Too Close to Home

It was not actually published as Nicholas Dickless. It was released as A Missing Part. It was a major bestseller about eight years ago. Hit the New York Times list. It didn’t hurt in the slightest that some of the major non-bookstore chains, like Costco and Wal-Mart, refused to carry it out of fear of offending their more conservative customers. It was the best thing that could happen to A Missing Part. Once it got labeled as forbidden, Borders and Barnes amp; Noble and independent bookstores could barely keep it in stock.

I don’t know how many copies it actually sold. A hundred thousand, half a million, a million, did it really matter after a certain point? There was talk at one point of making it into a movie, but that never happened. If it had, I think I would have waited for the DVD. Actually, reading the book was enough, and I hadn’t particularly wanted to do that. But I couldn’t stop myself. I thought maybe reading it would provide some insights into the author, would help me understand why my wife had chosen to sleep with him. But I have to say, once I’d finished it, I was none the wiser.

What I do know is that the book made Conrad Chase a literary star. It catapulted the Thackeray College English professor to national fame and paved the way for him to become that institution’s president. It’s unlikely a guy could write a book like A Missing Part and be made principal of an elementary school, but a college with a fairly left-of-center point of view was a different thing altogether. Granted, someone who’d written a book about a man losing his penis and testicles and ending up with a vagina instead, if he was going to become a college president, you might have at least expected it to be a college in California, and not upstate New York.

But Conrad Chase had brought fame not only upon himself, but Thackeray as well. And while at first the college administration and fellow faculty had responded uncomfortably to Chase’s outrageous novel and were inclined to distance themselves from it, as it soared up the bestseller list, and as critics embraced it as a work of satirical genius and brilliant social commentary, the general feeling on campus was, what the hell, let’s see how we can use this to our advantage.

Chase, who taught early American literature and a course on the plays of Eugene O’Neill, became the college darling. Thackeray had never had a bestselling author before. Chase wasn’t the first professor to get published- everyone who taught there felt tremendous pressure to publish something, at some point, during their careers, even if no one would ever actually read it, which was generally the fate of most of the academic treatises that Thackeray professors produced. He wasn’t the first to publish a work of fiction, but he was the first to receive international recognition.

The administration decided to use Chase’s notoriety to fashion a new reputation for the college. They had already been running a literary festival for a couple of years that they wanted to continue as an annual event. It’s why they had hired Ellen. Now they had their own headliner in Conrad Chase. It made it easier to attract famous authors to Promise Falls. And that’s what the college had been doing for several years, running the thing over four days, setting up lots of different venues where authors could read or talk about their works, bringing in the public. They got Mayor Finley on board, who saw this not only as a way to get Promise Falls more recognition, but also as a way to give his profile a boost.

But Conrad was still a fairly anonymous professor when Ellen was hired to help set up that literary festival.

We’d been living in Albany. Ellen had been working for a company that planned and organized major events. They did concerts, corporate functions, speaking series. When Thackeray started advertising for someone full-time to look after an annual literary event, Ellen applied and, to her own amazement, got the job. I was working for an Albany security firm at the time, going through, to be honest, a bit of depression because I wasn’t getting anywhere with my art.

It was something I was struggling to come to terms with. As a young adult with no parents, I’d managed to scrape up enough money to attend a single year of art college, and I’d tell myself I’d be the one to beat the odds, the one in a hundred who could actually make a living with his talent. I’d had a buddy that year, Teddy, a brilliant sculptor who could find a leopard hiding in a block of wood, and I figured if any graduate would make it, it’d be him. A few years later I ran into him driving a truck weighed down with hot asphalt.

We grabbed a beer, the smell of tar sticking to him, and I got around to asking him about the dreams he’d had in college.

“They got overtaken by fucking life, man,” he said.

I knew the feeling. How else to explain working for a security firm that was sucking a little bit more of life out of me every day? So when Ellen was offered her job in Promise Falls, I had no qualms walking away from mine and looking for something else. Even another job that had no meaning would at least be a change.

On top of all that, Derek was seven and not having the greatest time in elementary school. Didn’t pay attention, the teacher said. Wouldn’t focus on his studies, she said. Wouldn’t settle down, she said.

We chose to do what a lot of parents do. We blamed the teacher. Maybe it even was her fault, who knows. So we figured a move to Promise Falls would be a new start for all of us. Ellen would begin her new, terrific job, I’d find something better, and Derek would start afresh in a new school.

So we bought a place a couple of miles south of Promise Falls, a modest but charming two-story tucked down a lane, just beyond the Langley house. Ellen started her new job. Derek started with a clean slate at a new school, where his teacher, in about a month, asked us in for an interview to discuss the problems Derek was having paying attention, focusing on his studies, and settling down.

I found work at another security firm, spent my evenings and weekends painting, even persuaded a gallery in town to put together a show of my work. Did the whole wine-and-cheese-party thing, invited everyone we could think of, sold one painting, a small one that went for under a hundred bucks, to a friend. Ellen tried to keep my spirits up, insisted I had talent, told me stories she’d heard about great writers who’d taken a long time to be recognized. None of that helped. I fell into a deep funk that lasted several months. Ellen, either discouraged or fed up, or a bit of both, gave up trying to boost my spirits. I think Ellen had been attracted to me in the first place because I was an artist, and as I seemed to be giving up on it, I wondered if there was a part of her that was giving up on me.

I quickly came to hate my new security job. No surprise there. So when I saw an ad in the Standard that the mayor’s office was looking for a driver, I thought, what the hell, why not apply. Ellen ended up working very closely with Conrad to get the first festival organized. He’d offered to be an adviser for the event, given his background in English literature, particularly as practiced by those who were still alive and could accept invitations. This was a heady experience for Ellen, working with someone as charismatic and sophisticated as Conrad, and this was even a couple of years before he ended up on the cover of Newsweek, when it did a story on a new crop of writers who were supposedly pushing the envelope. As it turned out, Conrad mostly wanted to push himself onto Ellen, and maybe, if I had been more attentive at the time, hadn’t been so wrapped up in my own problems, dragged down by not being able to make a career through my own creative outlets, he wouldn’t have been successful.

It didn’t last long. I don’t even know whether you could call it an out-and-out affair. A misstep, perhaps, on Ellen’s part. Getting caught up in the moment. That doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt, and it doesn’t mean I didn’t think about responding in ways that would only have made the situation worse.

But it was nearly ten years ago, and the whole thing was, for the most part, behind us. It was a rough patch, I’m not glossing it over. For a while there, Ellen tried to assuage her guilt with drink. I don’t think she was ever a bona fide alcoholic, but she certainly was in a fog for several months there, and how she managed to do her job during that time, I have no idea. It was as though a small, slow-moving hurricane had settled on our house for several months. The turbulence was always there, but then Ellen, on her own, came to some kind of inner realization that she could not continue on the way she was going, and she stopped drinking. Just like that. That’s one thing I have to say about Ellen. When she decides it’s time to pull herself together, she does it. I remember, when her mother died, she was torn up pretty bad for a couple of weeks there, then one morning got up and said aloud, “Time to move on.”

But sometimes, while you were waiting for that moment, it could be a rough ride.

Once the storm had passed, and Ellen and I had found a way to forgive each other, life improved. We were both smart enough to know that what we had together was too good to throw away. We had a son. We weren’t going to ruin Derek’s life by splitting up.

Ellen still had regular dealings with Conrad Chase after the affair, but those became less of a worry once his