The Serialist Page 2

  Anyway, we scheduled the interview and prepared carefully, with me listening on the bedroom extension, scribbling answers on a pad, and passing them to my young pal Claire, who relayed them to my mother, who sat in the kitchen in her housedress.

  My worst fears were realized immediately, however, when within five minutes she announced that vampires were “nothing” compared to Germans, that they lived mostly in Pennsylvania (she later blamed this on my handwriting), had “a thing” for crosses, and died from silver bullets.

  “That’s werewolves,” I hissed, standing in the bedroom door and frantically miming a stake driving into my chest.

  “Oh yeah,” she added into the phone. “Garlic gives them heartburn.”

  After this she declined all requests. And there were some, because Madam Sibylline Lorindo-Gold was popular, my most popular writer by far. Though of course popular in my world meant a $4,500 advance on a 350-page novel, requiring that I keep up my strict diet of ten manuscript pages a day. God, I hate to think of the forests I’ve felled, just to pay the rent and keep my lights on. When it comes to literature, I’m a furnace. I’m a wildfire. I’m the inferno of American Fiction.

  5

  All in all, my mother was very pleased with her virtual celebrity, and it was a fun thing for us to share, answering her fan mail, getting her hair and makeup done, choosing the clothes and taking pictures. And I’m glad we at least had that, because three months after that first book was published, she was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. A year later—after Crimson Darkness Falls and Darkly Crimson, My Sweet, after I had moved back into my old room to look after her, to count her pills and bring her to her chemo appointments, after her hair no longer needed to be straightened for the photos because it had fallen out and we got a red, straight wig—she finally died, quietly, one night while I slept next door. I found her around noon the following day, since even then, in her last extremity, she was always the early riser and I was the dead log of a sleeper who had to be awakened with nudges and coffee every morning.

  And that is how, on the day my death row fan letter arrived, I found myself in a midtown photo studio, wearing my mother’s red wig and one of her black “Lorindo dresses,” as we once called them, as well as thick makeup, lipstick, eye shadow, foundation and rouge, all applied by Claire, who was accompanying me to the shoot for the new portrait I needed for Crimson Night and Fog, which was due to come out soon. Needless to say I resemble my mother quite a bit, although my hair isn’t red. But then again neither was hers. Not really, I mean. In truth I don’t know what her natural color was, and neither did she.

  Claire leaned over me, breathing bubblegum into my nose and frowning in concentration as she struggled with my eyebrows, which presented a special problem. So did my greasy forehead, my pronounced, bristly jaw and my Adam’s apple, but Claire managed to overcome these failings with her clever deployment of wardrobe, hair and a bag full of products about which I knew only that they itched. But my eyebrows were particularly recalcitrant, since despite her many cogent arguments, I refused to have them plucked.

  “They’re just so bushy,” she muttered to herself, snipping away with a tiny scissors. “It’s like I’m lost in a forest.”

  “Don’t exaggerate. Of course they’re bushy for a woman.”

  “For a human. And your mom’s were so nice and elegant.”

  For the record, my mother was one of those women who essentially have no eyebrows, merely a dusting of microscopic hair. She then drew in her own with the same little colored pencils she used for her shopping list.

  “I probably have my dad’s eyebrows,” I offered.

  “Then this must be his ear hair too,” she said, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “You should be writing about the wolfman.”

  At last she sorted me out by somehow disappearing my beastly brows with makeup, then painting new, ladylike curves on my forehead. In the mirror, I looked perpetually surprised by something, maybe my own face.

  “Now hold still and try not to furrow,” she said, so I sat back and stretched my legs. Since the photo would only be chest high, I was still wearing jeans and high-top sneakers under my dress.

  “Here, before I forget.” Claire was restuffing her backpack. “I grabbed your mail.”

  “Thanks,” I said. She had my spare set of keys. It was mostly bills of course, and a few letters for Sibylline forwarded from the publisher. Pangstrom and Johnson got some too, but less often. I answered them all, though my mother, and now Claire, signed Sibylline’s, since I believe, perhaps foolishly, that one can tell gender from handwriting. Then, on the bottom of the stack, there was another letter, with several of those yellow forwarding stickers attached, recording all the places I’d lived in my increasingly frantic wanderings through the shrinking bits of cheap New York.

  “What’s that one?” Claire asked. “I didn’t recognize it.”

  It was addressed to Tom Stanks, c/o Raunchy magazine. And the return address was Sing Sing Penitentiary.

  6

  A few years back, when Jane and I split up, or rather (who am I kidding?) when she dumped me, the only possessions we fought over were the books. We’d spent eight or nine years together (even this was in dispute), and one could trace the epochs of our shared life in the shelves that lined our, soon to be her, apartment as if they were geological strata: first the two lonely his and her libraries that came shyly together, my Dylan Thomas rubbing against her Sylvia Plath, my Barthes kissing her Wilson, my Borges squeezed under her Waugh, with all our cute twinned stepvolumes: two Frannys and two Zooeys, two very Pale Fires, and for some reason three Ask the Dusts. These were easy to dismantle, of course, and even a bit tender, as we pulled them apart and laid mine to rest in boxes, where they now remain, come to think of it, in my mother’s storage room in the basement. Also easy were the new books, the bedside and desktop stacks—her review and advance copies of story collections by the young and promising, my complimentary issues of Hot Asians #7 and Best of Big Buns piled on Henry James, who slumped half-read and prostrate, as if unable to face our breakup. The hard part of undoing our library came with that layer I call the Middle Ages, when for about four years we were eternally joined and not only buying but reading the same things, sometimes, forgive me, even out loud together in bed.

  “Didn’t I buy this?”

  She was holding up Cortázar’s Hopscotch.

  “Yes,” I said. “You bought it for me, remember?” She frowned, unsure. But I remembered. She brought it to read on the bus that time we used her uncle’s time-share in the Poconos, back when she still thought being poor and unknown together was just perfect. Dazzlingly, dizzyingly, diamondly brilliant—that book made me carsick on the lurching ride up, then seasick all weekend in the waterbed, bobbing together and switching off, chapter by chapter, as we followed those other, cooler, maté-sipping fifties bohemians through Paris and Buenos Aires. All Jane wanted then was to die beautifully for art by my side, ideally in eccentrically titled chapters. As I stared at my face in the mirrored ceiling, pale and sweaty, like a drowning man going down in a wave of nausea, she offered me a fizzing Alka-Seltzer and asked me to ask her to marry me.

  “Are you sure?” I asked, and tried to embrace her, though my sudden move set off a lurching roll that sent me bouncing off her chest. Our heads knocked. “Shit,” I muttered. “I think your uncle overfilled this.”

  “We love each other,” she declared. “What else matters?”

  “Lots of things. What if I’m always poor and struggling?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “And you don’t mind waiting till my first novel comes out to have the wedding? You know I can’t get distracted now.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “And you understand,” I said—and feel free to laugh at what an ass I was, as I have on many bitter nights since—“you understand that even if we are married, my work will always come first?”

  Oh, how she loved that. The sweetly sad grandeur of it fil
led her to the brim. She clutched at my hands, as if I were a cramped swimmer getting pulled out by the tide, and we floated into each other’s arms. “I understand,” she told me. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

  “I guess that changed,” I told her, seven (?) years later, still poor and unknown, sitting on a box marked Russian Fic while she ruffled the dog-eared pages of the Cortázar and found the one red maple leaf we’d laid in the book as a mark. She held it up to me now like a tiny, brittle flag, captured in my defeat.

  “Yes, yes, I admit it,” she said. “I changed. I’m sorry. I’m thirty-one now. I want a husband and a house and a kid. Forgive me.” And I tried to. I said:

  “If I tell you, let’s do it, let’s get married and get pregnant right now, then you’ll stay with me?”

  The anger went out of her. She slumped. “No,” she whispered, turning her head from me, as if an invisible hand had wrapped around her throat. “Not anymore. Not with you.”

  I was silent. She began to sob. Why is it that while she was breaking my heart, she was also the one who cried, and I was the one who watched, stony and unmoved like the heartbreaker? A big tear fell into Hopscotch. Page forty-nine. I know because when it dried it shriveled the paper, and I’ve gone back to review it many times.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But you’re the one who changed. You used to be so passionate about everything. Writing. Life. Everything. Just taking a walk. Now I can’t live with you. It’s too sad. When was the last time you even wrote a poem?” Then she shut the book and crushed the leaf.

  7

  Yes, I admit I was a poet once. No, I wasn’t much good. I’m not claiming to be some thwarted, tragic genius. This isn’t that kind of story. The fact is, like many a socially awkward man-child, good with words but bad with people, I broke out in poetry, like acne, somewhere in preadolescence, and by the time I met Jane, versifying had already become one of those vestigial gifts, like card tricks or making crepes, that we trot out only on request. I wrote one poem a year, for Jane’s birthday, because I couldn’t afford a real gift, and offered it up the way others glue glittered macaroni onto coffee cans. And they probably ended up the same way, buried in a basement in Brooklyn.

  After my mother died, I found in her night table an envelope containing copies of the very first poems I wrote, back in my golden age, which lasted from eight to nineteen. Creased and bent and stained, handwritten or typed on a typewriter, they were, I realized, the only works of mine she’d ever really liked and even read out loud to her cousin Sadie on the phone. I looked them over. They were, of course, thoroughly mediocre, about Fall or Time or Vacant Lots, or in one particularly wincing case, the Miracle of Hanukkah. So much for my poems, and their only two readers, both lost.

  But still—like the former would-be anarchist whose subversion is now reduced to muttering under his breath after you order your lunch from him, like the meek bank teller who behind her smile is always plotting how to blow the vault, like the author of scathing, unsent op-ed pieces, or the sex outlaw who ravishes only with a glance—I have remained a secret poet in my heart, carving there the lines that no eye will ever trace, nor lips speak. And here, in my own true story, in my own name, I will invoke the rights of a poet and not, if I don’t care to, go into all that endless fucking prosaic detail about the weather and how couches looked. And I won’t pretend to know what everyone is thinking either, even me, or why we all do what we do. Like a poet I will simply say what I have to say, straight to the point. Because that’s what poetry really is, the most information in the least words. We poets say what we mean, in the only way it can be said. And so if I say, just for example, Her heart was as black as a spider, that is just what I mean. Black. As a spider. Her heart.

  8

  I guess, before going any further, I should stop and explain about Claire.

  Since, despite the blizzard of paper I’ve produced in what I’ll call my career, there’s never been more than a flurry of green, I’ve resorted to many other jobs along the way, including tutor. It was not very lucrative, ten or twenty bucks an hour helping variously hyphenated Americans get up to speed in written English or coaching public school kids who were “special,” “alternatively gifted,” or just plain extraordinary. But armed with my Ivy League credentials (I know, I know, whatever) and the 800 that by some weird fluke I got on the verbal GRE (don’t be too impressed, I got a 350 in math), I solicited tutoring work with the posh uptown private schools as well, schools that, as a product of Queens’ finest, I only knew from the movies. Most just ignored my emails. A few responded, then ignored my calls. Only one, the Bradley School, called me in for a depressing interview, where some administrator held forth on how great their students were, how they mostly went to what she insisted on calling “the Ivies,” and how they didn’t need much outside tutoring because the faculty “loved helping kids.” I didn’t, I admitted to myself while nodding my approval. I don’t even like kids. I just love paying rent.

  “We take an individual approach here. Does the thought of developing your own curriculum excite you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Very much. It excites me a lot.”

  So by the time I left I had pretty much written it off and had completely forgotten the whole thing when, a few months later, I got a call from someone named Peter Nash.

  “This Harry Bloch?”

  “Yes it is. How can I—”

  “Yeah, my daughter’s not testing as well as she should.”

  “Um.” It took me a minute to think of what he meant.

  “You know Sally Sherman?”

  “Um . . .” For some reason the name came back to me. “The lady from the Bradley School?”

  “Right. You have some time this week?”

  “I’ll check my schedule,” I said. I was in the kitchen about to eat lunch. I glanced down at my bowl of tomato soup. It was dead winter. My calendar was wide open for the next thirty years. “Let’s see. How about Thursday at five?”

  “And how much do you charge?”

  My head swam. I’d never made more than twenty bucks an hour for anything. I gulped a big drink of air. “Fifty?” I croaked. “My usual fee is fifty, but if . . .” Luckily he stopped me before I talked myself out of it.

  “OK, as long as that’s not the unusual fee, ha! Look, I’ll have Claire call you about the schedule. I handle the big things and she handles the little things. Ha!”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll assess her individual strengths and weaknesses and develop an exciting core curriculum . . .” I rambled on a while before realizing he’d hung up.

  A few hours later I got a message from Claire. If she hadn’t introduced herself I would have thought she was her mom. Her voice was perfectly poised, with no teenage uncertainty. She confirmed the random time I’d suggested and gave her address, on the Upper East Side. I realized that she’d neglected to give her apartment number but decided to just wing it and look at the mailboxes. Fifty dollars! I was so amazed at my good fortune that I was afraid to call back and ruin it.

  That Thursday, when I showed up, huddling in a wind so icy that it seemed to scissor right through to my underwear, I saw the reason she hadn’t told me which buzzer to push: there was only one. It was all theirs, the whole five-story building. I was early, and as I paced back and forth, shivering, under the glowing lights of their house, the ridiculousness of my worries over charging a piddly fifty bucks made me blush. Although it’s hardly news, it still never ceases to stupefy and amaze me: how rich other people are compared to me.

  I buzzed, and a few frigid minutes later, Claire answered wearing a string bikini. She had very straight, very blond hair, very blue eyes, a microscopic nose that barely made a bump between her freckled cheeks, and a small round mouth. Her body, under or perhaps I should say around the bikini, since it covered only what was absolutely necessary with its three small triangles, was, well, it was fourteen: without fat, without wrinkles, without wear of any sort. She was like a doll never taken from the
box. She was mint.

  “Hi, come in. Sorry, I was under the sunlamp.” She was not, by the by, tan at all. In fact her skin was so white that her veins looked blue. And I could see them all since she was so thin that I think I could have wrapped a hand around her thigh. She led me out of the burning cold into the soothing warmth of her home. “I’ve got sad.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. What about?” I asked as I struggled with my scarf and hat and coat.

  “Seasonal affective disorder.”

  “Oh.”

  “The sunlamp is supposed to help with it. Anyway, that’s what they say.”

  “Oh.” We were in a marble entrance hall with a grand staircase leading up and away and mail laid out like hors d’oeuvres on a silver platter. I dropped my glove and when I stooped to pick it up, I noticed four rubber bands on the floor, where they’d probably fallen off bundles of cash. Instinctively I picked them up.