the time we finished our main course and ordered dessert, I lost interest in him.
After I paid the bill and tipped the waiter, as we were rising from the table to leave, Milo said, “I gotta pee, Dad.”
The restrooms were at our end of the premises, off a short hall, and as we crossed the room, I glanced toward Waxx. I couldn’t see his table clearly through the throng, but his chair stood empty. He must have finished lunch and left.
The sparkling-clean men’s room featured one stall wide enough for a wheelchair, two urinals, and two sinks. Redolent of astringent pine-scented disinfectant, the air burned in my nostrils.
Someone occupied the stall, but Milo wasn’t tall enough to use one of the urinals unassisted. After he unzipped his pants, fumbled in his fly, and produced himself, I clamped my hands around his waist and lifted him above the porcelain bowl.
“Ready,” he said.
“Aim,” I said.
“Fire,” he said, and loosed a stream.
When Milo was more than half drained, the toilet flushed and the stall door opened.
I glanced sideways, saw Shearman Waxx not six feet from me, and as if my throat were the pinched neck of a balloon, I let out a thin “Eeee” in surprise.
In the restaurant, his table had been at such a distance from ours that I had not been able to see the color of his eyes. They were maroon.
Although I have thought about that moment often in the days since, I still do not know whether, startled, I turned toward the critic or whether Milo, held aloft in my hands, twisted around to see what had made me gasp. I suspect it was a little of both.
The boy’s stream arced to the tile floor.
For a man as solid as a concrete battlement, Waxx proved to be agile. He danced adroitly backward, out of the splash zone, and his gray Hush Puppies remained entirely dry.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I chanted, and turned Milo toward the urinal.
Without a word, Waxx stepped over the puddle, went to one of the sinks, and began to wash his hands.
“He’s a little guy,” I said. “I have to lift him up.”
Although Waxx did not respond, I imagined I could feel his gaze boring into my back as he watched me in the mirror above the sinks.
I knew that the more I apologized, the more it might seem that I had intended to use Milo like a squirt gun, but I couldn’t shut up.
“Nothing like that ever happened before. If he’d nailed you, I would have paid the dry-cleaning bill.”
Waxx pulled paper towels from the dispenser.
As he finished peeing, Milo giggled.
“He’s a good kid,” I assured Waxx. “He saved a dog from being euthanized.”
The only sound was the rustle of paper as the critic dried his hands.
Although Milo could read at a college level, he was nonetheless a six-year-old boy. Six-year-old boys find nothing funnier than pee and fart jokes.
After giggling again, Milo said, “I shook and zipped, Dad. You can put me down.”
A squeak of hinges revealed that Waxx had opened the door to the hallway.
Putting Milo on his feet, I turned toward the exit.
My hope was that Waxx had not recognized me from my book-jacket photograph.
The eminent critic was staring at me. He said one word, and then he departed.
He had recognized me, all right.
After using paper towels to mop up Milo’s small puddle, I washed my hands at a sink. Then I lifted Milo so he could wash up, too.
“Almost sprinkled him,” Milo said.
“That’s nothing to be proud of. Stop giggling.”
When we returned to the restaurant, Shearman Waxx sat once more at his table. The waiter was just serving the entrée.
Waxx did not look our way. He seemed determined to ignore us.
As we passed his table, I saw the device that imprisoned the book was clever but wicked-looking, as though the critic were holding the work—and its author—in bondage.
Outside, the November afternoon waited: mild, still, expectant. The unblemished sky curved to every horizon like an encompassing sphere of glass, containing not a single cloud or bird, or aircraft.
Along the street, the trees stood as motionless as the fake foliage in an airless diorama. No limb trembled, no leaf whispered.
No traffic passed. Milo and I were the only people in sight.
We might have been figures in a snow-globe paperweight, sans snow.
I wanted to look back at the restaurant, to see if Shearman Waxx watched us from his window seat. Restraining myself, I didn’t turn, but instead walked Milo to the car.
During the drive home, I could not stop brooding about the single word the critic had spoken before he stepped out of the men’s room. He transfixed me with those terrible maroon eyes and in a solemn baritone said, “Doom.”
That afternoon, while Penny finished a painting for her next children’s book, while Milo and Lassie worked on a time machine or a death ray, or whatever it might be, I sat in an armchair in my study, reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, a short story that I much admired.
One of the most disturbing pieces of fiction ever written, it remains as affecting on the tenth pass as on the first. This might have been my twentieth reading, but Miss O’Connor inspired in me a greater dread than ever before.
I did not understand why phantom spiders crawled the nape of my neck, why chills shivered through my bowels and stomach, why my palms grew damp and my fingers sometimes trembled when I turned a page—all to a degree that I had never experienced previously with this work of fiction or any other. Later, I figured it out.
After I finished the story and as I sat staring at the page, where the words blurred out of focus, a disquiet rose in me that had nothing to do with “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” I told myself that my uneasiness related to my career, to concern about what Waxx would write in his review of my next novel, which he seemed to have promised to savage when he spoke the word doom in a portentous tone.
But surely that could not be the entire cause of the nameless worry that crawled my mind. I had not yet finished my next novel. It would not be published for a year. At my request, my publisher would withhold an advance review copy from Waxx. We had time to devise a strategy to thwart him. Yet my current uneasiness seemed to anticipate a more immediate jeopardy.
