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CHAPTER ONE
The first story I ever wrote was "How the Dog Got Its Tail." Writing was easy then. The contents of the story aren't important. Suffice it to say that I was a child at the time; oblivious to career aspirations, living in the nowhere of Appleton, Wisconsin, I was writing to answer questions for which I could find no conventional answers. Honestly, I can't recall the specifics—something about happiness, a way of expressing it without having a mouth that could smile. But I do remember going into the garage and cutting two pieces of wood, filching a couple of brass hinges, and making a cover that was sturdier than the covers of the books on the shelves in my bedroom. And I worked hard on decorating the cover. I can't remember exactly how I illustrated it—with a dog and a tail that was attached? Detached? Little dots indicating its recent attachment?
The story was important, of course, but more important was the book as object—a rectangular entity that resembled the ones I already owned. Even then I resented my status as passive reader, starstruck consumer. Already the satisfaction of feeding on words must've been wearing a little thin. And so I was writing my own book, the purveyor of fantasies and not just their silent witness. Given the choice of wielding the spoon or meekly opening my mouth, I knew what I wanted.
Until I bought one, I'd never touched a gun, never stood in front of a full-length mirror pointing a gun at myself. Bang, bang. Mine was a Magnum .357 purchased in New Jersey, much more handsome than I'd imagined a gun could be.
A gun was tantamount to a secret, I realized soon enough; it required the right coat with a pocket roomy enough to provide a hiding place. A gun was also an instrument of illusion; it had a way of fudging the difference between appearance and reality. In the small town of Sandhurst, New York, where I lived, I probably seemed like just another man taking an evening's stroll through the neighborhood, wearing a long, olive-colored gabardine coat. But was that really the case?
I made a habit of taking such walks, working against the initial trepidation—the fear that danger might approach if only to create a situation apropos of my secret. There was also a worry about the gun going off and sending an excruciating shot toward my groin. But eventually, as I went walking past the lit windows, peering in for a peek at the familial bosom of my anonymous neighbors, fear gave way to courage. I found myself falling into an almost dreamy state—just this side of serenity. It made me think of prayer, meditation, afternoon naps. It made me think of the attractive nurse who gave me too much codeine for a third-degree burn to my hand when I was seventeen.
There were nights when I'd return to the house and stand in my kitchen and stare down at the gun, asleep in the palm of my hand. It lay there like some solemn bird with one eye shut, feigning death—quiet and yet very, very powerful. It held its breath with the best of them. Who knows, maybe I was fooling myself, but I sensed—in the sheer weight of the weapon—a gravity, an authority beyond my own. Was I wrong?
How's the bed?
Robert Partnow lifted his head and looked in my direction. Fine, he said.
I see you've chosen the lower berth, I said. Smart choice.
Should I be expecting company? he said—his eyes rolling upward.
No, no. Ikea just had a fantastic deal on bunk beds. I couldn't resist. You slept well?
I didn't sleep well. I barely slept. I have a headache.
And this when you can afford to sleep, I said—shaking my head. How many hours do you usually get, Robert? On a weeknight, I mean.
Can I have something to eat?
Of course, I said. I cleared my throat—a habit of mine, and not the kind of habit I can easily ignore. What would you like?
I get a choice?
It's not a restaurant, Robert, but I've got a kitchen upstairs. I even bought a few items I thought you might like. I bought eggs. I never eat eggs myself.
I don't eat eggs. And don't call me Robert. It's Bob.
Everyone used to eat eggs, remember? Then I gave him a smile—big, toothy—but I don't think he saw me. He was looking down again, running a hand through his sparse hair. Obviously, despite my best efforts, he wasn’t a happy man.
What about some oatmeal? he asked—still looking down.
You got it, Bob. Maple syrup, brown sugar, cream, milk?
Nothing else. Just oatmeal.
No milk?
Nothing.
Sandhurst, a small town fifty miles up the Hudson from New York City, didn't seem like a particularly dangerous place. Certainly not in comparison to Alphabet City, the neighborhood where I lived in Manhattan until my parents died and I came into a bit of money. But until I had a gun in my pocket I'd never realized that danger was always lurking in the shadows, toying with my imagination, screwing it up. I’m somewhat ashamed to say it, but the gun loosened my imagination. After those evening strolls through the neighborhood, I wrote most productively, even fluidly—no small feat in the meager world of my psychology. Yes, for once I wrote feverishly. Sentences came out of me like stray bullets.
What is a gun, after all? It’s like an umbrella on a cloudy day. You tend to look up less. And so my mind had the luxury of wandering. Like a zone outside myself, it entertained wild notions—including ideas for putting the gun to some higher purpose.
You can scream, you can holler, I said, but no one will hear you. I've soundproofed the basement. Twice. Sound won't travel up, down, right or left. Sound doesn't travel. It gets to the wall or ceiling and stops right there.
You're very proud of this, Bob said.
Do you have any idea just how difficult it is to soundproof a basement?
Personally, I haven't had cause to find out.
Well, it's not easy, I said—and I began to pace along my side of the chain-link fence. I was feeling a little proud to be finally sharing my secret accomplishment, even if Robert Partnow wasn't the ideal audience. He was still in his mood of recalcitrance, defiance, or what at times I took to be feigned indifference. The Porta-Potty is brand-new, I said—pointing to the polyethylene booth in the back without breaking stride. Use it at your whim.
My whim?
I cleared my throat, once and then twice. Your cuffs, Bob, are made of indestructible plastic.
Bob nodded. What’s your name? he asked me—and it seemed odd, right then, that he hadn’t asked before.
Evan. Evan Ulmer.
And you obviously know mine.
A television, I said—pointing at the set on his side of the fence. You probably don’t even watch television. So to your left is a small library of books. I've stocked it with titles that I thought you might enjoy. I can get more, of course. I don't know your tastes, Bob, but I've made a few educated guesses. I've spared you the self-help crap. You must be tired of it.
So you know—
I've centered, as best I could, on the theme of writers. Novels about novelists, I said. But no Roth, no Updike, no white boys gone gray and soft in the dick. A little David Leavitt and Ian McEwan to keep things contemporary. Have you read Joyce’s Portrait lately?
No.
Staring at Bob, secretly worrying about my choices for this little library of his, I knew I was talking off the top of my head—babbling out of anxiety more than anything else. But then, what was the alternative?
Anyway, I said, I think you'll see you've got a pretty decent deal here. The refrigerator is small but sufficient, I hope. I have zero interest in harming you or making your life uncomfortable during your confinement, if that makes any sense.
It makes little sense, Bob said.
I mean no harm. And there's obviously no question of a ransom.
I don't understand.
I hope in time you will, I said—nodding, and in that moment I was hoping this for myself as well.
In fact, with Bob as my guest, I was doing a lot of hoping—wishing of the sort that makes you speak in an officious tone. Still getting to know my captive—my editor, I almost said—I was acting as though I knew what I was doing when, honestly, I didn't. And even if it was a little hard to listen to my own voice, I was determined. I was not going to screw this up.
A treadmill, I said—pointing to the brand-new apparatus. And it's a good one. Maybe a little short of what you'd find in your health club. Do you belong to a health club?
No.
I didn’t think so. Mostly the treadmill’s for walking, but it’s entirely possible to jog, even with handcuffs.
What's the point of this? he said—closing his eyes, shaking his head.
You can do whatever you want, I said. But a word of advice. Coming from me, I know, any advice is suspect. But you might use this time, and your solitude, as an opportunity for reflection and physical exercise. And reading, of course. The television is here for your entertainment, Bob. But it's the only one in the house and so we'll have to share it.
What is it that you want?
I used the word solitude, I said. Compared to your office environment, and probably your home life, you'll be living in a kind of solitude. And yet I'm here too. I live in this house. Essentially we're roommates. I have the key, you have the television. I use the bathroom, you use the Porta-Potty. I live upstairs, you live downstairs, but I think we'll probably be spending some time together.
What exactly does that mean?
You're an intelligent man, I said. I'm an intelligent man. We have things to talk about.
What exactly is a girlfriend?
My last girlfriend hadn't really been one, not in the strictest sense. We hadn't gotten around to sleeping together, and obviously—the way things fizzled, petered out—the whole question of fidelity hadn't risen to the point of discussion. The last time I saw her, in my apartment on Houston Street, she’d told me she was going on a blind date that coming Friday. And so she couldn't have dinner with me—not on that particular night. Maybe another night would work.
I'd carefully considered how to respond, and I was trying to align my response with whatever it was she wanted—whether she knew what she wanted or not. And what did she want? Did she want me to be accommodating? Did she want me to show I had enough confidence to wait it out? Did she want me to pull out my dick and draw a line in the sand? Was I supposed to say to her, Listen, you're making a mistake, honey. You've already hit the jackpot right here. That guy is just a waste of your time, and so why don't you skip the tedium of finding out that I'm the best thing that's ever happened to your little bitch ass?
Not that I would ever have said that. Someone else, someone bolder—not me.
Promise Buckley lived only a couple of blocks away, it turned out. Funny how I'd never seen her before in Sandhurst. And in a mere two months, I thought I’d seen everyone—for better or worse.
Right from the start I liked everything about her except her name.
Robert Partnow, his face creased with a smile, sits behind a desk cluttered with paper, magazines, newspapers, and books. A pair of eyeglasses dangle from one hand—a show of vanity for a camera that demands it. Two columns of manuscripts in their boxes, slightly out of focus, sit precariously on the foregrounded corners of the desk. It's one of those simple but somewhat gaudy French antiques—thin top, no drawers, gold molding along the curvy edges. You expect its owner to be wearing a double-breasted suit, looking like some literary equivalent of Donald Trump. Robert Partnow is, instead, unpretentiously tieless in a long-sleeved knit shirt.
On a relatively warm day in late February, I'd found this picture, along with a short article, at the public library across the street from the Museum of Modern Art. (This was right before I left Manhattan, my belongings already cloistered in the orange and white U-Haul.) The article described a minor reshuffling of the beleaguered editorial staff at what was "once one of the largest and most prestigious publishing houses in New York." Although it had been recently downsized, stripped of a significant paperback imprint, the house was still very much afloat—or so Mr. Partnow insisted. And even if books in the self-help genre were now a more dominant part of the list, the strengths of the house still lay in the quality of its fiction and nonfiction.
That picture, torn from the magazine and folded twice, found its way into the interior pocket of my long gabardine coat.
Right from the start I liked everything about her except her name. I thought a lot about names, chose them carefully when I had the authorial privilege. I kept a list of possibilities. And Promise was the kind of name—Candy, Hope, Summer, Tuesday—that you could never quite get past. Because of its overtness, it was not a name that really appealed to me.
Promise had recently returned from a trip to Prague, a kind of belated graduation gift from her parents. Now she was living temporarily in her parents' house in Sandhurst—their weekend getaway for most of her childhood.
If Promise wasn't quite pretty, she wasn’t plain, either. She had a round face, its surface slightly rough and porous, beautiful lips, and a perfect nose—larger than necessary, some might think. Tall, she had brunette hair that hung straight and grazed her shoulders. (Hair without a blueprint, she later called it.) I especially liked her eyes, which were big and blue and guileless. For me this was an achievement—avoiding guile, feeling not drawn to it, or feeling drawn along by something else.
I met her at the Sandhurst Public Library, which barely passed for a library. The librarians were dawdling, charmless, and slow-witted. They hadn't shelved any titles published within the past six months. The restrooms were surprisingly dirty. Somehow the Sandhurst Public Library wasn’t really a systematic enterprise. Still, I felt calm there, which had always been the effect libraries had on me, since boyhood; and I became a regular after Bob entered my life. It felt like a good idea to escape the house occasionally and leave him to his own devices, if only because it reminded me that I wasn’t the prisoner.
Promise and I were both in the A-G fiction aisle one day, and then the next day we found ourselves in that same aisle again.
That picture, torn from the magazine and folded twice, found its way into the interior pocket of my long gabardine coat. Standing in Midtown the day after a freaky April snowstorm that nearly nixed my plans, I unfolded the picture and stared at the man I was about to meet. Despite the thinning hair at the front of his head and the goofy smile, Robert Partnow wasn't such a bad-looking fellow. Slightly overweight, maybe. He was like a dark-haired cross between John Malkovich and Kelsey Grammer. He looked nice, even charming—not particularly studious or bookish, which was how I’d imagined him when I came across his name.
Pausing at the southwest corner of Madison and Forty-eighth, I surveyed the other three corners of the intersection. The snow was already becoming a muddy, sludgy mess—too many cars, too many people. What was I looking for? Mostly I was looking for someone looking for me. Normally you walk through life with a narcissistic audience of one; now I had the disturbing feeling that everyone was watching me. As you might imagine, it was a rush—but it was also disconcerting. And at that moment I was glad I'd decided against wearing a hat, which might've attracted more attention. In a white shirt, a long coat, and a pair of blue jeans, I felt relatively anonymous.
Stopping in front of the Evergreen Building, I looked back toward the street and saw nothing but the usual bustle—the back-and-forth haste of sidewalk traffic at one-thirty in the afternoon. Inside the building I found a lobby roughly the size of my childhood home in Wisconsin, with eight elevators arranged in two sets of four. A young African American woman in a blue outfit sat at a security station, behind a wooden counter with a bold, undulating design. What was she doing? As she looked down at something in front of her—a magazine, her nails, a log of last night's visitors—people walked by without glancing in her direction.
I knew I couldn't afford to be recorded in her memory, loitering in the lobby and looking aimless, a small bulge in the pocket of my coat. So I went outside again and stood near the entrance to the building. Spotting a man walking past with a Seeing-Eye dog, I considered myself lucky—for once.
And then I saw him, Robert Partnow, walking toward me, hidden among the masses—or almost.
Promise and I were both in the A-G fiction aisle one day, and then the next day we found ourselves in that same aisle again. Two days after that, on the last day of April, it happened yet again—this time it was Promise in H-P, me in Q-V. We saw each other through the stacks, in between the shelves. She was far enough away for safety but close enough for comment. A mutual wave of acknowledgment passed between us, and then, at a closer distance, a whispered conversation about the trials of dealing with sloppy shelving and the muddle of Dewey decimals (which the library used for everything but fiction). She had a sympathetic way of rolling her eyes, I noticed—unusual, I thought, in a woman her age.
Promise was a decade and a half younger than me, and yet we had in common an interest in reading fiction and, more importantly, in becoming what she referred to as professional writers. I didn't particularly like that way of putting it; it made me think of someone who went to a job every day, churning out computer manuals or press releases or text for greeting cards. (Or proofreading for that matter—which was what I used to do, back in New York City, for too many years.) But I could see why Promise liked the aura of professionalism, why the designation appealed. Neat in appearance, she always kept at her library table a collection of mechanical pencils along with her trio of wire-bound journals and a copy of Kafka's diaries. Promise liked the workaday rubric of a vocation, even if her own ambitions were strictly literary. She’d recently tried to explain her activities in Sandhurst to her parents by drawing parallels to her father's law practice—an office, a schedule, meetings. Meetings that took place between her and herself, she told me.
Apparently, Promise believed in structure as much as she believed in herself.
And then I saw him, Robert Partnow, walking toward me, hidden among the masses—or almost. And for once there wasn't any doubt in my mind—just the pull of inevitability, the gravity that keeps the snowball rolling. It was like a voice, egging me on. It was my voice, it seemed, uttering a name that had been floating in my head for days. And the man to whom I’d addressed this name, in the form of a question—he turned, stopped, looked at me and smiled.
Right then I realized the power of my own voice. It felt as though I’d spoken underwater, but apparently he'd heard me. And, bolstered, I went on to speak the words I’d learned by heart. Right now, if you look down for a moment, you can see I'm holding a gun and it's pointed at you. And with my hand deep in the pocket of my coat, I pointed the gun in his direction, even though I realized, right then and there, that it looked like it could've been anything—a finger, a screwdriver, a compact camera. It was not the most effective show of force. In the movies, where I must've gotten some of what I was doing, this maneuver seemed to carry more weight. I'll pull the trigger if you move, scream, or try anything whatsoever, and if you understand what I'm saying, please nod. The man’s head bobbed.
Given the circumstances, he seemed remarkably coolheaded—moving and reacting to my words with the poise of an actor remembering his lines. He'd stopped smiling, but he didn't show any outward anxiety. He merely repositioned his leather satchel on his shoulder and waited.
Do you want me to—
I want you to turn right on Lexington, and then I'll give you further instructions. OK. Now please start walking.
What is this about?
It's about you, Mr. Partnow. And it's about me. Please now.
And together, following my instructions, we walked down the sidewalk, choosing our steps in yesterday’s melting snow, toward Lexington. I made a threat or two along the way to impress upon him my resolve, but it probably wasn’t necessary. Robert Partnow was docile. The ease with which I carried out my plan reminded me—not right then and there, but later—of the time I stole a Three Musketeers bar at Morton’s Pharmacy and found out how oblivious the world could be.
Apparently, Promise believed in structure as much as she believed in herself. That was one reason why I liked her. She also endeared herself to me by using inventive swear words to complain about the library restrooms and the flickering fluorescent lights that made "reading corner"—across the way from where we sat, at the tables—a misnomer. If she didn't like order quite as much as I did (my fastidiousness likely learned from years of proofreading), she came very close. And her powers of organization—the tidy way she kept her writing things—were just part of her overall zeal. She wrote easily, without the self-consciousness that made writing such a burden for me. Was this zeal the effect of her Yale education? I steered clear of the irony with which I typically sized up others’ enthusiasms. She was only twenty-five years old, so why shouldn't she exude hope at being a writer whose career would, in her chosen field, rival her father's? And wasn’t she smart to skip over the joke of a graduate degree in creative writing, which had been my own particular method of wasting a year and a few thousand dollars?
If she'd gone further, entertained notions of grandeur, assumed she‘d make as much money as her father, then I might've needed to intervene and set her straight. But Promise knew better. Unlike me, she'd grown up around the rudiments of culture—concerts, museums, galleries. She’d been given a charmed but worldly perspective on artists. Most of them didn't make a lot of money, and the others—like the ones she'd met at literary gatherings and the pre-Whitney Biennial parties her parents sometimes hosted—were the exceptions. These fortunate few who hit the jackpot, she told me, suggested only a serendipitous combination of talent and circumstance.
I don’t know, Bob said—shrugging, gently lifting his cuffed hands.
I was just wondering, I said—keeping my eyes on the television, trying hard to soft-pedal my inquiry into the logic of marital infidelity.
I mean, you think about asking someone out, he said. You think about sleeping with someone when you're not supposed to sleep with someone, when the consequences of sleeping with someone are enormous and dangerous. But you do it. You sleep with someone and it's wonderful and it makes life messy, and so what?
I can't believe you're saying this, I said—my eyes taking leave of Maury Povich and the chubby woman who claimed to have committed over two dozen acts of infidelity.
Why?
I don't really know you, Bob, but it just seems weird for you to be saying this. Are you speaking from personal experience?
I'm speaking theoretically.
Because if you're speaking from personal experience, it would help to know the particulars.
Particulars?
Because I'm interested in learning from you.
Learning from me, Bob said, slowly—trying the words on for size. Learning what? How do you mean? You mean, as if my life is in good shape?
Isn't it?
It's OK. A little messy, really, but—
Messy in what way? I asked.
There's a lot going on.
You're a busy man.
Yes, he said, I'm a busy man.
What are you busy with?
Everything.
I feel like you're avoiding me, Bob.
I like whispering, Promise said—doing just that, across the library table.
You do?
It makes words seem almost forbidden, don’t you think?
She’d been sitting there by herself when I arrived. And I’d asked if it was OK to sit down at her table, not in words but by signaling with my finger—wagging it between me and the empty chair. Her response had been sufficient, if slightly disappointing; she’d nodded after shrugging her shoulders. Sitting down, I’d opened my briefcase and written for thirty minutes in silence; the only interruption so far had been an exchange of smiles. And so, considering that we hadn’t been whispering, that our whispering had been initiated by her whispered question, I wasn’t sure how to respond.
Where else do you whisper? I said. I mean, besides in libraries.
In theaters. In the presence of sleeping children. In church.
You attend a church?
No, my mother does, she said—rolling her eyes. And I go with her sometimes.
So you whisper to your mother?
Never, she said—as emphatically as she could in a whisper. Not to her.
I wanted to understand, to ask Promise a few more questions, but I found myself oddly exhausted from the whispering. It was, in fact, difficult work, whispering for any length of time, at least across a table in a public library. Or maybe it had nothing to do with whispering. Maybe it was simply the toil of conversing with a young woman I found intriguing. Could I keep up with her? Could I continue whispering without, willy-nilly, divulging too much?
I leaned back in my chair, smiled, and returned to my green notebook—my haven, my shell, my lifelong excuse for not quite living.
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Tearjerker