Desperation Read online

  That incident hadn't marked the beginning of his decline, but it had marked the point where the decline had become impossible to ignore--he wasn't just having a bad day or a bad year anymore, he was sort of having a bad life. The picture of him climbing out of the pool in his sopping white suit, a big drunk's grin on his face, had appeared in Esquire's Dubious Achievements issue, and after that had commenced his more-or-less regular appearances in Spy magazine. Spy was the place, he'd come to believe, where once-legitimate reputations went to die.

  At least this afternoon, as he stood facing north and pissing with his shadow stretched out long to his right, these thoughts didn't hurt as much as they sometimes did. As they always did in New York, where everything hurt these days. The desert had a way of making Shakespeare's "bubble reputation" seem not only fragile but irrelevant. When you had become a kind of literary Elvis Presley--aging, overweight, and still at the party long after you should have gone home--that wasn't such a bad thing.

  He spread his legs even wider, bent slightly at the waist, and let go of his penis so he could massage his lower back. He had been told that doing this helped sustain the flow a little longer, and he had an idea that it did, but he knew he would still have to take a leak again long before he got to Austin, which was the next little Nevada shitsplat on the long road to California. His prostate clearly wasn't what it used to be. When he thought about it these days (which was often), he pictured a bloated, crenellated thing that looked like a radiation-baked giant brain in a fifties drive-in horror movie. He should have it checked, he knew that, and not as an isolated event but as part of a complete soup-to-nuts physical. Of course he should, but hey, it wasn't as if he were pissing blood or anything, and besides--

  Well, all right. He was scared, that was the besides. There was a lot more to what was wrong with him than just the way his literary reputation had gone slipping through his fingers during the last five years, and quitting the pills and booze hadn't improved things as he'd hoped. In some ways, quitting had made things worse. The trouble with sobriety, Johnny had found, was that you remembered all the things you had to be scared of. He was afraid that a doctor might find more than a prostate roughly the size of The Brain from Planet Arous when he stuck his finger up into the literary lion's nether regions; he was afraid that the doctor might find a prostate that was as black as a decayed pumpkin and as cancerous as . . . as Frank Zappa's had been. And even if cancer wasn't lurking there, it might be lurking somewhere else.

  The lung, why not? He'd smoked two packs of Camels every day for twenty years, then three packs of Camel Lights for another ten, as if smoking Camel Lights was going to fix everything somehow, spruce up his bronchial tubes, polish his trachea, refurbish his poor studgecaked alveoli. Well, bullshit. He'd been off the cigarettes for ten years now, the light as well as the heavy, but he still wheezed like an old carthorse until at least noon, and sometimes woke himself up coughing in the middle of the night.

  Or the stomach! Yeah, why not there? Soft, pink, trusting, the perfect place for disaster to strike. He had been raised in a family of ravenous meat-eaters where medium-rare meant the cook had breathed hard on the steak and the concept of well-done was unknown; he loved hot sauces and hot peppers; he did not believe in fruits and salads unless one was badly constipated; he'd eaten like that his whole fucking life, still ate like that, and would probably go on eating like that until they slammed him into a hospital bed and started feeding him all the right things through a plastic tube.

  The brain? Possible. Quite possible. A tumor, or maybe (here was an especially cheerful thought) an unseasonably early case of Alzheimer's.

  The pancreas? Well, that one was fast, at least. Express service, no waiting.

  Heart attack? Cirrhosis? Stroke?

  How likely they all sounded! How logical!

  In many interviews he had identified himself as a man outraged by death, but that was pretty much the same old big-balls crap he'd been selling throughout his career. He was terrified of death, that was the truth, and as a result of spending his life honing his imagination, he could see it coming from at least four dozen different directions ... and late at night when he couldn't sleep, he was apt to see it coming from four dozen different directions at once. Refusing to see the doctor, to have a checkup and let them peek under the hood, would not cause any of those diseases to pause in their approach or their feeding upon him--if, indeed, the feeding had already begun--but if he stayed away from the doctors and their devilish machines, he wouldn't have to know. You didn't have to deal with the monster under the bed or lurking in the corner if you never actually turned on the bedroom lights, that was the thing. And what no doctor in the world seemed to know was that, for men like Johnny Marinville, fearing was sometimes better than finding. Especially when you'd put out the welcome mat for every disease going.

  Including AIDS, he thought, continuing to stare out at the desert. He had tried to be careful--and he didn't get laid as much as he used to, anyway, that was the painful truth--and he knew that for the last eight or ten months he had been careful, because the blackouts had stopped with the drinking. But in the year before he'd quit, there had been four or five occasions when he had simply awakened next to some anonymous jane. On each of these occasions he had gotten up and gone immediately into the bathroom to check the toilet. Once there had been a used condom floating in there, so that was probably okay. On the other occasions, zilch. Of course he or his friend (his gal-pal, in tabloid-ese) might have flushed it down in the night, but you couldn't know for sure, could you? Not when you'd progressed to the blackout stage. And AIDS--

  "That shit gets in there and waits," he said, then winced as a particularly vicious gust of wind drove a fine sheet of alkali dust against his cheek, his neck, and his hanging organ. This latter had quit doing anything useful at least a full minute ago.

  Johnny shook it briskly, then slipped it back into his underpants. "Brethern," he told the distant, shimmering mountains in his earnest revival preacher's voice, "we are told in the Book of Ephesians, chapter three, verse nine. that it matters not how much you jump and dance; the last two drops go in your pants. So it is written and so it is--"

  He was turning around, zipping his fly, talking mostly to keep the megrims away (they had been gathering like vultures just lately, those megrims), and now he stopped doing everything at once.

  There was a police-cruiser parked behind his motorcycle, its blue flashers turning lazily in the hot desert daylight.

  3

  It was his first wife who provided Johnny Marinville with what might be his last chance.

  Oh, not his last chance to publish his work; shit, no. He would be able to go on doing that as long as he remained capable of (a) putting words on paper and (b) sending them off to his agent. Once you'd been accepted as a bona fide literary lion, someone would be glad to go on publishing your words even after they had degenerated into self-parody or outright drivel. Johnny sometimes thought that the most terrible thing about the American literary establishment was how they let you swing in the wind, slowly strangling, while they all stood around at their asshole cocktail parties, congratulating themselves on how kind they were being to poor old what's-his-name.

  No, what Terry gave him wasn't his last chance to publish, but maybe his last to write something really worthwhile, something that would get him noticed again in a positive way. Something that might also sell like crazy ... and he could use the money, there was no doubt about that.

  Best of all, he didn't think Terry had the slightest idea of what she had said, which meant he wouldn't have to share any of the proceeds with her, if proceeds there were. He wouldn't even have to mention her on the Acknowledgements page, if he didn't want to, but he supposed he probably would. Sobering up had been a terrifying experience in many ways, but it did help a person remember his responsibilities.

  He had married Terry when he was twenty-five and she was twenty-one, a junior at Vassar. She had never finished college. They had
been married for almost twenty years and during that time she had borne him three children, all grown now. One of them, Bronwyn, still talked to him. The other two ... well, if they ever got tired of cutting off their noses to spite their faces, he would be around. He was not by nature a vindictive man.

  Terry seemed to know that. After five years during which their only communication had been through lawyers, they had begun a cautious dialogue, sometimes by letter, more often by telephone. These communications had been tentative at first, both of them afraid of mines still buried in the ruined city of their affections, but over the years they had become more regular. Terry regarded her famous ex with a kind of stoic, amused interest that he found distressing, somehow--it was not, in his opinion, the sort of attitude an ex-wife was supposed to have for a man who had gone on to become one of the most discussed writers of his generation. But she also spoke to him with a straightforward kindness that he found soothing, like a cool hand on a hot brow.

  They had been in contact more since he'd quit drinking (but still always by phone or by letter; both of them seemed to know, even without discussing it, that meeting face to face would put too much pressure on the fragile bond they had forged), but in some ways these sober conversations had been even more dangerous . . . not acrimonious, but always with that possibility. She wanted him to go back to Alcoholics Anonymous, told him bluntly that if he didn't, he'd eventually start drinking again. And the drugs would follow, she said, as surely as dark comes after twilight.

  Johnny told her he had no intention of spending the rest of his life sitting in church basements with a bunch of drunks, all of them talking about how wonderful it was to have a power greater than one's self ... before getting back into their old cars and driving home to their mostly spouseless houses to feed their cats. "People in AA are generally too fundamentally broken to see that they've turned their lives over to an empty concept and a failed ideal," he said. "Take it from me, I've been there. Or take it from John Cheever, if you like. He wrote particularly well about that."

  "John Cheever isn't writing much these days," Terry replied. "I think you know why, too."

  Terry could be irritating, no doubt about that.

  It was three months ago that she had given him the great idea, tossing it off in a casual conversation that had rambled through what the kids were up to, what she was up to, and, of course, what he was up to. What he had been up to in the early part of this year was agonizing over the first two hundred pages of a historical novel about Jay Gould. He had finally seen it for what it was--warmed-over Gore Vidal--and trashed it. Baked it, actually. In a fit of pique he had resolved to keep entirely to himself, he had tossed his computer-storage discs for the novel into the microwave and given them ten minutes on high. The stench had been unbelievable, a thing that had come roaring out of the kitchen with quills on it, and he'd actually had to replace the microwave.

  Then he'd found himself telling Terry the whole thing. When he finished, he sat in his office chair with the phone pressed to his ear and his eyes closed, waiting for her to tell him not to bother with resuming the AA meetings, that what he needed was a good shrink, and in a hurry.

  Instead she said he should have put the discs in a casserole dish and used the convection oven. He knew she was joking--and that she thought at least part of the joke was on him--but her acceptance of the way he was and how he behaved still felt like a cool hand on a fevered brow. It wasn't approval he got from her, but approval wasn't what he wanted.

  "Of course you never were much good in the kitchen," she said, and her matter-of-fact tone made him laugh out loud. "So what are you going to do now, Johnny? Any idea?"

  "Not the slightest."

  "You ought to write some nonfiction. Get away from the whole idea of the novel for awhile."

  "That's dumb, Terry. I can't write nonfiction, and you know it."

  "I know nothing of the kind," she'd said, speaking in a sharp don't-be-a-fool tone he got from no one else these days, least of all from his agent. The more Johnny flopped and flailed around, the more gruesomely obsequious Bill Harris became, it seemed. "During the first two years we were married, you must have written at least a dozen essays. Published them, too. For good money. Life, Harper's, even a couple in The New Yorker. Easy for you to forget; you weren't the one who did the shopping and paid the bills. I loved the puppies."

  "Oh. The so-called American Heart Essays. Right. I didn't forget em, Terry, I blocked em out. Rent-payers after the last of the Guggenheim dough was gone; that's basically what they were. They've never even been collected."

  "You wouldn't allow them to be collected," she retorted. "They didn't fit your golden idea of immortality."

  Johnny greeted this with silence. Sometimes he hated her memory. She'd never been able to write worth a shit herself, the stuff she'd been turning in to her Honors writing seminar the year he met her had been just horrible, and since then she'd never published anything more complex than a letter to the editor, but she was a champ at data-storage. He had to give her that.

  "You there, Johnny?"

  "I'm here."

  "I always know when I'm telling you stuff you don't like," she said brightly, "because it's the only time you ever shut up. You get all broody."

  "Well, I'm here," he repeated heavily, and fell silent again, hoping she would change the subject. She didn't, of course.

  "You did three or four of those essays because someone asked for them, I don't remember who--"

  A miracle, he had thought. She doesn't remember who.

  "--and I'm sure you would have stopped there, except by then you were getting queries from other editors. It didn't surprise me a bit. Those essays were good."

  He was silent this time, not to indicate disinterest or disapproval but because he was thinking back, trying to remember if they had been any good. Terry couldn't be trusted a hundred per cent when it came to such questions, but you couldn't throw her conclusions out of court without a hearing, either. As a fiction-writer she'd been of the "I saw a bird at sunrise and my heart leaped up" school, but as a critic she had been tough as nails and capable of insights which were spooky, almost like telepathy. One of the things that had attracted him to her (although he supposed the fact that she had the best breasts in America back in those days had helped matters along) was the dichotomy between what she wanted to do--write fiction--and what she was able to do, which was to write criticism that could cut like a diamond chip.

  As for the so-called American Heart Essays, the only one he could remember clearly after all these years was "Death on the Second Shift." It had been about a father and son working together in a Pittsburgh steel-mill. The father had had a heart-attack and died in his son's arms on the third day of Johnny Marinville's four-day research junket. He had meant to focus on an entirely different aspect of millwork, but had changed course at once, and without a second thought. The result had been a wretchedly sentimental piece--the fact that every word was true hadn't changed that in the slightest--but it had also been a tremendously popular piece. The man who'd edited it for Life dropped him a note six weeks later and said it had generated the fourth-largest volume of letters in the magazine's history.

  Other stuff started to come back to him--titles, mostly, things like "Feeding the Flames" and "A Kiss on Lake Saranac." Terrible titles, but ... fourth-largest volume of letters.

  Hmmmm.

  Where might those old essays be? In the Marinville Collection at Fordham? Possible. Hell, they might even be in the attic of the cottage in Connecticut. He wouldn't mind a look at them. Maybe they could be updated ... or ... or...

  Something began to nibble at the back of his mind.

  "Do you still have your scoot, Johnny?"

  "Huh?" He barely heard her.

  "Your scoot. Your ride. Your motorcycle."

  "Sure," he said. "It's stored at that garage out in Westport we used to use. You know the one."

  "Gibby's?"

  "Yeah, Gibby's. Someone different o
wns it now, but it used to be Gibby's Garage, yeah." He had been blind-sided by a brilliantly textured memory: he and Terry, fully clothed and petting like mad behind Gibby's Garage one afternoon in ... well, a long time ago, leave it at that. Terry had been wearing a pair of tight blue shorts. He doubted if her mother would have approved of them, God, no, but he himself had thought those discount-store specials made her look like the Queen of the Western World. Her ass was only good, but her legs ... man, those legs had gone not just up to her chin but all the way out to Arcturus and beyond. How had they gotten out there in the first place, among the cast-off tires and rusty engine parts, standing hip-deep in sunflowers and feeling each other up? He couldn't remember, but he remembered the rich curve of her breast in his hand, and how she'd gripped the belt-loops of his jeans when he cried out against her neck, hauling him closer so he could come tight and hard against her taut belly.

  He dropped a hand into his lap and wasn't exactly surprised at what he found there. Say, folks, Frampton comes alive.

  "... new bunch, or maybe even a book."

  He settled his hand firmly back on the arm of his chair. "Huh? What?"

  "Are you going deaf as well as senile?"

  "No. I was remembering one time with you behind Gibby's. Making out."

  "Oh. In the sunflowers, right?"

  "Right."

  There was a long pause when she might have been considering some further comment on that interlude. Johnny was almost hoping for one. Instead, she went back to her previous scripture.

  "I said maybe you ought to drive across country on your bike before you get too old to work the footgears, or start drinking again and splash yourself all over the Black Hills."

  "Are you out of your mind? I haven't been on that thing in three years, and I have no intention of getting back on, Terry. My eyesight sucks--"

  "So get a stronger pair of glasses--"

  "--and my reflexes are shot. John Cheever may or may not have died of alcoholism, but John Gardner definitely went out on a motorcycle. Had an argument with a tree. He lost. It happened on a road in Pennsylvania. One I've driven myself."