Private Novelist (12 page)

YIGAL'S AGNOSTICISM BEGAN WITH A
gift from his parents on his eighth birthday:
The Wind in the Willows.
God makes way for “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” and as far as Yigal could tell, it was a big improvement.

He bought a copy for Mary at Scribner's across the street from the library. I admit it's a Rizzoli now, but for the purposes of this novel, it's still Scribner's. The book delighted her. “This is just like the ocean! Who is this guy?”

You can tell a lot about the author of
Wind in the Willows
by reading it, but Yigal hadn't given it much thought, so he said, “I don't know. The author.”

“He must have lived in the ocean for a while. These characters are so much like people I used to know down there. This frog is just like a sea tiger.”

“Sea tiger?” Yigal was imagining something large and furry with stripes, since a seal in Hebrew is a “sea dog.”

“It's a sort of squishy green thing about a foot long, with spots. What I mean is, sea tigers are always trying to take advantage of people. Actually they eat them, but you know what I mean. They sting, but they're easy to avoid.”

“Do they talk?”

“No, no. They have personalities, but they don't talk. Even rocks have personalities. They just sit there, and that's doing something. It's not at all like a bird that flies around, or seals playing.”

“Who in the ocean do I remind you of?”

“You're like an albatross. You keep moving all the time, and you sleep on the sea.” Yigal frowned. “I mean, you don't seem to like your apartment very much. You're always traveling.”

“Trident missiles fall on my apartment.” He took the book from her and leafed through it. “Do you want to go to England?”

“No, I want to go to Tel Aviv, where it's nice and hot.”

Yigal closed the book and said, “I don't.”

“But that's where you're from. It's your home.”

“And? Doesn't it seem like I'd want to get away? What bird spends its life sitting on the nest where it hatched? You left the ocean.”

“Only for a while. I'll go back, there's nothing more relaxing. Besides, I might have to. I think I'm pregnant.”

Yigal jumped up, then sat down again. He was swaying a little, as though she had hit him on the head with a board. “What? Already? How did you manage that? Are you sure?” He dropped the book, and his face contorted in anguish. Then he remembered that he might have had something to do with it, and he knelt to stroke her tenderly. “Dear Mary, this is sudden, but I'm so happy and proud—”

“Why?” Mary asked. “It's just a pain in the neck. I've never been pregnant when I was human, but it's got to suck. I mean, walking around, carrying all that weight all by yourself. But I love you, so I won't go back to Shetland until the very end. Then I'll be gone for maybe eight months till I can get it weaned and swimming.”

“There's something I don't understand,” Yigal said. “You mean our child is a seal?”

Mary laughed, then looked very solemn as she said, “Yes, I imagine it will be a seal. They're always seals.”

“Couldn't it be a silkie like you? It could be a seal and still look and act completely human.” Yigal was starting to seem really upset, like maybe he was wishing he'd listened to all the things his mother had told him about really getting to know a girl for at least two years, and meeting all of her family. For the first time since the army, he wanted to talk to his mother, but he realized there was nothing he could say. She had always told him what would happen if he married a girl who wasn't Jewish—the shouting, the recriminations, eventually one day she'd call him “Dirty Jew!” and pack up and go back to her parents—or something like that. Also, he recalled, this non-Jewish girl would be too skinny and give no milk. His mother always gave him advice of questionable usefulness, but he imagined it must have been really great stuff to know in Russia in 1942.

“Nobody's born a silkie. Being a silkie is a—a sexual preference. If you develop a taste for human guys, well, then it can happen.”

Yigal was actually crying.

Mary tried to cheer him up. “It might only take three or four years. Seal pups grow fast. I'll take her to a harbor with cafés, where she's sure to see lots of cute waiters and stevedores . . .”

“So in four years,” Yigal sobbed, “I might get to see my fifteen-year-old daughter—what if it's a boy?”

“There are no boy silkies,” Mary said. “At least not to speak of.”

“So he'll be a seal. Why didn't you tell me this before?”

“You're kidding, right? How can you be mad at me? I told you everything!”

“Like hell you did!” Yigal grabbed a towel off the rack and stuffed it in his backpack. He was muttering obscenities to himself in Arabic. Mary turned on the TV. After he left, she curled up in a little ball and cried herself to sleep.

Zohar was talking to journalists in the bar of the Hilton in Kathmandu. “It was nothing,” he said. “Don't forget, for the first two thousand miles I had a car.”

They all sat scribbling in their notebooks. One asked, “What did you eat?”

“I depended on an Israeli invention, the world's most compact and nourishing food, nutritionally complete and aesthetically satisfying, color coded for mnemonic purposes—pink for breakfast, green for lunch, yellow for dinner—so that even in the utmost extremity of deprivation, the Israeli is able to eat regular meals. I am referring, of course, to the world-famous ‘Kokos,' pioneered by our industry, if I am not mistaken, in the desert town of Be'er Sheva in 1961.”

“Can you show us what you mean?”

Zohar pulled a pink Kokos from his pocket.

“Breakfast,” a journalist said, nodding.

“Yes, it was just about breakfast time when I saw the llama caravan pause at a glacial stream eight thousand feet below me on the icy steppe.”

“Ooh,” the journalists said in unison. Zohar took out an Israeli Swiss army knife, made in China, with the awl and can opener broken off, and cut the Kokos into six pieces.

“Astounding,” a journalist said, chewing thoughtfully. “Do you like pancakes?”

“Yes,” Zohar replied.

“That's great, great,” said the journalist. “Our readers really go for a guy who likes pancakes.”

“Although I am known chiefly for my prose-poetry, my first loves have always been those of the common people, such as your readers: pancakes, olive oil, Peter Handke, Krembo, Raymond Carver, Tetris—are you getting this down?”

“You're going a little fast. Who's Krembo?”

Zohar realized he was losing their attention and said, “It's a sort of pancake.”

“Great, great,” the journalists responded. “Another bourbon? How'd you get out of Bhutan? Mr. Eitan? Where'd he go?” Suddenly, Zohar was nowhere to be found. Even the last slice of Kokos had vanished. Zohar was seated comfortably in a taxicab, on his way to the airport for a flight to Bangkok.

Then I had a sudden insight: What if Shats'
Sailing Toward the Sunset
employs less complex, easier Hebrew in the middles and ends of chapters than at their beginnings? Most authors start writing in a high, dense literary style and slack off gradually—why not Shats?

I opened his book at random and was instantly rewarded with a perfectly comprehensible passage about some guy named Taylor, who is hitting on some girl. “You could take off your clothes and sit on my lap,” he suggests to her, in his mind, before beginning to speak. The Hebrew is alarmingly straightforward, and I can put no other interpretation on it.

The guy named Taylor was standing behind Mary in line at a liquor store on Madison Avenue the next morning around eleven. He was an up-and-coming toothpaste executive in a blue suit and a yellow tie. She turned around and looked hard at what he was buying. “Why so much rum?” she finally asked.

“It's this stupid office party we have every year for the interns—the Equinox Luau.”

“Wow, that's dumb.” She looked down at the bottle of champagne in her hand. “I don't know why I'm buying this. I'm pregnant.” She set it on a corner of the counter and put the twenty-dollar bill back in her pocket.

Taylor, who had been in the middle of thinking, “You could take off your clothes and sit on my lap—” but had suddenly stopped, said, “They have milk too, in the back.” Mary fetched a carton of milk and stood in line behind him. “Go ahead, I'm not in a hurry. I have the whole afternoon off to get ready for this stupid party.”

“What else do you have to do?”

“This is it.”

“Want some help? My husband just abandoned me in a cheap hotel and I'm feeling sort of lonely. I couldn't get a flight back to Israel before the day after tomorrow.”

“Do you know where he went?”

She shook her head. “England, maybe? Or he might be riding back and forth on the L train, or the 7, or maybe the G.” She set down the milk and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “It's so sad.”

Taylor paid for her milk, picked up his case of rum and stepped outside to hail a cab. “Listen,” he said, “I've got to go, but I wish you the best of luck. My advice is, you go back to the hotel and wait for him. I'm sure he'll turn up. Taxi!” He turned toward the street.

“My husband leaves me alone and pregnant in a strange city, and you think you can make it all right by spotting me $1.49?”

He was embarrassed, and lowered his voice. “That's not
exactly what I was thinking. But now that you point it out, I guess that's what I did. Would you rather pay me for the milk?”

Mary opened the milk and poured it into the gutter. White and slightly viscous, it gathered particles of soot and gravel and a green note of antifreeze as it flowed to a crack in the cement and out of sight.

Taylor watched it in silence. He was not actually an insensitive guy. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Do you have money for food and the hotel until your flight?”

“I have plenty of money. I was just lonely . . .”

Taylor, who like all sensitive guys was made terribly uncomfortable by pathos, put his hand in his pocket and fiddled with his organizer.

“How would I look with lighter hair?” she asked suddenly. “I mean, like ash blond?” Raising her eyes from the milk, she had noticed a salon on the other side of the street.

He was taken by surprise. “Terrific,” he said. “I mean it.” He was relieved to be able to give her something she wanted, even if it was a trivial compliment about a hair color she didn't have. When he got into his cab, they both were smiling. He really felt much better, and took a card from his inside pocket. “Listen, if you do your hair, call me, I'd like to see it. I'll buy you lunch.”

SHATS APPEARED SHAKEN BY RECENT
events. He wrote:

While reading chapter ten, specifically the parts describing our visit and aftermath, I decided it would be safer to regard everything in
Sailing Toward the Sunset
by Nell Zink as pure fiction, a novel with stories about fictional people, who may or may not resemble real people I know. However, your assertion in chapter eleven, “I assume the reader has no difficulty detecting shifts from fiction to nonfiction, but in case there is some confusion, an explanatory note: everything I write about Avner Shats and
Sailing Toward the Sunset
is 100 percent true,” undermined my comfortable position. I will maintain this pretense, however, for the time being at least.

He then refers to a list of literary figures provided in the original
Sailing Toward the Sunset.
Half are fictional, and one is the poet Zohar Eitan. But, he adds, Zohar might as well be fictional, since no one has heard of him. With this insight, I think Shats hits the nail on the head.

In a sense, I am a fictional literary figure already—the novelist Nell Zink. This novelist will come into real existence for most people the day
Sailing Toward the Sunset
appears in a shop with cardboard around it, and will cease to exist the day it is remaindered.

The fictional Avner Shats is not a character in either version of
Sailing Toward the Sunset
. A former scuba commando, Shats published his first story, “Gill-Slit Neoteny: Challenge for Genetic Engineers or Invitation to Hubris?” in the
Congressional Register,
July 14, 1981. Following a prison term for piracy, he spent six years in Liberia assisting General Butt Naked (now the evangelist Milton Blahyi) in his effort to satisfy Satan's appetite for human blood. After Naked's conversion to Christianity, Shats returned to Israel, attaining a master's degree in literature from the Hebrew University in 1996. He now lives with his wife, Ronit, and eleven children on Moshav Modi'in. He has published four novels,
Race for the Bottom, The Manganese-Nodule Murders, Belly-Up!,
and
The Shark Inside Me,
and the 1997 collection
Tentacles,
whose title story won the PT-109 Award of the Naval Institute for best nautical adventure under one hundred tons.

Furthermore, to my dismay, the lucid, readable Hebrew I mined so proudly from the interior of
Sailing Toward the Sunset
was not in fact the work of Shats, but of David Pupco, his collaborator in drafting a political thriller.

Bemused by my mistake, Shats writes,
[Taylor's] wife left him . . . for consuming South African pineapples, thus breaching political correctness codes (it was in the eighties). That was my addition. She also refused to blow him (Pupco's). He really is sensitive, I guess. I think in the original plot he was killed, but I didn't include it: I just used him for the obligatory porno part every thriller must have.

The next day at noon Mary, with noticeably lighter hair, in a ponytail to keep it from being too distracting, sat opposite Taylor in a dark niche in Little Italy. She looked dandy, and they were both glad that Taylor had been right.

“So you think you look too good for him now?” Taylor asked, twirling a carnation from the vase on the table and leaning on his elbow.

“He's had better-looking girls than me before. You should see this girl who's in love with him now, Osnat—she's like Cindy Crawford.”

“What's his secret? You said he's nothing special—I want to know how he attracts these girls.”

“His job, I think. Or the self-confidence it gives him. Also, he doesn't have regular hours, or any hours at all really, and girls like that. Actually, except for a couple minutes last week, I don't think he's worked since I met him.”

“What does he do?”

“He's a hit man. Why do you look angry? Isn't that a funny job for a nice guy like Yigal?”

Taylor leaned across the table and took her hands in his. He had drunk two glasses of Chianti. “Mary, please don't go back to him. I mean, don't fly to Israel tomorrow. I think maybe this is the luckiest thing that's happened to you since you met him. I don't think you, and your baby, should be following this criminal who's abandoned you. I think you're terrific. Way too good for him.”

“You think so?” Mary asked.

“You say he kills people for a living.”

“Well, he tries to avoid it. Nobody really knows who he's supposed to kill anyway, or if the guy even exists. It's a weird political thing. Maybe he never killed anybody in his life.”

“How long have you known him?”

“About a month.”

Taylor appeared to be doing math in his head. “And you're sure this is his baby? Is there someone else? You can tell me.”

“There's nobody else. I love Yigal.”

“Why don't you stay in New York, just for a while, and keep checking for messages at the hotel, and let me help you?” He took her hand again.

“Because Tel Aviv is so nice and warm. Hotel rooms have those little forced-air heaters that don't really work unless you turn them up so loud you can't think, and the bathtubs are gross.”

Taylor turned his head away and looked at a picture of gondolas, then turned back and said, “You could stay with me for a little while. You can sleep in my office and turn up the heat as high as you want. I know this sounds dumb, but there's something so unique, so special and sort of childlike about you, and I hate to think of you running back to someone, just because you think you have nowhere to—”

“I know, I know,” Mary said. “Don't get upset.”

While Taylor was amazing himself by inviting a pregnant stranger, whose husband was a professional killer, to stay in his apartment—it made him feel almost as glamorous, he thought, as professional killers must feel—Yigal was sitting in a rented car in a state park in northern New Jersey taking hits off a bottle of Bacardi 151, and I was on my way to the port to watch the sunset. There was a lot of commotion down by the water, and I couldn't get close enough to see anything. I was pushing forward through the crowd when everyone suddenly turned and began running toward the road, crushing me against a wall so that my head got slammed twice and I scraped up my shoulder. I was bleeding from three places by the time the stampede thinned out enough to let me near
the seawall. When I got there, whatever had happened was over.

I asked a religious guy what it was.

“Nobody knows,” he said. “All I saw was something going up, like a rocket. It was black and white.”

“Damn it,” I said, but when I got home, nothing was out of place. I turned on the radio—nothing. I tried a religious station, and again there was nothing, no news. Then I went up to the roof to take down my laundry, and there I found the Trident warhead. It had bounced off the mattress Yigal and Zohar dragged up there in April, and landed in a barrel of rainwater.

I e-mailed Yigal right away.

Yigal—

Another attack, lucky this time, it's in a barrel on the roof. Please tell me what to do with it. Maybe you can keep it from happening again or you're going to be looking at a lawsuit from me and the condo association. Take good care of Mary.

Readers of political thrillers enjoy technical details, so I should point out that the submarine, Mr. Pickwick, was a unique futuristic prototype with no moving parts. It was made almost entirely of a gelatinous substance from which the missiles slipped like spoons from a bowl of cold consommé. The exterior was sheathed in a continuous ribbon of osmium sealed with caoutchouc and wooden dowels. Like the golem of Prague, it took its motive power from a name. However, in this case the name was not that of God, but of Moshe Dayan.

Yigal woke up before it was light and slipped out of the car to retch. Frightened, a doe and two bunnies crept back into
the underbrush. They had wanted to give Yigal a message of universal love and hope, but in the end they were too timid.

He drove slowly out of the park to a Wawa store and drank a great big coffee. During the night, he had decided to volunteer for more hazardous duty, something with plague germs or Kurdish guerrillas, but after the coffee he sat in the car and looked at the rental company's map of New Jersey. Three hours later he was in Atlantic City, up $15 on blackjack. By nightfall he had won $80 and was buying drinks for a secretary from Red Bank. He spiked them with B vitamins, but she didn't notice. They talked about the weather and gambling until she asked if he was Italian.

“No, I'm Israeli.”

“I'm Jewish too! Come over and meet my friends.”

“I don't think being Jewish is the most important thing to have in common.” Yigal finished his drink and signaled the bartender for another. “I think it's more important to be human.”

“We're all human under the skin. What really matters is communication, and it's so easy to communicate with someone who shares your way of life and your traditions.”

Yigal realized he was sliding off the barstool, so he stood on the floor.

“Are you okay?”

“Maybe I should go to bed,” Yigal said. “I feel dizzy.”

“How many drinks have you had?”

“None at all, compared to yesterday. It's my wife. She—forget it.”

The secretary backed away one step and said, “Where is she now?”

“I don't know.”

“You poor man!” She threw her arms around him. “You need some cheering up!”

“No,” Yigal said firmly. “I need to be depressed. I need to find a deep hole, fill it with mud, and climb in headfirst.”

“What a wet blanket.”

“I need to lie under a fallen redwood in the Olympic rain forest, while banana slugs crawl all over me.” Yigal was struggling with his wallet, trying to pay and leave.

She must have misunderstood, because she slapped him and said, “You son of a bitch.” After a brief walk under escort, he found himself in front of the casino with the secretary and all her friends. His pistol had fallen out of his jacket and was lying there on the sidewalk. He picked it up and ran toward the parking garage.

Meanwhile, as Mary walked from the bathroom to Taylor's office past his open bedroom door, she glanced inside to say good night, and saw that he was lying on top of the bedspread, wearing striped pajamas. His fly snaps were open and he was gently petting himself. “Sorry,” she said, closing the door.

“No, it's okay,” Taylor called out. “Come in, I want to talk to you.”

“What about?” She sat down on the bed.

“Oh, Mary,” he said. “If you would just touch it.”

“No, thanks.”

“Or put your mouth on it.” He reached out for the back of her neck, trying to incline her head in a certain general direction.

She stood up quickly. “What gave you that idea? If you try anything like that again, I'll leave and I won't come back. I ought to kick your ass.”

He snapped up his pajamas and sat upright. “I'm sorry. I
thought it would be fun. You know, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I apologize.”

“It was incredibly rude.”

“I said I'm sorry.”

She left him alone and closed the door. He lay there masturbating for a while, thinking about his wife. For eight years he had loved her, supported her, helped her get work (she illustrated gardening books and seed catalogs) and worked very hard to be as romantic as possible and to please her in bed. In his whole life, he had loved only her. She had left him very suddenly. She said it had something to do with South African produce, but he knew it was the fatigue, escalated by repetition into a sort of agony, of the scene with which he unfailingly managed to destroy their most intimate times together and both their egos: When they felt closest, when he really felt that they belonged to each other completely, he would always feel compelled to take advantage of the situation by asking her, very hesitantly, if by any chance she hadn't overcome her revulsion, which was so instantaneous and physical that Taylor couldn't help perceiving it as a sort of mortal insult to him, though he knew it wasn't intended as one, to oral sex. Every time he posed the question, it drove a wedge between them, which seemed all the greater because of the perfect closeness that had to arise before he would even dare to ask it. In the end she left him and moved in with her sister, saying she couldn't stand his hypocrisy.

Mary lay in the dark and thought about her husband. She wondered where he was.

Yigal happened to be lying on the floor of the rental car while police shone flashlights all around him. He was lucky to be drunk. It's more comfortable to be drunk if you have to lie across the hump in the floor of a Lumina and crush your ear
against a bristly plastic carpet while noticing bits of dry mud in your mouth, especially when Atlantic City police with lead-weighted flashlights two feet long are after the illegal weapon that is still in your pocket. Yigal felt he had gotten his wish. At least, he hoped there was nowhere to go but up.

When he heard other cars starting and moving around, he slid to the front seat and looked in the mirror. There was some orange juice left in a bottle under the passenger seat, so he poured it over his hair and slicked it flat. He took off his jacket and his glasses. He pried open the inside cover of the car door, dropped in the gun, and snapped the cover shut. Then he drove slowly down the ramp and out of the garage, past the secretary from Red Bank, who was sitting in the front seat of a police car, talking to the policeman. He put on his glasses and was happy to be seeing details again, but instead of relief he felt only bitter scorn for the whole world. Idiots, he thought.

He stopped at a wayside in the Pine Barrens and pulled the car several hundred feet into the woods. The crackly pinecones and the hard, sandy forest floor, the sort you can sweep clean with your hand until it feels smooth as fur, reminded him of the artificial forests in the Negev, except that in New Jersey the pines had grown all by themselves. He had read that by 1820, there wasn't a tree standing in America between the Appalachians and the sea. The soil was exhausted and everyone had to move west. If there were any justice, they would have returned to find a rocky desert ready to wear them out with backbreaking work, but instead they were awarded vast forests of loblolly pines. He was very quiet, imagining he could hear jackals. He lay down in the car, and while he slept he had a vivid dream.