The Dark Half

The May 23rd issue of People magazine was pretty typical.

  The cover was graced by that week's Dead Celebrity, a rock and roll star who had hanged himself in a jail cell after being taken into custody for possession of cocaine and assorted satellite drugs. Inside was the usual smorgasbord: nine unsolved sex murders in the desolate western half of Nebraska; a health-food guru who had been busted for kiddie porn; a Maryland housewife who had grown a squash that looked a bit like a bust of Jesus Christ — if you looked at it with your eyes half-closed in a dim room, that was; a game paraplegic girl training for the Big Apple BikeA-Thon, a Hollywood divorce; a New York society marriage; a wrestler recovering from a heart attack; a comedian fighting a palimony suit.

   There was also a story about a Utah entrepreneur who was marketing a hot new doll called Yo Mamma! Yo Mamma! supposedly looked like 'everyone's favorite (?) mother-in-law.' She had a built-in tape recorder which spat out bits of dialogue such as 'Dinner was never cold at my house when he was growing up, dear' and, 'Your brother never acts like I'm dog-breath when I come to spend a couple of weeks.' The real howler was that, instead of pulling a string in the back of Yo Mamma! to get her to talk, you kicked the fucking thing as hard as you could. 'Yo Mamma! is well-padded guaranteed not to break, and also guaranteed not to chip walls and furniture,' said its proud inventor, Mr Gaspard Wilmot (who, the piece mentioned in passing, had once been indicted for income tax, evasion — charges dropped).

  And on page thirty-three of this amusing and informative issue of America's premier amusing and informative magazine, was a page headed with a typical People cut-line: punchy, pithy, and pungent. BIO, it said.

  'People,' Thad Beaumont told his wife Liz as they sat side by side at the kitchen table, reading the article together for the second time, 'likes to get right to the point. Bio. If you don't want a BIO, move on to IN TROUBLE and read about the girls w o are getting greased deep in the heart of Nebraska.'

   'That's not that funny, when you really think about it,' Liz Beaumont said, and then spoiled it by snorting a giggle into one curled fist.

  'Not ha-ha, but certainly peculiar,' Thad said, and began to leaf through the article again. He rubbed absently at the small white scar high on his forehead as he did so.

   Like most People BIOS, it was the one piece in the magazine where more space was allotted to words than to pictures.

   'Are you sorry you did it?' Liz asked. She had an ear cocked for the twins, but so far they were being absolutely great, sleeping like lambs.

   'First of all,' Thad said, 'I didn't do it. We did it. Both for one and one for both, remember?' He tapped a picture on the second page of the article which showed his wife holding a pan of brownies out to Thad, who was sitting at his typewriter with a sheet rolled under the platen. It was impossible to tell what, if anything, was written on the paper. That was probably just as well, since it had to be gobbledegook. Writing had always been hard work for him, and it wasn't the sort of thing he could do with an audience — particularly if one member of the audience happened to be a photographer for People magazine. It had come a lot easier for George, but for Thad Beaumont it was goddam hard. Liz didn't come near when he was trying — and sometimes actually succeeding in doing it. She didn't bring him telegrams, let alone brownies.

  'Yes, but — '

  'Second of all . . . '

    He looked at the picture of Liz with the brownies and him looking up at her. They were both grinning. These grins looked fairly peculiar on the faces of people who, although pleasant, were careful doling out even such common things as smiles. He remembered back to the time he had spent as an Appalachian Trail Guide in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. He'd had a pet raccoon in those dim days, name of John Wesley Harding. Not that he'd made any attempt to domesticate John; the coon had just sort of fallen in with him. He liked his nip on cold evenings, too, did old J.W., and sometimes, when he got more than a single bite from the bottle, he would grin like that.

  'Second of all what?'

  Second of all, there's something funny about a one-time National Book Award nominee and his wife grinning at each other like a couple of drunk raccoons, he thought, and could hold onto his laughter no longer: it bellowed out of him.

  'Thad, you'll wake the twins!'

  He tried, without much success, to muffle the gusts.

    'Second of all, we look like a pair of idiots and I don't mind a bit he said, and hugged her tight and kissed the hollow of her throat.

In the other room, first William and then Wendy started to cry.

    Liz tried to look at him reproachfully, but could not. It was too good to hear him laugh. Good, maybe, because he didn't do enough of it. The sound of his laughter had an alien, exotic charm for her. Thad Beaumont had never been a laughing man.

'My fault,' he said. 'I'll get them.'

    He began to get up, bumped the table, and almost knocked it over. He was a gentle man, but strangely clumsy; that part of the boy he had been still lived in him.

    Liz caught the pitcher of flowers she had set out as a centerpiece just before it could slide over the edge and shatter on the floor.

    'Honestly, Thad!' she said, but then she began to laugh, too' He sat down again for a moment. He didn't take her hand, exactly, but caressed it gently between both of his. 'Listen, babe, do you mind?'

   'No,' she said. She thought briefly of saying It makes me uneasy, though. Not because we look mildly foolish but because . . . well, I don't know the because. It just makes me a little uneasy, that's all.

    Thought of it but didn't say it. It was just too good to hear him laugh. She caught one of his hands and gave it a brief squeeze. 'No,' she said, 'I don't mind. I think it's fun. And if the publicity helps The Golden Dog when you finally decide to get serious about finishing the damned thing, so much the better.'

She got up, pressing him back down by the shoulders when he tried to join her.

   'You can get them next time,' she said. 'I want you to sit right there until your subconscious urge to destroy my pitcher finally passes.'

'Okay,' he said, and said. 'I love you, Liz.'

    'I love you, too.' She went to get the twins, and Thad Beaumont began to leaf through his BIO again.

   Unlike most People articles, the Thaddeus Beaumont Bio began not with a full-page photograph but with one which was less than a quarter-page. It caught the eye regardless, because some layout man with an eye for the unusual had bordered the picture, which showed Thad and Liz in a graveyard, in black. The lines of type below stood out in almost brutal contrast.

   In the photograph, Thad had a spade and Liz had a pick. Set off to one side was a wheelbarrow with more cemetery implements in it. On the grave itself, several bouquets of flowers had been arranged, but the gravestone itself was still perfectly readable.

GEORGE STARK

1975 — 1988

Not a Very Nice Guy

    In almost jagged contrast to the place and the apparent act (a recently completed interment of what, from the dates, should have been a boy barely in his teens), these two bogus sextons were shaking their free hands across the freshly placed sods — and laughing cheerily.

   It was a posed job, of course. AU of the photos accompanying the article — burying the body, exhibiting the brownies, and the one of Thad wandering lonely as a cloud down a deserted Ludlow woods road, presumably 'getting ideas' — were posed. It was funny. Liz had been buying People at the supermarket for the last five years or so, and they both made fun of it, but they both took their turn leafing through it at supper, or possibly in the john if there wasn't a good book handy. Thad had mused from time to time on the magazine's success, wondering if it was its devotion to the celebrity sideshow that made it so weirdly interesting, or just the way it was set up, with all those big black-and-white photographs and the boldface text, consisting mostly of simple declarative sentences. But it had never crossed his mind to wonder if the pictures were staged.

   The photographer had been a woman named Phyllis Myers. She informed Thad and Liz that she had taken a number of photographs of teddy bears in child-sized coffins, all of the teddies dressed in children's clothes. She hoped to sell these as a book to a major New York publisher. It was not until late on the second day of the photo-and-interview session that Thad realized the woman was sounding him out about writing the text. Death and Teddy Bears, she said, would be 'the final, perfect comment