After the workshop, p.2
After the Workshop, page 2
He looked over at me and said, “Is there a problem?”
“No problem,” I said. I walked closer to the security guard who kept people from entering the gate area, a man so large he looked like he might have had trouble tying his shoes, let alone chasing down someone with ill intent. I glanced over my shoulder at the man in the white turtleneck and sport jacket; he was still staring at me. Lately, I’d begun mistaking words and phrases when I saw them, mostly on street signs or billboards. At a quick glance I might think “No Stopping” said “No Groping,” or “Watch Out: Bump Ahead” said “Watch Out: Bum Ahead.” Only on a second, more discerning look would I see the words for what they were. But today was the first time I had mistaken a person for someone other than who he was, and I feared that I was in the early stages of some horrific disease, like the villagers in One Hundred Years of Solitude who, suffering from mass amnesia, begin hanging signs on things, like cows, to remind themselves of what they were looking at.
A plane started deboarding, so I held Vanessa Roberts’s book in front of my chest—her cue that I was her media escort. One thing I had learned: Never rely on an author photo. If it hasn’t been Photoshopped to death, it’s probably twenty years old. One time, I stood waiting with the book held up, looking for a sexy, woodsy woman in her late twenties to amble up to me, and I became increasingly irritated when a heavy-set, middle-aged woman eating an enormous cookie stepped in front of me and blocked my view. She finally lowered her cookie and said, “Should we get my bags or what?” “Oh,” I said, “hello!” and when she smirked at me I could see, if only fleetingly, the younger, spunky woman inside the older one, and how the woman standing in front of me had decided, at some critical juncture, to just let herself go. She was wearing sweatpants that day, and her hair stood on end. Cookie crumbs dotted a stained T-shirt that advertised the Bermuda Triangle Writers Conference.
Another time, I chased a black man across the airport, thinking that he had failed to see me holding up his book, but when I caught up to him and tapped him on the shoulder, asking if he was indeed the book’s author, even going so far as to show the author photo to him and point at it, he said, in a good-natured way, “If I say yes, do I win something?” Before walking away, he laughed and shook his head, muttering something under his breath that I couldn’t hear. I didn’t blame him, and as a guy who prided himself as being sensitive to racial issues, I was mortified that I had followed the wrong man across the airport.
So I had quit looking at author photos altogether. I read the press material, and I skimmed the book, but I refused to be led astray.
A woman holding a baby approached me. The baby, still red-faced and wrinkled, looked fresh out of the womb. It was, to the best of my recollection, the smallest human I’d ever seen before.
“Vanessa Roberts,” she said. “I’d shake your hand, but . . .” She held up the infant to prove that her hands were full. “Oh, hey, could you take the baby for a minute?” she asked.
I’d recently had a nightmare in which a stranger handed me her baby and I accidentally dropped it. As dreams went, this one landed somewhere between forgetting my locker combination and falling off a cliff: a classic anxiety dream, the subconscious flotsam of a chronic worrier. Fortunately, I jumped awake before the baby hit the floor.
I took Vanessa’s baby. I cooed, but the baby seemed barely sentient. I made a face, poking out my bottom lip and widening my eyes, but the baby simply moved arms and legs back and forth, like a toppled-over insect.
Vanessa set down various bags, purses, and satchels, rummaged through a few of them, then pulled out a bottle and handed it to me. After picking up all her detritus, slinging some of the bags over a shoulder, she hitched her pants and straightened her blouse, then motioned for me, by wiggling her fingers, to give back her child.
“Here,” she said, annoyed. “I’ll hold; you can feed.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“The nipple goes in the mouth,” she said impatiently, and I must have turned red, thinking about the author’s memoir—naked siblings fondling each other in an outhouse—because she said, “Forget it,” and jerked the bottle from me, doing the task herself. “Where’s baggage claim?” she asked. “I checked the baby seat.”
I pointed to my left, and off we went.
3
WITH ONLY TWO exceptions, the authors I picked up never asked me if I was a writer, and I never brought it up. It was no different with Vanessa Roberts, who sat in the backseat without putting on her seatbelt and then fell sound asleep while the baby, belted in place like an astronaut about to be blasted into outer space, looked around wide-eyed.
I hit a bump, and my muffler fell off. Vanessa woke up and asked me what that noise was.
“What noise?” I asked. I saw cars in my rearview mirror swerving to avoid running over the muffler, but then a semi-trailer flattened it, sending debris bouncing toward the side of the road.
“And that smell?” she asked. She coughed a few times. “What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t smell anything.”
The exhaust fumes were burning my eyes, but I admitted nothing. We’re almost there, I thought. Just a few more miles to go.
The baby started wailing. Vanessa, coughing, rubbed her own eyes. “Now, now,” she said to her child. “Everything’s okay.” To me, she said, “What’s wrong with this car?”
“Nothing’s wrong with this car,” I lied. “The pavement’s ridged along this stretch. That’s the noise you’re hearing. What you’re smelling is an old milk truck with an oil problem. It sped by us while you were napping.”
“Dammit,” Vanessa said.
“What?”
“I lost something.” She rummaged through her bags. “It must have fallen out in the overhead bin.” She shut her eyes. “Shit!”
Vanessa was silent the rest of the way to the hotel. I zipped into the semicircle and killed the engine as hotel guests stopped to stare at me and my loud car. I needed to work fast—the next author pickup was in an hour—so I carried the baby to the sidewalk.
“Does she stay in the chair, or do you want to carry her?”
“He. Him.”
“What?”
“The baby is a boy,” she said.
“Oh. Him, then,” I said and smiled. I set his chair on the sidewalk. I looked down and said, “Hey, li’l guy. How ya doin’?”
The baby started bawling.
“Look,” she said, “I need a favor.” She pulled a Montblanc pen and a leather-bound journal from her purse and started writing. Maybe this was what I had needed to get me through my writing slump—a $200 pen and a pad of paper sheathed in the skin of some exotic or unlikely animal, like a bobcat or a hedgehog. Maybe the cause of my creative impotence lay in the fact that I had used black Bics and legal pads purchased in bulk at Office Depot.
Vanessa tore the sheet from her journal and handed it to me. What she’d written was a product name, but the words meant nothing. They looked foreign or made up.
“I need you to get that for me,” she said. “Bill it to my publisher.”
“Where do I find it?”
“The drugstore,” she said.
I nodded. I glanced at my watch, worried about my next author pickup. “When do you need this?”
She looked down at her howling, pinch-faced baby and said, “As soon as possible.”
“Okeydoke,” I said. “Good enough.”
I started to pick up the baby again, but when I saw one of the bell-boys, I motioned him over and said, “Could you? Do you mind?”
He smiled at Vanessa but frowned at me, reaching down and taking hold of the baby seat as though it were an old piece of Samsonite.
“Be back soon,” I said. Vanessa merely nodded. She followed the stranger lugging her child away. The huge glass double doors swept open, and an agreeable blast of ventilated heat hit me before the doors swept shut again, leaving me in the skin-charring cold.
4
A CHEERFUL, ANTISEPTIC MUZAK version of “Psycho Killer” wafted like nerve gas through CVS’s ceiling. I looked down at the sheet of paper that Vanessa had given to me. The only words on the page were “Advent Isis iQ Uno.”
“Excuse me?”
A portly woman stocking shelves stopped what she was doing to hear what I had to say, but she wasn’t pleased that I had interrupted her.
“I was wondering,” I said, “if you carry this?” I showed her the sheet of paper.
She read it, then looked up at me. By her expression, I half-expected her to pull out her walkie-talkie and announce a Code Red in aisle four, but then she turned without uttering a word and walked away. I followed. When we reached an aisle stocked full of baby supplies, she pointed to a box on the top shelf. What I had asked for, apparently, was a breast pump.
“Oh,” I said. “Perfect. Thank you.”
The woman, still not speaking to me, returned to her appointed aisle. Her revulsion clung to me, though. I wanted to find her and say, “Look, it’s not like I came to CVS looking for a penis pump. This is for my wife! It’s for our child!” But it wasn’t for my wife or child, and maybe she sensed this. I wasn’t wearing a wedding band, and I was slightly out of breath. I may even have been panting.
I grabbed a Starbucks Frappuccino from the freezer on my way to the checkout. More than anything, I needed a fix of caffeine right now. Or, perhaps, I desired the Frappuccino, whereas I neededa new muffler. It had been my experience, however, that desires almost always trumped needs.
Behind me in line, someone said, “Jack?” It had been over three years since I’d last seen Alice, ten years since we’d been a couple. Even though we resided in a town of sixty thousand, it was entirely possible to live your whole life here and not see everyone, so it wasn’t particularly surprising that Alice and I traveled in entirely different orbits: She was a scientist; I was . . . something else. I couldn’t say that I was a writer. And yet I couldn’t quite pin down my occupation—my reason for being—since what I did for a living struck me as more of a hobby than a profession. In an earlier life, back when I could have said what it was I did (or, at least, what it was I thought I was doing), Alice and I had been engaged to be married.
“Alice!” I said, trying to convey in my smile a complicated commingling of fondness and regret, though almost certainly expressing bewilderment and worry instead. Alice shut her eyes slowly and opened them, the way a cat sometimes does when you say its name. She had green eyes and skin so pale it was almost blue from her veins. Strange as it sounded, I fell in love with her translucence before I fell in love with her.
“It’s funny,” Alice said. “I was just thinking about you the other day. A friend of mine was going on and on about a play that I should see, and I remember how much you hated plays. Remember? You used to say, ‘The acting. It’s so . . . theatrical!’” Alice laughed. “Remember that?”
“No. Did I say that?” I asked, wagging my head, though I knew perfectly well that I had. I was the king of witticisms back when my New Yorker publication meant (or seemed to mean) that I was destined for larger things, but now that I knew the truth, that I was a one-hit wonder, I quit making ridiculous pronouncements and regretted that I had been such a pompous asshole.
Alice, making a pained expression, said, “So, how have you been?”
“Oh, not too bad,” I said, but when this sounded to my own ears like a pathetic appeal for sympathy, I said, “Actually, pretty good. Great, really.”
“Oh good,” Alice said, brightening. “I’m so glad.”
“And you?” I asked.
She made an exaggerated frown. “I’ve put on a few pounds,” she said. “You know. Old age. Metabolism. Ugh.”
“Stop it,” I said. “You look great. You could use the weight. Seriously. Don’t get me wrong. You were gorgeous before. But you look even better now.” I could see that I was heading into dangerous territory, so I quickly added, “And I’m older than you. Remember?”
“You’re sweet,” she said.
I raised my eyebrows, shrugged. I looked down at my shoes. I was still in love with Alice, but I didn’t want her to know. And yet I couldn’t think of anything else trivial to say or ask.
“Are you all right?” she whispered.
“What?”
“You look so sad,” she said.
“I do? No, I’m great. No, no, everything’s great.”
“NEXT!” It was the cashier; I had failed to see that my turn had finally come. I stepped forward, and Alice moved up behind me.
“Do you want to get coffee sometime?” I asked. My heart had begun to thump harder, causing me to take quicker breaths.
The scanner beeped twice—once for the Frappuccino, once for the breast pump—and the cashier said, “That’s two hundred and sixteen dollars and forty-three cents.”
“How much?” I asked.
Alice, eyes lighting up, said, “What did you buy, Jack?” and then she looked down and saw the breast pump. “Oh,” she said. “Congratulations?”
“It’s not what it looks like,” I said, but as soon as I said this, I realized that it sounded even worse. If a breast pump wasn’t going to be used for its intended purpose, then to what use would I be putting it?
“Credit?” the cashier asked. She pursed her lips, waiting.
“Uh . . . just a sec,” I said. My credit line was close to being maxed out, but in my bank account sat less than three hundred bucks—barely enough to last me the month. My choices were to humiliate myself with a credit card purchase that would be denied, float the check, or return the merchandise.
“Do you take checks?” I asked.
“Do you have an I.D.?”
I pulled out my driver’s license and wrote a check.
The cashier bagged the pump, threw the receipt inside, and yelled, “NEXT!”
I drank my Frappuccino and waited for Alice by the exit, hoping to salvage our talk, but she pretended to be in a hurry when she saw me.
“I’ve taken way too long of a lunch break,” she said.
“Do you know who Vanessa Roberts is?” I asked.
“Is she the one who wrote The Bathroom?”
“The Outhouse,” I said.
Alice nodded.
“Well, this is for her,” I said. I raised the bag with the breast pump in it.
“I really need to go,” she said. “But it was great seeing you, Jack. Take care of yourself, okay?”
“All right,” I said. “Okay.” I lifted up the bag, spun the breast pump to tighten the plastic sack’s opening, and then carried it out of the mall like a hunter clutching a dead goose by its limp neck.
Back at the hotel, standing at the front desk, I used the house phone to call Vanessa. Her phone rang and rang, but no one answered.
“Are you sure this is the right room?” I asked.
The man working the front desk shut his eyes and nodded. Displays of visible irritation were not uncommon in Iowa City. Nearly everyone in town had an MFA or a PhD, and yet most were relegated to jobs that paid barely above minimum wage. For all I knew, I was probably talking to the next great post-abstract-expressionist.
I hung up and said, “Listen. She needs what’s in this sack. Could you give it to her as soon as possible?” I handed over the pump and said, “This is urgent. A child’s life depends on this.” To further make my point, I added, “A baby’s life.”
The man took the bag with no emotion.
“Thank you,” I said. “I mean that.” My hope was that sincerity might breed competence.
The man looked over my shoulder and said, “Checking in?”
I looked over my own shoulder: A family of eight had somehow snuck up on me.
“Welcome to Iowa City,” I said, “the third best small metropolitan area in the United States!” I stepped aside, gesturing for them to proceed to the front desk. “According to Forbes,” I added.
5
ON THE CORNER of Summit and Burlington I lived in a turn-of-the-century house that had been divided into four apartments, two large, two small. I lived in one of the small ones—hardwood floors, gas oven, built-in bookshelves, arched doorways, a claw-foot tub. Each year, the owner jacked up the rent; a letter, informing tenants of the new rates, appeared under our doors in the middle of the night. My annual income had long since plateaued, so it was only a matter of a few years before I would get the boot.
The first thing I saw today when I stepped inside my apartment was the blinking light of my answering machine. There were half-a-dozen messages waiting for me. I punched “play” and listened while I made myself a baloney sandwich. All of the messages were from Vanessa Roberts’s publicist, Lauren Castle. Lauren was head of publicity for Roberts’s publisher, and, like most New York publicists, she seemed to think that if I wasn’t busy running errands for the publishing house, I was out slopping pigs or birthing calves. This was Iowa, after all. What else would I be doing?
Publicists usually worked for a season or two, and then they disappeared, never to be heard from again. Mostly they were women in their early to mid-twenties, and when they called, they barked orders at me, wondered why I didn’t have a cell phone, and told me what wonderful human beings the authors were that I would be taking care of, even when it wasn’t true. Oh, most of the authors were lovely people (polite, gracious, funny, even apologetic), but more than a few had been terrors, like the famous Canadian author, Coop Dunfield, whose list of demands specified that he required a wooden podium for his reading (metal would not be acceptable), a 1.76-ounce tin of cinnamon-flavored Altoids (unopened), Fiji water (no other brand would be consumed), three black Sharpie Ultra Fine Points, and four moist towelettes (the kind given to patrons of Kentucky Fried Chicken for cleaning their greasy fingers). There were detailed dietary restrictions, too, and a message that I was to relay to the bookstore: Mr. Dunfield would not be signing any books after his event.
