A week later he left for baseball camp. That had, incidentally, been what the shouting match was about. The shower of stones was forgotten. He never thought of it again.
Chicago, 1980
They were living in an apartment on Clark Street in Chicago when Binder first began to feel he was living out the balance of someone else’s life. They had married his second year at the University of Tennessee and he immediately dropped out. He had to have more money. Two, it seemed, could not live nearly as cheaply as one, especially if that one had been accustomed to subsisting on whatever fell to hand, spending what little money he did have in secondhand bookstores. There seemed to be precious little money in Blount County that year, and none he could lay hands on.
He went to work in Corrie’s father’s furniture store, but that hadn’t lasted long. Then he went to work for a garment factory. That lasted a little longer. All this time he was writing. He began a novel, abandoned it. Began another, wearied of it. After eighteen months the factory shut its doors and Binder was out of a job.
For decades Chicago had been the gateway to another sort of life for the rootless of the South, and so it was for David Binder: he found a job first week there and in one month sent for Corrie.
Binder worked days as an assembler in a plant that made gauges for aircraft. He had enrolled in night classes with some vague idea that he might become an English teacher, Corrie enrolling just to be with him. They had little time for each other, for Binder was writing another novel in his spare moments, writing it without knowing why or even believing that it would be read by eyes other than his own. While he played at writing, Corrie played at housekeeping, pregnant already and little more than a child herself, unsure and willing to settle for whatever time Binder could give her. Binder was living on the edge already and knowing it, knowing that he was spending time like money he might not be able to replace.
In two years’ time he would have achieved enough distance to look back on it with nostalgia, to remember it as the best of times, days and nights filled with purpose and ambition, but he did not know that then. Not in the dislocated otherworldly hour of two or three o’clock in the morning when he would put away the typescript and look at the clock with a grim foreboding, a man on a losing streak sweating the last card in a hand of five-card draw. Nor would he know it the next day, listening to the jungle of machinery, hypnotized and robotlike, his hands doing the selfsame job over and over until they seemed divorced from him, appendages that could have functioned as well without him.
When he finally stood looking down at the neat stack of typescript he had not an inkling of what to do with it, but having invested so many hours typing it and untold hours writing it and thinking about it, he knew he had to do something.
For no other reason than that he was a devotee of Faulkner, he sent it to Random House first. He and Corrie made a small ceremony of the trek down to the post office to mail it. One of the stamps the postman affixed to it bore the likeness of Eugene O’Neill and Binder wryly took that as a good omen.
In reality he expected to wait two or three months and get the manuscript back with a polite note of refusal; he was already trying to decide where to send it next. That was not the way it happened.
Scarcely a month later Corrie handed him a letter from Random House. Her face was white and solemn. She had opened it. He stood in the doorway, still holding his lunchbox, looking down at the letter, and he was suddenly afraid. He was afraid they weren’t going to buy it. He was afraid they were, and he realized intuitively that his life was going to alter drastically and he didn’t know whether he wanted it to or not.
Oh, Jesus, he said.
Open it, she said. Oh, David, I told you so. I told you you were good.
The letter was from an editor who had liked the book and was full of cautious enthusiasm for it, though they did not feel that the book was the sort that would be a great commercial success they were certainly impressed with his ability and they felt he had the potential to become an important writer.
In effect they were willing to gamble a five-thousand-dollar advance on the book. If Binder was amenable, a contract would be drawn up.
Binder was more than amenable, and the next two years seemed a curious dreamlike altering of time, as if his life was a clock running a shade too fast. The book was published to a virtual world of praise. It was almost unprecedented for a first novel to be so well received. The only note of reservation came from a reviewer for the New Yorker, who, though giving the book grudging praise, thought Binder dealt with the morbid and the dark shadings of life perhaps a bit too lovingly. Binder barely noticed this sentence at the time, but two years later it would creep up from his subconscious and come back to haunt him like a curse or a Gypsy seer’s halfforgotten prophecy fulfilling itself.
The book didn’t sell well. In fact it barely earned back the advance, but it went on to win the Faulkner Award for the best first novel of the year, and coincidentally the not inconsiderable monetary sum of ten thousand dollars.
Binder was ten feet high, and he guessed for a Tennessee boy he was chopping in mighty tall cotton. He and Corrie had a better address now and were even thinking about moving back to Tennessee. They had more time. Binder had dropped out of night school. He had decided he didn’t want to be a schoolteacher after all, and on days when he felt he needed a little something to cheer himself up he had only to drive out to the Stewart-Warner plant in the industrial park and listen to the sound of metal perpetually flaying metal and watch the folks file in and out with their lunchboxes in their hands, and know he didn’t have to.
He was working on his second novel, and when he finished it he boxed it up and consigned it to the US Mail. He thought it had gone pretty well and he took a few days off for a welldeserved rest and waited for the check to come rolling in.
There was silence for a time, as if he had walked onto a pier and dropped a box into Lake Erie or dispatched it to the voids of windy space. Then finally he heard. Up there in New York they did not think the book went quite as well as he had: in short, there were faults. Structural faults, stylistic faults, the ending didn’t work. And perhaps another title?
He sat rereading the manuscript with the cold clarity of distance and he was reading it with eyes that seemed to have the scales only recently fallen from them. What a ghastly piece of shit, he thought, possessed with a sardonic sense of amusement, as if someone else had written it. Poor, deformed thing from its mother’s womb untimely ripped. Looking at it now he realized he had written it out of the sheer necessity of stringing words together. Having written one novel he felt compelled to write another, whether he had anything to write about or not. Hadn’t the reviews called him a novelist? He began revising it, but it seemed cold and lifeless, as dead as a letter turning up with a postmark ten years gone. He sat staring at the typewriter but his mind wouldn’t work. Someone had unplugged it, had left the switch on, and the battery had run down, he thought.
The beginning of summer in Chicago that year was fiercely hot. You could feel the sidewalks leaking back the sun through the soles of your shoes. The Windy City lay breezeless and heatbenumbed. Binder took to sitting in a bar on Clark Street and watching the Cubs play baseball on TV and drinking ice-cold beer. The Cubs weren’t having that great a year either.
Along the way he had acquired an agent. Her name was Pauline Siebel and she was a large, plainspoken woman whose motherly manner belied the stubbornness beneath it, like spring steel deceptively upholstered.