says he’s a walking colon.”
“You shouldn’t have let him into your head, Cubby. But now that he’s in there, flush him out.”
“I will.”
She put her arms around me. “You’re a sweet, talented man, and I love you.”
Holding her tight, I said, “Don’t look at my feet.”
“What’s wrong with your feet?”
“Everything. I should never go barefoot. Let’s have dinner at Roxie’s, celebrate publication day.”
“That’s my boy. You went off the track for a bit, but now you’re on it again.”
“Maybe I am.”
“Let it go. Remember what Gilbert said.”
She was an admirer of the late G. K. Chesterton, the English writer, and she made me an admirer of his, as well.
“‘Nothing,’” she quoted, “‘can do a man harm unless he fears it.’ There’s no reason to fear a weasel like Shearman Waxx.”
“If I had shaved, brushed my teeth, and didn’t have sour-coffee breath, I’d kiss you so hard.”
Pinching my lower lip between her thumb and forefinger, and pulling it into a pout, she said, “I’ll be around when you’ve cleaned up your act.”
In the first-floor hallway, heading toward the stairs, I passed the open door of my study and saw Milo and Lassie sitting side by side in my office chair, boosted by a sofa pillow. This was a Norman Rockwell moment for the twenty-first century: a boy and his dog surfing the Internet.
Stepping behind the chair, I saw on the monitor an aerial view of a seaside house with an orange barrel-tile roof.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Milo said, “Google Earth. I googled the guy, where he lives.”
“What guy?”
“The Waxx guy.”
When I was six years old, my technological prowess amounted to helping my buddy Ned Lufferman build a tin-can rocket powered by firecrackers that he stole from his big brother’s Fourth of July stash. Ned lost the little finger on his left hand, and I was rushed to the hospital with a second-degree burn on the nose. There was also some concern that my eyebrows would not grow back, but they did.
Milo clicked the mouse, and a street view of the Waxx property replaced the aerial shot.
With cream-colored walls and terra-cotta window surrounds, the Spanish Mediterranean residence was both handsome and romantic. Twin forty-foot magnolias canopied the front yard, and red bougainvillea all but concealed the flanking property walls.
“I thought he was in New York,” I said.
“No,” said Milo. “Laguna Beach.”
Barring heavy traffic, Laguna lay only twenty minutes away.
In this e-mail age, Waxx could live as far from his publisher as I lived from mine, yet meet his weekly deadlines. His presence in the vicinity was a surprise, though surely nothing but a coincidence.
Nevertheless, I was pricked by either intuition or imagination, and through me bled a cold premonition that the critic’s proximity to me might be more significant than it seemed.
“Did you read the review?” I asked Milo.
“No. Mom told you—let it go. She’s smart about this stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Most stuff.”
“So if you didn’t read the review, why did you google him?”
“It was Lassie’s idea.”
The dog turned her head to look back and up at me.
“Shearman Waxx is an enema,” Milo informed me.
As I gently rubbed my thumbs behind Lassie’s ears, I said, “While that may be true, it’s not a nice thing to say.”
“Wasn’t me who said it.”
Milo’s small hands moved cat-quick from mouse to keyboard to mouse. He bailed from the current website and went to an online encyclopedia, to the biographical entry on Shearman Waxx.
Leaning over my son, I read aloud the first sentence on the screen: “‘Shearman Thorndike Waxx, award-winning critic and author of three enormously successful college textbooks on creative writing, is something of an enema.’”
Milo said, “See?”
“It’s an error,” I explained. “They meant to write enigma”
“Enigma? I know what that is.”
“A mystery, something obscure and puzzling.”
“Yeah. Like Grandma Clotilda.”
I continued reading: “‘Waxx declines honorary doctorates and other awards requiring his attendance at any pubic event.’”
“What’s a pubic event?” Milo asked.
“The word should be public.” Scanning the screen, I said, “According to this, there’s only one known photograph of Waxx.”
“He’s really, really old,” said Milo.
“He is? How old?”
“He was born in 1868.”
“They probably mean 1968.”
“Do real-book ’cyclopedias make so many mistakes?”
“No.”
“Could we buy a real-book ’cyclopedia?”
“Absolutely.”
“So when will we get Waxx?” Milo asked.
“What do you mean—get him?”
“Vengeance,” Milo said, and Lassie growled softly. “When will we make him sorry he messed with you, Dad?”
Dismayed that Milo could read my anger so clearly and that it inspired him to talk of vengeance, I moved from behind his chair to his side, and with the mouse I clicked out of the encyclopedia.
“Revenge isn’t a good thing, Milo.” I switched off the computer. “Besides, Mr. Waxx was only doing what he’s paid to do.”
“What is he paid to do?”
“Read a book and tell his audience whether he liked it or not.”
“Can’t
