“Me too,” his daughter said.
“And,” he said, his head tingling with the excitement of a man about to push in all his chips, “I want to give it to you.”
His daughter’s eyes widened. “Daddy. That’s not why I—”
“I know,” he said.
“But we can’t—I mean, Paul won’t allow it.”
“That’s your job,” he said. “You work on him.”
“Daddy. You really mean it?”
He nodded.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, oh, oh.”
“Sweetheart. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I’m just so happy.” She put her arms around him. “Thank you.”
“Of course.”
“Thank you so much.”
“Of course,” he said again, less confidently this time. “Eh. Sweetheart?”
“Yes, Daddy?”
“I forgot to ask about the price.”
She named a number.
“Mm,” he said.
“Trust me, it’s a steal, even at asking.”
“Mm-hm.”
She released him. “You don’t have to do this.”
“I want to.”
She embraced him again. “I love you so, so much.”
Pfefferkorn tried to remember what he was due to be paid for the delivery and acceptance of his next novel. He tried to calculate whether it would be enough to pay for the entire house or whether they would need to take out a mortgage. He didn’t know the first thing about real estate finance. Whatever the case was, he couldn’t afford anything unless he turned in a book. The present word count stood at ninety-nine, including the title and dedication pages. He wondered if making an outlandish offer was his subconscious’s way of motivating him to get to work. Or perhaps he could not bear to see his daughter disappointed. With the wedding, he had set a high standard, one he now felt compelled to meet and exceed. He pulled away so she wouldn’t feel his heart starting to pound.
“Daddy? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You look a little green,” she said. “Do you want to sit down?”
He shook his head. He managed to produce a smile. “Question for you,” he said.
“Yes, Daddy?”
“When I’m old and pissing my pants, where’s my room going to be?”
“Stop.”
“Oh, I get it. You’re going to put me in a home.”
“Daddy. Stop.”
“Never mind, then.”
40.
Pfefferkorn’s success had at once heightened and undercut his stature as a professor. On the one hand, demand for his creative writing classes had grown, with long waiting lists established. With so large a pool available to him, he had the ability to control the composition of the class. However, he tended—stupidly, he thought—to admit a disproportionate number of literary types. These were the very students who tended to be snobbish about his work, comporting themselves with disdain, as though he could not possibly teach them about real literature when he had made a fortune writing trash. Even his good reviews provided grounds for scorn, signaling the death of critical integrity. The fact that his first novel had been literary fiction did not impress anyone. Nobody had heard of it. Pfefferkorn often wondered if he ought to go back to shepherding fragile young women.
The story under discussion that morning centered on an old man nearing the end of his life. He was tending his garden, oblivious to how its flourishing mocked his own senescence. The old man then watched a film in which the growth of flowers was shown, sped up, so that they went from seedling to full bloom to wilting to dead, all in a matter of seconds. This sequence was described in minute detail. The story ended with a cryptic fragment of dialogue.
The author was a twenty-year-old boy named Benjamin who came to class dressed in a homburg. His grasp of the aging process was limited to lurid descriptions of the male body in decay, although Pfefferkorn did acknowledge that the young man wrote with impressive confidence about urogenital problems and arthritis. Still, in Pfefferkorn’s opinion, the story lacked emotional insight. Indeed, it made no attempt whatsoever to penetrate the old man’s psyche at all. It was as if the author had laid the character on a slab and left him there. When Pfefferkorn attempted to raise this critique he met a blistering counterattack, not only from Benjamin but from a host of like-minded supporters. They argued that Pfefferkorn’s understanding of character was antiquated. They abhorred writers who overexplained. Pfefferkorn defended himself by citing avant-garde and postmodern writers whom he enjoyed, stating that even these seemingly stone-faced works had at their center a moist, beating core of humanity. “That is total bullshit,” Benjamin said. “We’re all robots,” a hard young woman named Gretchen said. Pfefferkorn asked her to explain what she meant by that. “I mean we’re all robots,” she said. Heads nodded. Pfefferkorn was confused. “You can’t all be robots,” he said, not knowing what argument he was making or why he was making it. These students did not speak the same language as he did. He was tired, too, having slept badly for several months running. His doctor had prescribed him a sedative, but so far it had proved ineffective, lulling him to the cusp of sleep but not beyond, so that he spent his waking hours in a fog. He saw himself through his students’ eyes and he saw weakness. “I am not a robot,” he repeated firmly. “How do you know?” Gretchen said. “Because I’m not,” Pfefferkorn said. “Yes,” she said, “but how do you know?” “I’m human,” Pfefferkorn said. “If you cut me, I bleed.” “If you cut me,” she said, “I bleed motor oil.” This was agreed upon by several of the students to be very funny. Pfefferkorn, feeling the beginnings of a migraine, was glad when the hour was up.
That evening he sat at his desk with two large piles in front of him. One was a long-neglected stack of mail. The other was made up of hundreds of stories his students had written over the years. He had always kept copies on the off chance that one of them became famous and the story turned out to be valuable. That was not his present purpose in browsing. Rather, he was trying to find something he could use. A recent Herculean effort had pushed the word count to one hundred ninety-eight, but he still hadn’t gotten past the second page. Perhaps somewhere in this yellowing tower of mediocrity was the key to kickstarting his creativity. He told himself he wouldn’t steal anything word for word. That wasn’t his style. All he needed was to get the juices flowing.
Four hours and two hundred pages later, he put his head in his hands. He was headed for the rocks.
He turned his attention to the mail. Most of it was junk. There were bills, many of them overdue. His agent had sent royalty statements, along with a few medium-sized checks—nothing to sneeze at, but nothing that would cover a large suburban house, either. A padded envelope contained paperbacks of the Zlabian edition of Blood Eyes, all but one of which he planned to get rid of. Already his new office was overrun with author’s copies. He crumpled a circular and spied an envelope addressed to him in a large, shaky hand. It was postmarked several weeks prior. There was a return address but no name. He opened it. Inside were several folded pages and a note written on heavy-stock cardboard.
Pfefferkorn shuddered as he remembered Bill’s agent with the huge, veiny head. There was no phone number on the note. Nor had Savory indicated when to come. Was Pfefferkorn supposed to show up at the return address at a time of his choosing? How would Savory know he was coming? It was an altogether bizarre—and officious—way to schedule a meeting. Schmuck, Pfefferkorn thought. He had no intention of honoring the request until he unfolded the enclosed pages. Then he understood immediately.