into the front with me. They had the tuba back there with them as well, though I wasn’t entirely sure how that had happened. I still didn’t know if it really belonged to Miss Sloviak or not. “There are eight of them. Nights.”
“Is he kidding?” said Miss Sloviak, all of whose makeup seemed in the course of the ride in from the airport to have been reapplied, very roughly, an inch to the left of her eyes and lips, so that her face had a blurred, double-exposed appearance.
“Why didn’t you say anything, Tripp? I mean, why did you come down here?”
“I guess I just … I don’t know.” I turned back around to face the windshield and listened to the commentary of the rain on the roof of my car, a fly-green ’66 Galaxie ragtop I’d been driving for a little less than a month. I’d had to accept it as repayment of a sizable loan I’d been fool enough to make Happy Blackmore, an old drinking buddy who wrote sports for the Post-Gazette and who was now somewhere in the Blue Ridge of Maryland at a rehabilitation center for the compulsively unlucky, playing out the last act of a spectacular emotional and financial collapse. It was a stylish old yacht, that Ford, with a balky transmission, bad wires, and a rear seat of almost infinite potential. I didn’t really want to know what had just been going on back there.
“I was sort of thinking maybe I’d just imagined it all,” I said. As a lifelong habitué of marijuana I was used to having even the most dreadful phenomena prove, on further inspection, to be only the figments of my paranoid fancy, and all day I had been trying to convince myself that this morning at about six o’clock, while I lay snoring with my legs scissor-forked across the freshly uninhabited regions of the bed, my marriage had not come asunder. “Hoping I had, I mean.”
“Do you feel all right?” said Miss Sloviak.
“I feel great,” I said, trying to decide how I did feel. I felt sorry to have driven Emily to leave me, not because I thought that I could have done otherwise, but because she’d tried very hard for many years to avoid an outcome to which she was, in a way that would always remain beyond my understanding, morally opposed. Her own parents had married in 1939 and they were married still, in a manner that approximated happiness, and I knew she regarded divorce as the first refuge of the weak in character and the last of the hopelessly incompetent. I felt as you feel when you’ve forced an honest person to lie for you, or a thrifty person to blow his paycheck on one of your worthless tips. I also felt that I loved Emily, but in the fragmentary, half-narrative way you love people when you’re stoned. I closed my eyes and I thought of the lash of her skirt snapping around her as she danced one evening in a bar on the South Side to a jukebox that was playing “Barefootin’,” of the downy slope of her neck and the declivity in her nightgown as she bent to wash her face in the bathroom sink, of a tuna salad sandwich she’d handed me one windy afternoon as we sat on a picnic table in Lucia, California, and looked out for the passage of whales, and I felt that I loved Emily insofar as I loved all of these things—beyond reason, and with a longing that made me want to hang my head—but it was a love that felt an awful lot like nostalgia. I hung my head.
“Grady, what happened?” said Crabtree,
