Henry Dunow, an agent who had contacted me in Iowa, agreed to read the novel. Then, with enthusiasm, confidence, and the appropriate touch of intimacy an agent and a writer need to share, he offered to represent me. “Although, the book could use some cutting,” he said. Within days, Jody and I trimmed four hundred and sixty-seven pages to four hundred and seventeen pages. Then Henry submitted the book to several editors. This time, no one answered within forty-eight hours. There were no pleas for more time, no clamoring for our attention. Instead, Henry and I waited for forty-one days, April 17 to May 24, 1994. Each morning, I woke hoping to hear the telephone ring. At 5:00 PM, I resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn’t. I dreaded Friday afternoons. Once they ended, silence reigned for two days. Yet, rather than diminishing my anxiety, the weekend’s silence intensified it, giving my imagination sixty hours to concoct disastrous scenarios. The results were always the same: no one would publish my novel. But my novel
had to be published
, not to satisfy my vanity, not for fame, not even for money, since I knew I hadn’t written the type of novel that would yield a life-changing advance. No, my novel had to be published for one specific reason—so I could escape Texas and the university where I taught.
Also, I was determined to have my choice of an editor (if I was to have an editor). Of those who had read the novel’s early pages, only Gerry Howard had seen the book’s potential. And so, despite his wariness concerning my ability to finish the book, I decided to work with him should I have the chance. I believed he would be the best editor for the book. I’d betrayed my intentions once. I wouldn’t do it a second time.
Late one Friday afternoon, Henry called. Gerry had offered to buy the book. The advance: $17,500. Even though it was $25,000 less than the advance for
Season’s End
, I didn’t hesitate. “Say yes.”
“Maybe we should wait,” Henry said.
“No. Sell the book.”
Amused, Henry said, “Okay.” Five minutes later, he called back and said, “Well, you’re a Norton author.”
As soon as I heard those words, three years of anxiety whistled through the infinitesimal hole in my heart and vanished.
Henry added, “When I accepted, Gerry laughed. He said that was his opening bid. He would have gone to twenty-thousand.”
To me, this didn’t matter.
“Gerry was running out the door to get to Los Angeles for the book fair,” Henry said. “He’ll call you next week.”
“Okay,” I said. Then I added, “Thanks. I mean it. Thank you.”
After I returned the receiver to its cradle, I stepped into the living room and dropped to my knees. With my forehead pressed against the carpet, I closed my eyes and remained there until my breathing slowed and I was at peace.
Eight weeks later, I was clinically insane.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I
t was 1994 and Frank had invited me back to the workshop for another summer. The day we left for Iowa, Jody and I packed the car, then placed our cats on the backseat in their carrying cases. Since they hated to travel, we’d given them tranquilizers. Stoned, they stared at us from behind their cages’ silver bars and meowed weakly, protesting their confinement. By the time we reached the interstate, they were asleep.
In Kansas, we stopped at a motel. I’d packed a bathing suit and when I dove into the pool I was alone. I swam laps, then rolled onto my back and, beneath a cloudless blue sky, wondered how, at thirty-nine, I’d sold my third novel and was returning to Iowa to teach. I’d worked hard for twenty years, but my effort didn’t seem connected to who I’d become. I felt like an eggshell that had been dyed with vivid colors, then pinpricked and drained. It may appear solid, but beneath its decorative surface it’s hollow and nearly weightless.
At Frank and Maggie’s house, we set our bags in the guest room, then walked down to the kitchen, where Frank handed me a cold imported beer.
“I hear we have something to celebrate,” he said. Then we tapped glass bottles.
“The advance is only seventeen five,” I said.
“Hey,” he told me, “it’s a book!”
The day Frank left for Nantucket, I stood in the driveway as he crammed the final items into his station wagon. Pausing to show me the interior of a small leather bag, he said, “This is what it comes to.” The bag contained insulin vials and syringes. At fifty, Frank had developed diabetes. For several years pills controlled the disease. Now, at fifty-eight, he’d been switched to needles. His health’s long, episodic decline had begun, and he knew it.
By contrast, over the next two months, my health seemed to improve. During the day, I taught, read, and played basketball. In the evening, I drank bourbon. Then, after sleeping for three hours, I’d wake at 2:00 AM, walk from the bedroom into its adjacent sitting room, turn on a lamp, settle into the armchair beside it, open a novel, and read until dawn. Not being able to sleep once the alcohol’s effects had worn off didn’t strike me as unusual. Neither did returning to bed at sunrise, or pouring my first cup of coffee at noon. If what I felt constituted the state others defined as happiness, I was happy. I played scales on Frank’s piano. And, after dusk, I sat in the yard and watched glowing fireflies form constellations.
But one night, I woke at 3:00 AM when my body sprung upright on Frank’s side of the bed. My heart beat so loudly that the sound filled my ears. For a moment, I thought I’d gone deaf and from then on I would hear only the internal thumps, gurgles, and growls my body made. Sweat had soaked my T-shirt, slickened my forehead, and dampened my beard. I’d leapt out of a dream in which I stood beside my brother near the tenement apartment building where I’d lived, fourteen years earlier. There, on the sidewalk, he handed me a sealed envelope that contained a warrant for my arrest.
Years earlier, I’d fled Provincetown when I had a chance to return to New York. On Cape Cod I had moved into one half of a small, wood-shingled cottage, divided in two by a thin plasterboard wall. The day I’d signed the lease, I didn’t know if I wanted the place, even though all I could afford was its $140 a month rent. Still, I hesitated. But as the afternoon’s light faded and shadows swallowed the weedy front yard, the prospect of being homeless frightened me.
The landlord was an overweight guy in his thirties with a pasty face and black hair. He carried a tall, cardboard Big Gulp container filled with Coke and spiked by a clear plastic straw. Between sips, he chewed a hamburger he’d pulled out of a greasy paper bag. “Listen,” he said, “it’s Saturday. It’s five o’clock. You have to be out of your place on Monday and you can’t possibly find another apartment by then. This is a good deal. Take it.” He removed the lease agreement from his coat pocket and placed it on top of the living room’s cheesy, plywood-paneled wet bar. “Sign,” he said. Then he tilted a ballpoint pen toward me and his hand remained motionless until, five seconds later, I took it. Once I’d written my name he said, “Someone broke a lease on me recently and I can promise you, I will hound that person to the end of the earth.” Then he looked at me and raised his black eyebrows. As I drove away, I knew I’d made a mistake. The following day I called and told him I’d changed my mind.
“Too late, you wrote a check.”
I said, “It’s Sunday. I know you haven’t cashed it. So please, do me a favor. Tear it up.”
“No,” he said. “And if you stop payment, I’ll sue you.”
I moved into the cottage and within twenty-four hours I had my radio, my leather jacket, and my ten-speed bike stolen, presumably by the drug dealers who lived in the adjacent cottage. At the police station, the officer to whom I reported the burglary said, “You look like a decent guy. Why are you living there? That’s the worst street on Cape Cod. Half your neighbors pedal dope; the other half live on food stamps, welfare, and whatever they can steal.”
Two driveways filled with fallen, desiccated pine needles separated our cottages. In mine stood a VW beetle; in theirs, a black Camaro with skull and bones decals pasted to its tinted windows. Every time I ventured into my backyard to drop a garbage bag into the dented aluminum trash can, the dealers’ German shepherds sprinted toward me, snapping their teeth, their nails scratching the rusty aluminum door an instant after I slammed it shut. Eyeing me through the dingy pane of glass above the doorknob, they growled, implying that, next time, they’d chew off my leg.
So when a Manhattan apartment with a monthly rent of $225 became available, I set the cottage’s thermostat to sixty-five degrees to keep the water pipes from bursting if the temperature fell below freezing, mailed the landlord a letter that said I would no longer be paying rent, and didn’t tell him where he could find me.
Shortly after I vanished, two men tracked me to the restaurant where I’d last worked. They asked the waiters, fry cooks, and dishwashers where I’d gone. A waitress said, “To California,” although she knew I’d moved to Manhattan. The pair then traced me to the Queens house I used to occupy and quizzed the new tenants, who told them I’d been gone for two years. Someone called my parents’ house and my mother said I’d disappeared. In Connecticut, my brother went to his power company’s office to have his electricity turned on. The clerk checked the debtor list, noticed that my brother’s surname matched mine, and summoned a manager. When the man asked my brother where I was, my brother told him we weren’t even related.
After I’d lived for a year in Manhattan without being found, my fear subsided. But when it returned in the dream that woke me in Frank’s bed, it left me drenched and trembling. The following day, rain fell. And, despite it being early August, Iowa City’s temperature dropped into the upper fifties. Wearing an old, camouflage army jacket, my hands stuffed inside its pockets, my face angled downward as if a boulder had been dropped onto the base of my neck and forced me to stare at the floor, I trudged through the house. Pressure around my temples threatened to crush my forehead. My jaw ached. My teeth ground against one another. And, that evening, when I drank several shots of bourbon, my mood sunk, rather than lifted. Hours later, I staggered to bed.
Then the voices started. Internally, I heard mostly gibberish. Conversations overlapped conversations until they became incomprehensible. My brain seemed to be hosting a noisy, endless cocktail party. But a vivid and relentless paranoia I’d never experienced before focused my guilt, and provided its narrative. I’d been found; and now, for breaking a lease, I’d be imprisoned. Intellectually, I understood this was idiotic; emotionally, the prospect terrified me.
By late August, when Jody and I left Iowa and returned to Texas, my depression had escalated into a state of manic anxiety I could barely control. Whenever I taught, I expected FBI agents to burst into the classroom and lead me away in handcuffs. As always, I faced my students; but, with one eye, I monitored the door, waiting for it to fly open. My mind split, like the brain’s twin hemispheres: one half interacted with people; the other half battled my delusions.
Each evening, I drank until I passed out. Otherwise, I couldn’t sleep. Once the alcohol wore off several hours later, I’d wake, wander through the house and, in the dark, I’d lean against the wall beside a window so I couldn’t be seen through its partially open blinds and watch for approaching headlights. When two appeared, I was sure the vehicle had come for me, and I would quake until it passed.
Then I did something unfathomable. I told Frank I couldn’t meet him for dinner. He had flown to Austin to visit James Michener, the wealthy, eighty-eight-year-old writer whose endowment provided fellowships for workshop graduates. Mr. Michener lay in bed, attached to the dialysis machine that kept him alive, but he had agreed to meet Frank. A week before his arrival, Frank called and we planned to have dinner. But as I believed Frank would think less of me if I acknowledged my paranoia, I remained silent about it, rather than requesting his help. I didn’t know he’d experienced a similar “breakdown” until we discussed it several years later. So I seemingly had no reason for canceling dinner when I called his hotel room two hours beforehand. True, a fine drizzle had slickened the oil-stained streets, and the thought of driving in the dark frightened me. Yet how could I say I was afraid to leave the house without offering an explanation? Also, I wanted to see him, and I knew I’d feel like I’d been impolite and ungrateful if I didn’t. But when my hand tremors convinced me that I couldn’t make the twenty-five-mile drive, I said, quite simply, “I don’t feel well.”
“Hey!” he said. “Don’t worry about it. Stay home. It’s crummy out.” Then he lowered his voice to convey the grotesque nature of his trip. “And let’s not kid ourselves, I’m not here for fun. This is me on my knees at the old man’s bedside, holding his hand.” He laughed softly, and with remorse, the way you’d laugh at a joke made about someone who’d just died. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “I don’t look forward to requesting money.” But, as the workshop’s director, Frank’s duties included begging ill tycoons and dying heiresses to leave behind millions for student scholarships. “The depths to which one sinks for literature,” he said. Then he added, “Listen, take care of yourself. You sound a little rattled.” We didn’t speak again until spring.