Providence (7 page)

I listened to her feedback. I needed it. I wasn’t sure about the stories I’d written the past few nights.

“Arthur’s probably mentioned to you the tight deadline. We’re already behind the eight ball on this one. We could get a big jump on editing if you would e-mail your pages to me instead of faxing them.”

“Sure, Judith. That’s not a problem. I’ll resend what I’ve already faxed.”

“That’s all I need for now,” she said.

“So, is Arthur pushing you as hard as he’s pushing me?” I asked, searching for a little
esprit de corps
.

“Oh, you know Arthur. These have been the best two years of his life. You can’t blame him for wanting to get the next chapter started.”

“I guess not. Is he still in the office?”

“No. We haven’t seen him since Monday. I think the office is forwarding calls to his cell.”

“I just spoke to him this morning.”

“Yep, me, too. But he left for Las Vegas last night.”

“Las Vegas? Another book convention?”

“No, the next one’s not for another month. I think he’s talking to retailers. You know they have to pay us in advance to get this one, right?”

“No … What do you mean?”

“If retailers want to have the sequel to Jack Clayton’s best-selling book in their stores on release day, they have to cough up 50 percent up front.”

“Before they even get the book?”

“That’s right. It’s never done that I’m aware of, but chains are lining up to pay. It’s a pretty big deal, Jack. If they don’t get in on the initial order, stores have to wait another ten days to get the book in stock. Arthur’s been selling this strategy to retailers since July.”

No wonder he’d been so unrelenting about my writing the book. He’d already collected payments.

“Do you think Shirley can track down Art?”

“She should be able to. Do you want me to transfer you to her when we’re done?”

“Yeah, that’s not a bad idea.”

Judith and I talked for another minute, and then she put me through to Arthur’s assistant.

“Arthur Reed Publishing. Shirley Dawson.”

“Hi, Shirley, it’s Jack.”

“Well, hello there, stranger. When are you coming up to see us again? It’s been forever.”

“I’d love to come up, but Arthur’s got me chained to a desk here. Until he comes back to change my food and water, I’m afraid I’m stuck.”

She laughed. Shirley always laughs at my jokes.

“I hear Arthur’s in Vegas. Could you transfer me to his cell number?”

“I don’t think he’s picking up anymore.”

“Is he in meetings?”

“Probably. He flew into Las Vegas last night, but he’s flying to the East Coast later today.”

“East Coast?”

“Uh-huh. New Jersey, I think.”

“Didn’t you create his itinerary?”

“Not this time. When he has to leave quickly, he usually makes his own arrangements. He checks in later to tell me where he is and when he’s coming back.”

“Do you know any other way to get in touch with him?”

“I should hear from him later this evening or tomorrow, Jack. Do you want me to have him call you?”

“Yes, please ask him to contact me ASAP.”

“I will, Jack. And oh, by the way … congratulations on being
Time
’s Person of the Year. We’re all just thrilled!”

I thanked Shirley and pushed the Off button on the portable phone. Arthur Reed had been selling my book for five months—and taking 50 percent of the proceeds from retailers even before I’d agreed to write it. Arthur could be aggressive, certainly ambitious, but this seemed out of character. Dark secrets on the other side of the writing world?

The bedroom TV was tuned to CNN, but with the sound muted. I meant to turn it off before I dozed but never got the chance. I fell asleep in minutes.

~
S
IX
~

My heart is old, it holds my memories
My body burns a gem like flame.

—Mr. Mister

“Kyrie”

Mitchell and I talked in a frenzy for the first two hours of the trip, but as we settled into the rhythm of the road, we chose music over talking, the W
ELCOME
TO
P
ROVIDENCE
sign still hours away.

Mitchell and I had become best friends on a middle-school playground fighting over a green and blue stocking cap that eleven fifth-grade boys were chasing. He got a bloody nose that day, and I got a friend for life. His parents were well-read Republicans who valued public education above everything except University of Iowa football.

The McDaniels’ home was like a natural-history museum. An old stuffed fox perched on the fireplace mantle in a basement that smelled like cherry-balsam pipe smoke, an aroma that wafted in from his father Hank’s workshop. Mitch’s room featured a working model of the human nervous system that lit up inside a translucent man. On summer nights Mitchell’s dad would set up the Celestron telescope, and the three of us would stay up late gazing at the stars. They loved astronomy, so I learned to appreciate it too, swept up by something I would never be exposed to at home.

The McDaniels’ house was open and breezy, in contrast to the literal and figurative darkness of my own. Mitch’s mother, Blanch, was a redheaded beauty who sometimes fried homemade potato chips for us to snack on after school.

One Friday night Hank took all the guys to the drive-in to see
Night of the Living Dead.
We were thirteen. The movie scared Scotty Levett so much, we couldn’t hear the chomping of human flesh over his screaming. Robert Dullis choked down a whole stick of bologna during the movie and promptly threw it up over the front seat after witnessing more acts of zombie cannibalism than his stomach could take. We left soon after. I still haven’t seen how the movie ends.

School fights, tree heights, dog bites. In sickness and in health, Mitchell and I grew up together. We played basketball through tenth grade, we dated girls together, we sang in the senior chorus, and we camped out at Indian Falls with the gang. But one day stands out above all others: the day Mitchell bought the classic 1976 navy blue Cutlass. It was his sixteenth birthday. There’s no feeling in the world that compares to riding in your best friend’s navy blue Cutlass through Overton, Iowa, on a Saturday night.

Through high school Mitchell was popular and good-looking, while I was neither. The closest I’d come to a high-school romance was a brief on-again-off-again relationship with a girl named Maria Lambert. We’d dated through my junior year, and then she dumped me to go to the senior prom with James Whitford.

Mitchell, on the other hand, experienced at least one serious infatuation every year of high school. All of them ended in an emotional mess. Mitchell fell head over heels for a girl named Heather Howell at a football game our senior year. Her name always made me think “feathered owl,” and I never saw in her what Mitchell did. The two were combustible. They’d fight and make up, fight and make up, all of us riding the roller coaster along with them. It all came to a head in March. They’d had words yet again, only this time Heather threw something—a can of Coke, an ashtray, a brick—at Mitchell while he was sitting in the Cutlass. She nailed the backseat window.
Hasta la vista,
baby. That was the end of Heather. I reminded Mitchell of that story as often as I could.

Providence, Indiana, appeared before us as bright as the moon and fantastically different from the small planet we’d traveled from five hours earlier.

Up Brighton Avenue, through the Mercer Mall, we drove the east-side marketplace, where recent city expansion gave evidence that Providence was indeed a college town. There were rows of student housing—renovated Victorian houses painted purple or bright orange. There was the fraternity mansion district—giant homes with giant porches filled with twenty-one-year-olds holding giant plastic cups of beer. We passed the Holloway Ice Arena, where the Badgers play ice hockey, and Briggs Stadium, where seventy-five thousand football fans camp out every Saturday when the Badgers play at home.

“Directions, please.”

“We’re going to …”—I pulled a folded sheet of paper from my shirt pocket—“1740 Wilshire Avenue. We’re meeting a rental agent named Margaret Shiner at four o’clock.”

The Providence College housing policy normally required freshmen to live in on-campus dorm rooms their first two years. But because of overcrowding from a peak year in admissions and woefully behind-schedule dorm renovations, there was a historic shift in college housing policy: Freshmen were allowed to live off campus. Mitchell and I were happy to take advantage of this change.

We met Mrs. Shiner at her office after grabbing lunch at Taco Bell. She showed us two apartments within walking distance of West Campus, and we took a semi-furnished two-bedroom on the corner of Alder Street and Thatcher. We moved in thirty minutes after handing over a cash deposit and signing the lease.

On Monday I wired my twenty-four-thousand-dollar nest egg from home, and Mitch and I set up shop. That summer of 1985, we would drink about a million bottles of Pepsi because something called New Coke had elbowed real Coca-Cola aside, and finding it was like finding treasure in Al Capone’s vault. McDonald’s Fry Guy glasses cluttered our kitchen shelves, and paper Kentucky Fried Chicken barrels filled the back of the fridge.

Mitch soon found a part-time job at Providence Athletics, a sporting-goods-and-school-supply store still in business on Broadway. I was hired at the famous City Club Restaurant and Bar, a downtown eatery on Fifth Avenue, simply known to patrons as City Club. It went out of business after I left college, but in its prime in the mideighties, it was
the
place to be. I worked there every Friday and Saturday night through football season, and a couple of lunches during the week. For this I made two hundred and fifty dollars a week. In student terms, a small fortune.

We became friends with Brian Aspen, Reggie Moehler, and Kim Prang, the guys in the apartment directly above ours. We all flirted with the two girls across the hall, especially the blond with movie-star good looks, Jennifer. But Jennifer left college before the end of our second semester. We didn’t know the reason until later. Turned out she was pregnant. Amy, her roommate, was the first girl Mitchell pulled into his magnetic gravitational field.

Each weekend brought carloads of new freshmen and returning upper classmen. Dorms became an unloading zone. The apartments, a daily ritual of lifting two-ton sofas up three flights of stairs. The streets and cafés of Broadway, the campus’s main drag, filled with rowdy undergrads and beautiful Providence College girls.

The last days of summer are blurred snapshots now. Mementos, once textured to the touch, now time smoothed of distinctive details, their essence blended together: Mitchell grilling steaks on the terrace, the girls next door playing the same Go-Go’s album over and over, Mitch and I watching the Cincinnati Reds playing well late into August. All was right in our world. If only we could have frozen that season of life. It was preseason for Providence football and preseason for Mitch and me.

I turned out the bedside lamp and wondered why I’d come here. Was it because of Ruthie? Was it all those pictures in the college catalog of happy students wearing their silver Providence College sweatshirts and maroon baseball caps? Or had Providence simply sprung up like an oasis, a cool place to rest and shelter my soul?

I thought about the yearbook pictures from Overton I kept in the drawer next to my bed. Every dime I earned had paved another inch of asphalt to Providence. Ruthie had disappeared, but Providence College remained.

~
S
even
~

Do you ever dream of me
Do you ever see the letters that I write?

—Elton John

“Nikita”

One appointment remained on my work calendar—a lunch date I’d refused to cancel with my friend Raymond Mac. Raymond has lived in Norwood most of his adult life. Back when the majority of Norwood’s residents weren’t sure they could trust us, dismissing our efforts, Raymond took our commitment seriously, championing our cause.

Raymond stands five feet seven inches, though he swears he was over six feet tall in his prime. He has silver hair on the sides of his head and, since he stopped driving, walks with his cane wherever he wants in Norwood, when the weather allows. We celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday together a couple of years into our friendship and his seventy-fifth in July this year.

Marvin’s is a rib joint on the edge between two worlds—Norwood and the rest of Providence. Raymond, like a lot of the people who live in Norwood, doesn’t venture outside the neighborhood much. I never met Ray’s wife, Ella. She died of cancer a few years before I arrived. They had one son, Roger, a Marine Corps sergeant killed in action in 1991 while serving our country. Ours is a mutually beneficial relationship: Ray tells me what he remembers about his life, and I bring him things he likes to eat. Beef jerky, fried chicken, chocolate-covered raisins, Little Debbie snack cakes. Raymond doesn’t worry too much about cholesterol or heart disease, but then again, neither do I.

“Boy, you look like dirt. Don’t you have sense enough to go to bed at night?”

“I don’t have sense, Ray. They’ve got me writing another book. It keeps me from doing the things I like, such as sleep.”

Raymond and I sat at one of ten white plastic tables. This place isn’t the Ritz. Marvin’s doesn’t only serve food; it serves gasoline to thirsty cars. The gas-station shelves are empty except for a case of pork and beans, enormous bags of road salt, and odds and ends like children’s balloons and decks of playing cards. They sell lotto tickets, cigarettes, beer, and … the best pork barbecue this side of Memphis.

“Oh, I see. They
made
you write it. They own you now.” Raymond focused his attention on the plastic fork he was using to eat his coleslaw.

“It’s a long story. Anyhow, I’m writing again, so I don’t sleep much. That reminds me, I’m not working for the ministry anymore, for the time being, that is. So if you need anything, call me at home. I won’t be at the office.”