AND YET There was a memory that never happened: of eating steak and drinking beer and watching all these children with his friend’s eyes play in a sunny yard, and it made him so fucking furious, so fucking crazy and desperate and sorrowful that he pressed his face against the surface of that bronze tablet and through gritted teeth and layered time sobbed into the metal, hot with the warmth of the Florida sun. An older Black lady, probably the mother of some other poor dead motherfucker, knelt beside him and took him in her arms. She whispered, “I know, baby. I know. We’ll all be with God soon,” while she stroked his back with one hand and held his heart with the other.
There was the tinkering clitter-clatter of silverware on plates, murmured conversations ebbing and flowing, hash browns and eggs being lapped up. Outside on the highway, the pickups and SUVs sluiced by, spraying mocha slush from their wheels. By now the pristine white had all but disappeared. The waitress returned, and Shane and Murdock ordered breakfast.
T
HE
A
CTOR
2014
I saw him in the bookstore without recognizing him at first. I was stewing from the last meeting of the week. Darren would get the promotion, and my eyes were still threatening tears. This news had enveloped me so thoroughly since leaving the office that my gaze passed over this man I’d watched so many times in other contexts. He was poorly incognito. He wore a crisp blue Cubs baseball cap and thick sunglasses that were a rectangular mask across his eyes. Yet I could see those distinct lips, naturally pursed like a blooming flower. The straight nose with its squarish point. The five-o’clock shadow, pinpricks of black on a flawless tan.
I’d wound my way from the office to the downtown Barnes & Noble because I did not feel like getting on the train at rush hour, not with the pulse of indignation still beating in my head, and decided to calm myself by browsing books. That meeting evaporated as I took in the rest of him. Dark blue jeans with the requisite fade, a tan jacket over a light blue shirt, brown leather shoes. He was shorter than I would have imagined, but you always hear that about actors. What surprised me more was his build—clearly in shape, but so slender. Those muscles that graced the posters were more compact in real life.
I thought of that peculiar phrase then, my eyes darting away from him as I sensed his glance: in real life. A cliché so far removed from what it ever meant, if anything. I could even remember watching one of his thrillers a few years back on one of those early dates with Jefferey; he was not exactly an A-lister, but his films were unavoidable if one saw enough American movies. I picked a book off the shelf just to have something to do with my hands.
Then he spoke to me. I missed what he said because I was trying to see the eyes behind the sunglasses. His lips curled expectantly, and my words came out with a defensive tinge that sounded crass to my own ears.
“Excuse me?”
“McCarthy,” he said, pointing to the book I held. “Do you like McCarthy?”
Blood Meridian lay in my hand, a limp accessory. I had never read anything by McCarthy. I’m one of those people constantly trying to read short stories by Flannery O’Connor yet reverting to Jodi Picoult and Gillian Flynn at the first pang of boredom.
“I haven’t read much of him.”
“He’s one of my favorite authors. The Road is incredible and an easier read. Blood Meridian has the Judge, who’s one of the best characters in modern literature, but it takes a lot of concentration. At least that’s my expert recommendation.”
He smiled and that institutional bookstore light almost created a glare on his whitened teeth. I set Blood Meridian down and picked up The Road.
“The problem is this is a movie, so I know I’ll quit halfway through and finish it on Netflix.”
It was a feeble joke, and I immediately hated the dynamic, as if he was the authority because he’d read this one book. At the office I had learned never to give the guys ammunition or I’d watch their entitlement bloat. This is exactly how Darren Grinspoon muscled in and took credit for my work on his way to leap-frogging me to executive creative director: I let men explain novels to me in bookstores.
He laughed. “Eh, movies are cheap facsimiles of what novels accomplish.”
“Strange coming from someone in your line of work.”
His sandy eyebrows perked upward. “Ah, so you saw around the disguise.”
“Oh, I’m calling my mother about this as soon as I walk out of here.”
He smiled and leaned into the shelf in the manner of a high school boy at your locker.
“In that case, can I tell you why you should read that book rather than see the movie?”
“They passed you over for the starring role?”
I put a foot forward, moving closer, challenging him. There in the pit of my belly was the kind of squirming excitement you feel so rarely as an adult, the joyous ache of a crush whose face you want to push into the mud. While my celebrity infatuations tended toward the older, more distinguished type (Harrison Ford from the eighties, please and thank you), I still had a pulse, and this attention from a man I’d learned about mostly through issues of People was undeniably thrilling.
“No, they wouldn’t even take my agent’s call,” he said. “But McCarthy has this way with his prose, so you’re always chasing sentences down these caverns of meaning. You just can’t translate that to film. No actor, no screenwriter, no director, no team of studio wizards can do in a lifetime what Cormac McCarthy can do in an afternoon.”
He said this with a wry smile that let me know he was as serious as he was aware of his own bullshit.
“That’s good,” I told him. “Do you have to wait for women to pick up a McCarthy novel to plagiarize a New Yorker review or…?”
His head bobbed back when he laughed.
“C’mon, I’m serious. Let me be corny!” His finger brushed against mine as he took the book from my hand. He lobbed his head toward the front of the store. “This is on me.”
“Don’t,” I said, reaching for it.
He brushed my arm back, a little too forcefully. “Seriously, it’s my pleasure—just in case you don’t like it.”