“Arthur,” she said. She held him back for inspection. “Dear Arthur.”
She was just as he remembered, exceptionally striking, if not quite conventionally beautiful, with a high, unlined forehead and a Roman nose. The latter had limited her acting career to a few pilots and the odd commercial. She hadn’t worked since her thirties. Then again, she hadn’t needed to. She was married to one of the world’s most popular novelists. Four-inch heels and the hat added to her already imposing stature: she stood five-foot-ten in bare feet, taller than Pfefferkorn but in proportion to her late husband. Pfefferkorn tried not to ogle the hat. It was an impressive thing, adorned with buttons, bows, and lace, its shape that of an inverted frustum, narrow around the head and widening as it went up, like Nefertiti’s headdress.
She frowned. “I’d hoped you would say a few words.”
“I had no idea,” Pfefferkorn said.
“You didn’t get my message? I left it this morning.”
“I was on the plane.”
“Yes but I thought you’d get it when you got off the plane.”
“That’s my answering machine you spoke to.”
“Arthur, my God. You mean to say you don’t have a cell phone?”
“No.”
Carlotta appeared genuinely awed. “Well. It’s all for the best. The ceremony went on much too long as it was.”
Her escort shifted noisily to signal that he was waiting to be introduced, a gesture Pfefferkorn found imperious given the context.
“Arthur, this is Lucian Savory, Bill’s agent. Arthur Pfefferkorn, our oldest and dearest friend.”
“Obliged,” Savory said. He was extremely old, with an extremely large head. It looked freakish atop his withered body. Thinning black hair was plastered back across his scalp.
“Arthur is a writer as well.”
“That so.”
Pfefferkorn waved noncommittally.
“Mrs. de Vallée,” a young man with a walkie-talkie said. “We’ll be ready shortly.”
“Yes, of course.” Carlotta offered Pfefferkorn her arm and they walked to the grave.
11.
Pfefferkorn stood at Carlotta’s side throughout the interment. He was aware of people staring at him, wondering who he was. To block them out, he cast his mind into the past. He and Bill had been in the same class from the seventh grade on, but it was while working on the high school newspaper that they had become friends, each discovering in the other a counterweight. Soon enough they were inseparable, the big, easygoing Polack and the lean, volatile Jew. Pfefferkorn nicknamed Bill “the Cossack.” Bill called Pfefferkorn by his Hebrew name, Yankel. Pfefferkorn recommended books for Bill to read. Bill endorsed Pfefferkorn’s grandiose dreams. Pfefferkorn edited Bill’s essays. Bill gave Pfefferkorn a lift home whenever they stayed late to finish the layout. Senior year, Pfefferkorn was appointed editor-in-chief. Bill became business manager.
Bill’s parents could have afforded to send him to a private college, but he and Pfefferkorn made a pact to go to the state university together. They ran in the same circles, the artistic ones that Pfefferkorn gravitated toward. Those were tumultuous times, and the campus literary magazine was an epicenter of the counterculture. Pfefferkorn rose to become editor-in-chief. Bill served as his ad manager.
At a be-in Pfefferkorn met a tall girl with a Roman nose. She was majoring in dance. She had read some of his stories and was impressed with his vocabulary. He lied and said that he was interested in dance. He fell in love with her instantly but had the good sense to keep his feelings to himself, a choice that revealed itself as farsighted when he introduced her to Bill and she proceeded to fall in love with him instead.
After graduation, the three of them got a basement apartment together. To make ends meet, Pfefferkorn worked at the post office. At night he and Bill played gin rummy or Scrabble while Carlotta cooked up crêpes or a stir-fry. They would listen to records and perhaps smoke a little dope. Then Pfefferkorn would sit at his desk, typing as loudly as he could to drown out the noise of Bill and Carlotta’s lovemaking.
He remembered the first time Bill revealed any literary aspirations of his own. Prior to then, Pfefferkorn had thought he understood the roles each of them played in their friendship, and it was with some unease that he sat down to read the story Bill had written “for the heck of it.” Pfefferkorn was worried it would be either superb and cause for envy or rubbish and cause for an argument. In fact, it fell somewhere in between, and Pfefferkorn felt relief at being able to express honest enthusiasm for the story’s strengths while yet retaining his position of dominance. He even offered to mark up the text, a suggestion Bill pounced on. Pfefferkorn interpreted his enthusiasm as an admission that Bill still held Pfefferkorn to be the superior writer and would gladly accept any pearls of wisdom Pfefferkorn cared to drop.
How naïve they had been. Pfefferkorn nearly laughed out loud. The sound of dirt being shoveled atop the grave helped him maintain his composure.
It took Carlotta more than an hour to shake the hands and kiss the cheeks of everyone who had come to pay respects. At her request, Pfefferkorn lingered nearby.
“Hell of a guy,” Lucian Savory said.
Pfefferkorn agreed.
“Hell of a writer. I knew from the first line of that first book that this fellow was something special. ‘Savory,’ said I, ‘Savory, behold something rare here. Behold talent.’” Savory nodded in confirmation of his own judgment. Then he glanced sidelong at Pfefferkorn. “You probably can’t guess how old I am.”
“Well—”
“Ninety-eight,” Savory said.
“Wow,” Pfefferkorn said.
“Ninety-nine in November.”
“You don’t look it.”
“Of course I fucking don’t. That’s not the point. The point, dingleballs, is I’ve been around the block. Updike, Mailer, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Twain, Joseph Smith, Zola, Fenimore Cooper. I knew em all. I fucked all three of them Brontës. And let me tell you, I never met a writer like Bill. And I never will again, even if I live to be a hundred.”
“I think that’s likely,” Pfefferkorn said.
“What is.”
“That you’ll live to be a hundred.”
Savory stared at him. “You’re a smart-ass.”
“I just meant—”
“I know what you meant,” Savory said. “Fucking smart-ass.”
“I’m sorry,” Pfefferkorn said.
“Pfft. Any rate, I’m telling you: Bill’s name belongs up there with the greats. We could chisel it into Mount Rushmore. Maybe I’ll do just that.”
“Mark Twain?” Pfefferkorn asked.
“Nicest guy you’ll ever meet,” Savory said. “Not like that Nathaniel Hawthorne, he was a cunt. You’re a writer?”
“Of sorts,” Pfefferkorn said.
“Publish anything?”
“A little.”
“How little.”
“One novel,” Pfefferkorn said. “In the eighties.”
“Name?”
“Shade of the Colossus,” Pfefferkorn said.
“Shitty title,” Savory said.
Pfefferkorn bowed his head.
“Not a selling title,” Savory said.
“Well, it didn’t sell.”
“There you go.” Savory rolled his tongue around in his mouth. “You should have called it Blood Night.”
“What?”
“Or Blood Eyes. Now those are selling titles. See? I haven’t even read it and I came up with two better titles in thirty seconds.”
“They don’t really relate to the book.”
Savory looked at him. “You don’t understand this business, do you.”