“Fine,” Bill said. “But listen, Art. Ask yourself this: you’re sure you can’t think of anything I have that you want? Anything at all?”
“Go straight to hell,” Pfefferkorn said and hung up.
Nine months passed before Bill called to apologize. Pfefferkorn made his own grudging apology as well. But the repercussions had been serious and long-lasting. Pfefferkorn had not been to California since. For his part, Bill still sent first editions, and he still inscribed them touchingly, but otherwise communication between them had all but atrophied. Pfefferkorn had concluded that it was sad but better this way. Few friendships were meant to last a lifetime. People changed. Bonds disintegrated. Part of life. So he had told himself.
Now, however, he saw the entire mess as a nauseating victory of pride over love. He began to shiver. He pulled the dressing gown around himself. It was Bill’s, far too big for him. Carlotta had loaned it to him. He wrapped himself tighter still and rocked in the moonlight, weeping without sound.
Some time later he stood up, intending to go back to bed. But again he changed his mind. He headed for the office path.
17.
Pfefferkorn stood in darkness, listening to the wind gust through the unused portion of the barn and stubbing his feet against the cold tile. He flicked on the light and sat at the desk, opening drawers. The first was empty. The second contained a box of pens of the same brand as those in the jar. The final drawer contained three reams of paper still in their wrappers.
The wind gusted again.
Pfefferkorn reached for the neatly piled manuscript. He leaned back in the chair. It let out a loud, rusty bark. He read.
If he had expected anything different from Bill’s previous work, he was to be disappointed: in both substance and style, the manuscript differed so little from what he’d read on the plane that Pfefferkorn entertained himself with the idea that Carlotta had been mistaken, and that the pages in his hand were not a book-in-progress but the same one on display in airport terminals throughout the world. Three chapters in, he glanced over at the bookcase containing both his and Bill’s life’s work. The disparity amazed him. Even more amazing was that Bill still thought so highly of him. Surely one would expect that decades of uninterrupted commercial success would go to a person’s head. Surely Bill had the right to believe that he, not Pfefferkorn, was the superior writer. And who was to say he wasn’t? Pfefferkorn decided that he had been too harsh. Consistency, productivity, broad appeal—these, too, were writerly virtues, as was the ability to repeatedly vary a theme. By the end of its opening sentence, a William de Vallée novel made its reader feel at home. As a student, Pfefferkorn had railed against mass-market entertainment, decrying it as a weapon of the ruling powers aimed at maintenance of the status quo. He gravitated toward writers who employed alienating styles or unconventional themes, believing that these possessed the power to awaken the reading public to fundamental problems concerning the modern condition. He had striven to write in that mode as well. But these were a young man’s concerns. Pfefferkorn had long ago stopped believing that his stories (or any story, for that matter) would have a measurable effect on the world. Literature did not decrease injustice or increase fairness or cure any of the ills that had plagued mankind from time immemorial. It was sufficient, rather, to make one person, however bourgeois, feel slightly less unhappy for a short period of time. In Bill’s case, the cumulative effect of millions of people made slightly less unhappy for a short period of time had to be reckoned a significant accomplishment. There, at a bare desk in a frigid office in the middle of the night, Pfefferkorn softened his heart toward his dead friend, and to bad but successful writers everywhere.
18.
Dawn broke and he still had seventy pages left. He had to hand it to Bilclass="underline" the man could spin a yarn. The latest installment of Dick Stapp’s adventures began with the murder of a politician’s wife but eventually led to far-off regions, as Stapp pursued a suitcase containing nuclear launch codes. Did they really call it a football? Pfefferkorn did not know. He put down the manuscript and stood, twisting to loosen his back. He knelt by the bookcase and took out his own novel, studying the cover, its blue darker than that of the faded spine. There was his name in yellow letters. There, in white, was a pencil drawing of a tree. The tree had been his idea. At the time it made sense to him but now he saw that it was boring and pretentious. Live and learn, he thought. He opened to the back flap. There was his author photo, taken by his wife on her old camera. In it he was young and thin, staring intensely, chin clutched between thumb and side of forefinger, a pose intended to give him gravitas. Now he decided that he looked like his head had become detached and he was trying to keep it in place.
He turned to the title page and the inscription.
Bill
I’ll catch you one day
love
Art
Had he really written that? Bill must have been embarrassed by the pettiness of it, although Pfefferkorn could not remember him saying anything other than thank you. And such folly. He would never catch Bill, at least not in terms of numbers. That much should have been apparent, even back then.
Shaking his head, Pfefferkorn opened the book to a random page. What he saw astonished him. The text had been heavily annotated, every sentence asterisked, underlined, boxed, or bracketed, some all four. A dense, Talmudic commentary filled the margins. Diction was analyzed, allusions explicated, scenes dissected for structure. Pfefferkorn riffled the rest of the book and was aghast to discover that it had all been given an identical treatment. The novel’s final paragraph ended in the middle of a page, and below the closing words Bill had written:
YES
Pfefferkorn turned to the table of contents—it was clean, which brought him immeasurable relief—then to the acknowledgments. He read that he had thanked his agent, his editor, his wife, and various friends who had provided technical advice. He had not thanked Bill.
Stricken, he went back to the title page, intending to rip out the inscription in penance. But he could not bring himself to do it. He replaced the book on the shelf.
He sat for some time in a meditative silence. He thought of his failed novels. He thought of his failed marriage. He thought of Bill, good Bill, kind Bill, bashful Bill, Bill who had ever shown him only generosity, who had admired and studied him, who had loved him and whom he had loved in return. He thought of Bill leaving his mansion to sit in a tiny, ugly room. Bill, typing his two thousand five hundred words, day in and day out. Bill, wishing he had one great book in him. Bill, with his own jealousies, his own regrets. Outside, the birds began to sing. Pfefferkorn looked at the manuscript, seventy pages unread, the rest piled messily and dangling at the edge of the desk, and he thought that Bill never would have been so careless. He thought of Carlotta, the way she had opened herself to him, in punishment and in reward. He thought of his daughter, whose wedding he could not pay for. He thought of his students at the college, none of whom would ever succeed. They had no talent, and talent could not be learned. He thought of life and he thought of death. He thought: I deserve more.
19.
Pfefferkorn waited for the rental car shuttle bus to take him to the departure terminal. In order to fit the manuscript into his carry-on he had had to discard several items of clothing, two pairs of socks and two pairs of underwear and one shirt hastily stuffed into the waste bin of a hallway bathroom that, to his eye, had not been recently used, the bar of soap in the sinkside soap dish still wrapped in ribbon and wax paper.